Dead Water (11 page)

Roopa pockets every bribe. Not so naive, she knows better than to raise her head above the parapet. She’s new here. She must work to fit in. She knows full well that, the moment her back is turned, the women in that house will turn their home back into a factory for the finishing, soldering and decoration of bangles. With flicks of their lathis, the businesswomen of Devnagar will go on imparting life’s dirty lesson to children who will never see the inside of a school.

For Roopa and Hardik, since they moved to Firozabad, ‘home’ is a box in a half-finished housing estate on Swami Dayanand Road, opposite Gandhi Park. They arrived to exposed sewage lines, live electrical cables and mud. Hardik has work that occupies his days and most evenings as well. Roopa suspects he has male lovers, but she no longer beats herself up over it. She has her mission. She is an agent working semi-legally on an investigation of national importance.

Of course, Hardik (rustling the local paper – yet another exposé of taxi touts cluttering the Taj Mahal) knows nothing of her secret life.

Roopa showers in tepid water, sloughing off the day. She dries, dresses, puts on her make-up. Milk to cleanse her skin; moisturizer, foundation, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. She cleans her teeth with bicarb to make her smile shine.

Hardik, nettled that she no longer stays in to cook for him, once asked her which of her many men she was meeting. ‘Just my pimp,’ she told him. ‘Which man are you meeting?’ Hardik slapped her. This was a mistake. Roopa is her father’s daughter. Hardik lost a tooth. He told his
shakha
that Muslim youths had ambushed him in the street.

Roopa Vish does not meet men. She calls round on mousy, forty-yearold Nidra, one of the secretaries from the station. Together they take a taxi to the Apsara Cinema Hall in nearby Agra. Sometimes Nidra’s husband Arun accompanies them: a man so kind and handsome and happy and funny and charming and attentive, sometimes Roopa could just give up and fall weeping into his lap.

The central police station of the city of Firozabad is a small building into which the authorities have crammed several miles of corridor. The corridors have many doors, all of them locked. They have windows of frosted glass and behind the glass, indistinct, fractured forms shuffle past. There is no daylight in this building. Along the ceiling, slung through loops of torn plastic carrier bag, run lengths of cheap concertina ducting: paper over wire. Once they fed air to portable air conditioners. Now they’re disconnected and bulge and slump their way over the heads of the crowds in the corridors like discarded skins.

‘Name.’

‘Samjhoria Nankar.’

‘Address.’

‘The brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

‘Do you have an occupation?’

‘I work there.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Give me his name.’

‘Manjit Nankar.’

‘Spell it for me.’

Silence.

‘Can you spell?’

‘M-a-n-j-i-t N-a-n-k-a-r.’

‘His occupation?’

Silence.

‘What does your husband do?’

‘He works at the brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

‘He is a labourer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘Yes. Two boys.’

‘What are their names? How old are they?’

‘Abhik and Kaneer.’

‘How old are they?’

‘They’re twins.’

‘How old?’

Samjhoria shrugs.

Nettled now: ‘What’s your date of birth? Have you even the faintest idea?’ ‘

July the seventeenth, 1955.’

‘Better. What’s your place of birth?’

Silence.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Lohardaga.’

The form is complex and poorly carboned. It is three pages long. When it is done, Roopa puts down her pencil. ‘I am Assistant Sub-Inspector Roopa Vish. You are –’ She consults her form in two places. ‘Samjhoria Nankar.’

‘Yes,’

‘Sit down.’

Samjhoria sits.

‘You’re complaining.’

Silence.

‘You are making a complaint.’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you complaining about?’

‘My back –’

‘Your back?’

‘My employer.’

‘Your employer.’

‘He beats me.’

‘Your employer beats you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your employer beats you across your back?’

Silence.

‘Is that what you are saying?’

‘Yes.’

Sighing, Roopa rises to her feet and studies the wall behind her. The entire wall is pigeonholed. There are forms in every pigeonhole except for the one that’s meant to hold diagrams explaining which form goes in which pigeon hole.

Roopa makes her best guess, pulls a form out of a pigeonhole and scans it. ‘Where did you say you worked?’

‘The brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

God. That benighted dump.

‘What’s its name?’

‘The Chhaphandi Brickworks.’

It figures. ‘There’s only one brickworks in Chhaphandi?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So who’s your employer?’

Silence.

‘Who employs you? Who do you work for?’

‘The brickworks.’

‘Who beats you?’

‘My boss.’

‘Who’s your boss?’

‘Vinod Yadav.’

‘Yadav?’

‘Vinod Yadav.’

‘
Yadav
.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yadav, in Chhaphandi.’

‘Yes.’

Roopa places the form on the table in front of Samjhoria Nankar. She takes a pen from the drawer of her desk. It doesn’t work. She takes out another.

Little by little, Samjhoria Nankar grinds out her story, a depressingly familiar tale of withheld wages, bullying and near-starvation. Dalit matters. Sensitive issues of a female nature. Roopa’s been wading through this weak shit since she arrived here. She doesn’t mind. She needs to get her feet under the table before she forges a friendship with the district’s new anti-terror chief. Samjhoria’s complaint gives her a first small ‘in’ to the Yadav family’s local interests.

‘Wait here.’

She leaves the room and heads for the toilets. She will come back by the kitchen and fetch tea for them both. She will devote time to this. She will tease out every detail. Every scrap of dirt on this Vinod character and his brick kilns.

She washes her hands and throws water in her face. She grins into the mirror, checking her teeth. Her dear dead dad used to say that her smile was her best feature. She is her father’s daughter, after all. Kabir Vish, who apprehended the Stoneman and died in a hail of bullets, during a shoot-out with Yadav syndicate men, on the streets of Matunga in 1983.

She knows how to follow a trail.

Roopa contacts Vinod Yadav at the Chhaphandi brickworks and arranges for him to attend Firozabad police station for an official interview – but on the morning of the interview, Roopa is awoken at 4:45 a.m. by a phone call from the station. She dresses quickly and takes the car into town. At the station she is issued with a helmet and a billy club and told to report to field headquarters in the south-west quadrant of the city. There has been a train crash: one of the worst in her country’s history. More than half the townsfolk have turned out to gawp. She’s being assigned to crowd control.

It takes her the best part of an hour to work her way around gridlocked cars and clustered, story-telling streets, to the armoured truck that’s meant to keep crises like this in bounds. It’s marooned beside the railway line some quarter of a mile from the scene of the wreck. From the top of its rickety aluminium steps Roopa sees what she can see, which isn’t much. A shoal of heads. She’s a Bombay girl and used to crowds, God knows, but this is crazy. The crowd is pliant enough, lumberingly curious as a herd of cattle, but densely packed, corralled by the walls of the cutting. Its collective breathing rocks the police truck from side to side.

A screw of brown smoke marks the wreck site. It rises through the sheltered air of the cutting, then a breeze shears it away, smearing it across the northern embankment. There are vehicles parked there: plainclothes four-by-fours with detachable lights spinning blue.

‘Who are they?’ Roopa asks nobody in particular.

It’s Yash Yadav, the region’s counter-terror tsar. ‘Now off you go.’

Go where? Roopa has no radio, there’s no real chain of command, and it’s all she can do to elbow through to where the Purushottam and Kalindi have collided – or, to speak more accurately, to where they have achieved a ghastly fusion. Coaches have burst like bags, sending bodies into the branches of trees. There are clothes everywhere, ripped to rags, and ribbons of flesh, intestine, hair.

Around the carriages the police have established a cordon and the crowds are climbing the walls of the embankment, away from the tracks. It’s hardly less crowded now they’ve gone. Milling around her, stepping round corkscrewed metal spars and crinkled sheets of granulated glass, round shattered pallets and pools of lubricant and here and there, for God alone knows what reason, bars of hot pink hand soap, there are uniforms that Roopa doesn’t even recognize. Police probationers, army cadets, nurses, paramedics, railways workers, masked and booted paramilitaries from every academy within fifty miles. No one seems to know what to do with Roopa, and Roopa is so preoccupied that no one thinks to call her to their heel.

Slipping in bloody turds and ponds of oil, Roopa rounds a sleeping carriage of the Purushottam. Hydrostatic shock blew out its glass. Bodies slump shapeless, bladderized, across its steel sides. Roopa imagines the moment of impact: the shock-front waving passengers like bloody flags through the carriage’s tiny window frames.

A sudden gust clears the smoke from the sky for a second and sunlight hits the train carriage. Light erupts from its polished walls and Roopa winces in the glare. Through her half-closed eyes the light from the carriage is a sheet of blue fire that, even now, is winding itself into a rope of many colours. She staggers under its imaginary weight. In the moment it takes for her to clear her head of the hallucination, the snake curls around her shoulders and stabs disconsolately at the train carriages, as though in dwindling hope of finding survivors.

She shrugs it off, and a fleck of something drops in her eye. She’s trying to remove it with a corner of her shirt cuff when a big man in civilian mufti, leading a retinue of suits and mobile phones, approaches from the other end of the carriage. From pictures, file entries and newspapers, Roopa recognizes Yash Yadav. He’s bigger than she imagined, and fitter: a workhorse of a man. Veteran of a dozen kills. Scion of the house that murdered her father.

Next to her, something moves. Someone.

Yash imagines she’s been crying. ‘Are you all right?’ He lays his hand on her shoulder. Beside them, a young man, propelled through a window, scalped, his head a beating polyp, rolls his head from side to side. Impossible to say where the face is. His skull’s a white nubbin, peering through red tissue like an eye.

The tea she’s drunk today drools off her chin as Roopa heaves.

‘Come on,’ Yash says, bearing her up. ‘This is no place for a woman.’

Yash half-leads, half-carries Roopa away from the carriages to where a concrete stair leads up the northern embankment. Roopa is afraid to look at him. All the time she’s spent planning how best to approach him – and now this! She feels as though a door she’s been battering has suddenly come open against her shoulder.

Footfalls on gravel. She opens her eyes and sees her feet and his. His steps subtly guiding hers. A pair of shoes, city-made, half-hidden beneath European-style suit trousers. The trousers are meticulously pressed. His shoes are clean. There’s not a speck of dust, not a smear of dirt. Impossible. He must be held above the ground on wires. On wings.

The shoes vanish. Footfalls pass around her. She feels his hands. He helps her to his car. He helps her bend so that she can climb inside.

He closes her door and walks round to the driver’s side. She tries to turn her head. She’s too weary to move: shock is closing her down. Her eyes will not focus. She smells him. A good smell. Shampoo and spice. Yash Yadav. Veteran of a dozen encounters. Pirates and mafiosi.

He says: ‘I’ll drive you home.’ But he doesn’t.

Yash Yadav lives in a freshly painted apartment block on Vyapar Marg. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’ Roopa hobbles after him, past the watchman’s cubbyhole (empty), through the gate (Yash has a magnetic key) and into the elevator.

Yash’s apartment isn’t what she expected. The whole place is decked out like a teenager’s bedroom. The walls are hidden behind movie posters. Yash shows her the bathroom and hands her a towel. ‘Where do you live?’

She gives him her address.

‘I’ll go fetch your husband.’

She goes to the bathroom. Yash has a bathtub. A rarity round here. A luxury. There’s a robe hanging from the door. She undresses and draws the robe around herself. While she waits for the tub to fill, she wanders back into the living room and up to the window. She watches as Yash Yadav lets himself out through the security gate, crosses the road, and points his key at his car, unlocking it: a new Opel Corsa. She leans against the glass. She wants Yash to pause. She wants him to turn. She wants him to see her there, against the glass, naked under his robe. She watches him drive away. He is everything she thought he’d be. More. Big and dangerous. Magnificent.

They dine in restaurants in Agra, far from Firozabad’s rumour mill. They drink in Mughal Bar and Downtown Club, Le Bar and Downing Street. He meets her in a side street behind the town hall. He pays for them. He chooses their food. He orders their drinks. At the end of the evening he pays her cab fare home. He buys her gifts: jewellery and shoes and scarves. She hides them from her husband. She keeps them in her locker at work. She takes them out only for him. She dresses only for him. She scents and shaves herself only for him. She dreams of him.

She remembers the flak she took, leaving Bombay. The cheap humour flying around as she packed up her desk at the ACB: beanpole-slim Roopa following wobble-hipped Yash Yadav into the outback. Even her superintendent, even Kala Subadrah, could not resist a gag as she returned Roopa’s salute: ‘I hope he’s worth it.’

Yash has not slimmed down. He’s hardened up: an engine, big and square, trembling with controlled violence. She fucks him and fucks him. She is sore from him. It is what her hard, athlete’s body was built for, has longed for, screamed out for.