A Cut-Like Wound

by Anita Nair

  ‘And what about you?’ Stanley asked curiously from the door. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going home. I am going to switch off my phone and sleep till I wake up. When I return, I hope I will be less of a caricature,’ Gowda muttered.

  Stanley smiled. The last time he had ticked Gowda off, he had brought home the basketball championship for the college.

  Santosh and Gajendra were tired and hungry. They had started trawling the Kerala restaurants in Banaswadi and Kammanahalli at a little past noon. One by one. But no one seemed to remember a thing. Santosh produced a photograph of the deceased. But all of them shook their heads.

  ‘Besides, it was a busy time, sir,’ one of them said. ‘He looks familiar enough. But I could have seen him anywhere. So many people come and go, so unless there was something unusual, why would we remember them?’

  Santosh looked at Gajendra helplessly. He had been certain that the glory of the day would be his, but it seemed they would have to return with nothing to report.

  Gajendra cleared his throat. ‘This young man, our victim, was not alone. He was with a woman,’ he said.

  The owner of Kerala Magic frowned. ‘Here, let me take a look at the photo again.’

  Santosh stared at Gajendra. Why hadn’t he thought about asking that? He knew what Gajendra would say. He would raise a leg and delicately rub the back of his other leg with it and say, ‘Experience, sir … nothing can duplicate experience!’

  ‘So?’ Gajendra asked.

  The restaurateur peered at the photograph again and suddenly jabbed a finger at the photo card furiously. ‘Yes, now I remember.’ He turned and hollered, ‘Gopal, come here!’

  A young man hurried to their side. ‘This is him, right? The son-of-a-whore and that bitch.’

  Gopal peered at the photo. ‘Yes, sir, this is him. I’ve kept the note aside in an envelope. I’ll bring it.’

  ‘We have a takeaway counter,’ the man explained. ‘So this man, boy actually, he couldn’t be more than twenty-two, came two nights ago. He ordered eight Kerala parotas, a plate of mutton curry and two pieces of fried fish. The bill was three hundred and ten rupees. The woman with him offered to pay and produced a thousand-rupee note. We gave them change, they collected the food parcel and left. Next morning, my accountant said the note was fake.’

  ‘How do you know that it was the young man’s?’ Santosh asked curiously.

  ‘We have two separate cash counters. One for the restaurant, one for the takeaway section. Friday night, the takeaway counter had received only three thousand-rupee notes. The other two are my regular customers,’ the man said.

  ‘When is the police going to do something about these counterfeit notes?’ he demanded abruptly.

  Santosh held up the note and looked at it carefully. ‘Soon. The Crime Branch is working on it,’ he said absently. He hoped they were. But what else could he say?

  ‘Did you see where he went?’

  The owner shook his head. ‘It was a busy night.’

  Gopal piped up suddenly. ‘I saw them walk towards the auto stand.’

  Santosh glanced at his watch. It was almost two. ‘Since we are here, we might as well eat lunch,’ he said.

  Gajendra smiled. He didn’t particularly care if they caught the murderer. But he did what he was asked to. Gowda raged at him for his apathy but Gajendra didn’t care. This was just a job and would never be more than that. Gowda would have been rushing to the auto stand by now. This one was more human, he decided as they waited for the food to arrive.

  None of the auto drivers remembered the young man. Just as Santosh and Gajendra were turning to go, another man arrived. Santosh watched him laugh and talk to the auto drivers. He was a gregarious man who seemed to be on best terms with the world and everyone.

  One of the older auto drivers said, ‘Sir, you should ask him too. He occasionally drives his friend’s auto. I think he was here four nights ago.’

  He would clutch at any straw now, Santosh thought as he beckoned the man and showed him the photo card.

  The man peered at it and said instantly. ‘I remember him. He and a woman. I dropped them off near a factory-like building near Narayanapura. The woman said her house was at the end of the alley and the road was all dug up.’

  Santosh’s eyes lit up. His hand shook with excitement as he thrust the card into a folder. ‘You remember the place, don’t you?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘I am not sure.’ The man grinned sheepishly. ‘It was dark and I was in a hurry to get home, so I didn’t really look at what was nearby. Maybe if I went that side again.’

  ‘Well then, come along,’ Santosh said firmly, walking towards the cheetah motorbike.

  The man looked at the spotted sides of the motorbike. ‘On this?’ he asked hopefully. A sub-inspector wearing a jacket that proclaimed ‘POLICE’ on its back driving him on his bike!

  ‘No,’ Santosh said. ‘Gajendra and you lead the way in an autorickshaw. I’ll follow.’

  Three hours later, when they returned to the station, they saw Gowda walk into his room. Santosh followed him, unable to contain his excitement.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘your hunch about the corporator’s involvement is right.’

  Gowda turned around.

  ‘We found the factory. There are no houses nearby. Just a few abandoned sheds. Apparently, it used to be a garment factory many years ago. It was shut down and has been lying vacant for some time now.’

  ‘So what’s the link to the corporator?’ Gowda asked. He raised his arms above his head and stretched. The nap had done him good. He felt ready to take on the world and the corporator.

  ‘Sir, I made some enquiries. The building belongs to the corporator. He bought it a few months ago.’

  Gowda looked thoughtful.

  ‘If we can get a search warrant,’ Santosh spoke slowly.

  Gowda nodded. ‘The counterfeit note … where is it?’

  ‘I was going to keep it in the evidence box,’ Santosh said.

  Gowda looked at Santosh. ‘I know how to get the search warrant.’

  He picked up his phone. ‘Stanley,’ he said carefully. ‘Something has come up. We need to talk.’

  Stanley thumbed the 1000-rupee note. There was no doubt at all. It was counterfeit.

  ‘Can you spot the difference?’ Stanley asked, pulling out a 1000-rupee note from his wallet. ‘Sometimes it is hard to know which is which. So I always keep a note in my pocket.’

  He held up both notes. Santosh leaned forward. ‘May I?’

  Stanley smiled and placed both notes on the table, jumbling them this way and that.

  Santosh held up one note, then the other. He looked at both carefully.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Stanley’s voice was smug.

  ‘The security thread. I was told fake currency doesn’t have that,’ Santosh said. ‘But both these notes seem to have it. So…’ He put the notes back on the table, puzzled.

  ‘Not any more. The new ones, the ISI-produced notes, are very hard to distinguish from the real ones.’

  Stanley leaned forward and held up both notes. ‘See this, the security thread and the RBI logo are distinct. But this one is hazy. The counterfeit ones can’t get that absolutely right!’

  ‘There is a whole list of directives. Like the hazy security thread. The three watermarks – the Ashoka pillar, the denomination and RBI – are prominent on the real ones and not so prominent on the counterfeit. See this, the alignment of the register on the left side of the watermark. Those bloody fellows didn’t even spare the Mahatma. His eyes and spectacles are thicker in size. And the sprinkled dots are visible when you hold it up in UV light. The fake ones won’t show that … the RBI wallahs have more specifics. Like the size and alignment of the series prefix and distinctive numbers are smaller in the fake ones, not in line, unlike in the original ones. And the paper used, that’s made of wood pulp.’

  Santosh looked dazzled by Stanley’s revelations.

&n
bsp; ‘And I am only talking about what the D Company, that is, Dawood Ibrahim’s people, produce and smuggle into India. Those bastards use our own people to bring it back.’

  Gowda frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Hyderabad has been the receiving port. There are workers from Nizamabad, Kadappa, Karimnagar who go to the Gulf on work, so they are used as conduits. These chaps are so grateful for a free ticket that they don’t mind bringing back a suitcase packed with perfume, clothes, etc., not knowing that the counterfeit currency is packed in carbon paper beneath. Or in a photo album…’ Stanley sighed. ‘We are doing our best, although now the racket’s shifted to Bangalore and it’s coming by road. But I know all of this anyway.’

  ‘Well, what you don’t is that the woman who was with Mohan, the murdered boy, was the one who paid with this note,’ Gowda said.

  ‘But there’s no knowing where she got it from,’ Stanley said, frowning at what seemed like Gowda’s almost childish glee.

  ‘No, we don’t. But we could ask her. There is something I have to tell you, but don’t blow your top, okay?’ Gowda said, darting a glance at Santosh.

  ‘On a whim, last Friday, Santosh had gone to Shivaji Nagar. He ended up near Gujri Gunta. And somehow ended up near Corporator Ravikumar’s house,’ Gowda began.

  Stanley’s mouth tightened into a thin line. ‘And?’

  ‘You don’t look very pleased?’ Gowda said, surprised at Stanley’s reaction.

  ‘I’ll get to that later. Now tell me what you have to say.’

  ‘Well, Santosh saw two people leave the place in the evening. One, a eunuch, and the other who seemed like a regular female. Since we have been wondering about a possible eunuch connection, Santosh followed them. He managed a good look at the woman: weight, size, colour of clothes. Unfortunately, he stuck close to the eunuch and had to let the other one go when they separated. Now, the restaurant people and the auto driver both mentioned a woman who seems to be the one who was with the eunuch. And the auto driver said he dropped the woman and Mohan near an abandoned factory, which we discover is the corporator’s.’

  ‘I should charge-sheet you for this, Gowda. You had no business mounting a surveillance on the corporator without clearing it with me.’ Stanley’s face was grim.

  ‘What surveillance?’ Gowda said, hoping the injured note in his voice sounded genuine enough.

  ‘Don’t fuck with me, Gowda,’ Stanley muttered.

  ‘Sir, I was looking for a spare part for my bike,’ Santosh piped up. ‘I happened to be…’

  Stanley silenced him with a glare.

  ‘You are missing the forest for the trees,’ Gowda said, inspecting his nails.

  ‘And don’t throw literature at me,’ Stanley snapped. ‘I did Macbeth in college too.’

  ‘No, Stanley. Listen to me, I think the corporator’s involved in some way. The serial murders and the counterfeit currency seem to have him as a common denominator. One other thing. The eunuch who was with the woman is his housekeeper. I don’t know if there is a real link, or if he’s a link to the link.’

  Stanley sniffed. ‘That’s precisely why I am not going to take any action. But Gowda, you are on a very slippery slope here. Do you hear me? And what you would do good to remember is, you take me with you when you go down. You have to clear everything you do with me. On this case, I am your senior officer … do you understand?’

  Gowda nodded. He could feel that familiar hopelessness settle in him. Stanley was driven by the need to bust the counterfeit ring. The murders were a by-the-way sort of a case. He would do nothing to jeopardize the primary case. A warrant or bringing in the eunuch for questioning would alert the corporator and probably ruin Stanley’s plans. Meanwhile, the murderer, whoever he or she was, would be free to continue.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Gowda said, trying to formulate the thought as it occurred to him. ‘The first victim, who we presume was the first victim, was targeted about a month ago. The next one, three weeks after that. But the one after that, a week after. And this one a week ago. So the murderer seems to have accelerated. Almost as if he or she can’t stop. We have little less than four days before another young man is killed. Are we just going to wait and watch?’

  Stanley stared across the room.

  ‘And, sir,’ Santosh spoke up. ‘I don’t know if this is of any relevance, but the old factory was sold to the corporator only two months ago. It may mean nothing…’

  ‘Or everything,’ Gowda finished for him.

  Stanley slumped into a chair. He reached for the glass paperweight on the table and placed it on the palm of his hand. Gowda and Santosh watched Stanley stare into it as though it held the answer he was searching for.

  Gowda cleared his throat. ‘We could tell him that we need to search the factory for a case that went back, say, six months ago. And if there’s something there, we can take it to the next step.’

  Santosh felt as if his chest would burst with the pressure of the air trapped within. He didn’t dare exhale. What if it changed the tide of Stanley’s peregrinations? What if it collided with Gowda’s star and was pushed off its path? What if it got Gowda’s goat? Gowda had snarled at him for lesser offences.

  Stanley considered the glass paperweight once again. ‘We don’t see too many of these any more,’ he said, holding it up to the light.

  Gowda clenched his jaw, reached forward and took the paperweight away. ‘I’ll arrange for a truckload of these if you like it so much.’

  ‘I don’t, actually.’ Stanley smiled.

  ‘So?’ Gowda prodded.

  ‘So I’m going to arrange twenty-four-hour surveillance of his house. In the meantime, you can have the warrant to search the factory premises. Only the factory premises. We’ll take it from there.’

  Santosh’s breath exploded in his chest.

  Mamtha called. When was he coming to Hassan next, she asked.

  Gowda felt the skin on his forehead pleat into a frown. ‘I am in the middle of a case,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect me to keep coming to Hassan every second week.’

  What was going on? she demanded to know.

  What was going on? he thundered back.

  ‘Roshan talks of art shows and dinner parties. Places you took him to. All the people he met. You seem to have time for all of that now that you are alone. When I was there, it was always work, work, work.’

  Gowda grunted. ‘This was work too.’

  ‘Who is this Urmila? You seem to be spending a lot of time with her.’

  Gowda felt his heart sink.

  ‘Mamtha, what’s wrong with you? She is a college friend who’s back in Bangalore.’ Gowda spoke the truth as it were, knowing that sometimes the truth can conceal much more than any lie could.

  ‘Oh.’ Mamtha retreated into a silence.

  Gowda could sense her embarrassment.

  ‘So, how was your day?’ he asked, affecting a heartiness he didn’t feel.

  When Mamtha had finished describing her long tedious day, Gowda waited for her to ask him about his. But Mamtha had to go and then the phone rang again.

  It was Urmila. Gowda held his breath. Something akin to guilt washed over him. This friendship, this whatever-it-was with Urmila, wasn’t doing right by Mamtha. And yet it felt so good, so right.

  ‘How was your day, Borei?’ Urmila asked.

  Gowda studied his fingernails. How was it the woman who was your wife, the one who was supposed to be companion and soul mate, didn’t even feel inclined to ask about his day? While another woman, whose role in his life was tenuous, was so interested in the warp and weft of his daily life.

  ‘Rather strange,’ he said. Mamtha seemed to have clamped his tongue.

  ‘You sound distracted. What’s wrong?’ Her voice felt like a caress on his brow.

  But Gowda couldn’t speak. He was too churned up inside. The many loose ends danced in the periphery of his mind. Loose ends he may not even be allowed to tie up because it was his case only unofficial
ly.

  Gowda mouthed a platitude into the phone and ended the call.

  TUESDAY, 23 AUGUST

  ‘I’ve had a strange feeling since morning,’ the corporator said, scratching Tiger’s head.

  ‘What kind of strange feeling?’ Chikka asked, looking up from the statement of accounts Anna had asked him to check.

  ‘I have this feeling that someone is watching me. I had my men check, but they said the street was clear.’ The corporator stood up and went to the window. He peered out and then pulled the heavy curtains back in place.

  ‘Are you sure you are not imagining it?’ Chikka asked slowly.

  ‘I don’t imagine things,’ the corporator said, rubbing his chin with the heel of his palm.

  He looked at Chikka for a long moment and said quietly, ‘There are days when I wonder if all this is worth it. There are days when I want to escape and start life again as someone else.’

  The corporator stared at the man in dismay. He ran his fingers through his hair and asked slowly, ‘You are sure? You are really sure?’

  The man nodded. ‘My source is reliable, Anna. He wouldn’t lie about a thing like this.’

  He watched Anna pace. He had never seen him look so agitated, so out of control. You couldn’t flap Anna, no matter what. If you were to tell him that the sky was falling, he would merely smile that slow smile of his and say, ‘So, let it fall. I’ll find someone up there who’ll know how to stop it falling! Everyone has a price, you see!’

  But not this morning. Anna was behaving just like anyone else would if they knew they were being watched by the police.

  ‘I’m cleaning up the whole business, you know that, don’t you?’ The corporator stopped near the window, parted the drapes and looked outside. There was nothing on the street. What had he expected anyway? They were getting better and better at it and now they could access mobile phone records as well.

  The man cleared his throat. ‘I heard.’

  ‘It’s not worth the risk. But I still have one last consignment to take to Kerala. What happened to the man you were going to bring?’ The corporator drew the drapes and picked up the tumbler of coffee he had been drinking when Ibrahim had arrived, asking to speak to him urgently. The coffee was tepid and a skin had formed on its top. The corporator made a face and slammed the tumbler down.