BLOOD RED SARI

by Banker, Ashok K

  Stanley was enough of a gentleman to rise when greeting Sheila. For a man of his stature there were no small or big people, only people or not-people. He had told her this the first time they met, when she expressed surprise at the same thing. If you didn’t fit Stanley Wu’s definition of a person, you didn’t exist, period. If he acknowledged you, he would give you his full attention. He was a man who either did or didn’t. There were no greys with him.

  He bowed graciously to her and she bowed as well, feeling ridiculous in her faded jeans, muddied Converses and wrinkled tee shirt. Fine way to meet a billionaire.

  He excused himself from the company without offering to introduce Sheila, for which she was grateful, although he didn’t do it out of consideration for her, she knew.

  ‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to a hostess, ‘go ahead, I will join you in a minute.’

  Sheila turned her head to watch him go around an undulating curved wall and out of sight. She tried not to gawk at the celebrities in the party crowd, and to make herself as small as possible to avoid being noticed. She felt shabby and cheap in this environment. She shouldn’t have cared a damn, but damn it, she did. Why hadn’t she put on some lipstick at least before coming? Brushed her hair. Lined her eyes. Maybe slipped on a pair of earrings. Something to identify her as a woman.

  Because you were more concerned about staying alive and that meant staying out of sight.

  Yes, but damnit, she had gone to Shakespeare Bazaar to meet the professor. She could have picked up a few things right there. Would it have killed her?

  Well, yeah, it might’ve!

  She hadn’t known she would be seeing him at a swanky party for the Who’s Who of Kolkata high society. She had thought the address was an office in an under-construction building off the E.M. Bypass – that was what it had been the last time she had come to see him here. How was she supposed to know that the construction was done and this was going to be the scene?

  She told her feminine side to shut up and followed the hostess. The woman’s tantalizing length of thigh played peekaboo beneath the generous slit as she led Sheila up the marble spiral staircase that she had passed earlier, by the elevators. She couldn’t help but be presented with an excellent close-up view of the woman’s bum clenching and unclenching beneath the body-hugging sheath, and took a professional interest in the view. Based on the gluteal definition and muscle form visible, Sheila concluded that the woman must do a lot of lunges and pullovers but not enough squats. Swimming would be good too, or maybe kickboxing. Still, she sniffed mentally, they weren’t that great, just better packaged. She resisted the urge to pat herself on the backside: she wasn’t in that bad shape herself. Just not dressed as showily.

  They reached the top of what seemed like two or three storeys worth of winding spiral stairs and found themselves in a palace of white and gold with flourishes of emperor’s purple and empress red in the form of paintings and wall hangings and objets d’art. The ceiling was easily ten metres high and the entire floor was one vast open luxuriant jewel box encased in crystalline glass. It was breathtaking. Sheila was still staring when the hostess smiled and bowed and began descending the staircase. She took several moments just looking around, trying hard to be casual and failing.

  She reacted with a start when Stanley Wu said, ‘You’ve been a bad girl, Sheila.’

  She turned and saw that he had been standing by a pearl-encrusted bar, smoking, since before she had arrived. He must have another way to get here, a private way, because he had been heading in the direction opposite to the stairs that she had taken.

  Reading her confusion, he gestured behind himself. ‘Private elevator. Runs through the whole building. On its own power generator, separate from the building, the grid, everything else.’

  She felt her brows twitch. That made sense. A man like him would make sure his lift would run even if there was a war, a riot, the end of the world. ‘So this is what you used to call your “new project” back when we used to meet?’

  He shrugged. ‘I told you I was getting into real estate.’

  He gestured to a couch lined with what looked like panda fur, in black and white. ‘Please.’

  She sat, he sat.

  He offered her nothing, she asked for nothing.

  He smoked and watched her.

  She waited.

  They sat that way for a long minute.

  Finally he nodded. ‘Nice job, the way you handled the American shooters.’

  That didn’t surprise her. It was the reason she had come to see him. ‘You heard?’

  He gestured vaguely towards a wall. ‘I saw. CCTV footage grabbed from the KMRC cams.’

  She realized he was indicating a wall where there must be a screen. It probably popped out or slid down when activated by remote. Right now, though, it was just a blank space on a pearl wall. ‘So the police have the whole thing on camera?’

  He shook his head, smoke blurring his face. ‘Only me. I had the discs wiped. Nobody but I saw.’

  ‘How—’ she began, then remembered.

  He watched her remember and smiled, nodding. ‘The Chinese built the railways across the world. Now, we own a few too.’

  She knew he didn’t mean that literally. He didn’t actually own the KMRC. His name probably didn’t appear on any paperwork anywhere, nor did the names of any companies he owned. But somehow, through a series of shell companies or ghost entities or proxies and surrogates, he owned a piece of the metro. Enough to call it his own. Enough to have a CCTV flash drive’s contents dumped, then wiped. It had been another of his ‘new projects’ only a few years ago. She was impressed by how much he had achieved and how far he had come in that short time.

  ‘Who were they?’ she asked.

  He smiled. ‘She comes to my house and interrogates me. My men would have anyone else chopped and minced just for that.’

  Again he gestured with a slight nod, again she saw nothing.

  She guessed he meant the men who were watching them, just out of sight, somehow positioned so they could see him, or her, or both, without being seen themselves.

  She smiled back while using her peripheral vision and tactical knowledge to guess where they might be positioned, keeping her eyes on Stanley. ‘It’s the reason why I came to see you, Stanley Wu,’ she said.

  He released a carefully timed burst of laughter and herb smoke, revealing a perfect pearly thirty-two, a pink tongue and a beautiful tapering throat. ‘She calls me by my name, informally! Even the chairman of Lehman Brothers doesn’t dare call me by that name. He says “Mr Stanley”, so careful to use the correct formal form for a Chinese. But you, you say “Stanley Wu” as if you are my relative … or my …?’ He gestured, inviting her to finish the sentence.

  ‘Your one-time fuck-buddy?’ she said casually. ‘Your dial-a-cunt? Your friend-with-a-benefit? Your pussy pal?’

  He laughed full-throatedly, slapping both his thighs, shaking his head and torso vigorously like a character in a Jackie Chan movie whose automated suit had gone out of control. ‘She blasphemes in church! She is a potty-mouthed slut! She is a bad, bad girl. Oh, I love this woman.’

  She got up and walked over to his couch, unbuttoning her shirt. She yanked the shirt out of her jeans and slipped it off her shoulders, reaching back and unhooking her bra. Her breasts spilled free, hot and sore from being kicked or punched the day before, she didn’t remember what. She kicked off her Converses, the lush white pile carpet feeling like she was walking on water. Then she unzipped the jeans, and peeled them off, the end of the left foot getting tangled in her toes, then coming free. She stood before him, presenting herself in just blue bikini briefs, pushing her groin forward until it almost touched his face. She could smell herself. She knew he could.

  He had stopped laughing by then. He was watching her with a lingering smile and a light in his eyes. She had seen that light before. She liked that light.

  ‘Prove it,’ she said.

  Slowly, delicately, almost reverential
ly, he peeled off the panties.

  Thirteen

  13.1

  ANITA WAS IN DEEP shit. Not figuratively – although that was true too – but literally. Emboldened by the kicking in of the sedative the zoo doctor had injected her with, she had decided to climb a wall. So long as she stayed on a walkway, they were bound to find her. She didn’t know how many there were, but judging from the torchlights waving around, there were enough to hunt her down and nail her ass. ‘Bitch!’ It came out louder than expected in the quiet of the zoo and she clapped a hand over her mouth. Somewhere to her left, in a row of cages with long vertical bars on the front, something growled. It occurred to her that she had just said the word aloud in an environment where it might be taken literally. ‘I meant myself,’ she clarified, even pointing at her own chest in the darkness. Yup, those sedatives had kicked in with a vengeance, no doubt about it.

  She was on a concrete wall now, lying face down on the top. The wall was really massive – probably two feet thick and about six feet high – which set off warning bells in her head. Whatever lived behind this wall must be a tough ammepanni. But the men chasing her were worse motherfuckers. She heaved herself over the side of the wall. Given a choice between men and predatory animals, she’d take her chances with animals any day. Using the crutch to support her descent, she relinquished hold slowly until both the crutch and her good foot were on solid ground. Then she began shambling through the darkness, away from the growing sounds of approaching men and footfalls. In moments, she was plunged into a darkness deeper than night, or so it seemed at first. And moments after that, her good foot plunged into a shin-deep pile of what felt and smelt like only one thing in God’s own country. She had played enough football in muddy Varkala fields in the rain as a schoolgirl to know that this wasn’t wet mud. She was in deep shit. Animal shit. She took another step, the ooze sucking at her lovingly, reluctant to let go. Please, please stay. I promise I won’t be clingy. After at least a half dozen steps, she realized this wasn’t just any deep shit, this was an entire fucking land mass composed entirely of compost. How turdilicious. Something sparked in her pain-exhaustion-and-drug-addled brain and she found the words of an old poem springing to mind, one she had discovered with … who else? Lalima, and liked the sound of so much, she had gone around reciting it every time a boy was mean to her or just plain boyish. It was a way of saying ‘Fuck you!’ to boys and men, of slut-walking through their world, of raising her feminine voice deliberately to match and outmatch their loud masculine tones. There was something about this poem that was so deliciously offensive without actually saying anything that she remembered every single line word-perfect.

  ‘Call the roller of big cigars,’ she said now, wading through her private shit field, ‘the muscular one, and bid him whip/ In kitchen cups concupiscent turds.’ The original poem said ‘curds’, of course, but she had changed it just now – it was that play on words that had brought the poem to mind. She took a moment to grin in the darkness at that witticism, disgusting though it was – but then again, so is life sometimes, Lalima, isn’t it? – and wondering what creature produced offal in such copious quantities and had a fondness for depositing it in the same spot each time. Somewhat like a capitalist free market wealth-builder, building a bigger pile and relishing the aroma of sweet shit each morning. Man! I love the stench of crap in the morning, ain’t free markets great? ‘Let the wenches dawdle in such dress/ As they are used to wear, and let the boys/ Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers/ Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’

  She was loud now, really loud. Loud enough to be heard across the whole habitat, for sure, probably even beyond that wall no more than a couple dozen yards behind her, quite likely loud enough to be heard across half the fucking Thiruvananthapuram Zoo, and she didn’t give a damn. If anything, she began reciting louder, at the top of her voice, as if challenging God in His Heaven to do his worst.

  Send my brothers in to rape and beat me when I was fifteen?

  Why not! They’re good Christian boys!

  Force me to choose between staying and enduring their nightly rapes and beatings and become their bitch–whore or run away from home and eke out a living any which way I could in a city that considers lesbian minority girls to be a blot on society?

  Sure, Father dearest, I’m just a perverted Christian dyke, why don’t you make me suffer some more!

  Take my best friend Lalima, the sweetest, most god-fearing, humanity-loving person that ever lived, and kill her for godknowswhat reason?

  Of course, because every bloody sundae needs a bright red cherry on top to make the Sabbath Special complete!

  She was out of the shit pit now and moving across solid ground, but it was still hard going in the darkness. She stumbled more than once, almost fell but caught herself and kept going somehow, anyhow. All she knew was that she had to keep going, to get away from them, make them chase her if they wanted to get her, make them work for it, damnit. She had no illusions anymore. She had been up shit creek enough times – though not as literally as tonight – to know when things were beyond salvaging. This time she was going to bite the big one. She was going to buy the farm. Kick the bucket. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, a hole in the bucket …

  ‘Take from the dresser of deal,’ she yelled, raising her fist in the air as she hobbled fast enough to qualify for a Special Olympic event. ‘Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet/ On which she embroidered fantails once/ And spread it so as to cover her face/ If her horny feet protrude, they come/ To show how cold she is, and dumb.’

  ‘Lalima’s dead,’ she whispered in the middle of the second, and last, verse. ‘She’s dead, and these bastards killed her. Fucking bitch!’

  She could hear voices behind her now, sounds of men jumping the same wall, their feet thudding as they landed inside the animal habitat. She didn’t look back. She had come too far now. There was no turning back. You killed your brother, Christ will judge you for it, her mother’s blotched face raged at her, swimming out of the darkness ahead. What had that fucking doctor given her anyway? LSD? She hobbled on, feeling the pain return to her broken foot like the zombified shambling corpse of a long-loved friend. Chakkare, Lalima said, dressed in the same sari she had worn the last time Anita had seen her, two days before she had left Varkala. Chakkare, come to me, let’s go down to the beach. It’s Papanasam. It was Lalima’s first sari, sign that she was a young woman now, no more a girl, a beautiful hand-woven Balarampuram sari, deep red in colour. Blood red. Symbolizing the maturation of a young woman, her coming of age.

  ‘Let the lamp affix its beam,’ Anita cried, loud enough to be heard across Kerala. ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream!’

  If God really was residing in His Own Country and happened to be visiting at that moment, he didn’t answer.

  But something else did. Several somethings.

  13.2

  PINK’S OFFICES WERE A hive of activity. There were more young men and women in indigo blue jeans and dark coloured jackets coming and going than at a St. Stephen’s literary group meet. Nachiketa was taken aback at first, then processed it. ‘Must be some internship thing,’ she said, mostly for her own benefit. Rajendra Powar was pushing her wheelchair and wasn’t really listening. He manoeuvred her clumsily up the entrance of the three-storey building and somehow managed to get her into the lift without any major mishap. She was glad she had kept this spare chair in the dicky of her car all this while, just in case. Today was a bloody just-in-case day through and through, that was for sure.

  Surprisingly nobody really paid much attention to her – the woman in the wheelchair with blood and urine all over her and bandages on her hands – or to the hulking Jat with matching bandages around his head and hands. Glancing at herself and Powar in the mirror of the cramped old cage lift, she saw that the two of them made quite a sight. Wheeling her through into the office, guided by her directions, Powar managed to improve his
technique slightly, which impressed her. The man had actually learnt how to wheel someone around in just a few minutes. She had friends who had kept banging her elbows and knees for weeks. Maybe all Jat men weren’t assholes, after all; just the ones from that colony in GK-II.

  And the bastards who did that to Shonali.

  Except …

  She was no longer certain they had been Jats.

  Well, maybe the guy who called her had been a Jat but not the people behind this whole mess. There was something else going on here, something non-Jatty that she was still trying to figure out. The call from that woman in Kerala … Anita? had helped put a few things in perspective. Just knowing that Lalima had sent her the package had helped. But she needed some more brainpower focused on this problem. And Pink was the best brains trust she had access to right now.