Jenny was dimly aware of being carried through crowds, of being slid into the back of a vehicle. Her friends were still around her. They spoke to each other words which were not Urdu, Bengali, Hindi or any other language Jenny had ever heard.
The vehicle started. Jenny felt frequent tight turns, and heard continuous babbling, hooting, ringing of bells. They were in the narrow, winding streets of a town.
The men were making curious movements, throwing out an arm or leg, as it seemed to Jenny, as though puppets tugged by strings. Over the other noises of the vehicle and the streets, Jenny could hear the rustle of fabrics, the squeak of shoe-sole and the metal floor, the zip of a bag. It occurred to her, in a flash of lucidity, that they were changing their clothes.
“We have to assume it’s part of the same thing,” said Colly.
“But,” said Ishur Ghose, “if I remember correctly, you told me that this – organization, if it is one – has never, ah, taken a woman.”
“They have maybe changed their rules,” said Sandro.
“Or it’s a different bunch,” said Colly. “Can we believe that?”
Ishur Ghose shrugged. “Lady Jennifer is a beautiful young lady. To an Indian her fairness makes her still more beautiful. There are millions of Indians who are very frustrated, very inhibited. It is an unfortunate effect of Hinduism. My years of contact with the British made me in some measure a freethinker, like Mr Nehru, and I can be objective about it. Men are simply not allowed intimate relations with a woman, except young married men. Except in the early years of marriage, Indian men are supposed to be celibate. It is not a natural state of life, is it? So they become very hot and lustful. You know that, after petty theft, the most frequent of all crimes in India is rape? Also there are millions of Indians who are very poor, and she looks, you know, not poor. I am not suggesting anything. I do not think you can leap to the assumption that it is part of what the police were telling you about.”
“Jenny’s disappearance,” said Colly slowly, “is one of 900 disappearances in the last six months.”
“What? What is this? What are you saying?”
“You don’t know about it?” asked Colly, very surprised.
“Not about 900 people. Not about a thing on that scale. Tell me.”
Sandro told him.
Ishur Ghose said, “I had not heard the extent of this. I am very out of touch. Almost a hermit now, busy with old books and memories almost equally old. I hardly ever read a newspaper, and I never listen to the radio. This contraption” – he waved a brown claw at his hearing-aid – “is not well adapted, for some reason, to the sounds made by the radio. It is no deprivation to me. I would rather read about Shah Jehan and Aurangzebe and Sivaji than about the leaders of the Congress Party who have grown so very rich by not following the precepts of their founder.”
“Even so,” said Colly, “I would have thought you’d hear things on the grapevine. I mean, your old mates in the service.”
“Good gracious no. I was quite discredited. Remember who I was working for. People like me were not at all popular with the new rulers of India. I suppose, in any case, the minimum of publicity has been given to this phenomenon you have described. Did you say over 900 disappearances in six months? Panic could be caused by a thing like that, and this country is difficult enough to keep calm at the best of times. They are somewhat volatile, my fellow countrymen, and deeply superstitious. There might be a witch-hunt started, you know, with the sort of consequences which followed partition. Wholesale slaughter of minority groups. It is always possible in India. Remember Bangla Desh. Suppose the Sikhs were blamed for these disappearances, or the Parsees, or the communists. There could be a blood bath, totally unjustified and illogical, but just as disagreeable for the victims. Oh yes, the less said in public the better about such a thing.”
“Makes it harder to get any answers,” said Colly heavily. “Makes it harder to go looking for anybody.”
“I am afraid that is quite true.”
The vehicle stopped. Jenny heard the door open, and felt herself lifted. She felt bright sun for a moment, hot on the wrappings which covered her; then warm, crowded darkness. She felt herself being hoisted up steep stairs. There were many soft voices, the high chirruping voices of young women. There was a smell of bhang, tobacco, incense and cheap scent.
After a long pause, heavy with misery and foreboding, Colly said, “Nobody who disappeared turned up. Not yet. Not in the whole history of this thing. Not one in over 900. No one turned up dead or alive. They stayed disappeared.”
“Si,” said Sandro.
“India goes from Karakoram to Cormorin, 2000 miles. From Calcutta to Kutch, 1300 miles. There’s mountain, desert, jungle, places so remote you can only get to them a few weeks in the year. More than 400 million population. Some people so isolated only one hundred in all speak the language. Some in enormous overcrowded cities like anthills. Some who keep their women veiled and behind locked doors. Even if Jenny’s alive―”
“We must believe she is alive.”
“We must try. Even if she is, the only way we’ll find her is if they get in touch with us, wanting a deal, a ransom.”
“I think,” said Ishur Ghose hesitantly, “I am right in saying they have not done that before.”
“No. Not once. Even though they took a few rich men whose families would have paid a big ransom. Kidnapping has got to be a big industry in a few places like Italy, but these guys are not in that racket. Or haven’t been, up until now.”
“If they are still not in that racket . . .”
“Then,” said Colley, “they won’t get in touch with us.”
“What will you do?” asked Ishur Ghose.
“I don’t know. Go look, but I don’t know where.”
The Moon of Delight was bored. She lolled among the cushions of her dark little room, smoking an American cigarette given her by her last client and playing with her bracelets. She was the most beautiful of the girls in the House of Whistling Birds (so called because its stairs and passages were always full of birdlike whispers and giggles) and for a full day and night she had done no business. The richest of her regular lovers was ill with a pernicious vomit: a business rival had, doubtless, achieved by sorcery what he had failed to achieve in the way of trade.
She heard footsteps on the dirty stairs, the footfalls of several men. Was this business at last? Or were these more of the stupid oxen who preferred the painted lips and sullen eyes of some of the younger girls? She looked through the arch, its curtain hooked back, out into the dim-lit passage, and saw the tall man his friends called Feringhia. She was disappointed. Neither he nor any of those that came here with him were customers, at least in the ordinary sense. They were courteous people, soft- spoken, not ungenerous, but they were clients neither of her own nor of any of the other girls in the house.
Feringhia saluted the Moon, inclining his head with its mane of silvery hair. She gestured languidly back, as she had long ago been taught, her bracelets jangling. Feringhia was dressed as a poor farmer, although the Moon knew he was not poor and guessed he was not a farmer. He glanced back over his shoulder, gesturing to someone behind him.
He said to the Moon, “Sheelah will want you.”
The Moon nodded. It was business, though not the usual kind of business of the House of Whistling Birds.
Feringhia disappeared along the passage. He was followed by two men, also seeming farmers, in dhotis and big red turbans. They carried between them a litter with a person or body on it. The person was invisible under white sheets. A fourth man, known by sight to the Moon, followed the litter-bearers.
The Moon got up from the cushions. She stubbed out her cigarette on the floor. She followed the men down the narrow passage to Sheelah’s room and pushed through the door-curtain.
The room was in half darkness. The window on to the balcony was shuttered. The cushions were as usual strewn untidily over the floor, with among them a few hookahs. The room smelled of stale tobacco and bhang. The litter was on the floor, its burden still covered with sheets.
Sheelah, lying propped on cushions and smoking her favourite small hookah, looked fatter and crazier than ever. She was immense. She had once, it was said, been as slim and beautiful as the Moon herself, a breaker of hearts, a driver to madness, an earner of great sums in gold and heavy baskets of jewels. Now she was old and grossly fat, vast-armed, many-chinned, dewlapped like Shiva’s own bulls. She was also blind, owing to the effects of disease or accident or witchcraft; her eyes were not like eyes, but like peeled eggs. She still made good money, not as a harlot but as a witch. She was known to few, but those few paid well. The Moon was her apprentice, her assistant and pupil, her chela, because the Moon’s own beauty would fade, and she would no longer be desirable to the smooth officials and businessmen.
Sheelah was dressed neither in a sari, like the Moon, nor in a tight immodest European dress like some of the girls, but was wrapped in scores of yards of what looked like dirty butter-muslin. She was a mass of gold ornament: her thick wrists and hamlike arms were jammed with heavy bangles; both dropsical ankles carried half a dozen circlets; there was gold hanging massively from her ear-lobes, transfixing her nostril, circling her neck, pendant on her brow. Her bangles crashed together like cars colliding in a narrow street.
She looked sightlessly towards Feringhia. She said, in the little girlish voice that came so strangely from her vast bulk, “The message spoke of colour that will last half a year.”
“Yes.”
“It is ready.”
She turned her face towards the Moon, although she could not have heard the girl enter, nor known in what quarter of the room she stood. She said, “The brazen bowl with turquoises at the rim. The green cloth.”
The Moon slipped into the little room, hardly larger than a wardrobe, in which Sheelah kept the supplies and implements of her trade. The bowl with turquoises set in the rim was ready on a shelf. It was full of a viscous, blueish liquid. The green cloth beside it was no rag, but a length of the finest Benares silk. The Moon would dearly have liked it – such stuff was rare now that the Mohammedan weavers had nearly all left Varanasi – and it was a shame that it should be indelibly dyed. But she would not have dreamed of disobeying Sheelah, who could tell colour through her fingertips. She took the silk, with the bowl, back to Sheelah in the main room. She set them down beside Sheelah who, without groping, touched each to be sure of its position.
Sheelah nodded again to the Moon, who struck a match and lit powdered incense in a flat dish. Smoke belched from the dish; the burning incense crackled like hot fat in a pan.
Sheelah gestured to the men to leave the room. They did so at once, in obedient silence. The last to go out into the passage carefully drew shut the heavy door-curtain. The Moon knew that the men would be stationed outside the curtain until Sheelah had finished, and that they would on no account whatever allow anyone into the room, or peep into the room themselves. They were serious men, who respected the decencies; they were sensible men, hard headed, who would not pay an expensive witch and then jeopardise her spells by prying.
At another signal from Sheelah – a gesture which set her bracelets clashing together like cooking-pots hanging from a donkey – the Moon lifted the sheets from the figure on the litter.
The Moon gasped. She had not expected a woman – still less a girl no older than herself – still less a very beautiful European with hair of a gold brighter than any of Sheelah’s.
The Moon stripped all the clothes off the girl, leaving only the bandage on her eyes; she looked down at last, with bitter envy, and the pearl-white, pearl-smooth body. The white fingers twitched; one white arm moved slowly, feebly, without purpose. The girl was drugged, but not enough.
As though Sheelah had heard or felt the small movement, she hoisted herself awkwardly into a crouch beside the litter. She put her fingers on the brow of the girl and very gently stroked it, her fingertips describing small circles. She murmured, in her high, girlish voice, a mesmeric command that the white one should sleep.
The twitching fingers were still. The slim white arms and long, beautiful legs were as flaccid as those of a drowned corpse. The breathing was regular, deep, very slow. Sheelah took the bandage off the girl’s eyes, which were fast shut.
The room was full of the aromatic, dizzying smoke from the incense-dish. There was no sound except the sizzle of the incense burning.
With the Moon’s help, Sheelah anointed every part, every square millimetre of the white girl’s body with the dye from the dish set with turquoises. She did not wipe, but dabbed with the green silk cloth. The Moon took the cloth and dabbed between the girl’s toes, and into the convolutions of her ears, because Sheelah’s fingers were too thick for the narrow places.
The hair was dyed, almost strand by strand, with a thinner fluid from a different vessel.
All the time she worked, Sheelah’s little high voice intoned invocations to demons and, though she was a kind of Hindu, to the djinns of Islam. The Moon made the responses in a voice which she lowered to a murmur from its usual shrillness. The invocations protected the girl from all kinds of danger, from discovery, from the premature fading of the dye, from death in childbed, from typhoid and smallpox, from the police. The invocations were also hypnotic; their purpose was to remove from the mind of the white girl, who was no longer white, all memories and personality, and leave it like a sheet of blank paper.
Sheelah had never read books by Western psychologists: she did not know that what she was doing was impossible – that experience reaches so far down into the personality, changing or deeply engraving all that it touches, that to try to eradicate it all, induce total amnesia, is ridiculous.
But by the same token, no Western psychologists had heard of Sheelah, and few knew anything about the ancient hypnotism which she practised. Had they done so, some books would not have been written, and many would have been written differently. It was not the first time, not by a score, that Sheelah had drawn out with her fingers and voice all the writing inscribed by experience within a skull, leaving blankness to be written on anew. She had not failed before. Not by so much as the twitch of an eyelid had any of the score shown that they retained any of that which she had removed: not by the gentlest thumping of the heart when faced with the face of wife or mother: not by the smallest catching of the breath when confronted by dead child or live enemy.
Sheelah had never failed: but Sheelah had never used her skills on a European, on a sophisticated, highly-educated, tough-minded Anglo-Saxon woman, brought up to independence of spirit, and with years behind her of quick decision, violent action, and an inbuilt refusal to be defeated or subjugated.
Colly and Sandro sat down to a late dinner, but neither could eat. They needed food, because they needed all their strength, but they could force nothing down.
Colly, looking across the table at Sandro, saw in the familiar face a weariness which was unusual to it: a despair which was quite new to it. It was possible to hope, but only just. It was impossible to plan. It would be impossible to search even one small Indian town, even with full and massive police co-operation, let alone the whole subcontinent.
And police co-operation was a dubious asset. A big police search meant warrants, documentation, clerks and files, messages; therefore a leak; therefore forewarning. Ishur Ghose had made this point and it was a good one. The bigger the police operation, the more certain that Jenny, if she was still alive, would be spirited away and hidden somewhere else.
Losing Jenny was unthinkable. The thought of life without her was unendurable. Life with her was difficult for Colly, an unceasing heartache, because he loved her, and had loved her for years, and would love her until he died. She loved him too, as devotedly and enduringly, but it was a different sort of love. There was a fatal difference. Sometimes knowledge of this was better than nothing, and sometimes much worse. There was nothing either of them could do about it.
Sandro was in exactly the same situation. He had been in love with Jenny a little longer than Colly, because he had known her a little longer. They never discussed it. It was perhaps the only subject they never discussed. But each knew exactly how the other felt.
Each knew that the other now felt a sense of loss like amputation, worse than any amputation, worse than any death.
Well, it was possible to hope. But only just. And hope was the only thing it was possible to do.
At last the colouring was finished, back and front, body and hair, the little folds below the eyelids, the tiny wrinkles over the knuckles.
Between them, Sheelah and the Moon propped the girl into a sitting position among the cushions, her back to the wall of the room. The Moon oiled and combed the long, shiny-black hair, then twisted it into a single thick plait. She covered the golden-brown eyelids with khol until they were as black as the hair. She painted the vermilion dot, the bindi which is the third eye for the use of the soul, in the middle of the smooth brown forehead.
Awkwardly, heaving the flaccid body this way and that, they wrapped the girl in a pink sari. They decked her with a narrow gold necklet, half a dozen bracelets, three rings, gold nose-jewel, and one anklet. They wound a veil, finally, round her shoulders and head and across her face.
Sheelah sighed. She belched softly. She settled herself, like a muslin-bandaged buffalo, back among her cushions on the floor. The Moon relit her half-smoked hookah.
The Moon called the men back into the room.
Sheelah said, “I will give you, for a small additional payment, a jar of the colour for the hair. It should be used once every nine days. Use this green cloth, which I will also sell you, and no other.”
“The fingernails?”
“It will serve also for the fingernails. Let her sleep now. She will wake in an hour, perhaps two hours. She will be confused and slow, but she will be awake. Be patient with her. She will not know where she is or who she is.”
“We will be patient. Do you wish me to buy the gold things?”
“No. I lend them to you. I know you will return them because I know you are an honourable man.”
“That is true, Sheelah,” said another of the men. “But – is it permitted to ask – how do you know that Feringhia is a completely honest man?”
“Because I am what I am. Because I can see without eyes what those with eyes cannot see. Also because . . .”
Feringhia smiled. He said, “Also because you know that I know that you are a very dangerous woman. I would neither step on your shadow, nor fail to return to you that which is yours.”
The Moon lit another hookah and brought mouthpieces. The men – the seeming poor farmers from the desert – thanked her with far greater courtesy than did the bankers and merchants for whom she usually performed such a service.
They settled down to wait for the girl to wake up.