Ellis Peters - George Felse 09 - Mourning Raga (5 page)

‘Tomorrow,’ said Ganesh Rao, digging thick, strong fingers into his thatch of black hair, ‘we’re going to finish the other two scenes there, the encounters with disease and death.’

‘So he did go again,’ Anjli said, and her grave eyes came back to Ashok’s face.

‘Twice, and he saw what really happens to men. And in the meantime Yashodhara had a son, but it was too late to deflect her husband, however much he loved them both. He saw that age and sickness and death were waiting for them, as well as for him, and that nobody had ever found a way of triumphing over these evils. So he named the child Rahula… that means a fetter, because the child bound him like a chain. And the prince rode out one more time, and he met an ascetic monk, who had forsaken the world for solitude, in search of the ultimate peace that no one knows. And after this Siddhartha brooded on the need to find this transcendent peace, this freedom from the wheel of recurring sufferings, not only for himself, not first for himself, but for his dearest, and after them for all men. And one night after the pleasures and entertainments of the palace were over, and all the court lay asleep, he got up in the small hours and looked at his sleeping wife and son, and went out from them silently in search of the way. The king had every gate guarded, being afraid of this, but all the guards slept, and all the gates opened of themselves to let Siddartha go free.’

‘Play some of the music,’ suggested Kamala, leaning over him from behind in a drift of pale silk and perfume. ‘Play my song, and then the theme of the departing, let Anjli hear how you can make a folk melody and a classical meditation out of the same notes. Do you know what is a raga, Anjli? They are the basic material for all our classical music, and there are thousands of them, the ragas, each for a special time and season, and a special mood, so that in a few rising and descending notes you have the mind’s first statement, the one thought out of which a work of art grows. Tell them, Ashok!’

Ashok explained with his fingers. The teak neck of the sitar leaned confidingly into his shoulder, his scarred fingers pressed the main strings, and with the plectrum he picked out a brief, rising phrase, and brought it sighing down again to dissolve where it had begun. A handful of notes tossed into the air and caught again. He repeated it slowly, to let them follow the sound, and then took it up in tentative chords and began to embroider. Not yet the form in which they had occasionally heard classical ragas, but turning the notes into a simple, folk melody, something even the western ear could accept readily and even memorise. Kamala took up the thread and began to sing wordlessly, in a sweet, forward, wailing voice, the gentle caterwauling of a deserted kitten.

‘But that’s something even we would find approachable,’ said Tossa, astonished. ‘I expected it to be much more difficult.’

‘It’s meant to be approachable, it must reach everybody in this form. If I do not hear it sung in the streets, once the film is shown, I shall be disappointed. And for that it must be grasped on the wing, it will be heard only once. It is the lullaby Yashodhara sings to Rahula after she discovers that her lord is gone. And this is how it will be heard at his going.’

This time the theme budded slowly, and began to uncurl in a meditative development. The plangent string tone of the sitar, no longer unfamiliar even in the West, swelled until from a curiously intimate and secret solo instrument it had become a full orchestra. Its sweetness and strangeness had a hypnotic effect, to which the nerves responded, and even though the expected acceleration did not come, or only in a strictly modified form, the usual mounting tension and excitement was present no less, drawing mind and senses taut in almost painful concentration. Some music lulls; this disturbed. And so it should, for it expressed the renunciation of the world and the assumption of the world’s burden in one symbolic act. They could almost see the solitary figure steal silently through the apartments of the palace, leaving the sleepers sleeping, and the gates one by one opening before him, until he bestowed his ornaments upon Channa, exchanged his rich garments for the plain yellow robe of a huntsman in the forest, cut off the princely knot of his hair, sent back in sorrow his charioteer and his white horse Kantaka, and walked forward alone into the darkness to do battle with life and death. And at the moment when he vanished the music died away in a shuddering sigh and broke off, unfinished.

Everyone stirred and drew breath, otherwise the silence lasted for a moment; then Anjli asked:

‘Do the ragas all have names?’

‘Yes, they have names. This is Raga Aheer Bhairab. It is a morning raga.’

‘And it has a special purpose? A special mood, Kamala said?’

‘It is to be played,’ said Ashok, stroking his still faintly vibrating strings, ‘in the early hours of the morning, when the guests are departing.’

Felder drove them back to Keen’s Hotel about nine o’clock in the evening, a little dazed, a little silent. Anjli was clutching the copy of
The Life of the Buddha
which Ashok had lent her. And again Felder had been quite right, they needed their coats; the air was sharp and very cold, the sky above crackling with stars.

‘Where is this place you’ve got to go? Rabindar Nagar? That’s one of the newish suburbs that are spreading out westwards, isn’t it? Will you find your way all right?’

‘I’ve got a town plan,’ said Dominic. ‘We’ll find it.’

‘I’d come with you, but we want to finish the Mehrauli shots tomorrow, and if we make it we’re off by air to Benares the next morning to do the Deer Park scenes. I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble. But just in case you do need any help, give me a ring in the evening. You’ve got the villa number and the office, I’ll be one end or the other. Give me a ring anyhow. I’ll be glad to know how you get on.’

‘We’ll do that. And thanks for everything.’

Rabindar Nagar was close to the western fringe of the town, completely cut off from any view of New Delhi itself by the long, undulating brown hump of the Ridge. It was a suburb as yet only half-built, every house in it an individual undertaking and of individual and often surprising taste. This was not where the very rich would build, or the very fashionable; but there was plenty of money here, too, putting up those fanciful white villas and running those substantial cars. Here came the wealthy retired tradesman, the Sikh taxi proprietor who had plenty of transport at his disposal, and didn’t mind the long run from town, the small factory owner who couldn’t rise to a property in the tree-shaded, fashionable enclaves of the city itself, and the young artist of independent means who preferred detachment, possibly from the distractions of traffic and noise, probably from too autocratic parents. Whimsy could have its fling on a small and fairly economical scale here, and on a limited site. The houses sat cheek by jowl along the neat roadways, and between their rear compounds ran narrow lanes by which the hawkers and salesman reached the kitchen doors. The rusty iron baskets that shielded new trees bristled everywhere along the roadsides. The sounds, in the early morning, were a curious mixture of domestic and wild, of cars starting up, of the wavering trade calls of the ironing man and the fresh vegetable man along the rear courtyards, bidding for custom, and distant and eerie from the west the wail of jackals prowling the harsh brown land. The ironing man’s little cart, with its small charcoal brazier at one end, halted under back windows, women came bustling out with armfuls of laundry to be ironed, and the hot smell of the smoothed cotton and linen was as savoury on the air as bread. Schoolgirls came demurely out of front compound gates in their uniform shalwar and kameez, close-waisted tunic and wide trousers neatly fitted at the ankles, gauze scarf draped over the shoulders with ends floating behind. The bane of all tomboys, those scarves, the first thing to get discarded when they ran out to play hockey on the open patch of ground after school.

Part of this open space was occupied, at the moment, by a cluster of brown tents, in which lived Orissan building workers, employed on two half-finished houses just along the main road. A long chain of them, moving rhythmically, carried away the excavated soil from new foundations, bearing it in baskets on their heads. More than half of them were women. They were the poorest of the poor, but after this hard training in deportment they walked like queens. Their children, in one tattered garment apiece, or none, haunted the open ground and begged vehemently and maliciously from every passer-by.

Two of them converged purposefully upon Dominic, Tossa and Anjli as soon as they stepped out of the taxi. Here were foreigners, their proper prey. A second look at Anjli, as she turned to face them, brought them up standing in considerable doubt; and that was as illuminating for Anjli as for them. And while they were hesitating, a plump lady in a sari came out of the next gate and shooed them indignantly away.

‘They are those labourers’ children,’ she said defensively, in slightly grating English, as though the language had not enough abrasive consonants for her, ‘from Orissa. No Punjabi would beg, you please believe me.’

She marched away across the open ground, and the children drew back from her path by a few yards and studied the sky as she went by, to close in again the moment her back was turned, and be shooed away again, good-humouredly enough, by the taxi driver. Dominic paid, and let the car go. He had noticed another taxi stand only a couple of hundred yards away at the corner of the main road.

‘N 305’ said the tablet on the gatepost simply, and there was a small, beautifully-made wooden mail-box attached beneath the number. The wall of the front garden was white, shoulder-high to a man, and the house lay only a few yards back, also white-painted, two storeys high and flat-roofed, with a perforated balustrade, and in the centre of the roof a sort of light pavilion, glazed in from winds and dust-storms, an ideal summer-house for a sociable man who yet had need of a working solitude at times. The ground in front of the house was paved with squares of a grey stone, with narrow flower-beds and a few shrubs along the walls, and a small, decorative tree in a tub by the door. But the enclosure ran round the detached end of the building, and there degenerated into a utilitarian courtyard of beaten earth, with a line for drying washing, and a low wooden shed built into the corner. Beside the shed, under a bracket roof of sacking stretched on a wooden frame, a small brazier burned with a steady glow, and the faint smell of sandalwood and incense was wafted to them in the thin blue smoke. All the fires of Delhi, sacred and profane, seem to contain the evocative scents of worship. Behind the brazier, cross-legged and motionless, sat a lean, shrunken old man, a loose cotton turban on his head, grey hair and tangled beard obscuring most of his face, a brown blanket hugged round his shoulders. When the three strangers came in through the open gate he raised his head, but did not turn in their direction.

At the last moment, with the door before them and the bell-push within reach of a hand, they all hesitated. Felder had talked with blessed bluntness about the moment of truth, about having a roof over Anjli’s head that she didn’t owe to her father, so that she could meet him on equal terms, and face his acceptance or rejection with unshaken dignity and independence. But when it came to the point, whether she wanted him or not, it was important that he should want her. And there was only one way to find out.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Anjli quickly, and prodded the bell-push with a rose-tipped finger, hard and accurately.

A moment of silence, and then they heard light feet trotting briskly towards the door. Very light feet, naked feet; that characteristic soft slapping of the soles on a stone-paved floor. The door opened, wide to the wall; a revealing gesture, which belongs only to the innocent, open-hearted and generous. A boy of about nineteen, square and sturdy, stood smiling brightly at them across the threshold. He was clean and wide-featured, with close-cropped hair, and wore khaki drill shirt and shorts a size too long for him; handsome muscles bulged the brown arm that held the door open. He bobbed his head repeatedly, and smiled, and said nothing, waiting for them to speak.

‘Good morning!’ said Dominic, aware of possible non-understanding, but not knowing in the least what to do about it. Names, at any rate, are international currency. ‘We are looking for the house of Shri Satyavan Kumar.’

The smile narrowed and wavered. At least he understood English. ‘Yes, this is house of Mr Kumar.’ His slight frown, his lost look, everything about him but his tongue added: ‘But…!’

‘May we speak with Mr Kumar? He will be expecting us. He has received a letter to tell him that we are coming.’

Nevertheless, Dominic had heard the unspoken ‘but’, even if he chose to ignore it. It might mean no more than ‘but he isn’t in at the moment’, which would hardly be a catastrophe, even if they were keyed up to meet him immediately, and liable to deflation if kept waiting. Tossa had heard it, too, she was looking more than naturally wise, patient and calm. So had Anjli; her face was a demure mask, no one could tell what went on behind it.

‘There is a letter, yes…’ said the boy slowly. ‘But my master not read letter.’ His brown eyes wandered from face to face apologetically, as if he might be blamed for this failure of communication. “The letter is here, I bring it…’

‘But if we could speak to Mr Kumar,’ said Dominic doggedly, ‘we can explain everything ourselves.’

‘I am sorry. Mr Kumar not here. No one can take letter to him, no one know where can find him. More than one year ago, in the night, Mr Kumar he go away. Never say one word. Never come back.’

After the moment of blank silence, in which the Orissan children advanced their toes over the boundary of the gateway, and the old man behind the brazier shrugged the blanket back a few inches from his shoulders, and the world in general incredibly went on about its business as if nothing had changed, Dominic said in reasonable tones: ‘May we come in for a few minutes? You may be able to help us.’

‘Please! Memsahib… missee-sabib…!’ The boy bowed them in gladly, waved them into a small front room, sparsely furnished by western standards, but elegant in tapestries, silks and cushions, and a screen of carved, aromatic wood. The bare feet turned and pattered to the table, where on a silver dish lay an air mail letter. Dorette had wasted her pains.

‘Please, here is letter. You take it?’

‘No, keep it here,’ said Dominic, ‘in case Mr Kumar comes home.’ But after more than a year without a word, why should he reappear now? And yet this was India, and who knows India’s motives and reasons? ‘You mean that Mr Kumar simply went away without telling anyone where he was going, or when to expect him back? Not even his mother? His family?’ Idiot, there was no other family, of course, he was the only child.

‘
Acha
, Sahib. In the night. He did not sleep in his bed, he did not take any luggage, everything left in place. He go. That is all.’

‘Like the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli unexpectedly, ‘when it was time to depart.’ She had a big white canvas handbag on her arm, and Ashok’s book inside it; she had been sneaking peeps into the pages even on the taxi ride out here.

‘Your father,’ Dominic pointed out unwisely, ‘was a devout Hindu, by all reports.’

‘So was the Lord Buddha,’ said Anjli devastatingly. She hadn’t been reading to no purpose.

‘
Father
?’ said Satyavan’s house-boy, half-dumb with wonder.

‘This is Miss Anjli Kumar, Mr Kumar’s daughter.’

He joined his hands respectfully under his chin, his brown head bobbing deeply; he did not question her identity, he believed that people told him the truth, as he told them the truth.

‘Missee-sahib, I not know anything, I not here when Shri Satyavan go away. When his servants send word to the big house that he gone, my mistress she send them all away, tell me go keep this place until Shri Satyavan return. Nobody see him go, nobody hear. More than one year now, and he send no word.’

‘Your mistress?’ said Dominic.

‘
Acha
, sahib, Shrimati Purnima Kumar. I her house-boy.’

‘And there’s nobody here now who was here on that night? When Mr Kumar went away?’

‘Sahib, no one. Only Arjun Baba.’ He said it with the mixture of reverence and indifference that touches, perhaps, only the dead and the mad, both of them out of reach.

‘Who is Arjun Baba?’

‘The old man. The beggar. Shri Satyavan took him in, and let him live in the compound. He comes and goes as he will. He eats from our table. Now Shri Satyavan is gone, Shrimati Purnima feeds him. It is all he want. This is his home until he die. Arjun Baba very, very old.’

‘But he was here then! He may have heard or seen something…’

The boy was bowing his head sadly, and sadly smiling. ‘Sahib, always he has said he hear nothing, he know nothing. Always, he say this. And, sahib, Arjun Baba is blind.’

It made perfect sense. The old ears pricking, the ancient head turning. But not turning to view. The ear was tuned to them, not the eye. And so old, so very old. And so indebted, in a mutual indebtedness, such as charity hardly knows in the less sophisticated lands of the west. His allegiance belonged only to Satyavan, who if he willed to go must be made free to go. Not all needs are of the flesh.

‘Sahib, if you are willing, I think it good you should go to my mistress’s house.’ He did not say ‘to my mistress’; and in a moment it was clear why. ‘She very ill, ever since Shri Satyavan go from here she fall sick for him…’

‘But didn’t she try…? To get in touch, to find him…?

The young shoulders lifted, acknowledging the sovereignty of individual choice. ‘If he must go, he must go. My mistress wait. Only now it is bad with her. But there is Shri Vasudev, Shri Satyavan’s cousin. He is manager for family business now. Please, you speak with him.’

‘Yes,’ said Dominic, ‘yes, we will. We have Mrs Kumar’s address, we’ll go there.’

The boy bowed them anxiously towards the door, and out into the warming sunshine, hovering as though uncertain whether to wish them to stay or go, as though it might rest with him to hold fast Satyavan’s daughter, and he might be held answerable if she turned and went away as mysteriously as her father. Anjli halted in the doorway and looked at him thoughtfully.

‘You are not from Delhi?’

‘No, missee-sahib, I come from a village near Kangra. Shrimati Purnima came from there, and has a house there. My father is her gardener.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Kishan Singh.’ And he pressed his hands together in salute and smiled at her hopefully.

‘We shall meet again, Kishan Singh. I am glad you are here to keep my father’s house so faithfully and look after Arjun Baba. If you hear any news of him, send it to me at Keen’s Hotel. Now we must go to my grandmother.’

Kishan Singh stood at the top of the steps and bowed and smiled her away across the paved garden, in some way reassured; but at the gate she looked back again, and caught Dominic by the arm.

‘Wait for me a moment. I want to speak to him… the old man. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, I saw that he heard us come.’

‘We can try,’ Dominic agreed doubtfully. ‘But it’s long odds he doesn’t speak English.’

‘Kishan Singh did. But let me try, alone…’

Something was changing in Anjli, or perhaps some part of everything in her was changing, her voice, her manner, even her walk. They watched her cross the beaten earth of the yard, and it might almost have been the gliding gait of a woman in a sari, though quite certainly Anjli had never draped a sari round her in her life, and wouldn’t know how to set about it even if she had possessed one. She halted before the motionless old man, and though he could not see her, she pressed her hands together in reverence to him, and inclined her head as the boy had done to her.

‘Namaste!’

She had no idea how she had known what to say, but when she had said it she knew that it was right. The old head came up, and the sun shone on the sightless face that seemed to gaze at her. A tangle of grey, long hair, beard and brows, out of which jutted a hooked and sinewy nose and two sharp protuberant cheekbones, and a great ridge of forehead. All of his flesh that was visible was the same brown as the brown, dry earth under him. A tremendous remote indifference held him apart from her. The sun gleamed on eyes white and opaque with cataract.