Mourning Raga

XI

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Govind Das took two lurching steps towards her, and beneath his red-brown skin the blood ebbed, leaving him dull and grey as clay. The woman, shivering and pleading, edged a timid shoulder between the two, and he took her by her sari with a clumsy, violent gesture, and flung her out of his way. He gripped Anjli’s arm, and dragged her away out of the empty office, back to the locked door beside the little living-room, the woman following all the way, her eyes great with terror, her tongue stumbling through agonised protests. It seemed she might even raise the courage to defy him, but Anjli knew she never would, she had been under his thumb too long.

The key was in the living-room door, he turned it and pushed Anjli blindly within, so awkwardly that she fell against the edge of the bed. For one moment she had caught a glimpse of the lavatory door being drawn gently but rapidly to, as Shantila hid herself within. Shantila knew about anger, and had learned to withdraw herself out of its reach; and this by its very quietness was no ordinary storm.

The key turned in the lock again. She had gained nothing, she was back in the old prison. Another key grated; the door at the end of the passage, the door through which she had just been dragged from the offices, was secured against her. And somewhere beyond it broke out the most horrifying dialogue of rage and pleading and despair she had ever heard. She understood not one word, and yet she understood everything that mattered; she knew that this was crucial, and that her own fate now depended on the outcome. The man raved and threatened, and even more shatteringly burst into desperate tears; the woman urged, coaxed, wept, argued, even protested. Sometimes, Anjli thought, listening with her cheek against the door, Govind Das struck her, but still she did not give up.

Crouching thus to the keyhole, she heard a soft step in the corridor, and the steadying touch of a light hand against the wall. Shantila, too, was listening there, and Shantila understood what they were saying. Anjli drew a deep, steadying breath, and waited. She dared not speak. Probably these two would hear nothing until they had fought out to the end this tremendous battle over her, but she dared not take the risk.

Very softly and cautiously the key began to turn in the lock, and inch by inch the door swung open. In the doorway Shantila beckoned, the fingers of one hand pressed to her lips.

‘Quickly!’ It was only the hurried ghost of a whisper, urging her. ‘You must go… my uncle is afraid now… you’ve seen him now, you know him, you can tell about him…’

Anjli crept to her side. They stood for an instant almost cheek to cheek, listening.

‘He wants to kill you,’ Shantila’s lips shaped soundlessly, ‘so that you cannot tell. They told him, keep you safe, not hurt you… but now he’s afraid…’

The careful disguise of Old Age, and all his expertise in the part, had been no protection to him in the end.

They edged their way silently into the corridor, and carefully Shantila re-locked the door. With held breath they tiptoed past the bathroom and the lavatory, and gingerly turned the last key that let them out into the sunshine of the compound.

The heavy wooden doors were locked, but the thick crossbars and the iron stanchion that held them in place made good aids for climbing, and they were both lightweights and agile. Anjli hauled herself up to the top of the gate and straddled it, leaning down to offer a hand to Shantila scrambling after her. Through the leaves of the single tree the noonday sunlight sprinkled the film company’s old utility with gold. And somewhere within the rear premises of the old house a man’s voice uttered a great, mangled howl of terror and dismay.

‘Quick, give me your hand!’ Anjli hauled strongly, and in a moment they lay gasping together over the crest of the gate. The rickety wooden door they had locked behind them shook and groaned to the impact of a heavy body, reverberated again and again, but held fast. The two girls scrambled over the gate and lowered themselves to hang by their hands. Shantila fell neatly on her feet, Anjli grazed her elbow against the rough wood and left a smear of blood on her sleeve. Behind them a window on the first floor opened, a deep sash-window that gave on the flat roof of the bathroom, and Govind Das came leaping through it with a convulsed face, and eyes half-mad with fear and hate, and let himself down in a scrambling fall to the compound. He saw, and they knew he had seen, the small, clenched fingers loose their hold on the crest of the gate. He heard, and they knew he heard, their light feet running like hares away down the crooked lane, and out into the street.

It was not for comfort they took hands and matched their steps; it was so that neither of them should be the fleeter, for now they were one creature in one danger, and there could not possibly be any half salvation.

The iron strut of the compound gates rattled against the wall, the unlocked gates hurtled wide and shuddered to the impact. In a moment the engine of the film company’s utility started into life, and Govind Das drove it out into the lane, and away at high speed towards Connaught Circus, where Anjli and Shantila fled from him hand in hand.

Round the corner in Parliament Street, where the spacious side-walks and the green shade trees began, traffic was indulging in its midday siesta, only an occasional car rolling at leisure down the wide, straight road. Screened by a little grove of bushes, a telephone kiosk sat in the green border between road and pathway. A large motorcycle-rickshaw with a deep green awning was parked beside it, and within the box Girish had just dialled the number of Sawyers’ restaurant, and was talking to the Swami Premanathanand.

‘I lost them. Bad luck with a bullock wagon. But I overtook the same taxi only a minute later, going on round the Circus from here towards Irwin Road, empty. They’re somewhere in this block, right on the Circus, between Janpath and Parliament Street. Yes, I’m certain. I know his number. I’ll get the police to pick up the driver, and when he finds out what he’s up against he’ll surely talk, for his own sake.’

He was listening to the Swami’s brisk reply, and gazing out through the glass panels of his kiosk when everything happened at once. Past him down Parliament Street from the Circus came two young girls in identical white shalwar and blue kameez, gauze scarves flying. They held hands, and ran like athletes, with set faces and floating plaits, ran as if for their lives. Unwisely but understandably, they had chosen to run in the roadway, because there was almost no traffic, and the few saunterers on the paths would have held them up to some extent. But even one car is enough to be dangerous, especially one driven as crazily as this black veteran coming hurtling down behind them from the circus. You’d have thought he was actually trying to run the children down…

Girish made never a sound. The telephone receiver dropped from his hand and swung for a moment, distilling the Swami’s dulcet tones into empty air. The door of the kiosk hurtled open and slammed shut with a force that broke one pane of glass, and before the pieces had finished tinkling to the floor, Girish was astride his motorcycle and had kicked it into life and motion. He sailed diagonally across Parliament Street, straight into the path of the oncoming car. The girls were hardly ten yards ahead when the impact came, and they leaped tormentedly forward like hares pursued, and never looked behind.

Govind Das saw from the corner of his eye the heavy rickshaw surge forward, bent on ramming him. He had just enough sanity and just enough driving instinct left to take the only avoiding action possible. He swung the wheel to the left, to minimise the crash, and the motor cycle took him obliquely in the right front wing and swept the car onward into the grass belt between roadway and path. In an inextricable mass of metal the two vehicles lurched to a stop, and subsided in a dissolution of plates and parts, the horrid noise eddying away in diminishing echoes between the trees. In the stunned moments before anyone came running. Govind Das dragged himself dizzy but uninjured out of the driving seat, and slid away hastily from the scene. A car stolen from the film company’s premises… a reckless driver… a crash… what was there new in that? All he had to do was take care of the girl, and then get back and report the car missing.

He could still see the two little figures in blue and white, well ahead now. They had made a mistake, they were heading for the great iron gates of the Jantar Mantar Park, down there on the left of the road. He needn’t even hurry.

He looked back once, and the driver of the motorcycle – was he crazy, or something? Govind Das didn’t even know him, had never set eyes on him before! – still lay in the road, huddled beside the wreckage. Dead or alive, did it matter? No doubt an ambulance would be along for him in a matter of minutes, as soon as someone grasped what had happened here. Govind Das turned contentedly, and loped gently after Anjli Kumar, towards the park gates from which there was no escape. This wall would be too high for them to climb.

Girish had swung his legs clear of the machine and jumped just before the moment of impact, but the impetus of his rush had carried him into the wing of the car just the same, though with less violence. He hit the road hard and flatly, knocking the breath out of his body, and his head struck the metal of the car body with enough force to stun him for some seconds. He opened his eyes upon the gravelly surface of the road, one cheek skinned, the grains of dust like boulders against his lips; but the first painful movements assured him he was alive, and had no breakages. Dazedly he drew up his knees under him, and raised himself from the road.

There had been no one very close to the scene of the crash, but from both directions now people were coming on the run. Hastily Girish withdrew himself behind the crumpled bulk of the two vehicles, and melted backwards into the shelter of the trees. Easy to vanish here, and he had no time to answer police questions, not yet, not until those children were recovered alive. They had disappeared utterly from view now. He removed himself far enough from the wreck to escape notice, and then moved out into the roadway and stared ahead down the long, straight vista of Parliament Street. They were nowhere in sight, yet he could not believe that they had run so far ahead in the time. There were two possible turns off, somewhat ahead but still possible, Jai Singh Road on the right, and the lane opposite to it. And before that, of course, there was the gate into the park.

That made him look to the left, where the iron filigree of the gates stood open in their high wall. He was just in time to see Govind Das turn in towards the gravelled paths of the gardens, limping slightly, in no haste. Until ten minutes ago he had never seen that man in his life, but he could not see him now, even at this distance, without knowing him again.

Girish wiped the smears of blood from his face with a crumpled handkerchief, and set off at an unsteady trot after his quarry.

The Jantar Mantar is the oddest monument of Delhi, and one of the most charming, though without guide-book or guide you might wander round it for days and be no nearer guessing at its purpose. It looks as if some highly original modern sculptor-architect, in love with the space-age, had set to work to decorate this garden with the shapes of things to come. In reality the buildings are nearly two hundred and fifty years old, but it is no illusion that their creator was in love with space. For this is just one of the five giant observatories built around India by the Maharajah Jai Singh the Second, of Jaipur, town-planner and astronomer extraordinary, in the early eighteenth century. Six immense masonry instruments, nobly spaced through the fine gardens with which the Indians inevitably surround every antiquity, tower even above the royal palms. Their shapes are as beautiful as they are functional – or as they were functional in their heyday – and their colour is a deep, soft rose, picked out here and there with white, so that their cleanness and radiance adds to the fantasy of their forms. A pair of peat, roofless, rose-coloured towers, each with a stone column in the centre, each with its walls regularly perforated by empty window-niches, once recorded the ascension and declension of the stars. A structure like half a giant rosy fruit lies obliquely tilted, white seeds of staircases glistening within its rind. Two lidless concrete inkwells open their dark interiors to the sun, and several short staircases invite visitors to mount and walk round their rims. There are stairs everywhere, even some shut within enclosing walls and apparently inaccessible from any point. There are doors hanging halfway up sheer old-rose walls, with no visible way to them. There are open rectangles of snowy concrete like dancing-floors, and curved projections of stone like hands cupping and measuring shadow. And all around these giants lie watered lawns punctuated with flowering shrubs, long herbaceous borders flanking the red gravel paths, and tall royal palms, their smooth trunks swathed in silver-grey silk.

Into this superb fantasy the two girls darted, still blown on the winds of terror and resolution, but running out of breath. A few people strolled ponderously along the gravel paths, a few clambered about the many staircases, one or two sat on retired benches in the shade, placidly eating sandwiches. But they seemed so few, and so unreal, as though someone had put them in, carefully arranged, to complete the dream. It seemed impossible that one could approach and speak to them, and actually be heard and answered. Anjli’s stunned senses recorded but could not believe in the wonders she saw. She knew nothing about primitive instruments of astronomy, and had had no notion of what awaited her within the wall. She had a stitch in her side, and her chest was labouring, she had to stop. Here among the trees, and under these gigantic shadows, surely they could elude one man, even if he followed them here. And if he passed by, all they had to do was wait, and venture out when it seemed safe, and take a scooter-taxi to Keen’s Hotel. She had no money, her bag had been taken from her along with her own clothes, but the driver would not ask for payment until he brought them to their destination.

‘I’ve got to rest,’ she said, gulping air, ‘I can’t run any more.’

‘Come farther,’ urged Shantila, quaking, ‘come to the trees. There he won’t see us.’

They took the left-hand path, which stretched straight ahead from the gate, because it led to groves where they could lurk in cover and still watch the gateway. They walked now, though in haste and with many glances behind, stumbling a little from pure weariness of spirit rather than of body. They passed the rosy, petrified fruit the giant’s child had dropped, a pomegranate full of white steps for seeds. The most awe-inspiring of all Jai Singh’s immense conceptions hung over them. They saw it from this angle as a lofty needle of stone, sailing sheer out of the ground for nearly sixty feet, with a round drum of stone on the top. It looked like a monolith, but as they hurried forward they drew alongside it, and saw that this sheer face was actually the shortest side of a right-angled triangle laid on its edge. Upwards by the hypotenuse, breathtakingly steep, a lady in a sari was proceding towards the summit, plodding stolidly, a flutter of blue and white silk. One more staircase for all game tourists to climb, the most daunting of them all. The containing walls that protected her scarcely reached her knees. At the top there was no handrail at all round the sheer drop of nearly sixty feet, and perhaps two feet of clearance all round the stone drum.

Anjli stumbled towards the bushes and sanctuary, suddenly terribly tired, oppressed even more by these unforeseen and incomprehensible marvels than by her own half-digested experiences. She had not the least idea that she was staring at the monumental gnomon of one of the biggest sundials in the world, Jai Singh’s ‘Prince of Dials’. If someone had tried to explain it to her then, she would not have understood. She was very close to the limit of her forces, and only too deeply aware that Shantila, loyal and loving as she might be, could not help her any more. They had reverted to their basic simplicity. It was a long time since Anjli had felt herself a child.

In the green coolness and dimness under the trees, themselves hidden, they found a seat where they could watch the gate. A few people came and went, but several of them were gardeners. Always, in Indian gardens, there are almost more gardeners than visitors. Anjli sat forward and cradled her head in her arms until her breath came more easily; and a terrible drowsiness laid hold of her and smoothed her eyelids closed.

Shantila’s sharp little elbow stabbed her side. She heard the first indrawn breath of panic. ‘He has come! He knows we are here!’

Anjli jerked up her head and rose to peer tensely through the leaves. There was no mistake. The incongruous head, short black hair still ruffled from under the wig of Old Age, cheeks marked by round grey patches of make-up and forehead seamed with false wrinkles, leaned forward like a hound on a scent, probing down this very path which they had chosen as a way to safety.

They clung together, hesitating far too long. If they had run at once, clean across between the instruments to the other side of the garden, they could have got back to the gate unobserved. Even if they had withdrawn a few yards farther into cover, hiding among the gardeners’ delicately concealed tools and compost, they might have escaped his notice. But they were at the end of their resources, and having waited too long, they took hands and ran, across the gigantic approach to the gnomon, there to hesitate again in the shelter of the stone walls, waiting to see him pass them on the path he had chosen. He did not pass. He had seen them flash across the open in their unmistakable blue and white, and had lingered slyly under the sheer face of the tower, edging his way round to the other side, from which they would not be expecting him.

Aware of their nakedness, they had stopped to creep into the first steps of the great staircase, hoping to be hidden from either side. It was the worst thing they could have done. Suddenly he was there, not ten yards away from them, poised to intercept them whichever way they ran; and in order to run at all they had first to break free from the low, containing walls, for they were crouching some few steps from the ground.

Reason no longer had any part in what they did. There was only one way they could retreat from him and remain out of reach, and there was no power left in either of them to reckon for how long. Every moment free of his grasp counted. They bargained only for that, seconds of freedom; beyond there was nothing certain. As he lurched towards the foot of the staircase they scrambled to their feet and ran from him, frantically, frenziedly, up the steps with all the breath and all the muscular force they had, utterly reckless of things which in any other circumstances would have halted them with horror. There was just room for two people to pass on those steps. The walls at the sides scarcely reached their knees. The gradient, though of this they had no idea, was approximately one in two. Below, there was nothing but hot white concrete waiting to receive them. They looked up, and nowhere else. Nothing else was possible. There was not a single person moving, up or down, on all those white steps, except themselves. There was no one warily circling the stone drum on the summit. There was no one left in the world but themselves, and the man who had begun, with hideous leisureliness, to follow them up the gnomon.

There was no railing, there on top. Thousands of unsuspecting children climbed these stairs every year, how many played too confidingly around the stone drum on the top? It was nearly as tall as a man, taller than these two girls. Parents might lose sight of their daring offspring, it needed only a little scuffle – children have no idea of danger. How thoughtful of them, how thoughtful, to provide this way out! One of them or both, what did it matter? If the vital one went, the other would be too terrified to cause any further trouble. She was, after all, his elder brother’s posthumous daughter. And she had no money, no allies, no power… not like the other one. No, let Amrita keep her if it worked out that way. Why not? Neither of them would ever dare to point a finger at him. As for him, that other, how easy to give orders and sit back and stay immune! Let him do what he liked, he had no weapons that would not turn against himself. Next time let him do his own dirty work, and find his way out of his own traps. This was the last time Govind Das meant to carry another man’s burden!

And no one following up here. No one. Perfect!

He might have to carry Shantila down the steps. No matter, she would not be any trouble, once the other was gone. That one, with her fine clothes, and her confidence, and her way of looking that was not Indian, not Western, but something between, something unique, a manner all her own, native and strange – everywhere native, everywhere strange. He wondered about that parentage of hers. He had never seen her sire. That had been a weakness, for surely she was her father’s daughter.

They were slowing now, blown and aching from the long, steep climb. Take it easily now, there must be no violent action to be seen on the skyline here, nothing but gentleness, nothing but family affection suddenly ruptured by tragedy. He could not look down now, he was too high. Fifty feet can seem so much more, without a handrail, with only two feet of level ground between you and space.

Slowly, step by step, there was no haste, since there was no way out.

On the last few stairs they were reeling and fumbling with exhaustion, and the man was only a few steps behind. Anjli groped her way ahead, one hand reaching back for Shantila’s hand, but often missing it, sweat running down into her eyebrows and lashes, stinging her lips, sickening her. Only to put that stone cone between herself and her enemy, even if there was nothing to hold by, and no way of evading him in the end. Her cleanness, her personality, depended on eluding his touch. There were no other ambitions left to her.

She saw as in a dream the marvellous panorama of Jai Singh’s vision from this altitude, and the quiet stretch of Parliament Street outside the wall, beyond the silvery palms. She saw the ripe, rosy fruit at her feet, hemmed with flowers, and the mysterious castle towers behind, spinning on their white central columns, dovecotes for stars. Then, only just behind her, she heard Shantila stumble and fall, clinging to the edge of the step, sobbing with frustration. She turned, reaching to help her up; and past the little heaving body her enemy stepped triumphantly, a hand already reaching out for her.

Shantila saw in the corner of her eye the deliberate foot climbing past her, saw it poised to touch the step above, saw the confident, greedy hand extended. With all the strength she had left she clenched both her hands in the string of her necklace, and tugged the cord apart. A sharp stab of pain seared her throat, beads of blood sprang along the wound and spilled among the Scottish beads. The pebbles from the Cairngorms spurted and danced across the white steps, bouncing, twirling, hard and round and adamant, merry as marbles in a game and double as dangerous. She heard them ring tiny, hard, gay notes of music, cannoning off one another, diverting one another, filling the whole width of the staircase with the irresponsible gaiety of murder. She actually saw Govind Das set his foot squarely upon no less than three of them. But it was the easy leaning forward, the disarrangement of his weight, which actually disposed of him.

The beads rolled, seeking a way downwards, safe enough in any fall. They spilled him forward on his face; his feet went out from under him, and the hand reaching confidently for Anjli’s arm missed by inches, and groped helplessly upon the air, baulked of any resting place. He tried to swing his weight and recover his balance, and the only effect was to turn him towards the abyss from which he had climbed, and fling him face-forwards into it. He hurtled past Shantila on the downward road, and she saw his face intent, puzzled, hopeful, still wrestling for balance and incontinent after life, a young man’s face incredulous of disaster, certain of salvation. But afraid, afraid, inhumanly afraid! Shantila was fortunate, for she had no terms in which to describe what she had seen, and no one was ever going to demand of her that she should find words for it. It is possible to forget what you have never formulated.

As for Anjli, she never saw it. All she saw was the beads rolling, the foot betrayed, the balance lost, and all this in a moment of time. She stood frozen, unable to withdraw from the hand which nevertheless failed utterly to touch her. From stair to stair, derisively, the Cairngorm pebbles rolled inviolable, skittishly evading every attempt Govind Das made to recover his equilibrium. From stair to stair they bounced happily, like water seeking their own level, oblivious of the plunging, lurching feet that fought in vain for a firm foothold. And after a moment he outran his destroyers, lunging, falling, leaping endlessly downwards, first running, then rolling, then bouncing like a thrown ball, then tossed like a rag-doll, arms and legs flying, bones cracking, an inarticulate thing coursed interminably down the hundred feet of one-in-two slope towards the concrete ground which was the home level, the final goal.

Far down the long white slide the fore-shortened figure of a man had begun to climb after them. They saw him only now, and cried out together in alarm and despair, for how could he possibly evade the grotesque projectile that was hurtling down upon him? He had come too far up the steps to be able to retreat and leap out of the way. He threw himself down, flattened along the stairs with braced feet under the one bordering wall, an arm flung over the rim to anchor him. Nothing could now have arrested the flight of Govind Das. His flailing body struck the tensed bow of Girish’s shoulders, and rebounded on to the crest of the opposite wall, sliding helplessly down it for several feet before the uncontrolled weight dragged it over the edge, to fall with a dull half-liquid sound on the bone-white concrete below.

Girish took his head out of his arms, and levered himself up from the steps. There was no more sound from below, and no more movement.

‘Be careful!’ called Anjli’s anxious voice from above him. “The beads… on the stairs…’

Then he saw them, one by one gently trickling down towards their own level, unbruised, adamant, the coloured pebbles from the mountains at the other end of the world. He met and passed them on his way upwards, and gathered the ones that came most easily to hand, so that no one else should mount here and accidentally follow Govind Das to his death. But many eluded him, for all the real passion of his senses and his heart was fixed on the children. Slowly they crept down to meet him, Anjli in front, one hand stretched back to clasp the hand of her friend. She felt her way from step to step with the methodical movements of exhaustion, when you cannot afford a first mistake because it may well be your last. Her face was pale and clear, almost empty as yet because fear had so recently quitted it and left it virgin. Her eyes, immense, so bruised with experience that they might have been darkened with kohl in the native way, clung unwaveringly to his face.

They were above the midway mark when they met. Anjli took her hand gently from Shantila’s hand, so that she could join her palms on her breast in the proper reverence.

‘Namaste!’

He held out his arms, and she walked almost shyly into them, and he kissed her forehead. They came down the steps together all linked in a chain of three, Girish in front for a barrier against any fear they might still feel of lesser things, now that the great fear was gone, Anjli’s right hand in his and her left hand in Shantila’s. They came slowly, because none of them was in haste now, and none of them was free of the great, clouding lassitude of achievement that hung upon this denouement. They must have heard the voices below, they must have seen the curious gathering at last, too late to be helpful, in time to be in the way. From nowhere someone had conjured two police officers. Through the gates an ambulance was driving. It had failed to find a victim upon the scene of the road accident in Parliament Street, but it would not go back empty-handed from here.

And there were other faces, faces Anjli knew well and some she did not know, but clearly all united in this moment, gathering there at the foot of the steps to welcome her back among them. Dominic, and Tossa, and Mr Felder, all radiant with relief, and an elderly, ascetic gentleman with a saffron robe and a shaven skull and lop-sided spectacles, gently beaming in the background, and an immaculate person in exclusive tailoring, who by his contented smile was clearly also a member of the alliance. She had never realised she had so many friends here. Find one, and you have the key to many more.

Anjli stepped upon solid ground, and her knees trembled under her. The ambulance men were just picking up and screening from sight all that was left of Govind Das.