She knew she could not go on worrying about the problem, as it would ruin their time in India. They had to focus on what they’d come out to do: research the book that was so important to them both. She believed the shared endeavour might help their marriage. She could insist they went home to Los Angeles, away from the assassins as well as from Narayan. But that would be cowardly and evasive. It was better to stay, despite the possible danger. She moved away from thoughts of being attacked, instead focusing on the gratitude and concern the cripple had directed towards her. There was no faking that, she thought. It had been real.
She and Max were looking forward to going to a performance of classical dancing. A Professor Subramaniam, an elderly relative of Tammy and Narayan, had invited them. The Professor was a retired historian in his late eighties. Narayan had phoned to say he was working late at the university and couldn’t come. Clare wondered if he was putting off seeing Max and, if he was, what the reason might be.
Tammy took them in a taxi to pick up the Professor, who seemed delighted to meet Clare and Max, en route to the theatre. The theatre had a balcony upstairs, with an ornately carved, gilded balustrade, and a wide aisle. The Professor, leaning on a stick, chatted with them amiably as they walked to their front-row seats. The place was crowded.
The faded velvet curtains eventually parted to reveal a dancer already in position. The musicians sat alongside their stringed, big-bellied instruments. A rapid rhythm was being beaten out on little drums. A song began, and the dancer started to move.
Professor Subramaniam leant across to whisper rather loudly in Clare’s ear.
‘This is Radha, and she’s complaining to the Lord Krishna.’
The song rose in pitch. The neck and head of the dancer moved from side to side, and she stamped her feet with mounting vehemence. The notes of the sitar swelled, vibrating loosely, and then trembled into silence.
The dance ended, and the audience began to applaud in a respectful, even mildly reverent, way. The dancer stood still, her face flushed, panting. She stared into the spotlight, the mascara around her eyes giving her a somewhat ferocious look.
‘An Indian love dance,’ said Subramaniam, delicately rearranging a tiny fold in his dhoti. He smiled reassuringly.
‘This is the Bharata Natyam, the classic dance of India. And now she returns. I shall explain it all, don’t worry.’
The dancer recommenced, slowly and imperiously, with a touch of condescension, as if she wasn’t quite sure her audience deserved it. The Professor leaned forward with one hand cupped to his large, whiskery ear. He spoke again in a resounding whisper.
‘Her mood is different. She is very sad.’
The dancer glared at him for an instant, in his vulnerable position in the first row. But she was soon again transported into her mythic world, evincing a fierce passion that didn’t entirely suit the plaintive, gentle words he ascribed to her.
‘She is saying, “My mind is restless. I can’t sleep when my brave lord is away.” Ah, but he does not come to her, the Lord Krishna. She says, “Come, sweetheart”, but he does not come… he will not come.’
‘Please sir, it is your kindness not to talk,’ said a woeful voice from behind, but Subramaniam, perhaps intent on not hearing it, seemed determined to go on.
‘Now the amorous Radha says, “The sun goes down and still my Lord Krishna does not come. Come, beloved. My blue god.” He is blue, always is shown as blue. It’s a mark of his very passionate nature. But still, the blue god Krishna does not come.’
There was considerable shushing from the rows behind. The old man gazed around for a moment, with an air of bewildered innocence, as if surprised by all the fuss and somewhat pained by it. Meanwhile, the dance continued, the dancer in a state of lofty ecstasy now, the drumming frantic but then falling into a more delicate beat that eventually faded out.
The performance ended. The audience clapped with greater determination. The dancer responded in a trance-like manner, just about able to notice the acclaim before gliding off in a majestic daze.
The evening continued with several performances by other dancers, but the Professor remained quiet during these.
‘Tammy and Narayan have asked me to tell you something of our religion and our history’ the Professor said to Max and Clare as they walk out of the theatre. So. Well, it’s nice to have Tammy back from UK. Good to have Narayan back from USA. All these young men going to their wonderful foreign parts, and I am eighty-eight and have never been. Oh no… I’m eighty-seven,’ He chuckled warmly. ‘I’m so ancient I even forget my age. Anyway, what is age? Does it really matter? When you think of the aeons that have gone and are yet to come.’
‘That’s a good way of looking at it,’ Clare said. ‘I’ll remember that when I next forget my age myself.’
‘Very funny for one so wonderfully young. So, what are you thinking of our Indian classic dance? The love of Radha for Krishna is so very touching, is it not?’
Clare made some appreciative comment, but she hadn’t really enjoyed the subject of the dance – a woman fruitlessly pining for her lover – because it had intensified the numbness she was feeling at the thought of Max being in love with someone else. The hurt still pierced her from time to time, and she felt jealousy and anger.
‘I see Krishna as a figure of myth indeed,’ said Subramaniam, responding to a question from Max as they reached a waiting taxi. Tammy helped the old man into it. ‘But one who feels to me a living presence. So near and so consoling. A god with many aspects, often surprisingly at variance with each other. A handsome youth, full of mirth and mischief, stealing the clothes of milkmaids when they bathe in the river. But then, in contrast, Krishna’s love for Radha is often thought of as symbolising the pining of the soul for God. In the Bhagavad Gita, he counsels us on our duties to society, and on the elimination of our bad, imprisoning desires. He’s playful and amorous but also very serious and wise.’
The old man waved his long, thin fingers in the air. They rose and fell as he carried on speaking. Max and Clare were grateful for his help with the background for their book, especially as he’d been an active member of the Congress Party during the struggle for independence from the British. He had even been a witness to Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Venkataraman’s assassination in the present had horrified him.
Clare therefore supposed he could be of some support to her and Tammy. On their return to Chennai, Tammy had been contacted by Inspector Veerapan, he of the wig-like hair and doleful manner. Tammy was wanted for another identification parade as the police had come under increasing pressure from the government and the media to identify the assassins. Clare couldn’t bear to think of the knife thrust and the pain Venkataraman must have felt, not just the physical pain but the terror of the realisation that his life was ebbing away, with all his aspirations and goals now never achievable. She felt great empathy, as she’d done with her dying father, who’d been similarly frustrated, and it now occurred to her that her horror at Venkataraman’s death owed something to that devastating loss eight years ago.
The taxi drove along the seafront, prompting Subramaniam to speak.
‘Over there you will see Saint George’s Fort. You British, who called this town Madras, built it. In the eighteenth century, the British and French fought for domination in Tamil Nadu, turning it into a battleground. Thousands of Tamils were killed. There was a Tamil uprising, but it was crushed, and the temple enclosures were filled with Tamil prisoners. We rejected the name Madras because of its imperialist associations and began to use an old Tamil name, Chennai.’
‘So this was where the British Raj began?’ Clare asked.
‘Yes, oh yes,’ Subramaniam replied. ‘But the British Raj was very wrong. Forgive me, but I’m afraid it was. It depressed the spirit of us Indians. It damaged our self-respect, our dignity. The British, with some rare exceptions, learnt little of our feelings and thoughts. They knew little of our ancient holy books, our Rig Veda, which is older than your Bible, or of the Mahabharata, our national great epic, which contains the Bhagavad Gita, the glory of Hindu speculative thought.’
‘And then there’s the Ramayana,’ Max interposed.
‘A wondrous story,’ said Subramaniam, smiling. ‘It tells of Rama and his beautiful wife, Sita, who was abducted by the demon king of Lanka. The monkey god Hanuman flew with his monkey army to get her back, the reason, no doubt, for our partiality for monkeys, mischievous as they can be. The Divali festival is in honour of Rama and Sita. Some of the Mughal emperors found the Ramayana fascinating, even though they were Muslims. But the British? They weren’t interested in our religion.’
‘Surely some of us were,’ Clare said.
‘The majority saw Hinduism as superstitious and idolatrous. It was so arrogant and ignorant of them,’ said Subramaniam, raising his hands in a quiver of protestation. ‘No wonder they lost their empire. I mustn’t be angry about it, though. I was when I was a young freedom fighter, but even then I had some kind friends among the British. It’s just I hated the insensitive imperialism…’
His voice trailed off as he stared out of the taxi window, but he suddenly became animated again as something caught his eye.
‘We’re passing the aquarium,’ he said. ‘At one time, there were seahorses in there but now I think they’ve gone. I saw them sixty years ago, when I first married. My wife was just fourteen. She thought them marvellous. Little tiny horses from the sea, so very touching.’
He sighed as if to imply that even though the world went on without them, they had been a wondrous detail in it. Clare felt he saw his young wife as wondrous too. Sadly, she had passed away.
They drove alongside a railway line. Tammy and Clare sat in the back, with Max and Subramaniam in the front. A train was hissing slowly past, hooting shrilly and shooting out blasts of steam. The carriages overflowed with passengers, and several small boys could be seen crouching on the roof, the braver ones among them recklessly scampering from carriage to carriage, defying a fat policemen with a whistle that he furiously blew to no great effect.
‘We rid ourselves of British rule through ahimsa,’ Subramaniam continued. ‘That is, non-violent resistance. It is what Gandhi taught us. Although it worked against the British, it wouldn’t have succeeded against Hitler. But would it have worked in South Africa and Ireland? Resistance was sometimes very violent there and this provoked even more oppression.’
‘Do you think non-violence would’ve brought freedom to the people in those countries any earlier?’ Max asked.
‘Well, we Indians won our freedom through ahimsa, although the British were quite oppressive. My uncle was shot in the Amritsar massacre, just after World War One. Four hundred men and women were killed. My father survived, but some years later he was arrested for being on Gandhi’s salt march. That was in 1930, when I was thirteen. The salt tax was a symbol of our oppression. Two hundred miles we walked to collect salt from the sea. I remember the long and dusty road, with villagers standing by the roadside, gently cheering. And then the sea at last! Such a sense of liberation! But sixty thousand people were imprisoned as a consequence. My father was locked for six months in a single cell.’
‘Were you imprisoned too?’
‘No, I was too young.’ Subramaniam waved his fingers once again. ‘All long past now, but we must not forget. Forgive, but do not forget. We must learn our lessons from it. There must be the right to protest, just as long as it’s non-violent. There’s been such violence since, though. Yes, indeed. And now poor Venkataraman, knifed to death by a mere boy.’ His voice rose. ‘How could he have done it? Giving Venkataraman a flower, pretending to be devoted. Oh, so very false and terrible.’
Subramaniam stopped talking and gazed pensively up at the sky, as if he sought consolation in the windblown clouds. He began to chant softly to himself, his fingers ascending from his lap to tremble in the air at the more sonorous moments; they hovered and made tiny dips before alighting on his knees again.
The car slowed down because of a large and unwieldy procession. They passed a couple of vehicles carrying enormous cardboard statues of Ganesh, with dangling trunks and slowly flapping, elephantine ears. A line of sadhus, wearing holy threads around their torsos, held their hands together. They were quietly intoning, picking their delicate way forwards. Some boys dodged nimbly between the onlookers, selling glasses of syrupy-looking tea, thick with milk and sugar. One of them wobbled along on an antiquated bicycle, chirruping his bell and balancing trays of oozing sweetmeats precariously on one hand.
The taxi had to slow down more to avoid hitting an overloaded cart that was being pulled by two half-naked, sweating men. A garlanded cow, with silver-tipped horns, chewed its cud musingly and meandered across the road with all the stately freedom the reverence of India allowed it. As it passed a vegetable stall, it seized some cabbage leaves in its frothy mouth with a lordly tossing of its head, to the startled dismay of the stallholder.
The taxi moved slowly forward again and then stopped at some traffic lights. A large, throbbing motorbike pulled up alongside. Clare noticed the rider was looking over at Tammy, whose face was turned outwards, his arm on the ridge of the open window.
Suddenly she thought she recognised, behind the Perspex of the crash helmet, the troubled eyes of the boy assassin!
She saw the knife in the rider’s hand and shouted out. Tammy reacted fast. He pulled his arm in from the window and wound it up at once. The knife struck the glass and rebounded. The driver pulled up on the clutch and the car lurched forward, through the red lights. A car was crossing the junction, and the driver had to swerve to avoid a collision. There was a scream and a shudder of wheels, followed by rasping shouts of protest and horns blaring out in anger and confusion. The car skidded towards a bullock cart; the animal jerked up its head, the whites of its eyes bulging. It emitted a terrified high bellow. The motorbike hurtled away with a reverberating thrum, leaving a trail of bluish fumes in its wake. The rider crouched forward, his body looking so thin and fragile on that vast machine, with its blazing headlamp.
The car had hit the bullock cart. It was only a glancing blow but the animal had been knocked down. It lay on the tarmac, bleating. The cow Clare seen earlier ambled grandly by, waving its great head as if in solemn deliberation and loftily preparing to overlook the incident. A policeman soon appeared, but no real damage had been done to the bullock or the cart.
Tammy was typically cool, surprising Clare with the assumption that the young man had merely been trying to cut the watch from his wrist.
‘This happened to me once,’ he said. ‘The strap was sliced off with impudent expertise. The young thief dashed off with a cheeky grin, which made the theft even more infuriating.’
While Max took photos, Clare led Tammy aside and spoke to him.
‘That might’ve been the assassin making an attempt upon your life.’
Tammy smiled incredulously.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answered.
‘The knife was far too large for what you suggest. And did you see the naivety of those eyes? Or the delicate, thin body? He was just like the assassin!’
‘That’s a very mild coincidence. Thinness isn’t exactly uncommon in India. Nor is criminality among the young. It’s a symptom of growing urban unemployment, desperation, lawlessness and social breakdown.’
Subramaniam was showing some solicitude for Tammy, although rather more, Clare thought, for the poor buffalo, whose owner Tammy now stepped forward to console with some much-appreciated banknotes.
As they got back into the car, Max looked inquiringly at Clare, curious about the closeness of her talk with Tammy. But she didn’t wish to share her fears with Max. He would be over-anxious on her account, as he always was, and she felt too hurt and angry with him over Narayan to want his concern now. However, as they drove on, she thought again about the crippled beggar and the motorcyclist, and about their being hit men determined to murder Tammy in his turn. But how morbid was her fear for him! And how melodramatic! Perhaps she was falling in love with him, she pondered with vague irony, and her anguish only measured how far she’d fallen. That was absurd, though. She merely found his attention reassuring; she liked his strange courage and his nonchalant, dry wit.
She gazed at the car window, at the scratch on the glass where the knife had struck. She imagined the blow again, and the motorbike leaping forward with its raging engine. Then she thought about the cow with its flower-strung head, as if it travelled to some grave and peaceful ceremony, well away from all the noise and speed and violence.