Three Bargains: A Novel (37 page)

“Sit and eat something,” said Nalini. She pushed him into a chair at the dining table, placing a pile of toast before him. Madan stared at the charred bread and pushed it away. Preeti sat at the other end of the table, her hair a disheveled pile atop her head, wearing the same clothes from the day before. Her eyes followed Madan as he moved around the room.

Her teacup hurtled across the table and grazed his head, breaking into jagged pieces of rosy pink china, cutting his scalp.

“Why did you take him with you? What were you doing there? How could you bring Arnav someplace where there were guns?” she asked. “Always, ‘I’ll take Arnav. Let Arnav come with me.’ Now who’ll bring him back to me? Where is he? Where is my son? Bring him back to me. I want my baby back,” she howled.

Preeti pulled at her hair, swaying and shouting. Her mother led Preeti back to her room, and Ketan-bhai came in. “She does not know what she is saying,” said Ketan-bhai. “She’s distraught.” Tenderly, he dabbed at the drops of tea and flecks of blood on Madan’s cheek with a napkin. “How could you have known?” He placed his hand on Madan’s. “Don’t blame yourself. It won’t change anything and will only make it worse for you and her.”

What did Ketan-bhai know about blame and responsibility?

Arnav lay on the drawing room floor on a bamboo stretcher, his body wrapped in thick white cotton cloth brightened by garlands of marigolds. An oil lamp burned nearby, casting flickering shadows on his still form. The pandit murmured a chant, asking Madan to repeat it. Madan almost refused but then found that he didn’t have the energy.

At the crematorium, funeral pyres burned in various spots for those sharing this day with them. Madan looked up at the blue sky and the circling carrion birds and at all the faces around him. Faces with eyes that saw and mouths that breathed and hearts that beat, while on a burning bed of sandalwood his boy went up in a rush of flames.

Tomorrow, they would return to collect the bones and the cooled ashes. In a few days, Madan, Ketan-bhai and Preeti’s father would leave for Haridwar. All that Madan had left of his son he would scatter in the Ganges.

Days later, Madan found himself alone in the house. Ketan-bhai and Nalini had finally gone home, returning to their lives. The servants were gone for the day, and Preeti was, he assumed, with her parents. Even when she was in the house, in the days after Arnav’s death she moved past Madan as if he were invisible.

Madan retired to Arnav’s room. A musty dampness permeated the air. He had drawn all the curtains shut. There was no need for sunlight. His head hurt. Sleep had become an erratic friend.

Since Arnav’s death Madan had called Sourav repeatedly, but he had only once answered the phone, saying, “Shit, I’m sorry.” From then on, a robotic message informed him that the number was unavailable. Surjit claimed he had been nowhere near Delhi at the time of the shooting. The police had lodged a case and gone to bring him in, but he had filed anticipatory bail and was out free until it was time to come to court. The goons had disappeared, as had the gun, and the police wondered how they could prove the brother’s presence in Delhi when there was only Madan’s word. The story disappeared from the news.

He opened the drawer of the bedside table and removed his son’s old shirt. The stripe pattern was coming through the splotchy bloodstain on the front, which had turned brown. He sat on the bed and studied the variegated lines of the splatter, a familiar rosette of blood. In his boy’s bed, his shirt clutched in Madan’s arms, he did not notice when he fell asleep.

Pandit Bansi Lal leaned on his cane. Madan peered at him in the dimly lit hallway. Suddenly the pandit thrust his cane aside, shoving his arm under Madan’s nose. A baby lay there, cozy and asleep. Pandit Bansi Lal began to hobble away.
Go after him, Madan
, he heard someone shout,
he has Arnav.

Madan ran but could not catch up, and soon the pandit’s figure faded in the distance. Madan spun around; he was in a grove of trees. Again, he saw the pandit’s retreating figure and ran after him.
Not that way
, he heard. He twisted and turned in the thicket of swaying trees, trying to decide which clearing to take. In the dusky light, a dhoti-clad figure shuffled away.

He heard laughter and the screech of tires and abruptly the pandit appeared in front of him. Madan raised his hand to grab him, but the pandit was out of his reach. A baby’s cry pierced the air.
Don’t hurt him
, Madan shouted. Pandit Bansi Lal shimmied before him, sweeping the cloth off the bundle in his arms.

He gave a lopsided grin, presenting the bundle to Madan like a waiter proffering a tray of pastries. Madan leaned in, peering closely.

“Very sorry,” said Pandit Bansi Lal.

The baby wasn’t Arnav.

Madan’s eyes fluttered open to the sound of his voice. He did not start or sit up, but lay calmly in bed, the covers smoothed over him. It was the same strange dream that often disturbed his sleep, though sometimes instead of through the trees he would chase Pandit Bansi Lal over the brown, muddy waters of the canal, the pandit skimming easily away over the water’s surface.

“I thought I heard you call for me.” Preeti stood silhouetted against the corridor’s night-light.

His heart pounded. He shivered.

“Madan?”

He shook his head to clear it, but she thought he was telling her to go and she returned to her room.

Wait
, he tried to say, but his mouth was dry, and the plea stayed glued to his tongue.

T
HE LANDFILL WAS A MOUNTAIN OF WHITE. THERE WAS SO
much garbage that as he drove by, his eyes, unable to distinguish shapes, colors and sizes in the undulating landscape of waste, washed the entire spectrum in a milky bright light. From the cocooned hush of the car, Madan couldn’t hear the squawks of the circling buzzards above or the scavenging boys calling to each other as they weaved between the stoic cows determinedly chewing on peaks of trash and lazily taking in the plentiful landscape.

The outskirts of Delhi fell away. Behind him lay the keyhole ramparts of Red Fort and the call of the muezzin from the minarets of Jama Masjid.

There had been no one up when he’d left early that morning, the driveway gravel slick with dew, his breath visible in the crisp air. He hadn’t told Preeti where he was going, or that he was going at all. Nor had he told Ketan-bhai.

Dusty faces peered down at him from the bus windows, villagers and townspeople returning home. On the far side of the road, two plodding elephants with smears of red on their foreheads flapped their ears. Loaded trucks lined the highway.

The car sped north along Grand Trunk Road. Gone was the narrow, two-lane, potholed road. With this new highway, it would take him half the time to reach Gorapur than it would have twenty years ago.

Towns and villages appeared and then disappeared in his rearview mirror. He looked for signs heralding his approach to Gorapur, but on either side of the highway massive billboards sprang up relentlessly before his eyes, the artwork in bold colors conveying as much as the written messages:

Dream no more . . . It is here. The City of Tomorrow. Jeet Megacity.

You are thirty kilometers away from Jeet Megacity . . . come see the home of your future generations.

Jeet Megacity . . . A luxurious oasis of peace and prosperity.

Vastu-friendly apartments and villas. World-class facilities.

Live green. Love green. Be green. Dream green. Jeet Megacity.

He forced himself to ignore the signs. He drove straight on, slowing down when the billboards petered out. Water-drenched paddy fields rippled out on either side of the highway, dissolving into swaths of maize, their broad leaves flowering open in supplication to the sun. In the distance, a lookout tower stood in solitary contemplation.

At last a broad, metal sign,
GORAPUR WELCOMES YOU
, arched across the road. He drove under it, and after a few kilometers the surroundings began to look familiar. The roads crisscrossing the center of town were as before. It was everything that stood around them that had shifted and changed.

Now that he had his bearings, Madan felt the town reaching out, drawing him in. He drove on, the singular action of moving forward taking full possession of him. He knew where to turn, when to cross and where, finally, to stop.

He was at the corner. The road straight ahead led to the main house, and to the left was the turn into the narrower street of the servants’ quarters. He parked to one side and got out of the car. A slow-moving bicycle rickshaw trundled past.

He had been twelve when he stood at this corner after having just met Avtaar Singh for the first time. “How old are you, boy?” He could hear that voice boom in his head. “How old are you?”

Very old now, saab.

He couldn’t see any obvious changes to the main house. Long and broad, as he remembered it, a row of windows peeking out from behind the pointed tips of the Ashoka trees. The gate was shut. How many times had he driven in and out of it, or stood outside frittering away the time with Jaggu, or stepped out through it to take Prince on his daily walks?

Back in his car, he turned onto the road to the servants’ quarters, then got out and walked to the rusted gate. He peeked in. The courtyard was empty. Strokes of a broom scored the dust on the recently swept cement floor, and a puddle of water lay at the base of the water pump. The doors of all three rooms were closed. There was no rope bed outside by the wall.

The middle door swung open and a man emerged, wringing a cloth and wiping his face. He quickly recovered from his surprise at seeing a well-dressed man at the entrance.

“This is the back way,” he said, waving his cloth at Madan. “The front is from the main road.”

“I’m looking for Durga,” Madan said. “She works in the main house?”

“Durga?” the man repeated.

“This house belongs to Avtaar Singh?” Madan asked, realizing he shouldn’t assume that nothing had changed.

The man nodded. “I don’t know of a Durga, but I’ve not been here long.” He knocked on the adjoining door and another man came out. They walked to Madan and the first man said, “He’s looking for someone called Durga, says she works here.”