The cousins grew tired of Anasuyabehn’s long silences and ran across the walk to the balustrade, which divided the river shore from the park. Thankful to be alone, Anasuyabehn paced up and down on the grass behind her aunts. Under the shadow of the tree, her green sari made her almost invisible.
A husband and wife, who knew her family, stopped by the bench to pay their respects to the aunts, and Anasuyabehn stepped deeper into the shadow, rather than face another barrage of good-natured jokes about the joys of matrimony. Though very exhausted, she was still simmering with anger.
When she heard the very softest whisper behind her, she was shocked. Stifling a shriek, she turned. ‘Go away,’ she whispered back to Tilak. ‘How dare you come near me? And how did you find me?’
Tilak’s black jacket made him invisible against the tree’s great trunk, as he breathed, ‘Followed you from home. Now, listen. Quickly. Have you a passport?’
Indignation welled up. ‘How dare you? How dare you?’ she upbraided him.
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t get away.’
‘No? I imagine you were very pleasantly occupied.’
Puzzled at her attitude, he said irritably, ‘Tell me, Rani. Your passport. I have to make plans for us.’
Anasuyabehn peered at him through the gloom. He was so close to her that she could feel his warmth. In the midst of her rage, her physical desire for this handsome man tore through her. One touch from his hand would have diverted the flood of jealousy into channels of self-recrimination and explanation.
‘Sister, sister, where are you?’ called one of her cousins, running back across the walk.
She whipped round, and, then, forcing herself to advance casually into the light, she called back, ‘Here I am.’
Bewildered and frustrated, Tilak slunk into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Old Desai sat on his wooden divan in his dismal counting house, his portable desk beside him. Sitting near him was his sister’s husband, hastily summoned by telegram from Baroda. With him had come his sister’s sons, aged fifteen and eighteen respectively.
Leaning against a battered filing cabinet and staring vacantly at the visitors was Mahadev’s brother, his face showing none of the sense of panic within him. Mahadev and the Maharajah’s jewels were missing and unusual decisions had to be made. He would probably have to go out to help with inquiries amongst dull Hindu clods in the villages, and he was not looking forward to it.
Why didn’t his father leave the job to the police?
He knew the answer only too well. His father loved Mahadev above everyone; he would literally leave no stone unturned in order to find him.
The stout, plain man in his round black cap gave a small quivering sigh, and tried not to think of his wife’s bitter tirade that morning. She had said she hoped that Mahadev would be found, since there had to be one brain in each generation of the family.
Old Desai turned to the one man in the room to whom he felt close, his Partner Brother, still spry in spite of his years and his sorrows, a man whose sons had died before him. He alone could truly appreciate his dread of losing Mahadev.
Partner Brother’s small eyes gleamed behind his heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Well, where shall we start?’ he asked.
Baroda Brother took off his pince-nez and polished them, to indicate that he was getting ready for action. Since Mahadev, fleeced by the dacoits, had not arrived at Delhi, he was, in his opinion, lying dead somewhere along the railway track. He kept his belief to himself, however, and suggested briskly, ‘We could search either bank of the railway track for some miles on each side of the site of the robbery.’
‘The police will have already done that,’ said Partner Brother.
The thorough, ponderous mind of Mahadev’s own brother had not been idle. ‘Father,’ he said, with a trace of excitement, ‘if there were anything dead within a couple of miles of the railway track, vultures would have come in clouds and would have been clearly visible; the police would have gone immediately to see what was attracting them.’
The other men looked at him in surprise. There was a stunned silence, and then everyone spoke at once.
‘He must be alive,’ said old Desai, his voice trembling.
Baroda Brother-in-law put his pince-nez firmly back on to his nose, and added, ‘He must, since his body was not on the train.’
Mahadev’s brother gritted his teeth. Even when he showed intelligence, he fumed, nobody really noticed. Even his name was forgotten by most; he was simply Husband or Brother or Son – or, worst of all, Mahadev’s Brother – a simpleton in the background of other people’s lives, lost in the shadow of a more brilliant brother and bullied by a shrewish wife.
Yet, who supervised all the account books of his father’s great concerns? he asked himself. Who checked the incoming interest and made the first moves against those who failed to pay? Who sat up late at night, to comb carefully through each agreement, so that not once had they lost a court case when some outraged landowner took them before a magistrate?
He hoped, in the forefront of his mind, that Mahadev was safe. But, deep inside, he wished savagely that he was lost for good. He chewed again his already closely bitten fingernails.
His father’s voice cut through his rumination. ‘We’ll first inquire of every Desai Society along the route, up to a distance of fifty miles from here. There is no great town to comb, unless he is, say, a hostage, in Shahpur itself – only villages.’
He then began to organize them. ‘Dress plainly,’ he advised. ‘You are moneylenders going about your normal business. On no account mention the jewels. Go by bicycle or by horse carriage.’ He tapped his fingers on his little desk, and then went on, ‘Take a servant or one of the others with you – if we find the task too great, we’ll close the office and use the clerks.’ He wagged his finger warningly. ‘Be careful to be courteous to the Headman or the Panchyat, when you inquire. And stop at isolated huts – and don’t forget the Untouchable quarters.’
All the men nodded agreement.
‘Should we inform Dean Mehta now?’ asked Partner Brother.
Old Desai considered this question carefully. He would have preferred to keep the matter secret, but the Mehtas might hear a rumour.
A fresh fear struck him. Such rumours might well reach the dacoits. If Mahadev had been left for dead, if he had seen the robbers’ faces and they realized that he was still alive, would not they also start to hunt for him?
He winced, as he foresaw a quick knife thrust under Mahadev’s well-covered ribs, the moment he showed himself. Impatiently he pushed the unwelcome thought out of his mind, and answered his brother’s question. ‘I’ll go to his office to tell him – so that, for the moment, his family does not have to know.’
He remembered grimly his Baroda Sister’s remark, when she had first been asked to act as go-between. She had said, ‘The girl is not lucky – she has already lost one fiancé.’ He had snubbed her thoroughly as being superstitious and old-fashioned.
The men got up and stretched, and he clapped his hands. When his Chief Clerk came running, he told him to bring in the morning mail, together with his notebook and pencil. While he was doing this, old Desai turned to his younger son and instructed him to stay and mind the business. After he had dealt with his letters, old Desai tottered into the long, dark room which was his general office. His half dozen more junior employees all rose to salute him obsequiously. He made this round of the office daily, pausing to poke into every small detail that caught his eye. Occasionally, he left some young man trembling and ashen-faced, after being upbraided. All his employees were in some way related to him, and it was unlikely that he would ever discharge one of them; but he held the purse-strings tightly in his rheumaticky hands, and it took devoted service and slavelike hours of work to loosen them.
After having left a trail of moral destruction in the office, he returned to his younger son in a more amiable frame of mind. He wanted to compliment him on his deduction th
at Mahadev was probably alive, and he considered giving him the emerald ring he always wore. He half slipped it off his finger; then his lifetime habit of parsimony re-asserted itself, and he slipped it on again. Words, however, cost nothing, and he left his son considerably cheered up, when he finally climbed into his carriage to drive himself to the University.
From the depths of his dusty cubicle, Dean Mehta’s secretary informed him that the Dean was at the Marwari Gate temple and would be a little late that morning. He looked at his watch, and said, ‘He should be back in about ten minutes.’
‘I’ll wait,’ Desai decided, and he was shown into the Dean’s office.
The secretary returned to his work and Desai could hear him shouting down the telephone. Desai fretted that he should have telephoned before he came. He had a telephone in his office on which he received incoming calls, but he could never bring himself to make a call. Lines could be crossed, he worried, and the contents of very private agreements be overheard by outsiders; skeletons might rattle in family closets; thieves might overhear. The telephone was, indeed, not something to be used lightly. In fact, most telephone calls received by the Desais resulted in one or the other partner driving over to see the caller.
The Dean came in slowly, his ascetic face mirroring clearly his sharp abstinence from food that day and his lack of sleep.
He bade Desai welcome and sent for tea for him. He then sat, amazed, listening to his story. In the back of his mind, he wondered if Mahadev had absconded. Though Desai had not mentioned it, he guessed that Mahadev had been carrying valuables, probably jewellery. A fortune in jewels would be a great temptation to a young man who would know how to dispose of them and who seemed to like living in the West.
They discussed whether to tell Anasuyabehn and decided that she had better know. A rumour would disturb her almost more than knowing the truth of the matter.
The Dean asked what assistance he could give. His brother, he said, had already arrived to help with the wedding and was supervising the delivery of supplies for it.
‘If you hear anything that might bear on my son’s disappearance, would you let me know?’
‘Naturally, I will.’
The Dean forced himself to stand up and see Desai out to his carriage. As they walked along the corridor, quiet except for the occasional burst of a lecturer’s voice as they passed a half-closed door, Desai said that, if Mahadev was all right, he wished to bring forward the date of the wedding. He wanted to send the boy and his new wife to Paris again for a little while.
The Dean foresaw cries of objection from his sisters and his sister-in-law; women were always so fussy about ceremonies – and the astrologer would be full of forebodings, no doubt, at a change of date. He was, however, a little uneasy. Since her first outburst, Anasuyabehn had said no more to him about breaking the betrothal. Aunt had assured him that the girl now seemed quite reconciled to it. Yet, he felt, he would be thankful when it was over; his last family responsibility would have been fulfilled.
As they paused at the top of the front steps, he said, ‘The preliminary invitations have been sent out, but I’ll hold back the second ones and the special invitation letters, until I hear from you.’
Desai smiled and saluted him. ‘A-jo,’ he said, and got back into his shabby, little carriage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘Where can a woman cry in peace?’ Anasuyabehn asked herself miserably, as she went back home from the park. She felt that if she did not cry soon she would choke. Her last stronghold, her bedroom, was at present invaded by her two cousins. They would not leave until after her marriage – and, after that, she would cease to be a person in her own right and be an appendage of Mahadev’s.
Apart from her grief at Tilak’s behaviour and her approaching marriage, she was still haunted by memory of the fearsome monk. Her religion, with its ruthless rules for the purification of the jiva, the soul, during each rebirth, had re-asserted itself that morning in a most alarming way.
In betrothing her to Mahadev, her father had broken only a rule of caste, which had crept into the originally classless, casteless Jain belief. Jainism had, at first, been a movement of revolt against caste, she thought, and, to be honest, he was marrying her into a group which epitomized Jain life.
If she ran away with Tilak, she would commit the sin of filial disobedience and would, in addition, marry a man of another religion, a high-caste Hindu. Even to love a man so much was in conflict with the teachings of her religion, she moaned to herself. To become too attached to anything or anybody was a prelude to suffering, and, as tears welled up in her, she knew the teaching had meaning.
‘When are the merchants bringing wedding saris to show you?’ broke in one of her cousins excitedly. ‘I’m longing to see them.’
‘Ask Aunt,’ replied Anasuyabehn shortly. ‘She has it all arranged.’
They turned hopefully to the old lady, to ask about everything to do with the marriage. ‘When shall we visit the Desais? Can we go to a potter’s yard? We want to mark his wheel with red powder and buy some pots for the marriage booth? And Lord Ganesh must get an offering of rice from us and have his elephant head specially marked, mustn’t he, Aunt? Respected Aunt, do tell us?’
Aunt laughed and answered them amiably, while the object of all the preparations trailed slowly behind her and began to regret bitterly her sharpness with Tilak. Perhaps, she argued, he had been held up by his work, so that he could not meet her. And there simply had to be a reasonable explanation of his attendance on Miss Armstrong, if she could only think of one.
The servant had put out string beds on the roof for the gentlemen and on the veranda for the ladies, each bed swathed in a mosquito net.
On arriving home, the Dean immediately excused himself and went to his study to perform his evening devotions, while his more worldly brother betook himself to the roof with a copy of Gone with the Wind and a flashlight by which to see to read it. The older ladies retired to one end of the veranda to say their prayers and sink thankfully into their beds. The younger ones sat, cross-legged, on their beds and loosened their long plaits of hair, while they continued to whisper across to Anasuyabehn for some time. She was taciturn in her replies, however, and eventually feeling a little deflated they curled up and slept.
Anasuyabehn could not rest. For greater comfort, she took off her blouse and wrapped her sari loosely round herself. Her throat ached with suppressed tears.
Finally, she slipped out of bed and went into the house. There was no light under the study door, so she assumed her father had gone up to bed on the roof. She made her way to her own room and switched on the light. The heat of the house was almost intolerable, but the need to cry was urgent. She paced up and down restlessly; the tears, so long repressed, would not come.
Undeniably, Tilak still had the intention of marrying her; otherwise, he would not have bothered to follow her to ask about the passport. She understood the importance of the question; a large deposit was needed in order to obtain one, and government procedure was extremely slow.
Well, she had a passport, obtained when she had accompanied her father to a conference in Sri Lanka. The problem was how to get this information to Tilak and how to ask his forgiveness for her rudeness.
Her cotton sari was soaked with perspiration. She went to the window, opened it and leaned her head against the iron bars. There was not a breath of wind. She stared aimlessly out at the rural scene lit by a moon partially shrouded in dust. She hoped that houses would never be built behind her father’s bungalow.
Then she remembered that, unless Tilak moved quickly, she would soon leave this pleasant home for the cramped and ugly Desai Society, behind high walls in the inner city. She had not yet seen it, but she could well visualize its crumbling walls and worn steps, its wavery, tiled roofs, its lack of fresh air. Aunt had told her that not many people lived in its multitude of rooms, that the business took up a number of them. She thought of Mahadev’s little girl wandering, solitary, throu
gh them. What was she like, after being pushed about by a spiteful aunt? Anasuyabehn felt suddenly cold at the thought of having to establish her seniority over her future sister-in-law – her aunt had warned her about this. And then there was the lonely, sad uncle whose wife and children were already dead. What was he like?
‘I can’t face it,’ she cried softly. ‘Tilak Sahib, how can I get a note to you?’
Her question was answered as if she had rubbed a magic lamp. From outside the window came an urgent whisper, ‘Put the light out.’
Mouth half-open in surprise, she stood motionless, and then began to giggle almost hysterically.
‘The light, Bahin.’
Still giggling, she went obediently and switched the light out.
‘Come to the window,’ pleaded Tilak.
She stood with her hand on the switch, trying to calm herself. She succeeded only in bursting into tears.
‘Come, Rani.’
She ran to him, tears pouring down her face. Putting her arms through the bars, she clasped them round Tilak. A very delighted Tilak slipped his arms through the maddening bars to hold her as best he could. The bars bit into their flesh.
‘My love, my dear love,’ he murmured. Endearments and passionate kisses passed between them, and the passport was momentarily forgotten.
Suddenly, from the roof, Anasuyabehn’s uncle shouted, ‘Who’s there?’ Keener of hearing than his elder brother, he leaned over the parapet and swung his torch wildly about, the darting beam moving too fast to pick out any single detail.
Without a further word, Tilak slid away from the windowsill. Like a squirrel, he streaked along the backs of the bungalows, then cut across the field path into common land, where he lay panting in the dry grass, until the lights went out again in the Mehta home. Then he jogged back to his room, cursing under his breath.
The Moneylenders of Shahpur Page 14