Chain of Custody (22 page)

They waited quietly in Gowda's car. Twenty minutes later, Basavappa and two constables arrived in a jeep and parked a hundred feet away from Gowda's car.

There was a low wattage light in the top floor; otherwise, the building was wreathed in darkness. Gowda and Basavappa,
followed by Ratna, climbed the stairs as quietly as they could. Byrappa and Gajendra covered the back of the building. Santosh stood at the foot of the staircase with the constables, who looked bored and grumpy. The T20 series between India and Australia was on and Virat Kohli had just come in to bat.

‘What do you think B-report Gowda is chasing now?' one of them grumbled.

Santosh glared at them. ‘Hush,' he whispered furiously.

They crept along the narrow verandah towards the doorway that Gowda remembered from his exploration. In the light of a naked bulb, Gowda saw through the door a young girl dressed in clothes too grown-up for her, a little boy and a middle-aged man. The man stood up and walked towards them. ‘Did the thekedar send you?' he asked Gowda in Hindi.

Then he saw the man in uniform. Gowda saw the panic on his face replaced by a sullen expression as he demanded, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?'

‘Who are these children?' Gowda asked softly.

‘Children?' The man laughed. ‘That's my woman. My new wife. And he is my son from my first wife who died last year.'

‘She can't be more than fourteen,' Ratna said, bristling. ‘It's a crime to marry a minor girl.'

‘Who said she is a minor? She is nineteen.' The man stood his ground.

‘Do you have proof?' Basavappa growled.

‘What proof do you want? We are here in Bangalore to visit relatives. We are from Bombay,' the man said.

‘If you are here to visit relatives, why are you in this unfinished building?' Gowda asked, his gaze lingering on the children. The boy's face was a mess. The girl had a healing bruise on one cheek. The children looked like they would never smile again.

As the man began a convoluted explanation, the girl stood up and came towards him. ‘I is Tina,' she said in English. ‘I is twelve years old. I is not his missus. Abdul not his son.'

There was a moment of silence. Then the man tried to race past them towards the balcony.

Gowda stuck his leg out and tripped him. Then he sank his fist into the man's face. As the man crumpled to the ground, Gowda saw joy flare in the children's eyes even if their faces stayed resolutely grim.

‘How did you know?' Gajendra asked as they drove back after dropping PC Byrappa home.

The man had been taken to the station lock-up by SI Basavappa, and the children to a shelter by Ratna. Santosh had gone with her.

‘The boy … Muthu … I had asked him to call me if there was any activity in the first floor of the building.'

‘And he actually did? What did you give him?' Gajendra couldn't hold back the surprise in his voice.

‘A can of Pepsi,' Gowda said.

‘Are you serious?'

‘I have never been more serious. He is eleven years old. The usual story – stepfather beat him every day till he fled. He should be in school; instead, he is working for a pittance in the tyre shop.' Gowda spoke as if he were speaking to himself. ‘He's a smart boy … and it's sad that he'll get nowhere. Unless …'

‘What are you thinking, sir?' Gajendra was worried. What new scheme did Gowda have germinating in his head now?

‘Nothing as of now …' Gowda drew up outside Gajendra's home.

‘Good night,' Gowda said. ‘Actually, good morning. It's 1.00 a.m.'

13 M
ARCH
, F
RIDAY

I
glanced at my phone. It was 3.00 a.m. I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what to do.

The previous evening, the thekedar had wanted me to pick up three items from K.R. Puram station. I had thought nothing of it and did as he asked.

Then the thekedar said I should come to the godown. He was already there when I reached.

‘There is something that has come up,' he told the men. ‘A party,' he elaborated.

‘At the farmhouse?' I asked.

‘Where else?' the thekedar said. ‘I need it to go right from start to finish.'

I nodded. I had helped out at a few parties before. Kebabs and booze, music, the lights on trees, cocaine for those who wanted it and viagra for those who couldn't get it up, porn on pen drives, all leading to the bedroom with the waterbed, mirrors and screaming girls. That seemed to excite the men until the girls turned into pliable orifices.

‘What about the girls?' I asked, my mouth going dry. I knew what was coming.

‘There's the one you picked up this evening. And we have one girl here. Together they'll make my client very happy.' The thekedar's face and voice betrayed no emotion.

I gazed at the floor. ‘Thekedar.' I tried to choose words that wouldn't form. ‘Isn't there anyone else?'

He sighed. ‘No … I can't wait. The client said he didn't want Nepali or Bangladeshi girls. He wanted a Kannadiga girl, he said. He insisted.'

I felt the lump in my chest grow. He patted me on my back. ‘Krishna, these things happen.'

He looked at Daulat Ali. I saw the beefy guard give him an imperceptible nod.

We drove back in silence. Just when it was time for me to get off, I asked, ‘Won't you reconsider?'

‘I cannot,' he said softly, almost apologetically. ‘There is much at stake. Besides, once I make an exception for you, the rest of them will expect the same.' His fingers tapped the steering wheel impatiently.

‘But I am not everyone. I am Krishna.'

He stared at me. ‘I made you Krishna.' The chill in the car made me shiver. ‘Without me, there would be no Krishna.'

I stood watching the car turn the corner.

Then I waved down an auto. ‘Sampigehalli,' I told the driver.

Daulat Ali wouldn't let me in. ‘The thekedar said no one is to be allowed to see her,' he said.

‘The thekedar didn't mean me,' I said, grinning.

‘He said especially you.'

Daulat Ali, I noticed, wasn't calling me chhote nawab as he usually did.

‘Oh, keep that little lollipop for yourself. What about Moina? I can fuck her, right?' I said, sighing. ‘I am going to explode if I don't.' I made a gesture of shoving my thumb into the fist of my other hand.

But he didn't grin. Instead, he said, ‘She is busy.'

‘Rubbish,' I said, trying to go past him. But he wouldn't let me.

‘Go away,' he said. ‘Don't make this worse for yourself.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I asked you to teach that girl a lesson, and instead you bought her chocolates. Do you think my name is Stupid?' he asked.

‘No, I know your name is Daulat Ali,' I tried to joke.

‘Go,' he said.

I tried to shove him. He shoved me back. I slapped him then. He slapped me back. Two others I had never seen before came to his aid.

‘Get out,' Daulat Ali said. I left.

I lay on the bed, hearing the thekadar's words in my head: I made you Krishna. These things happen.

I had thought I was special. The chosen one. I had thought that the thekedar would make allowances for me. But I realized I was nothing more to him than one more element in the grand scheme of things.

When I fled the kiln as a young boy, I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I didn't want to go home. My father would only send me back. So I hid in a truck. I didn't know where it was headed. I didn't particularly care. When the truck stopped, I saw it was a rest point. There were shacks on the roadside and loud music, and I knew that way lay the prospect of work and food.

I worked in a dhaba. I cleaned. I fetched water. I cleaned the toilet that wouldn't be clean no matter what one did to clean it. I washed dishes. I chopped vegetables. I kneaded dough. I plucked the chickens someone else killed. In a few weeks, I killed my first chicken. I didn't feel anything. It was just a job to be done.

I wasn't paid anything but once in a while the truck drivers would leave a few coins for me. Once, one of them left a lighter behind, which I pocketed. It was a metal lighter.

I don't remember how long I was there. But the day I had a hundred rupees, I took my lighter and cadged a ride with another truck driver. That was how I arrived in Bangalore. For a while I lived with a bunch of boys and girls on the streets. We begged, stole, foraged through garbage and we survived. Then, one day, I was hit by a car while darting across the road with a wallet I had picked from somebody's pocket.

A woman took me to a hospital. When she discovered I was a street child, she took me home. I was given a bath, new clothes, food to eat and a name – Rakesh. She was apparently a great admirer of some man called Rakesh Sharma who had gone to space. She told everyone that the sky was my limit.

When the photographs had been taken and the news item had appeared in all the newspapers about the child who had set her on the path to child welfare, I was sent to a home. I went to school by day and sucked the warden's cock at night. I didn't feel anything. Anger, disgust or sorrow. It was something that needed to be done to get the biggest piece of meat, the extra sweet and two hardboiled eggs every day. Fair is fair, I thought.

But one night, he wanted to try something new. I slashed the kitchen knife across his belly and fled. I jumped the wall and saw a car parked on the road. I thought the doors would be locked but for some reason, when I tried the rear door, it opened. I slipped in and lay down in the space on the floor between the front and back seat. A little later, a man came and started the car. He put on some music. I felt him slowing down; I heard him slam his fist on the steering wheel. Bloody thullas, I heard him mutter.

I felt a grin grow on my face. If the sight of policemen bothered him so much, he had something of value in his car. Something that wasn't entirely legal. When the car stopped, I was seated on the back seat. A policeman peered in. He looked at the man and me and called out, ‘Not the one we
are looking for. This is a father and son.' He waved at us to keep going, ‘Hogo, hogo …'

When the man moved away from the police blockade, he stopped the car and looked at me. ‘Who are you?' he asked.

I smiled. ‘I can be anything you want.'

He gave me a strange look. ‘Who taught you to say that?'

I shrugged. And so I became Krishna and he my thekedar. He was a patient teacher and I was eager to please; and I wanted him to be proud of me. Soon, everywhere he went, I went too. Anything he wanted done, I did it, or made sure it got done.

My rage grew. I didn't know what I was angry about. That the thekedar thought I could be dispensed with? Or that he was going to take away my Nandita even though he knew how I felt about her? Or that he had let even that scum Daulat Ali know that I could be treated with such disrespect?

I touched my jaw. It hurt where his fist had landed. I probed my mouth with my tongue. I could still taste the blood.

I stopped at a bar and picked up a half of Original Choice whisky. I needed something to numb my anger and my pain. All these years I had done everything he asked me to, without question or complaint. Clearly, none of it had mattered to him.

And he had the gall to quote the Gita to me.

Suddenly I felt light-headed. There is a way. There is always a way. Well, here's one for you, thekedar: The heat of the sun comes from me, and I send and withhold the rains. I am life immortal and death; I am what I is and what I is not.

Two lakh rupees, he had said. I had twenty-five thousand. I could raise another twenty-five. I needed a lakh and fifty. And I knew how to get it.

Jogan and Barun looked at me wide-eyed. They reminded me of bedraggled kittens. If I were to shine a torch into their faces, they would stare at me with the same helpless fear I would see in the kittens' eyes. ‘Dada,' they said. ‘What is this place?'

The bus ride from Hennur to Hosur took us more than two hours. The boys had been quite relieved to leave the lawyer's home.

When I took them there, they thought they had stumbled into heaven. The lawyer's house was beautiful and enormous. There were no children or pets to mess it up and everything stayed in its place. The floors were a pale marble and the walls an endless white. And when they lifted the dusty sheets and peered beneath, they could see dark wood furniture upholstered in real silk. The coffee table in the sunken living room was as big as a bed and there was a giant glass on it that could quench the thirst of a whole family for a day. In it were tall flowers that looked like crab claws. And this was just the front room. There was a dining room, a room with three walls of books, a giant kitchen that was as big as the shelter that they had been relocated to during the last cyclone in Satpada. And on the floor above were four bedrooms, each one with a big bed and a TV and its own bathroom. How rich the lawyer must be, they whispered to each other, we will live like princes here.

They were then shown the room allotted to them in the back of the house with its grey-washed walls, cement floor and two camp cots on which were a mattress and a thin pillow rolled up. And they thought, even if we don't live like princes, we will have three full meals every day and just as much work as we are capable of. They had it all chalked out in their heads. They wouldn't have to pay any rent and the food would be free. They would save
every rupee of their salary. Half to send home and the rest to keep till they had enough to open a small shop in Satpada. They told me all this when I went to visit them the day after I took them there as per the thekedar's instructions.

‘Don't forget my commission,' I had said pleasantly enough.

‘No, dada, every month, one-fourth of our salary is yours,' Jogan had said.

He hadn't known that the salary would be paid directly to me and that I would decide if it was to be one-fourth, one-third or half.

I was busy for the next three days. One of my contacts had been pestering me to source some boys for him. There was a man in MLA Pappana's employ, who had tentacles in Gulbarga. He would be able to provide me with a group, he had said. On my way back from meeting him, I had called in on the lawyer's house to check on my boys. I waited for the lawyer to leave before knocking on his door. The boys greeted me with sullen faces.

The lawyer had returned from Delhi and the easy time the boys had the first day had changed into a nightmare of excessive demands and miserly portions of tasteless food.

‘He keeps saying, don't do this, don't do that, don't touch this, don't sit there …' Jogan said.

‘And gives us very little food, dada,' Barun added. ‘We may as well have stayed home if we have to starve here.'

They thought me responsible for their plight. I wanted to tell them that no one was responsible for the life we led and the situations we got ourselves into. Just ourselves.

You can rest your head on another person's arm for a while, after which they will shrug you off. The only arm you can rest
your head on for as long as you live is your own. Who told me that? I don't remember.

My contact had asked for eight boys and I had been able to source only six.

‘I have found you something else. But it will be hard work,' I said.

‘Anything would be better than this!' Jogan muttered. The previous evening, the lawyer had given him an old sock, a mug of water and asked him to clean the leaves of the plants within the house. ‘Change the water in the mug after you finish a plant,' the lawyer had said, twirling his eyebrow. ‘And don't snap a leaf or tear one!'

Jogan had wondered if the lawyer was mad. Barun had been given a toothbrush and asked to work on the grouting of the tiles in the kitchen. It was spotless but the lawyer seemed to see lines of dirt and specks of dust everywhere.

‘What time does he leave in the morning?' I asked.

‘By seven-thirty,' Jogan said.

‘He starts eating his nashta at seven,' Barun had butted in. ‘A whole papaya that has to be chopped into cubes. A hardboiled egg and a big bowl of some grain he pours milk over. And we get to eat the previous night's rotis and a glass of black tea. No milk! No sugar! Black tea!'

Jogan cuffed him. ‘Is that all you can think of? Food?'

‘Get ready. Let's go.'

The boys put on the new t-shirts the lawyer had given them. I could barely hide my disgust. Ungrateful wretches, I thought. They deserved everything they got. I had told the thekedar that the boys were unhappy at the lawyer's.