Love and Longing in Bombay (13 page)

Now the ashes clung to his feet as he walked. Sartaj bent over a twisted piece of plastic and turned it over. It was the casing from a video tape, half melted away. The clouds shifted and suddenly the sun moved across the swamp. The smell filled his head, rank but full and rich. Two egrets came gliding over him and he turned his head full around to watch them. He was at the other edge, near the water. Leaves scraped across his face. He bent down and peeled a soggy curl of paper away from his shoe. It was a picture from a calendar, an almost-nude model in designer tribal clothes, smiling over her shoulder. He scraped at the muck with the side of his shoe and layers of paper parted. He bent quickly, then, to peer at the handwriting on a blackened fragment. “Patel,” it said, in the neat script from the chequebook. He squatted, and tried to turn it over, but it broke crisply in half. He took his ballpoint pen from his pocket and used it to poke at the debris. Under a piece of plastic he found a torn page with printing on it. He held it up between his forefinger and thumb. It was thick paper, and he could make out the writing. “… having got up in the morning and performed his necessary duties, should wash his teeth, apply a limited quantity of ointments and perfumes to his body, put some ornaments on his person and collyrium on his eyelids and below his eyes, colour his lips with
alacktaka,
and look at himself in the glass. Having then…” As he read, it tore across from its own weight and dropped. The sweat dripped down his neck. He could hear the dogs barking.

*

The wall in front of Parulkar’s house was crumbling even as Sartaj watched. As he waited at the door, he watched the rain carry away tiny pieces of stone and brick into the flowing gutter. But inside the floor was cool and polished as he bent to take off his shoes. Parulkar’s youngest daughter, Shaila, her hair swinging in two enormous plaits behind her, watched him gravely. She was fourteen, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles at the very end of her nose. When he had first met her she had loved to be tickled behind the ears. It made her weak with laughter. Now she was a very dignified young woman.

“You’re starting to look like someone, Shaila,” Sartaj said.

“Who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A model? A movie star? Madhuri Dixit, maybe …”

She looked at him sideways, but with a little smile. “I’ve decided I’m going to IIT,” she said. “I’m going to do computers.”

“Really?” Sartaj said. “No more Parulkars in physics?” Both her older sisters were physicists, one at ISRO and the other at Bombay University.

“Bo-ring,” Shaila said. “That’s old stuff, don’t you know? Computers are hot, hot, hot.”

“Which I don’t know anything about.”

“As if you know anything about physics.”

“You’ll have to teach me.”

She took him, with both her hands, by the wrist and pulled him down the corridor to the drawing room, which was large and sparsely filled by its two divans and
chatai.
This forward-leaning walk, at least, was something she hadn’t decided to outgrow yet.

“Sit,” she said, as she went back into the corridor. “Papa will be out in a minute.”

Sartaj didn’t mind the minute, or more, at all. He had always liked this room. It was long and opened out on one end into a small garden, which actually had a tree in it. The branches hung over the window and now the water dripped slowly, and the light was gentle and green. This light was the surprise the house hid behind its shabby walls, and today Sartaj was particularly glad for it.

“Anything new?” Parulkar said, as he came in, rolling up the sleeves of his
kurta,
which was a starched bluish white. He looked very elegant when he was not in uniform. Sartaj told him about Ghorpade and Kshitij and the mother.

“The forensic report came from Vakola this morning,” Sartaj said. “The interior of the Contessa seemed to have been washed with a three-ten mixture of hydrogen peroxide. There were no traces of blood, or any other suspicious substance. The car was scrubbed down, clean. It was wiped down very professionally. No fibres, nothing

“But what has the car to do with any of it? You could close the case really,” Parulkar said. “You have the watch, and so physical evidence and a motive, and the suspect, what’s his name, Ghorpade, places himself at the scene. What else could we need? What are you looking for?”

“Nothing, sir. I mean I don’t know.”

“These are delicate times, Sartaj,” Parulkar said. “Pushing too hard, without sufficient reason, on that family could lead to, let us say, sensitivities.” What he meant was that for an outsider, a Sikh, to push a little was to push a lot. It was true, even though the Patels were Gujaratis and so outsiders themselves. There were outsiders and outsiders. To say, I was born in Bombay, was very much besides the point. Sartaj nodded. “Meanwhile,” Parulkar said, “there’s something else I have to speak to you about …”

He stopped as Shaila came in with a tray. Sartaj watched him as he bent forward to pick up his steaming mug of tea, because he had never known Parulkar to be delicate about business around his daughters. In this house filled with women they were clinically straightforward about death and mayhem.

“There is something else,” Parulkar said after Shaila had swung her plaits out of the room.

“Sir?”

“I got a call from Shantilal Nayak last night.”

“Sir.” Nayak was an MLA who lived in Goregaon. He was the sitting home minister, and he had come to Sartaj’s wedding mainly as a guest of Megha’s family.

“He mentioned some papers.”

“Papers?”

“That you were to sign?”

Sartaj felt, suddenly, a rush of hatred for the rich. He hated them for their confidence, their calm, how they thought everything could be
managed.
But he said, “Yes, sir.”

“Sartaj,” Parulkar said, leaning forward a little. “Sartaj. If I could, I would have given anything to change it all.”

“Yes, I know,” Sartaj said finally. It was true.

At the door Parulkar put a hand on his shoulder, and Shaila came running out to take his wrist again in both of her hands.

“Don’t get wet,” Parulkar said. “It’s cold.”

Sartaj nodded and splashed down to the gate. Then he turned around and came back. “What is
alacktaka
?
”

“What is what?” Parulkar said.

“
Alacktaka
.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s something you colour your lips with,” Sartaj said.

“My lips?”

“Not yours, sir. I meant generally. Men use it to colour their lips.”

“This is general somewhere?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Sartaj said. He felt absurd standing there with his raincoat flapping around his knees and the water dripping from his eyebrows, and he turned abruptly and left them there, feeling their looks of enquiry on the back of his neck all the way down the lane. On the way home, under the bleak surges of anger, there was a nibbling doubt, an obsessive circling around something that was unknown and elusive. He now had facts about the deceased and his family, and these were quite ordinary and commonplace, repeated in any other family down the street or somewhere across the country. He knew something about the killer, if that was what Ghorpade was. They were two ordinary men who came together on a Bombay street corner one night. But Sartaj remembered the Rolex watch, and he was certain he knew nothing about the man who wore it, nothing that would explain the silky artifice of the thing, that would show how the commonplace and ordinary became Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel. He didn’t know this and somehow it felt like a debt.

*

Sartaj had put aside notions of debt the next time he went to the Bandra station. There was no option other than winding up the investigation and charging Ghorpade with murder, this was clear. He said this to Moitra‚ who nodded and said, “Yes, well, you’d better take a look at him.”

In the lockup the three other occupants were leaving Ghorpade well alone. He was lying on his side, his face against the wall, curled up. The air in the cell was cool, still between the old smooth stone of the walls.

“He can’t keep any food in his stomach,” Moitra said. The whole holding area smelled of vomit.

“Ghorpade,” Sartaj said. “Eh, Ghorpade.” Ghorpade lay unmoving.

“We’ll send him to Cooper Hospital this evening,” Moitra said. “But we have his statement anyway.” She meant that the hospital was no guarantee of his survival. “Come on, I want to finish up early tonight.”

In her office, while they stamped and signed papers under a picture of Nehru, the phone rang. “Hel-lo,” Moitra said softly. Sartaj looked up at her, and she changed to her usual clipped voice, “Hello.”

“Is that Arun?” Sartaj said.

“Yes,” she said, holding a palm over the mouthpiece and regarding Sartaj with a steady glare that dared him to be funny. “So?”

“I have a question for Arun.” Arun was her husband, a professor of history at Bombay University.

Moitra was still wary. “You do?”

“Yes, ask him what
alacktaka
is.”

She mouthed the word, feeling it out to see if there was a joke in it. Then she took her hand off the mouthpiece and asked. “He says he’s never heard of it,” she said after a pause. “He says what’s the context?”

“I’ve forgotten,” Sartaj said. “It’s not important anyway.”

*

So after all, on paper, it was going to be an open and quickly shut case, not even worth a headline in the afternoon papers, but still Sartaj studied Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel’s chequebook as the jeep wound its way north through afternoon traffic. The entries were routine, three hundred and eighty-three rupees for electricity to BSES on January 28, nine hundred and ninety five rupees to the ShivSagar Co-op. Building Society on January 29, one hundred and twenty-five rupees to the Jankidas Publishing Company on February 1, two hundred and ninety-two rupees to the Milind Pharmacy the same day, and Sartaj bent the book and the pages flurried by, the same names and the same little amounts again, BSES, Hindustan Petroleum for cooking gas cylinders on April 15, one hundred and twenty-five again to the Jankidas Publishing Company on May 1, two hundred and forty-eight to Patekar College on May 14. There were no large amounts, no huge payments to cash, nothing that indicated danger, or even excitement. Finally Sartaj took a deep breath and closed the book and put it back in his pocket. It was time to give it up. There were other cases to follow, which meant, he knew, other puzzles that would distract him from himself, so there was no reason to cling to this one. It was time to give it up.

And yet when he faced Kshitij, Sartaj had to force himself to pull out the chequebook and hand it over. “We will formally file charges tomorrow morning,” Sartaj said. “I came to tell you. It is a man named Ghorpade.”

When Kshitij had opened the grandiose door to the apartment, he was holding a dumbbell, and was dressed in a white banian and shorts which hung off his thin waist onto his angular hips. His chest heaved up and down as Sartaj told him about Ghorpade. His face was suffused and contorted, and when Sartaj was finished he nodded. He tried to speak and the breath came and went.

“I will get in touch shortly,” Sartaj said. They looked at each other and then Sartaj turned away. He paused, feeling as if he should say a word of comfort to this boy in his loneliness, and finally uttered with a smile that felt false, “Building the body,
haan?
”

Kshitij nodded. “Good,” Sartaj said. “Good.”

As Sartaj shut the lift door he heard the boy’s voice. “
Vande
mataram
.”

Sartaj paused with his finger on the button marked “G.” Kshitij was standing with his hands by his sides, his back straight. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Sartaj came to attention, and Kshitij and he looked at each other through the metalwork of the door. It was an old-fashioned slogan Sartaj had heard all his life, mostly in movies, but he could never say it without a surge of belief. “
Vande
mataram
‚” he said. Hail to the mother. And despite himself, unwillingly, he felt again, in his chest, a havoc of faith in the devious old mother he was saluting, and in the same moment, despair.

*

The sound of the rain was endless. It was still early afternoon but it was dark in the station house. Sartaj sat at his desk, loose limbed, and watched water stream down the panes of his window. Under the torrent, there was a strange quiet in the station house. It was as if everyone and everything were waiting.

Parulkar came in and walked over to the window. The collar of his shirt was bunched up around his neck, and he looked damp and uncomfortable.

“I had another call from Nayak this morning,” he said. “At home, this time.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Sartaj said.

Parulkar walked around the room, nodding gently to himself. Finally, from behind Sartaj, he said, “I don’t understand. Why don’t you just sign the papers and let it finish? What are you afraid of?”

And Sartaj, who was watching how the water on the window made the world outside a vague blur of brown and green, said without wanting or meaning to, “I’m afraid of dying.”

Parulkar put a hand on his shoulder, for a moment, with an awkward sort of fumbling movement. Sartaj twisted in the chair but already Parulkar was walking towards the door. His shoulders were hunched up as he pulled violently at his belt, and all the way out of the door his face was turned away.

There was a weariness in Sartaj’s arms and legs now, and his eyes, even after he closed them, felt hot and scratchy. Every breath was labour now, because he was afraid of the silence. He was too afraid even to feel contempt for himself.

*

Sartaj Singh lay flat on his back on the floor of his apartment, in a white
banian
and red pyjamas, arms wide to the sides, and contemplated death. He had these words in his head, “to contemplate,” and “death.” Between them there was a kind of light, a huge clear fearful sky in which he was suspended. When the shrill of the doorbell called, it took him a full minute to descend from this thin and deadly atmosphere, to lift his weightless body off the floor. Then there was a stagger to the door as he rubbed his eyes. In his blankness he found the rubbing pleasurable, and he felt keenly his knuckle on the eyelid, so that when the door swung open against his shoulder and he saw her, he had trouble recognizing the scene he had imagined a thousand times. “Hello, Megha,” he said finally, his hand still up to his face. She waited, until he understood the formalities now between them. “Come in, please,” he said, and hated the words.