After a brief negotiation (my driver’s hourly rate was less than I received for one second of concert playing) he agreed to eat chuppattis at my expense and wait for as long as I needed him — all night, if I wished it, he told me cheerfully. He was so pleased with the arrangement that I knew he believed he was overcharging me.
I was led inside by an old servant in a long, flowing robe. Chandra stood by a small table. He was almost unrecognizable. In little more than two years he had changed from a thin-faced ascetic to a roly-poly, smiling cherub. His eyes glittered with surprise and pleasure when he saw me, and that turned to a look of wonderment when he got a good look at my scarred face.
“I had read about your accident.” He shook his sleek head in concern. “No one told me how serious it must have been.”
In the world of music, news travels fast. Chandra must still be connected, even if he never performed.
He led the way to a sparsely furnished study. Over glasses of hot, sweet tea we sat down to talk. After playing catch-up on Chandra’s activities for the past two years, I offered a version (slightly edited) of my own past six months. People were mistaking me for my brother, I said. My brother had obviously left unfinished business — I thought it was in Calcutta . It was my wish to complete it, but my knowledge of what he had been doing was limited. He had mentioned walking in the Maidan before he died, but nothing of business detail. I even lacked his business address.
Chandra grimaced and nibbled on a marzipan plum. A servant stood discreetly outside the door, waiting for any request for food or drink.
“You have no company name or address?” Chandra waved a plump hand. “Hopeless. You can advertise in the newspapers, perhaps. But unless he was active in the business community here I think you will find it impossible to learn much. There is more chance for anonymity in this city than anywhere else in the world. Tomorrow, if you wish, I will ask at the University. He was your twin, was he not?”
I nodded.
“Then if you have no picture of him, perhaps we could put your photograph in the papers, and ask for information.”
I hesitated. “Maybe in a few days,” I said at last. “Let me settle in here first, and get used to the city. There’s no rush.”
“Would you care to stay here, rather than in a hotel?” asked Chandra. He smiled. “The Calcutta Zoo is in Alipore — a mile or so from here.”
He knew my habits. I shook my head. It had not escaped me that Chandra had made no move to show me most of his house, or to introduce me to members of his family. It was past midnight — the talk had rambled all over the world, following our mutual acquaintances — and he was beginning to yawn. “All the world passes through Calcutta ,” he had told me. “I do not need to travel to keep up with people.” But as eldest son in a thriving family jute business, he did need his sleep. He was up these days with the sun — when he used to be ready to go to bed.
“And the violin?” I couldn’t resist the question as we stood again at the front door, waiting for my driver.
For answer he held up his left hand, the fingers facing towards me. The horn-hard calluses built up by twenty years of daily playing had reverted to become soft pads of tender flesh. Forty thousand hours of practice, down the drain. He would probably never play again. As the cab took me north to the hotel, the difference between East and West ceased to be an abstraction, something that Kipling had invented for a poem. And I wondered again what the time in the Orient had done to Leo, how it had changed him inside the western exterior.
In a perverse way the meeting with Chandra cheered me up a lot. He had managed to construct a new life that did not revolve around music. If he could do it, so could I.
At 120 rupees, the three-color map of Calcutta I bought at the hotel was robbery. It was badly printed, the colors bled across the line borders, and the names were poorly spaced and hard to read. Unless I was willing to seek out a city bookstore, though, it was all that I would get.
I was afraid it would make little difference. Having come this far, I seemed to be at a dead end. It had looked to be easy when I was back in London . Leo would feed me the information I needed, somehow or other. But apart from the conviction that the Maidan, here in the center of Calcutta , was an important part of Leo’s past, I had found nothing to guide me to a special part of the city. I wandered, map in hand, looking for some new idea, all the way from the Howrah Bridge, with its great web of cantilevered steel and its teeming cars, oxcarts, rickshaws, bicycles, trucks and people, down south as far as Alipore and the Calcutta Zoological Gardens. I spent half a day in the Zoo, marvelling at the great thirty-eight foot reticulated python that had amazed the world when Funyatti captured it live in the Sumatran jungles in ’02. The zookeepers impressed me less than the animals. One of them, more foolhardy than rational, moved unprotected through an enclosure containing two splendid specimens of Dendraspis polylepis, black mambas that to me are the most unpredictable and dangerous of the poisonous snakes. I watched until the man came out alive.
But I found it hard to watch anything else for very long. Always, my steps drew me back to the Maidan. I sat there, hour after hour, looking at the white marble pile of the Victoria Memorial. It was a mixture of English and Moghul styles, and as ugly in its way as the Albert Memorial in London . I soon learned to hate it, but I went back day after day, wondering what I was doing there. Chandra twice invited me to attend University functions, and I resolutely refused both of them to sit out in that dull park and stare at that awful monument.
It was an unhappy and frustrating time. The weather was miserable, cold and windy. It wasn’t until the ninth day of my vigil, when my stomach and head were both thoroughly adjusted to the change in time and diet, that the break came.
The weather turned warm and sunny. I was sitting on the same bench as usual, looking north towards Fort William . I had occupied benches that faced north, south, east and west, like a dog turning round before it can settle, but always an indefinable discomfort took me at last to a bench that looked north.
I was reading the International Herald Tribune, my only real link with the West. I had lost patience with the Indian radio and television in my first day, and took all my news from the paper, several days late. When I looked up, a woman was sitting on a bench across the green from me, perhaps thirty yards away.
She was very dark skinned, clearly Indian, and dressed in a green sari with flecks of yellow-gold in the long skirt. Her dark hair was drawn back from her forehead, and in the center, an inch above her eyes, I could see the glint of a single golden ornament. She was looking straight at me, her face calm and disinterested. But at the sight of her I felt myself beginning to tremble, with a wave of tension and excitement in my stomach that was too much to endure.
I stood up, looking for some reaction from her — she still seemed to be staring straight at me. When she did not move, I began to walk slowly around the gravel footpath that bordered the small square of green.
It was perplexing enough to make my head ache and drive me dizzy. Obviously, Leo knew her. She should recognize him, and that meant she should recognize me. But I walked in front of her, almost near enough to touch, and there was no glimmer of recognition on her face. Close up, I saw that she was beautiful and young. I guessed no more than nineteen.