An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao Read Free Book Online

to dwell on, though the fact that it’d been based entirely on rumor had left in him a feeling of profound and inexplicable tiredness—and the isolation of this northwest frontier town suited him perfectly.
    He’d arrived in April, when all his former colleagues at Delhi Cantonment had been making preparations to spend the hottest summer months in the mountains, Shimla or Haridwar probably. Most of them had not even bothered to say good-bye, nodding imperceptibly as they passed his desk on his last day, their eyes averted with embarrassment. Or maybe pity. He could see them now: sitting on their vast verandas, under the cool shade of the Himalayas, sipping their Pimm’s and watching the bruised and tender green of the foothills with the same malevolent attention with which they’d watched him.
    The police station in Rawalpindi was composed of three rooms. The main room was the public area with a stone floor, a long counter, two thin wooden benches by the entrance—along which the town drunks, the only ones the police ever had occasion to pick up in this small town, tottered and tipped over—and an overhead fan that knocked and swung and brayed like the devil. Every day Jenkins was sure it would come unfastened and fly out of the window. The fan had the pull of the devil too; he watched it with such contempt and such longing during the sweltering hours of the afternoon that it sometimes felt to him like love. He had a direct view of it from his open door; beyond it was the third room of the police station, which was just a straw-filled holding cell. Sometimes, if they were repeats or if their wives threatened to beat them, Jenkins let the drunks sleep it off in the cell. But usually it was empty, and it was in front of this darkened cell that Jenkins had first espied Abheet Singh’s affliction.
    Was it an affliction? It was a mystery, no doubt, because despite his impeccable and almost fastidious devotion to his appearance, Abheet Singh was glaringly casual in one regard: his salutation. He of course saluted Jenkins, as his superior officer, promptly every morning and evening, but the way he raised his hand to his forehead had none of the fervor and precision of his other duties. In fact it was downright sloppy.
    It was because of this strange gesture that Jenkins began studying him during his second week in Rawalpindi. He did this surreptitiously, only when they were in the public areas of the station, and only when Abheet Singh saluted the other officer under Jenkins, Subinspector Iqbal. His two subordinates could not have been more different. Iqbal was corpulent and overly garrulous, mildly and gratingly obsequious; Jenkins guessed that a wealthy uncle, and bribes, had gotten him the position of subinspector. Abheet Singh, on the other hand, was a slim reserved man, young, in his early twenties. From his file Jenkins knew he’d already been married five years, probably in his late teens like all Sikh boys from the rural villages. His face itself, unlike the faces of the other young men in the village—fawning at the first sight of Jenkins, only to fall vacant once he passed—was like the desert that surrounded Rawalpindi. Somber and alive. The light in his eyes heaved and fell like the windswept sands. Even his skin was the color of sand dunes. Jenkins—who’d not met a single Indian during all his time in England—could practically feel the heat of the entire subcontinent rising from the bodies of these lovely brown men.
    Abheet Singh’s was no exception.
    Though what drove Jenkins to utter distraction was his salute. He eyed it with increasing irritation with each passing day: first Abheet Singh’s right arm would rise, as expected, but then his wrist would twist at a bizarre angle, palm out instead of down, just as his hand neared his forehead. He’d hold it there for far longer than was needed, almost as if he were drawing attention to it. Then his arm