A Fatal Inversion Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jamaican boys in there and they made a point of crowding the counter, holding their elbows akimbo, so that Shiva was unable to pick up his paper from the pile in front of them. Quietly he asked for the Standard and handed across his money between the jutting arms; he didn’t want any trouble. It was the Indians they hated down here, not the whites. Well, there were few whites left except for very old people who couldn’t have moved if they had wanted to.
    Lili was waiting outside, standing between their cases. She was very brave, he thought, to wear the sari and shop in the Indian shops and have her Bengali lessons when all these things drew attention to her. It would have been easy for her to pass for a white girl. Only her eyes, that distinctive dark bluish-brown and with somewhat protuberant bluish whites, betrayed her. But people were not that perceptive and for God’s sake this was London, not Johannesburg in the fifties. She could have gotten away with it, and he had more than once suggested she should, begged her almost. But it was her identity, she said, it was all she had, and she went on putting a caste mark which she had no right to on her forehead and wearing all her gold bracelets and cooking sag ghosht and dal instead of the defrosted hamburgers and chips that most people around there ate. He picked up the suitcases and she took their hand luggage and they walked home, passing three separate black people who looked at them with silent hostility and two elderly white women who did not look at them at all.
    Lili would start unpacking at once. She would put all the light clothes into one bag and all the dark into another and take them to the launderette in Pevsner Road. He knew it would be useless to try to hinder this; she would be fidgety and fretful if there were dirty clothes around. So long as she wasn’t out after dark, he supposed it would be all right. Nothing much could happen to her on a sunny September afternoon between here and the launderette, and Mrs. Barakhda, who ran it, was a friend of hers, or the nearest Lili had to a friend.
    He made her a cup of tea while she sorted the washing, closed up the valises, and pushed them into the closet under the stairs. At least they had a whole house with three bedrooms. Most of the houses down here were divided into two flats, two front doors squeezed in under the tiny porch. He offered to carry the bags for her but she wouldn’t hear of it. In her reactionary way—for Lili had been brought up by an independent feminist mother—she thought it all right for men to carry suitcases but not bags of wash. With his second cup of tea in front of him, he sat down to look at the newspaper.
    There was a big picture of the Princess of Wales visiting a home for handicapped children. The main story was about trouble in the Middle East and a subsidiary one about racial trouble in West London, street fighting mainly and breaking shop windows. Shiva’s eye traveled down the page. At the foot of one of the left-hand columns he read a headline. For the amount of text underneath it, a mere paragraph, it was a disproportionately large headline. It even rather spoiled the symmetry of the page.
    The headline said: Skeleton Found in Woodland Grave and the story beneath it ran: While digging a grave for his pet dog, a Suffolk landowner with a home near Hadleigh unearthed a human skeleton. The remains appear to be those of a young woman. Police declined to comment further at this stage and Mr. Alec Chipstead, a chartered surveyor, was not available for questioning.
    Shiva read it twice. It was rather strangely put, he thought. He felt this about most articles in newspapers. They didn’t know much but they told you what they did know in the most cryptic way possible to whet your appetite and make you speculate. For instance, they didn’t tell you if the landowner and Mr. Alec Chipstead were one and the same person, though you could tell that was what they meant.
    He could feel