‘So I reckon tomorrow morning will be time enough for Mr Kumar. Mornings are the time for starting enterprises. Right?’
‘Right! And we can have this evening! We haven’t seen anything yet. All we did at Bombay was get out of one plane at Santacruz and into another.’
‘Miss Lester did say,’ agreed Dominic hopefully, ‘that she would arrange a hotel for us. We took it for granted that Tossa and I would need one, of course…’
‘Don’t say another word, it’s all taken care of. I’ve booked you all in at Keen’s Hotel. It’s south of town, off the Lodi Road, but it’s cheaper than most and just as good, and I reckoned you might want to stay around town a while, since you are here on Dorrie’s errand. Shame to waste that air fare, who knows if it may not be once in a lifetime? How’s that? Sound OK?’
‘Sounds wonderful!’ said Tossa with heartfelt gratitude. You didn’t find a thoughtful host of this kind every day. ‘It’s terribly good of you.’
‘Come on, then, and let’s pick up your luggage, they should have turfed it out by now.’ He took Anjli by the hand as naturally as a tried and trusted uncle, and surprisingly she let him. They might all get a little dizzy and confused later, if Mr Felder kept up this pace and all his unit matched up, but at the moment he was certainly a huge relief.
In through the teeming halls of Palam, as loud and busy and stunning as any other international airport, but peacock-hued with glorious saris and bleached white with invading sunlight; and out to the stands where the luggage was deposited, and the porters waited bright-eyed, heads swathed in red cloths, ready to pounce on whatever cases were claimed. Two of them secured the items Dominic indicated, and hoisted them to their padded heads. Dominic would have lifted one case himself, but Felder nudged him good-humouredly aside.
‘Don’t! It doesn’t cost much, even if you over-tip, and these boys have to make a living. This country sure has a lot of people to feed.’
Anjli stood on the steps, and looked at the barren, parched, russet and gold land from which her father had sprung, a waste of reds, dead-rose-petal browns, tawny sand, punctuated with patches of vivid green grass and frail, newly-budding trees. A pallid forecourt, a circle of gardens, a silver-grey road winding away towards the distant white walls of the town. But mostly one level of dust-fine soil, drowned in sunlight so sharp and thin that it seemed there must be frost in the air. In her fine woollen cardigan suit she felt warm enough, and yet there was a clarity that cut like knives when she breathed. And this was Delhi in December.
She didn’t remember anything, or at least, not with any part of mind or memory. Only her blood stirred strangely, recapturing some ancestral rapport. Not necessarily in affection; rather with a raising of hackles, aware of compulsions not altogether congenial. It was too bright, too dry, too clear, too open; there was nowhere to hide.
‘This way. We’re not supposed to park private stuff round here, but what can you do? These foreigners!’ Felder led the way briskly round the corner of the buildings to the blinding white concrete where the airport bus was filling up with plump ladies in saris and ponderous gentlemen in white cottons and European overcoats. The truck turned out to be a minibus, from which two unmistakable young Americans leaned to grin at them hospitably and offer large, amiable hands.
‘Tom Hoskins is our driver-cum-handyman. There isn’t much Tom can’t do. And this is Joe Salt, assistant cameramen. We’ve got it dead easy here, mostly we’re playing second-fiddle to the Indians, and believe me, Ganesh Rao knows exactly what he wants, and nine-tenths of the time he’s dead right, so ours is a sinecure. Get aboard, ladies, choose your seats, we’ll take you round through the city for a ride.’
They climbed aboard willingly, eyes round and attentive at the windows, intent on missing nothing.
‘Shouldn’t we at least check in at the hotel?’ asked Dominic.
‘So we will, laddie, so we will, on our way out to Mehrauli. Don’t want to haul this luggage around, do we? This will be a lightning tour specially for you, because we’ve got to go right in to the shopping centre at Connaught Circus to pick up one of the gang, and then we’re bound due south for the edge of the town, where we’re filming. We’ll be quite close to Keen’s on the way out, and drop your stuff off there. Straight to the town office, Tom, Ashok will be there by now, we’re a mite late.’
Tom drove with the verve and aplomb which they were later to associate with Sikh taxi-drivers, and in particular with the devoted virtuosi, also mostly Sikhs and invariably young, who drove the wappish little scooter-rickshaws around the town. Clearly he had been here long enough to know his way around and to have bettered the impetuous elan of the native motorists. They clung to their seats (though Anjli tended rather to cling to Dominic) and stared their fill; and Mr Felder, with wide shoulders braced easily against the panelling and long legs stretched across the gangway, commented spasmodically on the unfolding scene of Delhi.
On either side the steel-grey road the overwhelming brownness of North India, at first a monotone, dissolved, as they penetrated it, into a marvellous spectrum of shades and textures, which yet were all brown. Even the grass was brown, a dry, subtle shade with tints of green breathing through it, to indicate that against first appearances it still lived. Beyond all question the air was alive, the light was alive, the incredibly brilliant sky was alive, radiantly blue and flecked with a few sailing feathers of cloud to emphasize its depth of colour. At first they drove across the barren brown earth as over a dead calm sea, the steely road now growing russet with the reflected glow, its dusty fringes lined with curious crude baskets of rust-coloured iron, like fireless braziers. ‘Newly-planted trees,’ said Felder, forestalling the question; and then they could glimpse the tender green saplings just peering over their bars. ‘You’ll see ’em all over the new suburbs. They won’t always be eyesores.’ Then they were among scattered small houses, dropped almost accidentally about the dun-coloured plain, and abruptly the white buildings congealed into a residential road. On their left rose the heaving brown flank of the Ridge, on their right, from clustering trees, soared a phantasmagoria of imposing buildings of every possible design and style, regularly spaced like huge summer-houses in a giant’s garden. ‘The Diplomatic Enclave. They suggested every country should build its embassy in its own national style. See those dark-blue domes? Pakistan did that! You ought to walk through, some time, you won’t believe your eyes. And that huge palace beyond, that’s the Ashoka Hotel. Prestige job. You won’t believe that, either…’
From Willingdon Crescent they caught glimpses of the dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan and the twin blocks of the government secretariat, a brief rear view of the spacious buildings of the new city; then they were careering up Irwin Road, head over ears into the pandemonium of modern Delhi’s street life at last, between banks and restaurants and cinemas plastered with posters tall as towers and vivid as the rainbow, caught in a whirling current of cars, buses, bicycles, pedestrians and motorbikes and scooters towing canopied rickshaws, extravagantly painted with flowers, birds and garlands, like some wonderful hybrid between an old-fashioned hansom cab and the cabin of a canal-boat. This brilliant river brought them suddenly to the whirlpool of New Delhi’s shopping centre, the wheel of radiating streets they had seen from the air.
‘Drive round Connaught Place, Tom, just once, let them have a look at the nearest thing we’ve got to Piccadilly.’
It was much more spacious than Piccadilly, a large, regular circle of park in the centre, ringed with a broad road and a colonnade of white shops, and eight radial roads lancing away from the centre like the spokes of a wheel.