by Arnab Ray
‘Things won’t be easy and we both know that. But it’s only when things get difficult do we truly become a family.’
Arjun felt her head on his shoulder and the wetness dripping down on to his kurta. They were not tears of anger or sadness, but of something else that he supposed existed in other marriages but that he had never really found in his.
And it felt strangely comforting.
The first phase of any war is reconnaissance.
Arjun had to know RP. He had to know everything about him, who he slept with, whose ass he kissed in the government and who kissed his, who paid his bills and where he parked his money.
A man could spend a lifetime trying to dig up all the dirt and still come up with his face black but with nothing in hand.
Or he could go to Abdul Ismail.
Arjun had met Abdul Ismail during the Israeli arms deal. Arjun had been working on breaking in a few officers in the army by digging up dirt about past procurements. Someone had suggested Abdul Ismail, who went by the somewhat strange alias of Aladdin Investigation Agency. It was, as Abdul Ismail had told Arjun the first day they had met, not the kind of agency that spies on spouses, or invoices for taxi fare and refreshments. Their price was in lakhs, sometimes in crores, based on the target and the value of the information and if he couldn’t get the information asked for, he refunded the money.
Abdul Ismail had never had to give a single refund. The intel he had provided had been rock-solid. Arjun had come to admire not only Ismail’s efficiency but also the man. He spoke very little, never talked about himself, and never bullshitted. In that respect, he was unlike every other guy in New Delhi.
Arjun had once heard a story about Ismail from one of the Israelis. He had been an officer of the Indian military intelligence, the very best. They had sent him undercover in Karachi during the ’65 war when he was captured by the Pakistanis. The Rangers had gone to work on him with a knife and saw. The Indian government had rewarded his bravery by putting him under investigation when he returned and though his court martial never proved anything, the suspicion that he had given Pakistanis information to secure his release never went away. He got a dishonourable discharge and no pension. Arjun didn’t know how much of this to believe, because people loved to make up stories in this town, but it did explain Ismail’s glass eye, the deep knife scars that he tried to hide behind a dense beard, and the stump where his left hand would have been.
The Aladdin Investigation Agency had no address. The only way to get in touch with Ismail was to call a certain restaurant at Parathewali Gali and ask for a thousand aloo parathas. Within an hour, Ismail would call back and fix a meeting point. Arjun knew, the moment his fingers rotated the dial, that he would be selling his houses just to pay the genies at Aladdin.
But then no war is fought without casualties.
The first file that Ismail produced was the dossier on RP. Much of the gossip surrounding RP and his father was indeed true. The son had inherited his father’s taste in women, though perhaps not his boundless energy for new conquests. He had married into a big industrial family, and had a boy Mohan’s age. He had a sister and two older brothers, both men dead, one of malaria in ’66 and the other in a car accident shortly after. Ismail had been intelligent enough to explore the angle that RP may have wasted them, but the police reports looked clean and the deaths checked out as natural. On the social front, RP was part of Delhi’s young brat pack, hanging around at posh nightclubs in Delhi and sometimes in London and Paris with his friends. This Arjun already knew but what he did not know was that RP did cocaine and his father had sent him to a rehabilitation centre in the Swiss Alps for a few months. He had stayed off the habit till his father died but was now into it again with the enthusiasm of a recovering addict. His great public passion was cricket, being one of the bosses at the Delhi board for cricket, and apparently he would make it a point to attend every Test match held at Lord’s.
A few weeks after delivering the personal file, Ismail gave him the bigger file – the one with information about RP’s contacts in the administration, his businesses and his investments. The file wasn’t really one file. It was eight boxes full of material. Liquor licences, mining rights, real estate, textile and automotive plants, three different chit funds, and stakes in almost everything that would make money. RP seemed to have his claws everywhere.
Now that he knew where to look, it was time for Arjun to start the second phase of the war.
The first part of that was the feint. He handed over whatever clients he had remaining to RP and made sure that Dubey knew he was not taking on anyone new. He had to let them believe he had been broken, and since Dubey never called, at least that part had been accomplished.
Then the journey began.
Over the next few months Arjun travelled all over India. He went back to his old friends from from his gunrunning days. A few of them were not very happy to see him but most were. He used them to reach out further into RP’s interests. He understood how liquor licences were handed out, how government quota obligations for mining licences worked and how they were gained, which automotive plant produced parts that were exported to which country, loopholes in export licences, which imports RP’s textile plants depended on, what kind of environmental clearances were needed to take protection away from forest land, how the value of RP’s real estate holdings doubled every two years and which land assessors, local politicians and police and bureaucrats RP kept in his pocket. He consulted lawyers, slipped hundredrupee notes into the pockets of peons, left cash-filled envelopes with desk clerks, supplied prostitutes to government inspectors and made hefty contributions to unions and politicians.
Arjun’s savings were all gone. Soon he was borrowing money, and a lot of it. It came with high interest, either rupees or in promises of privileges moving forward, but it was almost always given without collateral because Arjun’s word had weight. In all these years, he had always delivered on his promises and those around him seemed to believe that he would this time too, even though Arjun sometimes felt he could not. He was taking on too much too fast and the only way out was not to think – not to think of what would happen if he were to fail.
For the better part of the year, this went on. Life was as tough as it had ever been. To save money, he travelled second class in trains, stayed at the cheapest of dumps, and some nights he would be so tired that he would just lie down under a balcony on the open pavement and go to sleep. His love handles were gone and though Preeti would be very concerned about how his trousers were swimming about his waist and how his cheeks had lost their pink sheen, he felt more energized than he had ever been since he moved to Delhi. Riti was growing up fast, Sudheer and Mohan stayed close together, Preeti had taken control of the house, and the few days he would be at home, it finally felt like home. They would sit together for dinner in the evenings, in the afternoons he would join the boys in a game of cricket, and once in a while he and Preeti would go out to catch the latest Hindi release.
They were just another family.
He should have been happy. He wanted to believe that he was and yet he knew he was not. Whether it be in a dark theatre watching Amitabh Bachchan dispatching the baddies or bowling underarm to Mohan during afternoon cricket games, he could only think of her. The music of her voice, the touch of her hair, the weight of her body on his chest, the arch of her back, scraps of conversations, the taste of the dhokar dalna during lunch – he wanted to forget it all, but he could not.
Where was she? How was she doing? Did she have enough money for herself and Arijit? Had she found someone else?
And would he ever see her again?
She was the blade. She was also the balm. And nothing, right or wrong, would ever change that.
One day, he was walking down a narrow grey street on a cold evening in November. He was near Jharia, one of the little coal dumps, which seemed to lie forever in the darkness, asthmatic with dust and despair. He had been travelling and meeting people through days and nights, catch
ing an hour’s sleep on a platform or leaning against the cold steel wall of a train, and he knew he just had to lie down or else he would collapse. Yet he could not for he had in his briefcase about twenty-five thousand in cash and valuables that he had to hand over to a government assessor within an hour. Clutching his shawl tightly around himself he stumbled forward through the dense fog.
Then it happened. Two men came out from nowhere, or was it three, because Arjun did not know, for they were just shadows and one heavy breath of country liquor. A strong hand snatched his briefcase away and as he reached out to grab it back, something heavy cracked into the base of his skull. His legs gave way and he fell back. From force of habit, he reached for his gun but he no longer carried it, and in any case it would have been useless now. Lying face up on the road, he saw the men half-walking and halfrunning away into the fog with the briefcase.
The searing pain radiating from the back of his head focused his thoughts for a moment. These were not RP’s men, for if this had been a hit, he would be dead. They were local, someone had informed them he was carrying twenty-five thousand in his briefcase, and that could only be the government assessor. Nothing would come of going to the police, for they would merely squeeze him for more money and throw him in jail after that, for some of the money would have reached them too. He tried to get up and he realized his head was stuck to the gravel, glued to it by the blood and what he figured was his own splattered flesh. Now he felt thankful, for with the money gone, he could sleep here and bleed out, and he no longer cared what became of him. His eyes became heavy with fatigue, he breathed heavily, a strange sensation of languid peace creeping upward from his legs.
Maybe it was all over. Maybe this was the end.
He was never going to see them again. The broken mangowood bat. The dressing table. The wall clock. That frightful crockery Preeti insisted on keeping in the display case.
Preeti, Sudheer, Mohan, Riti. They were never going to see him.
Pity he had no money to leave behind, just debts to last a lifetime and then several.
In that twilight between life and death, regret and despair, he could have sworn – though in the years to come he would never tell anyone for no one would believe him – that he had felt a presence. He knew who it was though he could not see her, for she was not really there. Nor was it her voice for it came from inside him, the voice from Mitra Cabin and Grand Hotel and every perfect moment he could ever remember, and it said, in tones that cut soothingly through the pain, ‘Hold on, Arjun. Hold on.’
And he did.
‘Now we have to let your father sleep,’ said Preeti as she folded the clothes, freshly returned by the dhobi. She began putting them into the large steel almirah one by one, the large bunch of keys that lay tied to the end of her anchal making a slight jingling sound. ‘We don’t want him to fall sick again, now, do we?’
‘It’s fine, she can stay,’ said Arjun, putting a protective arm around Riti, who sat next to him on the bed, her little legs tucked in behind her, mouth and lips smeared with chocolate, brown splotches on her knees and on the freshly washed bedsheet, though it was obvious from Preeti’s relaxed smile that she had not seen the last part yet. Riti stuck out her tongue, coated brown as well, rebelliously at Preeti and said ‘see’, before throwing a scrap of golden wrapping paper at her mother.
Arjun’s wounds had healed but even five months after the attack, he still had occasional episodes of blurred vision, which Dr Banerjee had put down to the effects of the head trauma. He had not stopped travelling even with his head bandaged up, and nothing serious had happened to him on the road. It was only after the bandage had been removed and he was at home that one day he had had a blackout and rolled down to the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately the damage had not been much, just a twisted ankle and a hairline fracture on his toe, but after that Preeti had kept a strict curfew on his movements outside the walls of their home.
It didn’t matter though. He didn’t need to travel any more. All arrows had been fired and his quiver was now truly empty. Today he would know for sure if they had hit their mark.
For today was the day they were going to announce the results of the elections.
The twentieth day of March 1977.
The Emergency was officially over. The country had gone to the ballot and the counting of votes had begun. Arjun was sure that people were tired of being in a dictatorship. Or were they? Maybe the country preferred trains running on time, black marketers and mafia men in jail, and the order that the fear of the state had brought. One could never be sure.
The voice on the radio droned on joylessly. Only a few constituencies had been reporting so far, and it would not be till hours later that the real leads would start coming in. Till that happened, there was only Riti and her wide-eyed wonder about the world to make Arjun believe that there was still something worth looking for in it.
‘I hate the elections,’ grumbled Preeti.
Arjun smiled. ‘Yes. Because they cancelled the radio plays today.’ Preeti was addicted to them, the trembling voices, the theatrics and the ominous music.
‘No. I hate them because of what it has done to you.’ She closed the almirah and joined Arjun and Riti on the bed. ‘Promise me when this is over we will start a garage.’
Arjun didn’t have the heart to tell her that all their savings were gone and, if he lost this battle against RP, it would be a thousand years before he would have the capital to start anything again. He didn’t want to think of defeat, but think he did, every second, unless there was Riti or one of the boys keeping him busy.
Unlike Riti though, the boys only kept him occupied when they got into trouble. Sudheer was thirteen but looked eighteen, folds of fat below his chin, a rolling gait from his thighs brushing against each other, and a stomach that seemed to expand even more every time Arjun saw him. Puberty had hit him bad, leaving behind a thin trace of a moustache, and a raspy, complaining voice. He spent most of his days playing cricket and hanging out with a group of boys that Arjun knew were no good, but since he had been away from home for stretches there was little he could do about it.
Then there had been that incident sometime around September the year before – Arjun was trying to find his gold Rolex. After months of searching and asking around, he had finally found a buyer for that watch. Not that people didn’t want good foreign watches, it was just that, now with the Emergency, they didn’t want anything that would attract attention. The income tax people had eyes and ears everywhere and it took only a jealous relative or a neighbour to write a letter and they would swoop down like hungry hawks. This buyer, though, was in a fix. His daughter’s wedding was in a week and the groom had made yet another demand at the very last minute, and any Punjabi with knowledge of how the world worked knew what could happen if the in-laws of the groom felt slighted. He needed a second-hand Rolex in good enough condition that it could be passed off as new, and there was a shop in Connaught Place which would take care of the packaging and the polishing to make it look as if it had come fresh from Switzerland. Which meant Arjun could finally make this sale.
He had opened his steel almirah and the little vault inside to find that the Rolex was gone. His first instinct had been to suspect the servants but they had let all of them go, and he had definitely seen the Rolex the last time he had looked for it. Someone had stolen the watch within the last two weeks. Preeti flashed through his mind and then he felt guilty for it could not be her, but then that left only two suspects. Sudheer and Mohan.
Mohan was a quiet child. He went to school at the right time and came back on time, and his report card was satisfactory without being spectacular. Once home, he spent most of his time sketching or reading or solving the jigsaw puzzles he had from his childhood, again and again and once again, talking in monosyllables or slight nods of the head. Sudheer would drag Mohan along to neighbourhood cricket games with him from time to time, and, having played with the boys, Arjun knew that Mohan was quite a good player. But cr
icket didn’t interest him nor did any other sport. Arjun had tried once or twice to get him to open up and Arjun himself knew he had not tried hard enough, because he had too many things on his mind, more important than the moods of a difficult eleven-year-old.
In this case though, Mohan was not the problem. He would not steal. He had no reason to. Which only left one other person.
Arjun caught hold of Mohan when he knew that Sudheer would not be at home. That’s something he had learned from the business – always question them separately. Mohan denied having taken the watch. Arjun had been expecting that to be the case. Then Arjun asked if he knew who had taken it. Mohan shuffled unsteadily on his feet, looked at one toe and then the other, but refused to answer. But by then Arjun knew for sure who it was.
Sudheer came home at seven, a bat balanced proudly on his shoulder. Preeti had gone to the temple for her evening aarti, and this Arjun knew was good, because that meant she would not come in the middle of what he had planned.
Arjun asked Sudheer to come up to his room. After he came up the stairs, with a quizzical expression on his face, the first thing Arjun did was lock the door.
‘Did you take my watch?’
Sudheer first pretended not to have understood. Arjun repeated the question calmly. He shrugged his shoulders and said ‘Your watch? I don’t know what you are…’
He never finished. Arjun’s extended palm made contact with Sudheer’s cheek, with a light thwack.
‘Did you take my watch?’
Arjun thought he would feel bad for he had never hit any of his children before. But he did not.
Tears welled up immediately in Sudheer’s eyes, but he still shook his head.
Arjun brought his hand back in the opposite direction, this time hitting the boy’s cheek with his knuckles.
‘Did you take my watch?’ he asked again, his voice steel in its coolness.
The tears were flowing freely down Sudheer’s cheeks. ‘Yes, I did. I did.’ He crossed his arms over his chest and he stood in a gesture of defiance. ‘Yes, I took the watch and I sold it.’
