by Ings, Simon
It takes her the best part of an hour to work her way around gridlocked cars and clustered, story-telling streets, to the armoured truck that’s meant to keep crises like this in bounds. It’s marooned beside the railway line some quarter of a mile from the scene of the wreck. From the top of its rickety aluminium steps Roopa sees what she can see, which isn’t much. A shoal of heads. She’s a Bombay girl and used to crowds, God knows, but this is crazy. The crowd is pliant enough, lumberingly curious as a herd of cattle, but densely packed, corralled by the walls of the cutting. Its collective breathing rocks the police truck from side to side.
A screw of brown smoke marks the wreck site. It rises through the sheltered air of the cutting, then a breeze shears it away, smearing it across the northern embankment. There are vehicles parked there: plainclothes four-by-fours with detachable lights spinning blue.
‘Who are they?’ Roopa asks nobody in particular.
It’s Yash Yadav, the region’s counter-terror tsar. ‘Now off you go.’
Go where? Roopa has no radio, there’s no real chain of command, and it’s all she can do to elbow through to where the Purushottam and Kalindi have collided – or, to speak more accurately, to where they have achieved a ghastly fusion. Coaches have burst like bags, sending bodies into the branches of trees. There are clothes everywhere, ripped to rags, and ribbons of flesh, intestine, hair.
Around the carriages the police have established a cordon and the crowds are climbing the walls of the embankment, away from the tracks. It’s hardly less crowded now they’ve gone. Milling around her, stepping round corkscrewed metal spars and crinkled sheets of granulated glass, round shattered pallets and pools of lubricant and here and there, for God alone knows what reason, bars of hot pink hand soap, there are uniforms that Roopa doesn’t even recognize. Police probationers, army cadets, nurses, paramedics, railways workers, masked and booted paramilitaries from every academy within fifty miles. No one seems to know what to do with Roopa, and Roopa is so preoccupied that no one thinks to call her to their heel.
Slipping in bloody turds and ponds of oil, Roopa rounds a sleeping carriage of the Purushottam. Hydrostatic shock blew out its glass. Bodies slump shapeless, bladderized, across its steel sides. Roopa imagines the moment of impact: the shock-front waving passengers like bloody flags through the carriage’s tiny window frames.
A sudden gust clears the smoke from the sky for a second and sunlight hits the train carriage. Light erupts from its polished walls and Roopa winces in the glare. Through her half-closed eyes the light from the carriage is a sheet of blue fire that, even now, is winding itself into a rope of many colours. She staggers under its imaginary weight. In the moment it takes for her to clear her head of the hallucination, the snake curls around her shoulders and stabs disconsolately at the train carriages, as though in dwindling hope of finding survivors.
She shrugs it off, and a fleck of something drops in her eye. She’s trying to remove it with a corner of her shirt cuff when a big man in civilian mufti, leading a retinue of suits and mobile phones, approaches from the other end of the carriage. From pictures, file entries and newspapers, Roopa recognizes Yash Yadav. He’s bigger than she imagined, and fitter: a workhorse of a man. Veteran of a dozen kills. Scion of the house that murdered her father.
Next to her, something moves. Someone.
Yash imagines she’s been crying. ‘Are you all right?’ He lays his hand on her shoulder. Beside them, a young man, propelled through a window, scalped, his head a beating polyp, rolls his head from side to side. Impossible to say where the face is. His skull’s a white nubbin, peering through red tissue like an eye.
The tea she’s drunk today drools off her chin as Roopa heaves.
‘Come on,’ Yash says, bearing her up. ‘This is no place for a woman.’
Yash half-leads, half-carries Roopa away from the carriages to where a concrete stair leads up the northern embankment. Roopa is afraid to look at him. All the time she’s spent planning how best to approach him – and now this! She feels as though a door she’s been battering has suddenly come open against her shoulder.
Footfalls on gravel. She opens her eyes and sees her feet and his. His steps subtly guiding hers. A pair of shoes, city-made, half-hidden beneath European-style suit trousers. The trousers are meticulously pressed. His shoes are clean. There’s not a speck of dust, not a smear of dirt. Impossible. He must be held above the ground on wires. On wings.
The shoes vanish. Footfalls pass around her. She feels his hands. He helps her to his car. He helps her bend so that she can climb inside.
He closes her door and walks round to the driver’s side. She tries to turn her head. She’s too weary to move: shock is closing her down. Her eyes will not focus. She smells him. A good smell. Shampoo and spice. Yash Yadav. Veteran of a dozen encounters. Pirates and mafiosi.
He says: ‘I’ll drive you home.’ But he doesn’t.
Yash Yadav lives in a freshly painted apartment block on Vyapar Marg. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’ Roopa hobbles after him, past the watchman’s cubbyhole (empty), through the gate (Yash has a magnetic key) and into the elevator.
Yash’s apartment isn’t what she expected. The whole place is decked out like a teenager’s bedroom. The walls are hidden behind movie posters. Yash shows her the bathroom and hands her a towel. ‘Where do you live?’
She gives him her address.
‘I’ll go fetch your husband.’
She goes to the bathroom. Yash has a bathtub. A rarity round here. A luxury. There’s a robe hanging from the door. She undresses and draws the robe around herself. While she waits for the tub to fill, she wanders back into the living room and up to the window. She watches as Yash Yadav lets himself out through the security gate, crosses the road, and points his key at his car, unlocking it: a new Opel Corsa. She leans against the glass. She wants Yash to pause. She wants him to turn. She wants him to see her there, against the glass, naked under his robe. She watches him drive away. He is everything she thought he’d be. More. Big and dangerous. Magnificent.
They dine in restaurants in Agra, far from Firozabad’s rumour mill. They drink in Mughal Bar and Downtown Club, Le Bar and Downing Street. He meets her in a side street behind the town hall. He pays for them. He chooses their food. He orders their drinks. At the end of the evening he pays her cab fare home. He buys her gifts: jewellery and shoes and scarves. She hides them from her husband. She keeps them in her locker at work. She takes them out only for him. She dresses only for him. She scents and shaves herself only for him. She dreams of him.
She remembers the flak she took, leaving Bombay. The cheap humour flying around as she packed up her desk at the ACB: beanpole-slim Roopa following wobble-hipped Yash Yadav into the outback. Even her superintendent, even Kala Subadrah, could not resist a gag as she returned Roopa’s salute: ‘I hope he’s worth it.’
Yash has not slimmed down. He’s hardened up: an engine, big and square, trembling with controlled violence. She fucks him and fucks him. She is sore from him. It is what her hard, athlete’s body was built for, has longed for, screamed out for.
He’s serious, direct, utterly two-dimensional: a blank on to which she might project any desire. A hero of sorts; impervious, at any rate, to the ironies and doubts that hedge round ordinary men. He is a motive force and as earnest as a child. He lifts himself out of her and kneels over her and fills her mouth. He buries his tongue inside her. He slaps her, and she bends for him. He squeezes her breasts as though there were milk there. He’d eat her if he could. The bite marks show sometimes, but Hardik does not notice. Hardik never gets close enough to see – and if he could bring himself to do so, and he saw, would he even care?
This cannot last. This heat. This turbulence. But then, it does not have to. Roopa’s not forgotten why she’s here.
She’s drunk on Yash, yes, but it’s her betrayal of him that drives her to heat, quite as much as his passion. Bedding Yash Yadav, she finds quite easily the things she needs t
o incriminate him and smoothe her path in glory back to Kala and the ACB. ‘Raise your voice and it shall be heard!’ She’ll raise her voice, all right. She’ll make front page, if this goes well.
Yash rolls off to the bathroom; she reads the messages stored in his phone. She writes down his recently dialled numbers. Sometimes Yash leaves her in his flat when he goes out to work: the region’s anti-terror tsar. In a bedroom lined with movie posters – curry westerns, war films, historical epics – she reads his diaries. She trawls the trash under his desk. She undeletes the files binned on his laptop. She tabulates, crossreferences. She’d eat him if she could. Instead she’ll tear him down.
There’s a solicitor, Mohinder Gidh, works for Yash Yadav. He spends his nights in a room lit entirely from lights whirling underneath a raised plastic dance floor, throwing single, low-denomination notes on to the floor, more or less at random, as he tries to decide which heavily made-up girl to fall in love with tonight. Later he will hurl money by the handful at his chosen muse. Whole weeks’ wages. He is lucky that the club, a recent and controversial import from Mumbai, is a Yadav enterprise.
By day, Gidh sails close to the wind, orchestrating a land-grab backed by some possibly forged paperwork. A car-repair business has been acquired by the Yadav family on terms so unfavourable intimidation must have been a factor in the sale.
And it goes on: a steady stream of petty and not so petty extortion, fraud and theft. She’ll have her lover locked away long before his fire is out: her pet. She’ll get her man.
The severity of the Firozabad rail disaster keeps the station busy for many weeks. Only when the missing have been officially presumed dead can Roopa Vish pick up the loose threads of her ongoing enquiries. Top of her list is Samjhoria Nankar’s complaint into mistreatment and non-payment of wages at the Chhaphandi brickworks: Vinod Yadav’s fiefdom and the Yadav family’s weakest link. She calls Vinod on the phone to discuss Samjhoria Nankar’s accusations.
‘Samjhoria and her family absconded months ago.’
‘Nonetheless,’ she says, hoping to haze him into an interview.
It works: they set a date and time. ‘Whereabouts are you?’
The way Vinod describes it over the phone you’d think the Chhaphandi brickworks was a well-run, bureaucratic operation. You only have to see the compound from the road to know the truth. You only have to smell the children hunkered down in the dirt, chipping away with hammers at chunks of coal, their faces black with coal dust.
A girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, her face smeared with dirt and sweat, walks right in front of Roopa’s car, oblivious. She is balancing four heavy bricks on her head. At the edge of the nearest kiln she lifts her burden up to her father, who’s standing on top of an enormous heap of dun-coloured bricks. Then a boy runs under Roopa’s wheels, so close that she stalls, braking to save his silly life.
It’s all for nothing, anyway. Vinod’s blown her out. He’s left his Komatsu driver, Rishi Ansari, to answer her questions. He’s waiting for her by an old shipping container – ‘MOYSE’ dimly visible on its flank – which marks the southern boundary of the compound. ‘He’s had to go back to hospital to have his stump seen to,’ Rishi tells her. A persistent infection, apparently. There are many persistent infections round here. Stillbirths. Mysterious goitres. Birth defects. All the kids round here have these funny little bibbly-bobbly heads. Mind you, Chhaphandi’s always had a reputation for inbreeding. What else is there to do?
Rishi is here to set her right about Vinod Yadav, his medical problems, his important schedule, the need to confirm all appointments on the day. ‘He can’t be at everybody’s beck and call, you know.’ As though she’d come round here to try and sell him something. He turns his back on her a moment, swinging the door shut on the old shipping container.
As the door swings, Roopa feels suddenly ill, as though something is roping itself around her chest. She staggers, tugged by some impossible, invisible muscle, away from the shipping container. Another tug.
Another. Is she going to be sick?
There is a stale, mealy smell on the air. She puts her hand to her nose, instantly revolted.
Rishi hasn’t noticed anything. He secures the doors with a padlock, chuntering on, and the smell fades, the tugging ceases. ‘The Nankars? Vanished. God knows where they went. I mean, this Lohardaga scum. Excuse me, but you know how it is.’ Rishi Ansari: a forgettable man with a forgettable face. ‘A complaint?’ He sucks his teeth. ‘No, don’t know nothing about that.’
The thing around her chest lets go. It slides away. Roopa feels its dry rasp as it relinquishes her and she has this nonsensical impression that she has been rescued from some terrible, unseen danger.
She drives out of the compound, still on edge, sucking up air in shallow, panting breaths. She is afraid the smell will come back. She is afraid it will surprise her again, in the car, on a bend in the road. It was one of those fundamentally wrong odours that lodges in the memory, ready to trigger a fierce, unpredictable reflex. But the air in the car stays clean, cut only with the tang of the vehicle’s own hot oil.
The following morning, Roopa lies in Yash Yadav’s bed, testing the air. His room is full of smells, smells she has never noticed before. None of them are that smell, but the tugging sensation is still there. It has moved off her chest. Now it’s squeezing her stomach, stirring the acids there. She sits up, breathing the fit away.
The morning after, waking in her husband’s bed, she pulls herself from the bed and runs, dry-heaving, to the toilet.
A couple of weeks later and Roopa is standing in Yash Yadav’s bathroom, holding a plastic wand to the light.
Within seconds – faster and more surely than any Polaroid – two blue lines appear across the white of the window. Roopa feels the walls and floor of the bathroom slide away as the bars set a new vertical for her: a new, tilted reality. How many periods has her silly, sprinter’s body missed? They’re so irregular she finds it hard to count them.
She wraps the test in a fistful of toilet paper, opens her handbag and tucks the expensive white wand inside, losing it in a mulch of tissues, tickets and receipts.
Yash will be here in the couple of hours. She dresses in the bedroom. The walls are smothered in movie posters. Action classics. Line of Control. Sholay. A teenager might have collected them, she thought, the first time Yash brought her here, months ago. His hands, his bulk, the taste of his penis, the feel of him splashing her breasts, dear God, months ago! How far along is she?
She sweeps a hand across her midriff. She can’t feel a thing. What an infuriating machine her body is! What’s the use of a body that will not take you into its confidence? She imagines the changes a baby will wreak on it. How the stomach wall splits like a peach, how the ribcage bells out.
She forces herself to breathe. Could the test be wrong? What if it’s too late to terminate? What if it will not die? What if she only succeeds in, well, damaging it?
She searches in her handbag for her mobile. Her husband Hardik has a meeting tonight, a shakha, so there is no need for her to hurry home (if you can call that love-abandoned shell a home: a breeze-block box tossed about on a sea of mud). She will get Yash to take her out tonight, somewhere they will not be recognized. There is a hotel in Agra with a good restaurant, far beyond her means but well within his. She will get him drunk on his own generosity (it is important for her to play to his vanity) and she will tell him about the baby.
She dials and is put through to Yash’s voicemail. She risks a call to his office, but he is not there. She opens the door of the apartment and breathes in the communal smell of rose carpet shampoo and cigarettes. She wants to leave but she has nowhere to go. She aches in Yash Yadav’s absence. Yash has become a physical need. Strange how these things happen. Yash, veteran of a dozen legal kills – and yet the violence attaching to him, which so excited her at first, does nothing for her now. The attraction she feels for him, now that she knows him, is simpler and oh, so much more corrupt. Ya
sh’s home, his tastes, his childish comforts. His film posters. His DVD collection. His simple, strenuous appetites in bed. She fucks the boy, not the man. If it wasn’t Yash, it would have been someone equally adolescent. Why should she always be drawn to boys? Hardik and Yash: both are vulnerable men. What’s in this to trigger her desire?
She puts her phone away. Yash will greet her news with horror. The scandal of her pregnancy is enough to ruin his standing as Firozabad’s counter-terror tsar. The affair – the madness of it, and the pleasure – is done.
Away from the Anti-Corruption Bureau and its levelling realities she has been dreaming up a heroic role for herself. A female detective, alone against the system! A city cop hacking her way through rural corruption! What, in the end, has she uncovered? Some argument at the Chhaphandi brickworks between Yash’s cousin Vinod and a Dalit labourer. This was how she planned to build a case against Yash Yadav – all the while managing to get herself nicely groped! And now this!
She steps back inside the apartment and slams the door. She knows Yash better than she has ever known her husband. She knows the way his family works. She would make a good gangster’s wife. She imagines a future with Yash Yadav. She must speak to him, tonight, before her conscience and the ghost of her poor dead father weaken her resolve. She takes her phone out of her bag again.
This time her call gets through, but the conversation does not go well.
Another month, and now Roopa’s key no longer opens the door of the house she shares with her husband on Swami Dayanand Road. She hammers on the door.