Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (13 page)

Later, despite the furious thoughts crowding her head, despite the image of Jelch suffering torture at the hands of the Russians, she found herself giving in to exhaustion.

When she awoke, it was to find the room a melee of confusion. Dr Hammond was speaking hurriedly to a nurse while Vikram was slipping a hypodermic into her father’s arm.

The tiny, frail figure of her father ceased its pained writhing, and the doctor and nurses fell silent and stepped away from the bed. Dr Hammond took her hand. “We have done all we can, Miss Chatterjee. Your father is no longer suffering.”

One by one they slipped from the room, leaving her alone with her father.

She gripped his hand, and he turned his head and smiled at her. His lips moved, and Jani leaned even closer to make out his words. But she heard nothing, merely felt his warm breath on her cheek, and then not even that.

She pulled away in panic and stared into his eyes, and saw that they were gazing at her, glassy and blind.

She sobbed and kissed his face, then gripped his hand to her chest as if by doing so she might grant him some of her own vitality. She lowered her forehead to his chest and wept quietly.

Later Dr Hammond came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder, murmuring his condolences, and she dried her eyes and thanked him and asked that she might have a few more minutes alone with her father.

He withdrew from the room, and clutching her father’s frail hand Jani recalled the many times in the past when his big, strong hands had held her, protected her, and she smiled at the memories.

She recalled little of the next half hour. She felt as if her senses had been insulated, somehow deadened against the enormity of her grief. She remembered Dr Hammond coming in and asking her something, and then she was stepping from the room. Mr Rai and Anand were before her, staring at her with tears in their eyes. Slowly she shook her head, and she watched as they wept. Mr Rai asked if he and Anand might say farewell to her father, and Jani smiled and murmured, “Of course.”

She sat on a hard bench in the corridor while they were in the room, and someone brought her a cup of hot spiced chai – the first she had tasted in years. And this brought back a slew of memories, of drinking chai with her father on Delhi railway station and at Roopa’s Tea Rooms. Her father was addicted to chai, and had had a constant supply of the milky, cardamom-spiced beverage ferried to him throughout the working day.

It came to her that she would never again share a cup of chai, a meal, or anything else, with her beloved papa-ji. Something vast and dark and cold opened up beside her, something which crying could not disperse.

Mr Rai and Anand came from the room, ashen-faced. Mr Rai said, with the formality of a speech rehearsed, “Your father was a great and good man, Jani-ji. Everyone loved him for his compassion and humanity. He was good to everyone he met, whether that be the Prime Minister or the chai-wallah. They were all equal in his eyes.”

Anand, still weeping, said, “I loved your father like my own, Jani-ji. I am so sorry.”

Jani smiled, choked by their words. “You are both very kind. It is good to have friends like you at a time like this.”

“And now we will go home and you should go to bed,” Mr Rai said. “You will feel a little better when you have slept.”

They moved down the corridor to the reception area, and then outside. The night was passing and a rosy glow showed in the east. A knot of reporters was awaiting her exit, and she blinked at the flash of a camera, angry at the intrusion but working to keep her composure. How many times had she seen her father pounced upon by the press like this, and always he had maintained his enviable poise and equanimity.

A reporter asked, “Is it true, Miss Chatterjee, that your father has breathed his last?”

“How do you think this will affect security in the country?” another asked.

“Will your father receive a state funeral, Miss Chatterjee?”

She held up a hand and replied, “My father passed away, peacefully, just thirty minutes ago. I have every confidence that the government have matters in hand, and I am not aware at the moment of any funeral arrangements. Now, if I may...”

Escorted by Mr Rai and Anand, she pushed through the melee. “Is it true, Miss Chatterjee, that you survived the Russian attack on the...?”

Mr Rai snapped, “Do you not have any respect for the grieving, ha? Now cease your questions and let us through!”

It was five o’clock in the morning as she slipped into the car and was driven at speed from the hospital.

Crouched behind the wheel like an ugly temple monkey, Mr Rai said, “You do not wish to be troubled by this at the moment, Jani-ji, but your father left instructions regarding his funeral, and I have everything in hand.”

“That’s most kind of you, Mr Rai.”

They drove on in silence. They passed through the higgledy-piggledy suburbs of Old Delhi, where every building appeared grey in the dawn light and the streets were clogged with traffic and pedestrians even at this early hour. The city of five million souls was coming to life and soon everyone would be listening to radio reports and reading newspaper articles about the passing of the Minister for Security.

They approached the airyard on Disraeli Street, a sight that always reminded Jani of a carnival. Once, at the age of six, she had accompanied her father to the terminal and had mistaken the dozens of cigar-shaped airships for children’s balloons and the airyard for a fairground. Ever since, she had always associated airship termini with joy and excitement. She smiled now as she stared up at the tethered airships bearing the livery of a dozen different lines: the gold and green stripes of Empire Airways, the red and silver checks of the India Pacific Line, the black and white hoops of the Deccan Express, and many more besides. Taxis drew up outside the terminal and passengers alighted, and porters hurried hither and thither with luggage, and she thought of the many thousands of citizens taking flights today to all points of the compass. She watched a huge four-engined airship slip its moorings, turn slowly and head south.

She would stay for her father’s funeral, she decided, and perhaps a few days afterwards, and then book passage back to London.

They left the airyard in their wake and burrowed through the narrow streets of Old Delhi. She caught the delicious scent of cooking food through the open window, and it came to her that she did not want to return to her father’s house – so full of memories – and go to bed right now.

She wanted to stroll through the crowded streets of Old Delhi, as she had done as a child. She would find a café she and her father had frequented, and she would enjoy a breakfast of vegetable cutlets, chaat and salted lassi, just as she had done with her father all those years ago.

The idea became an obsession, and she would not let Mr Rai, for all his good intentions, talk her out of the notion.

“Mr Rai, I wonder if you might stop here and let me out.”

He peered at her myopically. “Here, Jani-ji?”

“Right here.”

“Very well. I will wait for you down this side-street, ah-cha?”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr Rai. Please head home and I will make my own way back.”

From the back seat Anand said, “Perhaps I should come with you, Jani?”

“No, Anand, thank you. I wish to be alone with my thoughts.”

Mr Rai tried to protest again, but she was insistent. “My desire is to be alone with the memories of my father. Chalo. I will see you later today, Mr Rai, and thank you for all you have done today.”

Mr Rai pressed his palms together and bobbed his head as she opened the door and climbed out.

She watched the car edge away through the crowds and felt a sudden and rather odd sense of release.

She recalled an occasion in London earlier in the year, when she had had an hour to spare before meeting Sebastian for lunch. She had strolled through Camden Town and Hackney, aware of the glances directed her way; she was a brown-skinned young lady, and alone, and as such a rare sight indeed.

Now she blended into the crowd that rushed about her. She felt a sense of remove from everything around her, and at the same time a feeling of belonging. This was her father’s country, her mother’s adopted country, and her own dear homeland. She relished the chaos of the street-scene, unmatched anywhere she had ever been: the headlong rush of pedestrians, the cries of street vendors, the thousand scents that assailed her from every direction. One moment, she caught a whiff of cooking garlic and ginger, the next the scent of rosewater from the hair of a passing Brahmin girl, overlaid then by the overpowering musk of dhoop, followed by wood smoke which in turn was superseded by the appetising aroma of masala dosa.

And the noise! The continual honking of car horns like a flock of importunate geese; the throaty warbles of hawkers advertising their wares, the blare of radio music and the ill-tuned tootle of pipe bands.

And in the skies, over all this, the intercity airships, the small dozen-berth craft flying from the capital to the other cities of India, to Bombay and Calcutta and Lucknow and Varanasi, hundreds of them crowding the skies in a dense, jostling pointillism.

If only her father had lived a little longer, so that they might have walked down this quintessentially Indian street together, hand in hand, and enjoyed a chai and a meal and chatted about everything and nothing at all...

She turned a corner and stopped suddenly, smiling.

And now she knew why some inner voice had told her to leave the car and walk through the streets of Old Delhi.

Before her, on the corner of the street, was the ancient establishment of Roopa’s Tea Rooms, a timeless place of worn mahogany and soft-treading waiters, of silver cutlery and cotton tablecloths. It was neither English nor Indian, but some strange quaint amalgam of the two, where cucumber sandwiches could be had beside vegetable pakora, Earl Grey alongside Kashmiri scented tea.

It was – it had been – one of her father’s favourite haunts in all the city, a quiet oasis where he could escape the stress of his job for an hour and pore over the
Times of India
while sipping his spiced chai. She and her father must have come here a hundred times before she left for England at the age of eight.

She hurried across the road, entered Roopa’s ground-floor room cooled by lazily turning ceiling fans, and climbed the worn wooden staircase to the first floor tea room. With a sigh of familiarity, she stepped onto the verandah overlooking the bustling city.

She was alone on the verandah, which suited her reflective mood. She ordered salted lassi and chaat, and a vegetable cutlet, then sat back and thought of Sebastian. She wanted suddenly to tell him of her father’s passing; she wanted to hear his calm words of love and condolence. She would call him just as soon as she returned home. It would be to her eternal regret that her father had not lived long enough to meet him.

Her breakfast arrived, served on a silver tray by a silent waiter in a white uniform and a maroon turban. He retreated with the same ghost-like glide as his arrival, and Jani dipped her vegetable cutlet into the spiced chaat and savoured her first mouthful of real Indian food for a long time.

As she ate, tears escaped her eyes unbidden and rolled down her cheeks.

She noticed movement in the doorway to her left and quickly dried her eyes. An overweight European gentleman stepped on to the verandah, eased his bulk behind a neighbouring table, and unfolded his copy of the
Times of India
. He was in his fifties, Jani thought, and sported a luxuriant walrus moustache. They exchanged polite smiles and the gentleman busied himself with his newspaper.

Jani sipped her lassi and recalled her father’s last smile, the grip of his frail hand, and the strange things he had told her as he lay dying. She thought through what he had said, the bizarre claims he had made: no such thing as Annapurnite, and no heavily guarded mine in the Himalayas, and the revelations concerning the strange creature called Jelch...

Her thoughts were interrupted by the European. He flicked a hand at his paper and said, in heavily accented English, “I see poor old Kapil Dev Chatterjee is ill again. A good man, from what I’ve heard.”

She found herself replying, “The newspaper is a little behind the times, sir. Mr Chatterjee passed away peacefully at six o’clock this morning.”

“Aha. You have the advantage of me. That’s where the radio surpasses the medium of print, yes?”

“I neither read the report nor heard the news on the radio. I was at Mr Chatterjee’s bedside when he passed away.”

The European stared at her. “You were? But...”

She smiled at his confusion. “I am Kapil Dev Chatterjee’s daughter and I was at his side just two hours ago.”

He folded his large face into lines of condolence. “But my dear... I had no idea. Please accept my apologies, and of course my condolences.”

She thanked him and returned to her breakfast.

“Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Otto Kaspar, of the German Republic, here in Delhi on business.” He rose from his table and, with German formality, approached her table and bowed. “And I wonder,” he went on, “if I might have the pleasure of buying you tea? I see that your drink is almost finished.”

“Your offer is most kind,” she said, “but I must decline, thank you.” She hoped that the German would get the message and depart.