by Ellis Peters
‘What about snakes?’
‘Things with no legs are out, too. But not as way out as things with eight. Who was it on the phone? Cousin Vasudev?’
‘I called Mr Felder,’ said Dominic, ‘but he wasn’t back from shooting yet. They’re going to ask him to call back.’ No need to tell her the voice on the phone had belonged to Ashok Kabir; she would have resented being left in ignorance, even in the bath.
It was another hour before Felder’s call came through. Anjli was in bed by then, but with her nose buried in The Life of the Budda, and at the first ring she was out and streaking for Dominic’s sitting-room door. The conversation was brief, and apparently satisfactory.
‘Of course!’ said Dominic, heaving a vast breath of relief. ‘How very simple you make it sound! Thanks a lot, that’s what we’ll do.’
‘And let me know what happens, will you do that? I shall be worrying about that kid from now on until I know, but I’m betting you it will bring results, all right. For the next few days you can get me at Clark’s Hotel, Benares – OK?’
‘OK, and thanks again. Hope everything will go right with the shooting.’
‘Now you’re believing in miracles! Never mind, it’s gone well today. And you take those girls and have a look at Delhi, don’t waste a minute. So long, then, I’ll be hearing from you!’
He was gone, energetic and bracing as ever, leaving his effect behind like a potent wine. Dominic hung up, relaxed and grateful.
‘What did he say?’ They were both at him in a moment, one on either side. ‘What’s so simple?’
‘He says, with Mrs Kumar’s death notice plastered all over the evening press – and you can bet it will be in the dailies tomorrow, too, – Satyavan will be absolutely certain to see it, wherever he is, and he’ll come running to pick up his responsibilities. No son will let anyone else run his mother’s funeral. All we’ve got to do is sit back and wait, to see if your father turns up for the ceremony. And the odds are strongly that he will.’
Nobody said – nobody even thought, in the exhilaration of the moment – ‘if he can!’
For two days they were on equal terms with all the other carefree European tourists in Delhi. They walked about the busy shopping streets round Connaught Place until their feet ached. They proceeded, half-stunned with grandeur, the full length of the King’s Way from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan, once the Viceroy’s palace, now the residence of the President of India, with its two great flanking blocks of the government secretariat, vast, glowing pink sandstone, one of the better legacies of the Raj, along with the legal system and the indomitable Indian railways. They risked their lives in the hailstorm of bicycles as the clerks of Delhi streamed to work in the morning rush hour, and baked themselves brown in the midday sun in the silent green park among the Lodi tombs, close to their own hotel. Islam weighted India with vast and splendid elegies to death, India herself withdrew elusively, dissolving into ash and essence, leaving life to speak for itself. And so it did, in the children who mobbed the strangers in Purana Quila, the Old Fort, half glorious ruined monument to the past, half refugee village congealed into permanence for want of other quarters; in the magical glimpses of Old Delhi after dark, blanketed figures squatting by stalls half-lit with tiny smoky lanterns, twilight children cross-legged, suddenly mute and inscrutable as gods, and everywhere smoky scents of cow-dung and joss and jasmine and sweat and all-pervading aromatic dust, electric on the darkness.
They took a motor-cycle rickshaw out to the Qutb Minar and the enormous ruined city of Tuqhluquabad, south of Delhi, silent and wonderfully peaceful within its broken, giant wall; and from there, having picnicked at ease in the sun, they crossed the road to the tightly-walled enclosure of the domed tomb of Ghias-ud-Din Tuqhluq, compressed as a blockhouse yet beautifully-proportioned, red walls leaning into themselves as solidly as the Egyptian Pyramids, white dome rearing austerely just high enough to peer over the flat brown plain, sprinkled with meagre trees.
They took a taxi to Humanyun’s tomb, the resting-place of the second Mogul emperor, delicately attached to the eastern flank of Delhi in an immaculate formal garden. They had no idea that they were looking at something in its own way fully as beautiful as the Taj, which on this visit they could hardly hope to see; nevertheless, their hearts lifted strangely as they looked at the long, level, red terrace, the jut of mellow stonework above, and the poised and tranquil white dome. No floating off, balloon-wise, here, this was a tethered dream, with feet rooted in the ground. At the gate, as they left, a bearded snake-charmer, grinning ingratiatingly, coaxed out of its basket a dull, swaying brown cobra. Everything about it was pathetic, nothing was sinister, except for the single flick of its forked tongue; almost certainly it had no poison-sacs. They wondered if the music enchanted or hurt; there was no way of knowing. They paid their few new pice, and took their taxi back north to the Red Fort to lose count of time wondering among the white marble palaces and the paradisal gardens that overlook the Yamuna river. The complex waterways in the gardens were still dry at this time of year, and the fountains silent, but with a little imagination they could insert a small, lighted lamp into every niche in the lattices of stone where the water-level dropped, and see the silver curve of falling water lit from within and giving off rainbows like the scintillations from a diamond. The Moguls loved water, played with it, decorated their houses with it, built sumptuous pavilions in which to bathe in it, and took it to bed with them in little marble channels and lotus-flower fountains to sing them to sleep.
From this haunted palace in its dignity and quietness the three tourists plunged straight into the broad, teeming, overpeopled clamour of the Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s grand market-place, screaming with cinema posters and advertisement hoardings, shrill with gossiping citizens and hurrying shoppers. They peered into the deep, narrow, open shops to see the silks and cottons baled and draped in unimaginable quantity, the Kashmiri shawls fine as cobweb, the gold and silver jewellery and the cheap glass bangles, the nuts and seeds and spices, the unknown vegetables, the fantastic sweetmeats. Horse-drawn tongas, scooter-rickshaws, cars, bicycles, stray dogs, pedestrians, all mingled in the roadway in a complicated and hair-raising dance. The noise was deafening. So next, because according to the map they were less than a mile from it and could easily walk there, they went to Rajghat, the spot close to the river bank where Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned after his assassination, and where now a white balustrade encloses a paved space and a flower-covered dais. And there, though there were plenty of people, there was silence.
At the end of the first day they half expected that Cousin Vasudev would telephone or send them a note, either to follow up his tentative recognition of Anjli’s identity and admit his own family responsibility for her, or to effect a careful withdrawal and leave the whole thing in abeyance, pending legal consultations. But there was no message.
‘I suppose he has got his hands full,’ Tossa said dubiously. ‘And after all, he is only a cousin, and you could hardly hold him responsible as long as we’ve got Dorette to go back to, could you?’
‘I expect,’ said Anjli cynically, ‘he’s just holding his breath and keeping his eyes shut in the hope that if he doesn’t look at us or speak to us we’ll go away.’
On the second evening there was still no message. They had spent the afternoon prowling round all the government and state shops in New Delhi, among the leathers and silks and cottons and silverware and copperware and ivory carvings, well away from the banks of the Yamuna where the rites of death are celebrated. Nobody mentioned funerals. Everybody thought privately of the little, shrunken body that had hardly swelled the bedclothes, swathed now in white cotton for the last bath and the last fire. By the time they came back to Keen’s Hotel, after a Chinese meal at Nirula’s, Purnima was ash and spirit.
And there was no message for them at the desk, and no one had telephoned.
‘Maybe he’s got a whole party of funeral guests on his hands still,’ said Tossa, �
�and hasn’t had time to think about us yet. I don’t know what happens, there may be family customs… I know there don’t seem to be any more near relatives, but there must be some distant ones around somewhere… and then all the business connections, with a family like that…’
‘We’ve got to find out,’ said Dominic. ‘I’d better ring him, if he won’t ring us.’
He made the call from their own sitting-room upstairs. A high, harassed voice answered in Hindi, and after a wait of some minutes Cousin Vasudev’s agitated English flooded Dominic’s ear with salutations, apologies and protestations, effusive with goodwill but fretful with weariness and hagridden with responsibilities.
‘It is unfilial, one cannot understand such behaviour. Everything I have had to do myself, everything. And into the bargain, with these newspapermen giving me no peace… It is a decadent time, Mr Felse, in all countries of the world duties are shirked, family ties neglected… The old order breaks down, and nothing is sacred any longer. What can we do? It is left for the dutiful to carry other people’s burdens as well as their own…’
It seemed that Dominic’s question had not merely answered itself, somewhere in the flood of words, but also been washed clean away on the tide. Nevertheless, when he could get a word in he asked it.
‘Do you mean that Anjli’s father has not come home? Not even for the funeral?’
‘He has not. Everything is left to me. One cannot understand how a son could…’
‘And he hasn’t written, either? After all, he might be abroad somewhere…’
‘I assure you, Mr Felse, certain preliminaries are necessary before Indian citizens go abroad. The authorities would know if that was the case, and of course I did, very discreetly, you understand… strictly private enquiries… My aunt did not wish it, but I felt it to be my duty… No, there has been no word from him at all. The position as far as that is concerned is quite unchanged…’
Dominic extricated himself from the current, made the best farewells he could, and hung up the receiver. They looked at one another, and for some minutes thought and were silent. Not because they had nothing to say, but because what was uppermost in two minds was not to be expressed in front of Anjli. Why, thought Dominic blankly, did it never occur to us until now to wonder whether he really did go of his own will? And whether there might not be a completely final reason why he hasn’t come back? And has that really never occurred to Cousin Vasudev, either? In all this time, and with that much money at stake?
‘He may not have seen the papers at all,’ said Tossa sturdily. ‘I know people in England who almost never look at the things.’
‘He can’t have seen them,’ amended Anjli with emphasis, ‘or he’d be here.’
‘But what do we do now? We could hang on for a few days longer, certainly, maybe even a couple of weeks, but if he’s as unavailable as all that what difference will two weeks make? And in any case, that would be a gamble, because we can’t do that and pay for a single ticket back to London for Anjli. So we’ve got to make up our minds right now.’
Anjli dropped the tiny packet of damp tissue-paper she was just unwrapping, and gaped at him in consternation for a moment; but she was quick to recover her own reticence, which in some unquestioned way had become curiously precious to her here in Delhi.
‘You mean you want me to go back to England with you?’ she said with composure.
‘What else can we possibly do?’ said Dominic reasonably. ‘We can’t deliver you to your father, which was the object of the exercise, or to your grandmother, which would have done as a substitute. The only legal guardian you have is your mother – for the time being, at any rate. I don’t see any alternative but to take you back with us… do you?’
‘We could go and stay at Grandmother Purnima’s house for a while, at any rate. He did ask us. That way, we needn’t pay hotel bills, and we’d still have enough for my ticket back if it came to that in the end.’
‘We couldn’t. He didn’t ask us, he asked you. And you said you didn’t want to live there. And in any case,’ said Dominic, smiling at her ruefully, ‘you don’t suppose we’d really hand you over to a man we don’t know at all, and just fly off and leave you, do you?’
She owned, after a moment’s thought, that that was too much to expect of them. ‘Well, all right, then, what’s the answer?’ But she knew, and she knew he was right, by his standards and by hers. Somehow standards seemed irrelevant to this new world; what governed action was something just as valid and moral, but more inward, and not to be discussed or questioned. She picked up the little moist packet, and carefully unwrapped the exquisite bracelet of white jasmine buds Dominic had bought her in Chandni Chowk, strung neatly on green silk cord the colour of the stems. ‘Tie it on, would you, please?’
Three days ago Dominic would have suspected that confiding gesture of her wrist towards him, and the way she inclined her head over the dewy trifle as he tied the green cord. Now she seemed three years older than her age, and every touch and sound and look of hers he accepted as genuine. She turned her wrist, leaning back to admire. ‘They wear them in their hair, don’t they? I could do that, too, if I put mine up, there’s plenty of it. A big knot on the back of my neck, like this, and the bracelet tied round the knot… Imagine all those gorgeous flowers, in winter! Did you ever see such gardens?’
‘The answer,’ Tossa said, watching the two of them with a faintly ironic smile, ‘is that we all go back to London. There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll have to see about your ticket and the flight in the morning.’
‘You’re the boss,’ said Anjli, ‘All right, if you say so, that’s what we do. Now, if you folks don’t mind, I’m going to put our bathroom light on and alert the enemy to get right out of there, and in about five minutes I’m going to have my bath.’
She had to go out into the corridor to go to the suite she shared with Tossa, next door; and in the corridor she met her least favourite room-boy, bearing on a pretentious inlaid tray a very grubby folded scrap of paper. His grin – it was a curious side-long grin, the antithesis of Kishan Singh’s radiant beam, and his eyes never met hers for more than a fraction of a second, but slid away like quicksilver – convulsed his thin dark face at sight of her, and he bowed himself the remaining four yards towards her, and proffered the tray.
‘Missee-sahib, messenger he bring this for you. Say, please, give privately. Your room dark, I think perhaps better wait…’
He had a confiding, you-and-I-understand-each-other voice and manner. She hadn’t been a film star’s daughter all her life without meeting his like in many different places. She dropped a quarter-rupee on the tray and picked up the dirty little note with more curiosity than she showed.
‘Thank you! That’s all!’
He withdrew backwards, not out of extreme humility, but to watch her face and bearing as she opened and read the note; which got him nothing, for she didn’t open and read it until she had stared him into turning and slithering away towards the stairs. Then she had it open in an instant, and held under the light in the corridor. She could see there was no more than one line to read; a glance, and she had it memorised.
English characters sprawled shapelessly and shakily across the paper, the pencil now pressing, now feebly touching, an old man’s hand:
‘Daughter, come morning before light alone.’
She had unfolded it so hurriedly that something small had fallen from it at her feet. She picked it up, and her fingers knew it before ever she got it raised to the light. It was her gold dollar, the token she had given to Arjun Baba in the courtyard of her father’s house in Rabindar Nagar.
The room-boy was on the stairs when she caught up with him. There was no time to be diplomatic; instinct told her, instead, to be autocratic. And, given co-operation, generous.
‘Boy!’ He turned, responsive to the tone, with more alacrity than usual. ‘Who brought this note?’
‘A messenger, missee-sahib!’ The obsequious shoulders lifted eloquently. ‘
Perhaps a porter? Or he could be somebody’s office peon. In a red head-cloth, like a porter.’
‘And he left no other message? Just brought the note? How long ago?’
‘Missee-sahib, only this minute. I come upstairs, your room in darkness, when I see you come… That peon maybe still only in courtyard there…’
Of course, there was no other way out. To enter Keen’s you must thread a narrow archway in from the street, walk round a high hedge and so come into the interior court; and if driving a car, you must drive from a double gate higher up the street, right round one wing to the same paved patio. Anjli dropped half a rupee on to her least favourite room-boy’s tray, and turned and ran from him without concealment, straight to the landing window that gave on to the courtyard gallery. Creepers wreathed the outline of the night in feathery leaves. Down below, lights shone upon the white paving and the scattered shrubs in their huge ceramic pots. Away across the expanse of silver-washed whiteness, towards the enclosing dark of the high box hedge, a foreshortened figure strolled at leisure, but still briskly, for the night air was sharp to the edge of frost. Under the last of the lights she saw the extravagantly-tied, wide-bowed headcloth, faded red. Like an office peon! She did not know the term, but she understood what it meant. The more menial the function, the more compensatory the uniform. On the whole not a bad principle. But Arjun Baba had no office peon to run his errands, and this was not Kishan Singh. Perhaps a kind neighbour with a job in the city. Perhaps a public porter earning a few extra pice and acquiring merit.
The man below her – he was rounding the corner of the box hedge now – was whistling. The notes came up to her clearly in the almost frosty air and the nocturnal stillness. She followed them subconsciously, plaintive notes rising, turning, falling, simple and poignant, like a folk-tune. She caught herself picking up the cadence accurately before she realised what she was hearing.
But it was impossible! No, that was nonsense, she knew what she was hearing, once the memory fell into place. But how was it possible, then? ‘Siddhartha’ wasn’t anything like finished yet, not even the shooting. The music had certainly not yet been recorded. How could a street porter or an office messenger know the entire air of Yashodhara’s bereaved lullaby, the simplified theme of the Buddha’s morning raga?
