His body filled the entire frame of the door, and he seemed to be concealing someone behind him. He stared at me with his mouth slightly open, and then said, ‘What do you want?’ His voice was gruff, and the accent was Israeli; I had come across it many times before in the alleys and shops of Dharamshala.
His manner softened when I mentioned Miss West.
‘Oh, I see. You want to talk to the English lady?’
I nodded.
‘She’s upstairs, on the roof,’ he said, and stepped away from the door.
I went in. I heard a shuffle of slippered feet, and the door to Panditji’s room banged shut immediately. I caught a flash of bare brown legs — a woman’s legs — and coils of cigarette smoke inside.
The Israeli man looked at me and smiled — a sheepish smile.
I trudged up the steep stairs, remembering how I used the brief exacting climb to prepare myself for the blank gazes of Mrs Pandey and Shyam sitting outside the kitchen.
But there was no one in the courtyard, which had been extensively renovated. The walls had been painted a bright yellow; the door leading to Mrs Pandey’s bedroom had new Diwali floral decorations on it; the place close to the kitchen door where she and Shyam once sat was now occupied by a sparkling white washbasin with a welter of exposed red rubber pipes underneath it.
But the room with the iron-barred door beside the kitchen still brimmed with darkness, and here, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I thought I saw someone stir inside.
I went closer. It was a man. He was sitting on the floor, his legs drawn up against his torso. He was leaning against the wall facing the stairway; he would have seen me come up.
At first, I saw only his eyes, then the rest of his swarthy, stubbly face, and then the grimy khaki shorts from which his dark hairy legs stuck out; I realized that it was Shyam.
I was too shocked and unsettled to speak. I stared at him for a moment, and when I eventually managed to get the words out, I said my name. I asked him if he recognized me. I tried to speak in the local Hindi dialect I used with him and Mrs Pandey.
I could see his eyes clearly now; I felt something flicker in them. But no words came out.
I came closer and now held the smooth iron bars with my hands. A faint smell of urine met my nostrils.
I said my name again, a little louder this time. I told him that I had once lived in the room on the roof.
‘He doesn’t hear anything,’ a voice said behind me.
I turned back to see a tall woman in a sari; she had silently appeared out of Mrs Pandey’s room.
It was Sita, Arjun’s wife. She nodded and said Namaste, inaudibly moving her lips. My presence didn’t seem to surprise her a bit. I would have recognized her immediately if she had been wearing the sari over her head in the way she used to when I passed her on the stairs.
She hadn’t changed much: she was as thin as I remembered her; her upper teeth slightly jutted out; frank curiosity lay in her round dark eyes and there was a soft solicitude in her voice.
‘He doesn’t hear anything,’ she repeated.
‘What happened?’
‘We had to take him to a mental asylum after Mataji died,’ she said, in Hindi, using the word Pagalkhana. ‘He got into a fight there; someone hit him on the ear with a hammer.’
I looked back at Shyam. He hadn’t moved; and now his eyes met mine: something dead now lay in them.
‘Will you have some tea?’ Sita was asking, half gesturing, as I turned to look at her, towards the kitchen.
I was beginning to decline politely when I heard a sound behind me. It was a low mumble. But a few words came through somewhat clearly; I didn’t have to listen to all of them to know what he was saying.
‘Greed,’ he was saying, ‘greed is the biggest evil. It divides families, sunders husband from wife, son from parents. .’
I saw Sita throw a quick impatient glance at Shyam before saying, ‘Have some tea. It’ll only take two minutes to make. We have a gas stove now.’
As she spoke, the door opened behind her, and Arjun came out, thick-lipped, with thinning hair, but startlingly clean shaven. He scowled at me for an instant and then his face broke into a smile.
‘Hello, boss,’ he said. ‘How are you? Come to see Miss West?’
It was the bantering manner of college-educated youth. ‘Yes, yes,’ I stammered, suddenly remembering what Pratap had told me, and still held by his face, the lips that appeared thicker without the beard.
‘Have some tea,’ Arjun said. ‘You must be tired. You have come a long way.’
I heard Shyam’s monotonous drone behind me. ‘. . Divides families, sunders husband from wife, son from parents. .’
‘See the kitchen at least,’ Sita was saying. ‘You will not recognize it. It’s all modern now.’
‘It’ll take two minutes only,’ Arjun said, in English. He added, a smile on his face, ‘Miss West is not going to run away in that time.’
Inside the kitchen, Sita flicked on the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The sooty black walls and the cow-dung-paved hearth were gone. White tiles gleamed on the walls, and on a raised cement platform squatted a gas stove, its metal frame painted a garish green. In one corner was a small fridge, with a large Dennis the Menace sticker on the door.
5
AS I CAME UP TO the roof from the constricted courtyard, the sky suddenly lay open once again, but darkening now, the sun muffled behind a thick bank of dark clouds on the western side, the river grey and placid, a few black boats scattered around the deserted ghat.
The riverfront was unchanged, but the view on the other side of the house had altered. A new shed of corrugated iron stood in the temple courtyard. The roof of the facing house had higher balustrades, stubs of iron girders sticking out of the uncemented brick wall. An unfamiliar lock with a round combination dial hung on the door to my room. Two tie-and-dye lungis with batik patterns hung down from the clothes line. I had to push them out of my way in order to reach Miss West’s room.
The door was open. She was standing over the table with the piled-up CDs, in the way I had often seen her, her gaze downcast, surveying the discs, her hair falling in a thick blonde veil around her face, and for one disorientating instant I almost expected her to say, ‘So what shall we listen to next?’
She turned and in another familiar gesture shook back her head a bit and nimbly tucked stray locks of hair behind her ears. ‘Oh, hello there,’ she said, smiling. ‘Come on in. I was sort of expecting you early. You have come too late for tea, I am afraid.’
There was affection in her smile, but her alert eyes looked at me intently.
She said, ‘You have changed, you know. You look taller and broader — or is it just my eyes?’
She had changed, too. It was dark inside the room and the light through the door contrasted with the black polo-neck jumper she wore, highlighted the wrinkles on her face and the loose skin on her neck; her eyes, though still vigilant, had lost their old lustre; they looked tired when not focused on something. She would have been past fifty now, and her face, its fine balanced features, held a kind of resignation, which enhanced its natural serenity — the serenity that had struck me in the days I used to see her sit out on the roof, watching the river.
I was full of what I had seen downstairs. Shyam in a cage of sorts; Arjun and Sita, their voices so calm, their manner so full of solicitude.
After what I had heard, I was expecting them to be strained and nervous with me, with someone who had lived in the house when Panditji and his wife were still alive, and who had heard about the quarrels and the conspiracies Mrs Pandey suspected her son of hatching against her. But with almost effortless ease, they had assumed the role of the house’s owners, with the casual confidence that went with it — a confidence unfazed by the presence of Shyam, another witness from the past.