THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE (7 page)

13

W
hat was Durai going to bring? The anticipation gnawed away at Joshua and he did everything in his capacity to not let it consume him.

After talking to Lakshman, he strolled down to the multi-cuisine restaurant downstairs and had a long and leisurely brunch in the company of the day’s newspaper, always curious to study the style, structure, content and political proclivities of English dailies in different parts of the world. The crazy-quilting of styles under the same masthead – colonial hangover in the OP-ED page, rabble rousing Indianism on the front page, idiomatic Americanism of the syndicated sections, curious colloquialism of the entertainment sections, pidgin thriftiness of the classifieds, grammatical anality and thematic banality of the editorials, old world charm of the culture and religion columns and the sheer incomprehensibility of the sports page – seemed to perfectly capture the dizzying chaos and contradictions sitting side by side with the striking coherence and consistency in the country. It was both amusing and revealing at the same time.

He returned to his suite after brunch and remained there for a while, taking a re-look at the paper he was working on. He was still unable to believe that he had failed to see the efficiency of the non-Robinsonian push-pop approach that Divya was so quick to spot and went through his algorithm once again with a fine-tooth comb. When his eyes and back started showing strains from sitting hunched and staring intently at the screen, he turned off the laptop and shifted base to the balcony.

The whiff of fresh air helped him unwind a little, but he was unable to bear the blazing sunshine beyond a few minutes. He decided to go downstairs and lounge in the shade of palm trees and parasols by the swimming pool and get some tan without pain. He changed into a comfortable T-shirt and khaki shorts and was knotting up his sneakers when the doorbell buzzed.

He opened the door and saw Durai Raj standing in the corridor, a respectful metre away from the door.

‘Hey Durai, come on in. I’ve been waiting for you with bated breath,’ Joshua said.

Durai walked in after Joshua and closed the door behind him.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘It’s okay, sir,’ said Durai. A guest offering a seat to a driver was as much a rarity as one offering coffee. In any case, Durai preferred not to sit, partly out of feudal respect for Joshua and partly out of the fear that he would be out of a job in case anyone ever found out about it.

‘What can I say?’ said Joshua. ‘If you’re comfortable standing, so be it. Any luck?’

‘I spoke to other drivers like you said, sir. And asked them casually about Mr Jeffrey Williams . . .’

Joshua leaned forward, eyebrows shooting up. ‘And?’

‘Mr Jeffrey did not have a regular driver like you, sir. He went with different drivers to different places. I could not talk to all the drivers, sir. Only some. What they’re saying is that he went to the Institute many times, sir. There was some conference going on last month and many foreigners had come to attend it.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Joshua said. ‘Where else did he go in the city apart from the conference?’

‘Don’t know, sir. These guys today didn’t say much. But I will check with the others, sir. Unfortunately, he never travelled in my car; otherwise, I would have known more.’ Durai said that with genuine regret which Joshua didn’t quite understand.
‘But there is something else I found out, sir. Mr Jeffrey did not always stay inside the city, sir. He also travelled long distance.’

‘Long distance? Where?’ Joshua asked eagerly. ‘Kanchipuram?’

Durai was surprised. Not even in his wildest dreams did he expect someone like Joshua to know the name of remote town like Kanchipuram. He had pronounced it can-chee-poo-ram, but there was no mistaking it.

‘Kanchipuram, I don’t know, sir,’ Durai said. ‘No one said he went there. They only said he went to the Delta area, sir.’

‘Delta area?’ Joshua asked, puzzled.

‘Cauvery river delta area, sir. It’s in the south.’

‘Oh, okay,’ Joshua said.

‘Tanjore, Trichy, Kumbakonam, Thiruvaiyaru . . . all those historic places, sir. All in the old Chola kingdom. A lot of tourists visiting the state usually go there, sir.’

Joshua remained quiet for a few moments and Durai began to wonder if he had understood. He had taken care to say the names slowly, but he wasn’t sure if they’d got across to Joshua. ‘Sir, if you want, I can write them down on a paper for you.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Joshua. ‘I got what you said. I know some of the places myself.’

The professor had taken Durai by surprise again. He seemed to know the lay of the land better than most foreigners the driver had encountered in his career. Curious, he asked, ‘Have you seen those places, sir?’

‘No, not yet. I only know of them. Maybe I’ll go visit sometime.’ Joshua had been to Trichy in the Seventies to attend Lakshman’s wedding, but it was a short trip and he hadn’t done much sightseeing.

‘They’re good places to see, sir. So many beautiful temples, both Shiva and Vishnu. The palaces are all gone, sir; just one or two left. But the old temples are all still there, sir,’ Durai said, his voice brimming with excitement. ‘I can drive you around, sir. I know all the places in and out. Three days and you can cover everything. I make at least one trip every month, sir. Foreign tourists are always interested in going.’

‘Thanks. I’ll let you know if I want to go,’ said Joshua. ‘Are you sure Jeffrey didn’t go to Kanchipuram?’

Durai became even more intrigued. Why was Joshua harping on Kanchipuram? ‘I don’t know for sure, sir,’ he said. ‘I haven’t talked to all the drivers yet. I’ll know better after I talk to more people. Is there anything special about Kanchipuram, sir?’

‘Could you try talking to the other drivers?’ Joshua said, brushing the question aside. Inquisitiveness was his prerogative, not Durai’s.

‘Yes sir, I’ll talk to other drivers. Today, tomorrow, anytime I see anybody, sir.’

‘Thanks,’ said Joshua. ‘Please try to find out as much as possible, about his local trips as well as his long distance trips. Come and see me as soon as you have something. And, as always, watch out, take all precautions.’

‘Yes sir, I know.’

Joshua opened his wallet and took out a sheaf of one-hundred-rupee bills. He didn’t even count. ‘Thanks for all your effort. Really appreciate it.’

Durai accepted his reward with both hands, a big smile lighting up his face. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Joshua looked at his Rolex and decided he could ill afford to spend time sitting by the pool and toasting himself to a tan as he desired. Durai’s report injected a sense of urgency into his system and he decided to get moving on the other line of investigation. Since Durai’s conversations with the other drivers were already yielding results, he decided not to disturb him. He asked Durai to fetch him a taxi and resume his good work.

‘Where do you want to go, sir?’ Durai asked.

‘Into the city,’ Joshua said.

Durai realized Joshua was not going to get any more specific than that. ‘No problem, sir,’ he said. ‘The taxi will be waiting in the porch in five minutes.’

He thanked Joshua once again and walked out of the suite a happy man: his job was not yet over and there was more mileage to extract from Joshua. As he padded down the corridor and made for the lift, he couldn’t help marvelling at the quirky way destiny worked. Dame luck didn’t smile on him when Jeffrey had come calling, scattering dollar bills out of a hat. Yoked to that Scrooge from Bombay, he didn’t get to make a single pie off Jeffrey’s generosity. But now, fate had sent him Joshua with a red ribbon bow around him, a milch cow willing to pay any price for information about Jeffrey. Present or absent, alive or dead, Jeffrey was still showering cash at the Oceanic.

14

B
y the time Joshua came calling, Lakshman was back in his office after his errand runs. However, there was no sign of the attendees register. Lakshman made Joshua wait in an adjoining room and rang up Velappan Kutty.

‘The office boy will bring the file to you in five minutes sir,’ Velappan Kutty said, sneezing.

‘What if the file doesn’t come in five minutes?’ Lakshman asked.

‘It will come after that, sir.’

Lakshman had no answer to such studied insolence. He knew he was at the mercy of Velappan Kutty and if he continued the conversation any further, he would have more such volleys coming his way. He hung up and waited. If there was anything Lakshman could take comfort in, it was that he hadn’t called Velappan Kutty in Joshua’s presence; it would’ve been doubly insulting to have his old friend witness his humiliation at the hands of a minor official. As Lakshman pondered over his ascent to head of the department, he couldn’t help feeling that his promotion was a dubious amalgamation of elevation on one hand and emasculation on the other, a marriage of inconvenience that could not be done apart.

An office boy delivered the file in half an hour. Lakshman turned it over to Joshua in the room next door. ‘Josh, all yours.’

Lakshman’s terseness told Joshua that his comrade of old was not able or willing to get involved any further.

‘Thanks, Lax. I’ll take it from here,’ Joshua said. He slumped back in his chair and flipped open the file. His heart thumped faster and he found himself breaking into a sweat. He riffled through the file quickly once and noticed that the attendees register was nothing but a sheaf of signup sheets, eighty to hundred of them. A quick and dirty estimate told him that, with about twenty or so rows per page, the total number of entries ran into thousands. He was sure the number of participants did not run into thousands and he got his confirmation when he thumbed through the pages a little more slowly: The organizers had made the participants sign in at every plenary and breakout session, so most of the names were just repetitions. Why they chose to collect the same information in so many places instead of just having everyone sign up once at the point of entry was something Joshua couldn’t tell. But he didn’t linger on it for long. This was India, where filling forms and paperwork in triplicate was a national occupation. They never made anything easy for you and he resigned himself for the long haul.

Once he got the hang of the file, he began plodding through it carefully, his glasses sliding down his nose. The entries were often in illegible handwriting as one could expect from signup sheets but he went through them patiently, dog-earing the page and marking the rows he wasn’t sure about with a pencil for further review.

A little over twenty minutes of search, his heart skipped a beat and then began to thump faster again.

Jeffrey’s name in full . . .

There was no mistaking it. His university and official email address were scrawled next to his name, in block letters.

Joshua sprang up from his chair and shot out of the room, the file clutched in his hand. He barged into Lakshman’s office, barely pausing to give a perfunctory knock on the door.

‘Lax, we’ve got work to do,’ he said, slapping the pink file down on Lakshman’s desk.

Lakshman froze in his chair for a moment before collecting himself and saying, ‘So you found what you were looking for?’

‘Yes, indeed. The guy who paid a little visit to your campus . . . he’s the same guy I’m after.’

‘Are you sure? Jeffrey Williams is such a common name.’

‘Positive,’ Joshua said and lowered himself into a chair. ‘His university, TDU, it’s mentioned next to his name.’

‘Okay. What do you want to do?’

‘Correction.
We
not
you
,’ said Joshua. ‘We need to go to Kanchipuram–’

‘
What
!’ Lakshman exclaimed. ‘Kanchipuram?’

‘Yes,’ Joshua said nonchalantly. ‘We don’t have much time to waste. It’s probably too late today, so we leave first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Why do you want to go to Kanchipuram of all places?’ Lakshman asked.

‘Once again, for the record, it’s not “you” but “we”.’

‘What for?’ Lakshman asked and then with a sigh, ‘I’m totally lost, Josh.’

‘Why don’t we go sit down somewhere as soon as your day is over? Maybe over a beer or something? I’ll fill you in, in every sense of the term.”

‘Beer is fine,’ Lakshman said, immediately perking up. Beer was always fine with him. But when he considered all the work piled up on his desk, he realized it wasn’t going to be easy to take the day off tomorrow. ‘But do you really need me for Kanchipuram?’ he asked. ‘I have loads of work.’

‘Hey, is it so hard to get away from work for one day? Put it down as a research trip. And that won’t be a lie, I swear.’

‘Work is one thing. But I also need to think about leaving Urmila behind. She’ll be all alone at home,’ Lakshman said, thinking on his feet. If he had to summon his dead grandmother for rescue, he would have summoned her.

‘Don’t give me that crap, Lax,’ Joshua said acidly. ‘You haven’t changed much after all these years, have you? I know Kanchipuram is only a couple of hours away from here. Once we get to Tambaram, there won’t be much traffic and we’ll be there in an hour. We can go and get back in half a day. I’ll drop you home by sunset, I promise. I’m sure Urmila can manage without you till them.’

For once Joshua’s knowledge of the local terrain managed to take even Lakshman by surprise. He had no more excuses that would wash with Joshua. ‘Okay, but you better tell me why we need to go.’

‘Good. That’s what I like to hear,’ Joshua said.

Lakshman cocked a curious eye at Joshua. What did he mean?

‘You said “we
”
,’ Joshua said with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. ‘We’re already making progress.’

‘How the hell do you know about Kanchipuram? I wouldn’t have thought that you would know the name of the place, and here you are giving driving directions off the top of your head, even remembering places like Tambaram on the way.’

‘Which was perhaps why you thought you could BS me,’ Joshua chuckled. ‘Why don’t we do this? You join me in the bar this evening and I’ll let you in on everything. The full disclosure, I promise.’

‘All right,’ said Lakshman. ‘I’ll come down to the bar and let’s take it from there. But let me be clear upfront, I still haven’t promised to go with you.’

‘Understood,’ Joshua said and rose to his feet. ‘I’ll get moving then.’

‘Let me walk you to the car,’ Lakshman said. ‘What do you want to do with this file? Do you want to keep it or return it?’

‘Could you keep it safe in your office? We might need it again.’

‘Sure,’ Lakshman said. He slipped the thing into a drawer and locked it up.

~

Joshua and Lakshman trooped down the corridor, the clip-clop of their shoes reverberating in the near-spooky emptiness. Joshua looked around as he walked, drinking in the strangeness of the classrooms and facilities in this part of the world. When they passed by the computer lab, he stopped to take a curious look through the window, sort of like Vanathi’s husband outside the ICU. The sight of UNIX machines dotting the room made him wonder how far the labs here had come since the days of mainframes and punched cards, monochrome monitors and German manuals, dumb terminals and dot matrix printouts. India surely was on the move.

Joshua was about to turn away when his roving gaze stumbled on a petite form in an amber top in front of a terminal at the far end windows.

‘Lax, that’s the same girl from yesterday, isn’t she?’

When Lakshman took a peek inside, he could see Divya sitting hypnotized in front of the computer, all alone in the lab, her dexterous hands drumming away at the keyboard. ‘Yeah, it’s her.’

‘I think I’ll say hi to her. Can we go in for a minute?’

As soon as Lakshman opened the door, a gust of air loaded with the aroma of Dettol hit them in the face. Only then did Lakshman remember what the place had been through.

‘Jeez, smells like a hospital ward in there,’ Joshua said.

‘It could smell far worse inside,’ Lakshman said. ‘Why don’t you just wait here? I’ll call her outside.’

Lakshman held his breath and stepped in. Divya turned around to the sound. She shot up from her seat when she saw Lakshman. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

Without a word, Lakshman motioned her outside the lab and stepped out.

Divya was surprised to see Joshua in the corridor. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said to him with a smile.

‘Hi, good afternoon. How are you?’ said Joshua.

‘I’m fine, sir. How are you?’ Divya replied, taking Joshua’s question a little too literally.

‘Doing great. Thank you,’ Joshua said.

‘I thought you were leaving for Boston yesterday?’

‘Well,’ Joshua said, hesitating a little. ‘Change of plans. I have some more things to take care of here. What are you doing here? Isn’t it supposed to be your holidays? . . . Don’t let this guy make you work so hard,’ he said, stabbing a finger in Lakshman’s direction. ‘You’re only a sophomore for crying out loud.’

‘I’m actually working on
your
algorithm, sir,’ Divya said with a twinkle in her eyes. ‘I’m typing up the stuff to send to you.’

Lakshman laughed, as did Joshua.

‘Oh, don’t kill yourself over it,’ Joshua said. ‘We may have bigger fish to fry. So go home and relax now, but don’t be surprised if we suddenly call on you to burn some brain cells for us.’

‘Anytime, sir.’

‘Are you in town for the next few days?’

‘Yes sir. I’m not going anywhere,’ Divya said.

‘Not travelling outside for holidays? I’m surprised.’

‘Winter is actually the best time to stay in the city, sir,’ Divya said.

‘Winter? In Madras?’ Joshua said, bemused. ‘I thought there were only three seasons here: summer, summerer and summerest?’

Divya laughed. ‘Mid-December to mid-January is the music season here, sir. So we’re planning to go to some concerts.’

‘Right,’ Joshua said. ‘I remember seeing some ads in the paper. Didn’t realize it was such a big thing.’

‘Don’t worry, Josh,’ Lakshman said. ‘She’ll drop everything and come running if we ask her to.’

‘I hope it doesn’t come to that,’ Joshua said. ‘Trust you know how to reach her?’

‘You bet,’ Lakshman said. But he was baffled about what it was Joshua was pencilling in Divya for.

‘All right then. We’ll let you get back to work,’ Joshua said to Divya. ‘Saw you in there and thought I’d to say hi.’

Divya said bye and ducked back into the lab, into the miasma of disinfectant and excrement.

Lakshman escorted Joshua to the taxi waiting downstairs and waved a pensive goodbye. Trip to Kanchipuram. Help from Divya. What was Joshua really up to? Or worse, what kind of a jam was he really in?