very much. You’re very kind.’
Sushil Dastur fled. And Dominic followed the others out into the seaward garden. It was from the right, from the west, that the sand was advancing, marching so softly, so insidiously, that for long months a broom might hold it at bay, and then suddenly one morning the broom would have to be exchanged for a spade. To the left the garden opened into an untroubled expanse of grass, and a few clumps of shrubs and trees. The drive wound round the building to this frontage, braving the rim of the dunes, and here, too, a few cars had found parking space, though that at the landward side of the hotel was higher by several feet, and quite free of sand. And there among the parked cars was the sky-blue Ford with the scratched door; and just hoisting out the bags and locking the boot again was the rangy young man in khaki shorts and bush shirt, who had been sleeping placidly under the temple wall on the road from Nagarcoil.
He lifted his head at the sound of their voices, staring for a moment in tension between delight and disbelief, and then his face split open in a broad and bountiful smile, and he dropped the Bessancourts’ bags on the ground, and came gladly salaaming over the gravel pathway to meet them.
‘Sahib… sahib! So I find you here also! You know me? You remember me? Romesh Iyar, boat-boy?’
‘Romesh!’ It was impossible not to be warmed by the reflection of his pleasure. Larry halted willingly. ‘We never expected to see you here, you’re way off your beat. I thought you had a job waiting on the railway at Tenkasi. What are you doing here?’
‘Sahib, I stay in Tenkasi three days, work sometimes, but no regular job. My brother very poor man, I not stay there to live on him. Third day police say can go now, not report any more. In Tenkasi is not good, no jobs there. So I go try in Trivandrum, but there also I got no luck. Everywhere many men without jobs.’
‘You’d have done better,’ Dominic suggested ruefully, ‘to stay in Thekady, where you had a job.’
The turbaned head shook violently. Anything rather than that. ‘No, sahib, no stay there. No go there again. That was bad place, bad luck, must get away from that place.’
‘But what will you do, then? Are you working for the Bessancourts now?’ Self-contained and self-sufficient, those two elderly, invincible people seemed the last pair in the world to need or want a servant.
‘I very lucky, sahib. Someone tell me, good jobs going in Dindigul, in tobacco factories, so I want go there, but it is long way, cost too much money. But then I meet Bessancourt Sahib and lady, and they remember Romesh. They say they go from here to Pondicherry. Best road to Pondicherry is through Dindigul. So I ask, please take me like servant, you not pay me anything, only food and let me ride with you, and I do for you everything. They very kind, tell me yes, can come.’
‘Fine! And you think there really will be a job for you there?’ asked Larry.
‘Oh, yes, sahib, very good jobs in tobacco factories. I am good worker, can do all.’
‘You drive a car, too?’ Not that the Bessancourts seemed to need a relief driver, but there was little else for a travelling servant to do for them, they were so used to being self-supporting.
‘Oh, yes, sahib, I drive anything with wheels, very good driver.’ He went and picked up the discarded bags from where he had dropped them. ‘Must go now, Bessancourt Sahib waiting for luggage. You stay here tonight, sahib?’
‘Yes.’ Dominic thought, as perhaps they were all thinking, it’s Thekady all over again, but without Patti. The same cast, even a rather similar Victorian hotel, the same parked cars, the same – though very different – tourist spectacle long since formalised by strict custom. Here you don’t go out to watch elephants from a boat; but the rules are no less firmly laid down. You go out in the evening towards the west, to watch the sun go down in the Arabian Sea, and in the morning you get up early and go out towards the east, and watch it come up again out of the Bay of Bengal, far away beyond invisible Ceylon.
Romesh Iyar had been an employee at Thekady for a matter of months, he remembered; and suddenly he asked on impulse: ‘Romesh, all the time you were at the lake, did you ever see a sadhu begging by the Siva shrine, the one near the forestry bungalow? Wearing this cult sign?’ He drew it with a stick in the gravel. Romesh had put down the bags again, and was gazing down at the scratched drawing with a face suddenly tight and wary. He took some moments for thought, though they could not escape the feeling that he had known the answer from the beginning. Finally he looked up into Dominic’s face, and he was no longer smiling.
‘Yes, sahib – once I see such a man. That is strange – it was that same time, same weekend when
‘We saw him, too,’ said Dominic, ‘that same day. We wondered if perhaps he was often there.’
‘No, never before I see him. Only that once. But, sahib – there is something else, now you have spoken of this man. Just such a man I see also today.’
‘Today?’ said Dominic sharply. ‘Where?’
‘Sahib, in Nagarcoil. Bessancourt Sahib stop there for midday meal, and I go look at the town. In Krishnancoil district I see this sadhu, sitting under a tree, in Jambukeshwar Lane. This same mark he had. Sahib, was this the same man? Was it he…’ His voice foundered. The whites began to show in a widening band all round the pupils of his eyes. ‘But, sahib, this was
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Dominic reassured him quickly. ‘The police wanted to check on everyone who was in the area, that’s all. Why should you be anxious about it now? You’re with the Bessancourts, and in a day or so you’ll be heading for Dindigul with them. You’ll get your job, and never hear any more about this.’
‘Yes,’ said Romesh, but abstractedly, and as he picked up the bags for the third time his face was still taut and alert with something that did not quite amount to fear – wariness, uncertainty, disquiet. He would be glad when the sky-blue Ford headed north-east again. ‘I go now, sahib, must go, got work to do.’
He set off round the corner of the house, and they stood looking after him until he vanished.
‘You don’t suppose,’ Larry said tentatively, ‘that he was making up today’s sadhu, just to oblige?’
‘No,’ said Priya quietly, ‘he is speaking the truth. The man was there. I know, because I saw him, too. Perhaps you did not notice – Jambukeshwar Lane is the name of the road where we live.’
She told them the whole story. ‘If the Bessancourts were at lunch, that would be about the right time. I think
