He sat beside her on the deerskin, and they talked like two people who have always been close to each other. They caught up on the last twenty years—or, rather, he caught up with her; there was nothing he needed to tell her about his years in London. She told him how, after that last scene with him, she had borrowed the fare from Sunil and gone straight back to her parents’ house in Delhi.
“The moment I got there,” she said, “it was as if I’d never been away, never got married, never been to London, never been broke. I did what everyone else did, all the sisters and cousins—went to the club in the evening, played tennis, played bridge, sat on committees to help the poor. Oh, you know your family’s old house next door that was sold? They’d pulled it down and built a block of flats on it. It was sad. Well, everything was sad. Papa got sick and then he died, and just six weeks later Mama died, too. Yes, you know about that. We had to start dividing everything—the furniture and carpets and silver and Mama’s jewelry—and there were such quarrels, you can’t imagine. How can such things happen between brothers and sisters! One day, Roxy and I got into this really awful fight about Mama’s diamond necklace. You remember how fat my sister Roxy always was? Well, she’s ten times fatter now—huge—with a huge face all painted with lipstick and mascara. And when we were tugging at the necklace—she at one end, me at the other, and both of us screaming—I looked into this face of hers and suddenly I thought, my God, that’s me, I’m looking in a mirror. And at the same moment I won the battle and had the necklace in my hand, only now I couldn’t bear even to hold it. I flung it away from me as far as I could, and then I rushed out of the room and out of the house and got into Papa’s old Fiat and drove without stopping—all the way up to Kasauli, you know, to the summer house there. No one had been there for ages, because of the lawsuit about it between Papa and his nephews. Everything inside had been taken away, completely stripped, and in what used to be the dining room there was a dead squirrel, with water dripping on it from a burst pipe. I got back in the Fiat and drove further up, as far as I could go, till I got to the first snow. It was completely silent there and completely bare; there were no birds and nothing growing, nothing at all. The snow sparkled white and the sky sparkled icy blue. The air was so sharp that it was like being inside a crystal. I found a cave in the side of the mountain, and it had icicles festooned around its entrance, as if someone had hung up decorations to welcome me. So I went in.”
That was as far as Farida got in telling her story to Farid. There was a silence, and when he asked, “And then?” she said, “And then I came here.” He never could find the connecting link between the entrance to the cave and this tree where she sat as a saint, with people lining up to see her. Whenever he pressed her for more information, she blushed and glanced down and smiled; she looked exactly the way she had when they were passing from childhood into adolescence and were awakening into new secrets that made him tremble with boldness and her with shyness and shame.
One day, Sunil turned up on the mountain. He came in an air-conditioned limousine driven by a chauffeur. Sunil was wearing a suit of the lightest tropical weight, but this did not prevent him from sweating most disagreeably. Farid felt at a tremendous advantage over him—a feeling that grew as the days passed and Sunil stayed on. For one thing, Sunil never had a private audience with Farida but had to line up with the other pilgrims. Also, the living conditions were not at all what he was used to; instead of occupying a suite in some five-star hotel, he was forced to sleep on a string cot placed beside Farid’s in the whitewashed cell. He could not get used to the plain meals prepared in the ashram kitchens, and when Farid took him to one of the eating stalls in the bazaar he got sick from the kebabs served there. At night he sweated and groaned and suffered tortures from the mosquitoes whining around him, though they never seemed to bother Farid. His air-conditioned limousine stood waiting to take him back down, and the chauffeur grumbled and had to be bribed to stay, but Sunil did not leave. It was almost the way it used to be when they were children and Sunil came to Farida’s birthday parties and stuck on stubbornly even though the other children pricked his balloons and hid his shoes and ate up his chocolate cake.
Of course, it was all for a purpose, a plan, and one night when he couldn’t sleep because of the mosquitoes he woke up Farid and broached it to him.
“She’s wasted up here,” he said.
Farid sat up. “What’s on your mind?” he said.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sunil grumbled. “Instead of sitting under that tree of hers, she could be making a fortune in London. Not to speak of New York.”
“You must be crazy,” Farid said in a shaky voice.
“You’re crazy,” Sunil said. “You and she both. But it’s always the same story with you two. You have absolutely no business sense.”
“Business!” Farid shouted. “What’s she got to do with business! She’s beyond all that now.”
“All right, call it something else then, call it whatever you like. But I’m telling you, she’ll go over big. They’ve never seen anything like her before. There’s money in what she does—money,” he repeated, irritably rubbing his thumb and middle finger together to make his meaning clear.
Sunil settled in. Each day, his car could be seen driving up and down the mountain roads, with Sunil sitting in the back, phlegmatic but confident, picking his teeth. He was setting up everything for Farida’s first public appearances in London; it meant getting a whole organization going, but of course that was the sort of thing he excelled at. He had made an arrangement with the post office in the bazaar to get his international calls through several times a day, and soon a contingent of publicity people arrived—very incongruous Englishmen in Daks slacks and Hush Puppies shoes who moved in on the group under the tree. They shot photographs, made sketches, took the measurements of Farida and the handmaidens, and called everyone “darling” and “angel” in cold, indifferent voices. They did their job and went away. But Sunil stayed on.
Farid sneered at all this, but he was frightened. He knew that Sunil was stupid, but he also knew that the man was capable of pushing and lumbering ahead like an army tank unencumbered by human intelligence. The worst of it was that he seemed to have sold his idea to Farida herself. She was fully persuaded that it was time for a wider, more international audience to be given the benefit of her spirituality, and that Sunil was the man to arrange it. One day when Farid arrived for his own session with her, he found Sunil there before him, sitting on the edge of her deerskin as though he had every right to be there. From then on, he was there every afternoon, and Farid’s blissful tête-à-têtes with Farida were finished. Now the handmaidens no longer slept quietly on the other side of the tree but tripped up and down, primping and preening, studiedly graceful. Farida was different, too. She didn’t lose the serenity that was now an integral part of her personality, like a shawl on a mature and beautiful woman, but she had that small half smile of satisfaction she had always worn when things were going well for her. It made Farid want to slap her. Doesn’t she see, he thought. Doesn’t she know? His anger turned on Sunil, who took no notice of it at all.
Farid stopped going to the tree in the afternoons, and instead began to nap on the cot in his cell. No one seemed to miss him; no message came from Farida to ask where he was. He slept as much as he could. It was the same thing that had happened to him in London, when he didn’t want to get up any more, and day turned into night for him, except that now he was dulled only by despair. He didn’t drink here; he didn’t need to. Now he took walks by moonlight, as he used to walk in the daytime. He climbed up to the same incline as before, from where he could look down on Farida’s tree and the bazaar on one side and a steep slope descending into a ravine on another. He wished it would never be day again.
One night, he went to Farida’s tree, descending very carefully, so that no stone might clatter down and make a noise. Everyone was sleeping—Farida
