Mourning Raga Part 2

Part of this open s.p.a.ce was occupied, at the moment, by a cl.u.s.ter of brown tents, in which lived Orissan building workers, employed on two half-finished houses just along the main road. A long chain of them, moving rhythmically, carried away the excavated soil from new foundations, bearing it in baskets on their heads. More than half of them were women. They were the poorest of the poor, but after this hard training in deportment they walked like queens. Their children, in one tattered garment apiece, or none, haunted the open ground and begged vehemently and maliciously from every pa.s.ser-by.

Two of them converged purposefully upon Dominic, Tossa and Anjli as soon as they stepped out of the taxi. Here were foreigners, their proper prey. A second look at Anjli, as she turned to face them, brought them up standing in considerable doubt; and that was as illuminating for Anjli as for them. And while they were hesitating, a plump lady in a sari came out of the next gate and shooed them indignantly away.

'They are those labourers' children,' she said defensively, in slightly grating English, as though the language had not enough abrasive consonants for her, 'from Orissa. No Punjabi would beg, you please believe me.'

She marched away across the open ground, and the children drew back from her path by a few yards and studied the sky as she went by, to close in again the moment her back was turned, and be shooed away again, good-humouredly enough, by the taxi driver. Dominic paid, and let the car go. He had noticed another taxi stand only a couple of hundred yards away at the corner of the main road.

'N 305' said the tablet on the gatepost simply, and there was a small, beautifully-made wooden mail-box attached beneath the number. The wall of the front garden was white, shoulder-high to a man, and the house lay only a few yards back, also white-painted, two storeys high and flat-roofed, with a perforated bal.u.s.trade, and in the centre of the roof a sort of light pavilion, glazed in from winds and dust-storms, an ideal summer-house for a sociable man who yet had need of a working solitude at times. The ground in front of the house was paved with squares of a grey stone, with narrow flower-beds and a few shrubs along the walls, and a small, decorative tree in a tub by the door. But the enclosure ran round the detached end of the building, and there degenerated into a utilitarian courtyard of beaten earth, with a line for drying washing, and a low wooden shed built into the corner. Beside the shed, under a bracket roof of sacking stretched on a wooden frame, a small brazier burned with a steady glow, and the faint smell of sandalwood and incense was wafted to them in the thin blue smoke. All the fires of Delhi, sacred and profane, seem to contain the evocative scents of worship. Behind the brazier, cross-legged and motionless, sat a lean, shrunken old man, a loose cotton turban on his head, grey hair and tangled beard obscuring most of his face, a brown blanket hugged round his shoulders. When the three strangers came in through the open gate he raised his head, but did not turn in their direction.

At the last moment, with the door before them and the bell-push within reach of a hand, they all hesitated. Felder had talked with blessed bluntness about the moment of truth, about having a roof over Anjli's head that she didn't owe to her father, so that she could meet him on equal terms, and face his acceptance or rejection with unshaken dignity and independence. But when it came to the point, whether she wanted him or not, it was important that he should want her. And there was only one way to find out.

'I'll do it,' said Anjli quickly, and prodded the bell-push with a rose-tipped finger, hard and accurately.

A moment of silence, and then they heard light feet trotting briskly towards the door. Very light feet, naked feet; that characteristic soft slapping of the soles on a stone-paved floor. The door opened, wide to the wall; a revealing gesture, which belongs only to the innocent, open-hearted and generous. A boy of about nineteen, square and st.u.r.dy, stood smiling brightly at them across the threshold. He was clean and wide-featured, with close-cropped hair, and wore khaki drill shirt and shorts a size too long for him; handsome muscles bulged the brown arm that held the door open. He bobbed his head repeatedly, and smiled, and said nothing, waiting for them to speak.

'Good morning!' said Dominic, aware of possible non-understanding, but not knowing in the least what to do about it. Names, at any rate, are international currency. 'We are looking for the house of Shri Satyavan k.u.mar.'

The smile narrowed and wavered. At least he understood English. 'Yes, this is house of Mr k.u.mar.' His slight frown, his lost look, everything about him but his tongue added: 'But...!'

'May we speak with Mr k.u.mar? He will be expecting us. He has received a letter to tell him that we are coming.'

Nevertheless, Dominic had heard the unspoken 'but', even if he chose to ignore it. It might mean no more than 'but he isn't in at the moment', which would hardly be a catastrophe, even if they were keyed up to meet him immediately, and liable to deflation if kept waiting. Tossa had heard it, too, she was looking more than naturally wise, patient and calm. So had Anjli; her face was a demure mask, no one could tell what went on behind it.

'There is a letter, yes...' said the boy slowly. 'But my master not read letter.' His brown eyes wandered from face to face apologetically, as if he might be blamed for this failure of communication. "The letter is here, I bring it...'

'But if we could speak to Mr k.u.mar,' said Dominic doggedly, 'we can explain everything ourselves.'

'I am sorry. Mr k.u.mar not here. No one can take letter to him, no one know where can find him. More than one year ago, in the night, Mr k.u.mar he go away. Never say one word. Never come back.'

After the moment of blank silence, in which the Orissan children advanced their toes over the boundary of the gateway, and the old man behind the brazier shrugged the blanket back a few inches from his shoulders, and the world in general incredibly went on about its business as if nothing had changed, Dominic said in reasonable tones: 'May we come in for a few minutes? You may be able to help us.'

'Please! Memsahib... missee-sabib...!' The boy bowed them in gladly, waved them into a small front room, spa.r.s.ely furnished by western standards, but elegant in tapestries, silks and cushions, and a screen of carved, aromatic wood. The bare feet turned and pattered to the table, where on a silver dish lay an air mail letter. Dorette had wasted her pains.

'Please, here is letter. You take it?'

'No, keep it here,' said Dominic, 'in case Mr k.u.mar comes home.' But after more than a year without a word, why should he reappear now? And yet this was India, and who knows India's motives and reasons? 'You mean that Mr k.u.mar simply went away without telling anyone where he was going, or when to expect him back? Not even his mother? His family?' Idiot, there was no other family, of course, he was the only child.

'Acha, Sahib. In the night. He did not sleep in his bed, he did not take any luggage, everything left in place. He go. That is all.'

'Like the Lord Buddha,' said Anjli unexpectedly, 'when it was time to depart.' She had a big white canvas handbag on her arm, and Ashok's book inside it; she had been sneaking peeps into the pages even on the taxi ride out here.

'Your father,' Dominic pointed out unwisely, 'was a devout Hindu, by all reports.'

'So was the Lord Buddha,' said Anjli devastatingly. She hadn't been reading to no purpose.

'Father?' said Satyavan's house-boy, half-dumb with wonder.

'This is Miss Anjli k.u.mar, Mr k.u.mar's daughter.'

He joined his hands respectfully under his chin, his brown head bobbing deeply; he did not question her ident.i.ty, he believed that people told him the truth, as he told them the truth.

'Missee-sahib, I not know anything, I not here when Shri Satyavan go away. When his servants send word to the big house that he gone, my mistress she send them all away, tell me go keep this place until Shri Satyavan return. n.o.body see him go, n.o.body hear. More than one year now, and he send no word.'

'Your mistress?' said Dominic.

'Acha, sahib, Shrimati Purnima k.u.mar. I her house-boy.'

'And there's n.o.body here now who was here on that night? When Mr k.u.mar went away?'

'Sahib, no one. Only Arjun Baba.' He said it with the mixture of reverence and indifference that touches, perhaps, only the dead and the mad, both of them out of reach.

'Who is Arjun Baba?'

'The old man. The beggar. Shri Satyavan took him in, and let him live in the compound. He comes and goes as he will. He eats from our table. Now Shri Satyavan is gone, Shrimati Purnima feeds him. It is all he want. This is his home until he die. Arjun Baba very, very old.'

'But he was here then! He may have heard or seen something...'

The boy was bowing his head sadly, and sadly smiling. 'Sahib, always he has said he hear nothing, he know nothing. Always, he say this. And, sahib, Arjun Baba is blind.'

It made perfect sense. The old ears p.r.i.c.king, the ancient head turning. But not turning to view. The ear was tuned to them, not the eye. And so old, so very old. And so indebted, in a mutual indebtedness, such as charity hardly knows in the less sophisticated lands of the west. His allegiance belonged only to Satyavan, who if he willed to go must be made free to go. Not all needs are of the flesh.

'Sahib, if you are willing, I think it good you should go to my mistress's house.' He did not say 'to my mistress'; and in a moment it was clear why. 'She very ill, ever since Shri Satyavan go from here she fall sick for him...'

'But didn't she try...? To get in touch, to find him...?

The young shoulders lifted, acknowledging the sovereignty of individual choice. 'If he must go, he must go. My mistress wait. Only now it is bad with her. But there is Shri Vasudev, Shri Satyavan's cousin. He is manager for family business now. Please, you speak with him.'

'Yes,' said Dominic, 'yes, we will. We have Mrs k.u.mar's address, we'll go there.'

The boy bowed them anxiously towards the door, and out into the warming sunshine, hovering as though uncertain whether to wish them to stay or go, as though it might rest with him to hold fast Satyavan's daughter, and he might be held answerable if she turned and went away as mysteriously as her father. Anjli halted in the doorway and looked at him thoughtfully.

'You are not from Delhi?'

'No, missee-sahib, I come from a village near Kangra. Shrimati Purnima came from there, and has a house there. My father is her gardener.'

'What is your name?'

'Kishan Singh.' And he pressed his hands together in salute and smiled at her hopefully.

'We shall meet again, Kishan Singh. I am glad you are here to keep my father's house so faithfully and look after Arjun Baba. If you hear any news of him, send it to me at Keen's Hotel. Now we must go to my grandmother.'

Kishan Singh stood at the top of the steps and bowed and smiled her away across the paved garden, in some way rea.s.sured; but at the gate she looked back again, and caught Dominic by the arm.

'Wait for me a moment. I want to speak to him... the old man. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, I saw that he heard us come.'

'We can try,' Dominic agreed doubtfully. 'But it's long odds he doesn't speak English.'

'Kishan Singh did. But let me try, alone...'

Something was changing in Anjli, or perhaps some part of everything in her was changing, her voice, her manner, even her walk. They watched her cross the beaten earth of the yard, and it might almost have been the gliding gait of a woman in a sari, though quite certainly Anjli had never draped a sari round her in her life, and wouldn't know how to set about it even if she had possessed one. She halted before the motionless old man, and though he could not see her, she pressed her hands together in reverence to him, and inclined her head as the boy had done to her.

'Namaste!'

She had no idea how she had known what to say, but when she had said it she knew that it was right. The old head came up, and the sun shone on the sightless face that seemed to gaze at her. A tangle of grey, long hair, beard and brows, out of which jutted a hooked and sinewy nose and two sharp protuberant cheekbones, and a great ridge of forehead. All of his flesh that was visible was the same brown as the brown, dry earth under him. A tremendous remote indifference held him apart from her. The sun gleamed on eyes white and opaque with cataract.

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 k.u.mar. I have come to find my father. Help me!'

Faintly and distantly a convulsion pa.s.sed through the fixed, unchanging face, like the pa.s.sing 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 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. 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 pa.s.sed 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 k.u.mar gra.s.s.

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 s.p.a.ced 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 a.s.sertive leaves, taming and shaping and reducing all things to order. Under the awning of the loggia roof stone urns of flowers were s.p.a.ced, 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 k.u.mar?' 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 pa.s.sage 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 k.u.mar. 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 k.u.mar.' 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 k.u.mar 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 k.u.mar.'

That was quite a bombsh.e.l.l, 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 k.u.mar 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 circ.u.mstances 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 k.u.mar 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 ident.i.ty, of course?'

'Of course! She has her own pa.s.sport, 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 circ.u.mstances...'

'In the circ.u.mstances,' said Dominic, 'having told you the facts, I think we had better leave, and get in touch with you later, when I hope Mrs k.u.mar 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 k.u.mar.'

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 k.u.mar 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.

The bed was just a low wooden frame, without headboard or footboard, with laced springs supporting a thin mattress. A dark blue cloth covered with crude, lovely Naga embroideries of b.u.t.terflies, elephants, cows and chickens, scarcely swelled over the shrunken body beneath it. On the pillow lay a grey head, the still luxuriant hair gathered into a white ribbon; the up-turned face was grey as the hair, one side of the mouth a little twisted, the eyes half-open and fixed. Her hands lay out on the blue coverlet, motionless.

It could have been any Indian woman's room, any but the poorest of the poor. All that wealth and luxury and grace came down at the end into this small, aged figure stretched on a common truckle bed.

Only the eyes were alive. They moved as the strangers came in, the gleam beneath the lids was not quite quenched. They settled upon Anjli.

Anjli went forward slowly, past Vasudev, past the two women, and stood beside the bed. She joined her hands reverently, and bowed her head over them as she had to Arjun Baba; and this time there was a curious suppleness and rhythm about the movement of head and hands which had not been present before.

'Namaste, Grandmother Purnima!'

The fading brightness watched her; there was no other part of Purnima that could express anything now. Anjli slid to her knees beside the bed, to be nearer, and that movement, too, had a fluid certainty about it.