The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

  ‘If there was a storm,’ he asked her, ‘and I knocked on your door, would you take me in?’

  Rolling down the glass she said, ‘Well, storms are tricky.’ In her voice he heard a train departing its station.

  Several hours after her brief stop at Crawford Market and her subsequent trip to the clay vendor in Kumbharwada, Rhea sat on the stool before her dressing table trying to tighten an exasperatingly loose gold earring; she was terrified the earring, a family heirloom, would fall and get lost amid the crowd at Ban Ganga. A smart coat of mascara had made her eyelashes, already long and curled, all the more stark and feline. Priming her lips, she removed all traces of excess lipstick. She assumed she was ready, that she could face the crowds at the music festival.

  She presented herself before the mirror.

  Studying the reflection she experienced a familiar pang of discomfort: She did not know the woman looking back at her. But perhaps her discomfort really stemmed from the fact that she knew the woman in the mirror only too well, and her undeclared particulars were not all that flattering. Who was she then? A wife? A potter? A traitor? She questioned the ease with which she went from wife to lover to wife, slipping in and out of the roles as if exchanging one pair of shoes for another. Guilt made her want to flee her home, its marital stipulations, the adolescent, societal impositions on the human heart. Most of all, she wanted to flee the heart itself, its intractable ability to love variously, heroically, idiotically.

  She knew that to try to come to terms with what had transpired between Karan and herself was like trying to catch a fish with one’s bare hands. She believed that at the onset she had been genuinely taken with his work, and so she had chosen to show him around town. But when exactly did their friendship evolve into something larger, ineluctably dangerous, beyond definition? Surely it had not started when she had slipped on the staircase and he had gripped her, and they had united on the landing, struggling in the agony of lust. Such transgressions were all too easy to commit, and they did not result in the complicated pacts formed when people engaged the unlit portion of another soul. She did not know the exact moment, the hour or the day, when her feelings for Karan had spiralled out of her control and taken her hostage. She leaned closer toward the mirror. She could not believe her eyes. The woman gazing back at her was guilty of the final betrayal in love: she had surrendered her own self.

  This realization filled her with an overpowering rage.

  Taking a deep breath, Rhea resolved that she would not let the tumult of her feelings interfere with the evening ahead. Composing herself, she looked into the mirror again. This time, her inspection was superficial: she cringed at her reflection. In spite of the gorgeous guava-green silk sari, the ancestral kundan necklace around her slender neck, she was plain; at most, comely. She stood up and surveyed herself critically. Oh, she was hopeless, she was pathetic; she was far from perfect; she had chosen the wrong sari. As if to rescue her from the eddy of her insecurities, Adi emerged from the bathroom and whistled admiringly when he saw her. She blushed, his whistle like alchemy: what the mirror had established as ordinary was now transformed, before her very own eyes, into dramatic magnetism.

  ‘I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.’ His arms enveloped her from behind and he buried his face in her neck.

  ‘No one would give me a second glance.’

  ‘We’re going to need security to keep them from you; I’m going to have to call in the commandos!’

  When Adi straightened, and stood as upright as Karan did, she felt as if both men were watching over her.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said, waving her hand before his awestruck face. ‘How else will you stave off the millions of imaginary fans?’

  At Ban Ganga, after locating a clean stone ledge of some vantage to sit on, they waited for the Sufi singer to take the stage. Rhea’s thoughts wandered back to the concert the year before: Hariprasad Chaurasia had played the flute, and they had been so lost in his poignant, smooth recital of Raga Desh that the night had faded, the stars had faded, the crowds had faded, and she and Adi had been left together as guardians of each other’s solitude. Tonight, in her husband’s company, she felt adorned, and adored—so much so that if she were to meet Karan she would find it impossible to recognize him. She was deeply involved in her role of Mrs Adi Dalal; she was like an actor on stage, completely sold to her character, running on the fuel of an imaginative sympathy that burned down the subtle but significant divide between reality and performance.

  Gradually, as voices hushed and the lights dimmed, leaving only the raised platform illuminated, the faint strains of the instruments being strummed and tuned floated out over the water. Fateh Khan, who had been sitting cross-legged with his head bowed, now looked up and faced his eager audience, humming a fine, unwieldy tune to himself. Hardly had he started on a song written by Bulla Shah than Rhea found unbidden tears pressing at her eyes; her head seemed to spin with the rising fervour of the music, the mesmeric rhythm, the timeless, fire-stroked words extolling love, its madness, its retreat, and its awful wound. The singer’s voice was like the wing of a bird pressed against her black heart. Rhea wondered how she—devious, impatient, made of flesh and bone, an edifice of mortality—could hold so much emotion that she feared she might burst from it. Maybe that was the point of having children: to distribute what might no longer be held in oneself. In which case she was not, she would have to concede, an edifice of mortality but a sheet of music fashioned for reprise.

  And Adi’s desire for a child, an heir, was more than just the clamour of male vanity.

  As the singer’s voice opened up like the flames of a fire, she glanced at Adi’s enrapt face. Briefly, she looked up, searching for Karan’s room, his balcony. What if she saw him now? What she shared with Adi was rare and fundamental, a kind of oxygen, without which she simply would not exist. Karan, on the other hand, had been helium, and he had made her weightless, taken her higher, released her from the awful apathy of everyday existence. The sadness Karan had experienced at giving up his work filled her now, belatedly, making her choke. Without his camera, his world was unlit with either beauty or horror; it was in despair and pathetically mundane. Adi put his hand on her shoulder, but the tears continued to roll down her cheeks, a dark sediment of grief having broken out of her, its exodus illuminated only by the glow of music.

  In the car on their way home she said, ‘Why did you get me fireflies that evening, Adi?’

  He was surprised; he had been remembering the fireflies when he had woken that morning, and now she was asking about them.

  ‘Right after we started going out you kept telling me you dreamed of fireflies. You said you had talked to your father about what the dreams meant and he had connected them with some aspect of your childhood. When I asked you for details of his analysis you clammed up. I didn’t probe. But you continued to complain that you were unable to sleep when you dreamed of them. I wanted to give you some so the dreams would stop, so you would be free.’

  She kept disappointment out of her expression; she had been expecting a far more cerebral reason, on the lines that the fireflies had been symbolic of something. But a few moments later, studying his face intently, she was moved by the profound simplicity of his pure and vigorous concern.

  ‘I just wanted you to sleep deeply, Rhea.’ He pressed on the pedal of the car. ‘And for you to wake rested.’

  She gazed out of the window.

  Bombay was a different beast at midnight. She saw the stall of a paanwalla with glossy clusters of heart-shaped vein-green leaves and papyrus foils of silver; she saw a monkey pedlar goofing around with his pet. On Warden Road she turned to face Adi, whose eyes were firmly on the road; she felt unreasonably lucky and safe.

  She raised her hand to her ear; the earring was loose again, and she tightened it deftly.

  Family gold ought never to be lost.

  14

  On the morning of his appearance in court, Bunty Oberoi was the centre of all atten
tion. The key witness in the trial looked dashing in his drainpipe pants and a black linen, lapelled blazer. His muscular build and cavalier smile strengthened the impression that only the truth might ever leave his lips, as if dishonesty were somehow the prerogative of ugliness.

  Once he had taken oath his initial statement was read out to him, the deposition that clearly indicted Malik Prasad as Zaira’s murderer. When the prosecution lawyer, Gautam Vakil, was called upon to question him, Bunty began to answer him in clumsy, half-broken Hindi.

  Samar strained forward to hear Bunty, who was sounding like someone being made to speak in Hindi for the first time.

  While answering the second question, Bunty paused, turned to the judge and asked if he could continue in English, a request to which the judge consented. Gautam Vakil then asked him to verify his statement to the police, which had just been read out before the court.

  ‘But the report was recorded in Hindi,’ said the actor.

  ‘That’s correct.’ The lawyer tilted his head. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Oh, it matters—a great deal.’ Bunty’s tongue smacked over his lips a few times, as if they had become numb. Although he had just snorted a line of coke a few minutes earlier in the sanctuary of the stinking toilet, it had failed to put him at ease, as it usually did.

  Samar, waiting for his turn to take the stand, felt his heart cave in; his fingers tightened their hold on Leo’s wrist. He looked at Karan, who had got the drift of things, and was ruefully shaking his head.

  Bunty said confidently, ‘You see, I don’t follow a word of Hindi. When the police had interrogated me on the night of the murder, they’d asked me questions in Hindi. I agreed with what they were saying because I was in shock. Also, I wasn’t sure any one of them could speak English. So they recorded my statement in Hindi and I signed in good faith. Later, it was re-read to me. In translation, in English. That’s when I knew they had recorded something I hadn’t said.’

  The judge rapped his gavel to hush the shocked murmurs.

  Karan glanced at Samar but Samar was staring blankly at the floor, his mouth slightly open.

  ‘Are you saying the statement you gave the police is false?’ Gautam Vakil said slowly.

  ‘Not at all,’ the actor said. ‘What I’m saying is that the statement the police recorded is false. They recorded my statement in Hindi. When they read it out to me, it was in Hindi. How could I verify it one way or the other since I don’t understand the language?’

  ‘In that case, why did you agree with it at the time?’

  ‘I had no choice! The police were forceful. I was helpless. I felt cornered. I signed the statement in a state of complete shock.’

  ‘So, Mr Oberoi,’ Gautam Vakil went on, ‘can you please tell the court what you did see on that night at Maya Bar?’

  ‘It was very dark,’ Bunty said. ‘There was a crowd of about two hundred people. At around one-thirty in the morning, when the last drinks had been served, two men entered the bar. I went to get some ice from the kitchen. Although cigarette smoke had obscured my view when I returned, I could see one of the men in silhouette, dressed in a white shirt and jeans. This man shot in the air, at the ceiling. Then, someone else came up from behind him and shot Zaira. She collapsed and Nalini Chopra came running to my side. Before long, Samar Arora ran in. When Zaira lost consciousness Samar pulled her on to his lap.’

  ‘Who was the man who shot Zaira, Mr Oberoi?’

  Bunty looked at his feet. ‘It was impossible to see clearly.’

  ‘Could you identify Malik Prasad as Zaira’s murderer?’ Gautam Vakil pointed to Malik, seated beside his lawyer, Vijay Singh. ‘That’s what your police statement indicates.’

  ‘I’ve already told you my statement was recorded in a language I do not understand.’ Bunty looked at Malik and then at the judge. ‘I’ve never seen Malik Prasad before.’

  ‘Are you certain it was not Malik Prasad?’

  ‘Objection, Your Honour.’ Vijay Singh stood up now. ‘The prosecution is trying to intimidate the witness.’

  ‘Sustained.’

  ‘Who, then, was the assailant?’

  ‘It was too dark to identify the man in question,’ repeated Bunty, his voice rising.

  ‘We cannot hold you to the first information report you gave the police?’

  ‘Of course not! How can you hold me to a report recorded in a language that I do not understand! I don’t know a word of bloody Hindi!’

  The judge glared at the model. ‘Mr Oberoi, do not shout in my court.’

  Two days after Bunty Oberoi’s outrageous revelation had taken up the front-page headlines in all the leading dailies, D.K. Mishra, the investigating officer in charge of Zaira’s case, lay in bed next to his wife.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Rupa Mishra said. ‘We don’t have to.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  ‘You must be tired.’

  ‘It’s the weekend, Rupa!’

  ‘Stress?’ She jerked his willy, so embarrassingly limp it was like a strand of beached seaweed. ‘It’s the bloody case!’ She sat up and covered her breasts with her sweaty fingers. ‘You haven’t been the same since this investigation started.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’ He pressed a pillow over his crotch.

  ‘When will it be over?’

  ‘Please don’t sound so frustrated, Rupa.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how tough this case is getting to be on me?’

  ‘You think this is a joyride for me? Do you have any idea how many calls I have to field every day about this bloody case?’

  She asked him who was on the dial.

  Calls from the press, he said; from his superiors; from Minister Prasad.

  ‘Will they ever nail the killer?’

  He threw his hands up in the air as if to say: What is there to nail?

  She lay down and drew the green chequered sheet over her perspiring nakedness. ‘All right then, is he going to get away?’

  ‘Malik Prasad is not a bad sort; I don’t see CRIMINAL plastered on his forehead.’

  ‘Even if Malik is not a bad sort,’ Rupa said in a tone generally reserved for castigating cocker spaniel puppies with toilet-training troubles, ‘the fact that he shot a woman in the head makes him one very crazy man, don’t you think?’

  ‘I also get calls from the Hindu People’s Party,’ Mishra grumbled. ‘Those rascals in Delhi are terrified this scandal will screw them in the next elections.’

  A few days earlier, Ram Dube, head of the forensics department, had called Mishra and reminded him that according to the findings of his department, the bullets had been shot from two different guns. Lowering his voice, Dube asked him why he had failed to consider the possibility of two assailants being present at Maya Bar that night, thus unwittingly confirming that he was in collusion with Minister Prasad.

  ‘They found a way to bugger the forensic report as well.’

  Rupa pressed her body against her husband’s. ‘How much influence does the forensic report have on the case?’

  Mishra said that the minister’s scheme to acquit his son relied on establishing the presence of two assailants with the same gun at Maya Bar. This would beef up the defence lawyer’s theory that, along with Malik, an unidentified man was at the venue—and this second man had shot Zaira.

  ‘I see. And so the defence is trying to establish that the unidentified man is Zaira’s murderer.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What an evil little plot! This will give an entirely different twist to the case.’

  ‘And now, even Bunty Oberoi has gone back on his original deposition.’ He tugged himself free of his wife’s sweaty grasp.

  ‘Didn’t he say in court there were two men at Maya Bar?’

  ‘Yes—and that connects perfectly with the two guns–two assailants theory.’

  ‘Why did Bunty do a turnaround in the witness box?’

  ‘He’s bought an apartment on Bandra Bandstand.’

  ‘So?�
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  ‘Can you explain how a total nobody like Bunty Oberoi lands a sea-facing apartment worth almost four crore?’ he said crossly.

  She wondered just how much the minister had actually paid Bunty. ‘Hmmm. But why did the judge buy Bunty Oberoi’s me-no-speak-Hindi act?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Mishra yawned, wishing his wife would stop with the questions.

  ‘But Bunty has spoken in Hindi in his films, D.K. Doesn’t that go against him?’

  ‘It can go against him if the judge wants it to.’ He had begun to worry that the Limp Dick Syndrome was for keeps.

  ‘He probably speaks a dozen dialects of Hindi.’

  ‘We have records of Bunty’s school education in Hindi. He studied Hindi up to the eighth standard.’

  ‘And the judge won’t take that into account?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘But there are two other witnesses still left, ne?’

  ‘If Malik’s father managed to break Bunty what makes you think he can’t take out the other two?’

  ‘But you said Samar Arora is tough, and unlikely to crumble under pressure.’

  ‘The minister will find a way to crack him like an egg.’

  ‘So that leaves the socialite.’

  ‘Nalini Chopra and her daughter did not have a liquor licence for Maya Bar. I recently got a note from higher-ups saying that I should investigate this lapse.’

  She sighed. So now her husband’s bosses too were in cahoots with Minister Prasad.

  ‘The idea is to keep Nalini Chopra in line,’ he added. ‘They want to scare her. If she back-pedals on her statement, it throws another witness out of the ring. These are all ploys to distract from the real issue, the murder, and focus attention on the peripherals. If the defence drags the case for years, witnesses will slacken, the prosecution lawyer might lose hope, judges will get transferred. A pity, though, if Tara Chopra is thrown in prison for serving booze without a licence.’ He snorted like a pig. ‘What a waste of a good woman!’