‘That’s nothing,’ said Tossa, ‘a gecko fell on me this morning in bed.’
‘I know, I heard you squeal. There’s another one going to fall on you any minute now.’ He was clinging with his tiny, splayed feet to the high ceiling just above Tossa’s head, close to the light fixture, lying in wait for flies, a whitish green lizard no more than four inches long, of which more than half was tail. He was so young and small that he was still almost translucent, and only the faint, rapid palpitation of his throat indicated that he was alive, and not a worked fragment of alabaster. ‘I’d rather have geckos than cockroaches, any day. Anything with up to four legs,’ said Anjli, quite seriously, ‘is my brother. Over four, and they’re out.’
‘What about snakes?’
‘Things with no legs are out, too. But not as way out as things with eight. Who was it on the phone? Cousin Vasudev?’
‘I called Mr Felder,’ said Dominic, ‘but he wasn’t back from shooting yet. They’re going to ask him to call back.’ No need to tell her the voice on the phone had belonged to Ashok Kabir; she would have resented being left in ignorance, even in the bath.
It was another hour before Felder’s call came through. Anjli was in bed by then, but with her nose buried in The Life of the Budda, and at the first ring she was out and streaking for Dominic’s sitting-room door. The conversation was brief, and apparently satisfactory.
‘Of course!’ said Dominic, heaving a vast breath of relief. ‘How very simple you make it sound! Thanks a lot, that’s what we’ll do.’
‘And let me know what happens, will you do that? I shall be worrying about that kid from now on until I know, but I’m betting you it will bring results, all right. For the next few days you can get me at Clark’s Hotel, Benares – OK?’
‘OK, and thanks again. Hope everything will go right with the shooting.’
‘Now you’re believing in miracles! Never mind, it’s gone well today. And you take those girls and have a look at Delhi, don’t waste a minute. So long, then, I’ll be hearing from you!’
He was gone, energetic and bracing as ever, leaving his effect behind like a potent wine. Dominic hung up, relaxed and grateful.
‘What did he say?’ They were both at him in a moment, one on either side. ‘What’s so simple?’
‘He says, with Mrs Kumar’s death notice plastered all over the evening press – and you can bet it will be in the dailies tomorrow, too, – Satyavan will be absolutely certain to see it, wherever he is, and he’ll come running to pick up his responsibilities. No son will let anyone else run his mother’s funeral. All we’ve got to do is sit back and wait, to see if your father turns up for the ceremony. And the odds are strongly that he will.’
Nobody said – nobody even thought, in the exhilaration of the moment – ‘if he can!’
For two days they were on equal terms with all the other carefree European tourists in Delhi. They walked about the busy shopping streets round Connaught Place until their feet ached. They proceeded, half-stunned with grandeur, the full length of the King’s Way from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan, once the Viceroy’s palace, now the residence of the President of India, with its two great flanking blocks of the government secretariat, vast, glowing pink sandstone, one of the better legacies of the Raj, along with the legal system and the indomitable Indian railways. They risked their lives in the hailstorm of bicycles as the clerks of Delhi streamed to work in the morning rush hour, and baked themselves brown in the midday sun in the silent green park among the Lodi tombs, close to their own hotel. Islam weighted India with vast and splendid elegies to death, India herself withdrew elusively, dissolving into ash and essence, leaving life to speak for itself. And so it did, in the children who mobbed the strangers in Purana Quila, the Old Fort, half glorious ruined monument to the past, half refugee village congealed into permanence for want of other quarters; in the magical glimpses of Old Delhi after dark, blanketed figures squatting by stalls half-lit with tiny smoky lanterns, twilight children cross-legged, suddenly mute and inscrutable as gods, and everywhere smoky scents of cow-dung and joss and jasmine and sweat and all-pervading aromatic dust, electric on the darkness.
They took a motor-cycle rickshaw out to the Qutb Minar and the enormous ruined city of Tuqhluquabad, south of Delhi, silent and wonderfully peaceful within its broken, giant wall; and from there, having picnicked at ease in the sun, they crossed the road to the tightly-walled enclosure of the domed tomb of Ghias-ud-Din Tuqhluq, compressed as a blockhouse yet beautifully-proportioned, red walls leaning into themselves as solidly as the Egyptian Pyramids, white dome rearing austerely just high enough to peer over the flat brown plain, sprinkled with meagre trees.
They took a taxi to Humanyun’s tomb, the resting-place of the second Mogul emperor, delicately attached to the eastern flank of Delhi in an immaculate formal garden. They had no idea that they were looking at something in its own way fully as beautiful as the Taj, which on this visit they could hardly hope to see; nevertheless, their hearts lifted strangely as they looked at the long, level, red terrace, the jut of mellow stonework above, and the poised and tranquil white dome. No floating off, balloon-wise, here, this was a tethered dream, with feet rooted in the ground. At the gate, as they left, a bearded snake-charmer, grinning ingratiatingly, coaxed out of its basket a dull, swaying brown cobra. Everything about it was pathetic, nothing was sinister, except for the single flick of its forked tongue; almost certainly it had no poison-sacs. They wondered if the music enchanted or hurt; there was no way of knowing. They paid their few new pice, and took their taxi back north to the Red Fort to lose count of time wondering among the white marble palaces and the paradisal gardens that overlook the Yamuna river. The complex waterways in the gardens were still dry at this time of year, and the fountains silent, but with a little imagination they could insert a small, lighted lamp into every niche in the lattices of stone where the water-level dropped, and see the silver curve of falling water lit from within and giving off rainbows like the scintillations from a diamond. The Moguls loved water, played with it, decorated their houses with it, built sumptuous pavilions in which to bathe in it, and took it to bed with them in little marble channels and lotus-flower fountains to sing them to sleep.
From this haunted palace in its dignity and quietness the three tourists plunged straight into the broad, teeming, overpeopled clamour of the Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s grand market-place, screaming with cinema posters and advertisement hoardings, shrill with gossiping citizens and hurrying shoppers. They peered into the deep, narrow, open shops to see the silks and cottons baled and draped in unimaginable quantity, the Kashmiri shawls fine as cobweb, the gold and silver jewellery and the cheap glass bangles, the nuts and seeds and spices, the unknown vegetables, the fantastic sweetmeats. Horse-drawn tongas, scooter-rickshaws, cars, bicycles, stray dogs, pedestrians, all mingled in the roadway in a complicated and hair-raising dance. The noise was deafening. So next, because according to the map they were less than a mile from it and could easily walk there, they went to Rajghat, the spot close to the river bank where Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned after his assassination, and where now a white balustrade encloses a paved space and a flower-covered dais. And there, though there were plenty of people, there was silence.
At the end of the first day they half expected that Cousin Vasudev would telephone or send them a note, either to follow up his tentative recognition of Anjli’s identity and admit his own family responsibility for her, or to effect a careful withdrawal and leave the whole thing in abeyance, pending legal consultations. But there was no message.