Mourning Raga

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Anjli sat on a string bed in a tiny room about eight feet square, lit by one little smoky window far above her head. It was the fourth day she had spent in this place, and she knew every article in the room, every fine crinkle of cracks in the dun-coloured plaster of the walls, every crease in the garish almanack pinned above the rickety wooden chest. The ceiling was disproportionately high, the floor of rough concrete with one threadbare cotton rug. On the bed was a thin flock mattress, and a grey blanket. The chest of drawers was of thickly varnished and heavily scratched wood, dark red, with an artificial silk cover in several violent colours spread over it, and above it the smooth, effeminate blue Krishna smiling over his flute with those kind, mischievous, amoral, dangerous eyes of his, the eyes of a fairy rather than a god. Propped on the gay cover were one faded family photograph, so faint now that it had nothing to say to her, not even whether the persons in it were male or female, and one picture of Sri Ramakrishna, cut from a newspaper and stuck askew in a carved wooden frame.

There was nothing else in the room. And all three of them slept there at night, the two little girls on the string bed, the woman on a rug spread on the floor beside them.

This was not the whole of Anjli’s present world, however. She could pass at will through the single door of the room, or most of the time she could do so; but that would merely bring her into a short clay-coloured passage, locked against her at the nearer end, and at the other leading only to two even tinier rooms, the first an Indian bathroom, a concrete box just big enough to stand up in, with a cold water tap on the wall and a drain in the centre of the gently sloping floor, the second a flush lavatory, eastern style, with a porcelain basin sunk in the floor and two raised platforms for the feet. There the passage ended in another locked door. But she thought that wherever she might be, she was on the ground floor, for at the minute window of the lavatory leaves leaned down to her at an angle which suggested the lowest branches of a tree.

This was all she knew, and after four days she knew it like the palm of her hand; but she could not deduce from it anything that might be useful to her.

There was nothing the matter with Anjli’s mind or memory, she was not too much afraid to sift detail from detail and build them laboriously into a picture of her days, but the picture could never be complete, for this place of her confinement was a bubble, without a material location at all. She remembered perfectly the gleam of the old man’s eyes across the brazier, the instant flash of intelligence that warned her this was not Arjun Baba, and spurred her into flight. She remembered the sickening half-suffocation under the folds of the blanket, the struggles that wasted themselves feebly, and soon ceased when she realised that she was in a van in motion. She had not lost consciousness at all, but face-down in her odorous wrappings on the floor of the van, with no light, and the vehicle turning and circling and dodging to complete her confusion, she had lost all sense not only of direction but of distance. Towards the end she had lapsed into something close to a faint, starved for air. Now she did not know even whether she was still in Delhi, much less in which part of it.

Two people between them had carried her in from the van, she thought by the locked door beyond the lavatory, but even of that she could not be sure. All she could be certain of was that they had released her from her wrappings in this room, the old man and the woman between them, and here she had been ever since, watched and guarded.

The old man she saw seldom, he came only now and again to make sure that his catch was still safe. During his few visits she had studied him closely, because she had now no resources but her own ingenuity, and the only food she had for that was observation. The more she recorded, the more chance that some day she might find a weak place in the fortress and its garrison. But she felt from the beginning that it would not be in the old man. Now that she came to study him at close quarters she saw that he was not at all like Arjun Baba, and certainly not nearly so old and frail. This one, grizzled and bent though he might be, and tangled in a wealth of beard, would have made two of Satyavan’s pensioner. He was broad-shouldered, sturdy and muscular, and she had already experienced the strength of his arms and hands. He had a harsh, querulous, irascible old voice that grated unpleasantly on the air and even more unpleasantly on the mind, suggesting as it did a short temper, and a nature subject to malice and panic. He spoke to her not at all, not even one word. It was to the woman he talked, hectoring, bullying and demanding, in Hindi. And the woman did everything he ordered, in cringing haste and for the best of reasons, because she was afraid of him.

It seemed to be the woman who lived here. She was much younger than the man. She looked, perhaps, fifty, but there were factors which caused Anjli to reason that in reality she must be considerably younger still; notably there was the girl, who seemed to be about Anjli’s own age, give or take a year, and yet was almost certainly this woman’s daughter. So it wasn’t time, it was circumstances that had aged the mother. She was painfully thin and worn, her features blurred by timidity and hopelessness, the only rich thing about her her great coil of dark brown hair. She wore blouses and saris of plain cotton dyed in single colours, and so faded with washing that the once brilliant red had ebbed to a streaked and withered rose. When the old man was there she was a quivering, wary creature obsequious to his every gesture and word, and yet in some insinuating way she seemed to place herself between his possible animosity and Anjli. And when he was not there she was timid and gentle, she offered food with consideration, she left the bed to the children; but she was too cowed ever to be an ally, and too much afraid of the old man ever to forget to lock a door.

Her cooking was done somewhere outside. Anjli pictured a lean-to shed in a corner of a small compound, with pots hissing gently over the inevitable charcoal braziers, such as she had seen in the modest residential areas of Rabindar Nagar. Altogether, there was something about this woman’s living quarters which did not suggest the most primitive poverty, by any means, poor though she undoubtedly was. A certain respectability and security existed here. Somebody’s housekeeper, perhaps? The old man’s? But no, he did not live here, she was almost certain of that. And what sort of place was it, in any case? These rooms were so enclosed that traffic noises did not penetrate. She could not even guess at the kind of road or street that lay outside her prison.

And then there was the girl. Late in the afternoon of the first day she had manifested herself, first as a young, curious voice plying the woman with questions, somewhere beyond the locked door. And surely there had been a low, continuous hum as background to their exchanges, a sound which made itself known in retrospect as the purr of a vacuum cleaner? Anjli could never be quite sure about that, but perhaps only because the idea seemed to her so fantastic. She forgot about it, in any case, when the woman unlocked the door and the girl came sliding through it, and stood staring, mute with shyness, at her mysterious contemporary.

Her name was Shantila, for Anjli had heard her mother call her so. She was learning English at school; but as yet she spoke it very haltingly, and indeed for the most part, even in her own language, was a very taciturn child. Life had not encouraged her to be voluble. She was a couple of inches shorter than Anjli, but otherwise they were well-matched in size, as was soon demonstrated; for on his next visit the old man had issued his orders, and Anjli had forthwith been given some of Shantila’s school clothes to wear instead of her own jersey suit. White shalwar and deep blue kameez, and the inevitable gauze scarf in white. Would a country school make use of such a uniform, or could she rely on it that she was still in Delhi? No use asking Shantila, she had all too clearly been told to avoid such subjects. Probably she had even been told to keep away from the prisoner. She vanished whenever the old man was there. But in his absence the attraction was too great. Shantila was free to pass through the locked doors if she wished; but after a day Anjli began to understand how barren a freedom this was to her. The most fascinating and wonderful thing in her world drew her inward into Anjli’s captivity.

At first she simply sat and stared, devouring with her eyes every facet of the strange girl’s strangeness, the supple leather shoes in their antique leather shades melting from deep red to mouse-brown, the delicate silvery-pink colouring of the woollen jacket and skirt, the finger-nails shaped and tinted like rose petals, all the exotic accoutrements of Anjli’s westernness. On the second day, approaching with daring shyness, she began to touch, to stroke the kitten-softness of the angora and lambswool jersey, and even the smooth texture of Anjli’s lacquered nails.

They arrived at a kind of understanding almost without words. Shantila shook her head nervously when she was questioned, so why question her? What she let fall unwittingly might be worth much more. Moreover, Anjli found that she could not pursue a creature so wary, and with such evident reasons for her fears. This was not and never could be an enemy, and there are measures which are inadmissible except with enemies. Even her own desperate need to act in her own defence did not alter that.

She knew, of course, what must be the reason for her abduction. There could be only one. She was the child of money, and someone intended to get money in exchange for her. The trouble was that she was too sophisticated to conclude that that in any way guaranteed her safety; she knew of too many cases to the contrary. But so far, at least, she was hoarded like treasure, and with luck she might yet have time to find a means to help herself. But preferably not at Shantila’s expense.

They slept together on the sagging bed at night, and drew delicately apart when they inadvertently touched, with a kind of mutual respect that could have arisen in no other circumstances; and then, when they touched of intent, in search of a mysterious measure of comfort, they did not withdraw.

And this was the fourth morning. The sun was already high, for the leaves that whirled and span just within view from the lavatory window were gilded through. Shantila had come home from school, and had no more classes that day. They ate their mid-day food together, and Shantila sat content as on the first day to watch and wonder. For her Anjli was inexhaustible. Even now that the fabulous clothes were gone, the glamour had not departed. And there was still her necklace and polished round beads, in a dozen melting shades of brown and grey and green. Shantila had no jewellery; even her mother had only two or three thin glass bangles to her name.

Anjli saw how the huge, hungry brown eyes dwelt on her necklace, not coveting, only marvelling, satisfied with contemplation because there was no further possibility. Dorette had brought the beads back for her once from Scotland, they were only the subtle semi-precious pebbles of the Scottish hills, rounded and polished and strung into a neat little choker, eminently suitable for a young girl. What they were to Shantila she saw suddenly in a wonderful, inverted vision, the jewels from the ends of the earth. They had no value until you realised they had a transferable value, and then they were beyond price. How stupid, then, that they should stay where they were worthless, when they could so easily go where they were treasure.

Anjli put up her hands to the back of her neck, and undid the silver clasp.

‘Turn round, let me put it on for you.’

She lowered the chain of stones to Shantila’s neck, and Shantila drew back from it instinctively, shaking her head in fright and putting up a hand to fend off the gift.

‘No… no… they are yours…’

‘No, they are for you. I want to give them to you. If you like them? You do like them?’ She said simply: ‘I have others.’ And she thought: ‘I had others!’ and wondered when, if ever, she would see them again.

Shantila’s eyes, still dubious but unable to lie, shone huge as moons with pleasure. Anjli fastened the clasp, and stood back to look at the effect, and Shantila’s awed fingertips explored the cold round smoothness of bead after bead in astonishment and delight. The two girls looked at each other long and steadily, in recognition and wonder and satisfaction over the exchange of something undefined, the completion of some bargain in which both of them had gained.

They were so engrossed in their own mutual discoveries that they had not remarked the voices raised outside in the passage. The sudden opening of the door, the apparition of the old man on the threshold, massive head sunk into the brown shawl he wore round his shoulders, shook them apart with a disagreeable shock, as though they had only now realised his possible significance to them both.

‘Come, Anjli,’ said the ancient, gravelly voice, with a horrid note of ingratiation that matched the fond, false smile on the bearded face. ‘You are going shopping with us.’

He took her by one wrist before she could even reason whether there was any sense in resisting, or indeed anything to be feared in complying. The woman, shrinking at his shoulder, obediently took her other arm. Shantila ventured to follow them uneasily along the passage to the rear door, but then the old man turned his head and scowled her back, and she stood motionless where they had left her, watching them go.

It was the first time Anjli had ever seen this narrow wooden door opened. It brought them out into dazzling sunshine in a small, high-walled yard, the sparkling leaves of one tree leaning over the wall. There were two or three sheds, as she had expected; there was a car of unobtrusive age and make standing in the shade; and just outside the open yard gates, in a narrow lane, there was an unmistakable Delhi taxi waiting for them.

They put her into the middle of the back seat between them, the woman holding her left arm, the man her right; and as the taxi began to move, the man twitched her scarf dexterously round her eyes, and blinded her until they were well away from the house and the yard. She did not resist; and in a moment he let her emerge, for though there was no disguising Delhi, one Delhi street is like enough to another to confuse all those who do not know it well.

So they were still in the city, that was something gained. Anjli sat silent but tense between them, watching and thinking. What was to happen now? Had she already been ransomed, and was she now to be set at liberty? She could not trust too easily in any such optimistic assessment of her position. Then why? Had her hiding-place become unsafe, and was she to be transferred to another? Then she had better be ready to seize even the least chance that might offer, here in the streets. Anything could be true, except, of course, that they were simply going shopping.

They drove for some while in the spacious streets of the new town, but never could she find a firm landmark; and when at length the driver brought them to the sweet shop opposite Sawyers’ Restaurant, he did so by the nearest of the radial roads, so that the long, smooth, crescent curve of Connaught Circus should not be obvious.

The car drew up closely to the curb.

‘Come,’ beamed the old man, ‘we are going here. To buy some sweets for you and for Shantila. You will be very quiet and sensible, will you not, Anjli? For your father’s sake, remember that!’

She could have outrun them both, but they never let go of her wrists. And there was no one close, to whom she could call, no traffic policeman, no passing English tourist. She stood for a moment hanging back between them on the broad pavement, and looked all round her with one rapid glance at the shining day that offered her no help; a Delhi schoolgirl of fourteen in shalwar and kameez, out shopping with her mother and grandfather. Who was going to give her a second look? She yielded to the pull of their hands, and went with them into the shop.

‘Yes,’ said Dominic, leaning over Tossa’s chair to strain his eyes after the slight figure vanishing under the shop awning, ‘that’s Anjli!’

‘You are quite sure? It’s so long,’ said Kumar defensively, ‘since I saw her.’

‘Quite sure,’ said Tossa.

‘It’s Anjli, all right,’ Felder confirmed, and his voice shook with tension. ‘Now, for God’s sake, what do we do?’

‘Exactly what we promised,’ said the Swami Premanathanand gently, not even leaning forward in his chair. ‘We remain here, making no move to alarm her captors. We wait for further word. So far, you will agree, they have kept their part of the bargain.’

‘But, damn it, she’s there, right under our eyes, and only those two decrepit people to keep her from us… if we went straight down now, and into the shop after them…’ Felder mopped sweat from his seamed forehead, and breathed heavily.

‘We were also warned that if we made any such move we might never see her again,’ the Swami pointed out gently, and sipped his soup. ‘We cannot take such a risk. We must abide by our side of the bargain, too. For her sake.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’ Felder subsided with a vast and bitterly reluctant sigh.

‘They’re coming out,’ whispered Tossa.

All three linked, as before, both Anjli’s arms prisoned. The box of sweets they had bought was carried under the old man’s arm. Helplessly the five in the first-floor window of Sawyers’ watched the trio move unhurriedly to the edge of the pavement, and saw the Sikh taxi-driver lean to open the rear door for them. First the woman vanished within, then the child, then the old man. The door closed on them with a brisk bang.

‘We can’t…’ breathed Felder. But none of them moved. The Swami sat erect, a small, rueful smile curving his lips. The noon traffic round Connaught Circus swirled placidly, thinning for the siesta. Into the scattered stream the taxi moved gracefully, like a floating leaf, caught the full current and was away. A garishly-decorated scooter-taxi brushed by it in the opposite direction, and another as gay let it pass at a side-street before turning off. A few cars swung here and there in the dance. Out of a garage yard a more powerful motorbike-taxi sailed with a roar, dark green awning flapping, and rocketed away in the same direction Anjli and her escort had taken.

The Swami appeared to be watching nothing, and to see nothing, but he had in his mind a complete map of all these complex traffic movements. Everyone else was staring frantically, but none of them observed the one significant thing which had happened. For the driver of the motorbike rickshaw, had he not been as invisible to them as all the other casual service personnel of Delhi, the postmen, the peons, the porters, would have been recognised at once as Girish, his master’s monumental Rolls for once abandoned. Girish had made no promises, and taken part in no bargain. Girish was a free agent.

The taxi proceeded without haste round the curve of Connaught Circus, the motorcycle-rickshaw followed at a nicely-judged distance. There could hardly be a better instrument for pursuit in Delhi, where in any street of the new town at any time of the day you may see at least three or four of them, all looking much alike. Nobody pays any attention to them, unless he wishes to hire one, and even then it is not unusual to watch them sail disdainfully by, for in the deep shade of their awnings it is difficult to be sure whether they are occupied or not. Nor does anyone turn a hair at seeing them driven at crazy speeds, so that even an alerted quarry might have great trouble in getting away from them. Girish, however, had no intention of betraying himself. His object was to trail them to their destination, not to overhaul them. He hung back by fifteen yards or so, driving obliquely behind the taxi so that he should not become obtrusive in the driving mirror, allowing other vehicles to intervene now and then, varying the pattern of his pursuit, the big machine idling happily under him. He foresaw no trouble. All he needed to know was where they were holding her, and then the rest was up to him. In the meantime he did not mean to make any mistake.

Nor was what happened next due to any error on his part. It was something against which he could not possibly have taken precautions.

In the back of the taxi Anjli sat between her guards, quivering with tension and aware that time was running out. They were on their way back to the tiny, obscure dwelling in the quiet yard, and once they reached it she would have lost her only opportunity. This inexplicable trip back into the world, on the face of it completely senseless, must mean something, if only she could grasp what. Had she merely been removed from the place for a brief while because someone dangerous was expected there? Had she been put back into apparent circulation simply to show her to someone, to disarm suspicions of who or what she was? It had to mean something that could help her to know how to act, and here were the minutes and seconds dwindling through her fingers, and nothing gained. Uneasily she craned on all sides, searching the pavements that unrolled beside her. The old man had loosed his hold on her. She turned and swept her hand across the dusty rear window, peering back along their track. She saw the motorcycle-rickshaw that should have meant nothing to her, the long, slim, lightly-balanced body of its driver; she saw, and studied for one broken moment with astonished passion, the lean, aquiline face with its bold bones and intent, proud eyes fixed unmistakably on the car that carried her.

She uttered a shriek of exultation, and whirled to pound with both fists upon the Sikh driver’s shoulder. ‘Stop!’ she cried, in a voice of such authority that his foot instinctively went down on the brake. ‘Stop, at once!’

The old man had her by the arm again by then, though it took him all his time to hold her. She had not lost her instinct for the last chance; when the driver braked they were all three flung forward in the seat, and she reached across the frightened woman and tore at the handle of the door, willing to push the woman out before her and jump for it if only they gave her time.

She was just too late. ‘Drive on, drive on, quickly!’ bellowed the man beside her, and all the cracked tones of age had fallen away from his voice in this crisis. ‘Don’t listen to me. You see she is ill… she is mad… we must get her home…’ The car lurched forward again powerfully and gathered speed, and Anjli was flung back helplessly into the cushions. The woman was sobbing with excitement and dread. The man cursed her savagely, cursed Anjli with even more heartfelt passion, and crouched scowling through the back window. He knew now that they were followed. She had done the one thing she should not have done.

‘Faster, faster! There is a motorcycle-rickshaw following us. You must lose him… you must! I promise you double your fare if you get us back safely.’

They were threading traffic at speed now, taking flagrant risks to put other vehicles between them, whirling dangerously out of the main stream, plunging through side-streets, Anjli was lost again, the city went round her like a kaleidoscope. She tried to pull herself up to the window, and the old man took her by her braid of hair and thrust her down again. She struck at him with all her strength, clenched her fingers in his beard and tugged. Spitting curses, he took her by the wrists and unlaced her fingers by force, one by one.

‘Faster, faster… this bullock-cart… Quickly, pass it, and it will block the way for him! Yes, now! No, no, not to the back, drop us at the front here, there is no time…’

The taxi hurtled to a halt, groaning, the doors were flung open, and Anjli dragged out, dishevelled and panting, and hustled across a narrow garden and in at a fan-lighted door. She heard money change hands hurriedly, enough money to close the taxi-driver’s mouth. She heard the car accelerate in haste and dash away. The outer door slammed again upon the old man. He came into the cool, bare white office in which she stood with the shivering woman, a bristling caricature of fury and terror, dripping words like acid, holding his head as if it ached beyond bearing.

So now, too late, she knew. She knew where she was, where she had been all these four days. That tall, Victorian-colonial facade she was not likely to forget, nor the little garden and the low hedge before it. If they had not been forced for lack of time to come in by the front way she might never have recognised the place. Outside that door she had waited with her friends for Ashok Kabir, on the first evening in Delhi. All this time she had been held prisoner in the caretaker’s quarters of the film company’s Delhi office and store, on Connaught Circus.

And now that she had begun to make discoveries, it seemed there was no end to the things she knew. She knew that the old, cracked voice, when shaken out of its careful impersonation by a crisis, grew full and resonant and loud. She knew that when she had clenched her fingers in his beard what he had felt had not been pain, but only alarm; why else should he have disengaged her hold so carefully, instead of hitting out at her with all his force?

She let him come close to her, the awful, bitter, incomprehensible words nothing to her now. She stood like a broken-spirited child until he was within her reach, and then she lunged with both hands, not at his beard this time, but at the thick bush of grey hair, bearing down with all her weight, ripping it from his head. Wig and beard came away together in her clutch, tearing red, grazed lines across his cheeks and brows where they had been secured. Nothing remained of the senile elder but two round, grained grey patches of make-up on his cheeks, the carefully-painted furrows on his forehead, and the tangle of hair that Anjli let fall at his feet, curled on the floor like a sleeping Yorkshire terrier. What was left was a sturdy man in his thirties, high-complexioned, smooth-featured, with close-cropped black hair.

‘Now I know you,’ she said, without triumph, for she knew that she had made an enemy in a sense in which she had never had an enemy before. ‘You are not just an old man, you are Old Age. Old Age and Death. I even remember your name. Your name is Govind Das.’ And suddenly and peremptorily she demanded, as if it emerged now as the most important thing in the world, and the most crucial issue between them: ‘What have you done with Arjun Baba?’