Dead Water

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Dead Water Page 7

by Ings, Simon


  ‘My father,’ Roopa says, her voice barely audible over the raucous chatter of the Australians.

  ‘Kabir Vish. Caught the Stoneman. Ugly bugger, as I remember. Terrible teeth. Your mum must be a beauty.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  Kala laughs. ‘Relax, Roopa. I know quality when it’s under my nose. Your father, may he rest in peace, taught me everything I know.’

  Installed in her own office, with her own assistant and even a phone of her own, Roopa works long hours on Yash Yadav. She could recite you the highlights of his police career without recourse to the file. Armed encounters with Islamist mafiosi. Police shoot-outs and legal kills. Roopa studies statements, photographs, autopsy reports, official denials. The legal kill: it is, she thinks, with a thrill of mischief, one hell of a way to get rid of your family’s business rivals.

  In bed at night, alone, she thinks of Yash Yadav: a big man, taking aim. Naked, self-aroused, she dreams the just blow and its aftermath. Shock and recoil. She pushes a finger inside herself as she comes. Afterwards, trembling, disgusted, she wonders how it is that she finds any of this erotic.

  She clambers out of bed. She moves around it, as you would shy away from a bad memory. What time is it?

  After midnight.

  After one.

  Where is her husband? Where is Hardik? Of course she knows the truth about Hardik by now. Any wife would. Once, in desperation, she tried to get him to watch her masturbate. What a farce that was.

  Roopa and Hardik have been married barely a year. In the beginning, they were gossip-worthy: the daughter of a decorated police martyr come to rub the rough edges off a gutter patriot! A fairytale of the city’s New Right. But it’s a dizzying time for the RSS and Hardik’s volunteer work has been keeping him out late. Roopa has been staying up for him, keeping his meals hot. It is not easy, in her line of work, to be always putting Hardik first.

  Hardik is riding the wagon of saffronist resurgence: a force that will soon transform Bombay down to its very name. He wants her to know that she is not part of this. He wants her lack of understanding established: a fact as secure and protective as a wall. He has been dabbling at the edges of political violence for years. Now he wants her to think he has been drawn into some sinister activity. How can a bourgeois girl like Roopa hope to understand the plight of the slums? It is Hardik’s very big alibi for betrayals that have nothing to do with politics.

  Under the bed, in a suitcase filmed with dust, Roopa’s old probationer’s uniform lies neatly pressed and folded. She shakes it out. She finds a shirt of Hardik’s which, at a distance, will pass for a service garment. She dresses the part.

  She is her father’s daughter: Kabir Vish, who never let the spoor of the Stoneman go, though many said he was just a fairytale the bhangis told to keep their brats in check. For a woman of such pedigree, tracking down her husband is a very small matter. Last night she followed him to Kamala Nehru. Tonight – she knows his habits by now – she will find him in Shivaji Park.

  Roopa’s old uniform prickles and sticks. Still, it is necessary. It gives her a reason for being here, a woman alone at night in Bombay’s biggest public space. The wildlife will leave her alone. At the same time, any upright citizen – any fellow officer, God forbid – will feel that he can call on her. Officer, I’ve lost my dog! My child! My service weapon! My mind! If she’s caught impersonating an officer, there will be hell to pay.

  It’s out of her hands. She follows her husband. She slides off the broad avenue after him, off raked gravel and on to mown dirt. She follows him into the dark, around cricket pitches, past the Scout hut and the temple of Ganesh, into ornamental shrubberies where abandoned cricket balls dome like fungi out of a salad of leaf-mould and tissues. She follows him past the tinkling of bells and the susurration of silks. The men who congregate here wear their make-up so thick its river-bottom smell overpowers any amount of cheap perfume. Roopa knows what goes on here. The hijras of Shivaji were her father’s eyes and ears. Each time a superintendent got it into his head to clean up the parks, Kabir Vish tipped off his fancydressed friends. It’s how he caught the Stoneman.

  What is Hardik doing here? What investigations does he pursue? Tonight, watching him, his antics and caresses, Roopa knows that she has always known.

  Roopa retires to her mother’s house in Thane and for a few weeks she tries to knit herself into the old solid, suburban life.

  Her mother is sympathetic. Her daughter’s disgrace is, in some halfacknowledged way, an opportunity for her. A chance to exert some authority. She schools her daughter in the art of managing shame. For Roopa, it is like being buried. With no work for her to do, and no husband to look after, she is bored out of her mind. But staying with Hardik is impossible.

  ‘You can stay here as long as you like, dear.’ Long enough for the city to change its name, and every street and every street corner. When Roopa finally returns to work she feels as though she is visiting the city after an absence of years. She arrives at the ACB to find that her phone is gone, her office is gone, her clerical help has been reassigned. Kala Subadrah calls her into her office. ‘I’m sorry, Roopa,’ she says, ‘it’s out of my hands.’

  ‘Then why –’

  Kala throws up her hands in exasperation. ‘Yash Yadav has resigned from the Central Bureau of Investigation.’

  ‘ What ?’

  Kala hands her the file.

  Yash Yadav has secured a transfer to Uttar Pradesh. A paper promotion, and a whopping cut in salary. Why has Yash Yadav abandoned his CBI career just to run anti-terror in Firozabad, of all places? Why rise so effortlessly through the ranks in Bombay only to return to the provinces?

  Roopa knows. Long before she was copying out chalkboard diagrams in the classrooms of Marol – ‘Assets disproportionate to known sources of income amassed by a Public Servant’, ‘Public Servant obtaining valuable thing without consideration from person concerned in proceeding or business transacted by such Public Servant’ – Daddy explained to her, without all this verbal hoopla, how saffronist mafias tick. Yash Yadav’s appointment as Firozabad’s anti-terror tsar leaves him plenty of time to take up the reins of the family’s regional business interests. The construction work. The haulage concern. ‘Ma’am, Mumbai has been an apprenticeship for him! The family doesn’t need him in Mumbai any longer. They need him in Firozabad. They’re putting him to work!’

  Police Superintendent Kala Subadrah sighs. ‘Write it all down if you must, but I can’t promise you anything.’

  Roopa writes it down all right. Every nuance of the case she’s so far amassed against Yash Yadav. Stated baldly, and without the circumspection of a legal document, her argument against Yadav is a thing of pure spite. Roopa assumes this is an exercise of sorts. A way of keeping her occupied while she adjusts to her disappointment.

  On the contrary, her investigation into Yash’s too-perfect record and too-healthy bank balance have won her more friends than she knows. Kala takes Roopa’s ‘exercise’ to meetings at the highest level and when eventually a decision is made to send someone out to the sticks to keep an eye on Yash Yadav, they call on Roopa Vish.

  ‘In Firozabad you will be tackling women’s issues,’ Kala tells her. ‘Errant husbands. Domestic violence.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The hours will be long.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Plus, they don’t have much experience of women officers.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If it goes badly for you we can’t help you. The ACB has no jurisdiction outside Maharashtra.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘This is not an official posting. It will not appear on our records.’

  Roopa can barely contain her excitement.

  It is a new beginning for her. From her mother’s house, and with her mother by her, squeezing her hand, she phones Hardik and tells him what she has decided to do. She asks him to come with her. She wants them to try again. Hardik is her husband, after all.

  �
�What the hell is there for us in Firozabad?’ he complains. ‘We should have talked about this!’

  Nonetheless, he follows her.

  Firozabad: city of ovens and cutting wheels, city of fires and flapping skin. This is the place where people breathe more glass than air. ‘You imagine this is a flourish, heh? Go there! Feel your lungs bleed!’

  Firozabad: city of asthma. City of tuberculosis. City of burns and scars. Virtually every glass ornament, bangle, kangan and kara is pulled from Firozabad’s furnaces on asbestos trays. Boys carry skewers tipped with molten glass across the factory floor. The heat of the skewers calluses their palms, turning them green. The boys gather bangles from baking trays and stack them on trolleys, and men pull the trolleys out of the factory gates and down the hill, along roads crusted with broken glass, to the warrens of Devnagar.

  Devnagar. Washing on a thousand lines: cheap saris from China, white shirts and baggy grey salwars. Firewood. Dogs on chains. Children playing cricket with bats and stumps torn from packing crates. Sparks and sudden outages. Bags of cement, stacks of bricks. Cementation rods spilled everywhere. It is never quiet. Spinning wheels and screaming babies. Arguments over water, about who is tapping whose electricity. Insults hurled from house to house. Generators that will not start. Cars that will, but only on a hill. Squeal of pulleys. Snap of clothes pegs. Scrape of metal wool against the bottoms of ten thousand pans. Water poured from bowl to bowl, water poured into the gutter, water poured from a high window. Snap of washing in the wind. Slam of ten thousand doors.

  In Devnagar, girls sit cross-legged before single flames, soldering bangles. Specks of flying glass make tiny scars that turn their eye-whites bright yellow. The City of Glass is a city of child labour, and if indeed the times are changing – if indeed there is such a thing as progress, as the government claims – it is expressed here in time-honoured fashion: the authorities send junior officers, probationers, do-gooders, and, at a pinch, women like Roopa Vish, to check that everyone’s papers are in order.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Police.

  Scrabble, scrabble.

  Come in, do! Yes, madam, these are all my children. Twelve of them, madam? If you say so, madam. I must confess I had lost count. Why so many? Well, madam, I am also bringing up my sister’s children. Because she is dead, madam. Yes, madam, I am pleased to say I have that certificate kept safe about my person. Here it is. Read it. Feel it. Judge it. Admire it. Yes, my children go to school, madam, and here are their papers. Read them. Feel how the boss of gelatinous ink on each letterhead forms a poignant contrast to the cheapness of the type beneath. No, madam, of course not. I know the law! Not one of these darlings is younger than twelve, I would not dream of such a thing. Besides, read what is printed there. Feel and judge. But I understand your mistake, madam, for indeed the little darlings are small, they are scrawny, they do not thrive. And you can see why, madam. After all, I have so many. Allow me to present you with this token of my esteem, madam. Thank you, madam, until next year, then, goodbye.

  Roopa pockets every bribe. Not so naive, she knows better than to raise her head above the parapet. She’s new here. She must work to fit in. She knows full well that, the moment her back is turned, the women in that house will turn their home back into a factory for the finishing, soldering and decoration of bangles. With flicks of their lathis, the businesswomen of Devnagar will go on imparting life’s dirty lesson to children who will never see the inside of a school.

  For Roopa and Hardik, since they moved to Firozabad, ‘home’ is a box in a half-finished housing estate on Swami Dayanand Road, opposite Gandhi Park. They arrived to exposed sewage lines, live electrical cables and mud. Hardik has work that occupies his days and most evenings as well. Roopa suspects he has male lovers, but she no longer beats herself up over it. She has her mission. She is an agent working semi-legally on an investigation of national importance.

  Of course, Hardik (rustling the local paper – yet another exposé of taxi touts cluttering the Taj Mahal) knows nothing of her secret life.

  Roopa showers in tepid water, sloughing off the day. She dries, dresses, puts on her make-up. Milk to cleanse her skin; moisturizer, foundation, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. She cleans her teeth with bicarb to make her smile shine.

  Hardik, nettled that she no longer stays in to cook for him, once asked her which of her many men she was meeting. ‘Just my pimp,’ she told him. ‘Which man are you meeting?’ Hardik slapped her. This was a mistake. Roopa is her father’s daughter. Hardik lost a tooth. He told his shakha that Muslim youths had ambushed him in the street.

  Roopa Vish does not meet men. She calls round on mousy, forty-yearold Nidra, one of the secretaries from the station. Together they take a taxi to the Apsara Cinema Hall in nearby Agra. Sometimes Nidra’s husband Arun accompanies them: a man so kind and handsome and happy and funny and charming and attentive, sometimes Roopa could just give up and fall weeping into his lap.

  The central police station of the city of Firozabad is a small building into which the authorities have crammed several miles of corridor. The corridors have many doors, all of them locked. They have windows of frosted glass and behind the glass, indistinct, fractured forms shuffle past. There is no daylight in this building. Along the ceiling, slung through loops of torn plastic carrier bag, run lengths of cheap concertina ducting: paper over wire. Once they fed air to portable air conditioners. Now they’re disconnected and bulge and slump their way over the heads of the crowds in the corridors like discarded skins.

  ‘Name.’

  ‘Samjhoria Nankar.’

  ‘Address.’

  ‘The brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

  ‘Do you have an occupation?’

  ‘I work there.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give me his name.’

  ‘Manjit Nankar.’

  ‘Spell it for me.’

  Silence.

  ‘Can you spell?’

  ‘M-a-n-j-i-t N-a-n-k-a-r.’

  ‘His occupation?’

  Silence.

  ‘What does your husband do?’

  ‘He works at the brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

  ‘He is a labourer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘Yes. Two boys.’

  ‘What are their names? How old are they?’

  ‘Abhik and Kaneer.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘They’re twins.’

  ‘How old?’

  Samjhoria shrugs.

  Nettled now: ‘What’s your date of birth? Have you even the faintest idea?’ ‘

  July the seventeenth, 1955.’

  ‘Better. What’s your place of birth?’

  Silence.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Lohardaga.’

  The form is complex and poorly carboned. It is three pages long. When it is done, Roopa puts down her pencil. ‘I am Assistant Sub-Inspector Roopa Vish. You are –’ She consults her form in two places. ‘Samjhoria Nankar.’

  ‘Yes,’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Samjhoria sits.

  ‘You’re complaining.’

  Silence.

  ‘You are making a complaint.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you complaining about?’

  ‘My back –’

  ‘Your back?’

  ‘My employer.’

  ‘Your employer.’

  ‘He beats me.’

  ‘Your employer beats you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your employer beats you across your back?’

  Silence.

  ‘Is that what you are saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sighing, Roopa rises to her feet and studies the wall behind her. The entire wall is pigeonholed. There are forms in every pigeonhole except for the one that’s meant to hold diagrams explaining which form goes in wh
ich pigeon hole.

  Roopa makes her best guess, pulls a form out of a pigeonhole and scans it. ‘Where did you say you worked?’

  ‘The brickworks in Chhaphandi.’

  God. That benighted dump.

  ‘What’s its name?’

  ‘The Chhaphandi Brickworks.’

  It figures. ‘There’s only one brickworks in Chhaphandi?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So who’s your employer?’

  Silence.

  ‘Who employs you? Who do you work for?’

  ‘The brickworks.’

  ‘Who beats you?’

  ‘My boss.’

  ‘Who’s your boss?’

  ‘Vinod Yadav.’

  ‘Yadav?’

  ‘Vinod Yadav.’

  ‘ Yadav.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yadav, in Chhaphandi.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Roopa places the form on the table in front of Samjhoria Nankar. She takes a pen from the drawer of her desk. It doesn’t work. She takes out another.

  Little by little, Samjhoria Nankar grinds out her story, a depressingly familiar tale of withheld wages, bullying and near-starvation. Dalit matters. Sensitive issues of a female nature. Roopa’s been wading through this weak shit since she arrived here. She doesn’t mind. She needs to get her feet under the table before she forges a friendship with the district’s new anti-terror chief. Samjhoria’s complaint gives her a first small ‘in’ to the Yadav family’s local interests.

  ‘Wait here.’

  She leaves the room and heads for the toilets. She will come back by the kitchen and fetch tea for them both. She will devote time to this. She will tease out every detail. Every scrap of dirt on this Vinod character and his brick kilns.

  She washes her hands and throws water in her face. She grins into the mirror, checking her teeth. Her dear dead dad used to say that her smile was her best feature. She is her father’s daughter, after all. Kabir Vish, who apprehended the Stoneman and died in a hail of bullets, during a shoot-out with Yadav syndicate men, on the streets of Matunga in 1983.

  She knows how to follow a trail.

  Roopa contacts Vinod Yadav at the Chhaphandi brickworks and arranges for him to attend Firozabad police station for an official interview – but on the morning of the interview, Roopa is awoken at 4:45 a.m. by a phone call from the station. She dresses quickly and takes the car into town. At the station she is issued with a helmet and a billy club and told to report to field headquarters in the south-west quadrant of the city. There has been a train crash: one of the worst in her country’s history. More than half the townsfolk have turned out to gawp. She’s being assigned to crowd control.

 

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