man who had been used as a lure for her, but this was the first time Felder had ever actually heard the name of Arjun Baba. Names are powerful magic. That anonymous wisp of India, a puff of grey dust blown away almost unwittingly by the wind of somebody’s greed, suddenly put on a man’s identity and was illuminated by a man’s soul; and suddenly, for the first time, Felder was gazing with horror at the reality of murder.
The Rolls, starting up with somnolent dignity, drove away out of the courtyard with the Swami erect and impassive in the front passenger seat. Kumar, though he had left in company with his friend, was apparently not dependent on him for transport.
‘I don’t like it!’ said Felder, watching the old car round the tall hedge and vanish from view. ‘I can’t help it, there’s something going on that I don’t like and don’t trust, and there goes the man who’s stage-managing the lot of us. It was that driver of his who distracted my attention from the money, just long enough for the parcels to be swopped over. And now tonight, why didn’t he want us to let Ashok in on the truth? Why? You saw as well as I did how he jumped in to put his foot on that instantly. Oh, sure it made sense – sense enough for Kumar to echo what he said. And yet – you’ve seen him at work, he sits there like a god, and nods, and we all do what he says. And now we’re all committed to this lunch tomorrow. And
‘As long as he pulls the one that produces Anjli alive,’ said Dominic, shaken but helpless, ‘does it matter?’
‘No… if he does that, no, nothing else matters. Not until afterwards, anyhow. No, that’s right, we haven’t got much choice, have we? She’s what matters. Once we’ve got her back, we can afford to get inquisitive.’ His tone said that ‘inquisitive’ was an under-statement.
‘You don’t really believe,’ whispered Tossa, appalled, ‘that the Swami can be behind Anjli’s kidnapping? But he’s her father’s friend. You can see it’s true. They’ve known each other for years.’
‘That’s right! And who knows better than the Swami how much money his friend’s good for, and how little he’ll miss it? And who can get him to dance to his tune better?’
‘But it’s crazy! He doesn’t care about money. It means nothing to him…’ she protested, shaking.
‘No, not in dollars, or rupees, or pounds sterling, not one damn’ thing. Only in grain seed, and pedigree stock, and agricultural plant, and expert advice… An opportunity’s an opportunity, whatever you want the cash for, it doesn’t have to be for yourself.
They laboured to find answers for him, and discovered that they had none for themselves. The thin fingers of the Swami Premanathanand were indeed unobtrusively present in the plot wherever they looked, gently stirring, bringing the mixture to the boil.
‘Our hands are tied, anyhow,’ said Dominic flatly. ‘If he really is behind the whole affair, then he genuinely intends to hand over Anjli tomorrow. And there’s nothing we can do except go along with him until she’s safe.’
On which exceedingly chilly comfort they separated for the night, Felder to the villa at Hauz Khas where Ganesh Rao was waiting with the rushes from Sarnath, and Tossa and Dominic to a belated sandwich and a lime soda in the bar, and then a solitary walk round the quiet streets near the Lodi Park. It was the walk that completed their sense of disorientation and confusion; for they returned by way of Aurangzeb Road, and passing by the drive of Claridge’s, were just in time to see one of the handsome, well-groomed, well-heeled couples of Delhi strolling arm- in-arm from the hotel to the taxi rank. A good-looking, austere, proud, pale Punjabi in a European suit, and a very lovely woman in a white and gold sari on his arm, her towering beehive of lustrous black hair defying fashion, which one so beautiful could well afford to ignore. There was nothing indecorous about them, they were talking together gravely and quietly, their faces intent. There was nothing about them, indeed, to excite any feelings but those of pleasure and admiration – except that the man was Satyavan Kumar, and the woman – once seen, never forgotten – was Kamala, whom they knew best as Yashodhara, the bride of Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha.
X
« ^ »
Anjli sat on a string bed in a tiny room about eight feet square, lit by one little smoky window far above her head. It was the fourth day she had spent in this place, and she knew every article in the room, every fine crinkle of cracks in the dun-coloured plaster of the walls, every crease in the garish almanack pinned above the rickety wooden chest. The ceiling was disproportionately high, the floor of rough concrete with one threadbare cotton rug. On the bed was a thin flock mattress, and a grey blanket. The chest of drawers was of thickly varnished and heavily scratched wood, dark red, with an artificial silk cover in several violent colours spread over it, and above it the smooth, effeminate blue Krishna smiling over his flute with those kind, mischievous, amoral, dangerous eyes of his, the eyes of a fairy rather than a god. Propped on the gay cover were one faded family photograph, so faint now that it had nothing to say to her, not even whether the persons in it were male or female, and one picture of Sri Ramakrishna, cut from a newspaper and stuck askew in a carved wooden frame.
There was nothing else in the room. And all three of them slept there at night, the two little girls on the string bed, the woman on a rug spread on the floor beside them.
This was not the whole of Anjli’s present world, however. She could pass at will through the single door of the room, or most of the time she could do so; but that would merely bring her into a short clay-coloured passage, locked against her at the nearer end, and at the other leading only to two even tinier rooms, the first an Indian bathroom, a concrete box just big enough to stand up in, with a cold water tap on the wall and a drain in the centre of the gently sloping floor, the second a flush lavatory, eastern style, with a porcelain basin sunk in the floor and two raised platforms for the feet. There the passage ended in another locked door. But she thought that wherever she might be, she was on the ground floor, for at the minute window of the lavatory leaves leaned down to her at an angle which suggested the lowest branches of a tree.
This was all she knew, and after four days she knew it like the palm of her hand; but she could not deduce from it anything that might be useful to her.
There was nothing the matter with Anjli’s mind or memory, she was not too much afraid to sift detail from detail and build them laboriously into a picture of her days, but the picture could never be complete, for this place of her confinement was a bubble, without a material location at all. She remembered perfectly the gleam of the old man’s eyes across the brazier, the instant flash of intelligence that warned her this was not Arjun Baba, and spurred her into flight. She remembered the sickening half-suffocation under the folds of the blanket, the struggles that wasted themselves feebly, and soon ceased when she realised that she was in a van in motion. She had not lost consciousness at all, but face-down in her odorous wrappings on the floor of the van, with no light, and the vehicle turning and circling and dodging to complete her confusion, she had lost all sense not only of direction but of distance. Towards the end she had lapsed into something close to a faint, starved for air. Now she did not know even whether she was still in Delhi, much less in which part of it.
Two people between them had carried her in from the van, she thought by the locked door beyond the lavatory, but even of that she could not be sure. All she could be certain of was that they had released her from her
