'I'll take it,' said Urmila.
The fish-seller shook his head. 'No,' he said, grinning. 'I can't give you that one: that's for them. But I'll give you this other one, it's just as good – here, look.'
Urmila gave him a perfunctory nod. 'All right,' she said, 'that one.' She told him to cut it up and went in to fetch her purse. By the time she came back, the fish-seller had a packet ready for her: he had wrapped the fish in bits of paper and stuffed it into a plastic bag.
Urmila clicked her tongue in annoyance when she saw the packet. 'You shouldn't have wrapped it up,' she said.
The fish-seller mumbled an excuse and began counting his money. Urmila went inside. She had no time to lose now. Hurrying into the kitchen she tipped the contents of the packet onto a plastic plate, in the sink. The chunks of fish fell out with a thump, scattering all over the sink. Urmila grimaced: the paper in which the fish was wrapped had turned into a soggy mess. She touched a piece of fish gingerly and the tip of her finger came away with a bit of paper attached. She had trouble shaking it off; it had dissolved into a wad of sticky glue.
Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she stole a quick glance out of the window. RashBehari Avenue was jammed with buses and minibuses, all belching thick clouds of smoke. She had no more than half an hour to spare if she was to get to the Great Eastern Hotel in time for the press conference. She began to scrub furiously.
After a few minutes she realized that her scrubbing was only making matters worse by working the paper deeper into the chunks of fish. She threw up her hands, thoroughly irritated now, and peeled a scrap of paper off her fingers. It was thin, cheap Xerox paper: the kind that accumulated in vast quantities in the Calcutta copying room.
So this is where it all ends up, she thought, as fishwrapping.
She glanced at the plastic bag again and saw that it was still full of paper. A few bits and pieces were dry; the blood hadn't seeped through to them yet. She tipped the paper out on the counter and held a sheet flat with the back of her hand.
It was a large, legal-size photocopy of a page of very fine English newsprint. The typeface was unfamiliar, old fashioned: she knew at a glance that the page wasn't from any of the current English-language papers printed in Calcutta. She made space for it on a shelf and spread it out.
The print was so fine she had trouble reading it. She turned on a light and looked at it again, turning instinctively to the top margin to look for the paper's name. The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: ' Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898.'
The page was divided into eight columns, each containing dozens of announcements of a routine kind: 'D. Attwater, Esq. transferred to Almora as Deputy Magistrate, Revenues', 'So-and-so to quit his post in the Port Authority, Calcutta, in order to become Assistant Harbourmaster in Singapore' and so on. Urmila skimmed quickly through it. She could not see why anyone would go to the trouble of copying something like that, a record of old bureaucratic appointments. She was about to sweep it into the wastebin when she noticed that one of the announcements had been underlined, in ink.
Squinting at the page she read: 'Leave approved for Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham, Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta, 10-15 January… '
Urmila cast a quick glance at the clock above the dining table. She really had no time to lose now, not a minute; if she didn't get the fish done in the next ten minutes she would be late for the press conference.
She knew she ought to get on with the cooking. But instead she found herself pulling out the two other bits of paper left in the plastic bag.
The next page was even more puzzling than the first. It was a copy of a sheet of paper with a list of names under an elaborate and unfamiliar logo. Holding the logo up to the light, she saw that it said 'South-Western Railways'. Handwritten beneath it were the words: '10 January 1898, Passenger list, Compartment 8'. Under this was a list of names. Urmila looked quickly through them; they seemed like British names. She read a couple of them to herself, spelling them out slowly: Major Evelyn Urquhart, D. Craven, Esq., Sir Andrew Acton… ' Then she noticed that a name at the bottom of the list had been underlined. It was: 'C. C. Dunn, Esq.'.
That's strange, she thought. The other name was D. D. something.
She didn't bother to look. She pushed the page aside and spread out the only remaining sheet.
It was a copy of another page of The Colonial Services Gazette. This one was dated 30 January 1898. She cast a quick glance over it: another long list of transfers, leaves approved, positions filled. Again one of the announcements was underlined. It read: 'The public is notified that Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham is currently on leave pending his retirement. He will be replaced by SurgeonMajor Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service.'
'Haven't you started cooking yet, Urmi?' her mother called out from the bedroom. 'It's getting late.'
Urmila started. She was furious with herself now for wasting so much time staring at used Xerox paper. She snatched the sheets off the shelf, flung them aside and hurried over to the sink.
The paper-wrapped fish had turned into a stinking, glutinous mess. It was all she could do not to vomit into the sink.
Chapter 26
SUDDENLY URMILA found herself shaking with indignation. She knew she was on the verge of one of those periodic seizures of outrage which sometimes gripped her when she was working on her investigative articles. She was so angry now that she stopped caring about the time about the press conference at the Great Eastern, the news editor, even the Minister of Communications from Delhi. She stuffed the pieces of fish back into the plastic bag and marched to the door. On her way out she snatched up the sheets of Xerox paper, crumpling them into a ball, in her fist.
Her mother had come out of her bedroom to see what the matter was. Her mouth fell open, seeing Urmila marching out of the flat in her grease-spattered sari, clutching a ball of paper and a bag of fish. 'Where are you going, Urmi?' she cried.
'I'm going to return this fish,' Urmila said, letting herself out. 'We can't eat this: it'll kill us. Look at this filthy paper it's wrapped in. I'm going to make that man take it back: I paid more than a hundred rupees for this fish. I'm not going to be cheated like this.'
The front door of their flat opened on a narrow, corridorlike veranda that served three other apartments beside their own. Urmila was certain she would find the fish-seller outside, knocking on the doors of the other flats. But the veranda was empty: she looked to her right and then to her left. There was no sign of the young man with the basket of fish.
Urmila stood undecided for a moment and then she went to the neighbouring door and rang the bell. Several minutes later the door opened and a middle-aged man dressed in pyjamas and a cotton vest looked out suspiciously. 'Yes?' he said. 'What do you want?'