Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  He walked silently across the floor to the kitchen table. The cats sprang out of his way, like furred moths flying up at a touch. He saw the table-top was blank, cleared away as might be expected from a fussy old bachelor. But what he looked for lay there as if at his request – the long thin kitchen knife with which he had seen Baumgartner cut up the disgusting putrid flesh for his damned cats. The memory of that repulsive meal and of the stupid slow warty old man fussing over the caterwauling beasts made him lift his lips off his teeth as he reached out for the knife and picked it up with silent fingers. He stood holding it still for so long as to make the cats stop pacing around him, worrying at these unfamiliar movements. Then he turned and glided over the floor towards the divan, ready at any moment to stop and freeze or else leap into frenzied action.

  There was no movement. Baumgartner slept on, his hands clutching each other under his chin as he lay, curled on his left side. His right arm had sunk down over his chest to meet the left arm, leaving his ribs as well as a triangle of chest exposed, the flesh soft and yellow, like tallow, where the pyjama top was open. His mouth was open, too, and his breath came and went, the lips moving faintly as cats’ whiskers move, but without their sensitivity to what was happening near him. Baumgartner slept, in ignorance. Ignorance was, after all, his element. Ignorance was what he had made his own. It was his country, the one he lived in with familiarity and resignation and relief.

  Kurt steadied himself, drawing his feet together, straightening his legs, both to ensure his balance and give him a position of strength. He brought his hands together so that both clasped the hasp of the knife and it seemed to take long moments before he could get his grip right, place his fingers in correct alignment, summoning up all his faculties so that they gathered in that one shaft. Then, with great speed, he raised the knife, then bent, and plunged it in, deep into that soft tallow so that it shuddered and let out a kind of whimper, or just a gasp, but some kind of flutter. It had to cease, it had to be made to cease. Withdrawing the knife, he plunged it in again, and again, and again. With increasing slowness, and increasing weakness, till all movement came to a halt – the rocking, the quivering, the flutter, the gasp, all ended.

  Then the silence and the concentration and the control all broke together. The cats were leaping like black flames around his feet, yowling maniacally. Jumping over them, he hurried to the shelf, sweeping off all the tarnished silver trophies with ringing sounds of metal on metal, clanging and clanking, one against the other, as he filled his arms with them, carried them to where he had seen his rucksack leaning against the wall and, falling down on to his knees, shoved and pressed and pushed them all in. In that kneeling position, he swept his hands over the small table – Baumgartner might have left his watch there, or his wallet. Whatever there was, he scooped up and crammed in, throwing aside bits of paper, cards, letters that he certainly did not want. When he got up, he found a black fluid running down his knees to his feet. Trying to wipe it off, he stared at the body on the divan – yes, that pale mound of yellow tallow was oozing with something dark, liquid. It was not like blood, it was like a diarrhoea of blood. God, why didn’t he stop that? Kurt felt a bubble rise in his throat that he had to choke back. Then he bent to swing his rucksack on to his back. He was breathing hard as he buckled it back into place, fumbling with the straps, getting it all wrong. Hell, he cursed, and hurled aside some furry body that had come too close, and bumbled his way to the door. He spent a minute struggling with the lock, lurching past the doorposts, suddenly clumsy again, out of control again. His feet no longer floated; now they were like stones and fell from one stair to another, thundering on them like an avalanche descending. Surely everyone would wake, fling open their doors, look out and see –

  Kurt fled, so fast that he did not see if the watchman was on his perch or not, but he did note the white bodies stretched on the pavement because he had to avoid them, and the figure slumped against the lamppost that suddenly jerked itself upright on seeing Kurt escape from Hira Niwas with a sack. Pushing past him, Kurt vanished.

  Clutching the empty bottle by the neck, Jagu approached the doorman and taunted him. ‘Thieves come and go and you sleep your ganja-sleep, eh?’

  The watchman, who had been dozing, snapped shut his mouth and woke with a jerk. ‘Shut up or I’ll crack your skull for you,’ he growled.

  Sighing, shifting and preparing to chat the small hours of the night away, Jagu looked down for a clean strip of marble on which to sit, then saw the stain – a footprint marked in fresh blood.

  Seeing him double over, his greasy hair falling over his face and his eyes bulging, the watchman drawled, ‘What’s the matter – taken sick?’

  ‘Fool,’ Jagu muttered, ‘come and see,’ without really wanting to draw attention to, himself not even wanting to take notice of, this evidence of a violence he knew, he felt, had been committed. Before the watchman could get off his stool and come down to look, he had already started running – first down the road after the firanghi who had just left with a loaded sack, then wheeling around and turning back to Hira Niwas as though he had gone mad, screaming, ‘Blood! Bloodshed! Blood!’

  The watchman had seen what Jagu saw. Clutching him by the arm, he wrenched him around and clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘Drunkard, idiot, swine,’ he hissed, ‘what are you trying to do? Bring the police here?’

  ‘Pol-pol-poliss,’ the drunkard whimpered, covering his cut lip with his hands. ‘You saw? You saw?’

  ‘Saw what?’ the watchman spat at him. He too wanted to see nothing. He would be dismissed, he would lose his job, his family would starve –

  Jagu clung to his arm. ‘We must go up and find out.’

  The watchman swore and spat and shook his head but it did not help: he had to go and see.

  All along the worn terrazzo flooring of the hall there were the bare footprints marked in blood, as well as a trail of dark drops. On the wooden staircase these became brown spots. The two men followed them up to the third floor landing where Baumgartner’s door stood open. Then they faltered, hung on to the staircase, stared at each other. Now it was Jagu whose courage failed: he realised at last what the police would surmise. He had been hauled up to the police station before at the first report of a theft, a burglary, a rape, a brawl, anything at all in that quarter. He knew he ought to leave, to run. Rouse his family, pack his bags and bundles, and leave, silently in the night. Yet, in spite of this urge based on both common sense and experience, he felt a totally senseless curiosity and concern too.

  ‘Which sahib is it?’ he whispered to the watchman. He had never been in the building before but he knew, somehow, which one – ‘the firanghi?’

  The watchman nodded. ‘Old fool,’ he muttered, ‘he and his filthy cats –’

  ‘The one with the plastic bags? That beggar who eats other men’s leftovers?’

  Then they heard a sound inside that made them stiffen with fright – it was a wail, high-pitched and quavering. Jagu swung around and made as if to roll down the stairs but the watchman held him by the arm, explaining, ‘The cats –’ and together they ventured in.

  It was a little while before they found the light-switch. As they stumbled around in the dark, cats brushed against their legs, hissed, spat, leapt out of the way, lashed their tails and made warning sounds; their eyes were everywhere, huge, shocked, triangular and brilliant.

  Jagu spat. ‘What a stink. Did the sahib never throw out any rubbish? Smells like the municipal rubbish dump.’

  ‘Maybe the dead body,’ the watchman muttered, not wanting the prestige of Hira Niwas lowered in the eyes of a common street drunkard. It was he who found the switch, illuminated the room and saw the sight.

  They kept their distance. Neither would approach. At the door, they argued. Send for someone – but who? The landlord did not live in Hira Niwas. Which of the neighbours –? Who knew the sahib? The watchman had seen a blonde woman come and go, on foot, she must live nearby, but where? The watchman clutched
his head as if a piercing headache threatened to split it – and actually it did – when he remembered seeing Baumgartner go into the Café de Paris at the corner so frequently that he must surely be known there. Giving Jagu a push, he said, ‘Go, go to Caffeydepree, go call the owner. Tell him to come.’

  Jagu shrank away from his touch. He retreated on to the landing and stood there in the shadows, sweat pouring from his body copiously, rankly. ‘No,’ he refused, shaking his head violently. ‘No.’

  ‘Then go and call the police,’ the watchman exploded. ‘I have to stay here and guard – I am the guard –’

  Jagu rolled his eyeballs at him. ‘Mad,’ he accused. ‘I – I go to the police?’ and he pointed at his chest dramatically.

  Neither would go. They stood staring at the wrecked room in the blank artificial light – the objects flung down from the shelf and scattered below it, the knife on the rug, stained, with the papers and cards swept off the small table by the divan, the thing on the divan – a nondescript bundle of old, stained clothes that someone might have thrown down, a part of the general litter. Except that it oozed the filthy black stuff that was spilt everywhere. The cats who had been springing from one corner to another as if demented, now sat frozen, staring from under tables and chairs at the two men. Only when the window became a frame for greyness instead of night did they realise the need to make a move. By then they could hear people moving about the building, doors opening, cisterns flushing, bathers hawking and splashing, a radio blabbering. Finally the watchman decided to fetch the nearest neighbour and Jagu sank down on to his haunches by the door to wait.

  The neighbours came. For a while frenzied words flew over the drunkard’s head – ‘But – you haven’t called the police? You saw the murderer? You didn’t chase him? You didn’t call? You fools, you idiots, you’ll be made to pay –’ and then there was silence as they rushed away in different directions, thundering up the stairs and down them and along the passages, leaving the watchman to come and huddle beside Jagu, equally guilty. They waited like criminals in prison for the gaoler.

  People came streaming in, adding up to more visitors than Baumgartner had had in years. Farrokh, who had come in his pyjamas and slippers, unwashed and unshaven, stood in their midst, his face sunken and devastated. He had been brought to help – but what help could he give now? Others, more energetic, less hampered by emotion, seized enthusiastically upon the first likely suspect – Jagu, who was still squatting in a corner, too frightened to slip away as he knew he ought. Fastening on to his hair and neck, they shouted in triumph, ‘Here he is – we have found him – the murderer!’ The watchman made a feeble attempt to intervene, protesting that it was Jagu who had alerted him in the first place, but no one listened; they marched Jagu down the stairs and, seeing the police van draw up at the pavement, threw him inside. ‘Take him to the thana,’ they advised the police, ‘and interrogate him.’

  Jagu’s family, gathered by the door, set up a great wail. The woman tore her hair and beat her breast in lamentation. A policeman gave her a push in the chest, saying, ‘Murderers, thieves, pimps, all of you – you’ll be cleared off the pavement and sent back to the thieves’ village from which you come. This is the end of all of you,’ whereupon she fell at his feet, trying to prevent him from driving away with Jagu, and received a kick on her back in return. Jagu, totally paralysed with fear, lay moaning in the van.

  Two Dobermanns leapt out, held by two policemen who seemed scarcely able to restrain them as they scampered up the stairs. This created instant pandemonium amongst the feline inmates of the flat – they jumped on to cupboards and curtain rods and stood there, arching their backs, spitting and yowling and slashing out with their claws if the dogs approached. Both the Dobermanns and the policeman retreated, apologetically, telling the watchman they would wait outside till the flat had been cleared of these defenders of Baumgartner’s realm.

  The watchman turned to Farrokh in appeal. How was he to get the cats out of the way? Farrokh stared at him and at the cats, equally helpless. But one of the neighbours ran down and out and returned with two ragged boys with sacks. They earned their living, they claimed, by picking through the dustbins on the streets, and they were quickly persuaded to catch the cats and put them in their sacks and remove them – ‘far away’, the watchman recovered sufficiently to say, sternly, and Farrokh, tender-hearted, retreated on to the balcony rather than watch. He stood there with his head bent, listening to the furniture falling, the boys shouting, the cats spitting as they dashed from cover to cover. The situation grew worse when the fire brigade arrived: someone had called them on the telephone, thinking that the crowd at Hira Niwas could only mean a fire. Shown into the flat on the third floor, they discovered that all they could do was help in the cat hunt. One cat, cornered on a window-sill, leapt out of the window and fell to its death.

  He – it was the lamed Fritzi – missed by inches the bald, perspiring head of the landlord who stepped out of his car and hurried in, moaning and wiping his face. ‘Never in all these years,’ he groaned as he stumped up the stairs, ‘in all these years – in Hira Niwas – has such a thing happened.’ He appeared to blame Baumgartner entirely although he had a few words of abuse for the watchman who cowered when he saw him enter. But for all his disgust and distress, he did walk across to the telephone and, remembering that it was Chimanlal who had brought Baumgartner here for a room, rang his office and drew a reluctant assent from the son to come and see to his late father’s murdered friend.

  The police returned, timidly, without the Dobermanns who had lost heart in the search and could not be made to mount the stairs again. They helped the rag-pickers to secure the sacks and saw them off the premises thankfully. Farrokh re-entered the room, wiping his eyes which watered from the glare on the balcony, and protested mildly against the wreckage, the broken glass and the overturned furniture, but the police paid no attention – they were pleased, it seemed, to see so much havoc, it made a good case against the murderer.

  ‘Sahib,’ the watchman made a quavering attempt, both hands folded together in a prayer for an audience, ‘sahib, Jagu saw a man – a firanghi, a young firanghi – run out, with a sack –’

  Chimanlal’s son pushed him roughly aside as he entered. He was dressed for the office in a safari suit with brass buttons that shone. Holding his handkerchief to his nose, he complained, ‘The stink – what is stinking in here?’

  Farrokh had heard the watchman’s words and asked, through lips stiff with fright, and foreboding, ‘You saw – he saw – a young firanghi, you say?’

  ‘Such filth!’ Chimanlal’s son exclaimed, looking around him. ‘Tchh, how these filthy foreigners live!’

  ‘It was not like this,’ Farrokh protested, ‘it was someone else –’

  ‘It was getting worse and worse,’ the young man insisted. ‘Whenever I saw him, I found him looking more like a beggar.’ He glanced across at the divan, then draw his handkerchief over his nose quickly. ‘What is that doing here? Call the police. Get it moved to the morgue.’

  The police, who were still waiting for their chief to come and begin the investigation, explained feebly that they could not disturb the scene of the crime.

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ the young man said crisply. ‘Get the hearse and have this – this body removed at once.’

  The police, looking almost relieved that someone should have given an order so clear and precise, saluted and went tumbling down the stairs ‘to make arrangements’, they said.

  ‘But – should we not call his friends?’ Farrokh protested, turning away from the murder and the murderer to what seemed now of greatest urgency. ‘There are no relations but friends may want –’

  ‘What friends? He had friends?’ the young man asked with contemptuous disbelief.

  ‘Yes, yes – there is a memsahib – she lives in Colaba – I know her – she comes many times to my café with Bommgarter sahib –’

  ‘Memsahib?’ the young man’s face searched
for an expression, found none. How could any memsahib be involved with something so soiled, used and useless, ready to be dragged away for disposal?

  But Farrokh became stubborn. Pushing out his lower lip, he insisted. He gave instructions to the watchman to go and fetch Lotte. The watchman turned to the landlord to ask for permission to leave the scene – ‘duty’ was the word he used and kept repeating, in order to mend his spoilt image – ‘my duty’ – when a neighbour, an excitable young man who could scarcely wait to take some part in this drama, offered to go and made off instantly. The thought of breaking the news to a memsahib galvanised him: it would be better than any play on television.

  While waiting for the chief police officer to arrive, Chimanlal’s son walked around the room, inspecting the battered objects it contained. He asked Farrokh to put everything in a box that could be taken away by the police. ‘Clear this flat, it must be handed back to the landlord, no one is going to pay the rent.’ At the mention of rent, the landlord pricked up his ears and began to take a lively interest. ‘Perhaps the furniture can be sold,’ he speculated, ‘and the rent owing to me can be paid out of the proceeds.’ The police guarding the scene objected to anything being disturbed, even more to anything being removed.

  ‘Sahib,’ Farrokh appealed to the landlord and to Chimanlal’s son with a gesture of his open hands, ‘Bommgarter sahib is still here – he has not even left yet.’

  Then Lotte arrived, dragged out of her sleep and brought in by the excited neighbour. So fast did she come, hobbling, that she broke the heel off her red slipper. Then had to limp. Still, she burst in, clutching the hair that stood up on her head with one hand, the open front of her cotton dress with the other, herself looking the victim.