Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

  That’s when a rifle went off. Indians know a .303 just from its sound and he jumped, not so much because it was fired at him, but because it was fired at all.

  The Chinese were pleasantly surprised invading India in 1962, to learn that a .303 Lee Enfield is purely for show. Something every Indian by the way knows. Because no one can squeeze the trigger with that right amount of love, and even then it kicks like a bhenchod. Consequently, the bullet never strikes where aimed; meaning the Sikh wasn’t worried about being hit, just being fired at in the first place.

  Also, what was rented security doing with a .303? Turning around, he was startled at first to find dark blue police now running alongside the khaki security guards, then lost it because the police couldn’t just fire at people. The British said so before leaving. Cane them, they argued, or beat them to a pulp. Even hanging a suspect was fine, as long as officially deemed suicide. But no shooting. The gunshot was therefore enough of an outrage for him to halt, swing around and accost his pursuers, who braked in turn to remain a safe distance from the giant maniac now yelling at them, asking, ‘What the fuck?’

  The police havaldar, the one who fired, looked ridiculous, still pointing a Lee Enfield like that, and the Sikh said so. ‘Like the chootiya that you are, saale, Pandu Havaldar, bhenchod. Why don’t you put it down so I can make you my bitch?’

  No one spoke to the police like that. But because he did, no one was taking any chances. The havaldar lowered his rifle.

  With both sides taking time-out, the Sikh looked around and saw they were near the sulphur burner all brightly lit and waiting to be fired up. Now that he noticed, must be shift change, because there was no one there except for more dark blue havaldars and a police jeep nearby. When did the police show up? No idea, but he acknowledged the balance of power had shifted. It was no longer a laughing matter. A shot had been fired—probably hit someone in the jhopadpatti slums because the music had stopped.

  Only then he noticed the police sub-inspector with his polished, brown belt and buttoned-down, leather holster. Standing alongside was another officer, who looked too senior to get his shiny, black shoes dirty like this. The sub-inspector held a black umbrella, ready to open at a moment’s notice for the Very Senior Officer.

  ‘Sardarji,’ the Very Senior Officer said. His voice was deep and low. He sounded English, looked Marathi. ‘These fellows bothering you?’

  ‘The bhenchod fired at me.’

  ‘I heard it.’ He looked at the dark blue culprit, who looked down. ‘So did the rest of Bombay.’

  ‘I could’ve been killed.’

  ‘By a three-naught-three?’

  The night air was cool and sickly-sweet from benzene. The smell of hydrogen sulphide was as if all of Bombay had farted as one. The Very Senior Officer studied his hand. His words were clipped like his nails.

  ‘You took something that doesn’t belong to you. ’

  ‘Sirji, I’m a Sardar. We don’t steal.’

  ‘You need to hand it back. Do the right thing.’

  He would have, now that the police were involved. If not for the Chinee. The Chinee was a miracle that had happened, and the miracle was as follows. After pining for months and being ignored, he was ready to give up, write his last love letter and drive away in his Tata to never come back. Just about then, the little Chinee had for no reason giggled seeing him. The Sikh died and went to heaven. One thing led to another and before you knew it, he was spooning the little porcelain doll, kissing mouth-to-mouth while giving and receiving to his heart’s content. He wasn’t going to fuck with that.

  ‘I’m told Sardars never lie,’ the Very Senior Officer said.

  Generally true, give or take. And while all Sardars aren’t Sikhs, all Sikhs are Sardars, and therefore a people apart. So much so, during British rule, a Sikh’s testimony in court required no corroborating evidence.

  ‘I’m telling you Sirji, I simply climbed over for the fun of it. Wanted to see the Coca Cola machine.’ He would charm the pants off this officer-type, if it were the last thing he did.

  ‘Sardarji, you believe in God? In the Guru Granth Sahib?’

  He nodded, even though these days he only believed in his Chinee. Where was the harm though? He liked people who were good at their jobs. The way the subject was being broached, this Very Senior Officer was clearly the best. The Sikh had to wonder what exactly was in the gunny bag, for someone like this to get here in no time.

  ‘You’ve taken something, Sardarji, please return it,’ the Very Senior Officer requested. The sub-inspector with the umbrella was more to the point. ‘That gunny bag you were holding earlier. Where is it?’ It wasn’t a request.

  The Sikh went, ‘What gunny bag?’

  The sub-inspector had a don’t-fuck-with-me look. ‘He doesn’t have it now, but he did. Probably gave it to someone. Sir, we’re wasting our time.’

  A policeman and not stupid? This was a first.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ The Very Senior Officer looked a reasonable man.

  ‘I didn’t take anything,’ the Sikh repeated. ‘Believe me, Sirji. ’

  The Very Senior Officer looked like maybe he would, maybe not.

  ‘I was here last week, Sir,’ the sub-inspector said. ‘That naphtha pilfering case. I saw this Sardar hanging around with a Chinese-looking worker. Every time I looked, they were together.’

  ‘You mean my Nepali cleaner-boy. He’s asleep in the tanker. Go check.’

  ‘We’ve checked,’ the sub-inspector said. ‘That’s not him. I’m talking about a Chinee worker in blue overalls. Don’t get all smart with me.’

  ‘Come on, Sardarji,’ said the Very Senior Officer, ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  When the sub-inspector spoke again, it was as if he had taken his cue from the Very Senior Officer. He didn’t use his standard police voice this time, the otherwise I’ll-shove-a-fucking-baton-up-your-arse voice, or I’ll-attach-a-12-volt-battery-to-your-testicles voice. He spoke like a human being, not police. You could say he was speaking to a friend, finally giving a Sardar the respect due.

  ‘He’s good-looking, the Chinee,’ the sub-inspector conceded. The Sikh went, ‘Yeah? What Chinee? You mean, Nepali.’ The sub-inspector went, ‘Really? Come on.’ The Very Senior Officer went, ‘He must be special. Tell me, where’s he? I would love to meet your Chinese friend.’

  Some other time and place and the Sikh may have crumbled. ‘He’s inside my head, Sirji,’ he would have admitted, ‘when I’m not inside him. Without him, I cannot eat, I cannot think, I cannot sleep. I just want to hear his voice. I’ll follow him to China, if need be, like a cuckoo riding monsoon clouds.’

  But he remained silent and saw the Very Senior Officer watching him intently. ‘You were right,’ the Officer said to his sub-inspector. ‘This is a waste of time.’

  The Very Senior Officer held his hand out with an expression to his face. The Sikh looked up at the skies, thinking he was asking for the sub-inspector’s umbrella. The sub-inspector unbuttoned his holster and drew out his Indian Ordinance, .38/200 Webley. When he handed it to the Very Senior Officer, the Sikh realised time-out was over. No more niceties, and he hunkered down for a whole lot of threats and bluster. He was a truck driver and knew the drill. Fuck them .

  The Very Senior Officer took the Webley from the sub-inspector’s hand, then took a step back and shot the Sikh three times—right in the face, then the chest and neck. The Sikh didn’t have time to flinch though his Chinee did, hiding out there in the shadows. His delicate hands shook and that gunny bag the police were after, it fell with a thud. Recalling how weightless it had looked swinging from his Sikh’s massive hand earlier that night, the Chinee began to whimper.

  1

  Fertilisers

  Public sector factories are the temples of modern India.

  —Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

  Rumour had it they’d gone found some poor dead bastard at Fertilisers, and Ernst Steiger realised he too was out of luck. Times like this, he wo
uld rub the mole on his face. The fertiliser factory compound was emptying before his eyes and he thought, surely a skeleton shift stays back to man a continuous process plant?

  It didn’t appear that way, even though not everyone was headed for the gates. A crowd had gathered around the sulphur burner. A strong burst of ammonia caught Ernst in the eye and there was this pervasive smell of shit. The sound of children’s laughter filled the air. A posse of havaldars in dark blue shorts moved towards the sulphur burner in absolutely no rush.

  Like any Jew muddling through the diaspora, Ernst wore two hats. He had showed up at Fertilisers wearing the frayed Indian one to try mix freely, but there’s no mistaking a white man. Seeing him, the police posse stopped to go, ‘Sirji!’

  Dead man over there, they said, all smiles, pointing towards the sulphur burner.

  He smiled back, but felt the dead man could have chosen another day. Today was the annual tender opening and Ernst was here to play his part; plug his German-made stainless steel pipes, then wait in queue with other suppliers. Being German, his pipes were technically, German-made. Not Made in Germany, but this was India and that was enough. Every year, he walked away with something, sometimes large, usually not. Today though there was a dead man in queue, and so wouldn’t matter whether Indian-made, German-made, or Made in Germany. He would go back home empty handed, he knew. Whereas, Salary Day was around the corner and his workers waiting to be paid.

  Where exactly? The havaldars pointed towards the sulphur burner. Body burnt to a crisp, they said. How come? Because the place is wacked, they said, that’s how come. Check those Lambadi women out, they suggested. Have you seen how they behave? The dead man was sniffing around them for sure, and probably why he’s dead in the first place. Any which way, we will find out who did it, and Ernst agreed. Bombay Police, after all.

  Some more back and forth, and the posse saluted before moving on. They strolled past a Lambadi kid on his haunches, a dog by his side. Then for the sheer joy of it, one of the havaldars goes kicks at the dog sniffing the child’s naked bottom. Amidst the animal’s howls and Lambadi children shitting in a public sector factory, Ernst recalled his wife saying, India could make a Jew pine for Nazi Germany. Some more policemen walked by with more smiles and Sirjis to remind Ernst that whatever Ingrid may have felt, in India, he was nothing less than a white man.

  In Germany, he was a Jew.

  I don’t want to be one, he had told his parents on finding out what was in store. Besides, he said to them, I pass the Mischlinge Test—implying he was only half-Jew. His Aryan mother, Jew father, had looked at each other. It was like being half-pregnant. After that, Ernst’s father took to patting his son’s head for no reason at all. Siegfried Steiger was big and fat and loud and boisterous, but also a complex man, hard to understand. I’m sorry, Ernst felt his father was trying to say whenever he patted his head like that. Back then, Ernst didn’t know what to make of it.

  Truth be told, he still didn’t know what to make of his father’s life, or his mother’s death. Everyone else did—said it was cancer. He, on the other hand, felt maybe not; that maybe she died from shouldering a shitload of guilt on behalf of her fellow Aryans. Sitting in his flat at Colaba, he would mull over how he left her behind with an illness, all that guilt, and a husband who would eventually go slit his wrists to escape being a Jew. Suicides are straightforward affairs, but not his father’s—no suicide note, nothing; leaving room for conjecture, the size of a football field.

  Siegfried made up for the missing suicide note by making regular visits instead. The visits began some years after he killed himself, slitting his wrists in a bathtub at the Jüdische Krankenhaus in Berlin. Ernst would have preferred his father didn’t take the trouble. Not keeping in touch when alive was bad enough. Trying to compensate afterwards only made it worse.

  ∼

  A sub-inspector barked at his cohort, and pointed at a single mud-caked leather Multani lying by the sulphur burner. The havaldars gathered in a circle around the guilty footwear. An unnaturally tall, black man standing nearby ignored the proceedings.

  The sub-inspector was loud and unequivocal. That Multani could only belong to a Sikh truck driver. A saffron Sikh turban lay coiled nearby, in case you felt like challenging the assertion. The open-toed Multani was caked brown, as if the sub-inspector’s Sikh had walked all the way from the Punjab to come here to die.

  Police havaldars began cordoning off the sulphur burner and the sub-inspector let go the forlorn Multani to focus on the Lambadi labour hired to carry sulphur to the melting pits. Watching the Bombay Police sub-inspector behave like one, Ernst could see where this was going and it wasn’t going well. The police officer implying for all to hear, that the Lambadi had something to do with whatever happened. He had precedence on his side. This wasn’t the first time some Sikh chatted up a tribal and disappeared, then reappeared dead.

  ‘Probably why,’ the sub-inspector deduced, ‘the Multani’s missing a Sikh.’

  ‘Your menfolk,’ he then asked the Lambadi women, ‘why gone all of a sudden?’

  Good point. Typically, kohl-eyed Lambadi men hovered close by while their women worked. Their hooked noses and curved daggers were a deterrent to anyone, except possibly some Sikh tired of spooning his cleaner-boy.

  ‘Your men,’ and the sub-inspector looked the women up and down. ‘Where are they?’

  The lack of response was deafening. Dealing with authority figures was an everyday affair for Lambadi women. The sub-inspector appeared torn between gypsy titties and gypsy truculence. The woman he kept running his eyes over wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, but Indian men have a high tolerance when it comes to age. There was a pot-bellied child clinging to her leg and others playing nearby amongst mangy pye-dogs.

  The very tall, black man standing nearby looked bored with all this. He also looked Tamilian, except for his height. Then out of nowhere, the havaldars dragged over a young worker half his size. His skin was like bone china.

  ‘So, you fucking have it or not?’ the big black man asked the Chinese-looking boy with the porcelain complexion. He spoke in Hindi, something Tamilians shouldn’t do, and people around him cringed.

  ‘It was in a gunny bag. Don’t tell me you don’t have it.’

  The Chinese-looking boy simply shook his head. His eyes were red and looking past his inquisitioner towards the sulphur burner.

  ∼

  Neon stars twinkled along the upper reaches of the Government Fertilisers Complex amidst pipes and towering cylinders, cracker units and looming stainless steel vessels. The illumination was harsher though at ground level and Russian, high-pressure, sodium vapour lamps imported against rupee payment, created black shadows around brutal yellow pools. The lighting cast everyone in a sickly hue and because nothing had gone according to plan that day, Ernst felt this was more like it.

  He had left Colaba around noon for the tender opening at Fertilisers, determined to make things go his way while doubting he could pull that off. It was an effort visualising anything going his way. But things had once, the first few years in India—no worries about money, or meeting payroll on Salary Day, or anything, except Ingrid .

  He was all caught up toying with Ingrid’s cold Bombay version, then the icy Berlin one, and back again to Bombay Ingrid, when Beatrice Taylor came by towing a young girl starting to bud. Going by the files the girl clutched for protection, Beatrice now had an assistant.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Beatrice said, smelling of Yardley lavender. She wanted to know what he was still doing here. There was no tender opening now by the way, what with this dead man thing. These people needed any excuse not to work. There was nothing to do. He might as well leave. The skinny assistant hovered by her side, straightening her sari, fingering her files, then looking away, then listening in. Ernst hadn’t seen her around Beatrice before. Could have something to do with Beatrice Taylor’s recent promotion. She was now Personal Assistant to Fertilisers’ General Manager. It meant Beatrice
Taylor was now entitled to a Personal Assistant.

  Beatrice was Anglo-Indian, not to be confused with English people from the Raj, who also called themselves Anglo-Indians. According to them however, the correct, technical term for someone like Beatrice would be dingo, or kutcha butcha—half-baked. If you see a snake and a dingo, they advised before leaving India forever, kill the dingo.

  Irish-white, you would never know she was half-baked. Her freckled face hovered over D-cups balanced by a solid backside at the far end. Her buttocks were watermelons, grown through competitive field hockey at St. Anthony’s and had ripened over the years. Men would stare at that arse with a collective focus that burned a hole through her skirt.

  ‘Look at them,’ Beatrice said, nodding towards the sulphur burner. ‘No wonder they don’t prosper.’

  As always, everyone was having a ball except her. These people, she said. Staring at you like that one moment, stabbing you the next. If you see a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian.

  Ernst smiled, resisting giving in to a show of sympathy for her to then go misunderstand—half-baked dingos were dangerously attracted to Europeans in spite of everything. If a dingo saw a snake and a European, the snake was fucked .

  There was a whoosh, and gas flared from a stack over at the urea plant. It lit up Beatrice’s broad, freckled face from the back. The sun would do the same from behind Berlin Ingrid over long-drawn evenings on the Unter den Linden. That’s where any similarity ended and wasn’t just the looks. The Ingrids never harboured any of the urgency one saw flicker in Beatrice’s eyes.

  ‘Just look,’ Beatrice said. ‘God knows what they’re up to over there.’ Saying that, she walked right past the sub-inspector’s dark blue cohort standing there, hypnotised by her thick backside. Her chit of an assistant scrambled to keep up, leaving behind a trail of jasmine sweat. There was this broad sweep to the girl’s forehead and Ernst eyed those cheekbones, except that she was a very dark brown, bordering on black, and that wouldn’t do. Indians were a flexible lot, though not when it came to colour. No amounts of Johnson Baby Powder on that face could change the fact that Fertilisers was as far as she would go. It also didn’t help that her upper incisors stood out like piano keys. The two women were headed towards the crowded burner and Ernst thought it best to follow. He hurried, only to speed up further, avoided stepping on some shit lying in wait, and barely managed to edge past Beatrice’s tits and arse cleaving through the crowd.