The Lahoris were Kashmiri Hindu. Kashmir is a beautiful region in the north of the Asian subcontinent, but one that has for ages been the center of conflict. It’s claimed by India as well as by Pakistan and, halfheartedly, by China. For more than a thousand years, rule of the region as a whole, or portions of it, has traded hands among Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders—and the British too, of course, who came up with one of the more curious names ever for a country: the Princely State. In recent years the Hindu population of Kashmir, largely Saraswat Brahmin, lived in Kashmir Valley. Representing about 20 percent of the region’s inhabitants, they were a people moderate in their religious practice and they comfortably blended spiritual and secular lives, avoiding as much as they could the simmering turbulence of the area.
Inevitably, the peace and isolation didn’t last. In the 1980s a militant Kashmiri independence movement arose, composed largely of radicalized Muslims. Its mission was ethnic cleansing, which resulted in the infamous Exodus of 1990, in which more than 150,000 Kashmiri Hindus fled. Those who didn’t risked death. In the end, only several thousand Hindus remained in the valley.
Vimal was born in the United States and had no personal knowledge of these events—which were, of course, hardly topics touched upon by world history classes in American schools. But he was an expert on the independence movement, the rapes and murder, and the Exodus because Papa lectured him and Sunny on the topic frequently. Papa had been in the United States when the Exodus occurred but a number of his relatives had to abandon their homes, leaving all behind, to be relocated to India proper—the congested, polluted urban sprawl of the National Capital Region—Delhi. Several older aunties and uncles died prematurely, Papa was sure, because of the resettlement.
Papa harbored deep, unrelenting resentment toward all people Muslim.
Adeela Badour, for instance—had he known about her.
It didn’t matter that the Badour family had lived here for more generations than Papa and that their forebears had no connection with the radicals in the valley, or that they were moderate in religion and secular in worldview. Nor did it matter to Vimal’s father that Muslims in India suffered their own abuse at the hands of the Hindu majority.
No, no matter.
What irony here: His father had finally and reluctantly abandoned his insistence on an arranged marriage for his sons; Vimal could have married any Hindu woman of his choosing (though Papa occasionally reminded him that Akbar the Great, the most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire, and his courtesans vastly preferred Kashmiri women for wives and—yes, his father actually said—concubines, because of their beauty).
Possibly, eventually, with a great deal of lobbying by his mother, Vimal’s father might have accepted someone non-Hindu.
But Muslim?
Never.
But it was a Muslim who, sipping tea in Greenwich Village and looking over a drawing of a human heart, had stolen Vimal’s.
He now turned back to her, as she leaned against the car, arms folded.
Adeela repeated, “Tell him. You have to.”
I tried, Vimal Lahori thought. And I ended up a prisoner in my own basement.
He told her, “You don’t know him.”
“I’m Muslim, Vim. I know about parents.”
Silence filled the garage, then was suddenly broken by the sound of rain, loud, since the roof wasn’t insulated. Vimal glanced up and saw an abandoned bird’s nest.
With a faint gaze of resignation she said, “Do what you think you have to. I have three years in New York. After that, residency, which’ll be flexible. Maybe California. I could probably make that work. But I need those three years here.”
Her message wasn’t a threat, not by any means. Adeela was never threatening. She was simply and clinically pointing out the undeniable truth: A lot can happen in three years.
“You’re going to go, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
Her eyes closed. And she hugged him hard. “Do you have money?”
“Some.”
“I’ve got—”
“No.”
“You can borrow it. And I know somebody in Glendale.”
“Where’s that?”
She laughed. “Los Angeles. Do your homework. She taught at NYU for a year. She and her husband, they’re good people. Wait here. Taalia’s in the house.”
Adeela’s parents did not know she was dating Vimal but she was close to her younger sister, and the two girls and Vimal had seen a few movies together and had some fast, furtive meals. Better to have no witnesses.
Vimal noted on the workbench her phone, car keys and purse. This gave him an idea. He’d borrow her car and drive it to a suburban town that had a train station, Westchester somewhere. He’d leave it there. She could take the train to pick it up. And he could get a ticket to another train, Amtrak, and head up to Albany, then find a train going west.
He pocketed the keys. She’d understand.
Then he paused. He heard a car roll into the side street and the brakes squeal as the vehicle stopped. The engine went silent. He looked out and didn’t see the vehicle.
Nothing, he was sure. A neighbor. And reflected again that the odds of the killer finding Adeela’s house were just about zero.
He leaned against the workbench and waited for his Juliet to return.
Chapter 46
What a time this was.
As she walked up the stairs from the backyard into her house, she reflected that she could understand Vimal’s wanting to escape his father. Her own—as she’d said—could be overbearing. Oddly, in a culture often male-dominated, it was Adeela’s mother who was the formidable partner in the marriage. (This was the opposite of Vimal’s Hindu family.) After graduating, Adeela would get an internship and residency out of arm’s reach of her mother.
But not too far away. Probably Connecticut (Adeela Badour loved autumn foliage, just loved it). Maybe Long Island.
That was as far as she was willing to go.
California? Of course not.
And it wasn’t right for Vimal either. But she supposed it was not a bad idea for him to leave now, get to the West Coast for a time. Until they caught that madman.
She glanced into the living room and saw Taalia, on the couch. The ten-year-old was in a Phineas and Ferb T-shirt, and jeans. Adeela had to smile. What a child of our times! The girl was texting on the same phone that was pumping music through the massive pink headset embracing her ears and watching, distractedly, a muted Disney Channel cartoon.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Adeela stepped into her room, glancing at a poster on the wall: a periodic table of the elements, each represented by Japanese anime characters—from Sailor Moon as hydrogen to Vegeta as Ununoctium. She’d made it herself, inspired by a similar one she’d found online. Adeela was amused, recalling the fight she’d had with her mother about taping up other posters on her walls when she was in middle school: boy bands. Which depicted boys she had no interest in, bands that played music she never listened to. She’d done it simply out of defiance.
So totally mature of me, she now thought.
She pulled her checkbook from a folder and sat for a moment. Adeela had a decent-sized bank account. She’d worked a number of jobs since high school, and, though medical school was excruciatingly expensive, she had a student loan for most of it (the day of reckoning was some years away). She looked at her balance. A sigh. She wrote Vimal a check for two thousand dollars.
She tore the check out; the noise seemed particularly odd and troubling, something surgical. She thought of Vimal’s wound and his refusal to go to the ER.
Another sigh.
She walked down the stairs and into the kitchen, heading for the back door, when she heard a familiar click.
The front door opening.
Oh, no! Her mother must’ve returned early. But why the front door? The woman would have parked in the alley beside the garage.
Adeela walked to the doorway and peeked around the corner to the living room. She froze and gave a quiet gasp.
A man in a black coat and ski mask, holding one of those box-cutting knives in his right hand, was looking around. He spotted Taalia and moved quietly up behind her.
No, no, no!
Adeela stepped back, looked around the kitchen and ran to the island. A moment later, holding a ten-inch carving knife, she strode into the front hall. Her gaze toward him was pure steel.
The man blinked, glanced at the knife, and smiled. “Ah, little bird. Look at what you have there. You are the big one, Adeela.”
This would be the killer.
“And cute little Taalia, little birds.”
How the hell did he know their names?