A few doors down, we enter a room piled ceiling-high with coconuts. Guddi has to run down the corridor to retrieve several that roll out. “Who authorized this?” Chitra fumes. “Somebody’s going to have to do some explaining.” She strides into the corners of the room and yanks off the sheets covering mounds of trinkets, pyramids of fabric, boxes of molding sweets. Even the bathtub is filled with fruit, much of it brown and rotting. “All the gifts people bring Devi ma—those lazy attendants stuff them into any room that’s free.”
As we prepare to leave, Sarita emerges elatedly from the bathroom. “Look what I found! To replace the one Devi ma tossed off the terrace.” She triumphantly holds up a pomegranate. “It’s still perfectly good—not even a mark on its skin.” I nod my felicitations at her, though in truth, I’m mystified by this karmic cycle of adopting and losing pomegranates she seems to be embroiled in. (And why pomegranates, why this obsession with them in particular? Why not apples or pears or better still cherries, which would be so much easier to tote along?) Chitra raises an eyebrow at this pilferage from Devi ma’s wares, but remains silent as Sarita ties the fruit into her sari.
Somewhere between the college Superdevi groupies colonizing Room 332 and the chanteuse singing a hymn to Mumbadevi for the cement tycoon in Room 334, it strikes me I’m not going about this search in the most intelligent way. What if we do come upon Karun? With Sarita at my side, how might I expect him to behave? If history is any indicator, he’ll keep his true desires firmly bridled, allow spousal loyalty to canter to an easy victory again. I need to ditch Sarita, in the hope I’ll discover Karun while searching alone—the only way to give myself a fighting chance with him.
Not that I expect to find Karun in these rooms. The occupants are too carefree, the atmosphere too festive, the smattering of Khakis don’t even pretend to be guarding anything. If someone forced Karun here at gunpoint, wouldn’t they keep him more tightly under lock and key? Otherwise, why wouldn’t he simply sneak out and try once more to return to the south part of the city? Surveillance at the gates of people leaving seems pretty lax—after all, didn’t Guddi decamp with an entire elephant?
What I therefore need to hunt around for (without Sarita) are areas of enhanced security. “I think we should split up. Devi ma might call us back at any time—we need to get through the rooms much more quickly.” Chitra rises in opposition to this idea but I hold firm, invoking the authority granted me by the Devi. She then tries to pair up with me—perhaps to keep me subtly off track, as I suspect she’s been doing. “Oh, but you and Sarita form such a great team,” I say. “Let Guddi accompany me.” Chitra’s eyes narrow when I ask for her swipe card—she silently fishes another one out from her pocket and hands it to me.
About to part, Sarita stops me. “How will you recognize Karun when you’ve never even met him?”
I look at her stupefied. How, indeed? How could the Jazter have missed something so obvious? “I guess I’ll just have to ask,” I reply weakly. Sarita’s mouth tightens—she has noted my blunder, added it to the tally.
Before anything else can crop up to scuttle my escape, I promise to regroup later in Devi ma’s suite, and cut out with Guddi.
AS A FIRST STEP, we visit the remaining floors in the wing to verify they are equally unguarded. I have to keep shushing Guddi, for whom stealth and unobtrusiveness seem like entirely alien concepts. “We’re looking for his friend,” she announces to everyone we encounter: cleaning staff, guests, Khakis. “We have permission from Devi ma herself.” She frisks through the hotel as if it were a giant amusement park—swinging down corridors, bouncing on the landing sofas, darting into every nook and corner on her eternal quest for cell phones. The escalator to the ground level fascinates her, though she’s unnerved by the floor swallowing its endless diet of steps.
By the time we’ve finished with the wing, Guddi is bored—she suggests we go pay Shyamu a visit. “I’m afraid he might have caught a cold from that dip in the swimming pool.” When I inform her that elephant stables are not on our list, she gets downcast. “Can we at least catch the last part of the Devi pooja then?”
I block out her voice and concentrate on Karun. Ensconced in this hotel somewhere. The premise I must keep reinforcing in my mind, since without it (as any shikari knows) there can be no game. As far as this wing goes, though, Karun’s trail feels completely dead. The clerks took justified umbrage when I questioned their ledgers—the Devi and he seem to have never met.
Who ordered his kidnapping then? Clearly the same person who runs the show here: this sprawling temple to the Devi, the fireworks, the electricity, the elephants. With such a vast enterprise, it has to be Bhim. The great white Hindu hope, as deft at multitasking as Vishnu himself—whether it’s Muslims in need of massacring or the nation in need of saving. Though what he might want with a vanful of physicists, I can’t guess.
Why haven’t I discerned more evidence of Bhim’s presence at the hotel? Does he maintain a low profile to keep the limelight focused solely on the Devi? Is he holed up in a secret section along with his armory and his men? Wouldn’t locating him lead me to Karun as well?
I make a mental inventory of the parts of the hotel I haven’t explored: the guestroom floors in the towering front wing, the arcade of onetime salons and boutiques next to the lobby, the disco dormitory in the basement. Then there’s the half-complete annex behind the garden enclosure, which Chitra says has remained unoccupied ever since one of the shoddily built floors collapsed inside. A small conference center stands near the badminton courts, along with a shorter building, perhaps a gym, by its side. More structures under construction loom hazily in the rear—to check everything, my parole would have to last well into the night.
But perhaps I needn’t go down my list. Perhaps Bhim’s Khakis can lead me to him. They’re sprinkled rather sparsely throughout the hotel, with the exception of the restaurant coffee bar, where they swarm around the food like insects. Like ants, more precisely, I think—why not track them to get to their anthill?
A little reconnaissance reveals a good number of them peeling off towards the annex. So I take Guddi past the garden for a little stroll in that direction as well. The building is drab, almost ascetically plain, as if to atone for the Indica’s over-the-top excesses. Dark windows with stingy panes of glass more befitting an office complex stare out from between concrete strips. Even the side facing the sea has no balconies. The project, announced in the first few flush days of the hotel opening, looks like it stalled even before the war started. Spikes of metal pierce through the unfinished top—after all this time, only three and a half floors stand completed. Belying Chitra’s claims of tottering construction, these floors look quite sturdy, well-fortified.
The entrance actually lies on the other side of the wall enclosing the pool and garden courtyard, which further perks my interest. The barrier means that annex occupants can be kept quarantined, away from hotel residents. The locked metal grille built into this wall is unguarded—a swipe with Chitra’s card opens it. Ahead, though, two Khakis slouch against the building doorway, engaged in casual conversation. As we near, they briskly pick up their rifles. “Where are you going?” they demand in unison, clearly annoyed we have caught them chatting.
Neither my “open sesame” card nor my Devi-level security clearance impresses them. “You need special authorization to enter this building.” When I ask them from whom, they simply glare, as if this will clarify what they’ve said.
Guddi steps in with such a spirited try that I feel ashamed at underestimating her. “If you think Devi ma is going to forgive you two pups for disobeying her command, you have another thought coming. Just yesterday, she had an attendant’s ears cut off—he didn’t hear her order, that’s all.” She snips at a guard with scissor-like fingers, so close to his ear, he backs away.