Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [138]
She knew it was up to her to take the initiative. Auro and Parvati were asleep in their ground-floor suite. Even if burglars had driven a truck into the living room and begun demolishing the walls with hammers, Auro's snoring would muffle the noise. Anjali and Rabi shared the second floor, separated by a second living room, but she couldn't bring herself to open his door and enter, as he so jauntily did with hers. And what good would he be in a crisis? He'd want to take a picture. She opened her own door and listened with a kind of attention she'd never exercised, because the last thing in the world she expected was a stranger in the house.
And another thing: she knew, almost immediately, that she was to blame. If she had disappeared from everyone's life after the hours in jail, they'd all be safe. If she hadn't come to Bangalore, none of this would have happened. She had brought destruction on her own home, and on Minnie and Husseina and even poor Ahilya, and now the same thing was about to happen to Parvati and Auro.
It was Tookie, of course, and her new friends, and her Rajoo. Bang-a-Buck had got to her.
Anjali could hear the distant, muffled sounds of movement. She could picture the two men somehow cracking open the rear door, or cutting the window and not letting it fall to the floor to waken the house. She could imagine them now in the kitchen, perhaps with flashlights, then moving into the living room and clearing the tables of anything valuable ... but when she ran a mental inventory of the downstairs tabletops, there were no valuables worth the effort of breaking in. They weren't like Minnie's tables, laden with "priceless" silver trays, "irreplaceable plates," heavy sterling silver that had once graced the mouth of a king, and thinner-than-thin "historical" crystal goblets and champagne flutes.
And then it came to her: the only valuables were the paintings, by the Bangla women artists. She had no sense of their value, but she remembered what Parvati's friends had said: the paintings were nice, of course, but such brilliant investments.
In the end it was an easy decision. I owe my life to Parvati, and my life is worthless anyway. Anjali lifted Dinesh's hockey stick from its place on the wall. It floated like a feather in her hands. The stairs were just outside her bedroom door, and as she slowly descended, barefoot, the noises, even the male voices, grew more distinct. They were in the downstairs living room. Why didn't Auro wake up? But of course, he snored too loudly. Some nights, she could hear him all the way upstairs.
No lights were on, but moonlight was pouring through the windows. The burglars had lifted two paintings off their brackets and leaned them against the wall, and with their backs to her, they were working on the next. They were laughing and talking loud enough to be understood, had she spoken Kannada, as though they'd been assured the house was empty. She knew the location of every chair and table in the living room; she could negotiate the passage to the far wall with her eyes closed.
The men half-turned, facing each other, in order to lift the painting off its hooks. And that's when one of the men must have seen her from the corner of his eye; he gave a shout and dropped his end of the painting, and their eyes met and she remembered his face, and that's when Anjali aimed for his head and let the hockey stick fly. It caught him between the eyes, across the bridge of the nose, and he screamed as a plume of blood shot straight out; then he staggered and fell. The second goondah dropped his end of the painting, and it flopped toward her, separating her from him as he frantically turned his head in every direction. He was cursing