East of the Sun (38 page)

“This isn’t it,” she said. “Miss Barker lives near the Umbrella Hospital. Could you stop, please?”

But the wheels kept on whirling and he didn’t turn.

“Stop now!” she called, but he didn’t reply. The next thing she felt was a jarring bump and her heart thumping as she looked around her and saw nothing that she recognized. “Excuse me! Excuse me.” It felt important to be polite to him. “This is not where I want to go. Wrong street!”

She tried to lean forward but was flung back in her seat by the speed with which he accelerated.

They were jolting down another narrow street where the cobbles made her teeth chatter. To the right of her she could see the slum dwellings the locals called
chawls,
a grim collection of buildings where itinerant workers could stay. They were mostly in darkness now except for small pinpricks of light from kerosene lamps. With a jerk, the rickshaw turned right; on the street corner she saw two women in saris standing in a pool of yellow light in front of a narrow building with grilled windows. Street girls, she thought.

The road was churning underneath her feet. She sensed a slowing down, a rise in the road: opening the curtain again and seeing the road so close, she thought if she chose the right spot it should be perfectly safe to jump out. She was gathering up her shawl when a turn to the left threw her off balance and scattered the contents of her handbag—lipstick, compact, notebooks, and pens—on the floor.

She felt the rickshaw stop. A cloudy eye appeared around the curtain. She saw the jagged edge of his teeth stained with betel juice.

She felt the tip of a knife underneath her ear.

“Get out,” he said.

Her black notebook had flopped to her feet in the gutter. It had all the notes in it she’d planned to type up the following day.

“I want that,” she said, trying not to move or blink. “Can I please pick it up?”

The tip of his knife settled deeper into the hollow between jawbone and ear.

“Don’t move,” he said.

A scuffed shoe kicked the book into a heap of rubbish near an open gutter.

“Please,” she said. “Take all the money in the purse, but give me my notebook back.”

The knife jumped against her throat this time.

She heard him sigh. His right leg hooked the book toward her.

Briefly, as he picked it up and handed it to her, the knife went away. “Thank you,” she said, but he shook his head.

He punched her roughly in the back. “Walk,” he said.

There were no Diwali decorations in this part of town, just the faint orange of the night sky above them, and shuttered dark slums on either side.

He led her down a passageway so narrow that she had to walk ahead of him. On one side of them was an open sewer that stank of human waste, and on the other heaps of rubbish, parts of a bicycle, and what looked like the dreadful remains of a medium-sized animal, maybe a donkey. She caught a glimpse of fur, of staring eyes as she walked by.

Her ears strained to pick up scraps of sound behind the slum windows: a baby crying, the clink of a bottle on a table, a tangle of music. He prodded her painfully from time to time, muttering, “
Gora
”—foreigner—and obscenities she recognized from the street boys.

At the end of the street, the rickshaw man stopped. They’d reached a high narrow house with a solid-looking studded door. The windows were covered in dirty louvered shutters; there were no lights visible behind them.

“We’re here,” he said.

The door opened. She felt arms pulling her down a narrow corridor lit by an oil lamp. There was a soft patter of feet. Someone held her hair back, and before she had time to scream, a petrol-smelling rag was forced between her lips.

A door opened; she was pushed so hard into the clammy darkness that she hit her head on a solid wooden object, a chair or a windowsill. She heard a man shout, the scrape of a chair as she fell down. The last thing she felt were ropes being tied around her wrists and neck, and then a blow and a darkness that tasted of metal.

W
hen Viva woke, a man, middle-aged and wearing an embroidered cap, was staring at her. His eyes were large and protruding, their whites yellow. His breath smelled of garlic.

“She is awake.” He spoke in Hindi to someone she couldn’t see.

She was cold. There were red swellings on her wrists, and marks where they had been tied tightly with rope. The piece of sacking around her shoulders smelled of hemp and mold.

“My name,” the man in the cap said, “is Anwar Azim.”

He was a small but powerfully built man, with a large nose set slightly off center, and a sprinkling of gold teeth set in a fleshy mouth with a ridge on the lower lip where it looked as if he’d been cut and had stitches. He had the deep phlegmy voice of a heavy smoker, but he spoke good English, though without a hint of warmth. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.”

He cleared his nasal passages noisily, a contemptuous sound that filled her with dread. When he’d emptied his mouth in the
brass spittoon in the corner of the room, he looked at her again impassively.

Her head ached so badly it was hard to focus on him or the room she was held in, but she saw it was small, about ten foot by twelve, with stained walls and a torn carpet. In the corner, a table marked with cigarette butts held a gaudy shrine to Ganesh, the elephant god. The plaster elephant had a garland of dead marigolds around its neck and, inexplicably, a red toy car in its arms.

His eyes followed hers. “This is not my room,” he said.

In the middle of his temple was a dark brown mark and the slight indentation of a devout Muslim who kneeled to pray several times a day.

She must have lost consciousness then, because when she woke up again, a young man with a wispy beard and a pleasant, pockmarked face was looking at her. He was lying on a charpoy placed in front of a locked door. A bolt of pain shot through her head as she turned to look at him.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Can I have a drink?”

To her surprise, he leaped up immediately.

“Of course,” he said. He picked up a carafe of rust-colored water and poured her a glass.

He held the glass to her lips and she heard her noisy gobbles. He looked away as though she disgusted him.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a posh, precise voice, “this place is a bit of a fleapit. I have no idea what sanitary arrangements will be here.”

She felt herself gaping at him.

“Why am I here? What have I done?”

“I can’t tell you,” the young man said. “It’s not my part of the ship. Mr. Azim will return later. In the meantime, do you want something to eat?”

“I want to go home,” she said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Her head was hurting her so badly it made her feel sick,
and although one part of her knew she was in danger, a huge lassitude was creeping over her like a fog, and what she most wanted was to lie down, to go to sleep, and to let what would happen happen.

When she woke again, she looked toward the window where a closed wooden shutter filtered bars of light across the room. The rope around her wrists had been untied and her hands lay uselessly in her lap. There was a large fluid-filled blister near her watchstrap.

A fat woman in a dirty sari stood in front of her with a tray holding two chapattis and a small pot of dhal. The bearded boy with the refined English voice who had spoken to her the night before appeared at the doorway. He spoke sharply to the woman, who removed the plaster elephant statue, tucked it under her arm, and took it downstairs with her.

Viva wasn’t hungry but forced herself to eat, hoping it would clear her mind. While she ate, her ears strained to hear anything that might help her: she heard a tin can knocking in the street outside, a door closing, the rumble of a handcart, a bird.

She looked at her watch—eight thirty-five in the morning. Surely they’d be looking for her at the home by now? Daisy had expected her at the party, she wouldn’t let her down, but then a bad thought came. If it was Wednesday, which she was almost certain it was, Daisy taught a morning class at the university, and the others might think she was with her. Also, how on earth would they find her here? A room in the middle of nowhere.

While Viva ate, the boy lounged on his charpoy and watched her. There was a gun on the mattress beside him and two lethal-looking knives.

When she had finished her meal, he left the room suddenly,
shouted into the darkness and the woman came back with a rank-smelling bucket. As she used it, she dimly remembered someone telling her that Indian men were mortified at the thought of a certain kind of woman having bodily functions.

The woman, who had a rolling walk and coarse open pores, tied her up again. The look she gave her was curiously blank, and empty of either malice or curiosity, but at the sound of heavy male footsteps coming upstairs, both of them stiffened, and the woman’s movements became jerky and rushed as though she was scared, too.

Anwar Azim opened the door.

This morning, his clothes were a perfect mixture of East and West. Over his
shalwar kameez
he wore a beautiful butter-colored camel-hair coat, the kind of coat a chap could have worn without disgrace inside the winner’s enclosure at Ascot. The conker-colored brogues under his soft linen trousers were expensive and polished to a high shine.

When he took off his coat and folded it carefully, she saw a Moss Bros label in the silken lining. He drew up a chair and sat opposite her, close enough for her to smell his cigarettes, the mustard oil on his hair.

“Good morning, Miss Viva,” he said softly. His eyes moved slowly from her neck to her breasts, to her legs. “How was your night?” he asked in his plummy accent.

“Unpleasant,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m here.” She was determined to look him in the eye.

He yawned elaborately, showing gums and teeth. “I’m sorry you were uncomfortable. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would like a blanket; I’m cold.”

“Cold by English standards?” he teased her, for the air in the room was quite warm.

He pulled up a chair. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a few easy questions to answer and then you can go home.”

He turned and said something to the boy, who stood up
with a square of black cloth in his hand. He pushed it over the top of the window shutters, blocking out the light, then he lit an oil lamp and put it on the table.

“Sorry about all this.” When Azim moved closer and stared at her, she was conscious again of how unhealthy his eyes looked. Their whites were the color of overboiled eggs.

“And maybe I should say ‘happy Diwali’ to you,” he said without a ghost of a smile. “Do you find our native customs quaint?”

She watched his hand stroke the front of his shirt.

“No,” she said. It annoyed her that her voice sounded so weak and trembling. “I don’t find them quaint. I enjoy them,” she said more firmly. She looked down at the patterns that the children had drawn on her hands, fading now and slightly smudged. “As you can see.”

“I myself don’t celebrate. We used to burn the bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night at our school.” She stared at him. Was this a bit of sarcasm on his part? “Another charming custom,” he said.

He took out a mother-of-pearl case, put a cigarette between his plump scarred lips and lit it with an expensive-looking silver lighter that she recognized as a Dunhill—Mrs. Driver had used the same model to light her morning cheroots.

“So,” he said when his head was enveloped in a blue haze. “I won’t beat about the bush with you. It is very simple, actually. First, I want you to tell me where Guy Glover is, then I’d like to hear from your own lips what you do on Friday nights at your children’s home.”

The request surprised her. “What do you want to know?”

“Mr. Glover has been keeping an eye on you there, or he was until we lost him. Anyway,” he continued mildly, “tell me what you do.”

“Well, nothing much,” she said. “We all have supper with the children, and then we read stories to them, and then they go to bed.”

“What kind of stories?”

“All kinds: adventure stories, legends, Bible stories, Ramayana stories.”

“Anything else?”

“No. We try and make it a special night of the week, but only in the sense that we all eat with the children. We look forward to that.”

“So there is no truth in the rumors circulating that you make the boys bathe with the girls at your home?” He stopped for a moment to remove a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip. “Or that you wash provocatively in front of the children?” His voice had become cold as steel.

She felt fear fly through her body. “Did Guy Glover tell you that?”

Mr. Azim just looked at her.

“If he did, he’s lying,” she said. “We respect the children and they respect us. If you came to look around you would see.”

“We have had people looking around,” he said. He rubbed his lips with his hands and looked at her for what felt like a long time. “And we have seen and heard many bad things.

“Next question. Why do
you
live in Byculla?”

She looked at him and took a deep breath. She estimated he must have had about ten or twelve stitches in his lip, it looked like a knife wound and gave him a surgical sneer even when he was smiling.

“Because I like it there. I have a job there.”

“Why do you question our children all the time and write their names down in a book?”

He pulled open his coat and from its plush lining produced her notebook.

“That’s mine.” When she moved her body toward him, she heard the click of a rifle at the door. The guard stood up.

“Sit down.” He was suddenly shouting at her like a dog. “Answer my questions.”

With a huge effort of self-control she said, “I’m writing the children’s stories.”

“Why?” His eyes snapped open.

“Because they’re interesting.”

“They’re nothing; they’re street children, life dust.” He gave that most dismissive of all Indian gestures, a flick of the hand sideways as though to rid one’s body of an insect. “You have better things to do than that. What other books have you written?” he said. “Can I buy them?”

“No,” she said. “It’s my first.

“Your English is very good,” she said after another long silence. She had decided to soft-soap him, or at least to try. “Where did you learn it?”

“I was at Oxford University, like my brother,” he said it coldly but the little side-to-side wiggle of his head showed he was pleased. “Before that St. Crispin’s.”

She’d heard of it, it was one of a number of Indian public schools that claimed to be “the Eton of India.” They delivered Western-style education and values to the sons of maharajahs, and the sons of anyone who could afford it and who felt it beneficial to have at least a veneer of Englishness.

“Was that where you celebrated Guy Fawkes Night?”

He got up, frowning. “Don’t ask me questions,” he said. “We don’t have long.”

When he left the room quickly, she assumed it was for his noon prayers. A few moments later she heard a trickle of water running and then in the silence that followed, imagined him performing his salah, the obligatory prayers that the Muslim children at the home performed five times each day, at sunrise, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and nightfall.

While she waited, the young guard at the door pointed the barrel of his gun in her direction.

Half an hour later, Azim came into the room again, this time without his coat on.

“Did you go to pray?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I am not a religious man. Not all of us are.”

So she was wrong about that, and looking more closely saw the mark between his eyes was a frown, not a prayer mark.

He moved closer to her. “I am going to make it clear to you why we are holding you here,” he said, with ice in his eyes. “What goes on at the children’s home is a side issue; our main aim is to find your friend Guy Glover.”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“No?” Mr. Azim flicked out his tongue and removed a shred of tobacco from it. “You shared a cabin with him on the
Kaisar-i-Hind
. I saw you leave the ship with him.” And suddenly she remembered. The glaring face on the quayside. He’d taken her photograph and Guy’s.

“I didn’t share his cabin,” she said. “I was his chaperone.”

He looked puzzled.

“I was paid to take care of him,” she explained.

Azim started to scratch, first his neck, then his chin, as if she was giving him a rash.

“Don’t start by telling me lies, Miss Viva,” he warned her. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

A sour feeling like nausea began at the pit of her stomach and traveled up through her spinal cord into her mouth.

“He was a schoolboy,” she stammered, “or at least I thought he was. I needed a job. I was there to look after him.”

“Well, you didn’t do your job very well,” he said softly.

The photograph he took out of his coat pocket was of a smartly dressed young man with oiled black hair crimped into waves. He was sitting in a dinner shirt on a chair in a resplendent ship’s cabin. His lip was swollen, his eye half closed and shiny. On the bed behind him a dinner jacket had been laid out like a dead penguin. A pair of immaculate dinner shoes lay on the floor.