BLOOD RED SARI

by Banker, Ashok K

  He argued again when she tried to make him stop on Chandni Chowk Street. ‘All closed,’ he said.

  She wanted to tell him she wasn’t here on a shopping trip to pick up petticoat material. ‘Please wait. I need to check if the person is there.’

  He shrugged, but switched off the engine and waited.

  She got out and looked around. The street was filled with stalls and vendors and shops selling bric-a-brac. This was a market area after all, as the Bangladeshi had rightly implied, but she wasn’t here to shop. Shakespeare Bazaar – which was what the area had been called when she was a child – was where the professor lived. She was on full alert after the shootout at the metro station. Her instincts told her that she hadn’t been followed but she wasn’t reassured.

  She had asked to meet the professor because she knew she had to do something. Sitting around in a hotel room in her bra and panty wouldn’t have got her anywhere. This was definitely not about Marhabha and Tasneem or any politician with a grouse against her. This was about the evidence she had in the envelope stuck under her arm. And that meant finding a person who could help her figure out what that evidence really meant, so she could then figure out what she could do with it.

  The area had changed and she had difficulty finding the place. He said they had renovated recently. It took her a few minutes to realize that it wasn’t renovation but rearrangement. Some of the old vendors and stores had given way to new ones, and the owners of the shops had repainted and refurbished their places, which made everything look different. She found the shop she was looking for at last, and the narrow stairwell beside it. She had called ahead, using a public call phone after she had put a safe distance between herself and Phoolbagan Station, and he had said to look out for the green staircase. This was it, although the naked yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling turned the parrot-green into blue.

  The staircase – barely wide enough to let her walk straight – creaked as she went up. Reaching the top, she went down the only corridor to the door on the far right as he had instructed. The door on the left was open and looked out on a terrace. There were dark sheets spread out across the terrace, with fish drying on them. She couldn’t actually see them but the smell left no doubt. She paused, remembering her mother bringing home big jars of putimaachi and telling her how this was Shakespearan hidol-shidol. The way she used to say it made it sound like manna from heaven. The way her mother fed it to her, mixed with rice balls in just a certain ratio, it was manna. She still associated the smell with her mother feeding her rice balls on the veranda of their Dakshineshwar house.

  She knocked on the door and it opened inwards. ‘It’s open,’ said a voice.

  She went in.

  Nine

  9.1

  ANITA SUPPOSED SHE SHOULD be thankful that the lawyer hadn’t given her away to the cops. But it was probably Lalima she ought to be thankful to rather than the shyster himself. She had picked him well. She believed him when he said he hadn’t read the contents of the packages. He wouldn’t have been able to lie so smoothly if he had.

  She wished she had been able to keep some of the papers or better yet, the whole package. But the way things went down, if she had tried to collect all those scattered pages at that instant, it would have cost her her life. She had no illusions about her brothers. What they had done to a fifteen-year-old girl had been unforgivable. But they had justified it with religious claptrap, her mother even forcing her to pray every day, tell her rosary and go to confession every Sunday. It had taken Anita a year or two after she left that house to figure it out completely, mainly because her young mind hadn’t been able to accept the truth: her mother had known all along, had perhaps even encouraged Isaac and Graham to molest and rape her, and then to beat her when she cried and fought back and threatened to tell the world. Her mother had justified it because she had found out about Lalima and Anita, had all but caught them red-handed in Achchan’s old car behind the house one afternoon, fooling around.

  They had just turned fifteen then and were beginning to discover each other’s bodies, and their love was pure and innocent and beautiful. But Iris Matthew hadn’t seen any of those attributes of that relationship. All she had seen was two young girls making love, one of them happening to be her daughter. That was more than she could handle. She was the sort of woman who hated intensely and indiscriminately and sought the answer to everything in her worn Bible with the black leather cover and red-brushed pages. As far as she was concerned, this was the devil’s work and needed to be thrashed out of a misguided young girl. When thrashing didn’t achieve the results she desired, she had seethed and festered and eventually found a twisted, warped method that fit her dogmatic thinking. What better to turn her daughter back to God’s path than to show her the pleasures of natural man–woman cohabitation? And how better to control such a ‘treatment’ than to let her own sons administer it?

  To this day, Anita had no idea if her mother had come up with the sick plan or if her brothers had talked her into it. Isaac had had his eye on her and Lalima ever since her boobs had started to show and he had taken the discovery that Lalima was sweet on his sister as a twisted motivation for a personal vengeance. Anita could imagine him using the twisted logic of religion for the sake of his mother to justify what he intended to do to Anita in order to set her right. But she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t even be sure if it was planned and intentional or whether it had just happened that first night because Isaac and Graham had gotten too drunk and horny and their mother had found out later and tried to rationalize it after the deed was done. She knew nothing of the truth because the truth didn’t exist anymore, only fractured versions of it that varied depending on whose point of view you believed. Graham had always had a completely different take on things: he had claimed that the brothers had only been fooling around and it was Anita who seduced them. This was one of the versions that their mother had latched on to enthusiastically at first, using it as yet another piece of evidence to justify her theory of demoniac possession. Why, she had even talked Father Yeshua into coming to the house and attempting an exorcism!

  The nightmare had lasted barely two months, at the end of which Anita had left the house and her family, knowing she would never return, and that they were as insane as it was possible for people to be and yet appear sane. Again, religion played a large part in that; for what else was intense fervour but a kind of insanity sanctified by society? Lesbian, gay, artist, socialist? Lock ’em up and throw away the key! Religious nutcase, fanatic, riot-instigator, bigot or racist? Why, that’s just good old god-fearing morality.

  Thirteen years later and she was still pissed off about it.

  ‘What you looking at, bozo?’ she asked a baboon sitting on the branch of a tree and scratching his balls. Some school children nearby giggled and pointed at the woman talking to the monkeys. Anita moved away, reminding herself that she was trying to be inconspicuous. Yeah, sure, she thought bitterly, if they had a habitat here for lesbian Malayali P.I.s on the run from the cops, I would be right at home.

  She stayed at the zoo all day. Towards evening, she managed to hook a cell phone. She had to steal it, which was unfortunate, but she picked her target carefully, choosing a suited-booted type who was more involved with his Bluetooth than with his wife and kids. He was that typical thirty-something Malayali male with the thin moustache, slim physique, polished shoes, razor-sharp creased trousers, pinstripe shirt and slicked-down hair that announced DUBAI-RETURN in life-size block letters, Arial Black Extra Bold font. The way he carried himself when with his wife – speaking curtly, and always presenting a one-third view to her, always walking a step or two ahead, never looking back to see if she was keeping up – the sharpness with which he corrected his children, the oily obsequiousness with which he chattered away on his BT headset, all spoke of a man who had spent a decade alone in a bare apartment with ten other guys, working twelve-hour shifts and saving every rupee so he would be set for the rest of his life. She wondere
d how much dowry his parents had asked for him. A lot, given his Dubai-return status, the inevitable flat, car, life savings, and not to be forgotten, pliss, his Brahmin caste. What’s that you say? How can a Christian be a Brahmin? Well, how can a dark-skinned man be considered inferior to a white man in America? Lawksadaisy. It’s in the Constitution! All men are created equal … except the Christians and white folk are created more equal than others. So Keralite Christians, and most other converts across India in the wake of the great rumbling-farting lorry of the erstwhile British Raj, still remembered and marked their previous caste status and that of their neighbours, because you didn’t simply replace one social system or religion with another, you just layered it on top of the old one, layer after layer after layer, until bits and parts of the older layers peeked out through the new and it all made up the whole.

  She flicked the phone from Mr Dubai-Return when they were in the snake farm. He had it in his pocket and was between calls at the time and his daughter needed to be held up so she could see the ‘sarppam’ better. Mr D-R grumbled about the crease of his trousers and the cut of his shirt, but finally relented and picked his four-year-old up by the waist and held her out, keeping her at a distance of about six inches from his body, as if actual contact would contaminate him, while she wriggled and giggled and squirmed until her bootie struck his shirt, soiling the precious fabric irreparably. It was while he had put her down and was fussing over the shirt that Anita had slipped past him, transferring the HTC from his pocket to her own, then continuing on out of the snake farm. The girl had felt ticklish, Anita knew, because she herself had felt ticklish when her father had picked her up once that way, back when her parents were still on speaking terms (and other terms that didn’t involve speaking) and her mother hadn’t gone all Biblical yet and he hadn’t fallen into a bottle and drowned.

  She found a spot near the bird habitats where it was quieter than elsewhere – in a zoo this size, with African animals and predators galore, who wanted to see birds shitting and cackling? She took out the courier receipts and checked the phone numbers on each. There was a woman named Sheila Ray in Kolkata, then herself in Mumbai, then another woman named Nachiketa Shroff in Delhi, and the fourth was a woman named Aadila Shah in Hyderabad. She had never heard or read of any of them before. She thought about it for a while, then decided to try the Hyderabad number first.

  She felt oddly nervous as she dialled the number, fumbling with the city code and having to call an enquiry line to get the correct code. The HTC rang several times with incoming calls but she ignored them all, knowing that Mr D-R would have discovered the loss by now and must be using his wife’s cell – if he permitted his wife to use a cell phone – to call his number over and over again. She just hoped he didn’t blame it on the little daughter; his kind usually did, nasty self-centred bastards.

  Finally, she got the correct code and dialled the number. It rang several times and then a cool female voice answered.

  9.2

  ADVAITA SET UP CAMP in Nachiketa’s room. Her cell phone rang constantly, both calls and messages, and she took every single call and replied to every single message, as well as called and sent out several dozen herself. The hospital staff protested more than once, but she intimidated the nurses and bullied the doctors into submission, forcing them to back off and leave her alone. Nachiketa wondered how she could concentrate on the documents at all, but after a while, Addy settled down and read with almost no interruptions, except for an occasional glance at her Blackberry when the message tone went off.

  It was dark outside when she finished. She put down the last sheet and held her head in her hand for a moment, then sighed heavily and shook her head, as if trying to clear it.

  ‘What is it?’ Nachiketa asked. She had tried to glance at a few of the papers, but between her bandaged hands and the way her medication made her head swim, it was all she could do to stay conscious and concentrate at all. It frustrated her not to be able to go through the package herself, but she had had no choice in the matter. She missed Shonali bitterly, then felt very small, realizing that she was only thinking of herself. Sure, you miss Shonali – you miss her not being here to help you go through those documents! Still, even in that moment of selfish need, there was an element of genuine sadness. Numbed by pain medication and still in shock from the previous night’s events, she knew that she did sincerely miss her and part of what was driving her to figure out that damned package was Shonali’s death. And Justicebitch too. A life was a life, after all. And those bastards had murdered more than one as far as she was concerned. Powar had told her that all the puppies had died, save one, the eldest female, alpha of the litter. That poor thing had lost some fur and been singed by the fire, but had survived and been taken in by an animal shelter. Nachiketa had already had them contacted and asked to care for the pup until she was well enough to take it home.

  Now, she looked at Advaita’s face and tried to read it.

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘I could see there are a lot of figures and accounts statements and ownership deeds, but what does it all add up to?’

  Advaita spread her large hands, her bangles jangling. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘Come on, Addy,’ Nachiketa said impatiently. ‘You’re a B.Com, LLB, you must have some idea.’

  Advaita sighed and put her hands heavily on her thighs. She got to her feet, slipping on the sandals she had kicked off hours earlier. One foot slipped in wrong and she had to nudge it against the leg of the hospital bed to get her foot all the way in. She walked to the window and raised the venetian blind. It clattered noisily. From the bed, all Nachiketa could see was the night sky and the deflected light of the sodium vapour street lamps, but when she had sat up earlier she had glimpsed Park Hotel. She knew Advaita must be looking at the lights of the traffic going by on nearby Park Street.

  ‘Nachos,’ Advaita said at last. ‘Who sent you that package?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nachiketa confessed. ‘I told you, it just arrived.’

  ‘And later this bastard called you and threatened to kill Shonali if you didn’t give it to him. This package?’ Advaita stabbed a silver-ringed finger at the envelope and papers piled haphazardly at the foot of Nachiketa’s bed. ‘You’re sure he meant this package?’

  Nachiketa frowned, struggling to think. ‘What other package could he have meant? He said he was calling from the office. They had obviously torn the place apart searching for something already. If it had been there, they would have found it. The only reason they didn’t find this one was because it had fallen under the—’ Nachiketa stopped. ‘I’ve told you all this.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little convenient?’

  ‘Convenient? How?’ Nachiketa didn’t follow what Advaita was trying to say.

  ‘That the package they were searching for happened to have fallen under the table and even though they “tore the place apart”, as you say,’ Advaita crooked one finger to indicate quote marks, her bangles sliding down that raised forearm, ‘they still couldn’t find it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Addy. Shit happens. What are you driving at anyway?’

  Advaita sighed and came over to the bed, sitting on the window side beside Nachiketa. ‘Nachos, don’t you find it a little bizarre? A strange package? Jat bastards? Shonali raped and killed? Your office set on fire?’

  ‘With me in it, don’t forget,’ Nachiketa reminded her. ‘They probably figured they would get rid of me and destroy the package together.’

  ‘Two birds with one stone, I get it,’ Advaita said. ‘What I don’t get is why. Why would strange Jat men go to such lengths? For what? Even for Delhi, even for Jat men, raping and killing isn’t an everyday thing, you know.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nachiketa said, puzzled and a little angry now. ‘These guys were obviously criminal elements. The man on the phone sounded really nasty.’

  ‘Yes, but still. Burning down a … challenged person in her office? Just to get rid of a few documents?’ Advaita shook her hai
rdo. ‘I don’t buy it, sweetie. It’s like something out of a Ram Gopal Varma film, a bad RGV film.’

  ‘Well, it happened,’ Nachiketa said, a little coldly. ‘Shonali’s dead. So is Justice and her pups. My office is down to ashes. It’s not a film set, you know.’

  Advaita put her hand on Nachiketa’s thigh, squeezing. ‘Sweetie, I’m not trying to belittle your trauma. I know what you went through is terrible, awful. Whoever did this is a bloody motherfucking lauda. Shonali’s death is a tragedy. NDTV is doing a special We the People show on violence against women and they want us both to be on it. And HT asked if they could …’ She shook her head, long earrings swinging. ‘But we can talk about all that later. I’m just saying …’

  Nachiketa was feeling frustrated now – and more than a little pissed off. ‘What are you saying, Addy? I don’t get what you’re saying. Can you spell it out clearly for me? I’m on painkillers, you know. My thinking is a little fuzzy. That’s why I asked you to look at those documents for me. What do they add up to? Is it another defence spending scam? Should we take it to Tarun? What is it?’

  Advaita sighed again. Nachiketa was getting irritated with her sighing too.

  Advaita leaned over Nachiketa, her breasts pressing against the recuperating woman’s feet, which of course had no sensation at all. But Nachiketa could feel the whole bed shift with Advaita’s weight. She was a heavy woman. She reached out and took hold of the pile of documents, pulling them over, then realized she was pulling them over Nachiketa’s feet and so picked them up and dumped them on her side of the bed. She sifted through and pulled out a sheet or three. She held it out in front of Nachiketa.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘Do you see this?’

  Nachiketa tried to focus. The pages appeared to be a list of names of companies. She squinted, trying hard to make her eyes coordinate. ‘It’s a list of … corporates?’