Bhendi Bazaar

by Vish Dhamija

  Tears flooded Desai’s eyes without a warning. Seeing his mother’s grave was pleasantly stirring and disturbing at the same time. Old wounds resurfaced. He sat down on a dwarf wall between the graves. The rain, long over, had left the cement wall damp, which seeped into his body through his bottom that sat on it. The sun shone through the partial clouds, humidity was high and rain wasn’t forecast for the coming evening. But how long could he stay there? He could taste his misery: the bitter tang of his mother’s defeat.

  Some wounds stay green. Each scar hurt, every memory pained, seconds moved like a lazy turtle. He knew he had to leave. He had to be strong. Viviane’s obituary might have been written more than fifteen years ago, but she still lived in Jay Desai’s heart and mind. To him, she was a wandering soul, drifting, seeking him, and watching him, eyes beseeching him to set her soul free.

  Jay Desai left Mumbai the same evening. He had decided never to return, and he kept his promise: Jay Desai never returned to Mumbai.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  2007

  It was incredibly embarrassing for Rita Ferreira, the Crime Branch and entire Mumbai Police that — more than three months into the investigation — even the gender of the perp couldn't be ascertained. Recanting on the hypothesis regarding the gender for the second time would indeed be disastrous for the department's standing; they weren't speculating on Angelina Jolie's next adoption: would it be a boy or a girl? They were trying to apprehend a killer who had brought Mumbai on the brink of panic.

  The media had run out of all positivity, and justifiably so. "This case would never be solved," most had prophesied. Mumbai Police, to their knowledge, had picked up no clues till now, hence if the killer didn't dispatch any more whoremongers, how would the police ever get to him? "Wasn't that why Jack the Ripper was never captured: because one day he just discontinued the killing?" they instanced.

  Only, the media weren't intimated about the newest discovery: Margaret Flynn, and what had been unearthed post that breakthrough. The fourth estate had been served with mere scraps to keep the killer satiated — should he be interested in news still — that the police had no scent yet.

  Decoys had been planted around Bhendi Bazaar to keep an eye on Margaret's bordello.

  All telephone lines had been bugged.

  The fact that both Viviane’s son and the guy who fathered him were missing from every national database searched was too unconvincing to be coincidental. Even if it was just coincidence, it was too overwhelming to be overlooked. They had to find these missing links.

  'Every single girl's alibi has been verified by their clients, including those men who aren't residents of Mumbai,' Vikram updated Rita. 'Makes me wonder if Margaret herself —'

  'If Margaret were to go on a killing spree, why wouldn't she have started a decade earlier? Why would she go into hibernation for so long only to come out of it to kill? Doesn't make sense.'

  'Maybe because she has more opportunity now than she had before...?'

  'You may have a point there, but I'd wager on the son. Let's find him.'

  One of Senior Inspector Nene’s snitches loosened some nuts and bolts of an old infamous massage parlour at Cuffe Parade. The informant was uncertain about Viviane or her son, but was confident that the owner — Pathak — had sent a young boy to some Catholic children's home in Bandra, in early 1991.

  Locating the orphanage at Mount Mary Steps was effortless for the police. The records indicated that Pathak had given a boy named Jay Desai into the custody of the orphanage, but the boy had fled sometime in late 2000 — the records weren't meticulously maintained.

  Seven years previously, Rita calculated. 'Why wasn't it reported to the police if a juvenile had run away?' she asked.

  The caretaker, now, was an old man, Peter Coelho, in his late fifties. He had no answer to Rita's question. He shrugged his shoulders.

  'Who was the caretaker of this institution in 2000?'

  'Mr Fernando. He was the caretaker from 1989 till 2003 when he was...' Coelho stopped in mid-sentence.

  Rita caught the strain. Coelho had braked hard to stop himself from saying something derogatory; his countenance, nonetheless, had let him down. 'He was fired,' she baited.

  'How do you know?'

  'I guessed it 'cause you didn't complete the sentence.'

  'Oh.' Coelho looked relieved; he didn't wish to be known as a turncoat against the sacred institution.

  'Care to tell us?'

  'Why are you looking for Jay Desai after so many years?'

  'As I told you on the phone, this is in connection with another investigation, which we cannot reveal at the moment. Why did Mr Fernando leave?'

  'He was accused of paedophilia. Some boys in the orphanage reported it to the authorities. He was asked to leave before someone brought up a case against him.'

  'No one bothered to report that to the police either,' Rita stated in a prosaic tone.

  The shake of the head insinuated no. 'It was up to the victims if they wanted to report.

  Most didn’t want publicity, so —' ‘Where is he now?'

  'He lives in...' Coelho cringed his eyebrows to think for a moment. 'I think I have his address on file. He sifted through a few files in the shelf behind his desk. 'Here it is...Andheri East.'

  He wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it over to Vikram, as though his celibacy would be invaded if his hand had come in contact with a woman. Or maybe his antediluvian monastery still believed that a woman officer had to be lower-ranked than the male?

  'Any photograph of Jay Desai on file?'

  Coelho nodded, got up and left the room. He returned with a single postcard size picture of a bony boy who appeared frazzled, perhaps because of years of living as an orphan.

  'We'll take this.' Rita didn't ask. She took the photograph from Coelho and gave it to Vikram. 'If you find any more photographs or come across any other information that might help us locate him, please give me a call.' She pulled out her card and waited till he reluctantly stretched his hand to take it.

  The last photograph of Jay Desai when, according to the records, he must have been fourteen had been taken in September of 2000. It was hardly challenging for the police artist to generate a computer-aided e-fit of what he might presently look like.

  'If Jay Desai left the orphanage at fourteen, he should have been — according to this picture — five feet one, so he shouldn't be any taller than five feet three inches, maximum five-four,' Rustom, the young expert constructing the e-fit at the lab, told Rita and Vikram confidently. 'The picture you gave me tells us that the boy was slightly built, skinny for his age if you ask me, but we can never predict his present frame with more than eighty per cent confidence level, which is unusable. There are too many unknowns — he could have taken steroids, built up muscles through exercise or maybe reduced to a skeleton by substance abuse, whatever…’

  'Let's go and see Mr Fernando. Maybe we get to know something more about Jay Desai, more than just a picture and a few photofits.' Rita got up. 'Come Vikram.'

  'Do we need a back-up ma'am?'

  'What for?' As a reflex, Rita's right hand went under her jacket to check for her service revolver.

  The lock at Mr Fernando's door in Takshila Apartments at Andheri East was rusty, like it hadn't been opened for quite a while. No recent activity showed. Mr Fernando could have been travelling; there might be no one to look after the place in his absence.

  Rita rang the bell. Nothing.

  She rang the bell again and put her ear to the dusty door. There wasn't any sound of the bell either. Fernando might have been out long enough for the electric connection to be disconnected.

  Maybe.

  Rita knocked hard. Then Vikram stepped forward to give it a man's knock. Nothing.

  'Stay here Vikram.' Rita looked at the damp asphalt — there had been sporadic showers the night before — around the ground floor apartment. 'I'll go round to check if some window is open.'

  'OK ma'am.'
r />   She was back before the minute lapsed. 'Call for a back-up and break the lock Vikram...I think there is someone lying on the floor, motionless.'

  Vikram pulled out the handcuffs from the back pocket and gave the lock a thunderous strike with the metal. The lock didn't resist.

  If there was one thing that was more nauseating than the stench of death, it was the fetid scent of an old death. Rankness of decomposed human remains could make the toughest guys retch, but Rita and Vikram stayed composed. Putrid stench increasingly filled the nostrils as they walked deeper into the apartment. A million maggots that had partied on the corpse had died too after bingeing; that or they died of starvation after nothing was left in the body to suck at. Scuffed enamel of the bones beamed when Vikram switched on the torch; almost skeleton, there was barely any skin left. The skeleton, in places, was attached together by leather, which was once ligament, skin or muscle. The little mummified ribbons left were so abraded it was hard to tell the sex of the corpse.

  The body had certainly been exposed to a couple of monsoons and as such, there wasn’t much physical structure left for necropsy. The stiff would require a forensic pathologist to formally identify who it was once-upon-a-time, how she or he died and when? Unlike a morbid pathologist, the identification — of body, the cause and time of death — in such a case would typically need an autopsy that took longer than usual. 'Dead for more than a year, I think,' Vikram murmured.

  'Easily a couple, maybe more.'

  They found a broken wristwatch with the time 08:17. No a.m. or p.m., no month, no year. That was hardly any information to work with. Besides, there was no way to establish the watch had stopped at the time of this person's death.

  The crime scene investigation army arrived within half an hour. They scoured and dusted latents off everything possible: tiles, doorframe, pipes, and collected fragments in bottles.

  A fresh flush of adrenaline rushed through Rita's veins. Who was it? A lot would fall into place if, and when, they could determine who he was before he became this wretched paste: Mr Fernando or Jay Desai? Trying as hard as she could, she couldn’t come up with any other names to associate with this corpse.

  With the body so pulverised, it was impossible for forensic expert to ascertain the real cause of the death on the spot, except for a cracked skull. However, he was certain it was a male corpse, and it was surely murder; he had been hit on the head.

  Everything was neatly indexed, packed and transported to the mortuary.

  The teeth — and lack of some of them — gave the age of the man as early Sixties. The X-ray of skull plates showed a clear fusion between brow and top plates, which also established the age of the person: above sixty for sure. The age tallied with Fernando's. Height: five-ten, which was another indication that it could be Fernando, and not Jay Desai. Must have been well built in his youth and middle age — about ninety kilos. Bludgeoned on the head with something like a cricket bat. Death might have been instant after the fracture of the skull, but there were several other broken bones — a few ribs, the left wrist, which might or might not have been post-mortem; it was too late after the decay to ascertain. There wasn't much else the experts could tell.

  A tired cliché but there was, really, no free lunch. You savoured a chocolate, you paid for it. Karma has a just way of getting back at you. The heinous old custodian of the orphanage was known for malpractice — an unconscionable, barbarous, paedophile that he had been. He seemed to have had a sub-rosa group that revelled in vile activities; fellow degenerates in hallowed clothing. They sodomised helpless kids, and someone came back to fuck Fernando. It was Karma. It was fair. Pity it wasn't legal and a policewoman was not to question why. Rita couldn't commiserate as a police officer — the law neither paid nor was permitted to sympathise with suspects — but as a woman, as a human being, she did condole this particular murder. She was grateful she wasn't the judge.

  How could anyone convict Fernando's killer and sleep at night?

  However, if Fernando had abused a lot of children, any one could have turned around and exterminated the bastard. Fernando's murder could be a totally different case.

  Fernando had been coshed on the head that had resulted in his death. The five murders suggested a pattern. Al Khan's murder, Rita was aware, had been different; it had been in a hurry, to protect the murderer's identity. This sixth — and the oldest one at that — deviated from the pattern. No stabbing, no drugging, no bullet. Perhaps another unplanned murder the killer committed or did he kill Fernando before he became a serial killer?

  "And because you haven’t yet discovered any of his past crimes does not indicate he’s never killed before. Recidivism is extremely common amongst such people." Hadn't Ash warned?

  Then again, the blow to the head, possibly, wasn't intended to kill; murder might not have been the objective, but it happened nevertheless. The other murders were committed with precision. Could this be a different killer or was it too much of a coincidence? Or was this where it all began, and then stopped only to recur with an utterly antithetic Modus Operandi? Rita's mind was relentlessly trying to work out the puzzle. She couldn't afford to make mistakes on a case she had been working on for three months now. Bungled detective work, everyone in police circles knew, was known to be like death by poison; the corpse of the case could be easily exhumed to prove the blunder.

  'For someone to attack a man of ninety kilos, that someone would have to be far bigger,' Vikram uttered.

  'Or smarter.' Rita looked at him. 'The attacker was shorter for sure. The cricket bat hit on the lower back on the head, not on the crown.'

  'Could he have fallen on something sharp, like a pipe or stairs...?'

  'And then disposed of the bat or whatever the hard plank was?'

  'We've seen Jay Desai's e-fit. How can a man his size kill Fernando?' The bewilderment showed on Vikram's face.

  'Exactly like a comparatively tiny lion can attack an elephant...the world, in some way or the other, teaches everyone that everything is possible, should there be enough desire or hunger.' Rita's mind drifted away yet again. It was a visceral thought, a mere intuition as of now, but if it was Jay Desai — a man with a deep-rooted contempt for men — he must have lived with the hatred for years. Hate, like love, was a passionate feeling, but unlike love, hate didn't have vivid colours; it was monochrome and for someone to live with a hatred of that magnitude for so long, it must have been extremely taxing for the brain. Hatred, surely, couldn’t remain passive for long; it was now impelling him to kill the object of his hatred.

  If Jay Desai ran off from the orphanage in 2000 and Fernando was killed in 2005, where had Jay Desai been for five years? "Quinquennium," Sexy would have surely referred to the period of five years with a fancy word, Rita smiled; she was putting into practice the age-old maxim to trick her brain: humour yourself to keep your sanity in such times.

  The day was practically over. Rita, still preoccupied with the case, poured Jim into a glass and looked down from the window. The nondescript car, provided to her for security on insistence of Sexy, was parked on the opposite side of the street, and a plainclothesman sat seemingly uninterested in what happened around him. His binoculars resting on the car's dashboard, however, blatantly betrayed his discreetness should even some one-eyed half-wit apply his brain, not to mention the above average IQ killer they were dealing with. She put on music, which soothed her and made her unwind. She scrambled a couple of eggs and devoured them with buttered toast. The recondite case had dragged on and the very thought of it depressed her. "My rainbow is overdue..." sang Bad Company, aptly, in the background.

  She closed her eyes to ponder and Ash Mattel whirled into her thoughts. Good idea, she thought. Knowing that her phone was no longer bugged, she called him.

  'Hi.' Ash sounded cheerful, as always.

  'What do you eat?' Rita blurted before the pleasantries; she hadn't intended to, but Ash's exuberance prompted it.

  'You called me to ask that honey?'

&nb
sp; 'Nah…just wanted to know how do you keep yourself so jovial at all times?'

  'Who said I am jovial at all times? I get excited whenever I hear your voice. You're the reason.'

  'And how many girls have you used that line on?'

  'On no one else in the last few months...'

  At least he was honest. 'I am honoured.'

  'You're too self-deprecating sweetie, you deserve better than me.'

  'Thanks. Want me to take off my clothes now?' she bantered.

  'Well, if we could have a video call, why not? What are you wearing honey?' Ash began in a hoarse voice to sound sexy; to sound lecherous, strictly speaking.

  'OK, could we get a bit serious now?'

  'Moving to London then? Let's have a few kids...'

  'Have you lost your mind?'

  'Long time back. What is it you're after?'

  'Ash.' Rita's tone elucidated she wasn't talking about the seriousness of their relationship.

  'All ears honey, all ears. How's the case going?'

  'It's a he.'

  'Who's he?'

  'The killer, who else?'

  'I told you so.'

  'But you agreed it was a female...'

  'I conceded to your surmise dear girl, it wasn't my hypothesis. I have always maintained the killings had male stamped all over them, remember?'

  So he had conveniently chosen to ignore his last deduction. Rita saw no point in cantankerously arguing over some past miscommunication. Ash was only trying to help. 'Yes,' she agreed.

  'So what made you reverse your decision from a 'female' to 'male' killer now? What about the perfume, the lipstick, the bra?'

  'Only an amateur would believe in such conspicuous blinds, my surmise was based on other findings, but never mind.' Rita detailed her encounter with Margaret, the digging up of Jay Desai and the discovery of Fernando's corpse. 'What I cannot understand is why this guy disappeared, first, for five years since his escape from the orphanage and, then, for another two after killing Fernando.’