destroyers, lunging, falling, leaping endlessly downwards, first running, then rolling, then bouncing like a thrown ball, then tossed like a rag-doll, arms and legs flying, bones cracking, an inarticulate thing coursed interminably down the hundred feet of one-in-two slope towards the concrete ground which was the home level, the final goal.
Far down the long white slide the fore-shortened figure of a man had begun to climb after them. They saw him only now, and cried out together in alarm and despair, for how could he possibly evade the grotesque projectile that was hurtling down upon him? He had come too far up the steps to be able to retreat and leap out of the way. He threw himself down, flattened along the stairs with braced feet under the one bordering wall, an arm flung over the rim to anchor him. Nothing could now have arrested the flight of Govind Das. His flailing body struck the tensed bow of Girish’s shoulders, and rebounded on to the crest of the opposite wall, sliding helplessly down it for several feet before the uncontrolled weight dragged it over the edge, to fall with a dull half-liquid sound on the bone-white concrete below.
Girish took his head out of his arms, and levered himself up from the steps. There was no more sound from below, and no more movement.
‘Be careful!’ called Anjli’s anxious voice from above him. “The beads… on the stairs…’
Then he saw them, one by one gently trickling down towards their own level, unbruised, adamant, the coloured pebbles from the mountains at the other end of the world. He met and passed them on his way upwards, and gathered the ones that came most easily to hand, so that no one else should mount here and accidentally follow Govind Das to his death. But many eluded him, for all the real passion of his senses and his heart was fixed on the children. Slowly they crept down to meet him, Anjli in front, one hand stretched back to clasp the hand of her friend. She felt her way from step to step with the methodical movements of exhaustion, when you cannot afford a first mistake because it may well be your last. Her face was pale and clear, almost empty as yet because fear had so recently quitted it and left it virgin. Her eyes, immense, so bruised with experience that they might have been darkened with kohl in the native way, clung unwaveringly to his face.
They were above the midway mark when they met. Anjli took her hand gently from Shantila’s hand, so that she could join her palms on her breast in the proper reverence.
‘Namaste!’
He held out his arms, and she walked almost shyly into them, and he kissed her forehead. They came down the steps together all linked in a chain of three, Girish in front for a barrier against any fear they might still feel of lesser things, now that the great fear was gone, Anjli’s right hand in his and her left hand in Shantila’s. They came slowly, because none of them was in haste now, and none of them was free of the great, clouding lassitude of achievement that hung upon this denouement. They must have heard the voices below, they must have seen the curious gathering at last, too late to be helpful, in time to be in the way. From nowhere someone had conjured two police officers. Through the gates an ambulance was driving. It had failed to find a victim upon the scene of the road accident in Parliament Street, but it would not go back empty-handed from here.
And there were other faces, faces Anjli knew well and some she did not know, but clearly all united in this moment, gathering there at the foot of the steps to welcome her back among them. Dominic, and Tossa, and Mr Felder, all radiant with relief, and an elderly, ascetic gentleman with a saffron robe and a shaven skull and lop-sided spectacles, gently beaming in the background, and an immaculate person in exclusive tailoring, who by his contented smile was clearly also a member of the alliance. She had never realised she had so many friends here. Find one, and you have the key to many more.
Anjli stepped upon solid ground, and her knees trembled under her. The ambulance men were just picking up and screening from sight all that was left of Govind Das.
XII
« ^
There were nine of them present in Dominic’s hotel sitting-room over coffee that night. The promise made to Ashok had been no vain one, after all; he came straight from a recording session, his head still full of music, to find Anjli, in her own western clothes and with her normal poise rather enhanced than impaired, seated dutifully between Dominic and Tossa, and apparently totally engrossed in pouring coffee for their guests. The Swami Premanathanand sat cross-legged and serene at one end of the cushioned settee, with his driver Girish balancing him at the other end, a silent man with a faint smile and a grazed face, one profile beautiful in a falcon’s fashion, the other marred. Felder lay relaxed in a reclining chair, after days of tension. And the last-comers, or so it appeared, surprised everyone, except the Swami, who was not subject to surprise. For Satyavan Kumar did not come alone, but brought with him Kamala, fresh from the expensive salon of Roy and James with her glossy pyramid of black hair heady as a bush of jasmine, and her superb body swathed in a new sari of a miraculous muted shade between lilac and rose and peach. She kissed Anjli, with so serene an implication of divine right that Anjli took no offence, fluttered her fingers at Ashok, and said: ‘Darling!’ The simplest chair in the room became a throne when she sat in it. ‘I should be apologising,’ she said, smiling at Dominic, ‘I wasn’t specifically invited. But I wanted to celebrate, too. I hope you don’t mind?’
‘I am afraid,’ said the Swami, looking modestly down his nose, ‘that some of us here are not as well informed about the nature of this – celebration – as the rest Perhaps first I should explain exactly what has been happening during the last few days.’ And he did so, with such admirable brevity that he was done before anyone had breath to comment or question. ‘The only apology, perhaps, is due to you, Mr Kabir. You must forgive your young friend here, it was at my suggestion that he refrained from telling you the truth yesterday. We have not met before, but by sight and by reputation, of course, I know you well, and I assure you it was not from any doubts about you that I excluded you from our counsels. I had a respectable reason, which perhaps will appear later. The invitation to you to join us here tonight was a promise, which you see we have managed to fulfil. I hope it may be taken also as an apology in advance.’
‘No one owes me any,’ said Ashok. He looked at Anjli, and his sensitive, mobile face pondered in silence the changes in her. ‘If this thing had happened, all of us who knew of Anjli’s background were suspect. How could I be exempt? You say that Dominic heard and recognised my music… Kamala’s lullaby. Where else should you look, then, but among those of us who knew that music? And we were not so many.’
‘Not so many,’ agreed the Swami. ‘And most of them like Mr Felder here, were in Sarnath at the time of the kidnapping, as you were in Trivandrum, though we did not then know that.’
‘
‘And Govind Das,’ concluded Felder ruefully.
There was a small, flat silence. ‘We hadn’t realised,’ said Dominic then, ‘how many might be left in town. We thought the whole company had moved to Benares. Of course we thought first of the company, but filming in Sarnath seemed to put you all out of the picture. And yet I was always quite certain about Ashok’s morning raga. I knew what I’d heard. I’ll admit there were times when we didn’t know whom we could trust, or even whether we could trust anybody… even the Swami here. Even you…’ He looked up across the room at the two handsome, smiling people sitting comfortably side by side there, with an almost domestic ease and felicity. ‘Last night, Mr
