Last Labyrinth Read online

  She laughed. ‘If you want to sleep with me it is all right by me,’ she said.

  She dropped her petticoat. I lay on top of her. I woke up feeling moist, sticky, roused. I lay while wondering where I was. The colour in the ventilators was slowly dissolving. In a couple of hours I had to catch my plane.

  Anuradha saw me off on the driveway. She looked just as she did when she had left me. I wondered if she had slept at all.

  Aftab, she said, was asleep.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Give my regards to Geeta.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Don’t go away in anger.’

  ‘Good bye,’ I said.

  The plane circled the city before setting its bearings. Amidst the white-washed houses, the temples and the mosques raised their heads in the morning sun. Everything looked hot and prostrate. There was the river with its decrepit, world famous water front. On the other bank, somewhere amidst those trees, I knew, was Gargi’s cottage. I was in a hurry to get back to Bombay, back to my factories, Mr. Thapar would, from now on, handle Aftab. The past twenty four hours had been like a dream. And I was glad the dream was over.

  8

  K, according to my father, was a man for all seasons. In age he was closer to me than to my father but he had maintained a distance and a reserve with me which became apparent only when we were left alone. I was surprised, therefore, when he phoned me at the office and invited me to lunch.

  Over coffee, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the harbour, he said, ‘I understand you visited Aftab Rai.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ I said. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Anuradha was here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She said you are after Aftab’s company.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘He is an odd sort.’

  ‘It takes all kinds to make the world.’

  K did not smile.

  ‘And that is an odd sort of a house, that haveli of his.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘Yes. Aftab invited your father once...’

  ‘Oh, did he? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes, he did. For a meal. It appeared — well, a depraved sort of a place to me.’

  I thought of the diamond on Aftab’s little toe.

  ‘I should have thought so,’ I laughed.

  ‘What did you think of it?’

  ‘It was quaint.’

  ‘You will be going there again?’

  ‘Why not? I am over twenty one, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  We fell silent. A monkey-man sought our attention from the pavement below. For five rupees his monkeys would have showed us some sexual tricks. A knot of junkies, gaunt, their hair matted, passed by as though sleep-walking. There wasn’t much in Aftab’s haveli that was not available within a hundred yards of where we sat.

  The lunch came to an abrupt end. K started to say something, then pulled himself up. He looked at his watch. ‘I had better run along. It’s May Day today. They are bound to bring in casualties.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Outside, it was hot and sultry. I said, ‘An odd couple, no doubt.’

  ‘Aftab and Anuradha?’

  He made them sound like the indestructible organic compounds that my factories churned out day and night.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What do you know about them, anyway?’ I said.

  He did not answer. For the remaining half-mile to his clinic we drove in silence.

  A constable was waiting for him along with a dark thin man. The man had a deep gash along one cheek. The blood ran down his face and into the collar of his shirt. He was barefoot.

  ‘Are you a worker?’ K asked him as he got ready to stitch the wound.

  ‘No. I don’t have a job,’ said the man.

  ‘What rally were you in? Raise your hand if you feel the needle.’

  ‘You know,’ the man said, ‘you know, in Cambodia they tear children apart. Children of the officers of the old government. They don’t waste bullets on them. The officers are killed with bayonets or clubs. The women, too. Their wives, of course. They have killed ten lakhs by now. Another twenty might have to be finished before the new order can be established. They take them out into the country in trucks. They make the men strip and kneel, their hands tied behind their backs. Two men bayonet them simultaneously, one in the chest, the other in the back. Their families are looking on all the while. You know what they have been doing to the women? They...’

  ‘Shut up,’ K shouted in a sudden rage. ‘Just shut up.’

  The man clammed up at once, a picture of obedience. K had a way of exercising authority if he chose to. I wondered if I really knew him as well as I imagined.

  When the man was gone, K lit a cigarette and sat back. ‘You asked me what I know about them?’

  I took a second to catch on. ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Not much about Aftab. A little more about Anuradha. She used to be a film star.’

  ‘When did you meet her?’

  ‘Oh, many years ago, quite by accident. At the bedside, in fact, of an actress who lived in the flat next to mine. The actress was dying — of liquor, I think. There was very little to be done. She was there along with an old man.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What I remember most about her is that she wouldn’t let me leave. She was terrified. After the actress died, I brought her over to my flat for some brandy. We talked a bit. She is odd, as you say. She was odd even then but I liked her a lot. She didn’t like being in the movies.’

  K picked up a stack of X-rays, put them, one by one, against the light. An ambulance, white and gleaming, backed out of the green gates of the hospital across the street. My mother had been hospitalized there until she ran away one night. Painters were putting a new coat on the gate.

  ‘Was that the last you saw of her?’ I said.

  K did not reply. He was not much of a conversationalist and I knew he couldn’t be rushed. I sensed, however, a new reluctance in him. I let him finish the X-rays, then repeated the question.

  ‘I saw her off and on, went to a couple of her parties. She had an aunt living at Juhu. I even saw her shoot one whole morning. Then she went away with Aftab.’ He fell silent again, lit another cigarette, became thoughtful. ‘A strange thing happened a few years later. One night, Aftab phoned from Benaras. He was very upset. He had just been told that Anuradha was very ill and could I go and see her at her aunt’s place. I didn’t know Aftab but I liked Anuradha and I went. It was past midnight. I had to wake up the aunt. She was surprised to see me. Anuradha had had an attack of small pox, she said, which was serious enough, but she was not aware of any sudden developments. We went to her room. It was locked from inside. We had to break it down. Anuradha lay in the tub in the bathroom. She had cut her wrists.’

  ‘Good God!’ I said, horrified.

  Slowly, another point sank into me.

  ‘But how did Aftab know about it if her aunt did not?’

  ‘That remains a mystery.’

  As I drove back to the office I could not shake her thought away. I saw her sitting on the divan holding my face in her hands and, then, slumped in the brown water, her body covered with scabs, blood pumping steadily out of her slashed wrists. I felt sick, nauseated.

  What had my lunch with K been about? Depravity? Maybe it was depravity that had so stirred me that night. All in all, though, I had no desire to return to the labyrinths of Lal Haveli. The cutting edge of my life pointed the other way, even if I did not know which other way. Anuradha’s cold farewell had put an end to my obsession with her. It was time now to turn to the affairs at hand, the wrapping up of Aftab’s company, in the interest not only of business but also of the forces of evolution, the survival of the fittest.

  I had nearly forgotten Aftab and his haveli. If I had met him at a party I would have ignored him. And, yet, when he came and sat
near me at the next meeting of the Plastic Manufacturers Association, touching my hand with his own, bringing with him that peculiar musty fragrance of his haveli’s interiors, that must surely have existed only on that one spot on earth, I felt my breath quicken, my thoughts coming suddenly to a boil. Images, drenched in the colours of bangles, smothered my senses. While the minister humbugged a hundred businessmen, I could only hear the songs of Azizun, the footwork of the little dancer, the sound of my nail tracing the line of a vase etched in marble. Echoes of those empty rooms shot about my head like billiard balls. My senses knocked at the brown teak doors of a room in which the carpet with a peacock’s image lay. I dared not open that door. And yet, even before the vote of thanks, when Aftab whispered, ‘Come with me, there is a plane at five,’ I went.

  Benaras was hot. Tarakki had brought the Dodge. I noticed the wistfulness with which Aftab watched the goings on beyond the tinted glass, like an animal in a cage. My eyes met Tarakki’s in the rear view mirror. I looked away.

  Spurred by the heat, Tarakki drove fast, as fast as the crowds allowed. The river had thinned down as had the rush of pilgrims. There were traffic lights at wide intervals. Each one of them was red but Tarakki, swearing under his breath, ran through them all.

  In fact, it was not to Aftab’s house that we went that evening. I found myself recording each crossing, each turning, as though I were being kidnapped and would later have to find my way back. The streets widened or narrowed without explanation. Tyres squealing, the car reversed direction. There were trees and long stretches of cobblestones. At one point, we stopped to let a procession of ash-smeared sadhus pass. Silent, except for the jangling of their chimtas, unblinking eyes straight ahead, they passed like a pageant of ghosts, grey and ephemeral against the white houses. Sometime later, we stopped. I had been able to retain nothing of the route.

  It was nearly dark. I followed Aftab out of the car. He walked up a little distance and beckoned. His manner suggested a secret rendezvous. What I saw, at the turn of the corner, however, was a vast chowk afloat with rehris. Each of the rehris had an acetylene light. They were packed like sampans in Hongkong. On the layers of dust and stench of rotten fruit lay fumes of acetylene. A large crowd milled about the rehris.

  ‘Our summers are long and hot,’ Aftab said. ‘But it would rain sooner or later.’ He pointed towards the sky as if the rain lurked somewhere behind the stars.

  He stood for a moment, pensive and watchful. Then he stepped into the crowd. His step was firm. He walked without touching anyone as though he abhorred contact. Yet he was happy, buoyant, as I had seldom seem him. The rehris were loaded with knickknacks: plastic, rayon fabrics, smuggled shirts from Nepal, tobacco, eatables, pornography, soda water, religious books. Indifferent to the heat, the crowd jostled about in the highest of spirits. Here and there, in the wavering light, the face of a pretty woman stood out. There was something about them, the women, a coquettish consent, a readiness for romance, that intrigued me.

  ‘There is a festival today,’ Aftab said. Maybe that explained it. At the far end of the square Aftab pointed out the silhouette of a dark mysterious shrine.

  ‘They used to perform human sacrifice there,’ he announced. ‘Azizun lives over there,’ he added in the same breath as though she too had something to do with human sacrifice.

  And where was Anuradha? At Aftab’s haveli? In the streets nearby? In a dargah? That morning in Bombay, shaving in the brightly tiled bathroom of the town apartment in which I then lived, I had thought of her. It was the sight of an iron grill, ornate and delicate, in an apartment across the street, that had sparked her memory. The apartment belonged to an acquaintance, chief of a pharmaceutical company, and I had seen the grill many times before. I had even touched it, traced the iron vines and leaves. But in the pre-dawn darkness, in the diffused light from the sky and the sea, it had been transformed, filled with a life of its own, until it stood detached from the building; stood breathing over the balcony like a black mysterious animal. Why it should have brought on the memories of Anuradha, I do not know. After I finished shaving I stood for a while at the window, looking at the grill and building all around. There was a mystery about Anuradha that I had yet to crack. She should have been no more to me than a woman trying to save her lover’s (husband’s?) property. She should have been transparent. Why should she appear mysterious unless, possibly, there was a mystery within me that, in her proximity, got somehow stirred, as one tuning fork might stir another.

  So, while Geeta thought I was getting ready, I stood at the bathroom window wondering about the mystery of the grill and that other mystery, the mystery of Anuradha. In the half-dawn the concrete all around me loomed all the more overwhelming. No wonder I had not noticed the grill all these years. Perhaps my father was right. The concrete did change your vision, narrowed down the wavelengths of sight and sound and thought that you could register. Aftab’s haveli, his city, transmitted different wavelengths and appeared mysterious because I could not receive their messages. Beyond a faint crackle, that is. It was the crackle, that was important. Without it, I would not have known the existence of another world.

  ‘I thought you were getting ready.’

  Geeta had come in from the bedroom.

  ‘There is still time.’ I put an arm around her waist. She was slim and shapely and, at that hour, very desirable. Yet, lately, we had not been particularly active in that department.

  ‘It is a meeting of the Association?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will be meeting Aftab?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I hope you are not getting too involved with him.’

  ‘Has K been talking to you?’

  ‘Yes. I have my own feelings, too.’

  ‘Anyway, I am not getting involved with him.’

  ‘But you are going ahead with the acquisition of his company.’

  ‘That is another matter.’

  After a silence she had said, ‘I hope you won’t go off to Benaras, like the last time.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  And, yet, here I was, admiring coquettish women and places of human sacrifice and now entering a narrow lane that presumably led to Azizun’s place.

  Despite the heat, the lane was full. Of men, women and animals. The women were probably wives of workers and clerks doing their buying at the shops that occupied the ground floors of the buildings on either side. They could not care less what went on the floors above. Or, maybe, as in Bombay, there was a magical hour when the ordinary life of these lanes instantly yielded to a life of flaming passions, madness, and suicides. Four Nepali girls, their kamizes tight around their hips stepped giggling out of a photographer’s shop. They stopped abruptly before Aftab, took a quick glance at me and went away, giggling once again. We entered the dim hallway of a house. A mongrel, its coat covered with scabs, lay curled in its cool darkness. From Aftab he received a sharp, unexpected kick in the belly and ran away screaming. We went up the steep stairs.

  We came upon an unlit landing, passed through a creaky unbolted door and entered a courtyard. It was in fact the roof of the shop below. Its hot brick was sprinkled with water and gave off an odour of wet earth. Beyond the courtyard, Aftab knocked on a wooden door. It was opened by a middle aged woman. She was respectful but did not smile. ‘Azizun Jan?’ Aftab enquired in his soft, hesitant voice, the fine eyebrows (I wondered if he plucked them) raised just a little. The woman nodded. We followed her at a distance. ‘She is Azizun’s mother.’ After a pause he added, ‘Some hooligans cut off her breasts during the riots of 1947.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘She was among the finest singers of the city.’

  ‘Does she still sing?’

  Aftab looked at me in disbelief, annoyance. ‘Would you sing if your breasts were cut off?’

  I had never seen him out of countenance before. He opened a door and peered. The sound of ghunghrus spilled out.

  ‘Let her teach,’ said Aftab, quic
kly shutting the door. He led me to a decrepit wooden balcony that overlooked the street. Or, maybe, the wooden planks hid a steel frame. The bannister, in any case, was of wood. Under my hands it felt of dust and flaking paint. A couple of flower pots stood to one side. They smelled of wet earth, too, and of marigolds. The way Aftab bent down and smelt them I had a feeling they were his gifts to the house. Across us, at eye level, was a tenement similar to Azizun’s. A man and a woman stood looking down. I could see right through the tunnel of rooms at the end of which an angithi belched smoke through a mound of coals. On the third floor stood two plump girls, also looking down. ‘I have always suffered from vertigo,’ said Aftab pulling back a bit. ‘Can you look down and tell me who is making all that racket?’

  In the street below bedlam prevailed. It was like a river of bobbing heads in spate. Smoke arose from a hundred angithis. Radios blared. The complexion of the crowd had subtly changed. The housewives had retired, their place taken by young men in a variety of dress. They had black glossy hair and a raucous laugh. There was a strange similarity about them as if they had been cloned from the same movie star. I wondered what they did for a living. In Bombay, I would have known but here I was at a loss. Their muscular bodies and white flashing teeth exuded mountains of unconsumed energy that would doubtless explode in a hundred ways before the night was done. To the right of me, before the mirror-doors of a cinema, two young men horsed around watched by a circle of admirers. That was the racket that Aftab had referred to. One of the men wore a bright red shirt, the other a green scarf. ‘Two young men are horsing around,’ I informed him, but even as I talked, I realized that the ‘horsing around’ had turned into a full-scale fight. The friendly yelling had turned into grunts of wild rage. A couple of bystanders stepped in, making gestures of peace but, just then, the red shirt flashed what looked like a knife and plunged it into the other’s stomach. I could see green-scarf holding the hilt of the dagger, trying to pull it out. Red-shirt sped through the crowd on bare feet. Green-scarf fell on the pavement and the crowd closed over him.