“I am Leo’s brother,” I said, slowly and carefully. “Not Leo. My name is Lionel.”
“Brother?” Her face changed expression again, from sadness to worry and confusion. She came nearer and touched her hand up to my face. This time she was more thorough, running her fingers gently over my forehead, then back to the scars that were still lumpy patches of tissue on the back of my skull. She hissed to herself, tongue between her teeth, when she came to the patched-up bone.
“Leo-yo. You have been hurt.”
“Not Leo.” I took her hands gently in mine. She looked up at me patiently, her eyes wide and opalescent. “Ameera,” I said. “Please believe me. I am not Leo. Leo had a brother, I am his brother.” As I spoke I winced at my use of the past tense for Leo, but Ameera’s English was not good enough to catch it and read its significance. Her face remained perfectly calm.
“Ameera,” I went on. “I would like to talk to you. About my brother. About Leo.”
The long eyelashes flickered, and the lids covered the cloudy beauty of her eyes. She was looking down, her hands running their sensitive fingers over the back of my hand and my forearm.
“I understand,” she said at last. “You told me this. That there might be a time when you could not know me, you warned of hidden times. But here… where only we are here, after so long…”
Her voice trailed away sadly, and I swore under my breath. If only she could see… It was hard to believe that those dark orbs were unseeing. What could I do next? This was supposed to be the place where I would meet all Leo’s eastern contacts — but where were they?
“Ameera, whose house is this?”
She looked surprised, her lips parting to show pearly teeth with slightly prominent canines. “House? This house? Leo-yo, you know it. This house is your house, as it has always been — what else? We have waited for you here, waited and waited… Chatterji said you would not come back, you would never come back. When he saw you in the Maidan, he did not believe it.”
I was hardly listening. Leo’s house. I knew he had been in the east for years, and he hated living in hotels. But why had he never mentioned it to me?
“Now that you are here,” Ameera was saying, “it will be a tandoori meal. Shamli has been told, and Chatterji will get the chutney you like. In one half of an hour it will be ready to eat.”
She reached confidently across the sideboard and picked up a decanter and a glass. She removed the stopper, sniffed to make sure, and poured. It was a fine oloroso sherry, Leo’s favorite. Should I try and explain to her again? I sipped, watched as she replaced the stopper and set the decanter back in its exact place, and caught a hint of the delicate perfume she had applied since we reached the house.
Suddenly I had a visceral understanding that she had been Leo’s mistress. If I closed my eyes I saw images of dark, flawless skin beneath the modest clothes. The contours of her figure glowed with secret oils, familiar to me as no woman had ever been familiar. I took a bigger gulp of sherry.
“Ameera.”
“Yes, Leo-yo?” Still she refused to accept me as myself.
“There are many books here. Where are the other books and papers in this house?”
“Many places.” She was confused. “You know it. In this room, in the bedroom. There are books everywhere.”
“Did you ever hear anyone talk about T.P.? As someone’s name?”
“Teepee?” Her voice was bewildered, “Never. Who is Teepee?”
“I don’t know — it is a bad person. How about Belur? Do you know about anything called the Belur Package?”
Now she hesitated, “Belur is a common name in the south of the country. But what is in the package?”
“I don’t know.” I would try Chatterji and the others, if I could find an interpreter, but I sensed that there would be no success. Leo’s secrets were well-kept. He would not have told these people what he kept hidden from me.
A gong, softly struck, was sounding a low note through the house. Ameera took my empty glass from my hand and led the way towards the back of the ground floor. The table in the dining room was set for two, with gleaming Benares silver and white linen tablecloth. I sat opposite Ameera and felt enormously frustrated. I had travelled a third of the way around the world to chase a long shot. Now the long shot had come in, and I was more stymied than ever. The mysterious stranger in Calcutta had been found. He was my own brother.
The chicken tandoori was delicious, served with lime pickles and an array of chutneys and vegetables by silent servants whom Ameera addressed in Bengali. The effort of speaking and understanding English seemed to have tired her, and she concentrated on enjoyment of the food. Leo had been fluent in Bengali, that was obvious from the way that I was occasionally addressed in that language by the puzzled servants. As they served a dessert of banana halva I wondered again about the household. Leo must have managed to set it up to run separate from any business activities that he had carried on in India . It had run smoothly — at what cost I could not guess — even when he had disappeared for over six months. I had the feeling that he had left the house in the past on extended trips, and my sudden appearance was less of a surprise than I expected. I looked around me at the elegant furnishings and careful arrangement. I couldn’t have set up a house to run like this in my absence, not in a million years. The old conviction that I was somehow the lesser half, a reduced version of Leo, grew stronger as the meal concluded with a demitasse of Turkish coffee, and the sun outside the window sank lower in the sky,
Afterwards Ameera led me outside, to walk in the walled garden. There was no sign of a weed anywhere. As we passed through an archway framed by climbing roses, she took my hand to lead her. I saw the new shoots that reached out to catch at our clothes and guided her clear of them. When she moved through the arch the setting sun struck directly on her face, turning it to a bronze carving.
I passed my hand across her eyes, blocking out the light, and she followed the movement of my arm with her head.
“You can see that?” I moved my hand back and forth,
Ameera smiled. “Light and dark, Leo-yo. Nothing more. It has not changed.” She reached out to take my hand as it moved in front of her. I could smell her perfume again, rosewater and jasmine. She stroked my hand.
“Your room,” she said, “it was not made ready. If we had known you would be here… we have not even cigars for you, Chatterji will buy them tonight.” She sounded upset.
“I have my room at the hotel,” I said. Then I saw her face, and added: “All my clothes are there. I have nothing here with me.”
“There are clothes.” She turned her face again to the setting sun. “It will soon be dark. You are tired from your travel? Wait here, and I will see if the room is ready yet.”
I was exhausted from tension, but before I went up to bed I wanted to look over the rooms of the house. At my request Ameera led me around the whole place. Many rooms were unlit and I had trouble following her, though she moved confidently everywhere, past huge settees in the living room and the grotesque wooden statues in a long corridor that led back to the kitchen. I realized in the first few minutes that any search of the house for evidence of Leo’s activities in India would take days. But the best place to begin might well be Leo’s bedroom.
The house bustled busily about us as we went through the kitchen and up the rear staircase. It was clear what was happening. The master of the household had returned. Ameera treated me just as though I were Leo, and the rest of the staff took their cue from her. Everywhere I heard polite Bengali greetings, and Ameera replied to them. She seemed to feel that Leo, for his own purposes, was choosing to speak only English, and she behaved as though it were some kind of test. She had already told me, a little proudly, that for the past six months she had been practicing English speech every day — as I had told her to.