A Curious Indian Cadaver

by Shamini Flint

  Mrs. Singh, not so easily swayed by this appeal to Sikh brotherhood demanded abruptly, “So, how much to Colaba?”

  The man climbed out of his Fiat and gestured with open palms. “Arrei, sister. How can it be more than one hundred rupees for such a distance?”

  “You see,” whispered Mrs. Singh triumphantly, “we just had to find someone trustworthy.” She continued darkly, “In India, you can only trust your own kind. Blood calls to blood.”

  One friendly Sikh and suddenly they were all part of the Sikh brotherhood. Singh was always impressed at his wife’s ability to draw large conclusions from infinestimal pieces of evidence. She’d fit right into the Singapore police murder squad.

  In a few minutes, they were whizzing past small boys who had the latest cricket scores written on bits of cardboard. They held up the information for passing traffic and the drivers exclaimed at the news – Sachin Tendulkar had scored a fifty – and threw coins at them in thanks. So much for avoiding the result of the game, thought Singh. This system was more efficient than subscribing for updates on a mobile phone.

  The dust flung up from the dry roads caused Singh’s eyes to water and throat to hurt. There were hardly any trees en route. A few straggly sugar palms and the odd clump of coconut trees looked as miserable, grey and dusty as he felt. At the next light, the car was surrounded by thin hands as small children held their open palms up to him. Some had books and flowers to sell, most were empty-handed. All the kids had the hollow cheeks and thin limbs of chronic hunger. Singh remembered the overweight children in Singapore supermarkets shouting at their Filipina minders and reached into his pocket, determined to give away all the cash he carried.

  “Naa! Bhai, you mustn’t do that,” shouted the driver and set off at such a speed that Singh was flung back against the seat.

  “Why not?” demanded Singh, enraged by the thwarted attempt to salve his conscience.

  “If you give, more will come. Very bad idea to fall for their tricks.”

  “Tricks?”

  “Waiting for foreigners to be feeling sorry for them. Others will steal the money anyway.”

  Singh didn’t doubt that there were adults ready to filch the collection but that didn’t make him feel any better about leaving the kids empty-handed.

  By dint of weaving through traffic and running lights they arrived at the apartment building that matched the address in Mrs. Singh’s notebook.

  Singh reached into his wallet, retrieved a hundred rupees and handed it to the driver.

  There was a sorrowful shake of the head. “No, no, bhai. You are misunderstanding me. One hundred rupees each.”

  Inspector Singh paid up without hesitation. The expression on his wife’s face was worth every penny. So much for the Sikh brotherhood.

  The apartment building was tall and modern and would not have looked out of place in Singapore. In Singh’s view, it was extremely dull. “I thought that these rich Indians lived in mansions with one lot of stairs going up and another coming down and dancing girls everywhere?”

  “You watch too much TV.”

  A guard made them print their names in a thick notebook which he’d carefully ruled into sections with a blunt pencil. He licked the tip, initialled the entry – the inspector noted that he was the eleventh Singh to visit the building that day – placed the pencil behind his ear and waved them in. They took the lift and rode up in the company of a thin man with an enormous bundle of washed and pressed clothes tied in string on his head and a grimy lunghi wrapped around his waist and pulled up between his legs to form a pair of baggy shorts.

  “Dhobi wallah,” explained Mrs. Singh and was rewarded with a toothless grin from the laundryman.

  The inspector nodded and wondered why a man who clearly took pride in his handiwork didn’t bother to wash his own outfit.

  Outside the apartment door, Mrs. Singh adjusted her resplendent salwar kameez, purchased at Mustafa’s in Singapore for just this occasion, smoothed her dupatta and patted the bun on the back of her head. She gave Singh a look that combined disgust with resignation – she’d never been a fan of his uniform of dark trousers, white shirt and white shoes, let alone the surfeit of pens in his breast pocket – and rang the doorbell.

  ♦

  The door was flung open immediately and a young Sikh man with a large nose, an Impressionist-style splash of acne, scraggly beard and large turban stared at them with an expression of bewilderment on his face.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  The inspector’s wife took a step back at the belligerent tone. Her husband was made of sterner stuff but he too was puzzled. Who was this scowling whippersnapper? Surely not the MBA? This was certainly not the welcome – chai, sweetmeats and gratitude – they had expected.

  A high voice could be heard calling in the background, “Ranjit, who is it? Is there any news?”

  In Singh’s professional opinion there was a note of fear running through the words.

  A small woman in a vivid yellow cotton salwar kameez hurried forward and peered anxiously over the young man’s shoulder. Wispy grey hair poked out from under the dupatta that she wore wound tightly around her head. When she saw Mrs. Singh, her plump-cheeked, apple-shaped face creased in recognition and into a welcoming smile.

  “You are here!” she exclaimed. “We forgot you were coming this afternoon. Come, come.”

  “Mata, this is not a good time,” said the stripling urgently.

  “This is family,” said the old woman, ushering them in and waving the youth away when he seemed about to barricade the entrance. In an apologetic voice, she said, “My youngest son, Ranjit.”

  Further introductions were hurriedly made and the inspector was not surprised to discover that this was Jesvinder Kaur, widow, mother of the bride, cousin of Mrs. Singh and dependant on her father-in-law’s generosity. After the initial greeting which had been genuinely affectionate – did his wife really provoke genuine affection amongst her relatives? – the tension in the room returned immediately. Fine lines of stress and fear radiated from the woman and her son like invisible trip wires. Inspector Singh was not a senior policeman for no reason. He had finely honed instincts of which he was inordinately proud and he was quite sure that they had stumbled upon some family crisis. He also knew that he wanted no part of it. He’d seen it before – crisis in the midst of a large family was always accompanied by high drama. Whatever the root cause, and it was usually trivial, matters would inevitably deteriorate into tears, raised voices and a failure to serve meals on time. It was time to make himself scarce.

  His wife had other ideas. She followed the other woman across the threshold hastily, her skinny frame in marked contrast to the ample outline of her cousin.

  They were barely seated on a sticky leather sofa in the front room when his wife began her cross-examination.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Singh, scrutinising Jesvinder, noted the dark panda rings around her eyes and a redness about her irises that suggested recent tears. Her youngest son, angular collarbones visible at the neck of his cotton kurta, sat next to her. The room, although crowded with furniture and knick knacks, was otherwise empty. But Singh had a distinct feeling that they were not alone in the apartment.

  The doorbell rang.

  “It must be him, Mata.” The boy’s knee was bouncing up and down like a see-saw, a physical manifestation of immense stress. He added, “Is there a way we can keep him out?”

  Singh was impressed. There was someone at the door who was even less welcome than they had been? What was the Indian equivalent of a Jehovah’s witness? One of those emaciated, naked, dusty fakirs with matted hair and wild eyes who wandered the streets?

  The bell rang again.

  “There is no way. I must go to him,” said Jesvinder.

  She didn’t have to – a middle-aged woman with broad hips, jet-black hair in a single plait, eggshell-smooth skin and a rather disconcerting wandering eye ushered an elderly gentl
eman into the room.

  “Tara Baba is here,” she said unnecessarily and then stood quietly by the door. The wandering eye gave her the appearance of an ultra-competent security guard, who could look in all directions at once.

  Singh stared at the elderly dapper creature in the neat turban and snowy beard who walked in with small slow steps, leaning on a polished, ivory-handled cane. So this was Tara Singh – Tara Baba to his family – the font of generosity who was sparing no expense over his granddaughter’s wedding including putting up motley relatives at the Taj. His suit, with the Nehru collar preferred by Indian businessmen, was clearly expensive. There was a certain gravitas about his demeanour that might have been intimidating in a boardroom. Tara Singh’s gaze flickered over the assembled group, hesitated for a puzzled second when confronted with a rotund fellow Sikh and then quickly dismissed him as irrelevant. He focused his gaze on his daughter-in-law and the inspector recognised that this slight old man was a force to be reckoned with. The unblinking black eyes, under the sparse eyebrows, held the attention of the woman like a basilisk.

  “What’s going on?”

  Silence greeted his question – this was the quietest family gathering he’d ever attended, decided Singh. Usually, an occasion involving his wife’s relatives resembled a riot in a henhouse.

  “Where is she?” The quiet voice had the contrary effect, in the pin-drop silence, of suggesting that he’d screamed the query at the top of his voice.

  The inspector noticed for the first time that Tara Singh’s left hand, the one that did not have the cane head in a white-knuckled grip, was trembling. The old man feared the answer to his question.

  He continued, “Where is Ashu? What have you done with my granddaughter?”

  Four

  The rat was behaving oddly.

  Mahesh, squatting next to a ditch, peered at the creature. It was huge, all the rats in the slum were. They always seemed to have ample food, unlike the people. It had grey-brown slick fur, the long hairless tail of its kind and fevered eyes like bright currants. Instead of foraging for food in the garbage-strewn area or travelling in a sea of fur with the other rats, this one was turning round and round as if it was a puppy chasing its tail. Once, every few seconds, it would run madly in one direction, stop suddenly and rush back the opposite way as if it was surrounded by terrors on all sides. Mahesh shuffled back a little while maintaining his squatting position. The scene was making him uneasy. He knew very well the dangers of rat bite. It was easy to catch some nasty rat-borne disease. Doctor Amma, who came almost every morning to tend to their ills, always warned the kids to stay away from the horrid creatures. But this situation was different. The rodent acted as if it was possessed by demons. Mahesh wondered whether he should bring it up with anyone and then decided that none of the elders would take kindly to the introduction of a conversation about rats.

  It was at moments like this, when he needed to consult a grown-up, that he missed his mother. Not his father, of course. The wiry man with muscles like rope knots drank himself into a stupor every night but had always used his last conscious moments to thrash Mahesh. The boy remembered his mother’s worn, tired face and that last evening when she’d taken a blow to the side of the head trying to defend him. Still watching the rat, Mahesh hugged his knees close to his chest and blinked hard. She’d been all right once he had helped her to the pallet on the floor that was her bed, wiped the blood away with a clean rag and brought her some water to sip. But he’d made up his mind then, as he maintained his bedside vigil, one wary eye on his snoring father.

  In the morning, just as first light was breaking, he wrapped his spare shirt into a bundle, tied it around his waist with twine and walked two miles in bare feet. When he reached the railway line, Mahesh snuck on board the slow goods train bound for Mumbai. In the end, his escape had been easy and he wondered why he’d not done it years ago.

  Arriving at Victoria Terminus – renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus but always referred to as ‘VT’ by the natives of Mumbai – had been a shock, a blow as hard as any of his father’s. The enormous cavern, the locomotives, the jostling crowds, the flashing boards with train timetables, the shoeshine men, the porters with bags piled high on their heads and the gangs of youths selling botded water and defending turf from newcomers. Mahesh lived on rotting food from the bins until he’d learnt to stand up for himself against the big boys, to sleep on the platform so lightly that he could sense trouble before it found him and to run away as fast as his legs would carry him when the police came to clear the homeless away.

  He’d even made a friend. A boy just like him with a village home left far behind and the survival instincts of a ferret. Eventually, Mahesh had fallen in with a gang who controlled a small but sufficient corner of the station. They appreciated his quick wit and his quick feet and the wide smile that caused the women in the ‘ladies only’ carriages to reach into their purses for a few rupees to buy a bottle of water they didn’t need. Mahesh smiled a little at the memories. He’d been hungry, tired and dirty but almost happy as well. He’d picked up English so he could con tourists. He’d saved money so he could rescue his mother except for when he purchased a bright orange shirt with buttons and pockets, the first time he’d ever bought something for himself. He’d been genuinely amused to discover that the words on the mucky torn poster of Gandhiji on the subway wall read, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

  Life had been all right until those men came with their guns and bombs and blood was splattered and pooled on the VT station floor and his best friend lay dead with his arms blown off and a hole in his chest the size of a young coconut. The gang leader moved Mahesh to a slum outside the city. “You can come back when you’re ready,” he’d said and there had been just a hint of warning that the boy was not to get ideas into his head about moving out of VT permanently.

  A voice interrupted his contemplation. “Nice shirt, Mahesh. You think you’re Shah Rukh Khan?”

  The boy grinned. He was indeed wearing his favourite orange shirt, newly washed and dried by the post-monsoon sun that penetrated the slum and lit up the pools of oily water with rainbow colours.

  “What are you looking at?” the other boy asked.

  “Dancing rat.”

  His friend came over quickly and peered into the drain. “Another one? I saw a rat doing this earlier today.”

  “Auditioning for Bollywood, maybe!” said Mahesh and then laughed uproariously at his own wit.

  ♦

  “We don’t know, Tara Baba,” whispered Jesvinder, the girl’s mother.

  “What?”

  “We don’t know where Ashu has gone.” It was Harjeet, the aunt, speaking from the doorway and providing corroboration.

  The old man swayed as if subject to invisible conflicting forces. Singh realised for the first time how frail Tara Singh was. He wondered whether he was unwell or merely old. It was impossible to gauge his age from his face. Despite his snowy beard which was almost two fistfuls long, his face was unlined and his eyes were clear. Jesvinder suddenly gave up the battle to be calm and gave full rein to her fear. She fell to her knees at Tara’s feet and clutched him around the shins, weeping with the abandon of someone grieving the dead.

  Inspector Singh, completely nonplussed by this display of emotion, averted his eyes while trying to process the information he’d received so far. Ashu was gone? Wasn’t that the bride?

  Mrs. Singh hurried over to her cousin and tried to help her to her feet but the woman was distraught and beating the ground with heavy fists. Her son, galvanised into action by Mrs. Singh’s attempt to help, managed to drag his mother to the sofa where she slumped back and half-disappeared into the cushions, still sobbing wildly.

  “Tara Baba, you must sit down. This news is a great shock to you,” said Harjeet.

  The old man nodded and lowered himself slowly into an armchair, using his cane for support. When he spoke again, Singh noticed that his voice was crisp and resonant, the expensive E
nglish accent of the very wealthy in India softened around the edges with a lilt from the sub-continent. “Stop howling, woman,” he barked at his daughter-in-law, “and tell me what has happened.”

  When there was no answer, Tara turned to his grandson and said, “What about you, Ranjit? Will you make a contribution for a change?”

  Ranjit flushed and his acne stood out like a rash. This gawky young man was not a favoured grandchild then. Was the girl the only one who had garnered a spot in the useful affections of the wealthy entrepreneur?

  “I’m sure she’s all right, Tara Baba.”

  “I need more than your convictions.”

  A deep voice from the door said, “Tara Baba, there is not much we can tell you. I have just returned from looking for Ashu.”

  The inspector guessed that this was another brother to the missing girl, an older one from the self-confidence he wore like a comfortable suit.

  Tara Singh’s shoulders became more rounded and his jaw slackened. “Tell me what you can, Tanvir. I trust you.”

  It seemed that Tanvir too was a favoured grandchild. Looking at him, it was not entirely a surprise. The good fairies had been present in large numbers at his birth, bestowing height, good looks and an aquiline nose.

  “She disappeared some time yesterday or early this morning,” explained Tanvir, “although she was not supposed to leave the house because the choora ceremony was complete. We all thought she was in bed resting. She claimed to have a headache.”

  “I’m so sorry, it is my fault. I should have watched her.” The mother wiped her face so vigorously with her dupatta that she left a furrow of red streaks down her cheeks. Tanvir walked over and placed a comforting hand – or was it a warning hand, wondered Singh – on her shoulder. Ranjit, officially excluded now, huddled at the end of the sofa looking more resentful than concerned.

  “No one can blame you, Jesvinder. You’re her mother, not her prison warden,” said Harjeet.

  “Was there any sign of forced entry or a struggle?”