Banquet on the Dead (24 page)

Hamid Pasha closed the booklet. With a delicate forefinger and thumb he removed his reading glasses and put them back into their case. Then he closed his eyes and threw his head back against the chair’s back-rest. The dry air from the fan hit him full in the face. He opened his mouth, licked his parched lips with his tongue, and sighed deeply.

‘Begum,’ he said.

There was no reply. He heard the blade of the vegetable knife hit the wooden board again and again. He heard the water run in the sink. The door of the fridge opened and closed every now and then. A steel vessel clanged against the granite top; and the mixer sprung to life for a minute before sputtering back to silence.

All these suggested that she was there. So Hamid Pasha cleared his throat and called out, ‘Begum.’

‘Haanji?’ she said.

‘Are you listening?’ he said. The cacophony of activity continued from the kitchen.

‘Haanji,’ she said.

‘I do not know...’ said Hamid Pasha, and when he said those words he involuntarily grimaced, for he hated saying those words about anything to anyone, least of all to his wife, and least of all about a case he was dealing with. But circumstances were such. ‘I do not know where I am,’ he said, ‘or where I am going’. On receiving no answer he said, ‘Begum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘There is neither head nor tail to this story, begum. Did the old lady die because she forgot to take her glasses with her and therefore took the wrong path to the well? Or did she die because she was filled with misery at her failure to build a happy family? Or did one of them kill her?

‘I think she was killed, begum, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it is because I look for the worst in men that I think one of them
had
to have killed her. But it is not that, begum. There are things that do not make sense—they do not fit!’

‘Haanji.’

‘The glasses—
they
do not fit. The hands, the servantgirl’s sister—they do not fit. The people working at the gates do not fit. The chlorine bags and the bloodied water—they do not fit. Lakshman telling us that Praveen could have scaled the wall—does that fit? Then we go and find Praveen is going to kill himself because he thinks
he
is responsible for his grandmother’s “suicide”. Does that fit anywhere? It does not.

‘Durga and Gauri have a meeting by the well in the afternoon. There is another man in Durga’s life. Swami saab has his hands full with the communists next door. Raja saab wants money to watch movies and buy cigarettes. Karuna—what does Karuna Mayi want? Why is she here if she wants nothing and hates everything? No, she wants something too. I wonder what that is...

‘But Swami saab has an alibi. So does Karuna Mayi. The former slept through the whole afternoon. The latter only arrived in the evening from Hyderabad. Ah, Hyderabad— what was that other link with Hyderabad in Praveen’s story? Yes, Kalanjali school of dance and arts. Has that got anything to do with any of this? Or is it just one of those stray pieces of data that do not mean anything? How am I to know? How am I to know, begum?’

‘
Zara aake pyaaz kaatiye,’
the begum said.

Hamid Pasha lumbered to his feet and went into the kitchen. He took a knife in his right hand and stared down at the blade. ‘So easy it is to kill someone with this, begum,’ he said, ‘and yet people go to the trouble of pushing some unfortunate soul into a well’.

‘Haanji.’ A basket of onions was pushed in his direction.

Hamid Pasha took one, peeled it and sliced it in half. ‘Gauri’s sister,’ he murmured, while his hands went through the motions of cutting. ‘Venkataramana was sure that it was Gauri’s sister he saw that day, but everybody else in the house thinks it was Gauri. Even Nagesh and Ashok claim it was Gauri. Should I ask Gauri to back them up? But her own words will not work either way. She could be lying.

‘And Venkataramana could be mistaken. The man is the kind who literally sleeps the whole day. Who can take him at his word? Or are all the others mistaken? Is it possible, then, that the lady with her head covered was
not
Gauri?’

‘Haanji.’

‘But she
had to
be Gauri. Gauri’s own story corroborates it; so does Kamala’s and Lakshman’s. It must have been Gauri who walked up and own the path; but for some reason she had her pallu
down
on her shoulders when she walked up, and
over
her head when she walked back.

‘But even there I am not sure; Kamala says her head was bare. Lakshman says the head was covered. Gauri does not remember either way. I do not know even this simple fact, begum. Not even this simple fact!’

‘Haanji.’

‘And still,’ said Hamid Pasha, gathering the tiny diced pieces of onion and dropping them into the bowl next to him, ‘I keep coming back to hands.’ He sniffed, and his eyes blinked against the burning. ‘Ah, begum,’ he said, ‘you could have asked me to cut brinjals, boiled eggs, anything but onions!’

‘Hmph,’ the begum said.

‘Ah. Ah.’ He stepped to the sink and splashed his face with two handfuls of water. ‘Ah.’ Panting, he moved back to his station and picked up the knife again. In his other hand he took a fresh onion. ‘Yes,’ he said dreamily. ‘Hands. I am fascinated by hands, begum.’

The begum giggled and said, ‘
Chup
.’

‘Hands keep coming into this problem, begum, more than they should. Karuna Mayi’s hands, clean, pale... Raja saab’s hands, shaking, strong, stout... Prameelamma’s hands, nervous, clasping, sweaty... Swami saab’s hands, quiet, agile, beautiful... Lakshman’s hands, sweaty and wet and sticky and slippery... Kauveramma’s hands—yes, Kauveramma’s hands on the morning of her death: dark and spotty, and later on, the water in which she washed her hands was red. Was it the arsenic that caused it? And Koteshwar Rao’s hands—the hands of a surgeon, clinical, steady, never nervous... hands that nursed the old woman, hands that held on to the old woman when he was a child, hands that could have, if he wanted, administered anything to her with no emotion attached; yes, Koteshwar Rao is a doctor. He has seen death. He would not be fazed by it.

‘Hands—I do not understand my fascination with them, begum, but it is there. Perhaps I am a fool. Perhaps I am just an old lecherous man and nothing else.’

‘Haanji.’

18

T
HERE WERE SOME
art houses in Hyderabad which could claim to have fallen on bad times. There was the Nartanasala which opened some time in the late 1970s to packed houses, whether it was staging Kuchipudi or the Telugu translation of a Shakespearean play. In the 1980s, with the advent of television, Nartanasala saw a steady thinning of patrons. The organisers gave in, unable to shoulder the running costs as more and more tickets came back unsold. In 1988, the art house gave way to a movie theatre called Sangeet, which was now, in 2011, in turn giving way to a multiplex. Very few Hyderabadis still remembered Nartanasala.

Kalanjali’s story, though, was a little different. It was situated in Padmaraonagar, twenty years ago a fringe suburb, now very much in the thick of Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s sister city. Kalanjali had never touched the heights Nartanasala did in its heyday; even in the 1970s Kalanjali staged Vijay Tendulkar, Karnad and Tagore, scripted and played by motley crews of bank clerks, revenue office employees, registration officers, retired army men, and housewives. If Nartanasala attracted the cream of young professional acting and dancing aspirants, Kalanjali threw her weight in with the spirited amateurs. While Nartanasala drew throngs week after week and spilled out of every orifice with patrons of art, Kalanjali considered her job well done if on any given weekend her auditorium was half-filled with people, accounting for the fact that at least a quarter of those present were friends and family of the performers.

One never had to worry about tickets running out with Kalanjali; one simply walked in two minutes before the show and took one’s pick of a seat. No one ever read in the papers what played at Kalanjali during the weekend; they never advertised; if Nartanasala was your rich socialite aunt who threw the best party in town, Kalanjali was like your mother’s place; you never had to call before you dropped in, you never had to wonder if you would have a good time if you went, and most of all you could be sure you would not be turned away.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties and the decade following that, Kalanjali stuck to her position, staging show after show and dance after dance every weekend, and the smattering of patrons that filled its auditorium was enough to keep her going. She never aspired to more, and she never achieved less.

Mrs Geeta Pradhan, the eighth chief organiser of Kalanjali in forty years, looked across the table from over her rimless glasses and scowled. She had a rehearsal she had to oversee in ten minutes, the junior artistes that the Aparajita people requested for had to be interviewed, props had to be set up for Krishnamurthy sir’s daughter’s Bharatanatyam performance, and a balcony had to be set up for the
Romeo and Juliet
piece that was on later. She had enough on her hands without strange-looking Muslim elderly gentlemen knocking on her door without an appointment.

She allowed herself to consider him for a minute: shabby, stained clothes, unkempt beard that he kept scratching every minute; a yellow-white Nehru cap sitting on top of his bald head; a brown waistcoat with a large egg-stain near the left shoulder—she stopped herself and sighed. Where did these people
come
from?

‘Yes, Mr Pasha?’ She clasped her hands in front of her on the table. ‘How may I help you?’

‘Yes, memsaab, I come from Warangal. I hope I do not take up much of your time. I have to be back in my city by lunchtime.’