Love and Longing in Bombay (17 page)

“True,” Sartaj said. “What did he do in the room?”

“He went through it,” she said. “Just like you, searched it, opened drawers, looked under the bed, in the bathroom. Looked in the rubbish bin. Like he was checking it for something. Evidence. Clues. Things left behind.”

“I see.”

“But he was shaking and his eyes were red. Speaking under his breath to himself. Mad.”

“Yes, mad. Did he find anything?”

“No, nothing. He was their son?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Khanna stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Chetanbhai was a good man,” she said. “Poor Chetanbhai.”

*

On his motorcycle, with metal trembling against his thighs, Sartaj thought of bodies. He tried to picture his own, and found it curiously blurred, his knowledge of it dulled and patchy. He had known it forever, but what were his shoulders like in pain? The back of his thighs in sleep? Megha he knew, the pulse on her wrist and the one that beat hard on her throat, but each time they settled against each other, had settled, he had felt compelled to take stock anew. Like a man afraid of memory dying. The loud blatting of the engine beat on his ears. He tried to imagine Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel naked, as he had been under the sheet at the morgue, a round face and a sloping chest, a paunch, thighs splayed apart. In his life had somebody watched him in the morning, awoken him with an invading caress? Sartaj tried to imagine his own parents, and his mind turned. It turned and stopped, as firmly as the bike stopped in grinding rush-hour traffic, in front of the temple at Mahalakshmi. His mother he saw in her gentle plumpness, her slow walk, her pleasure in afternoon talk and tea. He remembered his father’s vigour, the energy the old man took such pride in at fifty, bounding up the stairs, roaring with unexpected laughter at his son’s infrequent jokes. But had they lain against each other late at night, satiated but unable to sleep? Touching with a holding hand? These were only words, and Sartaj was unable to see it. It was impossible to imagine. There was no photograph that he could construct, rising the colours out of his childhood, marking here and there with lines until the shapes became bodies.

Katekar was waiting at the end of the lane when he reached the Narayan Housing Colony, smoking a
bidi
near a
paan
-seller’s kiosk. Sartaj was wearing his dingiest civvies, but Katekar looked sceptical as Sartaj strolled up, relaxed and studiedly casual. Katekar was carefully nondescript in shiny rayon pants, and there was nothing in Sartaj’s wardrobe that could equal the bland horror of his shirt. Sartaj accepted the criticism, because since training he had known he was not very good at shadowing, and his turban was only part of the problem. It was his walk and the cast of his shoulders—he had found it difficult always not to swagger, to fade away into the crowd.

“The mother’s gone,” Katekar said, looking away and pulling on the
bidi.
They were two friends passing the time on a weekday evening. “He drove her to Bombay Central this evening. She caught the Saurashtra Express to Okha. That’s in Gujarat.”

“I know. They’ve started running,” Sartaj said. “That’s very good. Then?”

“He didn’t wait for the train to leave,” Katekar said, his face stiff with disapproval. “Just put her in the compartment and came back here and went up. Just got back. He’s up there.”

“Right,” Sartaj said. “Go back to the station house. Rest. Well done.”

Katekar nodded. “With care,
sahib.
Something strange is going on here.”

“I know,” Sartaj said. He watched as Katekar pedalled away on an old Hero bicycle. In many ways, care had come hard to Sartaj, because in his pride he had believed that he would win the things he wanted by just asking. But now, older, he had found patience. He found a table behind a window at a restaurant called East Haven near the intersection and ordered dinner. He regretted the
ragda-patis
after the first bite. It had that searing hotness of all the cheap restaurant food that he and Megha had once lived on. It was incredible to him that they had actually enjoyed it, in Formica-paneled dives like this one. Now the place filled up quickly with T-shirted teenagers, and Sartaj listened intently to them, and pushed a piece of bread around his plate. The road outside was crowded with cars and scooters and through it all he could see the gate through which Kshitij must come, but an hour passed, and then two, and there was no sign of him. The groups of friends changed at the tables around Sartaj, and outside on the tiny patio, and it was a slightly older crowd now, less raucous, with none of the rapturous pubescent laughter of the early evening, but still there was no sight of Kshitij, or any mention of him in the lengthy gossip that wound and unwound in the smoky air. They all knew each other, as everyone had in Sartaj’s colony, and he remembered sitting like this, shoulder to shoulder in an endless round of silly
phattas
and cups of tea. And the girls who came in and sat at their own tables but not too far away. Sartaj wondered if Kshitij would stay up there all night, behind the brassbound door, without even the Apsara for company, and then gave up the thought instantly: no one could stand that hideous loneliness of that apartment’s four bare walls. He would come, sooner or later.

At eleven East Haven was nearly empty, and the waiters had stopped asking Sartaj if he wanted anything. The traffic was no longer the mad snarl of the evening, and yet Sartaj missed the car completely. It had passed and was already long out of sight behind a bus when Sartaj saw in his memory the red Contessa with the shadowed figure behind the wheel. He ran out to his motorcycle, leaving a hundred on the table, and cursed the machine as it coughed and hung. By the time he came out at the mouth of the bazaar the Contessa was far ahead, a pair of red dots far ahead in the dark, and now his anger at himself for expecting a walking man made himself come up on it fast, too fast. Before the next intersection he found the right distance, two cars behind and to the left, and whenever there was a lit-up stretch of road he switched off his headlight, so that there would be no regular illumination in the Contessa’s rearview mirrors to attract attention and suspicion.

But there was no sign that the driver ahead knew of the shadow: the car went steadily, not too fast or too slow, through the Andheri subway and north on the highway on the other side, past the Sahar turnoff, past the right turn for Film City, and still further north, and Sartaj exulted in a growing certainty: this was too far away and too late to be innocent. And in the next moment he remembered the joy of pointless and endless rides, not so long ago, and he rebuked himself for having become, completely and deep in the bone, what he had thought he would never become, a policeman like his father, and his father before him.

The car stopped in front of a new apartment building, in a development so new that there was still the rolling shape of a wooded hillside behind it. Sartaj switched off his engine and coasted gently to a halt, crunching across gravel as a figure got out of the Contessa and walked in through the double gates. There was a cool breath of air from the hill as Sartaj pushed down the kickstand and edged closer to the car, keeping his back against the low wall that ran around the building. There was that sound of night that was always lost in the city, insects and calling birds, and the size of the sky. Two men came out now, through the doors, each carrying something heavy, dark bundles that they loaded into the dickie and then the back seat. They went back and forth, carrying the square boxes to the car, and now Sartaj could see the glint of Kshitij’s glasses. When the car was full, they got in, and now the sound of the engine was very loud, and the glaring circle of the headlights moved towards Sartaj. He took a deep breath and stepped out into the road, holding up his hand.

He leaned them against the hood of the car and patted under their arms and over their backs. He let them see the pistol under his bush shirt, and Kshitij frowned.

“What do you want?” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Shut up,” Sartaj said. He walked around the car, and the back seat was full of the bulky packages. Sartaj’s heart was thudding. The dickie opened smoothly, and Sartaj felt around in the box on top. There was only paper, pamphlets of some kind. He held the box by the edge and pulled it out, tipped it over onto the road, and the small stapled notebooks spread across the asphalt. There was nothing else in the box.

“Why are you doing it?” the other boy said. He was larger than Kshitij, more confident in his body. “That is only our literature.”

“Whose literature?”

“Us,” the boy said, gesturing at himself and Kshitij, and then at the building. “Us, the
Rakshaks
.”

“You’re a
Rakshak?
”
Sartaj said to Kshitij.

“Yes,” Kshitij said, standing up straight. “I am.”

All of Kshitij’s resentment made sense now, his dense anger just under the innocuous surface, all of it barely concealed. Except, of course, to a man vain enough not to believe that he could be despised for what he was, for his beard, for his turban. But Kshitij no longer was hiding his contempt, his keen scalpel-edged hostility His face was eager with it.

“You have no right to do this,” his friend said. “We are a cultural organization.”

“This?” Sartaj said, bending down to pick up one of the pamphlets. “This is your culture?” There was a line drawing of a goddess on the cover, superimposed over a map of India, and the words “The Defender” underneath. He had seen the magazine before: it was a call to arms, a hearkening back to a perfect past of virtue and strength, and an explanation for every downfall. “You defend nothing. You are attackers.”

“We attack only those who attack us. And those who attack our culture.”

“What is your name?”

“Pramod Wagle,” the boy said, puffing out his chest.

“Pramod Wagle. I want to see what’s inside,” Sartaj said. He pushed them towards the building, and as they came up to it two men came out of a door and watched silently. On the ground floor, next to the unfinished lobby, there was a double door with the same goddess painted in full colour over the door, and she wore a sari of radiant white. Now there were three other men in the corridor, watching. Inside, the apartment was divided into an office, which contained a large cyclostyle machine, and a dank gymnasium, with mirrors on the wall, and a rack of
lathis.

“Everything is legal,” Pramod Wagle said. “We are a registered organization.”

Sartaj was fingering the long length of a
lathi
,
following the dark sheen of the wood. “Yes,” Sartaj said. He had seen, four months before, a man killed with a
lathi
in a fight, his head had been split open, but Wagle was correct, it was legal. So was everything else. “Come on,” Sartaj said to Kshitij, and turned to the door, but in the corridor outside it was they who watched him, a solid phalanx of dark faces, completely silent. They stepped aside to let him pass, but exactly that one moment too late that let him know that they could do anything they wanted, despite his pistol and any other thing.

“Drive to the police station,” Sartaj said. “I will follow you on the motorcycle.”

“Why?” Kshitij said.

“There are certain questions we must ask you.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Sartaj said. Just behind Kshitij his friends made a crowd, pushing against each other’s shoulders.

“Did your father own a Polaroid camera?” Sartaj said. In the boy’s silence, his absolute stillness, there was absolute fear. Sartaj leaned over to him and spoke in his ear. He could smell, faintly, hair oil. “I have the photographs, Kshitij. I could pull them out now in front of everyone and show them to you.”

“All right,” Kshitij said finally. His voice was loud. He turned to Pramod Wagle. “It’s all right. Just some questions.”

*

But at the station he refused to answer questions. Somehow, during the drive to the station, with Sartaj’s single light blinking and bobbing in his rearview mirror, he had decided that there were no questions he could answer. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, clenching his jaw. “Why are you asking me anything? You have the man in jail already. I want to see a lawyer.”

“Come on, Kshitij,” Sartaj said, leaning back in his chair. “Come on.” He had Kshitij sitting in his office, across the desk from him. Behind Kshitij, Katekar sat in a chair against the wall, slumped but alert. “We know everything. We don’t need you to say anything really. We know every last thing. We know what your mother and father did. Here, look at this advertisement. Strange, isn’t it? Good, ordinary people. Doing this kind of thing. Unbelievable, if we didn’t have it in black and white. Then, we have the woman who runs the house where they rented a room. A cheap whorehouse, really, it is. This woman, the manager, tells us all kinds of things. And also we have, finally, the photographs. Colour Polaroid photographs. Like life itself. Can you imagine? Disgusting photographs. Disgusting things they are doing with god-knows-who-all. To do things like that and then take photographs…. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if someone had told me. Only when one sees with one’s own eyes can one believe. Is that what you were burning in the rubbish heap?”

Kshitij was staring at the brass plate on Sartaj’s desk, which announced his name in blocky ornamental letters. He seemed to be reading it back and forth. Behind him, a slow and very faint smile spread across Katekar’s face.

“So what happened, Kshitij?” Sartaj said. “Did you find the photographs? Did you see them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kshitij said.

“Did you see your mother in these photographs?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“With other men, Kshitij?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Doing things, Kshitij?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“A mother is pure, Kshitij. After all she is a mother. But your mother, Kshitij. What is she? In a whorehouse? And your father? To take pictures? What did you see, Kshitij? We’ll find out, you know, Kshitij. We’re investigating, we have our people asking questions in Okha. We know she’s gone to her brother’s house near Dwarka. Samnagar, the place is called, isn’t it? We’ll bring her back. In handcuffs to jail. The world will know then. All your friends. Everyone will know everything about her. So you might as well tell us now. Maybe we can keep it all quiet. What happened? Did you see these photographs and get angry?”