Dead Water (9 page)

The sun rockets into the sky to meet them near Firozabad, city of burns, city of scars, and lights the cooling metal mash that was their train and still contains, in smears and scraps and soaps, their lost remains.

They’re story-eaters now. They’re djinn. They’ll pull a story from this mess. They’ll find a way to make a meaning from their lives, their deaths, their lives-in-death. They’ll find a way to make this right: their dad’s death, their mum’s death, their stunted, hopeless birthright and all the petty cruelties of their world. They’ll find the sense in this.

They settle over the wreckage and weep their glass into each undefended eye. No child, no bird, no dog is safe: all must give up what they know. Glimpses, rumours, histories: the brothers drink them in.

Names, faces, places.

Smells, sights, memories.

Banyan trees. Hindu swastikas. Bad typography.

Cooking fires in a parking lot.

A foul smell. Christmas dinners. Pink Australians. Yadav.

The twofold genie lurches.
Yadav
? Blue flame erupts across the sky as the boys scurry and slither through the wreckage, among the living and the dying, the human and the animal, hunting down this errant thought. (Mortal men, hiding as they must from too much reality, assume that this fierce blue blaze that does not burn is simply sunlight, catching against the bright metal of the Purushottam’s carriages. The birds aren’t fooled: they wheel and caw.)

The blue fire winds itself up again and slides through many colours into the invisible as it curls towards a young woman, her face as bright, iconic and ambisexual as the emblem on a stamp. Hers is a smile to stagger the heart. Hers is a heart that yearns for love. They wrap her round, their instant auntie, loving her for her smile and her heart. They lick a forked and twofold tongue into her ear, all glass, to tease out what she knows.

Mmm
. (They sip and cogitate.)
A cheeky little number, this:

Engine grease / US$38 barrel / 27 barrels Revolvers (assorted) / US$ N/A piece / 37 Ammunition (assorted) / US$ N/A / 128 x 10rds box

And an aftertaste of silencer
.

And here, with uniformed retinue, he comes: a big policeman in civilian clothes.

Yadav
.

It’s no Yadav the boys have ever met. There’s story here, for sure. The boys will stick around for this. They slide in, bed down, twine around the bright young woman’s silky guts (none too gently – the old mistake) and the little tea she’s drunk today drools off her chin as Roopa Vish, Bombay child, father’s daughter and police spy, heaves...

Sion: a suburb of Bombay.

It is 1993, two years before the Purushottam Express collides with the stalled Kalindi service just outside Firozabad, causing the second-worst rail crash in Indian history.

Hardik Singh and his boys have arrived early at the community centre. Police Probationer Roopa Vish finds them loitering in the portico. Muscular poster-boys for the hardline saffronist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, right now they’re stuffing their faces with egg sandwiches. Why so many of them? She feels their eyes on her as she unlocks the door. Their smiles are speculative, halfway insolent. Her dear dead father warned her about boys like these. Boys who shelter under a religious banner. Boys who think they’re God’s gift.

‘The meeting’s not until six.’

They watch her. They await her next important pronouncement. Oh God, is she blushing? The youngest is barely a teenager. The oldest is no older than her. He offers her his hand. Unthinking, she shakes it. ‘Hardik.’ His features are delicate and expressive. Not handsome. She cannot hold his gaze.

The venue is a former Scout hut. (This is Roopa’s job, six months into her service with the Bombay police: community events.) Stacking chairs. Dusty windows. Peeling paint. They build fast round here and they build cheap. When they need concrete they dredge sand from the nearby creeks. When it rains the concrete acquires streaks and stains and it cracks and crumbles and, yes, collapses, as though these blocks were ancient, weathering to failure over centuries.

Hardik and his boys want to reassure the locals about their organization. They will explain to the law-abiding and aspirational communities of Sion that their children have joined a benign outward-bound movement. Any cheaply produced pamphlets they may have found under their darlings’ beds – banyan trees, Hindu swastikas, bad typography – are nothing to do with the RSS.

The boys wrap up their sandwiches as they enter the hall. One of them disappears through a door into the little galley kitchen at the rear of the room. He comes out with a rubbish sack. The boys throw their half-eaten sandwiches in the sack. The sack disappears into the kitchen and the boys set out the chairs. The first residents arrive to find tea already hot in the urn, the room already arranged.

They’re not grateful. These are the old, the halt, the lame. The ones who come just for the free cups of tea. Had the boys repainted the hall saffron-yellow and thrown rice at their feet, it wouldn’t have made any difference to them. No one of any significance turns up until the room is already half-full and by then it is no longer obvious that the boys had anything to do with the setting up. Outnumbered, the RSS boys gather at the back of the hall. They haven’t a clue how to work a room.

Hardik meets Roopa’s gaze. His friends whisper in his ear. She watches him, his face, his small mouth, and for some reason she recalls the moment they touched: the warm, dry grip of his hand in her hand. The memory is shockingly vivid. She tries to get rid of it, wiping her hand against her nasty nylon slacks – the dismal uniform of the police probationer. The meeting is called to order. Hardik watches as people take their seats. As though he were waking out of a dream, he approaches the lectern.

He is not used to this. He’s on the defensive before he’s even begun. His voice is pitched too high, hectoring people. He tells his audience he’s a
pracharak
: a full-time RSS volunteer. He tells them enough about his life, and with enough humour, to establish his rough-diamond credentials, but the tone of his voice tells a different story entirely. It is the voice of someone frantic for respect.

Seated at the back of the hall, Roopa loses the sense of what Hardik is saying. His words are being drowned out by the rattle of the airconditioning unit. It’s not even keeping the room cool. Roopa squirms in her hard chair. Her slacks are sticking to her legs, it’s disgusting. She gets up and goes to the back of the hall. Now that she is nearer the airconditioning unit, Hardik’s speech is completely inaudible. This is good. There is something sad and small and vulnerable about Hardik. She does not want it to touch her.

Plenty of Sion’s residents have turned out to hear the RSS put their case. But there are no teenagers here. This meeting is about them, so why aren’t they here to fight their corner? Have their parents told them not to come? And if they retain that much authority over their children, why are they so worked up about the RSS? A few yoga exercises? Advertisements for a wrestling tournament?

Then the meeting is over and, again, here they are, Hardik and the boys, ostracized in their corner while their audience mills around the tea urn. The boys are learning that they are not so controversial, after all.

The next time Roopa sees Hardik he is in an American magazine, covered in blood. His picture accompanies an article describing the worst terrorist atrocities yet perpetrated in post-Partition India: the bombs let off across Bombay on 12 March 1993 by Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company.

Roopa has been taking witness statements. Every day, she visits a different hospital. Two hundred and fifty people killed, seven hundred injured. Roopa thought that the more she heard the clearer her picture of events would become. (She is her father’s daughter, youngest child of Kabir Vish, who caught the Stoneman, who beachcombed the streets of Matunga for meaning – pure police.) But each statement she takes is virtually identical to the last. There was a loud bang. I fell over. I saw blood. Impossible to get frustrated with these people. Impossible to despise the recall abilities of a man without arms or a mother mourning a child. They remember well enough. The problem is what they remember. It will not fall into words. Logic will not parse it. It is story-proof.

Yesterday she was weaving past cooking fires in the parking lot, shouldering through knots of weeping, jabbering relatives in the corridors. Today’s rota has her at Pushpanjali Hospital, talking to the private sector. A better class of paraplegic. A more educated burns victim. While she waits for the ward sister to admit her, she picks up a magazine. It is not one you often see. Not
Cine Blitz
, not
Sportsworld
. It has been dropped here by a recent visitor. A British colour supplement. She reads:

Young, frustrated, politically engaged, Hardik Singh has amassed a file of misdemeanours following trouble at rallies of one sort or another. Now his saffron-dyed politics have achieved legitimacy. He is a hero, and his cause is one the city’s liberal intelligentsia can no longer belittle.

Within minutes of the explosions, the RSS were pulling people out of the rubble and tearing the injured free of mangled vehicle wreckage. Long before the ambulances got there, the RSS’s trained first-aiders were hammering hearts to life again and kissing breath into deflated lungs. RSS boys gathered maimed and bleeding children in their arms and ran relays, bearing them to hospitals at a speed the city’s rescue crews could not match. Fire trucks arrived to find that local RSS boys had put out their fires with nothing more than blankets and dirt. It was what RSS shakhas all over the city had been training for, planning for (cynics said, hoping for). It is their finest hour, and Hardik Singh, covered in filth and soot and other people’s blood, and obviously annoyed by my questions, knows it.

In the photograph Hardik is standing in front of a wrecked car. He has been saving the injured. He is smeared with other people’s blood. The photographer has captured him shouting orders. His delicate face is distorted by a fierce intensity.

Riots begin in earnest a few weeks later. Whole streets burn. Entire families roast. Hardik is arrested. He still thinks he’s a hero. Roopa watches him in the holding cell. Milling there with a dozen others, already he has the poise and dignity of a political prisoner.

Roopa speaks to the desk sergeant, then goes and waits outside the station for Hardik to come out. There are Tempos and mopeds pulled up outside the front gate. There are boys: RSS and Shiv Sena. When Hardik comes out, a free man, he ignores their cheers. He hunts the crowd. He spots her. He walks towards her.

Roopa snaps to attention: her father’s daughter. She is as tall as he is. He stands before her for the longest time, looking at her. She wishes he would say something. She wishes he would take her hand, at least.

And he does.

Bombay’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (‘Raise your voice and it shall be heard!’) operates out of an industrial estate in Worli, next door to Raj Electricals. The ACB has a twofold remit: to weed out government corruption, and to tackle the city’s long-established mafias. Organized crime in Bombay is divided along religious lines. The Muslim syndicates receive clandestine backing from Pakistan’s intelligence community and pose a serious terrorist threat to the Indian state. The saffronist mafias have connections to domestic far-right groups and hide beneath a banner of Hindu patriotism.

Of the saffronist families currently operating in Bombay, the Yadavs are the most notorious. The ACB has files on the Yadav family going back to Partition. Whole careers have been expended poring over the family’s business affairs, its influence in the port, its political connections. ‘The deepest fissure in Bombay’s black economy is the traditional rivalry between the Indian Ocean commercial–criminal nexus and the landbased nexus stretching from Bombay to Delhi to Kashmir. The Yash syndicate has begun to square this circle for itself, through a programme of intimidation, assassination and a series of strategic alliances across religious boundaries.’