Lost for Words: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

palace gates and see the city, which sometimes betrayed its presence as a faint smudge in the air, complicating the glorious sunsets which were such a talking point among guests at the palace. His father had forbidden him to leave the grounds, and Sonny spent many weeks planning his secret expedition and accumulating what he imagined was an appropriate disguise in which to move unnoticed among his people.
    When he finally arrived at the outskirts of the city, he wrapped his borrowed garments more tightly around himself, cupping his palm over his nostrils to filter the stagnant air, clogged with the thick odours of cooking, the stench of sewage and the reek of rotting marigolds.He finally emerged from the miserable maze of leprous lanes, their mud walls plastered with drying cow dung and streaked with crimson eructations of betel juice, and found himself on open ground overlooking the river. Back at the palace the melting spring snows were artfully channelled into fountains and bathing pools, into swift streams whose murmuring music enlivened shaded pleasure grounds; here, beside the city, the sluggish flood burnt in the sun like molten glass, its unlovely banks strewn with garbage. Somewhere down by the glaring water he could hear the crackle of a funeral pyre. Slipping on the dark glasses which, mercifully, he had tucked into his shirt pocket at the last moment, Sonny watched as a blackened corpse, excruciated by the intense heat, sat up for the last time, while a pariah dog gnawed on a charred limb that had escaped the flames and lay smoking on the greasy beach. Further along the shore, an indifferent washerwoman beat clothes on a rock and chucked them into a tub nearby.
    Shaking off these memories as he moved towards the exit, Sonny nodded at the cluster of air hostesses, accepting their longing to see him again on board their airline as the inevitable consequence of the awe that he inspired. One of them, not completely ignorant of the history and traditions of her country, must have known and then told the others, in a lather of excitement, that the passenger in the front row (he had, as usual, reserved the entire front row, so as not to find himself sitting next to that famous bore, God-Knows-Who) was the six hundred and fifty-third maharaja of Badanpur. Sonny could trace his ancestry, according to the highest Brahminical authority, back to Krishna, the dark-blue god. The thought of those happy days when gods had mingled freely with humankind, and infused his own lineage with divinity, brought a radiant smile to Sonny’s face, as if he were Krishna himself, smiling at the exquisite milkmaid who was to become the first great Queen and Founding Mother of the House of Badanpur. Sonny saw the pretty little girl who had fetched his frock coat stagger for a moment, as if trying to regain her balance after an obscure shock wave that only he could fully understand had passed through the cabin. He almost reached out to support her, but checked his compassion, feeling that his touch might have the opposite effect, throwing this frail human creature to the ground and robbing her of her sanity, like a circuit incinerated by a charge that it was never designed to carry.
    As he sped through Heathrow’s long low corridors in a beeping golf cart, Sonny checked his phone to see if Katherine Burns had sent a text, shedding light on the mystery of The Mulberry Elephant having so far received no notices in the British press. He didn’t pretend to understand the workings of a newspaper editor’s mind, but he could imagine that the press would want to make a bigger splash by synchronizing all the profiles, reviews, interviews, television chat shows, and guest appearances in popular soap operas, with the explosive appearance of Mulberry on the Elysian Big List. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was that there could be no other explanation, but he was disappointed, if not altogether surprised, that Miss Burns was so overcome