Ellis Peters - George Felse 09 - Mourning Raga (6 page)

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He had withdrawn a little into his blanket, his head recoiling into cover from the sun.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 scattered 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.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Anjli, strongly recovering, and dug her heels in faithfully at his side.

Someone was coming, hurried, quiet, obsequious feet sliding over polished floors. A turbaned house-man in white cotton, austere but imposing.

‘Shri Vasudev Kumar?’ said Dominic, evading lingual difficulties.

The man stepped back, and wordlessly waved them inside, into a large hall half-darkened by curtains and palms, and panelled in aromatic dark wood. Far to the rear a staircase spiralled upwards, intricately carved and fretted. The servant bowed himself backwards out of sight through a door to their right, and left them there among the exotics and the impersonal evidences of money and loneliness. Beyond the staircase the room receded to a large window, and beyond that again they caught a glimpse of a half-circle of paved courtyard, and two large cars standing, and occasionally the passage of scurrying figures. Beneath the civilised quietness there was a deep tremor of agitation.

They waited for some minutes, and then a door opened, somewhere out of sight, and let through the murmur of subdued but troubled voices. Then a man came hurrying in by the door through which the servant had disappeared, and confronted the three visitors with patent astonishment. He was not above medium height, but his hard, stringy Punjabi build made him look taller, and his immaculate western suit of dark grey worsted, and the springy black hair crowning his narrow head, accentuated the impression of length. His complexion was smoothly bronze, his features aquiline, and his age somewhere in the middle thirties. He looked every inch the city magnate, director of companies and arbiter of destinies, but with all his machinery temporarily thrown out of gear. His hands were wiping themselves agitatedly on a silk handkerchief, his thin features jerked with tension, and his eyes, confronted by three such unexpected and unaccountable people, looked dazed and a little demented.

‘You wished to see me? I am Vasudev Kumar. But this is a very inconvenient time…’ His voice was rather high-pitched, and would have been shrill if he had not been so intent on keeping it almost to an undertone.

‘Yes, I see it is, and I’m sorry, Mr Kumar.’ Dominic went straight ahead because withdrawal without explanations was now, in any case, out of the question. ‘I’ll try to be brief, and perhaps we can talk at more leisure another day. We have just come from your cousin’s house in Rabindar Nagar, Kishan Singh thought it advisable for us to come straight to you. We realise Mrs Kumar is ill, and certainly don’t want to increase your anxieties. My name is Felse, and this is Miss Barber. At her mother’s request we’ve brought your cousin’s daughter over to India to join her father, but now we find that he is not in Delhi, and has not received the letter which was sent to him. This is Anjli Kumar.’

That was quite a bombshell, he realised, to drop on anyone, especially at a time when he was already beset by family troubles of another kind; but on the whole Vasudev, by the time he had heard this out to the end, looked considerably less distracted, as though one more shock had served only to concentrate his faculties. He did not, however, look any more friendly. His black, feverish gaze flickered from face to face, and lingered longest on Anjli. He bowed perfunctorily, with no implication of acceptance.

‘My cousin’s daughter? But we have received no communication about her, we did not expect…’

‘No, I realise that. Her mother’s letter to Mr Satyavan Kumar is still at his own house, you will find it unopened. I think that will make a better explanation than I can give you. We were expecting simply to bring Anjli over to join her father… permanently,’ he added, seeing no sense in softening anything. ‘Naturally none of us had any idea at all that your cousin had vanished a year or more ago. We heard that only this morning, from Kishan Singh. You’ll appreciate that in the circumstances the obvious thing to do was to bring Anjli to her grandmother, as her nearest relative here. In any case, Miss Lester had asked us to do that in case of any difficulty arising. But I’m very sorry that we should happen to turn up at such a distressing time for you.’

Anjli, who had stood woodenly to be inspected, not much resenting the suspicion and hostility of a man she didn’t know and had no desire to know, asked now in a wary but determined voice: ‘Is my grandmother very ill?’

‘She has had two strokes since my cousin went away without a word.’ Vasudev’s high voice clipped the sentence off resentfully; and indeed he had a grievance, having been forced to step in and shoulder the whole abandoned burden of the family businesses, while never quite acquiring the status of managing director in the eyes of any of the Kumar employees and hangers-on. And then, into the bargain, the old lady’s illness, with its endless demands upon his patience and his nervous resources. ‘Yesterday, I am sorry to say, she had a third one. It is very bad. The doctors have been with her all morning. I do not know what I can do for you… it is very unfortunate…’ A momentary gleam of active suspicion flared in his eyes. ‘You can give me proof of the young lady’s identity, of course?’

‘Of course! She has her own passport, and you can check with the American authorities. There is also her mother’s letter waiting to be read.’

‘Yes… yes… naturally! Please excuse me, but this is so sudden, I can hardly grasp it. And in the circumstances…’

‘In the circumstances,’ said Dominic, ‘having told you the facts, I think we had better leave, and get in touch with you later, when I hope Mrs Kumar will be better. If you have the doctors in the house with her now, we mustn’t add to your worries. We are at Keen’s Hotel, if you should want to reach us. Otherwise, we’ll call you later to enquire about Mrs Kumar.’

Vasudev wrung his hands and twisted the silk handkerchief in a despairing gesture. He did not want them, Dominic thought, upon any terms, but neither was it politic to let them go away like this. There was something more that had to be said, in his own defence, and out it came in a thin, irritated cry: ‘It is useless! You have not understood. Mrs Kumar is barely conscious… paralysed… she cannot speak… The doctors say that she is dying!’

There was an instant of silence and shock. Then Anjli said, firmly and finally: “Then I must see her. Whether I stay here or go back to America, I must see her. While there’s time. Surely you can see that. I am her granddaughter, and I have a right to see her, and she has a right to see me.’

There was no doubt that Vasudev was distinctly reluctant to allow any such thing, and they were always in some wonder as to why he gave way. For one thing, he had to cover himself. It would have looked bad if he had let an accredited relative go away without knowing that this might be the last chance of seeing Purnima alive, and it would look equally bad if he denied access to the dying woman now that it was requested. But he could have tried persuasion, and in the event he did no such thing. Perhaps there had been something in Anjli’s tone that he recognised and respected, an echo of Purnima, the uncompromising firmness of an Indian matriarch laying down the law, very well aware not only of the limitations of her rights (which are obvious) but also of their full scope (which is not, by any means). At any rate, he gave her a narrow, considering look, and then bowed slightly, and turned towards the inner door.

‘Very well! Come this way!’

Tossa, following anxiously, murmured: ‘Anjli, do you really think…’ But Dominic put his hand on her arm, and whispered: ‘Leave her alone.’

Anjli walked rapidly after Vasudev, along a panelled corridor hung with brocades the beauty of which would have stopped her in her tracks at any other time. No wonder they needed legions of servants to run about these endless halls. Door after door, glimpse after glimpse, where the doors were open, of silken luxury; and at the end, a final door, that opened on a dimmed room with a small lamp burning in a corner, and a little garish altar on a shelf behind it, an almanack Krishna, blue and sweetly-smiling, a dressing-table covered not with the brocades of Benares but the tinsel embroidery of the bazaars, a picture of Ramakrishna and another of Vivekananda on the walls, the gentle saintly seed and the hurricane wind that scattered it across the world. And in the middle of the room two white-clad servants standing on one side of a low bed, and on the other side an elderly gentleman of almost completely European appearance, sitting with his fingertips on the patient’s pulse.