BLOOD RED SARI (5 page)
Authors: Ashok K Banker
‘When they had finished with me, I had seventeen major fractures, including two on the skull, a shattered hip, a smashed spine, a ruptured spleen and pancreas, a damaged kidney, a collapsed lung, three broken ribs, and I had miscarried and lost the foetus I had been carrying, of which even I was not aware at that point. I required fifty-eight stitches, fourteen hours on the operation table, three months in the ICU, over eight months in hospital, and another two years in physiotherapy before I was even fit enough to use a wheelchair independently. I am disabled for life and can never bear children or enjoy a normal life. esult of the considerable amounts already given to my husband’s family, and the medical expenses that followed, my family was thoroughly bankrupted. My father suffered a stroke and was subsequently paralysed. He died within the year after the Shahs attacked me. My mother developed a heart condition and succumbed to it three years later, and there is no doubt that the shock itself had reduced her life. I consider what the Shahs did to be nothing less than murder. Had they shot my parents dead, they could not have killed them more effectively. As for me, I have spent the subsequent eight years, not including the three years of hospitalization and therapy, attempting to bring the Shahs to justice for their acts. Today, finally, I came to this venerated court room to hear the summary judgment on my case. I await your Honourable decision with all grace and humility. Thank you, Your Honour.’
And she rolled back a metre from the bench, keeping her head down and eyes averted, praying that she hadn’t gone too far, that her little ‘performance’ had served to draw the media’s attention to her otherwise nondescript case and the judge’s attention to the presence of the media, in the hope that whatever backdoor deal the Shahs had worked with this R.K. Jain, it wouldn’t be immune to the glaring eye of the fourth estate.
SHEILA WAS DOING ABS
when the men entered the gym.
She did cardio and abs three days a week, legs twice, weight training six times weekly, one major body part and one minor. Today was chest and triceps day. She had started with a ten-minute warm up on the treadmill, just to get her heart rate up and a little sweat going. Then she had started with flat bench presses: three sets of 60, 80 and 100 kgs, fifteen reps each set, thirty seconds between sets, then a two-minute break and a couple of tiny sips of an electrolyte drink to keep her salts balanced. She tended to sweat a lot once her heart rate crossed 135–140 and hence dehydrated easily. After that, incline bench presses, same weight, same reps and time. And finally, decline bench presses.
That earned her and her spotter a five-minute break each, during which she exchanged hellos with regulars and kept an eye on the trainers, both the private ones who got paid extra for every forty-five-minute workout session as well as the floor trainers who only got a salary. She preferred to promote floor trainers to private trainers because that motivated the salary earners who were eager to work hard and prove that they deserved their own set of clients and a cut of the extra fee paid for private training. She also paid a better percentage to the private trainers – 60 per cent as against the 30 or 40 per cent most gyms reluctantly shared. She was routinely called by private trainers from other nearby gyms, eager to bring their roster of clients with them to earn the extra commish she paid. But she rarely agreed because in her view the extra commish was to reward her own deserving trainers who had worked hard to build their own list of clients, rather than an incentive to poach trainers and clients from other gyms. It kept other gym owners from getting too resentful of her quick success and at least one had visited a couple of times and expressed grudging admiration for how she ran the place.
Five-minute break over, she did flat bench dumbbell flys, three sets of 25 kgs (two dumbbells made 50 kgs), 30 kgs and 35 kgs, twelve to fifteen reps each. The same thirty-second break between sets, two-minute break to sip on Enerzal. Repeat with incline, then decline. Then another five-minute respite, during which she greeted a group of young women who had just entered for their workout: the Dakshineshwar athletes in training. These were India’s best women boxers, wrestlers and weight lifters, many of them world class, all national-level or at least state-level champions, and Sheila had offered them a month of free workouts if they won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. They had won not one but two golds, one silver and a bronze, and she had generously upped the offer to three months of free workouts. The girls came by bus all the way from Dakshineshwar just to workout here, and livened up the place. It was great publicity and inspirational for the regular members to see these international-class athletes pushing the same weights and sweating it out on the same mats every day. New memberships had quadrupled by the second week before stabilizing at about twice the normal sign-up rate. Cheers and high-fives went up all around as they greeted her one by one and made the usual jibes about the ‘old woman’ who still liked to keep in shape. She was well liked by them all, not just for the free workouts, but because of something she had done for two of the girls a year ago, just before she started the gym, back in her ‘earlier life’, as she liked to say, though she never talked about that earlier life.
By the time the Dakshineshwar athletes settled into their own routines, good-naturedly joking in Bengali as they peeled off their tee shirts and stripped down to their shorts to reveal dark brown and near-black bodies compacted and tightened to perfection through hard training and punishing discipline, Sheila was on her third session: cable crossovers. Giving in to the temptation to show off a bit, she went way over her usual top pulling of 120 kgs, and tried for 160 kgs – 80 kgs on each end. The athletes whistled and cheered her on as even the members on the bank of cardio machines at the far end stopped looking at their plasma screens and Blackberrys long enough to watch, some with sneers of naked jealousy but mostly with bemused amazement.
She ended the session drained, and slumped down on the floor, sweat staining her pullover from under both arms, right down to her waist. Her breath steamed inside her hood as she sipped the orange-flavoured drink from a Bisleri bottle and got her wind back. Fuck. Who said she was too old? At thirty-seven, she could give most women half her age a run for their money. Mits, her spotter, crouched beside her, patting her on the back proudly, happy to be sharing the limelight with her boss, and rambled on about some new scandal in Bollywood. Sheila could never understand how Hindi films had encroached even into parochial Bengal which had once had a flourishing film industry of its own and whose bhadralok had refused to speak any language except their own beloved Bangla. Yet there it was: Mits spoke reverentially of Bollywood stars and films the way her fellow bhadralok had once revered Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. Sheila sighed. The world had changed. The dampness started to feel cold in the air-conditioned gym and she began to take off the pullover, then stopped herself: the scars. Exposing them would invite too many questions. Let the past stay past.
She gave herself a break on the triceps. Over-extending her limit on the cable cross had already given them a pretty good workout. She settled for doing bench dips which worked out both her abs as well as strengthened her triceps further. She was in the middle of the fifth set of fifty with one more set to go after that when the men walked in.
She knew right away that they were trouble. For one thing, men weren’t allowed on this floor or the one above – strictly. Their entry meant that they had roughed up the receptionists to get in, because that was the only way Shailly and Meenakshi would have let them past. Then there was the way they looked. Two of them moustached, one bearded, two clean-shaven but with badly groomed oily hair. They were dressed in pant–shirts – except for the guy leading them who was in the staple white kurta–pyjama that most politicians favoured – all chewing paan at eight in the morning, and had that certain macho swagger that she knew well. It was the strut of political party workers or uniformed policemen, of off-duty military men or gangsters, men whose job entitled them to the use of force and violence, and who thought that hurting other people made them more powerful, superior in some way.
She watched as they strolled through the gym floor, looking at the women working out, ogling openly, exchanging lewd glances, wiggling eyebrows, staring openly at breasts in sports bras and bums in cycling shorts. Several of the members stopped working out to gape disapprovingly at them, and at least one snooty Park Street princess unleashed a barrage of Bengali, complaining about the invasion of her privacy. One of the men made a comment in street-crude Bengali about how he would like to
really
invade her privacy and the other men laughed.
What the fuck?
Sheila lowered her feet to the floor and rested her butt on the bench, watching them make their way towards this side of the floor. Mits glanced at her nervously and asked if she wanted her to go upstairs and fetch Ashutosh and the others. She meant the male trainers on the mixed floor, the only other men in the building apart from Jiteshkaku, the security guard who wasn’t really old but not quite in his prime either.
Sheila shrugged and said okay, then reached out and gripped Mits’s forearm. ‘But quietly jaabo, no panicking, huh.’ Mits slipped out discreetly, glancing back anxiously over her shoulder as she went.
The men were amongst the Dakshineshwar boxers now, who were neither intimidated nor upset by their presence. These were girls who had risen from the toughest backgrounds, many of them brutally abused by close family members, male relatives, or total strangers, brought up in the filthiest, poorest slums and backwaters: to them fitness and sports were survival, not a means of looking good or some macho power game. They fought to survive, to live. They had seen the likes of these assholes all their lives; they had dealt with them. They knew how to take care of them. The men seemed to realize this and their stances altered subtly. Instead of the open catcalling and eyebrow twitching, they resorted to verbal insults, questioning the feminity of the boxers, wondering aloud if there weren’t penises – the Bangla word was ‘boga’ – in the girls’ pants, challenging their womanhood. The girls drew closer, fists tightened, ranks closed, and just when violence threatened to explode, Sheila stood up and identified herself.
‘Aami Sheila Ray aachey, owner of this establishment,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for me?’
The man who seemed to be in charge, a hefty fellow with mutton moustaches and a mouthful of paan, glared one final time at the boxers, then looked at Sheila with calculating, droopy eyes. Sheila thought he might be high on something other than just the tobacco in the paan.
‘We are come to tell you shut up,’ he said in horribly accented English. It was obvious he was trying to demonstrate that he was no less familiar with the language of Bengal’s past oppressors than anyone else present.
It took Sheila a moment to absorb this. ‘Shut up?’ she asked, resisting the impulse to laugh because that would have been a disaster.
He waved his kurta-clad arms around. ‘Gym! Shut up. Bandh koro! Closing time. Finish.’
That was clear enough. ‘On whose authority?’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a chai-stained sheet of pulp paper, folded into a small irregular square. A loose cigarette fell out when he pulled out the paper and opened it. ‘Kolkata Municipal Corporation. KMC. Myself Assistant Ward Commissioner Raghuvendra Choudhry. Myself authority.’ He sneered as his companions agreed loudly.
Sheila was at a loss for words. What was that short form everyone used in text messages and on Twitter and Facebook these days?
WTF.
This was a WTF moment, if ever. She started over to the man, reaching out for the paper, even though she knew already that she had been fucked over but good … but by whom, and why?
ANITA BENT HER HEAD
to duck beneath the trajectory of the approaching gunstock, moving diagonally off to Isaac’s right in the same motion. This put her out of the approach of the heavy wooden grip aimed at her skull, along with taking her just out of easy reach. As she passed him by on his right, she reached up with both hands, gripped his arm which by then was stretched out and starting to turn to adjust to her movement, and yanked upwards, hard. She pushed her hip into his groin, overstepping his right foot with her own, and anchored his lower body to the ground, even as she shoved his upper body up and back as hard as she could. Isaac’s snarling expression changed to a look of shocked surprise as he found himself flung back and bent over. A sharp twist to his wrist and he lost the grip on the shotgun, issuing a small yelp. Then she stepped back, removing her foot and releasing his lower body while turning sideways and kicking his foot with her left boot. Bent over backwards at a thirty-degree angle, one foot kicked out front, he tottered for a moment like a slapstick character on freeze, then fell with a crunching of dried leaves to the ground. He stared up uncomprehendingly for a moment at Anita, who was now holding the shotgun that he had released. She pointed it at his chest and cocked both barrels before putting her finger on the trigger.
