BLOOD RED SARI (12 page)

6.1

ANITA AWOKE WITH THE
certainty that something was very wrong, and her first instinct was to lie still and assess the situation. She found herself on the carpet, behind the bed, facing the window. She had sat that way to use the bedside lamp and avoid disturbing Philip who was sleeping on the other bed. She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep, but her internal clock told her she couldn’t have dozed off for more than a couple of hours. Forget the internal clock, her bleary brain told her that! The light in the room was the same as before, but there were voices on the other side of the room, near the door.

Male voices, several of them.

One of the voices was definitely Philip’s and she thought that the other two were of her brothers and perhaps another man. The way they were speaking – softly but with unmistakable anger barely suppressed – must have been what woke her up. Either that, or the door opening: she had learnt since girlhood to dread the sound of a door opening at night. That and the sound of her brothers’ voices was enough to send all her alarm bells ringing. Two months of unrelenting abuse would do that to a girl. Even now, so many years later, she would still wake up at night in Mrs Matondkar’s flat and check the door and windows – and the sound of a particular kind of male voice always put her off, no matter how nice the guy. Once you had been raped and beaten by your brothers, days after your father’s funeral, it tended to scar you for life.

She lay still, knowing that the reason they were speaking softly was to avoid waking her. She caught the drift of their conversation: they were discussing the best way to take her, which sent chills up her spine, transporting her hurtling back to that fifteen-year-old girl lying battered and bleeding and terrified in her own bed at home. The only thing missing was the sound of her mother calling the boys to have their beef mulligatawny soup. Soup! Because boys had to keep up their strength. Of course. Damn
pishaachs
! Fucking flesh-eating, blood-sucking bastards.

The papers from the manila envelope were still beside her. She had fallen asleep all over them, and one loose sheet was stuck to her arm and backside and would make a noise if she moved. She reached down and peeled it off carefully. She didn’t know what to do, so she folded it slowly and carefully and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans, with her wallet.

While she did that, she examined the window from her floor-level viewpoint. She was on the second floor and the window faced the back of the hotel. What was at the back? The parking area? The courtyard? But then she remembered: the window wouldn’t do. They were the old-fashioned Kerala type – solid wooden frames criss-crossed with panes of glass. She might end up cracking it, but more likely she would crack her own ribs and break a few bones before that frame broke to let her jump through. She didn’t have enough body weight to do it, or running space to gather the momentum.

Which meant she would have to go out using the door, past them.

For the first time in her life – well, technically not the
first
, but it always felt like the first time on each occasion – she wondered why the fuck she didn’t carry a gun. She knew why, of course. Because she hated the damn things. Growing up watching your brothers shoot every living animal or bird that took their fancy – including stray dogs, pups, cats, kittens, birds – would do that to a girl. There were days when she felt that ridding the world of all guns and explosive weapons should be every government’s first priority. Her favourite fiction was the
Change
series by S.M. Stirling, which imagined a near-future where all combustible agents stopped working: planes fell out of the sky, cars wouldn’t run, guns stopped working. The world returned to bows and arrows and swords. It was even more brutal than before for a while, but somehow the absence of guns and motors almost seemed to be worth the cost. It was the only series she bought religiously in hardcover, ordering each new book online from a Bengaluru-based online bookstore.

One of the things she had learnt from the book was that if you knew what you were doing and if the circumstances were right, you could render guns ineffectual. A closed room with many opponents and obstacles – like this hotel room – qualified as the right circumstances.

Now, she had a chance to put the theory to the test.

She heard the unmistakable growl of her older brother Isaac’s voice say quite distinctly, ‘Enough talk. Move!’ Then the voices fell silent and the sound of fabric rustling could be heard.

They were moving in.

She had crept under the bed while they talked. Now, she could see their feet approaching the first bed, going around it, then around the second bed. They were expecting her to be in the alcove between the second bed and the window, not between the two beds. That put two of them to her right, and at least one on her left – barring her way out. Three plus Philip, and she didn’t know for sure where he was standing. She guessed that the first two would have guns aimed down at the spot they expected her to be in and had fingers ready on the trigger, especially after the way she had defended herself back at the house. Isaac was a vengeful bastard; he would want to punish her for hurting him, or worse. She didn’t know if Graham was in on this, but he would probably do as Isaac said. But why hadn’t Philip woken her? Why had he opened the door to let them in? He was the one who had called her here to Varkala in the first place, told her about Lalima’s funeral. He was on her side.

Then it came to her in a flash: it was a set-up. This wasn’t about Lalima’s death at all. It was about the contents of the yellow manila envelope. She knew that now that she had read the papers, even though she couldn’t figure out most of what they meant. The information they revealed was massively important, there was no doubt about that at all. She also knew that it had come from Lalima’s lawyer after her death – the Trivandrum postmark had told her the place and Philip had told her about the instructions to send out the packages. He had also told her that similar packets had been sent to people besides her. The Matthew clan had known that one envelope had been sent to her and had Philip call her here on the pretext of Lalima’s funeral, hoping to get back the documents – and get rid of her. That was why Philip had come to her hotel and told her that sob story. She had thought she was nursing him and putting him to sleep. In fact, she was the one being lulled into sleeping, thinking she was safe here for the night. Then he had called the others and hail, hail, the gang’s all here, let’s have a gangbang, boys. Enough soup for everyone. Let’s go turn the crazywhoremysister into mincemeat.

She exploded from between the beds, a Bible in her hand. It was the room Bible which she had taken from the lower drawer of the bedside table while they were talking by the door. She threw it at the man to her far right – Isaac with a makeshift sling on one arm and a gun in the other hand. He reacted, trying to swat the hurtling object with his only free hand, which happened to be the hand in which he was holding the gun, and because his finger was on the trigger, it went off.

6.2

THE LIGHT OF THE
cell phone came on but wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the whole room. She held it as high as she could, turning it this way and that to throw a little pocket of light on one part of the room, then another, until she was able to piece together the whole picture in parts, like some obscene jigsaw puzzle. Her hand shook. In intermittent glimpses, all the more garish for being seen in the half-dim light of the cell phone screen, was a scene out of an Asian horror film. Something by Park Chan-wook, perhaps, or Kim Ki-duk. Some twisted tale of a plan gone wrong. Except that this was her office, not some seedy by-the-hour love hotel in Seoul or Hong Kong, and the woman sprawled naked on her desk was Shonali, poor lovely young Shonali who was a JNU pol. sci. grad with intense views about the legitimacy of some aspects of the Maoist cause with regard to tribals in deforested areas, and who liked Mojitos and long-haired, intellectual-type guys with a sense of humour. Nachiketa’s hand trembled again as even the incompetent glow of the BB left no doubt that her office assistant had been savagely raped and battered and then left for dead. Nachiketa forced herself to turn her right wheel with her free hand and bumped her knee against the corner of the desk. Gritting her teeth, she reached out and checked for a pulse. The feel of human skin was the worst thing of all. It slammed home the realization that this was no subtitled film in Siri Fort Auditorium, it was, to use Shonali’s own favourite phrase, ‘really real’. The skin on the girl’s neck felt slippery, but not with blood, with sweat. It brought home nightmarish flashes of Shonali’s last moments alive. She couldn’t have been dead long: her skin was still warm. But her pulse was MIA.

Nachiketa withdrew her hand, shaking, and used intellectual action to compensate for her inability to act out her emotions physically. It was a sublimation devoutly to be wished, perfected by herself to deal with her reduced state of perambulation. She looked around the office again, bringing down a curtain of calm to seal off any possibility of a breakdown. So the bastards had killed Shonali here, poor wretched thing. That still didn’t account for all that blood back in the outer office as well as in this room, and the stench of shit. Someone else must have died here or been badly hurt …

She saw a patch of something on the side of a desk that looked like cloth but which she recognized, sickened, as animal fur. It was damp and dark and had stuck there as if it had caught there in the course of some brutal unimaginable struggle for survival. She looked around as best as she could but could find no sign of Justice herself. Poor bitch. Where was she? It was impossible to be sure, but from what little she could see, Nachiketa assumed that the men who had called her when she was driving had somehow broken into the office, found Shonali here – doing what, since she wasn’t supposed to come back to the office tonight? – and had attacked her in this inner chamber. Justice must have tried to defend Shonali and had paid for it dearly, but probably after causing some damage herself. Still. The blood was too much to fit even that tragic–heroic scenario. And where were the bastards who had done all this? They had called her here and then …

Frump!

The sound caught her attention. It was unmistakable, given the omnipresent stench of petroleum in the office. That was petrol igniting. She saw the room brighten at once as light from the other room spilled in. Someone had lit a fire in the front room. But she had heard no footsteps or voices.

‘Kahaan ho saaley madarchodhon?’ she said, not caring what might happen if they heard her and came to finish off the job they had started here. Her eyes were running with tears and she was angrier than she had ever been in her life before. ‘Where the fuck are you, assholes? Show yourselves!’

The only answer was the sound of paper crackling noisily. She wheeled herself backwards through the open door, swung around in a half-circle and stopped at the sight of a small pile of court papers on Shonali’s desk crackling away as merrily as a blaze in the fireplace of a Kasauli cabin. She saw a matchbox on top of the pile of papers and a cigarette in there too, crumbling to ashes as she watched. Of course. They had set a crude cigarette-matchbox timer and then vamoosed. This way, the fire would start when they were safely away. One of her activist friends had shown her how to do it: you lit a cigarette and stuck it in a matchbox full of matchsticks on top of a pile of papers in a wastepaper basket or in-tray. Five or ten minutes later, the ember would burn down to the match heads, igniting them, and the whole kaboodle would go up in flames. It was impossible to prove that it hadn’t been a smoking accident: someone carelessly tossing an unextinguished fag into the basket. The activist friend, a self-proclaimed radical, the son of a pair of ex-hippy Brits, claimed to have used the trick to set a corrupt judge’s chamber on fire in Thailand. She hadn’t believed he’d done that, but the trick itself was genuine.

The papers on the desk flared up and the fire leapt to the books and files around it. Fragments of burning paper fell off, and the instant they touched the floor, the spilled petrol went up like a firebomb. In seconds, the entire outer office was a mass of flames. Nachiketa gasped and began to wheel herself backwards. But the trail of fire had reached the inside office and that room all but exploded when the petrol ignited.

She felt the heat of the ignition scorch the back of her head and left arm and started forward again. There was a wall of fire leaping up at the front door already. How had it spread so fast?

That’s why they used an accelerant, you fool. It was a trap. They waited till you were about to enter, then left through the window. The plan was to get you in here and then set the place on fire.

That’s why there was so much petrol oozing out from under the front door. They wanted to make it impossible for her to get out. She heard the yelps of terror from the puppies outside the door and her heart sank as she thought of them being caught in the blaze, their fur soaked in the petrol. Poor wretched things!