Season of the Rainbirds Read Online Free Page A

unblocking the underground sewage channels. As he turned the corner the trailing end of the pole – more than fifteen yards separated the two ends – shot across the width of the street. The police inspector, a short man with a round stomach and a balding head, managed to step out of the way just in time to avoid a blow on the ankles. ‘Christian bastard,’ he murmured, shaking his head. Azhar was coming out on to the courtyard when the inspector entered the house.
    ‘The chief inspector, the superintendent of police and the chief superintendent have been informed,’ the inspector told Azhar. Azhar nodded. Elsewhere, as deputy commissioner, Azhar’s rank would have been too high for him to involve himself in such matters. As it was, he lived in the town – two streets away from Judge Anwar’s house – and the dead man had also been a friend.
    Together the two men walked through the labyrinthine house room by room – each one high-ceilinged and excessively decorated – and tried to work out a possible sequence of events following the break-in, Azhar listening patiently to the theories that the inspector had had time to formulate since dawn. They asked the servants to open up the locked rooms. They peered under the beds and behind the cupboards and armoires. They unbolted several windows, all of them set in deep recesses and many of them never opened by the family, and looked out – without consequence – on to the back lane. They stood on the elaborate balconies that kept the edges of the street in shade at midday, and considered the drop on to the street below. ‘One of them probably climbed on to the roof’ – the police inspector pointed at the displaced cover of the water-tank at the top of the staircase – ‘and came down to let the others in.’
    ‘The servants will have to be questioned,’ Azhar said.
    Outside in the street Gul-kalam, the nightwatchman, was talking excitedly to a group assembled around him. He moved his shoulders and hands boisterously. On seeing Azhar and the police inspector appear at the front door he became suddenly grim and, abandoning his audience, crossed the street hurriedly.
    ‘I was two streets away when I heard the shot,’ he said in his clipped north-western accent. ‘I couldn’t have done anything.’ He had pale blue eyes which he kept rimmed with antimony; his great bushy moustache curved into his mouth, obscuring the upper lip.
    ‘You’ve already made your statement, Gul-kalam.’ Azhar placed his hand on the man’s shoulder.
    But Gul-kalam shook his head miserably. ‘I’m worthless. I couldn’t save him.’
    ‘Later, Gul-kalam,’ the police inspector said impatiently. ‘First, get these people to clear the street.’ And turning to Azhar he said, ‘We had better erect a shamiana out here. Soon there won’t be enough room inside.’
    Gul-kalam had walked away from them. The brass whistle, which he would blow at the ends of each street on his rounds, dangled from his neck. On his feet he wore brown leather sandals whose thick soles held his feet inches above the mud. They watched him in silence for a few moments.
    ‘So,’ the inspector turned to Azhar and said, through a half-smile, ‘what’s this I hear about you , deputy-sahib?’
    Azhar looked at him in incomprehension. A man carrying on his head an enormous basket as wide and flat as a stork’s nest, heaped with flowers, sidled past him and went into the house. ‘What?’ said Azhar, at the same time expelling the heavy fragrance of marigolds from his lungs.
    The inspector smiled more openly. ‘The men who went to your house this morning to tell you about the death say there was a woman there with you.’

    Through the small window of his room the old man saw Kalsum and Suraya open and enter the cemetery gate. He stopped kneading his limp biceps and went to that corner of the room where, in the angle between two walls, there was a heap of soil covered with a tough canvas sheet. With slow