Banquet on the Dead (19 page)

‘What was the work done at the main gate all about, miyan?’ Hamid Pasha asked.

‘I do not know, and I do not care,’ Ellayya said. He muttered something under his breath. Out loud he said, ‘Something to do with a hole to be plugged. Nothing that could not have waited a couple of days until I felt a little better. Or that thing at the side gate. They had to plant some bean sprouts, that’s all. Could I not have done it? What difference does it make if the plants are planted a couple of days later is what
I
would like to know.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘It was not like this when Kakaji was here. No, sir, it was not.’

Hamid Pasha asked, ‘Is your wife in, miyan? We would like to talk to her as well.’

‘My wife?’ Ellayya asked. ‘What will
she
tell you about any of this? She is quite an ignorant woman, sir. She does not know anything.’

‘Even so,’ said Hamid Pasha smoothly, ‘is she in?’

Ellayya huffed and looked along the wall to the left, towards the backyard. ‘She is usually over there by the clothesline at this time,’ he said, and as they stepped away he repeated: ‘Just an ignorant woman. Don’t see why you should talk to her.’

They walked along the side wall of the old house to step into the backyard, where two nylon threads crossed each other. Nagarajan could first just see fabrics of different colours hanging off one of them, making it sag with their weight. Then on moving closer he made out a pair of dark arms that came into view and disappeared, then a quick glimpse of the edge of a sari, then a momentary flash of silver anklets. The men moved along the wall to the shaded sit-out and waited.

From somewhere within the maze of wet clothes Gauri emerged. She was about the same height as the rest of the women in the house, about five-foot-one, and in age she seemed to be placed somewhere between Karuna Mayi and Prameela. Like Ellayya’s, her hair had partially greyed too, but it was set in a long, neat plait. She moved with the assurance of someone who knew what she was doing, and in spite of her age and the fact that she had just finished a rather demanding task, she breathed easily. She walked up to where they were standing and asked them to sit on the ledge.

Hamid Pasha said they were comfortable on their feet.

She eyed his crooked waist. ‘Are you sure, babu?’

‘Yes,’ Hamid Pasha said coldly, and added: ‘So you do all this work by yourself. Does your husband not help you with it?’

She broke into quick laughter. ‘You are not from around here, are you, babu? If you were, you would not have made the suggestion that Ellayya does any work around this place.’

‘You mean he does not help you?’

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘he does not do any work around the place. He is always in bed, my dear husband. He is always “feeling sick”, you know.’ She nodded at them knowingly. ‘He only comes out of the house if he sees a pretty young thing in a bright skirt or blouse.’

Hamid Pasha smiled at her. ‘You do not seem to be angry at that. Does it not bother you that your husband makes eyes at other women?’

‘Oh, babu, who will have him? Wherever he goes, he has to come back to me. I think his eyesight is failing him too. He is starting to see me in other people as well.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Did he not tell you about how I have started to ignore him these days and how he has seen me around the main gate a few times, and even though he has called out to me I haven’t looked back at him?’ she asked. ‘He likes telling people that story.’

‘Is it a true one?’ Hamid Pasha asked, smiling.

‘Partly,’ she said shyly. ‘But it has not happened as many times as he tells it. He makes stories up, the old man. He probably saw some young girl around the place and whistled at her—and of course she was not going to come running to him. He is no Chiranjeevi now, no, babu?’

‘No, he certainly is not.’

‘At times he called me when I was in the middle of something, and then of course I didn’t look back at him. But that did not happen much. It definitely did not happen in the last month—he—he had a fall, babu, gave me a big fright, he did. Went to the bathroom and fell down and broke his hip, the poor fellow. Ever since then I have been taking good care of him. But he keeps staring at every other girl that passes by—the old fart.’

‘So—this did not happen on the day Kauveramma died, then?’

Her face changed, and the smile left her face. ‘That day,’ she said, and blinked once. ‘No, it did not happen that day. No, wait, it might have. Did he say it did?’

Hamid Pasha said, ‘I am asking
you
if it did.’

‘If he said it did, it may have,’ she said, and Nagarajan saw her eyes appraising Hamid Pasha thoroughly. ‘It was a day on which many things happened, babu. I do not remember every single incident.’

‘Ah, that is okay, madam,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘None of us remembers
everything
, do we, miyan?’ he asked rhetorically in Nagarajan’s direction, then, turning back to face Gauri, he said, ‘Tell us whatever you remember. For instance, what time in the morning did you go to the house?’

A pall had come over her, Nagarajan saw, ever since Hamid Pasha mentioned Kauveramma’s death. Whether it was brought about by grief or by fear he could not yet say. Her voice, which had been light-hearted and full of life when they arrived, was now distant and untrusting.

‘Normal time,’ she said. ‘Six-thirty in the morning.’

‘And where did you go first?’ Hamid Pasha leant against the wall and folded his hands.

‘I—I do not go to the house from the front door, babu. The men sleep there. I go from behind where the ladies sleep. They wake up early, no?’

Hamid Pasha nodded. ‘And this day was the same?’

‘Yes,’ she said, hanging her head and lowering her voice. ‘I went to the bathroom to wash my legs—it had drizzled that morning and my legs were muddy from the walk to the house, no? So I went to the bathroom and opened the door, and in the darkness I saw Kauveramma washing her hands...’

‘Indeed? And this is normal for her? She is usually in the bathroom at the time?’

‘Well, I do not know, babu, because at the time
I
am never in the bathroom, no? I—I am not allowed in there.’

‘Not allowed?’

‘Kauveramma is very particular about us—the old man and I—using the bathrooms. She says—used to say—we have to use our own bathroom. She was very ritualistic too. She did not allow anybody to touch her in the mornings— you know?’

Nagarajan knew. That sounded very much like his own mother’s daily routine in the mornings, mumbling prayers and swaying out of touching distance of her family. She also insisted on eating from her own plate, having her own corner in the kitchen, having a separate bathroom of her own... he sighed. Old Brahmin women were all the same, he thought.

‘What happened next?’ Hamid Pasha asked, a shade disinterestedly, Nagarajan thought. Talk of Brahmin rituals would be boring to him, of course.

‘I opened the door and took a step inside, and she went, ‘Hmm?’ I told her it was me, and she asked me, softly, but very angrily, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said I just wanted to wash my feet. But she said, ‘Did I not tell you that you cannot use this bathroom?’ And— and I just turned and ran, babu.’

‘Ah,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘Quite interesting, that. Was she always like that with you? Angry and stern?’

Gauri nodded. ‘Especially if it is something to do with her
madi
. Once I accidentally touched her in the morning, and she had to take a bath once again and she had to wash her clothes again—yes, she was in an extra bad mood that day.’

‘And on this day she was washing her hands, did you say?’

‘Yes. She was sitting on a stool with her back to me, and there was no light in the bathroom that day. I do not know why. Maybe the current was off? No, I remember the porch light was on—I do not know why the light was not on in the bathroom.’

‘Forget the light for now,’ Hamid Pasha said gently. ‘Tell us what you saw.’

‘She was sitting with her back to me, on the little stool. And she was holding up her hands like this.’ Gauri held up her hands, palms facing them. ‘And it looked like she was staring at them. That was when I walked in.’

‘And she turned around?’

‘No,’ said Gauri. ‘She does not look anybody in the eye unless she has to. She just lowered her hands and said “Hmm?” ‘

‘Ah.’

‘But babu, her hands... ‘

‘Yes?’

‘Her hands were—I do not know—there was no light. The day was just breaking, so it was very dim. But I could see—her hands were—not normal.’

Hamid Pasha moistened his lips with his tongue and waited.

‘Her hands—they had spots on them. Black spots. And I think she was trying to wash them off.’

Something suddenly clicked in Nagarajan’s mind. There was some association between arsenic and spotted hands that he had learnt from one of his earlier cases. His eyes sought Hamid Pasha’s. The old man had noted it too.

‘Black spots...’ Hamid Pasha said.

‘Yes, babu, and of course, when she asked me what I was doing there I just ran from there. She had a cold the night before, babu, and her voice was so—so—rough, you know, and in the darkness, with those spotted hands—er, she looked like a ghost.’ She stopped. ‘What am I saying? It is wrong of me to say something about a dead woman.’

‘No, that is perfectly all right,’ Hamid Pasha said in a soothing voice. ‘Now tell us what happened after you went into the rest of the house.’

She said, ‘Prameelamma was just getting up, and she asked me where I’d been. I told her I had woken up late and had to come running, and that I stopped to wash my muddied feet, and she said, ‘okay, okay, go and heat the milk. I am coming.’ I was nervous when she asked me, babu. It would not have been good for her to know that I went to the bathroom too. So I just went into the kitchen and started heating up the milk. She joined me in a little while.’

Hamid Pasha tightened his lips, and his tongue passed over them again. ‘Did you see Kauveramma return to her room? I understand she returned to her room a little while later?’

‘Yes,’ Gauri said. ‘I mean—I did not
see
her, but you could hear her very clearly that morning, babu. She was groaning and moaning about the cold, about the smell of chlorine, and I could even hear her moan about me in the bathroom. Prameelamma pretended to ignore all of it, thankfully for me!’

‘And you made breakfast...’

‘Yes, we finished making breakfast, and Swami saab came out and asked for a bowl of water for his mother to wash her hands, because she was too tired to come out, he said. I give him a bowl of water and he went back in with it. Then after a long time he came out, with the bowl of water, and went out into the backyard.’ Gauri paused here, and looked cautiously at both of them.

‘Yes?’ said Hamid Pasha.

‘When he was going out with the bowl of water, I happened to walk by—and by this time there was enough light around the house, no? So I walked by and I looked at the water.’ Again she paused, and again she looked at them both.

‘Yes?’ said Hamid Pasha again, his face the picture of patience.

‘The water was red, babu,’ said Gauri, ‘as though they had washed a wound in it.’ She paused and eyed Hamid Pasha squarely in the eye. ‘A big, red, bloody wound, it must have been,’ she said.

As if from nowhere a wind blew and made her hair dance, and just as she attended to it with her hands Nagarajan thought she looked like one of those old death-crones he had heard about when he was young; the ones that washed clothes on the muddy banks of the river in the middle of the night and beckoned to passers-by to come have a look. His grandfather had told him the story of the village washerwoman who had lost her mind and clubbed her husband to death with a rolling stone before wandering off into the darkness, out of sight, only to appear on nights of the full moon at the old temple by the edge of the river to villagers whose misfortune it was to trek alone along the Godavari on their way to Dhavaleshwaram.

Maybe it was the faint, musty odour of the drying clothes; maybe it was the sudden breeze that disarranged her hair in such grotesque a fashion; maybe it was what she said; or maybe it was a combination of all the above, Nagarajan felt that if there was a death-crone in this house, it was most likely to be Gauri.

Hamid Pasha’s face was set in a tight expression that Nagarajan could not read. In a perfectly impassive voice, he asked Gauri, ‘You did not tell anybody that the water was bloodied?’

Gauri shook her head, her hair now normal, ceding to her hands, so that Nagarajan’s illusion was broken. ‘No, babu,’ she said. ‘I—I did not give the incident that much importance at the time, you know. Only after Kauveramma died that evening—then I thought of it and thought maybe it was strange.’

‘Yes,’ Hamid Pasha agreed. ‘It
is
strange. Why did you not think it was important when you first saw it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gauri, thinking. ‘To be honest with you I was not sure what it was at first, babu. The colour was not bright red, you know, like they show in the movies. But it was like a brick had been dissolved in it, no? Reddish-brown, I guess, will be the closest description. I only gave it a passing glance, so I did not give it much attention. But that night when I was in bed thinking things over, I suddenly remembered and thought it was quite odd.’

‘Well,’ Hamid Pasha said, ‘you say she was feeling sick that day, so maybe it is not
that
strange that she vomited blood.’

‘Do you think that was the case?’ Gauri inquired.

‘It is possible, is it not? Anyway, all we can do is record the fact and move on. Tell us—what happened after that?’

‘We finished making breakfast, and I took some for the old man. We had it together, and he went back to sleep after he’d had a little something to drink. I came back to the house after that. Swami saab was just taking out the bags of chlorine on the wheelbarrow.’

‘Out of the back door?’

Gauri nodded. ‘The bags were in Kauveramma’s room, so it made sense, I suppose. All the while he was taking the bags out I hears Kauveramma complain about the smell, and I tell you, sir, the smell
was
horrible indeed. How she managed to live for so long with them right in the next room, I will never know.’