Death to the Landlords

Thirteen

Cape Comorin: Saturday Morning

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Priya crouched in heavy darkness against the seaward wall of the hut, her back against the matting, the harsh coils of old fishing nets scoring her arms and shoulders. Her wrists were crossed behind her, and tethered uncomfortably tightly to a staple in one of the timbers of the wall. While her numbed fingers retained some sensitivity she could feel the grain of the wood with them, and touch the cold iron. Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the dark she could distinguish shapes and shades, the vague, formless monsters that were piles of coiled rope and cord, and stacked nets, and oars, and the heavy bamboo poles with which many of the boatmen steered their craft. But in particular nets; great coils of net, mesh within mesh. She sat upon a low mound of them, and the air she breathed was thick with the thready dust of coconut fibres, and their rank scent, and the smell of the many hauls of fish they had brought in in their time. The odour, too, of oil and joss and sweat, the irrational sweat of excitement and exultation.

She had drawn herself as far back against the wall as she could, and pulled in her feet and made herself small, to put as much distance as possible – whatever she did, it was all too little – between herself and the man. She saw him as two blurs of pallor in the darkness, one his head and one his loins. Here in the hut she could have sworn that the cotton cloths he wore were white, if she had not seen them in her own room at the hotel, and outside in the starry night, and known them for the faded peach-yellow that holy men wear. He had nothing on but those two lengths of thin cloth, and the oil with which his body was smeared. To make him hard to hold should anyone ever get to grips with him, and to enable him to withstand a long period in the water should he have to swim for it. He had his back to her now, but she knew better than to move a muscle; he could turn like a snake, and he still had the knife in his hand. He had made a horizontal slit in the matting shutter of the small window space, close to the door on the landward side, and he was watching the long expanse of the dunes through it, waiting for the light to come. Sometimes he talked to himself, low-voiced, forgetful of her. She did not exist for him except as a means to an end, she had realised that now. Sometimes he laughed, quite a sane laugh, contented, self-congratulatory, chilling her blood.

He was waiting for Purushottam. She knew that now; it was her sorrow that she had not realised it in time, and avoided the two fatal mistakes she had made. Now it was too late to redeem them; she had missed her chance.

She had started out of a dream to the awareness of someone in her room, and close to her bed, and in instant alarm for Purushottam she had opened her lips to cry out his name but never got beyond the first syllable before a hand was clamped over her mouth. That had been her first mistake, because it had told the intruder that she was indeed what he had come for, a sure and infallible bait for the man he wanted to trap. And then she had felt the cold fire of the knife against her throat, the fine prick of its tip deliberately biting under her ear, and a man’s voice, muffled to a hoarse undertone, had told her to be silent or dead, as she chose. She should have taken the omen and grasped its full possibilities at once. Why had she come away with him so tamely?

But she had been half asleep and half in shock, incapable of connecting what her senses told her. A dance of fantastic details assaulted her eyes, her ears and her reason. The head that stooped over her was monstrous, swathed in saffron cotton wound twice over his face, muffling his features into a grave-mask. The hands that held the knife to her throat and covered her mouth were long and sinewy and strong. His body was naked but for the saffron loincloth, and glistened with oil. She was aware of the intent stare of his eyes through the cloth; though she could not see them, she knew that they could see well enough. The cotton was no thicker nor closer-woven than cheesecloth, it hardly hampered his vision at all, but it made him invisible.

Confused and disorientated as she was, it was no wonder that when he took away his hand, telling her flatly: ‘Make one sound, and I kill you!’ she lay mute and still, shrinking from the prick of the knife. No wonder that she rose from the bed at his orders, and put on her dressing-gown and sandals, and went down the iron staircase with him silently, the point of the knife pricking her onwards all the way. By then she had been aware that he was not solely dependent on the dagger. He made sure of being at the window before her, and from the place where he had propped it behind the curtain he retrieved a rifle, and slung it over his shoulder with a dexterity that told her he was well used to handling it. She had thought at first that she might be able to elude him, once in the garden, and escape in the darkness, but a rifle has a longer reach than a knife, and even in the dark, how can you be sure of evading it? And he had thought of the possibility, too, and made provision for it. She was no sooner on the ground than he had a hand twined in her hair, and dragged her back by it under the staircase, and there drew her hands behind her and knotted them fast with the girdle of her dressing-gown.

‘Walk!’ he ordered her, spitting the word almost soundlessly into her ear. ‘Out to the road. And silently!’

And she had done it, had done everything he had ordered, his one hand always tight on the tether that bound her wrists, the other pricking her on with the ceaseless reminder of the knife. Up the undulating slope of the dunes, a moon-world in the lambent night, the smooth, dry sand sliding in and out of her sandals cool and light, like small silken hands stroking. A surrealist dream, austere and frightening. No wonder she had done everything she was told to do, and sought to keep the blade away from her throat at all costs.

But how she regretted now the slowness of her understanding! Not until they were well away from the house, from the road, from all listening ears, did she realise that she had mistaken her role and missed her once chance. She was nothing. What could this nocturnal assassin, in the saffron remnants of his old disguise as a holy man, want with her? She was accidental, simply an outsider who had blundered into a private war. Purushottam was still the quarry, must be the quarry. This man had come for Purushottam tonight. If he had taken her instead, it was because for some reason he could not reach Purushottam. She was only a second best, a second string – an alternative route to the prize.

So then, too late, she recognised her own mistakes. Her first waking thought had been for Purushottam; that must have been a gratifying confirmation of the enemy’s thinking. What she should have done, as soon as the muffling hand was lifted from her mouth, was to scream and scream and arouse the entire house. She would probably have died, yes – though not certainly, since nothing was ever certain – but she could not then have been used to induce Purushottam to venture his life for hers. She should have realised when she watched the invader fold the sheet he had torn from her writing pad, and score that savage superscription across it, and laugh silently, one eye always trained upon her as she fumbled stiffly into her sandals, one hand always ready on the knife. If only she had understood in time she might even have achieved the capture and arrest of her killer, and made the future safe for others. She thought ‘others’, but she meant Purushottam. And who knows, the killer might not even have killed. Petrified by the first tearing scream, he might have thought of his own life first, and run with no thought but to save it. The trouble is that one never has time to consider the issues fairly until it is too late.

Now she was here, bait for a trap, and there was nothing she could do.

‘He will get my message,’ crooned the man, self-congratulatory and exuberant, watching the bare, motionless sea of the starlit dunes, and stroking the butt of his rifle lovingly. ‘He will come! Shall I let him see you, before I fire? Shall I let him come all the way, to find you here dead before I kill him?’

Priya said nothing. She had not uttered a sound since he thrust her in here before him, stumbling among the nets. There was no point in speaking with him, none in pleading or reasoning; that she knew. Whatever eloquence she had was being expended inwardly, and directed towards whatever it was that she had made out of her odd, heretical heritage, something huge and approachable and not insensible to human outrage and anger; not necessarily just, but better, involved and indignant and compassionate, something that could be argued with, like Krishna enduring without offence the reproaches of Arjuna, and stooping to unravel for him the complexities of duty and compulsion and love.

‘Listen, you,’ thought Priya vehemently towards the anonymous power that hid itself from her but was patently there somewhere, too nearly palpable to be a figment of her imagination, ‘I don’t know what to call you, but since you must be everything in any case, what does it matter? You know all about us, all of us, I needn’t tell you anything. Don’t let them win! Not unless you’re on the side of evil, and that’s impossible. Don’t let Purushottam come here tamely to be killed, as I’ve come. That’s all that matters. If he survives, then we have won! There must be something one of us can do to unwind this wound-up machine, and break it. That’s all I’m asking for. Then it wouldn’t matter so much, dying… after all, everybody has to, in the end.’

She had begun to be aware, while she closed her eyes upon this emphatic wrestling with God, that the images were forming in her mind in a kind of insistent but disciplined rhythm, as though the tabla had just struck into the improvisations of the sitar for the first time, halfway into a raga; the key moment when the first acceleration begins, and the first formal excitement. It took her some moments to track this drum-note down, even after she opened her eyes; it was soft and private, felt rather than heard, like the tabla, a vibration rather than a sound. She sensed it throbbing in her spine, gently insistent, and sprang into full consciousness with a shock of wonder and disbelief.

It really existed, and deliberately it was hardly a sound at all, only a very soft, steady, rhythmic pressure, barely even a tapping, against the matting wall at her back. Once she had grasped its source, she began to trace it to its exact location; it had reached the thick, woven wall right behind her, and just above the level of her bound hands. When first she had become aware of it, it must have been approaching, slowly and stealthily, from her right side, testing and waiting all the way for a response. Someone was outside the hut, feeling his way to where she was, demanding an answer from her, while she had been demanding an answer from whatever God was.

The mat wall pressed once, twice, against the small of her back. Painfully she hoisted her bound hands, grown prickly and numb from the tight cord, and thrust outwards with them, once, twice, three times, tapped with impotent fingers, scratched with her nails against the fibre.

Hard fingers pressed back against her fingers in recognition and reassurance. The rhythm of the tabla ceased. Whoever he was, he had found her.

‘He will come,’ whispered the man with the rifle, turning his featureless cotton face towards her for a moment. She saw light – already, even in this enclosed place, there was light of a kind – flow down his sinewy arms and long torso, and die into the pallor of the sadhu’s cloth twisted round his loins. ‘He will come, and this time he will be mine. You want to see him die, you, woman?’

Behind Priya’s back, with aching, insinuating gentleness, the tip of a knife eased its way between the stitches that seamed the coconut-matting wall. She felt the steel touch her arm, sliding by above the wrist without grazing. She heard the first fibre of the first stitch part, and thought it a terrible and wonderful sound, like the trumpets outside the walls of a city under siege. Very carefully she shifted her position a little, sitting forward on the coils of net, and posing her body steadily between her captor and the knife.

They reached the loftiest rise of the dunes, and Purushottam’s headlong march wavered as soon as the ridge-thatch of the distant hut broke the suave undulations of the sand like a clump of stiff grass. He turned and looked at Dominic, seemed to be searching hopelessly for something to say by way of good-bye, and then would have walked on without a word, after all, because there was nothing left to say. But Dominic laid an arresting hand on his arm.

‘No, not yet. Look, it’s only just after half past six. Take every moment you safely can.’ Safely! How could they be sure that the word had any longer a meaning for any of them? How did they know, even, that Priya was still alive? Dead hostages are quiet hostages, make no attempts at escape, identify no suspects. But in so far as there was still any hope at all, they had to preserve it as long as they could.

‘He must see me coming before the deadline,’ said Purushottam, in the level, low voice that had hardly varied its tone since they had found the note. ‘Before seven, not at seven.’

‘He’ll see you the minute you go over that crest. Forty yards. Even if you go at ten to seven, you’ll be nearly halfway to him by the hour. Wait till then.’

He shook his head, but he stayed. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, it matters. The one moment we throw away may be the one that makes the difference. At least give it a chance.’

‘You expect a miracle?’ said Purushottam, with the most painful of smiles. ‘I’ve been thinking – he must have a gun, don’t you think so? I think a rifle. Because he’s set me up as a target he can hardly miss, even at long range. The one thing moving in all this space, and no cover anywhere. Not that I’m looking for cover. And the sea right there at his back – that’s the way he means to get away.’

If he’s a poor enough shot to want me at short range before he can be sure of killing me, he thought, unable to break the habit of hope, I might be able to rush him yet. He wouldn’t be able to take his eye off me then to turn on Priya, and inside a hut that size a rifle will be an unwieldy weapon. If I could reach him, hit or not hit, I might at least be able to give her the chance to get away.

The sun was already well above the horizon behind them, climbing with amazing speed. The dunes put on colour, and became a rippling sea of lights and shadows.

Dominic shook the arm he held. ‘Give me until ten to seven. Promise!’

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked it indifferently, for he knew there was nothing his friend could do to help him. They were all bound hand and foot; for at the least wrong move, Priya would pay.

‘Try and work round by the shore, if I can. I give you my word I’ll keep out of sight.’

‘Impossible. You’ve seen how indented the coast is. It would take you hours.’

It was true; he was only reaching out for something he could at least seem to be doing, to avoid the one thing he could not bear, having to stand here and watch Purushottam walk out to his death without raising a hand to help him. No Sidney Cartons here, even supposing one could be that sort of hero; whoever was in that hut knew very well the appearance of the young man for whom he was waiting. Nobody else would do; and the mere sight of another person approaching would mean the end of Priya. No, there was nothing at all left for him but to watch.

‘Even if you swam every bay and climbed over every headland,’ Purushottam said gently, ‘you couldn’t possibly get near by seven o’clock. You don’t know these seas. It would be suicide to try it.’

Their eyes met, and improbable as it seemed, they both smiled pallidly. ‘Coming from you at this moment,’ said Dominic, ‘that’s good.’

‘If Priya dies,’ said Purushottam simply, ‘I don’t want to survive. But I shouldn’t like to have to apologise to – 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.