by Monabi Mitra
Bikram held the line faithfully. Tender notices to newspapers meant big money, so the man was a big shot. A big shot after small fry like me, but why? he thought.
The reporter returned to the phone. ‘I was right. He fancies himself to be a realtor, but actually began life as a two-timing crook who used our corrupt system to establish himself. The game is to buy up a more or less washed-out factory, pretend to pump in money for modernization and quietly sell off whatever assets remain there. There are a few brittle sheds in front and rows of high-rises cleverly hidden at the back, being sold for about twenty lakh rupees per flat . . . and there are thirty flats. Work out how much that comes to! In time the workers are laid off, the machinery is sold as scrap and the factory announces liquidation, while the land from the factory has been converted into a housing estate and your men and the local politician and the union leaders queue up at the bank. Fiendishly simple! Where does he fit into your murder?’
‘I don’t know. I have to find out.’
‘Who told you about him?’
Bikram answered evasively, ‘He wants me to meet him for information on Piloo. The question is, why me? He could have spoken to Toofan Kumar or the inspector general.’
‘Sounds promising. I’ll look forward to something hot from you after the meeting.’
‘I’m not going to meet him,’ said Bikram emphatically.
Ten minutes later the reporter was back on the phone.
‘Ahem, this is rather awkward but, well, beyond our professions we are old chums. I thought you’d like to know.’ The reporter sounded apologetic. ‘Of course, it’s your personal life, but, well, I dug around a bit more . . . This guy beds all the stars in town. Tell her to be careful.’
Feeling more distressed than he had in a long time, Bikram turned off the light.
* * *
Bishu lived in Fulia, a hundred and fifty kilometres away from Calcutta. It was an old town which the twenty-first century had passed by. His house stood next to an old dilapidated temple complex where cattle grazed contentedly and boys flew kites. At the back was a pond shrunk with weeds and scum and beyond that was a tumbledown cottage with a tin roof where the weavers worked, weaving cotton saris with fish and paisley borders that the Calcutta traders would sell for two thousand rupees in swanky city shops.
When news of Piloo Adhikary’s death reached him, Bishu had a fairly good idea of whom the police would hunt down first, so he picked up his charger and mobile phone, stuffed five hundred rupees into his pocket and disappeared. He drifted from hideout to hideout, biting his nails and waiting anxiously for the police to swoop down on his village.
Soon enough, a constable from the local police station slouched around to the house and asked for him in a bored voice, readily accepted his nephew’s excuse and shambled off. Bishu waited and waited, not knowing that Ashu Das had been tardy and Bikram had been unwell and that the Crime Branch had been at its incompetent best. Accordingly, no police team came from Calcutta.
Bishu’s five hundred rupees began to run low. Also, he worried constantly about his dogs. There was a pregnant German Spitz and a Labrador with a tumour. His nephew could deal with these for a few days but not indefinitely. So one evening, when the crickets buzzed in the bushes and the fireflies floated about the champak tree, Bishu slunk back home. He was picked up almost immediately by the local thana van. ‘Why did you kill your employer, you bastard?’ they screamed.
‘I didn’t do it,’ he protested.
‘It! So you know all about the murder. Pumped in five bullets, we were told.’
‘Believe me, I’m innocent. Let me be, please.’
‘Then why did you run away? Get in.’
‘Please don’t take me away, sir.’ Bishu folded his hands and felt his voice turn hoarse with fear. ‘My wife is expecting our first baby! Please sir, let me go.’
‘Move it,’ said the constable and pushed him towards another constable, who pushed him back. Though Bishu was too tired to pose any threat, they continued to push and drag him forward into the waiting jeep. At the last moment, before getting into the van, he found himself yelling out instructions to his nephew about the pregnant Spitz and the sick Labrador.
When he reached the police station he was pushed into the lock-up while the sub-inspectors wondered what to do with him.
‘Won’t keep him here, that’s for sure. It’s a murder case from the city. Take him away as soon as you can.’ The Fulia South Police Station officer sounded grumpy. The Crime Branch subinspector peered outside at the foggy October night and swore. ‘Three hours to get here, three hours to return, no lunch and little prospect of dinner before two in the morning.’
‘You can try the egg curry and rice from that shop. Twenty rupees a plate.’
‘Twenty! That’s too much. I’ll pay fifteen.’
‘You can’t try Calcutta-style policing here. If they want twenty, you pay them as much.’
Bishu stood hopelessly inside the lock-up and felt his stomach rumble. He hadn’t eaten anything that day except a scrap of biscuit that smelled of ammonia and a glass of sugary tea. He watched a mound of egg-potato curry and rice vanish into the mouths of the hungry sub-inspector and his two assistants.
After some time Bishu sighed and slipped down on the floor. All emotions had been deadened within him and he felt he had been wrung dry. They would torture him and extract a confession, for sure, and he would be jailed. His nephew might continue for some time, selling off the Spitz pups, if he could bring them round to being born, that is. But Bishu’s unborn child would not know him and his wife might marry again. It was his fault, for refusing to follow the family trade and become a sari weaver. He shut his eyes and felt a blackness and chill envelop him.
In half an hour the policemen were ready to take him away. A dark-blue Tata Sumo stood outside the thana. Bishu was thrust into the back seat and the door was locked from outside. The sub-inspector creaked in beside the driver and the assistants burped and belched their way onto the middle seat. A rope had been tied around Bishu’s waist and one of the constables sat holding it like a leash.
‘No tricks in my area!’ the Fulia PS officer shouted. Then the car roared off into the night and Bishu felt a sickening lurch well up in his stomach.
It was difficult for Bishu to keep his balance in the car as it blasted and shook its way through a pitted and potholed National Highway 34. The rope around his waist cut through his thin shirt as the car rumbled down the highway. There was no balmy night air here but only acrid diesel fumes that slanted across the lights of the head lamps in a dusty haze. The constables started nodding and the sub-inspector turned around now and then to shout at them. Soon Bishu felt his head swim and drowsiness overcame him too. He sat awkwardly, half on the seat and half on the floor, half asleep and half awake. Once his head jolted backwards and hit the window with a sharp bump. He rubbed his head and found they were overtaking a truck crammed with cattle—rows and rows of cows with baleful eyes, piled in and secured with rope. He guessed they were being smuggled across the border into Bangladesh. Bishu sighed and felt a sudden kinship with the cows.
8
‘. . . the policeman’s activities cover a rather wide and inclusive field of usefulness . . .’
Ghosh had been rescued from a benighted village in Bihar. He had decided he would probably die there, uncared for and forgotten, and had spent his nights slapping at mosquitoes and rationing water amidst the debris of a tumbledown school building. He had stopped eating, revolted by the parchment-like snakeskin that waved amongst the bushes where the reptiles had moulted. The two constables with him had shrunk in misery. Their clothes let off a mouldy smell and their red country towels stank. Towards the end of his stay Ghosh had stopped getting dressed for the day. He girded his towel around himself, crawled under his shawl, rolled up his vest as a pillow and lay babbling in fever. The frightened constables made emergency phone calls to Bikram.
Bikram had been waiting for an opportunity. There
was talk of Toofan Kumar going on vacation to Australia and a younger officer taking over as his replacement. This young officer was Toofan Kumar’s protégé and had secured a coveted posting in Calcutta under his benevolent patronage. He was already becoming very much like his mentor and crashed into office every day in a storm of car beacons and hooters, waited on by constables in army fatigues carrying automatic weapons. But he was still young and less malicious. He treated Bikram with haughty condescension because of the class-conscious ranks in the bureaucracy but secretly admired his looks and air of quiet confidence. Besides, it was rumoured that the guy had a glamorous girlfriend. Virendra Singh aka ‘you can call me Vir’ loved glamour.
Bikram decided to change his style for Ghosh’s sake. Accordingly, and in consultation with a friend, he sent Vir Singh a mountain of Washington apples and a bunch of orchids the day Toofan Kumar left. After which he mouthed a prayer that Toofan Kumar, away for a month, would be too busy with the wallabies to care. He then asked for Ghosh to be allowed to return to town. He’s not much good there but invaluable here, he said defensively. Ashu Das would be better able to deal with robberies and interstate criminals, he lied. With his experience he could make a short trip and round off the enquiry. Vir Singh looked at the apples and agreed. And just like that, Ghosh was taken off the Bihar case.
* * *
Ghosh fell upon his bed within ten minutes of returning home. He slept for an hour, then woke up and stared fuzzily at the ceiling. A fan? And sheets! A bed? Then his mind cleared and he remembered he was home. A bedside clock said two-thirty. It felt unreal to be at home at two-thirty in the afternoon. He could hear the maid scraping a bucket and his daughter arguing with Mrs Ghosh over lunch. There seemed to be a palpable feeling of wretchedness in his household because he was not in office. He wondered what he would do after retirement, and fell asleep again.
A day later, on the 31st of October, Sunday, there was to be a cricket match at Eden Gardens between India and Australia for which three-fourths of the metropolitan police had been requisitioned. Bikram, Ghosh and Sheena Sen had found their names on the police arrangement file delivered to them two days earlier.
The same day, a king and head of state from a neighbouring country, a VIP requiring Z-category security, was to arrive in Calcutta to offer prayers at the three-hundred-year-old temple at Kalighat during the day and presumably catch the cricket match in the evening. Bikram and Ghosh had found their names in the police arrangement file for this one too.
On Sunday morning Bikram rang up Ghosh over his morning cup of tea.
‘How come Sheena and Ashu missed the temple and traffic duty for the king?’ He sounded unusually testy.
‘You didn’t read the files properly. Sheena is also on duty at the hotel where the king and the players are staying. She couldn’t be on the road, at a hotel and in the stadium all at once. Ashu is part of the king’s pilot convoy, from the airport onwards. By the way, someone called Bishu arrived here from Fulia last night as a suspect in the murder case. He’s waiting at the Crime Branch lock-up.’
‘Well, he has to stay locked up for some more time. At least till the king departs.’
‘I hear the DIG is on leave,’ Ghosh sounded a little merrier, though his voice was still broken by pharyngitis.
‘Um. Virendra Singh is in charge. He brought you over. You’d better salute him vigorously when you meet him.’
Bikram paused to swallow his tea. In the silence he could hear raised voices in the background and a tremendous bang as a door was slammed shut. At the same time Ghosh coughed in a melancholy manner, in a belated attempt at a cover-up.
‘Well, I’ll be seeing you then!’
Bikram rang off and stared vacantly ahead. In all the years that they had been together, there had only been television noises filtering through the phone during a conversation with Ghosh, but never shouting and howling. No longer so. There seemed to be severe domestic discord in both their lives, though his could hardly be called domestic, he thought as he belted his uniform. The belt was loose by two notches. He stared at himself in the mirror and saw a gaunt face with tired eyes look back at him. You’re losing it, he said to the reflection. Picking up his cap and without bothering to put it on, he left.
* * *
Calcutta was at its chaotic best that morning. Traffic was being forced into narrow roads and lanes to keep the main thoroughfares empty for the benefit of the king. Mistry whipped their car through the streets and flung it onto a road that was surprisingly quiet. Only an ambulance and a truck blocked their way, unable to sort out the tangle of who should move forward first. Lalbahadur stepped out to add to the mess. Bikram looked at the walls covered with political slogans and movie posters and shrank in dismay. There was a poster of Shona, gazing at a bearded man who had dabs of theatrical-looking blood on his cheeks. Shona’s hair was undone and had been styled to give her a wild look, in deliberate contrast to the primped-up second heroine who stood on the other side of the bearded man. She was looking beautiful. Bikram gazed at the poster till he was shaken out of his reverie by honks from cars that had piled up behind. Mistry, too, was lost in contemplation of Shona on the wall and seemed to have forgotten where he was. Lalbahadur had cleared a way forward for them and now leaned in through the window and pinched Mistry to animate him.
Turning his face away from the posters, Bikram tried to make sense of his predicament. Though he didn’t fundamentally approve of what Shona did, he was still mesmerized by her screen persona. On the other hand, so was his driver and his cook and presumably a thousand other drivers, cooks, students, maids, aunts, uncles, schoolgirls, housewives and so on. Which made Shona and her beauty and what she meant to him not something precious and romantic, but cheap and sordid instead. This was a tension that Bikram did not know how to deal with. He picked up his phone and began to fiddle self-consciously with it as their car shot forward.
He briefed Ghosh as best he could at Kalighat as the king said his prayers. The roads had been cordoned off and all the carts, cars, cycles, motorbikes, beggars, fake lepers and food kiosks had vanished. Only one shop had been allowed to stay open in case the king wanted to buy a souvenir, and Bikram and Ghosh stood under the framed images of Krishna, Kali and Shiva, discussing Piloo Adhikary and his dogs.
‘Suspect number one, the girlfriend-cum-wife; the kennel boy, two; deranged neighbours, three; person and persons unknown, four . . .’ Ghosh ticked them off on his pudgy fingers.
‘Leena Mukherjee, five,’ added Bikram helpfully. ‘She came all the way to my office to accuse Monica Sarkar and her own husband, so it could have been her also. Besides, she mentioned that the dead man had a legally wedded wife once, so that makes it a list of six.’
‘Any more?’ asked Ghosh genially. ‘I’ve got four more fingers left.’
‘They’ll come,’ said Bikram brightly. ‘There will be a briefing with the inspector general soon, I’m afraid, so we’ve got to hurry a bit. Start with the kennel boy tomorrow. Remember the shots came later, someone had knocked him out with Xylazine first. Also,’ he said broodingly, ‘I feel there is money involved somewhere. The bank books look too clean for a man who produced movies. There are other documents we know nothing about.’
‘The diary he wrote disappeared? That could be a start.’
‘To what?’ asked Bikram absently.
‘Appropriation of evidence. Someone who knew the house and where things were kept. He let himself in or was invited inside, remember? In short, someone who came with a revolver and the definite purpose of threatening or killing him. Think of the bullets.’
‘His wife didn’t seem stricken by grief at his death,’ said Bikram. ‘She was more worried about the dogs and the way they’d died.’
‘Women are like that,’ said Ghosh bitterly. ‘All they think about is their own selves. You spend a lifetime wearing your boots out just to give them food and shelter, and all they do is grumble and swindle and cheat and wait for you to die.’
Bikram cast a quick look at Ghosh. Something was definitely on at home.
‘If she comes into money she could well be a suspect,’ he said after a studied silence. ‘As much as Bishu. Or the dark unknown, like Leena Mukherjee’s husband. He could have resented their relationship, however platonic it was, and done him in.’
‘Was the relationship as innocent as she made it out to be?’ asked Ghosh mirthlessly. ‘Why do we imagine that only the young tumble into bed? Why not Piloo and Leena in drunken ecstasy?’
At that moment the king came out of the temple and the meeting ended, though Bikram spent fifteen minutes meditating on this new possibility.
At three o’clock that afternoon, an assortment of policemen swarmed around the Eden Gardens stadium. Wireless sets cackled from mobile vans and swashbuckling police sergeants marched up and down solemnly. In honour of the king, the commissioner of police had tried to create an opulent effect by turning out the Mounted Police that cantered around on silken horses and added to the confusion. Bikram picked his way through the crowd, saluting and being saluted according to the dictates of hierarchy and reached the stands assigned to him. The man in charge of the police arrangement had thoughtfully provided some eye candy for the rich and famous by assigning Bikram and Sheena Sen to the VIP gallery, under the stewardship of the dazzling Virendra Singh, who stood proud and erect in his imported sunglasses amidst the posh party crowd. Ghosh had been assigned the unfashionable Gate 12 and stood glumly in charge before a crowd of unemployed youth.
Bikram stood near the rear gallery with arms akimbo. There was nothing much to do. They could never do much even if something went horribly wrong, he had reasoned in the past, so the best policy was to appear calm and in control and watch the carnival unfold. The stadium had become a pleasure ground and the banners, flags, bunting and face paint seemed to hint at a grand festival. Sixty thousand human beings laughed, shouted, bellowed, roared and did the Mexican wave. The mobile phone towers had tripped under a wild tumult of phone calls, so he was undisturbed.