‘Panda Victor. What is your E.T.A.?’
Driving the panda, Toby gave Loach a sour glance, nodding that Loach should answer the call.
Loach buttoned the car radio. ‘We’ll be there in a couple o’ minutes. Over.’
‘A couple o’ minutes?’ jeered Sheila’s voice from the radio. ‘You said that ten minutes ago. What you got in your tank – a tortoise? Our complainant is getting very stroppy, chaps.’
Toby wrenched the gears in a misguided effort to dodge the traffic and get there faster than humanly possible.
Even though her voice was coming through the radio, it was clear she was speaking in a confidential tone. ‘Oh, by the way, Loach. I tried to raise Dutrow, but no luck so far.’
As if he didn’t have enough to worry about without trying to go outside the proper channels to get a message to Detective Inspector Dutrow from a prostitute. Avoiding Toby, he stared out through the windscreen at the dark road ahead, wondering at his own willingness to travel to the ends of the earth to lend a hand to someone who had nearly chewed his thumb off of it.
Time had stopped. Anjali worried not only that the antiquated ritual of two families negotiating her future would never end, but that their great expectations were to make this merely the prelude to an eternity of such occasions. She could not help but study the thin young man they had chosen to be her husband, and her lover, trying to imagine a lifetime of intimacy with this stranger. Did he ever stop sniffing, even when asleep? She noticed that he had reduced the Kleenex to confetti, prompting her to venture a question during the next inevitable lull in the conversation.
‘Speaking about health … Does your son have an allergy perhaps?’
A deathly silence permeated the sitting room crowded with otherwise supposedly living persons. Her intended husband’s father did not respond to the question – perhaps pretending that no one had heard it, and therefore it had not been spoken – and instead pressed on with unyielding determination, staring doggedly at Uncle Ram.
‘A substantial dowry was mentioned, I believe.’
Anjali feigned innocence as well, though at an awkward moment. ‘I only ask in case there is something in the room which may be affecting his sinuses.’
Her interruption made it somewhat more difficult for everyone to ignore her. Nonetheless, Uncle Ram struggled to control his natural emotions and maintain his concentration as well as respect, and follow the age-old custom to the degree possible in a decaying modern society where unruly children didn’t know their place.
‘We are not a poor family, but neither are we rich,’ Ram responded evenly, attempting a return to diplomacy.
Again Anjali interrupted, her mind obviously in another world. ‘Of course, he could be allergic to me. And that would certainly pose a problem for our future happiness.’
Her intended husband’s expression changed from disoriented to dumbfounded, although the sniffs continued unabated. The remaining members of his family were struck dumb as well, except for his father. Manfully shouldering his burden in the face of unanticipated opposition, he ploughed on once more.
‘My son has a good job with good prospects.’
‘Doing what?’ Anjali asked, seeing Uncle Ram bridle out of the corner of her eye. ‘Am I not allowed to ask?’
Sanjay giggled behind his hand, enjoying her every calculated blunder. Meanwhile, the mystified relatives of her intended husband were becoming restive.
Uncle Ram cleared his throat to restore order, both internal and external. ‘A good job with good prospects is … very good indeed … And no doubt he is a good worker?’
The father nodded humbly and proudly. ‘My son works in a supermarket.’
‘Not in the Delicatessen, I hope,’ Anjali remarked more to herself than the assembled witnesses.
‘He earns nearly eight thousand pounds,’ the father boasted.
She nodded as though impressed. ‘Really. Let me think.’ Her eyes rolled upward, searching her memory. ‘What do I get for my job, Uncle Ram? Do you remember?’
Uncle Ram burrowed deeper into his chair.
‘Oh, yes,’ she answered herself. ‘Twelve thousand last year, I think it was.’
That was the final blow. A grim hush descended upon them all, perhaps out of respect for the dead. With quiet reserve, the now-unintended groom’s father addressed Ram in a formal manner, cold as a cadaver. ‘I think your niece makes fun of me and my son.’ When he arose from Uncle Ram’s chair, his entire family stood up, including the former groom, followed by all of Anjali’s aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews.
‘She is too wise, perhaps … too old … for my son, I am thinking. My son needs a more … traditional girl, you understand.’
Mute, speechless for perhaps the first time in his life, Ram could do nothing but watch the father, his sniffing son and the rest of his family slowly depart from the sitting room – and from Anjali’s life forever – their contemptuous noses in the air. He paced to and fro, marshalling his thoughts among the members of his own family milling about, until the ill-fated groom’s family was gone. The sight of his heartbroken sister, her eyes about to dissolve into tears, brought him to a halt. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and stared at Anjali as if she’d turned green.
‘Look at your mother. My sister was once a beautiful woman. Now see the lines on her face. Every one has been placed there by you, her ungrateful daughter.’ Frustrated to tears and anger himself, he tried to appeal to her one last time with his words. ‘How can I make you understand?’ he pleaded with her. ‘You are twenty-five years old. You need a life-partner!’
‘And be the slave to a stove? Have a husband tell me how much of my own money I should give to the Temple?’
There was so much she didn’t know. He tried to reason with her, shifting his strategy hoping he might catch more flies with honey than vinegar. ‘Anjali? Marriage is like a tray of candies – sweet!’
She scoffed. ‘The kind that gives you indigestion.’
At the end of her endurance, Anjali’s mother burst into sobs. Watching her grief, Uncle Ram and the others consoling her, Anjali didn’t know how she could live her own life without bringing disharmony and disappointment to theirs … except for Sanjay, amused by her embarrassment, who seemed to enjoy her in the role of family misfit for all seasons.
The panda was parked on a well-to-do suburban street in front of a posh house where Toby and Loach waited at the door. Toby decided to ring the doorbell again, but before he could the door was flung open by a diminutive gentleman, apparently the houseowner, a short barrel of spleen.
‘Well, about high bloody time!’ The houseowner jerked his thumb toward the equally posh residence next door. ‘It’s been like World War Three in there.’
‘Can we come in, sir?’ Toby asked politely.
