Their journey in the morning would be on foot, their host told them, before retiring back to his liquor and his children in the tiny back room which was his year-round home. Unable to sleep, the man listened to the alien sounds of the city folk and to the howling of the monsoon wind.
In Goa too the wind was rising, ripping tiny waves off the sea's surface and sending late swimmers towards the shore. Everywhere along Aguada beach stallholders were packing up their things or hauling tarpaulin and ropes along the sand.
Sara had finished telling DC Mazumdar about the time that she, Cameron and Adam took the young Vincent Sinbari under their wing and showed him their city. She mentioned the open invitation they had all had from his tycoon father to be guests in return, and the vouchers his secretary had sent them in the mail. When persistently questioned about each location she had visited with or without Adam and the dates for these visits, she feigned confusion and uncertainty. She wisely refused to speculate about any further dealings between her lover and Sinbari. Her head ached and she felt as if her body was disintegrating around her. The buzz of the local flies sounded louder than helicopters. But her heart felt lighter than it had before she spoke out. And she did not regret the decision.
She was allowed to return to her hotel, but told to stay in the vicinity and to phone the station at ten every morning. When she asked if Adam was a suspect she was told in no uncertain terms that they couldn't say. They would have to liaise with Hàrélal in Delhi before making up their minds. That might take some days. When she asked if Antonio Sinbari was a suspect, they said warily that everyone in a murder enquiry was a suspect but that this wasn't a murder enquiry. Yet.
*
When Inspector Ribera called him, murder enquiries were amongst the last things on Hàrélal's mind so he signalled to his secretary to take a message. This Mrs Méghé did, trying hard to comprehend the strange accent of the Goan officer and making numerous mistakes in her transcription of the message. At the conclusion of the call, she dropped her notes into her boss's in-try and continued with her previous work.
*
Hàrélal felt as if he was the only person in the world who was trying to get Tanya back. He had located her, late the previous evening, ensconced at the residence of Lal Bahuba Saané, one of his 'trusted' and elite guards to whom the task of following her around had been so confidently allocated five months ago. Now, all the girl's mother could say was 'Let the child rest a bit', as if the foolish ingrate had not been doing precisely that for the past sixteen days, leaving her mother to wither like a leaf and her father to call in more favours than anyone owed him and which had probably bankrupted him for life in the favour department. Yes, he'd found her, but that was only at the moment of despair when he had begun to feel that were it not for his need of revenge against that bastard Sinbari, he might have contemplated taking his own life.
So, what possible excuses could the women dream up now? Sentimental, illogical, totally remorseless – they were.
Number one, they were claiming that he'd driven his daughter to this insolent vileness by his overprotectiveness. Was there such as thing as overprotectiveness in today's society, he'd countered, reminding them of the Goongha girl who was seduced, then tortured and left for dead on the side of the Gopalganj flyover. The world is cruel.
But the women were having none of it.
By throwing Tanya repeatedly alongside this young man – who apparently had been detailed to guard her in the nights and had been left to do this solo, on occasion, due to staff sickness or unreliability – had he not created in her bosom an unreasonable attachment to Lal Bahuba Saané, displaced Maharastrian and erstwhile pugilist? After all, the only men who should be protecting a girl were her brother, her father or her husband. Thus spoke Mrs Hàrélal.
And Tanya herself? She would not justify or apologise or explain. She'd wanted Lal Bahuba. Recklessly. So what if she had flirted with Jimmy Parikh's son? Was there an engagement? What was the matter with her father? Did he think that Saané was less of a man because he employed him? Hadn't he once told her that Kailash Karmel was like a brother to her, a son to him, despite his family-bereft, casteless existence? Wasn't he always saying that mother's guru was the wisest man they knew? And he wore rags at least once a week! Couldn't they all just get along and stop arguing because it was not good for any of them.
Oh, and yes, she was pregnant.
Chaos drifted into their habitually ordered home. Sulking, Hàrélal decided to sleep at the office. His clothes took on the slightly wilted look of one who is not getting them freshly starched each morning. His secretary tried to discuss the on-going Olympic games with him, knowing his weakness for athletics and his admiration for Italian athletes. But all she got for her trouble was a dirty look.
After two nights haunted by visions of his daughter dying during childbirth – of which he had only the sketchiest understanding – he was ready to go home; but stubbornness made him refuse to see his daughter. The one time he had seen her, on the day she was located, he had wanted so badly to hug her, to hit her, to show her he cared. She had looked so unfamiliar, yet so dear, with her pretty kurta that now hid a tiny bump and her designer maternity jeans. Ridiculous that she had kept secrets from him for so long; absurd that he had not suspected. And then images of Lal Bahuba Saané mounting his little girl flashed and he was all rage again, all bluster, and reconciliation seemed like foreign territory.
He missed Kailash until his head ached.
He personally supervised a number of criminal investigations – stuff he hadn't handled for years. A woman fell from a tower block – newly married, known to have complained about her in-laws only weeks before. Did she jump or was she pushed? And even if she did jump, could her husband's family still not be held morally accountable? He had never thought like this before. He had never wanted to enter the mind of a woman or question the motives of his kind.
In another landmark case, a bus driver was successfully prosecuted for failing to stop at a clearly marked bus-stop during rush hour. He did his sixty days in jail and then drove his bus at seventy kilometres per hour into an unsuspecting crowd of commuters near LC College. Most of them were young women. Their families were devastated. The local ruling party were alleging that the driver was actually a terrorist, following in the footsteps of recent suicide bombers. The Police were forced to act.
His whole family had been arrested, including his pregnant sister. She was stoned by families of the victims on her way to jail and lost first her baby and then her life. The papers claimed that the cops stood by and watched the woman die, chewing paan, chatting. One prestigious Daily alleged that the cops even joined in. The bus driver's family were lower caste; puzzled villagers in an alien setting. They didn't stand a chance.
Hàrélal couldn't take any more. He found tears in his eyes. Only action could abate such throes of conscience. He called in some more favours and discovered that a party of Sinbari's people had set off for an unknown destination in the north two days previously. So, he was sending a team up there to discredit the police department by discovering the body. He'd deliberately misled them all to throw them off the scent! He probably wanted to get one of his friends appointed as Chief Superintendent. Bastard. Dirty rascal. Liar. Chor. Stealing from India and giving to Italy. If a crime had been committed, and it surely had, he decided that Sinbari was going to pay – in taxes or in some other, less fashionable way!
Meanwhile, entirely unaware of the fury he had engendered in Hàrélal's breast, Antonio Sinbari was calling in experts. He had rarely had cause to do so before, Sadrettin's multitalented labour standing him in good stead during the past seven years. Now, slaveless and angry, he tried to find the source of the leak in his company. His hands shook slightly as he puzzled over the meaning of the deleted files.
Who would have searched his mail with such success? Who would have tried not once but several times to find his correspondence and finally, accessing it, who would have deleted and perhaps cop
ied the very files that he was most anxious to preserve?
The experts assured him that no one had used his machine to make copies of anything he'd written or else it would have been clearly shown on the data-log; from an external computer and using a modem to link-in, however, anyone canny enough could have accessed and copied his mail: codes and passwords were easy to break these days and by-passing them was big business. There were ways of accessing his computer's automatic back-up system and recovering those letters if he wished them to do it. No, he did not; he would do it himself if the need arose. Okay, then, we'll be off sir, if there's nothing more we can do to help you. Time is money, as you know.
Soaking in his hot tub later that evening, he tried to forget about the day's events. His cook provided an excellent roast and he began to feel himself relax. Pudding was superb. But nothing could quite banish the spectre of the computer invasion from his thoughts. Someone had used his password, gone through all his files and, having wasted the chance to access important information about capital and mergers and bids, had settled on his correspondence with Cameron as the only data worthy of deletion. Who would have done that and why? For several hours Antonio Sinbari pondered this little conundrum and the more he thought about it, the more he saw it as a warning. Someone knew or suspected his plans. Perhaps they wished to prevent his expansion in the north; perhaps they had some less precise, some messier motive. Whom had he thwarted in the past few weeks?
The list was long and worrying, even for a man with no conscience; his dreams that night were brief and unpleasant.
16
Reptilian Stitching Woman and her swollen-bellied daughter featured in Karmel's dreams that night but he couldn't retain any precise images of them when he woke. Eager to hold Thahéra to her suggestion about guiding him around the area, he dressed with record speed and shaved twice but when he opened his door and saw the sharp grey drizzle he was sure that she would refuse him, make some excuse and abandon him to his solitary projects again.
Half an hour later, the growing belief that Thahéra wouldn't show made his limbs weak; he squatted by his door, allowing the wind to spatter him with rain. Then he heard the self-pity and disappointment in his thoughts and a wry awareness of absurdity gave him renewed energy. He was not in the district for a dalliance with a pretty village woman. Having verified the facts he should have immediately notified headquarters and then received new instructions. The mobile phone was useless up here but he could have made his trip down to Charmoli two days back in order to use a telephone or to Bhukta to use the post. Locals did those journeys twice a week.
He planned his day. Perhaps he should try to rescue the corpse and transport it somehow to Delhi; but that seemed fanciful, given the changed weather and the difficulty of the terrain on the descent. He had determined to take himself off in the direction of the lake, ignoring his hostess' promise, when Thahéra herself appeared, breathless and urgent.
'Hurry, sir, please! She is dying! My neighbour's girl – sick, since last night . . ..' Abandoning his plans, Karmel stuffed an assortment of medicines and first aid items into a small backpack and hastened after her.
A group of anxious people were gathered around the girl's bed. She was running a high fever and at first Karmel thought that she might have Malaria, for she was shivering uncontrollably and there were septic mosquito bites all over her thin legs. But after touching the child gently and asking questions he realised that there was no pattern to the fever and that the girl had complained about a terrible pain in her gums for several days. He asked her mother, a hunched woman with straw-coloured eyebrows and buck teeth, to wake her.
Looking inside a mouth which gave off a stench reminiscent of city sewers in summer, Karmel was sure he had found the girl's problem: an infection under and around one of her teeth. Rot had set in and it was difficult to see where the gum ended and the tooth began, but he felt certain that the tooth needed to come out, and fast.
With Thahéra's help he sterilised cloth and gathered implements that might aid him in his task. The other villagers saw what he was planning to do but remained sceptical; an old man he hadn't seen before opened an almost toothless mouth to show three utterly decayed teeth. He mumbled that he had never had such a fever. 'What do you say to that, stranger, huh?' Karmel didn't bother to reply. If the tooth broke up he would be powerless for he had only the most rudimentary skills, acquired when he was young and lived on the roads, watching street dentists and bone-men heal or pretend to heal the destitute and the desperate.
The girl screamed so much that almost all those in the vicinity thought he was killing her. Women argued loudly with Thahéra when she asked them to leave but ultimately only the child's immediate family remained to watch as blood poured from the little girl's mouth and tears from her eyes. She looked possessed. At last the tooth, a molar with deep roots, rendered itself up to the tarnished silver tongs and Karmel fell back against the wall. After that he worked swiftly, cleaning the cavity, packing it with cotton, disinfecting her whole mouth and forcing her to swallow crushed analgesics on a spoon. Her mother thanked Karmel without being overly grateful. Then, as he turned from the now quiescent girl, Karmel noticed Thahéra's sister, a scarf pulled low on her brow, leaning against a wall of the cabin and watching him with her pale eyes. When he smiled at her, she turned her head away and withdrew hastily from the room. A shy village woman.
It was nearly ten a.m.; he had spent three hours trying to get the tooth out.
Lightening flashed as Thahéra accompanied him back towards his own cabin and when they had stepped inside and closed the door, thunder started in a monotonous bullying roll. During the walk his mind had been preoccupied, but for once it was not by his companion. In the cabin to which he had been called he had spotted something that aroused his curiosity: it was a sweatshirt, worn by one of the older boys, sporting a Nike logo and still relatively clean.
Under guise of wanting to keep the girl warm he had begged the use of this item. When the garment was in his hands, in the moments before he slid it over the shivering child, he examined the label. So, signs of the foreigners were everywhere, but no one mentioned them. Should he come straight out and request the villagers' help, revealing his status and his purpose – or were they all in on it?
Noting the grim expression on his face, Thahéra didn't speak. Once inside the cabin, she stood quietly leaning against a wall, unconsciously mimicking her sister's pose. What had he been thinking earlier, dismissing her as 'pretty'? She was one of the most startlingly beautiful women he had ever met. Even if her face had not been so alluring – that wide mouth, those sparkling, long-lashed eyes – the swell of her bosom and hips might goad a lover to distraction.
He stared at her and swallowed but made no move, savouring the adolescent discomfort of an erection he had sudden thoughts of satisfying. Ultimately it was she who reached out and pulled him by the wrist until they were seated side by side on the string cot, which sagged beneath them. Resting her forehead against his, she opened her grey eyes wide. Smiled. The fringe of her scarf tickled him and he swept it away, trailing tentative fingers across her cheek. She pulled him towards her and their breathing became coarse. When the silky softness of his lips brushed the parched roughness of hers, she dug her fingers into his back and pressed herself against him as if to leave him in no doubt of her willingness. Looking over her shoulder, however, he was unaccountably distracted by the rusting tin trunk in the corner of the bare expanse of his cabin. Another detective would have closed his eyes, shut out the sight, at least until sex had boiled its way to climax. Not Karmel.
His brain danced and spun; he drew back and spoke tenderly to Thahéra, reminding her that she had promised to accompany him on a walk that day and suggesting that she make them some food to take along. Usually so outspoken and confident, she seemed suddenly shy, and simply nodded her head in response. Moving further from her, he drew her to her feet. He could see that her lips were still moist from their kiss, and he longed to
pull her towards him once more, but his job came first. There'd be time for kisses later, once his curiosity was satisfied.
He led her towards the door and pushed her firmly over the threshold in his eagerness to search the trunk.
17
Everywhere across the plains the monsoon started. In Delhi and the surrounding areas a few fitful showers laid the dust to rest and took the edge off the heat. Karmel's landlady looked regularly at her calendar to determine how many days her handsome lodger had been gone and on the morning of the first rain of the year she marked a big red dot. It symbolised freshness and fertility in her mind. She used to mark a green dot until one of her relatives asked if she was marking Pakistani Independence day and she stopped using green altogether.
August was advancing and the summer was over for another year. In Bhukta and Charmoli the side streets turned to rivulets of muddy brown water with treacherous stones underneath. Cobbled paths were equally difficult to negotiate. People knew that these clouds would not want to depart until they had shed their burden so they wisely refrained from speaking about the weather and got on with their lives.
Only in Bhukta Lodge, Sinbari's party of architects, surveyors and secretaries bemoaned their fate. They had a DEADLINE. They were expected to report back. Time was Money. Money was being wasted. True, in Delhi each one of them with their westernised tastes and expensive habits would have spent up to eight times more than the miserable hundred rupees they were paying the owner of the Lodge; true they were all on monthly salaries that would have made most Indians blanche. But still, their employer's time was precious. And he was expecting them back within a week.
Taylor and Cornell tried to use their mobile phones to keep up with market news; when the satellites cut out they took to alcohol and became increasingly caustic about their employer. They made a pact that they were returning to Delhi if the rains kept up beyond the morrow. Narayan made a pass at Rimi and was slapped for his pains. Sadrettin watched it all, awkward, reticent, bothered to distraction by Rimi's constant flirting and unable to decide whom he hated most from amongst his colleagues.
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