She fought her eyes open, scraping at them with her nails, and darted across. It was Chunni, kneeling on the ground, tearing at her hair and screaming hysterically, as though she wanted to rip her lungs apart. Zindi crouched low and clutched at Chunni’s hand. She caught a bleary glimpse of Karthamma lying beside Chunni and she snatched at her hand, too, and pulled, crying: Come on, quick. But Chunni slapped her hand away, and before Zindi could stop her she had struggled to her feet and wandered off, screaming, straight towards the black-uniforms. Then Karthamma’s head rolled limply to one side and Zindi screamed, too, for she saw that Karthamma was dead; that she had fallen on a pickaxe, and that the end of the axe had passed through her back and emerged bloodily from her navel.
Heaving the body away, Zindi turned and threw herself across the road and down the embankment. She rolled to the bottom, her skirts ripped to shreds and splashed with blood. When she managed to push herself up again, she saw three figures, nothing more than shadows, vanishing into the haze. She ran after them and caught up; and together, shielded by the darkness, they hurried towards the inlet and the waiting motor-launch.
And, though she was weeping herself, she comforted them and helped them and she put her arms around their shoulders and held them up, for they stumbled often on that torn beach: it was not long since that the black-uniforms had driven their jeeps across the same sand, leaving it furrowed and sown with salt.
Part III. Tamas: Death
Chapter Twenty. Playing to a Beat
And so it happened one day that Dr Uma Verma came upon an odd little group in a roadside café while she was walking down the sand-blown, dusty length of the Avenue Mohamed Khemisti in the little town of El Oued on the north-eastern edge of the Algerian Sahara.
She was on her way to visit a Berber patient of hers, an elderly Acheche woman who had promised her half a dozen eggs from her own chickens. She was walking very briskly; not because she was in a hurry — her patient had assured her, smiling till the tattoos on her face disappeared into her wrinkles, that there would always be eggs in her house for the ‘Indian doctor’ — but partly because that was how she always did everything. That was one of the first lessons her father had taught her. Often, before he set off for school in the morning, the old man would say to her: If you’re going to do anything, do it as though you meant to finish it, and finish it well besides. That’s what went wrong with this country — nobody ever thought anything worth finishing. Look at those Rajput kings and all those Mughals who sat around in Delhi and began things — just began … She could see him now, old Hem Narain Mathur, masterji, his bespectacled eyes bright in the gaunt hollow of his face, smiling, sucking his teeth, standing as though for a photograph beside the most treasured of his few possessions, his first bookcase — a few old nailed-together planks of wood which he had clung to somehow through all his years of wandering — three shelves which held all the most beloved books of his college years, the very bookcase which now haunted a corner of her drawing-room in El Oued like some patient, dusty ghost waiting for who knew what? And she could see herself watching him, stiff and starched in her school uniform and oiled braid, hurrying him out of the house — It’s time to go now, Ba — out into the almost-Himalayan cool of the Dehra Dun morning; walking hand-in-hand through their gullie, past the Clock Tower, listening to his frayed old cotton shirt and white trousers swishing briskly beside her, trying to keep up with him and wondering why it was that he who walked so briskly and talked so often of finishing — not just beginning — had never finished anything himself.
But there he was, in front of his bookcase again, smiling. She could see his smile clearer than ever now; and today, with the smell of failure already bitter in her nostrils, it stung, for she could see that it was at her that he was smiling, even though his smile was not mocking but melancholy.
And so, with her worries gnawing at her mind anew, Mrs Verma quickened her pace.
Just before leaving her house she had spoken to an acquaintance of hers, an Indian doctor in the hospital in Ghardaia, far to the south-west, deep in the Sahara. He or, rather, his wife was more or less her last hope. All her other Indian acquaintances in various hospitals in Algeria had said no, some rudely, some nicely. The young doctor’s was the last name on her list, and now he had said no, too. She couldn’t really blame him, for Ghardaia was a long way away and in any case she had got such a bad connection that he had barely understood what she was trying to say. At the end of her long explanation he had shouted: You want a young Indian woman? Why? She had begun to explain all over again, but the phone was crackling wildly, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine what he heard, for suddenly he shouted, very angrily: No, we don’t have a maidservant, and if you want one you should go back to India, Mrs Verma, instead of asking for my wife.
Then he had slammed the phone down.
So now, despite that unbelievable stroke of luck three days ago, she was back exactly where she had started. It looked as though it was all over.
Mrs Verma pulled the anchal of her sari tight over her head and walked straight on. She was always careful to keep her head covered when she went out into the streets of El Oued; it seemed appropriately modest somehow in that land of cavernous hoods.
But she was still conspicuous as she walked down the Avenue, not only because so many of her own and her husband’s patients greeted her with deep bows and their hands on their hearts, but also because her sari was brilliantly orange. Otherwise there was nothing at all remarkable about a short, pleasantly plump, honey-complexioned woman in her mid-thirties striding briskly down a dusty avenue in a small town. If there was anything to distinguish her from the thousands of other similar women who were probably doing the same thing in thousands of other small towns around the world, it was something which had no connection with her at all. It was the stark lunar majesty of the immense golden sand-dunes which towered above the avenue.
And so Mrs Verma hurried on down the Avenue Mohamed Khemisti, as strikingly visible as a newly flowered anemone on a beach, walking even faster now, for there was her father again, stooping over his bookcase, smiling, saying in his firm, gentle way: Stop worrying about it; it won’t work. It’s pointless. Can’t you see — the issue is political? Haven’t I told you? It’s the very same mistake that the Rationalists made.
Kulfi, who was sitting next to the window, saw her first. Alu, opposite her, was staring down into a glass of thick mint tea; and Zindi, sitting between them, was testing Boss’s forehead with the back of her hand, trying to decide whether he was running a temperature or not.
Kulfi spotted the orange sari when Mrs Verma was still a long way down the street. Very slowly, as though she were afraid to trust her eyes, her thin, tired face froze, and then suddenly she shot upright on her hard steel chair and struck the tin table-top with her fists.
Zindi looked up at that, and when she saw Kulfi sitting deathly rigid in her chair, gripping the edges of the table, her eyes feverishly bright, a great tide of weariness washed over her. She knew the symptoms; she could hardly not. In those two months she had watched the onset of Kulfi’s attacks of chest pains more than a dozen times. She had always done what she could to help her; but this time, with Boss already ill, in an unknown town in the middle of the desert, with nowhere to spend the day but the sand-dunes, an almost irresistible longing to let go gripped her — a yearning to give up, like them.