by Anita Nair
‘What? You don’t like it?’ Daulat Ali asked, seeing the untouched food. ‘What does the shezadi want? Do tell.’
Moina felt her heart hammer in her chest. Each time he called her princess, it was followed by a beating. She blinked rapidly. ‘No, no, I was just enjoying the aroma of the biriyani,’ she said, cramming fistfuls of rice and meat into her mouth and emphasizing her pleasure with loud chewing sounds.
Daulat Ali said nothing. From the partition across came a mewling sound. A girl was crying.
‘Oiii, shut up,’ Daulat Ali growled, yanking aside the curtain. ‘Do you want me to come in there?’
Moina caught a glimpse of the girl before Daulat Ali pulled the curtain back. She was a child. I am sixteen but that is a child, Moina thought. How old is she? Twelve or thirteen?
‘Finish eating quickly and you can clean up in the big bathroom. Have a bath. This place smells like a pig sty!’ Daulat Ali said as he walked away.
The child is hungry, she thought. She is crying because she is afraid and hungry. Moina shut her eyes tight. She didn’t want to think of the alternative.
Daulat Ali returned to stand in front of her. ‘Take that girl with you. Show her the lavatory, and explain to her that if she wants to be fed she must do as we ask. No dhandha, no khana. Tell her that!’
Moina scrambled to her feet. There was a tiny stinking toilet at the end of the hall, which was what she was allowed to use. The big bathroom was at the end of a terrace, a few feet away from the back door of the hall. Ten steps away. She had counted. Ten steps, during which she could catch a brief sight of the skies, smell the air and feel sunlight against her skin.
When Moina had finished her tenth standard, back home in Bangladesh, a woman her mother knew had suggested she attend tailoring classes. She can find a job in a garment factory, the woman had said. Two streets away from her home was Noor Tailoring Institute. No one knew who Noor was: the lady who ran it or her plump daughter. Moina did what everyone else did – call the middle-aged woman Aunty. Soon she was Aunty’s star pupil. It was Aunty who told her that her sister who worked with a fashion designer needed an expert seamstress. It was Aunty who talked to her mother and made the arrangements. Aunty had paid her mother fifteen thousand rupees as advance against the salary whe would earn.
They had taken a bus from Faridpur to Jessore. Two men had met them there and taken them on a bike to the border. Two men who knew a gap in the barbed wire fencing and held it apart for the women to cross. Moina had looked at the gap and known a tremendous fear clamp her feet. What was she crossing into? It was Aunty who pushed her hard, hissing, ‘Do you want to get us shot by those BSF bastards?’
She stumbled in fright. The Border Security Force men were merciless, she had been told. They shot at anything that seemed suspicious – a cat, a crow or a crouching woman. She almost fell and grabbed at the barbed wire. One of the men pulled her hand away, causing blood to spurt from her palm.
Somewhere on that border crossing I left a piece of myself – flesh and blood – Moina would tell Sanya later.
Moina had made it across the border. But after that, everything was a haze of pain. The men had left but there were two others who took them to Habra, where a doctor had sewn up the gaping wound in her palm. From there to Kolkata and a train that brought Aunty and her to Bangalore. They had got off at a station and for the first time Moina felt a surge of hope. The fear and uncertainty that had dogged her began to retreat.
Aunty seemed to know her way well enough. They took an autorickshaw to a house in the middle of a colony of houses. She had heard Aunty say, ‘Horamavu’. What did it mean, Moina had wondered.
‘This is my sister’s house,’ Aunty had said. But there was no one there except two men. Moina was too tired to care. She had eaten the rice and dal Aunty had rustled up and fallen asleep. When she woke up, Aunty was gone and the two men had been waiting. They had asked her to pack her things.
‘Are we going to the factory?’ Moina asked.
One of them nodded. The other one said, ‘You could call it that!’
The factory had looked nothing like the factory Moina had built in her head. She had imagined a long hall with many sewing machines behind which many women sat sewing garments. There would be giant tubelights on the ceilings and it would be air-conditioned so their sweat wouldn’t stain the garments. There would be laughter and chit-chat and over the weekends, they would go shopping or to watch a film.
Instead, she was led into a narrow street flanked by tenements. At the end of it was a building painted a pale pink that had turned brown in some patches and grey in others. There was a godown on the ground floor, and a staircase went up two floors. There was a curious stillness to the place as they climbed the stairs.
Moina realized something wasn’t right. Where were the other girls? The noise and chatter of a factory floor? There wasn’t even a signboard. But they flanked her from the front and back, and there was nothing she could do but follow the man who led the way. And at the end of the staircase, Daulat Ali had been waiting for her.
He had led her into a cubicle where another girl stood. They had gazed at each other uncertainly. Sanya had smiled first. ‘Where are you from, didi?’ she asked.
She had come from Bangladesh too. From Daulatpur. Moina hadn’t ever gone beyond Faridpur. That had been her world. Beyond its circumference, she always thought, lay another world which was nothing like her own. But Sanya’s Daulatpur, her home and circumstances, seemed different from Faridpur and her life. Sanya had been twelve.
But they had not had much time together. Sanya had been taken a few hours later. She had heard a high-pitched scream and then a silence that had boomed in her ears.
No one had come near her for the rest of the day.
The next day a plate of food was thrust towards her. In the corner was a plastic paint tin. That was to be her lavatory. She had sat huddled, wondering how she could try and escape.
Daulat Ali rapped hard on the plywood wall of the cubicle. ‘What? Are you still here?’
Moina grabbed a towel, her soapbox and a shampoo satchet and went to the opposite cubicle. She may as well wash her hair while she had access to water, she thought. She drew the curtain gently and said to the child, ‘Come with me.’
The child cowered and clung to the bed she was sitting on. When Moina went closer, she flinched and began to scream. Moina placed her palm – the wounded palm where a bar of flesh was testimony to the crossing she had made – across the child’s mouth. ‘Ssh …’ she said.
The child was dressed in what looked like a school uniform. A blue kameez and a white shalwar. A white dupatta was still pinned to the kameez in a V-shape. Her hair was done in two braids with blue ribbons. Her face was streaked with tears and she looked like she hadn’t eaten or slept in days.
Moina said gently, ‘Where are you from?’ The child shook her head. She didn’t understand Bengali. Moina touched her lip with a finger to gesture silence. Then she touched her chest and murmured, ‘Moina.’
The child gazed at her through eyes filled with tears. ‘Nandita,’ she said.
Gowda glanced at his watch. He had twenty minutes to cover eleven kilometres. They were still at Hennur Bande and the traffic showed no signs of speeding up. They still had three traffic lights to get past. ‘What were you thinking of, taking this route at peak hour?’ Gowda sighed.
‘I thought we could take the outer ring road and turn into Thanisandra at Nagawara Lake. I know a way from there to Saharkarnagar. Once we get there, Kodigehalli is not too far. I thought we would get there ahead of time.’ PC David thumped the steering wheel impatiently.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Sainuddin Mirza was a stickler for punctuality and he wasn’t going to look kindly on Inspector Gowda if he was late for the appointment.
‘Is there an alternative route we can take to get past this bottleneck?’ Gowda asked, peering at the rearview mirror. Fortunately, there seemed to be enough space for them to manoeuvr
e out of the line of traffic gathering behind them.
‘There is a route, sir, but the road – if you can call it that – is horrible,’ David said quickly. Gowda in a good mood was hard enough to handle but Gowda in a bad mood … David shuddered.
‘Just go,’ Gowda said, glancing at his watch again.
David turned into a road that led towards Narayanpura. He seemed to be guided by some mysterious satnav located within his skull as he swerved into alleys and raised dust on mud roads. Gowda watched the countryside unfold before him in amazement. A field of cauliflowers here. A field of marigolds there. A stream over which was a tiny bridge. A small temple beneath a giant peepul tree. A makeshift stone bench by a casuarina grove on which an old man sat dozing, leaning against a staff. A flock of sheep grazed while a dog stood among them. Who would have thought such tiny pockets of seemingly bucolic bliss lay hidden just a few kilometres away from the city that was heaving and bursting at its seams? For a moment he wished he were on his Bullet. He would explore these roads one day soon, he decided.
David drove up to the DCP’s office with a couple of minutes to spare. Gowda looked at himself in the rearview mirror and smiled in practice. He was ready for all the fake smiles and enquiries of well-being he would have to endure in the brief walk down the corridor and up the steps to Mirza’s chamber.
The DCP’s room was a paean to minimalism, thought Gowda wryly. A heavy wooden table with a sheet of glass on top sat right in the middle. A table that was conspicuously bare except for DCP Mirza’s laptop that was open and humming. Flanking the table on either side were units that he knew held books and an assortment of this and that. A nest of phones sat on top of one of the units and a deep brown leather briefcase sat alongside. A striped Turkish towel draped the back of the chair. It occurred to Gowda that the towel’s twin lived on his chair. He didn’t even know why it was there or who had placed it. Gowda wondered if that was what differentiated a public servant from a private sector employee – the striped Turkish towel on the chair back that said so much without saying anything at all. Of the complacency born out of job security, the lassitude of babudom, slavery to bureaucracy and red tape. And yet, DCP Mirza was nothing like that. Speaking of whom, where had the DCP disappeared?
A minute later, the DCP emerged from the bathroom attached to his chamber. Gowda stood to attention and saluted.
‘You’ve lost some weight,’ the DCP said by way of greeting.
Gowda grinned. ‘I’ve been working out, sir, and I’ve resumed running.’
‘Are you sure running is advisable at your age?’ a voice asked from behind Gowda.
Gowda shut his eyes in dismay. How could this orangutan in a uniform arrive just like that? He’d had Gajendra do some discreet probing to check on his schedule for the day and had been told that the man had a hearing at Mayo Hall.
DCP Mirza looked just as surprised and dismayed to see Assistant Commissioner of Police Vidyaprasad. The man was a nuisance and unfortunately had political connections that went high up. Despite the scandal of the corporator case where there had been a great deal of speculation and some evidence of his dealings with the corporator, including steamrolling Chikka’s bail, he had sneaked back into his seat with just a rap on his knuckles. In fact, it had made him more smug than before and twice as dangerous. Gowda and Vidyaprasad in the same room was, as his Ammi would say, like keeping a mongoose and a snake together.
‘I thought you had a hearing this afternoon,’ Mirza said, waving for Vidyaprasad to sit down.
There were two chairs to the left of the table. And it was one of these that Vidyaprasad slid into. He looked at Gowda appraisingly as he sat down.
‘It has been shifted to next week. The judge’s wife passed away this morning,’ the ACP said. ‘Bloody nuisance, if you ask me.’
Then, shifting his gaze to Gowda, he asked, ‘I say, what brings you here, Gowda? You know, don’t you, that all enquiries need to be routed through me.’
Gowda chewed on his lip thoughtfully. What on earth was he going to do? He knew that no matter what his request, the ACP would either turn it down or keep it pending, merely as a matter of routine.
‘What about that monastery issue? Have you been to meet the priests?’
‘I just got back from Markapur this afternoon and there was a missing case to be looked into. I’ll inquire about the monastery issue by this evening.’
‘Who went missing? A calf? These rural stations …’ The ACP rolled his eyes and guffawed.
‘A twelve-year-old girl, sir,’ Gowda said quietly.
‘She must have run away to a relative’s home. It’s exam time, I say. That’s what these children do. But the monastery rape could become a human rights and communal issue. So look into it ASAP. And send me a full report,’ the ACP snapped.
DCP Mirza took a deep breath. ‘Vidya,’ he said, using a diminutive rather than the dickhead’s full name to soften what he was going to say next. ‘I have a confidential matter to instruct Gowda about. Would you excuse us for a few minutes?’
Vidyaprasad’s eyebrows rose high as his hairline. ‘Confidential matter?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Yes,’ the DCP said in his firmest voice. ‘Confidential.’ He paused pointedly, waiting for the ACP to leave his chamber.
When the ACP had shut the door, Mirza looked at Gowda who had trained his gaze on a paperweight that sat on one of the units, holding down a sheaf of papers someone had brought in.
‘Yes, Gowda, what can I do for you?’ he asked.
Gowda smiled. ‘It’s about Sub-inspector Santosh, sir.’
‘How is he?’ the DCP asked quietly.
‘He’s fine. He needs to go for voice therapy. But, sir, I think he’s ready to resume duty.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ the DCP asked. ‘You don’t think he is?’
‘He is as ready as he ever will be. But this is a man who has had an almost fatal encounter. So I was wondering if we could assist in the transition from hospital bed to uniform,’ Gowda said carefully.
The DCP’s mobile beeped. He picked it up and said, ‘Let me call you back.’
Gowda saw he had the DCP’s full attention. ‘Sir, the CWO at the Neelgubbi station has gone on compassionate leave. The grapevine tells me he won’t return till he can arrange a transfer to his hometown. So I was wondering if …’
‘Good idea,’ the DCP interrupted, smiling. ‘I knew I was going to have to sort it out. Santosh will make a good CWO. In fact, there is a smart assistant sub-inspector called Ratna whom I have identified for the assistant CWO post. I’ll send the orders out. Meanwhile, they can come in for the orientation tomorrow.’
Gowda rose. ‘In which case, sir, I won’t take up any more of your time.’
The DCP leaned back in his chair. ‘Don’t give up on running or fitness, Gowda. I know you are a fine officer and I have great hopes for you.’
Gowda nodded and stepped out. ACP Vidyaprasad stood in the corridor, talking into his mobile phone. A new one, Gowda noticed. The latest iPhone. Where did he find the money for such fancy gadgets? Not on his police salary for sure.
The ACP gestured to Gowda to stop. But Gowda pretended to read the gesture wrong. ‘An urgent matter has come up, I just heard from the control room. I’ll send you the report by the evening,’ he called out, striding away.
Gowda raced down the steps, much to David’s astonishment, and ran towards the Bolero.
‘What’s the matter, sir?’ he said even as he ran to catch up with Gowda.
‘We need to leave immediately,’ Gowda said, clambering into the seat.
‘What’s wrong, sir?’ David asked again.
‘I didn’t want to talk to someone,’ Gowda said as they turned onto the main road.
David grinned. He had seen ACP Vidyaprasad walk in, and everyone knew that Gowda and the ACP were two wrestlers in a ring, sizing each other up all the time. For the moment, it seemed that Gowda was not in the mood to grapple and preferred to flee the spot.<
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The Bullet was washed clean. Gowda stood and admired it with the hose still in his hand. The chrome sparkled and even the tyre rims glinted in the twilight. There was a puddle of water around the bike but it would soon dry up, he knew. It was only early March but already summer was on in earnest.
Gowda heard a mew. He turned around, wondering if a cat had dropped her litter somewhere in the premises. He darted a look upstairs. The previous tenants with their dog had been replaced by yet another young couple. A techie couple who worked at Manyata Park. They never seemed to be home except late at night. The mew again. Why would they have got a pet when they were away all day? Gowda frowned.
He was on the patch on the side of the house where, on Shanthi’s prompting, the gardener who came once a week had started a vegetable garden.
‘You are going to blitz them if you point your hose directly at the plants,’ a voice said from behind him.
Gowda turned on his heel abruptly, sending a stream of water all over Urmila. She gasped in shock. He exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh fuck!’ and dropped the hose.
She stood on the spot, staring down at her drenched top while he hurried towards the tap to shut the water down.
Gowda came back, trying hard not to grin. ‘You caught me by surprise,’ he said.
She glared at him.
‘C’mon, U,’ he said, ‘it was an accident. I am not twelve to drench you on purpose. Though now that I see what I can see, I wish I had done this earlier.’ He leered suggestively. She glared at him. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. So I turned around without thinking …’
‘That’s the problem. You don’t … I mean you don’t think of me. Out of sight is out of mind,’ she said, turning away so he wouldn’t see the hurt in her eyes.
He went towards her and took her hand in his. ‘Let me give you something to change into,’ he said, tugging at her hand.