Dead Water (27 page)

Rishi has grown up thinking that this land would one day be his. Fields for him to tend and grow a little rich by. Crops to harvest, money to spend. Land for him, in turn, to hand on to a son.

He says to his father. ‘Old Samey wants me to work the digger. There. In the brickworks.’

Keshav nods.

‘It will pay for Safia’s dowry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Dad. There must be something we can do.’

Keshav’s eyes are sucking absences.

‘Please.’

Please show us what you’re made of
.

The vacuum he glimpses in his father’s eyes goes deeper than anyone suspects. By 1993 Keshav is dead and his widow is spending her days decorating glass bangles, cutting them against a spinning wheel. Banglemaking: the occupation of her widowhood. Safia has two children by Vinod and seems happy enough living under Old Samey’s roof. Old Samey gives Vinod charge over the family brickworks, and Rishi is still its Komatsu man.

Every day Rishi trundles a saffron-yellow earthmover back and forth over land that should by rights belong to him. He moves bricks from one corner of the yard to another. He shovels ash into holes. The money is good, but Old Samey keeps most of it to pay for Safia’s dowry. Odd that the debt grows bigger as the months go by.

The change in Rishi’s fortunes arrives in the guise of a catastrophic failure of the steering rack on Old Samey Yadav’s Padmini Deluxe. Late one morning, driving home from a building site, Vinod’s father swerves to avoid a truck and hurtles off the Sher Shah Suri Marg at around 60 mph. The slope of the embankment matches the arc of the falling car so closely the Padmini kisses the ground, hurtles into some fruit bushes, and rolls to a halt, undented.

Labourers in the fields run to the car to find Old Samey grinning, upright in his seat, clutching the wheel. They mill around the car, yelling, pointing at their flattened fruit bushes. They hammer on the door and the windscreen, yelling for compensation. Look what the old fool has done. Look at all our lovely fruit.

No one tries the doors. There are rules to this game. They are waiting for the old man to make a move. To wave his hands about in protest. To drive away, or try to. They are sportsmanlike, in their way. They need an excuse before they pull him out and kick him half to death, and he just sits there, smiling. (If they’d known him when he was alive, they’d have known straightaway that something was wrong. Old Samey never smiled in his life.)

Vinod takes his father’s death hard. He wants to grieve, but he doesn’t know how. Instead, he rages, explaining repeatedly to the police how his father had only just taken the Padmini in to have the steering tweaked. ‘Those fucking grease-monkeys all but killed him!’ Of course, the police aren’t remotely interested. If the shock of the accident caused an old man’s heart to stop beating, what business is it of theirs? A fragile heart, unable to cope with the knocks of life, is not their concern.

So Vinod reaches out and Yash agrees to drives over from Bombay. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says.

Vinod and Rishi are sitting in a roadhouse, arguing about money, when Yash rolls into town. The place isn’t much: a square bunker of breeze blocks and wire-reinforced glass. The white emulsion smothering the interior is the establishment’s sole stab at decoration. The walls are bare, the tables melamine, the floor concrete, the air heavy with old fat. A car pulls up outside and Yash stumbles over the step into the restaurant. ‘Come see,’ he calls to them, cutting to the chase, as though the years of his absence, his training, his years on the beat in Mumbai, were no more than a moment’s absence. A trip to buy cigarettes.

Rishi and Vinod follow him out, mesmerized by his familiar bulk, his unprecedented drunkenness, and the weird Elvis roll of his hips. Yash Yadav is all grown-up. He is a policeman.

In the forecourt are half a dozen trucks, a shoe dangling from each tailgate: the trucker’s talisman. Some mopeds. Yash’s car: a clapped-out Standard Gazelle. Yash hunkers down by its right front wing. ‘Doesn’t look much, does it?’ He reaches up inside the wheel arch and pulls something free. He stands up, peeling gaffer tape off the stock. He shows it to them: a smart new police-issue Glock 17. ‘Polymer frame and five and a half pounds of pull. Some hot-head
gandhu
fucks with me, he fucks with death.’

Squirming as best they can out of the way of the weaving barrel, Rishi and Vinod try to steady Yash down and get him into the roadhouse. Yash insists on tucking the gun into the waistband of his trousers. He’s CBI now: a plain-clothes constable with the Central Bureau of Investigation. He wants to celebrate.

‘We can’t go in there with that thing.’

Yash is adamant. He has passed a firearms course.

Rishi and Vinod help him round the back of the building, where string mattresses slung around short wooden posts make hammocks for drivers plying the Sher Shah Suri Marg. At least, they try to.

‘A moment.’ He stumbles off towards his car.

Vinod sucks his teeth. ‘Can you believe they’ve given that oaf a gun?’

Yash has a personal supply in the car. He returns with the bottle. He’s already opened it, releasing into the air a pungent chemical smell with an undertone of burnt sugar. Yash takes a swig and hands it round. The stuff is as strong as it is rotten. Rishi tries to read the label in the weak exterior light.

Yes: Rishi can read. Not that you need much skill to interpret the three big Xs printed, blood-red on black, beneath the brand name. Under them comes an admission, CONTAINS FLAVOURS, and in smaller letters, along the bottom, FOR SALE IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR ONLY. This rotgut is a long way from home. A gift from one of Yash’s army friends, perhaps: souvenir of one of those drear winter camps that fill whole valleys of shitbrown Ladakh. Holding the Himalayan line. Keeping the Moslem hordes at bay. Rishi takes another slug and fights a gagging reflex. No wonder the they don’t drink if this is all they have to hand.

Yash is in a mood to celebrate. He wants to show off, and he has plenty to show off about: ‘I recently completed the Advance Commando Combat System of Professor Doctor Rao,’ he announces, climbing on to the webbing of his crude string bed. He keenly communicates the professor’s insights concerning Vital Organ Striking and Subclavian Artery Termination, ‘One Enemy, One Chance, One Strike, One Kill!’ The bed frame creaks as Yash bounces back and forth, cantilevered hips in constant hula motion, arms sweeping and chopping the air.

Rishi and Vinod gaze at him, captivated, waiting for him to fall through the netting or for the gun to go off in his pants.

Rishi and Vinod stretch out side by side on string mattresses, slugging cold beer in the dark, while Yash, a wakeful drunk, lectures them on the nature of the insurgent Mohammedan machine. Its networks, its
hawala
economy, its sleeper cells.

Three young men, bullshitting the dark.

Yash tells them: ‘You can beat a man bloody, but a night in a refrigerated truck is cleaner and faster.’

Morning brings them back to the matter in hand. Over chilli-egg sandwiches, between bare walls, hunkered over a melamine table, Vinod explains the circumstances of his father’s death. ‘Those cunting retards fucked Dad’s car. They as good as killed him.’

‘Not in law,’ says Yash.

‘Their carelessness –’

‘The lack of evidence –’

‘Fuck’s sake –’

‘
Not in law
, I said.’

A pause.

‘There are things the law cannot do.’ Yash’s statement hangs over them a second: a general sentiment regarding the human condition. ‘Off the books, we still have one option.’

‘What?’

‘We can ruin them. We can take their garage off them and kick them into the street.’

‘How?’

‘There are papers Mohinder Gidh can draw up.’ He turns to Rishi. ‘But he will need your help.’

‘My help?’

‘Mohinder can show you the documents he needs. He can show you what to make.’

‘Make?’

‘Come on, Rishi,’ Yash sighs. ‘Vinod’s told me what’s in that tin of yours.’

Each week Rishi visits Devnagar and collects glass blanks for his mother to cut against her wheel. The journey from Chhaphandi to Devnagar and back is too much to do in a day, so Rishi spends the night with a cousin of his mother’s. After they have eaten, his auntie goes to bed – she’s forever dropping with tiredness – leaving Rishi free to pursue his hobby. On the roof, basking in the city’s churn (spinning wheels and screaming babies, insults hurled from house to house, squeal of pulleys, snap of clothes pegs, slam of ten thousand doors), he pulls his biscuit tin out from under the plastic water tank and sorts through the dollars there.

The trouble with the dollar-stamping machine – a constant of his life, and still sporting its Clint Eastwood paint job – is that while he can compose pretty much whatever message he wants around the edge of the coin – ‘Board of Intermediate Education’, ‘Bihar School Examination Board’ – the centre of the coin must feature a novelty motif.

So Rishi embosses his legal-looking documents very lightly, rubbing the paper over the circumference of his chosen dollar with steady strokes of a soft eraser. The impression this leaves is weak-wristed, but the stamp is fraudulent anyway so this isn’t a huge problem. Growing adept, Rishi has even begun cutting his printing blocks by hand, using the chewed up jewellers’ tools that litter the city’s bric-a-brac stalls. And with this reconditioned kit he counterfeits what so few round here can afford: a paper life.

‘You don’t have to make masterpieces,’ Yash assures him. ‘Just make documents good enough that if someone asks, Mohinder can hold them up and say he was honestly duped.‘

Rishi thinks about it. An idea comes to him. Really, a very good idea. ‘Write off the dowry.’

Rishi’s demand surprises them both. Yash laughs.

‘Years I’ve been driving your family’s fucking earthmover around and what have I ever had to show for it? What wages have I ever seen? I’ve paid you Safia’s dowry many times over and you know it.’

Confused, Vinod glances at Yash.

‘After all,’ Yash says to his cousin, ‘you’re getting a going concern out of the deal. You’re getting an entire auto business. You can afford to be generous.’

Vinod takes a swallow of Pepsi and swills it around his mouth, scowling, judging the vintage. After a minute or two of this charade, he holds out his hand: ‘So we’re done,’ he says, and Rishi shakes his hand.

Once Rishi has some money in his pocket, he goes in search of a companion. He finds a girl from Agra. Educated. A catch. A prize. Pali Ghoshdashtidar. They marry. In Firozabad he gets a foreman’s job in one of the city’s glass factories and his mother comes to live with them in Devnagar.

They don’t rub along too badly. Once Rishi’s off to work in Firozabad, away go the pots, the pans, the cushions, the few domestic knick-knacks that make their home. Out come the gas bottles, the lathes, the burners, spools of solder.

Men tend the kilns in the centre of town and it is their grievances and disputes which make the headlines, but in reality the city’s industry is driven by the women and girls in places like Devnagar, squatting in poorly lit rooms like this one. Pali is a businesswoman and expects to be taken seriously. Rishi’s mother hides her fear of her daughter-in-law behind a tremulous smile.

By the time Rishi gets home, Pali has packed away the children and his mother has prepared their dahl. They move around their room in silence, rearranging their few possessions. They eat, and for a while the smell of food erases the day’s busy milling of glass blanks: hot electric leavings in the air.

Rishi’s mother piles their dishes into a bowl of grey water and washes them herself: servile work performed without complaint. We spend all day with children, Pali and I, ordering them about, keeping them in check, seeing to their cuts and scrapes, what do we want with a housegirl cluttering up the room of an evening? (In truth, she is glad of a way to demonstrate her humility to her scary daughter-in-law.)

At night a curtain, drawn from wall to wall, divides the room, offering the couple a little privacy. Rishi’s mother sleeps among the piled-up lathes and wheels, boxes of irons and solder spools.