by Monabi Mitra
‘I know, I do it myself. Any leads on the fake currency? Toofan forwarded me a report but how far does this chap you’ve got, Montu, right—well—how much does that give us?’
The laptop screen flashed a black-and-white picture of Alice in Wonderland, talking to the caterpillar on a mushroom with a hookah. Even as he was answering Prem Gupta’s questions, one part of Bikram’s brain registered surprise. Where did it come from? Downloaded from the Internet, no doubt, but why?
‘He’s way down in the hierarchy, Sir, I don’t think he knows much. I’ll have a go at him again but I don’t see much hope there’.
‘I suppose you’ve checked out the addresses he’s given?’
‘Apple Hassan floats all over the city, Sir, but I think he operates from somewhere in central Calcutta, from one of those hopeless lodges for across-the-border visitors. I’ve asked the local police station to give me some details but they are taking their time.’
Another photograph on the laptop, this time of a familiar plant with beautiful star-shaped leaves. A caption underneath it said, ‘Get It Man, My Mouth’s Watering’.
‘Well, keep going. The director general seems very keen on the fake currency case. Maybe you should check out something that happened in Howrah last night. A trader dealing in garments was returning home around 11 p.m. when two men on a motorcycle came up to him, stabbed him twice and made off with his bag. Nothing much happened to the man, but the funny thing is that some local guys in a chemist shop picked him up and alerted the police, then sent him to the general hospital, but the man himself wasn’t too keen on lodging a complaint. You never know, something interesting may turn up there.’
‘I’ll go over just now.’
‘The officer-in-charge is on leave, I think. Daughter’s exams, and I don’t much like the next-in-charge.’
Bikram hung up. The constable on duty in the visitors’ room came in with two visitor’s slips, bearing unknown names and addresses, carrying references of obscure people Bikram had met once or twice and forgotten. It was 10.45 a.m. and the office was warming up. Bikram shut down the laptop, put it carefully inside its case—of good quality leather and expensive—leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. After thirty seconds or so, he rang up Sheena Sen.
‘Hello.’ He could hear traffic in the background which meant that she was not in office yet.
‘Can you find out if Robi Bose used the Internet frequently after his illness, and if he did, for what? Do they have friends abroad with whom he corresponded, or some old office acquaintances he was in touch with? Did anyone else use his laptop?’
He rang the bell for the first visitor. The phone rang again. This time it was Toofan Kumar. ‘What’s new about this currency guy?’
‘I’ve asked the local thana for some help, Sir.’
‘Haan, so you should have told me. I would have asked the deputy commissioner to organize a raid! The amount of time you guys take. What about the Robi Bose thing? The newspapers want a bite and I can’t keep feeding them lines about ongoing inquiries.’
‘I’m working on the call details, Sir, and have interviewed the family as well as the servants.’
‘So arrest one of them! Something is better than nothing. At least it will look good in print.’
Toofan Kumar was in full spate and it was useless arguing with him. ‘I’ve sent someone to meet you this morning, a lady who has been cheated of money. Her name is Lily Lahiri. She’s a good friend of mine, so listen to her carefully and start working on that straightaway. And don’t forget to follow up on the airport thana guy, the currency fellow. I want an updated report by next week.’
While they were talking, a lady of about fifty-two, wearing a crisp cotton sari, had been ushered in. Her eyes were outlined in well-smudged kohl, her sunglasses were perched fashionably on her head, there were diamonds in her ears and she carried a crocodile leather handbag which she placed on Bikram’s table. She had been carefully made up to project a very specific look. Lily Lahiri, no doubt. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble, Mr Chatterjee. I’ve been to the police station and filed a case, but they are so-oh inefficient, that’s why I called Toofan and he directed me to you. Only you can help me.’ Her voice was hoarse, with a slow drawl to it that perfectly fitted her attire. ‘Toofan must have told you all about it.’
‘Not much, I’m afraid. What is the problem?’
Lily Lahiri placed her elbows on the table, leaned forward slightly, and began her story in a low, husky tone. As always, Bikram marvelled at sunglasses which sit so delicately on the head without slipping an inch.
She lived alone in a house in a well-known residential neighbourhood on the eastern fringes of the city. She was a single woman with a daughter studying abroad. She was well off, but had lived extravagantly and had negotiated with a property dealer to sell a flat in the older part of the city, fetching good money with the rise in real estate prices. The terms of payment had been complicated but she had trusted the dealer, a friend of a friend. The first round of payment had been made, then the second, after which the dealer had reneged, leaving about fifty per cent of the total amount unpaid. The friend who had recommended him didn’t know much about him anymore, it transpired, and, indeed, was surprised that she had negotiated with him at all. She had rung the dealer up umpteen times but he had hummed and hawed, citing deaths in the family and illnesses and then, finally, had issued a cheque which bounced at the bank. Would Bikram arrest him immediately and help her get her money back?
‘Did you get the first part of the payment by cheque or in cash?’
‘Cheques, mainly, with some cash. Recently I bought a new washing machine and was dismayed to find that some of the notes he had given me were fake. Can you imagine my embarrassment, Mr Chatterjee, when the shop rang to say that three one-thousand rupee notes were dud? How awkward I felt! The shopkeeper was rude and wanted me to make fresh payments. What cheats! That’s when I told him I would take the matter to my friends in the police. It isn’t my fault, is it?’
The perfume Lily was wearing bothered Bikram, whose nose was sensitive to strong odours. He sneezed twice and wondered how to ease her out of the room. The only way, of course, was to make a show of great activity. Bikram rang the police station to which she had been and spent a few minutes talking to the officer-in-charge there, who repeated the facts he already knew. As expected, the phone call calmed Lily. Though Bikram had said nothing, she was assured that a majority of the personnel of the Calcutta Police were treating her problem on a priority basis and would solve it soon.
‘I have heard so much about you, Mr Chatterjee; I knew you would be the one to help me. I meet Shona here and there, and it would be so nice if you two could come over for a bite at my flat some time. Such a well-matched couple, I say.’ She was still gushing as Bikram escorted her to the door. It was 11.30 a.m., and time to visit the businessman who had been stabbed in Howrah.
The man broke down in three minutes. The clothes shop was, as suspected, a front for other businesses. The man had just exchanged a large consignment of fake notes for real ones and was on his way back home when the attackers had swooped down and made off with the money. Now he had been robbed, was in debt, and was the subject of a police investigation. The man began sobbing in great whoops. And in between sobs, set up a lament about what he was to do now, with his parents and wife, his two sons and unmarried sister having no idea of the exact nature of his business.
‘You should have thought about all of them when you began,’ said Bikram crossly. The other patients were struggling to listen in.
‘But I did, Sir. I dropped out of school in class eight, spent my time ferrying saris on my cycle, selling them at a discount in the houses of the peons and sweepers of the Railway Quarters. How much money could I ever have made that way? There were days when we ate only muri.’
‘From whom did you get the money?’ asked Bikram unkindly, refusing to be drawn into family crises and the finer points of slow starvation.
‘We call him Lala, that’s all; I don’t know anything else about him.’
‘Who’s the “we”?’ pounced Bikram.
The man’s eyes became hooded. ‘Pain, pain, I can’t breathe …’ he fluttered.
‘Whoever you’re protecting is probably the one who got you robbed, so unless you give me his name, I can’t do anything.’
But the man refused Bikram’s bait. He lay back and moaned once or twice, then closed his eyes. An attendant in a blue sari strolled up. ‘Give me hundred bucks and I’ll get the name out of him when I’m changing his drip,’ she whispered.
‘Hey, hey, get out now.’ The uniformed constable tapped his cane on the ground and looked fiercely at the woman. She winked at Bikram and, laughing, turned away. ‘All right, for you, I’ll do it for free. Just drop by again and I’ll have the name ready.’
Bikram raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and started for the door.
When he came back to the office, Mistry demanded an audience. It was almost one and Bikram was hungry, but the constable at the door wouldn’t serve lunch.
‘Sir, Mistry would like to talk to you for a moment.’
‘Where’s my lunch? Tell him to wait till I finish eating.’
‘Sir, the lunch is almost ready, we’ve just run out of green chillies, I’ve sent Dorjee down to get some … shall I ask Mistry da to come in?’
Should he bow to this silent pressure and eat later, or should he force his way for once? He decided to become Toofan Kumar for a change. ‘I don’t need the chillies, just get me my lunch. Tell Mistry to wait.’
The defeated constable withdrew. The lunch came in on a yellow melamine plate, looking pinched and meagre—two chapattis and a mash of vegetable curry, the wedge of lime looking lonely without the chilli, and a plate of peeled apple for dessert. Bikram ate slowly, fastidiously tearing the chapatti and wrapping it around the vegetable, mopping the gravy with smaller bits, the absent chilli marring the meal. And so it was with him in love, work and leisure—a slow savouring of whatever he had, a painstaking attention to detail and the nuances of every case, and the love of order and familiarity. When he finished, he washed his hands with a small bar of perfumed soap he kept in his bathroom, rinsed his mouth, sprayed breath freshener, almost involuntarily looked at himself in the mirror, patted his hair and felt ready to meet the world again. The world began with Mistry.
When Mistry had finished his breathless delivery, Bikram felt no great elation. There had always been something suspicious about Buro, but now that there seemed to be a definite lead to him, he felt strangely upset.
‘What is Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari’s line of business?’ A superfluous question intended to cover his feelings, since he had a fair idea.
Mistry giggled nervously. ‘The usual, Sir, money collection and no questions asked, local land deals, supplying building materials, stuff like that.’
‘I take it you’ve been pals for years,’ said Bikram morosely. A good tip coming from his driver didn’t look so good after all, in light of the fact that Mistry shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
‘Same village, Sir, his father and mine are brothers, all cousins from the same family, such ties cannot be forgotten …’
‘Mistry,’ said Bikram gently. ‘For my sake, be careful. You know how fussy I am about silly things. Don’t overdo it.’
‘I am always careful, Sir,’ said Mistry devotedly. ‘Swear by God, Sir, we would never bring you any shame.’
‘Give me the address and don’t go there again this month, or at least until we decide what to do with Buro.’
After he had dismissed Mistry, and between three more telephone calls, during which the peon brought in two fat files, which Bikram’s unseeing eyes used as a place board for a sheet of paper, he wrote ‘Montu, Babul, Raja, Dhoor, Apple’, encircled the words, put a large ONE; then wrote ‘Robi, Nisha, Buro, Maid, Poor Cousin’, encircled those words with a large TWO, and stood staring down at the names with a heavy heart. In a margin he wrote, Fake Currency, Suicide, Murder and Border. Then he wrote ‘Buro’ and underlined it thrice, signing in Tewari underneath. Then he looked at the mesh of interrogations, the running up and down, tailing, false leads, difficulty in procuring evidence, witnesses, warrants, convictions that the scribbling involved, and the mess that the mesh indicated and felt his heart sinking. On an inspiration he drew a stick figure with a large moustache and a car with five beacons on it and labelled it TK. Then he stared mournfully at his handiwork and looked out of the window.
Cars—beacons on top, in front, poles from which the flags with their stars fluttered and shone majestically—were roaring in and out of the driveway. Bikram’s eyes narrowed. An idea stirred in his mind, he could feel it welling up from within him, some detail, horribly important, which he had registered and then missed. It would be back with him in a moment.
His cell phone rang, the screen blinked. Bikram swore. Briefing at 2.30 p.m., said the screen. Bikram looked at the clock. It was 2.10 p.m. He swore again, rang for the peon, and noticed for the first time that one of the files was for the briefing on the security for the football match, picked it up, unconsciously checked for his revolver and made for the lift. By the time the car moved forward, he had forgotten the fleeting thought.
The meeting was well attended though Bikram suspected that even the officer conducting it was half-asleep. The voice that droned was boring background music. Even Sheena Sen nodded twice and tried to cover it up by fiddling with her handkerchief. Ghosh was sweating as if air conditioning had not been invented, and his face was shiny with perspiration and the strain of controlling his wheezy coughs. The tea was served late and was raw, and the room had been oversprayed with freshener. Bikram realized with dismay that his uniform would be reeking of jasmine for the rest of the day.
When the ordeal of the meeting ended, the ordeal of the football match began. Bikram walked up and down the dilapidated galleries, shuffled around the run-down dressing room, watched the watchers—a melancholy lot, either from the suburbs, or unemployed, or plain riffraff toting violently coloured flags printed on crumpled coarse linen—and waited for a chance to corner Ghosh. He found him standing near the iron entrance gate and walked over to meet him.
‘Any leads on that Babul thing? I had one more fake currency guy this morning, after you left.’ Briefly, Bikram told him about the stabbed trader at the hospital.
‘I’ll have a go at the leech guy again, Sir, to see if he can lead us to Babul. He spoke of some cross border syndicate of which Babul was a member, I forget the name.’
‘Dhoor?’
‘Yes, Sir, I knew it was some worthless sounding thing, Dhoor.’
‘I’ve picked up some information about Dhoor also, from the airport police station. I should have a go at this leech guy myself. Can you fix up a meeting some time?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, why not, tomorrow. Same place, you can bring him there, and then, if you don’t mind, I’ll talk with him alone. But for heaven’s sake, remind me about it well ahead in the morning, not like today, when you didn’t say a word about this bloody match.’
‘You didn’t give me time, what with everything …’
‘I guess. But I do have something interesting about the Robi Bose case. Mistry, as usual, pokes his nose and finds something funny.’
When Bikram’s narrative was done, Ghosh’s face looked as if he had just returned from a friend’s funeral. ‘Nice,’ he said, with the air of someone who has discovered a strand of hair in his pilaf. Then he scratched his head and said, ‘I always knew it was the servant.’ There was silence. The match had begun and a roar rose from the audience, accompanied by a deafening chorus of catcalls, squeakers and drums. Ghosh chewed his lower lip, grunted, scratched his ear, and finally said, ‘But I think I know someone who might be able to help us.’
Bikram waited. Part of the reason why Ghosh was invaluable was that when Bikram’s mind was blocked, Ghosh’s policing instincts stood up
and simply clamoured to be let out. ‘He’s dying to meet you anyway, must have heard about you,’ as they all do, he almost added in parenthesis, ‘so when you finally get him tomorrow, Sir, you must play him well. If anyone’s grateful for all you’ve done for him and will do a good tailing job and will not squeal, I guarantee it’s him, for there’s a kind of loyalty about that rascal that is genuine. Raja, the leech guy. He will lead us to Buro’s game.’
12
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Shona asked. It was 7.30 a.m. and she hoped Bikram would be back from his routine jog at Eden Gardens. She could just picture him running on the crumbling track that snaked this way and that through the park with its plastic kangaroo waste bins and its unkempt lawns. Shona had long given up coaxing Bikram into a membership at a discreet air-conditioned gym or an exclusive weekend health club. With characteristic mulishness Bikram thought of such places as the epitome of the class divide and preferred to jog doggedly to the sound of clinking cups and the smell of frying chickpea curry that wafted over the boundary wall from the roadside eateries where the drivers of long-distance buses waited.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked him again.
‘I’m all right,’ he said, but the starchiness in his tone was unmistakable.
‘No, you’re not,’ she said.
Bikram, who was still at Eden Gardens, had slowed down from a jog to a half-trot; now he quickened his pace again.
‘Why this persistence? I tell you I’m fine.’ Then, to change the subject, he said, ‘No shoots today?’
‘No, I’ve cancelled them. I thought, well, tomorrow’s May Day, you might be free, we could go somewhere.’
The truth was that Shona was not well, had a sore throat and a stuffy nose and felt the flu coming on. At such times her confidence and ebullience deserted her, her profession grated and something in her cried out for a pair of grey eyes and a tall figure. There was a restfulness about him that could set her back on course like nothing else.