The Room on the Third Floor
A ruby ring vanishes from a bolted lodge room in Secunderabad. The police are an hour away. A retired railway clerk has an idli to finish.
Annapurna Sastry had spent thirty-four years in the accounts section of the railway headquarters in Secunderabad, and in that time she had learned that most mysteries were a matter of two columns that did not add up, and a person standing nearby looking very sure of themselves.
She was seventy-seven now, and a widow these eleven years, and she had come down from Visakhapatnam for her eye doctor in Marredpally, who liked to see her every six months and tell her that her left eye was a disappointment but her right eye was a marvel. She always stayed at the Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Lodge near the station, because her husband had always stayed there, and because the manager, Khader bhai, sent up idli and coconut chutney at seven without being asked.
This time, the third floor was full of a wedding.
The Reddy family had taken five rooms around the open courtyard. The lodge was old, built in the shape of a square with a hollow middle, so that every room on every floor looked onto a narrow verandah and, beyond its iron railing, a deep well of air that went down to the ground floor where the water drums stood. You could hear everything in that building. You could hear a spoon dropped two floors below.
Annapurna’s room was 305. Next door, in 304, was Saroja Reddy, the bride’s aunt, a large, warm, anxious woman who had knocked on Annapurna’s door within an hour of arriving, to borrow a safety pin and stayed to tell her the whole family history.
The evening before, there had been a mehendi function on the third-floor verandah. Two girls from Begum Bazaar came with their cones and sat cross-legged on a durrie, and the women of the family lined up and held out their hands. Annapurna, who had been invited, declined the mehendi but accepted a plate of pulihora and a chair by the railing, from which she could see everything.
She saw Saroja, before her turn, hold up her right hand to show off her mother’s ring: a ruby, deep as a drop of pomegranate, set in old gold with tiny claws.
“Amma gave it to me when she was dying,” Saroja said to anyone who would listen. “It’s too loose now. I’ve lost weight with all this wedding tension.” She laughed and took it off, and dropped it into a small round steel kumkum box, and shook the box at the children. It rattled, bright and hard, like a tooth in a tin.
Then she gave the box to her niece Divya, the bride’s cousin, a thin, quiet girl of twenty-four who had already had her own hands done and was holding them carefully away from her clothes.
“Keep it till I’m finished, Divya-ma. My hands will be wet.”
Divya held the box between her palms, awkwardly, as the mehendi girls worked on Saroja. A little later, when the women stood to admire one another’s patterns, Annapurna saw Divya put the box into Saroja’s handbag and snap the bag shut.
“It’s inside, Pinni,” Divya said. “Don’t forget.”
Saroja carried the handbag into 304 on her forearm, her orange-brown hands held up in front of her like a surgeon’s. Annapurna, passing the open door on her way to her own room, saw her set the bag down on the steel table. The bag made a soft sound. Only a soft sound.
Annapurna went to bed. She was seventy-seven. She did not think about it again until a quarter past six in the morning, when Saroja began to scream.
By seven, the whole third floor was in the verandah in nightclothes and towels.
The ring was gone.
Saroja told it six times, and each time the details stayed the same, which Annapurna noted with approval. She had gone into her room at a little after ten. She had bolted the door from inside, top and bottom, because she was alone and the lodge was near the station and one heard things. She had slept with the handbag beside her pillow. At six she woke, washed the dried mehendi off her hands in the bathroom, opened her handbag, opened the kumkum box. Empty.
The window of 304 had iron grilles, the bars so close that you could not put a hand through, only fingers. The ventilator above the door was covered in a wire mesh furred with old dust, undisturbed. The bolts had been closed; Saroja herself had opened them to scream.
“Then it was the boy,” said Saroja’s brother-in-law, a big man with a towel round his neck, and everyone turned to look at Mallesh.
Mallesh was the room boy, seventeen, from a village near Jangaon, and he had brought Saroja a bucket of hot water at ten the night before. He stood at the end of the verandah holding a tray of coffee tumblers, and the tumblers had begun to chatter against one another.
“I gave the water and came out, sir. Madam was there. I didn’t touch anything.”
“He could have taken it when he brought the water,” said the brother-in-law.
“The box was in my bag,” Saroja said, but uncertainly now.
“These fellows are quick.”
Khader bhai, who had come up the stairs in his lungi, wiping his spectacles, said that he had telephoned the police station at Gopalapuram, and a sub-inspector would come, but there was a procession on the main road and it might take an hour.
“An hour,” said the brother-in-law, looking at Mallesh. “Good. Nobody leaves.”
Divya, standing at the back with her arms folded tightly across her chest, said, “Pinni, maybe call the police again. Maybe they’ll come faster.”
Annapurna’s idli had arrived. She took the plate, and her coffee, and sat down on her chair by the railing, and began to eat.
She ate slowly, and she thought in columns.
On one side: the ring went into the kumkum box at about half past seven. She had heard it go in. It had rattled like a tooth in a tin.
On the other side: at about ten, the handbag was set down on Saroja’s table, and it had made a soft sound. Only a soft sound. A steel box with a loose ruby ring in it does not make a soft sound when it is set down. It makes a small, cross, metallic remark.
So the ring had left the box between half past seven and ten. Before the door was ever bolted. Before Mallesh had carried up any hot water.
The locked room was not a puzzle at all. It was a distraction. Everyone was staring at the bolts and the grilles and the poor boy with the tumblers, when the only thing that mattered had happened in the open air, on the verandah, in front of fifteen women and a seventy-seven-year-old widow eating pulihora.
Who had held the box between half past seven and ten?
Annapurna looked across the verandah. Divya had sat down on the top step with a tumbler of coffee in her right hand. Her left hand was closed. Not clenched; simply closed, resting on her knee, the way you hold something you do not want to show.
Annapurna remembered something else from the night before. In the guest register, downstairs, Divya had signed the family’s names in a careful, backward-sloping hand. She had held the pen in her left.
A left-handed girl, drinking coffee with her right hand.
“Divya-ma,” Annapurna called across, pleasantly. “Your mehendi has come out so dark. Show me. At my age we’re allowed to be nosy.”
The girl hesitated, which was all Annapurna needed, and then, because there was no polite way to refuse an old woman, she held out both hands, palms up.
The right palm was a peacock, every feather perfect, the colour of strong tea.
The left palm was a peacock too, except in the very centre, where the design had been ruined. A round smudge, the size of a five-rupee coin, where the wet paste had been pressed and pressed and held under something small and hard, for a long time, until the pattern had smeared and set that way. In the middle of the smudge was a ring of paler skin, no wider than a thread, as if something with tiny claws had been closed inside a fist all evening.
“Beautiful,” said Annapurna. “Very dark. It means your mother-in-law will love you.”
Divya took her hands back.
The police had still not come by half past seven. Saroja was crying in 304 with the door open. The brother-in-law had gone downstairs to argue with Khader bhai about the phone. Mallesh had been told to sit on a stool by the stairs, and he sat there, and nobody brought him any coffee.
Annapurna got up, which took some doing, and walked to the top step and sat down beside Divya, which took more.
“When I was young,” she said, “my grandmother had a pair of gold bangles. Very heavy. Old work, from Machilipatnam. She had always told me, Annapurna, these are for you, because you’re the eldest girl. Then she died, and they went to my aunt instead. My aunt had three sons. She didn’t even wear them. She kept them in a cloth bag in her almirah.” She looked out across the courtyard well, at the pigeons on the opposite parapet. “I thought about that cloth bag for twenty years.”
Divya said nothing. Her left hand was still closed.
“Was it promised to you?” Annapurna asked.
After a long time, the girl nodded. “Ammamma said. In front of everyone. For the eldest granddaughter’s wedding. And then at the end she was confused, and she gave it to Pinni, and Pinni doesn’t even—“ She stopped. “I wasn’t going to keep it. I just. I held it. When she gave me the box, I just took it out and held it, and then I couldn’t put it back with everyone looking. And then I thought, they’ll think it’s lost. And then they said Mallesh.” Her voice cracked on the boy’s name. “I didn’t think they’d say Mallesh.”
“No,” said Annapurna. “People never think that part through. That’s how you can tell an honest person who has made a mistake from a thief. A thief thinks of the Mallesh first.”
She held out her hand, palm up, the way the mehendi girls had held out theirs.
“There is mehendi in the claws of that setting,” she said. “It will need a soft toothbrush and a little lime juice. Not soap. Soap makes old gold dull.”
Divya opened her fist. The ruby lay in the middle of the ruined peacock, dark as a pomegranate seed, its old gold claws stained faintly orange.
At twenty to eight, Annapurna Sastry knocked on the open door of room 304.
“Saroja garu,” she said. “Your ring was in my room.”
Saroja stared at her.
“Last night, after the mehendi, you were waving your hands about, and the box must have opened in the bag. I found this on the verandah outside my door when I went to wash. I thought it was a bangle bead and put it in my purse, and only now I looked properly.” She held it out. “My right eye is a marvel. My left eye is a disappointment. Today, it seems, I was using the left.”
Saroja shrieked, and embraced her, and put the ring straight back on her finger, where it immediately slid round loose. Then she ran out to tell everyone. The brother-in-law came upstairs and said he had always known it would turn up. Khader bhai went down to telephone the police and tell them not to bother, though by then the sub-inspector was already climbing the stairs, very hot, in a cap, and looked deeply disappointed to have come all that way for an old lady’s purse.
Annapurna went over to the stool by the stairs, where Mallesh was still sitting.
“You can go,” she said. “And bring me another coffee. A strong one. I’ve earned it.”
The boy looked at her. He was young, but he was not stupid. He looked from her to Divya, who was sitting very still on the top step with her face hidden behind her coffee tumbler, both hands wrapped round it now, left over right, the ruined peacock hidden underneath.
“Yes, amma,” Mallesh said. He brought two coffees. He gave one to Annapurna, and after a moment’s thought, the other to Divya.
Annapurna drank hers by the railing, looking down into the well of the courtyard, where the morning sun had just reached the water drums. Her idli had gone cold. She ate the last one anyway. In thirty-four years at the railway, she had never once left a plate unfinished, and she was not going to start because of a little excitement on the third floor.