Dead Water (29 page)

Of them all, only Vinod has resisted his cousin’s patronage, for reasons he will not rehearse and anyway no one wants to hear. Since the rail disaster – almost a year ago now – Vinod’s disappearing acts have been growing in number and duration and no one has really tried to do anything about it, except maybe Safia. (‘He’s so depressed, Rishi. He seems so
defeated
. Can’t you talk to him? Please?’) Safia has tried to bring the two of them back together. ‘My husband misses you,’ she’s said to Rishi on any number of occasions. But Vinod is failing. More than that: he is wilfully tearing up his own life. Rishi’s not seen him since they covered over the killings at the brickworks. He’s staying well clear. He’ll not become the straw a drowning man might grab.

Safia stays loyal to her childhood sweetheart, of course. She was always a good girl. She says will not divorce Vinod, even now he has more or less abandoned her for the life of an itinerant. Mum, meanwhile, helps her manage her shame.

*

When he moved out of Devnagar, Rishi took a single room in the Motellissimo Motel, ten miles out of the centre of Firozabad. He’s still there a year later. From the outside, the place might be decades old. Inside, it reveals its modernity. Folded like a piece of origami from a single wipeclean surface, the Motellissimo offers superior hygiene for the better class of traveller on the Sher Shah Suri Marg. Foremen and junior managers. Men without wives or children.

Each morning he sets off towards the city and the print shop Yash Yadav has bought for him. (Say what you like about Yash Yadav, he knows how to bring on talent.) Businesses along the Sher Shah Suri Marg bring Rishi their day-to-day copying and collating. Once the day’s business is done, he pulls down the shutters and tackles the Yadav family’s confidential affairs: documents to smoothe the family’s expansion from construction into longhaul along the GTR, from long-haul into the import-export game. His biscuit tin gathers dust. He’s learning computers. He’s mastering Photoshop. This double trade is how he’s been able to afford a car, a saffron-yellow Maruti Zen – even if it has gone and got itself stuck in third gear.

The annual monsoon is on its way. There are no clouds but the sky is thick, trembling with a tension Rishi imagines he can hear. Below him, spread before him as he rides the embankments of the Sher Shah Suri Marg, the countryside stretches and bubbles. Layers of sky bend and twist and cavitate, generating hot, invisible bubbles in the sky. As Rishi drives home to the motel, his day’s work done, he sees clouds of birds racing the poison cloud: banks of filthy, sand-laden moisture from the Arabian Sea. Worms wriggle across the road. Forgetting himself, Rishi reaches for a higher gear – but the car is broken, there is no higher gear.

Come to that, there’s no gear stick.

His hand touches living skin, dry skin, warm and scaled, and a rippling of smooth muscle beneath. He squeals, the Zen swerves, catches a pothole with his nearside wheel, and lollops into a bank of weeds.

The car stutters and dies. Rishi scrambles out, winded and sore from his collision with the steering wheel. Where the hell is it? How’s he going to find it? More to the point, how the hell is he going to kill it?

Rishi edges his way round the car, peering through the windows, half afraid that the snake, whatever kind of snake it is, not any snake he’s seen before, will try and strike him through the glass. Then it comes to him that the snake must have somehow wormed its way into the car from underneath, which means –

Rishi skips away, badly spooked, afraid of what might be weaving towards him through the grass. He steps into a cowpat.

A car appears on the horizon. Rishi squishes his way to the roadside and tries to wave it down, but the vehicle, a green Honda, does not stop, and Rishi freezes there a moment, trying to make sense of what he’s glimpsed: his old, broken, half-forgotten friend and brother-in-law Vinod Yadav, riding the chicken-strap next to a woman whose lips are pulled back, as though by acceleration, over grey shark’s teeth.

Rishi shivers in the day’s liquid, rapidly escalating heat. It will rain tonight for sure. He walks beneath the sky’s grey and spreading wound, covering the half-mile to the nearest roadhouse as quickly as he can. It would not do to be caught in the poison shower.

Rishi finds it easy enough to find a truck driver prepared to pull him out of his ditch for a few rupees; much harder to answer the driver’s torrent of friendly questions. Who is he, anyway, and what does he do?

Month by month, Rishi’s answers to these questions are becoming increasingly vague. ‘I drive a Komatsu.’ An obvious lie. You only have to look at his clothes. His shoes. Rishi has done well from his work with Yash Yadav. In the last year he has lost his wife – torn limb from limb and scattered piecemeal, one of hundreds, over the wreckage of the Kalindi and Purushottam Expresses – and he has, into the bargain, felt the old certainties shift from under him – family honour, personal reputation – but he has a decent wardrobe, and a car, even if it is still stuck in third gear.

Gingerly, Rishi takes his seat at the controls of his weirded car. There’s the gear stick, reassuringly dull and plastic and useless. The day’s twisted weather must be throwing up hallucinations.

He can’t wait to be home. First, he has an errand to do. Under a sky grown purple with threat, he kangaroos his way along the Sher Shah Suri Marg at speeds not exceeding 20 mph, ready at a moment’s notice to hurl himself bodily into the road. It’s night by the time he arrives, exhausted and nerve-fried, at the mouth of a dirt track overlooked by a sign for Apollo tyres.

His errand: to tell Yash what he saw when he was inspecting his car – that Vinod’s back in town, with company.

This is the worry, a fear quite as pressing as any snake bite: that by covering up Vinod’s killing of Manjit Nankar – and worse, compounding his death with the execution of his wife – Yash and Rishi have laid themselves at the mercy of Vinod’s conscience. This didn’t seem much of a risk at the time, but Vinod’s been falling apart ever since the rail crash, very visibly falling apart, and getting Manjit Nankar’s death off his conscience might be the single best thing Vinod can do for himself these days. Then where will they all be?

Rishi turns down the dirt track. The forecourt lights are out, but light bleeds through the shutter of an upstairs room. He sounds his horn and watches the window, waiting for Yash to appear. When no one comes he climbs out of the car. The house is quiet. There’s no music, no TV. There’s a car drawn up here, a cheap Japanese saloon, its dark paintwork indistinguishable from the shadows it casts across the forecourt.

A green Honda
. Is he too late? He should run – but where? Rishi heads for the corrugated-iron lean-to at the side of the house. Under the roof, grey against the darkness, a police car stands on blocks and, beside it, Yash’s latest acquisition: an Opel Corsa.

The shutters of the upstairs room clatter open. A shadow moves in front of the window. Here it comes...

‘Who’s there?’

Rishi walks out again, and into a square of yellow light.

‘Rishi?’

‘Yash.’

The air snaps and Yash rises, silhouetted against the muzzle flash. He is naked. He passes through the open window and turns in the air, a cork screwing its way out of a bottle. He turns head over heels and lands, seated, a few feet away from the car, one leg outstretched, the other tucked unnaturally beneath him, with a queer elegance:
ta da!
– a gymnast completing a routine.

Rishi moves towards the wreck. He’s not seen Yash without his clothes since they all went skinny-dipping as children. Time has not so much aged Yash Yadav as accreted to him, rounding and folding and filling.

Yash’s torso slumps at a subtly unliving angle. The impact has broken his spine. ‘Ah,’ he says, just about alive. His lips are moving and perhaps he’s saying something, but Rishi can’t hear because in the room upstairs a woman is screaming. A second gunshot claps her shut. Rishi looks up at the open window. He tries to find his voice but there’s no spit in his mouth, no air in his lungs.

In his mind he is running, running, but his body is calmer than he is. It walks him past the car – a metallic green Honda, glistening in light pouring from the open window – and leads him under the lean-to. From here it isn’t more than twenty feet to the side entrance.

The door is unlocked. He steps into the hall. He closes the door behind him. The whole floor is in darkness. He finds the stairs and climbs. Light spills on to the landing from a door, barely ajar. He palms it open. He sees a small wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a sideboard, and on the wall above it a film poster. Soldiers and mountains. On the sideboard there’s a set of car keys and a gun. He enters the room, his attention snared by the gun. He recognizes it. It is Samey’s old service Browning. His Hi-Power. The one he and Vinod played cowboys and Indians with when they were children. He sees a woman’s legs, sprawled spastically across the bed. The rest of her is hidden behind a crouching form. Vinod Yadav is bending over her, wobbling for balance, tugging at her with his remaining hand.

‘Vinod.’

‘Rishi.’ Vinod reaches for his childhood friend, desperate, drowning. ‘Help me.’

‘What have you done? Vinod?’

‘Help me to dress her.’

The woman is Safia. Rishi’s sister. Vinod’s wife. She is making small, urgent gestures with her hands. She is naked. A pool of blood spreads under her hips.

‘She’s going to be all right.’ Vinod clambers off the bed. He gets behind her and tries to get her to sit up. Not so easy with only one arm. He slips his hand under her shoulder and pulls. Her eyes spring open. She says, ‘I can’t feel my legs.’

Rishi puts his hands to his head. His head pulses. An unfamiliar muscle is pumping away inside there: ‘Vinod. Go downstairs. Get Yash into the back of the pickup. We can’t leave him outside. Go on.’

‘Only I can’t feel my legs.’

‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘Vinod, I know what I’m doing. They taught us things in the factory. Punctures, burns. Go downstairs. I have this.’ Rishi leans over his sister. The mess that’s left of her. He’s dimly aware of Vinod running out of the room. ‘What happened?’

‘I tried to snatch the gun.’

‘It’s going to be all right.’ He looks for something to keep her warm. There are no blankets.

‘He surprised us.’

‘Vinod.’

‘Yes.’

‘Vinod burst in on you.’

‘Rishi? Where are you?’

Rishi is standing by the window, looking into the yard. Vinod is framed in light cast from the open window, staring at the havoc he has made of Yash Yadav.

‘Rishi?

He turns back to the bed. ‘I’m here.’

‘I can’t feel my legs.’

Rishi looks at her, sprawled there. His temples thrum: an unfamiliar rhythm. His breathing comes fast; it’s as though he were running.

‘Help me.’

A muscle in his head is flexing, working, burning all his breath. It brings a picture to his mind. A picture of the future. Safia crippled. Her reputation done for. A figure of fun. Kids will throw stones at her in the street. He’s a child of these villages. He knows what goes on. The petty cruelties of this place.

‘I can help you,’ he says. He picks up a pillow and brings it down over her face.

She claws at him, clutching and tugging at his shirt. In her shock and confusion it does not occur to her that her life is already over.

‘Rishi!’

It is Vinod, outside in the forecourt.

‘Rishi!’

Rishi lets go of the pillow and climbs off the bed and goes to the window.

Vinod is still standing beside the body of Yash Yadav. ‘I can’t find the keys to the pickup.’

‘They’re in the lid of the toolbox. In the flatbed behind the cab.’

From the bed there is a sound, like bathwater curling down a plughole. He turns back into the room. Safia is trying to crawl off the bed. She is trying to drag herself forward. Her fingers pluck uselessly at the sheet. He can see the entrance wound now: a little well of blood, shimmering and wobbling like a jelly in the small of her back. As he watches, fresh blood trickles across her hip, over the smears.

Rishi turns her on to her back and puts the pillow over her face a second time. Now, it seems she understands.

Afterwards Rishi goes downstairs.

Vinod has got the pickup started. He backs it towards the house. Rishi walks over, waving him into position, then raises his hand. Vinod stops the truck and climbs down from the cab. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s all right.’

Yash is dead. At least, he is no longer moving. Rishi and Vinod stand together, looking down at his crumpled remains.

Whatever has influence over Vinod’s mind at this moment – whatever pill or powder, whatever endogenous chemical response to events, or to the horror of events – it has removed from him all sense of anxiety. Impossible to imagine Vinod bursting into Yash’s bedroom. Impossible to imagine him killing Yash. ‘We shouldn’t blame Safia,’ Vinod says, recalling in tranquillity an atrocity barely a minute old.

‘No,’ says Rishi. He has barely had time to register what he knows: that Yash – after how many years of waiting? – was taking Safia into his bed.

‘Because people will say.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of this bastard.’ Vinod hawks up his phlegm and lets fly. A gobbet of mucus lands on Yash’s bent head.

Rishi gives an involuntary shudder – someone walking over his grave. Imagine it. Vinod, under interrogation by the Firozabad police! Vinod spills his story out to some yawning regional prosecutor. Vinod rots in prison and everything that Yash has built – the haulage company, the shipping business, Mohinder’s legal career, Rishi’s own print shop – the whole empire goes up in smoke.

‘Come with me.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I don’t want Safia left alone. You can wait with her while I deal with Yash.’ He leads Vinod to the side door, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Safia lies spreadeagled on the bed, her hands raised over her head, her fingers curled like claws around invisible prey. Around every manicured nail there is a thick semicircle of blood. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth. Her eyes are wide open. Rishi stands, poleaxed by the horror of it, while Vinod runs to the bed and hurls himself on to his wife.