She had no idea when she fell asleep.
She opened her eyes to find herself lying asleep on her side, crouched in a foetal position with the bed against her spine and the room in pitch darkness. Even so, she instantly knew where she was: I’m in a room in a hotel in Papanasam; I’m here for Lalima’s funeral. Her cell phone was buzzing somewhere close by and there was a knock at the door. She had sleep grit in her eyes and her breath smelt awful to herself, but the impromptu slumber had refreshed her. She grabbed her phone as she stood up, noting by the flashing screen that she had slept the afternoon and evening away, almost seven hours, and that Philip was calling. She happened across the light switch while patting the wall to find her way to the door and switched it on: cold fluorescent lighting bathed the room.
She fumbled the door open.
It was Philip.
‘Chechi,’ he said, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘May I come in?’
Someone dropped a spoon in another room – their door was open, the sound of a television playing also audible. The clattering made him glance over his shoulder in a way that suggested pursuit. She let him in.
They sat sipping filter coffee. Ordering some filter coffee first, Anita had taken a moment to pee and then splash some water on her face. She had forgotten her toothbrush and had settled for rubbing her finger over her teeth. The filter coffee was hot and smelt wonderful. She had missed filter coffee in Mumbai. Mrs Matondkar had some kink about filter coffee and refused to let Anita make it in her kitchen – one of her many small eccentricities. And the only places that still served good filter coffee in the city were the handful of Udupi joints that hadn’t caved in and morphed into restobars, and there were fewer of those each year.
Philip looked thirty years older since she’d last seen him, which was about thirteen years ago. He had put on some weight, all in the wrong places, and his watery grey eyes looked even more dog-sad than they had before. His hairline had receded considerably and he hadn’t shaved in days. He sat rubbing the skin of his palms with his thumbs, an old nervous tic he had had as a kid. He looked haggard. He would pick up the cup of coffee, sip it noisily, then put it down quickly and go back to rubbing his palms. Anita didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to know there was something seriously fucked up about him. Then again, her whole family was fucked up. It’s The Munsters again, Lalima, they just won’t quit.
Finally, she reached out and touched his knee gently, barely a fingertip. He winced as if struck by a belt.
‘Want to tell me what’s up?’ she said.
He looked around, then sat up, leaning forward awkwardly in the low cane chair. She could see a bald patch beginning at the back of his head. It was shiny. He looked at her and she was shocked to see his pupils looking huge, like a schoolgirl’s eyes in an anime cartoon. He’s hopped up, she thought. She knew the signs. But on what?
‘The package,’ he said. ‘Lalima must have sent you a package. Where is it? I have to give it to them. Otherwise, they’ll fucking kill me, chechi.’
4.2
NACHIKETA WAS STRANDED AT the Delhi–Gurgaon border toll plaza when she got the call. Traffic was bad as usual on NH-8 but what irked her was the proliferation of Qualises filled with foreigners blocking every single toll lane. The huge hoardings told her what all the firangs were here for: the Annual BPO World Convention. Bad enough that they descended in tens of thousands upon an already choked traffic and infrastructure system, but did they have to block all the toll lanes too? Really? Couldn’t they simply queue up and occupy eight or ten of them? She wasn’t the only irked driver: people were honking angrily all around her.
A Sikh driver in the adjoining lane got out of his Honda CRV and walked over to the nearest Qualis to knock at the driver’s window. The driver looked like a Jat; he ignored the Sikh. The turbanned sardar said something through the closed window. The driver ignored him, then lurched the car forward into the space left by the car in front as the line crawled forward. The Sikh mouthed what was clearly an abuse, gave the Qualis driver the raised finger, which gesture, since the car was moving forward, was extended to the blonde and brunette foreigners packed into the back seats as well. They glared at him in evident shock and one of them said something to the driver. Nachiketa saw the driver lean back and reply, saying something that made them smile.
Probably telling them in Haryanvi-accented English that all sardarjis are crazy. And at some point, they’ll meet a Sikh who’ll tell them that all Jats are crazy. Welcome to India. We all hate each other equally. Please to be paying in USD, sirji.
The Qualis in front of her lurched forward and she inched the car ahead. Her phone rang just then and she was tempted to ignore it. She was too euphoric from the judgment today to want to deal with another client. This was her day, whatever was left of it, and all she wanted was to go home, crack open a bottle of Sula and listen to some Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. During the weekend, she was going to meet up with the girls and part-ay! But she happened to glance at the screen of the Blackberry and it was flashing ‘Office – Direct Line’, which meant the landline on her desk. That had to be Shonali.
She slipped the Bluetooth earphone over her ear and pressed the button. ‘Yeah, Shonali?’
Silence.
The Qualis in front of her had stopped moving, but hadn’t put its brakes on; the vehicle rolled slowly back towards Nachiketa’s Civic. She hit her horn with the heel of her hand and the red brake lights came on at once, though she could see the driver’s eyes glaring at her through his rear-view mirror. This one looked like it was filled with Swedes. Every passenger was tall, thin and blonde. They reminded her of the cast of the movie based on a Stieg Larsson novel, the original Swedish one starring Noomi Rapace, which she had loved – and whom she had loved. She was dreading what Hollywood would do to the US adaptations.
‘Hello, Shonali? What up, girl?’ She wondered if she was crying. Shonali could get emotional at times, usually over a man. Though she was cut up about her mother, the fact was that after ten years of fighting cancer through successive courses of chemo, radiation and ultrasonic treatments, she had pretty much exhausted her reserves of emotion on that front. The news that the cancer had metastasized yet again, this time to the brain and lungs, wasn’t exactly earth-shattering. Don’t be bitchy, Nachos, she told herself admonishingly. People might say ‘it’s better she went soon, she was suffering so much’ all they liked, but the fact was dying was dying and gone was gone forever.
Still no response.
An argument appeared to have broken out four or five lanes to her right. She couldn’t see much because all the Qualises fencing her in were higher than her eye-level. But she thought it must have something to do with the Qualis convoy blocking up all lanes. She could hear the angry raised voices even through her closed window, air-conditioning and the soft rock playing on 107.1 FM on her car radio.
Dogs barking.
Not here, not at the Delhi–Gurgaon toll.
On the phone.
Dogs were barking in the background. Close by.
It sounded like Justice and her pups. One grown dog’s high-pitched hoarse ruff and a chorus of smaller ruff-ruffs pitching in for support.
‘Hello? Who is this, please?’ she asked sharply. With one hand, she switched off the radio and used the other hand to cover her open ear to block the rising noise of the argument outside. People were getting out of their cars to peer in the direction of the fight. All the firangs stayed inside their Qualises, no doubt terrified of being massacred by sardarjis. She would have probably been out there if the effort of shifting to the wheelchair, then lowering herself out, then coming back and doing it all over again wasn’t so Olympian.
‘Hello, will you please answer me? I know you’re calling from my office. I can see the number on my caller ID. Who are you?’
The dogs stopped barking briefly. In that moment of respite, she distinctly heard the sound of someone breathing. A man. It sounded like a man breathing with the phone receiver held t
o his ear.
‘I can hear you breathing, you bastard. Mard hai to kuch bol, gaandu! If you’re a man, then speak up, assfucker!’
The Hindi abuses and challenge to his manhood did the trick. He spoke up at last, speaking in a coarse Punjabi accent.
‘Where is package? We want now. Tell us.’
Who was this guy? What package was he talking about? A dozen recent and some not-so-recent cases passed through her mind, but none of them had anything to do with any packages. All were about women: those were the only cases she took. Women’s rights, battered women, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape, spousal abuse, a few high-society divorces to help pay the rent … but no packages she could recall.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she replied.
The man said something in Punjabi, but not to her, to someone else with him in the room – in my office, the fuckers! – then came back on the line.
‘Soni kudi hai. Bada mazaa aaya. Ab bol tu phataphat. Package kahaan hai. Gudiya ki jaan pyaari hai to bataa varnaa bye-bye bol abhi.’
She was struck dumb for a moment, then recovered. ‘Who is this? Kaun ho tum? Main abhi issi waqt police ko phone kar rahi hoon. You won’t get away with this, you bastards!’
He sounded unimpressed by her threats.
‘Package! Madam, package is where? Please tell fast-fast. Time is short.’
‘I don’t know what package you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘But if you hurt even a hair on that girl’s head—’
The man on the phone said something to someone else in her office.
Then he disconnected the line.
The Qualis in front of her moved forward. The fight appeared to have escalated because she could see heads bobbing over the tops of Qualises, people clearly fighting, even some arms rising and falling, then the distinct sound of glass breaking and something heavy striking the metal body of a car. The car behind her honked long and hard for her to move forward. She glanced to the right: she was boxed in on that side. But on the left, there was a gap similar to the one in front of her, caused by the driver being distracted by the fight and forgetting to move forward in the queue. Horns were blaring everywhere now, adding to the chaos and confusion. The driver in the car beside hers had opened his door and was standing on the seat to get a better view. He was grinning and passing a running commentary to the other occupants of his car.
Nachiketa put the paddle shift into gear and eased out of her line, cutting across the car to her left and swinging around. She cut around it and U-turned, then drove back the way she had come, earning several horn blasts as drivers reacted angrily to her lack of civic sense. But most were distracted by the fight and the confusion, and in the chaos, she was able to slip back and turn into the lane heading back towards Delhi. In another moment she was back in the flow, heading towards Delhi Gate. She thought she could be in her office in half an hour at this hour, maybe even less. Tears began spilling from her eyes as she accelerated, overtaking car after car in rapid succession. She wondered what people made of the ‘handicapped’ sign on her rear windshield when she overtook them: they probably thought it was a joke. Crippled drivers didn’t go racing on one of the world’s deadliest highways. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She had never done anything like this before and her heart was pounding.
Then again, nobody had ever broken into her office, taken her assistant hostage and then called her to say in guttural Punjabi: ‘Lovely girl, this one. We had a great time. Now you speak quickly. Tell us where the package is. If you want to see this girl alive again, speak fast or say your goodbyes.’
She made it in twenty-two minutes.
4.3
IT WAS LATE BY the time Sheila dropped the last photocopy on the dishevelled pile beside her. Her habit of neatness made her gather up the pages and slip them back into the envelope. Then she stared at the thick envelope, stupefied. Her stomach had stopped complaining about half an hour ago though she had forced herself to stop reading and order some takeout from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. She had the tendency to get acidity if she missed a meal. That, and the fact that she had barely eaten all day, had worked out harder than usual, and she had burnt as many calories from stressing as from physical activity. But right now, food and calories were the last things on her mind. She was just too stunned by the contents of the yellow manila envelope.
She sat back, leaning her head against the wall. It was difficult to rest her head because the inside of the wall was coated in those faux half-stones used for weatherproofing that resembled stone walls of some ancient castle or fort. This side of the building leaked during the monsoon and she had had the waterproofing done just three months ago. Now, how the hell would she recover that cost? Forget that. How would she continue her business with these goons breathing down her neck? Assuming she didn’t give up the girls – which was a given – how the hell was she going to survive? Everything she had was invested in this place. She would lose it all.
Yet she wasn’t able to think about that either.
All she could think about was the contents of the manila envelope.
And what they meant.
She sat like that for several minutes, barely aware of the passing of time. The sound of someone calling out roused her. It was coming from the front of the building. She frowned and got to her feet and walked out of her office to the adjoining yoga room which was empty except for a pile of rubber mats neatly stacked in a corner. She had booked an up-and-coming power yoga instructor from the city to come down on alternate days for two sessions of fifty minutes each day. The classes were over-subscribed already and not, she assumed, because the instructor happened to be male and charismatic. Now she would have to call him to cancel and let him swallow the one month’s advance she had had to pay to book him.
The yoga room had floor-to-ceiling glass and brushed-aluminium French windows running along its length. She slid them open and stepped out, leaning out to look down at the front of the building.
A man was standing, peering up at the lit windows of her office, the only part of the building still illuminated.
‘Hello?’ she called out, waving to attract his attention.
He turned and saw her, and held up a plastic bag in one hand. ‘Parcel?’
Of course. The place was locked up. She had come in through the rear service entrance, but he must have been foxed by the locked front door and dark entranceway. She pointed to the rear of the building and said in Bengali: ‘Go around to the back. There’s a door there. I’m coming down.’
He nodded and began walking in the direction she had pointed.
She shut the French windows behind her and went through the gym room back to her office. Her handbag was on her desk. She unzipped it and pulled out her wallet and left the office.
He was waiting outside the rear door when she came out. Little more than a kid, thin and gangly. ‘Sorry to confuse you,’ she said in Bengali, ‘I forgot that the front door was locked up.’
He smiled at her awkwardly and she noticed his distinctly south-Indian features.
‘Bengali?’ she asked.
He smiled again and shook his head. ‘Chennai,’ he said by way of answer.
She nodded and paid him. This was the new Kolkata where nobody watched Bengali films anymore and Hindi movies ran to full houses, and your home delivery was more likely to be dropped off by a young man from Chennai than a native Bengali. After all, she was in Salt Lake City, the most modern township in the region, built entirely by Yugoslavians on contract. Anything was possible.
The bill came to Rs 267 and she had given him three hundred-rupee notes. He was counting off the change when she saw the red light flashing, reflected in the glass window behind the delivery boy. It seemed to hover in mid-air, disconnected from any other object, floating steadily in an arc as it approached. It went down the bylane and then was hidden from her view by the building.
She didn’t need to go to the front of the building to kn
ow that it was a police wireless van with the red light blinking on top, or that it had stopped outside her gym, or that it meant the police had come for her. She should have expected things to escalate quickly once she didn’t cooperate immediately with the municipal thugs. It was obvious that the big guns meant business this time. Their harassment, she might have endured stoically. But by sending in the cops, they had upped the ante, forcing her to fess up or get fucked. They knew her history; they knew she wouldn’t bear scrutiny by the authorities. They knew that Kolkata Police would love to take her in for questioning and hold her for as long as the big guns wanted her held.
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