well as first-aid when the parties became violent or when the Goa police exploded in on their motorbikes on the suspicion that someone was selling drugs.
Indi, who owned Sharkey’s Hotel, lived in a white-painted house on the far side of Capuchine Beach. The house overlooked the rocky part of the beach and a clear lagoon set back from the sea by an undulating bank of sand.
In the evenings, when Indi sat in her veranda, her face towards the lagoon, all movement on the beach stopped. The financial consultants and models who tripped past in their Speedo suits came to a standstill. And the fishermen who pushed their motorized crafts into the water whispered that when Indi was nearby, the poor prawns and pomfrets in the sea seemed to stop swimming and give themselves up distractedly to the fishing nets.
Indi was brutally beautiful. Her beauty had always been as formidable as a conquering army. At five feet ten, she was the tallest Indian woman Alqueria had ever seen. Her skin was the colour of freshly churned butter and she had eyes that stretched from the bridge of her nose to her temples. Her eyes were unlike any other. They were the colour of the ocean in the monsoon, azure streaked with grey, eyes that thundered and stormed under black brows. The straight nose and cheekbones that angled out of her skin were chiselled to knife-edge sharpness but there was nothing pure about Indi. Everything about the voluptuous figure and defiant expression, was brazenly sensual. Her clothes seemed to want to constantly fall off her body, as if in apology for covering up what should be displayed to the world. Her grey-streaked black hair flew around her face and when she smiled she looked wickedly unpredictable. She was a master-craftsman’s gift to himself. A prima ballerina’s swan song.
She was blind. Her stormy ocean eyes were dead. She hadn’t been born blind. She had been born with retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable progressive degeneration of the retina. She had been night-blind as a teenager, lost her peripheral vision in her thirties, developed tubular vision in her fifties, until one afternoon, one hot afternoon, something snapped and her vision went completely.
All her seeing life she had felt two thick black arms crowding into her eyes from the sides in a deathly embrace. Indi called these two arms her prison bars. Prison bars that were marching in towards the centre of her eyes from the sides bringing the blackess of solitary confinement. For many years she had seen the world as a distant planet, a circle of existence framed by a galaxy of pure darkness. Perhaps this was the way god saw us, she thought – as a far-away aberrant circle in a surface of uniform black.
The diagnosis was delivered to her parents when, as a fourteen-year-old, she began bumping into too many doorways at night. There was no known cure for retinitis pigmentosa. The retina could not be rescued. She must start learning Braille, the ophthalmologist suggested, to equip herself mentally and try and enjoy her life as much as she could, because inevitable darkness awaited her in old age.
She had tried not to notice the prison bars when she was younger because they started as faint threads. But as she grew older they began to thicken, getting broader and fatter until finally, one hot afternoon, when a dry wind came beating against the windows, they swelled and blocked out the sun forever.
Indi had learnt to feel her way along walls. She could tell if a wall had been recently touched by sunlight and if it led into a doorfront, or if a wall was damp and smelt of a bedroom. Bedrooms smelt of underwear, living rooms of shoes, cigarettes and farts. Footsteps were eloquent on character: angrily stomping or shuffling or suspicious. She felt the sun on different parts of the body like the touch of a friend or the push of an uncaring bystander. She could smell the starch on a napkin and judge whether it had been recently washed or not. She had never been able to properly distinguish colours, and sometimes dressed in wildly clashing clothes. She had never properly been able to see the power of her own beauty, but sensed it in the startled intake of breath she heard when someone saw her for the first time.
Sometimes she would smell and count her way to the lagoon and turn her face to the sky and bend her head this way and that to ease some sliver of sunlight into any remaining crack in the undulating dark.
But all she came away with was the mossy smell of the lagoon and remembered souvenirs of the sun on her skin.
She was extremely difficult to deal with. Frightening Indi – with the fresh-butter complexion who shouted at the top of her voice. Night-blind by her early teens, the family shuddered everytime they heard the thud of Indi against a bathroom door or an unladylike grunt when she stubbed her toe. During the day, although she was losing her ability to cross roads, her frontal vision was still strong and she would run out of the house, in taxis or in the family Ambassador, manically filling her days with a panorama of sights and feverish reading; committing it all to memory, building a restless visual bank for her future poverty. She was always impatient, her mind fixed on the coming apocalypse, always enraged that all those millions of rod and cone cells were giving up on her, noisily enclosed in a self-centred world of her relationship with the sometimes steady, sometimes wavering prison bars.
‘Don’t you get tired,’ Indi blinked scornfully at her mother, ‘of using only small small words? Why don’t you ever use a really big word?’
Shiela Devi had been confused by this question and had run off to Indi’s father, Ashish Kumar, quivering in fear. They had tried to dress her up in the conventional way. In fresh pink saris and white linen blouses, with ribbons in her hair. But however pretty and sweet they tried to make her, however kind and gentle they convinced each other she could become if they tried hard enough, they knew that, at any moment, Indi could throw off her pink clothes and emerge hissing and sensual, her speech as arch as her body, as boastful and as blind as only she could be.
The family lived in a house called Victoria Villa, in the Civil Lines area of Delhi, the genteel enclave where Indian collaborators with empires had been allotted spacious bungalows for their loyalty. Victoria Villa was a single-storeyed house built in the British style and named after the Queen Empress. A wide veranda ran around it, leading through triangular arches into a flat lawn. In the lawn were two splendid old trees. A jamun with its leaves hanging shyly to the ground. And a tall semal covered in the early part of the year with brash red blossom.
Victoria Villa was the property of the Ray family, who had owned it after the British left. The Rays were one of India’s most energetic clans, successful soldiers, businessmen and doctors, but fatally cursed. Cursed, it was said, by the the Four-Armed-One.
A century ago, the patriarch of the Ray clan had been a poor fisherman in West Bengal. One morning, out on a catch, his boat sprung a leak and began to sink rapidly into the sea. But, suddenly, miraculously, a beautiful woman with eyes the colour of the ocean came rising up from the deep, black hair streaming behind her, fitted – so the legend went – with four arms. The Four-Armed-One was as strong as she was beautiful and quickly ferried the patriarch and his boat to safety. He immediately fell in love with his supernatural lifeguard and together they founded a huge family.
The Four-Armed-One brought luck to the patriarch and he soon grew rich. But as it turned out, she was as evil as she was beautiful and one night when the children were asleep, she stole into his bed and devoured him. Hair, bones, tongue and all. Then she walked back to the ocean from where she had come, fell into it and never returned, leaving her children orphaned and confused about what exactly had happened to their folks overnight. However, since they were all of semi-divine (although slightly macabre) lineage, they all grew up well enough, developed vigorous brains and healthy appetites, escaped the village and became civil servants and businessmen in the city.
The Four-Armed-One left the family an enduring legacy. When any of the family were near death, wherever they might be, they always saw her standing stockstill at the foot of their bed with her four arms crossed.
Great-aunt Pola had had a heart attack when the spirit of her long dead cook (so she claimed) came flying out of the refrigerator, still apparently agitated about the cut in wages, and tried to suffocate her with a cauliflower. Great-aunt Pola never recovered from the attack and came to live in Victoria Villa where she uttered a dire premonition before she died: ‘Be warned,’ said Great-aunt Pola to