The Temple-goers (28 page)

Even before the press conference was over, the city was on the boil. Megha’s mother, also a large woman, was shown standing among a crowd of people. Her daughter’s face was visible in hers; she wore a brown printed kurta. ‘Would a brother kill his own sister?’ she said, weeping and on the verge of breaking her bangles. ‘Today I have lost not only a daughter but a son as well. And Megha’s murderer is still roaming free. The police are lying through their teeth.’ Kris was shown next, being silently led away by the Sectorpur police, his protruding lower jaw hanging open. Within hours, vigils of university students, with flowers and posters of Megha, had formed in the street, standing up against ‘character assassination’. Bloggers went like flesh-eating fish through the SSP’s remarks.

By the time Chamunda’s convoy of white Ambassadors and Jeeps had driven into the safe house, Shabby had already interviewed Megha’s mother in her newsroom and, via satellite, some of Kris’s American friends, who spoke of how gentle and artistic he had been in university. She had also launched a full investigation into the political pressure police officers were forced to operate under in Sectorpur. In our own small group in the upstairs TV room, deep tensions had arisen. Sanyogita’s eyes, so recently dry, had begun to flow again at the sight of her friend Kris being led away. And when Aakash whispered, ‘Lul,’ to me, causing me to laugh out loud, she rose and left the room.

Chamunda’s arrival brought the house together for a late lunch. It was Aakash who saw her first. He had gone to the bathroom, leaving the door of the television room half-open. A few moments later I saw him on the balcony, looking at the courtyard below. He didn’t hear me come up behind him. Downstairs, Chamunda in her dark blue sari and shawl, her sunglasses on her head, was standing by the lily pond instructing a servant on how to lay the table for lunch. When he put a clear globe-like vase of violet dahlias on the edge of the table, she rushed ahead and moved it to the centre. Aakash watched mesmerized as she told the servant where to put the wine glasses, corrected the arrangement of cutlery, then stood back and looked from a distance at the table that was now nearly ready. Watching Aakash watch Chamunda, I felt I knew what held his attention. I was willing to bet that until that moment the privileged women Aakash had met were too good for housework; they would have worn black Western clothes, led idle lives and required Aakash to keep them slim so that their husbands didn’t stray. That kind of woman would have had her attractions, but Aakash could not really have respected someone like that. In Chamunda, however, he would have seen traces of the traditional Indian woman that he could never have done without, as well as new and seductive things, like money, independence and power. The combination would have been beguiling.

Chamunda, aware of us watching her, shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up. For a moment she giggled with girlish embarrassment, then firmed up her voice and said, ‘Come on, boys. Come down for lunch.’

We followed an internal staircase, with old movie posters on the walls, and came out through a bright blue door into the courtyard. The sunlight went right through the pond’s green water, where orange fish flashed from time to time. The foliage round the pond was thick with palms and ferns. Behind the lunch table a tall forest-green bamboo fence protected the little courtyard from the view of those working in the house. Chamunda now sat at the table sipping a glass of pomegranate juice, a brood of pugs yapping at her feet.

‘Hi, baba,’ she said, with some distress in her voice, as I reached down to touch her feet. But with Aakash following my example, it melted quickly into embarrassed laughter, and, ‘Oh no, you don’t have to. It’s only because I’m like his aunt. I’ve known him since he was this high.’ Then, ‘May you have a long life, my son,’ she said at last, with resignation in her voice. But when he rose and she saw his face, seeing perhaps even more clearly than me the marks of his caste, I thought I saw a different light in her eyes. It was as if her various screens – of being chief minister, Sanyogita’s aunt, politician, older woman, princess – fell away and those vast eyes were now for a moment limpid. There was nothing innocent or unguarded about this gaze; if anything it was blacker despite its heat. And as quickly as it came it was gone.

A moment later, Sanyogita appeared from a corner of the house and we sat down to lunch. It was a grim meal during which everyone seemed to be negotiating their way out of some private mood. I had served myself meat curry and rice when I saw that Chamunda wasn’t eating.

‘You aren’t having anything?’

‘I’ve eaten, baba,’ she said. Then perhaps to deflect attention from herself, she added, ‘Here, have some wine,’ and filled both mine and Aakash’s glasses. Sanyogita looked sourly across at her. ‘Can I have some too, Chamunda massi?’

‘Tch! Yes, of course,’ Chamunda said, and passed the wine.

Silence fell over the table. Only Aakash, though still watchful, had a surprising calm about him. He ate and drank wholeheartedly, like a man celebrating a victory. He looked up occasionally at Chamunda with sidelong glances, seeming to finesse his study of her. At length we began talking about the case.

‘It’s a stain,’ Chamunda said bitterly. ‘It’ll blow over, I know, but it’s a stain and that bloody Shabby will do everything to draw attention to it in the run-up to the election.’

‘How can she not?’ Sanyogita said. ‘You’ve got the wrong…’

Her words were lost in her throat. Chamunda, though having gauged their meaning, made her repeat them. ‘What?’

‘Guy!’ Sanyogita said. ‘You have the wrong guy.’

Chamunda’s face darkened, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Isn’t there any way to save face?’ I asked.

‘No, not at this stage,’ Chamunda replied. ‘We’ve made one mistake already.’

Aakash looked up from his food and smiled, his lips glistening.

‘This other one’s more serious. It’s galvanized the whole city. Now if we come out and say, “It wasn’t him either, we just arrested him because my SSP got it into his head that the girl was of loose morals,” we’re going to look really bad. We need to keep the case going with this brother of hers as a valid suspect for at least some time. Till we can find an out.’

The remark seemed aimed at Aakash, but he said nothing.

‘Keep it going,’ Sanyogita said, ‘i.e. keep my friend in jail until then?’

‘You think I bloody want to?’ Chamunda exploded. ‘I have to!’

‘Why do you have to?’

‘Because your fat friend Shabby will crucify me if I don’t. This is politics, all right? It’s not fun, it’s not creative writing, but it has to be done.’

‘I don’t understand, if people like you don’t stand for justice and the rule of law, how is it –’

‘I can’t listen to this shit,’ Chamunda snapped. ‘I’m not Gandhi. I’m working with an imperfect system. Yes, I don’t want an innocent boy to go to jail, but I’m not losing my job over it.’

Sanyogita put a last mouthful of rice and lentils in her mouth, coldly moved the fork a little right of centre on her plate and rose. She looked at me, but I pretended not to notice. Then after kneeling down and stroking one of the pugs, she slipped away.

Chamunda had upset herself so much that she reached for a plate. She was about to serve herself some food when Aakash stopped her.

‘Ma’am, don’t. I have a solution. Everything will be fine.’

Chamunda looked stunned, perhaps both at what was said and the tone with which it was said. Recovering her poise, she asked, a smile playing on her comic-book lips, ‘Well, can I at least have some lunch?’

‘Better not, ma’am,’ Aakash replied quickly. ‘I was hoping to repay your hospitality by giving you a session after lunch.’

‘A gym session?’ Chamunda said with wonder, then looked at me as if I’d brought a lunatic into her house.

‘Yes, ma’am. I’m a professional person,’ Aakash said in English, and let out a short laugh.

Chamunda fell silent, her eyes wandered and for a moment it seemed as though she didn’t approve of this over-familiarity. Then looking up, she breathed, ‘Why not!’

Aakash laughed at the success of his overture and looked to me for approval.

Chamunda in the meantime had stood up. ‘All right, then,’ she said, as if convincing herself that she was truly about to work out in the middle of the afternoon on a day when her government was close to falling. ‘I’ll get dressed. Raunak Singh! Raunak Singh! Get my exercise things ready.’

‘Very good, ma’am,’ a voice returned from some hollow section of the house.

‘Aakash, in the gym in five minutes?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

With this, Chamunda gave me a little kiss on the head and disappeared behind one of the rust-painted courtyard’s many blue doors. I turned in amazement to Aakash, who at that moment had submerged his entire hand into a silver finger bowl.

‘What now?’

‘Nothing now. We’ll see.’

‘Well, what’s the solution?’

I thought he relished saying that he couldn’t tell me; that he wanted to but couldn’t; that his future was at stake.

Chamunda appeared a moment later in her exercise clothes. She wore denim shorts, exposing her brown, faintly dimpled legs, New Balance trainers and a T-shirt. It was a simple white T-shirt, with a cartoon image of a Hollywood blonde in grey sunglasses, the lenses each mapping perfectly on to Chamunda’s large breasts. Hanging from the cartoon blonde’s neck, and stretching over our chief minister’s soft, slightly protruding midriff, was a pair of binoculars. Giving me a little wave, she trotted up the couple of steps that led from the courtyard into the gym.

Aakash followed her a moment later, leaving me in the courtyard alone.

Oppressed by the solitude, I went upstairs to get a book. Sanyogita was checking her emails in an involved, distancing way. The house, which had been driven since the morning by a jolting, uneven energy, was at last quiet.

*

It would have been an hour, an hour and a half later, once the late-afternoon light had almost left the courtyard, that Chamunda emerged from the gym, sweating heavily, her long hair in a bun, visibly exhilarated.

‘He’s very good, your friend,’ she said, ‘much better than my fellow. I think I might get him to come and give me trainings. He had me do ten to fifteen minutes inclined walking, then very light weights and finished me off on floor exercises. My body is breaking.’ She rested a hand heavy with rings on my shoulder, and becoming quieter, said, ‘Baba, he’ll probably tell you what we spoke of. Please, not a word to Sanyogita. Not till tomorrow.’

At that moment a band of fairy lights coiled around one of the trees in the courtyard came on. They followed a cycle: one strip at a time, they worked their way up the trunk, then all the lights glowed at once and burst into rhythmic flashes. Chamunda wiped her hands and lit a Dunhill cigarette. She offered me one, but I declined. We sat in silence for some minutes. The rising smoke moved sideways over a ruled page of fine, slatted light coming in past the green bamboo fence.

‘So listen, baba,’ Chamunda said, ‘it looks like no one will have to stay here after tomorrow. I mean, you can stay on, of course, if you want to, this is your house. But what I mean to say is that you don’t have to stay here. You don’t know how grateful I am that you came, though. These have been trying times, really. But you watch, we’ll win the election and then we’ll have some fun. We’ll get your mother here as well. You know, I love her like a sister. Much more than a sister.’ Chamunda laughed wickedly, thinking perhaps of Sanyogita’s mother, with whom she had strained relations. Then as an extension of that thought, she added, beetling her eyebrows, ‘Try and make Sanyogita understand that her aunt is not such an evil person. You don’t know how she wounds me. I have no children, so she’s like my own, but she’s always edgy around me. I want her to get in touch with India. We’ll need someone from the family at some point. Already there’s no one to contest the parliamentary seat from Ayatlochanapur. Get her to sort herself out. Creative writing! Emigrés at Home! What is this nonsense!’

At the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask how Chamunda would have known the name of Sanyogita’s creative writing group. Nor did I think she was purging her guilt as she spoke. I thought she was acting with her niece’s best interests at heart.

Raunak Singh appeared a moment later with a cordless telephone.

‘Right, baba. I must go. I’ll see you in Delhi.’

I sat in the courtyard a while longer, looking at the flashing tree, and got up only when I saw Chamunda, now in a turquoise sari adorned with reflective, gold-rimmed flowers, go out of the house for the last time, followed by a small entourage.

Aakash had not emerged from the gym. When I went in a few minutes later, he was working out himself, barefooted, bare-chested, in just his jeans.

‘Hi, man. How’s you doing, man?’ he said, swinging his arms up in bicep curls.

‘Fine,’ I said, and sat down on a workout bench.

‘It feels so good. I can’t tell you. It feels like I haven’t worked out in weeks. Everything’s gone. Look, look,’ he said, flexing a tricep, which emerged obediently like a great vein in his arm.

‘Aakash, it’s fine, really.’

‘And chest,’ he said, shrinking his face and pushing out his pectorals.

‘Also fine.’

‘But abs are really gone, no?’ He pulled down the skin from his stomach and the faint outline of a six-pack emerged, the beauty spot on it, reminding me that I had seen it before.

Then he looked hard at my reflection, and seeing perhaps some fatigue, some sorrow in my face, he stopped and turned round. ‘You’re all right? No?’ he asked with concern. ‘Not angry with me, I hope. Chamunda Devi told you what happened between us?’

‘No.’

His face cleared.

‘You’re upset this is our last night.’ He laughed. ‘You were getting comfortable. Come on, I’m going to cheer you up. We’re going to do something I used to do with my brother when we were children.’

‘Aakash, I’m fine.’

‘No, no, no. I can see there’s a problem. Come on.’

With this, he pulled me out of the gym. The house was in half-light. It was caught in that special Indian hour when the day has gone and the servants are still to turn on the lights. Under the cover of this dusk hour, Aakash stole into the dimly lit pantry, past a few Nepalese maids, and hunted round for something. Not finding what he wanted, he stuck his head out and said, ‘Sister, where is the wine kept?’ She pointed him to another area of the kitchen, and not wishing to break momentum, he rushed over there. The sight of many bottles of wine of varying quality confused him.