The Moneylenders of Shahpur (12 page)

Although the Income Tax authorities might not yet be aware of the extent of Mr Desai’s fortune, the police knew of the plainly dressed old man. Doors were immediately opened to him, and it was not long before he was ensconced in a chair in the office of a police chief of gratifying eminence, a small, calm Bengali who had come down from Delhi, armed with instructions to solve the robbery mystery at all costs, before there was a diplomatic row over the death of Mrs Belmont-Smythe.

He sat quietly and listened, while Desai told him of his son’s non-arrival at Delhi and his fears for the young man’s life. Desai minimized somewhat the value of the jewels he was carrying, but indicated that it was sufficient to tempt a professional thief.

Desai had spoken in Gujerati, his knowledge of English being limited to being able to read it, and his son translated as he went along. There was a pause at the end of the recital during which time the Delhi detective removed his shoes and socks thoughtfully, so that he could sit comfortably cross-legged on his chair. At last he said, ‘No body, other than that of the English woman, has yet been found; and these dacoits, as you know, rarely hold anyone for ransom. Perhaps he missed the train.’

These remarks did little to console Desai. ‘No. My head book-keeper saw him on to it. Perhaps some of the other passengers saw what happened to him?’

The detective made a wry face and shifted the papers about on his desk.

‘We still have in custody a few suspicious characters who were on the train, and we have, of course, the names and addresses of a number of passengers. The majority are untraceable.’ His voice rose with decision. ‘I’ll cause further inquiries to be made, and will have the railway embankments searched again.’

Desai had already decided to obtain the help of his caste brethren in a private search round the scene of the robbery, so he took his departure.

He was conducted to the door, with painstaking respect, by a local inspector, who promised that he would himself again question the railway police who were aboard the train. ‘They were overwhelmed by the force of the attack,’ he said almost apologetically.

‘They always are,’ replied Desai dryly, and climbed wearily into his carriage.

As his younger son drove him deeper and deeper into the heart of the city, the old man’s spirits sank lower. Why did one scheme and amass money, if it were not for one’s sons and their sons? The boy must be dead, dead without leaving
a son to tend his funeral pyre, he thought bitterly. The nincompoop beside him had two sons, satanic images of their mother, for whom he felt no affection. It had been Mahadev’s sons he had wanted to see before he died himself.

‘If he lives, I’ll hasten his marriage,’ he promised himself.

Hearing his father’s mutter, his younger son turned to him. ‘Ji?’ he queried respectfully.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ replied Desai testily.

He had told neither Mahadev nor his brother about the opposition of older members of the family to the marriage to Anasuyabehn. The elders had argued that a wealthy girl in the Desai community could be found, a girl strategically placed to increase the power of the caste. Intercaste marriages, they said, dissipated wealth and weakened authority.

Desai had been tempted to agree. When he read the
Financial Times
, however, and when men of other castes planning big enterprises asked his financial help, he felt that to become a power in the new, free India, it was wiser not to emphasize caste.

No one, not even his trusted brother, had ever seen Desai’s small private ledger with a swastika drawn, for luck, on its first page. In this, the final results of all his business were entered. He planned that most of what that ledger represented should pass to Mahadev, just as his own father had chosen him to head the business when he had retired. It was, therefore, a good idea that Mahadev have a modern wife, but a wife without bossy caste relations.

The carriage jerked to a stop in front of the plain wooden door behind which lay the Desai Society. Old Desai was helped down from his perch by his son, who handed the horse and carriage over to the care of a servant squatting on the step.

Old Desai went immediately to the counting-house. Partner Uncle was immersed in work, his little grand-niece playing contentedly at his feet with a piece of paper and the office’s entire collection of rubber stamps. She received the monkey-on-a-stick with great glee.

‘The police,’ said old Desai, ‘are doing their best, I’m convinced. However, so much is at stake – our reputation for reliability – and poor Mahadev – I’m worried to death about him – that I think we should attempt a search ourselves.’

‘I suppose we could,’ said Partner Uncle doubtfully.

‘Of course, we could,’ snapped old Desai. ‘We can send for Brother-in-law from Baroda to help organize it, and we have plenty of servants and clerks to help.’

‘What about the business?’

‘The business can wait,’ snorted old Desai, to which unheard of heresy his brother had no reply.

Diana and Dr Ferozeshah’s sweeper wearily tidied up the operating room. Dr Ferozeshah, his legs shaking with fatigue, washed his hands and wished he could afford air conditioning. Perhaps next year, he thought. His reverie was broken by Diana’s voice.

‘…and so I promised to go over again today. Would that be convenient to you?’

He turned round, his hands dripping.

Diana was struggling out of her white gown.

‘Go where?’

‘To that old body in Pandipura. She doesn’t seem to be doing very well.’

Dr Ferozeshah surveyed his employee. In spite of her lack of weight, she was plum-coloured with heat and exertion. Too thin, he decided; she needed more rest.

‘She’ll be all right for a couple of days,’ he said, ‘and you should rest for a while – we’ve had a busy morning.’

‘I am tired,’ admitted Diana, ‘but I feel uneasy about her. If you don’t want me this afternoon, I could go up on the bus.’

Dr Ferozeshah’s perfectly modelled face broke into a mischievous grin. ‘All right. Go to see this illustrious patient – and then take the evening off.’ He picked up a towel to dry his hands. ‘Mirabai can do the evening rounds with me – you’ve taught her very well.’

A whole evening off was a rare luxury. It sounded as if Ferozeshah was at last satisfied that Mirabai, the new nurse, and a new Sindhi dispenser were competent to undertake some of her work, and she heaved a sigh of relief.

She thanked the doctor, took her handbag from a locked cupboard, and went slowly through the waiting-room for high-caste clients and down the steps to the tree-lined road. She had a room in the house of a widow further down the road, and, as she strolled towards it, she looked back over the previous thirty months. She smiled a little as she remembered how the small private hospital had helped to fight epidemics, patched broken limbs after riots, done operations that in England would have been left to specialists, delivered babies and consoled the bereaved. Though the doctor was making money, much of it was spent on precious pieces of equipment – the X-ray machine, for example, what a help that had been – and the big sterilizer.

When she knocked, her landlady, Mrs Jha, unbolted the front door to let her in. She was a stringy-looking woman, garbed in a plain white sari, her grey hair clipped close to her head to indicate her widowhood. Though she was quite orthodox in her way of life, her grandson, Dr Ferozeshah’s lawyer, had persuaded her to take in Diana.

The two women had become good friends and, quite often, Mrs Jha would cook some vegetarian delicacy for the girl and bring it to her. As a caste Hindu, however, she would not eat with her. The line was drawn there.

In return, Diana respected her caste rules and tried not to infringe on her privacy. She never entered her landlady’s part of the house lest she defile it. With the aid of a tin bath in her room, she washed herself and her clothes. The sweeper came twice daily through a special sweeper’s door into the cupboardlike bathroom, to clean her commode and remove her garbage. Mrs Jha’s own servant, for a small tip, drew water from the well in the compound and filled her water-pots on the veranda, both morning and evening. It worked quite well.

Now Mrs Jha was full of news. Mr Lallubhai had sent his peon to ask Diana to attend a meeting at his house the following evening. The man had also brought more news of the train robbery. ‘He said,’ she commenced in a hissing whisper in case the dacoits might hear, ‘that in the bazaar they are saying that this is no ordinary train robbery, and that they must have had local help.’ She pursed her lips and glanced over her shoulder, as if expecting to see someone listening to her. ‘They think it was not Saurashtrian dacoits who did it – and that makes sense, when you think of it. They wouldn’t be foolish enough to kill an English Memsahib.’

She pushed her key ring more securely into the waist of her petticoat, as if to guard it carefully, and looked expectantly at Diana.

Diana, however, knew the value of bazaar rumours, and replied quite cheerfully, ‘Except for the murder, the newspaper this morning didn’t seem to think there was anything special about it. Just that they were after the registered mail.’

Mrs Jha refused to relinquish one scrap of her morbid excitement, and wagged her head slowly in negative fashion.

‘We must be prudent,’ she said earnestly. ‘When my nephew comes home from work, I shall ask him to clean the gun. And he and his sister can escort you whenever you want to go out.’

Diana restrained the gurgle of laughter which rose in her throat. Mrs Jha’s nephew was a huge, flabby, amiable youth and in a crisis, Diana was sure, his only thought would be to find a cupboard big enough to hide in. His shy young sister was hardly necessary to act as chaperon.

She thanked Mrs Jha and retreated to her room.

It was an airy, comfortable room, though, by Western standards, rather bare.

A divan, covered with a homespun bedspread, lay along a whitewashed wall, a few gaily coloured cushions piled upon it. Above this hung a carefully arranged group of family photographs in plain, black frames. There was a small bookcase, crammed with novels, a few travel books, the Bible, a Gita, English translations of the Upanishads and the Light of Truth; on top of it, by a brass vase of wilted wild flowers and grasses, lay some library books, including one of John Bennett’s histories. Her few dresses hung on a rail set across a corner of the room, with her shoes in a neat row beneath them. A trunk, its careworn appearance disguised by a frilled cover, held her underwear and a precious tennis racket. On top of the trunk there was a workbasket in which lay balls of wool and knitting needles.

There was little else in the room, except for a small wooden table with its accompanying chair, and a locked
cupboard for her modest stores of food, linen, clothing and other oddments.

Diana hurried to her veranda, where she kept her cooking tools and Primus stove. She quickly put together a pan of khicharhi and, while it was cooking, she washed herself and changed into a khaki blouse and skirt, relics of her Mission of Holiness days.

To eat her meal, she sat in a basket chair and looked out over the little courtyard, with its well in one corner and a drooping neem tree in another. Near the well, tiny flowers bloomed between the paving stones, watered by splashes from the water-bucket. A sacred, well-tended tulsi tree flourished in a stone pot in the centre of the courtyard.

Diana never trespassed into the courtyard, and now she thought how nice it would be to do so. ‘I’d like a home like this,’ she pondered a little wistfully.

‘You could have it, if you took a nursing post with a European company here,’ she told herself.

‘And get caught up in the empty world of club life? Ugh!’

Marriage would also have brought her a home, but she always shrugged when she thought of it. ‘I’m past it,’ she would say quite philosophically. During her probationer days in Edinburgh she had dated other students, but her shyness made her boring. She had turned to her studies and had become a reliable, cheerful surgical nurse, losing her individuality behind her starched uniform.

It would not have been difficult for her to obtain a well-to-do Indian husband; her ordinary English prettiness was a thing of unusual beauty in Shahpur. She knew, however, that the adjustment to such a life would be too difficult for her.

Her mind wandered. ‘What about your new friend, John Bennett?’

Tears stung her eyes. In a moment of honesty, she
realized that John had ceased to be only a patient to her and had become a special person, unlike anyone she had met before; a man of integrity, considerable physical strength and high intellect, she reflected wistfully.

She stirred her food around a little, to cool it. Perhaps, she thought rather pitifully, there was good reason for a quiet, older woman like herself to keep away from him, if she wanted to avoid being hurt. Absorbed in his work, he would hardly think about her.

He had an enviable war record and, amongst the University people, he was famous for his kindness – and his celibacy. No hint of gossip ever seemed to touch him, she had observed, not even the assumption, common enough in regard to a man who lived like he did, that he was a homosexual.

She pushed away her half empty dish, and wiped her lips on her handkerchief. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway,’ she told herself. ‘Just because a man is courteous and thoughtful of you, doesn’t mean much.’

She pushed back her chair, took a glass and went to a water-jar. She drank a glass of water and also filled a small water-bottle, which she put into her black, nurse’s bag.

She picked up her black umbrella and went out to catch the bus.