The inspector wrote out a note for Urvashi, telling her to return with Aisha tomorrow for a meeting with the clinical psychologist. Then he took Urvashi aside, so that Aisha wouldn’t hear, and said to her: ‘Madam, she is underage. We need her family’s permission to make a full physical examination and to lodge an FIR.’
‘FIR?’ asked Urvashi.
‘First Information Report,’ said the inspector in English. ‘After that,’ he resumed in Hindi, ‘we take the victim to a government hospital for a medical check-up.’ His voice became more hushed. ‘Usually hymen based.’ He wiggled his finger. ‘Doctor judges whether hymen is intact or ruptured. Presence of semen, abrasions, state of genital area, mental distress, condition of apparel – often difficult to judge so long after the event. If there is semen, maybe a DNA test is possible.’
‘You’ll find out his genes?’
He nodded approvingly. ‘Ninety days elapse. Case goes to Lower Court. Rape is a state case, victim will be granted government lawyer. After first hearing, with deposition of witness list, et cetera, process can take three years. Accused if under trial and not on bail, goes to Tihar Jail. Victim is a minor: any type of intercourse is an offence. If girl’s family decides to file a case they will have to do it quickly. But bear in mind trauma for the girl. Such things are a dishonour. I don’t need to tell you about comments being cast on girl’s character by unfortunate mishaps such as these. Very rare for victims to receive compensation.’
Urvashi, standing in the doorway, held her stomach protectively with one hand.
The inspector went over the basic facts again. ‘First lodge FIR. To do that, speak to the family. She is minor. Parental assent to effect that case can go to court – essential. Provide doctor’s medical examination, and check-up and all from gynaecologist. Then get statement from the girl. That is most important.’
Urvashi put a hand to her forehead.
‘And hurry,’ he went on, ‘we have a suspect.’
‘You do?’
He ushered both women out: ‘Strictly confidential police information.’
chapter 4
At first, Ash Chaturvedi didn’t notice that his wife’s parents hadn’t come to the wedding lunch. He stood in the Rose Garden at the India International Centre, dressed in the embroidered white kurta pyjama that Sunita had selected for him, holding a glass of beer – and trying to keep it together.
In the midday sunshine, the Rose Garden was crammed with people: all the professors and activists and teachers and writers and visual artists and documentary filmmakers of his father’s acquaintance whom Ash had grown up with. Dressed in colourful cotton khadhi, drinking beer, eating ruddy chunks of chicken tikka, they chattered nonstop, ruefully praising their one-maximum-two children, ruefully complaining of their two-maximum-three servants, eagerly exchanging notes on the small coterie of private schools to which they sent their offspring, passionately denouncing the Hindu-right government, generally expounding on minority religious culture, and specifically disavowing adherence to any faith bar the socialist-feminist-atheism of their own milieu. Not one of them, in short, was crassly middle class; nobody’s English diction was lacking; there was not a soul here who believed all the flim-flam about Lord Ram’s temple at Ayodhya needing to be rebuilt over the demolished mosque, a view that the Hindu-led government was endorsing. Ash had already talked to three of his father’s colleagues from the university and exchanged pleasantries with a range of cousins and aunties, and was now being lectured to by an acquaintance of his father’s – an old man with a thick grey beard who ran a charity monitoring educational facilities in the slums of Delhi – on the dangers of the current government’s attitude to Muslims and other minorities, and the monstrous things that they might try to do, legislatively or otherwise, under cover of the hysteria emanating from America. And thus, had he stopped to think about it, Ash would have understood entirely why Sunita’s parents had not put in an appearance at such a godless gathering.
But he had no time to think of it. He had just witnessed the arrival of the one other person – aside from Sunita – who didn’t belong here: her brother Ram. He saw Ram making his way slowly across the lawns towards him and tried to correct the stricken, fearful expression on his face. But it was no good. The look had taken possession of his features since the early hours of the morning.
It would be fair to say that all Ash Chaturvedi’s hyperactivity, the exuberance of his wedding night, had disappeared at dawn: the moment he awoke and found himself sharing a bed with his wife’s elder brother. He had hidden his face in his arms for a moment and then – praying that Ram wouldn’t wake – stumbled out of the door, pulling on his crumpled groom’s attire as he ran, not forgetting to grab his glasses, and arrived at the bridal suite where he found, to his great relief, that Sunita was still asleep.
Standing by the bed, Ash had looked down at his wife and wondered if he had made a huge mistake, marrying this innocent young woman whose opinions he had helped to form – but whose kisses he barely knew. He hoped that the strange ethereal gasps he had heard himself uttering in the arms of her brother were some kind of trick played by the body on the mind, that his marriage was the truth. He hoped that the fearsome, exhilarating feeling he had felt last night with Ram – of something fluttering inside him trying to get out (a bird, he had thought, a bird flying higher and higher through a dark space, soaring optimistically upwards to where the air was thinner but the light hovered) – he hoped that those thoughts and feelings were a sham. But he wasn’t sure.
Despairing at himself, he had walked over to the hotel window and pulled back the curtain. From this angle, at this height, Delhi was a mass of green trees and gardens, with only some tower blocks in the very far distance. He breathed deeply, soothed by the sight. It was as if he and his wife were sleeping in the middle of a forest.
His wife. Now that he thought about it, everything to do with this marriage had been to avoid one thing – to cleanse himself of this Internet romance, and the illegal, concomitant desires that had troubled him so much. Sunita had provided the solution. She had mentioned marriage in her innocence: and suddenly he saw the way. This was how he would exorcise his inappropriate obsession with the sweet chatroom friend who called himself Man-God.
Ash closed the curtain and returned to the bed, watching Sunita as she slept, the breaths she took dilating her nostrils slightly, her eyelashes fluttering. After a moment, he undressed, pulled back the sheet and got into bed beside her. She made a slight, protesting noise in her sleep, but he inched forward nevertheless until his body was cradling hers. She was soft, and smelt faintly of something foreign and flowery. He put an arm over her, feeling her naked skin touching his, and wondered how he had been foolish enough to get himself into this situation.
Ash had been embarking on his Ph.D. in Genetics when his father first introduced him to Sunita. ‘What do you think of her?’ his father had asked that evening; and Ash had to admit that the librarian was very nice. ‘She seems to enjoy your company,’ his father commented the following week at dinner, ‘more than mine, at least’; and Ash looked up in surprise: he wasn’t used to girls enjoying his company. But the concept pleased him; and in the weeks that followed, he began to notice that this neat, quiet girl did seem to listen when he spoke; she looked up when he came home from the lab; she brought him tea on the terrace, preparing it herself (she said the maid didn’t do it right); and he, in his turn, began to appreciate Sunita. With her quietness and sincerity, she was quite unlike the other young women he had known in his life – the sharp-tongued girls from school, his witty cousins, his dazzlingly confident sister. And he began to notice a certain feeling in the air when they were in the room together; he felt with no lessening of surprise how sensitively she continued to respond to his most mundane statements. He began to sense that here was a mind that he could shape, even. Obliquely, he sounded out her politics; asked questions designed to reveal her cerebral acuity; gently examined her on culture (Indian and
foreign), on religion (Hinduism and the rest), on her role as a wife and mother. After some months passed, he was gratified to notice that the opinions Sunita espoused were becoming more sophisticated; that the books she now read were of a higher grade than those she had talked of when they first met. He came to think of her as the original innocent; a mythical Sita to his imperfect Ram.
On the day when Ash went to ask for Sunita’s hand in marriage, Mr Sharma brought up the question of locating an ‘Aryan gene in India’s upper-caste population’. The way he phrased it, Ash reflected afterwards, sounded very much like a requirement.
‘There has been very little work done on it as yet,’ Ash said, trying not to look ignorant. He racked his brain for whatever it was they were taught in the first year about early genetic studies of population; ‘In the nineteen thirties, of course, Haldane was looking at the prehistoric migration out of India. He proved it by looking at blood groups.’
Mr Sharma had thumped the desk. ‘Fantastic!’ he exclaimed.
‘But since that work was done so long ago,’ Ash went on, feeling rather surprised at how delighted this prospective father-in-law seemed with his credentials – didn’t they generally want you to be a doctor or an engineer rather than an ill-paid researcher? – ‘obviously it would need updating—’
‘Wonderful!’ said Mr Sharma; and he began talking about the historical references to the Aryans in India’s ancient Sanskrit texts. ‘If you just prove this Arya gene with science,’ he said, pacing around the room, ‘I can secure you funding for further—’
‘Oh, no,’ Ash had interrupted, ‘I can conduct all the necessary research as an adjunct to my Ph.D.’
But Mr Sharma was no longer listening. He was shaking Ash’s hand, patting him on the back, and sitting down again in something of a flurry. Then he exclaimed, in clear English, ‘Absolutely marvellous! Bravo!’
Ash had already chosen two of his Ph.D. topics. There was to be a chapter on gene defects as a cause of disease: he was looking at the degenerative eye condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa; another chapter using Short Tandem Repeats for rapid forensic applications – the identification of individuals – which he was doing in association with a lab in west Delhi; and meanwhile everyone at CBT was talking about a new national ‘mapping project’ in which institutions across the country were collaborating on a countrywide database of genotypes. If he pursued a line of enquiry related to this in a third chapter, Ash thought, it would give him plenty of material for publications. And so he began to consider exploring whether there was a marker on the genome that could be traced back to an ancient Aryan people.
Mr Sharma was very happy with the tentative steps Ash was taking in this direction. Whenever the two men met, the elder would talk enthusiatically to the younger about Vedic references to fair skin-colour and intelligence – in Sanskrit, ‘arya’ meant ‘noble’. He argued that Ash only had to identify a nobility gene in him, Shiva Prasad, to hit on the elusive question of who in India was Arya and who wasn’t. He said that the Sharma family’s fair skin colour (the women always made good marriages because of it) proved that they were Aryas as distinct from the dark-skinned Dravidian population (mercifully confined mostly to the south of India) but Shiva Prasad was well-read enough to know that skin-colour alone wasn’t enough: he needed the genes to prove it.
Much as Ash wanted to please Shiva Prasad, his research didn’t provide such easy answers. To gain some elucidation on the matter he tried to broach the subject with his father. His father, however, answered in professorial mode – saying something complicated and incomprehensible about the Indo-European language group and the names of rivers common to Iran and India. So Ash brought up the subject with his schoolfriend, Pablo, who had returned to Delhi from Bangalore four years ago, absolutely brimming over with history and sociology and innumerable abstruse theories about India and its place in the world.
Unfortunately, Pablo wasn’t at all impressed by the parameters of Ash’s gene proposal. ‘I don’t understand. Are you looking at an Aryan migration into India or out? Where do you think the Aryans came from?’
‘You tell me,’ said Ash, feeling confused, and pushing his glasses back onto his nose with his finger.
‘Some people say Iran, others the Caspian sea, or the Middle East,’ said Pablo. ‘But as far as I can gather from my reading, the evidence is highly contested either way, which is why it is so easy for people of one particular persuasion to hijack the debate. The problem with your contribution is that in order to prove which way this so-called Aryan people went, you’ll have to look at the DNA of population groups from Europe to India at least as far east as Bengal – wherever the Indo-European language group stretches, in fact. Whereas you are telling me that your study will focus on a maximum of ten Indian individuals. What this will prove I have no idea.’
‘I am trying to identify an historic people,’ Ash said in a tiny voice.
‘Why?’ asked Pablo.
‘For intellectual interest,’ Ash said, his face growing hot with displeasure and unhappiness.
‘All that will happen,’ Pablo replied, ‘is your research will play into the hands of the nutcases currently running the country.’
‘But isn’t it worth finding out for sure? Sunita’s father thinks he is a pure Indian Aryan.’
Pablo laughed. ‘What has he got to do with it?’
‘He’s really interested in my research.’
‘Ash,’ Pablo tapped his head with his hand. ‘Sunita is very nice – but believe me, her father is a crackpot. You know the kind of unscientific rubbish those people speak, surely. They condemn as anti-Indian anyone who thinks the Aryans might not have been indigenous to this country.’
‘You just told me the evidence goes either way,’ Ash said.
‘I also said that there are groups in this country who use that extreme complexity to befuddle people and tell them that the debate is cut and dried when it’s not. Shiva Prasad is linked to—’
But Ash, feeling defensive about his betrothed and her family, was no longer listening. To his own relief, after months of confusion and internal debate, things were made very simple one warm afternoon when he broached the issue with his supervisor at the lab. Instead of throwing up his hands in horror, as Pablo had done, the man sat back, unwrapped a boiled sweet and sucked on it for a while. ‘Interesting, very interesting,’ he murmured at last. ‘I suppose you could try to prove the Aryan migration by examining data from, say, east India, Pakistan, Russia, Germany . . . Though if you find nothing conclusive – and given your expansive canvas, such a thing is not unlikely – the right-wingers will use it to prove that this Aryan gene is indigenous, of course—’
The statements petered out, and Ash realised that the man was thinking. They sat together in silence, and finally his supervisor said: ‘I like it. Go ahead with this Aryan idea. If you find something juicy, we’ll send it to one of the journals.’
Ash was pleased – relieved – and he threw himself into the work. To his father-in-law’s delight, Ash took blood samples from each member of the Sharma family, subjecting the samples to routine forensic analysis, and adding them to his population database for the Aryan chapter. From then on, whenever Mr Sharma asked him what he was up to, and how the research was going, Ash murmured something equivocal about history and something specific about genetics – imitating to perfection the manner of his own supervisor – and this kept Sunita’s father happy. No spanners were thrown into the works of the wedding preparations.
‘Ash!’ said two voices at once, and Ash saw two people converging on him at the same time from the other side of the Rose Garden – Bharati, dressed in a heavily embroidered pink and red salwar kameez, her eyes made up with kohl, and Ram, looking sexy and nonchalant, clad all in white but for a long indigo cotton scarf draped over one shoulder.
‘Hello,’ Ash said to both of them at once and neither in particular, hoping that his consternation didn’t show, presuming – praying – that Ram, who had caress
ed him so lovingly that night, would know how to behave with him in public. He thought to himself, as he had thought during the night, This is Man-God in the flesh, and the idea that the mystery man he had Internet-chatted with almost every evening for a year was here in front of him gave him a whoozy, disorientated feeling. He wished he could get away from this party, he longed for it to be over, he felt incapable of making chitchat. He had no idea how he was going to get through the next four days until he and Sunita left for their honeymoon in Goa – a departure that had been delayed until after his birthday, so that they could attend the opening of the Living Sanskrit Akademi, which was a major event for his father. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. But Bharati was saying something to him with all her usual intensity.
‘Ash!’ she repeated. ‘I’ve got to speak to you. Privately.’ And she smiled sweetly at the old man with the beard, and glared at Ram, clearly expecting them both to get the message and disappear.
The old man obediently melted away. Ram, however, was not to be put off by the rudeness of his lover’s sister.
‘Namaskar,’ he said to her, placing his hands together respectfully – and also pursing his lips, so that Ash couldn’t help but remember the pleasures and traumas those very lips had so recently unleashed in his being. ‘It’s so good to meet you finally. Sunita has told me you are living in London, that you have fled our despicable city. I imagine you living in a large house in . . . Chelsea.’ He smiled at her, knowing full well that such a vision was impossible. ‘Or Mayfair, or Hampstead—’
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