had had the feeling then—from the too familiar, too friendly clerk—that he had been overdoing the trips to the post office in Raja’s scooter and had been making himself too noticeable there as the man who got letters from Germany. Until then he had thought of the poste restante as quite safe; very few people even knew of the facility. But now he had a feeling of foreboding. He examined all the dangers that might be connected with the poste restante; he dismissed them all. But the foreboding remained. He thought, “This is because of Raja. This is how a bad death lays a curse on us.”
The railway workers’ colony was an old settlement, from the 1940s perhaps, of flat-roofed two-roomed and three-roomed concrete houses set down tightly together in dirt roads without sanitation. It might have been presented at the time as a work of social conscience, a way of doing low-cost housing, and it might just about have looked passable in the idealising fine line (and fine lettering) of the architect’s elevation. Thirty-five years on, the thing created was awful. Concrete had grown dingy, black for two or three feet above ground; window frames and doors had been partially eaten away. There were no trees, no gardens, only in some houses little hanging pots of basil, an herb associated with religion and used in some religious rites. There were no sitting areas or playing areas or washing areas or clothes-drying areas; and what had once been clean and straight and bare in the architect’s drawing was now full of confused lines, electric wires thick and thin dipping from one leaning pole to the next, and the confusion was fully peopled: people compelled here by their houses to live out of doors in all seasons; as though you could do anything with people here, give them anything to live in, fit them in anywhere.
The safe house was in one of the back streets. It seemed perfect cover.
Bhoj Narayan said, “Stay about a hundred feet behind me.”
And Willie dawdled, his heels slipping off the smooth leather of his village sandals and trailing on the dirt of the street.
Some scrawny boys were playing a rough kind of cricket with a very dirty tennis ball, a bat improvised from the central rib of a coconut branch, and a box for a wicket. Willie saw four or five balls bowled: there was no style or true knowledge of the game.
Willie caught up with Bhoj Narayan at the house.
Bhoj Narayan said, “There’s no one there.”
They went around to the back. Bhoj Narayan banged on the flimsy door, which was rotten at the bottom where rain had splashed on it for many seasons. It would have been easy to kick it in. But sharp, acrid voices from three houses at the back called out to them: women and men sitting in the narrow shadow of their houses.
Bhoj Narayan said, “I am looking for my brother-in-law. His father is in hospital.”
A wretchedly thin woman in a green sari that showed up all her bones said, “There’s no one there. Some people came for him one morning and he went away with them.”
Bhoj Narayan asked, “When was that?”
The woman said, “Two weeks ago. Three weeks.”
Bhoj Narayan said under his breath to Willie, “I think we should get out of here.” To the woman he said, “We have to take the message to other relatives.”
They walked back through the parody of the cricket game.
Bhoj Narayan said, “We are still paying for Raja. Everybody he got to know with us is compromised. I let my guard down, I liked him so much. We have to give up this town. We are being watched even as we walk here.”
Willie said, “I don’t think it was Raja. It might have been Raja’s brother, and he didn’t really know what he was doing.”
“Raja or Raja’s brother, we ’ve taken a bad knock. We ’ve lost a year’s work. Lakhs of rupees in weapons. We were building up a squad here. Heaven knows what has happened in other sectors.”
They walked away from the railway colony to the older town.
Willie said, “I would like to go to the post office. There might be a letter from my sister. And since we are not coming back here this might be my last chance for a while to hear from her.”
The post office was a small, much-decorated British-built stone building. It had ochre or magnolia walls edged with raised masonry painted red; it had deep, low