‘Any idea if he’ll be back soon? Prithwish really wanted to come.’
‘He has plans.’
‘Oh, okay.’
Deepa could be so brusque at times. Nandana wasn’t really in the mood for it today. She finished her shingara out of politeness (and also because it was delicious) and got up to leave.
Deepa looked confused, ‘What, going already?’
‘Yes, I have things to do.’
‘Er… I’m sorry if I was rude.’
‘Not at all, I just remembered I have to get something from the grocery store. See you downstairs in the evening!’ Nandana smiled at Deepa to show there were no hard feelings, waved and left.
******
In the evening, Mrs Ghoshal returned with her ghost of a hobble, and sat back down in an easy chair. She should stay alert for the pressure cooker whistle now, or her rice would turn to paste like the previous day. She had been fastidious all her life about what passed her lips; she was not about to eat just anything now!
She sat primly, one age-spotted hand laid on the other, legs together and back straight. She itched to turn the TV on, just for the company of human voices, but she was determined not to make a hash of the rice tonight. Kedar said her memory was slipping, but she knew it was simply because of her passion for serials.
She sat in this fashion for a few more minutes, waiting single-mindedly for the whistle to blow. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and glanced at the wall clock: 8.30 pm! It had been ten minutes already! That pesky pressure cooker was acting up; if she didn’t hurry she would have to eat rice mash again.
Mrs Ghoshal hurried as fast as her legs could take her and stood stock still in the middle of the kitchen. Her empty pressure cooker sat on the counter, with the overturned lid and the box of rice beside it. She hadn’t even put anything in it yet, let alone set it on the stove to boil.
The fish chops she’d fried earlier in the day lay uncovered, stone cold and uneaten. Sacrilege! Did people know how much time, effort and money went into those precious chops of hers?
She knew she had to throw them out. She really should throw them out.
But she’d lived 85 years and never thrown food out. Her philosophy was to reuse every leftover for another meal; curry made over for delicious, melt-in-the-mouth rolls with freshly made paratha, or the dregs of the day’s cooked vegetables, all reheated and jazzed up so they seemed like a different dish altogether. These were the tricks she’d practised to raise her son (and during their joint family days, his cousins) frugally, yet with full stomachs. Not that they really needed to skimp when they were young, her husband’s family had been open-handed enough with the money. But she had come from a poorer household that had seen the famine, and she had a horror of going hungry again.
Mrs Ghoshal stared at the fish chops, thinking of the children. How they would wolf down her chops so fast they burnt their tongues! If she had been the sort to cry this would have been a good time, she felt. So many hopes she’d had for them, all of them! Life had been unfair to her.
Mrs Ghoshal set her lips in a grim line and began to wash the rice with a vengeance. It had been a harrowing day, it was just that. Her forgetting the rice could have happened to anybody after the day she’d had.
Mrs Ghoshal hadn’t gone through life with this equanimity by accepting she was at fault. Blessed are those who are free of blame, even of something as trifling as forgetting to put the rice on to boil.
*****
3
Thursday, 6th September 2014
In a fully occupied, urban residential complex like Panorama Apartments, 2 am was the witching hour, the sweet spot if mischief was to be done.
Now, the apartment complex housed all sorts―there were night owls who worked late, came home late, took their toddlers for walks at midnight, and retired only around 1 am with muted whispers, shuffles, and creaks of furniture. This class of people resumed their lives the next day well after the sun had risen. Within a few hours of that, there were the people who took early rising as an extreme sport and rose before the sun. Pressure cooker whistles tooted merrily, pots and pans clanged with impunity by 4.30 am―because there is no virtue shinier than that of an early riser.
Nestled right between these two kinds of people, who lived their lives almost in parallel dimensions with very little intersection, were several hours of darkness and silence. By unwritten law and mutual consent this was a time when the building was completely asleep. When all its inhabitants took the rest that was required to motor them through yet another day of hating their jobs and their lives, and dreaming of miracles.
In those few hours, especially because Panorama Apartments was blessed with a bunch of unusually inept and lazy night guards, anything could happen. Someone had taken on the challenge and done exactly that.
*****
Ira walked homewards through the gates of Panorama Apartments and past the sleeping guards in the inky blackness of 2 am. She was feeling buoyant. It had been a good day in the office. After many a rotten job in poky holes, this was a role she had really taken to. Ira passed under the ugly and redundant archway that led to the complex, wondering with half a mind what was different. It was true that she was later than usual. A fire had broken out in Lake Market late that night and Ira had had to wait for the reporter to file a story and the photographer to send spot photos before she could sub it and leave for the day. A further ten-minute wait for an office cab to take her home had compounded matters, and now here she was, nearly an hour late.
She strolled towards her building, Wing 1, and stumbled on a broken paving stone. Now she knew what was off, it was much darker than usual. The complex was plunged in darkness with only the emergency lights shining in the distance. A power cut! Quite unusual in Kolkata. The back-up diesel generator hadn’t fired up yet, she saw. It probably had fallen into disuse, and wouldn’t work, even if the guards bestirred themselves enough to try. Argh, going up two floors at 2 am―in the dark, after a long day’s work!
Ira began to mount the steps. She thought of her boss who was a sweet, harassed, middle-aged man with a liking for pompous inspirational quotes. He would probably say something like ‘A journey of twenty steps starts with the er…first step’ before hiking up his perennially slipping trousers and beginning to climb. She smiled at the thought and hefted her backpack to a more comfortable position as she mounted the steps. On the landing that led to the second floor, she stopped short.
Mrs Something Roy, the occupant of 401, stood at the top of the stairs looking decidedly odd in the fluctuating light cast by the emergency lamp overhead. Her acne marks, usually not-so-artfully concealed under makeup a shade too light for her skin, stood out against a face that was as bloodless as anything Ira had seen in real life. She looked at Ira and opened her mouth as if to scream, then reconsidered. She closed it again. Her eyes looked fit to pop out of their sockets.
‘What is the matter, Mrs Roy?’ Ira hurried up the flight of stairs separating them and offered an arm to the older woman, ‘Are you ill?’
Again, Mrs Roy opened her mouth wide, reminding Ira sharply of Edvard Munch’s painting. Nothing came out.
Ira pulled her gently away from the stairs, ‘Don’t stand so close to the edge if you’re dizzy, you could hurt yourself.’
The woman just looked at her blankly and made no reply.
Ira took a stronger grip on Mrs Roy and tried to propel her towards the lift. The power would be back soon and she could see the lady to her own door two floors above. Whatever was ailing her, she couldn’t be left teetering at the top of the stairs like this. Ira used a combination of pushing and a steady stream of talk to corral her towards the lift. ‘Don’t worry, once you’re home, you’ll feel better… We’ll just hop into the lift right here, shall we?’
‘NO!’ The words echoed in the stairwell. Mrs Roy pointed at the lift and shouted, ‘He’s in there!’
Ira simply thought, Who? Her thumb, however, was already on the elevator button
.
The metal doors clanged open so suddenly they both jumped. In the flickering light of the blue elevator lamp, she saw a man sitting slumped on the floor facing them. His eyes were wide open and the mirror showed the reflection of the back of his lolling head―a mass of blood and hair and bone.
Ira did what Mrs Roy couldn’t. Her scream rang up and down all six floors of Wing 1, Panorama Apartments.
The elevator doors slid shut as if in response. Ira stared at the metal expanse, while she caught her breath and marshalled her thoughts. Mrs Roy seemed to have given way completely; she had slid down to the floor and gibbered quietly at Ira’s feet.
‘Alright,’ Ira said. ‘Get up, Mrs Roy, we should alert security.’
Just as she was helping the older woman up by the elbow, they heard the latch draw back on the door nearest to the elevator―flat 202. Mrs Roy and Ira both tensed, united in the primal instinct to flee the scene of the crime.
Mr Talukdar emerged with a frown, scratching his enormous pot belly through his undershirt. ‘What the hell is all this shouting at this time of the night?’
He caught sight of Ira and his features shifted into an I-should-have-guessed-it indignation. ‘You…women,’ he spat, ‘partying and raising hell.’
He filled his lungs for a further tirade but stopped short when he recognised Mrs Roy hanging off Ira’s arm, like she’d had a few drinks too many. Always quick to think less of his neighbours in general and women in particular, he screwed up his bushy eyebrows. ‘Madam, you?’ He looked deeply disappointed.
Ira clicked her tongue in irritation, ‘Never mind all that…someone is in the lift…er…badly hurt!’
Another door opened further down the corridor, and the entire Sinha family spilled out in frilly night clothes (the women) and various states of hairy undress (the men). Oh, my eyes, Ira thought, irrelevantly. First the dead body, then this.
The regular white lights came back on.
Mrs Roy gasped when the lift jerked and travelled upwards with a hum. The display button showed 5.
Ira waited mutely along with the others in morbid curiosity…what would happen next? There was a long moment of silence. Then a man’s strangled cry echoed down the stairs, ‘Hai bhogobaan!’
Everyone started to talk at the same time. Their voices almost drowned the slap of naked feet running down the stairs, making towards the sound of other people.
It was Kedarnath from the sixth floor, old Mrs Ghoshal’s son.
He stopped in mid-bound down the stairs at the sight of them. ‘The lift, the lift!’ He gasped for breath. He bent to rest his hands on his knees. Ira noted that his seemingly unbreakable composure was in disarray tonight.
She stepped forward. ‘I know,’ she mustered her best matter-of-fact tone. ‘Can someone please call security? One would have thought they would have come hearing so much hoi-choi.’
Talukdar harrumphed and said, ‘Can everyone calm down and tell me what the matter is with the lift?’ He ran an exasperated eye over Ira, the nearly insensible Mrs Roy, and the panting Kedarnath and decided upon the last as the least of three evils. ‘Yes, Kedarnath?’
Ira decided she’d had enough of incoherent talking. She found her phone while Kedarnath talked to Talukdar and dialled the number of security at the main gate of the apartment complex.
‘Yes, hello! There’s a, um, dead person in the lift.’ It sounded so absurd she nearly laughed. She shook herself and continued, ‘Call the police! And…come quickly!’
Mrs Sinha, in a purple and pink celebration of frilly synthetic fabric, unfroze and came forward to help with Mrs Roy, who had begun to subside onto the floor again. Ira relinquished her burden gratefully.
‘Yes,’ the frilled Mrs Sinha said. ‘You just come in to our house, sit down and drink a glass of water. You’re shaking like a leaf!’
The lift hummed to life. ‘Not again!’ Ira cried.
Kedarnath ran to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up the stairwell. ‘Shunchhen? Keep away from the lift!’
Number 6 glowed on the lift display. There was a grating sound, then deathly silence. Everybody started talking in unison.
The podgy night security guard puffed up the stairs looking sleepy and annoyed. ‘Someone is fooling with the lift, sirs! I was waiting for the lift because of my dodgy knee, otherwise I would have been here earlier.’
‘Gopal, there is a dead body in the lift,’ declared Talukdar. With such authority, Ira thought unkindly, that one would think Talukdar had put it there.
‘Yes, a madam said as much on the phone but I didn’t really believe it until now…what did you see, sir?’ Gopal’s posture was at once attentive and deferential.
‘Uff, just see for yourself, it’s a dead man, just sitting up against the mirror, someone call the police. 1-0-0!’ Ira barked.
Mr Sinha disappeared through his front door, surprisingly quick for such a bearish man, presumably to fetch his phone. Ira reached out and hit the lift button again.
The lift jerked and hummed for what seemed like an eternity. Ira looked away; once had been enough to burn the sight into her brain. When everyone gasped, she couldn’t help but glance in the lift’s direction. She saw a curious expression on Kedarnath’s face and she saw why.
The corpse now lay flat on his back, his legs bent at an unnatural angle to fit the small, boxy lift.
The security guard took one look and went haring down the stairs. ‘I’ll get the boss!’ his bobbing head announced as the rest of his body disappeared from sight.
Ira stared, riveted, until the doors clanged shut again. The loud noise broke the spell, and both Mr Talukdar and she jumped. Mr Talukdar raised his finger to reopen the lift, but thought better of it. Cowardice trumps curiosity, Ira smiled in her head. Aloud she said, ‘Okay, since everything’s under control I’ll go home!’ to no one in particular and began to walk towards her door at the end of the corridor.
A cracked voice floated down from a floor or two above. ‘Kedaaar’ it called. ‘Where are you, Kedar, what’s all this hoi-choi?’
Kedar looked up and yelled, ‘Ma, go in immediately!’ He scampered back up the stairs, all the while shouting, ‘I’m coming up, go in!’
Kedar was really losing his cool over this business, but one had to give it to him, he was super fit for his age. Ira was surprised at the irrelevance of her thoughts at a time like this.
‘Mrs Ghoshal, it’s not safe, go in! In fact, everyone should go back home, it’s not safe!’ added Mr Talukdar in an officious bellow, pleased to be seen taking charge. There was no sign that anyone heard. Everyone stayed put, in fact Ira noticed that more people with excited expressions had begun to gather near the stairs. The whole building seemed to hum like a hive.
Ira was tired, she wanted to shut all the horridness out and retreat to her sanctuary. Tomorrow it would be in the hands of the police, and soon it would be a mere anecdote she could tell her more morbid friends.
*****
4
Thursday, 6th September 2014
Ira was pulled out of a restive, nightmare-filled sleep with her mobile phone shrilling incessantly by her side. She glanced at the watch she wore 24/7. A mere 8.30 am. Who in God’s name?
She snatched it up and saw her landlady’s number. At least it wasn’t bad news from home. ‘Yes?’ her voice rasped like someone had worked the insides of her throat with sandpaper. She cleared it and tried again, ‘Hello?’
‘Yes, er…Ira? I’m calling from the Association room downstairs,’ said the apologetic voice of her landlady. ‘I was wondering if you could join us?’
‘Eh?’ Ira ran a mental finger down the checklist of infractions she could have committed as a tenant. Pets? Parties? Men? No! At least not yet. She should be so lucky in this boring building.
‘Sure, Mrs Bhattacharjee, but what is this about?’
‘The man…you know…murdered yesterday. I hear there are some matters they need to discuss with you.’ There was a disturbance on the line, the vo
ice of a man saying something impatiently. ‘Just, just come as soon as you can, Ira. We’re waiting.’
Ira pulled on her ‘outside’ trousers. Now that she had been reminded, she realised that the police must have come around and wanted to have a word with everyone on the scene.
Her landlady could have just said that without all that mincing and dilly-dallying. Uff, some people just couldn’t complete a single meaningful sentence in under a minute.
She brushed her teeth quickly but decided to give her hair a miss. She bundled it up with a scrunchy and it sat like a tiny jota at the top of her head. If they wanted to see her this early, they shouldn’t expect a vision.
As Ira thrust her feet into her house slippers and fished the house keys out of a bowl on the white plastic dining table, her thoughts turned to the body in the lift. Her irritation faded, and curiosity and revulsion replaced it. What had they found out?
Now eager of her own accord to get answers quickly, she hurried down the stairs (still too soon to take the lift) and turned towards the Association room at the base of the next wing, where, by the sound of it, a swarm of giant, angry wasps had congregated.
*****
‘Ah, so you’re here!’ The secretary frowned in a displeased manner. ‘We’ve been waiting.’
‘Yeah, I was asleep.’
The man made significant eye contact with a few other grey-haired personages who were seated in plastic chairs around him, before turning back to her. Ira thought she knew none of the people in the room, until a wider scan revealed Mrs Bhattacharjee, her timid and pretty landlady, standing against a wall with her arms crossed, looking miserably at the floor.
The vibe of the room alarmed her. She wished Mrs Bhattacharjee had spoken to her first.
‘So…Ira, is it?’ the alpha, white-haired male asked officiously.
Ira nodded and spotted Mr Talukdar on her second pass around the room.
‘Yes, and you are, sir?’
There was a collective intake of breath and more furious glances full of meaning exchanged.
A Killer Among Us Page 2
