He saw his hand pour the oil onto the floor, then empty out the rice and flour and sweep through the line of washed pots. They fell with a deafening series of clangs. He turned on his heels as his uncle began screaming, “Jadua, the cat! It can’t be the cat! Thief! Stop the thief!” Badal knew that if he had found a box of matches, he would have thrown the kerosene stove to the floor and put a flame to it.
He went to his room only to pick up his scooter keys and the tin box where he had, years ago, hidden away his father’s spectacles and rosary, a Swiss army knife, and a pocket-sized glass model of the Taj Mahal. An afterthought propelled him to his cupboard and he collected a few clothes and the papers and chequebook for the bank account his uncle knew nothing about.
On his way out he uprooted what remained of the shiuli he had planted.
He burst out of the door, slammed it behind him, stuffed everything he had taken into the basket of the scooter and kicked it alive. The roar of its rackety old engine made his muscles jangle to his fingertips.
He had gone only a few hundred yards when he had second thoughts and skidded to a halt.
The scooter’s wheels scooped up some more dust as he turned and made his way back down the road, retracing his journey, slower this time. He came to a halt near the old woman’s shrine. A wisp of smoke trailed from the incense the woman had lit. Badal touched his head to the floor before the tiny idols inside the shrine and saw that the images were decorated with red roses today.
The woman who tended the shrine was balled up in her usual place on the pavement, in the shadow of the neem tree. Her spectacles were askew, she had fallen asleep without taking them off. A thread of drool shone in the trench that went from her lips to her chin and it had collected in a damp patch on the bundle she had placed under her head as a pillow. Three thick white hairs sprouted from a spot on her chin like the roots on an onion. Her steel plate lay beside her, in its usual place on the pavement. It held five rose petals and a rupee coin.
Badal took his wallet from its usual place in the left pocket of his kurta. It had a hundred and fifty rupees. Keeping no more than a few tens and twenties for himself, he emptied the rest of his money onto her plate. Then the thought struck him that the money might be stolen while she slept. He had a sudden irrational urge to wake her, bundle her onto his scooter, take her with him. Instead, he picked up the plate and edged it into the shrine for her to find when she woke.
*
The Sun Temple’s parking lot was a square of baking grey cement patrolled by a sun-shrivelled attendant who stopped giving Suraj meaningful looks after his first few glances at the packet of cigarettes went unacknowledged. The excitable clamour of tourists and guides was no more than a distant murmur here. Suraj perched on a low wall shaded by the bulk of a four-wheel drive. He counted the dents on the car, speculating about their causes. The owners must be slobs: the car was dirty both inside and out, muddy and scratched. His own car, when he could buy something that wasn’t a dinky Korean toy, would gleam, it would smell of leather. He would never smoke inside it. He had always wanted a four-wheel drive — a real, heavy, roaring Jeep whose top could be rolled away so you could drive with the wind in your face. He would drive to Ladakh in that Jeep, right from Bangalore, taking a month, maybe more, wandering coasts and forests along the way, foraging for food in wayside dhabas, picking up hitchhikers, letting them go, stopping when tired, then carrying on, filming the journey.
If he had told her about it, Ayesha would have called it another of his schemes to run away from life — as if life were something that you had to grit your teeth against and endure. She said he was an escape artist — when all he wanted was the freedom to just be, to come and go without a hundred accusatory questions from strident wives and anxious mothers. He lied to them both for no reason at all sometimes, merely to feel himself free. Why shouldn’t he tell his mother he was in Hyderabad when in fact he was in Jarmuli?
It struck him that he should call Nomi. He had left her so suddenly up there on the way to the tallest tower, shooting off like a bullet the minute he sighted Latika Aunty holding hands with a stranger. Maybe Nomi hadn’t heard him when he told her he would wait for her in the car. What if she thought he was going to come back to the ruins for her? He slid his hand into his pocket for his phone.
It wasn’t there. Of course. It had been stolen on the beach that morning.
He got up from his wall and found his driver chatting nearby in a knot of other waiting drivers. He borrowed the man’s phone — then was stumped trying to recall Nomi’s number. He had never needed to memorise it.
He retreated to the warm shade of their hired car and sat inside it, sweating, wondering if he should go back and find her — but if he went back he would very likely bump into his mother and her friends. He decided to wait. He fidgeted, drank some water, smoked a cigarette. He thought he would stretch out on the car seat and take a nap, but it was full of things. He stowed away a tube of Nomi’s sunscreen and bottles of water. One of the many elastic bands she used for her hair lay on the seat too. It had a plastic daisy on it. He slipped it round his wrist like a bangle to give her later.
Then his hands fell on her computer. She had left her laptop in the car. He sat tapping the lid, listening to his nail on its surface, a metallic sound. It had a sleek body, slim and light. He had never seen one of these machines, they had just come out. He opened the lid. He shut it again. Should he go on?
What if she happened to arrive just then and saw him? She would be furious he was snooping. But he wanted to snoop. He had to know: where had she disappeared to that morning when she abandoned him at the Vishnu temple? And then yesterday, when he thought they would go together to clear a few permissions to shoot, she had made an excuse and not come back till the evening, when she came up with that cock and bull story of going to see a sculptor.
He opened the laptop’s lid again. There was the lit screen — she hadn’t even shut the machine down and he had to tap no password to access the files. Really, people as careless as her deserved what was coming to them. His fingers revelled in the familiar pleasure of trackpad and keys. He navigated her machine swiftly and surely. He was good with computers, it took him seconds to find his way around new ones. He opened her photo application and found it empty. That was odd. He had never come across people who didn’t store pictures on their machines. He started up her e-mail programme — it wasn’t configured. That meant she used e-mail off the internet, but since there was no connection here, he wouldn’t be able to see what she did on the net.
He began searching her folders. Quite a lot of notes and writing — he couldn’t linger too much on those — she might come back. There was a folder named after him. He paused over that, but it contained only copies of his own e-mails to her.
The door of the car clicked open and Suraj slammed the laptop shut, his mind racing to find explanations to give. “I was hunting for your phone number,” he would say. That was the most plausible.
But it wasn’t Nomi. It was the driver. “We should go,” the driver said. “It’s getting late, we have a long way to go and it’ll get dark. We can’t wait any more. There are buses from here also — she must have gone back to Jarmuli on one of those.”