Mourning Raga

‘A very serious crime.’ He made a brief gesture with the cane in his hand, and deflected all attention into the distant corner of the compound, partially cut off from view by the jut of the house wall. Tossa wanted to close her eyes, but did not; what right had she to refrain from seeing what was there to be seen? The poor little girl, shuttlecock to this marital pair who didn’t care a toss about her, and now fallen victim to some incomprehensible perversion that was an offence against India as well as against youth and girlhood…

‘Come, you should look more closely,’ said the Sikh, and led the way, turning once to say with authority: ‘The lady must stay here.’

The lady stayed; she could not very well do anything else. But her eyes, which had excellent vision, followed them remorselessly across the sparkling white paving, across the beaten, rust-coloured earth, under the lightly- dancing clothes-line, to the shed and the lean-to roof in the corner, where Anjli…

No! There was no honeyed rose of Anjli’s skin there, and no midnight-black of her hair, and no silvery angora pink of her best jersey suit. There were two policemen and one dried-up little medical civilian sitting on their heels around something on the ground; and when the Sikh brought his accidental witnesses over to view the find, these three rose and drew apart, leaving the focus of all attention full in view.

He could not have been found there, any chance passerby in the side street might have looked over the wall and seen him; they must have brought him out into the light after measuring and recording his position on discovery, somewhere there in the corner shed, fast hidden from sight.

The dull brown blanket was gone. Only a thin, skinny little shape, hardly larger than a monkey, lay contorted on the darker brown earth of Satyavan’s yard, bony arms curled together as if holding a secret, bony legs drawn up to his chin, streaky grey hair spread abroad like scattered ash. There was so little blood in him that his face was scarcely congested at all; but there were swollen bruises on the long, skinny, misshapen throat to show that he had died by strangulation.

The eyes were open; blank, rounded and white as pearls.

Arjun Baba, that very, very old man, had quitted the world in the night, and left no message behind him.

Kishan Singh padded across the yard at the policeman’s heels, protesting: ‘I did not touch the old man, I swear it. Sahib, why should I touch him? All this year I have given him food, and brought him his pan, and been as his servant, as my mistress told me. Always when I rose in the morning he was sitting by his brazier… Today he was not there. I called him, and he did not answer, and therefore I looked within… Sahib, he was lying there in the dark, as you see him, so he was. I saw that he was dead… Also I saw how he had died, and therefore I ran for the police. Should I do that if I had killed him?’

‘It would be the best way of appearing blameless,’ said the Sikh officer drily, ‘if you had the wit.’

‘But why should I wish to harm him, I? What gain for me? You think such a person had money to be stolen?’

‘You may have grudged the effort of feeding him. Perhaps he was in your way. It would be easy to make away with some of the furnishings of this house, without a witness always in the compound…’

‘The old man was blind…’

‘But very quick of hearing,’ called the plump lady from next door, bright with excitement at the gate; and all the neighbours joined in in shrill Hindi, shouting one another down. ‘Everything he heard! I had only to set foot on my roof, and he would call up to me. He knew by my walk when I had my washing basket on my arm.’

‘This boy has been always a very trustworthy servant,’ Vasudev urged in agitation. ‘I cannot believe he would hurt the old man.’

‘You do not know what he might do, being master here as well as servant. Young people have no time now to care for the old… Arjun Baba was a trouble to him, that is how it was! Who else was here to do this thing, tell us that? In the night we are not minding our neighbours’ business here, we are good people. Very easy to make away with the old man in the night, and then find him – oh, yes, all innocently! – in the morning and run to the police.’

Other voices rose as vociferously, arguing against her. The two policemen, affronted by the steady surge of curious people across the threshold into the front garden, began to push them back outside the gate, were shrilled at indignantly in consequence, and shouted back no less angrily. The noise soared into a crescendo that was like physical pain. And all the while Dominic and Tossa gazed at the shrunken, indifferent corpse of Arjun Baba, old age torn and savaged and discarded where they had dreaded to see Anjli’s youth and grace. It is a terrible thing to feel only relief when you are brought face to face with a murdered man. They felt themselves, in some obscure way, responsible, if not for his death, yet for the absence of all mourning; if the world had not owed him a living, yet surely it owed him at least justice and regret now that he was dead.

‘If you did not do it, then who did? Who else would want to kill such an old man? Who were Arjun Baba’s enemies?’

‘He had no enemies… No friends now except me… and no enemies… I do not know who would do such a thing. But I did not… I did not…’

In the fine drift of dust along the lee of the old man’s hut a tiny gleam of whiteness showed. Dominic stepped carefully past the stringy brown feet, and stooped to pick up the small alien thing no one else had yet noticed. It lay coiled in his palm light as a feather, seven inches or so of fine green cord stringing a bracelet of white jasmine buds, threaded pointing alternately this way and that. After sixteen hours they were a little soiled and faded, one or two torn away from their places, but they were still fragrant. He saw that the green cord was not untied, but broken; and silk is very strong.

Anjli had been here!

He began to see, vaguely, the shape of disturbing things. Anjli had been here, and the flowers she had worn had been ripped from her wrist with some violence, perhaps in a struggle. And the old man, the only one remaining who had been here when Satyavan vanished in the night, was dead. Anjli had given him a token, and coaxed him to tell her whatever he knew. And last night Anjli had received a grubby note brought by a common messenger, a note which had sent her out secretly before dawn. To this place. For so the jasmine flowers said clearly.

He turned to the Sikh police officer, shouting to make himself heard. ‘Have your men examined all Arjun Baba’s belongings? May I know what you found?’

‘Belongings? Sahib, such a man has nothing… a brazier, a headcloth, a loincloth, a blanket…’

‘But you see he hasn’t got a blanket! And it was a cold night!’