Bhendi Bazaar (22 page)

'I'll remember that. Good night.'

The door was slammed before Rita took the first step down. Aware of the reduced crowd, her hand, subconsciously, checked her revolver under the jacket. Thank you, Smith & Wesson. She boldly walked back to her Gypsy, got in and drove back to Crawford Market.

"…the roots of the crime look deeper than we might have originally thought…"

Rita radioed the team to be back in the Operations Room for a briefing. She wanted the team to start the investigation with the new information at daybreak, and not squander time coming in for the meeting. ‘Tap all phones in that building – landlines and mobiles. I want every call to be recorded. I’ll get Mr Joshi to sign the papers first thing tomorrow morning,
’
she told Vikram.

The team called it a day sometime after midnight.

Who was Margaret? Or Malti? Where did she come from? Who were her two friends that were dead? How did they die?

Back at Bhendi Bazaar, Margaret slid open the rear cover of her mobile phone, took out the SIM card and shred it to pieces with a scissor. Replacing it with another one, she called out. ‘The police have got the scent…’ she was on the phone. ‘Yes…she got here, that DCP Ferreira…she thinks we leak information…No, don’t do anything stupid…she said she’ll be back…and I know all my phones would be wired by morning, so this is my last call to you…yes…I have decided to leave…I’ll be careful, you take care too.’ Concluding the call, Margaret destroyed this SIM as well. She was erasing every track she could.

Rita made a strong demitasse with twice the dose of coffee she normally used. She had never figured out why she needed coffee to wake up and coffee to sleep. How could it cut both ways? It was coffee, not a magic potion, she reflected sitting in her office after everyone had left. She remembered Margaret mentioning
twenty-five years sinc
e…so the best guesstimate would be to search the archives between 1981 and 1983.

Working with the police database continuously for the next couple of hours, Rita unearthed more than she — or anyone — had since the beginning of this investigation. The 1982 Asian Games, Embassy of USSR issuing a public notice of three missing girls; the pictures were grainy, they had been scanned from newspaper cuttings, but the
Margaret
she had met hours ago had a slight resemblance to Magdalena. What, then, happened to Dunya and Varinka? If Magdalena had changed to Margaret and Malti, what had the other two changed to? How did they get to Mumbai, and into prostitution?

Life of a hooker, Rita knew it all: some started early, real early, as if they’d waited for puberty all along only to peddle ass on streets. It, sure, was illegal but there were creeps willing to take the risk. For some hookers, it started as experimentation, for some as a rebellion against norms and family, some others came in for the money. Many were drugged and sold off. Funny thing this flesh trade was. Most women did not start off as career hookers; many thought it a stopgap arrangement till they escaped or got their feet firmly on the ground to move ahead.

Rita pondered over a fresh idea. Getting out of the police archives, she searched for unnatural deaths of any Russian girls in the Eighties; their deaths in early life could hardly have been natural. None were reported. Or the person who digitalised old newspapers might not have considered such deaths to be too significant to fill the archives. Or, maybe, Margaret hadn’t told Rita the complete truth. That she had two friends had been verified now, but what if they hadn’t died. She searched for Dunya. The only search result generated that had any connection with India was the little news item published in New Delhi on their disappearance in 1982, and it mentioned all the three girls.

Search on “Varinka + India” produced, along with the article of her disappearance, an old court case in Bombay High Court. In 1990. The case facts mentioned Viviane Casey — surely Varinka must have been mentioned in the case to be picked up by the search engine.

Viviane. Could Viviane be to Varinka what Margaret was to Magdalena?

Rita closed the public Internet and delved into police archives once more to dig up the case of Viviane Casey.

She read Viviane's case thrice. And it, suddenly, seemed to start making sense. Sure, there were gaps, but when had anyone hypothesised without gaps? She persuaded her exhausted brain that she was finally on the right track; that the provenance of this crime laid elsewhere. Did Viviane’s losing the court case merely send her to the grave, or was it the cradle for the current murders?

Were her instincts on the wane or was she simply too tired to think? Rita felt a tremor of fear as she descended the steps to walk to her parked Gypsy at 4 a.m. She thought she’d merely put her feet up for a few hours and return to the office by eight. But, it was like someone had switched off lights in her brain; sleep was a befitting corollary.

Rita woke up with a start.

Didn’t the case report say Viviane had a son? Where was he? More importantly, who was he?

From whatever she had learnt — abandoned by an unknown father and raised by a prostitute mother, if he had ever witnessed endless men fornicating with his mother in unnatural ways, his profile matched more than half the serial killers ever apprehended and charged.

Back at Crawford Market, Rita logged into police archives compassionately studying how the defence lawyer had brilliantly twisted the misery of Viviane into ambitious, evil desire for making extra cash. And the irony was that the judge had agreed that the defence lawyer’s tale was truer than the naked truth; but better lawyers not victims won cases, that too based on evidence. That black night, in Mumbai in 1990, had involved six people: Raja Kumar and friends — the enchilada, the moneyed — the soirée of well-heeled men who could afford the best lawyer in the city against a tart peddling her ass. It was never an equal hand at the table and, as such, the dirty game was decided before the first card was thrown. Viviane’s umbrage, understandably, must have been intense and shocking enough for her to take the dire step.

Maudlin sympathy was voiced, on the back pages, by the media — single mum, immigrant, vice girl with a parochial aspiration to make money who bit off more than she could chew in one evening. Who would have believed a hooker cry rape?

However, Rita thought purposefully, there was a gap between Viviane's suicide and her missing son, and the six murders. Pointers and conjectures were, well, mere pointers and conjectures. It was like a trail ending on one side of the grave and a new one beginning on the other side; Viviane’s son, the only possible link to concatenate the two, was missing.

Perplexity grows with every missing trail; this was no exception. The most cognitive factor of advancing the theory of Viviane's son being a suspect was that he seemed the person with the strongest motive. But Viviane’s son was nowhere to be found. He, if at all alive, was obviously living under an alias and thus not on any database that Rita could access. However, the son was a man and the mysterious caller that phoned Rita had been a female. Also, based on surmises, she had convinced herself that the killer was a female. Rita’s dilemma was to reverse her earlier surmise.

As Rita read the case file, she gathered that after the initial kerfuffle, the hoo-ha by the media, the case had faded into obscurity. The media, sadly or selfishly, turned a blind eye to her suicide. Now, a quarter of a century later, the ink in the words might have faded on the crumbled piece of paper or the scanned document, but it had enough weight to shake up the devil's conscience without making much effort.

Unfortunately, there was no more the police archives could tell Rita about Viviane or her missing son.

TWENTY-FOUR
1991 – 2006

Life became one unbroken nightmare for Junior. His body hurt, he lost his appetite, his childhood, his smile. The twinkle in his eyes was long gone too. He was morbidly frightened of nights. Though some nights Mr Fernando didn't turn up to defile him or degrade him by others, the fear persisted nevertheless. On nights when Mr Fernando didn't take him to the study, he lay awake crying, thinking about how could he get away from the hellhole. The puerile mind was inept at thinking or devising a plan to escape. There was no help, no friends he could trust, no one to turn to for advice. He was too small to fight, too young to subsist on his own if he ran away. If he went back to Margaret, would Pathak let him stay there? Maybe. But Pathak surely hadn't wanted him there: wasn't that why he was sent here in the first place? What were his options?

As years passed, Junior's mind sprouted and he grasped the meaning of things that he hitherto had only dimly understood. Aided by his sordid experiences, he stitched together the pieces to chronologically process the flashes of pictorial memories — what his mother did...the strange men at nights...the wretched assignations...his mother's tears...there was some court case...her suicide...her final moments when she lay in a pool of blood with wrists slashed. Why did she leave him behind to bear this world? But he never blamed his mother for what had happened. His mind could comprehend that she had been no more than a pawn like him, shackled by destiny. History had a fucking unfair custom of repeating itself.

What if his mother hadn't died? The problem, he realised, with asking "what if" was how far did he need to go back to theorise? Sequentially, ‘
what if
she hadn't died’ trailed ‘
what if
she wasn't a hooker’, which followed ‘
what if
she hadn't come to this country’? It was moot, idle speculation. In reality, she was dead now and Junior was Mr Fernando's bitch, as none of the
what ifs
could be altered.

He contemplated suicide, but never attempted it— suicide meant accepting defeat, when your life beats you. The Bible — and he had read the New Testament infinite times — said life was sacred. The world was more than he could see, he figured; there were a million reasons to live.

Thankfully, Mr Fernando lost interest in Junior. Another unfortunate prepubescent boy had joined the orphanage, and Junior had seen Mr Fernando shower his avuncular attention towards the new toy. Junior considered warning the new boy of Mr Fernando's intentions that were as transparent — at least, to him — as a pole dancer's outfit, but he dropped the notion. What would be the point? Mr Fernando and his friends would still have his way with the little boy. On the flip side, if the boy mentioned to Mr Fernando about Junior's caution, the caning would be too severe.

A night later, he heard the sobs from the younger boy's room.

When he was a bit older, Junior decided to flee. He didn't know where he'd go, what he'd do, but once he had made up his mind, he resolutely planned. For weeks.

A few nights later, Junior heard footsteps as he lay awake in the stillness of the night; Mr Fernando had come to pick up the new boy. Junior heard the soft protests, but Mr Fernando, nevertheless, succeeded in taking the boy to the study for the waiting guests. A few minutes later, Junior went to the study and bolted it from the outside. He rushed back to his room to pick up the little bag he had already packed and tiptoed out of the building. He turned back to look at the building, knowing he would return one day. Surely.

When he had been pushed out of the Club at Cuffe Parade, he had been too young to know the location. How would he ever find Margaret? He had no idea how or where to begin the search. He had been a pawn for too long to do anything that wasn't instructed. But he knew he'd learn and survive.

Escape was one thing, the fearful idea of surviving on his own, in Mumbai, was another; food, shelter, clothing and the basic necessities required for subsistence were hard to come by. How? Who would pay for them? It might have been morally and physically degrading for him in the orphanage but there was always food on the table. Moreover, the perpetual paranoia that someone was looking for him drove Junior crazy (though no one cared; with millions living in care homes, who would bother coming after a few getaways?) For the first three days, he endured on water from filthy municipal taps.

Then he found a friend.

Raaj was an underclass criminal who belonged to one of the few underprivileged thugs whose forefathers had escaped the mass execution of their tribe under the British Raj. Or so he claimed: that he was born to be a criminal. A six-feet tall, burly guy of twenty-one, his skin and hair exhibited the insanitary conditions he squatted in. He didn’t reside in an apartment or a house; it was a seven feet long cement pipe, nine feet in diametre, left behind by one of the carefree builders on the outskirts of
Dharavi;
a few thousands called such huge pipes their home, so did Raaj. Flanked against a wall on one side, the pipe had a curtained entrance on the other — the drape made by sewing together a few disposed of jute bags. Raaj eked out a living by rag-picking and pick-pocketing. With no regular income, he ate surplus food that had been discarded by restaurants and scavenged tatters in rubbish piles that had been tossed out by their previous owners.

“You looking for food?”
is how the conversation had begun when Raaj observed Junior going through the waste bins outside restaurants.

‘Yes. Your patch?’ Junior was petrified he had encroached on another reprobate’s area.

‘No. Haven’t seen you before. Who are you?’

Raaj, a runaway from his estranged family, understood what Junior had been through after the latter confessed he had fled from an orphanage. Just why Raaj took on Junior as an apprentice or a friend would forever remain a mystery, but he did it; out of pity, for brotherhood, for humanity.

Life in the cement pipe wasn’t luxurious; sadly, it wasn’t as transitory as Junior had anticipated. It lasted longer than he had imagined, but, at least, he had someone to share the miserable life with. Raaj and he lived on rag-picking; ate and drank abstemiously, and any extra money they earned with unscrupulous activities went towards watching Bollywood flicks and an occasional feast in a cheap restaurant to eat food, which, for once, wasn’t leftovers.

Life in miserable, yet majestic Mumbai.

However, the quest to find Margaret and his roots never left Junior’s brain. He could never fathom why he needed to know, the need to go back…and go back to what? He tried to exorcise his past ghosts, but unfailingly strayed back into memories of his mother. Her violation, each tear she had shed after losing some legal case, and, then, her killing herself.

His mind had retained the scenes of his mother’s last moments…he had seen her dying…he regretted there had been no goodbyes. Retribution had become his bedmate; when he slept, when he couldn’t sleep and lay sobbing softly — so that it didn’t wake up Raaj — or when he woke up. Time couldn’t debilitate his resolve. If anything, the passing time made his determination more sinister.

Junior kept his misery personal; he didn’t share it with Raaj, at least for the first few months.

It was the July of 2002. It had rained since the evening before, making it impossible for the duo to venture outside for any food. If you lived life as pennilessly in Mumbai, you instinctively knew you had to stock up for such days. The fish don't need swimming lessons.

‘You ever had sex?’ Raaj asked as he nibbled on cold and soggy French fries they had picked from trash outside a takeaway the day before.

Junior turned crimson. Sex was something one had to stomach to sustain; his mother fucked for money, he had fucked to survive. The ugly visions flashed in front of his eyes: of being in Viviane’s room or Margaret’s room, watching them having sex or when Mr Fernando and his friends sodomised him. Sex couldn’t have been intended for pleasure. In any case not
his
pleasure. Why was Raaj asking such questions? Had he come to know about Junior’s background?

‘What happened man, you didn’t answer me,’ Raaj said, busy gobbling on whatever was left. ‘In fact, it would have been so much better if you were a girl. You know what…you are real
chikna
…look at you.’ He turned around to face the bare-chested Junior sitting in his shorts. ‘No hair, smooth white skin…’

Junior clenched his fists, he tried hard to keep his rage under control, but Raaj noticed his friend’s growing distress. However, before he could utter the next word or apologise, Junior burst out. The tears flowed; he had stifled his emotions for an extremely long time, pushed them under, but they gave away. Raaj dropped his food and rushed to console his friend.

‘What happened? I was only joking. Let me get you some water.’ He picked up a tin can, stretched his hand outside the pipe to collect distilled water from the skies above and brought it back to Junior. ‘Sorry. I know you are unhappy, I sometimes wake up at nights to find you sobbing, but I never asked. If you think I am a friend, tell me. Maybe I can help.’

Junior relented. Raaj had been his friend for quite some time now, given him shelter, food and had never asked for anything in return. He gave an account, albeit anachronistically, of the miserable life he’d lived; the mind had lost all sense of sequence, certain frames had gone missing on account of memory lapses or because of the sameness of the preceding decade. How was one supposed to discern one squalid night from another?

‘So you’re looking for this foreign girl Margaret, who was a sex-worker in Mumbai years ago?’

Junior didn’t say anything, just nodded. He appreciated Raaj’s good judgment of not using the word
whore
. Whoreson, that’s what they used to refer to him as. Even back then, when he did not comprehend what it meant, it sounded like a profanity.

‘We’ll find her together. Don’t worry.’ Raaj comforted his younger friend, taking him into his arms.’

How?
Neither knew.

‘Have you ever had sex?’ Junior asked a bit later as they lay alongside each other watching a steady stream of raindrops leaking into their dwelling through a small aperture in the pipe.

‘Ha…how?’ Raaj lit up a cigarette from his collection of half-smoked cigarettes he had gathered throughout the previous day from various pavements.

‘What do you mean, how?’ Junior took the cigarette out of Raaj’s hand and inhaled, deeply filling his lungs with smoke.

‘Boy, I live in a pipe…sorry, I share this pipe with another guy.’ He looked at Junior and quickly took the fag back to catch the last drag of the stick. ‘I survive by picking rags and pockets. There isn’t enough to feed my stomach, how do I feed any sexual itches? You think some girl would fuck me for love?’

‘Why does it have to be a girl?’ ‘What?’ Raaj had a double take. ‘I love you.’

‘Oh…I love you too, but —‘ ‘No. I love you.’

‘Whoa…’

Junior had rolled on to his side looking fervently at Raaj. His hands moved to the uncovered torso of the bigger man playing with the hair on the chest. Raaj closed his eyes. The sensation was too much to bear. He felt Junior’s hand move down to unbutton his shorts, while Junior slipped out of his shorts too, and came on top of Raaj. He kissed Raaj on the lips, and then slithered down to take his older friend in his mouth.

That night when Raaj entered Junior, it didn’t hurt.

There’s a good reason why the lion bears the moniker of the king-of-the-jungle. Irrespective of how old, indisposed or wounded it is, no other animal even conjures up the illusion of hunting the big cat. Not one.

The wolves patiently wait till it dies.

Bir Desai had successfully disposed of any or all challengers who had ever threatened his position. People died or simply vanished. He was in his seventies, an old man now, weakened with age, and terminally ill. The end was nigh. His once impregnable, vast empire of illegal activities — firearms, alcohol, drugs, hired-killings — was disintegrating owing to him being out of action.

However vile, corrupt or precarious your business is you, nevertheless, wish for the right heir to take the reins. Desai’s only son had beaten him in the ultimate race by almost two decades. The whispers he had disregarded about the illegitimate grandson up until now, had increasingly started to scream at him. A lot of water had flowed under the rickety bridge: Bombay was Mumbai, Jay Desai was Junior, Pathak was dead, and the Club at Cuffe Parade had closed.

Mumbai was a city of 18 million: how could one look for a lost child in this madness, lost in this glut some twelve years ago? Nonetheless, if Bir Desai decided to hunt for someone, he found him or her; it didn't matter if the prey had to be exhumed or the earth needed excavating.

Raaj got arrested. He had snatched a lady’s handbag outside a restaurant, but her man caught Raaj. No amount of apologies or begging for mercy worked. The man called the police.

Custody. Police beatings.

Petty-offence charge.

Three-month imprisonment.

Bail was set at ten thousand rupees, which was a fucking farce considering that the boys didn’t have money to feed themselves.

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine Junior. Do not stop looking for Margaret,’ Raaj said when he came out of court after the conviction. Junior, holding back his tears, nodded. He hadn’t been away from Raaj for years now, but fortunately Raaj had taught him how to survive. Three months would pass soon. ‘And don’t fall in love with anyone else,’ Raaj whispered as he gave a seemingly friendly hug before the police constable dragged him into the van.

Junior watched the van drive away through a waterfall of tears. He felt his pockets to check if he had any cigarette stubs to smoke, but couldn’t find any.

‘Cigarette?’ a hoarse voice, behind him, asked.

‘No thanks.’ Junior refused without turning around. He had no intentions of peddling his ass for a cigarette.

‘Are you Mister Jay Desai?’

‘Yes.’ Junior turned around. A well-dressed man in his mid-thirties smiled and offered a cigarette. A full Benson & Hedges, not a half-smoked stick. His first instinct was to bolt, there was every possibility that the orphanage authorities had caught up with him, but he stood confidently. He was an adult now, he knew, and they couldn’t take him back to that despicable house. ‘Who are you?’ he confidently asked.