Love and Longing in Bombay (9 page)

*

Sheila heard a footstep and lifted a hand to her face. It was wet with tears. She wiped it with her sleeve and when she looked up she saw that the sea, far below, was gold. She stood up and felt the light hot on her face. Sanjeev came up beside her and subsided lankily into the chair. She smiled down at him. He had a book in his hand and looked very handsome in a kind of tragic way.

“You were out late last night,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You went on to one of your parties?” His mouth was pouty with disdain.

Sheila laughed. As she looked down she could see on his T-shirt a blond, scruffy-looking man and the single word “Nirvana.” She said, “Sanju, you’re my son, but it would take a lifetime, two lifetimes, to tell you all the things you don’t know about the world.” As she walked away, she ruffled his hair.

In her bedroom, she laughed to see the mountainous bulk of her husband under the bedclothes. She pulled at his toe. “Come on. We have work to do.” He followed her down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, to the office. He sat in front of her as she leaned back in her chair and picked up the phone.

“What are we doing?” he said.

She put her feet in his lap. He rubbed them, smiling, because in her flowered nightgown and with her hair pulled back she looked like a child, and she looked at him sideways from lowered eyes, naughty and a little dangerous. Her fingers moved so quickly over the keys of the telephone that the beepings came out as a kind of music. She grinned. “Ah,” she said. “I thought we might make a few calls to Hong Kong.”

*

What we remembered from the wedding was not the scale of it and not the celebration, not even how beautiful the couple was or the speculations about their honeymoon in France. It wasn’t even the sight of Sheila and Dolly walking hand in hand into the reception. It wasn’t the sight of Tiger Pataudi and a very boozy Freddie re-creating their second innings so that T.T. and Mani Mennon could judge whether there had indeed been a flannelled Pataudi leg before the wicket. It wasn’t at all the news that Ganga had bought a large shed in Dharavi, where she was going to put in a cloth-reclamation factory. After it was all over, what stayed in the mind was a strange moment, before the double ceremony (one for each religion), when the two families had moved into the centre of the huge
shamiana
. On one side we could see Sheila’s aunts, large women in pink and red saris with bands of diamonds around their wrists and necks, and, on the other, Dolly’s relatives, in particular one frail, tall old lady in a white sari and a pair of pince-nez glasses, with pearls at her neck, and all these people looking at each other. Then all the talking died away, there was a curious moment of silence, it was absolute and total, even the birds stopped chirping in the trees. Then two of the children ran through the
shamiana
, it was Roxanne’s second cousin who was chasing Sheila’s niece, both squealing, and the moment was broken and everyone was talking. Yet there had been that strange silence, maybe it was just that nobody knew what to do with each other. But I think of that moment of silence whenever I realize how much changed because of that marriage. What I mean is the formation of the Bijlani-Boatwalla Bombay International Trading Group, then the Agarwal loan scandal, the successes of the B.B.B.I., the fall of the Yashwant Rao Ghatge government, and the meteoric rise of Gagganbhai Patel, and what happened after that we all know. But that’s another story. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another evening.

T
HAT SUMMER
I was heartbroken. I was weary of myself, of the endless details like prickly heat, and the smell of hopelessness in my armpits. It was after all very boring, nothing but something that someone else and I had thought would go on forever, and it had come apart savagely and with finality. It seemed so ordinary, so average in its particulars that I found it sordid to think about, and yet I could do nothing but think about it. I knew I was supposed to drink it away, but liquor just made me even more tired and sleep eluded me anyway. I went slouching sullenly about the city and waited for the monsoon to break, without faith, without belief in its powers, waiting only for something to change.

One evening they were talking of a murder. I say “they” because lately I had been slumped over in my chair for weeks, silent but always nervous, shifting from one side to another incessantly. Subramaniam had been watching me all this time. Now I was very interested in the details of the murder. I wanted to know how they had been killed. It was a husband and wife and they had been found bloodied in their apartment in Colaba. The papers were full of it. The fact that there were no signs of a struggle gave me a particular satisfaction. I nodded rapidly. The others watched me, uneasy.

“No great mystery there,” I said. “It must have been love. Sex, you know.”

“Or gold,” Desai said. “Property. It says that the police are questioning the servants.”

“Something like that,” I said. “Simple and stupid.”

“Or the most complicated thing of all,” Subramaniam said suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know?”

He was smiling gently. I collapsed suddenly. I must have been insufferable, and they had been very patient and very kind.

“No, sir,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

He laughed, his shoulders shaking. Then his face became serious, and he looked at me for a long time. He nodded with that peculiar motion of his, from side to side.

“All right,” he said. “Listen.”

*

The body was almost submerged in the ditch, but what Sartaj noticed about it as he squatted beside it was its expression of pride. One arm was curved out of the water and rigid. The passerby who had found the body was a driver on his way to the milkstand for his
memsaab
’s bottles, and he had seen through the rain a hand, reaching up out of the rushing stream as if for something. It had been raining for three days and three nights and through the morning now, and the water was actually roaring as it pushed below a culvert. The dead man was jammed in between the curving brick wall and the broken metal grill. The driver had stood next to the ditch and shouted until people in the nearby buildings had come out, and then he had stood guard until the police came. He seemed to think that somehow it was his responsibility since he had found it, but now he was trying not to look down at it. The skin on the palm of the hand that emerged from the water was a strange bluish grey.

Sartaj Singh, who was an inspector in Zone 13 and used to bodies, was squatting carefully next to the ditch, looking at the ground, but there was running water everywhere and it was likely that the body had drifted. He walked the few yards to the next culvert, feeling his boots sink into the mud. A gust of wind blew water into his face. The flashbulbs were freezing the drops in the air in their sudden glare. It was the first heavy rain of the monsoon, and he knew that the next few weeks would be miserable with mud, with clumsy raincoats and flooded streets, clothes that always seemed wet, and the impossibility of keeping a crease in one’s pants. Anyway there was nothing to be found. The photographers had finished.

“All right,” Sartaj said. “Get him out.”

They put a crowbar against the grill and pulled at the dead man’s arm, his shoulders. Finally one of the constables, whose name was Katekar, shrugged, took off his boots, and got into the water. It beat against his waist and chest as he strained and finally the body came free. The driver gasped as they dragged the body out and over because under the chest, on the right side of the belly, the flesh had been eaten away. The rats had been at him before the water took him and covered him over. But the face was unconcerned and smug.

“Turn around,” Sartaj said to the driver. “What’s your name?”

“Raju.”

“Raju, take a look at him quickly. Do you know him?” Finally Sartaj had to take Raju by the elbow and steady him. “Look,” Sartaj said. Raju was in his early twenties and Sartaj knew that he had never imagined his own death. Now in the early morning he was looking at a corpse. He shook his head so violently that Sartaj felt the jerks in his arm. “All right. Go over there and sit down. We’ll need your statement.”

“Robbed, sir,” Katekar said as he pulled on his boots. He pointed with his chin at the white band of skin around the dead man’s wrist, which showed up clearly even after his colour had drained away into the water. “Must have been a good watch.”

“It was a big one anyway,” Sartaj said. “Big enough to get him killed.”

*

He had been dead at least eight and not more than twelve hours when he was found. The cause of death was a single stab wound, under the sternum, only an inch and a quarter long but deep. The blade had pierced his heart.

“What was taken?” Parulkar said. Parulkar was Sartaj’s boss. He had been promoted up to deputy commissioner from the Maharashtra police service, and still lived in Ghatkopar in what he called his ancestral abode.

“Wallet,” Sartaj said. “And a watch.”

“Ah, I see,” Parulkar said. “Bombay was never like this.”

Sartaj shrugged. “It’s a new world. He was fifty or thereabouts, no distinguishing marks.”

He looked up and Parulkar was smiling. Sartaj had been cleaning his boots with a moist rag, scrubbing away the mud caked around the tread and the ankles.

“It’ll get on again as soon as you go out,” Parulkar said.

Sartaj nodded. “Yes, sir. But the point is to keep trying?”

“Of course, of course,” Parulkar said, standing up and hitching his pants over his considerable belly. His uniform was always bunched up somehow, looking as if it had been made for someone else. “Young fellows must be tip-top. Carry on, carry on.” But he was still smiling as he walked out of the room.

Sartaj stood up and walked across the room to a map of the state. In the glass, over the dark borders and the blue roads, he could see himself, and he checked his shoulders, the tuck of his shirt, the crispness of his crease. Now when the moisture hung in the air it was difficult to come close to the perfection he wanted to see in the glass, but he patted his turban and ran a finger over his sagging collar. He did not mind Parulkar’s smile at all, because he was a dandy who came from a long line of dandies. His father had retired as a senior inspector in Zone 2, and every street urchin had recognized the swagger stick with the shining steel tips and the gleaming black boots. Sartaj’s grandfather’s upturned moustaches had been acknowledged as the most magnificent in all of Punjab, and he had died in service as a
daroga
, in a gun battle with Afghan smugglers near Peshawar. The legend went that when he was hit he was eating a
dusseri
mango. He sat down, not far from a
babul
bush, finished the mango, crossed his legs, held out his hand for a napkin that his seniormost
havaldar
was holding for him, wiped his fingers, dabbed at his mouth, twirled his moustaches, and died.

Sartaj had never been able to eat a mango without thinking of the old man, who he had met only through the garlanded portrait that hung in his mother’s house. Next to that picture was a portrait of Guru Nanak, another one of Guru Gobind Singh, and then one of Sartaj’s father, who had made it to retirement and had passed one night in his sleep, resting on his back with his hands folded neatly on his chest. Sartaj was eating a mango now, holding a slice with his fingertips as he leafed through the reports from the Missing Persons Bureau with his other hand, stacking the probables to the left, face down, and the rejects to the right. He was looking mainly for the age, but also for the kind of man who would have wanted what the dead man wanted. He had it down to fifteen when the phone buzzed angrily. In the quietness after the rain it was very loud.

“Are you still in the office, you sad man?” a boy’s voice said.

“Yes, I am,” Sartaj said.

“Doing what?”

“Eating the last
alphonso
mango of the season.”

“You should go home.”

“You’re still up. You must be very happy or very sad.” It was Rahul, his wife’s younger brother, who was now in his second year at Xavier’s and therefore always falling in love with someone or out of it.

“Happy, actually,” Rahul said quietly. “I bought a new shirt at Benneton today.” They had a mutual interest in clothes, although they mystified each other with their choices. They talked for a while about this shirt, and then suddenly Rahul said, “When’s the exam tomorrow?” Sartaj flipped over another report as Rahul talked nonsense about college. What that meant was that someone had come into the room, and Rahul was pretending that he was talking to a college friend. Finally Rahul said, “See you at college tomorrow. Go to sleep soon. Night,” and hung up.

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. “Hello, Sartaj,” his mother said. “I just called home and of course you weren’t there.” She lived alone in Poona, with a rose garden and one aging Alsatian. When Sartaj’s father had been alive, they called every Sunday, but now she allowed herself a daily call.

“
Peri
pauna
, Ma,” Sartaj said.

“
Jite
raho,
beta
,” she said. “Did you find a cook?”

“No, not yet, I’ve been busy.” Which, of course, was no excuse. Sartaj held the phone loosely against his ear, and turned pages, and his mother spoke at length about bad diets and nutrition. He could see clearly the sofa she was sitting on, the little table next to it, her small feet which he had just touched in devotion, her hands with which she had blessed him, and the sari wrapped around her plump shoulders, and the garlanded pictures on the wall.

“It’s too late, Sartaj,” she said finally. “Go home and rest.”

“Yes, Ma,” Sartaj said. But he stayed for another two hours before he walked home. Even then he walked slowly, stopping sometimes to watch the water as it roiled around the gutters and made whirlpools. He leaned against a wall and scanned the layered many-coloured mess of movie posters and political slogans, dominated by the latest broadside bearing the crossed spears of a right political party. He read all this with the concentration of an archeologist smoothing away layers of ancient dust. What he was avoiding was the small bundle of foolscap paper that sat on his dining table, wrapped in a white ribbon. Rahul’s sister had sent him these papers, and he couldn’t bring himself yet to say the word for what she wanted. But he was supposed to be distinct now from her and her family, disengaged. He had been told that they considered him dead. Which was why Rahul made phone calls late at night: maybe that’s when you talk to the dead.

*

Sartaj found the next of kin, whose name was Smt. Asha Patel (“wife of missing person”), but not on the batch of missing persons reports that he had. It was in another stack that came three days later from the Missing Persons Bureau. The name of the dead man was Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel and the age was right, but what clinched it of course was the entry under distinguishing marks and features: “Wearing a gold Rolex watch, value Rs. 2,18,000/-.” Chetanbhai was then a man who liked people to know the make of watch that he was wearing and its exact and precisely calculated value. Sartaj did the missing-property paperwork (in triplicate as required), and out of habit made some phone calls to his usual official and non-official sources, although he had no hope that he would ever see this grand keeper of time, but in this he was wrong because that same afternoon there was a phone call from the station at Bandra. Two of their constables, at seven that morning, had picked up one Shanker Ghorpade, a known bad character, beggar, suspected pilferer, and drunkard. The suspect had been observed in the very early morning hours to be staggering proudly through the bazaar at Linking Road, wearing an ornamental timepiece clearly beyond his means and needs. Since he was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation they had brought him in, and had already been commended for their alertness.

The station house was hardly alert in the sudden, sultry heat of the afternoon when Sartaj held the watch up to the light. It was indeed a Rolex, large and heavy and very yellow, with a pleasing glistening feel under the thumb. Moitra, the Bandra inspector who had pulled it out of her desk, was leaning back and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands.

“Big fucker,” Moitra said. “It should tell more than the time.”

Sartaj was turning it over and then over again. “Like what?”