‘Good morning!’ said Dominic, aware of possible non-understanding, but not knowing in the least what to do about it. Names, at any rate, are international currency. ‘We are looking for the house of Shri Satyavan Kumar.’
The smile narrowed and wavered. At least he understood English. ‘Yes, this is house of Mr Kumar.’ His slight frown, his lost look, everything about him but his tongue added: ‘But…!’
‘May we speak with Mr Kumar? He will be expecting us. He has received a letter to tell him that we are coming.’
Nevertheless, Dominic had heard the unspoken ‘but’, even if he chose to ignore it. It might mean no more than ‘but he isn’t in at the moment’, which would hardly be a catastrophe, even if they were keyed up to meet him immediately, and liable to deflation if kept waiting. Tossa had heard it, too, she was looking more than naturally wise, patient and calm. So had Anjli; her face was a demure mask, no one could tell what went on behind it.
‘There is a letter, yes…’ said the boy slowly. ‘But my master not read letter.’ His brown eyes wandered from face to face apologetically, as if he might be blamed for this failure of communication. “The letter is here, I bring it…’
‘But if we could speak to Mr Kumar,’ said Dominic doggedly, ‘we can explain everything ourselves.’
‘I am sorry. Mr Kumar not here. No one can take letter to him, no one know where can find him. More than one year ago, in the night, Mr Kumar he go away. Never say one word. Never come back.’
After the moment of blank silence, in which the Orissan children advanced their toes over the boundary of the gateway, and the old man behind the brazier shrugged the blanket back a few inches from his shoulders, and the world in general incredibly went on about its business as if nothing had changed, Dominic said in reasonable tones: ‘May we come in for a few minutes? You may be able to help us.’
‘Please! Memsahib… missee-sabib…!’ The boy bowed them in gladly, waved them into a small front room, sparsely furnished by western standards, but elegant in tapestries, silks and cushions, and a screen of carved, aromatic wood. The bare feet turned and pattered to the table, where on a silver dish lay an air mail letter. Dorette had wasted her pains.
‘Please, here is letter. You take it?’
‘No, keep it here,’ said Dominic, ‘in case Mr Kumar comes home.’ But after more than a year without a word, why should he reappear now? And yet this was India, and who knows India’s motives and reasons? ‘You mean that Mr Kumar simply went away without telling anyone where he was going, or when to expect him back? Not even his mother? His family?’ Idiot, there was no other family, of course, he was the only child.
‘Acha, Sahib. In the night. He did not sleep in his bed, he did not take any luggage, everything left in place. He go. That is all.’
‘Like the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli unexpectedly, ‘when it was time to depart.’ She had a big white canvas handbag on her arm, and Ashok’s book inside it; she had been sneaking peeps into the pages even on the taxi ride out here.
‘Your father,’ Dominic pointed out unwisely, ‘was a devout Hindu, by all reports.’
‘So was the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli devastatingly. She hadn’t been reading to no purpose.
‘Father?’ said Satyavan’s house-boy, half-dumb with wonder.
‘This is Miss Anjli Kumar, Mr Kumar’s daughter.’
He joined his hands respectfully under his chin, his brown head bobbing deeply; he did not question her identity, he believed that people told him the truth, as he told them the truth.
‘Missee-sahib, I not know anything, I not here when Shri Satyavan go away. When his servants send word to the big house that he gone, my mistress she send them all away, tell me go keep this place until Shri Satyavan return. Nobody see him go, nobody hear. More than one year now, and he send no word.’
‘Your mistress?’ said Dominic.
‘Acha, sahib, Shrimati Purnima Kumar. I her house-boy.’
‘And there’s nobody here now who was here on that night? When Mr Kumar went away?’
‘Sahib, no one. Only Arjun Baba.’ He said it with the mixture of reverence and indifference that touches, perhaps, only the dead and the mad, both of them out of reach.
‘Who is Arjun Baba?’
‘The old man. The beggar. Shri Satyavan took him in, and let him live in the compound. He comes and goes as he will. He eats from our table. Now Shri Satyavan is gone, Shrimati Purnima feeds him. It is all he want. This is his home until he die. Arjun Baba very, very old.’
‘But he was here then! He may have heard or seen something…’
The boy was bowing his head sadly, and sadly smiling. ‘Sahib, always he has said he hear nothing, he know nothing. Always, he say this. And, sahib, Arjun Baba is blind.’
It made perfect sense. The old ears pricking, the ancient head turning. But not turning to view. The ear was tuned to them, not the eye. And so old, so very old. And so indebted, in a mutual indebtedness, such as charity hardly knows in the less sophisticated lands of the west. His allegiance belonged only to Satyavan, who if he willed to go must be made free to go. Not all needs are of the flesh.
‘Sahib, if you are willing, I think it good you should go to my mistress’s house.’ He did not say ‘to my mistress’; and in a moment it was clear why. ‘She very ill, ever since Shri Satyavan go from here she fall sick for him…’
‘But didn’t she try…? To get in touch, to find him…?
The young shoulders lifted, acknowledging the sovereignty of individual choice. ‘If he must go, he must go. My mistress wait. Only now it is bad with her. But there is Shri Vasudev, Shri Satyavan’s cousin. He is manager for family business now. Please, you speak with him.’
‘Yes,’ said Dominic, ‘yes, we will. We have Mrs Kumar’s address, we’ll go there.’
The boy bowed them anxiously towards the door, and out into the warming sunshine, hovering as though uncertain whether to wish them to stay or go, as though it might rest with him to hold fast Satyavan’s daughter, and he might be held answerable if she turned and went away as mysteriously as her father. Anjli halted in the doorway and looked at him thoughtfully.
‘You are not from Delhi?’
‘No, missee-sahib, I come from a village near Kangra. Shrimati Purnima came from there, and has a house there. My father is her gardener.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Kishan Singh.’ And he pressed his hands together in salute and smiled at her hopefully.
‘We shall meet again, Kishan Singh. I am glad you are here to keep my father’s house so faithfully and look after Arjun Baba. If you hear any news of him, send it to me at Keen’s Hotel. Now we must go to my grandmother.’
Kishan Singh stood at the top of the steps and bowed and smiled her away across the paved garden, in some way reassured; but at the gate she looked back again, and caught Dominic by the arm.
‘Wait for me a moment. I want to speak to him… the old man. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, I saw that he heard us come.’
‘We can try,’ Dominic agreed doubtfully. ‘But it’s long odds he doesn’t speak English.’
‘Kishan Singh did. But let me try, alone…’
Something was changing in Anjli, or perhaps some part of everything in her was changing, her voice, her manner, even her walk. They watched her cross the beaten earth of the yard, and it might almost have been the gliding gait of a woman in a sari, though quite certainly Anjli had never draped a sari round her in her life, and wouldn’t know how to set about it even if she had possessed one. She halted before the motionless old man, and though he could not see her, she pressed her hands together in reverence to him, and inclined her head as the boy had done to her.
‘Namaste!’
She had no idea how she had known what to say, but when she had said it she knew that it was right. The old head came up, and the sun shone on the sightless face that seemed to gaze at her. A tangle of grey, long hair, beard and brows, out of which jutted a hooked and sinewy nose and two sharp protuberant cheekbones, and a great ridge of forehead. All of his flesh that was visible was the same brown as the brown, dry earth under him. A tremendous remote indifference held him apart from her. The sun gleamed on eyes white and opaque with cataract.