A Cut-Like Wound

by Anita Nair

Santosh walked to the end of the road, deep in thought. His bike was parked in a by-lane.

  Where was Gowda? There hadn’t been a single call from him in the last one hour.

  Gowda sat across from Urmila, sipping a mocktail in the piazza. He looked around him with interest. When she had mentioned that they could meet at UB City, he hadn’t objected or suggested another venue. It was best they meet in a public place and no one from Gowda’s world was likely to go to UB City. At least, not on a Friday evening.

  ‘I’ll be in the piazza,’ Urmila had said on the phone.

  ‘The what? Did you say pizza?’ Gowda had waggled a finger in his ear.

  ‘No, you nut,’ Urmila had giggled. They were nineteen all over again. ‘The piazza.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It just means an open square… in Italian,’ she said.

  ‘Fine, I’ll see you in pizza piazza whatever…’

  And so here they were in the piazza, Urmila in a short white kurta and blue harem pants and wearing a strangely familiar-looking turquoise-blue bead necklace.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Urmila asked.

  Gowda took a large sip of his Coco Colada. ‘It would be better if there was a shot of white rum in it. This is plain pineapple juice.’

  ‘I did ask you if you wanted a glass of white wine.’

  ‘I can’t drink while I am on duty,’ he said.

  She stirred her drink and peered at him. ‘So you think this is duty?’

  He looked away. Oh no, there she went again.

  ‘Look, Urmila,’ he said, ‘I said I am still on police duty.’

  She giggled. ‘You are so easy to rile, Borei. I am just pulling your leg. Come on, lighten up. It’s such a lovely evening!’

  ‘It is,’ Gowda said quietly. He should be enjoying this little sojourn into posh life. Lean back in his chair and watch the world pass by. Only, his world wasn’t this and he couldn’t stop wondering what Santosh and Gajendra had discovered during the course of their surveillance.

  ‘Am I seriously out of shape?’ he asked suddenly.

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Nothing a few sessions at the gym won’t sort out… and less of that chilli chicken and rum.’

  Gowda sighed deeply.

  ‘Come on,’ Urmila said, standing up. ‘I want to show you something. Leave that drink… you can have a proper one after seven p.m. You go off duty then, don’t you?’

  Gowda rose and walked with Urmila. He felt a few curious glances come their way. Urmila fitted in here amidst all the foreigners and upwardly mobile people. He stuck out. Then as now, he knew that no matter what Urmila claimed, they didn’t belong together.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you remember this?’ she said, tapping the bead necklace around her neck. ‘You brought this for me from Delhi when you went for the intercollegiate games. All those years ago, Borei. I never bought you a thing. Ever. So, now it’s my turn.’

  Gowda swallowed. They were standing outside the Montblanc showroom.

  ‘But this is silly. It was so long ago and a trifle. I can’t accept this,’ Gowda growled. A Montblanc pen! If someone saw him with it, they would think he was on the take.

  ‘But you collect pens, Borei!’ Urmila tugged at his elbow.

  ‘Not expensive pens,’ Gowda said, pulling back. ‘And I don’t really collect in that sense.’

  ‘Don’t lie, Borei. Your son said you do. And Santosh said the one thing you do like is pens.’

  ‘All rubbish.’

  Her face fell. She squared her shoulders and turned on him furiously. ‘Why won’t you let me buy you a pen? What’s the big deal? Or, are you worried that if you take something from me, you will be beholden?’

  His phone rang. Gowda grabbed it with the fervour of a drowning man clutching at anything he can find. ‘Yes, Santosh, tell me,’ he said. He saw Urmila edge closer.

  ‘Sir, nothing to report yet. The corporator and his brother left at about four forty-five p.m. Should we continue the surveillance now that they have gone?’ Santosh’s voice emerged tinny, flat and clearly audible.

  ‘No, let the surveillance continue. Are you there?’

  ‘No, I am at the commissioner’s office. I thought I’ll take a look at the SCRB and go back by 6.30.’

  Gowda saw Urmila’s eyes sparkle with interest. He glanced at his watch. ‘Give me a call when you get there.’

  ‘What’s SCRB?’ Urmila asked.

  ‘State Crime Record Bureau,’ Gowda said, slipping the phone into his pocket. He shoved his fists into his pockets and took a deep breath. He cleared his throat.

  ‘I need to go, Urmila. I am in the middle of a case. I’ll call you,’ he said firmly.

  For a while he had thought he would have to abandon the evening’s plan. He couldn’t be seen going into the house. Then Bhuvana, or was it the goddess, sometimes they sounded alike, had whispered in his ear: Remember the other gate.

  He had slipped back into the house by the side gate. Whoever was watching them hadn’t thought of posting a man there.

  ‘Do you think I look all right?’ she asked.

  ‘You look beautiful.’ Akka smiled. ‘What’s with you today? I’ve never seen you like this. All fidgety and restless.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said and leaned back in the chair. Then she looked at the elderly eunuch and said softly, ‘Akka, I have to go out in a little while.’

  Akka frowned. ‘It’s just a little past seven … are you out of your mind?’

  She shook her head. ‘You think I don’t know that? But I have to be somewhere by eight. It’s important.’

  The elderly eunuch frowned. ‘What’s going on? What are you up to?’

  She tossed her head. ‘Nothing’s going on. Can’t I go out on my own?’

  ‘It’s not safe…’

  ‘I’ll be careful. One hour is all I need. One hour and I’ll be back,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ the elderly eunuch said.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. But to a point. After that I have to go alone. I’ll meet you at the Muthayalamma temple in one hour and we can return together.’

  Santosh sat up as he saw two women leave the corporator’s house. He narrowed his eyes to see better. The tall one was definitely a eunuch. Of the other he wasn’t so sure. She looked like a real woman.

  Santosh slapped a fifty-rupee note on the table and slid out of the teashop. ‘I owe you only thirty-four rupees, but I don’t have time to collect the change. I’ll be back,’ he told the bemused teashop owner as he hurried down the steps into the street.

  Ahead of him, the eunuch and the young woman hurried towards Seppings Road. If they took an autorickshaw, he would be stuck. His bike was parked elsewhere. But he could follow them on foot if they continued to walk.

  The eunuch paused and put her hand on her companion’s shoulder, speaking earnestly. But the young woman seemed unwilling to listen. Was the eunuch a pimp? Santosh wondered. Was that what it was all about? Using the young woman to trap men and kill them to steal their possessions? He dismissed the thought almost instantly. That had been Gowda’s first theory, but he seemed to have changed his mind.

  Kothandaraman, the pharmacist, had been found with all his jewellery and money on him. The murder had a more sinister angle, Gowda had said.

  Santosh waited in the shadows to see which way they would go. He still wasn’t familiar with many parts of Bangalore, but he would worry about that later. For now, he would tail them and see where they led him to. At a temple on Seppings Road, the eunuch and the woman paused again. Once again, it seemed to Santosh that the eunuch was pleading with the young woman, who just patted her hand and walked on.

  Santosh sighed with relief when the eunuch entered the temple. He crossed the road and positioned himself by a shop and prepared to wait.

  Gowda stared unseeingly at the TV. A tight close-up of a shrub, the narrator’s drone, but Gowda couldn’t focus on the life and times o
f Walking Stick Insect.

  Last week, when Roshan was home, he had wanted him to watch something called CSI. ‘It’s all about how crime scene investigation is done in America, Appa,’ Roshan had said, his eyes not straying for a moment from the screen as men and women worked with equipment that looked more space-labish than forensic. Do our forensic people even know about these techniques? Gowda wondered.

  Gowda watched for a bit and then yawned.

  ‘Appa, don’t tell me you are bored,’ Roshan had said.

  ‘You don’t really think all of this is true, do you?’ Gowda asked, standing up.

  ‘Of course it is!’

  Just then, as if to vouch for Roshan’s statute of faith, a CSI info bit came on: Did you know that Crime Scene Investigation has been marked as a problem for real-life crimes? It was dubbed as the ‘CSI Effect’ or ‘CSI Syndrome’ for raising the expectations from forensic science.

  Gowda smirked.

  ‘It’s only because it’s so realistic that criminals know what to do now,’ Roshan defended his favourite TV show. Gowda looked down at his son and marvelled at his naivety.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But you know something, we don’t use the yellow tape to cordon off the crime scene area here, nor do we even put on gloves at times; we may not have such sophisticated equipment or methodology, our policemen are out of shape and mostly lazy, but the percentage of cases solved in India is far higher than in the West.’

  ‘That’s what you claim,’ Roshan said, as the credits came on.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Gowda said, reclaiming the remote and switching channels. He paused as a programme on dolphins came on. Gowda dropped back into his chair.

  Roshan stood up. ‘I’m off to bed,’ he said.

  Gowda liked watching the nature programmes. He enjoyed picking up little nuggets of information; interesting facts about the world that these programmes were filled with. There were no untidy emotions to deal with; no chance word or thought that led his mind down alleys he wished to avoid. Nature was what you saw and knew. These shows merely enhanced knowledge.

  ‘I really don’t understand why you find these shows on animals and insects so fascinating,’ Roshan called out from the door.

  ‘Details, my boy, details and not drama. That’s what gets me,’ he said.

  Tonight, too, it was a detail that niggled at him. He knew he ought to remember it, but it just wouldn’t rise to the surface of his mind.

  The case worried him more than any case had done in a long while. There was no such thing as a perfect murder, but it became one when no one was looking for the murderer. Gowda was certain that all four homicides, including Liaquat’s, had been perpetrated by the same person. A serial murderer was at large. No one seemed to realize that. No one seemed to care. What would it take for things to hot up? The death of someone related to someone important? On his own, with just Santosh and Gajendra, he wouldn’t get very far. What this needed was a full-scale investigation and a set of IOs who would use paranoia as a device, who would leave nothing unturned and examine every crevice and open end.

  Gowda didn’t think ACP Vidyaprasad was inclined to work this case. He would rather have Gowda in charge of the Evangelist meeting that was fixed for a week from now. ‘Leave all this criminal investigation to the CCB. That’s what they are there for,’ he had admonished Gowda earlier that day.

  DCP Mirza had made sure that ACP Vidyaprasad’s leave was cancelled and the ACP was a furious man seeking to vent his ire on everything that came his way, most of all Inspector Gowda.

  In the background, the narrator in that monotone so distinctive of nature programme voiceovers intoned: In nature, to stand out is good only if one is a) poisonous or b) a predator. And even if a predator, blending in helps when stalking prey. The stick insect is a master of camouflage, giving itself away only when it moves. No wonder its name Phasmatodea is derived from the Greek phama, meaning phantom or apparition.

  Gowda watched the stick insect as it moved away from the habitat it had chosen to camouflage in. That was the key, he thought.

  This predator too would have to be forced to make a move.

  Her heart hammered in her chest. This was the first time she was seeing him after that first night. They had talked every night for a week now. She thought she knew everything there was to know about him. The cold, bare facts. Height, weight, education, family, his favourite colour, the vegetable he hated, his dog’s name, the number of rooms in his family home, but when they met, he would be more than an assemblage of detail. He would be Sanjay. Her Sanju, as he said he was.

  The autorickshaw spluttered to a halt near Komala Refreshments on Wheeler Road. He was seated on his bike outside the restaurant.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he said.

  She smiled and moved into the shadows. Street lamps had a merciless eye, she knew. ‘There was some extra work at office, so I had to stay back,’ she said.

  He smiled at the way she held herself back. The shy glance, the half smile, the shrinking… you hardly saw girls like her any more, he thought with infinite tenderness. Especially in Bangalore. Some of the girls he had seen on the street set his teeth on edge. The deep, deep necklines with half the breasts visible, the short skirts, the low-waisted jeans so when they sat on a chair or on a bike, the underwear could be seen. How could parents let their girls wander the streets dressed like that?

  But Bhuvana, his Bhuvana, was not one of those sluts. Bhuvana was the kind of girl he knew his sisters to be. Shy, docile and traditional.

  ‘I can’t stay very long,’ she said.

  ‘Why? Chikka master keeping tabs on you?’ Sanjay murmured.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled and looked at her watch.

  ‘I have to be back at my hostel by nine thirty.’

  ‘Let’s go in,’ he said.

  ‘No, not here,’ she said quickly. ‘Someone Chikka knows may see us. On the other side is another restaurant. Let’s go there.’

  ‘How do you know about the other place?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Chikka told me about it. He said he was going to take me there as a treat.’

  He nodded and pushed the bike off its stand. As they turned the corner, he asked, ‘Have you had anything at all after lunch?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Katthe,’ he whispered. ‘You shouldn’t go hungry this long.’

  She smiled. He had called her a donkey. But only if there was great feeling could there be such familiarity. ‘I couldn’t eat even if I wanted to,’ she murmured.

  ‘Why? Are you on some silly fast?’ he said as he climbed the staircase.

  ‘How could I eat when I knew I was going to see you?’ she said quietly.

  Sanjay smiled at her. He hummed a popular Kannada song, replacing the word Geetha with Bhuvana. ‘Sanju mattu Bhuvana, serebeku antha, baredaagide indhu Brahmanu…’

  Bhuvana hid her smile. That Sanju and Bhuvana should belong to each other had been ordained by Brahma the creator himself…

  Sanjay pushed open the restaurant doors and looked at the low lights and the little pools of intimate space it created. This place would certainly be more expensive than Komala Refreshments. But perhaps he could find a corner and hold her hand without shocking her out of her wits.

  In the cover of darkness, girls even as demure as Bhuvana lost some of their timidity. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

  She drank in his smile hungrily. Her heart felt as if it would explode with the weight of the love she felt for him.

  He waited for her to slide into the bottle-green velvet sofa set against the wall. Instead of sitting across the table, he slid in beside her. She shrank into herself. He smiled at her tenderly and reached for her hand. ‘Relax,’ he murmured. ‘I am not going to do anything to you even though…’

  ‘Even though what?’ she asked.

  ‘Even though I want to… badly. Kiss you from head to toe … mmuwa mmuwa… till you ask me to stop.’

  She
smiled and hid her face in her hands. ‘Oh Sanju,’ she said, peering at him through a crack between her fingers.

  He was a young man. Not older than twenty-six or twenty-seven. A nondescript young man working in a restaurant on the Outer Ring Road near Marathahalli, as a steward. The hours were long and the pay wasn’t very good, but it was a place to start and he had grabbed his chance when a friend who supplied bottled water to the restaurant told him about it. ‘Once you have some experience, I’ll find you a place in a star hotel,’ the friend had said. ‘Or in the housekeeping section of one of the IT companies.’

  Mohan liked his life the way it was just then. He had fled his little village near Kannur in Kerala, knowing that to live there was to be in a prison, trapped between his family’s expectations and social compulsions. But in the anonymity of a big city like Bangalore, he was his own man and he could be anyone or anything. Free to wear the jeans that clung to his crotch like a second skin. Free to flirt with his customers. Free to find solace in the arms of whoever he chose. He liked them both: men and women. Different contours, different pleasures. ‘You are just greedy,’ a middle-aged schoolteacher with gaps in his teeth and a long curling tongue had told him a week ago. ‘You want it all.’

  Mohan smiled. He wanted it all. But he was also careful to not take any risks. He waited for them to come to him. He looked down at the man kneeling before him. The man had just given him one of the best blowjobs of his life and would pay him, too, for pleasuring him. ‘That’s why you like me so much,’ he retorted.

  But that evening, Mohan made a mistake. A customer at table number 8 had flirted with him even as he walked in. Darting glances his way, leaning forward as he ordered so his face was almost in Mohan’s crotch. Calling him back to the table again and again. Chatting him up. What was he to make of it? Mohan liked what he saw; he was flattered by the obvious attention. When he brought the bill, he let his fingers slide over the customer’s. And the man had sprung up from his table screaming, ‘Get away from me, you bloody homo!’

  Mohan had stood stricken.

  The man flung the bill and its faux leather folder to the ground. He reached across and with one angry move swept the plate, dishes, cutlery, glass, water jug and the bud vase with a wilting-at-the-edge rosebud in it off the tablecloth. Over the din of smashing crockery, he hollered, ‘Is this a restaurant or a pick-up joint?’