Banquet on the Dead (17 page)

They were walking towards the right side of the building which led to the servant’s quarters—in the old house—but Hamid Pasha stopped abruptly and took Nagarajan by the elbow. ‘Come, miyan, someone is at the well.’

They hurried back up the path and took the way to the well. They crossed the bushes and came upon the clearing to see Koteshwar Rao standing by the edge of the well, looking down into its waters. For a second it seemed to Nagarajan the man was about to jump in, but then he recalled this was a family of swimmers.

At least the men, he corrected himself.

The doctor gave no sign of having seen them arrive, neither looking back nor saying anything. For a minute or two they stood behind him, not knowing what to say. Just when Nagarajan was about to lose patience and say something, Koteshwar Rao spoke.

‘We used to come here as kids,’ he said. ‘We used to live near Vijaya Talkies, and it is only a short run here—or at least it seemed like a short run back then, when we were young.’

Nagarajan heard these words and thought they suited a man of fifty, not one of thirty, which was what Koteshwar Rao was. He suddenly realised that he had always thought of Koteshwar Rao as elderly. He had a son aged seven, but he had married early, when he was in his final year of college. But it was the hair. By the time Nagarajan had first met Koteshwar Rao, the latter’s hair had already greyed. Now, in his head of neatly combed, thick hair, one would have to hunt to find a single strand of black hair.

Maybe it was that, yes, and words such as these, talking about running around and swimming and playing in the old days.

‘In summers we used to swim. All of us—Lakshman, Praveen, Krishna, Ram, Swamannayya—he taught us all to swim, right here, in this well. I taught my son to swim in this well too.’ He looked down at the depression on the ground to his left, where the grass was flattened and muddied, as though a big weight had been recently removed. ‘I used to come running from there,’ he looked back along the path, ‘and jump over the roller here and dive into the well’. He looked up at Hamid Pasha with a faint smile. ‘Into the ring provided by a scooter tire.’ After Hamid Pasha’s incredulous look he said, ‘I used to be thinner then.’

Mild consternation appeared on his face. ‘I don’t know where the diving stone went. I have never known what it was used for, though, but it was always there, somehow. It has always been right here.’ He looked around again, desperate, Nagarajan thought, to cling onto some remnant of a dead past.

Hamid Pasha limped forward and placed a hand on the doctor’s shoulder.

‘You must think I am sentimental, coming here and reminiscing like this. But I have happy memories of this place. I am so glad that it was not me who found her, sir. Even now when I look down at the water I feel like I see her, just as Praveen described it to me, floating face down, with her arms spread out wide, her hair fanning around her head, and I feel dizzy. Just before, when you were standing behind me, I felt I would topple over and fall.’

Hamid Pasha said softly, ‘Come, my boy.’ And that manner of addressing him did not seem strange at all to Nagarajan, though he would never be able to bring himself to call Koteshwar Rao that. Yet that was all he was compared to Hamid Pasha and himself. He was young enough to be their son. Suddenly, Nagarajan felt old, and he sighed.

‘My sister died in this well too,’ said the doctor. ‘I had another sister. Her name was Kiran Mayi. She—she died of fright more than anything else.’ He had taken a step back from the well, but now he peered out at it, like he wanted to see the calm green water again. ‘Swamannayya had told her that our well had snakes—harmless, small snakes, sir. She wanted to swim with us, play in the well with us—she was young, you see. Karuna was already sixteen by then, but Kiran was twelve,
our
age, almost.’

He stopped and stared. Lines appeared and changed shape on his smooth features, as emotions surfaced and faded away. Nagarajan could not tell exactly what was going through his mind, but he was recalling events long past, that much was clear. Hamid Pasha said into the silence, ‘Tell us, my boy, how did she die?’

‘She was bitten,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘We had seen snakes in the well all the time, sir, and we
hoped
that one of them would come and bite us. We knew they were non-poisonous, of course. But we were never bitten.
She was
. And for all her bravado, she went into a fit that day. It was a small, harmless wound—just a flat jaw-mark and a couple of punctures, you know. Requiring nothing more painful than two injections. Swamannayya brought her out of the water, and she had an attack right there. They rushed her to a hospital. Got her out of it that evening, but then she ran a temperature for a few days, had another fit—all psychological, the doctor said—and she slipped away.’

‘Hai Allah,’ Hamid Pasha murmured.

‘Karuna never forgave Swamannayya for it,’ said Koteshwar Rao quietly, ‘and I don’t think she forgave my grandmother either. She always maintained that they should never have let Kiran take to the water that day. But who can foresee these things, sir?’

Hamid Pasha asked, ‘And from then on your sister would always be cold towards your uncle and grandmother?’

Koteshwar Rao nodded. ‘You have to remember she was a young girl as well, just sixteen. In many ways she was the most impressionable of us all, I would say. Maybe it affected her more than it did all of us—maybe because she
remembers
more of it than all of us. I—I just remember what my mother tells, and things have come back to me after I have grown older. With Karuna it was not so.’

‘I heard your son also had a little—brush—with drowning when he was learning to swim?’

‘Who told you about that?’ Koteshwar Rao asked hotly. Then in a mellower voice he said, ‘Don’t misunderstand me, sir, but it is an exaggeration to say that my son had a brush with drowning when I was by his side all the time. We’d just strapped him to an empty barrel and thrown him into the water, but there was a hole in it, and I just dived in and brought him back up. Nothing really happened.’

‘And yet people remembered the incident.’ Hamid Pasha paused tactfully. ‘Maybe there was some debate on how the hole—or holes—happened to be there?’

Pursing his lips, the doctor shook his head. ‘Conspiracy theories abound everywhere. I don’t believe anything without evidence. I would like to ask who would want to kill my son, and even if they did, would they do so in so clumsy a fashion?’

‘You are right,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘It is probably just a theory.’

‘It is,’ said Koteshwar Rao. And a hint of stubbornness crept into his voice as he said, ‘We have happy memories of this place. Happy!’

‘Miyan,’ Hamid Pasha said slowly, ‘what is Swami saab’s feeling towards Karuna Mayi?’

Koteshwar Rao sighed, and Nagarajan got the impression of a man who’d been asked to decipher and explain the meaning of existence. ‘Karuna is not an easy person to get along with, sir,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mean just now. She has always been aloof, even as a child. She was never close to any of us—not to my father nor my mother. She was off on her own most of the time.’

‘Off on her own doing what?’

‘I guess all artists are like that,’ Koteshwar Rao said, not hearing what Hamid Pasha had said. ‘She was the only one in the family who took after my father. My father was an artist. And she used to paint too. I suppose my father spent some time with her before the rest of us were born.’ Again that faint, ironic smile, again that ruffling of hair.

‘Does she still paint?’

The doctor shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge, no. We have drifted apart, sir, all of us. None of us knows any more what the rest of us are doing. That is understandable, isn’t it, with siblings—you never think you need to keep in touch with them, and suddenly you realise it has been a year since you last talked to each other.’

‘That is so, miyan. Regrettably so, but that is so,’ Hamid Pasha said, stroking his beard and nodding.

Koteshwar Rao’s voice acquired that dreamy tenor again, which told Nagarajan that he was once more recollecting the past. ‘She was a very irritating sister to have, sir. I remember being told almost every day that I should be more like her. She used to come first in school, she used to paint, she used to participate in her school’s theatre, she used to play the violin, she used to be an athlete, she had an interest in gymnastics...’

Hamid Pasha’s eyebrow rose appreciatively.

Koteshwar Rao saw that and nodded. ‘That is the reaction most people have when they hear of her. I don’t think she was very happy to have gotten married when she did. I think she wanted to study further—though I cannot be sure. We never really talked about that.’ He pursed his lips in thought. ‘We should have.’ Then he shook his head.

‘But you became a doctor,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘You must have been a source of pride to your father too.’

‘Oh, yes, I was. I am the oldest son too, so there are some “privileges” that come with that, I suppose. And yes, as you said, I am the only one among us all who got a medical seat. My father once told me he would have killed himself if I had not qualified.’ He added hurriedly, ‘Not that he would have—but he said so.’

Hamid Pasha nodded. Nagarajan looked about them. They were nestled between bushes on three sides and the compound wall on the fourth. There was a brick wall that rose from the edge of the well to a height of about five feet. The day was cloudy, but the breeze was warm and dry. He felt as if the three of them were alone in a forest. This might be a place which was open to all eyes from the entrance, but once one reached it, there was complete seclusion and privacy. So maybe it was not a bad choice for a murder, provided that the murderer had a way to arrive at the well and leave it without being seen.

‘This is a very quiet place,’ said Koteshwar Rao, echoing Nagarajan’s thoughts. ‘People generally don’t come here unless they have a good enough reason. Swamannayya comes every now and then to dump some chlorine bags into the water. But unless we want to swim—and we haven’t swum here for at least two years now—we don’t come here.’

Hamid Pasha said, ‘But you are easily seen when going to it and coming from it, are you not?’

The doctor’s hand once again rose to his hair. ‘The path is
visible
, yes. But unless you are at the window at the time, you don’t see anyone. I mean, the windows that look out on this path, both upstairs and downstairs, are situated at the corners of the living rooms. You don’t go there unless by chance, or unless you
want
to look at the path. You know?’

Hamid Pasha exchanged a quick glance at Nagarajan, and their eyes gleamed for a quick fraction of a second. He nodded at the doctor. ‘So this is a good place for quiet reflection, hain?’

‘I come here every now and then, for just that. It’s a busy house, sir, and sometimes you just don’t get the peace you need. Wherever you turn you find people.’ This time the smile was good-natured, and there was genuine warmth in his eyes. ‘This is a good place for those awkward conversations too, I gather.’

‘Ah, my friend, what do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, nothing in particular. They say walls have ears. There are no walls here.’ He looked around. ‘In the house you cannot say anything that is private or confidential. You can rest assured that someone or the other is listening in on everything you say. But here—’

‘We have a wall here too,’ Hamid Pasha said, pointing at the brick barrier.

‘Oh, that. It used to be much bigger than that until two years ago—about eight feet tall. We used to dive into the well off it. I taught Uday to jump off it too. I was going to teach him to dive off it and they got it chopped down to half its size.’

‘Ah, do you know why, miyan?’

Koteshwar Rao shrugged. ‘I suppose it was for the best. If children climbed it and fell and hurt themselves—it’s a much safer world these days, is it not, sir?’

Hamid Pasha said solemnly, looking down at the steps leading down to the well, ‘Not for everyone, hain?’

Koteshwar Rao’s face darkened too. ‘I suppose not,’ he said.

Again silence settled over them. Nagarajan could not help but think that Hamid Pasha sometimes deliberately ignored the time-honoured technique of avoiding conversation-killers during interrogation. You wanted the suspect to talk as much as possible; the more he talked, the more it was likely he would give you something to go on. Killing the conversation only made the suspect uneasy, and you had to redouble your efforts to tease him into the talkative comfort zone again.

But this time Koteshwar Rao took up the tack himself. ‘My grandmother was the only one on my side of the family who supported my marriage. “You go and marry anyone you want to, Kotesh,” she told me. I told her my to-be-wife was a Reddy and that my mother was against an out-of-caste marriage, but she told me not to listen to anyone. “If the girl is nice, does it matter what caste she is from, boy?” she said. And she gave me a bundle of fifty-rupee notes. “Keep these—fifty-thousand rupees,” she said.’ Again the kind smile opened up his face, and the eyes glistened with moisture. ‘I gave it right back to her, and I told her a bundle of fifties was
five thousand
rupees, not fifty-thousand.’

Nagarajan heard the choke in the man’s voice, and his attempts to clear it. The breeze died down, and a stillness fell over the place. The bushes and the grass seemed as reluctant to move as the brick wall. Koteshwar Rao’s shoulders slumped, and though he was not a tall man, he looked like he had shrunk in size from just a few moments ago.

‘She was ahead of her time,’ he said. ‘She never learnt to read or write, but she had that which all the members of the next generation lacked—yes, including my mother. She had common-sense. And quite a lot of it.’

‘You do not seem to like living in this house very much,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘And you have not always lived here, have you?’

‘No, sir. We have a house in Reddy Colony. We came here only because my grandmother asked me to come. I was to be her doctor and look after her. I ended up being a doctor to their whole family, of course.’ He grinned disarmingly. ‘My wife did not like us coming here.’