Anwar Azim opened the door.
This morning, his clothes were a perfect mixture of East and West. Over his shalwar kameez he wore a beautiful butter-colored camel-hair coat, the kind of coat a chap could have worn without disgrace inside the winner’s enclosure at Ascot. The conker-colored brogues under his soft linen trousers were expensive and polished to a high shine.
When he took off his coat and folded it carefully, she saw a Moss Bros label in the silken lining. He drew up a chair and sat opposite her, close enough for her to smell his cigarettes, the mustard oil on his hair.
“Good morning, Miss Viva,” he said softly. His eyes moved slowly from her neck to her breasts, to her legs. “How was your night?” he asked in his plummy accent.
“Unpleasant,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m here.” She was determined to look him in the eye.
He yawned elaborately, showing gums and teeth. “I’m sorry you were uncomfortable. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” she said, “I would like a blanket; I’m cold.”
“Cold by English standards?” he teased her, for the air in the room was quite warm.
He pulled up a chair. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a few easy questions to answer and then you can go home.”
He turned and said something to the boy, who stood up with a square of black cloth in his hand. He pushed it over the top of the window shutters, blocking out the light, then he lit an oil lamp and put it on the table.
“Sorry about all this.” When Azim moved closer and stared at her, she was conscious again of how unhealthy his eyes looked. Their whites were the color of overboiled eggs.
“And maybe I should say ‘happy Diwali’ to you,” he said without a ghost of a smile. “Do you find our native customs quaint?”
She watched his hand stroke the front of his shirt.
“No,” she said. It annoyed her that her voice sounded so weak and trembling. “I don’t find them quaint. I enjoy them,” she said more firmly. She looked down at the patterns that the children had drawn on her hands, fading now and slightly smudged. “As you can see.”
“I myself don’t celebrate. We used to burn the bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night at our school.” She stared at him. Was this a bit of sarcasm on his part? “Another charming custom,” he said.
He took out a mother-of-pearl case, put a cigarette between his plump scarred lips and lit it with an expensive-looking silver lighter that she recognized as a Dunhill—Mrs. Driver had used the same model to light her morning cheroots.
“So,” he said when his head was enveloped in a blue haze. “I won’t beat about the bush with you. It is very simple, actually. First, I want you to tell me where Guy Glover is, then I’d like to hear from your own lips what you do on Friday nights at your children’s home.”
The request surprised her. “What do you want to know?”
“Mr. Glover has been keeping an eye on you there, or he was until we lost him. Anyway,” he continued mildly, “tell me what you do.”
“Well, nothing much,” she said. “We all have supper with the children, and then we read stories to them, and then they go to bed.”
“What kind of stories?”
“All kinds: adventure stories, legends, Bible stories, Ramayana stories.”
“Anything else?”
“No. We try and make it a special night of the week, but only in the sense that we all eat with the children. We look forward to that.”
“So there is no truth in the rumors circulating that you make the boys bathe with the girls at your home?” He stopped for a moment to remove a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip. “Or that you wash provocatively in front of the children?” His voice had become cold as steel.
She felt fear fly through her body. “Did Guy Glover tell you that?”
Mr. Azim just looked at her.
“If he did, he’s lying,” she said. “We respect the children and they respect us. If you came to look around you would see.”
“We have had people looking around,” he said. He rubbed his lips with his hands and looked at her for what felt like a long time. “And we have seen and heard many bad things.
“Next question. Why do you live in Byculla?”
She looked at him and took a deep breath. She estimated he must have had about ten or twelve stitches in his lip, it looked like a knife wound and gave him a surgical sneer even when he was smiling.
“Because I like it there. I have a job there.”
“Why do you question our children all the time and write their names down in a book?”
He pulled open his coat and from its plush lining produced her notebook.
“That’s mine.” When she moved her body toward him, she heard the click of a rifle at the door. The guard stood up.
“Sit down.” He was suddenly shouting at her like a dog. “Answer my questions.”
With a huge effort of self-control she said, “I’m writing the children’s stories.”
“Why?” His eyes snapped open.
“Because they’re interesting.”
“They’re nothing; they’re street children, life dust.” He gave that most dismissive of all Indian gestures, a flick of the hand sideways as though to rid one’s body of an insect. “You have better things to do than that. What other books have you written?” he said. “Can I buy them?”
“No,” she said. “It’s my first.
“Your English is very good,” she said after another long silence. She had decided to soft-soap him, or at least to try. “Where did you learn it?”
“I was at Oxford University, like my brother,” he said it coldly but the little side-to-side wiggle of his head showed he was pleased. “Before that St. Crispin’s.”
She’d heard of it, it was one of a number of Indian public schools that claimed to be “the Eton of India.” They delivered Western-style education and values to the sons of maharajahs, and the sons of anyone who could afford it and who felt it beneficial to have at least a veneer of Englishness.
“Was that where you celebrated Guy Fawkes Night?”
He got up, frowning. “Don’t ask me questions,” he said. “We don’t have long.”
When he left the room quickly, she assumed it was for his noon prayers. A few moments later she heard a trickle of water running and then in the silence that followed, imagined him performing his salah, the obligatory prayers that the Muslim children at the home performed five times each day, at sunrise, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and nightfall.
While she waited, the young guard at the door pointed the barrel of his gun in her direction.
Half an hour later, Azim came into the room again, this time without his coat on.
“Did you go to pray?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I am not a religious man. Not all of us are.”
So she was wrong about that, and looking more closely saw the mark between his eyes was a frown, not a prayer mark.
He moved closer to her. “I am going to make it clear to you why we are holding you here,” he said, with ice in his eyes. “What goes on at the children’s home is a side issue; our main aim is to find your friend Guy Glover.”
“He’s no friend of mine.”
“No?” Mr. Azim flicked out his tongue and removed a shred of tobacco from it. “You shared a cabin with him on the Kaisar-i-Hind. I saw you leave the ship with him.” And suddenly she remembered. The glaring face on the quayside. He’d taken her photograph and Guy’s.
“I didn’t share his cabin,” she said. “I was his chaperone.”
He looked puzzled.
“I was paid to take care of him,” she explained.
Azim started to scratch, first his neck, then his chin, as if she was giving him a rash.
“Don’t start by telling me lies, Miss Viva,” he warned her. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
A sour feeling like nausea began at the pit of her stomach and traveled up through her spinal cord into her mout
h.
“He was a schoolboy,” she stammered, “or at least I thought he was. I needed a job. I was there to look after him.”
“Well, you didn’t do your job very well,” he said softly.
The photograph he took out of his coat pocket was of a smartly dressed young man with oiled black hair crimped into waves. He was sitting in a dinner shirt on a chair in a resplendent ship’s cabin. His lip was swollen, his eye half closed and shiny. On the bed behind him a dinner jacket had been laid out like a dead penguin. A pair of immaculate dinner shoes lay on the floor.
“This is my younger brother,” said Azim. “Your friend Guy did that.”
“I knew about it,” she was forced to admit. “But I had no part in it.”
“So why not tell the police? Because he was a nignog?” He smiled at her unpleasantly.
“No.” She looked at him. “That’s a horrible word. I never use it. What I was told was there were special circumstances and that everybody wanted it hushed up.”
“What circumstances were these?”
She looked at her hands. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Did you know Guy Glover was a thief?”
“I did.” Her mouth was so dry she could barely talk. “And so did your brother. Why didn’t he press charges?”
He squished his mouth between his fingers and looked at her for a while.
“Because,” he said, “we were able to persuade Mr. Glover to work for us instead, and now we are very angry with him for giving us the slip. We hear he may be going back to England. He may even be on his way now. As soon as you can help us find him, we will let you go.”
After he’d gone the guard put a blindfold around her head. Through it she heard the sound of Azim’s shoes clumping downstairs, then the whoosh of the geyser again, the rattle of the pipes. Straining to hear other sounds in the street outside, she caught the rumble of wheels and the cry of the water man. But she dared not shout back. She was frightened of Mr. Azim now. He meant business.
Before he’d left he’d said in a voice of deadly calm, “My brother is a fine man. A peaceful man. He didn’t want me to do this. He doesn’t believe in your eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth business. But your young friend left him deaf in one ear. You can still see the marks on him. I should have killed Mr. Glover then, but I thought he might be useful to us. He has not been useful to us. He has betrayed us. Now, it is my duty to avenge him.”
On the fourth day, after a breakfast of dhal and chapatti, the woman arrived and allowed Viva to wash in a trickle of rusty water and then to use the bucket while she averted her eyes. Viva hated this bit. When this was done she was tied up again and heard the descending tinkle of the woman’s bangles as she walked downstairs. She’d begun to associate this sound with a pounding in her heart, a dryness in her mouth—after it, Azim would appear.
He frightened her, but she was beginning to see a kind of insecurity in him. He seemed like a man who has raided a theatrical wardrobe department without any clear idea of what part he was required to play. Sometimes he’d arrive in one of a number of beautifully tailored, expensive, and hot-looking English suits that he’d wear with an embroidered Muslim flat cap, twice he came to her in his soft cotton native clothes but wearing a monocle that kept popping out of his eye.
The pattern of his interrogations was just as unpredictable, and she began to think the clothes were the outward manifestations of some kind of mental crisis; sometimes he would lecture her softly on his personal beliefs: “I am first of all a Muslim, then an Indian,” he told her one day. “The Koran teaches us we have a right to justice, the right to protect one’s honor, the right to marry, the right to dignity and not to be ridiculed by anyone.” The next day, he told her that he was a man who believed only in progress, not religion: progress and reform. It was time, he said, for the people of India to stop being grateful for every crumb that fell at their feet, and to rise up against the bloody British. To stop being their servants: “Oh yes, sir,” he’d mimicked a minion. “I am running, jumping, fetching for you.”
On the fourth morning, he returned to a familiar obsession of his.
“What do you do on Friday nights at the children’s home?”
“Nothing very special,” Viva replied. “We have a meal with the children who are boarders, and we sometimes have readings afterward.”
“What kind of readings?” Mr. Azim asked suspiciously.
“I’ve told you: poetry, Bible readings, sometimes the children will tell us a story from the Mahabharata, or some local fairy stories—it’s a way of understanding each other’s cultures.”
He gave her a look of deep disgust. “So how do you explain this to the children?” He shoved a book near her face. “Do you understand what this is?” He was trembling with barely suppressed emotion.
“I do. It’s a holy book—the Koran.”
“And this.” His hands were shaking with emotion as he riffled through the pages. “This is a great insult to a Muslim.” He grabbed her hair and shoved her face toward the book. There were torn pages in the middle of it.
“I know.” Her lips were so dry she could hardly speak. For the first time she wondered if she would get out of here alive.
“We found it in your room.”
“I—We didn’t do that, Mr. Azim,” she said, trying to keep as still as possible. “None of us would—we’re nonsectarian.”
“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Miss Viva.” He was shouting so loud he was spraying her with spit. “My own father died in the 1922 riots in Bombay, so I know what happens when you British get involved with our religions, and you had nothing to do with that either—oh, these naughty natives.” His voice had risen to a hysterical high-pitched squeal. “So wild and out of control, but your people started them to prove to us how much we needed you. What you have done to my brother…same thing! What you are doing at your school…same thing! And still you think you are a great wonder helping those poor Indians.”
“I didn’t do it,” she screamed, and then with an enormous effort of will calmed herself down.
“Mr. Azim,” she said, as he sank back into his chair, “I am truly sorry about your father.”
“Don’t talk of him,” he said stiffly. “You disrespect his name.”
“And your brother,” she went on, knowing that this might be her only chance. “But I didn’t help hurt him, and I’m not a spy.”
He gave a soft snort and licked his lips.
“You may not believe this,” she continued, “but we have tremendous admiration for Gandhi at our home; we believe the time has come for India to rule itself. We know we have made terrible mistakes but we’ve done some good things, too.”
“I don’t like Gandhi,” he told her. “He is only for Hindus.”
“Well, there’s something else I must tell you, too,” she added. “My own father died in Cawnpore in 1913. I was nine years old; he’d gone there to work on a new railway. It had nothing to do with politics. I was told he was killed by bandits, seven local Punjabi men who he worked with and respected were killed, too. My mother died a few months later. Englishmen are not the only ones with blood on their hands.”
There was a silence in the room. When he looked at her his eyes were so blank she wasn’t sure he’d heard her, perhaps he’d been thinking again about his own father.
“I have forgotten how to pray,” he said, almost to himself.
And she felt for a moment perfectly cocooned, as if she was some fly caught in amber, or a speck of matter inside a block of ice.
His chair scraped on the floor as he moved it closer to her. He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts before he began to speak to her.
“I am a member of the All India Muslim League,” he said. “Some of your lot, British peoples, have been collaborating with us behind the scenes. I gave your friend Guy the chance to help us, too. Your friend Miss Barker at the school is well known by us to be a close Gandhi supporter—we think it goes further
than this. Can you help us?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“No?”
“No.”
He stood up. “That’s a shame,” he said. “Tonight is the last night of the Diwali Festival. It’s time for us to decide what to do with you.”
“I’m not a spy,” she said monotonously, although she really didn’t care at that moment what happened to her. “None of us are.”
“Don’t bother to tell us your lies anymore, Miss Viva,” he told her and closed the door.
Chapter Forty-six
Viva tried to sleep to blot out the fear but woke half an hour later frozen and with a crick in her neck. The last night of the Diwali festivities must be nearing. Last night she thought she’d heard from a few streets away the muffled thuds, and then the screams and fizz of fireworks. The idea that there were people out there leading normal everyday lives—laughing, eating, hugging their children—made her feel even more alone, like someone in a boat lost in the middle of the ocean who sees pinpricks of light from a distant shore.
Now she wondered if she would leave here alive. If Guy had been blackmailed to spy on them all at the home, God knows what he might have told Mr. Azim about her. Who would miss me if I died tonight? she thought. Who would care? She imagined her funeral: Daisy would be there, and maybe Talika and Suday; some volunteers from the home, maybe Mrs. Bowden, maybe Clara, the Irish nurse who had never really liked or trusted her, out of some Catholic sense of duty. Tor, she was sure of it, would make the trip from Amritsar, and Rose, miles away in Bannu, with the new baby and everything else. She saw more clearly than ever before what a fragile bubble they all lived in and how much she had needed their laughter and their love.
And Frank. How painful to think of him now. He would come. She was almost sure of this now. He had tried to get close. Damaged people like herself and Mr. Azim were always protecting themselves, their families, their religion, their pride, their secret wounded selves. Frank had opened his heart to her, made no secret of his feelings. How brave that seemed now.
In the darkness she thought about that wonderful day in Cairo, when they’d all laughed so much, quite oblivious to the storm brewing back on the ship. The guest house at Ooty. “Don’t you dare be ashamed of this,” he’d said.
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