So this was the poor little girl! Little she was, in the physical sense, well below average height for a fourteen- year-old, and built of such fine and fragile bones that she contrived to seem smaller than she was. She wore a curly fun-fur coat in a mini-length, and a small round fur cap to match, in dappled shades of tortoiseshell, like a harlequin cat. Her long, slim legs were cased in honeycomb lace tights and flexible red leather boots that stopped just short of her knee, and the honey of her skin glowed golden through the comb. A fur shoulder-bag slung on a red strap completed the outfit. But the accessories of her person were every bit as interesting. Her fingernails were manicured into a slightly exaggerated length, and painted in a pink pearl colour, deeper at the tips. The shape of her lips had been quite artfully and delicately accentuated and their colour deepened to a warm rosy gold. A thick braid of silky black hair hung down to her waist, a red ribbon plaited into it. Half her face was concealed behind the largest butterfly-rimmed dark glasses Dominic had ever seen; but the part of her that showed, cheeks and chin, was smooth and beautifully shaped as an Indian ivory carving, and almost as ageless. Sophistication in one miniature package stared up at Dominic unnervingly through the smoke-grey lenses. The obscurity of this view suddenly irked her. She put up her free hand in a candid gesture of impatience, and plucked off her glasses to take a longer, clearer, more daunting look at him.
The transformation was dazzling. Thin, arched brows, very firm and forthright, came into view, and huge, solemn, liquid dark eyes; and the face was suddenly a child’s face as well as a mini-model’s, eager, critical and curious; and presently, with hardly a change in one line of it, greedy. No other word for it.
She was at the right age to wish to be in love, and to be able to fall in love almost deliberately, wherever a suitable object offered. Dominic was a suitable object. He saw himself reflected in the unwavering eyes, at once an idol for worship and a prey marked down.
Over Anjli’s head he caught Tossa’s eye, marvellously meaningful in a wooden face. They understood each other perfectly. No need to look any farther for the catch; they had found it.
II
« ^ »
I was here, once,’ said Anjli, unfolding the coloured brochure of Delhi across her lap with desultory interest. ‘In India, I mean. But I can’t remember much about it now, it’s so long ago.’
‘Your mother didn’t tell us that,’ Tossa said. ‘Was she with you?’
‘No, only my father. She didn’t want to come, she was filming. It was the year before she divorced him. I was only just five. I used to know a little Hindi, too, but I’ve forgotten it all now.’
Her voice was quite matter-of-fact; she felt, as far as they could detect, no regrets over America, and no qualms or anticipation at the prospect of India. She had been brought up largely by competent people paid to do the job, and she was under no illusions about her own position or theirs. A child in her situation, intelligent and alert as she was, would have to acquire a protective shell of cynicism in order to survive, thought Tossa. Anjli knew that there was money on both sides of her family, and that however she might be pushed around from one parent to the other, that money would have to maintain her in the style to which she was accustomed. As for the cool equanimity with which she had parted from her mother at London Airport, who could be surprised by it, when she had spent most of her young life as isolated from her mother as from her distant and forgotten father?
‘He brought me to see his mother, I think, but I don’t remember her at all. I guess she must have been pretty upset at his marrying in America, like that, and staying away all that time. They’re very clannish, aren’t they?’
‘Very much like the rest of us, I expect,’ said Tossa. ‘She’ll be pleased enough when she has you on a more permanent basis, I bet.’
The Indian Airlines plane hummed steadily towards Delhi, half its passengers dozing, like Dominic in the seat across the gangway from them. Strange, thought Anjli, without resentment, almost with appreciation, how neatly Tossa had steered him into that place, though Anjli had designed that he should sit beside her, as on the long flight over. This small reverse she could afford to take in her stride; she had time enough, she calculated optimistically, to detach him from his Tossa before they left Delhi again. As yet they were only one hour inland from Bombay. The adventure had hardly begun.
‘Oh, I haven’t made up my mind yet about staying,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t know whether I’m going to like it here. It’s kind of a corny country, don’t you think?’ She frowned down at the coloured pictures of the Red Fort and the Qutb Minar. ‘All this old stuff, I mean, what’s the
She was quite firm about it; and on reflection, Tossa thought, she was quite capable of demanding to be taken back again when India palled, and getting her own way, too. Dorette had made her plans; but so might Anjli, and there was a good deal of Dorette in Anjli, enough to make the struggle a dangerously even one if it ever came to that. And yet…
‘Do you really think,’ said Anjli suddenly, her cheek turned to the window, where the blinding light clung and quivered as it touched her lips, ‘she’ll be glad to have me? She’s old, and she
‘But you’re not Dorette, you’re you… partly her son. You’re her only grandchild. She’ll be glad,’ said Tossa with certainty.
It was the nearest they had come, in all that long and tedious journey, to asking and giving sympathy; and even now Tossa felt herself to be on thin ice. Very aloof, very independent, this child; she’d be infuriated if you tried to mother her, when she’d managed for so long without any mothering. Not the clinging kind, Anjli; except, of course, in a predatory fashion to Dominic’s arm when the slimmest chance offered. Inscrutable, dangerous and to be respected, that was Satyavan Kumar’s daughter. Tossa didn’t know whether to be sorrier for the grandchild or the grandmother. Somehow, between these two, the face of the father eluded her imagination; for it had never entered Dorette’s head to show her a photograph of Satyavan. Probably she hadn’t even kept one, once the man himself was out of her life.
Anjli, her cheek against the sun-warmed glass, watched the baked, thirsty land revolve beneath them, presenting a changing, circling pattern of white buildings, radiating roads, scattered green trees dispersed in a rose-red landscape. The palette of North India, apart from the hills, is a wonderful range of reds and oranges and browns, glittering with drought. In winter the green of foliage looks faded and silvery against it, and the violent crimsons and purples of early flowering trees explode like fireworks.
‘Look, Delhi!’
Dominic awoke, and came to lean across them both and peer down with them at the fabled city, older than Alexander, eight cities superimposed upon one another, overlapping, showing faintly through like a palimpsest. The radiant light picked out minarets, domes, pompous white office blocks, the superb sweep of the King’s Way, ruled across New Delhi in rose-pink, lined on either side with vivid grass and the embroidered mirror-glitter of water,
