I wasn’t sure if she was hitting out at him blindly, or if she really knew of something that might have happened to Michael. I could see she was frantic on her own account and capable of saying anything.
“Ask him!” she cried. “Or his Bari Rani, why don’t you ask her—call her, she’s listening to every word anyway!” She took a few steps toward the connecting door, ready to fling it open and expose the Bari Rani listening at the keyhole.
The Rawul prevented her: not for his own sake, not for Bari Rani’s, but for Renée’s, to bring her back to herself. For it was painful to see her in this state. He grasped her hands; he begged her to be calm: “We’ll talk about everything,” he promised her. “We’ll try to satisfy you in every way. We’ll do whatever you say.”
“Just give me my money and let me go! Give me all those thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands you made me get for you!”
“What hundreds of thousands?”
This was Bari Rani, who evidently had been listening at the door and now appeared on our side of it. At the sight of her, Renée pulled her hands out of the Rawul’s tender grasp and turned toward her. The two women faced each other, and although Bari Rani was by far the smaller, rounder, softer, she appeared the stronger. She said “It’s we who’ve given everything, and without looking for anything in return.”
“And what have I had in return?” said Renée.
“In return for what? You were only carrying on your business. You cared nothing for us-—no she didn’t,” she said to the Rawul, who had made a movement to interrupt, “and the only reason she stayed—well, we know what it was.” Bari Rani looked at me and said: “Of course that’s all changed now.”
“Nothing has changed,” said Renée. “We’re clearing out—this girl too, and he and I. That’s what they’re afraid of,” she said to me. “That you’ll leave. The same way they were afraid with Michael.”
Bari Rani came between us; she said “Don’t listen to her rubbish and lies.”
Renée ignored her and went on talking to me: “Wasn’t he getting wise to them?” she said. “Wasn’t he planning to leave—and before his twenty-first birthday?”
I said to Bari Rani: “What happened last night?” When she didn’t answer but stood there not looking at me, I said it again and louder.
“Nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing worth mentioning—a little scuffle between the young men—”
“What happened!” I cried to the Rawul.
“He doesn’t know!” cried Bari Rani. “He was inside the tent with his guests.”
“Then what happened outside?”
“You saw yourself what a state Michael was in. He was ready to pick a quarrel even with me—of course I knew he was not well, I was concerned only for him, not for myself. But between young men it’s different—they’re hotheaded and ready to flare up at a word—”
“Was there something between the Bhais and Michael?”
“I don’t know—after all, I did have three hundred guests to see to—I couldn’t take care of everything that went on last night.”
“She’s lying,” said Renée. “She’s lying to both of us.”
“Where is he?” I said to Bari Rani. But I knew I could get nothing from her; she would continue to plead ignorance for herself and the Rawul. I turned to him—I felt that if he knew something he would tell me—but was met by his visionary eyes looking back at me out of his baby-plump face. I ran out of the room. All I cared about was to find Michael.
In the street, I jumped into one of those bone-shaking auto rickshaws and had myself driven over the pontoon bridge to the new colony where the Bhais lived. We were stuck on the bridge for a while, together with a host of cycles and a bullock cart loaded with cauliflowers that kept rolling off. It was hot, the season had changed, we had got into the Delhi summer, and its heat and dust blew through the open rickshaw in which I sat. There was no cooling water under the bridge, for the river was in its dry stage and had contracted to a few wet patches seeping into acres of mud flats from which flies arose. I waved them off me absently—my thoughts were elsewhere—I was thinking of where Michael could be, and where Crishi was, and I was hoping I would find them together. In fact, by this time I was expecting them to be together, and that I would find them at the Bhais’ house. And I thought, I must keep them together, reconcile whatever small differences there were between them; for it was unthinkable—unbearable—that the two people closest and dearest to me, the two tenants of my heart, should not be at peace with each other.
When I reached the Bhais’ house, it was empty. They had moved out, leaving nothing whatsoever behind—not even a beer bottle or one of their film magazines. There was absolutely nothing and the doors were wide open from the front to the back of the house. Even their cooking grate was empty. Except for a little pile of ash, they had taken away the last piece of coal, but the ash was still warm. From the workshop next door there was the usual noise of people shouting to each other and machines whirring and a dog barking, but the house was completely silent and deserted, with no breeze to stir the desert dust, which had already begun to settle on the floors and window ledges.
I returned to the main road and found another auto rickshaw, which took me back over the pontoon bridge and into the bazaar streets near the railway station. Here it was even hotter, for the dense city streets had stored up the day’s heat, along with the smells that had accumulated m the gutters and from the day-old produce of the vegetable and meat stalls. When I arrived at the hotel where the European followers stayed, I had braced myself to hear that they too had left; but the hotel clerk, smoking foreign cigarettes and with his feet on the counter, only told me that they were out. “What, all of them?” I asked. He said someone might be in and shouted to the hotel boy to go and see, but though he called him some bad names, the boy did not appear. He told me to go up myself and came around from the desk to watch me walk upstairs. When I knocked and got no answer, he encouraged me to go in. I did, and found Paul alone. There were as many of those string cots people sleep on as the room would hold, as well as everyone’s baggage and bedrolls, leaving no space on the floor. Paul was lying on one of the string cots, the one right under the fan, and to get to him I had to crawl across several other beds. He was sleeping but opened his eyes when I leaned over him. He said he had a fever.
He was certainly very hot, and eagerly drank the water I gave him out of the mud jar. When he had finished and I had tried to make him a bit more comfortable by settling his pillow and straightening the dirty sheet on which he lay, I asked him if he had seen Crishi or Michael. Maybe he didn’t hear me; maybe his mind was wandering with the fever. Another possibility was that he didn’t want to hear me. He took advantage of his weakened state to lie back with his eyes shut and ramble on about his own thoughts. He said this was the hotel in which they had first met Michael—the same blue distempered walls, he said, waving at them, except that they were more flaking and stained and scrawled with messages and phone numbers. After all, many, many travelers must have been here in the two years that had passed (only two years!). Paul remembered Michael distinctly, the way he had been. Michael had lived in a room of his own on the floor underneath this one; he didn’t join them upstairs very often but kept mostly to himself. Paul had envied him—Michael came and went where he pleased and did what he pleased; he wasn’t bound by anyone. Paul himself had been that way once upon a time—it was why he had come here in the first place: to get away, from home, from his family, from himself, his own personality as it had been formed by these outward circumstances; not to be bound by anything. But by the time he had met Michael, he had been more bound by circumstances than he would have ever thought possible. They all were, all the group around Crishi. Some of them, like Paul himself, had been in jail and, expelled as undesirable, were waiting for new travel documents; these documents were being got for them by Crishi, and it was he who was paying their bills in the hotel and doling out money to them. It wasn’t only
that they were materially dependent on him—most of them couldn’t live any longer without him telling them what to do and arranging everything for them; and with some of them it was even worse—they needed him emotionally—like the German girl Ursula, who had been pregnant by someone or other, and when she couldn’t get into Crishi’s room, she had slept on the stairs outside it.
But Michael had been completely free. He might sit in their room with them and accept some hashish, but if he didn’t care for the atmosphere—if it got too tense for him, or someone went berserk from having taken too much—he left them and went off on his own. Sometimes Paul sat at the window to look out for him; it gave him pleasure to see Michael walking down the street by himself. It was a very crowded street full of tourist hotels and the eating stalls catering to them, with homeless animals as well as some people hanging around for something to be thrown to them; and there were also stalls selling garlands and incense and offerings of candy to be taken into the Hindu temple opposite. For the sake of coolness and convenience, Michael was dressed like everyone else in muslin kurta and pajamas; but he walked there apart and alone, as if nothing and no one could touch him. And somehow people were careful to walk around him, and even when someone in a great hurry bumped against him, Michael went on undisturbed—gaunt, fair, self-sufficient, with his light eyes fixed on some far horizon
“Do you know where he is?” I interrupted Paul. “Have you seen him since last night?”
“Why are you crying?”
I hadn’t realized I was, but now I brushed the tears away. I was angry with myself, and with Paul, for saying all that and bringing up Michael as he used to be. I had to get going, I had to find out where Michael was—and Crishi—instead of sitting here listening to Paul. But he hadn’t finished yet.
“I’m going to be like him, you watch,” he said. “Just let me have my papers and get out of here—I know a girl, Monica, she lives on a farm in Yorkshire; it’s not much of a farm but it’s near a river where you can swim and there’s masses of yellow flowers growing on the bank. She says I can stay with her, she wants me there. Just let him get me my papers and my fare home. That’s all I want from him.”
“But where is he? Can’t you tell me? Hasn’t he been here?”
“Oh he’s been here all right—I said have you got my passport—he hadn’t but he said he was getting it, soon, tonight, not to worry, he said. Not to worry: how many thousands of times I’ve heard that from him. And then he said, If Harriet comes here—”
“Yes yes, what?”
“Tell her Michael’s okay. He was here too.”
“Who, Michael?”
“Yes they brought him here. Carried him in and put him on the bed there. That doctor came—the little Bengali, the same one they brought for the German girl after she took the pills—he fixed him up and then they took him away.”
“Away where? Where, Paul? Can’t you tell me any more? Paul?”
“I suppose the Bhais’ house.”
Here the bells started ringing from the Hindu temple, completely filling the room the way Michael had once described to me. Michael had said that it was a very loud sound and got even louder when the devotees started singing, as if trying to outshout the bells and vie with them in fervor. This was happening now.
“He was as white as a sheet, but he was always pale, wasn’t he? It used to strike me, that very white skin of his. A bit unnatural I thought it was.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“He didn’t speak to anyone. I think he was unconscious. They said it was only a flesh wound. Not to worry, they said. Not to worry,” he repeated, twisting his face.
I asked him question after question—I begged him to tell me every detail he could remember, but they were few. Michael had been carried in by Crishi and some Bhais, the doctor came, then they carried him out again: probably to the Bhais’ house. “Harriet,” he said, “if you see Crishi, tell him I’m waiting. Tell him he promised me for tonight. . . Oh don’t carry on, Harriet. I wish I hadn’t told you. These things happen all the time. It’s those damn Bhais—they’re just animals, and they have these knives they can’t wait to get out. I’ve told Michael before, he shouldn’t be carrying his dumb Swiss army knife—it only makes them mad to think someone might get at them first. Give me some more water before you go, and don’t forget to tell Crishi about tonight. Go to the Bhais’ house, that’s where they are, I bet you.”
I went back to our palace hotel, running along the street—people laughed at me, pointing at this mad girl—till I found a rickshaw. At the hotel, they were taking down last night’s tent from the back lawn—the tent people were there to take it down, and some of the hotel staff were helping them. These usually greeted me, but today they kept their eyes strenuously on their task though I hovered around, hoping someone would tell me something about last night. They did not; and when I spoke to the one I knew best—he had often been sent up by room service when Crishi and I called—his quite-fluent English failed him and he couldn’t understand a word I said. The same happened with others I approached—they either couldn’t understand or hadn’t been on duty last night; in any case, they were exceedingly busy, shouting instructions to one another as they cleared away all traces of last night’s feast. Kites came swooping down continually to a particular spot on the lawn and pecked at something there; and although they flew off when the bearers descended on them with flapping arms and dust cloths, next moment they were back. They didn’t bother to fly off when I came to see what it was that had attracted them. I found it was just a mess of what I presumed to be gnawed chicken bones, flung there by careless guests. There were more kites behind the hedge where the makeshift clay ovens had been set up last night, and where Michael had gone to get food for the Bhais after our conversation together. This place was being disassembled, but the people on the job were also too busy to talk to me.
Was it my imagination, or was it the same inside the hotel lobby? Did the clerks behind the desk, the porters and the elevator boys, all know something they wouldn’t tell me? As I passed through the shopping arcade, it seemed to me that the shopkeepers were peering out at me with the same secret knowledge as everyone else. I stopped outside the jeweler’s shop and hesitated only a moment before going in—he had to tell me, whatever his feelings about me after our scene yesterday. His assistant was in the front part of the shop. I didn’t believe him when he said his boss had gone out—I went past him and pushed aside the curtain leading to the back room: but it was as empty and seemingly innocent as everyone’s stare at me. This stare was also in the assistant’s eyes when I asked him directly if Crishi had been there, or when he had last seen Michael. He appeared not to know who these people were.
I had hoped to have more information before facing Sonya; but it was she who knew. When I went to her suite, I found the jeweler there, and whatever it was he had told her, had made her both frantic and resolute. She was dressed to go out. She had on a frock and little white hat that I had seen her wear to lunches and matinees in New York. She said both of us had to go immediately to the embassy, we couldn’t delay another minute. “Why, what have you heard?” I asked her. I looked down at the jeweler sitting there—he avoided my eyes, but Sonya said “He’s trying to help us.” Then she asked “Have you heard anything?”
I sensed she was trying to hide something that she had heard; I was doing the same with her, so there we were, sparing each other. I stalled: “Why do you want to go to the embassy?”
“Who else will help us, who else will do anything!”
“Do what?”
“Find Michael! We have to find Michael!”
I turned on the jeweler—“Do you know anything?” He wouldn’t answer me—he looked at Sonya; she was nervously running her tongue over her lips. I could see her little plump hands trembling. She did know something and was trying to prepare both herself and me to tell me. I thought I had better come out cautiously with what I knew: “Michael’s been hurt a little bit. It’
s nothing much and in a way it’s his fault, for playing around with that knife of his.”
Sonya looked at me with round eyes: “Then why did they—” she began; I intercepted an exchange of glances between her and the jeweler and got in there promptly—“Why did they what? What did you tell her?” I challenged him. Still he wouldn’t look at me; his eyes were lowered. “What do you know?” I went on. “Or is it all just rumor again, just things you’ve heard and like to whisper around.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You must know something or why are you here?”
“Darling, he’s trying to help us!”
“Then why doesn’t he speak! If you know anything, why don’t you speak!” Actually, I was shouting at both of them: my God, if they did know anything about Michael, what a time to keep quiet; what a time to spare me!
Sonya begged him: “Please be so kind—tell her what you told me.”
He still wouldn’t look up; his face was sullen and closed. I was so desperate, I was ready to assault him again. Sonya begged me: “Darling, he’s the only person who’s told us anything at all—”
I controlled myself; I spoke to him in the calmest voice I could, asking him for information. At last he consented to speak, though he remained sullen: “I don’t know anything about this hotel. When my shop is shut, I go home to my place in Shakti Nagar. I eat my food and go to sleep. When I return in the morning, I open my shop and attend to my business. Yes, sometimes someone may come and say this and that has happened. I may listen but I don’t ask, Is it true? It may be true, it may not be. I don’t call that person a liar. I listen.”
After this cautious and cautionary preamble, he repeated what he had told Sonya. There had been some sort of scuffle between Michael and the Bhais. The cause was not known—it may have been that Michael had wanted to go into the tent and make a scene; or it may have been about their food, or some personal quarrel. The Bhais were always quick to draw—it was well known that they never lost a chance to use the knives they carried; and in the present case, with Michael, they had probably been waiting to use them for a long time; and so maybe had he. Anyway, whatever the cause, Michael had been wounded—here, said the jeweler, pointing to a place on his chest. I quickly said that I knew it to be only a superficial flesh wound; I spoke with confidence, for Sonya’s sake, though I felt very little of it myself. The jeweler had heard otherwise but did not commit himself to any details; and I beat down my fears with the thought that in the telling everything tends to grow much bigger and worse than it is. They had wanted to carry Michael into the hotel but had been prevented by the hotel staff; the manager himself had come down to bar their way. He had explained that with their kind of clientele—wealthy Indians and international travelers—they could not afford a scandal, especially since it was a case where the police might be involved. In fact, he couldn’t wait to get Michael off the premises, and taking no chances, had had him carried out by the back way, by the block of servant quarters.
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