Dead Water (16 page)

The tramp sits up. He’s in a bad way. He has only one arm. ‘Good morning.’

She knows who this is now. She says to him: ‘We had an appointment.’

‘What?’

She shakes her head. ‘More than a year ago now.’

‘What?’

Roopa picks Nitesh up and carries him back to the accommodation block. She can be patient. A
bhangi
learns. A kiln-worker whipped. A family vanished.
Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick
. Decline and fall. Roopa sits by her window and looks out at Vinod Yadav sprawled there, derelict, upon his string bunk. She drinks her chai. She smiles a ghastly, toothless smile.

A
bhangi
handles all kinds of shit. From thin stews to gritty lumps, shit is the
bhangi
’s proper field, her métier. The schemes, the threats, the feuds. The hot nastiness that prevails over everything and everyone. In this idiot- and stillborn-stricken village the bereaved sneer at the barren and the barren laugh at the burdened, and the nights are a-mutter with the rehearsal of nested blames and intractable vendettas. Moany old Vinod, maimed in that rail crash last year and turning day by day into his dad until at last, they say, his mind gave out completely. And what about his cousin Yash, who couldn’t keep it in his pants? Some squire, some Lord Muck he turned out to be!

Roopa is her father’s daughter: Kabir Vish, who took tales from a city’s vagrants and rough sleepers,
hijras
and prostitutes, and wove them into a net to catch the Stoneman. There’s nothing here in this sleepy backwater can frighten a woman who, as a child, listened wide-eyed to her father’s tales of the maniac who dropped paving slabs on to the heads of rough sleepers in the midnight gutters of King’s Circle.

Tonight, as the monsoon approaches and the parched sky sings with tension, Roopa puts her baby to bed and comes to the window and counts the mattresses stretched out beneath the margosa tree. A handful of drivers are asleep there, weary from the road. One is awake: Vinod Yadav. He looks up at her. Just another deadbeat. One of hundreds of small-time dealers lubricating the Sher Shah Suri Marg.

Vinod Yadav: the toothless old men of Chhaphandi are mystified by his precipitate decline. He had enough to live for, you would think. A pretty wife. Two kids, and so what if their heads are a funny shape? Shubi and Ravi aren’t the worst-afflicted kids around here, not by a long stretch. He had his father’s house. He had the brickworks to run. Vinod, you would think, was set up for life – and yet he has contrived to piss the whole lot of it away. Vinod’s drunken no-shows have matured into wholesale vanishing acts, sometimes days, sometimes weeks in duration. What’s got into him? People talk about the rail crash as though that might be a trauma sufficient to explain his decline, but there has to be more to it than that.

She leans out the window. She beckons Vinod off his hammock. She beckons him in. A
bhangi
learns all kinds of shit. Today, unseen, she discovered why the sons Vinod has abandoned – Ravi, Shubi – come home from school with bruises on their knobbly little heads and bad reports:
Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick
.

She opens her door. Vinod staggers in. He’s very drunk. His smell is so pungent she is afraid it will wake the baby. More than rum, this smell. Fires. Truck exhaust. Rancid cooking oil. Vinod holds out his remaining hand. He tries to touch her. She pushes him away. He reaches for her again. She’s been stoking him for weeks now. Glad-eyeing him from her window. Sashaying past his little bed. She’s asked for this. She backs away towards the bed. He reaches under his shirt, fanning his stink through the room, and pulls out a gun. An old Browning Hi-Power.

She sits back on the pallet.

‘Take off your clothes.’ He watches her, one hand waving the gun. ‘Vinod, for God’s sake, put it down. Look. I’m giving it to you. This is what you want. Is this what you want?’ She raises her feet onto the edge of the bed and parts her knees. ‘Is it? Vinod?’ You cannot humiliate a machine.

Vinod hesitates, then bends down and lays the Browning on the bed.

‘Go and wash yourself first. It’s all right.’

He swallows. He sits beside her on the bed. ‘It’s not loaded.’ And when she does not reply: ‘How do you know my name?’

‘Vinod? Everybody knows you, Vinod. You’re famous. You’re Yash Yadav’s cousin.’

Vinod’s in no state to unpick riddles, but Roopa is going to make it simple for him. ‘Tomorrow,’ she says, ‘I’m going to show you something.’

The next morning a green Honda rolls into view around the corner of the roadhouse and stops in the shade of a lone neem tree. The monsoon is hours away. There are no clouds, but the sky is thickening, the heat is building, everything is buzzing. The whole countryside is stretching and bubbling. Vinod shambles over and leans on the door sill, breathing the fumes of the old car.

‘You can drive.’

Roopa smiles.

‘You have a car.’

She has grown teeth. Terrible, sharp, grey teeth. ‘Get in.’ Her baby is in a basket on the back seat. It sleeps soundly, lulled by the rhythms of the engine as they curl their way onto the Sher Shah Suri Marg.

Vinod stares at the sky. There is something wrong with it. There are no clouds, but its whole fabric has haemorrhaged from blue to mauve. Sand from Arabia: that’s what this is. Vinod sits up. The horizon is shimmering, the whole landscape is bubbling and bursting: the monsoon is coming to put out this fire. Out of his side window he can see birds flocking, preparing to outrun the poison cloud.

In the corner of his eye, something yellow catches the sun. He turns his head just in time to see a car, a saffron-yellow Maruti Zen, spun half-off the road. The driver’s by the side of the road, waving at them to stop, but why would they?

It’s his brother-in-law. Vinod turns in his seat, but the sun against the dusty rear window does not allow him a view. Rishi. It was Rishi. He’s sure of it. The kid he played with as a child. His workman at the kilns. The man who helped burn –

Rishi, at the wheel of a Maruti! Who’d have thought it? But this is the point. Vinod understands now. They have none of them grown up. Their childhood games have never ended. They have simply acquired a darker, more adult coloration. Now Yash is top of the heap and Rishi is on the rise, while he is falling, falling – and this was always on the cards. Even when they were little, you could have seen this coming: the turn of fortune’s wheel.

The Yadav family’s garage is easy enough to find because of the giant peeling sign by the roadside advertising Apollo tyres. The house itself stands at the end of a dirt track lined with deodar trees and choked with elephant grass.

‘But this is Yash’s place.’

She says, ‘We’ll walk from here.’ She picks up Nitesh and leads Vinod through brushy shade and down the hill, towards the house.

Vinod knows this place, and its history. It is the garage whose mechanics’ mistakes killed his father. The place belongs to the family now. Which is to say: his cousin, Yash. ‘Here, Vinod. Hunker down.’

It’s harder to do than you would think, one-handed. Vinod slumps and sprawls. They crouch for many minutes in weeds and shadows. What if the baby wakes?

‘You see?’

Yash Yadav’s car, the Opel Corsa, is parked under the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to. Two young boys come running out of the house. Two funny little heads wobble about on long, weak necks. Two miniature motor scooters zip back and forth across the dirt yard.

‘Are they yours? Vinod? Are those your boys?’

Vinod watches his sons playing in the yard.

‘Shubi and Ravi.’

Vinod swallows.

‘Where do you suppose their mother is?’

Poor Vinod.

‘Their mother’s inside. Safia. Can you guess who she’s with?’

Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick
.

‘In there.’

‘Yes.’

With Yash Yadav.

Roopa drives them back to Chhaphandi. The monsoon is coming. The earth is baking. Things are rising. It no longer matters if Badbhagi calls by for the rent and a game of peek-a-boo with Nitesh and finds a man in her room. It doesn’t matter what rumours go round – a lone
bhangi
mother at the wheel of an old but serviceable green Honda. She does not need her cover any more. She is peeling off her skin of other people’s shit. She is becoming something else. The plainest butterfly.

In her room the air fizzes and the walls drip. Roopa peels off her torn and filthy sari. Underneath she is clean. She is sweet. ‘Vinod. There’s no need for you to be afraid.’

He sits in front of her and bows his head. She kisses the top of his head. ‘Poor man,’ she croons. ‘You loved her so.’ He reaches up. He cups her breasts. ‘The police, they’re not interested in you. They’re not interested in Samjhoria Nankar. Some
bhangi
family gets into a row, then scarpers, who’s to know? Yash Yadav, though. Yash is another matter. He matters. He counts.’

She understands the politics of this, better than the precinct shitkickers do. If she can get Vinod to implicate Yash Yadav in violent activity – violent activity involving a scheduled caste employee – it will bring the case to life again. She will bypass Firozabad and go straight to Lucknow, the state capital. Look, sirs! Slavery, alive and well in the City of Glass! With such a story, hell, she can go straight to the office of the Director General!

‘Vinod,’ she whispers, cradling his head. Vinod falls back, his arm over his face. She climbs on top of him. Her belly, baby-softened, brushes his. Again. Again. ‘Tell me. What happened to Samjhoria? What happened to the Nankars? Was Yash involved? Tell me what he did.’

Vinod sobs out his anger at his wife’s betrayal.

‘Tell me: where did they go? Samjhoria? Manjit? Little Abhik? Little Kaneer? What did Yash do to them?’

Little by little, Vinod sobs out his fear of Roopa’s grey smile.

‘Tell me.’

At last, the seam comes open, releasing not one tale but dozens. How the Yadavs acquired their garage business with menaces. Their land-grabs. Their trucks. The pick-me-up trade, and what little Vinod understands about the adulterated sandalwood scam. The brickworks. The Nankars. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he says. At last: the killings.
Killings!
‘It wasn’t my idea...’

So this is what has beaten him: the sight of Yash Yadav taking control. Yash managing the situation at the brickworks, with a clinical cruelty learned in a dozen police encounters on the streets of Mumbai, and honed by Professor Doctor Rao’s Advance Commando Combat System. One enemy. One chance. One strike. One kill. Poor Samjhoria. Whatever did Yash do to her?

Vinod says he doesn’t know. ‘It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t there. I took the boys away. Yash wanted –’ He bites his tongue. (No matter: it is loosening, she needn’t press him harder now.) ‘But I snuck the boys away.’

‘Where did you take them?’

I was going to lose them in New Delhi.’

‘What happened?’

A stupid question. She knows what happened. The second-worst rail crash in Indian history happened. Even Vinod, in his agitation, won’t give that question the dignity of a reply. He simply lifts his stump and sobs and, sobbing, weeps away a year of pent-up horror, regret, self-disgust. ‘They never found the boys.’ Splashes it out. ‘Poor boys.’ Splashes it into her. Is – or seems to be – done.

They lie beside each other, panting and sobbing; panting and grinning a terrible, shark-grey grin. The sky changes colour, turning from blue to grey to charcoal. The darker it gets, the more Roopa’s grey teeth shine. The first clouds arrive. They are made of birds. Grass withers, leaving a thin dust that gathers itself up into twisters no taller than a man. Even the dust is impatient for rain. And it comes: black as coal and wrinkled like a brain. Stand out in this, you’ll catch your death. This is the first cloud. The pollution cloud. Worms, released from their baked-earth tombs, wriggle in a mass across the roadhouse parking lot, steaming in the acid washout.

*

Roopa wakes. The baby, little Nitesh, is crying. Roopa peels herself off the pallet and shivers. The whole rooms glimmers like a cave. The walls are running wet. Absently she runs a hand beneath her breasts. She gathers Nitesh into her arms to feed.

At last, heavy-headed, she registers the change: Vinod is gone.

Her heart skips a beat. Where is he? She is so close to victory. Vinod’s the man who can bring Yash Yadav down. She has only to keep him near.

She hears the gush of a tap. A footfall. He’s in the bathroom, that’s all. He doesn’t sleep so well. His stump is hurting him.

The bathroom door opens, but the footsteps go straight by her door and down the hall. It isn’t Vinod.

So where is he? She goes to the window, her baby at her breast. The branches of the neem tree turn and toss under poison rain. The courtyard is a lake. It is empty. There are no sleepers, and no cars –

No cars
.

Her green Honda is gone.

Wednesday, 2 April 1930

On beaches up and down Austvågøy, chief island of Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, sides of cod hang drying on wooden frames. Leathery and mummified, the fillets chock against each other in the wind.

Eric Moyse slumps in an old rocking chair before the kitchen stove. A mug of coffee cools, forgotten, on the floor beside him. Nine months have passed since the Russian icebreaker
Krassin
rescued him, snowblind and raving, from the shores of Foyn. Deep in the lassitude that has overtaken him since then, he listens to the clock-clocking of dried fish and turns the pages of Lothar Eling’s red notebook. Its gnomic sketches and its even more gnomic sentences.

Between air and water
and
between waters of different density: the formation of WAVES.

If the notebook belongs to anyone now, it belongs to the old professor, Jakob Dunfjeld. He alone might be able to make sense of it.

You don’t expect a propeller to function half out of the water. And this comes to the same thing.
Cavitation
: generating empty space within a solid body.