What Maya Saw

by Shabnam Minwalla

  This photograph was of a shield carved on the triangular, white pediment, just below the statues. The shield was divided into four segments.

  In one segment was Britannia, posing with a lion by her side.

  On another segment was the carving of a plump sheep with a ribbon around its midriff.

  The third segment depicted a boat sailing towards a pagoda.

  The last showed an elephant standing near a palm tree.

  Maya was gibbering with excitement. ‘Sheep, ship, pagoda …’

  She re-read the poem, ticking each line with a yellow marker.

  Britannia with her trident does rise (tick)

  Under warm blue skies (tick)

  We three sit at her feet (tick)

  Where many lands do meet (tick)

  A sheep represents Australia (tick)

  A pretty pagoda is China (tick)

  What am I? (India?)

  Grabbing her phone she dialled Veda, who answered with a sour, ‘What?’

  ‘Are you near your computer? Get onto Google and type exactly what I tell you.’

  Veda humphed but, for once, did as she was told. ‘She must really be feeling ill,’ Maya thought as she waited for Veda’s reaction. Which was gratifying when it came. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Veda gabbled. ‘This building is just a 10-minute walk from St Paul’s. I’ve passed it dozens of times. But I’ve never noticed these statues.’

  ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Maya asked.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Veda said. ‘But what’s the answer to “Who am I?”’

  ‘India? That seems obvious, doesn’t it?’

  ‘India? I don’t know … Maybe … But how does it help us?’

  ‘The key must be hidden in that saree-clad statue next to Britannia. The one that represents India.’

  Veda was silent for a beat. ‘In my opinion, that’s a risky place to leave a key. I can’t imagine Father Lorenzo creeping around a big bank in the middle of the night shoving keys into statues. Also, the article on the Internet goes on and on about how beautifully the building has been conserved. When all that repairing and painting was going on, wouldn’t somebody have spotted the key?’

  ‘Ohhh,’ Maya said, sounding deflated. ‘Can’t we check anyway?’

  ‘Let’s go and look at the building tomorrow, but I doubt they’ll let us on the roof unless we have great contacts. CEO-level contacts. It’s good you’ve identified the Standard Chartered Building. But at this point, we don’t really know what to do with it.’

  Feeling as flattened as a squashed cockroach, Maya settled down and tried to catch up on homework that had piled up because of a dead priest, a potion of eternal youth and a bunch of glamorous senior citizens. ‘When you put it like that,’ she thought bitterly, ‘it sounds like I’m trapped in one of those half-witted fantasy novels. Please somebody let me out!’

  CHAPTER 23

  Maya woke up on Wednesday morning to a series of messages from Lola.

  ‘Seize the day.’

  ‘I know he likes you.’

  ‘Long striped jacket over white tank top.’

  ‘Don’t ditch.’

  ‘Jeans.’

  ‘Try a French braid. Otherwise I’ll do it for you.’

  ‘Lipgloss, pleeeease.’

  Maya followed the instructions and headed for breakfast. Her father was busy with the Times of India, but when he saw Maya he whistled. ‘Going for a party?’

  Mrs Anand popped the toaster and raised her eyebrow at her husband. ‘Who goes for parties at 8 a.m.? Nobody that I know.’

  ‘True, true,’ Mr Anand said, retreating behind the newspaper. Then he popped out again. ‘Maya, I’ve given those pictures to Mr Gomes. He recognised one or two of the saints. But he’s going to check on the others.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Maya said, loading her burnt toast with strawberry jam. The chapel had yielded its clue, and she didn’t need the saints. But her father was so eager to help that she just smiled back.

  ‘In fact, he mentioned that one of them was his own patron saint,’ Mr Anand continued. ‘St Anthony, I think. He’s the saint of lost things. We had a good laugh over that. Mr Gomes is a champion at losing things. He has lost at least four mobile phones in the last three years.’

  Maya sat up. Her attention had been snagged by something her father mentioned. ‘Saint of lost things. That’s interesting,’ she said, before turning to her mother. ‘I need to leave early today. Shall I just take a taxi?’

  Mrs Anand looked at the clock. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I have a Big Basket order coming in this morning. So go by taxi but call when you reach.’

  Maya scooted into her room, checked her hair and lemonade-flavoured lip-gloss, made sure that she had change for the taxi and left the house. As she walked through the building compound, she automatically looked for Mr Pinkwhistle.

  His absence was a punch in the solar plexus.

  Maya was still hurting when she reached MG Road. Veda was in place—rather subdued in violet trimmed with silver— gazing at the building across the road. Maya joined her, trying to find a spot on the pavement amidst the stream of pedestrians flowing from Churchgate Station to their offices in Fort.

  A rumble of red buses blocked their view and the aroma of frying vadas and spicy red chutneys scented the area. ‘Do you feel like a vada pav?’ she asked Veda, gazing hungrily at the oily newspaper bundles. ‘Nothing made in a super-clean kitchen by a health-conscious cook can ever be as yummy as street food.’

  ‘Nothing made in a super-clean kitchen by a health-conscious cook gives hepatitis or cholera,’ came the killjoy answer. ‘Anyway, let’s do what we came to do and leave before we’re trampled to death. Look on top of the pediment.’

  ‘What?’ Maya asked confused.

  ‘That white triangular bit on top of the building,’ Veda said with exaggerated patience.

  Maya rolled her eyes. Normal people didn’t use words like pediment in everyday conversation. Normal people ate vada pav when they got the chance.

  Instead of sticking her tongue out at Veda—which is what she really, really wanted to do—she looked at the solid mass of the Standard Chartered building. A frisson of recognition ran up her spine. Standing above the white triangle were the familiar marble figures – dramatic and white against the azure sky. Britannia looked like a bully. A crow was perched on China’s curly locks. India and Australia looked slouchy and meek.

  Carved on the white pediment was the shield that Maya had examined so carefully on the computer. ‘OK,’ Veda interrupted her little gloat. ‘We’ve found the clue. But what does it mean? What is the answer to that last question – Who am I?’

  ‘India?’ asked Maya. ‘The answer has to be India. Just think about it. Ouch.’

  A blue box file slammed into her tummy, and a furious face glared at her before being carried along by the current of office-goers. ‘You’re right. We’re going to be trampled to death.’

  Veda ducked behind a yellow school bus and spoke firmly. ‘I don’t think the key’s in a statue here. Look at how exposed and public it is. Father Lorenzo knew his clues had to survive decades. So he had to choose hiding places that were safe. In my opinion, he was too …’

  ‘Wily,’ Maya supplied.

  ‘Not the sort to hide a key in such a ridiculous spot. So we may have found the building but we haven’t solved the clue.’

  ‘Still, we can rejoice for a few seconds,’ Maya protested.

  ‘Rejoice all you want,’ Veda said, cutting through the stream of pedestrians. ‘But we need to walk. Class starts soon.’

  Maya trotted behind Veda in thoughtful silence. They’d managed to follow the 60-year-old clue hunt from the chapel to the gargoyle to the Standard Chartered Building. So why did this feel like a dead end? Could the answer be in the other stanzas?

  She tried to ask Veda, but only got dismissive sniffs in reply. ‘I’ve got a bad headache. Can we please just get out of the sun?’

  Veda’s mood didn’t improve when they reach
ed Lecture Room 113. She was livid to find that the Crystals—giggling and chirruping as always—had spread themselves all over the front, middle bench.

  Veda believed the front bench existed for her alone. Or, perhaps, for her and Aadil. But definitely not for aspiring fashion designers who sat around, lip-syncing, posing and posting endlessly on Instagram.

  ‘We’ve got 78 likes already,’ one of them was announcing, and Veda winced.

  ‘My seat has gone. This is too much,’ she exploded.

  Maya didn’t care where she sat. (Well, that wasn’t strictly true. In an ideal world—one in which she knew Sanath was not a Shadow, one in which girls with names like Minty were vaporised—she would have liked to sit next to Sanath. But as Sanath was not even around, that was irrelevant.)

  So she sank into a cool corner seat, mopped her brow, pulled out her pad and waved at Lola, who was chatting with VJ/DJ/CJ. After casting surreptitious glances, Maya flipped to the last page.

  The Goddess of Wealth stands so high (Lakshmi?)

  A lotus grand raises her to the sky

  She grants favours to the building below

  While I watch all those who come and go

  I spend my days with a consort and his queen

  And the history that Bombay has seen

  On a verdant island I once lived

  Before I was smashed to bits

  Maya gnawed on her pencil. She knew the dangers of lead poisoning. She knew about the boy who needed surgery after his lip was impaled by his pencil. Still, she just couldn’t help it. A problem of this magnitude required a good chew.

  Okay, where would you find a statue of Lakshmi on a lotus, raised to the sky? On a mountain? In a garden? On a building?

  Maya was so busy nibbling and pondering that she didn’t realise there was anything amiss. She didn’t even react to the first screams.

  It was only when others joined in, when furniture was roughly pushed aside, when somebody started crying that she looked up. Students were surging to the front of the class, in the direction of a high-pitched, inarticulate cry.

  Scrambling to her feet, Maya joined the crowd. It took her some time to understand the cause of the commotion. One of the Crystals—it later transpired that her name was Katrina— was standing in the middle of the crowd, howling. Her face was white and streaked with tears.

  One hand was flailing. The other was caught between the sharp, rusty teeth of a clunky contraption. A mean, old-fashioned rattrap. Blood ran down from the small, mangled hand.

  Everybody was paralysed – and it was a couple of minutes before Clinton rushed away to find Brother Francis and Rupali ran for the college nurse. Nobody dared tackle the evil contraption and Katrina shook helplessly, while her friends patted her and whispered, ‘Any minute … soon be over … don’t worry.’

  Relief rippled through the room when Brother Francis arrived. Within seconds, he released the mechanism of the trap. The jaws opened with a reluctant creak and unclamped the twisted, bloody hand.

  Doubling up in pain and shock, Katrina sank to the floor while Brother Francis ranted, ‘What you were doing with the rat trap? You’re a fool or what? I think you’ve broken your finger.’

  ‘She didn’t do anything,’ two Crystals retorted. ‘You can’t blame her. How was she to know the trap was in the desk.’

  ‘How can you put a rat trap in the college desk?’ Mandira yelled. ‘Someone will obviously get hurt. We should check all the desks.’

  Nervous students ducked their heads to peek inside, but Brother Francis was aghast. ‘Nobody puts rat traps in desks,’ he said. ‘What rubbish you are saying. These traps are put in the college grounds and on the staircases.’

  ‘But it was in the desk,’ the most belligerent of the Crystals repeated. ‘It Was In The Desk.’

  ‘How it came here?’ Brother Francis yelled back. ‘Now everybody will blame me. There is only one man in this whole college to be blamed.’

  A hush fell over the room as the college nurse strode in alongside Radhika Rathod. She examined Katrina’s mangled hand and shook her head. ‘The finger seems fractured,’ she tutted, before leading the sobbing girl away. ‘The hand will need to be dressed. She will need a tetanus injection. We’ll need to go to hospital.’

  Katrina went with the nurse, and her friends trailed behind with solemn expressions. Brother Francis carried away the bloodstained rattrap. All the others sat in stunned silence till Radhika Rathod said, ‘I hope none of you was involved in this terrible, terrible prank. Can somebody please tell me exactly what happened? Rehana?’

  ‘Ma’am, Katrina was sitting in the front row,’ Rehana responded, pointing at the desk. ‘I think she’d put her bag in the shelf under the desk. Her phone rang and she put her hand inside. Then she started screaming. She pulled out her hand and it came out, caught in that … that … thing.’

  ‘It was horrible.’

  ‘There was blood everywhere.’

  ‘Really evil.’

  ‘But why?’ Radhika Rathod asked the babbling, shuddering students. ‘After all, anybody could have been sitting there. Anybody at all. So what was the point of such a random act?’

  Radhika Rathod’s words jolted Maya out of her incomprehension.

  Whatever Radhika Rathod believed, this wasn’t an act of random mischief. The rattrap’s pointy, hungry teeth had been waiting for a certain student.

  The student who always bagged the middle seat in the front row.

  Maya caught Veda’s eye. Veda was pallid.

  Radhika Rathod was coming to the end of her tirade. Looking tight-lipped she said, ‘In view of what has happened, I would really have liked to cancel class today. But we’ll go ahead because Professor Brown has a free slot, and will be talking to you about the plague epidemic in Bombay. He will be here in a couple of minutes so please settle down.’

  On cue, the door swung open and Father D’Gama ushered in the blond man who’d been spotted all over the college. ‘Doesn’t he look just like Hugh Grant?’ somebody whispered, and a few girls looked moony.

  Professor Brown climbed onto the platform and gave an affable nod. ‘I study plague epidemics and their impact on local communities,’ he said in a clipped British accent. ‘A fascinating business and few epidemics have been stranger than the one that swept through the island city of Bombay at the turn of the century. It marked the city in many ways, as we will see.’

  The Englishman launched into a story that opened with a spate of deaths in the hovels of Mandvi in 1896. He recounted the tale with the gusto of a first-person account. ‘Almost as if he had been there, rushing into the narrow lanes with Dr Viegas and watching rats scurry through the warehouses,’ Maya thought and then scolded herself.

  She had to stop seeing Shadows wherever she went.

  CHAPTER 24

  In the 15-minute break between classes, Veda and Maya hurried to Professor Kekobad’s office. Veda tapped on the swing door with the red and yellow glass squares and the two girls burst into the room.

  Professor Kekobad looked cross. ‘Anything important? I’m working.’

  Maya felt indignant. This depressing, untidy cubbyhole with its medicinal fug was the last place she wanted to be. She was here because she had no option.

  Veda, though, ignored the professor’s ill-humour and sank down onto one of the rickety chairs. ‘Please professor,’ she said, ‘we have to talk. I’m very afraid.’

  Squeezing her left hand—as if to reassure herself that it was intact—she told Professor Kekobad about the trail of clues that had ended so abruptly at the Standard Chartered Building. ‘We just don’t know where to go from here,’ she confessed, before launching into the story about Katrina and the rattrap. ‘Maya feels it was meant for me because the trap was placed where I usually sit.’

  Veda sniffed into a hanky and the professor paled. ‘This gets worse and worse,’ he rasped. ‘Those useless policemen have been in and out of the college, but Father Furtado is still missing. Nobody seems to kno
w who attacked Wagle. And now this!’

  ‘How’s Wagle?’ Veda asked.

  ‘In a bad way,’ the professor replied, shaking his head. ‘Please guard your backs. I would have felt better if Aadil had been with you. There is safety in numbers. The Shadows are capable of anything.’

  ‘They’re desperate,’ Maya agreed, trying her best to remain upbeat. ‘But even if they try to scare us, they won’t hurt us badly. They need us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ both Veda and Professor Kekobad demanded.

  Maya tried to organise the thoughts that tumbled around her head. She was convinced that the Shadows needed her and Veda too much to kill them. Mr Pinkwhistle, the rattrap, the threatening messages were attempts to prod them into finding the keys. Only then would the Shadows really strike.

  ‘The Shadows have been looking for the keys for some time now,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think they’ve made progress. Maybe they’re hoping we’ll crack the clues and lead them to the keys.’

  ‘Then why are they trying to break our fingers in rusty rattraps that can cause septicemia?’ Veda snapped. ‘In my dictionary, poisoning dogs and springing traps is dangerous behaviour. Thank you very much.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that they won’t hurt us the way they hurt Wagle,’ Maya said. ‘They need us alive. But they need us scared.’

  ‘Oh, so now we are to be grateful,’ Veda barked. ‘You haven’t had a narrow escape this morning, so you don’t know how I’m feeling. But, more and more, I think we should go to the police.’

  Maya sighed. Bossy Veda was bad, but Hysterical Veda was dreadful.

  ‘No police,’ Professor Kekobad intervened. ‘If you do something so foolhardy, I will tell the police that you are delusional. This story is not to spread any further than it already has. Can’t you see the harm it will do?’

  ‘Can we just look at the next two verses of the poem?’ Maya asked, before the professor could continue his rant. ‘Professor, I was reading the stanza about the consort and queen … umm …’

  ‘I spend my days with a consort and his queen,’ Veda recited.