She pauses, gives me a this-you-won’t-believe look. “He said, ‘Please don’t concern yourself, the police will soon move them on.’”
Well this in no way surprises me, but I’ve shaped various grimaces which satisfy her. So then she starts on about other things this friend’s told her such as how Khaufpur once had a high cultural life, and a remarkable history, famous it was for poets, politically progressive, a haven for refugees including a large community of Afghans. I think her friend must have meant Farouq’s lot, the Yar-yilaqis, who are really Uzbegs. He complained how all these things are forgotten because nowadays when the world hears the name of Khaufpur it thinks only of poison. “I curse the day the Kampani came here because its disaster erased our past.”
“Also erased thousands of people,” said Elli.
“Forget about the disaster,” her friend said. “Let it go! Let’s talk of anything but that painful night. Let go, I say, it’s been nearly twenty years. Let it rest. Maybe there are some people in the slums who want to keep the agitation going. Every year they burn effigies of the Kampani bosses, they daub slogans and chant. What does this achieve? Nothing. Meanwhile the rest of us, citizens, city council, chamber of commerce, everyone, we all want to move on.”
“But what about those people? The ones still waiting for justice? The ones who are suffering without help? Do you move on and leave them behind?”
“Please don’t think worse of me if I tell you the truth. Those poor people never had a chance. If it had not been the factory it would have been cholera, TB, exhaustion, hunger. They would have died anyway.”
“That’s such a harsh way to think.”
“I prefer to call it facing facts,” he said. “Elli, you will eat your heart out for them, but you’ll get no thanks for it.”
He’s rung a bell for his servant to bring more whisky, ice etcetera. Eyes, I should say it was night, they were sitting on his terrace, which looks out over the lake. The water was black, high above all was a cold white moon. The old doctor touched Elli’s shoulder and pointed. “Here’s something the books don’t tell you. On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the colour of blood.”
“You know what I should have said, Animal? I should have said, ‘I am a doctor, I know about blood.’ Instead I sat there drinking his whisky listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second rate poem.”
So bitterly does Elli tell her story about the old doctor, I’m scared she has come to hate Khaufpur and will surely go back to Amrika.
“Elli, there are many good people in Khaufpur.”
“Oh yes? Like who? The authorities who don’t care? The rich who want to move on? The poor who kick you in the teeth when you try to help?”
“I could take you to meet them. Good people. Poor people, the ones who are sick. Like me. We people need you, please don’t give up.”
“Ah, like you Animal,” she says, now softer’s her voice. “Well, I am glad I met you. Yes, you are a good person.”
Putain con! Just shows how wrong an educated person can be, but I am not going to contradict her, nor tell what memories were just now in my head of her naked, bending for soap. “Elli, everything will be okay, just you must convince people you have not come from the Kampani.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Tell them why you wanted so much to come here.”
“What? Like I heard about what’s happening in Khaufpur and thought it was shocking, I hate injustice, I felt moved, I had the skills, nothing better to do with my life, plus I was stupid enough to think I’d be welcome. Which of these reasons do you think they’ll believe?”
Full of sincere anger is this speech of Elli doctress, but again I’m getting that uneasy feeling, of something being held down beneath the surface.
“You need something they can check.” I’m thinking of Zafar.
“Or someone who’ll believe me?”
It’s now I have my brilliant idea. It can solve everything, why didn’t I think of it before? “Elli, the trouble you had making your clinic, plus these other things, there’s a very decent person you could speak to, it’s Somraj Pandit.”
I don’t know what response I’m expecting, Elli just looks surprised. “The music teacher? I hardly think so. Dayanand says it’s him and his friends behind this boycott.”
“Dayanand’s a sack of pus. Somraj Pandit has nothing to do with it, I swear on my life.”
“Truly? Is that so? Interesting you mention him. Such a serious man. I see him in his garden, we exchange hellos, that’s it. I get the feeling he’d rather not speak to me, he avoids my eye, not once has he ever smiled.”
“He never smiles at anyone.”
“Well, I guess it’s more like he’s shy, sort of clenched.”
“Shy around ladies,” says I. “Because of what happened to him. His wife.”
“I hoped it was some kind of misunderstanding,” says Elli.
I’m wondering should I tell her that Somraj spoke against the boycott of her clinic, but it would mean fingering Zafar and already there’s been betrayal enough. Instead I’ve started on how Somraj used to be a singer but his lungs were fucked by the gases on that night. Being a doctor she’s interested in this. “Maybe if I offered to help? Could nothing be done for him?”
“You’re right, nothing. Nisha, she’s his daughter, says he won’t even listen to his old records.”
“He must have been good, to make records.”
“The best. Somraj Pandit was famous. They used to call him the Voice of Khaufpur. The internest tells how he would sing cranes and waterspouts.”
“Not sure I follow you,” she says.
“Well…”
Alas, what kind of integrity have I, who’d promised Pandit Somraj not to repeat the things he confided to me and here’s babbling to a foreign doctress? Eyes, just now I mentioned betrayal, that’s what this is, but it’s happened, as these things do, without planning. You go with the heart, where it leads, but the heart is blind. I’ve jawed on for at least an hour. Elli’s full of questions about Pandit Somraj, about his wife, his fame as a singer. Some things I should not have told her.
“Frogs?” she says, “did you really say frogs?”
“Yes.”
“Bizarre. Was he joking?”
“Not he. Since the Kampani’s poisons tore his lungs, and took his wife and son, Somraj Pandit rarely laughs. Nor will he sing aloud. Out of his suffering he makes songs that he alone can hear.”
“That is so sad,” she says. “I shouldn’t laugh at the frogs.”
“Only one joke has Pandit Somraj. Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa, these are the notes which all recognise. Somraj says that for him the octave now runs Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Khã, Si, Khã, Si.”
Eyes, this is the pandit’s joke, he tells it against himself. It’s not meant to be funny, it’s a way of spitting in the eye of fate, of saying fuck you to the world which so carelessly mangled his life. Of course this joke is wasted on you, dear Eyes, first because no one has ever mangled you, but chiefly because you don’t speak our language. Khã and Si are not really notes in the scale, if you join them they make khaañsi, which means “cough.” What Somraj is saying is, every time I start to sing I begin coughing and can’t stop.