what was her name? Tossa? – for you. No, don’t go. Stay with me.’
Dominic stayed. A quarter to seven.
‘If only we’d taken her with us…’
‘No, don’t! What’s the use? We do the best we can.’
Twelve minutes to seven. ‘I’m going now,’ said Purushottam. ‘Remember me to the Swami, and don’t let him start saying: “If only… ”, either. I’ve got no complaints.’
He didn’t wait for any reply, and he didn’t look back. He walked over the crest of the dunes, set his course towards the distant dark speck of the hut, and marched straight towards it across the empty yellow expanse of sand.
A hand came through the growing slit in the fibre wall, and fingers felt their way carefully and blindly over Priya’s swollen wrists, and singled out the spot where the cords crossed. The knife followed the guiding fingers, grazed her wrist lightly, and found the cords.
How long he had been working out there she had no means of reckoning, but it felt like an age. Even the parting of a thread seemed to produce a loud, commanding sound, the knife had to work with infinite quietness and delicacy, slowly, very slowly. She knew that it was growing light, she knew the sun was up, by the shafts of brightness that entered at the rifle-slit and through the chinks of the door. The man with the gun leaned devotedly at his spyhole, the barrel of the rifle thrust out towards the dawn; and he was humming to himself sometimes, and laughing gently, sure of his triumph.
Her numbed hands lurched apart suddenly as the cords parted, and she gripped her fingers together to hold her position, afraid even of the rustle of her own clothing. Pain seeped slowly back into her wrists, a live pain; she was no longer quite so helpless. She held her place, covering her ally from sight; and with her reviving fingers she felt carefully at the slit in the matting wall behind her back. It ran upward from ground level – which was nearly at her waist, for the dune rose to the cliff’s edge behind the hut – almost to the top of her head. To take it higher was more dangerous, though blessedly this was the dark side of the hut, no sun here to shine through the crack. Priya raised herself a little on the pile of coiled nets, to cover a few more inches of the wall. The gap was not yet quite long enough to allow her to slip out quietly and adroitly. The hand from outside took a moment to press her hand, warmly and quickly, before it went on with its work.
A long tremor of fulfilment and delight passed through the braced back turned towards her from the window, and a low, chuckling cry marked the moment when Purushottam came into sight. The hands that held the rifle calmed and grew still and competent upon the barrel and trigger. His whole body became a concentration of duty and efficiency. Even when he addressed her now, he could not turn away his eyes from that solitary figure to look at the bait that was bringing it into his sights. She had served her turn; she was of no importance, first or last.
‘He is coming! So quickly he is coming, he is in a hurry! Now I could drop him… no, not yet, let him come nearer…’
It had become a race. The knife sawed away with feverish haste, ripping the slit in the matting higher. Purashottam walked rapidly, some corner of his mind still pondering the possibility – if it was a possibility – of getting just within range and then charging in like a madman, in an attempt to get to grips with his enemy. At least that would leave him no time to turn on Priya – if Priya still lived…
Fatally, he let this half-hysterical hope in speed infect his pace as he approached. He was winning his race, and to win it was to lose it. There was no time left at all. The swathed head leaned lovingly to the rifle-stock, the long, muscular hand tightened its finger on the trigger and began to squeeze, slowly, slowly…
Two more minutes, and the hands of the rescuer would have been helping Priya out silently and swiftly through the matting. But there was not even one minute left, and no means of buying one.
Dominic had stood motionless all this time where Purushottam had left him, because there was nothing else for him to do; and even to stir from the spot, unless it was to follow, which he must not do, seemed like a kind of betrayal. But tension drew him, almost against his will, up the last few yards of the slope. He raised himself just far enough to see over the plain of sand, and could not turn his eyes away. He watched the lonely figure advancing upon the distant hut, more like an attacking army than a reluctant victim, very erect, moving in an unswerving and unrelenting line – a little more, thought Dominic helplessly, and he’d be running. And already so near! He felt the hairs in his neck rising with apprehension. The shot must come any moment…
Another figure emerged suddenly from behind the hut, a diminutive, fleshless figure in yellow robes that clung to his body wetly and glistened as he moved. He walked as rapidly as Purushottam, and on a converging course. Round the corner of the hut he came, and at a distance of a few feet from the shutter he stepped deliberately into the path between the levelled rifle and its target, blotting out Purushottam from view. There was nothing in the sights of the rifle now but his bony golden body and the saffron folds of his robe.
The Swami Premanathanand, to whom violence was impossible, was fighting this last engagement in his own way and with his own unique weapon, a finite body interposed at the last moment between death and its victim.
Fourteen
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For the man peering through the sights of the rifle, the world dissolved suddenly into a blur of saffron cloth only a few feet away from the barrel of the gun. The lonely, advancing figure at whose heart he had been aiming had vanished in yellow light at the very moment when his trigger finger was tightening to squeeze gently home and put an end to it. The marksman uttered a curious, wailing cry of alarm and dread, and there was one instant when everything hung in the balance, when the finger almost completed its pressure and emptied the first round into that saffron cloud. It was superstitious shock that turned his hands feeble; the barrel of the gun lurched, and was lowered. He raised his cheek from the stock, to gaze with his own eyes, instead of with the automatic eye of the gun. And the cloud that blotted out the world condensed into the apparition – for what else could it be, here where he had deliberately created an empty solitude all round him? – of an elderly, venerable, composed personage in a yellow robe and a brown woollen shawl, standing perfectly still before him, almost within touch, though he saw it only through the slit he had made for firing.
Whether this was a god, a demon or a man, he had to stare it in the face and find a way past it, and instantly, or everything was lost. It stood so still that he dreaded it might not be human, after all. What man would take his stand there and wait, saying not a word? Ah, but the interloper was looking only at a blank wall! Did he even know that there was an armed man within? He could not know. No one who knew that would dare!
The man with the rifle flung out a long left arm, and swept aside the shutter of fibre matting, gleefully expecting an ordinary man’s predictable reactions of fright and retreat when suddenly confronted at short range
