features, full, mobile lips, hooked nose and jutting cheek-bones, were so jagged that he looked like a head by Epstein, and a good one, at that.
He said: ‘Welcome to Delhi!’ in a soft, shy voice, and clambered nimbly into the minibus, where he dumped his music-case between his feet and clasped fine, broad-jointed hands across his stomach. The first two fingers of his left hand were scored at the tips with deep, stained grooves, many-times-healed and many-times-re-opened wounds, smeared with cream that glistened when the light caught it.
‘Meet Ashok Kabir,’ said Felder, ‘our musical director. You ask him nicely, Anjli, and he’ll play you some of his music for
Anjli Kumar and Ashok Kabir looked at each other suddenly, attentively, at a range of about one foot, and in their own personal ways fell in love at first sight. Dominic, watching with sharpened senses, thought, good lord, I never dreamed it would be that easy. I needn’t have worried, I was just standing in for whoever it was going to be. Anjli saw the native, the initiate, the authority, whose grace was such that he was willing to share what he knew with whoever went to meet him in the right spirit. Ashok, the artist, and himself complete, saw the homing exile unaware of her wishes or her needs, a fragmented child unable to recognise her fractures, much less repair them. They looked at each other with wonder, interest and respect, and had nothing yet to say.
‘Now down Janpath, fast as you like,’ said Felder contentedly, ‘but take it easy where it crosses Rajpath – did I tell you that’s the King’s Way, you folks? Janpath is the Queen’s Way! – so they can get a look right along to the government buildings. You think you’ve seen something when you’ve seen the Mall, in London? Wait till you get a load of this! And then go round the back of the Lodi Park to Keen’s, and we’ll drop the bags off and sign in…’
Keen’s was an old-fashioned but English-run hotel, in an ancient white Indian house that turned a blank face to the street on all sides, and lived a full life about its internal courtyard and gardens, with a balcony for every room – every suite, if the truth be told – on its first and second floors, where the guests were housed. There was but one way in, masked by a tall green hedge; and inside, there was peace and almost silence, all street noises excluded. Room-boys dressed as rajas made off with the baggage, but they turned out to be one of the trimmings of every hotel, even the most modest, and were amiable enough at very low cost. The new arrivals lingered only long enough to stop feeling stunned, and to extract from their bags the coats which Felder insisted they would need in an hour or so. Then they were borne away to the two villas near Hauz Khas, on the most southerly fringe of the city, where a couple of trucks and a large saloon car had just unloaded the exhausted company from Mehrauli.
The din of voices was deafening but reassuring; who could feel inhibited or a stranger where the general babel made it possible to talk nonsense and not be brought to answer for it? And the array of faces, several of them still in make-up, baffled memory and withdrew names, making it necessary, after a while, to enquire discreetly about the dominant members of the collective; but that was taken for granted, and everyone answered cheerfully for himself. In a large, charming, rather bare room, with tall windows looking out on a neglected garden, they circulated and ate and drank, and in an unexpected fashion were at home. The girls – there seemed to be several girls – kept disappearing, and coming back with something freshly cooked. Everything was improvised, but everything worked. It might not be Indian – how could they judge? – but it was calming and reassuring and just what they needed.
Ashok Kabir sat cross-legged on a cushion, and cradled his sitar in his arms, its long, beautiful, polished body reclined upon his shoulder, the twenty moveable frets gleaming and quivering like nerves along its slender teak neck, the larger sounding gourd at the base of the throat nuzzling his heart. Six main strings, so they said, and nineteen sympathetic ones! And those strings were the reason why the fingers with which he controlled them were gashed deep, and never could be healed. And we think western music is a hard apprenticeship!
‘… so Prince Siddhartha was born to the King Suddhodana and his Queen Maya,’ said Ashok in his soft voice, ‘and all the auguries were auspicious, though a little puzzling. The wise men told the king that his son would certainly be a very great leader, there was only some doubt as to
‘Thank you, darling!’ said Kamala sweetly, and bowed her acknowledgements with hands prayerfully pressed together and head inclined. She wore a white silk sari embroidered with green and silver thread, and looked rather like the Indian Miss World, only more so. She was, according to Felder, as clever as she was beautiful, and nearly as acquisitive, and it had cost plenty to get her to play the heroine.
‘… the sweet Yashodhara… with whom in any case he was already in love, and she with him…’
‘Naturally!’ murmured Kamala, with a glance at the statuesque figure and consciously splendid countenance of her lord Siddhartha, holding court on the other side of the room with a fresh lime soda in one hand. ‘Who could help it?’
They had seen that face on one of the outsize posters in Janpath or Irwin Road, early that evening. There was no mistaking it. Felder had translated the lettering of the name for them; Barindra Mitra, one of the popular demi- gods, for top-flight film stars in India are little less than deities. Barindra Mitra sat cross-legged on his couch as on a throne, all the more devastating in majesty because he was still in costume, swathed in short gold tunic and white silk robe, with one bronze shoulder naked, and on his head a tower-like crown studded with property jewels.
‘But the prince grew restive with being cooped up, and soon outgrew all his pleasure-gardens and palaces, and would go out into the city of Kapilavastu. And when he couldn’t dissuade him, the king sent out orders through the city that everyone who was sick or ugly or maimed or old should be kept out of the way for the occasion. All the same, when the prince drove through the town with his faithful charioteer Channa, he was suddenly confronted by something he had never seen before in his life, and had never realised existed… an aged, senile decrepit, miserable relic of a man at the end of his span. Old Age in person!’
‘At your service!’ said the jaunty young man who was just handing round a tray of savoury patties. His arms and legs still bore the traces of the old man’s artful make-up, and he was still draped in picturesque rags, but he had shed the wig and beard, huddled shaggily at this moment in a corner of the long couch like a sleeping Yorkshire terrier, and his face, but for two painted patches of grained greyness on the cheeks, was in its smooth, high- coloured prime.
‘Naturally he asked whatever this creature could be, and if it was really a man at all, and whether it had been born so, or this was a visitation from the gods. And Channa had to tell him at last that what he saw was the common lot of all men at the end, that this poor wreck had once been as young and ardent as the prince himself, and that some day the prince himself would be as was this old man. And Siddhartha drove back to the palace terribly shaken. And that’s the scene they’ve been shooting in Mehrauli this afternoon.’
‘Mehrauli being only a village, properly speaking,’ said the director Ganesh Rao, in his immaculate and unaccented English, ‘but perhaps nearer to Kapilavastu than anything one could fake up in the city. And if you want
