Six Suspects (46 page)

No, no, no. It was all wrong. What was I thinking? This is
India. Here exposing your belly button is seen as indecent
exposure. Here a woman in a bikini leads to street protests.
And how would I ever prove that it was the 'fake' me on
tape? Especially after the release of the 'original' bath tape.

I should think police case. Think magistrate. Think jail.
Think riots by the Society for Moral Regeneration. Think
my effigies being burnt, my movie posters being shredded.
Think being shunned by the film industry. Think the end of
my career.

Shit!

Think, dammit. Just Think. THINK.

20 March

The call I have been waiting four years for came today.

At precisely nine twenty p.m. the telephone rang and a
jaded operator asked me if I was Shabnam Saxena. 'Yes, this
is Shabnam Saxena,' I said.

'Please speak, your caller is on line,' she droned,
completely oblivious to the fact that she had just spoken to
one of India's biggest celebrities.

'
Beti
, this is Ma speaking. I am calling from a PCO.' I
heard my mother's thin voice and my heart leapt into my
mouth.

The line was very bad, but I sensed instantly that this
was not a call to wish me Happy Birthday. It was a cry for
help.

Ma was imploring me to return immediately to
Azamgarh. 'There has been a big tragedy,' she said. 'Your
father is in hospital, fighting for his life. I cannot say
anything on the phone. Just come, my daughter. Just come.'

'Yes, Ma,' I said, fighting back the tears. 'I am coming.'

21 March

I have returned to Azamgarh, the town of my birth. I flew
from Mumbai to Varanasi and then hired a taxi to take me
the final ninety kilometres. Lest I be recognized and
mobbed, I put on a
burqa
over my jeans.

Lucknow changed a lot in three years, but Azamgarh has
remained unchanged even after seven. It is the same
congested cesspool dotted with dilapidated houses and
decaying slums. The roads are full of potholes. Rubbish lies
piled up at every street corner. Roadside drains overflow
with sewer water. Cows roam the roads freely. Posters of
politicians with plastic smiles and folded hands decorate
every empty space.

Kurmitola, where our ancestral house stands, has
become a claustrophobic monstrosity. Its narrow streets
used to teem with rickshaws and cycles, but now they buzz
with the sounds of car horns, three-wheeler klaxons and
screeching tyres. Pigeons flutter from the balconies of
spectacularly ruined houses. Battered hoardings display
garish film posters and advertisements for sex clinics.
Dexterous craftsmen in tatty clothes work in decrepit
shops. Wrinkled men smoke ancient hookahs on filthy
pavements, looking like derelict reminders of a forgotten
past.

I had no difficulty in locating my house, at the edge of a
field used by children for games of cricket and
gulli danda
. I
knocked on the weather-beaten door and Ma opened it. She
looked older and greyer than I had ever seen her. We
embraced, shed a few tears, then she made me sit on a
creaky charpoy in the octagonal courtyard where Sapna and
I used to play hopscotch and told me the reason for calling
me to Azamgarh.

Two days ago, Sapna was abducted while returning from
college. She was taken to a small house in Sarai Meer, a
notorious locality just outside the city, known for its
gangsters. There her abductor tried to rape her, but Sapna
somehow managed to get hold of the gangster's gun and
shot him dead.

She returned home within hours of her abduction, but
Babuji had a heart attack on receiving the news. Now he is
in hospital and Sapna is hiding in the house, terrified that
the police might come any minute to take her away for
murder. In desperation, Ma has turned to me as a last resort.

I gripped Ma's hand as she narrated these events, her
voice breaking.

'Your sister came back trembling like a leaf,' she
continued. 'I couldn't look into her eyes, so full of pain.
Lawlessness has increased so much in this city that no girl is
safe. Well, what can you expect when the Home Minister of
the State is himself a known criminal? Your Babuji will still
not admit it, but I say to you,
beti
, you did the right thing
by going away to Bombay. I only wish you had taken your
little sister with you. Then we wouldn't have had to see this
day.'

'Between right and wrong there is accident, Ma, which
is neither right nor wrong, over which we have no control.'

'You are right,
beti
. Whatever is destined will come to
pass.'

'Where is Sapna?' I asked.

'She is hiding in the luggage room and refuses to come
out. The poor girl has not eaten in forty-eight hours.
Perhaps you can make her listen.'

I remembered the luggage room was the gloomiest
room in the house. It was windowless and the air inside was
dark and lifeless, radiating the musty smell of dust and
mouldy wood. It was the perfect hiding spot when Sapna
and I used to play hide and seek, but neither of us could
bear staying in that creepy room longer than ten minutes.
Now Sapna had been holed up there for two full days.

I ran up the steps to the luggage room and knocked on
the battered wooden door, its paint peeling in strips away
from the wood. 'It is me, Sapna. Open up.'

There was a brief silence, and then Sapna opened the
door and fell into my embrace. She looked haggard and
gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes. She draped her
arms around me and hugged me tightly, her fingers digging
into my spine, searching for the familiar indentations of
childhood in the terrain of my back. Then she broke down
and cried, her frail body racked by sobs. Her tears flowed
freely till she had none left. I stroked her head and silently
shared her grief.

At my urging, Sapna finally ate a meal. Then we left for
the hospital to see Babuji, Sapna also dressed in a black
burqa
like me.

The room in the ICU was dim and quiet. My elder sister
Sarita was there, sitting on a chair with the same harassed
look on her face as when I had last seen her, the look of an
unhappily married woman with three unruly children. She
embraced me more warmly than I expected. We were
never that close, but perhaps my fame had bridged
the gap.

Babuji lay on a metal bed with a green sheet, breathing
through a tube. He has shrunk since I last saw him. Old age
has defined the furrows on his face and the veins on his
hands; illness has deepened them. His hair has thinned out,
leaving bald patches on the scalp. He groaned occasionally
in his sleep.

I have done many such scenes in movies – the dutiful
daughter at the father's deathbed – but I had almost
forgotten the antiseptic smell of a real hospital. The steady
blip of the heart monitor resonated in the room like a radio
signal in outer space. I listened to the pneumatic hiss and
whoosh of the ventilator, saw the green digital surge of the
EKG and felt a tiny wave of relief.

A bespectacled doctor in a white coat entered the room
and checked the chart attached to the bed.

'Is he making progress, Doc?' I asked him.

The doctor was clearly surprised at being asked a
question in English by a woman in a
burqa
. 'Yes. He is
making a good recovery. But we need to monitor him
closely for the next three days.'

'Please give him the best care possible. Money is no
object.'

I felt funny saying this, because money clearly is an object.
I am neck deep in debt without a penny in the bank. But
when you are grappling with something as elemental as
murder, concerns about money begin to seem inconsequential.

As soon as the doctor left, I caught hold of Sapna's
hand. 'Babuji will be fine. Now take me to Sarai Meer. To
the house where that man took you.'

She wrenched her hand away. 'No,
didi
. I cannot bear to
return to that place.'

'But you have to, Sapna,' I implored her. 'I have to
remove all evidence of your visit to that house.'

'I cannot see that man again, not even his dead body.'

'I promise you, I will take just ten minutes.'

After much cajoling, Sapna agreed to take me to Sarai
Meer. As our auto-rickshaw passed the familiar landmarks of
my childhood and youth, memories of another age came
flooding back to me. I remembered stolen afternoons spent
sucking sweetened crushed ice from the hawker in front of
the Inter College, bunking from school to see
Hum Aapke
Hain Kaun
at the Delight Cinema, window-shopping
expeditions to Asif Ganj, the spicy
chaat
of Nathu Sweets
on MG Road.

Sapna asked the driver to stop outside the main market
in Sarai Meer. From there we proceeded to our destination
on foot.

This was a predominantly Muslim area, but there
weren't many
burqa
-clad women walking about. Most of
the houses were run-down shanties. Clothes fluttered from
rickety balconies and cable-TV wires looped from every
roof. I peered into the cavernous grocery shops and the
bright pharmacies, the tiny video-rental shops and the
PCOs that had sprouted in the locality like a crop of
mushrooms. The aroma of freshly cooked meat drifted from
smoky food stalls.

Sapna clung to me like a drowning girl holding on to a
wooden plank. I could sense her desperation from the way
her nails gouged my skin and I knew that my little sister
had lost her innocence. For her, the familiar world of
Azamgarh had suddenly become foreign and evil, and I was
her only refuge.

What Bhola had done to me was nothing compared
to what had happened to her. I had paid the price of
fame, but she had paid the price of puberty, of simply
being a woman in a town full of lecherous men.

As Ma said, no girl was safe in this city. Even a threeyear-
old could be raped and mutilated by the perverts who
roamed the streets with abandon. I railed against these
bastards who had denied my sister even the feminine
happiness of visiting a market.

Sapna stopped at the mouth of a long alley framing the
green dome and lone minaret of a mosque in the far
distance, and glanced furtively left and right. The piercing
cry of an
azaan
suddenly rent the air, calling the faithful to
prayer, and a flock of pigeons rose into the grey sky from
their perch on the minaret's railing. A stream of bearded
worshippers began making their way towards the mosque.

We waited till the crowd had thinned; then Sapna led
me along the cobbled alley to a single-storey house with a
nondescript door. The door was unlocked and we entered
into a courtyard with a dying guava tree in the centre.
Crossing the courtyard, we came to another door with a
metal latch. Sapna covered her face with her hands as I
gently pushed it open. A swarm of flies and the stench of
rotting flesh assailed me.

I stepped into a small room which contained a
ceiling fan, a wooden four-poster bed with a green cover,
a desk, on which rested an earthen pot for water and an
unopened bottle of Triple X rum, and a wooden cupboard.
There were no calendars on the bare walls, no photographs
or personal belongings of any kind. It was a room
without memory, an impersonal place of assignation.

The man lay face-down on the stone floor, dressed in
white
kurta
pyjamas. He was tall and heavy set and very
dead. Next to his body was a pistol in a matt-black finish.

Seeing a dead body up close can be quite unnerving,
especially one that has begun to rot. I flipped open my veil,
clenched my nose and picked up the gun. It was a Beretta
3032 Tomcat, compact and lightweight. 'Is this the gun you
shot him with?'

Sapna nodded and shivered. 'He said he knew I was
your sister. He kept saying, "No one can get Shabnam, but
at least I can say I got Shabnam's sister." A sob escaped her
lips and I grasped her hand once again. I, too, was guilty by
association, complicit in the bastard's crime.

'I need to see his face,' I said.

'I don't,' wailed Sapna.

'Come on, help me.' I grabbed the man by his waist and
tried to turn him over. He was like a large, inert boulder and
I had to pin my leg against his hip and push with all my
might before I succeeded in tipping him over on to his back.

Bile filled my mouth as soon as I saw his bloated body.
The stomach had distended like a helium balloon and his
hands and feet were as stiff as cement. Some kind of fluid
had leaked from his mouth, nose, eyes and ears and
congealed into a sticky mucous-like substance. His skin had
turned a waxy greenish-blue. His face was almost
unrecognizable because of the grotesque bloating and the
eyes had sunk into the skull. All I could make out was that
he had a large, clean-shaven face, disfigured with numerous
pockmarks, perhaps the residuum of a childhood disease.
His left ear had a deep cut, as though someone had slashed
it with a knife. And in the middle of his forehead was a
small disc-like hole where the bullet had gone in. There was
surprisingly little blood.

'Any idea who this fellow is?' I asked Sapna, breathing
through my mouth.

'No,
didi
. I'd never seen him before. He just grabbed me
from behind as I was walking out of college and pushed
me into a taxi. At least twenty students must have seen me
being abducted, but no one dared to raise an alarm.'

'Did anyone see you when he brought you here?'

'I don't know. He bound and gagged me. I think I must
have been unconscious when he brought me to this house.'

'Was there a . . . struggle?'

'Yes. He asked me to undress. When I refused he lunged
at me, caught hold of my
kameez
and tore it in half. That's
when I glimpsed his gun lying underneath the pillow and
grabbed it. He charged at me like a mad bull and the gun
went off. I swear,
didi
, I didn't mean to kill him. I only
wanted to get away from him.'