During the course of the evening he received three calls in his room. The first was from Ujjwal Negi; he had managed to find out that Rohit Chaudhry had been in trouble with the Delhi Police in a drugs case. He was an occasional user, and had apparently been trying to put together a drug deal with a few Nigerians to make money. His father, who knew ministers and bureaucrats through his business, managed to hush up the affair and remove Rohit’s name from the police records, but only after coughing up a hefty sum. Things had been strained between father and son since then.
The second call was from Liza Thomas; her source had found out that Amenla Longkumer hadn’t made any foreign trips. However, in the course of looking that up, the source had found that two girls with passports with the same Humayunpur address mentioned in Amenla’s old passport had gone to Bangkok the previous year. Their first names were Abeni and Leiyachon. Arjun told her to find out, if possible, where the two girls had stayed in Bangkok.
The third and last call was from Abbas. He wanted to know why Arjun’s phone was switched off; he had called the hotel in the end and asked for Arjun’s room. As briefly as he could, Arjun told Abbas about what had happened at Dimapur and on the road to Moreh. The first question the MI officer asked him was whether he thought the two were linked. Arjun had said it could well be the case. Abbas thought it was a good idea that he left for Guwahati soon; however, someone he knew in Mizoram had managed to get in touch with Tony Haokip and had passed on Arjun’s phone number. Abbas said it was better he kept his phone switched off while he was there, and that he would pass on the Hotel Nirmala number to his contact.
‘If you want to wait a day or two for him to make contact you can do so,’ Abbas had said to him, ‘but also know that you’re in a dangerous position. Even I won’t be able to help you if you stick on there on your own.’
37
ARJUN WOKE UP AT 4 A.M. to a deep dark silence. Lying on the single bed in the hotel room, those scenes from the Upper Assam village came to him once more. The target house: an ordinary mud-plastered hut with a rusted tin roof and a raised veranda with an old loom. His men searched the house; the boys from the organization had already fled, alerted by the furore created by the villagers. The father was a retired schoolteacher, a meek man who had looked at the army men with helpless bewilderment. Arjun pushed those memories out of his mind and tried to decide what to do—wait in Imphal or leave for Guwahati. He had told Amenla’s father he would find her killer; he had given Mr Longkumer his word. He didn’t want to end up dead, but he also didn’t want to reach Delhi and then feel he could have done more. By 5 a.m. cars had started moving outside and by 5.30 a.m. he could make out through the frosted windowpanes that the sun was up. In the end, he decided to leave for Guwahati. Once there, in safer surroundings, he could take proper stock of the case. He would have to ask the receptionist to arrange a flight ticket for him.
Arjun was about to get out of bed when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver and automatically said, ‘Hello?’
‘Arjun Arora?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘The person you’ve been looking for. Anthony Haokip.’
For a moment he was too surprised to speak. Then his wits returned to him. ‘Yes. I wanted to talk to you, in person. Where are you?’
‘Quite a long way from Imphal. But I can have someone pick you up.’
After the previous day’s incident that didn’t sound like a good idea to Arjun. ‘Can you come to Imphal?’ he asked.
A short laugh, and then Haokip said, ‘It’s not safe for me now. What is this about?’
The voice was smooth and deep, pleasant-sounding.
‘A personal matter. It concerns . . . Amenla Longkumer.’
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘It would be better if we met in person, Mr Haokip.’
‘Has she sent a message for me?’
Arjun was puzzled by his comments. What did he mean? At the same time he tried to think of how he could take some precautions if he went to meet Haokip.
‘We need to talk, Mr Haokip. If I have to come to you, I need to know where.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘For my own safety. I’m in danger, someone is after my life.’
There was a silence at the other end, then Haokip said, ‘Churachandpur. I’ll call you again in ten minutes,’ and hung up.
Arjun immediately called the reception. Luckily there was a person there. He put a call through to Javed Abbas’s number. When Abbas came on line, still sounding sleepy, Arjun told him about Haokip’s call and the proposed location.
Abbas said, ‘Churachandpur is an entire district. But if he meant Churachandpur town, then I know an Assam Rifles major there.’
‘Okay. I’ll try and find out the exact location and text it to you.’
‘You can set a time to call me, maybe in the afternoon or evening, and if I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll ask the major to go and look.’
‘Thanks, Abbas.’
‘All the best, Arora.’
The call from Haokip came fifteen minutes later. He instructed Arjun to be standing before Martyr’s Gate at 6.30 a.m. with a black plastic bag in his right hand. Someone would come and pick him up and bring him to Haokip. The line went dead even as Arjun was asking him if he was in Churachandpur town. It was almost 6 a.m., so he hurriedly washed up in the bathroom, put on his jeans, a T-shirt and a light jacket, and went downstairs. Martyr’s Gate, the entrance to the park commemorating the Manipuri patriot Bir Tikendrajit who had been hanged there by the British, was within walking distance of the hotel, beside the famous polo ground. But he also had to find a black plastic bag.
The person at the reception was unable to help him, and he had to ask at the potato shops along the aloo gali and he finally got one. He hurried past the outer boundary of the Ima Keithel, where old women were already at their rice and dry fish stalls, crossed the road before the flyover to the polo ground and then went left towards Martyr’s Gate. 6.25 a.m. Cars and scooters went past on both sides of the road. It was a clear day, and still cold now. The minutes ticked by. 6.40 a.m. They might have him under surveillance, watching to see if he was alone. The commercial complex on the other side of the road was where in the year 2009 an unarmed ex-PLA member had been taken into a pharmacy and shot dead by a policeman while a search for some insurgents was on. Arjun recognized the place now, a group of police commandos standing at one end of the complex beside a Gypsy, and it made him anxious. He lit a cigarette, looking up and down the road. At 6.45 a.m. a brown Bolero drew up, and a short, stocky man with a lined face beckoned him.
‘Churachandpur?’ the man asked, in the manner of a taxi driver.
Arjun nodded, and said, ‘Haokip, Anthony Haokip?’
The driver nodded, and indicated with his thumb that Arjun get in the back. He climbed in, the driver ground the lever into first gear and the vehicle moved forward coughing out black smoke. Was it his imagination or had the police commandos been looking at them as the vehicle moved towards the flyover?
He sat back and looked around the vehicle: the interiors looked as dusty and worn out as the van from the previous day, probably a car for hire. The Bolero was the vehicle of choice in the hilly interiors of Manipur and Nagaland as almost all mechanics there knew the basic repairs it needed. Arjun rolled the windows down halfway and lit a cigarette as they sped along Tiddim Road. The driver showed no curiosity in him—he might as well have been alone in the car.
The highway headed down south from Imphal was arrow-straight—past the airport the buildings and shops dropped away, and huts and ponds appeared. Churachandpur town, or Lamka as the locals called it, was some sixty kilometres south-west of Imphal. Out in the countryside he saw familiar place names like Nambol and Oinam, with potholed roads, shabby shops and houses and mud-splattered marketplaces, on the whole a crumbling, depressing scene, brought about by years of conflict. It was a stark contrast to the beauty of the pale yellow stubble of the paddy fields and the gree
n hills rising up in the short distance with clouds rolling about the rugged tops and the clusters of tin-roofed houses on the foothills.
Sitting in the back of the speeding car, Arjun wondered how it would turn out today. The incidents in Dimapur and on the Moreh road returned to him: he felt tense and wound up, he could detect the beginnings of those whispers at the edge of his consciousness that severe stress brought on. If only he had his .38 Smith & Wesson tucked into his waistband, he thought, he would have felt a lot better. They crossed an army camp in the distance, and the Loktak hydro-project canal. After the right turn at Moirang, where the INA had raised the national tricolour in 1944, the road got shabbier, and the people and villages turned more tribal, like something out of Mizoram.
Churachandpur town was a small, bustling place spread out over the low foothills. On their way into the town they passed churches and the camp of the local Assam Rifles unit. The driver parked in front of a photo studio on the main road and got down. Arjun followed him.
‘You have to wait, so you can go have tea there,’ he said in English with a Mizo accent, pointing across the road to a tea shop. With that he locked the vehicle and strode off.
Arjun looked around, then did as he was told, crossing the road and entering the wood-plank shack. He asked the old tribal man behind a dirty display case for tea and one of the oily-looking samosas behind the glass panes. Sitting on a wooden bench by the entrance he studied the busy street with its second-hand clothes stores and motorparts shops. Christmas stars hung outside some of them and he could hear a festive jingle playing somewhere. Less than 100 kilometres from Imphal, it felt like a different world, with the people in the tea shop talking in their own tribal dialects. Here, among the various Kuki–Chin tribes, Paite was more of a link language but Meitei was used as well. He drank the mud-coloured tea, wondering how long he would have to wait to meet Anthony Haokip. And why had Amenla’s ex-boyfriend referred to her in the present tense? He took out his phone and switched it on; when it caught the network he messaged Abbas that he was in Churachandpur town and then turned it off again.
A stocky, dark-complexioned youth in a black tracksuit and crocs approached the tea shop. Arjun had noticed him earlier, coming out of the photo studio and looking up and down the street. Now he sat on the bench beside Arjun and asked, without looking at him, ‘The name of the Naga girl?’
It took him a moment to understand. ‘Amenla, Amenla Longkumer.’
The youth nodded and stood up. ‘Follow me please.’
They went over to the Bolero, which the youth unlocked with another key. He asked Arjun to sit in front with him, and started the vehicle. A little way up the main road he took a right, and then they were soon out of the town and back in a rural setting, with wood-planked houses and children playing on the crumbling road. Like the first driver this one too ignored Arjun. From his experience, the people of the larger Zo group were always more phlegmatic compared to the Nagas and Meiteis, but only with outsiders; among their own, they could go on talking forever. The road soon turned into a dirt track which would turn into a quagmire during the rainy season, and the number of houses lessened, overgrown fields and patches of sparse forest between them. In the distance rose up hills that were a dry green now in the winter season, the sky a hazy grey. Somewhere across those hills was Mizoram. There were Sumo taxis that made the trip from Churachandpur town to Aizawl, but the road till the border and beyond was terrible, even by the standards of the North-east.
They had bounced along in the Bolero for about half an hour when a large two-storey house with a sloping green tin roof came into view. Through the gate he could see plenty of flowerpots out in the front.
His driver drove into the adjoining compound, ringed with an old bamboo fence, and stopped in front of a wood-planked house dark with age and a porch along its front. They got down, and the driver went into the house while Arjun looked around. There were a couple of trees around the yard, and on the far side of the house was a ragged vegetable patch. While the house next door seemed to announce new money, the place he was in seemed rooted in an earlier era. There was a wooden bench on the porch and flowers blooming in soil-filled black polythene packets. The driver came out with a woman who, with her stout build and complexion, looked to be related to him. She was wearing grey trackpants, slippers and an old cardigan above a checked shirt. There was a money bag slung around her, and her hands were wet, as if she had been washing something.
‘You wait here,’ the driver said to him, indicating towards the house, and got into the vehicle and started it.
‘How long do I have to wait?’ Arjun called out, but he was already turning the Bolero around.
The vehicle drove away, and Arjun turned and saw the woman looking at him. She motioned for him to come into the house. The sitting room was large and spacious, with wooden benches with cushions ranged around the walls, leaving the middle of the room empty save for two long, low tables. It was similar to the front rooms of houses in Mizoram, and even in Myanmar and the rest of South East Asia. A practical arrangement, allowing for several people to sit and talk, with everyone able to see everyone else. She indicated to Arjun that he should take a seat, and disappeared into the house.
He sat down on a bench near the entrance, with a view through the windows of the neighbouring house. What now? Unlike the previous day at the border town though, he felt no anxiety, probably on account of his surroundings. The shaded front yard, the old wooden house—he felt as though he had arrived at a restful place after a long journey which had started nearly two weeks ago when Amenla’s father had knocked on his door. He looked around the sitting room. There was a pair of deer antlers mounted on the wall opposite the entrance, and framed portraits of an old tribal man and woman on the wall behind him. Across from him was a glass cabinet filled with an assortment of items: old dolls, a snow globe, postcards of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, wood carvings of animals and other trinkets. Beside the front door was a Presbyterian church calendar in what looked like the Burmese script.
There were two ashtrays on one of the tables along with a couple of newspapers: local Kuki pamphlets, English dailies from Imphal, even a few old copies of the Times of India. Arjun picked up one of the ashtrays and lit a cigarette. He turned his mind to the details of the case, something he hadn’t been able to focus on these past few days. He had always suspected Rohit Chaudhry had something to do with drugs—he would need to go and talk to him after he got back to Delhi. As soon as he had spoken to Tony Haokip.
Sitting there, flipping through his mental index, he suddenly remembered his call to the receptionist at Star Global and something that had occurred to him then (and which had escaped his mind almost immediately): no one wanted to get involved with the police if they could help it. In fact it was something Abbas had said as well, mentioning the police talking to the shopkeepers in Dimapur after Khrienuo’s men had shot two boys from a rival group: no one had seen anything. Suddenly a whole facet of the case involving Mrs Sodhi’s son became clearer to him.
The woman returned with a cup of milky tea and biscuits on a plate. Arjun thanked her, and asked when Tony Haokip would come. She nodded and held her palm up, telling him to wait, and went back inside. It was still early: 9.15 a.m. He drank his tea. From some distance away came the faint voices of children singing a church hymn. How peaceful and quiet it was here. He fell asleep for a while, and was woken by the rumbling sound of a vehicle. The plate and cup on the table were gone. Standing up, Arjun saw a white Mahindra Pik-Up entering the adjacent compound. It stopped, and a tall man wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses got down and strode into the large house. Was it Tony Haokip?
He returned to his seat, wondering what to do. It was as if he had been politely forgotten in this old house. Then he heard voices from within the house, followed by footsteps. He looked at his watch. It was just past 10 a.m. The driver of the pick-up truck walked into the room, sans the sunglasses and hat. Arjun got to his feet. It was Tony Haokip.
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38
‘MR ARORA, SORRY TO KEEP you waiting.’
As on the phone, the voice was deep and smooth. There was something Naga- or even Tibetan-like in his dusky complexion and longish features, especially the sharp nose. He was wearing jeans and a dark-green half-jacket over a black high-neck sweater.
‘No problem. Glad to meet you.’
They shook hands and sat down, Haokip turning towards Arjun and crossing his left leg over his right.
‘So you know Amenla?’ he asked. ‘How is she doing?’
Then Arjun understood. The man didn’t appear to be acting. But how could it be?
‘You don’t know about it then?’
‘Know what?’ He frowned. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Amenla passed away last year in September. She was killed, murdered, in her flat.’
‘What? What the hell are you saying?’
Haokip got up, walked out to the porch and came back, running a hand through his straight, mid-length hair. He continued walking around the room.
‘Dead, Amenla? It can’t be. No, no! Who would murder her?’ He turned to Arjun. ‘And why have you come to tell me?’
‘I’m a detective. Her father hired me recently. The police in Delhi have mostly given up on the case.’
‘To find who killed her? Wait a minute, that means . . .’ His eyes widened in surprise.
‘I wanted to talk to you. I know you met her on a trip to Delhi last year. But I can’t imagine you wouldn’t know about it.’
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