“Why not?” Smita asked, but he merely gazed at her impassively.
Smita shut her notebook and the three of them walked toward the front door. There, she stopped, struck by a thought. “One more thing. When we visited the brothers, they were still living in their house. How are they managing the bank payments now? You said . . .”
“We take care of our own, little miss,” he said. “I am giving them a loan, of course.”
“You are loaning them money to pay off their bank loan?” Mohan said, not bothering to hide his incredulity.
“That’s so.”
“At what interest rate?”
Smita could tell that Rupal was uncomfortable, but he held Mohan’s gaze. “Under these sad circumstances, I have given the boys a discount. They pay me thirty percent, only.”
Smita gasped. That’s highway robbery, she wanted to say. Instead, she said, “They can afford to pay you and still eat?”
“How is this my business? If they cannot pay, they will lose the house. It is that simple. As it is, I allow Govind to hire out his drunkard brother to me three days a week, to pay down the debt.”
“What does Arvind do for you?”
“What does he do? Whatever big-small jobs I am needing him to do. Three days a week, his scrawny neck is in my hands.”
Rupal raised his index finger to cut Smita off before she could speak.
“One final thing, miss. What I said about giving advice to Govind about the fire? I was only joking with you. Please don’t put such a silly notice into your newspaper.”
“Nobody jokes about such a serious thing to a newspaper reporter,” Smita said.
“We are just ignorant farmers, miss,” Rupal said. “What do we know about the rules of talking to a reporter? Besides, no one will believe such a story. I will deny it all.”
Before Smita could react, Rupal gestured toward their car. “Be careful on these roads,” he said. “They are hard to travel once it gets dark. All the ghosts and spirits come out at night.”
Chapter Nineteen
Smita and Mohan were quiet as they drove back toward the motel. Smita felt numb, exhausted, spent. She sifted through the interview in her mind, trying to locate the exact moment when it had gone off the rails. But the fact was, Rupal had controlled the conversation from the very start, and he had decided when to end it. Not to mention the fact that he had virtually thrown them out of the village. How dare he? And what was wrong with her that she’d let him? She was not on the top of her game, and to do Meena’s story justice, she needed to be.
Mohan groaned.
“What is it?” she asked.
He turned to her, his eyes red. “What is this country?” he cried. “How can we be this backwards? Did you hear what that bastard said? He ordered the burning? And he’s sitting there like a king, unharmed? How can this be so in this day and age?”
Smita nodded in sympathy. But some small part of her was gratified to hear Mohan’s distress, to see that this trip had pierced through his privilege. She remembered how reflexively defensive and proud of India he’d been when they’d first met. She didn’t wish this loss of innocence on him. But she was glad that they were on the same page.
Maybe even the son of a diamond merchant can be made to face the truth, she thought grimly.
Smita filled the bucket in her bathroom with hot water, then used the plastic mug to pour water over her body. She thought with longing about her hotel room at the Taj, with its powerful shower and marbled bathroom, then felt guilty about such a bourgeois desire. But who was she kidding? Soon, she would be back in her luxurious condo in Brooklyn, with its granite countertops and the rain shower in the bathroom. Papa had forced Rohit and Smita to take their share of their mother’s inheritance soon after Mummy had died. They had declined, but Papa had been insistent. Rohit had bought a car and put away the rest in Alex’s college fund; Smita had had her bathroom and kitchen remodeled.
What would little Abru’s inheritance be? The gravesite of a father she would never know, but whose specter would haunt her entire life. The ashes of her mother’s dreams, which she would taste in her own mouth. Her grandmother’s grief, which could manifest itself only as anger, in a harsh word or a quick slap whenever the little girl did something that reminded Ammi of her dead son. Abru’s life would be marked by hunger—an emotional hunger never sated, its roots in a time before her birth. And the physical hunger, the emptiness in her stomach that would feel as real to her as a shoe or a stone. Poor Abdul had thought that his daughter would be the heir to a new, modern India. Instead, she had become a symbol of the old, timeless India, a country scarred by ignorance, illiteracy, and superstition, governed by men who dropped the poison pellets of communal hatred onto a people who mistook revenge for honor, and blood lust for tradition.