echoes between the trees. In the stunned moments before anyone came running. Govind Das dragged himself dizzy but uninjured out of the driving seat, and slid away hastily from the scene. A car stolen from the film company’s premises… a reckless driver… a crash… what was there new in that? All he had to do was take care of the girl, and then get back and report the car missing.
He could still see the two little figures in blue and white, well ahead now. They had made a mistake, they were heading for the great iron gates of the Jantar Mantar Park, down there on the left of the road. He needn’t even hurry.
He looked back once, and the driver of the motorcycle – was he crazy, or something? Govind Das didn’t even know him, had never set eyes on him before! – still lay in the road, huddled beside the wreckage. Dead or alive, did it matter? No doubt an ambulance would be along for him in a matter of minutes, as soon as someone grasped what had happened here. Govind Das turned contentedly, and loped gently after Anjli Kumar, towards the park gates from which there was no escape. This wall would be too high for them to climb.
Girish had swung his legs clear of the machine and jumped just before the moment of impact, but the impetus of his rush had carried him into the wing of the car just the same, though with less violence. He hit the road hard and flatly, knocking the breath out of his body, and his head struck the metal of the car body with enough force to stun him for some seconds. He opened his eyes upon the gravelly surface of the road, one cheek skinned, the grains of dust like boulders against his lips; but the first painful movements assured him he was alive, and had no breakages. Dazedly he drew up his knees under him, and raised himself from the road.
There had been no one very close to the scene of the crash, but from both directions now people were coming on the run. Hastily Girish withdrew himself behind the crumpled bulk of the two vehicles, and melted backwards into the shelter of the trees. Easy to vanish here, and he had no time to answer police questions, not yet, not until those children were recovered alive. They had disappeared utterly from view now. He removed himself far enough from the wreck to escape notice, and then moved out into the roadway and stared ahead down the long, straight vista of Parliament Street. They were nowhere in sight, yet he could not believe that they had run so far ahead in the time. There were two possible turns off, somewhat ahead but still possible, Jai Singh Road on the right, and the lane opposite to it. And before that, of course, there was the gate into the park.
That made him look to the left, where the iron filigree of the gates stood open in their high wall. He was just in time to see Govind Das turn in towards the gravelled paths of the gardens, limping slightly, in no haste. Until ten minutes ago he had never seen that man in his life, but he could not see him now, even at this distance, without knowing him again.
Girish wiped the smears of blood from his face with a crumpled handkerchief, and set off at an unsteady trot after his quarry.
The Jantar Mantar is the oddest monument of Delhi, and one of the most charming, though without guide-book or guide you might wander round it for days and be no nearer guessing at its purpose. It looks as if some highly original modern sculptor-architect, in love with the space-age, had set to work to decorate this garden with the shapes of things to come. In reality the buildings are nearly two hundred and fifty years old, but it is no illusion that their creator was in love with space. For this is just one of the five giant observatories built around India by the Maharajah Jai Singh the Second, of Jaipur, town-planner and astronomer extraordinary, in the early eighteenth century. Six immense masonry instruments, nobly spaced through the fine gardens with which the Indians inevitably surround every antiquity, tower even above the royal palms. Their shapes are as beautiful as they are functional – or as they were functional in their heyday – and their colour is a deep, soft rose, picked out here and there with white, so that their cleanness and radiance adds to the fantasy of their forms. A pair of peat, roofless, rose- coloured towers, each with a stone column in the centre, each with its walls regularly perforated by empty window-niches, once recorded the ascension and declension of the stars. A structure like half a giant rosy fruit lies obliquely tilted, white seeds of staircases glistening within its rind. Two lidless concrete inkwells open their dark interiors to the sun, and several short staircases invite visitors to mount and walk round their rims. There are stairs everywhere, even some shut within enclosing walls and apparently inaccessible from any point. There are doors hanging halfway up sheer old-rose walls, with no visible way to them. There are open rectangles of snowy concrete like dancing-floors, and curved projections of stone like hands cupping and measuring shadow. And all around these giants lie watered lawns punctuated with flowering shrubs, long herbaceous borders flanking the red gravel paths, and tall royal palms, their smooth trunks swathed in silver-grey silk.
Into this superb fantasy the two girls darted, still blown on the winds of terror and resolution, but running out of breath. A few people strolled ponderously along the gravel paths, a few clambered about the many staircases, one or two sat on retired benches in the shade, placidly eating sandwiches. But they seemed so few, and so unreal, as though someone had put them in, carefully arranged, to complete the dream. It seemed impossible that one could approach and speak to them, and actually be heard and answered. Anjli’s stunned senses recorded but could not believe in the wonders she saw. She knew nothing about primitive instruments of astronomy, and had had no notion of what awaited her within the wall. She had a stitch in her side, and her chest was labouring, she had to stop. Here among the trees, and under these gigantic shadows, surely they could elude one man, even if he followed them here. And if he passed by, all they had to do was wait, and venture out when it seemed safe, and take a scooter-taxi to Keen’s Hotel. She had no money, her bag had been taken from her along with her own clothes, but the driver would not ask for payment until he brought them to their destination.
‘I’ve got to rest,’ she said, gulping air, ‘I can’t run any more.’
‘Come farther,’ urged Shantila, quaking, ‘come to the trees. There he won’t see us.’
They took the left-hand path, which stretched straight ahead from the gate, because it led to groves where they could lurk in cover and still watch the gateway. They walked now, though in haste and with many glances behind, stumbling a little from pure weariness of spirit rather than of body. They passed the rosy, petrified fruit the giant’s child had dropped, a pomegranate full of white steps for seeds. The most awe-inspiring of all Jai Singh’s immense conceptions hung over them. They saw it from this angle as a lofty needle of stone, sailing sheer out of the ground for nearly sixty feet, with a round drum of stone on the top. It looked like a monolith, but as they hurried forward they drew alongside it, and saw that this sheer face was actually the shortest side of a right-angled triangle laid on its edge. Upwards by the hypotenuse, breathtakingly steep, a lady in a sari was proceding towards the summit, plodding stolidly, a flutter of blue and white silk. One more staircase for all game tourists to climb, the most daunting of them all. The containing walls that protected her scarcely reached her knees. At the top there was no handrail at all round the sheer drop of nearly sixty feet, and perhaps two feet of clearance all round the stone drum.
Anjli stumbled towards the bushes and sanctuary, suddenly terribly tired, oppressed even more by these unforeseen and incomprehensible marvels than by her own half-digested experiences. She had not the least idea that she was staring at the monumental gnomon of one of the biggest sundials in the world, Jai Singh’s ‘Prince of Dials’. If someone had tried to explain it to her then, she would not have understood. She was very close to the limit of her forces, and only too deeply aware that Shantila, loyal and loving as she might be, could not help her any more. They had reverted to their basic simplicity. It was a long time since Anjli had felt herself a child.
In the green coolness and dimness under the trees, themselves hidden, they found a seat where they could watch the gate. A few people came and went, but several of them were gardeners. Always, in Indian gardens, there are almost more gardeners than visitors. Anjli sat forward and cradled her head in her arms until her breath came more easily; and a terrible drowsiness laid hold of her and smoothed her eyelids closed.
