He lights a cigarette for himself.
Doesn’t look.
Heads inside.
2.
Farah’s relatives are lodging in both guesthouses, two fourteen-bedroom delights, linked by gym, sauna, cinema hall, industrial kitchens, spa, heated Olympic swimming pool.
The servants housed in a humble building behind.
Children run, screaming, jumping into the pool. Her paternal grandfather breaks the whisky out. Most of Farah’s close relatives—mother, father, father’s parents, two aunts on her mother’s side, aunt and three uncles on her father’s, their children, her cousin brothers and sisters, her own brother and two sisters and their spouses and children—will reside here for the next two days.
Only Farah’s maternal grandfather is missing. He is already flying back to Amritsar on one of Bunty’s private planes. It does not matter. His work here is done. It was he who officiated the wedding, reading from the Guru Granth Sahib.
He is Giani Zarowar Singh, a religious leader of authority second to none, one of the most respected men in the community, one of the most revered. He remains the moral and spiritual adviser to the chief minister of Punjab, who is himself a not-too-distant blood relative of the bride on her father’s side.
It was Giani Zarowar Singh whom Bunty was really marrying.
* * *
—
Farah was simply the way in.
Her family had run to ruin. Her father was a generous, hopeful, sloppy man, a cheerful and hungry man, a gambler, an alcoholic taken up by impossible schemes.
Get rich!
He dared to dream at the roulette wheel of life and lost his shirt every time.
Among his follies, an ill-conceived medical supplies company, making parts for MRI scanners. Badly managed, profligate, it cost a great deal to set up and bled money from the start. Instead of listening to Lovely, his wife, he tried to compensate with farmland in Sierra Leone (failed, fifteen crore rupees down the drain), gas stations in New Jersey (watered-down gas, fell foul of the authorities, fined to the tune of eight crore rupees), and a diamond mine in Ghana. This was the worst of them all. He sent his eldest son to set that one up. The son came back after six months, five crore rupees down, with the Ghanaian management team all hooked on cocaine.
* * *
—
Farah saw all this play out as she grew into a woman all men adored. She was sent to a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills at the age of three. When she was seven, the European ski holidays dried up. The first-class air travel stopped at eight. The apartment in Mayfair was sold when she was ten. The house in Zurich when she was thirteen. In her teens, she and her siblings were reduced to holidaying in Shimla, playing Monopoly, placing plastic houses on the same streets on which real apartments had been owned.
They did what they could to keep up appearances. Every Sunday they dined out at the Taj hotel. And still they had their bungalow, with its luscious lawn and servants who stayed because this was also their land and they had nowhere else to go. They all lived together in asymmetric poverty, her mother and aunts, sitting out on the lawn sipping gin under the parasol, conducting affairs with strapping young army men, while the men of the home were out squandering the last things they owned.
Farah learned to fend for herself, harnessing rugged boyfriends, paragliding, hunting, riding motorbikes, playing and cheating at cards. Back in society, her charm, her intelligence, her ruthlessness worked its magic kindly on authoritative men. Her gymnastics tutor waived his usual fee. Her tennis coach was always free. Then there was her venerable grandfather. She was the apple of his eye. Because of their bond, no one could afford to get on her bad side.
* * *
—
By the time Bunty was readying his approach, she was a perfectly put together young woman of twenty-four. Bunty had met her once, a year before, at a VIP wedding in Chandigarh. He’d clocked the family first, then made a mental note of her: she had brains, fire, poise, she drank and smoked, but not excessively so, and not to make a point. She was ambitious. She was in control. The more he inquired, the more she suited Bunty to a tee.
While Sunny was recovering in hospital, he flew out to Bhutan, where Farah was holidaying in the Aman hotel with a wealthy and anonymous male friend. He sent a message: Would she come to meet him in the pine-shrouded Paro Lodge? He had a business proposition to make. Sitting on the deck, sipping a Ch?teau de Montifaud X.O., looking out over the misty valley and the monastery-clad mountains, she smiled and said, “This is irregular.”
And Bunty said, “I know.”
3.
Back out on the lawn, Ajay flicks the cigarette away, considers the green bottleneck of the beer, places the empty bottle down. He crosses the grass, the gravel, barefoot, to the mansion steps.