by Monabi Mitra
But the old man seemed to have divined her thoughts. ‘Preparing to leave? But not without a meal! What would your mother say?’
A waiter had been hovering around the next room. He now sprang to their side.
‘Is there some kind of soup on today’s menu?’
‘Yes, Sir, we have spicy chicken and pepper soup. And for vegetarians …’
‘Get us three bowls of the chicken soup on a trolley,’ the old man interrupted. ‘And proper round spoons, not the drop-shaped Chinese variety.’
There was now a power about the old man that made Tara restless. She suddenly felt very silly. And this authority was so different from the mildness of his former manner; it was as if the arrival of the young officer had stirred him up.
‘Bikram, allow me to introduce a very charming lady who has been keeping an old man company and whose name I have most distractedly not asked. But she is more intelligent than most here and more genuine than some of them will ever be. Also,’ here he looked at Bikram Chatterjee, ‘like you, she’s uncomfortable in Nikki’s monthly interlude of shallow affectation.’
Tara gave her name somewhat blushingly, elated by the old man’s compliments. Nikki Kumar noisily entered the room. ‘You can’t go without having a bite, dinner has already been served. No, no, I won’t hear of it.’ This was addressed to Bikram and the other man, though Tara, in a moment’s confusion, thought Nikki meant her. Tara rose, grabbed her bag, and walked quickly towards the door. Beyond, the gaiety had reached a crescendo. As she made her exit, Tara caught sight of Toofan Kumar looking slyly at Shona Chowdhury and then irritably at Bikram Chatterjee as he helped the old man in.
Outside, the garden was cool and fragrant. As Tara stumbled towards the gate, she caught the spicy smell of champak and passed a few low shrubs of the lily-like flowers that bloomed only at night. The smell, redolent of childhood nights on the terrace, seemed to make her present humiliation more piercing. Somewhere, a gate opened and a durwan, looking curiously at her as she wiped the first few tears that came down, asked for the car number. Tara shook her head and began to walk down the road. A taxi drew up and she managed to mumble her address as the driver hooked his left arm over the seat and opened her door. As Tara fell back on the seat, she noticed that her right hand still clutched a paper napkin now crumpled into a ball. Rolling down the window, Tara flung the torn napkin out. When Tara looked back, a dog was sniffing at the napkin and trying to paw it open.
4
‘Bikram!’
‘Sir!’
‘Where in bloody hell have you been? Your phone’s been engaged for the last ten minutes. Girlfriend or what?’
It was the morning after the party and Bikram Chatterjee expected Toofan Kumar to be his rudest.
‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ said Bikram as blandly as he could. ‘Actually, I was checking up with Ghosh about the Sunny Sharma affair. There have been complaints from one of their customers about a certain financial irregularity.’
‘Oh, damn the Sharma cheating case. I don’t suppose Ghosh has managed to get anything on them. No need to arrange any papers. In any case we shouldn’t be too hasty.’
‘Sir.’
Bikram permitted himself a smile. The Hermes Travel Agency advertised unbelievable tour offers for South-East Asian countries from its prim offices on Camac Street. However, what it really specialized in was quick weekends for middle-aged men with suitable escorts at discreet guesthouses. The proprietor, Sunny Sharma, was known to be close to Jojo Verma, who played tennis with Toofan Kumar and sent him a bottle of the best Scotch now and then. The need to get Bikram off the Sharma front and distract him was, therefore, imperative.
‘I’ve got more important things for you to do.’ The telephone spluttered for another minute or so as Toofan Kumar barked out his orders. Bikram listened patiently, his long fingers tracing out complicated circles on the paper before him. From the window of his flat he could see, far below, the chaotic 9 a.m. rush of life.
Half an hour after his conversation with Toofan Kumar, Bikram set out on an assortment of tasks ranging from serious police work to the utterly laughable. There was a testimonial to be given in court in the matter of a well-bred junior executive swindling his firm with amazing alacrity for a whole year. There was the delicate matter of scouting round for a picnic site for the Police Wives’ Association Annual Picnic. Lastly, there was Toofan Kumar’s order to be complied with. This involved a visit to a plush part of the town and Bikram kept it for the last.
Mistry, his driver, defiantly gunned the car through a sea of three-wheelers, hand carts and battered passenger buses. Beside Bikram sat Ghosh, now belching over his breakfast of onion omelette and five pieces of buttered toast. Ghosh had somewhat recovered from Siddique Ali’s death. Bikram had spent fifteen minutes counselling him.
‘It was my fault.’
‘Don’t be absurd. He should have listened to you.’
‘How can I blame him? I suppose his wife was like mine, whining on and on about her mother wanting to see Siddique. If only he had told me, I could have …’
‘Done what? Sent the Special Protection Group around with him?’
‘Well, anyway, what do we do now?’
‘Remember to see his widow now and then and send some clothes to her children. I’ll keep some money aside from the Source Fund.’
‘And what do we do about Babul and the border?’
‘When the lord closes a door, he opens a window!’
Ghosh blinked and wished Bikram would stop quoting the Bible at him. This infuriating habit came from attending a convent school and having a professor for a father and a schoolteacher for a mother.
Bikram smiled. ‘What I mean is that we have the guy we picked up during the raid. Has he said anything yet?’
‘Uh huh. We’ll have to take him apart at the PS.’
‘Do you think he actually knows anything? He’ll probably sham for attention.’
‘That, only you can find out, Sir. But I think he’ll be a valuable contact. We don’t have too many people giving us info on dope, women, fake currency and border crossovers all at one go, now that Siddique’s gone. This fellow’s quite a catch. Buy one, get three free.’ Ghosh was so pleased with his metaphor that he laughed wheezily for a moment. Since this was the first time he had smiled in two days, Bikram let him.
‘Mistry, take us to Angel,’ Bikram said. ‘There’s time to look him up and find out how he’s doing. The wounds should have healed by now.’
Angel Nursing Home was nothing more than a four-storeyed residential building—it once housed a large Bengali joint family—that had been converted into a shabby medical centre. The tiny rooms and kitchens of the original building had been broken down and reassembled into wards, doctors’ chambers and operation theatres. At the end of a cramped corridor, Bikram and his men arrived at a lift only to find a throng of nurses, slovenly ward boys and paan-chewing ayahs blocking the entrance. Ghosh tried to batter his way through but Bikram started climbing the stairs. A panting Ghosh tried to keep pace. When they eventually reached their destination, he sat down on a chair and wheezed, unable to utter a word.
‘Maybe you too should be admitted here. For a treadmill test.’ Bikram sounded testy but there was concern in his eyes.
A doctor came bustling up to meet them. He had an ingratiating smile on his face. He looked young but was already beginning to bald. The doctor performed abortions for ten thousand rupees each and had a steady stream of clients from the small towns surrounding Calcutta. He was anxious to keep policemen happy. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, what have we here.’ The doctor spoke in English with a BBC accent. ‘Should we get you a glass of water? Take your time, no hurry.’
Ghosh rose huffily from the chair. ‘I’m all right now. Let’s get on with it. Have you killed the patient or has he survived your attention?’
‘Such wit!’ The doctor continued to smile. ‘Is that all the thanks we get for admitting your guy early in the morning, no questions aske
d?’
‘May we see him now?’
Like Ghosh, Bikram did not like the doctor, the nursing home and the way its affairs were managed. But they had had no alternative. The injured constable had taken up all the resources of the public hospital to which Bikram and Ghosh had rushed him. To find a bed for him; to test him for his blood group and procure pouches of blood from a blood bank halfway across town; to convince the sleepy and disinterested doctor in charge to make preparations for an emergency operation—all this and much more had sapped their strength. In the confusion, the other man, the fugitive bleeding from leech bites, had been taken by an overzealous police inspector to the nursing home.
Outside the ward, the fat constable on guard had arranged for himself a plastic chair and a lurid Bengali newspaper and was nodding his way through it. The doctor clapped his hands to wake him up. ‘Get up, get up, your superiors are here.’
The constable attempted a belated salute and trotted in after them.
‘Out,’ said Bikram. ‘And I don’t want to see the newspaper when I leave.’
The man was lying in a mid-sized room crammed with six beds. An intravenous needle was pushed in near his wrist, its plastic tube snaking up to the bottle hanging from the iron stand above, a bedpan stood under the iron cot, and assorted parts of his body were swathed in bandages. The man, lying on his back with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, seemed strong but, in his present condition, was wiped out and helpless.
The doctor stood by his bed with his hands behind his back. ‘Here’s someone to see you.’ He had raised his voice to a shout, quite unnecessarily, and woken all the others in the room. Two patients struggled to an upright position; one began to moan for the doctor’s attention.
The young man turned his head and looked fleetingly at Ghosh, then at Bikram. He raised one arm and tried to reach out towards them and then let his hand drop. ‘You’ve saved my life, Sir,’ he quavered.
‘Cut out the drama,’ said Ghosh distastefully as he mopped his forehead and looked around the room.
The ward was full and the doctor busied himself, pretending to check pulse beats or fiddle with bandages, all the while tracking the situation with one curious ear.
‘No one dies from leech bites,’ said Bikram briskly. ‘You could have suffocated yourself though in that dirty water.’
‘In our line of work we can die from anything at any time,’ said the young man dramatically. ‘I was driven to this world out of hunger but now I’m addicted to it.’
His name had been registered in the nursing home ledger as Raja Das but he was known simply as Border Raja in his sphere of influence. The police had been looking for Babul who, it now transpired, had not been in the village at all for the last few months, but had unaccountably netted Raja. Bikram was now sure that the unfortunate Siddique had had some score to settle with Raja and had sent the police on his trail using Babul as a decoy.
Raja was still looking at him. ‘Don’t arrest me as yet, Sir. I can give you information, lots of it. About …’
‘We’ll discuss this later,’ said Bikram, aware that the whole room was listening. ‘I haven’t come here for information. I wanted to make sure you were all right. You lost a lot of blood, and there were other complications, but fortunately things have got better.’
The man turned his head away. His voice shook a little. ‘I’ve heard about you. And I was always scared that you would catch me one day. But now that I’ve seen you, perhaps things might go differently for me.’
Bikram led Ghosh out of the ward and into the corridor outside. The smells of formalin, antiseptics, urine, sweat, fear and death mingled in a heady cocktail. ‘What have we booked him under?’
‘307, Sir.’
Attempt to murder. An idea stirred in Bikram’s mind. Charge-sheet him under Section 308. No, wait, 326.’
Ghosh looked at him keenly from under his beetling eyebrows and nodded. ‘That’s a good one.’
Section 326 of the Indian Penal Code states that causing grievous hurt by a dangerous weapon can be punished by life imprisonment or by a lighter, ten-year sentence with a fine. This had the advantage of keeping the offender on tenterhooks. The trial would drag on and the man would be out on bail and nothing would ever be proved anyway. But Bikram and Ghosh would thereby have created an informer for whom it would be easier to supply bits of information and keep the cops happy than run the trouble of going underground and putting his business at risk. And in the long run, Raja might even get a chance to terminate some enemies by setting the police on them.
‘I’ll explain it to him once he’s released.’
‘I doubt if you’ll have to explain at all. He’s probably worked it all out already. Find out when they’ll let him go.’
The doctor had been waiting expectantly near a corner bed, oblivious to the groans of the patient there. He sprang forward when Ghosh looked at him.
‘Rapist or robber?’ he asked gleefully. ‘You should have seen him screaming when he was brought here. I knew at once he was a criminal. They’re the biggest cowards.’
‘When can he be released?’
‘But it’s not that simple,’ the doctor said. ‘We took some advanced tests and there is an indication that this man may be suffering from thalassaemia. Not thalassaemia major, of course, but the minor form due to which he’s anaemic. That’s why the leech bites and the blood loss caused such a severe reaction.’
‘Oh!’ Clearly, Bikram had not expected this. Ghosh looked troubled.
‘With the transfusion, the haemoglobin’s fine now but we need some more tests. The spleen needs to be looked into, so, an ultrasonography or two. I’ve written as much in the patient’s sheet.’ Here, the doctor cleared his throat with relish and tried to sound as delicate as possible. ‘We’re all here to help you, so don’t worry about payment. In fact, Mr Churiwala would like to reassure you about that. He’ll be here in half an hour’s time.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t wait today,’ said Bikram, ‘but I have his number and will talk to him about it.’ Privately, he cursed the crooked ASI for admitting him to Angel. Now Bikram would have to pay the hospital bill from his pocket rather than have Churiwala waive expenses and later claim a favour. Raja, listening to the conversation, looked at Bikram pleadingly as he turned to go.
‘We’ll talk later,’ said Ghosh curtly and then added in a kinder tone, ‘we’ll work out a deal. You look after us and we’ll look after you, but don’t go yammering all this to any of your friends.’
Back in the car, they discussed the failed raid and wondered if some good might come out of it after all. It was nice to imagine a chastened Raja feeding them delicious tips about cross-border smuggling. Bikram glanced out the window and noted that the roads were getting wider, the billboards sleeker and the pavements almost free of cycle carts and beggars as they entered affluent neighbourhoods. All this reminded him of the unsavoury task at hand and increased his annoyance. Flat-topped, boxlike buildings gave way to lovely houses shaded by trees and high walls covered with ivy and luxuriant bougainvillea. There were no buses or auto rickshaws. Sleek cars purred noiselessly through polished gates that opened briefly to offer glimpses of smooth lawns and white wrought iron garden chairs. Mistry stopped in front of a large black gate. The pillar on the left side of the gate was lettered 17B and the marble plaque on the right said, simply, BOSE.
A durwan was peeping at them through a slit in the gate. Mistry blew a raucous horn and then ducked his head out of the window. ‘Open up, you. We’re from police headquarters.’
‘He’s not been told about our visit,’ said Bikram. ‘I wonder why. If we’re here to exhibit ourselves and frighten the staff, as Toofan Kumar wants us to, it would have been a good idea for the owners to inform all of them about it.’
‘What’s the household like, Sir?’ asked Ghosh.
‘The gentleman’s paralysed and the wife runs the show. She does all kinds of things; teaches at a school, sells paintings, organizes exhibitions. Gen
eral order supplier, as we used to say in our youth. Throws parties, too, though where she gets the money for that, I don’t know. Well known in the movie circles, I’m told.’
Here, Ghosh cast a quick look at Bikram before looking away innocently. There was little office gossip that did not make its way to Ghosh, and Shona Chowdhury’s romance with the boss was a favourite topic these days.
He can be sly, thought Bikram. And he’s too friendly with that Calcutta Times reporter. Trading secrets for gossip in Park Street bars on Sunday evenings, I guess. A vision of the party last night and Shona in it, with him standing ineffectually beside her, sent a sudden spurt of anger through him.
Aloud, he said to his security guard, ‘Get down and open the gate, won’t you, instead of sitting back and leaving everything to that useless driver.’ The durwan then escorted them to the house and handed them over to a maid who looked warily at them as she led them into the drawing room. The air conditioning was on and the doors were closed, but the curtains had been drawn back. Through the windows they could see a homely-looking garden with a patchy lawn bordered with all kinds of shrubs.
A silken voice greeted the two policemen as they went in. ‘Come in, Inspector, do come in, this is a surprise. I didn’t think Toofan would remember me and my silly complaints so faithfully. Perhaps you’ll be more comfortable on this sofa. That one gets the full blast of the air conditioner. Robi and I have been meaning to buy a new one for ages but we’ve never really got round to it.’
Bikram felt himself expertly led away from a large and expensive sofa in white satin to a narrower chair in dark corduroy. The room was laid with a rich carpet that stopped just short of the chairs to which they were led. The lady of the house seated herself before him and arranged her sari delicately over her toes. Her carefully tinted hair was swept back from a wide forehead. A white handbag and a mobile phone stood on a table beside her.
‘I asked Toofan for help, I really don’t know how to solve this on my own …’ Her voice trailed as she stared at Bikram, then, as recognition dawned, it changed altogether. With a little gasp she exclaimed, ‘Wait a minute, I know you. You’re Bikram, Shona’s friend.’