Everyone stirred and drew breath, otherwise the silence lasted for a moment; then Anjli asked:
‘Do the ragas all have names?’
‘Yes, they have names. This is Raga Aheer Bhairab. It is a morning raga.’
‘And it has a special purpose? A special mood, Kamala said?’
‘It is to be played,’ said Ashok, stroking his still faintly vibrating strings, ‘in the early hours of the morning, when the guests are departing.’
Felder drove them back to Keen’s Hotel about nine o’clock in the evening, a little dazed, a little silent. Anjli was clutching the copy of The Life of the Buddha which Ashok had lent her. And again Felder had been quite right, they needed their coats; the air was sharp and very cold, the sky above crackling with stars.
‘Where is this place you’ve got to go? Rabindar Nagar? That’s one of the newish suburbs that are spreading out westwards, isn’t it? Will you find your way all right?’
‘I’ve got a town plan,’ said Dominic. ‘We’ll find it.’
‘I’d come with you, but we want to finish the Mehrauli shots tomorrow, and if we make it we’re off by air to Benares the next morning to do the Deer Park scenes. I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble. But just in case you do need any help, give me a ring in the evening. You’ve got the villa number and the office, I’ll be one end or the other. Give me a ring anyhow. I’ll be glad to know how you get on.’
‘We’ll do that. And thanks for everything.’
III
« ^ »
Rabindar Nagar was close to the western fringe of the town, completely cut off from any view of New Delhi itself by the long, undulating brown hump of the Ridge. It was a suburb as yet only half-built, every house in it an individual undertaking and of individual and often surprising taste. This was not where the very rich would build, or the very fashionable; but there was plenty of money here, too, putting up those fanciful white villas and running those substantial cars. Here came the wealthy retired tradesman, the Sikh taxi proprietor who had plenty of transport at his disposal, and didn’t mind the long run from town, the small factory owner who couldn’t rise to a property in the tree-shaded, fashionable enclaves of the city itself, and the young artist of independent means who preferred detachment, possibly from the distractions of traffic and noise, probably from too autocratic parents. Whimsy could have its fling on a small and fairly economical scale here, and on a limited site. The houses sat cheek by jowl along the neat roadways, and between their rear compounds ran narrow lanes by which the hawkers and salesman reached the kitchen doors. The rusty iron baskets that shielded new trees bristled everywhere along the roadsides. The sounds, in the early morning, were a curious mixture of domestic and wild, of cars starting up, of the wavering trade calls of the ironing man and the fresh vegetable man along the rear courtyards, bidding for custom, and distant and eerie from the west the wail of jackals prowling the harsh brown land. The ironing man’s little cart, with its small charcoal brazier at one end, halted under back windows, women came bustling out with armfuls of laundry to be ironed, and the hot smell of the smoothed cotton and linen was as savoury on the air as bread. Schoolgirls came demurely out of front compound gates in their uniform shalwar and kameez, close-waisted tunic and wide trousers neatly fitted at the ankles, gauze scarf draped over the shoulders with ends floating behind. The bane of all tomboys, those scarves, the first thing to get discarded when they ran out to play hockey on the open patch of ground after school.
Part of this open space was occupied, at the moment, by a cluster of brown tents, in which lived Orissan building workers, employed on two half-finished houses just along the main road. A long chain of them, moving rhythmically, carried away the excavated soil from new foundations, bearing it in baskets on their heads. More than half of them were women. They were the poorest of the poor, but after this hard training in deportment they walked like queens. Their children, in one tattered garment apiece, or none, haunted the open ground and begged vehemently and maliciously from every passer-by.
Two of them converged purposefully upon Dominic, Tossa and Anjli as soon as they stepped out of the taxi. Here were foreigners, their proper prey. A second look at Anjli, as she turned to face them, brought them up standing in considerable doubt; and that was as illuminating for Anjli as for them. And while they were hesitating, a plump lady in a sari came out of the next gate and shooed them indignantly away.
‘They are those labourers’ children,’ she said defensively, in slightly grating English, as though the language had not enough abrasive consonants for her, ‘from Orissa. No Punjabi would beg, you please believe me.’
She marched away across the open ground, and the children drew back from her path by a few yards and studied the sky as she went by, to close in again the moment her back was turned, and be shooed away again, good-humouredly enough, by the taxi driver. Dominic paid, and let the car go. He had noticed another taxi stand only a couple of hundred yards away at the corner of the main road.
‘N 305’ said the tablet on the gatepost simply, and there was a small, beautifully-made wooden mail-box attached beneath the number. The wall of the front garden was white, shoulder-high to a man, and the house lay only a few yards back, also white-painted, two storeys high and flat-roofed, with a perforated balustrade, and in the centre of the roof a sort of light pavilion, glazed in from winds and dust-storms, an ideal summer-house for a sociable man who yet had need of a working solitude at times. The ground in front of the house was paved with squares of a grey stone, with narrow flower-beds and a few shrubs along the walls, and a small, decorative tree in a tub by the door. But the enclosure ran round the detached end of the building, and there degenerated into a utilitarian courtyard of beaten earth, with a line for drying washing, and a low wooden shed built into the corner. Beside the shed, under a bracket roof of sacking stretched on a wooden frame, a small brazier burned with a steady glow, and the faint smell of sandalwood and incense was wafted to them in the thin blue smoke. All the fires of Delhi, sacred and profane, seem to contain the evocative scents of worship. Behind the brazier, cross-legged and motionless, sat a lean, shrunken old man, a loose cotton turban on his head, grey hair and tangled beard obscuring most of his face, a brown blanket hugged round his shoulders. When the three strangers came in through the open gate he raised his head, but did not turn in their direction.
At the last moment, with the door before them and the bell-push within reach of a hand, they all hesitated. Felder had talked with blessed bluntness about the moment of truth, about having a roof over Anjli’s head that she didn’t owe to her father, so that she could meet him on equal terms, and face his acceptance or rejection with unshaken dignity and independence. But when it came to the point, whether she wanted him or not, it was important that he should want her. And there was only one way to find out.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Anjli quickly, and prodded the bell-push with a rose-tipped finger, hard and accurately.
A moment of silence, and then they heard light feet trotting briskly towards the door. Very light feet, naked feet; that characteristic soft slapping of the soles on a stone-paved floor. The door opened, wide to the wall; a revealing gesture, which belongs only to the innocent, open-hearted and generous. A boy of about nineteen, square and sturdy, stood smiling brightly at them across the threshold. He was clean and wide-featured, with close-cropped hair, and wore khaki drill shirt and shorts a size too long for him; handsome muscles bulged the brown arm that held the door open. He bobbed his head repeatedly, and smiled, and said nothing, waiting for them to speak.