‘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 Kumar. I have come to find my father. Help me!’
Faintly and distantly a convulsion passed through the fixed, unchanging face, like the passing 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He had withdrawn a little into his blanket, his head recoiling into cover from the sun.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
‘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 passed 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 Kumar grass.
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 spaced 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 assertive leaves, taming and shaping and reducing all things to order. Under the awning of the loggia roof stone urns of flowers were spaced, 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 Kumar?’ 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
