And now, just when she had finally got her alone, here was this odd-looking man in the cap and the goatee.
Urmila considered making a more forceful interruption and then decided against it. She was still a little unsure of herself with Sonali: in fact it hadn't been at all easy to go up to her office today, without an invitation.
Urmila had been working at Calcutta since college, three years ago. She prided herself on dealing with hard news, on being the only woman on the reporting desk. She no longer thought anything of storming into the Home Secretary's office in Writer's Building, or of asking pointed questions at the Chief Minister's press conferences. But when it came to Sonali Das she found herself becoming unaccustomedly shy and tongue-tied. Sonali was such a presence in the city; the kind of person you read about in film magazines and newspaper gossip columns; whose name you grew used to hearing on the lips of your aunts and cousins, pronounced with equal measures of censoriousness and admiration, envy and outrage. She was one of those people whom everyone talked about without quite knowing why.
In part, her fame was due to her late mother, a famous stage actress from the forties and fifties. But Sonali had acted in a couple of Bombay films herself while still in her teens. The first one created a sensation, because it wasn't the usual song-and-dance affair. But then, just when she looked set for a big career, she left Bombay and came back to Calcutta. A few years later, she published a wonderful little memoir, funny, but also wistful, even sad. It was mainly about her mother, but also partly about her own childhood – about her mother's friends in the literary world, about the old studios in Tollygunge and Bombay, about accompanying her mother when she acted with jatra companies that travelled the countryside staging vast historical melodramas. A radical young director turned the book into a play; the play, in turn, was filmed, to much acclaim from critics and film societies. From then on, Sonali Das was permanently famous, even though she never did anything else – or at least not until she agreed to join Calcutta , at the owner's special request, to look after the women's supplement.
Urmila was intrigued to hear of Sonali's appointment at the magazine, but she hadn't for a moment imagined that they would become friends. And then one day she found herself standing beside Sonali in the lift. She recognized her instantly, even though she'd only set eyes on her once before, years ago. She was much changed, but Urmila decided at once that the changes were all for the better: that white streak in her hair, for instance – she was right to let it show. It suited her, marked her out.
After the first quick glance, Urmila kept her eyes carefully on the lift door, determined not to stare. But before she knew it Sonali was talking to her. Within minutes they were sitting in the magazine's grimy little canteen, drinking tea and chatting.
Urmila had broken her watch strap that morning, while struggling to keep her footing on a crowded minibus. She felt foolish mentioning it: what possible interest could someone like Sonali Das have in a broken watch strap? But far from being bored, Sonali proved to be very usefuclass="underline" she told her about a stall near Metro Cinema where you could get your watch strap fixed for a couple of rupees. Urmila was astonished that she should know about something like that.
And now, in the same indiscriminately helpful way, Sonali was telling the stranger with the goatee that the Vice-President had come all the way from Delhi to give Phulboni his award.
Urmila could tell that the only way they were ever going to get rid of the man was by going into the auditorium. 'Come on, Sonali-di,' she said, jogging her arm. 'Let's go, or we'll miss everything.'
Sonali took a last, long drag on the cigarette and stuck the glowing tip into a sand-filled ashtray. 'I'm afraid we have to go now,' she said flashing Murugan a smile. 'My friend here has work to do.'
Urmila led the way to a door and pushed it open. The auditorium was packed: waves of heads rippled away towards the brilliantly floodlit stage, where a tall, whitehaired man was standing at a lectern, wearing a plain white shirt and an old fashioned, high-waisted pair of trousers of a faded military green. The spotlights above had cast long shadows over his craggy face, but there was no mistaking the dark, glittering eyes beneath the jutting brow. Urmila froze: she had heard so much about him, read so much he had written, but she had never set eyes on him before, not in the flesh.
She took a hesitant step along the darkened aisle. Absently she noted that the Vice-President was swaying sleepily on stage, behind Phulboni.
The writer was gripping the edge of the lectern, leaning forward, speaking in a low, rasping voice. 'The silence of the city,' he said, 'has sustained me through all my years of writing: kept me alive in the hope that it would claim me too before my ink ran dry. For more years than I can count I have wandered the darkness of these streets, searching for the unseen presence that reigns over this silence, striving to be taken in, begging to be taken across before my time runs out. The time of the crossing is at hand, I know, and that is why I am here now, standing in front of you: to beg – to appeal to the mistress of this silence, that most secret of deities, to give me what she has so long denied: to show herself to me… '
Urrnila cast a glance over her shoulder, down the aisle. She noticed that Murugan had followed close behind and was standing at her side, trying to push his way into the auditorium. An usher walked up, torch in hand. He glanced at Sonali's press tag and then at Urmila's and waved them through. Walking down the darkened aisle Urmila looked back again. She was relieved to see that the usher was leading Murugan firmly out of the auditorium.
On the stage there was a minor commotion: the VicePresident's drowsily nodding head had knocked against the back of his chair.
Chapter 7
SUMMONING a dedicated Dakala-class courier signal Antar sent off a message to the Council's headquarters to let them know he had found the ID card of a LifeWatch employee missing since August 21 1995. Then he settled back in his chair and began to browse through the file that Ava had fetched from the Council archives. They'd want it back in an hour or so, and he knew he ought to go through it, just in case headquarters wanted him to do any followup work. From the look of it he estimated it would take him twenty minutes or so – leaving him just enough time for a walk to Penn Station before his dinner appointment with Tara.
In a few minutes he discovered that the file consisted largely of notices and newspaper clippings that had appeared at the time of L. Murugan's 'disappearance'. For the most part they merely reproduced the gossip that had circulated in the office. At the time, Antar remembered, everyone had assumed that 'disappearance' was just a euphemism for suicide.
Some of the clippings referred to the obviously desultory search that had been launched by the Indian police immediately after the 'disappearance': it wasn't hard to see that they, no less than Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch, had decided on a euphemistic use of the word.
It was the last item in the file that gave Antar pause. It was an article from an unexpected source, LifeWatch's internal newsletter. The piece had the reminiscent, quietly respectful tone of an obituary although the writer was careful to describe Murugan as 'missing' rather than 'dead'. It began on the customary anecdotal note, referring to him as 'Morgan' – 'the name by which his friends knew him'. It described him as a 'cocky little rooster of a man'; it talked, not without fondness, of his combativeness, of how he could never resist an argument, of his apparently unstoppable fluency; of the many contributions he had made as LifeWatch's principal archivist. It touched on his 'global' childhood spent wandering between the world's capitals with his technocrat father and spoke briefly of his love of Hollywood B-movies and old American TV serials – 'the only constant, as for so many, in a peripatetic, internationalized coming-of-age'.