Dead Water (12 page)

He’s serious, direct, utterly two-dimensional: a blank on to which she might project any desire. A hero of sorts; impervious, at any rate, to the ironies and doubts that hedge round ordinary men. He is a motive force and as earnest as a child. He lifts himself out of her and kneels over her and fills her mouth. He buries his tongue inside her. He slaps her, and she bends for him. He squeezes her breasts as though there were milk there. He’d eat her if he could. The bite marks show sometimes, but Hardik does not notice. Hardik never gets close enough to see – and if he could bring himself to do so, and he saw, would he even care?

This cannot last. This heat. This turbulence. But then, it does not have to. Roopa’s not forgotten why she’s here.

She’s drunk on Yash, yes, but it’s her betrayal of him that drives her to heat, quite as much as his passion. Bedding Yash Yadav, she finds quite easily the things she needs to incriminate him and smoothe her path in glory back to Kala and the ACB. ‘Raise your voice and it shall be heard!’ She’ll raise her voice, all right. She’ll make front page, if this goes well.

Yash rolls off to the bathroom; she reads the messages stored in his phone. She writes down his recently dialled numbers. Sometimes Yash leaves her in his flat when he goes out to work: the region’s anti-terror tsar. In a bedroom lined with movie posters – curry westerns, war films, historical epics – she reads his diaries. She trawls the trash under his desk. She undeletes the files binned on his laptop. She tabulates, crossreferences. She’d eat him if she could. Instead she’ll tear him down.

There’s a solicitor, Mohinder Gidh, works for Yash Yadav. He spends his nights in a room lit entirely from lights whirling underneath a raised plastic dance floor, throwing single, low-denomination notes on to the floor, more or less at random, as he tries to decide which heavily made-up girl to fall in love with tonight. Later he will hurl money by the handful at his chosen muse. Whole weeks’ wages. He is lucky that the club, a recent and controversial import from Mumbai, is a Yadav enterprise.

By day, Gidh sails close to the wind, orchestrating a land-grab backed by some possibly forged paperwork. A car-repair business has been acquired by the Yadav family on terms so unfavourable intimidation must have been a factor in the sale.

And it goes on: a steady stream of petty and not so petty extortion, fraud and theft. She’ll have her lover locked away long before his fire is out: her pet. She’ll get her man.

The severity of the Firozabad rail disaster keeps the station busy for many weeks. Only when the missing have been officially presumed dead can Roopa Vish pick up the loose threads of her ongoing enquiries. Top of her list is Samjhoria Nankar’s complaint into mistreatment and non-payment of wages at the Chhaphandi brickworks: Vinod Yadav’s fiefdom and the Yadav family’s weakest link. She calls Vinod on the phone to discuss Samjhoria Nankar’s accusations.

‘Samjhoria and her family absconded months ago.’

‘Nonetheless,’ she says, hoping to haze him into an interview.

It works: they set a date and time. ‘Whereabouts are you?’

The way Vinod describes it over the phone you’d think the Chhaphandi brickworks was a well-run, bureaucratic operation. You only have to see the compound from the road to know the truth. You only have to smell the children hunkered down in the dirt, chipping away with hammers at chunks of coal, their faces black with coal dust.

A girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, her face smeared with dirt and sweat, walks right in front of Roopa’s car, oblivious. She is balancing four heavy bricks on her head. At the edge of the nearest kiln she lifts her burden up to her father, who’s standing on top of an enormous heap of dun-coloured bricks. Then a boy runs under Roopa’s wheels, so close that she stalls, braking to save his silly life.

It’s all for nothing, anyway. Vinod’s blown her out. He’s left his Komatsu driver, Rishi Ansari, to answer her questions. He’s waiting for her by an old shipping container – ‘MOYSE’ dimly visible on its flank – which marks the southern boundary of the compound. ‘He’s had to go back to hospital to have his stump seen to,’ Rishi tells her. A persistent infection, apparently. There are many persistent infections round here. Stillbirths. Mysterious goitres. Birth defects. All the kids round here have these funny little bibbly-bobbly heads. Mind you, Chhaphandi’s always had a reputation for inbreeding. What else is there to do?

Rishi is here to set her right about Vinod Yadav, his medical problems, his important schedule, the need to confirm all appointments on the day. ‘He can’t be at everybody’s beck and call, you know.’ As though she’d come round here to try and sell him something. He turns his back on her a moment, swinging the door shut on the old shipping container.

As the door swings, Roopa feels suddenly ill, as though something is roping itself around her chest. She staggers, tugged by some impossible, invisible muscle, away from the shipping container. Another tug.

Another. Is she going to be sick?

There is a stale, mealy smell on the air. She puts her hand to her nose, instantly revolted.

Rishi hasn’t noticed anything. He secures the doors with a padlock, chuntering on, and the smell fades, the tugging ceases. ‘The Nankars? Vanished. God knows where they went. I mean, this Lohardaga scum. Excuse me, but you know how it is.’ Rishi Ansari: a forgettable man with a forgettable face. ‘A complaint?’ He sucks his teeth. ‘No, don’t know nothing about that.’

The thing around her chest lets go. It slides away. Roopa feels its dry rasp as it relinquishes her and she has this nonsensical impression that she has been rescued from some terrible, unseen danger.

She drives out of the compound, still on edge, sucking up air in shallow, panting breaths. She is afraid the smell will come back. She is afraid it will surprise her again, in the car, on a bend in the road. It was one of those fundamentally wrong odours that lodges in the memory, ready to trigger a fierce, unpredictable reflex. But the air in the car stays clean, cut only with the tang of the vehicle’s own hot oil.

The following morning, Roopa lies in Yash Yadav’s bed, testing the air. His room is full of smells, smells she has never noticed before. None of them are
that
smell, but the tugging sensation is still there. It has moved off her chest. Now it’s squeezing her stomach, stirring the acids there. She sits up, breathing the fit away.

The morning after, waking in her husband’s bed, she pulls herself from the bed and runs, dry-heaving, to the toilet.

A couple of weeks later and Roopa is standing in Yash Yadav’s bathroom, holding a plastic wand to the light.

Within seconds – faster and more surely than any Polaroid – two blue lines appear across the white of the window. Roopa feels the walls and floor of the bathroom slide away as the bars set a new vertical for her: a new, tilted reality. How many periods has her silly, sprinter’s body missed? They’re so irregular she finds it hard to count them.

She wraps the test in a fistful of toilet paper, opens her handbag and tucks the expensive white wand inside, losing it in a mulch of tissues, tickets and receipts.

Yash will be here in the couple of hours. She dresses in the bedroom. The walls are smothered in movie posters. Action classics.
Line of Control
.
Sholay
. A teenager might have collected them, she thought, the first time Yash brought her here, months ago. His hands, his bulk, the taste of his penis, the feel of him splashing her breasts, dear God, months ago! How far along is she?

She sweeps a hand across her midriff. She can’t feel a thing. What an infuriating machine her body is! What’s the use of a body that will not take you into its confidence? She imagines the changes a baby will wreak on it. How the stomach wall splits like a peach, how the ribcage bells out.

She forces herself to breathe. Could the test be wrong? What if it’s too late to terminate? What if it will not die? What if she only succeeds in, well,
damaging
it?

She searches in her handbag for her mobile. Her husband Hardik has a meeting tonight, a
shakha
, so there is no need for her to hurry home (if you can call that love-abandoned shell a home: a breeze-block box tossed about on a sea of mud). She will get Yash to take her out tonight, somewhere they will not be recognized. There is a hotel in Agra with a good restaurant, far beyond her means but well within his. She will get him drunk on his own generosity (it is important for her to play to his vanity) and she will tell him about the baby.

She dials and is put through to Yash’s voicemail. She risks a call to his office, but he is not there. She opens the door of the apartment and breathes in the communal smell of rose carpet shampoo and cigarettes. She wants to leave but she has nowhere to go. She aches in Yash Yadav’s absence. Yash has become a physical need. Strange how these things happen. Yash, veteran of a dozen legal kills – and yet the violence attaching to him, which so excited her at first, does nothing for her now. The attraction she feels for him, now that she knows him, is simpler and oh, so much more corrupt. Yash’s home, his tastes, his childish comforts. His film posters. His DVD collection. His simple, strenuous appetites in bed. She fucks the boy, not the man. If it wasn’t Yash, it would have been someone equally adolescent. Why should she always be drawn to boys? Hardik and Yash: both are vulnerable men. What’s in this to trigger her desire?

She puts her phone away. Yash will greet her news with horror. The scandal of her pregnancy is enough to ruin his standing as Firozabad’s counter-terror tsar. The affair – the madness of it, and the pleasure – is done.

Away from the Anti-Corruption Bureau and its levelling realities she has been dreaming up a heroic role for herself. A female detective, alone against the system! A city cop hacking her way through rural corruption! What, in the end, has she uncovered? Some argument at the Chhaphandi brickworks between Yash’s cousin Vinod and a Dalit labourer. This was how she planned to build a case against Yash Yadav – all the while managing to get herself nicely groped! And now this!

She steps back inside the apartment and slams the door. She knows Yash better than she has ever known her husband. She knows the way his family works. She would make a good gangster’s wife. She imagines a future with Yash Yadav. She must speak to him, tonight, before her conscience and the ghost of her poor dead father weaken her resolve. She takes her phone out of her bag again.

This time her call gets through, but the conversation does not go well.

Another month, and now Roopa’s key no longer opens the door of the house she shares with her husband on Swami Dayanand Road. She hammers on the door.

‘All right! I’m coming!’

In the moment before Hardik scrapes open the door, Roopa notices that the frame is damaged. The wood has been gouged here and there by something with clean edges: a crowbar. She recognizes the pattern. She has seen it before, during her probation in Bombay. The door opens.

Caught between relief and disappointment, Hardik’s words come out stripped of affect. A machine might be speaking. ‘I thought you were the police.’

Hardik will not tell her what went on in the interrogation room, but she can guess. Yash wants Hardik to acknowledge the baby as his. For as long as Hardik resists, Yash’s counter-terrorist teams will be raiding their home, ‘searching for seditious literature’. This time they have outdone themselves. The level of damage suggests relish more than thoroughness. Skirting boards have been jemmied away from the walls. Most of the antique furniture from her mother’s home in Thane has been smashed.

Hardik scuffs through the remains. A sock, a mobile-phone charger, a disposable razor, a cup. Roopa picks her way after him, her arms wrapped around her belly, as though she might shield the child from his sight. The kitchen is mostly put away. The door to one of the cupboards is missing. ‘Do you want to sit down? There’s still a chair.’

Roopa sits.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Hardik fills the kettle from a plastic bottle. ‘They’ve cut off the water.’ His face is grey. There are no obvious bruises. Yash Yadav’s crew are too well trained for that. Hardik is spent and demoralized but not visibly damaged. He puts the kettle on the stove and lights the gas with a cigarette lighter. It putters: the cylinder is running empty.

Roopa slips her hands around the hot thing lying inside her. This other self. This slip of human possibility. All day she has been working at words, conjuring them into phrases that might tie her and her husband back into each others’ lives. She stands. She takes her hands away from her belly. She wants him to see this. She wants him to confront this.

Hardik does not want to touch her. Then again, when has he ever wanted to touch her? Will he not even look at her? ‘It’s yours.’ She returns her husband’s incredulous look steadily, without flinching, without shame. She knows what he is thinking: How can she hold her head so high? ‘Do you understand? If you want it, the child is yours.’

If she and Hardik and Yash Yadav can only buy into the same lie, then everything will come right. Better than right, because she and her husband will have gained a child. If the baby is Hardik’s, if they make it Hardik’s by saying so, then they can begin again. ‘In Bombay!’ The child will grow, and it will be happy, and their life will go on being the life they know: a predictable life among people who know them and define them. ‘In Bombay. Hardik. Husband! In Bombay!’

‘Mumbai.’

‘Yes,’ she says, wrong-footed by this leaden correction. ‘In
Mumbai
.’

‘Roopa. I need to give you some money.’

‘What?’

‘A little money. I need to give you money.’

‘I don’t want money.’

‘I am going to give you money so you can stay here for a while.’ She stares at him.

‘The rent. If you’re staying here you will need to cover the rent.’ ‘Where are you going?’

He shrugs. ‘Mumbai.’

‘But –’

‘I have plans already, Roopa. It’s a chance for the party. It’s a chance for me.’

The rechristened city is a haven for right-wingers. The D-Company’s bombs have woken the saffron tiger: this is what they are singing, in
shakhas
and public rallies up and down the Sher Shah Suri Marg. Hardik has already reinvented himself. He is going to Mumbai without her.