by Anita Nair
She stared at her feet where the blob of saliva had come to rest. She heard his footsteps as he hurried from the alley. She was nothing. She was filth. She was scum. She had been so happy this evening and then…
She raised her eyes and saw the mocking expression on the other man’s face. If only this fucking cocksucker hadn’t followed her. If only … As the rage gathered in her, she forgot all about who she was.
She hurled herself forward and sank her fist into the fool’s belly. He bent over double with the impact, the pain, the breath knocked out of him, and as he tried to find his feet, his hands flailed in the air, grabbing for anything they could find to support him. It was her loosely woven plait of hair that he clutched at. The wig came away in his hand.
His eyes widened as he saw who stood before him. The face, even under all the layers of make-up, was one he recognized. Through pain and disbelief, he felt a grin stretch his lips. ‘I don’t believe this … you … it’s you…’
She flicked the small switchblade she kept in her bra and held it to his throat. ‘Quiet,’ she said coldly.
He stared at her, suddenly afraid. ‘Let me go.’ He fell to his knees. ‘I won’t tell anyone … I promise by everything I hold precious. I won’t. You must believe me … please.’
She hummed under her breath as she moved behind him, still holding the knife to his throat. He heard the snap of a bag open and shut. What was she doing?
Then the steel edge of the blade no longer pressed against his throat. He relaxed his clenched muscles. But before he could turn his head to look at her, he felt something descend on the back of his head.
He felt his skull crack. He screamed. Through the blinding pain, he felt something tighten around his throat.
‘No, no,’ he whispered, trying to snap the string, and felt a million particles of glass pierce his hands. Flashes of light burnt his eyelids and hissing serpents filled his ears. He felt unable to resist any more.
‘Are you here?’Akka called out as she entered the mouth of the cul-de-sac. The elderly eunuch was shocked into silence by what she saw. The man on his knees and she standing behind him with her disguise in disarray. As Akka watched, the man crumpled to the floor. He hadn’t even felt the string cut the skin of his throat and press down into his jugular vein.
Akka saw her take a tissue from her bag and wipe her fingers clean. She threw it on his face. The line of blood on his throat grew with every beat of his heart.
Akka ran towards her.
She didn’t speak for a while.
‘He recognized me. I had no option but this…’ she said in an even voice.
Akka felt a chill seep into her. Who was this person who stood before her?
‘Anyway, he is just a lowlife. No one’s going to miss him. So don’t waste your emotion on him,’ she said, arranging her hair carefully. ‘Give me your mobile.’ She opened her palm out to Akka.
Akka handed it over silently and watched as she pressed a few keys.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’ve left a thing in the alley near Siddiq’s garage. Deal with it. No leftovers.’
Akka’s eyes darted to the man on the floor. But he was still alive…
‘Let’s go,’ she said, handing the phone back to Akka.
As they turned into the street ahead, she suddenly stopped. She turned and walked briskly back to where he lay on the ground. She bent over and peered at him for a moment. Then she stood up and kicked him on his face with the heel of her sandal. ‘Scum,’ she muttered as the pointed tip split the skin on his cheek.
11.42 p.m.
Samuel rubbed the cuff of his biking jacket across his eyes. He was tired and sleepy as he rode his bike home. It had begun to drizzle. A fine stinging rain. What kind of a life was this where a man had to ride thirty kilometres across the city in the middle of a wet night after a whole evening of watching models cavort in their underwear and society types toss free alcohol down their throats?
How they wooed him. All of them. The models, the hosts, the sponsors, the party goers, the gatecrashers; Sam here, Sam there, Sam this, Sam that … Sammy, Sammy … and then they would want to see the frames he had shot, what they looked like as they held their pert poses with pasted-on smiles …
It disgusted him, this job he did as a photographer of the society pages for the Bangalore Messenger. Some days at least. Most days it was just a job, and one he was good at. He knew how to capture the right poses and intersperse the familiar faces with new ones. And he knew who was who. So he aimed his camera at the butterflies, leaving the moths and caterpillars for the photographers from the rival papers.
‘You have the eye,’ his editor said. ‘You are good. You don’t miss a thing. That’s why the readers prefer our page three to the others’!’
This was still better than working for the news pages as he had once. Prowling outside the house where a child had been mauled and torn to death by a tiger during a visit to Bannerghatta National Park. Crowding at the gates of Golden Palms for a glimpse of a Bollywood actor when he arrived for his nuptials. Sneaking on a politician’s tryst with a TV actress. On the day he was asked to get an unusual shot of the grieving family of a former Miss India who had killed herself, he decided to make the move. It had shamed him that he had to prey on people’s vulnerabilities and privacy to fill space. He preferred to capture images of people pretending to have a good time rather than impinge on naked emotion.
Samuel thought of his bed longingly as he turned from the airport road into Sathanur Cross.
Another eighteen kilometres and he would be home. The wind had an edge to it. The fine drizzle had turned into a steady rain, but Samuel felt hot under his collar. He had had too much to drink. He shouldn’t have while he was on an assignment. Now Samuel felt his evening’s excess curdle in his gut and rise upwards as he rode down the desolate road. He pulled over to the side of the road, retching. From the corner of his eye, he saw a Scorpio with Tamil Nadu number plates drive away. But a fresh rush of vomit hurled itself up his throat, obliterating all thought…
He wiped his mouth with a piece of crumpled tissue he found in his pocket. Then he sat on the kerb, letting the rain wash over him. He hoped a Hoysala wouldn’t drive by. It would be a bloody nuisance to explain to the police that he’d had too much to drink and have to flash his press card for instant immunity from the breath analyser.
Then, through the rain, across the road in the eucalyptus grove, he saw a movement. A tongue of flame crawling. A flash of white at ground level. Samuel rubbed his eyes and stood up. Then he ran across the road, instinctively picking up his camera, a Nikon D700.
A man lay in the ditch at the edge of the grove. Or what was left of a man. From the charred mess of flesh and cloth emerged a low moan.
Samuel’s hands dropped to his side in horror. What had happened here? What should he do?
Unable to help himself, he raised the camera and clicked.
11.51 p.m.
The night made it seem less unreal. Nights are the same everywhere, he thought. Only up there in the skies, the stars are different.
For fifteen years he had lived in another hemisphere. Different constellations had watched over him, his destiny cast by unfamiliar stars. Michael Hunt, Anglo-Indian by birth, Australian by choice, leaned back in his Meru cab and wondered at the conjoining of two stars from two different hemispheres that had brought him back to Bangalore.
‘It’s much better by daylight,’ the cab driver said. ‘Bangalore is a very hi-tech city. Have you heard of Infosys? We have big IT companies – Wipro, Dell, IBM … and Kingfisher beer!’
Michael smiled. ‘I know,’ he said.
‘Your second visit?’ The cab driver saw his skin and assumed he was a foreigner. No touch of the tar brush for Michael, former inhabitant of Whitefield and Lingarajapuram.
‘I grew up here,’ he said quietly in English and then again in Kannada, ‘Nanu illi beldhidhuu.’
The cab driver gulped and peered at him curiously in the rea
r-view mirror. He opened his mouth to speak and then changed his mind. Michael knew his words had had the desired effect. He shut his eyes to still the conversation. It had begun raining. He would have liked to roll down the windows and feel the breeze bring in the rain. Would it feel the same? Or would the rain in Bangalore have changed too?
The cab turned off the airport road. The new airport road. He hadn’t been to this new airport ever and thought of the old one longingly. That had been more in tune with the India he had grown up in and remembered. Michael opened his eyes and sought familiar landmarks. He was certain that his friends and he had explored these small roads a long time ago. But he couldn’t recognize a thing.
‘Where does this lead to?’ he asked.
‘Kothanur, and then to Hennur, and from there to Outer Ring Road,’ the driver said. ‘If we go straight ahead, we can go into the city via Lingarajapuram. But we’ll take a left and continue towards Whitefield.’
Michael nodded. One day he would go to Lingarajapuram. One day, when he had summoned the strength for it. For now they would go to Whitefield, where his grandaunt’s house waited. A house he could sell or keep, or do with as he pleased. Michael felt a great weariness descend over him. At his age, he ought to be making retirement plans and not having to consider new possibilities in life. But Becky, childhood sweetheart, wife of twenty-three years, had slipped out of his life and all that was left were memories, remorse, sorrow, anger, and the looming question: Where do I begin?
He had done this once before, when he migrated to Australia at thirty-three. How could any man be expected to do it all over again? Where was he to find the energy, the drive, the need?
Up ahead in the distance, through the windshield, he saw a man step onto the road and wave his arms. The man’s arms moved furiously, seeking attention, calling for help…
‘It is dangerous to stop at this time of the night,’ the cab driver said.
Michael didn’t speak. The cab driver knew best. Suddenly he spotted the bike.
‘No, no … stop the car,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’
WEDNESDAY, 3 AUGUST
Borei Gowda peered at the general diary. In the time he had been away, the station must have been bustling. Two cases of burglary. A domestic squabble. An accidental drowning of a child. A homicide.
His head hurt. There was a pounding at the back of his head like a 4-stroke Royal Enfield engine. Only, this one had a faulty tippet setting. The dhuk-dhuk note increased by the minute and then suddenly became something else.
Gowda pressed the sides of his forehead with his fingers. Harder, harder, hoping the pressure on his temples would stem the pounding. Why had he drunk all that whisky last night? He should have stuck to his regular drink. Old Monk Rum with Coke and a twist of lime. With rum, no matter how much he drank, he never had a hangover. Whisky offered no such assurances the morning after.
He wished he could go back home and lie in a dark room. He wished his wife would sit by his side and massage Tiger Balm on his forehead with fingertips that were soft but sure. He wished she were the kind of wife whose silkiness of flesh he could turn and nuzzle his head into.
Gowda’s wife Mamtha lived in Hassan. He had organized her transfer there when they found a seat for their son in the DGA Medical College in Hassan a year ago. They had to pay five lakh rupees as capitation fee. This, despite the minister’s recommendation and a majority of Gowdas on the management committee. To leave Roshan there on his own wasn’t advisable, his wife had said. The boy had a predilection for getting into trouble. So Gowda called in yet another favour, and his wife was now the doctor at one of the ESI hospitals. Roshan lived with his mother and until he graduated, Gowda was going to have to be on his own, except when he could get away to visit them. Or, when Mamtha was inclined to take a few days off and come to Bangalore. But she was increasingly reluctant to do so, saying it bored her to stay at home doing nothing while Gowda was away all day. It was better if he came to Hassan, she insisted.
It was always hard coming back to a silent home after being with his family. By reaching much later than he had intended to, he had lost one more day of earned leave and had also failed to fit himself within the rhythm of a working day. If he had gone to the station house, it would have swept him into its coils and made sure that the minutes and seconds of that first day were accounted for. Pending files, briefings, bickering, paperwork, phone calls – it was only when a man had none of these to hinge his day to that he realized the worth of a working day.
Gowda had pottered around in his house from five in the evening, wondering what he ought to do. There was something disquieting about being at home early in the evening. He switched on the TV and channel-surfed. None of the shows held his interest. Nor did the pile of magazines on the coffee table. What did people do at this hour anyway?
So it had seemed like a good idea when Nagaraj called. ‘Two of my friends are in town and we are going out for dinner. Why don’t you join us?’
Gowda had hesitated. Then he thought of the long evening stretching ahead. In a couple of days he would settle down, but the first night was the worst. That was when loneliness gnawed at him with piranha teeth. If he stayed at home he would drink on his own. Drink himself senseless. This way he would drink less, he had decided.
‘God knows how long this place will be here,’ Nagaraj had laughed as they parked outside the new Nandhini restaurant near Kothanur.
The Outer Ring Road and some of the main thoroughfares in the city outskirts were speckled with places such as this. Supposedly restaurants that families might want to eat at but more often filled with groups of middle-aged men getting drunk to their eyeballs as they discussed politics, mistresses, real estate and religion.
Gowda had looked around him carelessly, taking in the nature of the custom. Nagaraj and his friends belonged here along with the little Japanese bridge that ran over a blue-tiled artificial stream, the cluster of gazebos, the low-wattage lighting, the potted palms, the gingham tablecloths already splotched with turmeric and grease stains, and the overriding smell of curry. What the fuck am I doing in a place like this? he had thought. It had ‘This Way to Alcoholics Anonymous’ written all over it. And yet, what else was there for him to do? For that matter, who was he to sneer at Nagaraj and his friends? Just because he knew better didn’t make him any different or superior.
Gowda reached across and rang the bell. One of the constables rushed in.
‘Bring me some tea,’ Gowda said, and as the man turned to go, he added, ‘and increase the speed of the fan. Is it hanging there as an ornament to look at? Who turned the regulator all the way down?’
‘I was on leave yesterday, sir,’ PC Byrappa mumbled. It was obvious Gowda was in one of his moods.
Gowda waved him away and sank his head into his hands. The constable’s shiftiness had reminded him of someone. Suddenly he knew. Roshan. The moment you asked the boy something, he would produce a disclaimer. I don’t know; I wasn’t there; no one told me…
The faulty 4-stroke engine pounding in Gowda’s head shifted to his temples and accelerated its rhythm.
Gowda didn’t know what to make of his son. The boy had alternated between surliness and an eagerness to please. Gowda hadn’t known how to be with him. Aloof father or buddy daddy. In the end he had been neither and chosen to behave as if he were a guest just visiting. There and not there. Hello, how are you? How is college? Have you seen any good movies?
Hard work, this parenting, he told himself as he stared at the stack of files on his table. And for what? The little fucker won’t even give me the time of the day when he’s a hotshot doctor somewhere. But he was a father and fathers can’t absolve themselves of their responsibilities even if they know what lies ahead.
Neither can you absolve yourself of what you need to do now, Inspector Gowda, he told himself as his eyes paused on the mazhar report on the homicide at Horamavu.
Gowda read through the case diary. The homicide had taken place almost two
weeks ago; in fact, on the very Friday night he left Bangalore. There seemed to be no obvious intent. There was evidence of sexual activity but somewhere between sex and that final placement of the victim on the back seat of the Tata Sierra, he had been bludgeoned and strangled to death.
The deceased was a middle-aged man who had owned a medium-sized pharmacy. Preliminary investigation had revealed that he had no business enemies or pressing debts, no illicit liaisons or association with any underworld dons. He was just an ordinary man who had probably sought sex outside his marital bed and had to pay for it with his life. In fact, the only extraordinary thing about his life may have been the manner in which he died.
Gowda tried to recreate the crime in his head. The pharmacist in the back seat with the woman. He is so busy getting a blow job that he doesn’t realize that another person has sneaked into the car through the hatch. A hammer or something similar is used to strike the pharmacist on his head. He is strangled quickly but just as they get ready to strip him of his possessions, they are interrupted and so the murderer and his accomplice flee the spot without taking anything.
The deceased had on his person Rs 10,000 in cash and an iPhone. He had been wearing a diamond ring, a four-sovereign gold chain and an expensive watch.
Gowda pressed the bell. SI Santosh walked in and saluted.
‘What is this manja thread reference to the ligature used?’ he asked in greeting, pretending not to notice that the man who stood before him was a perfect stranger.
‘Sir?’ The sub-inspector’s eyes widened.
‘You are SI Santosh, aren’t you?’ Gowda said, peering at the badge pinned on his chest. Thank god, this one was a man. With his predecessor, a woman inspector, Gowda had without thinking stared at her chest to read her name and felt her eyes blaze on him.