Dead Water (36 page)

Her job. Her marriage. Her child. Her
face
.

‘I see. Do you want to see the room?’

They climb the stairs.

The door is open. There is a sideboard and above it, tacked to the wall, a faded portrait of Amitabh Bachchan. An old movie poster.
Sholay
. Seeing the poster, Roopa is transported back to that horrendous police report Arun showed her: easily the most unsettling legal document ever to have passed through her hands.

The officer who first bumbled his way up to this room was a probationer, barely into his twenties. He’d been sent to pick up the keys to a recently repaired patrol car. He had only the vaguest notion what his report should include and so he included everything. Entering the room, he observes: ‘It was virtually empty.’ He notes the movie poster. A small wardrobe. A chest of drawers.

There was a rug over the floor, and a pile of bedclothes. Opposite the sideboard was a bed. A woman lay there naked, her eyes open, and a man lay on top of her, fully clothed, without a face.

Imagine him, shambling up to the bed. Poor bastard. Imagine his legs, the numbness in his feet. Imagine his hands; the weight of them, in that moment. Gidh takes Roopa back to his offices above a tile shop in a hilly, unfashionable part of Agra. To climb wide concrete stairs, past sinks and cisterns and boxes of bathroom fittings, and then to pass through smoked-glass doors into Gidh’s dim, IBM-lit interiors, is to stumble upon a villain’s secret headquarters.

He pours them both a Johnny Walker. He tells Roopa that Vinod’s murdered wife had a brother: a Komatsu operator called Rishi Ansari. ‘Rishi still works for Yash Yadav.’

Roopa swirls the liquor around her mouth, a fire, a medicine to cauterize a wound. Dizzily, pain-drunk: ‘He does?’

‘In Mumbai. All Yash’s correspondence comes through him.’

Through lips made numb by whisky: ‘Safia’s brother works for the man who murdered her? Why?’

‘People like that, poor people, they take what they can get, don’t they? He’s done all right from it, too. Runs a wrecking yard in Mumbai Port Scrapping Area.’

‘Rishi Ansari.’ It isn’t much of a lead, but at least it’s local. Getting her man is all very well, but Roopa can only afford so many air tickets.

Late afternoon. Rishi Ansari is taking his ease on the terrace of his favourite Mumbai bar: the one with the slow but kindly service and the view over Juhu Beach. He’s watching a crowd of Saudi speculators gathered around a table at the opposite end of the verandah. This lot have been coming here every Thursday night for weeks now. ‘Another good week’s work!’ the Saudis scream at each other, gone deaf, the insides of their ears coddled to cream by mobile microwaves. Another bay, another beach acquired! Another village levelled! Another date orchard drained! Rishi watches them tugging at their cut-off dishdashas, their faces disfigured by lust, their eyes hot coals behind their Ray-Bans as they tap their feet to the Latin beat pulsing inside the bar. He watches as they sip up their Pepsis, their Pepsi and Johnny Walkers, then – oh, to hell with it – their Johnny Walkers, neat. A couple of hours of this and they will reveal their utter and conspicuous devotion to sin, and Rishi smiles, because watching them makes him feel honest.

As he watches, he works at his phone, transferring money from one account to another. He hits a button, piloting paper boats up paper creeks, under a canopy of paper trees. He hits a button, and leaps from registry to registry, continent to continent, laying down patterns of false-positive information. He hits a button, and skips from dry carrier to tanker to dry carrier. He hits a button, and circumnavigates the earth, from the Bahamas to Panama, from Malta to the Maldives. No two-bit forger from the sticks could ever hope to perform miracles like these. But Yash can. Yash Yadav, long dead, but resurrected; he speaks again through Rishi’s paper ventriloquism.

Rishi hits a button, numbers burning up the screen: complex financial operations reduced to a thumbed stereotypy that only his broker can decode. So much money to his nephews, Ravi and Shubi. So much to poor, nerve-wracked Mohinder Gidh...

Mumbai’s Port Scrapping Area in Darukhana is where ships that have been plying the Indian Ocean for over half a century come to die. It is male territory. By day: flames, risk, work, frequent injury, falls, fires, explosions, subtle debilitations wreaked by exposure to oils, lubricants, paints, cargo slop. By evening: thin dahl and ashy chapattis, songs, booze, violence and sleaze.

Roopa Vish passes sheds where oxygen is compressed and bottled for the ship-breakers’ yard. An oxygen-cooking oil mix burns hot enough you can use it to cut a ship’s hull into strips. The strips are loaded by hand on to lorries and Tempos and handcarts and carried inland to the rerolling factories where coke-blackened men with seared lungs drag the strips through pit furnaces cracked and crazed with age and overuse. They feed the glowing scrap through graduated rollers to make rebars: ribbed reinforcing rods for South Asia’s building trade. Men coming off-shift stare at Roopa frankly, with no hostility. It’s early evening, and carbon has filled every pore of their faces, making them impossible to read.

She passes yards devoted to reclaimed chandlery: linoleum, life jackets, piping, air-conditioning units, beds, canned goods, furniture. One square of fenced-off earth sells old injection-moulded bathroom cubicles.

She reaches the coast. It is on fire. She imagines some cataclysm. D-Company have deployed their first fuel-air weapon. Pakistan has dropped a puppet nuke. Eventually her eyes adjust. The fires engulfing the beach are flaming pools of engine sludge and the wrecks are only empty ships, waiting to be dismantled. Men cut up a ship’s engine with cooking-oil torches. Roaring diesel winches haul the pieces through the gutted hull. Sometimes the hawsers break and recoil, whipping through the air before they plunge, like striking snakes, and bury their severed heads in the sand. The end of a hawser once speared the roof of a Tata truck rumbling innocently along the service road like a flatulent Hindu shrine.

It missed Rishi Ansari by inches.

He cracks open a can of Thums Up, the local cola. He’s lying in his hammock on the verandah of his workshop: a smart concrete bunkhouse overlooking the final resting place of the Greek reefer ship
Frio Dolphin
, built in 1979. To its left lie the remains of the British general cargo ship
Kerie
, built in 1978. The empty space to its right is reserved for the German general cargo ship
Mercs Wadduwa
, built in 1967. A pilot will run it aground sometime tonight.

‘What you environmentalists don’t understand...’ Rishi treats Roopa Vish to his orientation speech. Ship-breaking is a necessary industry, and from politicians to foremen to cutters, the people of Mumbai speak of it with pride, impervious to the West’s nannying. Rishi’s the same: he assumes anyone in Western clothing is an eco-fascist and setting outsiders right about the view – the flames, the smoke, the stench of bilge and solvent and hot oil – is a task he has performed many times.

‘Mohinder Gidh sent me.’

Now Rishi understands, or he thinks he does. Mohinder has told him to expect a prospective client, a professional woman who requires a speedy, discreet service: documents and identifying materials.

Rishi Ansari is not in the scrapping business. Dominating his workshop is a government security press. Roopa can tell that’s what it is because a stamped metal plate on the side reads: India Security Press – Brigadier Road. It’s a measure of Rishi’s confidence that he hasn’t even prised off the badge. On a table covered with newspapers sits an Alps MD-5000 printer, a laminator, a box of 5 mil pouches, a bottle of Interference Gold paint, a can of Damar spray varnish, Mylar, latex paste...

Mostly, Rishi Ansari works for the shipping industry. Worldwide, one in ten seafarers admits to using counterfeit certificates. Many more – one in five – are happy to shop their friends. Fraudulent papers are most often wielded by the officer class. Many seafarers are keen to start earning money as soon as possible; others are desperate to obtain a quick promotion. Many wish to hide awkward facts about their health or age. In the course of a career at sea most hands have stumbled across at least one junior officer who’s yet to learn the difference between port and starboard. Since 9/11 Rishi has been exceptionally busy. Watermarks, laminated cards, magnetic readers, holograms, computer databases. Between them, bin Laden and Bush have created the conditions for a minor economic miracle in Darukhana. Every month some bright bureaucrat in the International Chamber of Commerce dreams up another security measure, and within weeks it has become just another veil for the stowaway, pirate or terrorist to hide behind.

Roopa’s parking permit is not yet ready. The yellow ribbon of Rishi’s MD-5000 has fused to the print head. The cheapest replacement he can find on the Internet is $700 – a swingeing amount of money – and there is no guarantee he will receive the goods. ‘eBay is full of tricky people,’ he says, with not a trace of irony.

He’s had more luck with her ATM card. The hologram is impressive. He basks in Roopa’s attention: ‘HG-107 diffractive film. Great under a desk lamp but be careful, the hologram vanishes under diffuse light.’

Roopa doesn’t care one way or the other and hands him 2000 rupees for a piece of fake ID that won’t work on a cloudy day. She knows what she’s doing. She lays her hand on Rishi’s arm. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she says – and smiles. Twenty thousand rupees these cost her: the smallest, whitest and most even teeth in her extensive dental arsenal. ‘Rishi, I remember you.’

Rishi’s shoulders stiffen.

‘I met you in Chhaphandi’s brickworks.’

His fear is palpable.

‘After the rail crash. When Vinod was in hospital, having his stump seen to. Do you remember? A policewoman came round to see him about a family of scheduled-caste labourers. You were there to fob me off.’

Rishi makes to move past her, towards the door, out of there. Roopa lays her hand on his chest. ‘It’s all right, Rishi,’ she croons. ‘It’s okay.’

‘What do you want?’ A small, high voice.

She knows what makes him tick. ‘I want what you want,’ she says. Surreptitiously, she flicks her tongue round her upper gum, the left side, above her tiny porcelain canine. There’s a fragment bursting through. She can taste the blood. She’s tanked with codeine today, half off her face. ‘I want the man who killed your sister and your brother-in-law.’

Rishi blinks at her.

‘It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Yash’s little helper.’

Rishi tries to swallow.

‘Don’t you see? You’re just like me.’

‘I am?’ He stares around the room: this little wainscot empire he’s built under the shadow of the Yash family syndicate: ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Together,’ Roopa whispers in his ear. Touches it with her tongue. Explores it. Paints a little pinkish blood inside it. Laughs. ‘Together we can kill him. Would you like that? Rishi? Would you?’

Nothing.

‘It’s why you’re here. It’s why you’re working for him. Shielding him.’ Something comes out on her tongue. A tiny bit of grit. ‘Isn’t it?’

He shakes his head. He can’t believe his luck.

‘You don’t fool me,’ she says.

There are indigents tottering around Mumbai’s port sector who have had their arms boiled off, their feet hoofed lengthways with roofing shears. You do not fuck with the Yadavs, and if they ever find out who Roopa Vish really is, and that she has a score to settle with Yash, the Yadav syndicate’s new, elusive and all-powerful boss, they will take their time killing her. Rishi knows the fun they’ll have with her, before their graceless
coup de grâce
. Poor Rishi: he wishes with all his heart he’d never got Roopa into this. There it is. She’s in it now, has been for nearly a decade, and nothing to be done.

Convincing Roopa that he is Yash Yadav’s creature, his gatekeeper and private secretary, has been the acme of Rishi’s career, centrepiece of his forger’s art. With one perfectly turned lie, he’s turned Roopa from a liability into his most reliable helper! Poor Roopa, who thinks she’s spent all these years working her way up through the organization to become Yash’s most trusted courier. Poor Roopa, who imagines she has come ever closer, through Rishi, to a man fifteen years dead!

Strange, that Roopa’s well-being should have come to matter so much to him. He is not without feeling. He is not without conscience, or regret. He is not, all in all, a bad man. He is just bad enough.

Poor Roopa. Rishi wonders: at what point, in all these years of deception, did Roopa cease to be a game for him? At what point did she become more than a counter for him to move around at will? Ruined as Roopa is, driven as she is, dangerous as she is, Rishi’s spent the best years of his life asking himself: dare I let her see more? Dare I invite her back to my apartment? Dare I show her my boat? Dare I cook her a meal? It’s taken him a long time to build up the courage. Absurd how long it’s taken him. Years. Evenings round at her place in front of the television. Meals out. Visits to the fair. Treats for Nitesh, a teenager now. Poor Rishi, edging with a painful slowness into someone else’s life, and no one’s getting any younger here.

Every quarter Rishi relays a mythical order from his mythical boss, Yash Yadav, and sends Roopa on a mission to the UAE. Every quarter she bears
hawala
notes and documentation across the Indian Ocean. Coordinates. SIM chips. Account numbers. Maritime documents of all kinds. Even cash money.

She waits. (This is her plan.) She waits. She works. She waits. One day she will meet Yash Yadav again, in person. Then, she’ll kill him.

Any streetwise crew of twenty years ago would have picked up Roopa’s scent in days. They would have found her son, her mum, her family’s home in Thane, her ACB profile, the registration number of her car. But the syndicate’s old street-corner crews, its has-been razormen and shooters, are following barrow-boys and trimmers, firemen and stevedores, into the same quaint dockyard oubliette. Origins hardly matter these days and the Yadav family is a ‘Mumbai syndicate’ in name only. From its paymasters to its deckhands, there’s not one in the firm who does not work out of a mobile phone, and all the smart money lives in Toronto. The distributed nature of modern piracy is keeping Roopa alive, but this cuts both ways, and Roopa, though safe enough, is no nearer to the truth about Yash Yadav than she was when she first visited Darukhana nearly nine years ago. She is wasting her life away on a vendetta that no longer makes any sense – and Rishi is helping her waste it.