ELEVEN
AT LEAST MONDAY MORNING ushered in some good news. Rhea had been admitted to the kindergarten of my choice, a place that promised ‘whole personality development.’ More than anything else, it was close to our complex and endorsed by many Fantasia parents as the gateway into Le Meilleur International.
Later that week, after dropping her off at school, I called the clubhouse for Bijoy’s villa number. The security guard who fielded the call in his ever-supplicating voice, was a migrant from Assam and a repository of all resident information. He said there was no point calling that villa because the family was away for a year. On a temporary assignment to Malaysia. Their home wasn’t rented out because they planned to return. He told me when they had departed too. And I couldn’t help but note that they had left the country soon after Sajan’s death. A coincidence?
I didn’t need to ask him for Joel’s and Suhel’s whereabouts. Those two kids were always together, always outdoors. If you saw one, the other lurked in the vicinity. Their lanky frames skidded by on skateboards, their Nike-clad feet pedalled past on geared bikes, their recently beefed-up arms swung clubs on our rolling greens. Only ten years old, but Joel already wore braces, and Suhel, round glasses. Manjushri had teased them the other day, saying they were blossoming into ‘lady killers’.
One evening, by the lake, they hurtled towards me on the biking path. I stood in the centre and held my palm up to signal ‘Slow down and stop, please’. But they merely wobbled their bikes around me, almost running over my shuddering feet. Another time, I sighted them exiting the golf course, hoisting clubs too large for their lithe bodies. ‘Joel, I want to speak to you,’ I said. His querulous face bore his mother Joanne’s Caucasian complexion and his father Subbu’s sharp features. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a sullen voice.
‘You were there that evening, with my son.’
‘Auntie, we have to go,’ he said. I sensed by Suhel’s whitening face, that Joel was his tyrannical leader. Though his skin colour might have betrayed his fear, his eyes had an expression of put-on insolence. Before I could mouth my response, the two boys dashed out of sight, as if they were dodging a pesky school principal.
Once, I found them near the fringes of our forest. With Rhea at school, I had the mornings to myself. Since I was approaching from the pathway through the forest, they hadn’t spotted me yet. Suhel held a whimpering grey cat in his hand, while Joel seemed to be administering some treatment to it. The cat was bristling fitfully inside Suhel’s arms. As I neared them, I halted and then almost stumbled. I momentarily shut my eyes to stifle the queasy feeling that was threatening to swamp my senses. ‘What are you doing?’ I said, my voice sharper than my dazed thoughts. Joel seemed to be poking the cat with something. They didn’t hear me.
‘Enough, Joe, enough,’ said Suhel. ‘I’m going to let her go now.’
‘Hold it,’ said Joel, his voice flat and imperious, shorn of human emotion. ‘I’m not done yet.’
‘Enough, Joe, she’s hurting...’
‘Listen, if you don’t have the fucking balls...’
Suhel was slightly taller than Joel, his round glasses sitting oddly on his beaky nose. He seemed to be wincing as much as the cat was, but he tightly gripped the writhing creature.
‘Joel, what are you doing?’ My voice emerged in a loud protesting yelp.
Joel whipped around, with a stony blankness in his eyes. I had read about psychopaths, about their ability to inflict wounds without experiencing remorse. But a ten-year-old? Suhel dropped the cat at once, and the whimpering creature streaked across the pathway, like a lightning rod. Joel calmly displayed a large thorn in his hand.
‘I saw what you were doing, Joel. You were hurting the cat.’
He stared at the trees behind me, as if he were listening to the pale-headed babblers’ shrill calls rather than my vexing voice.
‘We removed this from her foot.’ The tone of his voice, like his expression, was inscrutable.
I stood still, at a loss for words. Was he right? Had he saved the cat from that treacherous thorn or had he been hurting her with it? I suddenly wondered if the boy was being abused at home, in some manner. Often kids modelled the behaviour of adults around them. Joanne and Subbu seemed like such a lovely, compatible couple, but how much did we really know about the people around us?
‘Joel, can you tell me what happened to my son that evening.’
Joel continued to stare at me in his flinty manner.
Suhel turned to look at his friend, almost as if he were seeking permission. Then he said: ‘Auntie, Bijoy did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘Yes, Bijoy did it.’ Joel’s voice was still dull, devoid of any feeling.
‘What are you saying, Joel? This is not a game anymore. My son died. Someone said he was pushed into...’
Suhel moved towards me. His finger pushed the bridge of his glasses by a notch. His earlier nervousness had vanished. He peered at me through his glasses with the studied detachment of a scientist. ‘Ask Bijoy, Auntie.’
And then, before I could say anything more, the two of them had scurried away. Yet, before they had moved too far, I heard their sniggers. For some reason, I wasn’t just angry anymore, but frightened. There was something about both those boys, something in Suhel’s put-on bravado and Joel’s hardened expression. Something that wasn’t childlike at all, but startlingly grownup. How badly was Suhel being bullied by Joel? Was my son the victim of some savage boys’ game? How could they invent the same pat response—‘Bijoy did it’—unless they had been tutored? To direct me towards a kid who had been conveniently whisked away to Malaysia?
The next morning, I wondered loudly if we should involve the police. Manas rested his tea-cup on the center table and looked up from his newspaper.
‘With what, Veds? We have to face facts, Sajan died in a tragic accident.’
‘But you won’t believe what those kids were doing yesterday. Joel was torturing this cat with a thorn.’
‘Are you following these kids around the complex?’
‘I was walking around, I just saw those two kids.’
‘Vedika, kids and especially boys do all kinds of things. But that doesn’t mean, they’ve murdered...Listen, if you want to involve the police, I’m fine with that. I’d rather you do that, than nose around on your own.’
‘You know, just forget it. The local police will probably bungle this anyway, given how powerful these people are. I’m going to hunt down my son’s killer even if…’
‘Vedika, I think you should focus on your origami exhibit.’ My husband’s voice had turned worryingly gentle.
‘Manas, I saw those kids, I’m not making this up.’
‘Vedika, do you need a break from here? Maybe go to Kolkata?’ Did Manas believe I was unraveling inside this place?
‘Not now, Rhea has school.’
‘Fine, but you have to promise me, we’re not going to talk about the accident. And you have to stop digging around...you have to remember, we can’t even move out of here. We still have the bank loan and I need Raj’s funding.’
There was a thought that had been niggling me all these days, and it hit me now with a surprising clarity: ‘Manas, somehow I hadn’t asked you this earlier. But can you tell me again about the time you first met Raj. How did that happen again?’
Manas folded the paper and rolled it up, as if he were converting it into a weapon of sorts. ‘Vedika, that was so long ago. Don’t you remember, I always wanted to meet him to pitch my startup idea. I left several messages with his secretary, and then one day, out of the blue –’
‘He called you and asked you to invest in Fantasia, wasn’t it?’
‘He called. We set up a meeting, I pitched my idea, he offered us an invite –’
‘Manas, I remember now. He never called back till he wanted to pitch Fantasia. But why would he have invited us in, we were nobodies. Don’t you think that was strange?’
A fly hovered near Manas’ tea cup on
the center table. He smashed it with the rolled-up paper and squashed it into a messy pulp. He said, ‘Doesn’t Rhea have to wake up for school?’
‘In a complex filled with who’s –’
‘Raj is whimsical. He invites people he likes. But also brilliant. His investments have… Listen, don’t make him a villain just because you’ve been watching some crazy—’
‘I’m restarting my origami today,’ I said quickly, to placate him. I thoughtfully removed the squashed fly from the edge of the table with a magazine. Raj was whimsical and brilliant, no doubt, but he also a master in the subtle art of give and take, of dispensing favours to those that could pay it back, or of currying goodwill from those that had inched past him in the game. Didn’t Manas realise how bizarre it was that Raj had invested in his start-up after extending an invitation into Fantasia? Was our living here a pre-condition to his endorsement? And how could I discuss this with Manas without shattering his own belief in his business idea? For the time being, though this was immensely difficult, I had squashed the thought of my origami exhibit. I didn’t want my obligation to Raj to cloud my vision.
‘He really cares about us. He even had the guards changed at the DG room soon after—’
‘RHEA, wake up baby, school time,’ I said, as I ripped the magazine cover and headed towards the kitchen’s trash. I didn’t thank Manas for dredging up something I’d forgotten: the change of guards at the site of the accident. Or murder. Why was it still so difficult for me to wrap myself around that word?
TWELVE
MADHU, THE FANTASIA ELECTRICIAN, agreed readily when I asked him for a tour of the generator room. Till then, I hadn’t visited the site of my son’s accident. As I stepped into the messy concrete room, barricaded with a ‘DANGER-KEEP OUT’ sign, my guilt surged again. My son had been physically injured inside this room, and I hadn’t been able to stomach the knowledge of what exactly had happened.
Inside the room, more spacious than I expected, two generators were housed inside metallic mini-rooms. Between the mini-rooms stood a row of panels, with yellow, blue, green, red and black buttons, voltmeters and a few other indecipherable digital readings.
‘Madam, here,’ Madhu said, beckoning me into the metallic cavern that shielded ‘DG1’ or ‘Diesel Generator’. Madhu walked with a slight limp, but his short five-foot frame darted around the room, as if he himself were being charged by our in-house electricity. The floor space around those metal rooms was littered with drums wound with black cables, buckets, a toppled stool, an umbrella, steel pipes and a rusted motor. A striking contrast to the sanitised utopia that these machines powered.
The metallic room was dark and claustrophobic as I gingerly stepped into it. The generator hadn’t been turned on, but my nose was already stuffed with acrid whiffs of diesel smoke, fumes from an oily spill below the machine, and the electrician’s sweaty odour as he eagerly pointed out various parts. I was glad Rhea wasn’t with me.
‘Madam, this air filter. This pipe goes to engine. This pipe goes to filter. These are Exide batteries, must always fill with distilled water.’ His hairy arms roved across the machine’s parts, across nuts and bolts, wires, drums and a large, black fan, expounding on details I could hardly attend to.
‘Madhu, thanks, but I need to ask you some questions. About what happened that evening. To Sajan, my son.’
Madhu looked startled. I hadn’t noticed this about him earlier, but there was something dodgy about his eyes, his pupils shifting rapidly from left to right as if they were afraid to settle somewhere. He opened his mouth to say something and then shut it as if he had changed his mind.
‘They said he died inside the generator room, can you tell me exactly what happened?’
‘He was fallen here, Madam’ he said, pointing to the dark, cavernous space inside the metallic mini-room.
Had my son died here, inside this dingy, grimy, sooty place? This was a worse ending than anything I could have imagined. Perhaps I had been wise, all these months, to remain ignorant.
‘Can you turn this on?’ I asked.
‘Madam, you have to stand outside, otherwise too much smoke.’
‘I want to feel that smoke,’ I said.
‘Madam, I cannot, it’s security procedure.’
I sighed and stepped out. The electrician followed me out. From above the metallic boxroom, thick aluminium pipes led to the roof and then bent towards a narrow chimney that faced the forest behind us.
‘Can you show me again, what happened that day?’
His hand rested on a black button on the outside panel. His fingernails had been chewed down, and there were lines of dried blood on his translucent pinks. Was he an anxious man? He pushed the button, and without warning, the machine thundered into life, settling into a deafening roar. The chimney outside belched thick smoke that drifted towards the trees beyond.
Madhu beckoned me into the metallic room again. Now the black fan was whirling rapidly, emitting hot air that blew into our faces with an almost venomous might. There was some smoke in the room, but it wasn’t sufficient to choke anyone. ‘That day,’ Madhu said, shouting above the machine, ‘the pipe blocked. Bird’s nest inside pipe. So no outlet for smoke.’
‘Bird’s nest?’ I shouted back, in disbelief. Was it possible that nature had tangled with our man-made contraption, to snuff out my beautiful boy’s life?
‘Every time, generator start, smoke come. Next day, we find, bird nest inside pipe.’
‘What bird?’ I asked, as if that would resolve anything. What wretched bird had chosen that particular spot, on that particular week?
‘Pigeon,’ he said.
‘Can you turn this off, I can’t hear you?’
He turned it off.
‘Madhu, please tell me again, slowly, how did my son fall in? And what happened after that.’
‘Madam, not my shift. Security Dhanraj there, gone now. Left job. I know only child has fallen here, and smoke has come into room.’
‘Did you see the nest?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘But the smoke is generated only when the machine is turned on. So was that enough to fill the room…?’
‘Madam, Dhanraj say black button was press again and again. Children playing.’ This space and this version of the events in it bore no relationship with the story circulated earlier. I had always conceived of the generator room as a solid concrete block with a machine inside. I hadn’t realised how complex it was. And how pitch-dark the metallic cavern that engulfed my son in his last moments. Besides, that story was all false. No fire had broken out. The smoke was thrust into the room manually. By the kids, because who else was there? My son’s death wasn’t accidental. His life had been deliberately snuffed out. How could the others let this go if the danger was still with us?
I looked outside, where a lone security guard watched us curiously.
‘But where was the security guard, that day? How could he just stand around…’
‘Gone for break, Madam.’
There was no point questioning the new guard because as Manas had reminded me, the Committee had changed the Security Agency since the accident. All our guards were new; all unfamiliar with the events of that day. I had thought then that this was to remedy the breach that had occurred on that day. Had there been some other reason for changing the Security Agency, a reason that had eluded Manas and me in our grief-ridden states?
‘Do you know where Dhanraj is? Does he work somewhere else in the city?’
‘They say he work for IBM, Madam. At Manyata Tech Park...Madam, can I tell you one thing?’
‘Sure, what?’
‘You have other child, ila?’
‘Yes, a daughter. Why?’
‘Take good care of her.’
My heart beat faster. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because Kasurima still angry.’
‘Who’s Kasurima?’
‘She is Goddess.’ He looked at me as if I were a dull-witted student.
/> ‘Goddess of what? I’ve never heard of her.’
‘All Goddess is same. Durga, Kali, Kasurima…I have to go, Madam.’
At home, I nervously googled ‘Kasurima’ and ‘Goddess’, feeling absurd. The search did not throw up any relevant links, only flashing the pictures of a few girls named Kasurima and the usual porn sites. But why had the electrician implied that my daughter, too, was in danger? Was this just some old-fashioned village superstition or was there more to it?
I arrived at Rhea’s school a little earlier than usual. Since I had parked my car in a neighbouring alley, I walked towards the gate from the opposite side, and my daughter hadn’t spotted me yet. A few other mothers and bus drivers straggled in, and I stood apart, watching the kids scamper about the playground. Most kids were in groups, screaming gleefully as they slid down the plastic blue caterpillar slide or arched towards the noon sky on yellow bucket swings. Some were in pairs, scraping sand into buckets or playing some chanting game that involved rhythmic claps. Only my daughter stood dolefully alone, her backpack slung on her shoulder, her tea bag clutched in her hand, her sad eyes watching the gate for my arrival. My heart was wrenched by the sight. I used to be like that. Alone. Was her behaviour a remnant of Sajan’s death? What kind of mark would it leave on her? Would she ever recover?
THIRTEEN
THE GUARD, WHEN I eventually found him, said he could not meet me at his workplace. Apparently the agency had instructed him not to discuss that ‘event’ with anyone. So I cajoled him into giving me his home address, and descended on his cramped quarters on a Sunday morning. I had persuaded Manas to watch over Rhea while I stepped out, supposedly to replenish my origami supplies.
Dhanraj lived behind the meat section of the Russell market, where bloodied goat and chicken carcasses were hung by their legs. Inside his one-room quarters, the stench of recently slaughtered animals mixed in with a cacophony of other odours—open sewers, uncleared heaps of rotting vegetables, and then, like a flute note heard from afar, the fragrance of fresh jasmine.
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