now, stung by this vision of its owner, they picked up their hammers and their booty and retreated down the main staircase.
No corpse deserved to be gawked at. Anjali latched the bathroom door and rested her head against it. Too late to call for an ambulance, and even if it had not been too late, she realized with shock that she had no idea what number to dial. In Gauripur, emergencies requiring intervention by police or firemen didn't happen to decent middle-class families. When Mr. GG had surprised her with her very own cell phone and asked her whom she wanted on speed dial, it had not occurred to her to include the police. How naive she had been until now!
What was it that Mr. GG had said about butterfly effects? Minnie's death meant a windfall of profitable antiques for Rajoo of All-Karnataka Auction House, whose crew was still loading Bagehot treasures into trucks. Now Anjali had in effect been dumped, because the house and its owner and everything it stood for had been dumped. She felt more homeless than she had while riding interstate buses from Patna to Bangalore. She punched Mr. GG's number on her cell phone. He didn't pick up, so she left a message: 'SOS… Girish, need your help… desperate. Please, please hurry. Bagehot House is under assault, and I'm in the middle of it.'
She waited and waited for the call back. Who else could she count on for rescue?
Mr. GG would know how to right her upside-down world. He would insist she move into his apartment and his life. What was keeping him from calling her back? To give her hands something to do, she opened the bathroom cabinet and listlessly went through Tookie's and Sunita's toiletries. She dabbed an index finger into a jar of sandalwood face cream and massaged the cool, perfumed goo into her cheeks and forehead. She rubbed gel into her flyaway hair and squirted hairspray to keep every strand in place. She loosened the tiara from Minnie's tangled wig and tried it on. A cartoonish princess frowned back at her from the mirrored medicine cabinet. The tiara looked right on Minnie, so she stuck it back on her head. Minnie may have lived too long to be happy all the time, but she had died maintaining the illusion. Now Minnie was dancing a quadrille in her final durbar while Anjali again sat on the toilet seat, awaiting resolution.
SHE HEARD POLICE sirens, but because the bathroom window looked out on the old Raj-era tennis court, now a desolate stretch of red clay sprouting clumps of weeds, she couldn't see how many cruisers had pulled up under the carport. She hoped the police convoy included a paddy wagon for arrested looters. She heard barked orders and boot soles crunching gravel. Asoke, followed by a tall, paunchy police officer and three constables, strutted into her view. They conferred by the ragged net on the tennis court. Asoke radiated a butler's air of obsequious expertise. From their body language, Anjali guessed that the officer regarded Asoke as a reliable informant and not a vandal.
As wary of the police as her parents and Gauripur neighbors were, she now worried about being discovered alone in the tenants' bathroom with the landlady's naked corpse. She pressed her forehead against the window grille, hoping the cool metal would calm her. Below, police put up barricades to control entrance to the tennis court. Asoke's squatter youths carried a small fussy writing desk, which Minnie had called an escritoire, and a chintz- covered wing chair into the court. Asoke eased the officer into the chair as though the officer was a high-ranking army guest at one of Minnie's cantonment garden parties. He dispatched four of his youths back indoors. They came back with hand fans, a tall glass of limbu-soda, and Minnie's favorite ginger cookies on a plate from Minnie's best china.
Asoke presented the refreshments to the officer before answering, at length and with extravagant hand gestures, the questions the officer snapped at him. Anjali couldn't understand a word of their speech, it being in Kannada. And wasn't that mousy little Sunita Sampath, suddenly resurfaced, helping to serve the food and drinks, talking to the police, and occasionally pointing up to the bathroom? Soon after he had finished interviewing Asoke, the officer sent his three constables back into the house. They returned with a long file of women in their midteens and midtwenties, taken from among the looters and squatters. The girls who had emptied the pantry shelves and sneered at Minnie's hoard of Marmite were at the head of the sullen file. Why weren't the men lined up when their plundering was so spectacularly brazen? 'Hi, Girish, it's me again with an SOS!'
The interrogations had gotten well under way before she gave up on Mr. GG, opened the window, and yelled down to the seated officer in English, 'Mrs. Bagehot's here! Heart attack!'
'That's her!' An agitated shout from Asoke, this time in English. He pointed at the window. 'That's the tenant! There she is!' And Sunita stared as well, smiling but not bothering to point.
Before Anjali could duck, an angry woman, the first to be interrogated, scooped up a fistful of pebbles and flung it at the bathroom window. She inspired her friends. Some squatter men joined in, hurling chunks of concrete loosened from the front wall and broken bricks from the edges of wilted flowerbeds. The window grille, originally installed to deter burglars, repelled the large projectiles. Why had they suddenly turned on her? Anjali's distrust of the police softened into gratitude. Their duty was to protect her; they had no choice. She backed away from the window, crouched on the tiled floor, inches from Minnie's body, and prayed for rescue. When the officer, with a policewoman and two male constables in tow, finally burst through the bathroom door, that's how they found her. Asoke sidled in after them. He didn't shriek or wail at the grotesque sight. Instead, while the policewomen pulled Anjali to her feet and handcuffed her, he covered the naked corpse with the only bath towel, still damp from use, hanging on the towel rack, a servant's small gesture of gallantry.
'You are paying guest of this lady?' the officer demanded, and pointed his baton at Minnie's body. He had the sagging, full lower lip of a heavy smoker and sprayed saliva as he spoke. With her hands cuffed, she couldn't blot; she could only watch patches of spittle land on her silk clothing and spread. Like a Bollywood cop, the man wore oversize, mirrored sunglasses, like a mask, but the accusatory growl in his voice made her feel like a criminal. She'd already been judged. 'Please to describe your relationship to the deceased.'
'She was dead when I got here,' Anjali blurted. 'I don't know why all this craziness is happening.'
'Please to make response only to question posed.' The officer ordered a policewoman to confiscate Anjali's pocketbook, watch and cell phone before continuing his interrogation. 'What is nature of connection you are having with deceased aged lady?'
'I had nothing to do with any of this. She must have died of shock. I wasn't here. Goondahs were breaking into her home and stealing all her property.'
'You are putting my patience in jeopardy.' The officer extracted a pack of cigarettes from one of his many pockets but didn't light up. 'I'm asking one more time only. You are residing as tenant in the deceased's lodging, but owing rent money?'
She lowered her gaze from the officer's plump, moist lower lip to his heavy khaki socks and brown ankle boots.
'Yes or no?'
She said nothing. Why would the officer believe that the dead landlady had offered to run a tab for this handcuffed tenant?
'Your good name please?'
'Angie. Anjali Bose.' It conferred no identity. She didn't own the name. She could have been anybody.
'Your name is Anjali Bose? Why your purse is saying HS?' He was pointing to the gilt letters on the leather strap.
'I don't know.' She lied.
He made a dismissive gesture, a sweeping of his hand, and the two policewomen dragged her down the stairs, across the foyer, down the porch steps cluttered with Bagehot furniture, past the single-minded auction-house representative in the sky-blue suit and the screaming mob and into a police cruiser. Her foot crunched the photo of dead Sikhs, which lay on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history. There was no paddy wagon in the police convoy. There was no convoy.
11
