35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘THERE’S BLOODLETTING AS WE SPEAK’
gums working like those of a large carp. ‘We are women of the
century, Sudhadi and me.’
‘Call her, darling,’ Anjoo urged. ‘I told her you’d call as soon as
you got here.’
Her mother took my hands and whispered confidentially, ‘He
was blessed of God, you know. And he was more than a son to me.’
‘Who?’
‘Daddy,’ Anjoola explained.
I phoned Sudhadi. A man answered, telling me to wait. I waited
ten minutes, hearing vague noises through the cackling static.
‘It takes her a while to get to the phone,’ Anjoo added.
Eventually Sudhadi’s familiar voice sounded. I wasn’t sure she
could hear me, though – or that, if she could, she knew who on
earth I was.
‘This city is dark,’ she said, her voice quavering with the weight
of its message. ‘There’s bloodletting as we speak.’
‘Bloodletting?’ Manjoola snatched the phone from my hand and
tossed it to her mother, snapping, ‘Mummy! The poor chap’s just
got here. He doesn’t want Sudhadi rambling in his ear all night.
You know she can’t hear a thing.’
‘Except her own voice,’ Anjoola agreed thoughtfully.
‘I haven’t spoken to her since 1974,’ I protested.
‘Well, she’s worse now,’ said Manjoola, sneaking out of the room.
There actually was ‘bloodletting’ in Calcutta that night. Police
clashed, as they say, with demonstrators protesting price hikes they
couldn’t afford. The police are no nastier in India than they are
anywhere else; they’re just less restrained and less well paid.
‘It’s all such a mess,’ sighed Lady Sinha into the receiver.
‘Once she starts talking,’ Anjoo’s mother explained, ‘she does not
like to stop.’
‘I think you probably have to be very interested in yourself to live
that long, isn’t it?’ remarked Anjoola, igniting another Wills filter.
They were lost without their daddy, Anjoola confessed. Forced to
move back into the old family home, they’d rented out the bottom
two floors, and sold off the garden for the monstrosity that now
blocked whatever view they’d had. There was another family home,
out near Shantinekitan, where the poet Tagore had once established
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