‘Missee-sahib, messenger he bring this for you. Say, please, give privately. Your room dark, I think perhaps better wait…’
He had a confiding, you-and-I-understand-each-other voice and manner. She hadn’t been a film star’s daughter all her life without meeting his like in many different places. She dropped a quarter-rupee on the tray and picked up the dirty little note with more curiosity than she showed.
‘Thank you! That’s all!’
He withdrew backwards, not out of extreme humility, but to watch her face and bearing as she opened and read the note; which got him nothing, for she didn’t open and read it until she had stared him into turning and slithering away towards the stairs. Then she had it open in an instant, and held under the light in the corridor. She could see there was no more than one line to read; a glance, and she had it memorised.
English characters sprawled shapelessly and shakily across the paper, the pencil now pressing, now feebly touching, an old man’s hand:
‘Daughter, come morning before light alone.’
She had unfolded it so hurriedly that something small had fallen from it at her feet. She picked it up, and her fingers knew it before ever she got it raised to the light. It was her gold dollar, the token she had given to Arjun Baba in the courtyard of her father’s house in Rabindar Nagar.
The room-boy was on the stairs when she caught up with him. There was no time to be diplomatic; instinct told her, instead, to be autocratic. And, given co-operation, generous.
‘Boy!’ He turned, responsive to the tone, with more alacrity than usual. ‘Who brought this note?’
‘A messenger, missee-sahib!’ The obsequious shoulders lifted eloquently. ‘Perhaps a porter? Or he could be somebody’s office peon. In a red head-cloth, like a porter.’
‘And he left no other message? Just brought the note? How long ago?’
‘Missee-sahib, only this minute. I come upstairs, your room in darkness, when I see you come… That peon maybe still only in courtyard there…’
Of course, there was no other way out. To enter Keen’s you must thread a narrow archway in from the street, walk round a high hedge and so come into the interior court; and if driving a car, you must drive from a double gate higher up the street, right round one wing to the same paved patio. Anjli dropped half a rupee on to her least favourite room-boy’s tray, and turned and ran from him without concealment, straight to the landing window that gave on to the courtyard gallery. Creepers wreathed the outline of the night in feathery leaves. Down below, lights shone upon the white paving and the scattered shrubs in their huge ceramic pots. Away across the expanse of silver-washed whiteness, towards the enclosing dark of the high box hedge, a foreshortened figure strolled at leisure, but still briskly, for the night air was sharp to the edge of frost. Under the last of the lights she saw the extravagantly-tied, wide-bowed headcloth, faded red. Like an office peon! She did not know the term, but she understood what it meant. The more menial the function, the more compensatory the uniform. On the whole not a bad principle. But Arjun Baba had no office peon to run his errands, and this was not Kishan Singh. Perhaps a kind neighbour with a job in the city. Perhaps a public porter earning a few extra pice and acquiring merit.
The man below her – he was rounding the corner of the box hedge now – was whistling. The notes came up to her clearly in the almost frosty air and the nocturnal stillness. She followed them subconsciously, plaintive notes rising, turning, falling, simple and poignant, like a folk-tune. She caught herself picking up the cadence accurately before she realised what she was hearing.
But it was impossible! No, that was nonsense, she knew what she was hearing, once the memory fell into place. But how was it possible, then? ‘Siddhartha’ wasn’t anything like finished yet, not even the shooting. The music had certainly not yet been recorded. How could a street porter or an office messenger know the entire air of Yashodhara’s bereaved lullaby, the simplified theme of the Buddha’s morning raga?
Leaning over the rail of his balcony, Dominic pricked up his ears abruptly, listening.
‘Hey, did you hear that? Listen!’
‘Somebody whistling,’ said Tossa, unimpressed, ‘that’s all. They do it even here. You remember, Ashok said…’
‘Hush!’
She hushed obediently; he was very serious about it. She held her breath, following the tiny, silvery trail of notes up and down, a curiously rueful air. It receded, suddenly muted by the high hedge, but still heard, growing clearer again for a while as the angle changed, then cut off finally by the bulk of the wing. Now he must be in the street, lost among the trees. Theirs was a select residential road, silent at night. Indian cities have their preserves of silence, even close to the hub and the heart.
‘Did you hear it? Did you get it?’
‘I heard him whistling,’ she said wonderingly. ‘What about it?’
‘You didn’t get what it was he was whistling?’ And Dominic picked up the air himself, and whistled it softly in his turn; he had an ear for a tune even at first hearing. ‘You don’t recognise it? But was it the same? The same as his?’
‘I think so. It sounds the same. Why? How did you know it?’
‘I heard it the other day, and so did you. It’s the song from Ashok’s music to the film, don’t you remember? The simple one, the one Kamala sings. He said he’d be disappointed if they weren’t whistling it in the streets before long. But not before the film’s released! What on earth’s going on?’
‘But are you sure?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘After all, the ragas are everybody’s property, you just take them and improvise on them, don’t you? Somebody could accidentally produce a tune that recalled Ashok’s, couldn’t he? I mean, the unit is in Sarnath – or back in Clark’s Hotel at Benares, probably, at this hour. Not in Delhi, anyhow.’
‘I know. I must be imagining things,’ agreed Dominic, shivering, and turned back from the staring stars into the warmth of the room.
V
« ^ »
Anjli arose in the early hours of the morning, and stood beside her bed for a little while, listening to the silence, which was absolute. Not even a stirring of wind in the trees outside the open window. The air was clear, still and piercing, like dry wine.
She was just getting used to the size of the room, which held two beds, and could have accommodated ten. The distance between her single bed and Tossa’s made movement easy and safe. She dressed with care and deliberation, because she had the deep conviction within her that she was not coming back, that she had better get everything right the first time, for there was not going to be any chance of revising measures once taken. Delhi would be as cool as an English spring for some weeks yet, the nights cold, midday perhaps reaching summer warmth in the sun. Better be prepared for all temperatures. She put on the lambswool and angora suit in muted strawberry pink, took a scarf and her light wool coat, and slipped her feet into supple walking shoes. Then she carefully tucked into her large handbag a cotton dress, sandals, toilet necessaries and a towel. That was all. The Lord Buddha, when he passed through the palace gardens among the oblivious sleepers, carried nothing but what he wore, and even that he gave away when he entered the outer world and sent Channa back with the weeping white horse Kantaka.
She had some money of her own, changed into rupees for shopping, and some travellers’ cheques. Her passport, her own personal papers – it seemed wrong to possess any of these. But she was living in this present world, and its customs were not those of Kapilavasru, and a certain respect was due to the laws of the land. So she allowed herself the money and the credentials. And at the last moment she turned back to her dressing-table, and painstakingly tied round her left wrist the slightly wilted bracelet of jasmine buds. Dominic was, after all, rather sweet, and it wasn’t like allowing oneself real jewels. The Lord Buddha had divested himself of all his jewels before he exchanged his rich silk robes for a huntsman’s homespun tunic in the woods. Maybe she could exchange her expensive cardigan suit for shalwar and kameez and a floating, infuriating gauze scarf, such as the schoolgirls wore. She peered into the dark mirror, where a faint cadence of movement indicated the ghost of Anjli peering back at her, and imagined the transformation.