BLOOD RED SARI

by Banker, Ashok K

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said now to the judge who had started to look somewhat concerned – her face was probably contorted by now – not quite sure what she was agreeing to and not giving a damn.

  She had won!

  Everything!

  They would have to pay their entire official ‘white’ fortune to her now, even if they still had unofficial ‘black’ assets tucked away. The resulting public shame and community embarrassment would be even more expensive, because in their Ahmedabadi sub-caste, if dowry murder by itself was not considered a blot on a family’s reputation, financial loss certainly was. For them to have been defeated in open court by her, the ‘pagli’, the mad daughter-in-law, a woman who had dared to go up against the might of the community, was the ultimate humiliation. It would blacken the Shah name forever. They would be the laughing (sniggering) stock of the community and of Ahmedabad at large.

  She had won!

  Nachiketa spun her wheelchair around in a dizzying circle, startling the lawyers – waiting for their matter to be called next – standing behind her, and pumped her fist in the air, throwing her head back, tossing her hair off her face, and yelling to the packed courtroom: ‘Yes!’

  3.3

  IT WAS PAST NINE that night when Sheila returned to the gym. The building was in darkness and neither Jiteshkaku nor the night watchmen were anywhere in sight. She assumed they had simply walked away rather than get involved in a possibly sticky political situation. Politics is a life-or-death matter in West Bengal, even in this second decade of the 21st century. And if there was one word that terrified people more than even the dreaded T-word – which denoted terror and its associated activites – it was the mighty M-word: Maoism and its various manifestations. Maoism is to India what the Irish ‘troubles’ had been to Britain in the last century. If she had had any doubts this morning, she had no doubt at all now: she was up against the dreaded might of the Maoists, albeit their most genial public face, the CPI (M), Communist Party of India (Maoist). But the genial party face was just the front for the hydra-heads of the biggest grassroots-level violent armed rebellion India has faced in its history. And if she didn’t lie back and take it now, the main body would rear up and crush her like a mite. That much had been made clear to her this day itself.

  She stood for a moment on the gym floor, letting the events of the past several hours sink in. She had spent the whole day running from one bureaucratic office to the other before finally ending up back in front of the same asshole, Raghuvendra Choudhry, who had laughed uproariously when she entered his cabin, and had then proceeded to lay out the facts of the entire affair. She had still not absorbed everything he had said, and that was why she had returned here – to try and make sense of the whole mess. If things went badly for her – and by today’s reckoning, they had already hung a sharp turn past Fucked and were well on their way to Totally Fucked via that picturesque old detour Royally Fucked – then she would probably lose the gym altogether. She had had to come back if only to try and figure out how things had gone pear-shaped so suddenly.

  The glass windows let in enough ambient light to illuminate the outlines of the equipment. Without people working out, without the constant ambient chatter of voices talking and weights clinking, without the bright lights, pounding music and plasma screens flashing music videos and Bengali soaps, the gym was nothing more than a graveyard of hard-core branded tombstones. She’s Here had been proud of the fact that it was the first gym in the neighbourhood to stay open eighteen hours a day, and was shut only between midnight and 6 a.m. Situated on the edge of Sector V, Salt Lake City’s IT hub, it drew a number of members who worked odd shifts and liked to workout immediately before or after.

  Sheila herself had grown accustomed to staying around till closing time, and even kept a cot, TV set and bookshelf in her office where she had begun routinely spending the night several times a week of late. Her flat in Sector I wasn’t that far, especially with the roads being good and the traffic in Salt Lake City being minimal at night, but she found the still, empty flat in a dull residential-only neighbourhood boring after the vibrant hubbub of the gym. Besides, she couldn’t cook to save her life, apart from the fact that eating alone only underlined the loneliness of her private life. She enjoyed eating in the locker room at night with whichever trainers and staff were on their dinner break, catching up on their personal updates, local gossip, or just chit-chatting and kidding around. At times they would discuss sexual matters and all the women’s voices would grow hushed until a new arrival entered and enquired quizzically if there was a séance in progress, which comment would be greeted by embarrassed peals of laughter. It was during these sessions too that Sheila learnt what was in fashion and what was not, which were the best places to shop for cheap accessories, or knock-off winter wear from Tibetan immigrants, cheap Chinese electronics on the grey markets, and even the latest Sabyasachi formalwear worn on the ramp by the season’s reigning supermodel. On one occasion her staff, egged on by a member who owned a beauty salon, had even attempted a makeover for Sheila. She had run laughing from the room when she realized they intended to turn her into a replica of the current Bengali actress who had recently scored a major hit in Bollywood; she had locked herself in the toilet and they had banged on the door of the stall and attempted to coax and cajole her out unsuccessfully for the next half hour.

  She smiled now, remembering that horseplay. After her workout, that was her next favourite part of the day. After the last members had left, she would oversee the closing up, wave goodbye to the departing staff, and let the night watchmen fill their water bottles from the water cooler before locking the glass reception doors from the inside and retiring to her office. She would watch TV for a while if there was something on she was following – she had started to enjoy a couple of Bangla soaps of late – or read a book till she fell asleep. There were days she considered giving up her apartment and simply staying at the office. But she retained the lease on the outside chance that she would have a relationship again; one that lasted more than the three-week average of her past relationships. Until then, she felt more at home sleeping at the gym, and if that was pathetic, so be it.

  Now, she sat on the cushioned seat of a lat-pulldown unit, surrounded by the ghostly shapes and silhouettes of the machines that were her livelihood, and realized just how good the past couple of years had been. Perhaps the best ones of her life, barring maybe those few years of middle childhood back in Daman when her mother was still around and before her father had been transferred to Mumbai and begun doing undercover work and everything had fallen to pieces. Now her life was beginning to crumble again, and though she was a grown woman now, there seemed to be almost nothing she could do to tackle the situation.

  There’s always something you can do. Always.

  Yeah, sure.

  The roots of her present predicament lay not in the superficial municipal licensing laws and regulations she had allegedly violated, as today’s notification listed out, but with a case she’d worked on several years ago, back in Dakshineshwar. At least, it had ended in Dakshineshwar. The case had begun in Assam where she had been hired by a very eminent north-eastern politician, ex-chief minister of Assam, now a wealthy industrialist and head of the party’s north-east office, to find and retrieve his runaway seventeen-year-old daughter. Sheila had tracked the girl through the region for a month, finally locating her at Dakshineshwar in east Kolkata where she found her living in a contented same-sex relationship with a woman boxer of Bangladeshi origin. She had got to know both young women better and soon realized that running away from home had been the smartest thing the young girl had done in her short life. The father was knee-deep in dirty political dealings and underworld activities, and was that certain noxious type of Indian male whose one-sided sense of morality had frozen fast around the time that Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to whom same-sex relationships were a gross aberration, incomprehensible and unacceptable under any circumstanc
e. What made the situation even worse was the fact that the young woman boxer his daughter had chosen to leave him for happened to be a Bangladeshi Muslim. Sheila knew that once she reported back to him that his precious only child was spending her nights in bed with a lesbian Muslim Bangladeshi, if the bastard survived the shock, he would almost certainly want the other woman killed on the spot. He would then force the daughter into marriage with a suitable boy of his choosing, no doubt managing to find an alliance that furthered his own political and business interests at the same time, and that would be that. Sheila had done her share of bad things and had seen worse done, including some done to her. She had no intention of being part of the summary justice that the father would undoubtedly mete out to his daughter and her lesbian lover once he came to know of the truth.

  Sheila made her choice. The daughter was five weeks shy of turning eighteen and becoming a legal major under Indian law. Sheila called Shillong and told the father’s secretary that the daughter had gone to Pondicherry with a boy. Shortly after, she had gone down the east coast herself in hot pursuit, sending back periodical updates and increasingly optimistic reports as she apparently narrowed the chase. Once the daughter was legally eighteen, Sheila abruptly reported back to the father’s sprawling Shillong tea estate mansion that the girl was not in Pondicherry and had probably changed her name to marry a man from another community, perhaps even departing the country for foreign shores under the new name.

  The father had ranted and raved and refused to pay her the last part of her fee, which Sheila hadn’t given a damn about; beyond that, there wasn’t much more he could do. But Sheila knew that the father suspected, and the secretary was near certain that she had played them. In truth, the daughter had changed her name and religion – but she had converted to Islam, which they weren’t capable of even dreaming of, so they never did track her down despite their subsequent efforts with other investigators. But over time, they had learnt enough through their independent enquiries to know that Sheila had led them up the garden path and, quite naturally, they had borne her a blood-grudge the size of a shopping mall.

  Now, it was payback time. She had learnt today that the paan-chewing feudal-age bureaucrat who had strolled into her gym and shut her down today was the nephew of the politbureau chief of the eastern division of the CPI (M). And that gent was married to the sister of none other than the same ex-chief minister-turned-aggrieved-father and Sheila Ray’s former client. What was more, the secretary of that aggrieved father was now in Kolkata heading the group’s new thrust into realty development and IT. He had moved here from Shillong quite recently, less than a month ago. As it appeared, he had wasted no time in settling the score with Sheila and he had all the power and weight of his employer’s considerable political and allied network to do to her as he pleased.

  There was still one way she could appease them and be spared complete ruin. The nephew, aka Raghuvendra Choudhry, assistant ward commissioner, KMC, had spelt it out to her in no uncertain terms: if she could lead them to the long-lost daughter even now, she would be spared. All she had to do was write down the address on a chit of paper. Email it. Fax it. Text it. Write it on a pair of pink panties and drop it from a passing Kolkata metro train. Just tell them where to find the absconding bitch and they would do the rest. She would play no part in it; in fact, he had told her quite reasonably as he chewed his paan noisily, she would only be completing the assignment that she had begun four years ago. What could possibly be the harm in that?

  She sighed and pushed herself to her feet, heading in the direction of her office.

  The bright fluorescents made her blink owlishly after the past hour spent in near darkness. She felt like switching them off, but needed the light to get around. Her room always had a few boxes of unpacked equipment parts lying around and she didn’t need to break a toe or twist an ankle moseying around in the dark. She waited till her eyes adjusted, then spent the next half hour pottering around pointlessly, trying to think what she should do next. She knew that the one thing she could not do, absolutely would not do, was give up Gauri and Tasneem. Or Marhabha and Tasneem as they were now named. She would rather have her own teeth and nails pulled out with pliers one by one than give them up to these bastards. Which left … what? Go to war? Against whom? The entire CPI (M) cadre in West Bengal? The entire nationwide network? She almost laughed aloud at the idea.

  She realized that she hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing all day and that she was dehydrated. She reached for the bottle of packaged water on her desk and when she picked it up, the bottle hit something and knocked it off the edge of the desk. She bent to pick it up and saw that it was a hefty yellow manila envelope.

  Four

  4.1

  ANITA SPENT THE NIGHT at a hotel near Papanasam Cliff.

  On the long walk back to the highway, she had half a mind to take a taxi to Thiruvananthapuram and catch the first flight back to Mumbai. But Lalima stopped her. She had come here for Lalima, and the least she could do was pay her respects before going back. Tomorrow, she promised herself, tomorrow after I light a candle for her, I will go back to Mumbai.

  And after that, never again would she come back to the place of her birth and childhood, never again face those Munsters, the Addams Family, as Lalima and she had called them.

  They had come up with the name one summer after Ezhu had brought back two videotapes filled with cartoons taped from TV. She still remembered how goggle-eyed they had been at the thought of a channel dedicated to cartoons and which ran all day and night – 24/7 as one would say now – and how they had sat together on the leaking couch in Lalima’s house and watched Wily Coyote and Road Runner, Yogi Bear, Spongebob Squarepants, Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Speed Racer, Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester, The Addams Family, Elmer Fudd, The Munsters, Porky Pig, The Perils of Pauline, all day long for two whole days, rewinding the tape over and over again until Lalima’s amma had grown weary and thrown them out of the house, telling them to go spend some time in the sun. Watching The Munsters, Anita and Lalima had looked at each another and waggled their eyebrows as they did when they found something mutually amusing. Neither of them had actually said it out loud, but from that day onwards, they routinely referred to Anita’s family as The Munsters. As in ‘The Munsters are at it again’ or ‘I can’t come over today, The Munsters are forcing me to go to church with them’.

  That was also the night Anita became fully aware of her sexual proclivities.

  While watching one of those tapes later that night, they had paused the VCR between cartoons because Anita had to go use the loo and in the meantime Lalima had discovered an image left over from the programme that had previously been recorded on the tape. Apparently, Ezhu had taped the cartoons over a blue film. The errant bit of undeleted film didn’t show very much, just a bare-chested girl with part of what appeared to be a male appendage poking into the frame. The image was blurry enough that the said appendage might just be the man’s finger, or it might be what they both assumed it was. Excited and whispering to avoid waking Lalima’s mother, they kept pressing the cue button to fast forward frame by frame, but there were only two or three frames, blurred and grainy from the over-taping, and it was hard to be sure. The hardest part was suppressing their irrepressible giggling to avoid waking Amma. Ezhu denied it hotly when confronted the next day, but Lalima said she had seen a magazine once in his suitcase, peeking out between piles of shirts, and the portion of the cover she had glimpsed had said ‘PLAYB’ in big bold type.

  That errant image left over from the alleged blue film – which Ezhu insisted was a National Geographic documentary on African tribal mating rituals – had marked the first year that they had openly begun talking about the ‘S-word’ and all things related. Later that night, about to fall asleep facing each other on Lalima’s cot, Anita had been overcome by a wave of new emotion, a great desire to reach out and caress her friend, accompanied by a sweet aching in her groin. Unable to resist, she had reached out and put her h
and on Lalima’s shoulder and neck, then leaned into her warm intimate space to kiss her on the lips. Lalima, who became a zombie once she was very sleepy, mistook it for friendly affection, and thumped Anita on the side of the head roughly. The blow made Anita’s ear ring and she realized what she had been about to do – or guessed at it, since she had no real idea what these feelings meant or might lead to – and she blew a soundless whistle up Lalima’s nose, making her sneeze. Then she turned over and went to sleep. From that day onwards, Anita began to grow aware of the fact that she might not be a typical Malayali girl in certain respects. An understatement, to be sure, but even the most historic changes often begin with a nondescript event. Looking back later, she would always pinpoint that moment when she had tried to kiss the half-asleep Lalima as the moment of realization that she was gay.

  Now, unpacking her bags on the bed, she was suddenly overcome by a wave of emotion. There was a whole bunch of things mixed up in it: her family, the past, the present, Lalima … She slumped to the cold tiled floor, spine hitting the skeleton of the bed, and dunked her face between her knees. She thought she was going to cry, but no tears came. She focused on breathing slowly, taking deep, calming breaths. It helped a little. It had been a long day and an even longer month. She had just come off a case in Mumbai, investigating a murder in a tony private club on behalf of a media group that later turned out to want the crime covered up rather than exposed because the killer was a major advertiser in their group’s publications and TV channels. The fact that the murderer was also a serial rapist who used his Page 3 celebrity status to gain his victims’ trust didn’t bother them in the least. Anita had turned the evidence in that case over to a person who she knew wouldn’t hesitate to wreak vigilante justice on the bastard. The media group had suspected her of doing it and had refused to pay the balance portion of her fee, which had crimped her finances. She was short of cash and had no other job in hand – none that would pay decently, at least. There were plenty of messages on her voice mail from spouses wanting their wives or husbands or significant others followed, but sleazy infidelity cases rarely paid enough to cover the aggravation of dealing with jilted wives and cuckolded husbands. More often than not, the aggrieved parties blamed her, the messenger, for the message, as if by clicking pictures of the illicit trysts of their partners, she had made them happen. She had had it with those cases. But if she didn’t get something soon, she would have to pick the least sleazy of them and try to make a rupee or two. Mrs Matondkar was patient about her missing the rent mostly, but she could also get cranky occasionally. That usually had something to do with Anita being overdue more than three months. Right now, she was at two-and-a-half months, which meant she needed to give the old bag some cash or endure nagging lectures day and night.