THE ARRANGEMENTS is an intricate and subtle exploration of love. A quirky and oddball novel reveals a tender and moving story of characters all looking for something - and hidden under these individual stories is the search for love, in its many guises.
The novel is set in Chennai.

SUSIE/SUSHIMA

I do love America. You know that as well. When I fell in love with your father and stepped foot on American soil, I was doubly enchanted with love. No woman could have been as fortunate as I was. I also love it that everyone calls me ‘Susie’, not ‘Sue-shee-maa’, as I was always once called. ‘Susie’ is so much more me. America absolves our original identities. Mohan becomes ‘Mike’, Ashok becomes ‘Ash’, Bharati ‘Barbra’. We’re freed from the albatross of our past. It’s because I’m an American that I don’t wear ethnic clothes, as you want me to. Yes, yes, I see those exotic Indian women hurrying along the streets in their sarees but that’s not me any more. I don’t know why I can’t make you understand that. I’m not ethnic, as you like to keep saying, I’m an American. I prefer wearing Donna Karan or even jeans than a saree. It type casts me, the saree I mean, while even a pair of jeans lends me an air of mystery and people have to ask where I’m from and I tell them ‘why, New York, of course’, and that always shuts them up.
                    That’s why I’m telling you darling you won’t like India at all. Not one bit. You’ll hate it, I’m warning you. Why? Because you’re an American, like me, and you’re always so fastidious and India is certainly not that, not in the least. It can be a very deceitful place, and most confusing too. You have absolutely no idea how miserably hot it can get there. You won’t just be blackened, you’ll be burned to a crisp. Yes, like the burnt offerings I sometimes make for your dinner, if you have to joke about my opinions. I’m only telling you this for your own sake. If you love me, and you do, don’t you? you won’t even think such thoughts. Put them out of your mind, for my sake darling. There’s nothing there for you.
                    I just don’t know where you got your persistence? Certainly, not from me. I was never persistent; I’ve always been carried along by the currents of my destiny. I know I used to call it karma when you were younger but now everyone’s using that word- it’s become fashionable in New York, like yoga and gurus- so I prefer destiny. There’s little I can tell you. It’s so many, many years since I left that I can’t remember much about that city, so how do you expect me to remember any details? It had wide streets and narrow streets. No, certainly not anything as organised as Manhattan. They ran higgledy-piggledy. Stop laughing, isn’t that an American expression? I’m sure it is. Then what would you call something disorganised? ‘Outasight’? Are you sure? It means something unpleasant? I must write that down immediately. Well, the city’s outasight then, nothing running in a straight line in any direction. No, that’s a lie. In the area where I was born and grew up in the streets ran in straight lines, east-west, north-south. Oh, alright, if you insist, like Manhattan but that was only a tiny part of the city. It was called Georgetown, after one British King or another, I can never remember the numbers after their names. I prefer the American way, George Junior. And the streets were always so crowded with everything that you had to edge down them sideways as there was never enough room to walk properly. I think that’s where I learned to dance so well, hopping over excrement, dodging cows and rickshaws, gliding past carts, jumping heaps of garbage. Yes, I did learn some history when I was in school. It was lust that had conceived Madras, so now you know how that city was born. An East India Company employee, Francis Day, a scoundrel from all accounts, was having an affair with a Portuguese woman in San Thome colony. For his own convenience, he decided this spot on the Coromandel shore was ideal for his company’s trading post, and so the city was begot through the loins of a foreign man and a foreign woman. Yes, well that’s about all I can remember because I was so embarrassed when I learnt how it all came about.             

               It doesn’t say anything about your going to India in your horoscope. One minute, I’ll get it and read it out and see if you find one line which says you’ll be going there. I know I’ve read it out to you before but you always stop up your ears. There’s nothing Indian about believing in horoscopes, so don’t lay that trip on me. Even here there are tarot card readers, horoscope casters, coffee grind readers, tea leave readers, so India doesn’t have a monopoly on such a science. Nearly all my friends read their horoscopes in the magazines and the newspapers, so you can’t say they’re all Indian. Can you? I do believe in pre-destination and that our life is written on our foreheads and in the stars. That’s why I was watching the clock in the delivery room of the hospital so I would know the exact time you were born. Yes, don’t keep laughing, down to the second. Now you’re making fun of me. How can anyone tell the future from someone’s garbage? Garbage is yesterday and it only records that person’s past, especially what he’s eaten and drunk. See, I had your horoscope cast when a prohit was visiting the Queen’s temple two months after you were born. I used to read it to you when you were baby so that it would subconsciously inspire you to greatness. I hoped the predictions of success and good fortune in your horoscope, would guide your footsteps through life, and you would sidestep the mines of misfortune. The prohit predicted all that, if only you’d sit down and listen to it or else read it, if only for my sake. It will inspire you. Well, I went to the prohit only because I heard he was very good. I could have gone to Simon Lucas, who also casts horoscopes and reads palms, on Bleecker Street, but I believe he’s a bit of a fake. Besides, it’s the angle of the moon that’s important.

NICKY/NICK/NIKHIL

             My many names merely reveal the ambiguous nature of my soul. I am neither one – the Nick/Nicky- nor the other, I hover in between uncertain of who I am. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that he always chose the name of his character according to the nature of the person. What would he make of me and my nature? Schizophrenic? Not that I am one, I mean. My mom drives me nuts. I love her but she still drives me nuts. All mothers drive their kid’s nuts at some stage in their lives. All my pals in school thought the same as I did about their moms. Our fathers didn’t drive us nuts, mostly because we never saw them long enough. Mornings, evenings and little league was the most we saw of them. I should be thankful for that. The other way my mom drives me nuts is that she refuses to acknowledge her past. It doesn’t exist for her. It’s vanished into the ether. Like, she will never wear a saree. I’d love to see her in one, she’d look real cool. When I see the Indian women on the streets in their sarees I always turn to look, imagining my mom in one. When I was eight or nine, I caught the Lex subway south to twenty third street. Around there, for a few blocks east and west of twenty third, it’s ethnic Indian. There were cafeteria type places where you could get all kinds of curries and Indian candies. We never ate Indian food at home as my mom said it would smell out the apartment. I wandered around for an hour – into Prasad’s eat-and-takeaway which also sold candies of many colors, Govind’s groceries, which like the Uptown Korean all-night stores sold fresh vegetables but also the air was musty with cardamom, pepper, cloves, ginger, garlic and pickles which tickled my nostrils and made me dream that this was how India smelt in the streets and in the villages, and finally into Lalchand’s saree emporium. In each store they spoke a soothing musical language and gave me different answers to my questions in amused puzzlement – Gujerati, Maharathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali, they said contradicting each other. My billfold was bulging with cash, all of eight dollars of saved pocket money. I was going to buy her a saree and I had spent weeks weighing up the saree against Nintendo games, CDs, software I could do with but my yearning for her outweighed my own selfish needs. In Lalchand’s saree emporium I found a pale, seductive yellow saree, my mom’s favorite color, patterned with green silk mangoes and bordered green and gold. It cost me eighty dollars, all my saved allowance, as I didn’t want to seem a cheapskate for my mom’s present. I gift wrapped it and presented it to her on her birthday. She had blushed and gushed and enveloped me in warm smothering kisses. She splashed it out across her bed and the dull pastel shaded bedroom shrank away from such bold colors, and we both agreed she’d look wonderful in it. My mom was so exotically beautiful that no one would mistake her for an Anglo-Saxon. Her eyes were mesmeric as Saturn’s rings and cut men off at their knees. I waited to see her in my gift but, as the days and months passed, I realised I never would. It remained gift wrapped in her closet. It was only years later that I discovered she did own a saree, hidden away in old suitcase.

            The man my mom calls my father isn’t really my father. He’s my stepfather. Gary, a tall glossy man, snipped out of a Vogue advertisement, has a nose for sin, especially the sin of a narcotic possession. His pulpit was the television screen where, as an interlocutor of some reputation, he railed against drug abuse, among many other things, with the same zeal as 19th century preachers had against masturbation. I never watched his television show and never called him ‘dad’, ‘pop’, ‘father’, always Gary. He always confirmed her tale on how they had met in Bombay and embellished it with a sun setting in the background, lighting up her face with an angel’s glow, the color of her saree, the flowers in her hair. He probably remembered the color of her toe nails too but I never asked. My father died in a car smash, my mother told me when I was old enough to notice the difference between her and the man she married. He was driving to Bangalore when a truck hit him head on, wiping him off the earth. Period. I missed him although we had never ever met. I don’t even know what he looked like. Somewhere between Bombay, Brooklyn, SoHo and the upper eastside, their upwardly mobile trajectory, she had lost a whole album of photographs of back home. Her physical description of him was vague – tall, a full head of hair and ferocious eyes- was the best she could do for me. And no, she hadn’t fallen in love with him, as it had been an arranged marriage and there hadn’t been any time for love to blossom between them. ‘Blossom’ was her vocabulary, not mine. The moment he died she took off for America like a bat out of hell. I wish she had stayed there. So instead of living in that funky Georgetown place where you moved sideways through the streets, and learned to dance, I was raised on the Upper East Side in a pure white ghetto of a co-op on 73rd street between Lex and Park. I felt like a cockroach that had fallen into a milk carton. In the elevator, surrounded by the perfumed women-and if that isn’t air pollution tell me what is- in their Donna Karans, Guccis, Armanis- would peer down at me with my school backpack and wonder what the super’s child was doing riding in their elevator. Sometimes I would say ‘Buenos Dias, senora y senoritas’ and jabber away in Spanish although I didn’t know a fucking word. They would give me space then so I wouldn’t contaminate the air they breathed. The men all wore dark suits in the fall and winter, off whites during summers would not even notice me among the forest of briefcases. In the summers the Hampton’s plague hit the building from the first floor up to the Penthouse where the Lunds lived in their eighteen room Penthouse which I had visited only once and was the equivalent of heaven for every aspirant in the co-op. My best friend in school, Mike Holding, was the first to lose his cherry to sixteen-year-old Linda Lund, a true, beautiful American princess with long blonde hair and innocent blue eyes, when he grabbed her expensive ass in the elevator one day. Mike was built along Nordic lines – tall, blond and a wide grin- told me it was like sinking his dick into an oil well and we both understood what he meant as the Lunds had a whole bunch of stock – a billion dollars I heard- in Texaco, Gulf Oil, Exxon, Hess. The next day, with Mike’s tuition, I timed my grab too and Linda obligingly led me up to the penthouse, through the expensive maze of rooms and corridors and took my cherry in a bedroom overlooking Manhattan out of a south facing window on the thirtieth floor on a clear winter’s day. We lived on the third floor, burrowing our way like moles through perpetual ConEd light. I was the first, and probably the last, dark skinned person Linda laid, more as an experiment than out of sexual pleasure. Thankfully, as Gary actually worked for a living and wasn’t living off GE,GM, GF stockholdings, we only spent a week or two in the Hampton’s. That was as exciting as moving from a high rise co-op to a horizontal co-op with exactly the same neighbours. The only relief was that Mike, who lived on the fifth floor, was also exiled to the Hampton’s. We both agreed it was just a wealthy Gulag and a hundred times more boring than the ones in Russia. At least the Gulags produced Solzyheneitzen. Who did the Hampton’s ever produce?

SUSIE/SUSHIMA
My darling boy, you have absolutely no idea how horrible it is to be a widow in India. I mean I would have had to shave my head, dress all in white, yes like an angel but not to lead an angelic life, not wear any jewellery and mope around the house for the rest of my life. It’s truly worse than death itself and I’m not surprised in the old days the widows threw themselves on their husband’s pyres. No, we didn’t do that in the south so much; it was more a north Indian habit. They do have pretty bad habits, I must say. I was lucky to have met Gary and fallen in love. I was visiting my cousin in Bombay, they call it Mumbai now, godaloneknowswhy. I mean what would happen if New York suddenly became Yorkville or Newsville, just on a whim. I’m certain it’s a whim, just to confuse everyone and my city’s called Chennai, and don’t ask me why. I don’t remember which cousin in Bombay, it was so long ago. It’s not important. Your father (and I wish to god you’d call him that and not Gary, he feels it’s disrespectful) was introduced to me while we were having dinner at the Taj hotel. If anything, that’s a magnificent hotel. It’s probably been knocked down by now. He was a friend of a friend and joined us for dinner. At that time he was working for Newsweek and was such a dashing chap. Okay, guy, man. I think he was doing an article on Indian women and wanted to interview me. So that’s how we met. And when I was widowed, he heard about that and flew down from Delhi to condole me. I learned later he was coming down anyway on an assignment but at that time I was flattered to think he’d flown a thousand odd miles just to see me. As he couldn’t call at our house, we would meet in the tea room of the Connemara hotel. That was a lovely old British hotel, it looked like a stale wedding cake, but it was the in place to be seen in and I doubted any one of my relatives would have set foot in it. I knew my parents would never ever ever ever allow me to marry this tall, handsome white American and that’s why we flew away to New York without telling a soul. They never forgave me, that’s why I’m not in touch.

APU
Iyoooo, iyoooo enh thalanoovadhu. At times, I feel I’m living in an upsidedown world in which everything is wrong. I should not be alive; I have no right to be. This upsidedown feeling becomes more intense in unexpected situations, as if I should not be there. It happened when I passed through the pedestrian gate of the house of the man I was searching for. Behind me, on the other side of the gate, was this American who had hired me to find this man. I was back at the beginning. Unbidden, memory awoke. I never remember the precise day- a Monday, Wednesday? - though it’s in my diary but I never want to look at that day again. It had been Madras hot, hovering around 40 degrees, the height of summer, bathed in perspiration, steam cooked alive, choking on foul air, as I wobbled on my Bajaj scooter through dense traffic to the appointment. And as I had climbed those interminable stairs, I had felt like an Alice in Wonderland, not tumbling down a hole but up into it. I had tried to tumble back down but inexorably kept falling up and up, feeling furtive yet adventurous and about to change my life. This upward hole was an escape from the dreary classrooms, the dusty chalkboards, the blur of faces, like me, marking time in their lives, waiting for something inevitable, a marriage, to rescue them. I walked in, trying to be bold, the receptionist waving me through like a traffic constable into the other office, and the man sitting in the shadows. He had a kindly voice, roughened by smoking, even some whisky in the tone, asking me why I had come. I was answering your advertisement, I told him, and it seemed an interesting position. I didn’t tell him I wanted to escape that destiny which waited for me, and wanted to take a diversion before it claimed me for life.
             ‘Where’s Mr Balraj?’ were the first words the American said, sharp and quick. At least I think that’s what he said but his accent was alien at that moment.
              ‘Unavailable,’ I replied, still on the phone to Coimbatore, trying to trace a missing boy who had failed his tenth standard exams and run away from school in undeserved shame.
               I knew little about this American, four hours late for his appointment, prowling my office. He had called Valli from New York and made the appointment. A New York attorney had referred the agency after they’d found a missing New Jersey girl. I had tracked her down to the Aurobhindo ashram in Pondicherry, immersed in her new found sainthood. Who was he looking for? A woman? I noticed he rubbed the third finger of his left hand with his thumb, something was recently missing from it. He walked straight-backed, as if a military man, and there was lightness in his movements. He was physical, trained to project through body language and kept himself in good condition. There was a faint break in the middle of his nose, though I couldn’t see a scar. He had a couple of days growth, either he was fashionable or he hadn’t shaved on the plane. His clothes were crumpled from his travels and Valli told me had come straight from the airport, full of apology. I smiled to myself when I caught the flicker of his approval for the room. The paintings were my personal selection, so was the décor; though not the pipe rack on my desk or the tan-coloured fedora by the door. Some things need to remain as reminders of the vanished. He glanced towards me, beneath the impatience I sensed an urgency. He’d flown all the way for something that was very personal, to be revealed only to Mr Balraj. Of course, he wasn’t here. Now, it depended on whether he would confide in me or return to his America. The young man my mother was busy arranging for me to meet in the hope I would accept him as a groom was also from America. Would they know each other? I heard that Indians in America congregated together tightly as filings to a magnet. I finished my call and waited for him to tell me his problem, hoping I could help him.
            ‘The cab driver stole my suitcase just now,’ he said, with a lost sigh.
            ‘I am sorry. You should report it to the cops. Not that I’m sure they’ll find.’
Surprisingly, he took this in good nature and smiled. He had the beautiful white, straight-as-a-ruler teeth of all Americans. ‘Cops never do, even in New York.’
I knew he wanted to impress me as he approached my desk. ‘My attorney, Tony Pearson, recommended Mr Balraj.’ He emphasised the ‘Mr’, wanting me to know he still needed to be convinced.
            I laughed. ‘How is Tony? I haven’t seen him for years. He’s a typical New Yorker, drinks dry martinis and has fast hands around women. Is he still divorced?’
           He smiled. ‘Tony’s always divorced.’
           I gave him my visiting card with the office and home phone number. I was expecting his but remembered foreigners didn’t follow the same customs about cards as we did. Everyone has a card, even a bus driver. The little piece of paper reassures us that we exist, and can prove it to strangers.
           I glanced down at my note pad. ‘Figgs isn’t an Indian name.’
          ‘It’s Fig-gis.’
          I waited, his corrected pronunciation didn’t enlighten me on how he had that foreign-sounding name. He wasn’t about to explain further, a true Indian would have given me his life history on how he had acquired his name. He could be a Parsee, maybe a Sardar. They changed their names to suit the climate. Figg-is could have been the anglicised form of Fateh Singh. My cultural curiosity, more than my investigative one, got the better of me.
         ‘Where’s your father from?’ I asked, then I could pin point him to his town or village, his ancestry and even his social standing.
         ‘Connecticut,’ he said blandly, not adding another word, cutting me off from that line of curiosity. It could have meant something in America, an easterner, not a Texan or a Californian, but nothing here.
         ‘And Nicky?’
         ‘It’s Nikhil. In school, everyone changed it to Nicky or Nick. Sometimes to nickel, that’s a five cent coin and I’d even get called five C. Life’s easier if you have an Anglican sounding name in America.’
         Nikhil, I wrote and added, north Indian? Punjabi? He sat in one of the two chairs facing me across the desk, placing his still cooling can down on the polished desktop and removed it an instant later. He rubbed away the damp ring with his shirtsleeve. I smiled, at least he was house trained and slid over a coaster. He opened his shoulder bag, yet still hesitated. I read his thoughts in the frown lines so easily. Was I the right person? Was I any good? Was this going to waste his time, and money? I saw his mind flicking through the possibilities in that hesitation, and waited again for him to decide. I wouldn’t push. He removed a book from his bag, clutched it tightly, then handed it across as if saying farewell to a baby.
          ‘This is an old novel,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for the writer.’
          ‘Georgetown’ by S.K. Naidu. I made a mental note, quite reflexively: Naidu a Telugu name, not Tamilian. The Telugus had come from Andhra in the early 19th century to trade with the British and had first settled in Georgetown. They’d flourished as traders, then landowners and had spread out across the growing city. They had contributed schools, colleges and hospitals to the city. The book was old, there wasn’t a dust jacket, and the cloth binding had faded to a dull green. The edges of the pages had taken on a sickly jaundiced tinge. I opened the book to the imprint page; J.M Dent & Co, London, had published it thirty years ago. Only one imprint. The next page had the simple dedication, ‘To My Parents’, a first novel then. I flicked through the pages, nothing much else about the author though someone, I presumed Mr Figgis, had made notes in the margins and underlined sentences and paragraphs.
         ‘Why do you think S.K. Naidu’s from here?’
          ‘Georgetown’s in Madras and Naidu’s an Indian name.’
          ‘There are Indians in Kenya, South Africa, the West Indies, Fiji. Salman Rushdie and Naipaul live in New York and London and write on India. And there are other Georgetowns in the world. Guyana has one too.’
          ‘In fact, there are twenty-eight Georgetowns in the world. Seventeen of them are in the US, two in Canada, two in Australia and the other seven scattered around the old British colonies.’ He had a good voice, with a slight rasp of exhaustion, except he spoke too quickly. I still strained to understand his clipped American accent.
         ‘I thought the US, Canada and Australia were also old British colonies.’
A smile touched his eyes, and lingered. Some people could smile without smiling. ‘You’re right. Except he describes this city, and the fort by the sea.’
         ‘Have you asked his publisher?’
         ‘I have. They don’t know where he is. They’ve been taken over so many times they don’t even know where they are or who they are.’
I began to read the first page: “She was born in a large house, with an interior courtyard, on a side street in Georgetown.”
         ‘Tony said Mr Balraj was good,’ he said deliberately.
         ‘So am I,’ I smiled at his challenge, remembering to be courteous to customers even if they thought I was incompetent, and closed the book. ‘Why do you want to find him?’
         ‘I’m a theatre director. I adapted that novel for the stage and the New Haven theatre wants to mount it. But I have to get his permission, it’s called a release.’ He took the book back, almost snatched it, from me. ‘Have you read him?’
He sounded innocent, yet I sensed he was really saying: I bet you haven’t read him or even heard of him.
        ‘In high school,’ I said as innocently. ‘I think he’s dead.’
His panic surprised me. It was as if I’d wounded him in some way by using the word ‘dead’. Yet, why should he care? If S.K. Naidu was dead, and no heirs, he could stage his play. Or mount it, or whatever.
        ‘He can’t be,’ he burst out. He saw my reaction and added quickly to cover the panic. ‘I mean he couldn’t be that old. If the book’s thirty years old and he wrote it in his mid-20s, he’d be in his 50s. Or even say he was in his early 30s, now he’ll be in his sixties.’ He hadn’t dispelled my doubt, my stare was unblinking, trying to decipher his reasons. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’
          I made a call, still watching him. He held the book tenderly, he had long, slim fingers and I was reminded of Sarada’s description of Ramesh’s hands. She had told me he played her body as if it were a sitar. I didn’t think Mr Figgis would make a musician, his fingers were restless and fidgety, more a tabla player than a sitarist.
          ‘Raj’ I said into the phone when The Hindu newspaper’s literary editor came on the line. ‘I’m looking for the writer, S.K. Naidu. You have heard of him? Good, tell me if he’s still alive and where I can find him.’ I waited on the line, listening to Raj’s computer keys clicking in the background. When he came back on the line and spoke his few words I hid my disappointment. He always was a useless mutaal, ever since school. ‘He hasn’t heard of S.K. Naidu since that book was published and has no idea whether he’s alive or dead. Or where he could be.’
He had an ‘I-knew-you’d-not-find-him’ look on his face. Doubts swirled like storm clouds in his eyes. Should he wait for M.K. Balraj, a fine detective according to Tony Pearson, or go with me?
         ‘I’ll find him, alive or dead.’ Although I hoped I sounded quite determined I didn’t feel it. We women did have to try harder than men just to be to prove we were equal.
         ‘How much?’
          I hid my grin; he was half convinced, and I’d prove I was good. Once he’d decided, I knew this would be his next question. He was American, his shoulder bag, though slightly worn, looked expensive, he had on a Breitling watch, and his jacket was linen, and that could be costly even in India. It wasn’t that I would be greedy but my other clients in the waiting room could afford only my lowest fees.
‘Five thousand a day, plus daily bata,’ I spoke quickly, the way Balraj had instructed. Don’t give them enough time, never hesitate. Figgis blinked at ‘bata’, and I explained: ‘Expenses’. Would he bargain me down? That would prove without doubts, despite his name and accent, he was an Indian. Everyone who walked into my office demanded a discount, whined, pleaded, cajoled and wept, for it. I always gave it, only because I’d already hiked her price in anticipation. Now, with him, I would settle for half that. No, I’d drop a thousand, in two hundred and fifty rupee stages. I saw him mentally calculating the exchange rate. I could have told him it worked out to one hundred and eleven dollars a day, excessively expensive, if he accepted.
        ‘What does the… bata… include?’
         ‘Petrol, snacks, bribes, mostly bribes, everyone in this city and country have to be bribed.’
         ‘Yeah, I’d heard,’ he allowed a little contempt leak into his voice. ‘Do they give receipts?’ Research, and this was research, was tax deductible with the IRS. A look from me was enough. No receipts. ‘You take travellers checks?’
‘Yes, but ten thousand in advance.’
          He pulled out a book of cheques, and signed two one hundred dollar ones. As he signed, resting his cheque book on the table, head down, I again noticed the indentation on the third finger of his left hand. It had been the finger he’d been rubbing, obviously he’d just, within the last day or two, removed his ring. Wedding? Signet? Wedding, I guessed. Men didn’t hide signet rings. He tore out the cheques and passed them over.
         ‘Your passport, please.’
           I took it and opened it to the first page. I would’ve liked to have flicked through the other pages to see where he’d been over the last few years. It was a bit worn, bent slightly to fit carelessly into a back pocket. He was Nikhil Figgis, born in New York City on August 2 1974. After noting the number, I returned the passport and pulled out a clunky calculator from the drawer for his sake. Calculators assure people there’s no hanky-panky. I calculated the exchange rate and wrote out a receipt for nine thousand rupees. I opened her right hand desk drawer and, lifting the .32 automatic, which I used as a paper weight to hold down the loose cash, dropped the cheques on the pile of 100 and 50 rupee notes. Then shut and locked the drawer.
          ‘First thing tomorrow…’ I began.
           ‘No, now,’ he said and added politely: ‘I think my two hundred dollars entitles me to ask you to start the search today.’
I sighed loudly though, understanding his impatience and his value-for-money, I wished I could start tomorrow. ‘Will you excuse me a moment, please’ and called Ramakrishna and Chandra on the intercom to take over my clients. One was an adultery case, the other a fraud. Neither would pay much. I finished the call, picked up the telephone directory, and flicked through the pages. It was always the first place to start.
          ‘I checked international enquiries, checked the web, checked everything I could check. He isn’t anywhere, he’s vanished.’
I ignored him, determined to do it my way, and in my own time. He was right. There were hundreds of Naidus in the pages but no ‘S.K’
          ‘Listen, he’ll be old and broke, like most writers. You got any other ideas, apart from the telephone?’
I wasn’t about to admit he was right again. I had no idea where to start looking for an old man who had disappeared 30 years ago. What would Balraj do? What had he taught me? Check births and deaths to start with. I looked at the time, 5.10, the offices would have closed, the babus long gone home. Thankfully, Valli came in, carrying a tray with two cups of sweet tea and a plate of Marie biscuits. She handed Mr Figgis his tea, then gave me mine, leaving the biscuits precisely between us. I pulled out my note pad and began to make notes of what I knew about S.K. Naidu. One old novel, one old man, wrote in English, familiar with Georgetown, read him. I stopped when I noticed Mr Figgis had taken a small, plastic box out of his bag, and was concentrating on laying out four pills in a neat row on her desk. He popped the first in his mouth, followed by a swallow of beer. He noticed me watching.
            ‘Anti-malaria,’ he said, and popped another. ‘Anti-dysentery,’ popped, ‘anti-typhoid,’ popped, ‘ anti-…’ He shrugged, not caring, and popped that too. ‘I was told not to drink anything, eat anything or breathe the Indian air. I’d fall ill instantly and die.’
           ‘Who told you that?’
           ‘My mom… mother.’
           I added another word after I’d written Figgis; it was ‘hypochondriac??’ He was watching me, his tea untouched, waiting, waiting. An instinct told me that S.K. Naidu wasn’t phone-less. When I’d spoken to Raj, he’d said that ‘S.K. Naidu had been well-off.’ It meant he had money, and if he had money, he had to have had a phone. So, why wasn’t he listed? Who’d know? I rose abruptly.
          ‘Why don’t you check into your hotel, while I go out and talk to someone who might know something.’
         ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, and hitched the strap onto his shoulder and stood up. ‘It’s sort of urgent. I have two weeks in which to get his permission or I lose the slot.’
        ‘New Haven’s an important theatre?’
          ‘Kinda like off-Broadway, though it’s not in Manhattan. But it’s an important launching pad onto Broadway.’
          ‘You must be tired,’ I insisted. ‘And probably I won’t get the lead tonight.’
           ‘I don’t mind, it’s better than sitting in a hotel room, waiting for you to call.’ He strolled over to the door, pausing to look at the black and white photographs. ‘These movie stars?’
          ‘Some politicians, some crooks,’ I said, stuck with him now, wishing he’d go to his hotel. I didn’t add that the photographs were Balraj’s rouges gallery of the powerful and corrupt who had once been his friends. There were just other pieces of memory for me.
            ‘How do you tell them apart?’
            ‘You don’t.’