way she had when they were passing from childhood into adolescence and were awakening into new secrets that made him tremble with boldness and her with shyness and shame.
One day, Sunil turned up on the mountain. He came in an air-conditioned limousine driven by a chauffeur. Sunil was wearing a suit of the lightest tropical weight, but this did not prevent him from sweating most disagreeably. Farid felt at a tremendous advantage over him—a feeling that grew as the days passed and Sunil stayed on. For one thing, Sunil never had a private audience with Farida but had to line up with the other pilgrims. Also, the living conditions were not at all what he was used to; instead of occupying a suite in some five-star hotel, he was forced to sleep on a string cot placed beside Farid’s in the whitewashed cell. He could not get used to the plain meals prepared in the ashram kitchens, and when Farid took him to one of the eating stalls in the bazaar he got sick from the kebabs served there. At night he sweated and groaned and suffered tortures from the mosquitoes whining around him, though they never seemed to bother Farid. His air-conditioned limousine stood waiting to take him back down, and the chauffeur grumbled and had to be bribed to stay, but Sunil did not leave. It was almost the way it used to be when they were children and Sunil came to Farida’s birthday parties and stuck on stubbornly even though the other children pricked his balloons and hid his shoes and ate up his chocolate cake.
Of course, it was all for a purpose, a plan, and one night when he couldn’t sleep because of the mosquitoes he woke up Farid and broached it to him.
“She’s wasted up here,” he said.
Farid sat up. “What’s on your mind?” he said.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sunil grumbled. “Instead of sitting under that tree of hers, she could be making a fortune in London. Not to speak of New York.”
“You must be crazy,” Farid said in a shaky voice.
“You’re crazy,” Sunil said. “You and she both. But it’s always the same story with you two. You have absolutely no business sense.”
“Business!” Farid shouted. “What’s she got to do with business! She’s beyond all that now.”
“All right, call it something else then, call it whatever you like. But I’m telling you, she’ll go over big. They’ve never seen anything like her before. There’s money in what she does—money,” he repeated, irritably rubbing his thumb and middle finger together to make his meaning clear.
Sunil settled in. Each day, his car could be seen driving up and down the mountain roads, with Sunil sitting in the back, phlegmatic but confident, picking his teeth. He was setting up everything for Farida’s first public appearances in London; it meant getting a whole organization going, but of course that was the sort of thing he excelled at. He had made an arrangement with the post office in the bazaar to get his international calls through several times a day, and soon a contingent of publicity people arrived—very incongruous Englishmen in Daks slacks and Hush Puppies shoes who moved in on the group under the tree. They shot photographs, made sketches, took the measurements of Farida and the handmaidens, and called everyone “darling” and “angel” in cold, indifferent voices. They did their job and went away. But Sunil stayed on.
Farid sneered at all this, but he was frightened. He knew that Sunil was stupid, but he also knew that the man was capable of pushing and lumbering ahead like an army tank unencumbered by human intelligence. The worst of it was that he seemed to have sold his idea to Farida herself. She was fully persuaded that it was time for a wider, more international audience to be given the benefit of her spirituality, and that Sunil was the man to arrange it. One day when Farid arrived for his own session with her, he found Sunil there before him, sitting on the edge of her deerskin as though he had every right to be there. From then on, he was there every afternoon, and Farid’s blissful tête-à-têtes with Farida were finished. Now the handmaidens no longer slept quietly on the other side of the tree but tripped up and down, primping and preening, studiedly graceful. Farida was different, too. She didn’t lose the serenity that was now an integral part of her personality, like a shawl on a mature and beautiful woman, but she had that small half smile of satisfaction she had always worn when things were going well for her. It made Farid want to slap her. Doesn’t she see, he thought. Doesn’t she know? His anger turned on Sunil, who took no notice of it at all.
Farid stopped going to the tree in the afternoons, and instead began to nap on the cot in his cell. No one seemed to miss him; no message came from Farida to ask where he was. He slept as much as he could. It was the same thing that had happened to him in London, when he didn’t want to get up any more, and day turned into night for him, except that now he was dulled only by despair. He didn’t drink here; he didn’t need to. Now he took walks by moonlight, as he used to walk in the daytime. He climbed up to the same incline as before, from where he could look down on Farida’s tree and the bazaar on one side and a steep slope descending into a ravine on another. He wished it would never be day again.
One night, he went to Farida’s tree, descending very carefully, so that no stone might clatter down and make a noise. Everyone was sleeping—Farida on one side of the tree, the handmaidens on the other, on moss. The tree shaded them from the moon except for some silver streaks that spilled through the foliage and covered them as with a veil of finely patterned lace. Farid stood looking down at Farida. It seemed a pity to wake her, and when he did she wasn’t at all pleased. “Is this a time to come visiting?” she said irritably.
“Then when should I come?” Farid said. “With that slob sitting here all afternoon.”
She continued to lie there under her veil of moonlight. Her eyes were open and looking at him. It wasn’t so different from when she used to wake up at night in the other half of their double bed in London and regard him silently and speculatively in the dark. “Move over,” he said suddenly now. Didn’t he have the right? Wasn’t he still her husband? She didn’t argue but made room for him, so that he could nestle beside her. She no longer used the scent, Jolie Madame, she had in London but smelled of something else. Maybe it wasn’t a scent at all but only a fragrance rising from within her. It was somehow strengthened and given body by the racy smell of the deerskin.
“Let’s go away,” he whispered to her.
“We are going away,” she pointed out. “We’re going to London. I’m booked in the Royal Albert Hall in October.”
“Not like that. Not with all these people. Just you and me.” Chastely he kissed her cool neck.
“Where were you thinking of going?” she murmured.
“Away. Up there,” he said, gesturing toward a mountain peak glimmering with moon and snow.
“There’s nothing up there.”
“Yes there is. You said so. You’ve been there. You said there’s a cave.”
“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “That old story. You’d better go to bed and get some sleep. You’re dreaming with your eyes open.”
His reply was to move closer to her; he put his arm across her. After a long silence, during which both of them lay quite still, she said, “I don’t want to go up. I want to go down—go back. This time, it’ll work out. You’ll see.”
How often he had heard that from her—each time she had started some new scheme. She seemed to remember this herself, for she went on: “Sunil will help us. He’ll look after all that—you know, the business side you and I could never manage.”
“Sunil!” he said scornfully. “All he knows is buying and selling.”
“No one can live without buying and selling,” she said.
He was shocked. He sat up and stared at her in the moonlight. She looked back at him defiantly; and again he was reminded of how it had been between them all the years in London. Was she still the same? Hadn’t she changed after all?
She knew at once what