Noon (9 page)

In the first few days of my arrival, I set myself an iron-cast routine of reading and exercise. I ate little, drank little and worked hard. I felt at the end of the day mentally and physically
fatigued, but full of piety, as if nothing was more important than this private enrichment. But it had not been in place two weeks, my new routine, when Kalyan broke into it with news of the
missing laptops.

He returned some moments later with the security guards wearing uniforms in two shades of blue. They were burly men with thick stubble and lidded eyes. They filled the little landing with their
size and smell, sweat and sleep mingled together. And there was something unresponsive about them. They knew nothing; they had seen nothing; they heard nothing. Sati, leaving the property the night
before with large bags, was the only information they had. I warned them that if the laptops were not found they would all lose their jobs. They nodded gravely but seemed unperturbed. I sent them
to search the premises and servants’ quarters. Then I turned to Kalyan and fixed my gaze on him. He returned my stare with a look of vacancy and exaggerated innocence.

‘Go and search the house,’ I barked, ‘and see if anything else is missing.’

Next I called Sati. The Telegu film song he had set as his caller ringtone, with its mournful rising and falling rhythms, played through many cycles. My mind was quick to interpret the delay as
proof of guilt. One missed call in changed circumstances, and that too, at 6.30 a.m. on a man’s day off, was enough to erase a decade of trust.

But the call was not missed. Sati answered just before it rung off. And this raised other suspicions: Why was he awake at this hour? I had given him the day off. Why this readiness to answer the
phone?

He listened gloomily to my account of what had happened. I mentioned his unchecked bag but he made no reply, saying simply that he was on his way. Had he considered it beneath him to defend
himself? I went back into the study and called my mother.

That was when, timed with Kalyan re-entering the room, she said, ‘. . . Have you checked to see if anything else is missing, the silver, the safe . . . ?’

I was about to ask Kalyan about the safe, when using an English word, he pre-empted me: ‘Baba, that box of madam’s that she keeps in her cupboard, has she, by any chance, taken it
with her?’

‘You mean the safe, Kalyan?’ I said, offering the Hindi tajori. ‘It’s fifty kilos. Not the sort of thing one carries around.’

Still on the phone with my mother, I said, ‘Why?’

‘It’s not there,’ he said, now with real dread.

I looked hard at him. That lengthy formulation, the silly pretence of not knowing the Hindi word for safe, when it was a famous word from the movies, and the absurd suggestion that my mother
would take a fifty kilo safe with her to Calcutta – on what level exactly was this stupidity operating? He could not have expected me to believe the surface stupidity. But did he perhaps
imagine that I would think that only someone truly very stupid would try to fool me in this way? Would I then be convinced of a deeper stupidity within him? Was I? Or did I believe that someone not
in fact so stupid was making me lose myself in these double considerations? And then there was this business of him having discovered the safe’s absence, unprompted, within seconds of my
telling him to search the house.

Its disappearance meant many things at once: for one it was no longer a small theft; and two, Sati was no longer a suspect, not at least for having left the night before with a bag. He could
have concealed two laptops in a bag, not a safe. Because of the weight of the safe it meant also that more than one person would have had to be present, which suggested planning. And since the
thief seemed to have known where he was going, it suggested an inside man; most alarmingly for me, it meant the thieves had walked past my unlocked bedroom door. Their footsteps would have been
heavy, I could have woken easily and if I had . . . But there was something else: an inside job meant the thieves would have known I was home. And as both my mother and I were away a lot, and the
thieves would have had many opportunities to enter the house when no one was home, it not only meant that they knew I was home, they wanted me home.

‘It’s Kalyan for sure!’ my mother said. ‘How could he have known it was gone? I only just mentioned it to you. If anything, he should have been looking to see if the
silver was there. He ought not even to have known about the safe. I’ve had my suspicions about him for a while. And he’s a fool so he would give himself away like this.’

To understand her attitude, as well as the deeper tensions that would reveal themselves, it is important to say something about Kalyan’s and my mother’s relationship. It gives a view
into the kind of half-humanity we were all living by, the small kindnesses, the resulting expectations, and now, the great disappointment and distrust.

The trouble between my mother and Kalyan began when Kalyan’s little son broke his arm some six months before. It had happened in their village in Pauri Garhwal, in the mountainous state of
Uttarakhand, and the village doctor who set the arm had set it badly. It began to heal crookedly and the boy was in danger of never having full use of it again. That was when Kalyan, without
informing my mother, brought the boy down to Delhi. He showed him to a few doctors in the suburb of Najafgarh, close to our house, who told him that the boy’s arm would have to be reset. And
it would be expensive. It was at that stage that Kalyan approached my mother with a request for money. She, more irritated by the substandard medical treatment the boy had received than by the
request, got Robin on the job. Robin was the highly efficient factotum – presently on his way to Steeple Hall – who worked in Sethia Coal. The boy was taken to Max Clinic, a place of
cemented car parks, lush gardens and glittering green glass. And it was there, among air-conditioned pharmacies, abstract art and uniformed staff gliding smoothly over a chequered floor, that I met
him for the first time.

He was swimming in the hospital’s green oversized frock, and playing happily with the reclining function on the bed. He had bright black eyes full of mischief and a twinkling smile. When
the doctors would give him an injection, he would dare them to give him another. They said that they had never seen a child as fearless as him. With time, his arm healed, speeded along by the
incentive of a red truck my mother had promised him. On full recovery he moved in with his mother to Steeple Hall. I would see him in the evenings that followed, pedalling about on his red truck,
yelling ‘Namaste!’ and precariously bringing his palms together in greeting.

Some months later he started school in Delhi and was joined by his sisters. My mother at first welcomed the family’s arrival, feeling that they would be a grounding influence on Kalyan.
But no more than a few months after they arrived, she began to feel that the opposite was true. Kalyan became careless about his work; the quality of his cooking declined; his expenses soared; one
month alone his rations rose to thirty thousand rupees, almost double what she paid in Calcutta. (And this in a house that was empty for most of the month!) His quarters, big spacious rooms, he
kept in squalor, allowing dirt to encrust and that sweet musty servants’ smell, here infused with stale cigarettes, there with unwashed bedclothes, to pervade the place. Running alongside
this visible decline were my mother’s disappointed expectations of the relationship, which were like a denial of the realities of domestic servitude in India: a fond feeling that it need not
be different from its incarnations in the West; that they were not really servants, as we knew them, but staff or, better still, ‘help’.

But they were servants; and, by the time the theft occurred, Kalyan had been told to move his family off the property. He had looked around in the neighbourhood but soon despaired at seeing that
the accommodation was small, unhygienic and often without electricity. ‘Now he’s finding out,’ my mother would say. The night before the theft, Kalyan had brought his family back
to Delhi. He housed them secretly in his quarter, despite my mother’s clear instructions not to; and it was well known that even without this latest transgression Kalyan had been in danger of
losing his job.

I defended him now for reasons I was barely conscious of. Was it his physical nearness to me? Did I want to think of the thief as someone living at a remove from me, and not
the person who moments ago had been the first to enter my room? Or was it my belief in his talent as a cook that had led me to form an idea of his goodness as a man? Perhaps. For truly he was the
most natural cook I ever met. In his hands, the ingredients of a recipe, like colours in the hands of a skilled painter, would run to meet one another. Just the day before I had watched him work on
a recipe for Zack’s gazpacho. One could almost hear his mind sift through each ingredient. And though some, like extra virgin olive oil, were new to him, he arrived instinctively at the right
idea of proportion. He’d never seen or tasted gazpacho, but just from looking at it he was able to tell that the oil had fallen short; and with no prompting from me, added two fingers more.
Then tasting it, he guessed the last two ingredients: a spoonful of salt, and a splash of non-balsamic vinegar. Watching him, I had a thought that was like a forerunner of what was to come: it
would have been different elsewhere. In another country, with another idea of human possibility, Kalyan would have been a different man.

But defending him to my mother now, it was irritating to see him run through a charade of opening and shutting cabinets under the television set, which we both knew contained nothing but old VHS
tapes and yellowing legal papers.

‘Stop it,’ I snapped, ‘would the thieves have stolen the safe and laptop only to hide them in those cupboards?’

My mother chuckled down the line.

‘No,’ he said, looking up, ‘I was just checking to see if anything else was missing.’

‘Well, don’t check there. There’s nothing of value there. Check to see if the silver is still here.’

He went off.

I asked my mother what had been in the safe.

‘Well fortunately,’ she said, ‘less than what was there a few weeks ago when your cousin was getting married. If they had taken it then, it would have been mega. More than one
C worth. But because I had just brought most of it to Cal for appraisal there was only a few lakhs of stuff in there: a gold chain, a pair of solitaires, two Bulgari tops, that Bulgari ring I used
to wear, you know the one with yellow and blue topazes. And a few old things your nani grudgingly gave me, perhaps the only things to survive our poor days in London.’

I listened and after a pause said, ‘Now what?’

‘Now we wait. Robin’s on his way. He says we have to make a police case. In the meantime, why don’t you try speaking
to Kalyan. Explain to him that if he fesses up now, there’ll be less trouble. He’ll have to go of course – they may all have to – but there’ll be less trouble with the
police. Once it’s in their hands they’re in charge.’

Robin, the Sethia Coal factotum, was a slim man with a placid, youthful face and a thatched head of hair, whitening at the roots. He had a grave, slightly furtive manner, which
came, I felt, from forever operating beyond the system. In his whispered, persuasive way, he had gained airport access equal only to that of the country’s two or three most powerful fix-it
men; he could arrange airline tickets when flights were twice and three times overbooked; and, on one occasion, when Amit Sethia’s sister was in hospital, in need of blood, and even the
city’s blood banks were at a loss as to how they would find it, Robin organized a donation campaign via text message, supplying two and three times as much blood as her veins could take.
‘Bas, nothing,’ he said self-effacingly, when once I asked him what the secret to his influence was. ‘I keep good relations with everybody. I try figuring out what each man wants
– some want money, some a favour in return, some just want to speak to an honest, straightforward guy – and I adapt myself accordingly.’ It was in this ability to be every man, of
which the ability to look like every man was just an expression, that his true genius lay. He was the most bendable unbending man I ever knew!

His arrival at Steeple Hall made real the morning’s theft. The safe and laptops, which had only been missing up to that point, became stolen items within seconds of his entry on the scene.
And attaching to these stolen things were suspects, theories, points of entry, CCTV cameras and police on the way.

He stood outside, in a violet shirt and jeans, a blue tooth device in his ear, tensely surveying the scene. The property’s pink buildings, blue and white awnings and its pruned springy
hedges were reflected in the silver of his sunglasses. Sati had also just driven in on his moped; Kalyan had returned from searching the house, claiming nothing else was missing; and the security
had finished searching the servants’ quarters.

In this unprofitably altered environment, with the threat of police now at hand, the heat and dazzle of the July day ascendant, Robin introduced a new hope. He telephoned the property’s
recently hired manager and told him to come quickly to unlock his office so that we could check the camera footage from the night before. The cameras! I had forgotten about them.

Kalyan, in the meantime, recounted his version of the morning’s events, stopping between questions to take audible gulps of air. He had come in by the front door at 5.30 a.m. He was
surprised to find it slightly ajar, but then seeing everything else in the house in its correct place, he thought nothing of it, thought perhaps that I might have left the door open while letting
out Oscar (the house dog) the night before. Then Kalyan said he went into the kitchen, prepared the tea tray and brought it up to my room. Afterwards, he had gone downstairs and begun to dust in my
mother’s study . . .

‘Dusting at five-thirty . . . ?’ Robin asked and looked at me.

‘Six,’ Kalyan asserted with a loud breath.

‘Six,’ Robin repeated. ‘Dusting at six?’