by Vish Dhamija
'There have been murders all around the city and —'
'What have I got to do with murders? I thought you had come to help.' Margaret lit up a cigarette and took a drag.
'Help?'
'My friends and I were pushed into prostitution twenty-five years ago. Our fault? We trusted people; we thought the nightmare would end when the police found out. Some policemen came following their lust, the bastards. No one helped. Why have you come now?'
'Where are your friends?'
'They died.'
'You're not Indian.'
Despite Margaret's aged ruddy skin, several-shades-darkened complexion, and her impeccable Mumbai diction, Rita’s brain could discern the difference under the surface. Margaret took another drag. She responded with an expressionless stare for some time, and then gave a fake smile and responded after a nice, calculated pause. 'What makes someone an Indian? I've spent more years of my life here than anywhere else. Yes, I was Margaret once, but it doesn't matter now.'
So she was right, Rita made a mental note: “Margaret.” Where was this headed was her concern. What bothered Rita was why? Why was it said at all? It wasn't unwittingly dropped. She was intelligent enough to see it was an attempt to outsmart her, manipulate the conversation by implanting other tales. She realised she required to take the conversation back to the purpose she had come here for. 'As I was saying, six men have been murdered...hold on,' Rita told Margaret as the latter had opened her mouth to say something. ‘Each one of these men were in someway associated with you; they made contact with you either directly or indirectly.’
'And you think someone killed them because they banged one of my girls?'
'It's a possibility. Don't you think so?'
'Could be a mere coincidence.'
‘Six men? You'd think there was a terminal point in coincidences. I shall name them.
Just tell me if you know any one of them: Adit Lele...' Margaret reflected for a minute. 'No.'
'Samir Suri.'
'No.'
'Joseph Martin.'
'No.'
'Al Khan. Bhim Yadav. Dina Patel.'
'No. No. No. I have clients all over Mumbai. Some of them call for our services only once in a lifetime and some don't even give their real names. How do you expect me to know or remember any of the names?' The hesitation was momentarily there, but Margaret carefully controlled her face, her expressions. She wasn't a good liar; she was a better actress. She wasn't willing to give anything away, which, Rita knew, wasn't the same as not knowing. She was trained to recognise when a person lied. Margaret had prevaricated, she knew.
'How many girls stay with you here?' Rita looked around and above to explicate. 'Ten, including me.'
‘Could you give me the whereabouts of all these girls on the days these murders took place?' Rita knew Margaret and her ilk were notoriously secretive of their rendezvous, their high-roller clients, but she had to know.
A nod.
Rita pulled out the dates.
Margaret picked up her diary. She carefully provided names and addresses where every girl was on the dates asked.
'I am not looking for your word for it. I would make checks on every girl's whereabouts to corroborate the alibi.'
Nod again. 'I know.' Margaret blew smoke rings — two or three at a time — towards the stained ceiling, her eyes shouting invective, though the lips did not stir.
'And if anyone of these aren't upheld by these men —'
'Many might not be. You think the men who fuck hookers would agree when you ask them?'
'We got ways to make them talk.'
'Anything else?'
'Not at the moment, but if you remember anything that you think might be relevant, give me a call please.' Rita handed her card to Margaret, who kept it at the nearby credenza without looking at it.
'Hope you catch the murderer,' Margaret uttered as she led Rita to the door. 'I will. This might not be my last visit here.'
'My only request to you is come in the morning. This is business time. Some clients visit us here.'
'I'll remember that. Good night.'
The door was slammed before Rita took the first step down. Aware of the reduced crowd, her hand, subconsciously, checked her revolver under the jacket. Thank you, Smith & Wesson. She boldly walked back to her Gypsy, got in and drove back to Crawford Market.
"…the roots of the crime look deeper than we might have originally thought…"
Rita radioed the team to be back in the Operations Room for a briefing. She wanted the team to start the investigation with the new information at daybreak, and not squander time coming in for the meeting. ‘Tap all phones in that building – landlines and mobiles. I want every call to be recorded. I’ll get Mr Joshi to sign the papers first thing tomorrow morning,’ she told Vikram.
The team called it a day sometime after midnight.
Who was Margaret? Or Malti? Where did she come from? Who were her two friends that were dead? How did they die?
Back at Bhendi Bazaar, Margaret slid open the rear cover of her mobile phone, took out the SIM card and shred it to pieces with a scissor. Replacing it with another one, she called out. ‘The police have got the scent…’ she was on the phone. ‘Yes…she got here, that DCP Ferreira…she thinks we leak information…No, don’t do anything stupid…she said she’ll be back…and I know all my phones would be wired by morning, so this is my last call to you…yes…I have decided to leave…I’ll be careful, you take care too.’ Concluding the call, Margaret destroyed this SIM as well. She was erasing every track she could.
Rita made a strong demitasse with twice the dose of coffee she normally used. She had never figured out why she needed coffee to wake up and coffee to sleep. How could it cut both ways? It was coffee, not a magic potion, she reflected sitting in her office after everyone had left. She remembered Margaret mentioning twenty-five years since…so the best guesstimate would be to search the archives between 1981 and 1983.
Working with the police database continuously for the next couple of hours, Rita unearthed more than she — or anyone — had since the beginning of this investigation. The 1982 Asian Games, Embassy of USSR issuing a public notice of three missing girls; the pictures were grainy, they had been scanned from newspaper cuttings, but the Margaret she had met hours ago had a slight resemblance to Magdalena. What, then, happened to Dunya and Varinka? If Magdalena had changed to Margaret and Malti, what had the other two changed to? How did they get to Mumbai, and into prostitution?
Life of a hooker, Rita knew it all: some started early, real early, as if they’d waited for puberty all along only to peddle ass on streets. It, sure, was illegal but there were creeps willing to take the risk. For some hookers, it started as experimentation, for some as a rebellion against norms and family, some others came in for the money. Many were drugged and sold off. Funny thing this flesh trade was. Most women did not start off as career hookers; many thought it a stopgap arrangement till they escaped or got their feet firmly on the ground to move ahead.
Rita pondered over a fresh idea. Getting out of the police archives, she searched for unnatural deaths of any Russian girls in the Eighties; their deaths in early life could hardly have been natural. None were reported. Or the person who digitalised old newspapers might not have considered such deaths to be too significant to fill the archives. Or, maybe, Margaret hadn’t told Rita the complete truth. That she had two friends had been verified now, but what if they hadn’t died. She searched for Dunya. The only search result generated that had any connection with India was the little news item published in New Delhi on their disappearance in 1982, and it mentioned all the three girls.
Search on “Varinka + India” produced, along with the article of her disappearance, an old court case in Bombay High Court. In 1990. The case facts mentioned Viviane Casey — surely Varinka must have been mentioned in the case to be picked up by the search engine.
Viviane. Could Viviane be to Varinka what Margaret was to Magdalena?
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Rita closed the public Internet and delved into police archives once more to dig up the case of Viviane Casey.
She read Viviane's case thrice. And it, suddenly, seemed to start making sense. Sure, there were gaps, but when had anyone hypothesised without gaps? She persuaded her exhausted brain that she was finally on the right track; that the provenance of this crime laid elsewhere. Did Viviane’s losing the court case merely send her to the grave, or was it the cradle for the current murders?
Were her instincts on the wane or was she simply too tired to think? Rita felt a tremor of fear as she descended the steps to walk to her parked Gypsy at 4 a.m. She thought she’d merely put her feet up for a few hours and return to the office by eight. But, it was like someone had switched off lights in her brain; sleep was a befitting corollary.
Rita woke up with a start.
Didn’t the case report say Viviane had a son? Where was he? More importantly, who was he?
From whatever she had learnt — abandoned by an unknown father and raised by a prostitute mother, if he had ever witnessed endless men fornicating with his mother in unnatural ways, his profile matched more than half the serial killers ever apprehended and charged.
Back at Crawford Market, Rita logged into police archives compassionately studying how the defence lawyer had brilliantly twisted the misery of Viviane into ambitious, evil desire for making extra cash. And the irony was that the judge had agreed that the defence lawyer’s tale was truer than the naked truth; but better lawyers not victims won cases, that too based on evidence. That black night, in Mumbai in 1990, had involved six people: Raja Kumar and friends — the enchilada, the moneyed — the soirée of well-heeled men who could afford the best lawyer in the city against a tart peddling her ass. It was never an equal hand at the table and, as such, the dirty game was decided before the first card was thrown. Viviane’s umbrage, understandably, must have been intense and shocking enough for her to take the dire step.
Maudlin sympathy was voiced, on the back pages, by the media — single mum, immigrant, vice girl with a parochial aspiration to make money who bit off more than she could chew in one evening. Who would have believed a hooker cry rape?
However, Rita thought purposefully, there was a gap between Viviane's suicide and her missing son, and the six murders. Pointers and conjectures were, well, mere pointers and conjectures. It was like a trail ending on one side of the grave and a new one beginning on the other side; Viviane’s son, the only possible link to concatenate the two, was missing.
Perplexity grows with every missing trail; this was no exception. The most cognitive factor of advancing the theory of Viviane's son being a suspect was that he seemed the person with the strongest motive. But Viviane’s son was nowhere to be found. He, if at all alive, was obviously living under an alias and thus not on any database that Rita could access. However, the son was a man and the mysterious caller that phoned Rita had been a female. Also, based on surmises, she had convinced herself that the killer was a female. Rita’s dilemma was to reverse her earlier surmise.
As Rita read the case file, she gathered that after the initial kerfuffle, the hoo-ha by the media, the case had faded into obscurity. The media, sadly or selfishly, turned a blind eye to her suicide. Now, a quarter of a century later, the ink in the words might have faded on the crumbled piece of paper or the scanned document, but it had enough weight to shake up the devil's conscience without making much effort.
Unfortunately, there was no more the police archives could tell Rita about Viviane or her missing son.
TWENTY-FOUR
1991 – 2006
Life became one unbroken nightmare for Junior. His body hurt, he lost his appetite, his childhood, his smile. The twinkle in his eyes was long gone too. He was morbidly frightened of nights. Though some nights Mr Fernando didn't turn up to defile him or degrade him by others, the fear persisted nevertheless. On nights when Mr Fernando didn't take him to the study, he lay awake crying, thinking about how could he get away from the hellhole. The puerile mind was inept at thinking or devising a plan to escape. There was no help, no friends he could trust, no one to turn to for advice. He was too small to fight, too young to subsist on his own if he ran away. If he went back to Margaret, would Pathak let him stay there? Maybe. But Pathak surely hadn't wanted him there: wasn't that why he was sent here in the first place? What were his options?
As years passed, Junior's mind sprouted and he grasped the meaning of things that he hitherto had only dimly understood. Aided by his sordid experiences, he stitched together the pieces to chronologically process the flashes of pictorial memories — what his mother did...the strange men at nights...the wretched assignations...his mother's tears...there was some court case...her suicide...her final moments when she lay in a pool of blood with wrists slashed. Why did she leave him behind to bear this world? But he never blamed his mother for what had happened. His mind could comprehend that she had been no more than a pawn like him, shackled by destiny. History had a fucking unfair custom of repeating itself.
What if his mother hadn't died? The problem, he realised, with asking "what if" was how far did he need to go back to theorise? Sequentially, ‘what if she hadn't died’ trailed ‘what if she wasn't a hooker’, which followed ‘what if she hadn't come to this country’? It was moot, idle speculation. In reality, she was dead now and Junior was Mr Fernando's bitch, as none of the what ifs could be altered.
He contemplated suicide, but never attempted it— suicide meant accepting defeat, when your life beats you. The Bible — and he had read the New Testament infinite times — said life was sacred. The world was more than he could see, he figured; there were a million reasons to live.
Thankfully, Mr Fernando lost interest in Junior. Another unfortunate prepubescent boy had joined the orphanage, and Junior had seen Mr Fernando shower his avuncular attention towards the new toy. Junior considered warning the new boy of Mr Fernando's intentions that were as transparent — at least, to him — as a pole dancer's outfit, but he dropped the notion. What would be the point? Mr Fernando and his friends would still have his way with the little boy. On the flip side, if the boy mentioned to Mr Fernando about Junior's caution, the caning would be too severe.
A night later, he heard the sobs from the younger boy's room.
When he was a bit older, Junior decided to flee. He didn't know where he'd go, what he'd do, but once he had made up his mind, he resolutely planned. For weeks.
A few nights later, Junior heard footsteps as he lay awake in the stillness of the night; Mr Fernando had come to pick up the new boy. Junior heard the soft protests, but Mr Fernando, nevertheless, succeeded in taking the boy to the study for the waiting guests. A few minutes later, Junior went to the study and bolted it from the outside. He rushed back to his room to pick up the little bag he had already packed and tiptoed out of the building. He turned back to look at the building, knowing he would return one day. Surely.
When he had been pushed out of the Club at Cuffe Parade, he had been too young to know the location. How would he ever find Margaret? He had no idea how or where to begin the search. He had been a pawn for too long to do anything that wasn't instructed. But he knew he'd learn and survive.
Escape was one thing, the fearful idea of surviving on his own, in Mumbai, was another; food, shelter, clothing and the basic necessities required for subsistence were hard to come by. How? Who would pay for them? It might have been morally and physically degrading for him in the orphanage but there was always food on the table. Moreover, the perpetual paranoia that someone was looking for him drove Junior crazy (though no one cared; with millions living in care homes, who would bother coming after a few getaways?) For the first three days, he endured on water from filthy municipal taps.
Then he found a friend.
Raaj was an underclass criminal who belonged to one of the few underprivileged thugs whose forefathers had escaped the mass execution of their tribe under the British Raj. Or so he claimed: that he wa
s born to be a criminal. A six-feet tall, burly guy of twenty-one, his skin and hair exhibited the insanitary conditions he squatted in. He didn’t reside in an apartment or a house; it was a seven feet long cement pipe, nine feet in diametre, left behind by one of the carefree builders on the outskirts of Dharavi; a few thousands called such huge pipes their home, so did Raaj. Flanked against a wall on one side, the pipe had a curtained entrance on the other — the drape made by sewing together a few disposed of jute bags. Raaj eked out a living by rag-picking and pick-pocketing. With no regular income, he ate surplus food that had been discarded by restaurants and scavenged tatters in rubbish piles that had been tossed out by their previous owners.
“You looking for food?” is how the conversation had begun when Raaj observed Junior going through the waste bins outside restaurants.
‘Yes. Your patch?’ Junior was petrified he had encroached on another reprobate’s area.
‘No. Haven’t seen you before. Who are you?’
Raaj, a runaway from his estranged family, understood what Junior had been through after the latter confessed he had fled from an orphanage. Just why Raaj took on Junior as an apprentice or a friend would forever remain a mystery, but he did it; out of pity, for brotherhood, for humanity.
Life in the cement pipe wasn’t luxurious; sadly, it wasn’t as transitory as Junior had anticipated. It lasted longer than he had imagined, but, at least, he had someone to share the miserable life with. Raaj and he lived on rag-picking; ate and drank abstemiously, and any extra money they earned with unscrupulous activities went towards watching Bollywood flicks and an occasional feast in a cheap restaurant to eat food, which, for once, wasn’t leftovers.