The Hakkadi was seated on a luxurious white couch that seemed to extend sinuously around the entire room. She realized it was meant to represent a Chinese dragon, right down to the magnificently carved head at the end, but all in white, with gold touches. Seated by the head, resting his hand on its flaring nostril, was the Hakkadi, looking as handsome and suave as ever, surrounded by a half dozen people she vaguely recognized. One was definitely an Indian Idol winner and host, a Chinese Indian singer. Another was a Chinese Indian badminton champ. She didn’t recognize the others but they all looked very glamorous and rich. The hostess bent strategically so her slit side was in view of the Hakkadi and whispered to him. He looked up and saw Sheila.
‘Sheila,’ he said, standing up. ‘Sheila Ray. I should shoot you at sight.’
Twelve
12.1
ANITA WAS TAKEN ABACK by the woman’s tone and by her use of the name ‘Lalima’.
‘Um, excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m not Lalima. I’m a friend of hers. My name’s Anita. Is this Nachiketa Shroff?’
‘Yes, lady, you just called me, don’t you know whom you called?’
‘Yes, but how do you know Lalima?’
‘We met at a conference on violence against women in Delhi last August. We were both speakers and we co-chaired a panel. Haan, idhar se chalo.’
‘What?’
‘Nahi, woh one-way hai. Park Street se chalo, Powar.’
‘I’m sorry, are you driving right now?’
‘Yes. I mean, no. I mean yes, I’m driving but he’s the one driving and he doesn’t know Delhi roads. I don’t think he has a license. So I have to guide him.’
‘Have you had men trying to kill you today?’
Silence for a moment. Anita could hear traffic sounds in the background and someone using a car horn liberally while mouthing abuses in a north-Indian accent. Punjabi, she thought, or maybe Awadhi or Haryanvi or something.
‘Hello, Nachiketa? Are you still there? I said—’
‘I’m paralyzed from the waist down, suffering from second-degree burns on my hands and face and neck and back, my pain medication has worn off, I’ve seen one friend raped and killed, another friend died trying to save me from a German gunman, my office and all my case files were set on fire, and Justice and her pups are all dead, all except one. Where the fuck else would I be, Lalima?’
‘Um, I’m Anita, not Lalima,’ she said, feeling dazed. ‘Did all that happen today itself? I mean, I’m so sorry—’
‘Fuck sorry, Anita. Put Lalima on the line. I want to know why the fuck she sent me that package. What does it mean? What am I supposed to do with you? Nahi, nahi, yahan se right nahi, flyover se lo. Ring Road se chalenge.’
Anita’s head was beginning to swim. She was trying to absorb what the woman had just told her. Who the hell was Justice? And her ‘pups’? Was that some kind of metaphor? The woman in Delhi still sounded as if she was personally angry with her, Anita. So she decided the only thing to do was to shock her back.
‘Listen, Nachiketa, listen to me. Lalima’s dead. She was killed by my brothers, I think, and then they tricked me into coming to Kerala and tried to kill me too. I got away but I’m pretty sure my brother Philip’s dead. He got shot while I was escaping. Now I’m in Trivandrum Zoo with a broken foot and I know they’re coming for me. I don’t have much time, so please, just try to keep it together and let’s talk for a few minutes, wokay?’
There was silence at the other end. Traffic sounds. Honking. More abuses in some north-Indian dialect. Then Anita heard the Delhi woman tell her driver something and a few moments later, the honking and abusing ceased and the traffic sounds receded to the background.
‘Okay, Anita,’ Nachiketa said, still sounding upset but less pissed off. ‘I told him to stop by the side. I need to get my brains back into my skull anyway. I don’t know how to deal with stuff like this. We can talk now. Go ahead.’
Anita began by briefly telling her what she’d told Sheila and the little she’d learnt from Sheila, and about Aadila’s call being a dead end. Then she fell quiet, letting Nachiketa sort through the info. Nachiketa had already asked her what she did and told her that she was a lawyer, and they exchanged a few other bits of basic info.
Anita looked around as she waited in the darkness. She thought she heard voices somewhere but it was difficult to tell. Nothing close by, that was for sure. And if they did come this way, she would see or hear something, wouldn’t she? She hoped so.
‘Okay, okay,’ Nachiketa said at last. ‘My friend Addy said something about NGOs, lists of NGOs …’
‘Yes,’ Anita said, ‘I remember seeing that.’
‘Something about their being funded by illicit profits … and hedge funds are diverting those profits to the NGOs here?’
‘Yes, that’s what the paper trail shows, that someone has set up a long, convoluted paper trail of companies owned by other companies, ultimately funded by corporations through various capital market funds under legitimate corporate brand names, with legit banking and financing ties, but is mixing profits from illegal activities and using the NGOs to launder some of them and turn it legit.’
‘What illegal activities?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Anita replied. ‘The thing is, nothing’s really spelt out clearly. These are all mostly raw data grabs from all kinds of sources. There’s no index, no outline, nothing to help figure out the big picture. Now, I’ve done some forensic accounting before, so I know my stuff. But this is out of my league. There’s stuff on international double taxation avoidance treaties, proposed legislations, government regulations on investments and monopolies, insurance regulatory bylaws … it’s really complex stuff.’
‘So what does it all add up to?’
Anita paused, thinking. ‘Look, I can’t be sure exactly, but I think Lalima got hold of these from someone else. I don’t know who. She was a whistleblower, if you know what I mean. A troublemaker. She’d worked for Greenpeace, travelled the world, taken part in demonstrations, been arrested in a dozen countries, been extradited from a couple, banned, been arrested in India. I was out of touch with her for years, but the last I saw of her was a picture of her in a protest march against a dam in Madhya Pradesh, with a bunch of tribals and Arundhati Roy and Medha Patkar.’
‘I know,’ Nachiketa said. ‘She got into trouble at the conference last year because she tried to explain why Maoism was rising in the country and why so many tribal women were taking up arms to defend themselves and their families against army and police brutality. She was making comparisons with Kashmir and the north-east and she really raised a ruckus. We had to shut down the panel before time and cancel her next session. All she did was go straight to the press room and talk to the media till she found someone willing to cover her story.’
Anita grinned. ‘That sounds like my girl alright. But she wasn’t a publicity hound. She just wanted to fight for the underdog.’
‘And the underbitch,’ Nachiketa said. ‘Look, Anita, are you saying that the package she sent us is evidence against some hedge fund financiers on Wall Street?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but yes, I think that’s partly it. I think those documents were all public records and can be obtained by anyone. Lalima or someone associated with her pulled them together over time and was building a case against these people, and they found out and had her killed.’
‘So how does your family fit into this? Your brothers?’
Anita didn’t have an answer. ‘I don’t know. That’s what foxes me. My brother Philip,’ who is dead now, by the way, ‘said something about the church here in Kerala being involved. I don’t know what that means, but obviously there’s a connection. My brothers are really pissed off with me, to the point where they want me dead. But there’s also government authorities involved, I know, because the lawyer said that the police and state police had listed me as a terrorist and that they were after me.’
‘So,’ Nachiketa said, as if ticking off points on h
er fingers, ‘there’s Lalima, a radical activist, hedge funds in the US and Europe and Asia being used to launder illegal income from some criminal activity, there’s Kerala, and possibly the church, and your brothers, and the police and authorities, and NGOs and German assassins are involved as well. And everyone who received the package is being hunted down and killed. So whoever is behind all this is willing to go to any lengths to keep the truth from coming out. So what does it all add up to? What is the truth?’
Anita lowered the HTC for a moment. Someone was coming. She could hear the monkeys going crazy in their cages, shrieking and chattering, and a boar or some other creature snorting and grunting unhappily. She could also see lights bobbing in the darkness and, fuck, was that a chopper with a searchlight approaching over the horizon? Hey guys, I was only joking about the concentration camp thing! Then she heard the roar of an engine and saw headlights moving through the trees on the other side of what she guessed must be the crocodile swamp and knew the jig was up: they were here and they were heading towards her, or at least the general area in which she was located. ‘Listen, Nachiketa, I think they’ve caught up with me. I have to go now. I’m going to try and text you Sheila’s and Aadila’s cell numbers too. No other option, let’s hope they don’t trace it, wokay? Bye.’
She disconnected and adjusted the crutch under her arm. Time to run again.
12.2
‘HOLD ON,’ NACHIKETA SAID. ‘Is …?’
But the call was dropped. She looked at the BB and thought of storing the number, but how was she supposed to press those tiny buttons with these mittens on? She needed a phone with a bigger screen. An iPhone 4G. No, that needed finger touch. It wouldn’t work with cloth on your fingertips. Something with a stylus? But how would she grip a stylus with these mittens? An iPad? No, you couldn’t make calls with that, only VoIP, Skype and email. An Android device, then?
‘Chalo,’ she said aloud to Rajendra Powar. He was leaning forward on the steering and staring out at the traffic streaming past. With mittens covering their hands, they looked like characters in some bizarre NSD play. A children’s play at Nehru House on 14th November. He put the car into gear and took them back into traffic, not bothering to signal. Angry horns blared and cars screeched behind them, one Merc narrowly missing them as they cut right across its path at a sharp angle. It reminded her of the many times she had been cut off exactly like that by highway truck drivers.
‘Aap pehle truck chalate the?’ she asked casually.
‘Hanji,’ he replied, then glanced at her, frowning. ‘Aapko kaise pata chala?’
‘Just a lucky guess,’ she said and turned to the window to hide the smirk she wasn’t able to suppress.
They were on the flyover when she got the idea. ‘Aisa kartey hain, Daryaganj chalenge.’
He frowned at her. He was so tall he crouched over the steering wheel of the Civic and made it seem like a Maruti 800. ‘Daryaganj?’
‘Yes. I want to meet someone there. You know the way?’
He shrugged noncommittally. She gave him directions, carefully, and told him where to turn after they descended from the flyover. Then she used her cell to make a call. Before she dialled the number, she saw that she had a whole list of missed calls. When had they come? Apparently, all day. She hadn’t bothered to even look at the cell once the pain had got too much to bear, and once the pain medication had kicked in, she had forgotten about it. She was more involved with Advaita and the documents they were poring over by that time, and that was about all she could handle at the time.
Advaita’s dead, she told herself glumly. She didn’t even know how to feel about that. Horrible, of course. But also guilty. Was it her fault? Had she been partly responsible because she had told Addy to read the documents and stick around? She berated herself. You’re thinking like a victim, Nachos. Like women who get battered by their husbands and blame it on themselves. ‘I shouldn’t have provoked him, it was my fault …’ Bullshit! It was never their fault and it wasn’t her fault now. Nobody had the right to use violence against anyone else, whatever the provocation.
If a German with stylish hair and a gun comes in and shoots your friend, it’s not your fault, Nachos.
Yeah? Well, what about Shonali? And Justice?
She shook her head, trying to clear it. That woman Anita had sounded like she was in trouble, just as deep as Nachiketa herself. And she had mentioned two other names … what were they? She didn’t recall. Anita had said something about texting her the names and numbers. She hoped she would.
She struggled with the BB’s interface for several moments, trying to find the number she was looking for, then trying to dial it. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ she shouted, hitting the dashboard angrily.
Powar glanced at her. ‘Why don’t use voice activate feature?’
She looked at him dully. Her head throbbed; her hands felt like they were on fire – hitting the dashboard hadn’t helped – and her entire body was racked with pain. ‘Thanks. Should have thought of that myself.’
She managed the voice activation, feeling like a rustic idiot herself. Then used it to call the number she wanted. The person answered on the second ring, sounding distant and distracted as always. ‘Shama.’
‘Shama, it’s Nachiketa. Nachos.’
Dead silence for a moment. Powar took a wrong turn from CP but it was too late to correct him. She gestured in the other direction, he slapped his forehead, realizing his mistake, and nodded vigorously, swinging the Civic around to the right lane with an ease that speedboats on the open sea would have envied. She had no idea how he managed to do it without hitting a single other car in the thick of traffic but she guessed that drunks and Jats must be just plain lucky.
‘Nachos. Wow. Wow wow wow. Mind blowing.’
Nachiketa rolled her eyes. Typical Shama. ‘Yeah, I know. What have you heard?’
‘Basically … you were blown up, burned, shot, run over … the works? No, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound flip. Are you okay? How are you? Where are you?’
‘On my way to see you. Just passing CP. I have something to show you. I think …’ she hesitated, knowing that if she took this next step, there was no stepping back. It was either follow the yellow pulp road all the way or the house fell on you, hard. She thought of Shonali lying sprawled naked, semen on her thigh; Justice with her lips curled back, belly slashed open; Advaita with her eyes wide open, kajal smeared, vomiting blood; and she thought, Fuck it, let’s go for broke. ‘I think it might be a story,’ she said. ‘A pretty big one. Is Tyron there?’
‘He’s on his way. We’re closing tomorrow, so it’s the usual all-nighter.’ Shama Kidwai was the editor and her significant other Tyron Bose was the publisher/co-editor of Pink, an almost-fortnightly magazine that had once broken a major news story about government corruption in a telecom scam that made both of them famous for a while – and unemployable ever after. They had a hard time getting sponsors or advertising, and eked out a living on subscriptions and donations from well-wishers. They survived because Tyron came from a moneyed family with political connections and they ran the magazine out of a rented place in Daryaganj with the money he got from renting out his own bungalow in South Ex. to some MNC on a long-term lease. The lease brought in enough to cover expenses and they managed to survive from issue to issue. Enough of their stories got picked up and commented on and talked about for them to have some clout in Delhi hifi circles. Firebrand journalist–politician Arun Shourie had once called Pink ‘the liberal conscience of India’. The line ran beneath their logo on the masthead, with a credit line at the bottom of the masthead.
Shama was referring to their usual all-nighter before closing an issue. That was a bit of luck, the fact that they were closing an issue the very next day. Just enough time to change the cover, maybe. Perhaps even redo the whole issue. But that was getting ahead of herself. First she had to get there and show them the documents and see what they made of the whole pile.
‘You guys sit tight, okay?
I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Tell Tyron it’s big, really really big.’
‘Fuck me,’ Shama said. ‘Yeah, sure. We’ll be here. I’ll tell him. TC, TTYS.’ Shama was forty-four, with two teenage daughters, but she was still sixteen at heart, a perennial hippie.
Nachiketa disconnected the call and looked around. Where the hell were they? Was that Nirula’s?
Rajendra Powar raised both hands despairingly, taking them off the steering wheel. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t shout, madam. I go wrong way. Please to guide now.’
12.3
THE HAKKADI’S NAME WAS Stanley Wu. He was in his early thirties, handsome in a glamorous Eurasian Tony Leung kind of way, dressed suavely in immaculately tailored suits, smoked herb cigarettes that lent him an old-world ambience without the tar and nicotine punishment of real tobacco, and was the last Chinese Indian tycoon in the country. Some said he ran the Triads from Kolkata and she guessed they might not be far from the truth. Others said that over the last hundred years, his family had helped the two hundred thousand Chinese Indians settled in Kolkata migrate farther west, to the US and UK and Europe, and in exchange they had ‘inherited’ all the properties and establishments the emigrants left behind in the subcontinent. His great-grandfather (or was it his great-great-grandfather?) had perfected the blending of Cantonese cooking with Indian ingredients and spices that came to be called ‘Hakka’ after the predominant clan of Chinese immigrants that first settled in India. Over time, by inheriting, buying out, or simply taking over establishments, the family had come to possess a chain of Hakka restaurants across Kolkata, then across India that became the spearhead of his family’s growth in fortunes. Adding the word ‘di’ to a Chinese name conveyed great respect, elevating the person thus titled to the stature of a great being or God. Hence, Hakka-di. There had been many inheritors of the wealth, the fortune, the power and the title over the last hundred-odd years, but they were all just ‘Hakkadi’ to the world.
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