I was afraid it would make little difference. Having come this far, I seemed to be at a dead end. It had looked to be easy when I was back in London . Leo would feed me the information I needed, somehow or other. But apart from the conviction that the Maidan, here in the center of Calcutta , was an important part of Leo’s past, I had found nothing to guide me to a special part of the city. I wandered, map in hand, looking for some new idea, all the way from the Howrah Bridge, with its great web of cantilevered steel and its teeming cars, oxcarts, rickshaws, bicycles, trucks and people, down south as far as Alipore and the Calcutta Zoological Gardens. I spent half a day in the Zoo, marvelling at the great thirty-eight foot reticulated python that had amazed the world when Funyatti captured it live in the Sumatran jungles in ’02. The zookeepers impressed me less than the animals. One of them, more foolhardy than rational, moved unprotected through an enclosure containing two splendid specimens of Dendraspis polylepis, black mambas that to me are the most unpredictable and dangerous of the poisonous snakes. I watched until the man came out alive.
But I found it hard to watch anything else for very long. Always, my steps drew me back to the Maidan. I sat there, hour after hour, looking at the white marble pile of the Victoria Memorial. It was a mixture of English and Moghul styles, and as ugly in its way as the Albert Memorial in London . I soon learned to hate it, but I went back day after day, wondering what I was doing there. Chandra twice invited me to attend University functions, and I resolutely refused both of them to sit out in that dull park and stare at that awful monument.
It was an unhappy and frustrating time. The weather was miserable, cold and windy. It wasn’t until the ninth day of my vigil, when my stomach and head were both thoroughly adjusted to the change in time and diet, that the break came.
The weather turned warm and sunny. I was sitting on the same bench as usual, looking north towards Fort William . I had occupied benches that faced north, south, east and west, like a dog turning round before it can settle, but always an indefinable discomfort took me at last to a bench that looked north.
I was reading the International Herald Tribune, my only real link with the West. I had lost patience with the Indian radio and television in my first day, and took all my news from the paper, several days late. When I looked up, a woman was sitting on a bench across the green from me, perhaps thirty yards away.
She was very dark skinned, clearly Indian, and dressed in a green sari with flecks of yellow-gold in the long skirt. Her dark hair was drawn back from her forehead, and in the center, an inch above her eyes, I could see the glint of a single golden ornament. She was looking straight at me, her face calm and disinterested. But at the sight of her I felt myself beginning to tremble, with a wave of tension and excitement in my stomach that was too much to endure.
I stood up, looking for some reaction from her — she still seemed to be staring straight at me. When she did not move, I began to walk slowly around the gravel footpath that bordered the small square of green.
It was perplexing enough to make my head ache and drive me dizzy. Obviously, Leo knew her. She should recognize him, and that meant she should recognize me. But I walked in front of her, almost near enough to touch, and there was no glimmer of recognition on her face. Close up, I saw that she was beautiful and young. I guessed no more than nineteen.
She had a dark, flawless complexion, and her huge dark eyes were carefully made up with a layer of kohl on the eyelids. The features were regular, with prominent cheek bones and a broad forehead. And in the center of that forehead was the thing that sent my mind reeling and spinning. The golden ornament was not the smooth metal bead that it appeared to be from across the square. It was a tiny beetle — an exact copy of the beetle that Leo wore on his tie clip at our final meeting in London Airport .
I paused in front of her, cleared my throat, and then indecision moved me on. What could I say to her? That my brother knew her, though I did not, and I wanted to ask what he had been doing in Calcutta ?
As my brain dithered, my legs carried me halfway around the plot of grass, back towards my bench. Instead of sitting down again I stood and watched. After fifteen minutes — endless minutes in which she did not register my presence by a look or a blink — an older man approached her. He came slowly across from the north side of the Maidan, helping himself along with a black wooden cane. I found his age indeterminate, anywhere from forty to seventy, and his loose white robe made it hard to tell if his left leg was crippled by age or by injury.
He came up behind her and spoke. I heard her laugh, and she turned her head as he moved around the bench to sit next to her. As they talked together her face lost its calm appearance. She laughed again, expression alight and animated, and after a moment she patted him on the arm with a small, shapely hand. Her fingernails were lacquered a purple-red.
Another few moments, and they both stood up quickly. She took his arm and they began to walk across the park, heading northwest towards the exit. The Maidan had become suddenly filled with people, thousands of strollers taking a midday break from the offices in Dalhousie Square . It would be easy to lose sight of the two of them in just a couple of minutes.
I hurried after them across the grass, panting more than the effort could explain.
“Excuse me…” My long legs brought me close behind them. “Excuse me…” I had thought of nothing to say to them after those first few words. More speech turned out to be unnecessary. They paused and looked back at the sound of my voice. The woman seemed politely interested and a little puzzled. But the old man gaped up at me and rubbed a wrinkled hand across his forehead.
“Sahib Singh!” His voice quivered. It was clear now that he was at least in his sixties — old for Calcutta . At his words the woman gave a strange cry, mingled disbelief and excitement. I could see just how good-looking she was, with superb brown eyes and white, even teeth gleaming from a luscious mouth. Her hand went up to her throat and she remained motionless for a moment. Then she spoke to me in a long, questioning sentence.
I shook my head. It sounded like Bengali, but though I had worked hard over the past few days to pick up a sprinkling of phrases I had nothing like enough to follow a spoken sentence.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand you. Do you speak English?”
She gasped at my voice and stepped closer.
“Ameera!” said the old man warningly.
She reached out her hand and placed it on my chest. I towered over both of them — neither was more than five feet tall. She stretched up to touch my face, while I stared down into those dark, jewelled eyes. Less than a foot away, they showed a hint of diffuse light in their depths, a cloudiness behind the pupils. While I was still struggling with the significance of that, she moved her right hand to run it inquiringly over my nose, lips, and chin, then fell backwards swooning into the arms of the old man.
I was feeling dizzy, too. At that soft, careful hand on my face, my heart leaped up to my throat, and the rhythm, “Over the hills and far away,” pulsated again inside my head.
I stood panting and helpless, watching the old man as he held the girl. Two powerful and conflicting urges conspired to hold me frozen: overwhelming physical desire, and the visceral urge that told me to flee and hide in the busy streets of Calcutta .
- 9 -
The house they took me to was smaller than Chandra’s, but still another impressive mansion. A structure of dark-red brick, it was surrounded by the now-familiar screening wall, and the garden within was laid out with scrupulous care. The beds of sages and flowering thyme threw back at me the perfumed mix that had first hit my memory on a London street.
The old man would not (or could not) talk to me on the journey. After two or three Bengali sentences in a voice that was at once angry and deferential, he had given up on me. He had accepted my help in getting the woman Ameera out of the Maidan, leaving me to do most of the carrying while he shooed away inquisitive onlookers and two Calcutta policemen, but his looks
at me when we came to the carriage were angry and puzzled.
The ride in the closed, horse-drawn cab was short, only a few minutes of twisting and winding up narrow back streets. I already knew Calcutta well enough to realize that the horse was a sign of wealth, not poverty — a car would have been cheaper to maintain — and the houses that we passed confirmed the impression of ample money. By the time we arrived at the big double doors and had been admitted by a man with a heavy black mustache who stood guard in a little sentry box, the woman was awake again, sighing and fluttering her long eyelashes. I got out of the carriage first, ready to try and explain my presence and coax some English-speaking member of the household into allowing me to stay. It was quite unnecessary. The guard touched his hand deferentially to his brow, bowed stiffly from the waist, and motioned me forward toward the main structure of the house.
I stood in the entrance, wondering what came next. Ameera was led away through rustling curtains of silk by an older woman who bustled out of the house as soon as we entered the double gates of weather-beaten teak. She gave me one nod, then ignored me. After a couple of minutes, the old man who had been in the Maidan came in behind me and gestured to another inner room.
It was a study, panelled and lined with bookcases. The wall on my left was flanked by a long sideboard bearing a dozen full decanters of different colored liquids, and heavy armchairs and coffee tables stood in precise alignment on the hardwood floor. There were no rugs — I could see what a hazard loose rugs would be to a blind woman — and there was an exact orderliness to the furniture arrangement.
The man who had led me in had abandoned me at once. I stood for a while looking at the books but that quickly proved to be a waste of time. They were all in Arabic or Hindustani script. After a futile few minutes I stepped across to the sideboard and removed the stoppers from a few of the decanters: Scotch, rum, sherry. It seemed at odds with the eastern elements of the room. I ran my hand across the smooth wood of the sideboard. Everything was spotless, no mote of dust anywhere despite the absence of occupation.
I was still standing there when Ameera returned, alone. Her color was back to normal, a rich coffee-cream with a hint of pink behind it in her cheeks. She came in confidently, skirting a coffee table and heading straight towards me. If I had not seen the telltale cloud behind her eyes in the Maidan I would have sworn that she had normal vision.
A couple of feet away from me she halted and spoke again in Bengali. I shook my head, then realized that was probably useless.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Leo-yo?” The word was musical and strangely accented. It brought the hair up on the back of my neck, and it wasn’t just her use of Leo’s name. I had found it, Leo’s eastern contact!
“Leo-yo,” she said again. “Please talk to me.” Her English was precise but not fluent.
“I am Leo’s brother,” I said, slowly and carefully. “Not Leo. My name is Lionel.”
“Brother?” Her face changed expression again, from sadness to worry and confusion. She came nearer and touched her hand up to my face. This time she was more thorough, running her fingers gently over my forehead, then back to the scars that were still lumpy patches of tissue on the back of my skull. She hissed to herself, tongue between her teeth, when she came to the patched-up bone.
“Leo-yo. You have been hurt.”
“Not Leo.” I took her hands gently in mine. She looked up at me patiently, her eyes wide and opalescent. “Ameera,” I said. “Please believe me. I am not Leo. Leo had a brother, I am his brother.” As I spoke I winced at my use of the past tense for Leo, but Ameera’s English was not good enough to catch it and read its significance. Her face remained perfectly calm.
“Ameera,” I went on. “I would like to talk to you. About my brother. About Leo.”
The long eyelashes flickered, and the lids covered the cloudy beauty of her eyes. She was looking down, her hands running their sensitive fingers over the back of my hand and my forearm.
“I understand,” she said at last. “You told me this. That there might be a time when you could not know me, you warned of hidden times. But here… where only we are here, after so long…”
Her voice trailed away sadly, and I swore under my breath. If only she could see… It was hard to believe that those dark orbs were unseeing. What could I do next? This was supposed to be the place where I would meet all Leo’s eastern contacts — but where were they?
“Ameera, whose house is this?”
She looked surprised, her lips parting to show pearly teeth with slightly prominent canines. “House? This house? Leo-yo, you know it. This house is your house, as it has always been — what else? We have waited for you here, waited and waited… Chatterji said you would not come back, you would never come back. When he saw you in the Maidan, he did not believe it.”
I was hardly listening. Leo’s house. I knew he had been in the east for years, and he hated living in hotels. But why had he never mentioned it to me?
“Now that you are here,” Ameera was saying, “it will be a tandoori meal. Shamli has been told, and Chatterji will get the chutney you like. In one half of an hour it will be ready to eat.”
She reached confidently across the sideboard and picked up a decanter and a glass. She removed the stopper, sniffed to make sure, and poured. It was a fine oloroso sherry, Leo’s favorite. Should I try and explain to her again? I sipped, watched as she replaced the stopper and set the decanter back in its exact place, and caught a hint of the delicate perfume she had applied since we reached the house.
Suddenly I had a visceral understanding that she had been Leo’s mistress. If I closed my eyes I saw images of dark, flawless skin beneath the modest clothes. The contours of her figure glowed with secret oils, familiar to me as no woman had ever been familiar. I took a bigger gulp of sherry.
“Ameera.”
“Yes, Leo-yo?” Still she refused to accept me as myself.
“There are many books here. Where are the other books and papers in this house?”
“Many places.” She was confused. “You know it. In this room, in the bedroom. There are books everywhere.”
“Did you ever hear anyone talk about T.P.? As someone’s name?”
“Teepee?” Her voice was bewildered, “Never. Who is Teepee?”
“I don’t know — it is a bad person. How about Belur? Do you know about anything called the Belur Package?”
Now she hesitated, “Belur is a common name in the south of the country. But what is in the package?”
“I don’t know.” I would try Chatterji and the others, if I could find an interpreter, but I sensed that there would be no success. Leo’s secrets were well-kept. He would not have told these people what he kept hidden from me.
A gong, softly struck, was sounding a low note through the house. Ameera took my empty glass from my hand and led the way towards the back of the ground floor. The table in the dining room was set for two, with gleaming Benares silver and white linen tablecloth. I sat opposite Ameera and felt enormously frustrated. I had travelled a third of the way around the world to chase a long shot. Now the long shot had come in, and I was more stymied than ever. The mysterious stranger in Calcutta had been found. He was my own brother.
The chicken tandoori was delicious, served with lime pickles and an array of chutneys and vegetables by silent servants whom Ameera addressed in Bengali. The effort of speaking and understanding English seemed to have tired her, and she concentrated on enjoyment of the food. Leo had been fluent in Bengali, that was obvious from the way that I was occasionally addressed in that language by the puzzled servants. As they served a dessert of banana halva I wondered again about the household. Leo must have managed to set it up to run separate from any business activities that he had carried on in India . It had run smoothly — at what cost I could not guess — even when he had disappeared for over six months. I had the feeling that he had left the house in the past on exte
nded trips, and my sudden appearance was less of a surprise than I expected. I looked around me at the elegant furnishings and careful arrangement. I couldn’t have set up a house to run like this in my absence, not in a million years. The old conviction that I was somehow the lesser half, a reduced version of Leo, grew stronger as the meal concluded with a demitasse of Turkish coffee, and the sun outside the window sank lower in the sky,
Afterwards Ameera led me outside, to walk in the walled garden. There was no sign of a weed anywhere. As we passed through an archway framed by climbing roses, she took my hand to lead her. I saw the new shoots that reached out to catch at our clothes and guided her clear of them. When she moved through the arch the setting sun struck directly on her face, turning it to a bronze carving.
I passed my hand across her eyes, blocking out the light, and she followed the movement of my arm with her head.
“You can see that?” I moved my hand back and forth,
Ameera smiled. “Light and dark, Leo-yo. Nothing more. It has not changed.” She reached out to take my hand as it moved in front of her. I could smell her perfume again, rosewater and jasmine. She stroked my hand.
“Your room,” she said, “it was not made ready. If we had known you would be here… we have not even cigars for you, Chatterji will buy them tonight.” She sounded upset.
“I have my room at the hotel,” I said. Then I saw her face, and added: “All my clothes are there. I have nothing here with me.”
“There are clothes.” She turned her face again to the setting sun. “It will soon be dark. You are tired from your travel? Wait here, and I will see if the room is ready yet.”
I was exhausted from tension, but before I went up to bed I wanted to look over the rooms of the house. At my request Ameera led me around the whole place. Many rooms were unlit and I had trouble following her, though she moved confidently everywhere, past huge settees in the living room and the grotesque wooden statues in a long corridor that led back to the kitchen. I realized in the first few minutes that any search of the house for evidence of Leo’s activities in India would take days. But the best place to begin might well be Leo’s bedroom.
My Brother Page 11