got to make up our minds right now.’
Anjli dropped the tiny packet of damp tissue-paper she was just unwrapping, and gaped at him in consternation for a moment; but she was quick to recover her own reticence, which in some unquestioned way had become curiously precious to her here in Delhi.
‘You mean you want me to go back to England with you?’ she said with composure.
‘What else can we possibly do?’ said Dominic reasonably. ‘We can’t deliver you to your father, which was the object of the exercise, or to your grandmother, which would have done as a substitute. The only legal guardian you have is your mother – for the time being, at any rate. I don’t see any alternative but to take you back with us… do you?’
‘We could go and stay at Grandmother Purnima’s house for a while, at any rate. He did ask us. That way, we needn’t pay hotel bills, and we’d still have enough for my ticket back if it came to that in the end.’
‘
She owned, after a moment’s thought, that that was too much to expect of them. ‘Well, all right, then, what’s the answer?’ But she knew, and she knew he was right, by his standards and by hers. Somehow standards seemed irrelevant to this new world; what governed action was something just as valid and moral, but more inward, and not to be discussed or questioned. She picked up the little moist packet, and carefully unwrapped the exquisite bracelet of white jasmine buds Dominic had bought her in Chandni Chowk, strung neatly on green silk cord the colour of the stems. ‘Tie it on, would you, please?’
Three days ago Dominic would have suspected that confiding gesture of her wrist towards him, and the way she inclined her head over the dewy trifle as he tied the green cord. Now she seemed three years older than her age, and every touch and sound and look of hers he accepted as genuine. She turned her wrist, leaning back to admire. ‘They wear them in their hair, don’t they? I could do that, too, if I put mine up, there’s plenty of it. A big knot on the back of my neck, like this, and the bracelet tied round the knot… Imagine all those gorgeous flowers, in winter! Did you ever see such gardens?’
‘The answer,’ Tossa said, watching the two of them with a faintly ironic smile, ‘is that we all go back to London. There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll have to see about your ticket and the flight in the morning.’
‘You’re the boss,’ said Anjli, ‘All right, if you say so, that’s what we do. Now, if you folks don’t mind, I’m going to put our bathroom light on and alert the enemy to get right out of there, and in about five minutes I’m going to have my bath.’
She had to go out into the corridor to go to the suite she shared with Tossa, next door; and in the corridor she met her least favourite room-boy, bearing on a pretentious inlaid tray a very grubby folded scrap of paper. His grin – it was a curious side-long grin, the antithesis of Kishan Singh’s radiant beam, and his eyes never met hers for more than a fraction of a second, but slid away like quicksilver – convulsed his thin dark face at sight of her, and he bowed himself the remaining four yards towards her, and proffered the tray.
‘Missee-sahib, messenger he bring this for you. Say, please, give privately. Your room dark, I think perhaps better wait…’
He had a confiding, you-and-I-understand-each-other voice and manner. She hadn’t been a film star’s daughter all her life without meeting his like in many different places. She dropped a quarter-rupee on the tray and picked up the dirty little note with more curiosity than she showed.
‘Thank you! That’s all!’
He withdrew backwards, not out of extreme humility, but to watch her face and bearing as she opened and read the note; which got him nothing, for she didn’t open and read it until she had stared him into turning and slithering away towards the stairs. Then she had it open in an instant, and held under the light in the corridor. She could see there was no more than one line to read; a glance, and she had it memorised.
English characters sprawled shapelessly and shakily across the paper, the pencil now pressing, now feebly touching, an old man’s hand:
‘Daughter, come morning before light alone.’
She had unfolded it so hurriedly that something small had fallen from it at her feet. She picked it up, and her fingers knew it before ever she got it raised to the light. It was her gold dollar, the token she had given to Arjun Baba in the courtyard of her father’s house in Rabindar Nagar.
The room-boy was on the stairs when she caught up with him. There was no time to be diplomatic; instinct told her, instead, to be autocratic. And, given co-operation, generous.
‘Boy!’ He turned, responsive to the tone, with more alacrity than usual. ‘Who brought this note?’
‘A messenger, missee-sahib!’ The obsequious shoulders lifted eloquently. ‘Perhaps a porter? Or he could be somebody’s office peon. In a red head-cloth, like a porter.’
‘And he left no other message? Just brought the note? How long ago?’
‘Missee-sahib, only this minute. I come upstairs, your room in darkness, when I see you come… That peon maybe still only in courtyard there…’
Of course, there was no other way out. To enter Keen’s you must thread a narrow archway in from the street, walk round a high hedge and so come into the interior court; and if driving a car, you must drive from a double gate higher up the street, right round one wing to the same paved patio. Anjli dropped half a rupee on to her least favourite room-boy’s tray, and turned and ran from him without concealment, straight to the landing window that gave on to the courtyard gallery. Creepers wreathed the outline of the night in feathery leaves. Down below, lights shone upon the white paving and the scattered shrubs in their huge ceramic pots. Away across the expanse of silver-washed whiteness, towards the enclosing dark of the high box hedge, a foreshortened figure strolled at leisure, but still briskly, for the night air was sharp to the edge of frost. Under the last of the lights she saw the extravagantly-tied, wide-bowed headcloth, faded red. Like an office peon! She did not know the term, but she understood what it meant. The more menial the function, the more compensatory the uniform. On the whole not a bad principle. But Arjun Baba had no office peon to run his errands, and this was not Kishan Singh. Perhaps a kind neighbour with a job in the city. Perhaps a public porter earning a few extra pice and acquiring merit.
The man below her – he was rounding the corner of the box hedge now – was whistling. The notes came up to her clearly in the almost frosty air and the nocturnal stillness. She followed them subconsciously, plaintive notes rising, turning, falling, simple and poignant, like a folk-tune. She caught herself picking up the cadence accurately
