If her chapter was the most potent, mine was the funniest. Not that it was rip-roaring or anything, but it did have a dash of humor, and so Nandita wisely placed it first.
In my teens, at functions and gatherings, I sat in a corner and watched other corner and back-row people. The severely deformed were single and had to be attended to by servants. In addition, entire families who did not fit into the center sat on the rows of chairs that lined the back walls of marriage halls, and I, invisible among them, spent my time formulating the relative ladder of deformity. My chapter, called “The Greater Blemish,” was based on my observation that among couples, the woman was always at least one rung lower than the man. A girl with a bad face might be able to marry a man with a clubfoot. A limping girl had to marry a cripple in a wheelchair; a pretty deaf girl, an old man. A rich girl with a cleft lip could be married to a poor boy who needed prospects. Interclass was permitted because of the other disparities—rich girls with deformities were married to poor boys without prospects—but not intercaste. Caste must be maintained at all costs. A Brahmin could never marry a Banya. Not in an arranged marriage!
That was the essay, and sandwiched in between were the social underpinnings of how women were always at least one rung lower in a feudal patriarchal society; the hierarchy just became more pronounced in cases of deformity.
I could have mentioned that I lost my deformity the day I looked firmly into the mirror and decided that I had been dealt a goodly hand after all. What happened was that the blot popped right out of my soul the day I saw Nandita leave the hospital with her mother pushing her wheelchair, a small, straight smile on her face. I knew my deformity could be dreamt away, but hers could not be. A girl in a wheelchair could not pretend to be whole, not for all the perfumes of Arabia.
“I can understand why Nandita needs to believe that it was Raswani,” I said across the half-eaten plates of chicken chow fun. “She told me she still has nightmares about Raswani’s mad eyes looming over her, flared in unfathomable anger.”
“So if it was not Raswani, and you saw Nelson leave, who could it be?”
“I think she jumped,” I said.
It was logical to imagine that Prince went up to table-land that night with every intention of jumping to her death from the top of the cliff. She was a passionate and unstable girl, given to mood swings. And that night, she had felt completely alone.
Only your own family will tell you when you have snot on your face, she said to me that night. Only your very own people.
And maybe if I had been wise and courageous, I could have seen that she had something on her mind, that she wanted to talk. She might have shown me the letter that was in her pocket. But I was young, and my head was full of silly romance books. Everything revolved around what she did to me. And so I fought with her, and she stormed out. And then she had her fight with Nelson.
She walked up to table-land, her world as sharp and wounding as the blade of a steel sword. She must have been ready to jump when I saw her. I remembered how her raincoat flapped in the wind. Nelson interrupted her plans by going up to make amends. Prince did not turn, and Nelson did not stay.
Did she know I was there behind the rocks? I believe she did. I believe that it was I who sealed her death. I knew that if I had gone up to her as she sat on the edge, she would not have jumped that night.
“But what about the struggle?” said Akhila. “There were signs of a struggle.”
“I think some of it was her grabbing at dirt and rocks as she fell. And the rest, imagined. Don’t forget Inspector Wagle needed a reason for putting Shankar in jail.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What do you think then?” I shot back, our old hostility raising its head again.
“The strangest thing is how half of Panchgani was up there that night. In the middle of the monsoon, in the middle of the night, so many people just randomly there. It is out of a detective novel. You have to admit that, at least. I was in the school since I was seven, and I had never been on table-land at night—except once, when Miss Wilson took us stargazing—and there we were, breaking out of bounds, on that very night. We hadn’t even planned to be on table-land. I said it when we got back to the school and I say it to this day. It was the rain stopping suddenly after so long. And that too on a full-moon night. It drove us all mad that night.”
There was nothing to disagree about. It had been a fateful night.
“Miss Nelson,” she said, her words tumbling over each other, lest I not let her finish, “Miss Nelson was the most logical suspect. But then, as in any proper murder mystery, it turned out that she was innocent. We hold up many of the minor characters who, according to storybook logic, should have done it. I mean Mr. Blind Irani, it turns out, was walking on table-land that night and, with his tapping cane, could have banged into her and accidentally pushed her over. Or there was even Shankar.”
She hesitated, swallowed a large sip from her second Fanta, and said, “Well, what the hell, it’s been so long.”
I knew she would not let me go without finishing what she had to say.
“We always boil it down to two,” she said. “Shobha felt it was you. And Ramona will insist to this day that it is Merch,” she said, cracking ice with her teeth.
“Merch? Why Merch?” I asked, bemused, for how could Merch the Mystery Man hurt anyone?
“A love triangle. A crime of passion.” She mumbled, looking into her food.
She rode it to the end. I had to grant her that. I could imagine she brooked no nonsense from her children or her in-laws. I wondered what bizarre turns their thoughts had taken to pin the deed on Merch, a man whose feet barely touched the ground.
“You really don’t know Merch,” I assured her. “I can tell you he would be the least likely man on earth to kill for passion.” I was very patronizing. I ordered another salted lemon soda.
“You forget,” I said, “that I was very close to her before she died. I know instinctively that she jumped. She saw no life for herself, she jumped.”
“And all those people, you and Merch and Nelson, up there to watch her.”
“Look, I can’t explain it all in rational terms. You know that. It was as if she pulled us all to her that night. But none of us could help her. Maybe she called us there to say good-bye.” I shrugged. “And for your information, Merch was not there.”
Akhila shook her head. “I don’t know if Merch is still a friend of yours,” she said, “but I wonder about him. I mean, you know Ramona has never been the same since the episode with Merch on table-land.”
Merch, who was so gentle and elegant in those days, I could not see that at all. Were they still like schoolgirls after all these years? Were they still seeing the world through the Timmins filter?
“And what are you talking about?”
It was as if I had put a live wire to her head. She seemed electrified. She leaned forward, she sat back.“I can’t believe it. You actually did not know it all these years?” She shook her head. “I never smoke in public, but I can’t help it, what the heck.” She continued babbling, fumbling through her lumpy round purse for her pack. “They are not going to believe this. They won’t believe it. I wish Shobha and Nandita were here. At least one of them. Otherwise, they just won’t believe this. Gosh, imagine. All these years you did not know about Merch’s role in this whole murder episode.”
“The night of the funeral, when you went back up to table-land with Merch
, didn’t you know that we followed you?” Her hand was shaking as she rested her cigarette on an ashtray. “I mean, I wasn’t there, but I know it like I was. It was Nandita and Ramona. They followed you up to table-land. Didn’t you know?”
I shook my head. No, I did not know. I was still disbelieving, but something tripped in my gut, perhaps, because I felt hot and flushed and I had to fan myself with a Kamling napkin.
“Then why did you leave first, alone?” asked Akhila. She narrowed her eyes and looked at me through the smoke of both our cigarettes, for all the world like a Miss Marple from the colonies.
I recalled that night on table-land. We could still feel her presence near the needle, Merch and I, hugging and weeping. And then we sat quietly for some time. “He said he had promised to wait for Mr. Irani and walk down with him,” I said. “You know the old man used to walk on table-land at any time, day or night, since he could not see anyway, he said it made no difference to him.”
“But he threatened to kill them. As soon as you left, Merch walked up to Nandita and Ramona where they were hiding behind the bushes, and he said he would kill them if they tried to snoop into the murder,” she said quietly.
Merch? Our Merch threatening to kill two schoolgirls?
“I’m sorry, I can’t see it. I know he would never use the word snoop,” I said, and I knew it. How could anyone see him, with his lazy walk, parting the bushes, bending over the girls and telling them with a quizzical smile, “Don’t snoop into the murder or I will kill you?”
Akhila was quite astounded. “What is it with you?” she said, jerking forward with exasperation. “Was it a ’70s pot thing or something? And what about the raincoats? How did he happen to have those raincoats if he hadn’t been on table-land the night of the murder?”
Raincoats? This was a new story, after all these years. I listened in silence as she told me how Merch walked the two girls back to his room, giving them the raincoats they had left on table-land the night of the murder along with a sinister threat.
“Ramona’s mother tells everyone that her daughter has become touched,” said Akhila, patting her temple. “Every time we go there and Ramona spends hours talking intense nonsense, her mother says, as we leave, ‘It is a curse. Because she looked into the eyes of a killer as a child. A fresh killer still mad from the murder.’ But of course the mother is rather hysterical herself.”
I felt I had been dragged through that entire monsoon again during the course of this one Chinese lunch. First the schooldays with the girls floating like blue-checked balloons, and then the raw days after she died, when I was like a dead chicken ready for the fire. I withdrew into my shell, as if I were still twenty-one. I could only look at her, dumbly.
She tilted her head and eyed me with a somber look, resting her case. She had been perky, not pretty, as a girl, and now had a blithe kind of confidence. Her chubby cheeks had filled out into a round pleasant face. I could see her ordering endless plates of chicken sandwiches at CCI Club for her plump children.
I sat back, spent and cold as the air-conditioning dried the rivers of sweat on my body. It was not that I believed everything she said. It was that I felt suddenly certain that I had danced like a snake for the eyes of a killer.
I was possessed all of a sudden with the intensity of those days. I took a taxi from Kamling restaurant, past Marine Drive, where the sea glimmered like glass under the white-hot sky and pigeons picked at peas on the promenade, and went directly to Merch’s room in his mother’s flat on Napean Sea Road. I ran up the servants’ spiral stairway at the back of the building, arriving breathless on the fourth floor to find a lock on the door. I waited a while, heart aflutter like Charulata Apte of the old days, though I had not felt a whiff of that in any of the hundred times I had been to his room in Bombay all these years. The room had a separate entrance, a bed in a corner, and a balcony in the same place as his room in Panchgani. Instead of the layered mountains, the balcony faced a champa tree, on which kites got stuck in January and swung idly all through the summer. In the monsoon, the kites fell to the ground defeated, and the champas blossomed, blowing gusts of scented air into his room in the afternoons as if he were a Mughal monarch. It was the servants’ room of his mother’s large flat.
The alcove leading to his room had a forsaken air, and so I climbed down and went again up the main staircase and rang the front doorbell. His mother answered and stood as she always did, blocking the front door. She was elegant, in an ironed shift and a shock of short white hair. She was, as always, very warm and friendly, and we stood at the door for a full twenty minutes cooing to each other—how is that nice dark young man you brought with you last time, how is your daughter, I’m sorry I always forget her name—but she did not ask me in. “Sorry, the house is being pest-controlled today, and we are busy covering up all the furniture,” she said. She always made an excuse not to invite me in.
Turned out Merch had gone to Panchgani a few days ago. “He said he is going to be there for some time, doing his portraits. He did not tell me anything about when he is coming back. If you see him, please tell him he has to be back by next Tuesday. I need him to sign some papers and the ration card has to be renewed, not actually renewed, but last time the ganga took it they said there is something wrong with it.” I left before she could think up any more reasons.
In my dignified householder stage, I did not dash off on foolish hikes and errands. But the restlessness of the old days took hold of loin and limb, and I decided I could not wait for Merch to come back to Bombay. That Friday, after classes, I left Uma in my father’s care and went up the winding ghat road to Panchgani and entered the room above the dispensary for the first time in a dozen years.
Half the kitchen was now a darkroom. Merch’s black-and-white portraits of Panchgani people—portraits of fat Kaka in his restaurant, Mr. Irani playing blind bridge in the sun—were hung around without apparent order.
“What kind of idiot were you in those years, Merch?” I asked him, sitting on the bed, legs dangling. “Who were you in those days?” My mind was turning somersaults after the first joint. “Did you think you were that young man in Crime and Punishment? Smoking dope all day thinking of devious plans? I can’t remember his name. You know, that young man who stayed in a cupboard and killed the old lady.”
“Dimitri Dimitrovich,” said Merch. “It’s safe to call all Russian heroes Dimitri Dimitrovich.”
He must have known where I was heading. There was silence for a time as he went into the kitchen to make me some tea.
“You don’t know, Charu,” he said, coming out of the kitchen with two steaming cups. “I was obsessed with you in those days. Even when you were with Pin. I used to look at you all the time in the room, just wait for you to look up at me. I felt you were like a rosebud, you had a perfume around you. I concentrated on you. I knew I would make love to you. Even when I saw you with Pin. It was funny, I wasn’t jealous or anything, you just kept growing more beautiful before my eyes, blossoming. I knew it would happen suddenly one day, like magic. And it did.”
We sat there, lost in our own regrets for a while.
I lit a cigarette and through the distance of the smoke I saw him again. Merch has stopped smoking—“Only tobacco,” he always explains, “only stopped tobacco”—now that he is past forty. His hair is still straggly and long, but he has a very small bald patch at the back of his head, which he tries to comb over. I remembered him in this very room, bending over this sam
e record player when his body was lithe and shiny. I could not find him sinister.
“But were the girls right, or were they not?” My words came out in a tumble. “I have come all this way. I rushed straight to your house in Bombay and then came all the way here to Panchgani to ask you two burning questions. What were you doing on table-land on the night of her death?
“You were seen on the cliff that night, you know,” I said, accusingly. “Why did you never tell me, Merch, in all these years?”
“How am I supposed to tell you I was there when I was not? We went up together. It was the night of the funeral. That was the night I was up on table-land, with you.”
“But we went up together, we sobbed and had this heart-wrenching moment. And then you sent me down alone, saying you had to wait for Mr. Irani, right? Now Akhila tells me you went up to Nandita and Ramona, who were hiding behind the bushes, and you took them down to your room and gave them the raincoats they had left on the night of the murder. There was no sign of Mr. Irani. I don’t understand at all.”
I had always felt our love started that night, when we hugged and sobbed beside the needle. And to think that he lied and plotted that night hurt, even after all these years.
“You did not even tell me that we had been followed!” I said, disgruntled.
He fidgeted around for a while, blowing his nose with a crumpled handkerchief. “You found out about my fifteen minutes,” he said with the shy, shiny smile that had wormed its way into my heart all those years ago. “The two girls followed us up that night. I knew they were hiding in the bushes. So after you left, I walked up to them. It was such a strange echoing kind of night. Poor things, they were crouching and shivering behind the bush. It was so out of Enid Blyton, I could not help myself. I stood over them and told them to leave detecting to the adults. I think I said something about consequences. I did a sort of sinister Cyrus.” He was sheepish.
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