be to believe. Useless to take it for granted that Lakshman’s convincing display of innocence and co-operation could necessarily be accepted at its face value. He hoped fervently that there would be some move soon which would enable the police to produce the veritable culprit, alive, identifiable beyond question as guilty, and a total stranger.
Purushottam came in the dusk to where the Swami sat on his stone bench on the terrace quiet, rapt and alone. The young man brought a low stool and sat down at his feet. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. The very brevity of the twilight made it precious, a luminous moment held suspended in air, delicately coloured in gold and crimson and transparent green, soon to dissolve into the clear darkness of the night.
‘And are you seriously interested in that young woman?’ the Swami asked at length, in the same matter-of-fact tones and with the same aplomb as if he had been asking the time.
‘How did you know that I wanted to go?’ Purushottam demanded.
‘I did not, until you showed me. I thought we might have considerable difficulty, my son, in persuading you to comply. You saved me a great deal of trouble.’
‘I like her,’ said Purushottam cautiously, and looked down frowningly at his linked hands, aware both of the inadequacy and the ambiguity of words. ‘Swami, I am the classical Indian problem, and you must know it. I am the foreign-educated Indian youth coming home. I have two cultures, and none, two backgrounds and none, two countries, and none. You know the saying: He is homeless who has two homes.
‘You need have no doubts concerning Miss Madhavan,’ the Swami assured him tranquilly. ‘I have known students, secretaries, clerks, cooks, housewives, artists, all manner of women who have at some juncture turned to terrorism. But never yet, in any country, have I known a case of a nurse who became a terrorist.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I haven’t any doubts, of course. But if I am to continue as a target for assassins, how can I cause her to be involved with me? I have no right. Yet if I let her go now, I may never meet her again. And I know nothing at all about her family, the plans they may have for her, or what, for God’s sake, they’ll make of me!’
‘There is a very simple cure for that,’ said the Swami, watching the stars burst out, sharp and brittle as frost, in the distant sky, where the fading green of the afterglow ended. ‘Go with her to Nagarcoil, and find out.’
‘Three strange young men arriving out of nowhere? It will not be like that. We shall put her down a little way from the house, and she will take good care to wait for us to drive away before she goes in.’
‘You will be making a very stupid mistake,’ said the Swami reprovingly, ‘if you begin by under-estimating the lady.’
Priya appeared in the doorway, the green of her sari outlined in silvery light from the room within.
‘Purushottam, may I use the telephone?’
‘Of course!’ He was on his feet in a moment. ‘You would like to call your home?’
Her white teeth showed in an amused smile. ‘Ours is a very modest house, we have no telephone. But there is a silversmith at the corner of the street, a friend of my parents, he will take a message if I ask him. I want to let them know we are coming, so that they can prepare. I think we should be there by one o’clock? You are all invited to my home for lunch. My family will be very happy to welcome you.’
The Swami admired the stars, and said nothing.
Nine
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They drove out from the gate in the early morning, Priya between Dominic and Larry in the front sea, Purushottam among the luggage in the back, where Lakshman would be most likely to ride. Lakshman himself waved them away from the terrace, realistically enough. If there was a watcher, the picture was there for him to see. But it was hard to believe in it, except when the ruins of the office fell away on their left side, and the edge of desolation touched them afresh, and made the morning air seem suddenly preternaturally cold. They were all thinking of Patti, who had been so challengingly alive, and was now a mere broken body, not yet released from police custody. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. ‘To the born sure is death, to the dead sure is birth; so for an issue that may not be escaped thou dost not well to sorrow.’
Priya had said earnestly to the Swami, before they climbed aboard the Land-Rover: ‘They must not see her. It would be better to take home only her ashes and her belongings.’
And he had said: ‘I will take care of everything.’ For Priya had seen her, and Priya had strong feelings about what bereaved parents should and should not be asked to endure. It was a field in which he had some experience, too, but he respected hers.
To Dominic, and privately, he had said: ‘Telephone me each evening until we meet again. And if anything occurs,
But when they were through the gates, and Dominic was driving down the dirt road from the village, in the astonishing brightness of early morning, it was more than they could do not to turn their heads and their eyes away from the wreckage behind, and towards the world ahead, which was varied and beautiful, and had a welcome waiting for them.
They passed through Tirunelveli at about nine o’clock, and they were in the most Christianised district in the whole of India, though until they crossed the bridge over the Tambrapurni river, and saw the tall spire of the C. M. S. church soar in front of them, there was nothing to make them aware of the characteristic. From Palamkottai southwards they were on the main, unmetalled road to Cape Comorin, and the landscape was a sequence of palm groves deployed among rice paddies, thatched villages, the occasional gopuram of a minor temple, and always the accompanying shapes, misty and deeply blue-green under their jungle growth, of the Western Ghats on their right hand. Monkeys crouched under the trees along the road, unstartled, peering at them with their sad, wizened faces, and jack-fruit like huge, lumpy, holly-green Rugby footballs dangled on their thin, drooping stems from the
