Noon (13 page)

‘Where do you live, mali?’ Sharma continued.

‘In the Harijan colony.’

‘Are you a drinking man?’

‘No, sir. I don’t touch the stuff.’

‘You look like a drinking man. I can tell by your face that you drink.’

I could see what Sharma meant. The yellowing eyes. The dark unhealthy skin stretched like leather over the small bones of his face. But it could just as easily have been a caste assumption or an
aspect of poverty and undernourishment.

‘Sir, no,’ the gardener insisted, then resorting to the ultimate Gandhian virtue, added, ‘I am a poor man.’

‘Now you’re not!’ Sharma said and everyone guffawed.

The last in was the sweeper. He was slightly made with pale skin and good features. He was also attentive to his toilette and dress. He wore a fashionable close-fitting T-shirt and jeans; a
carefully shaved goatee framed his prominent lips and clean white teeth. Marring this generally pleasing impression were the hard and inflamed beginnings of a huge boil on his cheek, a boil that
was yet to unleash its fury.

When the policemen discovered he was the sweeper, their tone changed from subtle and playful, to outright violent. They seemed close to hitting him just for being in their presence. He answered
their stock questions in a whine. His jaw was clenched, the teeth clamped shut, as if out of the discomfort caused by the boil. He answered with painful innocence.

Was he married?

No.

Why?

He was still young.

What did he earn?

Two thousand a month.

But he didn’t think that was enough. Had he thought he might help himself to a raise?

At the mention of a raise an expression of hopefulness entered his face. ‘A raise would be a great help,’ he said.

‘A raise would be a great help,’ Jat imitated in a whining voice. ‘Get out you bloody idiot before I thrash you.’

It was late afternoon when the last of the drawing-room trials ended. The policemen, though they seemed no nearer to solving the case, were satisfied. They now readily accepted our offer of food
and drink. Presently a plate of sandwiches, followed fast by a second, arrived, and the men, with the plate between them, wolfed down a dozen, dipping them heavily in a pool of ketchup. They would
sometimes pause, and with mouths full say, ‘See, Mr Rehan, what you’ve learnt about your house today.’

At five, another strange message from Zack: ‘Deeply disturbed by events in London. Hope you didn’t know anyone. Don’t fall into easy attitudes.’

As evening fell I found I didn’t want to be alone. The house tried brokenly to recover its routine, but it was a place now suspicious of itself. And outsiders were a
comfort. As Robin sorted through plastic boxes full of keys – three sets for each glass and gauze door, of which there were as many as ten – finding some missing and others unaccounted
for, I called a cousin and asked him to come over and spend the night. He agreed but said it would take him a few hours.

In the meantime, Vijay Singh returned with an officer of still higher rank. I hadn’t thought that the interplay of caste and heraldry could become more refined. But Prakash Shourie wore a
uniform of a still sleeker material than Vijay Singh’s. He had three stars on his epaulettes, ribbon-bar slides in rich oranges and browns and a braided shoulder cord of Prussian blue; his
tan leather shoes shone brightly. And though an older man, bellied and balding, I saw in his paler and softer skin the high features of a Brahmin. His fluency in English far surpassed that of Vijay
Singh. He spoke in an unbroken stream, disapproving and dismissive, quizzing me on the details of the case, as if he were a doctor chastening a young patient for contracting an STD. He was also a
man of clichés. ‘While cat’s away rats will play,’ he said with relish when he heard we did not spend much time at the farm.

In minutes he demolished the point-of-entry theory, which now Robin confessed had been Kalyan’s. Walking briskly up to the glass and gauze door, he demonstrated that the abrasion on the
frame had not been made by a tool, but by the handle of the door’s lock brushing against the frame. Then once he had shown us to be deserving of burglary, and inept at solving crime, he no
longer wished to talk of the theft. He wanted instead to know where my mother’s practice was; was she really the Udaya Singh whose legal victories he had read about in the eighties? Was Amit
Sethia, the industrialist, my father? When I said ‘stepfather’ he asked, ‘And your father?’

‘Abroad.’ The interest drained from his face.

Surinder Sharma had joined us and in the presence of his superiors, he became, as Jat had before him, a lesser man, a source of fun and suggestive humour. ‘Sir, Mr Rehan, sir, speaks very
lovely Punjabi,’ he said, throwing upward glances at Shourie and exposing his faintly green-capped teeth.

‘And so?’ Shourie replied with a stern smile. ‘We’re all Punjabis.’ At this Sharma laughed and bowed as if some important observation had been made.

Only when the senior officers had left did he become his normal self. We stood outside smoking in the growing darkness; the heat, now without its source, had a magical intensity.

‘My suspicion,’ he said, ‘falls a hundred per cent on the cook and Santosh. We just have to find some way to get it out of them. Chalo, let’s see. We’ll take them
in for remand,’ he added as if it were a procedure in itself.

‘Nothing too rough, please,’ I said, the new role coming easily.

‘No, no. These days there’s a lot of scrutiny on our methods so we can’t do anything too bad anyway.’

‘What kind of scrutiny?’

‘Bas, you know, human rights nonsense.’ At this he laughed deeply. Then he made an absurd suggestion. ‘Why don’t you organize a party for these guys with alcohol?
Once they’re all talli, they will, by themselves only, start talking and showing off about what they’ve done.’

‘Well, naturally, I couldn’t be present at such a party.’

‘No, no, naturally.’

‘So how will I know what they talk about?’

Surinder Sharma looked despairingly at me, as if I had poked a hole in an otherwise excellent plan.

‘You don’t have a man on the inside?’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied, feeling now in the face of this abysmal stupidity, all the futility of the day’s violence and cruelty.

That night Kalyan was full of nerves.

My cousin had arrived, the lamps in the drawing room had been lit, Begum Akhtar was playing off an iPod in some further room. On the bar, a silver ice bucket had misted over, an open bottle of
Famous Grouse lay mostly undrunk and, in a clear carafe of soda, bubbles fired to the surface.

I was on my way to the kitchen, when I heard a small girl’s voice yell, ‘Papa, papa.’ It sounded like one of Kalyan’s girls, but as I had never seen them in the main
house before, I wasn’t sure. My entry into the kitchen coincided with hers. She saw me and her eyes showed white; she clutched at the little white frock she wore. Kalyan, standing with his
back to me, seemed not to have noticed me come in. But the sight of the girl sent him into a rage. The veins in his neck swelled. He began hoarsely screaming at her to go back to the quarters. The
girl, as though physically struck by her terror, vanished. It was then that Kalyan swivelled around and saw me.

The light from the stove fell over a pot of dal coming slowly to a boil and a pool of sunflower oil heating in a smooth black pan. On the granite counter, in a pink heap of freshly cut onions,
there was a knife, its brushed steel surface belying the sharpness of its blade.

‘What’s the matter, Kalyan?’

He turned the heat down on the stove. And with his head in his hands, he let himself drop with a groan onto a low stool.

‘Kalyan, what’s the matter?’ I said, wishing to console him, even while my gaze remained fixed on the knife.

After many moments he looked up, his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn and haggard.

‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘if something happens to me, what will they do?’

Suppressing a stab of emotion, I said in my firmest voice, ‘Kalyan, nothing is going to happen to you or them, but there’s been a big robbery. It’s happened under your nose. It
has to be investigated. I warned you that the police would do their job. Now pull yourself together, it isn’t pleasant for me either.’

He undid his apron strings and dropped his face again.

‘My children haven’t eaten a thing since all of this happened,’ he said, his voice indistinct. ‘My wife, you should see her face.’ Suddenly he rose. He turned the
heat up on the stove and looked with dazed confusion at its grimy surface. The exhaust whirred. My eyes were fixed on the knife in the pile of onions.

At last he said, ‘You people are like gods to me. I know that what madam has done for my family no one else would have done. This is your house, but it’s my house too. You
can’t imagine how awful I feel that on my watch this robbery has happened.’

‘Well, then, you must do something to help.’

‘There are at least ten people who work here . . .’

‘Stop saying that! I said before that is not so many.’

‘There is a new manager.’

‘Are you saying that you have some doubt about him?’

‘No, I’m just saying that he’s new. We don’t know anything about him. And you know Robin, sir, he thinks he’s taken all the keys, but there are keys missing. He
doesn’t have all the keys.’

‘What do you mean, Kalyan? Why didn’t you say something earlier?’

‘I just thought of it. And Amit still has the keys to his office. He never gave them up.’

The manager’s office was a separate structure from the main house. But it contained all the keys. Anyone with access to it would have access to all the house’s entrances.

‘Somebody did not do this,’ Kalyan said cryptically, ‘somebody had this done.’

I felt that at any minute I was about to hear a confession. But I was too perturbed to receive it. Not with that knife lying there and Kalyan’s manner so changeable.

‘Kalyan,’ I said at last, moving back, ‘if you know something, now is the time to say it. It is not too late. The theft we would forgive. It’s the truth that is
important. No one will harm you or your family. You have my word.’

But if earlier he had been close to cracking, he now recovered his composure. He had no idea who had done this terrible thing. But he would do everything he could to help the police. More than
anyone it was him who wanted to find the man, this man who had laid the most terrible of all traps for him – and him alone – to fall into. Hearing him speak, I felt again the possible
truth of his words. After all, since it was almost definitely a collaboration, why would he volunteer himself for something that would put him in so precarious a position, with so much to lose? And
why, even if the safe had not been taken the day before, force everything to its crisis on the day your family arrives in town?

But the day was not done. And, when I went back into the drawing room I had an indication of how consuming and surreal it had been: my cousin, sipping his whisky soda, said, ‘I can’t
believe the blasts in London.’

‘What blasts?’ I asked, realizing even as I spoke, what Zack’s text message had meant.

*   *   *

Saturday. No gardeners or sweepers were allowed into Steeple Hall. An unnatural calm fell over the place. At eleven there was a video. The camera footage of Friday night. The
new manager had not been able to retrieve it until now. Four or five of us – Robin, the manager, my cousin, Sati and Narender, the electrician – sat in the manager’s office
watching. The little room with its small ceiling fan and windows thrown open, the red gravel of the drive all around, baked. It was impossible to think of the manager spending whole days in
here.

The screen was divided into four segments, of which two were useless from our point of view: one camera had been focused on an unlit part of the garden; the other, though full of the drama of
headlights hurtling through the night, as in a David Lynch movie, looked onto the road outside. We watched the other two segments, from a camera trained on the drive and another on the front door,
riveted. Their electronic gaze accentuated the stillness of the night. The white path-lights in the distance seemed to pulsate. Partially concealing one camera’s view was the buoyant canopy
of an
Alstonia scholaris
. When the wind went through the tree, bringing some rare movement before the stillness of the camera’s eye, we all sat up, expecting any minute for the front
door to open and figures to emerge carrying out the safe. But the night deepened and the stillness remained. We seemed also to be watching highlights rather than the entire film. Narender, the
electrician, said that the cameras were motion-activated. And this made sense, he pointed out, as we could hardly have sat there for the full twelve hours.

Sati, watching with morose fascination, asked, ‘But how can they differentiate between the movement of a tree and the movement of a person?’

Narender had no answer. And already by 10 p.m. we could see there was a flaw in his theory: the cameras had not caught me letting out Oscar. Nor had they once caught the guards doing their
rounds. This was less easily explained. Because even if the cameras, perhaps not activated by movement, had missed the twenty seconds in which I let out Oscar, they could not have missed, despite
their abridged vision, each of the several rounds the guards claimed to have made.

‘Unless they’re lying,’ Robin said, ‘unless they did no rounds.’

The timer at the bottom of the screen read 2 a.m.

‘This is the time,’ the manager muttered, ‘if we see anything, we’ll see it now, between two and three.’

I thought of myself sleeping in the darkened house and felt a chill, felt as if I was watching myself through other eyes, and with malice. The tension in the room was high. At one point Kalyan
tried to come in with bottles of water.

‘Get out, get out,’ Robin barked at him as if his presence in the room would erase the footage.

Wishing to lighten the air, I said, ‘Sati, have you ever watched a movie where nothing happens, this intently?’

‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t even watch my marriage video this intently.’