More Bodies Will Fall

by Ankush Saikia

  ‘So tomorrow I’ll arrange everything, okay?’ Romeo said, picking up the last bit of steamed chicken. ‘You just wait for my call.’

  ‘My phone isn’t working, so when I get to Moreh . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you directions. Maung will meet you there.’

  They left just before 9 p.m., which was late by Imphal standards, with most shops closing by 7 p.m. The streets were quiet and deserted now; only the police commandos would be out and about. Arjun managed to place an order just in time with the kitchen for a bowl of vegetable soup chow. After dinner he briefly switched on his phone again. There was a message from Abbas saying that he had been asked to rush to Arunachal for some work, and that he had returned and found out about Khrienuo’s killing and seen Arjun’s missed calls from that night. Abbas had also asked for his email ID. Arjun messaged back saying he had reached Imphal and was at Hotel Nirmala, and that he was going to Moreh the next day on the trail of Tony Haokip. He sent his email ID as well. Then he switched off his phone, and called reception and asked to be put through to Rhea’s number.

  ‘What are you doing in Imphal, Papa?’

  ‘It’s that case I’m working on.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Soon. Listen, do you want to come for a holiday to the North-east with me?’

  ‘Sure! But when?’

  ‘Let me get back, we’ll work it out.

  At least that was something to look forward to, he thought as he hung up. Next he asked to be put through to Liza Thomas, and then Ujjwal Negi. His secretary told him that everything was in order in the office, and that she expected the information on the girl’s passport by tomorrow. The junior detective didn’t pick up even when Arjun asked the receptionist to try a second time. Where was Negi? He needed that information on the playboy Rohit Chaudhry soon.

  35

  THE NEXT MORNING HE WAS up by 5.30 a.m. Parts of his body still felt sore from the accident and the long Winger ride, but otherwise he felt rested. Romeo called him at 6 a.m. asking him to be ready and said he would let him know more soon. Arjun took a bucket bath—the old shower in the cramped bathroom didn’t work—and had a cup of oversweet coffee. There was still no word from Romeo, so he went down to the reception to pick up a newspaper. There were paintings in the corridor to the entrance: the Rasa Lila, a polo game, Loktak lake, Manipuri classical dance. The person on duty was watching a Meitei news programme in the small TV area. Arjun helped him lift up the shutter at the entrance and then went and had tea and puri at a tea shop at the corner of the police station. Back in his room he went through the paper. It was similar to the news in Dimapur: a collapsed bridge somewhere in the interior, allegations of swindling by ministers from the treasury, threats by myriad groups, a couple of workers of a road construction project released by their captors somewhere in Ukhrul district.

  The call finally came at 8 a.m.; Romeo said a van with a driver would be in front of the hotel in five minutes. Arjun had to cross over from Moreh, and then wait outside the Aya Bank branch on the way to Tamu market at midday. Ong Maung would approach him.

  ‘Thanks,’ Arjun said. ‘I hope he can put me in touch with Tony?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Arjun, by today afternoon everything will be clear.’

  He went down and saw a run-down dark-blue Maruti van waiting beside the cars parked on the other side of the narrow street. There were two people in front, and the driver saw him and raised a hand, then opened the sliding door at the back. Arjun got in and sat on the couch-like seat. The driver introduced himself as Ratan; he was lean and fair and seemed like a Nepali. The other passenger was a dark, potbellied man whom Arjun took to be a Tamil, one of the many living in and around Moreh. On the roads the morning traffic was slowly building up. The van was shabby and dusty in a way only long-serving Maruti vans could be. That was the way the city seemed to Arjun as well—nothing had changed over the years.

  It was cold as they sped out along one of the arrow-straight roads heading out of Imphal, the sun rising higher above the hills ringing the valley. He remembered his Naga bureaucrat friend telling him that at one time the entire valley would have been under water, and what remained now was the Loktak lake. The urban sprawl of the city gave way to fallow paddy fields and small, shabby houses and shops in Thoubal district, where Arjun saw several Meitei pangals or Manipuri Muslims on the roadside. The driver Ratan introduced the other person as his friend Sekhar who had a mobile phone store in Moreh.

  The van stopped for a while at Pallel, joining a line of tankers and other taxis while Ratan made an entry at the Manipur Police checkpoint. Sekhar bought what looked like red halwa from a tea shop and ate it with relish. Another road ran off from here towards Chandel, one of the most neglected areas of the state. Arjun had vague memories of a potholed road, poor settlements of the Anal, Maring and Chothe tribes, sawmills cutting large logs brought from the interiors on trucks, and Baptist churches. From Pallel the road wound up into the hills, and Arjun could see the tin-roofed houses down below in the valley. There was a Manipur police Gypsy waiting at a turning, but the policemen waved them off after a cursory check. They crossed villages with wood-plank-and-tin houses and small shops selling items for travellers, boiled eggs and papaya slices on display. He half-remembered the names of places from years ago: Saviom, Tengnoupal, Khudam Thambi. At the Assam Rifles checkpoints, jawans, most of them mainlanders with camouflage wrap-arounds on their faces, made them walk ahead while they removed the van seats and inserted iron rods into sacks in the vehicles returning from Moreh. The driver bought wild mushrooms and brooms at one place from a Kuki woman selling them ahead of the checkpoint. Arjun looked at the misty hills running into the distance and wondered when it would all change: a few rogue commanders of those jawans would be running ‘lines’ for themselves or for other people, ferrying teak and drugs from across the border in vehicles.

  The day was clear and warm now, and it got hotter as they went down towards Moreh and the Kabou valley. The driver’s phone rang; he picked up and replied in Hindi that they were nearing Moreh. Everything seemed dry and dusty and brown. Everywhere there were stands of spindly pine trees, the originals long gone, felled for timber or jhum cultivation. Many Kukis had moved down towards Moreh after the ethnic clashes with the Nagas in the mid-1990s. Abbas had told him that they, along with the Assam Rifles, now controlled the area and all trade passing through it, legal and illegal. Once again the driver’s phone rang, and again he replied in Hindi that they were near Moreh, and then agreed several times to something the person on the other side had said. When Arjun asked him he said it was Romeo dai, using the Nepali word for elder brother, who had told him that he had to return from Moreh with Arjun.

  Moreh was a dusty town with small shops and autorickshaws, the road narrowing down towards the border gate. The people were a mix of Kukis, Tamils (the women wearing long skirts) and Nepalis. From the van he could see winding, rubbish-strewn inner lanes with a slum-like aspect, wood-and-tin houses behind wood-plank walls and scruffy buildings of timber and brick. The driver stopped before the Tamil man’s shop and said he would wait there. The Indian checkpoint at the gate was the more elaborate one; on the Myanmar side where he got his day pass from the small soldiers in dark-green uniforms it was a more relaxed affair. The market on the other side, Namphalong, was larger and more organized, selling a variety of goods. The moment one crossed over everything seemed cleaner and more spacious, not shabby and dirty like on the Indian side. Women with sandalwood paste on their cheeks manned the shops and roadside stalls, where they were frying savouries and preparing salads.

  There was still time for his appointment, so he entered one of the beer ‘stations’ and asked for a cold Dagon draught beer. The beer came along with a small bowl of soup and something like papad, and he sat in the shaded veranda and lit a cigarette, watching the money changers at their small roadside stalls counting out wads of kyats and rupees for customers. At a nearby table sat two men in lon
gyis, leisurely drinking beer, one of them with a baby strapped to his chest. It felt nice to be there, in surroundings both foreign and familiar, and he got himself a second beer after finishing the first one. With luck he would have spoken to Tony Haokip and be back in Imphal before dusk. He could fly to Guwahati tomorrow, and then catch a flight to Delhi. He remembered Baia; she had said she would be in Guwahati. Should he call her? She might have been expecting it on that second day in Dimapur. If all went well he could call to thank her for introducing him to Romeo.

  He checked the wall clock behind him and saw that it was 11.30 a.m. He finished his beer and went out to the street and caught an autorickshaw to Tamu. The driver was a tattooed young boy in the usual longyi. They went past a forest that had been turned into scrubland, new stilt houses, a police building, buildings with open front rooms and barbed wire on the walls, wooden shacks and houses, a pagoda-like temple—overall a more relaxed air than on the Indian side. He spotted the Aya Bank branch on the left, opposite a traffic intersection, and told the boy to stop. He explained in broken Hindi that Tamu market was ahead, but Arjun managed to make him understand that he had to meet someone here. The boy said he would wait to take Arjun back. The bank branch was a modest building finished on the outside with the bank’s colours of white and maroon; he saw from the sign that Aya Bank was short for Ayeyarwady Bank. It looked clean and orderly inside, a little bit of the big city in this far-off border region.

  Arjun lit a cigarette and waited, looking at his watch every now and then. 12 p.m. passed. He paced up and down on the footpath. Would no one show up?

  36

  AT TEN MINUTES PAST THE hour a scooter stopped in front of the bank and a man in a green longyi with short hair and a misshapen face got down and approached Arjun.

  ‘You come from Imphal?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Are you Ong Maung?’

  He was, and he preferred not to shake hands. Casting a glance at the boy waiting in the autorickshaw, he barked something at him in the local language, to which the boy looked down and replied.

  ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing to Arjun to follow him across the road. They entered a wooden shack that sold snacks and cold drinks. An old lady came up to them with two cans of Myanmar beer. Ong Maung popped his open and said in English, ‘You look for Tony Haokip?’

  ‘Yes. I want to meet him. Do you know where he is?’

  Ong Maung now dug inside his longyi, took out his wallet and from it produced a photo. It showed a stocky, bare-bodied middle-aged man from the waist up, standing in what might have been a police station or an army barracks. ‘This is the man you look for?’

  ‘This one? No, this isn’t Tony Haokip.’

  The man shrugged and drank his beer. ‘This man name Tony Haokip. You come with me you can meet him.’

  The man’s eyes, flat and hard, were sizing Arjun up. A faint sense of alarm, of some trouble to come, stirred in him. He took out his phone, switched it on and pulled up the photo of Tony Haokip’s driving licence he had taken at the Delhi hotel.

  ‘This is Tony Haokip. Do you know him or not?’

  Ong Maung shook his head and smiled, as if he were dealing with a particularly slow child. He tapped the photo with a stubby finger. ‘Tony Haokip this man, okay?’

  ‘Maybe he has the same name,’ Arjun muttered. He drained half of the can and stood up. He felt tense and angry now. ‘Forget it then. I’m going back.’

  As he crossed the road to the autorickshaw Ong Maung followed him. ‘Hey, you come with me. I take you to Tony Haokip. Hey!’

  He placed a hand on Arjun’s arm but Arjun jerked it away and got into the autorickshaw and told the boy to head back to Namphalong. Ong Maung stood there grinning at him as if he was amused at Arjun’s anger. On the way back, he noticed the boy looking into his rear-view mirror. He got down outside the beer station and paid the boy, who seemed scared now. Walking back to the border gate he tried to fathom what had happened. Who was the man in the photo?

  Back on the Indian side he walked down the road towards where Ratan was waiting. He stopped at a shop to buy a bottle of water. From here he could see the dark-blue van and the driver outside the Tamil man’s shop talking on his phone. At that instant he made up his mind. It seemed like the photo he had been shown on the other side, and the young autorickshaw driver’s behaviour, had triggered this feeling in him.

  He turned and went back in the direction of the gate. In the midday warmth he was sweating. The vans for Imphal usually waited further back the other way, but he found one waiting down a side street as a Meitei woman loaded sacks from someone’s house. There was a single seat left and Arjun took it, sitting between two stout elderly Meitei ladies who appeared to be part of a group of traders. On the way out they crossed Ratan’s van. There was a tribal man sitting in the front seat, maybe someone the driver had picked up for the fare.

  As they headed back towards Imphal though, Arjun felt irritated with himself. Had he acted with undue haste? Why hadn’t he asked Ong Maung to try and call Romeo so he could have spoken to him? Had the former’s appearance prejudiced Arjun against him? The fact was that he had wasted the day and the trip to Moreh. A mood of indecision gripped him. The three middle-aged women in the seat opposite stared at him stone-faced. He still didn’t know what it was that had driven him to walk away from Ratan’s van.

  After going through all of the checkpoints in reverse, they reached Pallel, where the driver stopped at a rice hotel as the women traders wanted to have food. Arjun remembered he hadn’t had lunch and went into the gloomy and dank interior along with them. He was served ooti—peas cooked with soda—and a fish-head fry along with sticky rice, iromba made from banana-tree trunk, vegetable curry and fish curry. He helped himself to slivers of the umorok chilli kept in a bowl of raw sliced onions. When he was done he came out to light a cigarette. The view of the small, crumbling houses with dirty ponds and the dusty, flyblown shops brought a black mood upon him. What had he come all this way for?

  On the way back to Imphal the driver drove fast, weaving in and out of the late afternoon traffic. Once he got to his hotel room Arjun sank into the sofa and switched on the television. He was tired and didn’t feel like doing anything. Increasingly, flying to Guwahati and then Delhi seemed like a good option. He should never have agreed to track this Tony Haokip character down, he thought. Drowsy after the rice he had eaten for lunch, he fell asleep.

  When he woke up it was past 5 p.m., and he switched on the geyser and had a bath before calling for a cup of tea and some sandwiches. All along the television had been tuned to a Manipuri news and current affairs programme on which Arjun, before falling asleep, had been watching a segment about a village on the Myanmar border. As he drank his tea, his mind on the strange encounter in Tamu earlier in the day, he heard the newscaster mention the word ‘Moreh’ and ‘IED’. The visuals which came next, shaky footage probably shot on a mobile phone, showed a dark-blue Maruti van lying on its side on the inside corner of a turning, the passenger’s side caved in and torn apart.

  ‘What the hell?’ Arjun swore involuntarily as he leant forward, his eyes fixed on the screen. The video continued, showing Assam Rifles jawans and Manipur Police commandos milling about the place, with the vehicles coming from Moreh held up behind them. Was it the same van? It couldn’t be! Now he could see two bloody bodies laid out by the roadside, and items from the van scattered across the road. He recognized Ratan and the other man by their features and the colour of their now torn shirts. And there were mushrooms strewn beside the van, along with pieces of the broom the driver had bought on the way to Moreh. Arjun sat back on the sofa, stunned. The van had been blown up while returning from Moreh. There were usually no random attacks on civilians here. Therefore, the van must have been targeted by someone for a reason—had they expected Arjun to be in it?

  That moment of unease at the border town due to which he had got into another taxi now came back to him. He hadn’t known why he had done that, but it had save
d his life. Who could want him dead though? Had Colonel Khanna or the Captain tracked him down? It was possible. He went to the landline phone to call Romeo, then stopped. Something the minister’s son had said that morning came back to him: Don’t worry, Arjun, by today afternoon everything will be clear. Something wasn’t right. Another thing occurred to him now: he hadn’t shown Romeo the photo of Tony Haokip he had with him, nor had he told Romeo that he knew what Haokip looked like.

  He thought he knew now what might have happened. When Arjun hadn’t turned up, Ratan had left Moreh without informing Romeo, worried that the minister’s son might be angry with him. But someone had been told about the van, and had laid an improvised explosive device on the roadside, and had been waiting among the trees in the hills for the van to appear, confirming the colour and number plate as it slowed down at the turning before detonating the device.

  In the end though, he called the reception and told them to try Romeo’s number; let him try and find out what he could. But the number was switched off. He sat on the bed wondering what to do next, then put a call through to Baia’s number. She sounded pleased to hear from him, and said that she was in Guwahati. Arjun asked her if she had any other numbers for Romeo but she only had the mobile number which was now switched off. He told her he would probably be in Guwahati the next day, and would call her, to which she told him to make sure he did this time, which was possibly a reference to Dimapur. Well, he could tell her what had happened there, and now in Manipur, when he met her.

  For the rest of the evening he alternated between lying on the sofa deep in thought and going out to the balcony at the front of the hotel to smoke. His investigation in Delhi had brought up the name of Tony Haokip, and now in trying to find Haokip he had got involved with a host of unsavoury characters: Colonel Khanna, the Captain and even the minister’s son, Romeo. Staying on here in Imphal would be dangerous; whoever was after him could have him picked up by one of the many insurgent factions here or even by the security forces. He had escaped death twice; he doubted he would be lucky a third time. Getting to Guwahati would be a safer bet. He could take a call on the case once he was there. And yet, he felt reluctant to leave Imphal without making contact with the elusive Tony Haokip. In the end, he decided to wait till morning to decide. By the time night fell and the streets grew quiet and deserted he had more information with him.