She continued to stare at the screen as old photographs appeared within the montage, accompanied by melancholy music and a hushed voiceover. Where had she seen that face before?
And then the penny dropped.
Chapter 64
“SHE WAS NO social worker,” said Nisha emphatically. “Unless ‘social worker’ is a euphemism for ‘madam.’”
“Think carefully, Nisha,” said Santosh. “The incident that you mentioned was a long time ago. You could be mistaken.”
“I am absolutely certain. I never forget a face. It was her,” replied Nisha adamantly.
“Let’s go over this once more,” he said slowly. “Take your time and don’t leave out even the smallest detail.”
Nisha took a deep breath and began narrating her story once again. “When I had just joined the police service, I was initially posted to the Anti-Vice Squad. I distinctly remember we received a tip-off that a batch of young girls was being held captive at one of the establishments in Falkland Road, in the notorious red-light district of Mumbai.”
“And what happened next?”
“We raided the establishment,” answered Nisha, “and found several girls—most of them minors—inside the place. Some of them had already been forced into sex with male customers.”
“What did you do once you were inside?” asked Santosh.
“We rescued the girls and took them to a remand home. A couple of them were found in possession of drugs and were arrested. We also filed charges against the owner of the brothel—the madam.”
“And you believe that the madam was none other than Ragini Sharma?” asked Santosh incredulously.
“She was little more than a prostitute with an entrepreneurial flair,” said Nisha. “She had succeeded in networking with several powerful politicians whose perverted needs she served. It was because of her political clout that the charges against her were subsequently dropped, much against my wishes.”
“How did she leave behind the brothel and become a member of the legislature?” asked Santosh.
“She claimed that she was protecting the girls and offering them shelter,” replied Nisha. “A massive cover-up exercise was undertaken to reinvent her profile. I remember reading a newspaper report that referred to her as a social worker, someone who helped poor and downtrodden women.”
“And you think that it was all a cover? That she was actually encouraging prostitution?” asked Santosh.
“Oh, absolutely,” said Nisha, nodding her head vigorously. “The transformation from prostitute to brothel owner, then from social worker to politician, was a gradual one. At each stage she was careful to erase as much of her past as possible. I would never have made the connection if I had not seen those old photos of her on the news. Over the past few years she’s consciously cultivated a different—more mature—look. Shorter hair, traditional sarees, spectacles … but the photographs of her in her youth gave her away.”
“I still find it hard to believe that a mainstream political party would accept her as a candidate, given her past,” objected Santosh, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Stranger things have happened in Indian politics,” argued Nisha. “Over thirty percent of Members of Parliament have criminal cases pending against them. The figure is even higher in the state assemblies. Phoolan Devi, the famous Bandit Queen, who had killed twenty-two villagers in cold blood during her life as a dacoit, was subsequently elected to parliament even though she had thirty criminal cases conducted against her. Ragini Sharma pales in comparison.”
Chapter 65
IT WAS LATE and Mumbai’s oldest red-light district hummed with activity.
Kamathipura had begun life as a “comfort zone” for British troops in the 1880s and was now a fourteen-lane district densely packed with dilapidated buildings and precariously balanced hutments, almost every one of them a brothel. They teemed with young girls, many kidnapped from country villages or sold into the sex trade by their own families. Drug addiction, alcohol abuse, STDs, and HIV—they all abounded in an area that over fifty thousand prostitutes euphemistically called home.
“Do you recall which one it was?” asked Santosh, as they weaved through a street overcrowded with vendors, tea stalls, and beggars.
“I shall never forget it,” Nisha replied. Some of the girls that she had rescued that night had been less than twelve years old. She pointed him in the right direction.
“I know that you are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, but in this area any woman who makes eye contact with a male is considered fair game. Walk quickly and keep your head down,” instructed Santosh. They hurried toward the premises Nisha had already pointed out.
A few minutes later they entered a near-derelict building and began to climb a precarious staircase that creaked with each step they took. On the landing, a group of gaudily dressed women stood with dubious male companions waiting for bedrooms to be vacated.
“Hey, babe, how about a blow job?” asked a drunk with bloodshot eyes. He reeked of sweat and alcohol and ogled Nisha with a smirk. He held a bottle of cheap liquor in one hand, and as they passed he reached to grab Nisha’s behind with the other …
Nisha whirled, brought her knee into his groin and stepped away as the boozehound doubled over with pain, groaning on the bare boards. She shot Santosh a look, as though to say, “How’s that for fair game?” and he just managed to suppress a smile in return, hurrying her on instead. There wasn’t time for all this.
Now she led them to a room where, seated on a large red artificial-leather sofa, was the brothel’s queen bee, busy stuffing a mixture of betel nut and tobacco into her mouth. She looked suspiciously at Santosh and Nisha as they approached, then raised painted eyebrows as Santosh delved for his wallet and placed five crisp thousand-rupee notes into her hands.
The madam looked at the cash. She looked back at Santosh and Nisha, standing before her, and slowly smiled, revealing betel-nut-stained teeth.
“What sort of girl do you want?” she asked Santosh. “Someone to provide a threesome along with your girlfriend?”
“I’m not here as a customer,” he replied. “I just need a few simple questions answered.”
The madam looked at him distrustfully. “You a cop?” she asked. “If you are, you can have your money back.”
“I’m not a policeman,” said Santosh. “My colleague and I are writing a book about women who made it big but started out in the world of prostitution. I was wondering whether you could tell us something about Ragini Sharma.”
The madam eyed them both as though she didn’t believe a word they said, but even so she tucked the cash into her blouse. Leaning over the arm of the sofa, she spat chewed-up betel nut into a brass spittoon on the floor then wiped brown slaver from her mouth.
“That bitch!”
“I take it you knew her personally?” said Santosh, resting on his cane to ease the pressure on his bad leg. He wished his head would stop pounding. That his mouth wasn’t so dry.
“You could say that,” blurted the madam. “She took extra pride in getting her thugs to ‘inaugurate’ the new girls. I was one of the girls broken in by her goons. She may show herself off as being a mighty respectable politician these days, but she’s just a dirty whore! She used to fuck her clients; now she’s trying to fuck the entire country!” The madam had obviously not watched the evening news or read the news reports regarding Ragini Sharma’s death.
“Why didn’t you leak her story to the press?” asked Nisha. “Why did you keep quiet?”
She curled a lip. “When I first came to Kamathipura, I was fifteen. I was abducted, caged, abused, beaten, and raped repeatedly until I was broken in. There was nothing that I wanted more desperately than to be reunited with my family. Each night I would sob uncontrollably as I remembered my parents, my siblings, and my home in Uttar Pradesh.”
The madam took another betel leaf and delicately layered it with lime, catechu, betel nut, cardamom, and tobacco. She placed it in her mouth
contentedly and continued: “One night, I was able to escape from my imprisonment. I ran to Mumbai Central railway station and boarded a train for my home village. But when I reached home, my parents refused to acknowledge that I was their daughter. They said I was a woman of loose moral character—a liability. I realized that I had not been kidnapped. It was they who had sold me into prostitution. I took the first train back to Mumbai and returned to the very establishment that had pimped me. There was no looking back for me after that.”
“Ragini Sharma accepted you back?” asked Santosh.
She nodded. “A bitch she may have been. But she took me back when I had no home. I owed her for that at least.”
“And then?” pressed Nisha.
“I became one of her best-earning girls,” recalled the madam. “I was often sent to take care of her special political friends too. She welcomed me with open arms … so long as she knew I’d welcome new customers with open legs!”
“What prompted her to enter politics?” asked Santosh.
“She was especially close to someone high up in the government. She was soon serving the needs of several other politicians. I suppose it’s possible that she called in a favor,” replied the madam with a yawn.
She leaned and spat betel-nut mulch into her spittoon, the interview over.
On their way back down the creaking stairs they passed Mr. Blow Job, still nursing his swollen nuts and bruised ego. As they left the depressing and hopeless place and made their way toward Grant Road, they each privately breathed a grateful sigh of relief.
“It is said that politics is the second-oldest profession in the world but that it bears a close resemblance to the oldest,” said Santosh. “It seems that Ragini Sharma mastered both.”
Chapter 66
“YOU’RE NOT GOING to like this,” said Mubeen, entering Santosh’s office.
“Go ahead,” replied Santosh. “I’m a big boy.”
“The hair we found on Ragini Sharma’s pillow? I was able to extract DNA from the root. I then ran it against several databases. I ended up with a match, but you’re not going to believe whose it is,” said Mubeen anxiously.
“Given that the root was intact,” said Santosh, “I would have expected the hair to belong to the victim, Ragini Sharma.”
Mubeen handed over a single A4 printout to him: details gleaned from a database at the …
“India Fertility Clinic and IVF Center?” Santosh started. “You found a match using a hacked database?” Mubeen had been right. He didn’t like it.
Mubeen shrugged. “There’s no national database, so …”
“You hacked.”
“It’s called cooperation, not hacking,” replied the medical examiner defensively.
Santosh shook his head then looked at the printout once again. Sure enough, they had a match. The DNA from the hair found on Ragini Sharma’s pillow—it belonged to a clinic sperm donor.
“There’s something else you need to know,” said Mubeen.
Santosh looked up from the printout. “Yes?”
“In the entire series of killings we only found two DNA samples—the hair on Ragini Sharma’s pillow and the saliva on Elina Xavier’s eyebrow. We thought we had a possible third sample under Ragini Sharma’s fingernails because she seemed to have fought back, but the material turned out to be dirt.”
“Go on,” said Santosh curiously.
“I expected the DNA from the hair to match the DNA from the saliva on Xavier, given that both murders were apparently committed by the same killer,” continued Mubeen.
“They’re not the same?” queried Santosh.
“They’re not,” replied Mubeen. “But they are related.”
Santosh’s eyes traveled down to the bottom of the page. Saw the name there.
Nalin D’Souza.
Chapter 67
THE PROPERTY WAS long abandoned, its grounds so mud-soaked and choked with weeds that she was forced to park the car by the side of the deserted road and cover the last mile on foot.
And she wished that time wasn’t against them, and that she could have made this trip in the daylight hours.
Ahead of her loomed the crumbling building, painted gray by the moonlight. The roof had caved in, she realized as she came closer. The rear of the building seemed to have been burned down, the walls black with the marks of an inferno. All the windows were either cracked or covered in a thick coat of dust and grime. Behind them was utter darkness and a strange eeriness.
A solid door made from Burma teak had been subjected to years of adolescent graffiti. A rusted chain and padlock held it shut and a couple of speckled lizards stood guard on the smooth stone framing the teak. Nisha’s torch beam sent them scurrying for cover as it illuminated a faded signboard above the door.
Bombay City Orphanage, it said, and below that in smaller letters: ESTABLISHED 1891 BY THE SIR JIMMY MEHTA TRUST. She snapped a picture of it with her smartphone.
There was part of her that wanted to turn away from this sinister place. It dredged up memories of her own childhood, of a dead mother and an absent father. Adopted by a loving couple with strong middle-class values, she had been well educated and her adoptive parents had supported her endeavor to join the police force. But privately she always felt the absence of her biological parents.
Anyway. Enough. She shrugged off the memories to focus on the task at hand.
Would there be anything worth examining inside the ramshackle place? She could almost hear her own thoughts in the ominously silent ruins of the neglected establishment. Except for the chirping of crickets there was no sound to be heard, the nearest dwellings over a mile away. The land that had been donated to the orphanage trust was along the fringes of the long stretch of dark and forbidding mangroves that bordered Malad Creek.
She didn’t have a warrant but given the building’s state of disrepair she decided to take her chances and picked a rock from the ground to hammer against the rusting padlock. The blows reverberated in the stillness, shattering the creepy calm, and the rusted lock fell with a clunk to the porch floor.
Taking a deep breath, Nisha kicked open the door then slipped inside, listening. All was quiet.
So how come she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone?
She ran her flashlight beam over what turned out to be a colonial-style entrance lobby. Years of neglect had resulted in a heavy layer of dust everywhere and she brought a kerchief to her face as she moved the light. To her right was a doorway leading to smaller office rooms; to her left empty hooks and patches of fading plaster spoke of pictures removed from the wall.
In front of her was a wide staircase leading to the floor above. She stepped toward it, then jumped as startled pigeons suddenly took to the air, the flapping of their wings loud as explosions in the damp silence.
Her heart hammered in her chest and she fought to control her breathing, almost laughing. She decided that if it came to a straight choice between a drunk demanding a blow job and pigeons, she’d take the drunk any day.
Now she took the steps, gingerly, praying the creaking floorboards wouldn’t give way. She reached the first floor where a large room was filled with old rusting bed frames. Once upon a time it would have been a dormitory filled with children—children with no parents. Children like her.
Lost in thought, she didn’t sense what was behind her until it was too late, and a blow from behind sent her sprawling to the floor.
Chapter 68
SURROUNDED BY HIS entourage, the Attorney General made his way across the plaza outside the courtroom of the Chief Justice with an almost majestic swagger.
The legal guardian of the rights of 1.2 billion Indians and occupying a constitutionally mandated rank devised to keep him at one remove from the contemptible politics of New Delhi, the Attorney General was known to be an inexhaustible worker with an incredible memory for facts, a complete mastery of the law, and an ability to direct senior judges effortlessly.
He was also a master at negotiating his wa
y through the corridors of power. Having arrived in New Delhi as an outsider, he had taken to the country’s political capital like a fish to water. Realizing quickly that one often had to play the man rather than the ball, he had become good friends with the Prime Minister’s political advisor. And having achieved that, seemingly there was nothing and no one that the Attorney General could not maneuver in New Delhi and beyond.
He crossed the plaza, headed to his white Ambassador car bearing a red beacon on the roof, and asked his driver to take him to his chambers at Motilal Nehru Marg. His entourage bundled themselves into a second car and followed. As he settled into the uncomfortable rear bench seat—standard government issue—his phone rang. He looked at the number flashing on his screen. It was the Director of the CBI—the Central Bureau of Investigation.
He took the call.
“We have tried our best,” began the Director. “In my opinion nothing can be traced back to you.”
“How sure are you?” asked the Attorney General softly.
“I’ve had several men assigned to the matter. Unfortunately it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I cannot afford to have this come out. The stakes are too bloody high.”
“I understand completely,” said the Director. “I shall do my best to keep it under wraps.”
“I appreciate that,” the Attorney General told him.
It was fortuitous that the Director of the CBI was under a cloud and needed all the help he could get to hold on to his position. The Attorney General had promised him he would speak to the Prime Minister’s political advisor and swing matters his way.
The Attorney General smiled as he disconnected the call. It was always good doing business with people whose interests were aligned with one’s own.
Private India: (Private 8) Page 15
