The Swami appeared to be watching nothing, and to see nothing, but he had in his mind a complete map of all these complex traffic movements. Everyone else was staring frantically, but none of them observed the one significant thing which had happened. For the driver of the motorbike rickshaw, had he not been as invisible to them as all the other casual service personnel of Delhi, the postmen, the peons, the porters, would have been recognised at once as Girish, his master’s monumental Rolls for once abandoned. Girish had made no promises, and taken part in no bargain. Girish was a free agent.
The taxi proceeded without haste round the curve of Connaught Circus, the motorcycle-rickshaw followed at a nicely-judged distance. There could hardly be a better instrument for pursuit in Delhi, where in any street of the new town at any time of the day you may see at least three or four of them, all looking much alike. Nobody pays any attention to them, unless he wishes to hire one, and even then it is not unusual to watch them sail disdainfully by, for in the deep shade of their awnings it is difficult to be sure whether they are occupied or not. Nor does anyone turn a hair at seeing them driven at crazy speeds, so that even an alerted quarry might have great trouble in getting away from them. Girish, however, had no intention of betraying himself. His object was to trail them to their destination, not to overhaul them. He hung back by fifteen yards or so, driving obliquely behind the taxi so that he should not become obtrusive in the driving mirror, allowing other vehicles to intervene now and then, varying the pattern of his pursuit, the big machine idling happily under him. He foresaw no trouble. All he needed to know was where they were holding her, and then the rest was up to him. In the meantime he did not mean to make any mistake.
Nor was what happened next due to any error on his part. It was something against which he could not possibly have taken precautions.
In the back of the taxi Anjli sat between her guards, quivering with tension and aware that time was running out. They were on their way back to the tiny, obscure dwelling in the quiet yard, and once they reached it she would have lost her only opportunity. This inexplicable trip back into the world, on the face of it completely senseless, must mean something, if only she could grasp what. Had she merely been removed from the place for a brief while because someone dangerous was expected there? Had she been put back into apparent circulation simply to show her to someone, to disarm suspicions of who or what she was? It had to mean something that could help her to know how to act, and here were the minutes and seconds dwindling through her fingers, and nothing gained. Uneasily she craned on all sides, searching the pavements that unrolled beside her. The old man had loosed his hold on her. She turned and swept her hand across the dusty rear window, peering back along their track. She saw the motorcycle-rickshaw that should have meant nothing to her, the long, slim, lightly-balanced body of its driver; she saw, and studied for one broken moment with astonished passion, the lean, aquiline face with its bold bones and intent, proud eyes fixed unmistakably on the car that carried her.
She uttered a shriek of exultation, and whirled to pound with both fists upon the Sikh driver’s shoulder. ‘Stop!’ she cried, in a voice of such authority that his foot instinctively went down on the brake. ‘Stop, at once!’
The old man had her by the arm again by then, though it took him all his time to hold her. She had not lost her instinct for the last chance; when the driver braked they were all three flung forward in the seat, and she reached across the frightened woman and tore at the handle of the door, willing to push the woman out before her and jump for it if only they gave her time.
She was just too late. ‘Drive on, drive on, quickly!’ bellowed the man beside her, and all the cracked tones of age had fallen away from his voice in this crisis. ‘Don’t listen to me. You see she is ill… she is mad… we must get her home…’ The car lurched forward again powerfully and gathered speed, and Anjli was flung back helplessly into the cushions. The woman was sobbing with excitement and dread. The man cursed her savagely, cursed Anjli with even more heartfelt passion, and crouched scowling through the back window. He knew now that they were followed. She had done the one thing she should not have done.
‘Faster, faster! There is a motorcycle-rickshaw following us. You must lose him… you must! I promise you double your fare if you get us back safely.’
They were threading traffic at speed now, taking flagrant risks to put other vehicles between them, whirling dangerously out of the main stream, plunging through side-streets, Anjli was lost again, the city went round her like a kaleidoscope. She tried to pull herself up to the window, and the old man took her by her braid of hair and thrust her down again. She struck at him with all her strength, clenched her fingers in his beard and tugged. Spitting curses, he took her by the wrists and unlaced her fingers by force, one by one.
‘Faster, faster… this bullock-cart… Quickly, pass it, and it will block the way for him! Yes,
The taxi hurtled to a halt, groaning, the doors were flung open, and Anjli dragged out, dishevelled and panting, and hustled across a narrow garden and in at a fan-lighted door. She heard money change hands hurriedly, enough money to close the taxi-driver’s mouth. She heard the car accelerate in haste and dash away. The outer door slammed again upon the old man. He came into the cool, bare white office in which she stood with the shivering woman, a bristling caricature of fury and terror, dripping words like acid, holding his head as if it ached beyond bearing.
So now, too late, she knew. She knew where she was, where she had been all these four days. That tall, Victorian-colonial facade she was not likely to forget, nor the little garden and the low hedge before it. If they had not been forced for lack of time to come in by the front way she might never have recognised the place. Outside that door she had waited with her friends for Ashok Kabir, on the first evening in Delhi. All this time she had been held prisoner in the caretaker’s quarters of the film company’s Delhi office and store, on Connaught Circus.
And now that she had begun to make discoveries, it seemed there was no end to the things she knew. She knew that the old, cracked voice, when shaken out of its careful impersonation by a crisis, grew full and resonant and loud. She knew that when she had clenched her fingers in his beard what he had felt had not been pain, but only alarm; why else should he have disengaged her hold so carefully, instead of hitting out at her with all his force?
She let him come close to her, the awful, bitter, incomprehensible words nothing to her now. She stood like a broken-spirited child until he was within her reach, and then she lunged with both hands, not at his beard this time, but at the thick bush of grey hair, bearing down with all her weight, ripping it from his head. Wig and beard came away together in her clutch, tearing red, grazed lines across his cheeks and brows where they had been secured. Nothing remained of the senile elder but two round, grained grey patches of make-up on his cheeks, the carefully- painted furrows on his forehead, and the tangle of hair that Anjli let fall at his feet, curled on the floor like a sleeping Yorkshire terrier. What was left was a sturdy man in his thirties, high-complexioned, smooth-featured, with close-cropped black hair.
‘Now I know you,’ she said, without triumph, for she knew that she had made an enemy in a sense in which she had never had an enemy before. ‘You are not just an old man, you are
