A Cut-Like Wound (38 page)

‘Eat it up, Ibrahim. Every last grain of rice,’ India on the jaw spoke softly.

What was this new game? Ibrahim felt his throat constrict. He reached for the parcel and fed himself the biriyani slowly. At some point he gagged, but he continued to eat. Grain by grain. Till all that was left on the butter paper were two pieces of meat, three cloves and a piece of cinnamon. He licked his fingers one by one and glared at India on the jaw. No one was going to get the better of Ibrahim!

‘Get up,’ India on the jaw said from the doorway. Ibrahim followed the man into what looked like a storeroom. Ibrahim hesitated at the doorway. What now?

‘Stand here,’ he was told.

So Ibrahim stood. The meal hung heavy in his intestines. His chest constricted with the grease and spice. A faint queasiness filled his mouth. He was sleepy and ached to lie down. There was just enough room for him to stretch out. He lowered himself on the floor. But India on the jaw came to the doorway, barking, ‘Stand up. No lying down, no sitting, do you hear me? What do you think this place is? Your mother-in-law’s mansion, for you to stuff yourself and snore!’

Ibrahim paced in the narrow space. Four steps this way, four steps that. Hot air filled his ears, he was beginning to feel nauseous. He stopped and leaned against the shelf. The hands of a giant clock crawled in his head. A second. How slowly a second moved to the next!

An eternity later, India on the jaw appeared at the doorway.

‘Come with me,’ he said, leading the way back to the dining room.

Ibrahim’s eyes lit up. Perhaps the man called Gowda had
returned. He hurried after the man. Then his feet stilled. On the dining table was yet another packet of biriyani. A wave of nausea gushed up his throat. He clamped his lips shut.

‘Time to eat!’ India on the jaw jeered, gesturing at the parcel.

Ibrahim continued to stand at the door.

‘You have a choice. Tell us what you know or we’ll keep stuffing biriyani down your throat every hour. It is all in your hands. Or should I say, all in your mouth. Speak or swallow!’

Ibrahim didn’t know when he felt his will break. Was it after the fourth or fifth packet of biriyani? Was it when he couldn’t take any more the ache in his legs, the pain in the small of his back, the pressing need to lie down, to rush to the kakoos and shit what seemed to be a mountain of turds building in him? All he knew was he held up his hand and croaked, ‘Enough. I’ll tell you what I know.’

S
he stared at the phone, unable to make up her mind. He had called thrice already and she had let it ring, unwilling to press the reject button, unable to take the call and speak to him. She sat with others who didn’t know that she existed. She sat with others who wouldn’t understand anyway.

‘I don’t like this,’ he had said. Her Sanjay.

‘I don’t like meeting you in stealth. We are both young and unmarried. So what are you afraid of?’ he had said last Friday, taking her hand in his. ‘You have such pretty hands,’ he murmured, caressing it. ‘Such soft skin, like a bird’s wing.’

Her heart was a trapped bird in her chest. The fluttering of wings filled her ears. What could she say? She had been rash and foolish to take it this far. She slid her hand out of his.

‘Now that I am staying at the hostel, I don’t have vessels to scrub or clothes to wash. So my hands would be soft.’ She tried to inject the flatness of everyday into the sibilance of his sweet nothings.

‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.

‘I’ll drop you at the hostel,’ he said. And then at the gate, ‘there’s a new film releasing next week. Shall we go for it?’

She had nodded, knowing that she would have to find an excuse when the time came.

And here he was, calling again and again, to ask her to go with him on Friday evening.

She would have sold her soul to do any of those things women of her age did with little thought or planning. To sit on the back of a motorbike clinging to him. To walk in a park with him. To step into the light and let him see her untouched by the shadows. Maybe, one day she could. There were operations that would allow her to be herself. But what would she do until then, trapped within a man’s body?

And Sanjay, would he accept her once he knew the truth? He had put her on a pedestal and all it would take was one long look to dislodge her from it.

The mobile trilled again.

THURSDAY, 25 AUGUST

The corporator frowned. He had taken to standing at the window of an upper room from where he had a clear view of the gate. The house was built like a fortress. No one could
get in by scaling the walls. But the gate was an opening and since he was the corporator of a ward, there were always people coming in to see him with a petition, a complaint, a request, a bribe.

Ibrahim’s whisper of surveillance had spooked him. He had been careful all along. It was one thing to evade the eyes of the Lok Ayukta and its fierce guardian, Justice Santosh Hegde. He had made sure that all his amassed property was in the names of Chikka and his two sisters. If there was a raid, all they would come up with would be the expected. There would be some things for them to find. To keep himself completely clean would make Hegde smell a rat. And he was very good at sniffing out rats, the corporator knew. If there was a raid, there would be a minor scandal, some rubbish in the media and then time would spread a cloak of forgetting … but the Crime Branch mounting a surveillance was something else. If they found out what was really going on, everything that he had worked so hard for would come to an end. So, to see Ibrahim at the gate in less than forty-eight hours was a matter of concern.

The corporator rushed down.

‘They grabbed me,’ Ibrahim stated baldly. ‘They grabbed me last evening.’

‘And?’ The corporator sat in his chair, betraying no evidence of fear or anger.

Ibrahim swallowed. ‘I resisted. I resisted for as long as I could. They wanted to know about our association. I did what we had talked about all along. I told them the truth. But they didn’t buy that.’

Ibrahim paused. His throat constricted. What would Anna say when he knew?

‘Once upon a time those bastards would have tried to beat
the confession out of me. I would have been able to handle that. I would have passed out … but this … this was inhuman torture. Which shaitan mind could have thought it up?’

The corporator listened without interrupting.

‘In the end, I broke down, Anna, I didn’t have the will to go on, hold on … so…’

‘So?’

‘So, I had to give them a name. I said I knew nothing but there was someone who did. Someone who knew about the entire operation. I gave them the new boy’s name. He is the only one who won’t squeal because he knows nothing. All the others will,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Which means we will have to wait a bit to send out the next consignment. Another pigeon has to be found.’

Anna nodded thoughtfully, but didn’t speak.

‘I had no option, Anna…’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s gone to Mysore on some work. He has a job. He’s a certified AC mechanic attached to a service centre.’

Anna looked at his fingernails. ‘We have to make sure that he disappears.’

‘But it would still come back to you if something happened to him.’

‘Not if it’s made to look like one of the others got to him first. A pawn in a gang war. That would divert their attention elsewhere.’

Ibrahim nodded. He knew what must be done. He had to make amends and sometimes that involved an offering. God had intervened and provided that other Ibrahim a ram instead of his son Ishmael as the sacrificial animal. But no one had intervened for the ram. And so it would be for the new boy.

I
t was almost eight in the evening when Gowda stumbled home. It had been a long day of routine police work that didn’t allow him to sit quietly with the scattered findings of the case. To try and put it together, he needed to map it in his mind. But how was a man to do that when his desk was piled with nonsense like the stray cattle menace, a burglary at a construction site nearby from where a load of metal rods had gone missing, a complaint about a wedding hall that routinely played loud music. In the end Gowda had decided to deal with those petty cases before he set his mind to work on what seemed to him to be no case at all.

Gowda kicked his shoes off in the veranda. He peeled away his socks and flung them on top of the shoes. Eventually, he would have to put the shoes away on the shoe rack and carry the socks to the laundry basket in the work area adjacent to the kitchen. Or they would stay there till morning, till Shanthi arrived to bring order into his home and life. And he didn’t like her doing that. She did enough already. Gowda stared at his shoes and socks. Then, with a sigh, he bent and put the shoes on the rack. He opened the door and walked in, holding his balled socks.

The house was airless and smelt a little like unwashed socks. Gowda uttered an expletive under his breath. It bounced off the walls and came back at him. He opened the windows. The breeze wafted in, bringing with it the fragrance of jasmine. At one end of the veranda, Shanthi had planted a jasmine creeper. It had finally begun to bloom. Gowda breathed in the fragrance. And it came to him again, that hairslide with the withered jasmine attached to it. It probably had been part of a string of jasmines. The string had fallen off or had been cleared to leave no evidence, and only this had slid into the fold of the sofa-cum-bed.

Gowda went around the house switching on lights and the geyser. First a bath and then the rest, he told himself, taking a bottle of water from the fridge and drinking deeply from it.

A man was entitled to a few minutes with himself.

He stood under the hot shower, feeling his fatigue drain away. He peered at the showerhead, feeling the spray sting his upturned face. If it wasn’t for Urmila … He hadn’t been able to speak to her all day. She must be furious. He heard the phone ring. No, he wasn’t going to rush for it, he told himself as he ran the towel between each toe. He put on track pants and a T-shirt, splashed some cologne on himself and combed his hair carefully. Where are you off to? He smiled at himself. All spruced up like a bridegroom!

Gowda poured himself a rum and topped it with Coke. He carried the drink and phone to the veranda, sat down in his chair and only then allowed himself to take a look at the phone. Three missed calls.

Two from Santosh and one from Urmila. She had sent three messages as well:

Tried calling u. Call back
.