Murugan waited a minute to see if she would come out again and then went back into the bedroom. He was getting into bed when he heard the click of a closing door somewhere near at hand. Getting out of bed, he stuck his head into the corridor. The flat was dark and still. He fetched a torch and made his way across the drawing room to Mrs Aratounian's bedroom. Lowering himself on one knee, beside the closed door, he put his ear to the crack. He heard a soft, rhythmic sound inside: like gentle snoring – or possibly a fan. It was hard to be sure.
Murugan hesitated, wondering whether he ought to make sure that Mrs Aratounian was all right. He decided against and tiptoed quickly back to his bedroom. Just as he was about to step through the door he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his right foot.
Swearing softly, he stooped to investigate. There was a small gash in his heel. He had cut it on a sharp object, something that was lying on the floor, glinting in the halflight.
He picked it up and looked at it. It was an inch-long shard of thin glass, probably from some kind of tube.
Chapter 23
IT WAS PAST ONE when Sonali decided to go looking for Romen: she couldn't keep still and sleep was out of the question.
Fortunately, at exactly the right moment, one of her neighbours came home from a party, in a taxi. Snatching up her handbag, Sonali ran down and jumped in, without really giving any thought to where she would go. On an impulse, recalling Romen's overheard conversation at the gates of the Wicket Club, she told the taxi driver to go to Robinson Street.
She couldn't think of what Romen might be doing there at this time of the night. Yet somehow, when the taxi stopped at the gates of the old house she had an inexplicable feeling that Romen was inside. Fortunately he'd left behind a set of keys at her flat a few days ago: she'd put it in her handbag and forgotten to give it back.
She managed to find the key to the gate, but once she was in she wasn't sure of what to do next. She made her way down the gravel path, to the portico, and looked in through the door. It was very dark inside; she couldn't see very far. Cupping her hands, she shouted: 'Romen, are you there?'
She wasn't surprised when there was no answer: a generator was making a terrific noise next door. She could hardly hear her voice herself.
She always carried a small torch in her handbag, for power cuts. She took it out and shone the light into the vast hallway ahead. The beam circled slowly through the darkness, picking out randomly scattered piles of mattresses, charpoys and battered cooking utensils.
Romen had brought Sonali to the house once, a few months before,' to show off his new acquisition. The hallway was full of people then, cooking, eating, sleeping, feeding their children. The entire construction gang was living in the gutted shell of the house. They were from Nepal and there were about thirty of them altogether, not including the old women who had been brought along to look after the children. They cooked their meals in a paved courtyard at the back and slept in the hallways and under the portico, spreading out their mattresses and charpoys wherever they could. They were all related, Romen had told her, sons, grandsons, daughters-in-law, sons' wives, mothers, aunts: a whole village on the move.
She looked around once again, peering into the uneasy shadows that skimmed over the murky gloom of the hallway. Their belongings were all there, just as she remembered, but none of them seemed to be anywhere in sight.
Crossing the threshold, she took a few tentative steps into the hall. Then she caught a whiff of an odd smell and came to a sudden halt. It smelled like smoke at first, and she had a moment of panic, wondering whether there was a fire somewhere within. She sniffed the air again, and was startled to catch the distinctive odour of incense, the sweet, acrid smell of burning camphor. It was sweeping into the hall in clouds, from somewhere at the back.
She took a few more steps into the darkness, and now her ears, growing accustomed to the mechanical roar next door, picked up another sound: a hollow, rhythmic noise just distinguishable from the throbbing of the generator – a sound of drumming, familiar from pujas and festival days, when drums pounded in worship all over the city.
The sound grew louder as Sonali approached the grand ceremonial staircase that lay at the back of the hall. Suddenly the curved banisters were in front of her, their ragged, splintered rails wreathed in smoke. Shining the torch upwards she saw that smoke was pouring into the stairwell from above. It hung thick around her, diffusing the beam of the torch into a milk-white glow.
The staircase was a rusted shell; the last time she saw it the workers had just begun the job of stripping it down to the steel scaffolding, as a preliminary to restoring it to its original glory, when it had swept upwards in a grand curve of mahogany and wrought iron. 'The structure is still sound,' Romen had told her. She had followed him gingerly, stepping from foothold to foothold, and had counted herself lucky when she made it to the top without a fall. Looking at it now, curling up into the smoke, like a gigantic vine, she shied away, wiping her watering eyes. Then, making up her mind, she took a grip on the banisters and pulled herself up a couple of steps.
She stood on a steel rail and shone the torch ahead until it fell upon a length of rusty metal, lying exposed under a plank of rotten wood, a couple of steps further up. That was what Romen had said to do, she remembered now: don't step on the wood – keep to the steel frame. She leaned forward and jumped. Her foot slipped but she managed to catch hold of the banisters. Trying not to look down, she shut her eyes and breathed deeply, struggling to steady herself. She climbed crablike to the next foothold, biting the torch between her teeth, using her hands as well as her feet. She went up the next few steps the same way, rounding the curve of the staircase. After a few more steps she stopped to catch her breath and pointed the torch ahead. The landing at the top of the staircase was no more than a few yards away now. The drumming seemed very close; she could feel it reverberating in the metal, under her hands and feet. When her hand reached the landing she took the torch out of her mouth and placed it on a ledge. She heaved herself up and collapsed on the floorboards.
The drumming was all around her now, so loud and close that she could not tell which direction it was coming from. As she was turning to look, her sari brushed against the torch and knocked it over. It rolled a couple of inches, eluding her hand, and fell off the edge of the landing. She watched as it went spinning down the stairwell, its beam circling around the hall until it hit the floor and went out.
Stifling a sob, she sat up. She began to pat the floorboards around her, trying to orient herself, swivelling all the way around, banging her hands on the splintering wood. Then it dawned on her that she no longer knew which way she was facing – towards the staircase or away from it: her disorientation was complete.
She could feel her chest constricting. She knew she would panic if she stayed on the floor any longer, flailing about, blinded by sweat and smoke, deafened by the noise. She climbed to her feet and saw a dull orange glow somewhere ahead of her, within the whirling clouds of smoke. She took a step towards it and then lowered herself to her hands and knees. She couldn't trust herself to walk on the rotten floor and began to crawl instead, inching slowly towards the glow, shutting her eyes against the stinging smoke.
When she had advanced a couple of yards, she saw that the light was shining out of an arched doorway. Now suddenly she knew where she was: she was facing the entrance to the largest room in the house, a huge woodpanelled mirrored chamber that had once served as a reception room. Ramen had insisted on bringing her up to see it – it was the pride of the house, he said, and he was going to restore it to its former state.