Free Noon by Aatish Taseer Page A

voltage stabilizers was maddening. The room also had a problem with damp. One entire wall of fresh orange paint had
blistered. The surface swelled and cracked. My eye, trailing the contours of the sodden patches, was tempted to think of them as continents on a three-dimensional map. I was fighting the temptation
to crush Asia in my fingers when Kalyan appeared in the doorway with a coffee mug.
    He put it down on the desk and was turning to leave, when he stopped, and making matter-of-fact the tremor in his voice, said, ‘You know, baba, those two laptops that lie upstairs on
madam’s desk . . .’
    ‘Yes,’ I replied, reluctantly turning my mind to them.
    ‘Do you have them downstairs with you?’
    A stupid question. They were old and slow and out of use. They never moved
from their place on my mother’s desk. What’s more, I could tell that Kalyan recognized the stupidity of the question, because he spoke now like a servant, playing up his stupidity. And
he didn’t need to; he was stupid anyway. That he thought I might be fooled by this show of innocence was an even greater stupidity. But servants were often like this: they played with depths,
leaving you to wonder whether they might still have greater depths.
    ‘No, Kalyan. Why would they be?’
    ‘Because they’re not upstairs any more.’
    Save for his large eyes, seemingly kohled and liquid, growing wide with 
alarm, his face shrank. His small mouth twitched, its expressiveness concealed by a limp black moustache.
    ‘What do you mean not there?’ I said, getting up from the desk.
    We climbed the short flight of stairs leading from the basement to my mother’s study. Kalyan’s voice came like an echo from the stairwell, mumbling about how he had come into the
study, seen they were not there, thought perhaps I had taken them . . .
    They were gone. Their absence left a noticeable gap on the long table. Their chargers were gone too, but the rest of the room was undisturbed.
    ‘Call the security!’ I said in a loud voice to Kalyan. And as he went off, I added threateningly, ‘Kalyan, this is no small matter. They better be found.’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, untying the strings of his black and white apron and rushing off.
    The house was called Steeple Hall. It was part of Farmhouse Delhi, a new and privileged urban isolation, initiated some three decades before on the margins of the city. But it
was a cautious sanctioning and the men in charge dithered over the luxuries of this new life. They expressed their fears, and socialist resentments, by sometimes placing limits on the square
footage of the farmhouses, confining them on occasion to the size of an apartment in town. Then successive dispensations, feeling perhaps that it was absurd to expect anyone to leave Delhi only to
live in a house no bigger than a flat, would stretch that limit. It was in this happy period that the original Steeple Hall, allowed six thousand feet, had been built. But by the time Amit Sethia
had bought it for my mother, the limit had shrunk again to two thousand. And out of fear that in this season of reeled-in freedoms, my mother could end up with a smaller house than the one she
wished to demolish, she was advised to keep the walls of the original structure standing; they would defend their plinth. Inside, of course, she could do what she liked.
    The restriction made it impossible for my mother to have the house she wanted. It was to have been an old Delhi house with courtyards, verandas and balconies, a kind of celebration of space
following the barsati years; there was to have been a generous use of red sandstone; I think my mother would have wanted a high-pointed arch somewhere, a garden pavilion or two. And though, oddly
enough, in the house she ended up with these latter structures were present, as in fact – save for the courtyard – was the rest, the house was not an old Delhi house.
    Despite tearing off half a dozen green cement steeples from the