Ellis Peters - George Felse 09 - Mourning Raga (8 page)

‘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?

Leaning over the rail of his balcony, Dominic pricked up his ears abruptly, listening.

‘Hey, did you hear that? Listen!’

‘Somebody whistling,’ said Tossa, unimpressed, ‘that’s all. They do it even here. You remember, Ashok said…’

‘Hush!’

She hushed obediently; he was very serious about it. She held her breath, following the tiny, silvery trail of notes up and down, a curiously rueful air. It receded, suddenly muted by the high hedge, but still heard, growing clearer again for a while as the angle changed, then cut off finally by the bulk of the wing. Now he must be in the street, lost among the trees. Theirs was a select residential road, silent at night. Indian cities have their preserves of silence, even close to the hub and the heart.

‘Did you hear it? Did you get it?’

‘I heard him whistling,’ she said wonderingly. ‘What about it?’

‘You didn’t get what it was he was whistling?’ And Dominic picked up the air himself, and whistled it softly in his turn; he had an ear for a tune even at first hearing. ‘You don’t recognise it? But was it the same? The same as his?’

‘I think so. It sounds the same. Why? How did you know it?’

‘I heard it the other day, and so did you. It’s the song from Ashok’s music to the film, don’t you remember? The simple one, the one Kamala sings. He
said
he’d be disappointed if they weren’t whistling it in the streets before long. But not before the film’s released! What on earth’s going on?’

‘But are you sure?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘After all, the ragas are everybody’s property, you just take them and improvise on them, don’t you? Somebody could accidentally produce a tune that recalled Ashok’s, couldn’t he? I mean, the unit is in Sarnath – or back in Clark’s Hotel at Benares, probably, at this hour. Not in Delhi, anyhow.’

‘I know. I must be imagining things,’ agreed Dominic, shivering, and turned back from the staring stars into the warmth of the room.

Anjli arose in the early hours of the morning, and stood beside her bed for a little while, listening to the silence, which was absolute. Not even a stirring of wind in the trees outside the open window. The air was clear, still and piercing, like dry wine.

She was just getting used to the size of the room, which held two beds, and could have accommodated ten. The distance between her single bed and Tossa’s made movement easy and safe. She dressed with care and deliberation, because she had the deep conviction within her that she was not coming back, that she had better get everything right the first time, for there was not going to be any chance of revising measures once taken. Delhi would be as cool as an English spring for some weeks yet, the nights cold, midday perhaps reaching summer warmth in the sun. Better be prepared for all temperatures. She put on the lambswool and angora suit in muted strawberry pink, took a scarf and her light wool coat, and slipped her feet into supple walking shoes. Then she carefully tucked into her large handbag a cotton dress, sandals, toilet necessaries and a towel. That was all. The Lord Buddha, when he passed through the palace gardens among the oblivious sleepers, carried nothing but what he wore, and even that he gave away when he entered the outer world and sent Channa back with the weeping white horse Kantaka.

She had some money of her own, changed into rupees for shopping, and some travellers’ cheques. Her passport, her own personal papers – it seemed wrong to possess any of these. But she was living in this present world, and its customs were not those of Kapilavasru, and a certain respect was due to the laws of the land. So she allowed herself the money and the credentials. And at the last moment she turned back to her dressing-table, and painstakingly tied round her left wrist the slightly wilted bracelet of jasmine buds. Dominic was, after all, rather sweet, and it wasn’t like allowing oneself real jewels. The Lord Buddha had divested himself of all his jewels before he exchanged his rich silk robes for a huntsman’s homespun tunic in the woods. Maybe she could exchange her expensive cardigan suit for shalwar and kameez and a floating, infuriating gauze scarf, such as the schoolgirls wore. She peered into the dark mirror, where a faint cadence of movement indicated the ghost of Anjli peering back at her, and imagined the transformation.

In the other bed Tossa slept peacefully. She never stirred when the door of the room was gently opened. Anjli looked back, and was reassured, and at the same time curiously touched. She hadn’t expected much from Tossa, to tell the truth; anyone her mother deputed to do her dirty work for her was automatically suspect. But Tossa had been a surprise; so quiet, and so reasonable, and so aware, as if she knew just what was going on. Which was nonsense, because there couldn’t really be two Dorettes, could there? And how else would she know? Not stupid, either, she could put her foot down gently but finally when she liked. Anjli hoped they would not feel too responsible, and that she would soon be able to get in touch with them and put their minds at rest. Also that they would spend the last dollar of Dorette’s money on seeing India before they went back to England.

The corridor was lit only by a small lamp at the end. No one was moving. She listened, and the whole house seemed to be one silence. Anjli closed the door of the room softly behind her, and tiptoed along the darker wall towards the landing window that led to the balconies. There was a stairway to the courtyard there; and there were no gates or doors closing the archway that opened into the street. She knew the lie of the land by now; by the carriage gates farther along there were always a few rickshaws and taxis hopefully waiting, even at night.

She was not going back to Dorette’s synthetic world. Not now, nor ever. There were plenty of things in India that she didn’t want, the cockroaches, the flies, the dirt, the lean, mad-looking tonga horses, half-demented with overwork and rough usage, the maimed animals that no one was profane enough to kill but no one was vulnerable enough to pity, the hunger, the disease, the monumental indifference. Nevertheless, India was all she wanted, India and the links that bound her to it, notably her father, the indispensable link.

There was a room-boy curled up asleep in the service box at the end of the corridor. She passed him by silently, and he slept on. Down the stairs into the courtyard she went, and from shadow to shadow of the spaced trees across to the end of the box hedge – perhaps it wasn’t box, but it looked like it, and that was how she thought of it – and round it into comparative security. Now there was only the porter’s box by the archway. They were asleep there, too. She stole past them like a ghost, and never troubled their dreams. She was in the street, melting into the shelter of the trees, alone in the faintly lambent darkness.

She thought of the receding red turban, and the fine thread of melody whistled across the evening air to her, like an omen; it no longer troubled her, it was inevitably right now, at this hour. The early morning, and the guests – the guest! – departing…

At the last moment she thought better of taking a rickshaw from the end of the carriage drive, though there were two standing there. She crossed the road, instead, and circled round them, keeping in the shelter of the trees; for when enquiries began to be made about her departure, these would surely be the first people to be questioned. Close to the southern end of Janpath was Claridge’s Hotel, and there would just as surely be a taxi or two waiting there.

There was one car, the Sikh driver asleep behind the wheel, and one cycle-rickshaw, with a lean brown boy curled up in a blanket inside the high, shell-shaped carriage. Anjli chose the rickshaw. It would take longer to get her out to the edge of town, but it would pass silently everywhere, and not be noticed. It would be cheaper, too, and she might yet need her money. Who knew how far she would have to travel to find her father, even if Arjun Baba could tell her the way?

The boy awoke in a flash, uncurling long, thin limbs like a startled spider, and baring white teeth in a nervous grin.

‘Will you take me,’ said Anjli, low-voiced, ‘to the new school in Rabindar Nagar?’ She could have given the number of the house and been dropped at the door, but the hunt for her, if pursued devotedly enough, might even turn up this boy; and besides, if her father’s secret was so urgent, she did not want any witnesses.

The boy bowed and nodded her into the carriage, and pushed his cycle off silently into the roadway. It was a long drive, she knew, perhaps a little over two miles, but she was a lightweight, and the bicycle was new and well-kept; it would still be practically dark when they arrived. The shapes of New Delhi flowed past her mutely in the dimness, trees and buildings, occasionally a glimpse of a man stumbling to work, still half-sleeping, sometimes the smoky glimmer of little lanterns attached to the shacks where vegetable-sellers slept beside their stalls, waiting to unload the goods brought in at dawn. The stars were still visible, silver sewn into velvet. Now they were out of the city and cruising along the airy terrace of the Ridge for a while, where the air was sharp and bitterly cold, dry and penetrating as the sands from which it blew. And now the first small white villas, making pale patterns against the smoke-coloured earth that would be tawny by day.

The boy halted obediently at the shiny new gates of the school, and asked no questions. Probably he had no English, for he said not a word throughout the transaction, though he must have understood enough to bring her where she wished to be. When she opened her bag they needed no words. He had already summed up her appearance, her clothing and her innocence, perhaps even over-estimating the innocence. He smiled at her beguilingly, and deprecatingly raised two fingers. He thought she didn’t know exactly how many new pice per mile he was supposed to charge; but her mind was on other things, and in any case her mood was that of one turning her back upon the world’s goods. She gave him his two rupees, and it was a good investment, for he promptly mounted his cycle and rode away before she could change her mind. So he never saw which way she turned from the school.

Only a hundred yards to go now. It was still almost fully dark, only the faintest of pallors showed along the horizon, transforming the sky into an inverted bowl of black rice-grain porcelain with a thin golden rim. She saw the shape of Satyavan’s house rise along the sky-line ahead, the only one with that little princely pavilion on the roof; she wondered for a moment if he had a garden up there, or at least small decorative trees in tubs, like the one beside the front door below. All the whites of the white walls were a shadowy, lambent grey, for as yet there were no colours, only cardboard forms, not solids but merely planes. She came to the gate of filigree iron, and for a moment wondered what she would do if it turned out to be locked or chained; but the latch gave to her hand soundlessly. At the end of the garden wall, drawn aside from the roadway, a small van sat parked in the worn, straw-pale grass. Did that mean that someone had come home? Or was it merely the property of the man next door, the plump lady’s husband, who was probably a travelling salesman, or a veterinary surgeon, or something else modestly professional with need of transport?

She let herself into the compound. The house was dark and quiet, and Kishan Singh, with no need to rise early, was surely still fast asleep. But in the distant corner of the earth yard a small gleam of light shone, and the now familiar scent of dust and humanity and incense, funereal, vital and holy, stung her nostrils as she tiptoed across the front garden.

In front of his corner kennel, under his lean-to roof, Arjun Baba sat just as she had seen him three days ago, huddled in his brown blanket against the night’s cold, peering down sightlessly into the minute flame of his brazier. A glossy red reflection picked out the jut of cheek-bones and brow from the tangle of grey hair and beard that hid his face. When he heard her step he raised his head, but did not turn towards her. She had a feeling that three days had been lost, and all that had passed in them was a fantasy, not a reality; or perhaps that those three days had been demanded of her as a probation for what was still to come. Perhaps he had not even expected her. Yet she was here.

She crossed the few yards of bare, beaten earth with the soft, gliding walk of a woman in a sari, and sank to her heels, squatting to face him across the brazier.

‘Namaste! Uncle, I am Anjli Kumar. You called me, I have come.’

The old man shifted slowly in his blanket, and linked his hands beneath his chin in greeting. A creaking voice blew through the tangle of grey hair and said hoarsely: ‘Namaste!’

‘Uncle, you have something to tell me?’

The ancient head wagged in the ambiguous manner she had learned to interpret as: Yes. Slowly he shrugged back the blanket from his shoulders, and lifted his eyes to her face.

It was the gleam of the brazier that warned her. She had braced herself unconsciously to contemplate once again the opaque white membrane of cataract filming over the sightless eyes, and instead there was a bright darkness with a hard golden high-light, the sharp pheasant-stare of eyes that saw her very clearly. For an instant she stared back transfixed and motionless; then without a sound she recoiled from him and sprang to her feet, whirling on one heel to run like a deer.

A hand reached out across the brazier and caught her by the long black braid of hair, dragging her back. She opened her lips to cry out, but the blanket was flung over her head, and hard fingers clamped the dusty folds tightly over her mouth and nostrils, ramming the cloth between her teeth. A long arm gripped her round the waist and swung her off her feet, and in a moment she felt something drawn tightly round her arms above the elbow, pinning them fast. She tried to kick, and the voluminous folds of the blanket were drawn close and tied, muffing every movement. A hand felt for her mouth, thrust the woollen stuff in deep, and twisted a strip of cloth round her head to fasten the gagging folds in place.

The hair-line of gold along the horizon had thickened into a pale-rose-coloured cord. Just before the first backdoor tradesman pushed his hand-cart into the alley between the houses, the little van parked on the grass started up, and was driven decorously away towards the main road.