Ellis Peters - George Felse 09 - Mourning Raga (7 page)

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 butterflies, 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.

‘Grandmother, I am Anjli, your son’s daughter. I have come home.’

For one instant it seemed to Dominic and Tossa, watching, that the ancient, burned-out eyes flared feebly, that they acknowledged the stooping girl and approved her. Anjli pressed her joined hands into the Naga coverlet, and laid her face upon them. A tiny, brief convulsion, so infinitesimal that it might almost have been an illusion, heaved at the powerless fingers of Purnima’s right hand, moved them a fraction of an inch towards the glossy black head, then let them fall limp. The blue coverlet hung unmoving, subsided, lay still again, and this time finally. The doctor leaned to touch the old woman’s eyelid, to reach for her pulse again. One of the women in white began to wail softly and rock herself. Tossa pushed past Dominic, and took Anjli gently by the arm, raising her and drawing her back from the bed. ‘Come away now, leave her to them! Come! We’d better go.’

There was no need to tell her that Purnima was dead. Of all the people in the room, Anjli had been the first to know it.

Vasudev overtook them in the loggia, almost running after them with fluttering hands and a dew of sweat on his forehead. The thin line of his black moustache was quivering with agitation.

‘Please, one moment! This is terrible… I do not know how… I am so sorry… such a distressing home-coming for my cousin. Let me at least fulfil my responsibilities thus belatedly. You understand, I could hardly believe, so suddenly, with no warning… Of course Anjli must come to us, this is her home. Allow me, Anjli, to offer you the freedom of this house, until my aunt’s estate is settled and proper provision made for you. My aunt’s women will take good care of her, Mr Felse, I do assure you. We have an adequate domestic staff. Really, I insist!’

‘I couldn’t think,’ said Dominic very rapidly and very firmly, ‘of intruding on the household at this moment, you must allow us to keep Anjli with us at the hotel for a few days. Until after the funeral. You will have your hands quite full until then, and I think it is better that she should not be involved.’

‘I am so upset… so inhospitable and unwelcoming, you must forgive me. Perhaps, however, if you really prefer…’

‘For a few days, until after the funeral, I’m sure it would be better…’

He was not really sorry to let them go, though insistent on making the offer with all punctilio. Perhaps he was at as great a loss as they were about what to do next. As for Anjli, she walked down the long drive between her temporary guardians, silent and thoughtful, but completely composed. What she had done had been done naturally and candidly, and now there was no more she could do for her grandmother, unless…

‘I suppose funerals happen pretty quickly here, don’t they?’ she asked practically.

‘Not necessarily at this time of year,’ Dominic said, accepting this down-to-earth vein as the best bet in the circumstances. ‘Maybe I ought to have asked him. I expect there’ll be a notice in the papers by this evening, at least about her death.’

‘Do you think we should go to the funeral? I know I didn’t know her at all, but still she was my grandmother. And she understood what I said to her, I’m sure she did. What do you think, ought we to go?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what happens. We might only be in the way, not knowing the drill.’

‘I guess we might,’ she agreed after due consideration, and sensibly refrained from insisting. And the more he thought about her general behaviour, the more he realised that for years she had been standing squarely on her own feet, for want of mother and father as well as grandmother, and for all her compensatory posturing she had never lost her balance yet.

They walked back to the hotel, for Purnima’s house was down in the rich and shady residential roads in the south of town, not far from the golf links, no more than ten minutes’ pleasant walking from Keen’s. Not one of them said: ‘What are we going to do now?’ though they were all thinking it.

They waited for the evening papers to arrive, and there it was, the announcement of the death of Shrimati Purnima Kumar, the arrangements for her funeral; imposingly large in the type, as was fitting for so prominent a citizen, and such a rich one. And in every paper alike, at least the English-language ones.

So now they had all the facts flat before them; and while Anjli was taking her bath they could look each other squarely in the face and consider what was to be done.

‘We can’t possibly leave her here with Cousin Vasudev,’ Tossa said.

‘No, we can’t. Of course he may be all right, a thousand to one he is, but with no father here, and no grandmother, and seemingly no wife for Vasudev – I could be wrong, of course, did you get that impression, too?’

‘What difference would it make?’ said Tossa simply. ‘Wife or no wife, we couldn’t possibly hand her over to somebody who seems to be next in the running for the family fortune, somebody whose interests, if you look at the thing that way, she definitely threatens. I mean, if Satyavan inherits everything, then even supposing he never turns up, some day they’ll have to presume his death, or whatever they do here, and Anjli is next in line. But if there’s no Anjli…’ She let that trail away doubtfully, and kept her voice low. ‘But that’s being pretty melodramatic about it, wouldn’t you say? He doesn’t
look
the wicked-uncle type.’

‘No, he doesn’t. And I don’t suppose they’re any more common here than in England, anyhow. And yet, with all these millions of people around, it would be awfully easy for one little one, a stranger, to get sunk without trace. The thing is, unless we find her father, then the next move is Dorette’s responsibility, not ours, and we’ve no right to appropriate it to ourselves.’

‘Dorette,’ said Tossa with awful certainty, ‘would dump her on Vasudev and never think twice.’

‘Maybe she would, but she isn’t going to do it by proxy. Not these proxies, anyhow.’

‘Hear, hear! So what
do
we do?’

‘I tell you what, I think we’d better ring up Felder and ask his advice. After all, he did offer to help.’

When he got through to the villa near Hauz Khas, it was Ashok Kabir who answered the telephone.

‘They’re not in yet, they’ll probably be late. And they’re off to Benares early in the morning. Is it urgent? Why not tell me, and I’ll pass the problem on to him and ask him to call you back when he does get in?’

Dominic told him the whole story of Satyavan’s defection and Purnima’s death, down to the last detail that seemed relevant, and then sat down, a little cheered by Ashtok’s evident concern and sympathy, to wait for Felder to call him back. Presently Anjli sauntered in from the bathroom of the suite she shared with Tossa. In a flowing cotton dressing-gown, and with her black hair swirling softly round her shoulders, for the first time she looked Indian.

‘Watch your step when you go for your bath, Tossa, we’ve been invaded. Two huge cockroaches – I suppose they come up the plumbing. Put the light on five minutes before you go to run your bath, and I bet they’ll take the hint and run for the exit.’ She was being, perhaps, deliberately cooler than she felt about these hazards, just as she probably was about her experiences of the morning; but the slight over-statement was merely that, not a falsification. Presented with a burden, she practised the best way of carrying it. Confronted by a problem, she would walk all round it and consider how best to grapple with it. They were beginning to understand their Anjli.

‘That’s nothing,’ said Tossa, ‘a gecko fell on me this morning in bed.’

‘I know, I heard you squeal. There’s another one going to fall on you any minute now.’ He was clinging with his tiny, splayed feet to the high ceiling just above Tossa’s head, close to the light fixture, lying in wait for flies, a whitish green lizard no more than four inches long, of which more than half was tail. He was so young and small that he was still almost translucent, and only the faint, rapid palpitation of his throat indicated that he was alive, and not a worked fragment of alabaster. ‘I’d rather have geckos than cockroaches, any day. Anything with up to four legs,’ said Anjli, quite seriously, ‘is my brother. Over four, and they’re out.’

‘What about snakes?’

‘Things with no legs are out, too. But not as way out as things with eight. Who was it on the phone? Cousin Vasudev?’

‘I called Mr Felder,’ said Dominic, ‘but he wasn’t back from shooting yet. They’re going to ask him to call back.’ No need to tell her the voice on the phone had belonged to Ashok Kabir; she would have resented being left in ignorance, even in the bath.

It was another hour before Felder’s call came through. Anjli was in bed by then, but with her nose buried in
The Life of the Budda
, and at the first ring she was out and streaking for Dominic’s sitting-room door. The conversation was brief, and apparently satisfactory.

‘Of course!’ said Dominic, heaving a vast breath of relief. ‘How very simple you make it sound! Thanks a lot, that’s what we’ll do.’

‘And let me know what happens, will you do that? I shall be worrying about that kid from now on until I know, but I’m betting you it will bring results, all right. For the next few days you can get me at Clark’s Hotel, Benares – OK?’

‘OK, and thanks again. Hope everything will go right with the shooting.’

‘Now you’re believing in miracles! Never mind, it’s gone well today. And you take those girls and have a look at Delhi, don’t waste a minute. So long, then, I’ll be hearing from you!’

He was gone, energetic and bracing as ever, leaving his effect behind like a potent wine. Dominic hung up, relaxed and grateful.

‘What did he say?’ They were both at him in a moment, one on either side. ‘
What’s
so simple?’

‘He says, with Mrs Kumar’s death notice plastered all over the evening press – and you can bet it will be in the dailies tomorrow, too, – Satyavan will be absolutely certain to see it, wherever he is, and he’ll come running to pick up his responsibilities. No son will let anyone else run his mother’s funeral. All we’ve got to do is sit back and wait, to see if your father turns up for the ceremony. And the odds are strongly that he will.’

Nobody said – nobody even thought, in the exhilaration of the moment – ‘
if he can
!’

For two days they were on equal terms with all the other carefree European tourists in Delhi. They walked about the busy shopping streets round Connaught Place until their feet ached. They proceeded, half-stunned with grandeur, the full length of the King’s Way from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan, once the Viceroy’s palace, now the residence of the President of India, with its two great flanking blocks of the government secretariat, vast, glowing pink sandstone, one of the better legacies of the Raj, along with the legal system and the indomitable Indian railways. They risked their lives in the hailstorm of bicycles as the clerks of Delhi streamed to work in the morning rush hour, and baked themselves brown in the midday sun in the silent green park among the Lodi tombs, close to their own hotel. Islam weighted India with vast and splendid elegies to death, India herself withdrew elusively, dissolving into ash and essence, leaving life to speak for itself. And so it did, in the children who mobbed the strangers in Purana Quila, the Old Fort, half glorious ruined monument to the past, half refugee village congealed into permanence for want of other quarters; in the magical glimpses of Old Delhi after dark, blanketed figures squatting by stalls half-lit with tiny smoky lanterns, twilight children cross-legged, suddenly mute and inscrutable as gods, and everywhere smoky scents of cow-dung and joss and jasmine and sweat and all-pervading aromatic dust, electric on the darkness.

They took a motor-cycle rickshaw out to the Qutb Minar and the enormous ruined city of Tuqhluquabad, south of Delhi, silent and wonderfully peaceful within its broken, giant wall; and from there, having picnicked at ease in the sun, they crossed the road to the tightly-walled enclosure of the domed tomb of Ghias-ud-Din Tuqhluq, compressed as a blockhouse yet beautifully-proportioned, red walls leaning into themselves as solidly as the Egyptian Pyramids, white dome rearing austerely just high enough to peer over the flat brown plain, sprinkled with meagre trees.

They took a taxi to Humanyun’s tomb, the resting-place of the second Mogul emperor, delicately attached to the eastern flank of Delhi in an immaculate formal garden. They had no idea that they were looking at something in its own way fully as beautiful as the Taj, which on this visit they could hardly hope to see; nevertheless, their hearts lifted strangely as they looked at the long, level, red terrace, the jut of mellow stonework above, and the poised and tranquil white dome. No floating off, balloon-wise, here, this was a tethered dream, with feet rooted in the ground. At the gate, as they left, a bearded snake-charmer, grinning ingratiatingly, coaxed out of its basket a dull, swaying brown cobra. Everything about it was pathetic, nothing was sinister, except for the single flick of its forked tongue; almost certainly it had no poison-sacs. They wondered if the music enchanted or hurt; there was no way of knowing. They paid their few new pice, and took their taxi back north to the Red Fort to lose count of time wondering among the white marble palaces and the paradisal gardens that overlook the Yamuna river. The complex waterways in the gardens were still dry at this time of year, and the fountains silent, but with a little imagination they could insert a small, lighted lamp into every niche in the lattices of stone where the water-level dropped, and see the silver curve of falling water lit from within and giving off rainbows like the scintillations from a diamond. The Moguls loved water, played with it, decorated their houses with it, built sumptuous pavilions in which to bathe in it, and took it to bed with them in little marble channels and lotus-flower fountains to sing them to sleep.

From this haunted palace in its dignity and quietness the three tourists plunged straight into the broad, teeming, overpeopled clamour of the Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s grand market-place, screaming with cinema posters and advertisement hoardings, shrill with gossiping citizens and hurrying shoppers. They peered into the deep, narrow, open shops to see the silks and cottons baled and draped in unimaginable quantity, the Kashmiri shawls fine as cobweb, the gold and silver jewellery and the cheap glass bangles, the nuts and seeds and spices, the unknown vegetables, the fantastic sweetmeats. Horse-drawn tongas, scooter-rickshaws, cars, bicycles, stray dogs, pedestrians, all mingled in the roadway in a complicated and hair-raising dance. The noise was deafening. So next, because according to the map they were less than a mile from it and could easily walk there, they went to Rajghat, the spot close to the river bank where Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned after his assassination, and where now a white balustrade encloses a paved space and a flower-covered dais. And there, though there were plenty of people, there was silence.

At the end of the first day they half expected that Cousin Vasudev would telephone or send them a note, either to follow up his tentative recognition of Anjli’s identity and admit his own family responsibility for her, or to effect a careful withdrawal and leave the whole thing in abeyance, pending legal consultations. But there was no message.