by Anita Nair
When Gowda prowled his way through the city on the Bullet, its distinct thump, the Bullet sound, resounded through his very being, flooding him with power, strength and with the unassailable knowledge that this was who he was: rugged, unrestrained and not afraid to go forth.
Her thighs brushed against his knees as she found her way to her place two seats away from his. His eyes trailed her. Even in the darkness of the movie theatre, she knew. A frisson of excitement. A heartbeat that slipped. All her womanly instincts told her that a pair of eyes was following her, fondling her … Bhuvana smiled her secret smile of knowing.
She sat in the almost straight-backed theatre seat and placed her hands on the wooden armrests. A musty smell suffused the theatre and the dialogues were muffled as they emerged from the speakers. But no one would complain. The people who patronized Kalinga theatre would continue to come there even if the place smelt like a urinal in a public bus stand. Such was its pull.
The theatre was only half full. Mostly men, with a few women randomly scattered. She pulled the dupatta around her neck and adjusted it so that it fell over her right shoulder, covering her breasts and revealing a bit of her hair so her profile would be that much more striking. On her face was a half smile. She knew she looked like the singer in the Ravi Varma painting. Not the one in the centre, holding the tanpura, but the woman at the far left: mysterious, alluring, with an enigmatic expression in her eyes.
Monday had been a disaster. She had been so hopeful when she set out that evening. But it had all gone horribly wrong and Akka’s disapproval had dogged her every step home and as she wiped her face clean of make-up.
Akka watched as Bhuvana faded out and was replaced by a man in the mirror.
‘I suggest you don’t go out for a few weeks,’ she said.
It was the man who nodded, pretending to agree.
‘You really can’t take chances like this,’ Akka added.
He nodded again. It was best to let Akka believe that Bhuvana wasn’t going to emerge for a few days.
Akka would be furious if she knew Bhuvana had slipped out again. She bit on the fleshy pad of her thumb to stop the giggle from emerging. Bhuvana had a mind of her own. And Bhuvana did exactly what she wanted.
She touched her earlobe. It was a new earring with rubies in it. She missed the pearl earrings. But she had lost one of the pair. Perhaps in that scuffle in the alley or somewhere else. Or it may have fallen off on its own. The hook hadn’t been long enough to take the weight of the pearl. She would have that earring replicated. To feel again the cool touch of the pearl against her skin when she moved her head. She held her head pertly, seeing in her mind how it would be when her pearl earring adorned her ears again.
She gave him fifteen minutes. It was a low-budget flesh flick. The plot seldom changed. The horny sister-in-law. The desperate housewife. The untouched schoolgirl. The film pandered to the average fantasy of the average Indian man. If you wait your turn, everything you want will come to you. The epics taught you this, so did the movie changes at Kalinga theatre.
In fifteen minutes, the bits would start appearing. Inserts of hard porn. When the first bit came on, she stared at the screen in disgust. How could these louts here be turned on by this? The mechanical sucking and fucking; the moaning, groaning and slurping … her stomach turned.
All around her, as if on cue, the louts had begun their groping and fumbling. What was she doing here, she thought as she saw the man across the aisle fumble at the crotch of the man sitting next to him. They were strangers. She knew that. They had walked in separately along with her. Bloody homo cocksuckers.
Two nights ago the goddess had appeared in her dream and said it was time to begin. Friday was assigned as the chosen day when she would have to wait for the goddess’s call and follow instructions on where to go. No more stepping out on other days of the week, the goddess had warned, that doesn’t seem to have the desired effect. For the rest, listen to your inner voice, she had said.
But when the goddess spoke to her, she had to heed what was asked of her. This was where the goddess had asked her to go. And so she had slipped out of the house and brought herself here.
But this theatre that seemed to be filled with rutting animals, why had the goddess sent her here?
As she rose and walked past the row of seats, a hand pulled her back. ‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked. ‘Where are you going?’
A bird rose within her chest. A fluttering of wings in her ears. The tang of an expensive aftershave. Her mouth went dry.
‘I…’ she stuttered.
‘Don’t go, please,’ he said.
The plea in his voice, the softness of his skin, held her back. As she gazed into his eyes, she knew why the goddess had led her to Kalinga theatre. For it is in a pond of black mud that the lotus blooms.
SATURDAY, 6 AUGUST
Gowda woke up to the insistent ringing of the doorbell. He shoved his feet into a pair of slippers and walked to the door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He glanced at the clock. Quarter to six. Which bastard was it? Waking him up at this unearthly hour?
Roshan stood on the veranda, punching keys on his mobile. Gowda frowned. ‘What are you doing here? And can’t you let go of that bloody phone for once!’
‘Wow! When did you get that done?’
Roshan’s eyes lit on Gowda’s tattoo.
Gowda looked at his arm self-consciously. He had worn a sleeveless vest to bed. ‘Er … some months ago…’
‘But why didn’t you tell Mummy or me? Man, I can’t believe my father’s got a biker tattoo done. Cool!’
Roshan grinned at his father and walked past him. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked, his eyes taking in the fastidiously clean living room.
‘Are you on a fact-finding mission for your mother? Well, you can tell her that I was frolicking with half a dozen … Forget it. Do you want some tea?’
The boy nodded as he dropped into the sofa and settled his feet on the coffee table. Gowda opened his mouth to tell him to get his fucking feet off the table and then held himself back. This was his son. He had as much right to be here as he himself did.
As he spooned the tea dust into the boiling water, Gowda was stricken by a thought. Was this what the police force did even to ordinary nondescript men? Turn them into tyrants zealously guarding their fiefdom with abuse and violence.
Gowda was quiet as he sipped his tea. In a span of fifteen minutes, Roshan had turned the order of the room into chaos. His rucksack lay on the floor, its contents spilling out. His sneakers and a pair of balled-up socks were by the door. The magazines on the table were strewn and Roshan’s jacket sat in a heap on a chair. The boy was rifling through the stack of CDs and had it all messed up.
‘What’s … this?’ Gowda began, then held himself back. What was with him? Was he turning into an old woman? Soon he would be ironing his newspaper…
The dog, yes the dog, he would have to get the dog. That would teach him to ease up.
‘Yes, Appa?’ Roshan looked up. ‘You were saying something.’
Gowda ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘Nothing,’ he said, feeling a forgotten streak of gentleness, or was it tenderness, as his fingers slid through his son’s hair.
‘Shanthi will be here by seven. Tell her what you would like for breakfast. She’s a good cook.’
Roshan looked at him curiously. ‘I know, Appa. I used to live here,’ he said, smiling.
‘Yes, you did,’ Gowda said in a quiet sort of voice. ‘I’m going back to bed. You should too.’
Roshan nodded as he pulled out the CD and inserted another one.
Gowda couldn’t sleep. Roshan’s every step boomed in his ears. He could hear the boy shuffling his feet … then a dull thud as the rucksack hit the bed … buttons snapped, the screech of the zip on his fly … a sigh, a tuneless humming, the stream of urine as it hit the toilet bowl … was the boy actually making a zigzag as he peed? … The rumbling of his stomach at the lack of food … air travelling through the no
strils into the trachea down into the thoracic cavity, and the rise and fall of the diaphragm, the swelling and diminishing of the lungs as the alveoli gathered each breath … I can’t be hearing this. It’s all in my imagination.
Or was it, a discomfiting thought rose to the surface of his mind, that he resented the intrusion? The sharing of space even if it was his son.
Gowda pulled the sheet over his head.
How long would the boy stay?
He groaned as he thought he heard Roshan shut his eyes as he fell asleep.
No, no, I must remember he’s my son and I his father. I can’t resent his being here. What’s wrong with me?
Gowda was reading through Samuel the photographer’s statement when Mohammed called.
‘I hope I am not disturbing you, sir.’
‘No, Mohammed, tell me. I know you wouldn’t call without a reason,’ Gowda said as his eyes stalled on a line. A Scorpio with Tamil Nadu registration reversed and drove away as I stopped.
‘The mortuary attendant gave me a small package. He said it came from the hospital. Liaquat’s possessions, or what’s left of it. There is a flat little gold leaf that he wore on a thread around his … lower waist. It was a love token from Razak. And there is a pearl earring. A rather large pearl. It looks expensive. It made me wonder what Liaquat had been up to.’
‘I’ll call you in about an hour. Will you bring it to Jeweller Street? That’s not too far from where you are…’ Gowda said, thumbing through his phone book to call a jeweller acquaintance.
Gowda watched Narayan Rao’s face as he wiped the pearl with a soft cloth and examined it. It reminded him of his mother and their trips to the vegetable shop when he was a boy. Her eyes would narrow and flare in turns, her mouth would purse into a line as she hefted the brinjal and snapped the tail off a runner bean. Look, I know exactly what I am doing, that’s what it was all about. It hit Gowda how much he missed her and how little he thought about her any more…
‘It is the real thing, a South Sea pearl.’
‘How do you know it’s real?’ It puzzled Gowda, this secret sense that jewellers and women possessed to distinguish the fake from the real, the ripeness of mangoes and the age of gold and ridge gourds…
‘You said it was in a fire. It had burn marks on it which went away when I rubbed it with a cloth. If you rub it against your teeth, you’ll feel it’s gritty. A fake one would be smooth,’ the jeweller said, offering him the pearl.
Gowda looked at it for a moment and put it into a pouch. God knows how many places it had been rubbed against. He most certainly wasn’t going to put it in his mouth.
‘One of this size must have cost at least eight thousand rupees. Add to that the gold of the chain and hook. About four thousand. Altogether, with the making charge, about twenty-five thousand rupees at least for a pair,’ the jeweller said as Gowda rose.
Gowda stared. ‘That expensive!’
Narayan Rao nodded. ‘Not too many people would spend that kind of money on pearls. Resale value is almost nil, you see. And the workmanship is unusual. I think it’s been copied from an antique design. See how the pearl has been fitted here.’ The jeweller pointed to a detail.
Gowda grunted, more for effect. He could spot no difference between this one and the forty others on display in the shop. ‘Would you be able to tell who made it and if it was made here in Bangalore?’ Gowda asked carefully, not wanting to give anything away.
‘I could ask around. Better still, I’ll ask my goldsmith. He knows everyone here in Jeweller Street and beyond.’ Narayan Rao smiled.
Gowda put the pouch back on the velvet tray. The jeweller took the pearl earring out and held it to the light. ‘She is a beauty.’
As he put the earring back into the pouch, Narayan Rao said, ‘If you put a real pearl in a glass of water and hold it up on a night when there is a full moon, it will reflect the moon. Pearls look best in moonlight. Did you know?’ The jeweller stroked the pearl through the pouch with the tip of his finger as if it were a woman’s cheek. ‘On a full moon night, such pearls in a woman’s ears would turn even an ugly crone into an apsara.’
Gowda’s mobile burst into song. It was Santosh.
‘Sir, where are you? The ACP’s been calling for you. And there is a package that’s come for you from Inspector Ashok. And—’
Gowda cut the call with a brusque, ‘I’ll call you back.’
Pieces of a jigsaw heaped around him: Liaquat. A pearl earring. Chicken Razak, known defaulter and current jailbird. An SUV with a Tamil Nadu number plate. A middle-aged pharmacist. And the only connecting link was a string. A string coated with fine glass dust.
Where did it all lead to?
It was a narrow street intersected on either side by two main thoroughfares: Seppings Road on one side and OPH road on the other.
Once, it had been a slum strewn with shops that dealt in scrap. The real gujri was Stephens Square, but this had become a gujri of the gujri. They called it Gujri Gunta – the second-hand hole. Gujri Gunta dealt in everything from nuts and bolts to automobile spare parts to old newspapers and other raddi – plastic bottles, dented aluminium vessels, broken flashlights.
Here and there, on the street, were doorways. Not many knew what lay behind them. Narrow corridors opening into small square courtyards, around which were a warren of two-room tenements. The people living there had learnt to make do. Clotheslines were strung in the courtyard and there were a couple of brick stoves, so each household could make its own hot water to take to the two bathrooms that had to serve the entire populace of eight households. When it rained, the road turned into a stream of fast-flowing dirty brown water in which garbage floated. To open the main door of the house was dangerous then. There was no knowing what would float in. An old tyre or a single chappal or a dead bandicoot.
Then, in the late 1990s, the cleansing began. The slums were demolished overnight and the riffraff removed. The character of the street changed. One side of the street became a line of tenement shops that had nothing to do with scrap. A tyre retreading shop, a warehouse, a welding unit, a carpenter, a teashop, a rice wholesaler. The other side became houses. But the name stayed Gujri Gunta and it was here that Corporator Ravikumar had decided to build himself the home of his dreams.
The corporator’s eyes followed the man’s as they darted around his house.
He saw the man taking in the marble floors, the tinkling fountain, the gargantuan chandelier, the gilt-edged mirrors. He saw his gaze wander through the open door of the room that was located to the left of the courtyard, the heavy swag of silk that draped its windows, the leather sofas, the glass-topped coffee table and the gigantic brass lamp – the trappings of a man who has money and knows how to make more of it.
He sensed the man assessing the opulence, the grandeur. It was precisely the reaction he had hoped to elicit when he built the house. Right from the compound wall which stood eight feet high with shards of glass embedded on the top and two lines of barbed wire thereafter, to the sweeping curve of steps that led to the main door and an enclosed veranda that ran the breadth of the building. Every aspect of the house had a reason for being the way it was.
Both sides of the staircase were flanked by two wings – house within house, each independent with its own private entrances and kitchen. No one needed to know who came and went at either end.
The staircase was at the end of an imposing courtyard, one end of which was occupied by a lone throne-like chair. It was here the corporator received his guests.
A waterfall trickled merrily in one corner, into a pool where fish swam in circles. Sometimes, in the middle of a discussion, the corporator would rise from his chair and take a handful of fish food to scatter into the pond. He would stand there watching his fish feed while the discussion trembled and hung precariously in midair.
Upstairs was the corporator’s private domain. Half of it was his personal space. The other section was his office. A long hall that could seat two hundred people if requ
ired. Stacked against the wall of the office room, as it was called, were a row of folding steel chairs. Anyone who came in would have to unfold a chair and make a seat for himself if asked to sit down. It immediately put the person at a disadvantage.
Right now, all that the room held was a chair and a table with a sea of phones on it. None of the phones except the black and red ones worked. The rest were mute witnesses to the corporator’s dealings. The office room too had its private staircase so that people could come and go without entering the main house.
He saw the man’s eyes fix on Tiger.
The corporator reached across and stroked Tiger’s head. The dog turned its head and licked his fingers. The man’s eyes almost popped out as the corporator hefted the gold chain around the dog’s neck. A flat chain almost an inch wide.
‘It’s not gold, if that’s what you are thinking. It’s just gold-plated,’ the corporator said.
The man didn’t speak.
The corporator continued to stroke the dog’s head absentmindedly. ‘I am only a corporator. Do you know there are one hundred and ninety-eight wards in Bangalore and I am corporator of only one … So don’t start assuming things about me! You have to realize that I am your representative. A simple man who has simple tastes. A man of the people.’
The corporator’s expression dared the man to contradict him with word or gesture. The man bowed his head and murmured, ‘I know, Anna. Which is why I am here. You are one of us. Only you will be able to help me.’
The corporator had a name but no one called him by it. He was anna. Big brother. The omnipotent, omnipresent ruler of the ward he had claimed for his own. He was anna to his siblings and henchmen. And he was anna to the people who had voted for him and to the supplicants who sought him out with pleading eyes and open palms. What need for a name then?