After collecting his tatty rucksack from the luggage carousel, Marchant had taken a deep breath and walked out of the arrivals hall into a wall of heat, knowing that, as a backpacker, he wouldn’t have the budget for a taxi. (The thousand US dollars given to him by Hugo Prentice was carefully split between his money belt and a purse strapped to his shin beneath his cotton trousers.)
A horde of shouting people, mostly in white kurta pyjamas, had jostled for his custom, tugging at his backpack, calling out snatches of German, French and Italian as well as English. He had eventually settled on a Sikh auto-rickshaw driver, for no other reason than that he was bigger and more dignified-looking than his rivals. After an early, unpromising stop for fuel, the driver smiled in the wonky rear-view mirror and drove down the main highway into New Delhi, turning to make inaudible remarks about American presidents.
On either side of the road, road sweepers pushed their straw brushes idly in the heat while painters daubed thick yellow emulsion on the railings that ran down the central reservation, removing shirts and saris that had been hung there to dry. Occasionally, parts of the road itself had been cordoned off for potholes to be filled and new tarmac laid, tribal women trailing damp rags on the big wheels of the steamrollers to keep them moist.
The rickshaw took Marchant all the way to Pahaganj, north of Connaught Place, where his Rough Guide promised cheap accommodation and the company of other backpackers. The Hare Krishna guesthouse wasn’t exactly the Oki Doki, but with its permit room (‘for quenching thirst’) and rooftop restaurant overlooking the bazaar, it was perfect for David Marlowe. His flight from Poland, with a four-hour change at Dubai, had been tiring, and he slept deeply, despite the heat of the night and the rhythmic rattle of the ceiling fan.
Now, as he watched an orange sun set behind Qutb Minar, he knew his search for Salim Dhar must begin. He was wearing the least tatty clothes he could find in the rucksack, and he hoped that the taxi, an extravagance for David Marlowe, would not attract attention when he arrived at the Gymkhana Club.
As he was driven into town, the flow of traffic was busy on the other side of the road as commuters streamed out of the scrubbed-up city towards the suburbs. The sight of an elephant, ambling along in the slow lane, brought back memories of childhood birthdays at the high commission, always shared with Sebastian. He turned back to look at the animal, admiring the unrushed fall of its padded feet. An elephant used to be obligatory at expat parties, a telephone number for bookings written in chalk between its eyes. Children would be lifted up onto the unsteady palanquins to ride around the commission compound, thrilled and scared by the muscular sashay of their mount’s huge haunches.
Marchant remembered the time he fell out of love with the birthday elephant, or at least with the mahouts who brought them up from the slums by the river. He and Sebastian were sitting at the front of a gaggle of children, directly behind the mahout, when he saw the metal spike that had been driven deep into the animal’s thick and bloodied neck. The mahout twisted the spike whenever he barked an order, desperate to assert his waning authority over the animal.
The Gymkhana Club felt as if it had been waning for the past hundred years. A chowkidar at the gate searched under the car with a mirror before waving them on. Marchant told the driver to wait for him in the car park to the side of the whitewashed Lutyens building, explaining that he might be back in five minutes, or maybe an hour. ‘Koi baat nay,’ he replied, rocking his head gently from side to side before driving off.
Marchant paused beneath the large porch, catching the perfume of bougainvillea tumbling over the nearby perimeter wall. Above him, crows were roosting, their cries faintly eerie. He hadn’t been here before, but his father often used to talk about the place. Under British rule it had been known as the Imperial Gymkhana Club, but the Imperial had been dropped after 1947, and now its tennis courts, Lady Willingdon swimming pool, library and bridge drives were for the exclusive use of Delhi’s social elite, many of whom had waited thirty years to become a member.
Non-Indian guests were welcome, but Marchant remembered his father telling him of an unsettling custom at the bar that if a ‘Britisher’ bought a round of drinks, he couldn’t expect the favour to be returned. Marchant’s father had liked his Kalyani Black Label beer, but had found that the only way to quench his thirst was to keep standing rounds for everyone. Buying a drink solely for himself would have caused offence, and given that British diplomats often ventured to the Gymkhana Club to gauge the military’s current level of hostility towards neighbouring Pakistan, a subject about which they were especially prickly, it was important to keep the members onside.
‘I’ve come to talk to Kailash Malhotra,’ Marchant said to the khaki-uniformed man at the colonnaded reception.
‘Colonel Malhotra?’ the man checked him.
Marchant nodded, taking in the colonial setting–high ceilings, the whiff of floor polish, a sign saying that ‘bush’ shirts were prohibited–as the man looked through a list on a clipboard. Marchant could detect cigar smoke coming from somewhere, and it took him a few moments to realise that a distant clinking sound was the noise of billiard balls colliding. Marchant would be back at his Wiltshire boarding school if he smelt boiled cabbage for dinner.
‘He’s playing bridge in the card room,’ the man said finally.
‘I thought they didn’t get underway until eight.’ Marchant had made a call earlier.
The man looked at Marchant’s crumpled shirt for a moment, unable to conceal his disdain, then glanced at a large clock on the wall to his right. ‘Right now they are having sundowners in the bar. Is he expecting you?’
‘Yes. Could you tell him David Marlowe’s here?’
Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting opposite Colonel Malhotra in a corner of the bar, sipping a ‘burra peg’ of Chivas Regal.
‘When you were a naughty little boy–my God, you were so naughty–you used to call me “uncle”,’ the colonel said, laughing, one hand patting Marchant’s knee. ‘You can still call me uncle. Uncle K. It’s the name your dear father always used.’
Marchant had only very distant memories of Uncle K: watching Mother India and other old Hindi movies on a Sunday afternoon at his house, where he and Sebastian would eat pistachio kulfi and be told off by their mother for complaining that it didn’t taste like real ice cream. Uncle K used to sing along to all the songs, tears often streaming down his face. Afterwards, he would retire with Marchant’s father to another part of the house and talk in low voices while his mother fielded the children.
When Monika had mentioned the name Malhotra at the airport, he couldn’t be certain it was the Uncle K of his early childhood. It was only when the colonel had walked towards him in reception, open-armed, that Marchant knew for sure it was the same man. Now, as they talked, more memories came back: the discreet acceptance of a gift of Scotch brought over from Britain; the blunderbuss on the wall, once used for shooting tigers; the touché shaking of hands after cracking a gag; Uncle K’s avuncular kindness when Sebastian was killed.
‘Your father was very keen that you didn’t grow up resenting India because of the traffic accident,’ he said. ‘It could have happened anywhere.’
‘He did a good job. It’s great to be back.’
Marchant didn’t tell him that he hadn’t visited Delhi since they had left as a grieving family twenty years ago. He had backpacked through India in his year off, paving the way for David Marlowe, but he had made a point of travelling through the south, and then up into the Himalayas, consciously bypassing Delhi.
‘I fear your mother never got back her health, though,’ Uncle K said.
‘No,’