LITMIR.BIZ

      ‘ This is a completely loony cult!’ she raged loudly at the SkyVision office. ‘Some weird, all-male sect. Purification Journey, how to purify your love, purify your desire, reject the market, Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Extremely right wing on women and family values and all that. Fundamentalists. The guy’s a nut.’

      ‘ Well, apparently you got on rather well with him. Careful, darling, next it’ll be Pure Sex with a Python.’

      The night streaked past on her way home. The music from the pubs made her wonder why she had let her social life become extinct.

      ALQUERIA, GOA

      Regrets, Indi thought, never come in a neat package marked ‘regrets’. They hang about in bits and pieces like shreds of ash.

      She turned a page of her Braille novel. Her house had been burgled recently. And the thief had taken away most of her Braille novels, as if he had known how dear they were to her. Thankfully Pride and Prejudice still remained. Along with the novels, all Sharkey’s account books, some of them painstakingly transferred into Braille, had been stolen. The Phantom Listener had identified her belongings well.

      Before the theft there had been three other incidents. A bag of dead rats had been thrown into the kitchen and the place had had to be treated with disinfectant for almost a week. No one had been allowed to use the kitchens, work had stopped and the food thrown away. Guests had been provided food from a hotel in nearby Fontainhas; costs had rocketed.

      Then there had even been a short circuit in the central fuse-box; the switches had tripped and the electricity supply had been cut. The fuse-box had become a disembowelled gut with wires spilling out in different directions. Francis Xavier, Sharkey’s animating spirit, guard, chef and lead guitar, had examined the box and pronounced that someone had opened it and set the fuses on fire.

      And there were the blank calls. Sometimes, when Indi picked up her cordless, she heard the same quick breath she had sensed on her arm.

      She was not as worried about herself as she was about Sharkey’s Hotel because there had apparently been similar incidents all along the coast and in one particular case, it turned out that it was a property dispute and a sister had been harassing a brother simply to get his restaurant off her land. But the Phantom Listener couldn’t be the disgruntled descendent of a past owner. All Sharkey’s deeds were in order and had been scrutinized by lawyers. She had bought the land years ago on Justin’s advice. Years ago, she had stood here, under the Alqueria zigzag and smelt serenity in the sea breeze.

      A voice floated up under the roar of water.

      ‘ Indi!’

      A voice in which she could hear the smile or sense the embarrassment; a voice which she knew stayed focused on her; a voice in which she could remember every expression. She knew the slow grin, the frown, the unexpected anger, the energy in the shoulders. She could hear attention wander, then turn back to her like a boomerang, doomed always to return.

      She knew she enhanced his world every minute he saw her, she could feel his gaze touch her face and knew that it had remained unchanged for decades.

      Justin.

      For almost forty years, she had pranced in and out of Justin’s life daring him to surrender. And he had conquered her by refusing to be rejected. For four decades they had tried to see who would break first. In a sigh or a question or an unguarded glance, they had looked for signs of victory.

      She had never seen him old, never seen the grey hair he had told her about, nor the wrinkles or the hanging skin on his neck. She had only seen him properly when he was young. She had only seen herself young, she had been spared the sight of her own old age, even though she could feel the dryness of her skin and the ridges of stretch marks under her arms. In Indi’s blindness, Indi and Justin were perpetually, irresponsibly, youthful.

      They had met over three decades ago in Connaught Place in Delhi.

      He was trying in vain to wave down a rickshaw. Buses and tempos hurtled past sending him teetering back to the concrete kerb of the circular road and he flagged her down asking desperately for directions as she drove by. She had stopped, fascinated somehow.

      Justin had travelled many continents by now. He’d inhaled the spirit of the Sixties and become a textbook rebel. He felt stifled by his life in the luxurious east coast where he had worked as an intern, and felt drawn, instead, to the Third World.

      While in America, he had felt as if bones and open mouths were rattling at him as he walked past the gentle greens towards his classes. He saw blood pouring from his food. He saw grimy baby feet running in distant plantations to provide him coffee. He saw long rows of brown bodies with asthmatic breath sitting in airless ateliers and cutting the diamonds which glittered in his mother’s ears. He saw debt-ridden quarry workers with malnourished children working under a merciless sun to break stones that were used for the mansions of the far-away rich. He saw tiny infant fingers sewing gold thread onto garments sold to bored billionaires. His eyes acquired an unblinking stare, broken only when he laughed his slow laugh.

      He had once been a glossy child with yellow curls dancing around his ears. But as he grew older he became shabby and unkempt. Shabbiness didn’t suit him because Justin’s sharp features were designed to be polished up for view. But he abused his appearance almost as much as he abused his heart.

      A stubbornness began to grow inside him. He felt as if it was his responsibility to see things that other people could not. He felt impelled to ruin every dinner party that his parents forced him to attend by making statements that revealed how dysfunctional he was. After he had acquired his prized medical degree, instead of embarking on his parents’ chosen course for him as a healer of the rich, he found himself making plans to travel to India. He began work in a government hospital in Delhi where the rusty machinery was speckled with newborn blood.

      He knew only one way of penitence. He yearned only for one thing. To be able to love deeply and unconditionally. To love in spite of being rejected, to love in spite of being abused and humiliated. Only such love would assuage his guilt about the international injustices and the unfair world order, of which he was deeply, consummately, aware.

      At twenty-three, Indi’s beauty and figure strained against her clothes. Every time she appeared among the family, relatives drew their breaths in and whispered to Ashish Kumar that they better get her married at once. Aunts became witty with jealousy at the sight of her.

      Uncles looked away because she reminded them of their favourite whore.

      When Justin saw her – a cerulean-eyed Juno sitting behind the wheel of an ancient Ambassador – an anxious conviction came over him. He saw creation at its most perfect. He saw his life easily elevated to the extraordinary even as filth pulled at his feet. He became unmindful of

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