Chotta would say in Pakistan that he had hoped Kaukab would tell him if anything was suspected, if Jugnu had turned up during the day.
“But the woman didn’t say anything unusual, just took the delivery of the flour. She was kind and very courteous towards me because she sided with us when it came to the whole affair.” So Jugnu was still lost out there somewhere. As planned, at around one o’clock that night, they took two of their butcher knives and a cleaver, a saw, two hammers, a large box of black bin bags, a shovel and a Chinese-made Diamond Brand axe — one of the thousands imported each year and selling in hardware stores for £4.50—and went back into Jugnu’s house.
They were in the woods until five, using the implements, digging, burning with the help of Sheridan’s fuels, dismembering and burying her changeable eyes, her hair, the flesh orchid of her womb.
They didn’t know where Jugnu was. Two days after they disposed of Chanda’s remains, they went into the house to see if they had cleaned up everything properly, because someone at the shop said that her little son had gone into the back garden to look at the wren in the denim jacket and noticed a funny smell coming from the house.
Kaukab too noticed that faint smell, but she thought it was probably one of Jugnu’s creatures that had died in his absence, or that the fridge full of butterfly and moth cocoons had broken down. One year he had bought a chameleon — against her protests, because it was a chameleon that had bitten through the water-skin of Hazrat Abbaas in the desert, causing him to go without water in the burning sands of Karbala — and it crawled somewhere under the floorboards and died. The whole house stank for days.
The house smelled of death when Chotta and Barra entered it at around two that night — a smell they knew from their butcher’s trade, and from the hours they had recently spent by the drowned-giant’s lake. It was a dead peacock. The brothers were crossing the room downstairs, the room hung about with the monsoon washing, when the telephone rang from somewhere behind one of the yard-long veils and chadors. They were paralysed with shock. It rang two or three times before Chotta could move to pull it off the hook. That was when he saw Jugnu’s body, on the floor behind a blue-and-green dotted veil that was suspended from the washing line, the edge touching the floor. Next to him lay the bright corpse of the peacock.
Jugnu had been in the house all along. He was there when the brothers came in through the open door that first morning. He had made it back ahead of them and gone through the coloured cloths to connect the phone. He died there, before he could call the police. Chanda didn’t know he was in the house any more than they did.
After the British police had collected the testimonies of the people in Sohni Dharti, they would check to see if any telephone calls had been made to Jugnu’s house at that particular hour on that particular date. They would learn that the call was from Chanda’s husband. Drunk in the middle of the night, he had decided to use the number Kaukab had given him: “I wanted to tell her that I wanted her back. But no one answered, and I woke up with the receiver in my hand, the mouthpiece full of bubbles from my saliva, as though someone was trying to shout through water on the other end.”
“It was doubly fortunate that we went in because we saw something else,” Chotta would say in Pakistan. “When wiping a shelf with a rag, to get rid of any fingerprints on the wood shortly before we carried Chanda’s body out, I had let fall all the dust of the shelf onto the small table stand ing below it. The gun was on that table. And I picked it up just before we left the house with her body. On this return visit to the house, I saw that there was a perfect silhouette of the gun on the table. The fine waft of dust from the shelf had fallen onto the weapon and the surface surrounding it. It was like a stencil.”
“And as for peacocks that burst out when the police forced their way in the following week,” Barra would say, “we have no idea how and when they got into the house.”
The birds urinated on the dinner plate, picked pinned butterflies off the frames and ate them, spitting out the pins everywhere the way humans spit out fish-bones, and the female laid an egg in an open suitcase. The males had got into a fight, over food, over the female, ripping each other with their snake-killing claws and beaks, and the liquids seeping from their wounds and gashes would mean that the blood samples found on the floor would never prove to be conclusively human, conclusively Jugnu’s.
The house itself — the house of Sin, the house of Death, the house of Love — went through a destiny of its own, shut up, abandoned to dust and insects. The police dug up the back garden.
A spider’s web — sagging under the weight of a hundred dewdrops, no two the same size — had hung between two apple trees in the garden, and the late morning sunlight was a deep translucent yellow — as though the sky was being seen through a bar of Pears soap the day Chanda came to the house for the very first time. It was March. The sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers (the blossom would be out in May, and Chanda would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the Siberian snows of this year’s January).
Her veil caught on a branch (as though she were being clairvoyantly prevented by the tree from advancing any further, as though the crop of fruit last year was not apples but crystal balls full of blood, predicting red rage and red death), but she freed herself and moved towards the door.
On her upper lip there was a mole the size of a kiwi seed; and her eyes always changed colour in keeping with the seasons: in spring they were the bright green of budding leaves, but in summer they were darker, the colour of mature foliage, and while they were a pale yellow-brown at the beginning of autumn when the leaves were beginning to turn, with hints of pinks and reds here and there, they became and stayed wholly brown for the rest of autumn and winter, the cycle beginning again the following spring.
She knocked several times on the door but there was no sign of life inside the house; she hesitated and then went in.
Inside, the walls were decorated with pinned butterflies in glass frames that appeared to be strays from Paradise. The girl — carrying the little wooden stars — didn’t yet know that some of the butterflies she was looking at had stood at the centre of man’s interest since their discovery, the glinting creatures named after the heroes and heroines of Greek mythology and the queens of the great maritime powers, that at one time some of the rare specimens had been paid for with gold and others used as royal gifts. She moved around the room, slowly, and then came to a standstill. There were ten dead butterflies on the sky-blue table before her. They were large and belonged to the same species, the bodies as long as match-sticks, the wings breathtakingly lovely to her, and she — the girl dressed in straw-yellow — lowered her head to examine them. The charcoal-black forewings were rounded ovals while the outline of each hind wing was tear-shaped and had three thin spurs protruding from the base; the forewings were marked with white bars, and each hind wing — although the same colour and pattern as the forewings on the whole — had a circle the size of a ten-pence piece on it, divided into three vivid bands, one berry red, the middle one blue, and the lowest yellow, a thin streak from this yellow band emerging and flowing deep into each of the three spurs.