And had they anything to add to their account? Any forgotten detail? Dominic, by this time, had remembered that he had not mentioned hearing, or thinking he heard, Ashok’s morning raga whistled the previous night in the courtyard of Keen’s Hotel, at the very time when the note was being delivered to Anjli; but he had seen enough of the way the land lay to keep that item to himself now. The issue was confused enough already, why introduce into it what he might well have imagined, and what would certainly smell like a red herring to this suspicious person interrogating him?
‘Very well, let us leave it at that for the moment. You will be available, please, at Keen’s Hotel, you will not move from Delhi at present.’
‘We are not going anywhere,’ said Dominic steadily, ‘until Anjli is found. And I hope you are not thinking of detaining Kishan Singh, because he, too, will be available whenever you need him. He won’t leave here unless the Kumar family tell him to, and a word from you will take care of that.’
‘You are very concerned for the house-boy, Mr Felse. It is generous on your part – and interesting.’
‘I am concerned because he is young, alone here – his mistress, as you must know, is recently dead, and his family in the hills – and quite certainly totally innocent. You have only to look at him. He has never in his life entertained a malicious thought, much less deliberately hurt anyone. Arjun Baba was as sacred to him as the sparrows that fly in and out of the house. The boy was responsible for him to Mrs Kumar, whom he revered absolutely…’
‘And who, as you have pointed out, is dead. One person’s death may bring about a total disintegration for her dependents…’
They were raising their voices, both of them, and that made Tossa aware, quite suddenly, in what low tones they had been conversing for several minutes past. She pricked up her ears, and leaned upon a wall of noise that was not there, and fell through it into full consciousness. The din from the yard, that flat, clattering chaos of voices one gets used to in India, aggravated here by excitement to a sustained pandemonium, had almost completely ceased. When, she had no idea. Simply, it was gone. She reared her head, straining after it, and recaptured only a gentle, single murmur, unbelievably placid and reassuring.
‘Listen!’ she said peremptorily; and in sheer surprise they fell silent, too. ‘It’s gone quiet. What’s happened?’
The wonderful hush fell on them and charmed them into stillness. And stillness and silence, in Delhi, represent a new and more menacing crisis. The Sikh officer wheeled and strode to the window, with Dominic and Tossa pressing discreetly on his heels. They stared down into the yard together, forgetting all disagreements; for in their own way they were all the forces of law, and law had not sufficed to bring about silence and stillness in the confines of N 305, Rabindar Nagar, in the teeth of suspicion and disorder.
Drawn up in front of the gate stood an extraordinary car. Only a Rolls-Royce, perhaps, could have driven up so quietly as to be unnoticed. It was certainly an extremely antique Rolls-Royce, not at all well-maintained as far as its noble chassis was concerned, though apparently mechanically in first-class condition. Orissan children swarmed about it with absorption and delight, and were fended off good-humouredly, when necessary, by a long, slender, crop-haired driver in khaki shorts and bush jacket, who lounged at ease on the running-board. The women at the gate had stopped yelling, and stood decorously in a staged group, expressive of grief and modesty and respect, all facing inwards towards where Arjun Baba’s little wasted corpse lay uncomplainingly exposed. Beside the body stood a personage as remarkable, in his unassuming way, as his car, and for all his venerable appearance no more than half as old again. Put the man down as rising sixty, the car as around forty, and you wouldn’t be far out. Neither showed its age except in non-essentials. It was perhaps incipient baldness which had induced the man to shave his subtle and exquisitely-shaped crown, and climatic, seasonal rust which had suggested the removal of the world- famous radiator cap, and the substitution of a small brass knob from a bedstead; but both were spry, agile, in full working order, and would take some catching when in the mood.
The man was not even tall; he didn’t have to stoop to lay an arm about Kishan Singh’s shoulders, and Kishan Singh was squat and square. Nevertheless, the impression of lofty height was there, dominating everyone within sight. It may have been the erect and aloof carriage, it may have been the slight withdrawal of the naked, golden, ascetic head on its slender neck, the poised effect of a stylised bronze which withdrew him into the field of art. It certainly was not innocent, but equally certainly it was not posed. He knew what he was, and employed it fully for his own inscrutable ends; and what mattered was what dictated the ends. He had a gentle bronze face, thin of feature and disarming of expression, live dark eyes moving modestly within the sculptured head, fleshless bones as serene as weathered mountains, and a benevolent smile like the antique stone smile of Angkor, at once calming and shattering. He wore a robe of saffron cloth that fell in chiselled folds to his ankles, and over it a knitted shawl draping his shoulders. His feet looked like bronze skeleton feet in the worn leather sandals. He had his arm round Kishan Singh’s shoulders; the aura of his protection encompassed the boy in an almost visible glory. The two policemen hovering in the fringes of his influence looked now like attendant figures in a religious picture.
What was most humbling of all, the dominant figure sensed the presence of the watchers at the window above, within a minute of their gathering there, and with a gesture of his hand most courteously invited them to descend and rejoin the tableau.
Which, for want of a more appropriate response, they forthwith did.
VII
« ^ »
You must forgive us,’ said the newcomer, ‘for so inopportune an arrival. We had no idea that we should be intruding upon a problem and a tragedy. My name is Premanathanand. I am one of the members of the Native Indian Agricultural Missions, and I came here today to visit the home of my old friend Satyavan Kumar. I have been away on field studies among our settlements until recently, and for some time have had no opportunity of seeing him, and it is a friendship I value. But these ladies tell me – and the house-boy here – a good boy, I knew him in Mrs Kumar’s household in Kangra – that Mr Kumar is not here at present. Also that there is a matter of the young girl, his daughter, who has vanished from the care of her guardians.’ That, of course, must have come from Kishan Singh, who had been the only one of these people close enough to overhear what had passed between Dominic and the police officer before they went into the house, and who would tell everything without reserve to a man he trusted. In which case, Dominic thought, he would also have told him that Satyavan had been gone more than a year, and no one, not even his own mother, had known where he was, and no one knew now. That made this already interesting person even more interesting, since he had glided so gently over Satyavan’s absence, as though he had merely gone away for the weekend.
And it was, now that he came to study it at close quarters and somewhat below the level of his own, an extraordinarily ambiguous face, at once candid and withdrawn, giving and reserving, just as his smile both comforted and disquieted. Every detail you looked at was as ordinary as the dusty soil of Delhi; the saffron robe, if you observed it closely, was worn, a little faded, and frayed at the hem, the brown knitted shawl round his shoulders had a stitch worn through here and there; his hands were sinewy and broad-jointed and used to hard work; the spectacles on his thin, straight nose were steel-rimmed and had battered wire ear-pieces, and one lens was thicker than the other, so that they tended to sit askew, and the eye seen through the thick lens was startlingly magnified. Yet the sum of the parts was so much more than the whole that accurate observation was disarmed. His
