Free The Moneylenders of Shahpur by Helen Forrester Page B

John, a twinkle showing in his eyes, despite Tilak’s fury.
    ‘I just said, “All right” and left them and went home. What could I say? While Anasuyabehn was there I couldn’t quarrel with her father – such women as she are rare and I would not wish to trouble – and furthermore, he is the Dean, and I have only been here a few weeks.’
    Tilak’s rage was fizzling out and he looked haggard.
    ‘When I went back to the lab. this afternoon, there was a different padlock on it – and that seemed the final insult. I couldn’t even get into my own laboratory. I’m tired, Bennett Sahib. No Hindu will take life wantonly – but the situation here is absurd.’
    He sank his head again into his hands and groaned, the drama of which was lost, as the veranda door burst open,admitting three of Ranjit’s grandchildren, who must have been visiting him. John knew them well. They liked to peep around the door and examine the white Sahib, unbeknown to him, they imagined.
    Ranjit shouted to them from amongst his cooking pots to come back, but John held them with a smile.
    ‘Tilak,’ he said, ‘stay and have your evening meal with me. We can send a message to your mother by the children, and we can talk about the Dean.’
    Tilak looked relieved.
    ‘Dean, Dean,’ shouted the children like parrots.
    John laughed, and explained to them what he wanted. Tilak wrote a note for them to carry to Mrs Tilak and gave them an anna each. They hitched up their ragged little pants and were away through the front door and were scudding through the gloom of the dusty lane, before an irate Ranjit was aware they had gone.

CHAPTER NINE
    Anasuyabehn had been very frightened by the message from Tilak, asking for a clean set of clothes for her father. As she flew to the almira to get out the garments, she questioned the peon.
    The man knew only that the Dean had vomited. A cold fear nagged at her that he might be seriously ill – he fasted so much.
    She decided that she would herself take the clean clothes to the small corner of the University building in which the Zoology Department had been lodged.
    Two silent, embarrassed men awaited her. The peon carried the clean clothes into Tilak’s office, so that the Dean could change in privacy, and then sat down cross-legged outside the door, to wait. Except for him, she was alone with Tilak for the first time.
    Although she had already met him at several parties, she felt very shy, and her eyes uneasily examined her toes peeping out of her sandals.
    Tilak cleared his throat, and after two false starts managed to say, ‘It’s nothing very serious. Dr Mehta was a little upset.’
    Anasuyabehn raised her eyes as far as Tilak’s middle shirt button, became painfully aware of the fine, muscular body showing through the sweat-soaked shirt, and despairingly raised her eyes to the thin, black face at least a foot above her own.
    ‘What upset him?’ she asked.
    The shy scrutiny to which he was being subjected was too much for poor Tilak. Unused to having many women about him, he was acutely aware of every detail of the small, plump person before him. He could not think how to reply; he was aware only of the turmoil caused in him by a pair of rather deepset eyes, carefully rimmed with kohl, looking anxiously at him. He had a frightening desire to touch her softly rounded cheek and tell her that all was well.
    He turned abruptly and took a couple of steps away from her.
    ‘I dissected a fish and a frog,’ he said.
    Anasuyabehn was shaken out of her shyness by this admission, and she asked with a faint trace of awe in her voice, ‘Did you kill them?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tilak defiantly. ‘It’s part of my work – it doesn’t hurt them.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Anasuyabehn. ‘I didn’t attend the science courses at the convent – I don’t know much about these things.’
    She lifted her sari over her head, so that her long hair, now carefully plaited, was hidden. She held the sari a little over her face,