It was too dark to see what the wind and the rain were doing to the interior of the apartment. But he could imagine it all too welclass="underline" the water streaming over the bare wood floor, collecting in puddles around the rush mats she had laid out, so carefully and precisely.
Tara 's friends, Lucky and Maria, had helped carry her things up the stairs when she first moved in, a few months ago. Antar had marvelled at how few things she had: a futon, some sheets and mats and a couple of tables and chairs that looked like they'd come off the street. The only things on the walls were a few calligraphed scrolls. And now the scrolls were ruined: he could see them flapping on the walls of her living room in ragged flurries of white, torn to ribbons by the wind.
What was worse was that he had no way of letting her know. This was before her beeper: she was still working at her other job then and he didn't have her phone number. All he could do was wait.
The storm was over by the time the lights came on in her apartment. Antar hurried into the kitchen to tell her what had happened and discovered that it wasn't Tara who'd come in. It was Lucky, and he'd already got busy cleaning up. Antar kept a discreet eye on him over the next hour or so: he didn't seem to know that he could be seen. He took off his T-shirt and his trousers and wrapped a dishtowel around his groin, like a loincloth. Then he got down on his knees and mopped the floor, not once but twice. Antar watched worriedly, wondering whether he'd do any damage. Lucky was notoriously clumsy, always dropping trays and spilling tea: 'all thumbs', as Tara often said.
Shortly afterwards Antar heard Tara 's door banging shut.
He went into the kitchen to see if she'd come home at last.
He was in time to see her tiredly unslinging her handbag and dropping it to the floor. Then Lucky came hurrying out of another room – to greet her, as Antar thought. But instead he did something that amazed Antar. He flung himself down on the floor in front of Tara and touched his forehead to her feet.
Tara 's first, instinctive response was to look up, across the apartment, in the direction of Antar's kitchen window. She was very embarrassed when she saw Antar standing there. She gave him an awkward wave and then muttered something to Lucky, who pulled himself up, looking sheepish.
Antar was embarrassed too, but he managed a smile and a wave. He had always assumed that they were just friends; he'd even wondered if they were lovers – though Lucky did seem a bit young for her. But Tara explained later that they were related in some complicated way: thus the greeting.
And now she'd done it again: left her window open. Antar shrugged: well, at least it wasn't raining today. He lowered his sweating face to the sink and sluiced water over it.
He was on his way to his bedroom when the phone rang. He took the call in his living room, dropping into the chair that faced Ava's screen.
It was Tara, sounding a little breathless. 'You got my message?' Antar said.
'I did indeed,' she answered. 'You sounded so mysterious; I had to find out what you were up to.'
'Oh, nothing important,' said Antar. 'Just some routine stuff that's going to take longer than it should. '
'Oh, really?' she said. 'Sounds frightfully important.'
'Also I don't feel well.'
'Can I help?' Her voice was immediately full of concern. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'I'll be all right; I've been through this before.'
'I could come by,' she said. 'Just say the word.'
'No. Thank you.' He decided to change the subject. 'Where are you calling from?' he said.
'The playground at 97th and Riverside,' she said. 'My little monster's trying to climb a fibreglass dinosaur.'
'You're at the playground?' Antar said in surprise. 'But I don't hear any children.'
She laughed. 'No. Most of them are down with the sprinklers, getting soaked to the skin.'
Antar paused, in puzzlement. Something didn't seem quite right. 'Do they have public phones at the playground?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'Or at least I'm not using one if they do. One of the sitters lent me her – what do you call them? those portable thingummyjigs. I suppose I'd better let you go now. Let me know if you change your mind about dinner. I can be over in a couple of minutes.'
'Did you say a couple of minutes?' Antar said. 'But surely it'll take you at least half an hour to get here from 97th street. Even by taxi… '
'Justa manner of speaking…' she said quickly.
At exactly that moment Ava emitted a ping, to warn him that she was about to go into standby mode. An instant later Antar heard the same sound relayed down the telephone line.
'I'd better get off,' Tara said.
Antar started. 'Wait a minute…' he cried into the telephone. But the line had gone dead.
Antar stared at the receiver not quite sure of what had happened. For a moment it had sounded as though Tara were in the room with him and her mouthpiece had picked up Ava's ping.
He put the back of his hand against his forehead and wasn't surprised to find it very hot. He knew he was really feverish now.
He decided it was time to lie down.
Chapter 34
WITH HIS POCKET DIARY resting on his knee, shielded from the splashing rain by a protective arm, Murugan began to draw on an empty page with a ballpoint pen. When he had finished, he tore the page out of the diary and passed it to Urmila. It was a sketch of a figurine, a semicircular mound with two painted eyes. On one side of the mound was a tiny pigeon, and on the other a small semicircular instrument…
'Ever seen anything like this before?' he said.
Urmila examined the drawing minutely, frowning in concentration. 'I probably wouldn't have noticed if I had,' she said. 'It's like so many temple images – except for that thing over there. What is it?' She pointed at the instrument.
'My guess is that it's a version of an old-fashioned microscope,' Murugan said.
'So who or what is it an image of?'
'If I had to take a guess, I'd say that that was the demiurge of Ron's discovery,' he said. 'My guess is that she's the one behind this whole experiment.'
'You think it was a woman?' said Urmila.
Murugan nodded.
'Where did you find it?' Urmila asked.
'Over there,' said Murugan, pointing his pencil at the walclass="underline" it was raining so hard now that the alcove was barely visible, even though it was no more than a few yards away. He began to explain how he had found the little figurine there the night before. Urmila listened intently, and when he had finished, she gave a little nod, as though confirming something to herself.
'It's strange,' said Urmila. 'Just the other day, I was reading a book of Phulboni's essays – you know, the writer who was given the award at Rabindra Sadan yesterday? What you were saying reminded me of something he wrote a long time ago. I remember the passage almost by heart. "I have never known", it begins, "whether life lies in words or in images, in speech or sight. Does a story come to be in the words that I conjure out of my mind or does it live already, somewhere, enshrined in mud and clay – in an image, that is, in the crafted mimicry of life?"
'Apparently,' Urmila continued, 'Phulboni wrote a story many years ago: about a woman, bathing…' Her voice deepened in tone, in imitation of the writer's: "'… A woman no different from the hundreds of women you see every day, from the windows of your cars and buses, a woman washing off the day's dirt in the dank, weed-rich water of a pond, in a park – a pond like so many in our city, like Minto Park, or Poddopukur, or anyone of a dozen others. The woman kneels, in the soft, glutinous mud, the water rises in a dark curtain to her throat, allowing her to momentarily slip the top of her mud-browned sari off her shoulders, and run the tips of her fingers over her breasts, scrape a sliver of soap across the hardened skin of childbitten nipples, then run her hand down, below, past the folds of a wasted belly, and even further, down, down, scraping that foaming sliver past the parted lips that have vomited a dozen children into her husband's bed, and further still into the velvet dampness of the mud, the soap clinging to her fingers, and then, without warning her foot slips, and she finds herself, for one panic-stricken moment, clutching at the mud which is suddenly as soft, as pliant and yielding as death itself, her hands clawing at that depthless murk, and then, when the face of extinction seems to be looking unsmiling into her eyes, the edge of a fingernail scrapes suddenly upon something solid, something abrasive, something with redeeming, saving, lifegiving edges, something blessedly hard, something that can give her the moment's handhold she needs to claw her way back to the surface and seize a breath of our city's dankly sustaining humours.