Q & A

by Vikas Swarup

  Akshay, Meenakshi and their father are prodded similarly and made to climb down from their berths. They are groggy and disoriented. When you are woken up suddenly in the middle of the night, the brain takes some time to respond.

  We are all sitting on the lower berths now. Akshay and his father sit next to me, and Meenakshi, her mother and the woman with the baby sit opposite us. The baby is getting cranky again and begins to cry. The mother tries to soothe it but the baby begins crying even more loudly. ‘Give her your milk,’ the dacoit tells her gruffly. The mother is flustered. She pushes up her blouse, and instead of one, exposes both breasts. The dacoit grins at her and makes a show of grabbing one of her breasts. She screams and hastily covers it. The dacoit laughs. I don’t get titillated this time. A loaded gun pointed at your head is more riveting than an exposed breast.

  Now that the dacoit has everyone’s undivided attention, he gets down to business. He holds aloft a brown gunny sack in his left hand, with the gun in his right. ‘OK, now I want you to hand over all your valuables. Put them in this sack. I want the men to hand me their wallets and watches and any cash in their pockets, the ladies to hand me their purses, bangles and gold chains. If there is anyone who does not comply with my instructions, I will shoot him dead instantly.’ Meenakshi’s mother and the young mother scream simultaneously when they hear this. We hear cries coming from the far side of the compartment. The dacoit’s partner is, presumably, issuing similar instructions to passengers on his side.

  The dacoit takes round the open sack to all of us one by one. He starts with the mother and child. With a terrified expression she takes her brown leather purse, opens it quickly to remove a pacifier and a bottle of milk, then drops the bag into the sack. Her baby, whose breastfeeding has been interrupted momentarily, begins wailing again. Meenakshi looks stunned. She takes off her gold bangle, but as she is about to put it in the sack, the dacoit drops the sack and grabs her wrist. ‘You are much more beautiful than a bangle, my darling,’ he says as Meenakshi desperately tries to escape the man’s vice-like grip. The dacoit lets go of her wrist and makes a grab for her kameez. He catches her shirt by the collar, she pulls back, and in the process the shirt almost tears in half, exposing her bra. We all watch, horrified. Meenakshi’s father can take it no longer. ‘You bastard!’ he cries and tries to punch the dacoit, but the man has panther-like reflexes. He releases Meenakshi’s shirt and hits her father with the butt of his pistol. A deep gash opens up instantly on the businessman’s forehead, from which blood starts oozing out. Meenakshi’s mother starts screaming again.

  ‘Shut up,’ the dacoit growls, ‘or I will kill all of you.’

  These words have a sobering impact and we all become absolutely still. A lump of fear forms in my throat and my hands become cold. I listen to everyone’s laboured breathing. Meenakshi sobs quietly. Her mother drops her bangles and her purse into the sack, her father puts in his watch and his wallet with shaky fingers, Akshay asks whether he should put in the Archie comic. This infuriates the dacoit. ‘You think this is a joke?’ he hisses and slaps the boy. Akshay yelps in pain and begins nursing his cheek. For some reason I find the exchange rather funny, like a comic interlude in a horror film. The dacoit berates me. ‘What are you grinning at? And what have you got?’ he snaps. I take out the remaining notes and change from my front pocket and drop them in the sack, leaving only my lucky one-rupee coin. I begin to unfasten my wristwatch, but the dacoit looks at it and says, ‘That is a fake. I don’t want it.’ He appears to be satisfied with the haul from our cabin and is about to move on when Akshay calls out, ‘Wait, you have forgotten something.’

  I watch the scene unfold as if in slow motion. The dacoit whirls around. Akshay points at me and says, ‘This boy has got fifty thousand rupees!’ He says it softly, but it seems to me the entire train has heard it.

  The dacoit looks menacingly at Akshay. ‘Is this another joke?’

  ‘N-no,’ says Akshay. ‘I swear.’

  The dacoit looks underneath my berth. ‘Is it in this brown suitcase?’

  ‘No, he has hidden it in his underwear, in a packet,’ Akshay replies, smirking.

  ‘Ah ha!’ the dacoit exhales.

  I am trembling – I don’t know whether from fear or anger. The dacoit approaches me. ‘Will you give me the money quietly or should I make you strip in front of all these people?’ he asks.

  ‘No! This is my money!’ I cry, and instinctively protect my crotch like a footballer blocking a free kick. ‘I have earned it. I will not give it to you. I don’t even know your name.’

  The dacoit gives a raucous laugh. ‘Don’t you know what dacoits do? We take money which doesn’t belong to us, from people who don’t even know our name. Now are you giving me the packet or should I pull down your pants and take it out myself?’ He waves the pistol in my face.

  Like a defeated warrior, I surrender before the might of the gun. I slowly insert my fingers into the waistband of my pants and pull out the manila envelope, sticky with sweat and smelling of humiliation. The dacoit grabs it from my hand and opens it. He whistles when he sees the crisp new thousand-rupee notes. ‘Where the fuck did you get all this money from?’ he asks me. ‘You must have stolen it from somewhere. Anyway, I don’t care.’ He drops it in the gunny sack. ‘Now none of you move while I meet the other folks in your compartment.’

  I just stare dumbly and watch fifty million dreams being snatched away from me, dumped into a brown gunny sack where they jostle with middle-class bangles and wallets.

  The dacoit has moved on to the next section of the compartment, but none of us dares to pull the emergency cord. We remain rooted to our seats, like mourners at a funeral. He returns after ten minutes with the sack on his back, its mouth tied, the gun in his right hand. ‘Good,’ he says, hefting the sack to show us it is full and heavy. He looks at me and grins, like a bully who has just snatched someone’s toy. Then he looks at Meenakshi. She has covered her front with her chunni, but through the gauzy fabric the white cloth of her bra is visible. He smacks his lips.

  The dacoit’s partner shouts, ‘I am ready. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes,’ calls our dacoit in reply. The train suddenly begins to slow down.

  ‘Hurry!’ The other dacoit jumps down from the train.

  ‘I am coming in a second. Here, take the sack.’ Our dacoit sends the sack – and fifty million dreams – spinning out of the door. He is about to jump down, but changes his mind at the last second. He comes back to our cabin. ‘Quick, give me a goodbye kiss,’ he tells Meenakshi, waving the gun at her. Meenakshi is terrified. She cowers in her seat.

  ‘You don’t want to give me a kiss? OK, then take off your chunni. Let me see your breasts,’ he orders. He holds the gun with both hands and snarls at Meenakshi. ‘Last warning. Quick, show me some skin or I’ll blow your head off before I leave.’ Meenakshi’s father closes his eyes. Her mother faints.

  Sobbing and weeping, Meenakshi begins to unfurl her chunni. Underneath will only be a piece of white fabric. With two straps and two cups.

  But I am not seeing this happening. I am seeing a tall woman with flowing hair. The wind is howling behind her, making her jet-black hair fly across her face, obscuring it. She is wearing a white sari whose thin fabric flutters and vibrates like a kite. She holds a baby in her arms. A man with long hair and a thick moustache, wearing black trousers and a white shirt approaches her. He points a gun at her and grins. ‘Open your sari,’ he barks. The woman begins to cry. Lightning flashes. Dust scatters. Leaves fly. The baby suddenly jumps from the mother’s lap and leaps at the man, clawing at his face. The man shrieks and pulls the baby away, but the baby lunges at his face again. The man and the baby roll on the ground while the woman in the sari wails in the background. The man twists his hand and points his gun at the baby’s face, but today the baby is blessed with superhuman powers. With tiny fingers he pushes at the barrel of the gun, reversing its direction. Man and baby wrestle again, going left and right, rolling on the
ground. They are locked in a death struggle. At times the man gains the upper hand and at times the baby appears to be winning. The man finally manages to free his gun-carrying arm. His fingers curl round the trigger. The baby’s chest is directly in front of the barrel. The man is about to press the trigger, but at the last moment the baby manages to twist the gun away from himself and towards the man’s own chest. There is a deafening explosion and the man rears back as if hit by a powerful blast. A scarlet stain appears on his white shirt.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I hear Akshay’s voice, like an echo in a cave. The dacoit is lying on the floor, inches from the door, and I have a pistol in my hand, from which a thin plume of smoke is drifting upwards. The train is beginning to gather speed.

  I have still not quite understood what has happened. When you are woken up suddenly in the middle of a dream, the brain takes some time to respond. But if you have a smoking gun in your hand and a dead man at your feet, there is little room for misunderstanding. The dacoit’s shirt is suffused with blood, the stain darkening and expanding all the time. It is not like they show you in the movies, where a bullet produces an instant little red patch and it remains like that till they cart away the body in an ambulance. No. The blood doesn’t even come out at first. It begins to seep out very gradually. First there is a tiny red dot, no bigger than a thumbtack, then it becomes a circular patch the size of a coin, then it grows as large as a saucer, then it expands to the size of a dinner plate, and it just keeps growing and growing till the flow becomes a torrent. I begin gasping for breath and the whole compartment is about to drown in a red river when Akshay’s father shakes my shoulders violently. ‘Snap out of it, I say!’ he shouts, and the redness lifts.

  I sit on my berth with a crowd of people around me. Virtually the entire compartment has come to see what has happened. Men, women and children crane forward. They see a dead dacoit, whose name nobody knows, lying on the ground with a dark-red patch on his white shirt, a father with a gash on his forehead, a terrified mother from whose breasts every drop of milk has been squeezed by a famished baby, a brother who will never read Archie comics on a train again, a sister who will have nightmares for the rest of her life. And a street boy who, for a brief moment, had some money, and who will never have middle-class dreams again.

  The yellow light in the cabin seems unusually harsh. I blink repeatedly and hold the gun limply in my hands. It is small and compact with a silver metallic body and a black grip. It says ‘Colt’ in chiselled letters and has a picture of a jumping horse on either side of the inscription. I flip it over. On the other side of the muzzle it says ‘Lightweight’, but it feels ridiculously heavy. The pistol has some letters and numbers engraved on it which have become faded. I make out ‘Conn USA’ and ‘DR 24691’.

  Meenakshi glances at me furtively. She looks at me like Salim looks at film stars. I know that at this moment she is in love with me. If I propose to her now, she will marry me. Happily have my children. Even without the fifty thousand. But I don’t return her glances because everything has changed. I look only at the pistol in my hand and the face of the dead dacoit, whose name I don’t know.

  He could have died in any number of ways. He could have been shot dead in the middle of a crowded market in a police encounter. He could have been butchered by a rival gang as he sipped tea at a roadside stall. He could have died in hospital from cholera, cancer or AIDS. But no, he did not die from any of these. He died from a bullet fired by me. And I didn’t even know his name.

  Train journeys are all about possibilities. But a hole in the heart has a certain finality to it. There is no more travelling for a dead body. Perhaps to a funeral pyre, but it will definitely not meet any more hawkers or ticket examiners. I, however, am likely to encounter not just hawkers and ticket examiners, but also the police. How will they treat me? As a hero who protected the modesty of a girl and rid the world of a notorious dacoit, or as a cold-blooded killer who shot dead a man without even knowing his name? I know only one thing: I cannot gamble on finding out. And then Colonel Taylor’s words crash into my consciousness like a bolt from the sky. ‘CYTLYT, Confuse Your Trail, Lose Your Tail.’ I know exactly what I have to do.

  Just as the train is about to pull into the next station, where, without doubt, a posse of policemen will be waiting for me, I leap out of the door with the gun still in my hand. I race across the track and jump into another train which is about to steam away from the platform. I don’t sit in any compartment; just hang out at the door. As the train passes over a cantilever bridge, I send the gun spinning into the dark river. Then, as the train comes to a stop at the next station, I hop out and find another train going somewhere else. I do this the entire night, moving from station to station, train to train.

  Cities go by in a blur. I don’t know whether I am travelling north or south, east or west. I don’t even know the names of the trains. I just keep changing them. The only thing I know for certain is that I cannot go to Mumbai. Akshay might have told the police about Salim and they could arrest me in Ghatkopar. I also don’t want to get off at a dingy, deserted station and attract needless attention. I wait for a station with plenty of light, sound and people.

  At nine o’clock in the morning, the train I am travelling in steams on to a bustling, crowded platform. I alight wearing a hundred-per-cent-cotton bush shirt which is torn and has three buttons missing, Levi jeans which are caked with soot and grime, and a fake digital watch. This city seems like a good place to hole up for a while. I see a big yellow board at the edge of the platform bearing its name. It proclaims in bold black letters: ‘AGRA. Height above mean sea level 169 metres.’

  Smita holds her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, my God,’ she says. ‘So all these years you have been living with the guilt of having killed a man?’

  ‘Two men. Don’t forget how I pushed Shantaram,’ I reply.

  ‘But what happened in the train was an accident. And you could even justify it on the grounds of self-defence. Anyway, I’ll first find out whether a case was even registered. I don’t think the other passengers would have wanted to implicate you. You rescued them, after all. By the way, what happened to that girl, Meenakshi? Did you see her again?’

  ‘No. Never. Now let’s return to the show.’

  In the studio, the lights have been dimmed again.

  Prem Kumar turns to me. ‘We now move on to question number seven for two hundred thousand rupees. Are you ready?’

  ‘Ready,’ I reply.

  ‘OK. Here is question number seven. Who invented the revolver? Was it a) Samuel Colt, b) Bruce Browning, c) Dan Wesson, or d) James Revolver?’

  The music commences. I go into deep thought.

  ‘Have you heard any of these names?’ Prem asks me.

  ‘One of them sounds familiar.’

  ‘So do you want to withdraw or would you like to take a chance?’

  ‘I think I will take a chance.’

  ‘Think again. You might lose the one lakh rupees you have won up to now.’

  ‘I have nothing to lose. I am ready to play.’

  ‘OK. So what is your final answer?’

  ‘A. Colt.’

  ‘Are you absolutely, one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is a crescendo of drums. The correct answer flashes.

  ‘Absolutely, one hundred per cent correct! It was indeed Samuel Colt who invented the revolver in 1835. You have just doubled your winnings to two lakh rupees!’

  I can’t believe it. I have won back my fifty thousand rupees with three times interest. Thanks to a swarthy dacoit, whose name I didn’t know.

  There are ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the audience. The signature tune is repeated, but the only sound reverberating in my ears is the relentless piston movement of a train travelling from Delhi to Mumbai, via Agra.

  Prem Kumar suddenly leaps out of his chair to shake my hand, but finds it limp and unresponsive. If you are taken by surprise in the middle of a game show, the brain t
akes some time to respond.

  A SOLDIER’S TALE

  Like clockwork, the air-raid warning siren wails at precisely eight-thirty in the evening, leading to frenzied activity in the chawl. Residents follow the instructions which were announced by loudspeaker the whole of last week in anticipation of an outbreak of hostilities. Switch off all the lights, disconnect all gadgets, turn off the gas, close the house, make an orderly file and proceed to the bunker.

  The bunker is beneath the school building. It is a large, rectangular hall with subdued lighting. It has a faded and dusty red carpet on the floor, and the only furniture consists of a couple of rickety chairs and an old metal table, on which stands a fourteen-inch television set. The bunker feels hot, suffocating and claustrophobic, but it is for our protection, so we cannot really complain. Though there are rumours that the one in Pali Hill has a thirty-two-inch TV, Dunlopillo cushions and air conditioning.

  The residents gather in front of the television set, which is tuned to the news channel. I look around the hall. Almost the entire chawl is here. The Gokhales, the Nenes, the Bapats, Mr Wagle, Mr Kulkarni, Mrs Damle, Mr Shirke, Mrs Barwe . . . Only Mr Ramakrishna the administrator is missing. He must be busy counting his rent receipts and fixing fused bulbs, leaking taps, broken railings.

  First there are the advertisements. This war is sponsored by Mother India Toothpaste and Jolly Tea. Then we have a broadcast by the Prime Minister. Indian forces are winning the war, he tells us earnestly, and it is only a matter of days before the enemy surrenders completely. This war will be a fight to the finish, he says in a high-pitched voice. There will be an end to terrorism. And hunger. And poverty. Contribute generously to the Soldiers’ Benefit Fund, he urges us.