Page 52 of Six Days in Bombay

“Ah,” she said. She waved her hand for me to bring it to her. She pulled a loaf of bread out of it and offered the bag to me.

“This is perfect.” I grinned. She did too even though I don’t think she knew what the words meant. We were making each other understood without sound, and it made me happy.

***

The five-story apartment building was adjacent to the Vltava River. Like many of the buildings I’d seen in Prague, the Hitzig home and this row of elite residences bore more of a resemblance to British architecture than Indian. Gone were the minarets. Gone were the bulbous domes. Gone was the red sandstone. These buildings were flat-faced, angular, far less decorated than Indian ones, with row upon row of windows. The only embellishments were Greek and Italian statues like the ones from my old schoolbooks. At the top of the Hitzig residence was a colorful fresco of a woman lying on a bed, half-clothed, playing a harp with angels in attendance. Their counterparts in India were statues carved from stone of naked men and women—usually in the process of making love—ornate belts, anklets and bracelets their only clothing. The fresco woman looked as if she were posing. The naked statues did not. I smiled: one point for India.

I steeled myself for what was to come next. Either this would be Mira’s Petra or I would have to start my search at the Minerva school they had attended as girls.

When I rang the buzzer to the right of the enormous wooden door, a primly dressed maid, her hair in a bun, answered. Her expression was polite even as I saw a flicker of alarm in her eyes at the sight of my pinafore and cap.

“I’m here to see Miss Hitzig,” I said in French, which Mr. Peabody had advised I use with the likes of the Hitzigs. My schoolgirl French would have to do.

She hesitated a fraction of a second before opening the door wider. I entered a marbled foyer. It was cooler inside the building than it was outside. The end of May in Bombay would be sweltering. In Prague, I shivered, glad I’d worn Dr. Stoddard’s sweater before leaving my lodging. Straight ahead was the entrance to a small courtyard at the back of the building. To the left was a staircase that encircled the narrow room and seemed to go up and up and up, like that story my mother used to read to me,Jack and the Beanstalk. I looked up. High in the center of the ceiling was a leaded glass window. To my right were enormous paintings in gold frames where important-looking white men silently passed judgment on visitors. I could hear the faint sound of music, reminding me ofEine Kleine Nachtmusik, the night music Mira had hummed to me.

The maid led me up four flights of stairs. Along the way were more gilt-framed paintings, potted palms and thick rugs under our feet. There was a door at every landing, which I assumed was the entrance to another part of the house. The music got louder the higher we went. Once we were on the top floor, I could see that the stained-glass window on the roof was much larger than it appeared from the ground floor.

The music was coming from the apartment on this floor. The maid made a little moue with her mouth, as if she’d tasted something rancid, and indicated that I would find Miss Petra behind the door. Then she made her way back down the stairs.

I knocked, but the music coming from the flat was so loud I was sure no one inside had heard me. I turned the doorknob, found it unlocked and opened the door slowly.

“Who are you?” Petra demanded. Even though I didn’t speak Czech, the tone of her voice told me what she was asking. She was peering at me from behind a large canvas on an easel. Shelooked exactly as Mira had described her. Red-gold hair falling in waves across her shoulders and down her back. A wide mouth. Freckles across her long nose. The kind of pale complexion that can barely tolerate an hour in the sun. She was so thin I could see her hip bones protruding through her silky hand-­embroidered Chinese robe, left open to reveal a slip the color of a peach.

Unlike the cool of the stairwell, Petra’s flat was as hot as Bombay. It smelled stale, like the odor of unwashed bodies I knew so well from the hospital. The apartment was one large room that no one had bothered to finish. The walls were redbrick with white mortar. The floorboards were so old that there were now spaces between the wooden planks. Rough wood beams held up the ceiling. It looked like an attic of one of those colonial homes where I’d once attended an unwell servant.

I walked a few paces into the room.“Vous parlez français?”

“For God sakes, shut the door!” she said in French.

I hurried to do her bidding. When I turned around, Petra was lighting a match to a cigarette. Through narrowed eyes, she considered her painting, turning her head this way and that. She picked up her brush and dabbed it gingerly on the canvas. Her eyes strayed to me, standing a few feet from her now. She seemed to remember she had a visitor.

“Alors?”she said, taking a drag from her cigarette. For the first time, she regarded me seriously, looking me up and down. She frowned. “Is someone sick?”

I looked down at myself. The uniform again! “No—no. I’ve come to give you something.” I gestured to the canvas bag I was carrying.

“I can barely hear you, you know.” Before I could repeat myself, she turned to the bed behind her, a rumpled hillock of white sheets. A few of the pillows were scattered on the floor.

Petra said,“Káva!”to the bed. The hillock moved, then stopped.

“Now,” she said.

This time, a young man’s arm, then a leg, followed by a torso, emerged. He was naked. He stretched and yawned, his stomach muscles contracting. Then he shook his head as if to wake himself and headed to a makeshift kitchen, which consisted of a counter with a two-burner cooktop, a small sink and a wall cabinet.

I’d seen naked men and women in the course of my work, but never outside of it.

Dirty-blond hair hung over his eyes. I watched the muscles of his back move as he lifted the coffee jar, poured the beans into a coffee grinder. Then he reached for the tap to fill the most unusual coffee maker I’d ever seen—a stainless steel globe with a green plastic handle. He filled the funnel with ground coffee, plugged in the cord. His buttock muscles tensed as he walked to the radio near the bed and turned the knob. Suddenly, silence. I followed his walk back to bed.

Petra said, “Pretty, isn’t he?” She smiled through a smoky exhale. I blushed, embarrassed to be caught staring. I turned to Petra, who had returned to her canvas. “It’s about Miss Novak. Your old schoolmate.”

She blinked. “Mira?”

I loosened my grip on the canvas bag. “I’m sorry I bring sad news. Miss Novak was recently treated at the Wadia Hospital in Bombay, where I work. She died three weeks ago—quite suddenly.” I watched her reaction. At the hospital, some people had fainted on the spot when I told them a patient had died.

Petra’s mouth was somewhere between a grimace and a smile. “Mira?MyMira? But she can’t be more than twenty-nine? Same age as me. She’s too young. Are you sure you have the right Mira?”

“You’ve known each other since you were little girls. You went to Minerva Gymnasium together? She called youovce?”

Petra’s brush dripped yellow paint onto the floor. She looked down at the splat, which was rapidly creating a star pattern on the wood. Only then did I notice paint splotches scattered allover the floorboards. I doubt the maid ever came in here. Perhaps she wasn’t allowed.

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