Everyone stared at him blankly.
“Love,” Nimish explained, “is the cosmic complement to pain.”
“Let’s just love her then!” Savita cried out, squeezing Nimish’s arm in gratitude.
Jaginder burst out laughing.
“This is a proper Hindu household,” Maji said.
“Proper?” It was Savita’s turn to laugh.
“All of you would need to love her,” Parvati chimed in from her spot on the floor, “before she’d be willing leave.”
“Well I’m not going to,” Tufan declared.
“Please, please,” Dheer begged. “Why can’t we try?”
“Why? Why?” Jaginder hauled himself from the sofa and slapped Dheer across the head. “Because it almost killed you, you bloody idiot.”
“Look at all the trouble your ghost has caused already,” Maji said. “If we back down now, it will take over! And then what?”
“She’s only a baby!” Savita said desperately. “She’s never had parents to guide her! I could teach her!”
“Have you lost your senses?” Jaginder cut in, glaring at his wife. “Don’t eat garlic, fine. Put bloody marks behind our sons’ ears every morning, fine. Hang turmeric stones above our bed, fine, fine. But I draw the line at this!”
“It’s been decided—bas,” Maji boomed. “I will not tolerate your impertinence, Savita.”
Savita bit her lip, humiliated. Her deep, dirty longing worked its way up into her chest where thick, white milk still flowed unchecked. In four days hence, she silently vowed, staring at her mother-in-law, if you take my daughter from me, I will seize the bungalow from you.
Maji held out a fistful of black strings. “The tantrik gave me these, to tie onto each and every faucet in the bungalow to dry them out.”
“My bath!” Tufan said.
A chorus of ‘mine too’ followed.
“Take your baths!” Maji sighed irritably. “But before night falls, the faucets will be turned off for the next four days.”
“No need for all of us to suffer,” Jaginder said, striding to the phone. “I’ll book us rooms at the Taj for the duration.”
“Stop!” Maji ordered. “The tantrik said that each of us who was here when the baby drowned must bear witness to the ghost’s demise.”
“I have to miss my classes?” Nimish asked, thinking about getting back to Pinky at the hospital. She was the last one to see Lovely. She knew what had happened to her. He felt it in his bones. She knew.
“No one can leave for four days,” Maji answered, pointing her cane at each of them. “NO ONE.”
A loud collective gasp filled the room as each member of the household reflected upon the implications of this injunction.
“Parvati,” Maji said, “the laundry will have to be sent out each morning. Kanj, you need to set up a makeshift kitchen in your quarters out back.”
“We can’t be haunted back there?”
“Where’s your brain?” Parvati clucked at her husband. “The ghost can’t leave the bungalow. Tantrik Baba himself made sure of that.”
“Gulu, go pick up some food staples from the market. Kanj will give you a list.”
Gulu nodded, silently thanking his patron god, Ganesh, the remover of all obstacles. This outing would be his chance to escape, to find Avni at last.
“Kuntal, Nimish, Dheer, Tufan,” Maji continued, “every drop of water from ceiling leaks has to be immediately wiped away. No liquid of any kind will be allowed in this house. Do you understand what this means? And, lastly, we all have to share the servants’ toilet out back.”
At this Savita almost fainted, “I would rather die.”
“You have no choice,” Maji said. “You must adjust.”
“What about Pinky?” Dheer asked.
“She’ll stay at the hospital.”
“What!” Savita began to weep. The injustice of the situation was too much to bear. “She gets waited on hand and foot while we live like street urchins?”
“She wasn’t here when the baby drowned.”
“Well,” Jaginder said, trying to sound lighthearted. “I’m off!”
“Off?” Savita demanded. “Where are you going?”
“Tying up some loose ends at the office before our imprisonment,” Jaginder lied, feeling the ironic sting of his words.
“I’ll go with you Papa,” Nimish said. He had to get out of the house.
Jaginder snorted.
Nimish turned to Gulu. “I’ll come with you then.”
Gulu’s eyes grew wide. He’d be damned if Nimish was going to spoil his plan of escape.
Maji stepped in, guessing what Nimish had in mind. “You stay right here, young man. When everything is settled, then we’ll talk to Pinky.”
“But she was with Lovely last night!”
“No,” Maji said, already spinning the agreed-upon lie. “Inspector Pascal found her alone and unaccosted last night and took her straight to the hospital. She had nothing to do with Lovely.”
Nimish dropped his face. I must get out tonight. I must, he thought.
“Be back before nightfall.” Maji turned to Jaginder with a wagging finger, “The gates will be chained at sunset.”
“No need to worry,” Jaginder promised as he strode out the door. “I’ll be back.”
Eyeing the rectangular bulge in Jaginder’s raincoat pocket, Nimish turned away, not believing for a moment that his father would return.
CRYSTAL VIALS OF ATTAR
Gulu and Jaginder left the bungalow simultaneously but in different vehicles, and in different states of mind. Jaginder, in the black Mercedes crouched like a lion ready to attack. Gulu sat in the Ambassador, dipping into the dimly recalled determination of his boyhood days at Victoria Terminus, his bandaged hand cradled to his chest. Unbeknownst to one another, they were each headed to police headquarters, Jaginder just to pass by from the outside, to take stock of what he was about to do, and Gulu to go inside and hope for the best.
Jaginder reached it first, slowing his car just opposite the high stone archway and Victorian columns that supported the second story of the building. The compound itself was run-down. The thick stone walls held together with lime were now encrusted with mold, the red, sloping roof was missing at least half its original tiles, and the grimy windows hid immodestly behind cracked and warped wooden slats. Just to the left of the structure sat rows and rows of rusting metal drums, captured during raids on illicit distilleries and left, abandoned, for the sole purpose of impressing visiting senior officers.
To the right was a parking lot containing a number of impounded cars. The more dilapidated ones, not worth enduring a lengthy judicial process to reclaim them, simply rotted away. Others, perhaps involved in a terrible accident in which the driver or passenger had died, lay forsaken—the owners unwilling to touch a thing that had brought panavti, ill luck. Those particular cars would be eventually sold to a trusted kabadi, who regularly bought unclaimed goods from the station, stolen or otherwise, the tidy profit going directly into the senior officers’ pockets.
Jaginder hesitated for a moment, checking the sign written in white letters on a dark blue board that clattered noisily with each new gust of wind. If successful, he told himself, what he was just about to do would earn his way back into Maji’s good graces. If things did not go well, however, Jaginder could only imagine how his cat-and-mouse game with the inspector would end. Shrugging off his growing fear, Jaginder snorted. Imagine Nimish being asked to cut a deal with a police officer! His confidence boosted, he stepped on his accelerator, and drove hurriedly towards Churchgate Station. He planned to be early for his meeting at the Asiatica.
Gulu arrived at the police station and momentarily took a seat on one of the crowded wooden benches that lined the front verandah, glancing at the others waiting for the inspector’s attention. A woman in a pale green sari was wailing, fist beating her chest, about her dead child. Others stared at her with blank faces. Fear shot through Gulu’s body, a feeling h
e remembered from his childhood at VT—the vulnerability of being on the outside, of always being suspect because he was poor. He had run into many policemen back then, but Big Uncle always took care of any problems. Driving the streets of Bombay, Gulu continued to encounter the police, but they were usually lowly constables while he was firmly behind the wheel of an imposing Ambassador.
Standing now, he avoided the wailing woman, and pushed open the door, stepping into the dull aqua building buzzing with the sounds of ringing telephones, shuffling people, click-clacking typewriters—all unfazed by the ghastly screaming from the back office where a suspect was being beaten. The smallish hall, surprisingly tidy, was jammed with clerks and officers sitting at various desks. The station inspector sat in the far back corner, behind a large table covered with cotton baize. He was roughly interrogating an impoverished man whose head hung as he stood there, though there were two empty wooden chairs in front of him. To the right was a lockup for petty thieves, all men. A teenage pickpocket sat on a bench just beyond the lockup, eyeing the station inspector’s shiny watch which he would later successfully steal. A very old woman with sari hitched between her legs stooped over a short-handled jharoo and mercilessly swept up everything in her path. With swift circular movements, she collected trash, debris, and errant chappals under the officer’s desks and deposited them onto the wet ground just outside the station.
The wailing woman from the verandah was brought in. Immediately, she fell to her knees, pleading with an officer, her child having been run over by an imported car the previous night by a drunken teenager. The driver was standing sullenly to the side while his rich father handed over a stack of rupees, the bail to set him free.
“Very unfortunate,” the surly officer was saying to the distraught woman, as he counted the money. “But the law must be upheld.”
“Please sir!” the woman cried out. “What law lets a drunkard kill a child and walk away free?”
“Very old law, written in 1858,” the officer said authoritatively, as if the number of years it had been in effect somehow counterbalanced its injustice. What he neglected to say was that the legislation was originally conceived to protect horse-carriage-driving Britishers when they inadvertently ran over half-naked street children. Now that the British were no longer in power, the law served wealthy Bombayites just as well.
The woman threw herself at the officer’s desk, screaming, and was quickly gripped by two laati-wielding constables who dragged her to the door and threw her outside. The officer finished counting the money, separating the newly minted bills with a bit of reddish saliva deposited onto his thumb.
Gulu’s gaze fell on a rickety wooden staircase that led to a dank hallway with stained walls. Overlapping notices, most of them outdated and unreadable, competed for attention along the stairwell where a narrow window, the only one left unshuttered, let in a rectangle of bright light. The staircase curved just above him lined with several pipes that had been painted a sickly olive. Gulu walked past the stairs, approaching a thin, frowning man sitting behind a desk against a graying wall, hunched over a pile of papers. The man wore a beige uniform, epaulets indicating that he was an A. S. I. —an assistant police sub-inspector, his pencil resentfully jabbing upwards into the air. A layer of oil and sweat covered his bald head. Behind him was a steel cabinet; a graph with pink and gray bars indicating monthly crime statistics was posted onto the wall. A khaki canvas tote bag hanging from a wooden peg was being investigated by a rather large rat.
This was the man Gulu had been looking for.
“A. S. I. Bambarkar!” Gulu said, clicking his heels and offering a casual salute with his bandaged hand.
“Yes?” Bambarkar said with annoyance. His pencil hung in midair.
“It’s me, bhai. Gulu.”
The pencil twirled for a moment in Bambarkar’s hand. Suddenly the A. S. I. looked up. “Gulu from VT?”
“What, bhai, you no longer recognize your friends?” Gulu said cheerily, imitating the motions of shining a shoe.
“All these years,” Bambarkar said in a low voice, “I thought Red Tooth had done away with you.”
“I survived.”
“I see that.”
“I kept track of our gang, too. You in the police. Yash on Falkland Road. And Hari Bhai in Dharavi.”
“Yash a pimp?” Bambarkar sniggered. “And you?”
Gulu winked, “A first-class driver.”
“Something legitimate,” Bambarkar bit into the pencil. “I’m not surprised.”
“Listen, bhai,” Gulu said quietly, sitting down. “I need your help.”
“I’m listening.”
“The family I work for, their daughter Pinky Mittal –”
“You work for the Mittal family?” Bambarkar asked surprised. “That’s my case.”
“Ah! Then you can tell me what happened to the ayah.”
“Avni Chachar? We don’t know. Her mother insists that she’s dead. Suicide. There’s no evidence to support that however.”
“I saw her!”
“You did?” Bambarkar asked, leaning out of his chair. “Are you absolutely one-hundred-and-one-percent certain?”
Gulu searched his memory. As time had passed, he had grown unsure if the woman he saw outside the gate had been Avni. Perhaps he had imagined her. He shook his head.
“You see,” Bambarkar continued, his voice lowered, “I’ve been requested to revise the reports, to protect Pinky Mittal’s reputation. The other girl, Lovely, probably went out with some boy. As for Avni, the inspector is sending some of his goondas to rough up her family tonight. Get them to talk.”
“I have to see Avni’s mother, bhai. Please tell me where she lives.”
Bambarkar twirled his pencil, shaking the sheath of papers, a history rewritten. Giving out this type of information was against police rules. Yet, Gulu was an old friend and a driver for a very wealthy family. Doing a favor for him might come in handy. Bambarkar was very good at cashing in favors. It had become a hobby of sorts, keeping a chart of who owed him, taking full advantage, down to the free teas the chaiwallah gave him each morning, or the ongoing access the pretty, young tenant next door gave him to the place between her legs. Yes, favors owed equaled power—juicy, spine-tingling power. Sorting through the stack on his desk, Bambarkar surreptitiously handed Gulu a sheet of paper.
The earth had but a few hours to dry before the afternoon sun was eclipsed by the gathering monsoon haze. As the sky darkened and the shadows grew long, the clouds finally burst with a terrible roar, pouring rain into the waterlogged city, sending people running for cover, forcing the sun into retreat.
Night fell swiftly. The Mittal family, freshly scrubbed from their baths and satiated by an early dinner, gathered now in the parlor, nervously watching shadows grow in the corners of the bungalow. Savita had locked herself in her bedroom, waiting until the last possible moment to empty her bladder in her western-style toilet before Parvati tied the black string around the pipe and rendered it useless.
Not wanting to face her parents during Maji’s pani-hatao, “remove-water plan,” she had called them upon their return from Goa, saying that she would visit them the following weekend. Do you realize whom we were vacationing with? her mother had asked angrily. Bipin and Monu! They were just received by the Prime Minister last weekend—Mr. Nehru himself ! And now you tell me that your Pinky has been found and there’s no need for us to visit?
Savita had simply replied, She’s not my Pinky.
“Mummy come,” Nimish called gently from the door.
“Coming.”
Savita sat at her vanity and stared at her vast collection of Indian attars, turning a crystal vial in her palm, holding it up to the light, tilting it this way and that, fascinated by its dazzle one moment, its flatness the next. She pulled the stopper out and held the vial under her nose. The sandalwood fragrance was stale, the liquid a sickly yellowish brown. Savita remembered receiving it the morning after their wedding. Jaginder had driven
them to Colaba Causeway for lunch. In the car on the way there, as Savita sat stiffly in the front seat, Jaginder had shifted the gears and rested his hand upon her leg, touching her for the first time. It was an affectionate gesture, one that had brought a giggle to her lips. And then after lunch, Jaginder had proffered the crystal vial in a silk bag. My favorite scent, he said, his voice a rumbling purr. I would like to smell it on you tonight.
Savita carefully placed the vial back in its place, the first one in a line of them that marched across her vanity table, each one a precious memory, a possibility, a building block of her Number-One-First-Class-Life. She scanned the bottles, fingering them for the briefest of moments, allowing their fragrances to envelop her in a bouquet of nostalgia. The weeks after her wedding floated by in a cloud of Rose attar, the scent of love. Aphrodisiacal Amberi attar had been her loyal companion afterward, reducing Jaginder to an animalistic state during their lovemaking. When she first became pregnant with Nimish, Maji had given Savita musky Mitti attar distilled from the sacred earth at the Ganges River for the rebirth of life. And after her daughter died, Kuntal dutifully rubbed Shamana attar onto Savita’s motionless body for her spiritual protection. On and on, Savita touched each crystal: Gul Hina attar for balance, Champa for purification, Agarwood for meditation, and White Lotus for enlightenment. And her favorite. Saffron attar, embodiment of Lakshmi—goddess of wealth and prosperity— the fragrance itself emitting a striking, golden glow.
She struggled now with an urge to refill each of her vials with water, to thwart Maji’s plan and keep her ghostly daughter with her.
“Where are you?” she whispered, gazing around the room. “ Come,” she pleaded, “come to me so I can save you.”
Nothing happened.
“Mummy,” Nimish knocked on the door again. “Do you need anything?”
Darling Nimi, Savita thought, my darling son. “Nothing, beta, you go now.”
Savita sat motionless at her vanity, weighing the consequences of disobeying her husband and mother-in-law. Who would she be if she were not Mrs. Mittal, lovely wife of Mr. Jaginder Mittal of Mittal Shipbreaking Enterprises? How could she even consider going against Maji’s decision? Despite Savita’s entreaties, her daughter had not come back to her, had not even shown her face, choosing instead to make herself visible to Pinky and Parvati. Of all people, my undeserving niece and the maid! A surge of jealousy gripped at her.
Haunting Bombay Page 28