Murder in Mumbai (10 page)

“
Jee?
” It was a girl; she looked no older than twelve. Her clothes were of high quality, but worn, the kind worn by servants in the homes of the affluent. Despite the hand-me-downs, the girl smiled.

“Kohli sahib aahe ka?”
Gaikwad asked in Marathi. Is Kohli there?

“Yes, come in,” the girl replied in halting English, still smiling.

Gaikwad entered. The outside of the building belied the inside of this flat. The hall, as the living room is called, was capacious and, in contrast to the stairwell, well-lit. Light from the setting sun streamed in through the large windows. Bookshelves lined the wall, sagging under the weight of carefully selected tomes, many of which looked unread, tribal pottery, and art. A large abstract painting in orange dominated one wall; on another was a giant poster that read, “No justice, no peace.” An old-school record player stood at the far end of the room; Gaikwad was pleasantly surprised that there was no television here. He walked up to the bookshelves and recognized only some of the names. They were what you would expect in the home of every Indian intellectual: Gandhi, Marx, the Frankfurt School, Subaltern studies. Gaja Kohli might have come from very humble beginnings, Gaikwad thought, but he'd built a comfortable existence for himself.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, inspector,” Kohli said.

Gaikwad turned around and smiled.

“Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”

“My pleasure. Anything to drink?
Thanda ya garam?
” Hot or cold?

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Inspector, you've come as a guest, you must have something. Priya,” he called out. The girl who opened the door appeared, still smiling. “Two teas. No sugar for me. You, inspector?”

“None for me, either.”

“OK, two teas. No sugar.”

The girl bobbed her head to signal she'd understood and retreated to the kitchen. Gaikwad couldn't help but think that no matter what political cause Indians espoused, they didn't think twice about having servants—even child servants—who did their chores for them. He shouldn't have been surprised, but he, for some inexplicable reason, expected Kohli to live up to the ideals he espoused: self-reliance, dignity.

He decided to come straight to the point.

“Kohli sahib,” he said, “why didn't you tell me that you'd gone to visit the American woman on the day she died?”

Gaikwad could see blood drain from Kohli's face. His jaw dropped slightly, and the years of self-confidence that he'd built up seemed to instantly dissipate. Gaikwad could see he was battling with himself about whether to come clean. He decided to help Kohli along.

“We have a witness.”

Kohli sighed, and shook his head. “She was alive, I swear it,” he said, and then desperately added: “Do I need a lawyer?”

Gaikwad could only think of the formidable Arundhati Hingorani. He certainly didn't want her here now, but he couldn't deny this man representation.

“That's up to you,” he said. “We're having a conversation and you're cooperating. If you'd prefer to get a lawyer, we can continue this at the station.”

Kohli seemed to assess this offer for a while. He nodded. “No. Let's talk here.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“She called me to talk. Said she'd like to address the concerns my group had. I wasn't going to say no. I went there. She'd just come back from a trip. She seemed relaxed. We spoke. She was very gracious. That's it.”

“What did you talk about?”

“My group's goals. How Mohini could help in those goals.”

“Was she offering you money?”

“She offered me support, inspector. It's tough running an NGO. More costs than you can imagine.”

Gaikwad looked around the room, dripping with refinement, and thought that the appearance of poverty cost a lot of money, too.

“Did you take it?”

“I said I'd think about it.”

“Did she appear worried?”

“No. I'd only met her once before.”

“At the party where you threatened her?”

He looked sheepish. “Yes, at that party.”

“What made her contact you?”

“I'm not sure. It was a surprise to me, too.”

“Why did you not tell us this?”

“How would it look, inspector? I'd be a convenient suspect and your force has a reputation.”

Gaikwad let it pass.

“Still,” Kohli continued, “if you want to look at someone, look at Hazra. He approached me about increasing the protests against Mohini.”

“Vikram Hazra?”

“Yes.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You must ask him.”

“What did he offer you in return?”

Kohli hesitated.

“This is in confidence, right?”

Gaikwad nodded.

“He offered support for the NGO.”

“And you took it?”

“Yes. It was an easy choice. Mohini was a target anyway. If we were getting paid to target them, so be it.”

Gaikwad felt revulsion at this man. The servant appeared, still smiling, holding a tray balancing two cups of tea.

“Here's the tea, inspector,” Kohli said.

“Thank you, but I must go,” Gaikwad replied abruptly, no longer wanting to share the same air as this man, let alone a cup of chai. At least on the force, he thought, people were openly crooked; here they adopted public piety but did the same thing.

He made his way through the dark stairwell, this time his memory easily finding the footing. He had to talk to Vikram Hazra.

Chapter 10

Jay should have been happy about the breakthrough in the burglaries; instead he was annoyed. The drinks with Janet never happened. By the time they finished with the videos at the police station, the bars had been closed. He was tempted to invite her home for a drink, but the last thing he wanted was for her to think he was lecherous.

He spent the morning at work, putting together the notes he'd taken on the burglaries. He looked for Janet, but her desk was empty.

“Anyone seen D'Souza?” he asked a photographer.

“She's out on an all-day assignment,” he replied. “Won't be back until tomorrow.”

Disappointed, Jay thought about calling her, but decided instead to wait. He felt indecisive. He hated being indecisive.

Jay returned to his office where he went over the Khurana interview again. There was little to add to the story. He called a few police stations to see if there was anything else going on in the city. It was quiet.

After what seemed like an eternity, it was time for him to head to Bandra to meet an old friend. Almost immediately, he found himself stuck in traffic. It was hard to describe traffic patterns in the city. The only thing that could be said with certainty was that it was getting worse every day. There was no such thing as rush-hour traffic; there was no such thing as driving against the flow. The city's old commercial houses and businesses were based in Nariman Point, the newer ones in Bandra Kurla Complex, the media houses in Bandra, Andheri, and Versova, the ad agencies in Parel. And since there wasn't one place where the city's population worked, everyone seemed to be everywhere all at once. They said four hundred new vehicles were added to the city's roads each day. Jay felt as if each of those four hundred vehicles were at this time trying to occupy the same tiny spot in front of him. True, the roads had lanes, neatly demarcated with white lines. But these were ignored. While this road, in theory, had three lanes, five rows of vehicles packed it, each aggressively inching forward, ensuring that no other vehicle could move ahead or, God forbid, change lanes. It was like the adage about the exhibit of crustaceans from around the world and the Indian crabs being the only ones in open glass bottles. There was no worry of one escaping, the story went, as the others ensured it would never make it out. Cars, trucks, buses, taxis, auto rickshaws that worked the suburbs, bicycles, and pedestrian traffic vied for space, each content in spending an hour and a half on the road, so long as no one else got home earlier.

On the sides of the road, businesses thrived. A little tea stall brewed the concoction for weary workers heading home after a long day; a
paan
wallah sold cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and prepared betel leaves that would be chewed, its red spit stains providing a semi-permanent coloring on the city's walls; worshippers stopped at adjacent makeshift shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Sai Baba, an early twentieth-century saint worshipped by Hindus and Muslims, thereby uniting, at least temporarily, three of India's four biggest faiths. Little boys, no older than twelve, but seemingly much younger, carried stacks of newspapers, magazines, and pirated versions of the latest paperback bestsellers (fiction as well as the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” variety) and offered them to those facing interminable rides home in their cars; beggars, usually accompanied by children, some maimed, silently and pathetically implored passengers for cash. They picked their targets well: usually guilty Westerners or Indians returning home after a long time, having forgotten the existence of such public squalor (the true city residents remained buried in their newspapers or carried on with their conversations, as if the beggars didn't exist); a sinewy man, his muscles twisted and distorted, sweat pouring from his brow, pulled an impossibly heavy handcart laden with ice, covered with sawdust to prevent it from melting, toward an unknown destination. It would ultimately cool someone's drink in South Bombay.

Jay looked at the air conditioner. It was blowing hot air. He rolled down the window of his old Fiat. The fumes combined with the heat made it feel like a furnace. Jay's skin burned. Most of the time, he felt immune to it, but there was something today that made it worse than usual. He coughed and wished he were someplace else.

He went over the details of the burglaries. He had made a breakthrough that would help the police in its investigation, probably even result in the capture of the man in the video. He felt confident, an emotion that had long deserted him.

Like many such things, luck had played a role.

* * *

Jay knew that without the tapes, he'd have been unable to make what seemed to be the first incision in the case. It had been an arduous process, but well worth the result. Once he'd determined that the videos had shown the same man walking into the apartment building, all he had to do was ensure that the watchman had seen him. And the Nepali watchman in custody at that very moment had remembered a man just like that. Of course, Jay knew that the Nepali was possibly ready to confess to anything given the time he'd spent in a jail cell, but it corroborated what he'd seen in the tapes. Even if the watchman were lying, Jay knew the tapes were not. So, the police were now looking for a man who strode confidently into apartment buildings and walked out just as calmly with a conspicuously large bag full of electronics. He also had the details from his friend in Lamington Road who had told him of attempts to sell stolen electronics on the days of the burglaries. Jay had kept that tidbit from Gaikwad. He intended to catch the thief himself.

An hour and a bit later, Jay arrived for his meeting with an old school friend—now a Jesuit priest—who ran the alumni association.

There was little to distinguish the Rev. Sandeep Fernandes, S.J., from the others at the Barista coffee shop near Lilavati Hospital in Bandra. He wore dark trousers and a white half-sleeved shirt and peered at his laptop through his Gandhi-style metal-rimmed glasses. That's how Jay found him when he walked in twenty minutes late for their appointment.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “The bloody traffic.”

Fr. Sandeep Alfred smiled. “Your timekeeping was always crap.”

“Yeah, and the traffic in this city doesn't help. Still, twenty minutes isn't so bad!”

“No,” Sandeep said, smiling. “It allowed me to finish my notes for tomorrow's class.”

“I still can't believe you're a damn teacher—or a bloody priest.”

“Sometimes neither can I,” his friend replied, chuckling as if the memories of teenage transgressions all came flooding back at once.

A waiter approached and took their orders—both asked for black coffee—and returned a few minutes later. They sipped the hot drinks and oblivious of the waiter or the people around them regaled each other with stories from school.

As schoolboys in the 1990s, the two had attended a well-known Jesuit boys' school in Mazagaon, known for its grey stone walls and Gothic architecture, red mud and blue Mercedes school buses with its name proudly emblazoned on its sides. The boys wore white shirts and white trousers—invariably reddish brown by the end of the day—and blue ties, sang the school prayer, school song, and national anthem with equal zeal and eventually left with fond memories of the teachers, priests, and even the canings they received liberally. The school attracted a fervent following among its Old Boys, who met periodically to raise money for charity, to play cricket, or to just exchange gossip. Sandeep, now a teacher at St. Serephina in Bandra, headed the alumni association and periodically called his old friend Jay when he wanted media publicity for alumni events. Jay was only happy to oblige. Bombay may have been one of the biggest cities in the world, but in many ways it operated like a village: with things getting done through word of mouth; through friends and family; through someone who knew someone who knew someone else who'd only be happy to oblige. It was, as Sandeep liked to joke, the original social network.

After they had finished discussing school-related matters, the topic inevitably turned to which Old Boy was doing what. They talked about the professors, the IT programmers and management consultants in the U.S., the athletes, the boys who'd seamlessly taken over their fathers' businesses, the ones who were still adrift so many years after school.

“What are you working on?” Sandeep asked.

“These burglaries, you know. I just had a breakthrough. But the police still need to catch the guy.”

“I read about those. What did you find?”

Jay told him about the video, the man with the bag, the conversation with Gaikwad.

“And you think the police wallah will keep his word?”

“I've dealt with him before. He can be prickly, but he's true to his word and, more importantly, I've never heard anything about him being on the take.”

“That's a rarity.”

Jay nodded in agreement.

“What else?” Sandeep asked. “Anything else that's interesting?”

“I did this profile of Kabir Khurana. We're still waiting for the photos, but it's going to run on the weekend.”

“Khurana! He's an Old Boy, you know?”

“Really?” Jay asked in surprise. “I thought he studied at Harrow.”

“He finished there, but his first few years were here. In fact, his father was at the school, too.”

“Khulbushan Khurana? Really?”

“Yeah. The freedom fighter. And I remember one of the old priests from the school telling me there was some controversy about the Khuranas. About how the father used his influence to make something go away.”

“Oh?”

“I'm not sure what it was. But it was hushed up. And the younger Khurana was then taken out of school and sent to the U.K.”

“Any way to find out more?”

“It's just gossip,
yaar
,” Sandeep said. “Not something you can print.”

“Arre, I won't print it. Just gives me some background.”

“I'll check. Fr. Casale is still around. If anyone knows it, it'll be him.”

“He's still around? He must be what—”

“He turned ninety-nine this year. Still sharp as a tack. There's something about these World War Two–type European fellows. Strong as an ox.”

“Must be all that roast beef,” Jay replied.

They laughed. It was a common joke because beef was difficult (but not impossible) to find in India—since Hindus view the cow as holy. Any feat of physical prowess exhibited by non-Indians—from Pakistani fast bowlers to Jamaican sprinters—was usually attributed to beef.

“Well, give him my best. And ask him.”

“Arre, man, I said I will, nah. OK—anyway I should go. It's prayer time.”

“Isn't it always prayer time for priests?”

“No,” Sandeep said, laughing. “Only for sinners like you.”

* * *

The traffic gods took pity on Jay as he raced down the Western Express Highway toward his parents' home in Andheri. His phone rang. It was his mother.

“You're coming this evening, no?”

Jay scanned his memory for what he was supposed to be there for. Damn, he thought, it was the day of his father's eye surgery. He felt guilty at having forgotten.

“Of course, I'm coming over there right now.”

“Achcha, I just wanted to check.”

He picked up his parents and drove them to the ophthalmologist near Andheri station, where his father was due to have laser surgery to remove his cataract. On their ride there, Jay could not help but think how his parents' roles had reversed over the years. When he was young, his father's voice and laughter filled the room. Jay recalled how secure he felt holding his father's giant hand as he walked to school. His mother, on the other hand, was the quiet one. But even at an early age, he could see that she got things done. Jay did not like to see his parents age—especially his father. Along with the usual ailments that accompany age, his father looked physically smaller now. He had shrunk. He was taciturn. His laughter no longer filled the house. Jay's mother now filled that void. If she displayed quiet confidence then, she was dominant now. He was their only child who still lived in India. And because he met them more often than his siblings—but not often enough, if his mother was to be believed—her personality occasionally grated on Jay. Still, he was grateful for it. Visiting a silent home trapped in old memories would have been too sad to contemplate.

Jay brought the car to a halt outside the clinic.

“You wait here. It'll be an hour,” his mother said. “Don't go anywhere. I don't want to be waiting here forever.”

“I said I'll wait here,” Jay said, his tone betraying the exasperation he felt.

Jay watched his parents walk into the clinic. It was a reputable-looking place, assuaging his concerns that his father would yet again choose a smooth-talking, cut-rate operator who would provide substandard services. It was one thing when he did that for an electrician, a whole other thing with an eye surgeon.

Jay double-parked his car. There was no way he could leave the vehicle here even if he wanted to. With all the construction work nearby for yet another flyover, he would be towed. In many ways, this felt like he was on a stakeout. He pulled the lever and reclined his seat. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. It was the perfect time for a nap. Jay shut his eyes, but the noise outside made it impossible. There was noise from the construction work; noise from the chatter of the women workers who ferried bricks and cement on their heads from one part of the site to another, in an endless assembly line; noise from the scooters that darted recklessly around corners, blaring their horns in warning; noise from the solitary walking cow that had a bell around its neck; noise from the cawing crows that gathered near garbage dumps to eat scraps. Bombay was seldom silent and when silence came it was brief, and it brought peace. Not today though. Today, Jay waited for a silence that never came.