‘What?’
‘If you have come this far … you’ve found the key. Just remember that … umm … every key needs a … lock.’
‘Oh God. Not another riddle. What does it mean?’
‘That we’ve found the key. But we haven’t. The only keys we’ve seen belonged to the door and the chest.’
Maya and Veda looked at each other with sudden hope.
‘The key to the chest didn’t work.’
‘Maybe because it’s not the key to the chest …’
‘Shine the torch.’
Maya focused the beam on the key sitting in a little keyhole in the chest. Both girls gulped.
The chest had a key and a keyhole, but that’s it. There was no lock.
‘Every key needs a lock,’ Veda said. ‘Which means …’
‘Which means we’ve found it,’ Maya chanted, and stooped to pull the brass key out of the keyhole. It was dainty – smaller than her little finger and exquisitely made. Maya tucked it away in her jeans pocket and gurgled, ‘We’ve found it.’
‘We’ve found one key,’ Veda corrected her. ‘What about the remaining two?’
‘What?’ Maya asked.
‘The other two keys, Maya. I wish you wouldn’t vanish into the clouds every 20 seconds,’ Veda lectured. ‘Are the other keys here or somewhere else? I really don’t have time for more of this. I need to focus on assignments. I’m depending on getting credits from the Summer School.’
‘I think there’s just one key here,’ Maya replied. ‘The note clearly said “found one key”. So now what?’
‘Now we get out from here,’ Veda said.
Maya groaned, imagining the walk past dead things, hollow sockets and shadow-filled staircases. Now that they had the key they were more at risk than ever. It was a journey fraught with peril.
It was as she stepped out of the storeroom into the vast Zoology gallery that she heard the sound.
Clap, Clap, CLAP!
The hairs on her neck stood on end. Clutching Veda’s kurta, she dashed across the twilit gallery as the clapping grew louder and faster. They had almost reached the door to the staircase when two silhouettes emerged from dark corners and glided towards them.
‘Well done. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done any better. I always knew you were a bright spark, Veda.’
It was the boy from the chapel. The boy who smelt of death. Aniruddh.
‘And she likes you, she really, really likes you. If she shed about 20 kilos and changed her face around a bit she might be quite adorable.’
It was the girl with the horns. Amara.
Maya flinched as the two figures approached, soft-footed and relentless.
‘Give us the keys.’
‘We know you have the keys. We heard you. Give them to us.’
‘No,’ Veda said.
‘Noooo?’ Amara asked again, fluffing her glossy black curls around her sneering face. ‘Do you know what happens to nerds who say no? Aniruddh, show her.’
Aniruddh flashed his dazzling, white smile and flexed his muscular hands. Maya remembered the steel grip around her throat and fear flashed bright and hot in her stomach.
‘Just give me the keys, Nerda,’ Amara drawled, walking up to Maya and grabbing her by her ponytail. ‘Or I will put a screwdriver through your friend’s eye.’
‘You see, we really like blood,’ another voice, soft and satiny, sang out from a dark corner.
Maya saw a shape behind the camel skeleton. The Girl with the Green Eyes. The girl who hung out with Pratik Purohit.
‘I’ve been fantasising about puncturing your clever, all-seeing eyes for many days now,’ the voice continued. ‘Those eyes that look at me with such disgust. And that gaze at someone else with so much adoration.’
Maya struggled, but Amara was too strong. ‘Tch tch tch,’ she said pityingly. ‘Is that the best you can do? The forces of light are pretty lame these days. C’mon now, Nerda, my patience is running out. Put the three keys on the table in front of me and I’ll let your friend go.’
‘We don’t have three keys,’ Veda said, with a mouth so dry that the words came out like a series of croaks.
‘Liar, liar pants on fire,’ Green Eyes fluted.
Amara yanked hard on the ponytail, and Maya shrieked as silver pain exploded in her skull. Somewhere in the background, someone was sobbing and talking.
The pain receded, and Maya heard Veda screaming. ‘We only found one key. These clues lead to only one key. There must be other clues for the other keys. It’s the truth.’
‘Liar,’ Green Eyes said again, but she sounded uncertain.
‘We found only one key,’ Veda repeated.
‘OK,’ Aniruddh said, walking up to Veda with an outstretched palm. ‘Then give it to me.’
Veda lifted a clenched fist and threw something across the room. It sailed high before landing in a display case filled with fish skeletons. Both Aniruddh and the Girl with Green Eyes rushed towards the case.
Amara’s grip slackened for a moment, and Maya pulled away.
Lunging for Maya, Veda grabbed her arm and propelled her out of the long room, down the stairs and into a somnolent classroom somewhere on the second floor.
‘Are you hurt?’ Veda whispered.
‘Not really,’ Maya lied, poking a finger in the pocket of her jeans and touching the hard, cool metal. ‘I don’t understand? I put the key in my pocket, and it’s still there. So how did you give them the key?’
‘I didn’t give them THE key, I gave them A key,’ Veda exulted. ‘You think I would let them get the better of us? Never. I was still holding the storeroom key in my hand – the one that was hanging outside the room. It’s brass and old-fashioned. It’s a bit big for that silver box in the chapel. But those nail-art-obsessed dumbos won’t notice the difference. And the best part is that they’ll only find out if they get hold of the other two keys. Which is never going to happen. So there.’
‘Wow,’ Maya smiled, and teetered as pain flooded her head like a gush of water. ‘That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have to look for two more keys.’
Veda nodded in gloomy agreement. ‘What I can’t understand is how they knew where we would be. I made sure we went separately so that nobody would be suspicious. Nobody followed me. And are you pretty sure that nobody followed you?’
‘As sure as possible,’ Maya said, with a sinking heart.
‘So then, how did they know? Did you tell anybody where we were going?’
Maya shook her head, but she didn’t meet Veda’s eye.
Strangely, Veda didn’t meet her eye either.
CHAPTER 29
Maya loved everything about bedtime. The AC turned down to a temperature that most people considered arctic. Her snuggly, warm quilt. The tick tock of the grandfather clock that she had rescued when her mother decided to ‘go contemporary’; and the swaying silhouette of the pipal tree that made such graceful patterns on her windowpane.
On Thursday night, though, everything seemed wrong. The AC was too cold and the quilt too warm. The clock was too loud and the pipal tree too still.
Maya tossed and turned till 1.43 a.m. Then she sat up in bed, switched on her bedside lamp and brushed her hair before pulling out a page from an old Maths notebook, grabbing a blue pencil stub from her desk and making a list. Maya was a big believer in lists – she was convinced that problems lost much of their bite when they were trapped on paper.
Ten minutes later, she had her list of ‘things bugging me’:
Stuck with key that many people would kill for. Literally.
Need to hide key.
Have to hunt for two more keys. Stress.
How did Father D’Gama know we were at Bhau Daji Lad Museum? How did the Shadows know we were in Zoology Department?
Is Lola the leak?
Or could Veda have told someone? Aadil?
Maya decided to tackle point 1 and 2. She scouted around for a hiding place, but everything seemed too obvious. In movies, they taped
things to the bottom of drawers and in flush tanks, but Maya didn’t feel up to James Bond stuff. She looked around again and then inspiration struck.
Donkey Do wore a bright red bib around his neck. The bib had been stitched so that it had a little pocket, a favourite hiding place when Maya was four or five. She pulled the key out of her bag, slipped it into the bib and gave Donkey Do a big hug. ‘Take care of it for me,’ she told the stuffed toy. ‘Now maybe I can sleep.’
Still, sleep refused to come. Whenever Maya was drifting away, her mind returned to Lola. For the first time, Maya realised just how much colour and buoyancy Lola had brought into her life. Just how much she depended on her new friend with the ridiculously high heels and moon-ball spirit. ‘Lola would never have betrayed us. It makes no sense,’ she told herself firmly.
But another voice muttered in her head. ‘What do you know about Lola? Why do you think you can trust her? How do you know she’s who she claims she is? Have you met a single person from her family?’
Maya swatted the thoughts away, but they persisted like sluggish houseflies.
Harassed, she walked to the dressing table, poured herself a glass of water and wandered to her window to look down at the silent street. Through the grills on her window and the leaves of the pipal, she glanced across at Sea View Building, with its oblivious, sleeping inhabitants.
Five floors down, the street lamps cast gauzy petticoats of light, but for the rest the night was dark and so still that not a single leaf stirred. Maya started violently when she heard a tinkling – the pretty, inoffensive clink of glass bangles and silver bells.
Ghosts in old Hindi films invariably wore white saris and jingling payals when they visited the land of the living. It was a spooky thought, but Maya scoffed at herself. ‘Those ghosts also sang droning songs and haunted lonely forest bungalows,’ she asserted. ‘Don’t be a crackpot.’
Despite this robust lecture, Maya looked around for the source of the eerie tinkling. A fresh burst of jingles gave her the answer. The stupid wind chime that hung outside the fifth floor flat in Sea View. Of course.
That flat had been empty for at least three years. On windy nights, when the chime bashed away, it seemed incredibly unfair that the owners of that hyperactive chime were sleeping peacefully in another city while she was stuck with the racket.
‘Ghosts with payals,’ Maya snorted. ‘I’m really going nuts. It’s just the dumb wind chime. Mystery solved.’
Strangely, though, the realisation didn’t make Maya feel better. Something didn’t add up. But what?
Maya stared into the oppressive night and got her answer. There wasn’t enough breeze tonight to nudge a single leaf, so what was causing the chimes to strike?
Sea View was just a narrow compound away from Pine View, barely a badminton court for beginners. Still, it was impossible to see the brown chime in the moonless night. Maya peered through the inkiness and let out a low moan.
For years and years, the Sea View window across from her bedroom had remained firmly shut. Tonight it was wide open.
As she stared at that rectangle of darkness, Maya could sense a denser blackness. Someone was watching her from across the narrow distance. Someone was enjoying her terror.
Maya sprang back from the window, switched off her lamp and huddled under her quilt. She felt the walls squeeze in on her. The Shadows were everywhere.
It was hours before Maya fell into a fitful sleep. When she awoke the next morning, headachy and scared, the window across from her was shut. The wind chime was silent.
It all could all have been a dream – except it wasn’t.
CHAPTER 30
Maya was buttering her toast and applying a thin film of orange marmalade when her father popped into the dining room and handed her a sheaf of papers.
‘With compliments from Anthony Gomes,’ he smiled, knotting his red tie. ‘I forgot to give them to you yesterday. Problems at work and old age.’
‘You’re not old,’ Maya protested. ‘What problems at work?’
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Mr Anand said, grabbing his coffee and drinking it while still standing. ‘The usual office politics.’
‘I’d hardly call it that,’ Mrs Anand said, entering the room. ‘If anything, it’s unusual office politics. I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life. At least sit and drink your coffee.’
Mr Anand left a minute later. Maya poured herself half a glass of orange juice and wished she could stay in bed. She started rifling through the pile of papers. Mr Gomes had returned the pictures of saints that she had sent to him – but on each sheet he had scrawled a name in a red marker.
‘Saint Homobonus,’ Maya read, wrinkling her brow. ‘Gosh. Never heard of him.
She studied the picture of the saint, who was wearing a flat red cap and carrying a little white sack in his hand. Around him was a busy scene, but the picture was poor and the details were blurry.
‘Maya, aren’t you getting ready?’ her mother asked, glancing at the clock. ‘I have a deadline today, so I need to get back home quickly.’
Maya grabbed the papers from the table and went to her bedroom. She shoved them into her Emoji satchel, then showered, pulled on a white t-shirt and loose grey linen pants. She tied her hair into a hasty plait and made a quick call to Veda. ‘Do you remember those Latin phrases on the stained glass?’ she asked. ‘Have you been able to translate them? I’ve got the names of the saints.’
‘Why are you fixating on those saints?’ Veda asked, while horns tooted and traffic screeched in the background.
‘Intuition,’ Maya replied.
‘Well, I’ll look up the translations but in my opinion intuition is a highly overrated ability,’ Veda said. ‘Just so you know.’
‘OK,’ Maya replied with exaggerated politeness. ‘Do you have any other way to go about this?’
‘I’m just saying,’ Veda sniffed. ‘No need to get aggressive.’
Maya scowled and hurried out of the house behind her mother. Once the car had left the Pine View compound, she asked in as casual a tone as possible, ‘Do you know if anybody’s moved into that empty apartment in Sea View?’
Mrs Anand was intrigued. ‘No. Did you see any activity?’ she asked. ‘I wonder if that Punjabi family is back. I’ll ask Mr Ranglani. He should know. He’s had his eye on that flat for years. Maybe he’s rented it out. I’ll find out.’
‘OK.’
The silver Honda stopped outside St Paul’s and Mrs Anand was about to drive away when Lola popped out of a taxi. She was wearing an Indigo blockprint dress and silver slippers. She waved enthusiastically at Mrs Anand, who waved back.
Maya flinched when she heard the tinkle of bangles. The doubts of last night made it difficult to smile. So she hung back while Mrs Anand chatted with Lola.
‘I’m coming to your place for lunch on Sunday,’ Lola said, as they walked to Lecture Room 113. ‘Your mum invited me. Anyway, we urgently need to shop for the college dance. Now pleeeeese tell me. Did you find the keys? Did you open the Tibetan box. Is it all … like over?’
Maya groped around for an answer. ‘We found one key,’ she said. ‘But somehow Aniruddh and Amara and that Girl with the Green Eyes knew we were up in the Zoology department. They attacked us and took the key.’
‘Oh,’ Lola gasped. ‘How seriously scary. So what now?’
‘We try to find the other two keys, I guess.’
‘But what’s the point?
‘What?’
‘What’s the point? If they have one key, you can never open the box. So leave it. Let’s shop instead. I found a pattern for a net petticoat that swirls – you know the kind that they wore in the 50s under those umbrella dresses? It would be totally cool if we could get them made and swish into the college party.’
Maya blinked, and Lola reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘Sorry. I totally know you’re upset. I’m just trying to cheer you up. I can imagine it must feel horrible. Anyway, now you’re done with key-hunting. So look
at the bright side.’
‘You’re right!’ Maya exclaimed. ‘I never thought of it like that.’
The girls entered Lecture Room 113 and found seats at the back of the class. Veda was in a huddle with Aadil, and frowned in their direction. Sanath was talking to Owais, and didn’t notice Maya.
Father D’Gama entered moments later and made it clear he meant business. ‘We’re almost at the halfway mark of this Summer School,’ he warned. ‘And this year, I sense an absence of purpose, which will not be treated lightly.’
The morning vanished in a blur of facts, dates and information – and the famished class burst out of the room when the priest finally released them for lunch.
Amara and Pratik Purohit were standing outside the classroom, and both turned to stare at Maya. Amara with a triumphant toss of her glorious curls. Pratik with an impudent leer.
Maya felt naked and vulnerable. She hunched her shoulders and tried to hurry past, but heard his snigger. ‘That chick?’ he told Amara, not bothering to lower his mocking voice. ‘She’ll learn her lesson. Some worms are easy to crush.’
‘Oooh. Worm juice.’
Maya flinched, but hurried behind Lola towards the canteen. Pratik’s words were no more than the blather of a compulsive bully. Or so she told herself.
She was waiting for her cheese-butter dosas when Veda phoned. ‘Aren’t you coming to the chapel?’ she snapped. ‘I sent you a message. Professor Kekobad and I are waiting for you here.’
‘What?’ Maya asked. ‘Now? But I’m at lunch.’
‘Just for two minutes. It’s very important. Without Lola, please.’
Maya muttered rebelliously, apologised to Lola and headed to the chapel. As she pushed open the heavy door, she took a deep breath. She had something to say and this was as good a time as any other. She stepped into the crepuscular light and tranquility, and tried not to think of the last time she had been in the chapel.
‘Hi,’ she started, but Veda got there quicker.
‘You are so fixated on the Saints, so I thought we’d take a quick look at them. I checked the diary and …’
What Maya Saw Page 19