Mourning Raga

And the main issue was, and always would be, Anjli.

They waited all the evening in Dominic’s sitting-room at Keen’s, whither Felder had repaired via the garden staircase and the balcony. Eight o’clock went by, nine o’clock, half past nine… The telephone remained obstinately silent.

But at a quarter to ten there was a sudden insinuating rapping on the door. Dominic sprang to open it, even though this was not at all what they had expected.

Into the room, serenely calm as ever, and beatifically smiling, walked the Swami Premanathanand. Down below in the courtyard the ancient Rolls stood with folded wings and reposeful outline, like a grounded dove.

IX

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I trust you will forgive,’ said the Swami courteously, ‘so late and unceremonious a call.’ He looked from Dominic to Felder, whom he had never seen before, and his wise brown eyes, behind the unequal lenses, refuged deep in the shadow of large ivory eyelids and kept their own counsel. He even seemed able to suppress the unnerving magnifying power of the strong lens when he chose. ‘I am afraid that I have interrupted a private conference. But you will understand that I am exercised in my mind about Mr Kumar’s daughter. I may speak freely?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ said Dominic, torn several ways at once and quite incapable of resolving the struggle. ‘This is Mr Felder, who is an old and valued friend of Anjli’s mother. Mr Felder is directing a film here in India, and he has been very kind to us since we came. And this is the Swami Premanathanand, of the Native Indian Agricultural Missions, who is an old friend of Mr Kumar.’

‘Delighted!’ said Felder feelingly. ‘We can certainly use another friend here… and another good sound head, too. If I’m right in taking it that the Swami knows what’s going on?’

‘I have that honour,’ said the Swami shyly, and modestly accepted the chair Dominic offered. Tonight he wore an old European trench coat, minus the belt, over his saffron robe, and when he stripped it off in the warmed room his one shoulder emerged naked and polished and adamant as bronze, bone and sinew without the more dispensable elements of flesh.

‘You have received no trustworthy news about Anjli’s whereabouts?’

‘No,’ said Tossa miserably, ‘But we have had a telephone call to say she’s being held to ransom.’ She could see no reason at all for concealing anything that had happened; passionately she recounted the events of the afternoon. ‘And we’re no farther forward at all, and they’re not going to keep their bargain. We’ve been waiting here all the evening for a telephone call, and nothing! They’ve cheated us. And now we haven’t any way at all of getting in touch with them, it was a one-way traffic. We’ve just poured that money down the drain, and it wasn’t even ours, it has to be replaced. And I can’t bear to think…’

‘If money has been demanded and taken,’ said the Swami, smoothly interrupting the downward cadence of her grief and self-blame, ‘then clearly money is the means to further negotiation. This first sum was very easily come by, there is a strong temptation to repeat the success. Do you not agree, Mr Felder? You are a man of the world, where money counts for more, perhaps, than we realise who want it only to invest in crops and food and development. The actual notes we scarcely even see. Nevertheless, they exist, and there are those who know how to value them. And there are those who have them, and know how to devalue them when there is something of great worth to be bought.’

‘I’d give whatever I could raise,’ said Felder warmly, ‘to get Anjli back. But I’ve shot not only my own bolt, but the company’s too. Right now I’m bankrupt. If Dorrie stands by me, I’ll pull out of it. If she doesn’t, I’m sunk. And what did I buy for her? Not a thing!’

‘You have done what you could. It is now for others, perhaps with greater responsibility, to do as much as you have done. Also it is for them to appreciate at its true worth the thing which you have done.’ Benevolently the great eye, like a rare and awe-inspiring omen, beamed through the pebble-thick lens, and again was veiled as his head turned. Like the lance of light from a light-house its brief, comprehensive flash encompassed them all, and withdrew itself into dimness. He raised a lean, long-fingered hand, and took off his glasses. Mild, short-sighted eyes, one brighter than the other, blinked kindly at Dominic. ‘Since I saw you I have been active ceaselessly upon one problem, that of where Satyavan Kumar might be found. I have sat beside the telephone and pondered the possibilities, testing all I considered valid. There are universities where he has studied, colleges where he has lectured, laboratories where he has taken part in research. There are the ordinary places where he directed, not always willingly, the business of his family’s interests. But there are also places to which he withdrew sometimes for refreshment of the spirit, ashrams, solitudes, hermitages… And some of these I have, in the past, shared with him.’ He looked up obliquely, smiling with the delicate pleasure of a child bringing gifts, but a child acquainted, in some obscure amalgam of innocence and experience, with maturity and age. ‘I have run up,’ he said, with the sprightly nonchalance that emerged so surprisingly from his normally measured and precise vocabulary, ‘the very devil of a telephone bill. But I have located Satyavan.’’

‘You have?’ Dominic shot out of his chair joyfully. This couldn’t be the whole answer, it couldn’t solve everything, and above all it couldn’t absolve Tossa and himself, but the surge of relief and release he felt was wonderful. The father should have been there from the beginning, he should never have let go, at any cost, of that fragile essence of himself that survived in Anjli. He shouldn’t have given up what was his; and he must know it, in this extreme, better than anyone. If he was found, they had an elemental force on their side, a tornado that would sweep away obstacles like a breeze winnowing chaff. ‘Where was he, all this time? What’s he been doing?’

‘Is he coming?’ demanded Tossa, slicing straight through to essentials.

‘Where he has been I cannot tell you, surely in many places. Where I found him was in a place of the spirit where we have sometimes rested together when there was need. One does not ask too many questions of those one meets there, for only the answer to one question is of any importance, and that is; from here, whither? And yes, he is coming. There will be a plane from Madras arriving to-morrow a little after noon.’

‘Then he didn’t know,’ said Tossa, quivering, ‘that his mother was dead? He didn’t see the newspapers?’

‘He did not know until it was too late… no. One does not always read newspapers. There is a time not to read them, if you wish to remain upright.’

‘Then you had to tell him?’ she said, her eyes, dark and luminous with sympathy, fixed on the austere old face that confronted her with such serenity. ‘That must have been very hard for you both. And then, his child…’

‘It is never easy,’ said the Swami apocryphally, ‘to return to the world. Until you have left it, you cannot know how hard. But there is no other way forward and none back. Yes, I told him all that it was necessary to tell. And tomorrow in the afternoon he will be here.’

‘But what can he do?’ demanded Felder. ‘God knows I shall be glad to have him emerge into the light again,