by A. X. Ahmad
“It’s okay, Ali. You’ve done enough for me. You don’t have to wait here, just head back to Manhattan. If I don’t call you in an hour, help Leela, okay?”
“I’m not a coward, Ranjit, it’s just that … with my wife and daughters and all…”
Ranjit climbs out of the cab and watches it drive away. As its taillights disappear, he knows that he is now completely alone. He thinks of Dev and Auntie sitting terrified in their house, and feels a burn of anger. No matter what happens in here tonight, Jay Patel is in for a surprise.
He takes a few steps toward the dark building, and stops when he hears a soft cough.
“Ranjit. Over here.”
It is Jay Patel, leaning against one of the posts of the huge neon sign. Curling tubes of neon make up the letters PATEL MOTEL and an orange glow washes over Patel’s bald head and tints his white clothes. He shuffles forward in his bazaar-trader’s sloppy walk, his worn leather sandals slapping against the asphalt.
“Patel Sahib.” Ranjit keeps his voice level. “You wanted to see me?”
“Come over here. Closer.”
Patel grunts as he stoops to pat Ranjit down, his hands quick and efficient. “Where is the gun I gave you?”
“I didn’t think I would need it. Why?”
Patel steps back and rubs his face with one thin hand. “Look, Ranjit. I can’t hold him back any longer.” He tilts his head toward the darkened building. “He sent his men to Leela’s house. I’m sorry.”
Ranjit knows then that Lateef is inside the building.
“You brought this on yourself.” Patel’s voice is weary. “Now you will have to pay. If it is any consolation, he has promised me he’ll let the old lady and the kid go. And I’ll make sure that Leela is looked after.”
Patel has just handed him a death sentence. Ranjit feels the shock travel through him.
“You’ll take care of Leela?” Ranjit stares coldly at the man. “The same way you took care of Shabana?”
“Now listen, that was—” Patel’s mouth opens and closes, searching for the right words. “—unfortunate. I told Shabana to get out of the movies, but she insisted on investing all her money into Lateef’s film. Insisted, against my best advice. But I tried to help her, I let her stay in my apartment, gave her a job at the club. She was a fine lady, a very fine lady.”
“What an impressive speech. But you don’t have to use the past tense.” Patel looks uncomprehending. “Shabana is alive, you know. I found her a few hours ago, holed up at the Dakota with Mohan. Ruksana is the one who’s dead. The evening you sent Ruksana over to talk to Shabana, they had an argument. Shabana pushed her, and she ended up hitting her head. You were wrong all this time, along with the cops.”
“No, that is not possible. I saw Ruksana outside the police station, the day after the murder. She’d gone there to identify the body…”
“That was Shabana, pretending to be her sister.”
“Hai Ram.” Patel’s eyes widen in shock. “So Shabana is alive? Really? You’re telling me the truth?”
Traffic speeds by on the highway, punctuating the darkness with the red stutter of brake lights.
“Oh yes, she’s very much alive. You don’t need to worry about her, she’s leaving town with Mohan. You’ll never see her again. Before she left, she showed me her scars. Your friend Lateef, he beat her with his belt buckle. He also liked to put out cigarettes on her back. Oh, you certainly helped her. You helped her a lot—”
“Patel! Is he here?”
A tall figure appears in a darkened doorway, and Ranjit knows that it is Lateef. He also knows that the gun in Lateef’s hand is pointed at his stomach.
“I am sorry, Ranjit.” Patel’s whisper is almost drowned out by the roar of the highway. “Better luck in your next reincarnation.”
* * *
All three men stand in the darkened motel room, amongst the rugs and silk pillows and the brass floor lamps, which throw cones of light upward onto the walls. Ranjit is inside the room, and Lateef leans against the door, blocking the exit, a long-barreled gun in his fist, its grip wrapped in duct tape. Patel is to the side, leaning over a stereo system in a glass-fronted cabinet; he mutes the volume and the throb of tablas dies away, their beat held now by the pulsing blue lights of an old-fashioned amplifier.
“You know what I’m going to do with this maderchod?” Lateef’s voice is heavy with pleasure, and he addresses no one in particular. His hair has been freshly cut and gelled, but there is a thickening underneath the fabric of his blue silk shirt: bandages, Ranjit guesses, covering the rat bites.
“I’m going to take him back to the garage, along with the whore, her mother, and the kid. I’ll strip the kid, put peanut butter all over him. They can listen to the rats chew on him.”
“Lateef, no.” Patel’s voice is weak. “You promised me.”
“I did? Yes, you’re right. This isn’t Mumbai, this is New York. So tell you what—just a bullet in Ranjit’s stomach, then. Should take him, what, six, eight hours to die? We can just shoot the others in the back of the head.”
Lateef coughs, and it must hurt, because he doubles over slightly. He is sweating way too much—some kind of medication, probably—and the pockmarks on his forehead and chin glisten with moisture.
Ranjit keeps his voice calm and conversational. “You’re a buffoon. A real dunderhead. Thick as a coconut.”
“One shot in the groin, then.” Lateef raises his gun. “Patel, turn on your stupid music. Loud.”
“A smart person would have asked me what I found out. Like, for example, what’s inside those boxes of hair.”
“Bullshit. You know nothing.” Lateef’s pitted forehead creases into a frown.
“Of course I know what’s inside them. Do you?”
“Talk, before I put a bullet in your crotch.”
“You want me to talk?” Ranjit glances over at Patel, who is opening the glass doors of the stereo cabinet. “I’m happy to. Patel makes all that money by bringing in high-quality human hair, and he gets it for cheap.”
“So you don’t know anything—”
“Let me finish. We all know—” Ranjit glances at Patel again, who is frozen, his hand resting on a round dial. “—that the market for hair is going to top a billion dollars this year. Demand is growing, but supply, that’s a problem. Eastern European hair, that’s no good, it’s colored, processed, too thin. Indian hair from temples was a great discovery, but they auction it now, and the prices are going up. So where can Patel get a steady, cheap supply of good hair? Not Europe, not India.”
Ranjit repeats all the information he learned from Shabana. Lateef is listening, his mouth slightly open, while Patel’s face is creased in misery.
“Patel figured out a new source. A country where there are prison camps full of women with thick heads of hair. A government that controls everything, that is willing to sell to him at a rock-bottom price.”
“Stop making a fucking speech. Get to the point.”
“Patel is buying hair directly from prison camps in southern China. He’s having it shipped to his processing plants in Algeria, then sending it here disguised as Indian hair. All good, except that the Algerians are cheap. They reused the boxes, which have the Chinese trading agency stamp on them, a red house. So right now Patel is selling hair that is grown on the heads of prisoners, people who are being sheared like sheep. He’s violating all the human rights agreements between China and the USA, he’s essentially a smuggler.”
There is a silence. Lateef smiles widely, nodding in satisfaction. “China. Patel, you sly dog. That’s what you’ve been hiding from me, hanh? You think you’re so clever. From now on, you work for me, understood, you old—”
Patel reaches into the stereo cabinet and twists the volume dial. The sound of tablas rumbles faster and faster, reaching a crescendo.
“You old fool. Turn it down and—”
Patel’s hand comes up as a thunderclap of tablas fills the room.
Lateef s
taggers backward and raises his eyebrows in surprise. He drops his gun, touches the dark stain over his left pocket and starts to say something, but his legs buckle, and he falls slowly to his knees. He keels forward, and his forehead touches the floor as though he is praying.
Ranjit smells the gunpowder before he sees the gun in Patel’s hand, a small, lady’s-handbag kind of gun that must have been stashed inside the stereo cabinet, useless at long range, but good enough from five feet away.
Ranjit crouches and touches Lateef’s neck: there is still a pulse, but then the man lets out a shuddering breath, and the pulse stops.
The tablas are overlaid by a slow, plaintive bhajan invoking the Nataraj.
You, who drank the poison of the ocean, causing his throat to turn blue. Come, you who free us from troubles. You wear the world as your hair, you bear the Ganges, you are the ruler of the world …
“Is he dead?” Patel steps forward, raises his foot, and pushes Lateef over, and the man slumps onto his side, his eyes open. A foul stench fills the air: he must have emptied his bowels as he died.
Ranjit stands, staring at the neat hole in Lateef’s chest. Hard to believe that such a small wound could have done this.
“Look at what you made me do.” Patel’s face is gray as he turns off the stereo. He lowers the gun, steps back and gulps for air. “Couldn’t you keep your mouth shut, Sardarji? Look at this mess. The Don is going to go crazy when he finds out his nephew is dead. I will have to throw in my lot with the Hammer now, and he’ll want a big chunk of my profits. Your little story has cost me millions.”
Ranjit manages to find his voice. “So … Shabana was right. You’re buying hair from the heads of Chinese political prisoners.”
Jay Patel shakes his head in irritation. “Of course I’m dealing with the fucking Chinese.” He gestures with his gun as he talks. “Where else could I get that quality of hair for such a low price? Look, Ranjit, I’m a businessman, okay? It’s just demand and supply, I don’t let politics get in the way. This kind of clean business is the future. Something that fools like him—” He gestures at Lateef’s slumped body. “—refuse to understand. They’re always thinking prostitution, drugs, extortion. No, no, no. The future is hair, illegal information storage, organs. Low risk, high profit. And when I have enough capital, I’ll go legit. I’ll invest in technology, like everyone else.”
As Patel warms to his subject, he seems to forget the gun in his hand. “Look, this is the American way, you have to start somewhere. John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Do you know that Rockefeller used criminal tactics to monopolize the oil business? Andrew Carnegie and his mines: he was building marble libraries all over the country while his miners were dying from drinking contaminated water.”
Patel seems to remember the gun again. “And you, Sardarji. I thought you were a pragmatist. Now look at the stinking mess you created.” He raises the pistol and points it at Ranjit’s forehead. “I’m sorry about this. It’s not personal. But I can’t have you running around this town telling stories. You understand that, right?”
“Wait—”
“Shush. You’re making it worse.” Patel squints along the barrel of his gun.
Ranjit steps backward, but there is nowhere to go. “Wait. There is an envelope.”
“Envelope? What envelope?”
“An envelope containing all the details of your operation. It’s not with me or with Leela, I gave it to someone you don’t know. If I’m not back in Manhattan in an hour, that envelope gets mailed to my friend, Senator Neals. You remember my old employer, right?”
“Why the hell would a senator care about the hair trade?”
“You don’t watch television? He’s on the Senate trade subcommittee. He just got back from China, he was examining labor conditions over there. He’d love to expose a multimillion-dollar illegal trade with the Chinese. You’ve got people inside the NYPD, but do you think you’ll survive a federal investigation?”
Patel squints. “You’re lying. There is no envelope.”
Ranjit’s back is to the wall. “You were right to be worried. Shabana figured out your computer password. She copied all your e-mails onto a flash drive. That drive is inside the envelope.”
“Bullshit. She’s not capable of such a thing. You say that she hacked into my computer. In that case, what’s my password?”
She had mentioned the name of some movie. Pyara? Aawara? What the hell did she say?
“I thought you were bluffing. Better luck in your next reincarnation.” Patel’s finger tenses on the trigger.
“Pakeezah. The password was Pakeezah.”
The gun in Patel’s fist does not waver.
So this is how it ends. In this room, on the edge of a highway in New Jersey. Ranjit notices the elaborate patterns in the Persian rugs. Strange to think that in a few moments the rug will be there, but he won’t.
“Okay.” Patel abruptly lowers the gun. “Okay.”
Ranjit slumps back against the wall, and the plaster feels cool through his soaked shirt.
“But you destroy that flash drive, Sardarji, and keep your mouth tightly shut. If I hear a peep out of you, the faintest rumor, I’ll find you, and that whore of yours. I’m not a man of violence, but I will make an example of you.” Patel looks disgustedly at Lateef’s body and kicks at his expensive calfskin loafer. “And you know nothing about what happened here. I’ll call Lateef’s men and tell them to get out of Leela’s house. With their boss gone, they’ll knuckle under.”
“One more thing.” Ranjit clears his throat. “You promised me fifty thousand dollars. I want it now. And Leela doesn’t work for you anymore.”
“Fifty thousand dollars?” Patel laughs, throwing his head back. “Really, Sardarji, you astound me. You know that Leela makes a thousand on a good night? Fifty thousand, she’ll spend it in six months. And then what? You think she’ll stay with you when the money runs out?”
“You don’t need to worry about all that. Just give me the money.”
“Okay, okay. It is in the next room.” Still chuckling, Patel pockets the gun and walks past him into the back room.
What the hell is he up to? Ranjit moves quickly, unplugs a heavy brass lamp, and flattens himself against the wall, the base of the lamp raised and ready to strike. Through the thin wall, he hears the latches of a suitcase being clicked open, then a rustling sound. When Patel emerges from the back room, he carries a white plastic bag.
“Going to hit me over the head with that thing?” Patel’s face creases with amusement as he hands over the bag. “Don’t worry, I’m a man of my word. It’s all there.”
Lowering the lamp, Ranjit looks in to the bag and sees the neatly banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
“I never would have pegged you for a romantic, Sardarji. I wish you the best of luck with Leela, but remember—”
Ranjit drops the lamp, steps over Lateef’s stiff legs, and heads for the door.
“—remember, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, chances are that it is a duck.”
Leela had said exactly the same thing. Had she heard the expression from Patel? Ranjit walks out of the room, and slams the door behind him.
Will Patel come after him? His back tenses as he walks away.
There is the sudden screech of tires and he jumps back as Ali’s cab barrels into the parking lot and slams to a stop. And following Ali are four, then six, then eight yellow cabs. They speed into the parking lot, their doors fly open, and the drivers emerge, armed with baseball bats and tire irons and sticks.
“Sardarji!”
“We heard a shot—”
“We’ll thrash the son of a bitch who fired at you—”
Amongst the crowd of ragged, sweating men is Sridhar Murugappan’s bespectacled face, and many other regulars from Karachi Kabob. They are clearly frightened, but their faces are determined, their eyes angry slits.
Ali rolls out of his cab and looks around wildly. “Ranjit, I called the guys, we were
just about to go into the motel and get you—”
Ranjit feels a surge of love for these men, who would have risked their lives for him. “I’m fine, guys.” He spreads out his arms to show that he is intact. “Thanks for coming here, but really, I’m fine.”
“But…” Sridhar Murugappan bobs his head at the motel. “… there was definitely a shot. Should we call the police?”
“No. Trust me, it’s okay. I’ll explain later, guys. We need to get out of here.”
Ranjit slides into Ali’s cab and his friend takes off, driving like a madman toward the George Washington Bridge. The other cabs drive alongside and behind, boxing in the cab, protecting it.
Ranjit calls Leela, and she picks up on the first ring.
“It’s done. You can head home now. Lateef’s men will be gone by the time you arrive. I’ll see you there.”
“Are … you … sure?” She is hyperventilating so badly she can barely talk.
“Yes. I’ll be there in a bit.”
He leans back into his seat, and the shock of Lateef’s death replays in his mind: in the split second before Lateef hit the floor, he had known that he was dying, and that knowledge had puzzled him. Men like Lateef never believe in their own mortality, not even at the very end: he had gone out as he lived, in a fog of confusion …
“Hey, are you okay? Ranjit?” Ali’s bulldog face is bright red, and it looks as though he is about to have a heart attack.
Ranjit reaches over and gently pats his friend’s shoulder. “You came back for me. Thank you.”
Ali manages a smile, though his big face is pale and shiny with sweat. “No big deal. I parked on the shoulder and called the other guys. We were driving over when I heard the shot, I thought you were dead, for sure.”
Ranjit looks at the dark waters of the Hudson below. “It wasn’t fired at me.”
“Then who? What the hell happened?”
“Forget about it. Forget everything about tonight.”
“Okay.” Ali rubs nervously at his cheek. “So you worked it out with Patel? What is in the bag?”
“Patel is off my back. And let’s just say…” Ranjit smiles a thin smile. “… that we’ll be able to get your mirror fixed, and I’ll still be able to buy the guys some biriyani.” Ali’s forehead is still creased in worry. “And I need to ask you a last favor. Can you keep this money for me? In that safe deposit box where you keep the jewelry for your daughters’ weddings?”