There was a wig on it: long curling red hair. Even had two blue hairclips. So what do we do then? Of course we phone the doctor and we say, ‘Sir, you left a wig in your car.’ And the doctor shouts, ‘What wig? What do you take me for? Are you trying to insult me? I have a full head of hair and it’s my own, I’ll come to your workshop and you can pull it if you like and see if it comes off,’ he says, and bangs the phone down, so angry. There is no explanation. None, Diwan Sahib. Correct me if I am wrong, but mysterious are the ways of mankind. I have kept the head in the showroom of the workshop. Maya, you can come and see it if you don’t believe me. What was it doing in the boot? No idea.”
Diwan Sahib said, “Why won’t we believe you? Stranger things than this happened in Surajgarh in my time. Now let me tell you – ”
And Corbett was filed away for another day.
One afternoon, when I came to his lawn with the newspapers, I found Diwan Sahib smoking. I said nothing, but a look passed between us. He took a long, defiant drag and after a pause blew out a lungful of smoke. He tapped his Rolls Royce cigarette case and displayed a neat row of filter tips. If he had been a child he might have stuck his tongue out at me. He had stopped smoking with great difficulty three years earlier. He had sworn then that he was free of the siren call of addiction, and that he would never put himself through stopping again.
I marched into the house and found Veer’s assistant there. He was a limp, shy young man from Dehra Dun, who spent most evenings pacing in the garden murmuring to his wife on a mobile. He was a follower of the Radha Soami sect and cooked his own vegetarian meals, minus even onion and garlic, on a separate gas stove that he had set up on a back veranda. If chicken or fish was cooked in the house, he lit incense sticks by the dozen and his face assumed a rigid expression of martyrdom. He regarded cigarette packets and bottles of gin as objects that had been planted in the house by the Devil in person. He looked horrified when I asked him how Diwan Sahib had laid his hands on cigarettes. “None of us smoke, Maya Mam,” he said. “Some visitor must have left the cigarettes in the house.” They happened to be Diwan Sahib’s old brand too. “What’s a couple of cigarettes after three years?” Diwan Sahib shouted towards us. “Do you think I have no self-control?”
That evening, when I told Ama about the cigarettes, she gave me her all-knowing look and said with a cackle of sarcastic laughter, “Life’s improved for Diwan Sa’ab ever since his nephew came back! So much more to drink, and now cigarettes! The nephew will kill his uncle with trying to make him happy, just you wait and see.” I pretended not to understand what she was implying and busied myself with other work. I did not want her to suppose I was encouraging malice. She had never liked or trusted Veer, and she had told me so in the early days, not thinking he would actually start living at the Light House or that he and I would become friends. She was too politic now to be open about her dislike, but sometimes the temptation was irresistible.
Diwan Sahib lost weight because of eating less and drinking more, and that made him look both younger and frailer. However his eyes, spider-webbed with wrinkles, retained their wicked gleam. One afternoon, a buxom woman from somewhere in East Anglia arrived out of the blue, saying she was writing a love story based on the lives of Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. “It is vital to my project, Sir, that I see the letters I believe to be in your possession. If you allow me a day’s access to the papers, I’m willing to share my royalties with you.” She came in a flowing silk sari that repeatedly slid off her shoulder to bare her cleavage, so that, Diwan Sahib later said, two roads converged in a low silk blouse, and he wished he could have travelled both.
When she met with no success the first day – she had installed herself at the Westview