Noon (7 page)

‘What is it?’

But there was no reply. The images now appearing on the television held Sethia’s attention so completely that it was a second before he realized the sound was off.

‘Amit?’

‘I’ll call you back,’ he said in a furtive whisper and absent-mindedly hung up. Then turning on the sound to the special hour-long remembrance, he watched and listened in
horror. Under a black and white oval photograph of a thirties beauty, it said ‘The Rajamata of Kusumapur, 1919–2002’.

The sky outside was grey; the wind thumped against his window; there was a hint of snow. The goose-down bed and the darkness of the room seemed to muffle him. On the television, images of the
Rajamata, as in a slideshow, went moodily in and out of focus. They showed her at Ascot. In chiffon and pearls, awarding a polo trophy. In white at the pyre of her dead husband. With Prince Philip
and the Queen. With Jackie Kennedy. Released from Tihar Jail after the Emergency. Sethia watched, as if waiting for an image from that fateful night to appear. But of course it never came. The
Rajamata was going, free of her sins, into that edited heaven of coffee-table books and one-hour specials.

Sethia should have gone back to the forum; there were other sessions to attend; but he found he didn’t have the will. He decided, in the hope of taking his mind off his shock at the
Rajamata’s death, to step out to buy Udaya’s perfume. Perhaps he would buy Rehan something too; Udaya would notice if he didn’t.

He dressed lightly despite the cold, and passing the full-length mirror on the way out was momentarily detained by his reflection. He was old. His body had shrunk, his shoulders had turned in at
the corners and a dark length of flesh, stubbled white, hung lower from his chin than he would have thought possible. But he also recognized an old fire in his face, and no sooner had he squared
eyes with it than it consumed all trace of weakness. No, it was death to let anything go; he would keep it all very near to him, ‘the grief and the glory’.

Downstairs, the lobby swarmed with Indians. Sethia swelled with pride at the thought that he was a living record of the time when his countrymen had been pygmies abroad, restricted to twenty
dollars a day. And now, here they were, thinking nothing of paying five hundred a night for a room. He remembered when even he had had to eat at fast-food restaurants and delis; but now, at any
moment, the pretty blonde concierge would walk over to tell him that his reservation that night at Jean Georges was confirmed. And it was as he scanned the lobby for her that he caught sight of a
familiar figure gliding across its marble floor.

Though the hair now was grey and there was an ashen cast over his once glowing skin, he was unmistakable in his quilted kaftan and still held a broad packet of Dunhills in his hands. The
distress in his face was visible even at a distance.

‘Maggu!’ Sethia said, hurrying up to him with a broad smile.

Mahapatra stopped and swivelled around. A glazed look of disappointment entered his eyes.

‘Hello, Amit,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me! The great Indian socialist at the WEF?’

‘No,’ Mahapatra replied coldly, ‘I have a textile exhibition at the Met.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Amit said, now smiling more broadly than ever, ‘I thought you would have been by her side at the last.’

‘I was, till just the other day. But then she was better and said I should go. She went fast, and in peace.’

‘And you’re not Master of Ceremonies at the funeral?’

‘I’m flying tomorrow,’ Maggu said wearily, ‘with Chitra.’

‘Chitra?’

‘The Rajamata’s great-niece.’

‘She lives here, in New York?’ Sethia asked with fresh interest.

‘Yes,’ Maggu replied, ‘in this hotel in fact.’

An incredulous expression crossed Sethia’s face. He was about to say something when Mahapatra pre-empted him.

‘She’s a student of hotel management, here as a trainee. They’re turning the
Kusumapur Palace into a hotel.’

‘Ah!’ Sethia said with satisfaction. ‘I thought so. Otherwise, where could those broken-down princes afford to stay here? That’s all they can do now, I suppose. Hawk
their last few possessions, turn their palaces into hotels and use their names while they still can.’

‘Yes, OK. Well, nice to see you, Amit. Some other time. Give my love to Udaya.’

Before he could say anything else Maggu was gone, leaving Sethia with a new and deeper malaise.

Sethia was about to step out of the hotel but instead he let the revolving doors take him back into the lobby. He headed in long strides for the concierge’s desk. His blonde favourite was
not there; in her place was a tall black man, who managed to greet Sethia while artfully bringing a phone conversation to an end.

‘Mr Sethia,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’

‘I’m looking,’ Sethia began, ‘for an employee of yours, who happens to be the niece of a very dear
friend of mine from India.’

The concierge stared in wonder at this wide range of connections operating in the place where he worked.

‘From India? Wow! What is her name?’

Sethia hesitated and then said, ‘I’m not sure of the department, but her name would be Chitrangada Singh of Kusumapur.’

The concierge baulked, then laughed. ‘You’re going to have to spell that.’

Sethia had just begun to do so when the concierge said, ‘Wait, wait, I know her. Chitra from New Delhi. I know her. She works in the spa.’

‘In the spa?’ Sethia said, unable to contain his delight. ‘What does she do there?’

The concierge shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure, but they’re usually made to do everything from manning the gym floor to handling the reservations desk, manicures, massage,
I don’t know,’ he said, and laughing, added, ‘feed the epidermis-nibbling fish.’

But Sethia was not listening. A plan took shape in his mind.

‘Darius,’ he said, conspicuously reading the concierge’s name pin, ‘will you do me a favour? Will you send her a message saying that a friend of her family is staying at
the hotel and would like to take her out for a drink this evening? If she’s free, she should meet me at seven in the bar.’

Darius was nodding his head, hastily scribbling down the information. Sethia thanked him and hurried up to his room.

*   *   *

He waited that night in the bar, drinking Laurent-Perrier rosé alone. ‘So she hasn’t come,’ he said to himself, when he saw the clock strike eight,
‘works in a spa, massaging strange men, but thinks she is too good to meet Amit Sethia. Chal, we’ll see about that.’ Though a drunken aggression grew in him, he was not angry. He
was pleased she had not come; the second part of his plan depended on her not coming; in fact, he was not sure what he would have done had she actually shown up.

A little before nine he went upstairs and changed into a large Four Seasons robe, with a nap as soft as velvet, and a matching pair of towelling slippers. He liked to walk though the
hotel’s carpeted corridors dressed like this; it made him feel he was above caring for the proprieties the hotel inspired in others.

In the spa, the air was suffused with the faint smell of eucalyptus oil. An atmosphere part clinic, part afterlife pervaded the place. There were bamboo screens and narrow channels 
of water lined with floating candles. Attendants in white hurried about him, speaking in whispered tones. He allowed himself to be led into a dark room, stopping only
to ask if his choice of masseuse had been honoured. But he didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

In the room itself, where soft music played, he saw a girl in uniform, who for all her diffidence and servile manners, had a Kusumapur face. He knew those features immediately: the thick black
hair, the large limpid eyes, the thin stern lips. She stood in the ghostly light emanating from a steaming fountain full of white pebbles. And for a moment, even Amit Sethia was shocked by the
irreverence of it all. It was always the West, he thought; the West that had turned these small local rajas into exotic royalty; and the West now that offered them up as masseuses and spa
attendants. What are they really? And what are we in relation to them? Who was to know?

He closed the door behind him and pushed off his robe in one swift movement. He thought he saw the trainee-princess steel her expression at the sight of this old naked man from India. Then
climbing onto the massage bed, he let his face sink into its hollow. The darkness behind him seemed to expand, and a moment later, drops of warm scented oil fell lightly on his legs and feet. Soon
he felt the first brush of those little hands against his body. And in the large granite bowl below him, Amit Sethia saw, from the light of a floating candle, its thin aluminium base bounded in
with pink orchids, the smiling face of a man at peace. His revenge was at last secreting its satisfactions.

But what revenge could be exacted privately? To be complete, it had to be acknowledged. And practising what he would say, he mouthed the words into the cavity below him, too soft for her to
hear: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Yes, that would do it. Those little royal hands would stop their work and all that needed to be said would be said. But even with victory so near,
Sethia found himself strangely incapable of saying the words aloud. Was it weakness, the same lack of courage as that night many years ago? He didn’t think so. But then what was it? What was
preventing him from taking something that was so justly his? He wondered if the silence and darkness of the room had subdued him. If, perhaps, he was to get a conversation going, he would feel more
emboldened.

His questions came innocently at first. How long had she been here? Eighteen months. Where in India did she come from? A small central state. Which borough of New York did she live in? Brooklyn,
but she was hoping to move to Manhattan soon. She answered in a calm steady voice, like any young person doing work experience in a big city. But with the easy flow of conversation, Sethia found he
was, if anything, further away from saying the words that would seal his revenge.

The minutes passed and he could tell from her progression over his body that time was running out. He thought perhaps it was a logistical problem. After all, how could he say anything when his
face was buried in this hole? That was it. He would wait for them to be face to face, then he would see her haughty expression crumble. Sethia began to prepare for the moment she would ask him to
turn over, and then he would say, ‘You’re certainly a long way from Kusumapur!’ How funny and satisfying that would be. Yes, that was it; he was just allowing the anticipation to
build until he was face to face with her.

And finally, the moment came. He heard her voice softly ask him to turn over. But as soon as he had, even before he had, while the pressure points of his hard cracked heels were being pressed,
he was struck by a terrible feeling of pity. His heart went out to this young girl working the night her great-aunt had died. The small flat in Brooklyn. The long flight back to India. The decay of
that life, the banality of this one. And suddenly he was filled with a feeling of protective pride for this little Maratha princess. She was not someone so far removed from him, he thought with
sudden pain; she was, as he had once been, just one more person India had let down.

When Chitra and Sethia were finally face to face, she looked down on a man who wore an expression wretched with grief, a man who had exacted more revenge than he could handle, and wanted no more
massage. He rose fast and apologetically, reaching in the darkness for his robe. ‘It was very good. Fine, yes, fine.’ It was just that he was old and got tired easily these days.
‘I hope you understand. Please. And good luck with everything. Good luck in India.’

Oh, what had he said! He hoped she had not heard. He made quickly for the door, but his feet were oily and the floor slippery. He couldn’t find his slippers in the dark. He had managed to
pick his way to the door, when he heard her say from the blackness behind him: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come this evening. It’s just that I do this work . . . and it can
be embarrassing to meet people from India who know my family.’

The door was open. A crack of light cleaved the massage room in half. They stood for a moment that way as long shadows and little people. With voice hoarse and eyes turning to glass, Sethia
said, ‘We are not embarrassed, beti. We are never embarrassed. Life is too short. God bless.’

And saying this, he hurried away into the comfortless tranquillity of soft music and aromatic oils.

(2006)

‘It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant – birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always
think so – and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths – change in the sense of renewal. But renewal
becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not – safety, for example, or money, or power.’

On a day in July, when Delhi’s skies whitened, and I was in my last year of college in America, a period of extended isolation came abruptly to an
end. Jasbir Singh Jat (ASI), the first to arrive on the scene, trailed the house’s high green walls, pointing to places where a breach might have occurred.

‘Crossing could have happened here, Rehan saab,’ he said, ‘and, here.’ He grabbed hold of the rusted supports that propped up rolls of razor-wire on the boundary wall,
and defying the whiteness of his stubble, swung himself easily onto one corner. There, standing among cement dust and embedded shards of glass, he said, ‘And, here, too, a crossing could have
been made.’

His uniform was of a coarse greenish-brown material with a single star on the epaulettes. He had a hard prominent jaw and a changeable manner, now grim, now crude and mocking. It was as if, by
the sheer robustness of his personality, whether playful or violent, he would ferret out the thief.

But he wanted first to let me know the challenges of his job. He made a charge through the house sizing up the men he passed; he occasionally fell into a sofa, and from that sprawling posture,
screwing up his eyes like a comic book detective, took in the room. When passing my bedroom, I asked him how a fifty kilogram safe could have gone missing from the adjoining room without my hearing
a sound. ‘The thieves, Rehan saab,’ Jat replied, ‘are very clever; they sometimes pump ammonia into the room. You would have slept the sleep of the dead.’