by Ellis Peters
Part of this open space was occupied, at the moment, by a cluster of brown tents, in which lived Orissan building workers, employed on two half-finished houses just along the main road. A long chain of them, moving rhythmically, carried away the excavated soil from new foundations, bearing it in baskets on their heads. More than half of them were women. They were the poorest of the poor, but after this hard training in deportment they walked like queens. Their children, in one tattered garment apiece, or none, haunted the open ground and begged vehemently and maliciously from every passer-by.
Two of them converged purposefully upon Dominic, Tossa and Anjli as soon as they stepped out of the taxi. Here were foreigners, their proper prey. A second look at Anjli, as she turned to face them, brought them up standing in considerable doubt; and that was as illuminating for Anjli as for them. And while they were hesitating, a plump lady in a sari came out of the next gate and shooed them indignantly away.
‘They are those labourers’ children,’ she said defensively, in slightly grating English, as though the language had not enough abrasive consonants for her, ‘from Orissa. No Punjabi would beg, you please believe me.’
She marched away across the open ground, and the children drew back from her path by a few yards and studied the sky as she went by, to close in again the moment her back was turned, and be shooed away again, good-humouredly enough, by the taxi driver. Dominic paid, and let the car go. He had noticed another taxi stand only a couple of hundred yards away at the corner of the main road.
‘N 305’ said the tablet on the gatepost simply, and there was a small, beautifully-made wooden mail-box attached beneath the number. The wall of the front garden was white, shoulder-high to a man, and the house lay only a few yards back, also white-painted, two storeys high and flat-roofed, with a perforated balustrade, and in the centre of the roof a sort of light pavilion, glazed in from winds and dust-storms, an ideal summer-house for a sociable man who yet had need of a working solitude at times. The ground in front of the house was paved with squares of a grey stone, with narrow flower-beds and a few shrubs along the walls, and a small, decorative tree in a tub by the door. But the enclosure ran round the detached end of the building, and there degenerated into a utilitarian courtyard of beaten earth, with a line for drying washing, and a low wooden shed built into the corner. Beside the shed, under a bracket roof of sacking stretched on a wooden frame, a small brazier burned with a steady glow, and the faint smell of sandalwood and incense was wafted to them in the thin blue smoke. All the fires of Delhi, sacred and profane, seem to contain the evocative scents of worship. Behind the brazier, cross-legged and motionless, sat a lean, shrunken old man, a loose cotton turban on his head, grey hair and tangled beard obscuring most of his face, a brown blanket hugged round his shoulders. When the three strangers came in through the open gate he raised his head, but did not turn in their direction.
At the last moment, with the door before them and the bell-push within reach of a hand, they all hesitated. Felder had talked with blessed bluntness about the moment of truth, about having a roof over Anjli’s head that she didn’t owe to her father, so that she could meet him on equal terms, and face his acceptance or rejection with unshaken dignity and independence. But when it came to the point, whether she wanted him or not, it was important that he should want her. And there was only one way to find out.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Anjli quickly, and prodded the bell-push with a rose-tipped finger, hard and accurately.
A moment of silence, and then they heard light feet trotting briskly towards the door. Very light feet, naked feet; that characteristic soft slapping of the soles on a stone-paved floor. The door opened, wide to the wall; a revealing gesture, which belongs only to the innocent, open-hearted and generous. A boy of about nineteen, square and sturdy, stood smiling brightly at them across the threshold. He was clean and wide-featured, with close-cropped hair, and wore khaki drill shirt and shorts a size too long for him; handsome muscles bulged the brown arm that held the door open. He bobbed his head repeatedly, and smiled, and said nothing, waiting for them to speak.
‘Good morning!’ said Dominic, aware of possible non-understanding, but not knowing in the least what to do about it. Names, at any rate, are international currency. ‘We are looking for the house of Shri Satyavan Kumar.’
The smile narrowed and wavered. At least he understood English. ‘Yes, this is house of Mr Kumar.’ His slight frown, his lost look, everything about him but his tongue added: ‘But…!’
‘May we speak with Mr Kumar? He will be expecting us. He has received a letter to tell him that we are coming.’
Nevertheless, Dominic had heard the unspoken ‘but’, even if he chose to ignore it. It might mean no more than ‘but he isn’t in at the moment’, which would hardly be a catastrophe, even if they were keyed up to meet him immediately, and liable to deflation if kept waiting. Tossa had heard it, too, she was looking more than naturally wise, patient and calm. So had Anjli; her face was a demure mask, no one could tell what went on behind it.
‘There is a letter, yes…’ said the boy slowly. ‘But my master not read letter.’ His brown eyes wandered from face to face apologetically, as if he might be blamed for this failure of communication. “The letter is here, I bring it…’
‘But if we could speak to Mr Kumar,’ said Dominic doggedly, ‘we can explain everything ourselves.’
‘I am sorry. Mr Kumar not here. No one can take letter to him, no one know where can find him. More than one year ago, in the night, Mr Kumar he go away. Never say one word. Never come back.’
After the moment of blank silence, in which the Orissan children advanced their toes over the boundary of the gateway, and the old man behind the brazier shrugged the blanket back a few inches from his shoulders, and the world in general incredibly went on about its business as if nothing had changed, Dominic said in reasonable tones: ‘May we come in for a few minutes? You may be able to help us.’
‘Please! Memsahib… missee-sabib…!’ The boy bowed them in gladly, waved them into a small front room, sparsely furnished by western standards, but elegant in tapestries, silks and cushions, and a screen of carved, aromatic wood. The bare feet turned and pattered to the table, where on a silver dish lay an air mail letter. Dorette had wasted her pains.
‘Please, here is letter. You take it?’
‘No, keep it here,’ said Dominic, ‘in case Mr Kumar comes home.’ But after more than a year without a word, why should he reappear now? And yet this was India, and who knows India’s motives and reasons? ‘You mean that Mr Kumar simply went away without telling anyone where he was going, or when to expect him back? Not even his mother? His family?’ Idiot, there was no other family, of course, he was the only child.
‘Acha, Sahib. In the night. He did not sleep in his bed, he did not take any luggage, everything left in place. He go. That is all.’
‘Like the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli unexpectedly, ‘when it was time to depart.’ She had a big white canvas handbag on her arm, and Ashok’s book inside it; she had been sneaking peeps into the pages even on the taxi ride out here.
‘Your father,’ Dominic pointed out unwisely, ‘was a devout Hindu, by all reports.’
‘So was the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli devastatingly. She hadn’t been reading to no purpose.
‘Father?’ said Satyavan’s house-boy, half-dumb with wonder.
‘This is Miss Anjli Kumar, Mr Kumar’s daughter.’
He joined his hands respectfully under his chin, his brown head bobbing deeply; he did not question her identity, he believed that people told him the truth, as he told them the truth.
‘Missee-sahib, I not know anything, I not here when Shri Satyavan go away. When his servants send word to the big house that he gone, my mistress she send them all away, tell me go keep this place until Shri Satyavan return. Nobody see him go, nobody hear. More than one year now, and he send no word.’
‘Your mistress?’ said Dominic.
&n
bsp; ‘Acha, sahib, Shrimati Purnima Kumar. I her house-boy.’
‘And there’s nobody here now who was here on that night? When Mr Kumar went away?’
‘Sahib, no one. Only Arjun Baba.’ He said it with the mixture of reverence and indifference that touches, perhaps, only the dead and the mad, both of them out of reach.
‘Who is Arjun Baba?’
‘The old man. The beggar. Shri Satyavan took him in, and let him live in the compound. He comes and goes as he will. He eats from our table. Now Shri Satyavan is gone, Shrimati Purnima feeds him. It is all he want. This is his home until he die. Arjun Baba very, very old.’
‘But he was here then! He may have heard or seen something…’
The boy was bowing his head sadly, and sadly smiling. ‘Sahib, always he has said he hear nothing, he know nothing. Always, he say this. And, sahib, Arjun Baba is blind.’
It made perfect sense. The old ears pricking, the ancient head turning. But not turning to view. The ear was tuned to them, not the eye. And so old, so very old. And so indebted, in a mutual indebtedness, such as charity hardly knows in the less sophisticated lands of the west. His allegiance belonged only to Satyavan, who if he willed to go must be made free to go. Not all needs are of the flesh.
‘Sahib, if you are willing, I think it good you should go to my mistress’s house.’ He did not say ‘to my mistress’; and in a moment it was clear why. ‘She very ill, ever since Shri Satyavan go from here she fall sick for him…’
‘But didn’t she try…? To get in touch, to find him…?
The young shoulders lifted, acknowledging the sovereignty of individual choice. ‘If he must go, he must go. My mistress wait. Only now it is bad with her. But there is Shri Vasudev, Shri Satyavan’s cousin. He is manager for family business now. Please, you speak with him.’
‘Yes,’ said Dominic, ‘yes, we will. We have Mrs Kumar’s address, we’ll go there.’
The boy bowed them anxiously towards the door, and out into the warming sunshine, hovering as though uncertain whether to wish them to stay or go, as though it might rest with him to hold fast Satyavan’s daughter, and he might be held answerable if she turned and went away as mysteriously as her father. Anjli halted in the doorway and looked at him thoughtfully.
‘You are not from Delhi?’
‘No, missee-sahib, I come from a village near Kangra. Shrimati Purnima came from there, and has a house there. My father is her gardener.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Kishan Singh.’ And he pressed his hands together in salute and smiled at her hopefully.
‘We shall meet again, Kishan Singh. I am glad you are here to keep my father’s house so faithfully and look after Arjun Baba. If you hear any news of him, send it to me at Keen’s Hotel. Now we must go to my grandmother.’
Kishan Singh stood at the top of the steps and bowed and smiled her away across the paved garden, in some way reassured; but at the gate she looked back again, and caught Dominic by the arm.
‘Wait for me a moment. I want to speak to him… the old man. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, I saw that he heard us come.’
‘We can try,’ Dominic agreed doubtfully. ‘But it’s long odds he doesn’t speak English.’
‘Kishan Singh did. But let me try, alone…’
Something was changing in Anjli, or perhaps some part of everything in her was changing, her voice, her manner, even her walk. They watched her cross the beaten earth of the yard, and it might almost have been the gliding gait of a woman in a sari, though quite certainly Anjli had never draped a sari round her in her life, and wouldn’t know how to set about it even if she had possessed one. She halted before the motionless old man, and though he could not see her, she pressed her hands together in reverence to him, and inclined her head as the boy had done to her.
‘Namaste!’
She had no idea how she had known what to say, but when she had said it she knew that it was right. The old head came up, and the sun shone on the sightless face that seemed to gaze at her. A tangle of grey, long hair, beard and brows, out of which jutted a hooked and sinewy nose and two sharp protuberant cheekbones, and a great ridge of forehead. All of his flesh that was visible was the same brown as the brown, dry earth under him. A tremendous remote indifference held him apart from her. The sun gleamed on eyes white and opaque with cataract.
Anjli sat down on her heels, facing him across the little brazier, so that her face was on a level with his. Even before she spoke again, the tilt of his head followed her movement. What his eyes owed him, his ears paid.
‘Uncle, I am Saryavan’s daughter. I am Anjli Kumar. I have come to find my father. Help me!’
Faintly and distantly a convulsion passed through the fixed, unchanging face, like the passing of a breeze over standing water, and again left it motionless.
‘Uncle, you were here, no one but you, when my father went away in the night. If there was a secret he wanted kept from all the world, still he would not have kept it from me.’ Did she believe that? She had no time to wonder, she was so sure that the old man heard, considered, understood. He was not deaf and he was not mad, and when she mentioned Satyavan’s name the stillness of his face became distant and intense, like a listening stone. He believed her, but he did not know her, and he did not take her word against his own experience for what Satyavan would or would not have done. ‘Uncle, now I am going to my grandmother, who also wishes to find my father. If you know anything, where he is, how we can find him, I beg you to tell me.’
He had withdrawn a little into his blanket, his head recoiling into cover from the sun. He said nothing at all; she had the impression that he had turned inwards to converse with himself.
‘Come away,’ said Dominic gently, his hand on her shoulder. ‘You won’t get anything out of him.’
She started at the touch, and obediently began to rise, but she did not look up. He had understood, and there was something he knew, if his slow and profound communion with himself would allow him to confide it; but not yet, she could see that. Impulsively she rummaged in her bag for something, anything, she could leave with him as a token and a gift in one.
‘Uncle, think of me. I am Anjli, his daughter. If you have anything to tell me, send someone – send Kishan Singh – to Keen’s Hotel to ask for me. You do understand? You will find me at Keen’s Hotel. Kishan Singh will know.’ She leaned across the brazier, the faint aromatic smoke tingling in her nostrils, and took the old man’s hand in hers, and closed the dry, skinny fingers over her good-luck piece, the mounted gold dollar she sometimes wore as a pendant. ‘It is for you. Think of me, and send me word! Namaste!’
She drew back from him resolutely, because she knew she was going to get nothing out of him as yet. But before she turned and walked away through the gate she saw the two ancient hands rise, as though quite independently of whatever mind moved – or immobilised – the worn, inscrutable face, and press themselves together momentarily over her token, in acknowledgement and farewell.
‘Yes, I’ve been here,’ said Anjli with certainty, as soon as she saw the broad white carriage gates, and the beautifully raked drive curving away between the trees to the distant house that was visible only as a whiteness between the leaves. ‘I thought I didn’t remember, but now that I see it, I know it’s the same. This is where he brought me when I was a little girl.’
‘Of course,’ said Tossa, ‘he wouldn’t have the other house then, he was still expecting to stay in America for some years, perhaps even for good. In India this would be his home.’
Anjli passed through the smaller wicket gate with her eyes shut, and walked forward a few steps on the smooth rose-coloured gravel. ‘There’s a lawn all across the front of the house, and a sort of loggia, with a marble floor. And in the middle of the lawn there’s a big fountain.’
There were all these things. There was also a gardener in shorts and drill shirt, dipping water from the fountain basin and watering the flowering shrubs in the scatt
ered round beds, sleeping shrubs only just hinting at budding. Isolated in the emerald green turf, tethered to long, thin snakes of hosing, two sprinklers tirelessly squandered Delhi’s precious water supply on preserving the texture and colour and freshness of the Kumar grass.
In a thirsty land privilege can be reckoned in water. Plantation economy, Dominic thought, chilled and daunted, and wondered into what arid byways they had found themselves drawn, aside from the actual life of this painfully real and actual country. It didn’t begin with us, he thought, and it hasn’t ended with us. We were only an aberration, a contortion of history, suffered almost in its sleep. India twitched a little, and scratched a momentary itch, and that was the coming and the going of the British. But they still have this to reckon with.
‘It must be terrible,’ said Anjli, suddenly, her fine brows knit in consternation, ‘to be so rich!’
As far as they could see, beyond the long, low, pale facade of the house, just coming into view, the artfully spaced trees deployed their varying shapes as decoration, flowers used their colours to punctuate the restful green ground, creamy-white creepers draped the columns of the loggia. Before they reached the curving sweep of the steps that led up to the colonnade and the open double doors within, they had counted five garden boys, watering and tidying and clipping back too assertive leaves, taming and shaping and reducing all things to order. Under the awning of the loggia roof stone urns of flowers were spaced, and out of the open doors a scented smoke filtered. The bell was a looped rope of plaited red silk, but at least there was a bell; they had a means of informing this palace that strangers were on the doorstep, that the outer world did exist.
‘I don’t want to live here,’ Anjli burst out in ill-timed rebellion. In Rabindar Nagar she had looked upon everything, and made no protest, rather advanced a step to look more closely.
‘You needn’t stay, if you don’t want to,’ said Dominic, listening to the receding peal of the bell, eddying back and back into the apparently unpeopled recesses of the house. ‘We can always take you back with us. Don’t worry about anything. But if your grandmother’s ill, at least we must enquire about her. And find out if they do know anything here.’
