by A. X. Ahmad
So the cops are interested in the tall guy who escorted Leela out of the club. Who was he? Ranjit feels a surge of anger as he remembers the man’s arrogant laugh, the way he had shoved Leela into the car.
Straightening up, Ranjit walks around the corner, out into the street.
There is a flash of metal in his peripheral vision. A length of pipe comes down, out of the darkness, aimed at his head, and he throws up his left arm to block the blow. He feels bone shatter, and then stunning, hot pain, but his training kicks in, and he whirls to face his dark-jacketed attacker.
He ducks the next blow, feeling the pipe whiz over his head.
He hears the footfalls behind him a second too late. The second man must have come down the alley, and there is no time to duck. This blow catches him on the back of his head and he pitches forward, the trash-scented asphalt rushing up to meet him.
Chapter Fifteen
The pain has its tendrils deep inside him. Ranjit is lying on his shattered arm, facedown, tufts of dirty carpeting pushing into his nose and mouth. He stifles his impulse to roll off his arm, to stop the unbearable pulse of pain.
“The maderchod has a gun. A Glock, police issue.”
“Tiwari said he was asking a lot of questions about the club. What goes on with the girls, blah blah blah.”
The two men talk on, standing right over him. They are breathing hard, and must have dragged him inside the club.
“He’s got a gun, he’s in the alley, he could have nailed Lateef, easy. Fuck. I’ve been telling Patel, we need a camera back there, we can’t keep track of everything…”
“Lateef’s gone?”
“Yeah, he took that girl, Leela.”
“Shit. She’s nice, that one—”
“Bullshit, they’re all whores. Don’t forget that. And this one will keep her mouth shut, not like the last one. One fucking peep from her, and the old woman and the kid are screwed.”
“She’s nice, yaar. I talked to her a lot, when she worked on the floor … What do we do with this maderchod? Call Lateef?”
“I say we take this fucker to the Bronx, finish him off— Oi, he’s waking up.”
The pain is white hot, and Ranjit must have twitched. Arms reach down and turn him over, and he screams.
“Abbhey, Sardarji, don’t make so much noise.” The narrow point of a cowboy boot slams into Ranjit’s ribs, but this doesn’t even register against the constant pulse of the larger pain.
He blinks up at the two men in blue blazers and cowboy boots. He’s in a narrow room with dirty white walls: a bank of lockers fills one wall, and the other one is papered with peeling photographs of women in cocktail dresses and G-strings. He must be deep inside the club, because he can hear the thump-thump-thump of techno music.
His left arm lies uselessly on his chest. His right creeps over the carpeting, looking for anything he can find.
The man on his left raises his booted foot and presses down on Ranjit’s broken arm.
The scream comes out of him involuntarily. Tears stream down his face.
“I said, don’t make so much noise. And stop trying to be a hero.”
All Ranjit wants is for the pressure on his arm to go away. He blinks his eyes in submission. Let them think he’s finished.
The foot moves off his arm, and he can breathe again. The man kneels down, while the second one stands by the door. Both men are clean-shaven, with babyish faces, and both wear crisp white shirts under their dark blue blazers.
These were definitely the men who were looking for Kishen. The old Sikh in the Bronx had said they wore jackets and cowboy boots.
The kneeling man addresses Ranjit. “So. You think you can finish off Lateef, here? Who sent you, the Hammer? You guys are losing the war in Mumbai, so you want to start a war here?”
Ranjit lies still, tears still streaming down his face. “I don’t know who the Hammer is. Nobody sent me. I’m—”
The kneeling man stands and raises his pointy-toed foot again. His boots are new, the soles clean, the heels sharp.
“Don’t fuck with us. You moved fast out there, you have training. Talk, or we’ll break your other hand. Then your legs.”
“No, wait. Listen to me, please.” Ranjit raises his right arm, palm up, in a gesture of supplication.
“Talk. We’re listening.”
The booted foot hovers over his broken arm again. There is something fearsome about these baby-faced, clean-cut Indian men. They must be, what, twenty-two, twenty-four, with the look of poor boys who have made good.
“You have this all wrong. I don’t know anything about this Lateef—”
“Bullshit. You pumped his driver for information. Luckily that old fuck had the sense to call us.”
“Yes, I did talk to Tiwari. But, listen, I’m working for Patel Sahib. He wants me to find someone. I’m just looking for this one guy—”
The man standing next to Ranjit dips his hand into his jacket pocket and comes up with the blue, plastic-looking gun. “You are working for Patel? That’s a good one. So that’s why you’re in the alley, with a Glock?”
The cowboy boot slams down, and Ranjit screams again. The white-hot, electric pain shoots down his arm, jacking directly into his central nervous system.
“In … in my wallet.” Tears are flowing from Ranjit’s eyes, falling back into his throat, turning his voice into a hoarse rasp. “Look in there. I have Patel’s card, with his direct number. Call it.”
“Bullshit.” But the man takes out Ranjit’s wallet from his own jacket pocket, and rifles through it.
Ranjit lies on the floor, trying to breathe in the pain, then breathe it out of his body. The fluorescent light shines directly into his face.
“Fuck me. You do have Patel’s card.” The man holds up the crumpled card.
“Call the number.”
“Patel won’t like that. He goes to sleep at eight o’clock. You sure you want to do this?”
“Call it.”
The two men look at each other, and then the man with the card shrugs. He steps past his colleague and goes through a metal door—Ranjit glimpses a long, dimly lit corridor, hears female laughter—and then the door slams shut.
The second man’s eyes never leave Ranjit, but he suddenly yawns, as relaxed as a cat. Ranjit knows from his army days that there are many reactions to violence. It thrills some men, and nauseates others. The ones who kill and maim easily, almost indifferently, are the most dangerous, because they have been raised in a different moral landscape.
From outside comes the muffled sound of conversation. Ranjit lies, half conscious, praying for the pain to stop. Seconds pass like minutes, and thoughts flood his mind.
Shabana, lying dead on a parquet floor, her face destroyed. Despite everything that the cops said, Ranjit has never really believed that Mohan was capable of such violence. But these men are—they would destroy the face of a beautiful woman with very little compunction. Are Patel and the mob somehow behind Shabana’s death? That would explain why Patel is searching for Mohan: to find him and silence him. But why would Patel want Shabana dead? And who exactly is Lateef? Why are his men afraid of an attack by the Hammer? Who the fuck is the Hammer?
All that is academic. If Patel doesn’t confirm his own story right now, Ranjit is sure that these men are going to kill him within the hour. And that thought leads to Shanti, half a world away: the thought of not seeing her again is unbearable.
He closes his eyes and prays:
The one who created the day also created the night.
Those who forget their lord and master are vile and despicable.
O Nanak, without knowing the Name, they are wretched outcasts.
O humble servant of the Lord, I offer my humble prayer to you,
I am a mere insect, a worm.
O True Guru, I seek your sanctuary. Please be merciful …
The door suddenly clicks open. The man walks in from the corridor, a cell phone in his hand. He bends down and jams it into Ra
njit’s ear.
“Hello? Are you there?” It is Patel’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.
Ranjit raises his head. “Patel Sahib—”
“Why are you at my club? What have you got yourself into, Ranjit?”
If he gives Leela up, what will these two do to her? “Sir, I’m close to getting Mohan. I heard he might be here, tonight. I don’t know what else is going on, I swear—”
“If you heard something, why didn’t you come to me? Why wait in the alley behind my club, hanh? Are you trying to play some sort of double game? You think I’m a fool?”
Patel’s voice is hardening, coming to a decision about what to do. Give him something, anything.
“I was about to call you. Sir, the police are watching your club. The same two detectives who arrested me, they were here, in the back alley. They followed a limo that left from here.”
“What?” Patel’s voice erupts into anger. “You’re sure about this?”
“Yes, sir. Case and Rodriguez, they were taking pictures, in the alley.”
There is a silence. Ranjit knows that his life rests in that silence, in a motel room in Jersey covered with rugs and pillows.
“Okay.” Patel makes an effort to lower his voice. “I will take care of this. Now, you listen carefully. Your job is to find Mohan. You stay away from my club, from all my businesses. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
There is another pause. “How badly did they hurt you?”
“My arm is broken, sir.”
The hand pressing the phone into Ranjit’s ear quivers with suppressed anger.
“Okay. We will take care of that. And I’ll tell them to give you the gun back. Let me talk to them.”
Ranjit looks up at the stony faces of the two men standing over him. Lateef’s men beat him up and Patel apologizes. It makes no sense.
The phone is yanked away from Ranjit’s ear, and he rests his head on the carpet, his neck muscles cramped from the effort of raising up his head.
The man with the phone goes back into the corridor. Ranjit can hear Patel’s voice coming through, hard and punitive, and the man just murmurs his replies.
A few seconds later both men pull Ranjit to his feet. Biting down on his lip to stop himself from screaming, Ranjit allows himself to be half carried, half dragged down the corridor, past many closed doors, the techno music growing louder. At the end of the corridor is a thick metal door, which opens onto the service entrance.
Ranjit finds himself being hustled down the stairs and into the backseat of one of the Beemers parked there. The two men get into the front.
“Where are we going?”
“Don’t fucking worry, Sardarji. Your boss, Patel, he said to put you together again. Like Humpty-Dumpty, hanh?”
The two men laugh. Ranjit slumps back into his seat, each bump and sway sending hot pain into his arm. Mercifully, he passes out as they drive away.
* * *
The doctor is a worried-looking bald man with a faint Eastern European accent. They must have hauled him out of bed, because his breath stinks, but his office, on a high floor of an uptown building, is immaculate. Ranjit sits on a metal examining table as the man feels his arm with careful fingers, murmuring apologies whenever Ranjit winces.
“Aren’t you going to take an X-ray?”
“Don’t have one.” The doctor looks up with tired eyes. “Don’t worry, I set plenty of arms in Bosnia. This is simple, your ulna is fractured.”
The doctor injects anesthetic into his arm, and in a few minutes the pain fades to a dull ache. Ranjit watches as the doctor gently sets the broken bone, then slips on a tight, stockinglike sheath. He wraps it with cotton tape, then adds a layer of blue fiberglass tape, smoothing and cutting it with the concentration of a sculptor.
There is no noise except for the buzzing of the lights, and far off, the sound of a siren moving through the dark city.
“How bad is it?”
The doctor shrugs his thin shoulders. “You need to keep the cast on for six weeks. Meanwhile, no driving, no pressure on the arm whatsoever.” He takes out a medicine bottle and fills it with pills. “Percocet, a painkiller. These are high dosage, space them out every six hours, and don’t overdo it, they’re addictive. We’re done.”
The two men in cowboy boots are gone, and the doctor shows Ranjit out to a deserted bank of elevators. When he emerges from the bland glass building, he makes an effort to remember the address: on the corner of Seventy-fifth and Amsterdam, a few blocks from the Dakota.
The anesthetic is wearing off, and the pain is terrible. He dry-swallows a Percocet, noticing that there is no label on the medicine bottle. Fumbling in his pockets, he finds that they have returned the Glock, and his wallet, with enough money to take a cab. Peering into the thin stream of traffic, he hails a cab, which does an illegal U-turn to pick him up.
The cabbie is Pakistani, and from the way he bobs his head, Ranjit can tell that he doesn’t speak much English, so Ranjit switches over to Hindi and tells the man to take him to Jackson Heights. The man frowns, and Ranjit knows that he won’t be able to find a fare back, not at this time of the night.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll give you twenty extra, okay?” and the cabbie smiles in relief.
The cabbie drives down Central Park West, and the Dakota comes into sight, its gabled roofs and dormers silhouetted against the dark sky. The bronze sentry booth by its arched entry is lit up, and tonight it resembles nothing more than an upright coffin. Inside he glimpses a doorman’s blue uniform.
What if Shabana had hailed a cab thirty seconds later? He wouldn’t have met her, would never have run into Mohan. He’d be driving his cab right now, not riding in one, and his arm, his life, and his future would have been intact. He would have been ferrying home drunks and amorous couples, ending the night wiping down the backseat of his cab. He would have been still living in the future, the future of Shanti arriving, of moving to the new apartment.
What if, what if … The Percocet is taking hold now, making him still and dreamy. The lights on one side of him are a blur, the darkness of Central Park rushing by on the other. Like it or not, he has been plunged into the present now, and every hour is as sharp as a dagger.
Leela. Where was that man Lateef taking her? He tries to remember what they said about her: something about an old lady and a child, and keeping her mouth shut. He knows that he has to find her now, before this darkness he is in finds her too, and swallows her whole.
They are moving swiftly across the darkened city, and he recognizes the landmarks without even thinking: the latticework of the Queensboro Bridge, the long stretch of Queens Boulevard, and then a short distance on the BQE. He is almost home when his phone rings and he fumbles it to his ear. Ali’s voice comes through, loud and worried.
“Ranjit? Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“Can’t talk now, Ali. Not now…” He is slurring his words.
“What is going on? Are you drunk? Where are you?”
“Heading home. Arm’s broken. Not drunk, it’s the painkillers.” He doesn’t mean to say this, but somehow finds himself unable to lie.
“What? Your arm’s broken? How?”
“These men. Ghungroo.”
“You’re not making any sense, my friend. Are you cracking up? Hanh? Been driving two, three shifts nonstop?”
“Tomorrow. Come by tomorrow morning. Talk then.”
The cab swerves down Thirty-seventh Avenue into Jackson Heights, and he pays the cabbie, adding an extra twenty. The man looks curiously at him, having overheard the entire conversation.
“You’re Ranjit Singh, right? You’re looking for that guy, Kishen something?”
Ranjit rears back, alarm bells going off. Then he remembers that he had put the word out. “Yes, that fucker owes me money. You know anything about him?”
“No, bhai. But I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. I just started driving this week. I was a computer programmer in Pak
istan. This is just temporary.”
Despite the pain, Ranjit manages a grim smile.
Somehow he gets himself down into his basement apartment. When he turns the light on, the man in the mirrored wall stares back at him, face pale, his trousers, white shirt torn from climbing the tree, darkened with dirt from the alley.
He pulls off the shirt, sheds his trousers, and puts the Glock on the floor next to him. He gets into bed, but something is bothering him about the gun.
Turning the lights back on, he pulls out the magazine from the gun. It is empty. Those men have returned his gun, as instructed by Patel, but they’ve kept all the bullets.
He sits up in bed, the empty gun in his hand. From the mirrored wall, his reflection stares back at him, hollow-eyed and bankrupt. No bullets. Arm broken. Grand jury trial in five days. Trapped between the cops and Patel’s commands.
He’s been in bad jams before, but never have the odds stacked up against him like this. When he was up on the Siachen Glacier, he’d been resigned to death: the only way to function was to assume you were already dead, and then go from there. But that was a war, with an enemy. He thinks of himself lying inside the club on that dirty carpet, seconds away from dying at the hands of two unknown men. He had prayed then, the words pouring easily out of him, begging the Gurus for help. And he had been saved.
All these years in New York, he has let himself go, both his body and his mind. His body started screaming for care, and he had heeded it, but what about his soul? How could he have lost his faith so easily, turning to it only in a moment of crisis?
He stares at his reflection in the mirrored tiles, but his phantom self has no answers, either.
Chapter Sixteen
MUMBAI, 1997
Early one October morning Shabana left her bungalow and walked the short distance to her waiting car.
The monsoons had ended, washing away the gray smog that hung over the city, and there was a nip in the air; she sipped at a travel mug of hot chai as she walked, lost in her thoughts. Today she would begin shooting the most daring film of her career: a remake of the classic film Pakeezah.