We sat down at last in the foyer to wait for the forensics team. The security from the night before, Group Four men, one of Delhi’s best security agencies, stood around. Jat asked them
where they were from. They were heavyset men with local Haryana accents like Jat’s. And when he recognized the village from which they came, his suspicions lifted. ‘They’re family
men,’ he said to me, ‘they wouldn’t have done it.’
But they were all family men. And the man on whom the security had first laid their suspicion was not just any family man, he was our family man, of almost eight years. At that
stage we had known only of the two missing laptops. And because the security had seen him leave, according to their register, at 9.12 the night before, with a large bag slung over his shoulder, he
became our first suspect.
‘Oh God, I hope it’s not Sati,’ my mother had said on the phone, ‘it would be such a shame. I think it must be Kalyan. He’s forever in trouble with money, taking
loans here and there. I think he realized after I told him his family couldn’t stay that he was in danger of losing his job. He has to go.’ She paused and said, ‘Have you checked
to see if anything else is missing, the silver, the safe . . .’
That was when Kalyan had entered the room, having less than an hour before discovered the missing laptops.
The tone of the morning had been set by a strange text message from an American friend in Spain. It read: ‘Hope you’re safely back in India now. I think of you
often and I hope that all is well where you are. Beware of complacency, my friend, and work hard. Did you get the recipe for gazpacho?’
Zack. A friend from college studying abroad. I had been with him in Seville only weeks before, on my way back to India for the summer. It would have been late at night in Spain; I imagined he
would have drunk too much, even though the message was not uncharacteristic. A few minutes later Kalyan had come in with the tea tray and the two almonds, two walnuts and dozen raisins a
nutritionist had advised I eat first thing in the morning. I drank the tea in bed, then went in for a shower. It was not yet six when I rang Kalyan to ask him for a cup of coffee downstairs in my
study.
The study was new. Till just the other day it had been the Sethia wine cellar. But now for the past month or so, besides two glass-fronted wine refrigerators, the basement room contained a
coffee table, two rattan chairs and a Gustavian writing desk with blue painted legs. On its polished surface lay a brass ashtray, a silver Mac and a desk lamp with a green glass shade.
The new study was a bad room to work in. The buzz from the wine fridges and voltage stabilizers was maddening. The room also had a problem with damp. One entire wall of fresh orange paint had
blistered. The surface swelled and cracked. My eye, trailing the contours of the sodden patches, was tempted to think of them as continents on a three-dimensional map. I was fighting the temptation
to crush Asia in my fingers when Kalyan appeared in the doorway with a coffee mug.
He put it down on the desk and was turning to leave, when he stopped, and making matter-of-fact the tremor in his voice, said, ‘You know, baba, those two laptops that lie upstairs on
madam’s desk . . .’
‘Yes,’ I replied, reluctantly turning my mind to them.
‘Do you have them downstairs with you?’
A stupid question. They were old and slow and out of use. They never moved
from their place on my mother’s desk. What’s more, I could tell that Kalyan recognized the stupidity of the question, because he spoke now like a servant, playing up his stupidity. And
he didn’t need to; he was stupid anyway. That he thought I might be fooled by this show of innocence was an even greater stupidity. But servants were often like this: they played with depths,
leaving you to wonder whether they might still have greater depths.
‘No, Kalyan. Why would they be?’
‘Because they’re not upstairs any more.’
Save for his large eyes, seemingly kohled and liquid, growing wide with
alarm, his face shrank. His small mouth twitched, its expressiveness concealed by a limp black moustache.
‘What do you mean not there?’ I said, getting up from the desk.
We climbed the short flight of stairs leading from the basement to my mother’s study. Kalyan’s voice came like an echo from the stairwell, mumbling about how he had come into the
study, seen they were not there, thought perhaps I had taken them . . .
They were gone. Their absence left a noticeable gap on the long table. Their chargers were gone too, but the rest of the room was undisturbed.
‘Call the security!’ I said in a loud voice to Kalyan. And as he went off, I added threateningly, ‘Kalyan, this is no small matter. They better be found.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, untying the strings of his black and white apron and rushing off.
The house was called Steeple Hall. It was part of Farmhouse Delhi, a new and privileged urban isolation, initiated some three decades before on the margins of the city. But it
was a cautious sanctioning and the men in charge dithered over the luxuries of this new life. They expressed their fears, and socialist resentments, by sometimes placing limits on the square
footage of the farmhouses, confining them on occasion to the size of an apartment in town. Then successive dispensations, feeling perhaps that it was absurd to expect anyone to leave Delhi only to
live in a house no bigger than a flat, would stretch that limit. It was in this happy period that the original Steeple Hall, allowed six thousand feet, had been built. But by the time Amit Sethia
had bought it for my mother, the limit had shrunk again to two thousand. And out of fear that in this season of reeled-in freedoms, my mother could end up with a smaller house than the one she
wished to demolish, she was advised to keep the walls of the original structure standing; they would defend their plinth. Inside, of course, she could do what she liked.
The restriction made it impossible for my mother to have the house she wanted. It was to have been an old Delhi house with courtyards, verandas and balconies, a kind of celebration of space
following the barsati years; there was to have been a generous use of red sandstone; I think my mother would have wanted a high-pointed arch somewhere, a garden pavilion or two. And though, oddly
enough, in the house she ended up with these latter structures were present, as in fact – save for the courtyard – was the rest, the house was not an old Delhi house.
Despite tearing off half a dozen green cement steeples from the original structure, reshaping and reordering rooms, punching in windows where there had been none, there was nothing my mother
could do to ennoble the meanness of the house’s proportions. Its ceilings were low – made lower still by a false ceiling, installed to hold flat-panelled air conditioners with four
vents – and as a result the rooms though well sized forever felt poky. An abrupt and dreary staircase of many short flights and brushed steel banisters hung through the house. There were
concealed fluorescent lights and, on the insistence of the architect, sealed glass windows.
This
, in a city where for six months of the year air conditioners were not needed! My
mother’s decorator brother-in-law, who in memory of the deposed steeples had suggested the name, Steeple Hall, described it now as a cross between a mosque and an IT centre.
The latter part of that description was aimed at the house’s drab rectangularity, the former at a giant stand-alone Islamic arch in pink Dholpur stone. It had been pinned, with the help of
steel beams, to one side of the building. And, as with the balconies and verandas, it had been part of an imagined cohesiveness. But projecting now, off one face of the building, its base sinking
into the side of a grassy hill, the Dholpur stone pale and pinkish in the floodlights, it seemed to jeer at my mother’s original intention. It was like the balconies, which had been slung
onto the building with the help of iron girders, now each covered in rust, their black paint flaking. Or the verandas, which had pushed back rooms already cheated of their proportions.
But Steeple Hall, for all its flaws, possessed that rarest of rare attributes. With its jagged skyline of triangles where there had been steeples, its giant Islamic arch of the wrong stone, its
many blue and white awnings like those seen by a swimming pool and its Hindu figurines – Amit Sethia’s influence – dotting the lawn, each with a floodlight of its own, it was by
any assessment a house that had gone wrong enough to be right. It had natural lunacy. And once the miniatures and big Persian carpets went in, along with the deep sofas, goose-down pillows and
White Company sheets – this was the fourth house my mother had decorated and she did it with the ease of the British laying down a town – it also had comfort.
To this my stepfather, ever a man of the times, added his own technological element: wireless Internet, a modern gym, flat screens and DVD players, Tata Sky and dark-brown plug points capable of
taking the plugs of the world. And so, despite having shown the greatest reluctance to do so, Steeple Hall came together as a house, standing as a monument to the cultural confusions that had taken
root in India during the early part of the twenty-first century.
It was a place I had begun to come to nearly every weekend from Amit Sethia’s company house in town. I was at the end of my third year in college in Massachusetts and in the middle of what
I imagined was a significant private transformation. It had its origins in my friendship with Zack, which had begun in our first year. Zack was a slim, handsome mulatto from the Midwest, who had
spoken early on to me of his ‘protestant work ethic’. And already in those first weeks, when everybody was drinking beer from plastic cups and enjoying the good weather, I would see him
putting his words into action.
Every day he went directly from his classes to the sunless C-section of the Robert Frost Library. He remained there, in that gloomy basement till four-thirty, surfacing only for a hurried
cigarette. Dressed in stained khakis and a flimsy blue shirt, under which a white vest was visible, he could be seen pacing the library’s granite steps, tensely studying the reference cards
he had filled, in an abrupt jagged hand, with notes from his afternoon’s reading. If anyone approached him, he would look at the person for a moment or so with the terrifying aspect of the
Nietzschean solitary, wild-faced and fresh out of the cave. Then this expression would give way to an unnatural smiling manner that would send the intruder faster on his way than the grimmer
visage.
At four-thirty he would break for dinner, which meant a short trip to the dining hall where he packed himself two sandwiches in brown paper napkins. Then he would return to the library for the
rest of the evening. At close to nine, if I was lucky, I would be summoned for a drink. This occasion, though it had the outward appearance of a festivity, was no less utilitarian. It was a
ninety-minute session in which Zack smoked Black & Mild cigars while hastily drinking from a gallon bottle of Carlo Rossi’s red wine, spilling it here and there, further staining his
khakis. Over the course of these ninety minutes, after which I would be ushered out of his room, he would speak, drink and smoke with the force of a man wishing to relax his mind for sleep. And as
it softened, the day’s reading poured out of him, bringing a variety of writers and musicians my way: Du Bois, Ellison, James Baldwin; Nina Simone and Coltrane; Baudelaire and Arthur
Rimbaud.
Zack was absorbed with aesthetic questions, that though outwardly technical, were, in fact, about the aim of art. Questions of narrative, what you kept, what you left out; the function of
economy; the importance of discovering one’s material, of looking inward to see which of the stories we contained were important and worth telling. At the beginning of our acquaintance, I had
treated Zack’s concern with these questions as one of the many pretentious conversations I had routinely had in college. Part of the reason for this was that I myself had never thought to
question the purpose of my education.
I had come blindly to college in America from India because it was the thing to do. It was an extension of other forms of entitlement, like summer holidays in the West, or the buying of a nice
car. I don’t think I could have answered the question of why I was going to college; not, at least, on my own terms; in my heart, I would have known it was to impress those around me. It was
like Tolstoy’s youthful fascination with the idea of being
comme il faut
. And this desire to impress others would have extended to what I hoped to learn at the college as well:
fashionable French and Russian writers, whose names would serve me well at cocktail parties. The college, too, with its broad surveys of literature and performing professors, was complicit in the
acquisition of this kind of learning.
But Zack was different. And, in our third year, still wishing to discover what gifts lay within him, what his responsibility to his talent was, he quit all his reading and writing classes to
become a painter. Listening to him one night talk of ‘negative space’ in his paintings, which he described as the equivalent of ‘what is left unsaid’ in a story, I began to
feel that Zack was crossing the line between education that was ornamental, there to impress others, and education that was real.
Inspiring though his self-improvement was, it gave me a feeling of shame at my own wasted years, at the books read fast and for no other reason than to say I had read them. I wanted to go back
and to read again. I had, by then, acquired the aspiration to be a writer, but feared very much that it was no more profound than that initial desire to go to college in America. I wanted now to
look again at its motivations and see if there was really anything there. And that was why I came to Steeple Hall, to read and be alone.
Through this entire period of self-examination, with all its vanities, I had not once thought seriously about my childhood and adolescence in India. All that had remained remote, all still very
quiet, still in its preservative, my assumptions and entitlements safely in place. And this was strange, for though I was returning to India for the summer to read and think about my writing
ambition, I had not considered it important to think hard about India, which had made me, and which was experiencing significant change of her own. No; I was wilfully keeping her at bay, wilfully
taking her for granted. And Steeple Hall, with its new study, gym, large lawns, ponds and pavilions, was – or so, I thought – the ideal place to do so.