Baby Chullu senses his mother’s unease. He starts fussing. She reaches an arm over her shoulder to stroke his neck. He quiets down.
I look at Rekha. She’s stopped eating. She looks at her mother, then at the two of us. She senses something’s wrong, but I don’t know how much of what we’re saying she understands.
One of the main reasons I sent Malik to Jaipur was to keep him from falling in with traffickers. Carrying illegal goods tempts many who have heard that there’s good money to be made. I’d worried Malik might try trafficking guns, given that a war was on up north. With his enterprising instincts, he might have thought himself too clever to be caught despite the risks. But gold smuggling hadn’t even been on my radar.
Silently, I offer thanks to Manu and Kanta for agreeing to give Malik a home, away from all these temptations.
Now I squat next to Nimmi. “How would they—the smugglers—find your brother’s home? Your tribe is always on the move.”
“We are until we reach our summer destination. All the families have huts up there. Dev’s and mine is next to Vinay’s, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear another family has since moved in.” She reaches around her neck to stroke Chullu again. She must be remembering her husband and the life they had together with their tribe.
With renewed fervor, Nimmi begins rolling the bundle on the floor.
“You really plan to leave tonight? And take the sheep?”
Nimmi says nothing.
I look at Rekha, her eyes large, unblinking. “What about the children?”
Nimmi raises an eyebrow. “We’ve always traveled the mountains with our children.”
“And Malik?” I think about the letters I’ll receive from him addressed to her. How much he wants to say to her. How much he doesn’t say because he knows I’ll be the one to read it to her.
Her hands hover over the quilt for a second. “He’s not here,” she says. Then she cinches the bedroll with jute.
I look helplessly at Jay, who seems to be as lost as I am about what to do. I know that Nimmi shouldn’t go alone, with her children and the sheep, to find her brother. It’s too dangerous. If any one of them falls ill, is injured or encounters bandits, there’ll be no one there to help.
Now Jay squats beside us. “Wait until the morning, Nimmi. Please. Let us think about this, make a plan together.”
Nimmi flashes her dark eyes at him. “You won’t go to the police?”
He shakes his head. He and I had already talked about this. The police would be inclined to punish and jail a poor shepherd serving as nothing more than a courier. Or they might want the precious metal for themselves and decide Nimmi knows more than she does, in which case, they might threaten her life. When it comes to smuggling contraband goods, it’s hard to know whom to trust—even among the police, who are supposed to control the trafficking.
Nimmi looks at her daughter, who has wandered over to the sheep and is petting the animal’s head. Without meeting our eyes, Nimmi nods.
Jay and I breathe a collective sigh.
Jay rises and goes to the sheep. He smiles at Rekha. “Can I pet her, too?” he asks.
She whispers in the way small children do—loud enough for all of us to hear. “Her name is Neela.”
Gently, Jay lifts the sheep’s woolly pelt and inspects the wound. “Hello, Neela,” he says. He turns to look at Nimmi. “You did a good job. The wound will heal and she’ll be fine. I’m thinking maybe we could use a veterinarian in Shimla.”
The look of puzzlement on Nimmi’s face makes him smile.
“Animal doctor,” he says. “We need one.”
* * *
But in the morning, Nimmi does not show up for work. I go directly to her lodging. No one’s there. The children, the sheep, the bolster and the bedroll—gone.
9
MALIK
Jaipur
I’m at my desk just outside Hakeem’s office, admiring the new red Ford Maverick in the latest issue of LIFE magazine (“The first car of the ’70s at 1960 prices!”), when a ledger lands on top of it, barely missing the glass of chai on my desk.
“Arré!” I yell. When I look up, I see Hakeem standing on the other side of my desk. He’s glowering.
He taps his stubby index finger on the ledger several times. “You made a mistake. Yes!” He is triumphant.
I turn the ledger around so I can read the spine: Purchasing 1969.
Hakeem strokes both sides of his mustache with his finger. “Tell me, Abbas. C-M-T. What does it stand for?”
“Cement,” I say.
“And B-R-K?”
“Brick.”
Hakeem clears his throat. “Correct. So why would you have switched those two figures in the ledger?”
I’m still taking this in when he opens the ledger, then flips back a few pages. “See here? C-M-T? Yes? And here? B-R-K? Yes?”
I nod.
“The sum for bricks and the sum for cement used for the Royal Jewel Cinema is the opposite of what it should be. You have transposed the two.”
I look again at the columns. “But, Hakeem Sahib, I double-checked the bills against the ledger.”
He flicks his mustache with his finger. “Check them again. Sloppy accounting will not be tolerated here.”
“Yes,” I say, with a straight face, eliciting another cold glance from the little man.
When he goes back to his office, I look at the numbers in the ledger. I can see his point. There should have been a lot of cement used and very little brick for a project of this size. I’ve learned that much from the engineers who work for Manu. Manu himself has taken me to different building sites (ignoring the disapproving glare of Hakeem) to teach me about materials and methods employed for different parts of a building.
I’m aware Hakeem resents my presence in his little kingdom. He might think I’ve been hired to take his place. For all that, I can’t believe that he would stoop to jiggering the books to get me into trouble.
I turn the pages of the ledger slowly to see how much has been spent on the cinema house project since the beginning of the year. I add the totals up; the sums surprise me. The amount Singh-Sharma Construction has spent on cement is three times the sum the firm has spent on bricks. So why would the latest invoices show the opposite?
I’m puzzling over this when Hakeem comes out of his office, locks the door behind him and leaves for his lunch hour, dangling his tiffin in one hand, an Agatha Christie novel in the other. Hakeem is passionate about his murder mysteries.