Mourning Raga

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