LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

very approach to the Judge must mean that he could not be the famous Missing Conspirator. But there might yet be some other reason why he should want to threaten the old man’s life, and even, in twelve days’ time, to take it. Because if, as seemed probable, he visited here once a week, then he would at least have had ample opportunities to leave those threatening letters.

      He pushed out something of a trick question.

      ‘I am surprised that, if Sir Asif is willing to write, many other journals all over India do not seek his services?’

      The editor of The Sputnik did not immediately reply. Various emotions could be seen coming and going in his sombre eyes. At last one of them triumphed.

      ‘I do not think many other papers would be altogether happy to print Sir Asif’s opinions. The memory of the Madurai Conspiracy Case is not dead.’

      The truth, perhaps. Bitter though it might be to admit it.

      ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose that must be the case.’

      Mr Dhebar looked at him mistrustfully.

      ‘Should we go to join the delightful Begum Roshan?’ he said. ‘The drawing-room is that way, my dear sir.’

      The big darkened sun-protected room, where Begum Roshan and the other guests in the house were waiting until the unchanging hour for afternoon tea, looked, when Ghote entered it at Mr Dhebar’s heels, as if it was a painting, so still and so silent were the three people in it. Or an old sepia-coloured photograph.

      High-backed, intricately carved armchairs stood in twos and threes in front of heavy wooden screens, all scrolls and convolutions, here and there about the big room, the velvet of their padded seats, which might once have been a deep red or as deep a blue, reduced by the sunlight of years to an indeterminate grey. Only the huge blue Persian carpet that covered most of the middle of the cool marble floor seemed, indeed, to have retained any colour. That, and on the grand piano, standing, lid closed, in a far corner, dozens of framed photographs glinting silver. And the only sound to be heard at this still dully hot hour of the afternoon was a faint sizzling from the tall windows where not long before a servant must have splashed a bucket of rose-scented water on to the split bamboo sticks of the chick blinds which kept the whole big room in blessed near-darkness. That sweet rose-water smell struck the nostrils from the moment of entry.

      Yet the three people there – they did not seem to turn their heads at the sound of the opening door – were not quite statue still. Begum Roshan, tall, thin, wearing a sari of fine old silk, was in a state of continuous minute movement. The fine-boned hands resting on her lap flicked in tiny uncontrolled gestures, and her face, which the first time he had seen her he had thought of immediately as having been eaten away internally by some ever-acting acid, so little flesh there was on it, jerked in almost imperceptible darts to left and right and right again.

      Ghote greeted in turn each of the others with a formal pressed-hands namaskar. Words, he felt, would be somehow too jarring.

      The American, he saw, had put on once again the stringy black necktie he had worn the evening before. And, as before, it was pulled down a good two inches from the collar of his boldly checked shirt. He was sitting, too, in a pose of extreme casualness, the calf of one leg resting on the thigh of the other. Only the black eyebrows above the hollow eyes in his pale face were locked in a fierce tangle that indicated some inner tension.

      Could this man, so blatantly unconventional, so radical in all his opinions, really be a priest? Or had Sir Asif’s calling him that been only another devious way of putting confusion into his unwelcome visitor.

      But at least in response to that bowed namaskar the American did speak.

      ‘Hi,’ he said softly, breaking the dampened silence of the big room.

      The response of the Saint, Anand Baba, was however more disconcerting. He said not a word, made not a sound. Instead, sitting with crossed legs up on the velvet seat of his tall carved chair, body broad and sturdy beneath his loose saffron garments, he released from the flowing mass of his wide white beard a smile, a smile that beamed and radiated and lingered and warmed. Warmed through and through.

      It was like nothing else than being struck full in the face by a wave of feeling that was almost physical in its impact.

      He stood there and received it.

      ‘Today is one of Babaji’s days of silence,’ Begum Roshan said, after what seemed minutes of long-passing quiet.

      He absorbed the fact. Days of silence. Of course, many holy men underwent periods of refraining from speech, and it was no surprise that someone of Anand Baba’s spiritual stature should from time to time erect round himself a wall against the everyday babble of the world. But such a practice could make life distinctly awkward for an investigator pursuing his duties.

      He watched Mr Dhebar approach the saffron-clad figure and offer a deep reverence.

      ‘It is indeed an honour to have Anand Baba come to this poor corner of our country.’

      The Saint’s smile visibly decreased.

      ‘I think,’ Begum Roshan said, ‘that Babaji would tell us that it is to the poor corners of our country that he comes especially.’

      Mr Dhebar gave her a look of fulsome gratitude.

      ‘Begum Roshan is as always perfectly right,’ he said. ‘Right in everything that she is good enough to take into her consideration.’ He sighed. ‘Right even,’ he added, ‘to conceal from my humble self that her father was in process of writing his Memoirs.’

      Begum Roshan gave a sharp little laugh.

      ‘My dear Mr Dhebar,’ she said. ‘I was the last to know about that, I assure you. My father consults me about nothing. Nothing. If you wish to know about those Memoirs you must ask Doctor Ghote whom they have sent from Bombay University.’

      Ghote felt in quick succession a fire of rage against the Deputy Commissioner for having gone so ridiculously beyond common sense in inventing his cover story and a chill of anticipation at what answers he might be asked to provide in order to back the story up. The editor of The Sputnik, for all that he plainly came so far below the distinguished Sir Asif in the social scale, was nevertheless clearly a person with an understanding of the world of books, writing and scholarship. How would he fare at his hands?

      But he was spared any further interrogation. The mention of the Memoirs had stirred Father Adam. The indolent leg lying across its fellow came thumping to the floor.

      ‘Memoirs?’ he said. ‘Is Sir Asif going to write his Memoirs? And I suppose the book will sell like hot cakes, just because people will think it’s going to let out a few measly secrets. But all the time it’ll be nothing but a rallying cry for the oppressor class, just when this country was beginning to free itself of that sort of massive manipulation.’

      Begum Roshan, with a quick sideways dart of her head as if to see whether the very walls of the room, solidly there for scores of years, had not crumbled to hear such heresy, ventured a murmur of contradiction.

      It merely set the priest off as if it had been a hair-trigger releasing some long-kept-down force.

      ‘I know I’m a guest in this house, and please don’t think I’m ungrateful. But a man has a duty to the truth.’

      And for something like ten minutes more Father Adam did his duty to his truth. It seemed to Ghote, after a little only half listening, that what he repeated of Sir Asif’s views was more or less accurate, at least to go by what the old man had said at the dinner table the night before. Yet he could not help feeling that to blow those opinions up into the tremendous crimes that the priest seemed to think they were – the word ‘Fascist’ came up several times, and the phrases ‘capitalist conspiracy’ and ‘elitist monopoly of the media’ – was exceeding the bounds of ordinary debate, let alone of polite conversation.

      But he was only half listening. Because with every attacking word this surprising American uttered, he saw the case for him after all being

Скачать книгу