Chapter Sixteen · Adam's Robe Book 3

Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 20

Delnaz had imagined this meeting so often in the six months since the cousin's letter that she had half expected it to disappoint her.

She knew the feeling. It was the letdown of a rehearsal that outruns the event. It never came. She stood in the doorway of the courtyard at five minutes to seven, with the peepal rattling above her and the last light going copper on the wall. She watched two strangers come up the lane toward the green door. They walked with the slightly formal posture of people who knew what was riding on the next ten minutes. It felt larger than anything she had permitted herself to imagine.

The woman was shorter than she had expected. She wore a plain gray scarf and a dark dress that had clearly been chosen with care. The man carried a bundle against his arm, wrapped in a fold of coat, and held it as if it were warm.

"Dr. Sarkisian," Delnaz said, and put out her hand.

"Dr. Panthaki." The handshake was brief and exact. She had plainly asked in advance which greeting would read as respectful and which as presumptuous, and settled on the shortest. "Thank you for coming so quickly. I mean, thank you for letting us. You've been kind."

"My grandfather's message left you little time."

"We did not need much." The man spoke from half a pace behind. He gave his name as Karam, and only that, offering as much as the moment required and no more. His English was formal, with an older accent beneath it. "We have been preparing for this conversation for a good deal longer than the hour you gave us."

She looked at him. He looked back, steadily, with a long tired face and eyes that did not move over her as strangers' eyes did, taking an inventory. He simply received her. She had a sudden, absurd impression that he had been waiting at the end of her lane for a long time, and was in no hurry now to be anywhere else.

"Please," Delnaz said. "My grandfather is expecting you."

Framroze received them in the room behind his study.

It was not the room, she noticed, watching him make the distinction with the precision he would have used on a point of ritual law. It was the sitting room beside it, which was close enough to the cabinet to feel its presence and far enough that nothing said tonight would oblige either family to reveal more than words had already agreed to. The windows were open. A lamp burned. Low cushions had been set in a half circle on the matting, and she realized, only as she lowered herself onto one, that they had been arranged with the care reserved for guests whose visit mattered.

The two visitors had left their shoes at the door. The man carried his bundle to Framroze with both hands.

"It is sandalwood," he said. "A man at the foot of the sanctuary wall sold it to us, and would not take payment. He said that for a house one should bring a small gift. Not for the fire. For the people."

Framroze took it. He held it for a moment in both hands, bowing his head over it. Delnaz saw a look cross her grandfather's face that she knew from the room. He was still, receiving what he had not expected and did not mean to waste.

"That is Dinshaw's stall," he said. "He is a great scoundrel and has never in his life been wrong about a stranger." He passed it to Roshan, who had come in without a sound and stood behind him with her arms folded. "It will go in the front room, by the lamp. Thank you. Please sit."

Roshan brought tea. It came in the old white cups, on a tray, with a jug of hot milk and a bowl of sugar. Delnaz had been pouring tea this way all her life and had never thought about it. She watched her aunt measure out the milk and the sugar with a spoon, a small round of white going into a smaller round of brown, stirred once, and set before the guest. She had a brief odd sense that she was watching an act she had read about. She could not think where.

"You will forgive an old man's directness," Framroze said, when the cups had been set and the small courtesies were spent. "My granddaughter tells me that you believe a third party may already be here, in Udvada, seeking what you seek. I would like to understand, before we speak of anything else, what kind of man he is. And what kind of danger he represents to a house that has had no reason, in eleven recorded generations, to consider the question."

Leah answered with great care.

Delnaz listened less to the details than to the shape of the caution wrapped round them. A colonel of the Guards, a disgraced one. A mountainside. Nearly three years of unaccounted movement. She spoke in short, level sentences, with the exact hedges of a scholar who knew how much truth a room could take at once and had learned to feed it by the spoon. When she said mountainside her voice did not change, but the man beside her moved slightly, and was still.

It was a different kind of care from her own family's. Delnaz noticed that, and put it away to think about.

"He was an officer in an office that sent men looking, before any of us knew to look," Leah said. "I think you may have met them."

"Yazd," said Delnaz.

Leah's head came up.

"Three years ago. In the winter." Delnaz heard her own voice, level, and was a little surprised by it. "A cousin of my mother's wrote that men had come to the fire temple in a plain car, with a letter from an office in Tehran. They asked the priest about old ritual cloths. Older than the faith. He told them there were none. They left. My cousin thought it was a survey." She folded her hands. "I did not. I have never been able to say why."

"It would be about the right time," Leah said slowly. "It would be about the right office. I can't promise it was him. I can tell you that he was in that office then, and that he was one of the people who wanted what we're talking about badly enough to look in a fire temple for it."

Nobody spoke. Roshan, at the door, had unfolded her arms.

"I would not have written as I did," Delnaz said, "had I known he was still alive."

"You'd have sent it," said Leah. "You'd have sent it faster."

It was exact, and entirely accurate, and Delnaz felt a tightness in her chest give way a little. She smiled. She had not meant to.

"May I ask you a question," she said, when Leah had finished.

She had planned to wait. She had planned a quarter of an hour, perhaps a half, of the courtesies. But she had been listening for a long while, and she had noticed what she always noticed, which was what was not said.

"You have now told us a great deal about a danger to us," she said. "You have told us a good deal less about what your family keeps. Not its history. I imagine that you could recite that in your sleep. But its nature. What it does. What it costs a person to hold it."

Leah said nothing.

"I have noticed, across this conversation, that each time we come close to that subject you find a way to go round it."

She had expected offense, the usual response to being told one has a habit. What crossed Leah's face was more complicated. It was the flicker of being told, by a stranger, what her own friends had been too polite to say.

"You're right," Leah said. "I do that."

She sat back a little on the cushion. She laughed once, without much amusement, and pressed her fingers briefly under her eyes.

"I've done it for a long time. My family has spent four hundred years learning that the details of what we keep are the one thing that gets people killed. Not the secret. Half our own community has guessed the secret for generations. It's the mechanics. The exact shape of what it does and doesn't do." She looked at Delnaz directly, for the first time since the hands. "I don't circle it because I don't trust you. I circle it because it's the only professional habit that has ever kept the people I love alive. I'm sorry. I know that it's rude."

"It is not rude." Delnaz heard herself say it. "It is only different."

"Yes."

"My family has never needed that habit." She stopped. She had not meant to say it, and she turned it over now and found an edge in it she had not examined until this moment. It was not superiority, she thought. It was honest bewilderment. "I do not say it to suggest that yours chose wrongly. I say it because I am sitting across from the first person of that other tradition I have ever met, and I find that I do not yet know how to reconcile the fact that we have been keeping the same kind of charge, for the same length of time, and have come, so far as I can tell, to nearly opposite conclusions about what it is for."

She stopped. The lamp ticked.

"Ours was never concealment," she said. "When the moment finally came for it to be tested, it was openness. Deliberate, in front of witnesses, who could have destroyed us for it. I do not know what to do with the fact that you were taught the opposite and are still alive."

The silence that followed was longer than any Delnaz could remember sitting comfortably inside. Beside Leah, the man named Karam did what she had noticed him doing all evening. He said nothing. He attended, with a watchful stillness that was the opposite of absence. She had the impression of a ledger being filled in a small, exact hand.

"May I answer for my family?" Karam said.

His voice was quiet, and everyone turned. He did not look at Leah.

"You asked what it costs. It costs me a morning." He said it plainly, as one reports the price of grain. "At home, every morning, before I do anything else, I lay two fingers on a shelf in my room. I have done it for eleven years. My daughter has noticed. She is ten. She said to me, two weeks ago, that she had been waiting for me to tell her. That is the cost, Dr. Panthaki. A morning each day, and a child who learns to watch."

Delnaz did not answer. She found that she had no sentence ready, and that she did not mind.

"I don't think either of us has finished deciding whose conclusion was right," Leah said at last, quietly. There was none of the earlier hedging in it. "I've watched my own family's answer nearly cost us everything more than once. I suspect, from what you've told me, that yours has come through a lot more cleanly. But I don't think that makes yours correct and ours wrong, any more than the reverse. I think it means we've spent four hundred years, both of us, running an experiment that neither family knew the other was running. And I think tonight might be the first time that either experiment has been able to compare its results honestly against the other's."

Framroze, who had said nothing throughout, set his cup down in its saucer. It made a small clear sound.

"Then perhaps that is the work in front of us," he said. "Not to decide, tonight, whose four hundred years were better spent. Only to tell one another, honestly, what they cost. I find that I am more interested in that conversation than I expected to be an hour ago, Dr. Sarkisian. I suspect that you are as well."

Delnaz watched Leah's face soften, by some small degree, into an expression that had not been there at seven. It was not trust, not yet. She had come prepared for an argument and found the beginning of a conversation, and her shoulders showed it.

"I am," Leah said.

They stayed for two hours. When they rose to go, Karam stood a moment at the door with his shoes in his hand and said to Framroze, "This morning I walked past your house. I did not mean to be seen."

"You were seen," said Framroze. "I was glad of it."

"You inclined your head. I bowed. I do not know why I did."

"I have been waiting a long time," the old man said, "for someone to bow."

It was a strange thing to say. Karam did not ask what he meant. He nodded, once, and stooped to put on his shoes.

Afterward Delnaz stayed in the courtyard, under the peepal, with the sandalwood smell drifting from the front room and the tea tray cooling on the veranda. Her grandfather sat in the cane chair. Roshan was inside, putting away the cups, with the loud decisiveness that meant she had a remark to make and was deciding how.

"Tomorrow at ten," Framroze said. "I shall tell them what we do."

"All of it?"

"As much as the day can bear." He looked at the dark. "I said that I was glad to be seen. I was. I did not say that I was glad to see him."

"The man in the lane?"

"The one on the wall. With the newspaper. He sat there for an hour, two days ago, in the afternoon, and I came to the gate and looked at him, and he put his paper up." Framroze gave a thin breath. "I am an old man. I know when I am being watched. I did not know, until this evening, that I was watching someone I should have to meet."

"You think it is the colonel."

"I think it would be a great coincidence if it were not."

A step sounded on the stones, and Roshan came out onto the veranda with a dish towel over her shoulder, and the expression of a decision to speak.

"The foreigner was there again at dusk," she said. "The one from the wall. I was sweeping. He never looked at me. He looked at the house." She folded the towel with a small hard snap. "I do not like him. I should like it noted that I did not like him before the man with the sandalwood and the lady with the scarf came, and that I am not changing my mind."

"It is noted," said Framroze.

Delnaz went to the gate. She stood in the opening with her hand on the green wood and looked down the lane. The streetlamp at the corner had not been lit, because the power had gone again. The wall opposite was a long pale shape in the dusk. It was empty. A dog lay across the road. Past it the lane went on into the dark toward the main street and the sanctuary, and the station, and a small guesthouse on its farther side.

She stood there until it was fully night.

Then she went in and closed the gate, and for the first time in fourteen years she turned the key in the lock.