Love and Longing in Bombay

by Vikram Chandra

  “If you are going to charge me with something, charge me,” he said. “File an F.I.R., get a warrant. Otherwise what is all this? You’re doing this because I’m a member of the Rakshaks.”

  Sartaj sat behind his desk. He twisted his watch around his wrist, once, twice. His cheeks felt congested with rage. “Katekar, this chutiya thinks we’re idiots,” he said. “And he thinks he’s very smart. Take him down to the detection room and take some of his smartness out of him. Give him a good taste of what we do to smart chutiyas around here.”

  Katekar had Kshitij by the scruff of his neck and out of his chair before the boy had time to react, even to open his mouth. As he turned Kshitij away, Sartaj forced himself to raise a hand: easy, no marks. Katekar slammed Kshitij through the swinging doors, and pushed him down the corridor. “Chala‚” he shouted, and there was a terrible anger in his voice.

  Sartaj squared the papers on his desk and tried to work. It was raining heavily now, and the water softened all sounds. After a minute or two he gave up, sat back, and put his hands over his face. When the phone rang, he let it ring six times before he picked it up.

  “Sartaj Singh.”

  “Did you take money?” It was Rahul, and his voice was feathery and high.

  “What’s wrong, Rahul? Are you crying?”

  “Ravinder Mama came for dinner today. They were talking about you. They asked if you had signed the papers yet.”

  “Yes?”

  “Megha said not yet. Then Ravinder Mama said you probably were waiting for money. He said you were all for sale. So I called him a name. Daddy told me to shut up. I threw a plate on the ground and left.”

  Sartaj shut his eyes. “No, I don’t take money.” But Sartaj then remembered all the things he had been offered because of his uniform, that he had taken, suits at half-price from a tailor near Kala Ghoda, meals with Megha at a five-star restaurant, miraculous train reservations in the middle of summer. A smiling road contractor had once brought over a cannister of ghee to Sartaj’s grandfather’s house as a Diwali gift, and the old man had tipped the cannister over the contractor’s head. But life moved in jerky half-moments, in the empty spaces between big decisions, and Sartaj had been unable to resist the specially discounted shoes at Lucky’s. Italian style, the proprietor of the shop had said again and again, Italian style. That evening long ago Megha and Sartaj had taken Rahul out for a birthday dinner, the thirteenth, and Rahul had noticed the shoes, and Sartaj had promised him a pair, and then told him stories of detection. Sartaj sat in his chair, and his lips moved: And I arrested a man for a crime he didn’t commit, and that man is dead, and life is very long, and investigation is one way to get through it, but to call it justice is only half the truth. “No, I don’t take money,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  “Did you talk to Megha?”

  “Yes, I talked to her. Rahul, it’s, it’s not going to work.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not suited to each other.”

  “Like you couldn’t communicate?”

  “Yes. That’s it,” Sartaj said, grateful for the phrase.

  “You should’ve learned how to communicate.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was that?” Rahul said. There had been a sudden surprised yowl that echoed faintly down the corridor.

  “A cat outside, I think.”

  “A cat?”

  “A cat.”

  “Okay.” As always, Rahul believed him. Rahul had a whole and unadulterated faith that was beautiful in its clarity: he believed. Now Rahul was trying to help. “These things happen in life, you know. Between men and women. I’ll always be here, you know, to help or anything you need.”

  “Thanks, Rahul,” Sartaj said, his voice thick. “I know that.”

  *

  Megha hadn’t believed. One morning at breakfast she had put down a newspaper crowded with angry headlines, and had asked, for the third time in a month, do you really hit people? Torture them? Her brow was heavy with doubt, and he knew that the easy answer would no longer service. Yes, he said, sometimes it’s necessary. It’s a tool, an instrument. That night and the next night she had slept on the very far edge of the bed. When he had touched the back of her neck at breakfast she said, without looking up, I hate the world you live in. He had wanted to say, it’s your world also, but I am thirty-one years old and I live in the parts you don’t want to see. I live there for you. But he had quietly picked up his briefcase from the table in the hall and had shut the door behind him without another word. That had been one of their many silences.

  Now Sartaj walked down the corridor, towards a certain room in his world. As he walked he could see the curving pools of light from the bulbs, fading into darkness in the yard, and from beyond the shuffling sound of leaves under the fall of rain. He stepped through a door, and then another one. Katekar had Kshitij strapped face down on a bench. The bare feet hung over one end. The room was bare but for that bench and a chair, and had curving ceilings and a single ventilator high on the wall and, high up, higher than a man’s uplifted hands would stretch, a thick white metal pole that went from one wall to the other. In his hand Katekar had a lathi, with the wood shining a heavy brown in the yellow light.

  Sartaj pulled the chair and sat in front of Kshitij, one leg crossed over another. Kshitij’s face was red.

  “I’m sorry that you’re making me do this, Kshitij,” Sartaj said. “I hate to do this. Why don’t you just be sensible and tell me what you saw, what you did? Did you scrub down the car, Kshitij? Why? What was in it?”

  Kshitij’s eyes were amazed, as if he were seeing something that he had never imagined. He seemed to be thinking, contemplating some new but essential truth he had just discovered. Sartaj tapped him gently on the cheek.

  “You know, Kshitij,” Sartaj said. “I spoke to a lot of people about your father. Everybody loved him.” Now Kshitij looked up, straining his neck, his mouth working. “Everyone liked him, you know. His business colleagues said he was dependable, hard-working, dedicated. They thought he had come far and was to go far. In your building, they said he took his neighbour’s troubles on his shoulders like his own. Always he was willing to help, not only with advice but practically. At the weddings of other people’s sons and daughters how much work he did, they said. In times of grief a good friend. Generous and happy. Fun to be around, always singing, always playing his ghazals, always ready for a movie or an outing. A good husband in a happy family they said.”

  Kshitij’s eyes were watery and a trickle seeped from his left nostril. “He was not a good man.” His voice came out thick and anguished. In all his years Sartaj had never seen a face so full of pain as this one.

  “What did he do, Kshitij?” Sartaj said, leaning over close. In his stomach there was a bubbling, nausea, but he had to go on. “What did he do? Tell me. I know he wasn’t good, he fooled them. What did he do?” It was the beginning of a confession and he felt it coming. But Kshitij teetered at the edge for a moment, found himself then, and with an appalling effort pulled himself back. Sartaj saw the struggle as the face settled, went from disarray to control.

  “I have nothing to say,” Kshitij said.

  Sartaj sat back, shrugged. “Then I can’t help you,” he said. “I’m very sorry for that.” He waited until Kshitij looked up, then nodded at Katekar. “Go ahead,” he said, and got up.

  He was halfway across the room when he heard Kshitij’s voice, loud now. “What’s the matter, bastard? Can’t hit me yourself?”

  Sartaj turned, then looked around the room. Next to the door there was a row of black metal hooks, and from one of the hooks hung a worn strap, a piece of a heavy industrial belt meant for machinery, four inches wide, attached to a wooden handle. Sartaj felt in his arms a painful pulsing of blood. He took the patta, turned around, and with all the swing in his shoulder brought the strap up and around and onto Kshitij’s buttocks. And then again. The sound it made was like two flat pieces of wood dashing together. He had his arm
back again when he heard, through the rushing in his ears, Kshitij’s voice. “What?” he said. He stopped, took a deep breath, and stepped up to the bench. Finally he could make out the words.

  “You can’t hurt me,” Kshitij was saying.

  “Oy, did you hear the noises you were making?” Katekar said.

  “That was only the body,” Kshitij said, and Sartaj could see the drops of spittle darkening the dirty floor.

  “I’ll hurt you, bhenchod,” Katekar said.

  “You can’t hurt me,” Kshitij said. “Or kill me. Only my body.”

  Sartaj could see the eyes, shining and focused, looking straight ahead, straight through the grimy wall, at something a thousand miles and a thousand years away. He dropped the patta, stumbled to the door, which rattled under his shaking hand, and as he fled to the cooler outside air, he could hear Kshitij chanting, “Jai Hind, Jai Hind.” But outside, in the corridor, the sound of the rain was loud, and the voice was lost in the water, and Sartaj leaned against a pillar, leaned lower and out above the bending hedges, and retched into the darkness.

  When he was able to stand straight, he saw that Katekar was watching from the other side of the pillar.

  “I’m all right,” Sartaj said.

  Katekar nodded, then turned back to the doorway.

  “Katekar,” Sartaj said. “No more. Just talk to him.”

  “No? You don’t think he’ll talk if we give him a little more?”

  “Not this one.”

  Katekar nodded. “What could we do to him?” he said. “He’s already in hell.”

  *

  Sartaj sat on a bench in the corridor, one leg over the other, looking out at the greying sky. He watched Katekar walking up, stretching his right shoulder and then his left.

  “This one’s not talking, sir,” Katekar said.

  “Yes, I know,” Sartaj said.

  “He’s one of those, sir,” Katekar said. “Gets stronger.”

  “It’s all right,” Sartaj said. “Sit.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sit down, Katekar.”

  A moment, and then Katekar sat, his legs apart, his hands on his knees.

  “Did you always want to be a policeman, Katekar?”

  “My father was, sir.”

  “Mine also.”

  “I know, sir.”

  The rain had stopped. There was a silence like Sartaj had never heard before.

  “My back is going to hurt,” Katekar said.

  “Is going to hurt?”

  “It doesn’t hurt now,” Katekar said. “But it will. Not this month perhaps, or the next. But then someday soon it will. It’ll start and get worse.”

  “Is it the muscles? Or a disc?”

  “The doctors say it’s nothing. They give me pills and tablets and it still hurts. Then my wife sends me on pilgrimage to Pandharpur. I walk with the palkhi of Dnyaneshwar. There are hundreds of pilgrims. I tell nobody I am a policeman. Nobody can tell one from another. We walk during the day and it is very hot. For the first day and the next and after that my legs hurt and squeeze and become tight. My feet swell and blister and it is difficult to get up the next morning to walk. The sun is very hot and it is all a plain, no trees and just a straight road. The walking is hard. We walk all together. The days pass and it seems like it will never end. Everything is forgotten but the walking. At night the pilgrims sing songs. There are discourses. But usually I fall asleep early on the hard ground and dream of walking. Then I wake up in the morning and walk. Of course I don’t believe in any of it. My wife sends me. But when it is over after fifteen days, I cannot remember when my back became better but always, it no longer hurts. I come back to the city, tired. But my back is all right. For a while. Then it starts to hurt again.”

  Sartaj thought he should say something, but then the moment for speaking passed and they sat quietly next to each other. There were the distinct shapes of trees now, the walls, the top of a building across the way. Soon the colours would appear, the huge sweep of green, covering everything.

  *

  Samnagar was full of television aerials and pucca houses, and its share of modern amenities, Sartaj knew, was testimony towards the entrepreneurial and adventuresome spirit of its sons and daughters. Rupees and dollars and pounds sterling had updated everything except the old .303 Lee-Enfields his escort carried, which meant a certain reassuring traditionalism in the local crime. He couldn’t quite decide whether the enigma he carried in the case file inside his briefcase was old or new. Go yourself, Parulkar had said. We don’t have time to get her down here, we can hold the boy for only two days, three maybe, there is much political pressure. Already there are calls for your transfer.

  So Sartaj had gone. “Bad road,” the driver said. “Water.” The house they were looking for was six miles away from the village, from the town it was becoming. The metalled road vanished after the first mile and a half, and between the fields of cotton a rutted path rose and dipped. Now, ahead, it vanished beneath a sheet of water.

  “We walk,” Sartaj said. He stopped caring about his pants in the first three steps, and then splashed forward furiously. The clouds piled up ahead of him, black and dense. He had a sensation of feeling quite small, under this arching sky and long silence. They walked past a grove of trees and a ruin, a single wall with a door and a window in it. As he walked, Sartaj realized a bird had been calling, again and again.

  The house, when they reached it in late afternoon, was set between hedges at the intersection of three fields. There was one young constable, dozing on a charpai in front of the house. He woke up scrambling for his cap, panicked by Sartaj’s high official presence, but managed finally to say, “She’s inside.”

  She sat alone in a room inside, on the ground in a corner, in a widow’s white and also an attitude of despair so sharp that Sartaj stopped at the door, all his eager volition to get at the heart of it gone, vanquished completely. “She hasn’t said a word since she got here,” her brother whispered into Sartaj’s ear. “Not one.” It was obvious. Her hair hung around her face and to the floor. She was staring at a point on the ground a foot ahead of her, and she didn’t look up as Sartaj took off his shoes, or as he came and squatted next to her. He leaned close to her and spoke into her ear. He told her he knew everything. He told her what he knew and then conjecture as truth, the old policeman’s trick: yes, this is how it happened, Kshitij found out, he saw photographs, he quarrelled with his father, something happened, something was said, correct, do you remember, but now he saw the images as he told her and he was afraid she would say, yes, that story is how it happened, he was suddenly afraid. But she looked straight ahead at the floor and he wasn’t sure she heard him at all. Then he had nothing else to tell her. He stopped, and he could hear the bird calling outside. He came close to her, so that her hair tickled his nose, and he said, “I want to know how it happened. How you came to this. Kshitij said his father was not a good man.” She looked at him then, and her face was homely and common to any street. Sartaj put the Polaroid down on the ground in front of her. “This is you. Did he force you to do this? Did your husband force you to go to that room in Colaba?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t be afraid now,” Sartaj said. “It’s all over. He forced you?”

  Her gaze was level, and through her grief Sartaj could feel her pride. “No,” she said. “No. He didn’t force me. Nobody forced me.” She held him by the wrist and spoke to him, her breath hot against his cheek. She spoke fast in a Kutchi he didn’t completely understand, but he understood that there was no compulsion, no solution so simple as a bad man, only a series of fragments, dinner at the Khyber with her husband and her son, their honeymoon long ago in Khandala, a train ride and an upper berth together in a crowded compartment, at breakfast he must have a glass of cold milk, a movie in Bangalore and a quarrel during interval, and Sartaj knew that what Chetanbhai and Ashaben had done together was as complete and as inexplicable as what had happened between him and Me
gha, real and true and impossible to tell afterwards. Somehow it had happened. Not somehow but anyhow. Things happened, Sartaj thought, one after the other, and what we want from it is a kind of shape, a case report. Now Ashaben looked up at him, holding him still, with that confessional need, and he had seen it before and he knew what it required. “I understand,” Sartaj said, and understood nothing.

  Before he left, he said, from the door, out of a sense of duty, “Will you testify? Would you sign a statement?” She began to weep.

  *

  As they began the trek back to the jeep it began to drizzle. They splashed on, and then the gusts began to spray the water from the puddles up into their faces. Finally they ran for the grove of trees, past the ruined wall, and at the centre of the grove it was possible even to sit on the ground. It was damp but it was comfortable. Sartaj could see, still, through half-open eyes, the wall, the angle of the doorway. The bricks were small and oddly shaped. Sartaj had taken history in college, but he had no idea if the wall was fifty years old and English, or from a Moghul serai. Or from the other Dwarka, Krishna’s ancient city, sunk now, the story said, below the waves somewhere to the south. As he sat on the ground, Sartaj could feel the earth against the back of his thighs, grainy against his calves.

  “What kind of tree is this?” Sartaj said, leaning back against the trunk.

  “Mango, janaab‚” the seniormost of the constables said. “Rest, sahib. There is plenty of time.”

  Sartaj was thinking of the plaster Apsara, bobbing in the water near the Narayan Housing Colony, west and north of Andheri West, Bombay. He thought of her sinking and then rising a thousand years later to confound some historian’s calculations, and he laughed. He thought of the curve of her shoulder and the drops fell through the leaves above him. His eyes closed. He thought of Megha, and he tried to answer the question, Rahul’s question, his own, and he said what happened to us was that we loved each other, and we were unkind to each other, and impatient, and unfaithful, and disappointed, and yet we wanted it for forever, but these are only words, and then came a flowing stream of images, dense with colour and the perfume of her hair, and it carried him. He felt himself floating and it felt easy, but then a moment of wild fear, he was sinking, he clutched and held on to himself, tightly, tightly, but then he felt his pride quicken, the word reverberated suddenly, alacktaka, and he made himself, he let himself go, and he was plummeting, down, into darkness.