Love and Longing in Bombay (11 page)

*

Sartaj sat wrapped safely in the loneliness of his flat. It was very dark, moonless, and the small space between the gleams on the furniture held him comfortably in its absolute silence. He knew that if he disturbed nothing, not even the shadows on the floor, he could hold on to the madly delicate balance of peace that he had struggled himself into. He was trying not to think, and succeeding from moment to moment, and then the phone shrilled across the back of his neck. He held on for an instant, but on the third ring he turned his head and reached behind and picked it up. His hand was damp on the receiver and now he felt the sweat running down his sides.

“Ride?” Rahul said. Rahul practised a terseness which he had picked up from watching at least one American film a day on laser disc.

“I don’t know, Rahul,” Sartaj said.

“I’m ten minutes away.”

Sartaj took a breath and tried to recall the thin quiet from a moment ago, but already there was laughter, and tinny music, spilling in over the windowsill. He was dizzy suddenly from the pounding in his head. “All right,” he said. “But I have to dress. Give me twenty.”

After a quick shower, and with the crisp collar of a freshly starched white
kurta
against his neck he felt cool again: it was a simple Lucknowi
kurta
, but the very thin gold chain threaded through the tiny gold studs made all difference. The studs had belonged to his grandfather and he always stood a little straighter when he wore them. Rahul arrived with his customary honk downstairs, and he came up and they regarded each other acutely. This was a ritual of noticing each other’s style, but this time Sartaj was aware only of the boy’s long chin, of his nose which suggested his sister so strongly that Sartaj felt again that mixture of anger and longing. Finally he had to make a conscious effort to note the new haircut with sideburns, the loose red shirt, and the slightly flared black jeans.

“I have seen the look before,” Sartaj said. “A long time ago.”

“Yeah?” Rahul said, without interest. “I guess.”

“Yes,” Sartaj said. He thought, suddenly and apropos of nothing, that too young to know cycles is too young to know anything.

Rahul drove fast and well, with the assurance of the moneyed in a good car, or in this case a new red Mahindra jeep with a very good removable tape player. The music they listened to was completely foreign and remote to Sartaj, and as always it was played with a loudness that hovered on the edge of real pain.

“So how’re your girlfriends?” Rahul shouted above the music.

“My what?”

“You know. Women.”

“I don’t have any.”

“None? Such a big famous cop and all?”

Sartaj had been in the afternoon papers twice, both times for encounters with minor gangsters. The second confrontation had ended with gunfire, and a dead body on the floor in a dark corridor. Sartaj had fired six shots, and only one had hit. He had crouched, blinded and deafened and trembling, spilling shells onto the floor, but he had never told Rahul about that, or about the small spot of urine on the front of his pants. His picture, a formal studio portrait with retouched lips, had been in
MidDay
the same afternoon. “No, not even one woman. Slow down.” Rahul was speeding and then braking the jeep with a violence that was rattling the sleek little tape player in its housing.

“You’re a real sad case, you know,” Rahul said.

Rahul had girlfriends and broke up with them and then had others with a speed and complexity that dazzled Sartaj, and he was worldly in a way that had been impossible all those years ago when Sartaj and Megha had been the talk of the campus. They had twisted against each other in cinema halls, desperate and hungry, but now Rahul and his friends were too bored with sex to talk about it. It had all changed and he had never seen it change. “I’m just a poor old fogey, what to do,
yaar?
” Sartaj said with a laugh, and Rahul looked at him quickly but then had to swerve around a green Maruti 1000.

“Let’s get a beer,” Rahul said.

“How old are you, sonny?” Sartaj said and Rahul laughed.

“Don’t do the
tulla
thing on me now, Inspector
sahib
,” he said. “I need a beer. You do too.”

“I do?”

Rahul ignored the question and sped past a timber and wood merchant’s shop into a parking lot full of cars. A blue neon sign announced loudly that this was The Hideout, and inside the walls had been painted to look like the walls of a cave, and the floor was littered with barrels and crates. They were seated by a waiter in a black leather jacket, and above their table there was a large black-and-white print of Pran standing with legs wide apart, in black boots, flexing a whip. On the opposite wall a black-hatted foreign villain, one that Sartaj didn’t know, glared over his left shoulder, caped and sinister.

“I arrested somebody on this street once,” Sartaj said.

“Yeah? A bad guy?” Rahul said, waving to somebody over the heads of the sleek and the young.

“Bad?” Sartaj said slowly. He was staring down at the price of the beer. “Not really. He was greedy.” It was actually a quite dusty and unprepossessing commercial street, full of trucks and handcarts and the smell of rotting greens. The man Sartaj had arrested had been named Agha, and he had worked as a clerk for a company dealing in plastic goods. After they put the handcuffs on him he had looked at the owner of the company and said quietly, I have five children, and it was hard to tell whether that was an explanation for taking money or a cry for mercy, but it didn’t matter anyway. “I think he must still be in jail.”

“Everyone’s looking at you,” Rahul said sullenly. “Why do you dress like a Hindi movie?”

“This?” Sartaj said, running a finger over the collar of his
kurta.
“You’re the one who brought me here.”

The waiter brought their beer in what was obviously some designer’s idea of roughneck tin mugs that belonged in a low den, and Rahul bent over his beer. Sartaj took a long gulp and was shocked by the pleasure of the thick cold curling against the back of his throat, and he wondered if things tasted better when you paid more for them. He took another long drink and sat up, revived, to look around and to listen to the pleasant buzz of music and the hum of voices that sounded sophisticated even when it was impossible to tell one word from another. He was trying to pin what it was exactly, and after a while he decided it was that they sounded smooth, like there was a lubrication over it all, an oil that eased everything except that it was of course not greasy.

“She’s getting married,” Rahul said.

“Who?” But even before he spoke it the frightening pitch and yaw of his stomach told him who it was.

“Megha.”

“To?”

“She told me not to tell.”

“I’ll find out.”

Rahul looked up then. “Yes, you will.” His Adam’s apple ducked up and down and his face trembled, but then with a shake of his shoulders he said, “Raj Sanghi. You know.”

Sartaj knew. This was the son of a friend of Megha’s family, and Megha and Raj had known each other since childhood and the families had always thought that they were good together. He knew about all this. Now he sat with his hands on his thighs and found himself looking for a way to stop it, for a place where he could apply pressure until something snapped.

“Sorry,” Rahul said, and Sartaj saw that he looked frightened, terrified. He knew why: during one of their quarrels Megha had screamed at him that in his anger he had a face like a terrorist, looked as if the next thing he said or did would be complete and irrevocable, forever. He had looked at her then dumbly, made desolate and foreign by her choice of words. She had cried then and said she didn’t mean
that
at all. They had broken parts of each other like that all through the time at the end, and he tasted these strange victories that left him empty and wishing for nothing more than endless sleep, like the last man on a battlefield where even the blades of grass were dead. Finally it had seemed better never to say anything at all.

“No, no,” Sartaj said. “It’s all right.” He reached across the table and awkwardly patted Rahul’s wrist. He had to swallow before he could speak again. “I don’t think I should drink any more.”

*

It was morning and sparrows swirled madly through the arches of the police station. Ghorpade was sitting on the bench with his eyes closed when Sartaj and Katekar came into the detection room.

“Wake up,” Sartaj said, kicking one of the legs of the bench sharply. Ghorpade opened his eyes and Sartaj saw that he was not sleeping, or even sleepy, but that every moment was a struggle against some monstrous hunger. He had both his hands squeezed between his thighs, and he looked at Sartaj as if from some great distance. Katekar took his usual interrogation stance, legs apart and behind the suspect.

“Have you been thinking about what you did?” Sartaj said.

“I didn’t do what you said,” Ghorpade said. His eyes were yellowish, rheumy.

“You better decide to tell me the truth,” Sartaj said. “Or it’ll be bad for you.”

Ghorpade shut his eyes again. Katekar widened his stance, and flexed his shoulders. But Sartaj shook his head, and said, “Ghorpade, where do you live? Do you have a family?”

Ghorpade spoke without opening his eyes. “I don’t live anywhere.”

“Do you have a wife?”

“I had.”

“What happened?”

“She ran away.”

“Why?”

“I beat her.”

“Why?”

Ghorpade shrugged.

“How old are you, Ghorpade?”

Sartaj could hear the sparrows in the yard outside. Then finally Ghorpade spoke: “I was born the year before the Chinese war.”

Outside, under the sky which was clouded again, Sartaj considered the slight possibility that he and Ghorpade shared birthdays. He had no idea why it seemed important. Now Moitra, whose first name was Suman, roared into the yard in her new Jeep. They had been batchmates in Nasik, and on the first day of the course she had let them know that she was twice as intelligent and thrice as tough as any of them. Sartaj had no problems with this, especially since it was probably true.

“Did he confess?” she said, bounding up the stairs. “Closing the case?”

“I’m investigating,” Sartaj said. “This is an investigation, Moitra. Remember?”

“Investigating what?” Moitra said over her shoulder as she sped down the corridor. “Investigating whom?”

*

“Where is your mother?”

Kshitij was standing square in the middle of his doorway, his shoulders taut.

“What do you want with my mother?”

“Where is she?”

“She’s here. Resting. She’s not well. She’s sleeping.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“Why?”

“This is a murder case. We talk to everyone concerned.”

“What does my mother have to do with a murder case?”

“She was married to your father,” Sartaj said, stepping forward. Kshitij stayed where he was and Sartaj put the palm of his hand against the boy’s chest and pushed. Kshitij stumbled back, and Sartaj went past him into the drawing room.

“What do you want? Do you have a warrant? Why are you here? I heard you have a suspect in custody,” Kshitij said, following closely, but then Katekar had him by the arm and against the wall. Sartaj turned and Kshitij swallowed and subsided. Sartaj leaned forward and put his face close to Kshitij and watched him for a long moment, let him look and feel the pace of his anger as they listened to each other’s breathing. Then he turned away abruptly and stalked through the room, towards the bedroom. Inside, the cupboards stood open, and the double bed and the floor were littered with paper. She was sitting on the balcony that opened out onto the swamp, and far away across muddy patches of green, the silver haze of the sea.

“Mrs. Patel?”

When she turned to him her face was dense with grief. He cleared his throat and set forth briskly into his questions, when did you last see your husband, did he seem worried recently, were there any phone calls that upset him, were you aware of enemies and quarrels, were you aware of money difficulties, were you. She answered each time with a shake of the head, holding a hand at her throat. Her age was forty-nine, but her hair was a brilliant black, lustrous even in its disarray, and Sartaj looked at her, and thought that just a few days ago she must have been very pleasantly attractive, and that fact also settled into the confusion that surrounded the life and death of Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel.

Finally he asked: “Can you tell me anything else? Is there anything else I should know?”

“No,” she said. “No.” But the word was heavy with regret, and Sartaj followed her glance over his shoulder to the doorway to the bedroom, past Katekar, to the corridor where Kshitij’s shadow lingered. When he turned back to Mrs. Patel she was weeping, holding the end of her
pallu
to her eyes. And Sartaj, to his own surprise, felt a swell of emotion, rising like a knot in his chest.

In the bedroom, two of the cupboards were stacked full of shirts. Sartaj ran a finger up and down the row of the suits, rattling the wooden hangers against each other. The two other cupboards, against the opposite wall, were empty. He squatted and picked up a small booklet and flattened it out against his knee. It was a bank chequebook, with neat little tick marks in blue pencil next to the cheques and deposits. The closing balance was one lakh forty-six thousand rupees. He put the bank book in his pocket, and straightened up. There was a kind of grief in the wild litter across the room. Over these debris Sartaj began a quick but methodical survey, in a back-and-forth grid. In this practised routine there was a kind of relief.

“Aren’t you supposed to have two witnesses for a
panchnama
if you do a search?” Kshitij said from the doorway.

“Am I doing a search?” Sartaj said.

“It looks like you are.”

“I’m just looking around. Why is all this on the floor?”

“I, I was just cleaning up. Sorting things out.”

“Yes, I see,” Sartaj said. After a murder some people tidied up. Others cooked, made huge quantities of food that nobody would or could eat. But every time there was an attempt to find one’s way back to ordinary days. And all the paper on the floor was a record of the most innocuous kind of life: birth, insurance, deposits, loans, payments, the bills for hard-won purchases kept carefully for years. Now it was over. Sartaj looked across the room, towards the balcony, and she was staring out at the sea again.