my house, you eat my food, and you treat me like dirt?’
‘ It was just’ – Indi turned her green tempests on her father – ‘a joke.’
‘ Joke? It’s not for you to make jokes! Who are you to make jokes about these things?’
‘ The prime minister also has a great sense of humour,’ said Indi brightly.
‘ Don’t compare yourself with the prime minister, for god’s sake!’ screamed Ashish Kumar. ‘Don’t try to elevate yourself to standards you can’t even dream of! For god’s sake, you have a responsible job now. You have a position in society! You are an IAS officer. You will control government money!’
‘ He was such a good boy,’ wailed Shiela Devi. ‘Such a decent family. Now they will never even look at us again. Soon you’ll be blind and nobody will marry you! You will ruin us. You were born to finish us.’
‘ And look at the way you’re dressed up!’ Ashish Kumar bellowed again. ‘Just look at it. It’s so cheap. Like an extra from Hindi films. No decent man will look at you. Is this how someone in the government dresses? Like a bazaar girl!’
He was tremblingly proud of her. He knew everyone regarded her as exceptional. He knew she would take the family name to far greater heights than he could. But why did she persist in letting him down? Could she not see how much he depended on her, how successfully he had fought against his disappointment when she was born?
She felt like a painted clown. A painted, unseeing clown, sitting in front of her parents, in her scanty blouse and her made-up face with her breath smelling of rum. She was a hideous caricature of a daughter. She was a drag queen, rushing out of her lair, feathered and perfumed, the butt of everyone’s outrage. She could have easily told him what the roots of her anger were and why she felt so compelled to impersonate a volcano. But she didn’t. Only Justin, waiting in her room at the back of the house, comforted her with his hidden presence.
Justin buried his head in his hands. He felt his spirit fall into a crater and then rise up again towards the moon.
When she stumbled back into her bedroom, stained with insults, shaking with rage, jumbled words and sentences pouring out of her mouth like vomit, he stared at her reflection in the mirror and sat with her until she fell asleep. He placed his fingertips at her temples to feel the thudding veins.
Then he went back to his room in the hospital and killed the running cockroaches absent-mindedly with his hands, counting the time he had left with her and the time he had left to live.
‘ Indi!’ he shouted standing on the beach in front of her cottage.
‘ What, Justin?’
‘ More trouble.’
‘ Trouble?’
‘ Computer trouble.’
‘ Computer trouble?’
An email virus had snarled the hotel reservation system. The engineers were working on it but they didn’t think they would be able to fix it in a hurry. Meanwhile all the bookings had been deleted. Newly arrived guests were wandering aimlessly around on the beach. Some of them had taken the bus to other hotels. ‘Oh god, where are you?’
‘ Here. Down at the beach. Come.’
‘ Come,’ she muttered. ‘I better come. Any sympathy for an old blind bitch like me? No, none at all. Hang on. I’ll be there in a minute.’
She reached for her cane and began to feel her way down the wooden stairs. She knew the steps well enough. Hard footsteps down the stairs, soft and sandy on the beach. Down to where the beach began to smell sharp, touch the rocks surrounding the lagoon, then turn up and left towards the zigzagging road, with the wind sluicing her at right angles.
On the curve of the zigzag, under the gigantic hum of a banyan tree, Sharkey’s Hotel.
‘ So,’ she said. ‘The Phantom Listener strikes again.’
‘ You think it’s the same person?’
‘ Of course, it is. It’s the Phantom Listener. The person or persons making the blank calls. Who stole my accounts. The rats. The person who smells of sulphur or whatever…I can feel him. I know when he comes. I can feel it when he goes.’
He put his arm around her. ‘Move in with me at the hospital. Don’t live on your own any more. Please.’
‘ Rubbish,’ she scolded. ‘I have my cane.’
‘ Indi,’ grunted Justin, staring into her face. ‘Please. I don’t have a good feeling about this.’
She walked along the zigzag with Justin, listening. The quick breath, the glare on her face, she felt it clearly. She screwed up her eyes, willing her brain to transmit an image.
‘ Justin,’ she asked, ‘is there someone here?’
‘ Here?’ his voice was hurried. ‘Right here? Nobody I can see for the moment. No,’ he looked around, ‘there’s nobody here. No Phantom Listener.’
‘ He’s near me. Standing near me. And looking.’
‘ It’s only me,’ said Justin becoming increasingly troubled. ‘The only one who’s always standing near you is me…’
The scraping on the roof. The chemical odour. That long breathy yawn. Gliding, wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded…But who is that on the other side of you?
‘ We’ve waited long enough,’ said Justin after a pause. ‘We should tell the police. This may not be just a prank. Probably someone trying to push us out. I’ll go down to the Fontainhas station.’
‘ I don’t like you at all,’ said Indi playfully, talking musically to the Phantom Listener. ‘You are a foul spirit of some kind. I can sense you. I don’t like you,’ she sang.
‘ Indi!’ Justin shook her shoulders. ‘Knock it off!’
‘ You smell,’ sang Indi again. ‘Of nail-polish remover or gum. I can’t quite make out. But you smell.’
‘ Jesus,’ said Justin. ‘I have to tell the cops.’
4
LONDON
Tiger, Mithu’s astrologer-fiancé, worked in ABN Amro by day and charted the stars by night. Tiger’s parents were from Leeds, his grandparents from Punjab and he was an amateur astrologer. After Anand’s death, Mithu had visited him so persistently to ask if there was a second marriage in her stars, that he himself proposed.
His nickname was Tiger because of the two tiger skins he possessed, proudly displayed in his Marylebone Road flat. Tiger was in a hurry to marry the newly luscious Mithu and whisk her away to New York because an ascendant Jupiter had foretold that she would bring him luck in his new job. But he also knew that Mithu had vowed not to marry him unless Mia married first. So he found a prospective husband for Mia as fast as the horoscopes would permit.
The next morning, as Mia gulped her coffee with Mithu gazing at her in resigned bewilderment, the telephone rang.
‘Mithu?’ It was Tiger.
‘Yes, it is I.’ Mithu’s father had been a member of the Kolkata Shakespeare Club and she had been brought up to always say, ‘It is I’ instead of ‘It’s me’.
‘A boy.’
‘A boy?’ Mithu touched her forehead in grudging thanks to a hitherto aloof pantheon.
‘Yes,’ cried Tiger.
‘For Mia?’
‘Then for who, you?’