‘What is your relation to the missing party, madam?’ The inspector, Subhash Rajan, looked her up and down.
‘The missing party?’ She wondered if he was trying to be funny. When he looked at her unfazed, she said, ‘He’s my husband.’
Inspector Rajan smiled benevolently at her. He had already decided that Rhea’s husband was either road kill on some nameless highway or had taken off with some tasty little firecracker half his age, leaving behind a hapless, middle-aged wife. ‘So, tell me what happened, madam.’
‘Can you please not call me “madam”?’
The inspector was surprised by the tenacity in her voice, and then he smiled again, the flat, spooky smile with its dash of empathy and scorn.
She proceeded to tell him the particulars, the argument, her defection to Alibaug, the return to an empty house.
‘Are you sure there was no note?’
‘A suicide note?’
‘Any kind of note,’ he said generously.
She said she had found nothing. He gave her a form to fill, and she handed it back, completed, with Adi’s picture.
Inspector Rajan asked her if Adi had had a history of mental illness.
He had always been prone to depression, she said, and this became particularly pronounced after the death of their infant son.
‘How did your son die?’
She sighed. She told him.
‘A monkey!’ For the first time he looked genuinely interested in her. ‘Wow!’
She said nothing. He was perturbed by her blank expression; it was as if she were staring up at him from an abyss. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said after a moment. She thought Inspector Rajan had the slightly glandular, fatigued air of someone who masturbated for a living and moonlighted as a policeman.
‘Do you have any idea why your husband might have left home?’
‘I’ve told you everything I know, inspector.’
‘Everything?’ he asked her doubtfully. Leaning forward, he conjectured in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Do you think he was having an affair?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because middle-aged men often take off when they are cheating on their wives.’
‘An affair…’ She considered the word desolately.
‘I don’t mean to upset you, of course.’
‘Not at all.’
‘But who knows what goes on behind our backs?’
‘That’s correct. We don’t ever know anyone at all.’
‘I often tell my wife—trust no one! Not even me.’
‘That’s a very sound piece of advice,’ she said. ‘For your wife.’
To Rhea’s right, two boys in handcuffs, dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, were being accosted by policemen; she overheard a policeman addressing one of them as ‘saala pickpocket’. She felt the wooden sleeve of the chair she was sitting on; it was moist with her perspiration.
‘But fear not!’ the inspector said enthusiastically. ‘This is life. This is fate. Anything can happen. But we must do our best and leave the rest in the hands of the Almighty.’
Rhea resisted a disturbingly violent urge to slap the inspector. ‘Well, if there’s anything else you need to know, feel free to call me and I will come by.’
‘Mumbai Police is at your service. We are the custodians of your trust. We will find your husband, Mrs Dalal.’
‘You will find him,’ she repeated as she got up to leave. Her tongue rolled over ‘Mumbai’, and came away with a distasteful coating.
The inspector also stood up to say something but she could not catch a single word because one of the pickpockets had started to wail at a high, hysterical pitch.
28
Karan had been in London three years when he met Claire Soames.
He had taught her daughter, Sibyl, the previous year at the school where he worked.
Karan was in the green room as a performance ensued in the auditorium. Parents milled around furnishing food and providing assistance with the costumes. Several enthusiastic sorts had festooned the foyer of the auditorium with balloons, ribbons and streamers. From the green room Karan heard laughter, then faint, broken applause followed by loud jeering; he suspected that one of the performances had not gone down too well with the kids.
A few seconds later, Claire stormed into the green room, clad in a ghastly outfit of a hedgehog. At first Karan was taken aback by her dramatic arrival and oddball ensemble. Then it occurred to him that she had dressed as Mrs Tiggy-Winkle for the amusement of the children, but had met with a round of snarky booing.
‘Brutes!’ she cried. ‘Bloody brutes. You spend a week working hard on a look, and all they toss you is a sodding tomato; I’d have been so much better off coming as a dildo-juggling crack whore.’ She yanked angrily at her dirty brown spiky wig.
‘They’re only children,’ he said to calm her. ‘They probably thought it was cool to be boorish, although I can assure you that you look wonderful…’
‘In a hedgehoggy sort of way?’ Her face was taut with sarcasm.
Her spirited invulnerability and his tentative intrigue were like the opposite ends of two wires, and when they touched the sparks dazzled both briefly and privately.
‘Well…’
‘You’re not from England, are you?’ she asked as he gaped at her helplessly. She had a voluptuous presence; a face like an open book, and small, perfect breasts.
‘Why do you ask?’ He worried that his accent had been a dead giveaway.
‘Because you give the humans on our little island too much credit.’
As she started to disassemble the rest of her outfit, Karan turned away. She continued talking to him, asking rapid, personal questions, which he answered simply because no one else he had met in England had been so upfront.
‘So, where are you from?’ She was sitting on an ottoman, a few inches away from him, rolling down her stockings.
‘Shimla, India.’ His eyes fell on the crumpled heap of beige nylon at her feet, and he felt an obscene, hot rush of blood in his loins. ‘And Bombay.’
‘My great-grandfather was posted in the Punjab. When did you come to London?’
‘Three years ago.’ He fiddled with a pen even as he stole glances at her long legs and ballerina toes.
‘To teach?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows.
‘Yes.’
‘My God.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Is that all you ever did?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Sorry, that must have sounded awfully condescending. But surely teaching is not all you ever did?’ In her everyday clothes now she was elegant and regal, like a cat that has fallen from a great height and landed on its feet.
‘I worked as a photographer in Bombay.’
She beamed. ‘I’d love to know more about your photographs—but tonight you have your hands full with our nation’s bright young arsonists. So I will call you and quiz you another day, if you allow.’ Claire looked at him again, a little smitten by his hangdog charm, his slightly damaged demeanour. ‘Watch out for the tomatoes,’ she warned on her way out.
‘I’ve learned to watch out for more than just tomatoes.’
‘I guess that’s what they call a bumper crop,’ she said so softly that he did not hear her.
Two weeks later, Claire asked Karan to a Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the carefully lit gallery smart men in suits and young women in gowns strolled with an alluring, indolent air; plummy whispers bounced around like excitable debutantes.
Claire and Karan exchanged innocuous details about their lives. Growing up in the Home Counties, with a pony and three greyhounds, Claire had never imagined she would swap the indolence of the countryside for the hysterical eccentricities of London’s cocky, useless art world (‘A load of bollocks but still…’). She drove around her neighbourhood, Primrose Hill, on her ex-husband’s battered Vespa, and took the train
to the ICA, where she had been a curator for nine years.
‘Let’s go to Soho. There’s this little café I know,’ she said as soon as they stepped out of the museum. ‘Their strawberry gateau is positively nirvanic!’
‘Yes, let’s.’ Karan was slightly amused by the idea that dessert could confer salvation.
‘You said you live in East London?’ she asked in the cab.
‘New Road.’
‘The hipster’s new paradise. I can’t keep up with you young lot,’ she said, although Karan was older than her by a year or two.
‘When I moved there, it was sweatshop central.’
‘But didn’t you like the pubs around Old Street?’
‘I haven’t been to them. I generally keep to my studio apartment.’
‘Ah, the great indoors!’
‘When I do go out it’s to the parks of Richmond or Hampstead.’ By Karan’s present socializing standards, the outing with Claire was a minor adventure.
‘Do you enjoy teaching?’
‘I don’t know how on earth I got the job, but I’m grateful to be here.’
‘You said you’d worked as a photographer. Why did you quit?’
‘I fell out of love.’ His tone made her disinclined to question him any further.
‘And you went smack into a teaching career?’
‘I have a university degree in education.’
‘But that’s not reason enough to savage yourself.’
‘I got a lot of practice at being savaged in Bombay.’
‘Ah,’ she said with a smile. ‘So teaching our bright young arsonists is your higher education.’
‘Emphasis on higher.’
‘I’m glad you’re here but they say London can be quite lonely if you don’t have people you know.’ The cab halted outside the café she paid, and they disembarked.
‘And cold to boot.’
‘Do you miss Bombay?’ she asked as they climbed to the second level of the café.
He did not reply.
A waiter seated them around a circular table laid with red gingham cloth and shoddy cutlery. He glanced out at the street below: clusters of attractive men with buzz cuts walked hand in hand emitting wiry sparks of synthetic love; their eyes restless.
She motioned the waiter and asked for two strawberry gateaux.
The desserts arrived. ‘Bon appetit,’ she said.
‘Well, here’s to nirvana.’
‘Don’t get carried away now.’ She waved the spoon before him like a little sword.
‘I do,’ he said, scooping a piece of the gateau. ‘I do miss Bombay.’ He noticed only now that she was wearing a dramatic black mink coat; when his hand accidentally touched it the luxury it broadcast fled and its softness, he felt, had a seductive voltage all its own.
They went to a bar after dessert, drank plenty; he enjoyed her glittering levity, her polished performances of enthralling diffidence. Claire made him feel indispensable, irresistible even. But he noticed she was like that with most people; her charm was an equal opportunities employer. Later, when he looked back on that evening, he could not remember whether she had pushed him against the wall and tasted his mouth with a shameless, voracious hunger, or if he had stroked her smooth, delectable thigh as she ordered her fourth glass of merlot. In the morning, sunlight streaming in through her bedroom window revealed her naughty, luscious body wrapped around him like a smooth white scarf, the scent of their bodies intermingling like secret, wild herbs in a witch potion.
After a long season of seclusion, tender curiosity for a woman made him pull her closer.
When he joined her at the breakfast table Claire was playing with her daughter. She warmed him a scone and served it with marmalade and Valencia oranges. He drank two cups of tea, then rose to leave.
At the door, Claire clasped his unshaven cheeks and put her thumb into the dimple on his chin, as if assessing the indent.
The station was only a few minutes’ walk from her house. An hour later Karan got off at Whitechapel feeling sated and bright. He could not get Claire out of his mind, her fine elbows, the musky scent of her pussy, the rain-like softness behind her shins. Tabloids billowed in a wet, wet wind. He crossed a busy street, passed grungy artists, musicians with guitars, Sylheti women in silky black jellabas. Outside Royal London Hospital, he glanced at the fat, pink, grubby bums gathered on a dirty wooden bench, surrounded by a swarm of grey and white pigeons. He sighed. This sight always evoked his sympathy; he had come to nurse the vague, corrosive possibility that he too might end up either as a wayside drunk or like the madwoman he had once photographed on Dadar Bridge, so enraptured by private pain that she seemed to be free of it. But this time he told himself that he would not end up on the streets.
The loneliness he had struggled with in the last few years in London had initially seemed insurmountable; like the cold, it cut right to the bone. He had been perturbed to find that unlike the loneliness of Bombay, which could be shared with others, cut up like bread and sung away like a dirge, the loneliness of London held him hostage to its peculiar, unfamiliar rules. He had spent one night too many looking out of the window of his room at the young Bangla boys zooming around in little red cars blasting the latest craze in the Asian underground circuit; he had looked at people in London and found that they were protective of their own loneliness, which they polished and wore like a shield against the world. So when Claire sauntered on to the scene, a membrane tore open between him and the foreign city. Claire did for Karan in London what Rhea had done in Bombay: helped him forge a relationship with a great metropolis in the guise of a personal affinity.
‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ he called to ask two days later.
‘You mean in Hampstead Heath?’ she bit on her tongue.
‘Actually, I mean Old Street.’
Claire took him everywhere. To parties where skinny women looked as if they’d fled the perfumed pages of splashy magazines, to private screenings of Pedro Almodovar’s movies, to installations where artists of no distinguishable gender, age, or for that matter even talent floundered glamorously, to sit-down dinners in Bloomsbury, where dignified academics spoke with courteous scholarship about the Renaissance before they went home and begged their young lovers for golden showers.
They went on a holiday to Rome, strolled through the Villa Borghese, where, unknown to Karan, Adi and Rhea had sat years ago by an ancient mossy fountain and prayed for children. They went to Scotland, to tiny towns where the roads were so narrow only one car could navigate them and all the hotels had colossal, maudlin stag heads mounted in the hallway. Claire liked to make love in public, and he indulged her: hurried, energetic, almost violent encounters occurred on a cold gravestone in Harrow, in the last aisle of a bookstore in Bloomsbury, on the front seat of night bus No. 19. Afterward, she did not like to talk, preferring to feel wrecked open by his swift, furious dives of passion, his virile indiscretion; she never dwelt on the fact that she had asked him to violate her because it would have diluted the thrill of the experience and her subsequent sense of disrepair.
If Karan went right along, a pebble swallowed by the surf, it was because she had seduced his trust on two grounds. Unlike Rhea, who had kept their affair hidden like a mothball in a closet, Claire celebrated Karan, sharing him with her unending retinue of admirers and acquaintances. Little did he know that most of her friends were too suave to let on that they considered Karan docile and subcontinental, attractive but with a vaguely destitute air, wonderfully exportable in case of romantic malfunction; the shy schoolteacher, they all agreed, was the perfect conquest for Claire Soames.
Claire feigned no interest in India, never oohed and aahed over its history, culture or its colours. So Karan never had to tell her about his father, the false foot, his mother, her bruised shins; he never had to tell her about Zaira and the poignant vigour of their friendship; about Samar, missing now and missed so much. If Claire was smitten with his guilty, soulful face, she never attributed his pain
to an inheritance of affairs past: it was who he was, she believed, it was in the grain of his character. Karan found it easy, even exciting, to be around her, a woman with the presence of lightning, who could play a man like a harmonica tune, who wanted to devour his body with such ravenous gusto that they often found themselves in broom closets, phone boxes, ditches in Hampstead Heath, absolving themselves of some common pain in the clamour of a lust that surprised them with its force.
Rhea slipped beneath the creaking floorboards of Karan’s memory, but like a loyal and enterprising ghost continued to haunt him with her flamboyant absence.
The following year, at Christmas time, Claire invited Karan to accompany Sibyl and her to her parents’ home. In the four years he had been in England, no one had asked him over to their house; Karan was grateful, but nervous.
They had hardly hit the motorway when it started to rain, thin, pointless drops that gave the landscape a maudlin, incompetent air. Driving down the narrow, circuitous lanes of the English countryside she pointed to a spire jutting through a spectral cluster of leafless elms—the church Claire had attended as a child. She showed him her riding school; the clubhouse. He was amazed by the landscape, an exotic, glistening green; ravens called out from their perches on fence posts or in leafy oaks, sooty omens of some distant doom. Periodically Claire slowed the car and pointed out an architectural quirk, a farm known for its organic produce, a parking lot where her best friend had been arrested for dogging.
By the time they reached her parents’ home, the rain had cleared and the sky, the colour of old steel, covered them like a stern, cold sheet of canvas.
‘Don’t mind the dogs,’ Claire said. Sibyl had already run indoors, to be greeted by a pair of shaggy, ungainly greyhounds, with posh, hollow woofs, clamouring for her attention.
‘I like dogs,’ he said, remembering Mr Ward-Davies.
‘Oh, good; these two can be a bit much.’
‘Are you sure your parents are okay having me over?’
‘Of course! They’ve been wanting to meet you forever.’
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 28
