FIR

by Monabi Mitra

  MONABI MITRA

  F.I.R

  Contents

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  F.I.R.

  Monabi Mitra teaches English literature at the Scottish Church College, Calcutta. F.I.R., the first of the DSP Bikram series, is the result of a continuing interest in the working of the Indian police force.

  1

  ‘There’s a new cop in town,’ Nikki Kumar said as she straightened up from her toe touches. She flopped down on the grey non-slip gym mat, panting from her exertions. ‘I met him at the club yesterday. Seemed quite our kind, you know. He actually stood up when I was introduced to him.’

  There was silence at the fitness clinic. The other two women were so wrapped up in their own reflections, Nikki Kumar could very well have been talking to the gym equipment. An Indian blonde was eyeing herself critically in the mirror and casting envious glances at Nisha Bose, the third member of the club. The mirror in front of which Nisha was standing seemed to recognize the radiance of her beauty as it returned her steady gaze.

  ‘Now stop it, you two.’ Nikki Kumar looked annoyed. ‘Come here, catch your breath, and I’ll tell you all about him.’

  ‘All you know about him. It’s not the same, you know.’ Nisha raised a finger to her chin and surveyed herself dreamily.

  ‘It will be, once I get my hands on him. All I need are two parties and one club night. I got twenty-five per cent of his life history last evening; the rest should be easy.’

  ‘What you mean is twenty-five per cent of what the man wants to be known around town,’ said Nisha Bose, still annoyingly disdainful of Nikki Kumar’s gym bulletin for the day. ‘But do tell us all the same.’ She sat down before Nikki, assumed position for sit-ups, and waited for Nikki to begin.

  ‘His name is Toofan Kumar and he was in Delhi before this. With the Information Bureau, before he took a transfer to Cal. He …’

  ‘Intelligence Bureau,’ said the third girl, Anjali, her voice breaking from exertion. She was standing before a mirror, lifting weights, watching each muscle go taut as her arms went up and each sinew relax as the arms came down. A cousin had recently got married to someone in the police and Anjali felt a correction was a matter of family duty.

  ‘How does it matter?’ snapped Nikki. She was beginning to lose her temper.

  As Nikki puffed on the treadmill, her overwrought imagination created a cosy little conversation with Toofan Kumar out of what, in reality, had been a few minutes of hurried greetings and half a stolen conversation over a glass of beer. But now, Anjali and Nisha were paying her no attention at all!

  ‘He seems to be promising. All the other policemen I know have stopped answering my calls.’

  ‘How you frighten them, Nikki dear!’ Nisha Bose stared languidly at her painted toenails.

  ‘I don’t, but my drivers do. Is it my fault if the traffic lights turn red just when my car reaches the intersection? We usually squeeze through but sometimes these drivers are so slow, soon there’s a traffic constable peeping through the window.’ Nikki Kumar sniffed.

  A man, lean and energetic, entered, balancing a tray with three glasses of lemonade and wet towels. He deposited the tray in a corner and fiddled with a CD player. The gym was flooded with a mechanical voice repeating words in a nasal tone over a background of hectic drumbeats. The man looked at Nisha Bose out of the corner of his eye and hesitated. She ignored his presence and he left. The other two women were absorbed in themselves and they did not notice this quick exchange.

  Nikki said brightly, ‘But now I’ve met Toofan Kumar and will be safe for the next year or so. Should we have a cosy dinner at the club first, followed by a bigger do, or should I burst him in on to the party scene and then ask DP to follow it up with a round of golf?’

  ‘Don’t go overboard, Nikki, I beg you. One thing at a time! A cop’s a good thing, but in small doses. In spite of everything, they do handle dead bodies.’ This was Anjali, who had finished her toning for the day and was ready to join the conversation in a fuller way.

  ‘Cops and corpses! Not anymore!’ Nisha laughed a silvery laugh and stood up with a swift fluid movement. ‘They’re too busy knocking around processions and demonstrations to worry about the public any longer. And in the evenings they are with us!’

  A road wound towards the horizon through a patchwork of paddy fields. The black metalled sharpness of its surface was highlighted against the coppery terracotta of earthen embankments that flanked it. A straggling line of tired-looking casuarinas, their thin barks painted white in a brief, energetic spurt of activity by the Forest Department, tried ineffectually to beat back the tangle of weeds that grew happily at their feet. Down below, the verdant rice, separated by aisles of piled mud into chessboard symmetry, stretched limitless and infinite in its perfection.

  Deputy Superintendent of Police Bikram Chatterjee alighted from his mud-spattered Tata Sumo and surveyed the scene without enthusiasm. He had been running a low fever for the last two days. And having been awake the night before, he was exhausted. He had dozed off in the car, occasionally awakening to answer phone calls with the practised ease of a person who has learnt through long experience how to switch quickly between sleep and alert awakening.

  It was almost dark, about 6 p.m., when the sky takes on that indeterminate colour between pale orange and grey. All nature seemed to Bikram to be in a restless, last-minute bustle before settling down for the night. For someone who hadn’t slept well, such energetic preparations seemed annoying. A koel trilled insistently from a tree, crows hopped back and forth busily while, high up above, a flock of kites wheeled lazily in perfect circles. When Bikram sniffed the air he smelt the raw earth, the green leaves and, above all, the sharp heady tang of ripening mango flowers. Another two weeks and the small green mangoes would begin to form.

  A man who had been rummaging around in the glove compartment now creaked open the front door and heaved himself out. Inspector Ghosh, with greying hair and melancholy eyes, yawned, coughed and cleared his throat before looking dispiritedly at his surroundings. Because he was tired, sick and unwashed, Bikram looked disapprovingly at the belt stretched impossibly over Ghosh’s bulging stomach.

  ‘If you eat another chicken roll or even look at another bottle of McDowell’s, I’ll send you for a week of advanced firearms training.’

  ‘I try, Sir, but it’s the wife. She gives me Maggi for breakfast and instant pasta when I’m working late.’

  ‘Oh yes! And what does the owner of Bengal Bar give you for the weekend? Boiled vegetables and a glass of lemonade, I suppose.’

  Ghosh, Bikram’s second-in-command, knew better than to indulge in idle backchat with his boss, especially before an unpromising raid on a small village a hundred kilometres from Calcutta. Most of the inhabitants of the village were pickpockets, peddlers of crack and makers of crude bombs that fetched good prices before government elections. A few graduated to kidnapping, extortion and robbery. Bikram and Ghosh’s mission today was to try to catch a man suspected to have a finger in all the pies.

  ‘I hope that excitable informer of yours got it right this time,’ said Bikram testily.

  ‘Oh yes, Sir! Babul’s the man. He boasted to a whore that he’s moving in for a big kill. He’ll buy her Scotch from Calcutt
a wine shops soon. Maybe a newfangled cell phone as well.’

  ‘Have we come all this way on the testimony of a Bowbazar slut or does your guy have other information as well?’

  Ghosh took out a violently coloured handkerchief moist with sweat and passed it around his neck. ‘He’s positive, Sir. This is it! Nothing can go wrong tonight.’

  The two men surveyed the road, the fields, and the clump of date and palm trees in the distance that marked the entrance to the village. Bikram measured the distance to it from where they stood by counting the electric posts that loomed over the fields. A red and black bus, listing to one side, its roof piled high with sacks and suitcases and two cycles, sounded a loud do-re-mi horn as it rounded a corner of the road.

  ‘Mistry!’

  Mistry, the driver, languidly zipping his fly after urinating over the embankment near the rear side of the car, trotted to the door and held it open for the two.

  ‘Back to the thana, quickly. Where’s my flask? And wipe your hands before you touch it.’

  The policemen came back at midnight. The bushes and trees buzzed with the sound of crickets, and glow-worms flickered tantalizingly.

  First, two dirty white Ambassador cars, long curling scratches on their bonnets, POLICE lettered in red-and-white Bookman Old Style font at the back, came to a stop a little away from where the road drove into a meandering twist. A few minutes later, two more vehicles arrived, not Ambassadors but ugly Jeeps, almost as high as buses, a black iron collapsible gate built into each rear door. All four cars squatted impossibly by the road, clinging crazily to the edge of the embankment. Doors creaked open, the collapsible gate was folded back jerkily, and lines of men climbed down unsteadily, weighted under a strange assortment of goods. There were ancient muskets strapped to their shoulders and knobbly wooden canes in their hands. One or two wore helmets of fading green and incredible weight. Their brown uniforms were speckled with grease stains and clotted dal, and the buttons that held in place their WBP (West Bengal Police) shoulder badges hung askew. Their faces were dispirited and uninspired. Most of them were thinking of the night ahead of them: the endless tramping and running with nothing to look forward to except a breakfast of a loaf of bread and four bananas washed down with some bitter-sweet tea. One or two hitched the heavy rifles uncomfortably on to their shoulders as they walked a little way off for a quick pee. Another stopped to blow his nose and spit into the tangled undergrowth. Then, when a tubby man in a dirty uniform shouted something in a cracked voice, the men shuffled themselves into untidy rows and columns.

  Bikram left Ghosh to brief the men. Usually, during muster, a tangle of emotions swept over him: they ranged from sadness for this pathetic group of sullen, dirty men to anger against the authorities who did nothing for them. When the instructions were complete, he roused himself from his thoughts, gulped down great draughts of ice-cold water from his flask, and led the way.

  The bunch turned off the road, slithered down the scrubby embankment and on to the paddy fields. They walked on the mud banks that separated each field, feeling the mud sink beneath their boots. They began walking in a single file but, soon, the faster walkers beat their way through the paddy, feet sinking into the soft earth slushy and treacherous from the day’s watering. In the darkness, Bikram could just make out the shadowy steel of the gigantic electric pylons and kept track of the distance by counting them.

  ‘Turn off your torch, you bastard!’

  A light had bobbed somewhere behind them and there was a whimper as Ghosh rammed his cane into someone’s butt.

  ‘Something slithered past, Sir; this area is full of …’

  ‘Shut up,’ grumbled the others.

  There was more muttering and cursing towards the back of the line. An elderly constable, his moustache damp with misery as he tried to manoeuvre his huge form through the fields, slipped an inch into a patch of slush and cried out for help. In the end, it took them an hour to cover just three quarters of the distance to the village. Bikram looked briefly at his fancy watch, bought in celebration after another, hugely successful raid, and wondered if he would be equally lucky this time.

  As they reached the edge of the village, Ghosh abruptly stopped. The wind was blowing towards them and, over the smell of mud and leaves, came the sharp, unmistakable smell of burning tobacco.

  ‘Stay here,’ he whispered to the constable behind him.

  Ghosh and Bikram crept forward stealthily, occasionally halting and listening. The smell of the tobacco smoke was getting stronger. A straggly copse of banana trees, long leaves trailing irregularly on the ground, loomed in front of them. Someone was crouched under one of the banana trees. Except for the red tip glowing intermittently in the darkness, nothing was visible.

  Ghosh jumped first. As he hurtled all his ninety kilograms at the midnight smoker, the cigarette shot into the air and landed a foot away. At the same time, an all-too-familiar smell came to Ghosh and he gabbled in misery, ‘Oh no! He’s been shitting.’

  Bikram switched on his torch and blinked as the pale beam of light illuminated the scene. Ghosh was wrestling with a bare-chested man in a checked lungi which was now slipping open, occasionally allowing glimpses of his private parts. Fresh shit was smeared on Ghosh’s trousers.

  The man, in one quick movement, shot out an arm and hit Ghosh across the mouth even as the latter looked down at the mess on his shoes. As he turned to run, lungi flying, Bikram threw his torch at his head. There was a dull thud and the torch rolled on to the ground, casting crazy shafts of light on the foliage. Without waiting to retrieve it, Bikram wrenched out his revolver and pressed it to the stomach of the fallen figure, even as Ghosh flung himself on him again.

  The waiting troop, sensing trouble and guided by the tilting shafts of light, scrambled up and joined the jumble. Someone picked up the lungi and covered the naked man. At the same time, frenzied barking rang out in the distance, followed by another howl, and yet another, until a perfect orchestra of full-bodied, angry barks rent the air. Bikram sighed. If Babul was anywhere around, he would be well warned and was, perhaps even now, slipping out of his house and into the safety of whichever secret hideout he had chosen. Stealth was now rendered useless, so the party abandoned its furtive march and swept into the village. Their torches bobbed down dusty meandering lanes on which two people could hardly walk abreast. Scraggy dogs yammered and howled and pursued the policemen. Owls screeched, and crows, disturbed by the sound of tramping feet, hopped angrily from branch to branch. Ghosh, seething from the humiliation of the shit on his trousers, pushed forward, revolver in hand. As he drove on, six of his men tried to keep up with his sudden pace. Bikram dropped back, switched off his torch, slowed down and stopped. He sniffed the air. A light rustling breeze brought to him the delicate smell of night flowers. Laced through the perfume was the unmistakable smell of water. Bikram closed his eyes and tried to recreate the map Ghosh’s source had sketched. Babul’s house stood exactly at the centre of the village, fortified by a dense clot of mud huts with thatched tops and asbestos-roofed cottages. His house was the only double-storeyed structure and it had a narrow driveway in front and a boundary wall all around. If Bikram left the house and its adjacent areas to Ghosh’s brigade and waited quietly beyond, along the rear side of the pond, he might still be able to track Babul as he crept away.

  They waited along the water’s edge, Bikram and his men—the three from his team to whom he was closest, and whom he had handpicked. Mosquitoes fed greedily on their bare arms and foreheads and buzzed about in clouds above their heads. The three guards stirred now and then, slapped at their noses and hair. Only one man stood still, hardly breathing, his eyes narrowed in the darkness, watching and waiting.

  Behind the house, shadows crept along the boundary wall. Something seemed to detach itself from the darkness. There was a hiss and a scratching sound as a larger darkness hoisted itself over the wall. Bikram pursed his lips and waited for the policeman who had climbed over the wall into Babul’s com
pound to open the front gate and let Ghosh in. Soon, Ghosh’s voice could be heard, harsh and grating against the silence of the night.

  ‘Open the door! Open the door immediately!’

  Silence.

  More hammering and banging; this time with the butt end of a rifle. ‘Open up, you bastards!’

  A light came on in a back room, a faltering reddish glow in the erratic voltage of the rural electric supply. A voice sharp with apprehension rang out. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Open up and we’ll let you know.’

  ‘No way! Not until you identify yourself.’

  Bikram waited, motionless. Something was bound to happen now. The people inside had guessed what was going on and were simply buying time.

  Something, or someone, moved at the side of the house and crept out from under the tangled stems of a tree. The three men at the back of the house, intent on guarding the rear wall, had not noticed. Perhaps it was chance or some deep rooted instinct, honed over years of waiting, which caused Bikram to switch his torch on. A beam of white light skittering over the trees and bushes picked out a man, bare-chested and wearing only a lungi, scuttling away from the house.

  ‘Catch him!’

  There was a flash and a bang. Someone had fired a shot. Even as he ran, Bikram realized that one of the guards at the back of the house was slowly sinking to the ground, hands flailing, rifle dangling incongruously from his shoulder.

  ‘He’s been shot. Come quick.’

  Ghosh appeared from around the house, five policemen flapping behind him, their rifles raised, even as Bikram and his men ran towards the path.

  Trapped, the fugitive stood for a moment at the edge of the pond, low groans rising above the clamour behind him, his revolver useless against the array of weapons around. He raised his arms above his head, looked around once and plunged into the water.

  ‘Light, quickly.’

  ‘Aaaeee, I’m dying.’

  ‘He’ll get away, Sir, shall I jump in after him?’