Dead Water (10 page)

To put it in plain English, the Yadavs are everywhere. Roopa Vish finds this out for herself shortly after passing her police probation. Roopa has been working at the ACB for six months, matching names and addresses across commercial and contractual paperwork, when she comes across a small import–export concern called EastSpan Imports. Uncovering connections between the company and other Yadav family interests, Roopa tips off the Bombay Port Trust. The most she expects, and the most her bosses expect of her, is that the Trust might intercept some lowpressure cold extraction gear: plant associated with the Yadav family’s sandalwood scam.

What they get are twenty-seven barrels of engine grease which, when emptied over the quay, disgorge thirty-seven revolvers, 1,280 rounds of ammunition and a silencer.

It’s been common knowledge for years that the Yadavs of Bombay have been importing Tanzanian sandalwood and using it to adulterate genuine sandalwood oil. The family’s rural branches, meanwhile, have been smuggling protected sandalwood from Kerala and distilling it in mobile factories all over Uttar Pradesh. It’s a profitable trade and a relatively bloodless one. What the hell do the Yadavs need all this hardware for?

Roopa Vish, meanwhile, has uncovered something even more peculiar. One of the Yadav family’s country cousins has moved to Bombay and joined the police.

With a family this big, you expect a few recidivists to find themselves legitimate careers. It’s only when they start doing exceptionally well that alarm bells ring. Sub-Inspector Yash Yadav has been doing very well indeed. Bank frauds, financial frauds, foreign exchange violations: Yash Yadav’s case files record success after success. Now strings have been pulled to draw him up the police ranks and into the elite Central Bureau of Investigation. Roopa Vish wonders whether, underneath his uniform, this country cousin, this yokel, might not be working for the Bombay branch of the family. She picks up the phone.

Roopa has a new boss: Kala Subadrah, formerly the Deputy Inspector General of the Central Industrial Security Force, providing security cover to nearly three hundred sensitive industrial locations all over India. Kala’s just had twins, though you’d never know it to look at her. She has one of those labour-proof bodies: easy to picture her on the front cover of a maternity magazine, working out with small hand-weights. Only the bags under her eyes give her away. If she’s getting four hours of sleep a night, she’s lucky. For all that, Kala finds time to meet Roopa out of office hours, and this is a very good sign. Kala is new to her job and has a lot to prove. Roopa’s discovery may be the answer to Kala’s prayers.

The restaurant is pink with Australian tourists. You can smell the sunblock from here. And there’s a foul odour coming from the restaurant. Christmas dinners.

‘Well,’ Kala says, over tea and sweets: straight down to business. ‘This is a bloody mess, isn’t it?’

Roopa chews her halwa.

‘A decorated officer. Gallantry. Meritorious Service. And here you are dragging his name through the mud on no better grounds than that he has a notorious surname. What on earth do you think you’re doing, Assistant Sub-Inspector?’

Roopa stares at her plate.

‘Roopa.’

It takes a moment for Roopa to twig: Kala is smiling.

‘Roopa Vish.’ She pours them more tea. ‘Are you related?’

‘My father,’ Roopa says, her voice barely audible over the raucous chatter of the Australians.

‘Kabir Vish. Caught the Stoneman. Ugly bugger, as I remember. Terrible teeth. Your mum must be a beauty.’

‘Ma’am?’

Kala laughs. ‘Relax, Roopa. I know quality when it’s under my nose. Your father, may he rest in peace, taught me everything I know.’

Installed in her own office, with her own assistant and even a phone of her own, Roopa works long hours on Yash Yadav. She could recite you the highlights of his police career without recourse to the file. Armed encounters with Islamist mafiosi. Police shoot-outs and legal kills. Roopa studies statements, photographs, autopsy reports, official denials. The legal kill: it is, she thinks, with a thrill of mischief, one hell of a way to get rid of your family’s business rivals.

In bed at night, alone, she thinks of Yash Yadav: a big man, taking aim. Naked, self-aroused, she dreams the just blow and its aftermath. Shock and recoil. She pushes a finger inside herself as she comes. Afterwards, trembling, disgusted, she wonders how it is that she finds any of this erotic.

She clambers out of bed. She moves around it, as you would shy away from a bad memory. What time is it?

After midnight.

After one.

Where is her husband? Where is Hardik? Of course she knows the truth about Hardik by now. Any wife would. Once, in desperation, she tried to get him to watch her masturbate. What a farce that was.

Roopa and Hardik have been married barely a year. In the beginning, they were gossip-worthy: the daughter of a decorated police martyr come to rub the rough edges off a gutter patriot! A fairytale of the city’s New Right. But it’s a dizzying time for the RSS and Hardik’s volunteer work has been keeping him out late. Roopa has been staying up for him, keeping his meals hot. It is not easy, in her line of work, to be always putting Hardik first.

Hardik is riding the wagon of saffronist resurgence: a force that will soon transform Bombay down to its very name. He wants her to know that she is not part of this. He wants her lack of understanding established: a fact as secure and protective as a wall. He has been dabbling at the edges of political violence for years. Now he wants her to think he has been drawn into some sinister activity. How can a bourgeois girl like Roopa hope to understand the plight of the slums? It is Hardik’s very big alibi for betrayals that have nothing to do with politics.

Under the bed, in a suitcase filmed with dust, Roopa’s old probationer’s uniform lies neatly pressed and folded. She shakes it out. She finds a shirt of Hardik’s which, at a distance, will pass for a service garment. She dresses the part.

She is her father’s daughter: Kabir Vish, who never let the spoor of the Stoneman go, though many said he was just a fairytale the
bhangis
told to keep their brats in check. For a woman of such pedigree, tracking down her husband is a very small matter. Last night she followed him to Kamala Nehru. Tonight – she knows his habits by now – she will find him in Shivaji Park.

Roopa’s old uniform prickles and sticks. Still, it is necessary. It gives her a reason for being here, a woman alone at night in Bombay’s biggest public space. The wildlife will leave her alone. At the same time, any upright citizen – any fellow officer, God forbid – will feel that he can call on her. Officer, I’ve lost my dog! My child! My service weapon! My mind! If she’s caught impersonating an officer, there will be hell to pay.

It’s out of her hands. She follows her husband. She slides off the broad avenue after him, off raked gravel and on to mown dirt. She follows him into the dark, around cricket pitches, past the Scout hut and the temple of Ganesh, into ornamental shrubberies where abandoned cricket balls dome like fungi out of a salad of leaf-mould and tissues. She follows him past the tinkling of bells and the susurration of silks. The men who congregate here wear their make-up so thick its river-bottom smell overpowers any amount of cheap perfume. Roopa knows what goes on here. The
hijras
of Shivaji were her father’s eyes and ears. Each time a superintendent got it into his head to clean up the parks, Kabir Vish tipped off his fancydressed friends. It’s how he caught the Stoneman.

What is Hardik doing here? What investigations does he pursue? Tonight, watching him, his antics and caresses, Roopa knows that she has always known.

Roopa retires to her mother’s house in Thane and for a few weeks she tries to knit herself into the old solid, suburban life.

Her mother is sympathetic. Her daughter’s disgrace is, in some halfacknowledged way, an opportunity for her. A chance to exert some authority. She schools her daughter in the art of managing shame. For Roopa, it is like being buried. With no work for her to do, and no husband to look after, she is bored out of her mind. But staying with Hardik is impossible.

‘You can stay here as long as you like, dear.’ Long enough for the city to change its name, and every street and every street corner. When Roopa finally returns to work she feels as though she is visiting the city after an absence of years. She arrives at the ACB to find that her phone is gone, her office is gone, her clerical help has been reassigned. Kala Subadrah calls her into her office. ‘I’m sorry, Roopa,’ she says, ‘it’s out of my hands.’

‘Then why –’

Kala throws up her hands in exasperation. ‘Yash Yadav has resigned from the Central Bureau of Investigation.’

‘
What
?’

Kala hands her the file.

Yash Yadav has secured a transfer to Uttar Pradesh. A paper promotion, and a whopping cut in salary. Why has Yash Yadav abandoned his CBI career just to run anti-terror in
Firozabad
, of all places? Why rise so effortlessly through the ranks in Bombay only to return to the provinces?

Roopa knows. Long before she was copying out chalkboard diagrams in the classrooms of Marol – ‘Assets disproportionate to known sources of income amassed by a Public Servant’, ‘Public Servant obtaining valuable thing without consideration from person concerned in proceeding or business transacted by such Public Servant’ – Daddy explained to her, without all this verbal hoopla, how saffronist mafias tick. Yash Yadav’s appointment as Firozabad’s anti-terror tsar leaves him plenty of time to take up the reins of the family’s regional business interests. The construction work. The haulage concern. ‘Ma’am, Mumbai has been an apprenticeship for him! The family doesn’t need him in Mumbai any longer. They need him in Firozabad. They’re putting him to work!’

Police Superintendent Kala Subadrah sighs. ‘Write it all down if you must, but I can’t promise you anything.’

Roopa writes it down all right. Every nuance of the case she’s so far amassed against Yash Yadav. Stated baldly, and without the circumspection of a legal document, her argument against Yadav is a thing of pure spite. Roopa assumes this is an exercise of sorts. A way of keeping her occupied while she adjusts to her disappointment.

On the contrary, her investigation into Yash’s too-perfect record and too-healthy bank balance have won her more friends than she knows. Kala takes Roopa’s ‘exercise’ to meetings at the highest level and when eventually a decision is made to send someone out to the sticks to keep an eye on Yash Yadav, they call on Roopa Vish.

‘In Firozabad you will be tackling women’s issues,’ Kala tells her. ‘Errant husbands. Domestic violence.’

‘Yes.’

‘The hours will be long.’

‘Yes.’

‘Plus, they don’t have much experience of women officers.’

‘No.’

‘If it goes badly for you we can’t help you. The ACB has no jurisdiction outside Maharashtra.’

‘I understand.’

‘This is not an official posting. It will not appear on our records.’

Roopa can barely contain her excitement.

It is a new beginning for her. From her mother’s house, and with her mother by her, squeezing her hand, she phones Hardik and tells him what she has decided to do. She asks him to come with her. She wants them to try again. Hardik is her husband, after all.

‘What the hell is there for us in Firozabad?’ he complains. ‘We should have talked about this!’

Nonetheless, he follows her.

Firozabad: city of ovens and cutting wheels, city of fires and flapping skin. This is the place where people breathe more glass than air. ‘You imagine this is a flourish, heh? Go there! Feel your lungs bleed!’

Firozabad: city of asthma. City of tuberculosis. City of burns and scars. Virtually every glass ornament, bangle, kangan and kara is pulled from Firozabad’s furnaces on asbestos trays. Boys carry skewers tipped with molten glass across the factory floor. The heat of the skewers calluses their palms, turning them green. The boys gather bangles from baking trays and stack them on trolleys, and men pull the trolleys out of the factory gates and down the hill, along roads crusted with broken glass, to the warrens of Devnagar.

Devnagar. Washing on a thousand lines: cheap saris from China, white shirts and baggy grey salwars. Firewood. Dogs on chains. Children playing cricket with bats and stumps torn from packing crates. Sparks and sudden outages. Bags of cement, stacks of bricks. Cementation rods spilled everywhere. It is never quiet. Spinning wheels and screaming babies. Arguments over water, about who is tapping whose electricity. Insults hurled from house to house. Generators that will not start. Cars that will, but only on a hill. Squeal of pulleys. Snap of clothes pegs. Scrape of metal wool against the bottoms of ten thousand pans. Water poured from bowl to bowl, water poured into the gutter, water poured from a high window. Snap of washing in the wind. Slam of ten thousand doors.

In Devnagar, girls sit cross-legged before single flames, soldering bangles. Specks of flying glass make tiny scars that turn their eye-whites bright yellow. The City of Glass is a city of child labour, and if indeed the times are changing – if indeed there is such a thing as progress, as the government claims – it is expressed here in time-honoured fashion: the authorities send junior officers, probationers, do-gooders, and, at a pinch, women like Roopa Vish, to check that everyone’s papers are in order.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Police.

Scrabble, scrabble.

Come in, do! Yes, madam, these are all my children. Twelve of them, madam? If you say so, madam. I must confess I had lost count. Why so many? Well, madam, I am also bringing up my sister’s children. Because she is dead, madam. Yes, madam, I am pleased to say I have that certificate kept safe about my person. Here it is. Read it. Feel it. Judge it. Admire it. Yes, my children go to school, madam, and here are their papers. Read them. Feel how the boss of gelatinous ink on each letterhead forms a poignant contrast to the cheapness of the type beneath. No, madam, of course not. I know the law! Not one of these darlings is younger than twelve, I would not dream of such a thing. Besides, read what is printed there. Feel and judge. But I understand your mistake, madam, for indeed the little darlings are small, they are scrawny, they do not thrive. And you can see why, madam. After all, I have so many. Allow me to present you with this token of my esteem, madam. Thank you, madam, until next year, then, goodbye.