Truth Lake (5 page)

Acting Chief of Police Hàrélal felt ill. His chest was tight and his air-conditioned office felt stuffy; the outside temperature had reached forty-three degrees already and he dared not open a window. He had been on the phone all morning in an attempt to ascertain the whereabouts of the ridiculous village in the Western Himalayas from which he had heard no word of his assistant and right hand man, Kailash Karmel, for nearly ten days. Today he felt the full absurdity and short-sightedness of sending his most trusted ambassador out into the wilderness, for this morning his wife had discovered that their daughter was missing from her bed.

Sweating and trying not to scream, the poor woman had sought her child first in the garden and then, having failed to find her, had telephoned all her friends in a vain effort to keep him in ignorance and prevent his wrath from being visited on the foolish girl's head.

Tanya Hàrélal's personal escort – as he had named the men assigned to keep her under observation during the day – were always given the night off after she entered the premises of her father's home. She had returned by nine the previous evening and had seemed in reasonably good spirits. Now she was gone. Her bed had not been slept in and, to add to his terror, Jimmy Parikh Junior was sitting miserably in the outer office at this very moment swearing that he had not seen the girl for two days. Bruises on the young fellow's face – caused, no doubt, by Constable Makrand during the arrest or by Bokada's over-zealous interrogation – would have to be explained away to a very angry Jimmy Parikh senior who was currently on his way to collect his son.

Vain was all fury at Bokada, Makrand or anyone else; similarly pointless were the images of food that plagued his mind; the only thing that kept Hàrélal going was the possibility that his daughter might be off on one of her jaunts and would return safe and guilty in a few days.

The thought of kidnap preyed on his mind but he did not allow himself to dwell on it. Now was not time to dwell on his vocal declarations about not negotiating with terrorists. Instead he busied himself trying to summon Karmel back from his errand but discovered that here too he was being thwarted by circumstance, for the beeper signal failed to create any response and the mobile phone with which Karmel had been issued indicated ‘mobile out of range’.

He had personally spoken to the Chief Inspector of the region and asked if a team could be dispatched to search for his missing officer but – as he was not in a position to disclose what he had sent the man up there for and had to maintain that Karmel had taken leave, had gone on a private and solitary hike – the response he received was noncommittal: there were too many things going on in the region at the moment for them to be able to spare trained climbers. Messages would be left at the command post in Charmoli, the town geographically closest to Saahitaal. If Karmel showed up there he would be conveyed swiftly back to Delhi.

When he mentioned that Dilghum had been the point of departure for the trek, Hàrélal was chagrined to find that the route Karmel had been directed to take was utterly impractical and would have had him climbing up and down for days without bringing him any closer to Saahitaal. 'Monsoon should be here shortly', the fellow up at Charmoli had commented. That was not good. Definitely not good. If there was anything those two interfering tourist-idiots could add to the directions already given, he would personally have to send people after Karmel; he felt that he wouldn't be able to last much longer on his own with his suffering wife and Tanya gone. Karmel was like the son he had always wanted and who better to search for the girl than her brother? 

He thought of the first time he had met the youngster – all those years ago – trying his best to seem like a decent applicant and yet utterly different from the other boys waiting to join the police force. Someone had commented contemptuously that Karmel looked like a jumper. In the department, that was code for someone who would try to commit suicide if they didn't get the job. They'd already had three in the preceding month, village lads who had slogged through examinations, caste prejudices and family turmoil in order to make the Delhi force and couldn't face the anguish of rejection. 

Then merely a Chief Inspector, Hàrélal had been immediately drawn to the young Kailash.

It was not just that he knew him from somewhere, not just that he remembered him delivering flowers and running errands for the wife all those years ago – a good memory, Hàrélal had, that's how he'd stayed Inspector through a dozen riots and four successive governments – but it was the young man's poise that won Hàrélal's heart, his air of toughness that disguised and defeated the gutter from which he came, a worldliness that Hàrélal had craved and which totally seduced him. Instead of a 'jumper' or a desperate boy he saw in Kailash Karmel's face the possibility of an honest assistant. 

When the boy's application was rejected Hàrélal offered him a job as his personal assistant. He trained him ruthlessly, sent him on courses to study forensic pathology and asked his wife's guru to bless the boy. Which, for a small fee, the guru did. Five years later he made sure Karmel got a post on the force. There were only three people on the interview panel and all of them owed Hàrélal for past favours.

Twelve years on, Hàrélal was more delighted than ever by his own sagacity in educating and protecting Kailash. The result for himself had been a series of promotions as he took uncomplicated credit for Karmel's successful investigations. Until this morning he had not realised fully the strength of his love for the young man or the immensity of his own weakness without him. So alone did he feel with Kailash gone that he was even now thinking more of how to get him back than he was of the missing Tanya. Shaking off his memories, he loosened his collar and dialled Antonio Sinbari's private line.

As the phone rang, he allowed himself one brief thought about his daughter. It pained Hàrélal immensely to admit that his wife could be right about anything, but he was beginning to think that he had been too inflexible with the girl. She had always been a tomboy, different from the mild little girls of his colleagues. He remembered her ferocious grin as a child when her mother tried to comb her hair only to discover in it chicken feathers and sand.

All kinds of gloomy scenarios played themselves out in Hàrélal's mind. He was trying to keep his daughter's disappearance quiet but he could see on the faces of his sergeants and detectives that they had somehow come to know; if she had left of her own free will that would be the end of her prospects in Delhi's marriage market. Perhaps he would have to seek a husband for her further north or even, God forbid, in the south.

'
Who's this?
' Jolted back to the present, he fumbled with the phone.

'Aaah, Mr Sinbari, this is Hàrélal here about your little Himalayan situation . . ..'  He listened attentively for a moment, biting the corner of his sodden moustache.

Humiliation flitted across his face and then a slowly increasing wrath. 'Yes. Yes. Of course. Under control. But listen, could I have a word with one of the young chaps, aaah, fellows, no? We've run into one or two complicating factors . . ..  Need some key information about the venue and all . . ..'

Sinbari's crisp response made Hàrélal's hair stand on end and his heart beat faster with fury. Was this the same man who had requested his help only ten days ago? What the hell was going on? Someone was going to pay for this! He replaced the receiver and cursed his bad luck and all the evil spirits guarding his enemies.

His secretary came rushing through the door and he looked up hoping that they had found his daughter; but Mrs Méghé was only checking to see why he had shouted.

*

Karmel could not find a place to sit, so tightly packed were the small dwellings.  And when they ended, the forest took over once more, poking into his legs and brushing against his face on one side, trees growing almost at an angle out of overhanging rocks.

Abruptly the path flooded and he found himself on the brink of a dark, fast flowing stream that spurted out of the hillside and disappeared over the edge into the forest below. It was so utterly silent that he almost stepped into the water and was forced to step back in order to avoid soaking his boots. There was slime on the edges of the stream and moss on the stones beneath its surface, which suggested that it rarely dried.

He bent and tasted the water; it was cold and hurt his teeth. Then he squatted down right there in the middle of the path and lowered his pack. He was feeling disgruntled. No one had spoken to him but he could sense a presence at his back. He felt exactly as he had when as a child he had entered some up-market street and the homeowners had stopped their conversations to watch him in case he stole something or in some other way polluted their world. They too had watched with distaste as he made his way along beside their nicely manicured hedges and down one or the other of their driveways. In those days he had simply been begging for work and had not expected a friendly reception. Being prepared for contempt and hostility was his best defence. His discomfort now arose from the realisation that he had forgotten to expect rejection.  What did that make him, he wondered? A traitor to the heartsick street boy he'd been or a secure and normal survivor?

And so he sat for several hours, hunched beside the stream, chewing on his fingernails and thinking. His thoughts were so raucous that he missed the first invitation and only turned when a hand was placed on his shoulder.

'Brother, you've been here for many hours, my sister tells me?' There was a question in her voice. He replied hastily.

'Greetings. Your sister's absolutely correct. I felt that it was not proper to stop the other ladies from their work and I was in no hurry so I rested a while. Could you tell me the name of your village?'

She was a large woman, muscular and tall with a broad face and a birthmark on her throat. Her radiant grey eyes reminded him of a boy he had known when he was younger. She wore dull silver jewellery and had hitched her skirt up to ease her climb.  Hastily Karmel withdrew his eyes from her toes, which were loaded with rings and covered in local dust.

When he mentioned the village, her eyebrows rose fractionally, sceptically perhaps, but she responded politely enough, 'Saahitaal, it is. Yes, like the lake above us, Saahitaal and the river below, Saahi. You saw them as you walked?'

'Surely, yes, sister. It was a real sight. I could not move away from it after all the trees! So grand and peaceful.' He was babbling and couldn't stop; 'You are very lucky to live near such a place.' She looked faintly amused by his praise of the scenery.

'You are tired then? You've been walking all day? Perhaps for many days?' He nodded, noting that her voice was husky as if she smoked too much or had a cold.

'Come, let's walk to my home. As you must have seen, the animals have to go up to the pastures at this time of year. It's best for them. So you may wait many days if you wait for the men to invite you.' They began to walk side by side and he noticed that there were no others in sight. She questioned him steadily. 'Are you a traveller? You climb often? How far have you come? Did someone tell you about our village?'

'I began climbing at Dilghum. You know where it is?'  She shook her head. 'Not much below this place, but far to the East, I understand', he continued. 'The truth is, I'm not much of a mountain climber, but I work with soil, with earth.' Karmel bent and lifted a pinch of soil between his fingers, realising as he did so that the gesture was over-dramatic. He rubbed the pale substance gently and allowed it to slide back to the ground. She was looking intrigued; Karmel felt that he was expected to continue the explanation. 'I'm a soil analyst. I check for levels of pollution, or erosion; I find out the effects of cutting down trees in a particular place.' At that she seemed startled and ceased walking.

'You've come to check up on us? Here, in
Saahitaal
? You're one of
those men
sent by the government, a sarkari man?' She sounded annoyed. He shook his head and showed her both his palms.

              'No, no, sister. I just do research. Nothing big, no checking up, just for our records in Delhi. I go to lots of places all over India, quite random our work is.' His pack felt heavier every second and he was stationary on a slope. He hoped she'd continue walking soon. She did and he followed as nimbly as he could.

              'Where did you go last time?' she asked as they came to a small timber and stone dwelling, climbed a flight of steps and stooped to go through the entrance. 

He ducked to avoid a beam, using the moment as an excuse to think. No place seemed obvious. He rarely left Delhi and read more about other countries than his own.  She was looking at him again.

'The Ganga.' he asserted suddenly, and she accepted that, not asking him where along that vast river he had been or what he had found, or any further details. Perhaps she had never been anywhere either.

'Put your bag there. Here's some water for you to wash yourself. I'll be making the food and you can help me by going to find my daughter; she's always off somewhere.
Maya
she's called – her cap is blue with yellow thread on it; just step outside and call her. If anyone asks you, say you are now with Thahéra, Maya's mother.'

Her voice fell low when she said her own name. As she spoke she was busy removing millet flour from a tin box and scooping it into a pile on a tin plate. With deft movements she parted it and looked for insects. Then she swept the millet to the middle of the plate, dabbed her finger into the pile to create a hole and sprinkled in a pinch of salt. She had splashed water into the mixture and begun to knead dough by the time Karmel registered what she had asked him to do; he stepped back out through the low doorway, conscious of her eyes on his back. When he could no longer see her or she him, he allowed himself to think that she was a truly beautiful woman.