by Kota Neelima
‘I feel,’ Manoj reflected, ‘such a woman is sure to like you, Gopi.’
‘Not necessarily. There is no reason why she should like me.’
‘You’re being modest now,’ Manoj told him kindly. ‘You are honest, hard working and humble. Women like such things.’
‘They also like food on the table!’ Ramesh pointed out.
‘She wouldn’t care about such mundane things,’ Sikander mentioned.
‘Women never do in our dreams.’
Sikander agreed sadly.
‘If it’s not too impertinent,’ Manoj hesitated, ‘what would you say to her, if you met such a woman?’
‘Well,’ Sikander pondered, ‘I can’t think of anything to say to her. But perhaps I’ll just ask if I could kiss her.’
A spoon clattered to the floor at the next table, and the attendant rushed to replace it.
‘Now you’re talking!’ Ramesh approved. ‘Tell me, how does it go in your imagination?’
‘Not very well.’ Sikander was melancholic. ‘I get slapped.’
Ramesh said sportively, ‘That wouldn’t stop a man like you!’
‘It does. You see, in my imagination, she loves me too.’
Manoj was happy, but Ramesh was earnest. ‘You know you’re lost, Gopi, don’t you? I mean, you have no idea what’s happening out there in the world. Girls like that don’t exist!’
‘They don’t for idiots like you!’ Sikander told him cordially.
‘Really? So why don’t we find out who is right?’ Ramesh challenged. ‘Take a day’s leave from work and find such a girl tomorrow. Then I’ll believe you.’
‘Yes, but you see,’ Sikander said, ‘such a precious girl would be under constant vigil. She would get into trouble if I met her.’
‘You’re all talk, man.’ Ramesh was disappointed. ‘You’ll never find a girl like that.’
‘She might find me.’
‘That’s going too far!’ Ramesh objected. ‘Look at this dump we live in. You think a girl like that will come for a guy like you? It’s crazy, just Bollywood crazy!’
‘Some dreams do come true,’ Sikander said hopefully. ‘She will come to me, and perhaps, we will sit at the next table here and have dinner.’
A glass of water spilled at the next table, and the attendant hurried with a mop.
‘Hate to break it to you brother,’ Ramesh said with regret, ‘but even if she did find you, you can’t afford her dinner today.’
Sikander was repentant. ‘Should have stuck to cabbages.’
‘Told you.’
‘That’s a beautiful dream, Gopi,’ Manoj complimented him. ‘I hope it will come true some day for you.’
‘It never will, Manoj,’ Sikander chuckled. ‘As Ramesh put it so eloquently, damn my imagination!’
They all laughed, and then it was others’ turn to tell their stories. They didn’t look up as the clumsy woman at the next table finished her dinner and left. They also didn’t notice that her hands shook when she gathered her bag or when she held out the payment at the counter. Mira walked out in a daze and somehow made it to the nearest bus stop. That’s where she discovered she was drenched; she never noticed that it had begun to rain.
It rained darkness that night, and everything seemed to be at various stages of invisibility. As Mira walked home, she wondered if the watchers in the jeep at the corner of the road could actually see her. Her mind was still preoccupied by Sikander’s words, spoken in his liquid voice, thinking of her. She could sense the depth of his feelings for her, but she had no courage to go that deep yet. Unlocking the front door, she left the dripping umbrella in the corridor and entered her house. She was glad she had dinner, she thought, there was not a thing to eat in the kitchen. Then she saw the light in the living room and wondered if she had left it on. She walked in and froze; there were four strangers in her living room. Three men sat in the chairs, and the one standing was the driver of the surveillance jeep; she recognized those cold dark eyes. She had never seen the others before. One of them vacated a chair pointedly; there were no escape options. She sat down.
The bald man at her desk said, ‘Apologies for this, Mira, I don’t like surprises either.’
‘Who are you?’ She felt the question superfluous, but still asked it for the sake of balance.
‘We can’t give you names, but let me just say that each one here represents a different client hurt by the publication of the Parliament tapes,’ he explained slowly. ‘Four tapes, four men. Get it?’
Mira had already got that part. ‘You are from the PCB?’
‘No. But I will file my report for them. They are very keen to clean up their image after what you have done. Questioning you officially wouldn’t have helped.’ He added pleasantly, ‘So, I am here to do it unofficially.’
Mira glanced at the bottle of water near the sink, an open shelf in the kitchen and the book next to one of the chairs. They had been waiting for some time. She had to listen to each of them speak before she could decide how to get out of this situation.
She began, ‘How did you enter my house?’
‘That’s insulting,’ the PCB man noted. ‘Anyway, you should be more bothered about why we are here.’
‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because we know you have found Sikander Bansi.’
Mira couldn’t help her expression of dismay.
‘It’s traditional to deny,’ he reminded helpfully. ‘But let’s skip all that and move to the part where we get down to the business of threatening you with consequences if you don’t tell us.’
Mira tested an idea. ‘I could complain to the police.’
‘And say what, my dear?’ The PCB man said, ‘We don’t exist.’
‘But you are wrong,’ she tried. ‘I don’t know where Sikander is.’
The PCB man considered her patiently. ‘Are you sure you want to go with that answer? We won’t give up until we find him.’
Those were their instructions, she could discern his thoughts now. ‘I can’t help you,’ she was apologetic. ‘I am still working on the clues, and I don’t know . . .’
‘You think this is a joke?’ The fat man in the other chair interrupted her. ‘You think what you did to Bharat Kumar was a joke?’
He stood up suddenly and reached her. Mira gasped and made to get up from the chair, but he rudely pushed her down again.
‘Listen to me carefully, woman,’ he said maliciously. ‘We know you have been missing for several days from your office and home. Where do you go? What do you do?’
‘But . . . that may be none of your business,’ she said, experimentally.
That was too much for Bharat’s man. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her out of the chair. ‘We will beat you up and leave you for dead here. No one,’ he promised darkly, ‘absolutely no one will know how you got killed, and no one will be interested to find out. Every important person in the city is hunting for Sikander Bansi, Mira. They won’t mind the methods we use to find him,’ he said, and shook her shoulders hard as a sample.
Mira winced in pain. His fingers dug into her arm that was hurt from the other night. One of the two standing men intervened and politely restrained the fat man.
When she was seated again, the rescuer spoke to her. ‘We know because you left your cell phone behind, Mira. Smart thing to do, but a bit too smart,’ he told her regretfully. ‘Just like when you published that tape against Nuri. We also know from your call records that you didn’t answer calls, or make any, for long intervals in the last few days of this week. In other words,’ Nuri’s man paused, ‘you have left your cell phone behind often to go somewhere. Where did you go?’
Mira was now shaken a little, both by their findings and their thoughts. She glanced up at Nuri’s man, he had a friendly face. ‘Is it a crime not to use my cell phone?’
‘No. But then we are not the best people to define what strictly constitutes crime.’
‘Oh.’
&nbs
p; ‘Now please tell me,’ he smiled. ‘Where were you tonight?’
She smiled back. ‘I was out for a walk.’
‘In this weather?’ he asked tolerantly.
‘I like walking in the rain,’ she revealed.
‘For two hours?’
‘I didn’t notice the time. I was working the clues in my head.’
The man thoughtfully glanced at the PCB man. She could detect that he believed her, but Bharat’s man didn’t.
‘How would you like your head smashed against that wall?’ he inquired. ‘Will that help you with the clues?’
Mira was fairly certain. ‘I don’t think so.’
The driver, who watched in silence, now said decisively, ‘I think I will give it a try.’
He strode to her, and Mira pressed back in the chair, perceiving the violence of his thoughts. The driver regarded her scornfully. ‘You thought I didn’t see you in the morning today?’
Mira stared at him, as she understood that the slackening of the surveillance had been just a trick.
‘You thought I was asleep, you little fool!’ he sneered. ‘We were giving you a long rope. We knew you would do something stupid if you thought we were not looking.’
‘I didn’t do anything stupid,’ Mira protested, as she calmly registered his thoughts. She continued desperately, ‘I don’t know why you even watch me. I am not hiding anything.’
‘We watch you because you made the fatal mistake of writing against Kim Sharma.’ The driver reached out deliberately and held her hair. Mira gasped in surprise and pain. He said, ‘I have wanted to do this for a very long time now. You, in your silly car, driving all over the city with your arrogant colleague.’
Others objected to this form of revenge for her driving preferences.
He pulled back her head roughly. ‘Tell me what I want to know. Now!’
Mira winced in agony but something in what he had said earlier caught her attention. Her mind rapidly assessed if others would buy the story she fabricated. The man’s grip on her hair tightened, and her eyes filled up in anguish.
‘Please let me go,’ she begged. ‘I will tell you everything.’
‘Good girl,’ the man left her and glanced triumphantly at his colleagues. ‘I was sure that would work. You have to know what kind of person responds to what type of force.’ He was smug as he told them, ‘It’s almost a science.’
Mira felt her head ache fiercely. ‘The truth is,’ she said in a feeble voice, ‘I have been seeing Salat for some time now.’ She paused, discerning the immediate doubts in the minds of the four men. She resolved each as she explained, ‘His family is against me. They even monitor our cell phones to ensure we are not in touch. So, we meet during office hours on some pretext.’
‘Your colleague?’ The PCB man repeated, a little incredulously. ‘Salat Vasudev?’
Mira nodded, and then said tragically, ‘But Salat’s parents don’t want their daughter-in-law to be a poor nobody from nowhere.’
Kim’s man chuckled. ‘They’ve got that right!’
Mira stayed silent, apparently hurt by the words.
Nuri’s man glanced at him in reprimand. ‘Don’t have to talk to her like that. What if someone said that about your sister?’
‘Why do you mention my sister here?’
‘Calm down,’ the PCB man said. ‘You don’t have a sister.’
‘No reason why she can’t be mentioned.’
‘Refrain from referring to families,’ Bharat’s man said, vexed. ‘Now where were we?’
After a moment’s search, they returned to the point. ‘So you were with Salat?’ The PCB man asked, ‘Anyone who can vouch for that?’
‘Of course not!’ Mira alarmed. ‘The idea was that no one should be able to.’
‘I’m telling you she is lying!’ Bharat’s man was on his feet again. ‘Let me just crack open her skull and look for the right answers . . .’
‘Wait!’ Nuri’s man stopped him and turned to Mira. ‘I agree that if you and Salat were escaping attention, it is unlikely that you would have any witnesses. But how about Salat? Can he corroborate your story?’
Mira knew they all wanted that. She had hoped that they would not call Salat from fear of exposure, but they didn’t seem to care.
‘Of course he can,’ she said, confident. ‘Call him if you want.’
Kim’s man reached into his pocket for a notebook, which seemed to contain Salat’s cell phone number. He dialed it from his phone and waited.
After a moment, he glanced at Mira accusingly. ‘There is no answer.’
Mira shrugged. ‘I can’t help it. I mean, what can I do if . . .’
‘Call him from her number,’ the PCB man suggested calmly.
Mira waited, worried. Salat wouldn’t ignore a call from her. Kim’s man took her cell phone from the desk and dialed Salat’s number. He answered it immediately.
‘Mr Vasudev?’ Kim’s man put the phone on the speaker.
‘Who . . . where is Mira? Who is this?’
‘She’s here. We have a question . . .’
‘Is she safe?’ Salat’s concerned voice filled that silent room. ‘Let me talk to her.’
‘No, Mr Vasudev. You talk to me.’
‘All right. I will,’ he retorted, and Mira knew he understood there was something wrong. ‘But what’s with that gangster tone?’ He chuckled, startling everyone. ‘Is this a joke? Are we on reality television or something?’
‘Just answer the question.’ Kim’s man struggled to stay focused. ‘Were you with Mira today?’
Mira held her breath for the answer. She hoped Salat remembered his own words to her—she had no one who would worry. Or call.
‘Of course I was with her today,’ Salat said. ‘Who is this? What kind of dumb question is that?’
Mira lowered her eyes in relief.
‘You were with her, fine,’ Kim’s man spoke ominously. ‘But at what time of the day?’
Mira wasn’t bothered. She knew Salat would immediately know which answer would best fit the pattern.
‘Just left her a short while ago,’ Salat said easily. ‘Hasn’t she reached home? Are you from the police? Has something happened to her . . .?’
‘Yes, she is home. No, I’m not from the police. Nothing has happened to . . . wait a minute, I will ask the questions.’ Kim’s man remembered, annoyed. ‘Why were you with her today?’
‘What do you mean?’ Salat demanded.
‘It’s a simple question. Why were you with her and not with anyone else today? There must be girls your parents approve of.’
‘But I don’t approve of them.’ Salat paused, suspicious. ‘Why are you asking me all this? Have you been sent by my parents to spy on me?’
‘Of course not!’ Kim’s man was offended, and the others smiled discreetly.
‘Then get out of the way!’ Salat was blunt. ‘Let me talk to Mira!’ ‘Only after you answer one last question,’ Kim’s man said and added nastily, ‘You get this wrong, and you will never speak to Mira again.’
‘All right, but you must reconsider your style of talking,’ Salat said, and added disapprovingly, ‘Really doesn’t suit your voice, you know. You have the potential for an urbane and sophisticated . . .’
‘Will you please,’ Kim’s man said with immense patience, ‘tell me about her cell phone?’
Mira still sat with her eyes lowered to her hands. She knew the others watched her but couldn’t help stiffening at that question.
‘You mean why she doesn’t use it much? Doesn’t answer calls or texts?’ Salat asked.
‘Yes. I find it strange.’
‘You wouldn’t, if you knew my parents! I mean, if they can’t appreciate my emotions,’ Salat said upset, ‘I have no reason to respect their feelings either.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Kim’s man was distracted for a moment. ‘Didn’t you try to explain to them?’
‘Explain?’ Salat was agitated. ‘What can you explain to parents who ke
ep track of our cell phones to see if we are in touch?’
That confirmed Mira’s story, and the others in the room exchanged glances.
‘I see what you mean.’ Kim’s man frowned. ‘But you can’t abandon your parents just because they are crazy. It’s a given.’
‘I know. But I also can’t leave a girl who never answers her cell phone, just because it’s a call from me. She is an angel!’
Mira uneasily glanced around to see if anyone got the sarcasm; no one did.
‘Can I talk to her now?’ Salat asked. ‘Please.’
Kim’s man gravely handed her the cell phone and sauntered away, lost in thought.
‘Salat . . .,’ she put the phone off the speaker. ‘These guys think I have found Sikander. They are in my home . . .’
‘I’m on my way,’ Salat told her. ‘So will be the police. Don’t worry.’
The call ended, and Mira regarded the men as they prepared to leave. Kim’s man shook his head at some thought, Nuri’s man consulted about logistics with the PCB’s man, and Bharat’s man sat alone, despondent.
Mira wondered if she could prevent them from leaving her house for just another ten or twenty minutes more, until the police arrived. Then she reproached herself for her simple thinking; the police would never arrive while the men were still there. They wouldn’t be that suicidal.
Fifteen
It was a little after 9 o’clock when Mira finally woke up on Tuesday morning. She sighed with relief. There was no headache, but she was still groggy from the pain medication. Mira closed her eyes again as memories of last night came to her like forms through winter fog. The four men had left soon after the phone conversation with Salat, and, as she expected, the police had arrived a little later. When she was done explaining, Sita Patnaik had checked her notes clinically.
‘Let me get this straight. You were being watched by one of these four men for some days now.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you have no names.’
‘No.’
‘They told you they work for the People’s Party, the National Party, the Bharat Party, the People’s Crime Bureau and the individual known as Kim Sharma.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you have no evidence.’
