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 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.
IV
« ^ »
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
