BLOOD RED SARI

by Banker, Ashok K

  She had to check the inside office.

  The effort it took to wheel herself the few yards to the inside office door felt like the Wheelathon she had participated in once. That had been just fifty metres, but the competition had been tough because most of the other women were born paraplegics and had spent their entire lives manoeuvring wheelchairs, while she had barely been in one for a few years at the time. Still, she had been placed second and was proud of it because the other two prize winners had both been younger than her and much more athletic. She still had the trophy somewhere in the office: a trio of unisex figures raising their fists to the sky. A wink to socialistic ideology as well as bleeding-heart liberal sponsorships, she supposed. This felt much harder because there was no prize waiting at the end. On the contrary.

  Finally, she reached the door of the inside office and pushed it open, entering hesitantly. That same stickiness under her wheels, but this time it was more liquid, and the stench of petrol much stronger. This part had been heavily doused, she guessed. Though why the goons would want to douse her office in petrol and then run away mystified her. Right now, she only wanted to know if Shonali was in here and if she was, then …

  She fumbled with her Blackberry, holding it up. A part of her didn’t want to see whatever there was to see, but she had no choice. She had come this far. Come on, Nachos, she told herself sternly, you survived your marriage and your in-laws. You can deal with this. She had to check. She had to be sure.

  5.3

  SHEILA WAS STARING AT an extraordinary sight. She was across the street from the gym, standing just behind a young peepal tree which, along with its neighbours, blocked the light from the streetlamps. She was invisible under the shadows, a fact that others had been aware of and taken advantage of frequently, judging from the stench of male urine on the wall behind her. She had started to raise her hand to pinch her nose when she stepped behind the tree a few moments ago but then she had caught a glimpse of what was going on across the street and had forgotten the stench.

  The police were trashing her gym and office.

  Thanks to the large glass facade of the gym and the fact that her office was visible from where she stood, she could see everything as clearly as if it were taking place on a proscenium stage. Some fancy set at a Bollywood entertainment awards nite, perhaps. Except that the men in white Kolkata Police uniforms weren’t group dancers and there were no film stars descending from the sky suspended from winch cables.

  They were really tearing things up. She watched as they picked up and threw dumbbells through the glass partitions and walls, shattering them; put their shoulders to Nautilius machines and upended them; pushed exercycles over; shoved cross-trainers on their sides; threw member cards out of the slots on the wall-mounted board; smashed the juice bar and threw metal stools at the mirrors. She winced as she watched the mayhem. They were laughing and calling out to each other as they did it, clearly enjoying what they were doing.

  It was more of the same in her office. Her desk was battered with lathis, drawers pulled out and their contents emptied out, a chair deliberately thrown through the glass facade. How could they be allowed to inflict such wanton damage? She gritted her teeth in frustration, her fists clenching. They were the police; they could do anything. Besides, she could almost hear what they must be saying in Bengali as they went about their task. ‘Tear down the bloody lesbian joint! Smash the deviants’ pleasure palace.’

  Bastards.

  She saw the flash of yellow in a raised hand and all heads pausing and turning to look in that direction. A constable had found the manila envelope and was holding it up. The inspector who appeared to be in charge was standing at the far side of the gym, talking on his cell phone. He turned and beckoned the constable. The man ran across the ruined gym floor and gave the envelope to his superior. The inspector examined the exterior of the envelope for a moment, but didn’t pull out any papers from inside and look at them. Instead, he dialled a number on his cell and spoke to someone: even at this distance, Sheila could tell that he was being deferential. The call finished, he exited the building.

  Her heart pounding with anger, Sheila slipped out from behind the tree and crossed the street diagonally, heading at an angle directed at the next adjoining lane. A little traffic came by and for a long tense moment, she was on the wide brightly lit street, fully exposed to the policemen on the first floor. Any one of them could have looked down and recognized her at once. But they had resumed their destructive pastime and nobody looked at her. The traffic passed by, horns blaring at the woman standing in the middle of the road, and she crossed at a steady, unhurried pace. Out of the direct view of the gym, she cut sharply back and went into the bylane that ran behind the building, the one she had left by when the police came. The wireless van was parked in the same place with the red-light car parked behind it. It was an Esteem in decent condition. That told her that the officer was not an inspector but probably an ACP. Curioser and curioser. She reached the back of the car and saw him standing by the wireless van, speaking to the wireless operator in the rear. The rear doors were open. The sound of the wireless radio giving off static punctuated their talk.

  She crouched behind the Esteem, the metal of the dicky cool to her warm touch. She was trembling, not from fear but from anger. Watching the very people who were supposed to uphold the law and protect her from miscreants ruin the fruit of her hard work over the past several years did that to her. Who were these bastards? She knew now that this wasn’t just about Tasneem and Marhabha. It was bigger than that. Much bigger. The way the constable had held up the yellow manila envelope told her that. The fact that the ACP had taken the envelope but not bothered to look inside her told her the rest: they know what was in the envelope already. It’s the reason why they came after me, why they’re tearing up the place.

  An elderly man in kurta–pyjama and a young girl in shorts and a tee shirt walking a big happy golden retriever came by, passing her on the footpath. The old man and granddaughter didn’t notice her crouching by the car, but the dog sensed her and turned, pulling at his leash. The old man and girl pulled him back and walked on, too engrossed in conversation to turn and look her way. They were chattering in Bengali about something and Sheila caught a few words. The grandfather wanted to know what ‘sexting’ meant and the granddaughter was trying to fob him off with a bullshit explanation. Sheila felt the ACP get into the car before she heard him: the metal vibrated as he pulled open the door and did something in the car. Then the door shut again, hard, and there was silence except for the wireless crackling with a bored voice asking about traffic movement near Victoria Memorial flyover. Sheila raised her head over the rear of the car, peering out. She saw the ACP walking back across the street to the gym’s rear entrance. His hands were bare except for his cell phone.

  She glanced through the rear windshield at the back of the wireless van. The constable who was the wireless operator was sitting with his legs sprawled, scratching his balls and smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, but if she moved within his frame of view, he would see her at once, she guessed.

  She duck-walked around the back of the car to the pavement side, trying to stay low so the wireless operator couldn’t see her. She reached up for the car handle, praying the ACP hadn’t locked it. She felt the handle yield and the door open – just as something large and wet pushed itself into her armpit.

  She resisted the urge to leap up and scream.

  The golden retriever’s snout pushed against her neck and cheek as the dog licked her sloppily. Her found her ear and probed inside it with his tongue, slobbering happily.

  ‘Rancchoddas Shamaldas Chanchad!’ said a girl’s indignant voice from behind. ‘What is he doing, dadamoshai!’

  ‘Rancho, putra,’ said the old man’s voice in the manner of Bengali men trying to be stern and failing completely. ‘You will get us all arrested. That is policewoman’s vehicle!’

  Sheila glanced over her shoulder just
as the old man and girl regained control of the golden retriever’s leash and yanked him away. The dog’s tail slapped her on the side of the head, hard enough to almost make her lose her balance, crouched as she was on her haunches. The old man and girl seemed to notice nothing unusual about a woman crouching beside a police car. Policewoman’s vehicle indeed!

  They continued up the footpath, Rancho barking an enthusiastic goodbye to her as he went. She shot him the finger and he barked one last time, happy to be acknowledged.

  She glanced at the wireless operator. He was leaning over his wireless, speaking into the mike, seemingly unaware of the dog–woman encounter.

  Sheila decided that this was her chance, take it or leave it.

  She opened the rear door of the Esteem, slipped inside, and felt around on the back seat in the darkness until her fingertips brushed across what felt like an envelope.

  Crawling back out, she pushed the door but didn’t shut it. That would have required banging it loudly and even a distracted wireless operator would notice an empty car door banging shut.

  She duck-walked to the back of the car again, then continued in the same manner down the lane to the cross-street she had appeared from moments earlier. No grandfathers and granddaughters walking dogs here. She reached the corner and straightened up, slipping around the side and out of sight of her gym and the police vehicles. In the light of the streetlamps, she looked at what her hands held. It was the manila envelope again, with all the papers intact, exactly as she had left it back at her office.

  She started walking, away from the life she had built for herself, the legitimate decent life of Sheila Ray. She crossed over, keeping to the darker side of the street, and kept walking.

  Six

  6.1

  ANITA AWOKE WITH THE certainty that something was very wrong, and her first instinct was to lie still and assess the situation. She found herself on the carpet, behind the bed, facing the window. She had sat that way to use the bedside lamp and avoid disturbing Philip who was sleeping on the other bed. She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep, but her internal clock told her she couldn’t have dozed off for more than a couple of hours. Forget the internal clock, her bleary brain told her that! The light in the room was the same as before, but there were voices on the other side of the room, near the door.

  Male voices, several of them.

  One of the voices was definitely Philip’s and she thought that the other two were of her brothers and perhaps another man. The way they were speaking – softly but with unmistakable anger barely suppressed – must have been what woke her up. Either that, or the door opening: she had learnt since girlhood to dread the sound of a door opening at night. That and the sound of her brothers’ voices was enough to send all her alarm bells ringing. Two months of unrelenting abuse would do that to a girl. Even now, so many years later, she would still wake up at night in Mrs Matondkar’s flat and check the door and windows – and the sound of a particular kind of male voice always put her off, no matter how nice the guy. Once you had been raped and beaten by your brothers, days after your father’s funeral, it tended to scar you for life.

  She lay still, knowing that the reason they were speaking softly was to avoid waking her. She caught the drift of their conversation: they were discussing the best way to take her, which sent chills up her spine, transporting her hurtling back to that fifteen-year-old girl lying battered and bleeding and terrified in her own bed at home. The only thing missing was the sound of her mother calling the boys to have their beef mulligatawny soup. Soup! Because boys had to keep up their strength. Of course. Damn pishaachs! Fucking flesh-eating, blood-sucking bastards.

  The papers from the manila envelope were still beside her. She had fallen asleep all over them, and one loose sheet was stuck to her arm and backside and would make a noise if she moved. She reached down and peeled it off carefully. She didn’t know what to do, so she folded it slowly and carefully and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans, with her wallet.

  While she did that, she examined the window from her floor-level viewpoint. She was on the second floor and the window faced the back of the hotel. What was at the back? The parking area? The courtyard? But then she remembered: the window wouldn’t do. They were the old-fashioned Kerala type – solid wooden frames criss-crossed with panes of glass. She might end up cracking it, but more likely she would crack her own ribs and break a few bones before that frame broke to let her jump through. She didn’t have enough body weight to do it, or running space to gather the momentum.

  Which meant she would have to go out using the door, past them.

  For the first time in her life – well, technically not the first, but it always felt like the first time on each occasion – she wondered why the fuck she didn’t carry a gun. She knew why, of course. Because she hated the damn things. Growing up watching your brothers shoot every living animal or bird that took their fancy – including stray dogs, pups, cats, kittens, birds – would do that to a girl. There were days when she felt that ridding the world of all guns and explosive weapons should be every government’s first priority. Her favourite fiction was the Change series by S.M. Stirling, which imagined a near-future where all combustible agents stopped working: planes fell out of the sky, cars wouldn’t run, guns stopped working. The world returned to bows and arrows and swords. It was even more brutal than before for a while, but somehow the absence of guns and motors almost seemed to be worth the cost. It was the only series she bought religiously in hardcover, ordering each new book online from a Bengaluru-based online bookstore.

  One of the things she had learnt from the book was that if you knew what you were doing and if the circumstances were right, you could render guns ineffectual. A closed room with many opponents and obstacles – like this hotel room – qualified as the right circumstances.

  Now, she had a chance to put the theory to the test.

  She heard the unmistakable growl of her older brother Isaac’s voice say quite distinctly, ‘Enough talk. Move!’ Then the voices fell silent and the sound of fabric rustling could be heard.

  They were moving in.

  She had crept under the bed while they talked. Now, she could see their feet approaching the first bed, going around it, then around the second bed. They were expecting her to be in the alcove between the second bed and the window, not between the two beds. That put two of them to her right, and at least one on her left – barring her way out. Three plus Philip, and she didn’t know for sure where he was standing. She guessed that the first two would have guns aimed down at the spot they expected her to be in and had fingers ready on the trigger, especially after the way she had defended herself back at the house. Isaac was a vengeful bastard; he would want to punish her for hurting him, or worse. She didn’t know if Graham was in on this, but he would probably do as Isaac said. But why hadn’t Philip woken her? Why had he opened the door to let them in? He was the one who had called her here to Varkala in the first place, told her about Lalima’s funeral. He was on her side.

  Then it came to her in a flash: it was a set-up. This wasn’t about Lalima’s death at all. It was about the contents of the yellow manila envelope. She knew that now that she had read the papers, even though she couldn’t figure out most of what they meant. The information they revealed was massively important, there was no doubt about that at all. She also knew that it had come from Lalima’s lawyer after her death – the Trivandrum postmark had told her the place and Philip had told her about the instructions to send out the packages. He had also told her that similar packets had been sent to people besides her. The Matthew clan had known that one envelope had been sent to her and had Philip call her here on the pretext of Lalima’s funeral, hoping to get back the documents – and get rid of her. That was why Philip had come to her hotel and told her that sob story. She had thought she was nursing him and putting him to sleep. In fact, she was the one being lulled into sleeping, thinking she was safe here for the night. Then he had called the other
s and hail, hail, the gang’s all here, let’s have a gangbang, boys. Enough soup for everyone. Let’s go turn the crazywhoremysister into mincemeat.

  She exploded from between the beds, a Bible in her hand. It was the room Bible which she had taken from the lower drawer of the bedside table while they were talking by the door. She threw it at the man to her far right – Isaac with a makeshift sling on one arm and a gun in the other hand. He reacted, trying to swat the hurtling object with his only free hand, which happened to be the hand in which he was holding the gun, and because his finger was on the trigger, it went off.

  6.2

  THE LIGHT OF THE cell phone came on but wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the whole room. She held it as high as she could, turning it this way and that to throw a little pocket of light on one part of the room, then another, until she was able to piece together the whole picture in parts, like some obscene jigsaw puzzle. Her hand shook. In intermittent glimpses, all the more garish for being seen in the half-dim light of the cell phone screen, was a scene out of an Asian horror film. Something by Park Chan-wook, perhaps, or Kim Ki-duk. Some twisted tale of a plan gone wrong. Except that this was her office, not some seedy by-the-hour love hotel in Seoul or Hong Kong, and the woman sprawled naked on her desk was Shonali, poor lovely young Shonali who was a JNU pol. sci. grad with intense views about the legitimacy of some aspects of the Maoist cause with regard to tribals in deforested areas, and who liked Mojitos and long-haired, intellectual-type guys with a sense of humour. Nachiketa’s hand trembled again as even the incompetent glow of the BB left no doubt that her office assistant had been savagely raped and battered and then left for dead. Nachiketa forced herself to turn her right wheel with her free hand and bumped her knee against the corner of the desk. Gritting her teeth, she reached out and checked for a pulse. The feel of human skin was the worst thing of all. It slammed home the realization that this was no subtitled film in Siri Fort Auditorium, it was, to use Shonali’s own favourite phrase, ‘really real’. The skin on the girl’s neck felt slippery, but not with blood, with sweat. It brought home nightmarish flashes of Shonali’s last moments alive. She couldn’t have been dead long: her skin was still warm. But her pulse was MIA.