Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

  ‘Just the Men’s Room.’

  Gomes’s eyes glazed as his gorilla brain began processing. One waited for the coin to drop. The little red eyes widened, and he must have pictured Ernst cowering in the toilet stall because his mouth spread into a smile. His teeth sparkled.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Gomes said. ‘We just wanted your mian. He needs to return what he’s got. You know, all this really has nothing to do with you. But you go embarrass me, bribing that drug addict Waller to perform an unauthorised autopsy. You realise how much trouble you people have caused? The fucking Chinaman now comes daily to try and file a police report over his dead nephew. He is in there now. Every time he goes to the police, I have to be present. Chutiya is driving us crazy. He may not have any work, but we do.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ernst said, with utmost sincerity in his voice. ‘But there was no bribe. And you did kill his nephew.’

  Once again, Gomes demonstrated maturity by not reacting. Instead, he gave Ernst’s neck a friendly squeeze. ‘We shouldn’t be fighting,’ he said. ‘I am here to help. The Chinaman should do the right thing and come to me. Have him give me the autopsy report. I know everyone in the police. I can be of assistance.’ Asking the murderer’s help to investigate the murder. It had India written all over.

  ‘Sure,’ Ernst said. ‘I’ll let him know. But for now, why not let my friend go?’

  ‘You mean the Madrasi thief? Tell you what. Ask him to return what they took and I may even let you go.’ He gave Ernst’s neck a gentle squeeze and shouted something in Konkani—lingua franca down the upper Malabar Coast. Salim Ali’s assailants jumped back to life. One of the five men reached out and slapped Salim Ali tentatively, just to see what would happen. Ernst tried to pull away, but Gomes’s arm was still across his shoulder like a yoke. And as any buffalo will tell you, a yoke is a yoke.

  Gomes put out a sterner Konkani, and more realistic blows slammed Salim Ali against the Fiat. A fist smashed against his face followed by another blow to the head. Ernst struggled again to break free, but that didn’t seem to bother Gomes. Salim Ali lay sprawled, and one could see the gash under his eye. There was more blood running down the side of his head. Before you knew it, he was back up again on his moral high ground, eyeballing the assailants. Although in a chokehold, Ernst couldn’t help but feel a pride of sorts.

  A passing vehicle slowed down. It was a silver Mercedes with D’Souza’s Japanese flock staring through hermetically sealed windows. They looked out with identical mouths wide open. Gomes waved with his other arm like a friendly native and sent them on their way. Slowly, Ernst’s yoke turned into a vice while over there, the five Marathas continued playing ping-pong with Salim Ali’s head.

  Way back when Ernst was interned, he would practise holds every day with Purandhar’s few Japanese POWs. Ground fighting, the Japanese prisoners would yell in exasperation. Ground fighting! All very well, except that he was now running on empty. The morning’s rush was gone. He could have used some of it now. Besides, it had been a while since he had gone limp the way he now did, becoming a dead weight to throw a confused Gomes into letting go. Ernst fell to the ground and waited.

  Seeing him in the missionary position apparently stirred Henry Gomes. Enough to kneel and grasp at his collar for purchase, allowing Ernst to wrap his legs around the Goan’s waist. This put a jiujutsu cramp to Gomes’ style, literally, because he needed his hips to swing his arms. Probably why those punches raining down on Ernst didn’t kill him.

  They did hurt. Feeling his lower lip tear, Ernst tried to mentally assess the damage as his face kept getting slammed by Gomes. There was something ringing in his ear. Seeing a massive fist bear down once more, he shut his eyes. When he tried to watch out for the next blow, his right eyelid remained glued. It felt mushy and his nose flopped as he moved his head. There was this strong taste of blood and his mouth began filling up. He swallowed, and it filled up again. Gomes didn’t seem too worried about Ernst choking on his own blood. He did look irritated at the legs wrapped around his waist, stumped how they cut the locomotive power to his pistons. Then shrugging off the situation as ridiculous, he worked past Ernst’s weakening guard and freed himself from one leg, then the other. Within a few seconds, he was at ninety degrees, chest to chest, freed and back in charge.

  By the time Ernst reached into his pocket, Gomes had mounted him again and was sitting on his chest. He placed his hands around Ernst’s neck and in a gradual squeeze brought his face down close. His breath was cinnamon fresh.

  ‘All this,’ he said, ‘could have been avoided, no?’

  ‘Not really,’ Ernst replied, ‘not after what you did.’ Pressing the straight razor into Gomes neck, he then said, ‘I may be dying anyway. Why don’t you join me?’

  ~

  Cold steel to his skin and beady eyes gone wide, Gomes let go Ernst’s throat and froze, displaying no interest in shifting even an inch. Ernst was beginning to feel they were finally getting somewhere, when Gomes went and jerked as if kicked. Blood painted the straight razor and Ernst’s hand turned red. A form carved in granite hovered above them casting a black shadow. The bloodied razor fell to the ground.

  Chhote Bhai lifted a groggy Ernst before kicking out once more, this time at Gomes’ six-pack showing off through his tight T-shirt. Gomes howled and doubled up, hands going from neck to stomach, and back again, leaving bloody palm prints walking all over that muscle encased in white.

  ‘Aaiee ghuh,’ the gorilla grunted, calling out in Marathi for his mother.

  Ernst was starting to see things, because it appeared Chhote Bhai was protecting him from his own pet gorilla. Confusing, but all for the best. He was certain Dr. Waller’s two personalities would come together with Chhote Bhai to agree that cancer patients shouldn’t get into a fight. He felt feverish and wasn’t sure whether that actually was Mohan Driver, over there with smudged Hindu caste-mark still on forehead, bending over Salim Ali to take the beating meant for a Muslim. Ernst found it impossible to function on his own steam and Chhote Bhai had to hold him in both arms. Something round pressed against his armpit and unless he was imagining things again, the man was holding on to that bloody hockey ball of his while cradling him. Delirious he may well be, but this was worth noting. Talk about a fetish.

  At least he wasn’t imagining her standing across the street in the same khadi sari she had worn to the club. She would’ve been shimmying home and stopped to watch the tamasha. A dark waif she was, standing over there, watching along with her brother, Kirti, who made for a milky white replica, minus those teeth. This wasn’t the time to think about how her teeth had grown on him. What Ernst could not pinpoint earlier, was now clear in his befuddled state. Standing next to each other, their kinship—she and Kirti the caddie-boy—couldn’t be more obvious. She, on the other hand, remained confusing as ever, her eyes ablaze with either anger or some strange excitement. Who knows? Let Chhote Bhai figure it out. Or Sassoon. He couldn’t be bothered. But he couldn’t take his eyes away either, and she stared back as if on fire. Held like a child, he remained pressed against Chhote Bhai’s torso. Feverish from all that dark flesh here and there, everywhere, his mind wandered. He tried pulling away.

  Chhote Bhai let him struggle, settling him down in the rear seat of the one-eyed Fiat. Curled up at the back, Ernst found he had an erection. How could he not be in perfect health? He studied his blackened fingernails. They looked just like they would in the schoolyard in Berlin, after turning black and blue in the cold and dangerously close to frostbite. His teacher would cup those freezing hands in his own and blow to warm them before kissing the cold away.

  Salim Ali was still out there with Mohan Driver, so Ernst raised himself up to squint in that direction. The pummelling had stopped; Chhote Bhai’s presence saw to that. The Marathas stood away from Salim Ali with injured, ‘who me?’ looks. While Gomes remained in a pool of blood, there was no arterial spray, so Ernst guessed he would live. It wasn’t the cut on his neck that had kept him curled up,
nor the kick to a stomach designed for road rollers. There was something else. A gorilla assumes that position only when facing an angry alpha-male.

  ‘The Madrasi has the gunny bag,’ Gomes whimpered. ‘So I thought…’

  Chhote Bhai bent low on his haunches and took a swing with his right hand—how badminton players sometimes sweep the shuttlecock just before it touches the court. There was a crack when Gomes’ skull made contact with the hockey ball.

  ‘Don’t ever say Madrasi again,’ Chhote Bhai said. ‘And next time, don’t think. Ask.’

  Gomes lay there, motionless.

  Chhote Bhai turned to where Salim Ali stood, face bloodied from the head wound. Mohan Driver stood by Salim Ali’s side, as formidable as any henchman. Looking Chhote Bhai in the eye, Salim Ali said, ‘I won’t thank you,’ his voice so different, it penetrated Ernst’s haze. ‘I know what you and Gomes did to Arjun. Why? What did he ever do to you?’

  This would be where Chhote Bhai demanded the gunny bag with all those wires sticking out. ‘We know it was you,’ Ernst remembered Chhote Bhai asking Arjun in his Tamil English. ‘Bleddy bastard. Come on, just return the gunny bag.’

  Instead, he stared at his feet and it was Salim Ali who spoke.

  ‘You wanted something, I know, so you go kill him? How does that work?’

  And then, ‘Namaaz five times a day. For what?’

  The incorruptible are unlike the rest of us. Salim Ali made that clear from as far back as his job interview five years ago, and Ernst had hired him on the spot. Surely, Chhote Bhai saw something similar in Salim Ali today, because he couldn’t look him in the eye. Salim Ali had advised Ernst: ‘These past so many years I’ve greeted him, looked down and walked away. Next time, you do the same.’

  This time though, it was the slumlord who looked down and walked away.

  ‘I hope you don’t suffer too much,’ Salim Ali called after him, and once again, the voice wasn’t his.

  If this was Salim Ali going Buddhist, Ernst preferred not to be around. Slipping into darkness, he slumped unconscious in the back seat.

  29

  Rusalka, Song to the Moon

  It’s a simple fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

  —Paul Theroux

  The crowds were gone once past Haji Ali, and the buildings along the gentle upward climb at Peddar Road could be any European city. They entered Bombay, and Ernst was glad to leave Mumbai behind. He also wanted to leave his illness behind; whiz past the cancer that was now his shadow. He just needed some naphtha in his tank, get back his energy, then run like a bhenchod. He had proved incapable of killing himself. On the other hand, surviving a gorilla attack—no problem. Why not cancer? In a pivot from earlier that day, he now felt there were at least some things he could do properly. Saving his arse appeared to be one.

  Marine Drive opened up as soon as Mohan Driver turned the corner at Walkeshwar to take the Queen’s Necklace. It was past the magic hour, when golden sunrays angle to light the three-kilometres of whitewashed art deco arched around the Arabian Sea. Street lighting took over instead, setting ablaze the four-lane road that cupped the waterfront giving it its name. The light struck at welts on Mohan Driver’s neck, making their dark blue stand out. Blood caked around his left ear. Ernst wondered how his own face looked with the nose flapping every time he moved. He dozed off again, until Mohan Driver screeching around the Regal Cinema roundabout had him sit up, cursing .

  Mohan Driver was an illegal sub-tenant in the police quarters behind Colaba’s British-era police chowki that ruled Colaba Causeway. The police quarters rose behind the chowki—socialist cubes cocking their snook at the Gothic artwork in front of them. Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh-style cubes were sprouting all over urban Indian landscapes; each copy diminished from the Chandigarh originals, until left with the kind of despondent block where Mohan Driver resided, paying under-the-table rent to a police sub-inspector for the use of one room, no toilet. He would come to Karim Court every morning for a shit, turning Parvatibai into the harridan she became for the rest of the day. They hated each other like a married couple. Ernst asked him to park by the curb.

  ‘I’ll drive from here. You go home. Clean up and get some rest. Just look at you.’

  Mohan Driver shook his head the way one does at an idiot. His eyes darted back and forth in the rear-view. Unbelievable, they seemed to say and he gunned forward instead, throwing Ernst back. Mohan Driver knew something was wrong. Not the damaged nose from the scuffle. Something else. Something deeper. Ernst’s hands started to shake again. He wanted to pull away and regress to some earlier date. Any date. The worst moment from the past would do, as long as pre-cancer. He wondered how his hand had remained rock steady while holding the straight razor to Gomes’s neck. But then unlike the cancer, Gomes, one could see.

  Jai Gurudeva, Jai Mahadeva, Jai, Jai…

  3rd Pastor Lane was still another few minutes up the Causeway. Turn right on to Pastor Lane, then up the third lane to the left, and you get a row of mildewed buildings lining either side. The whorehouse ruled the lane from above Ernst’s apartment, lit up as if every evening was Diwali.

  Once home, his head rang like an alarm clock to remind him what a chutiya he was—trying to kill himself today to avoid dying tomorrow. The telephone too, started to ring. He attempted shrugging off a semi-hysterical Parvatibai, failed, threw Mohan Driver at her and dove down the corridor. Could be Salim Ali on the phone, maybe Major Punjabi, possibly, Bhairavi. Why not? She saw what happened. She would be concerned about his well-being. She had his number. It was Adam Sassoon.

  ~

  ‘They’re beating up white men now? Hell’s going on? You defended yourself with a straight razor?’

  Yes. After trying to kill myself with it.

  ‘Told you to get rid of the darkie. You never listen. They were after him. He has stolen property. Don’t you get it? They won’t let that go and I won’t have you killed in the process, you hear? For God’s sake. At this point in our lives?’

  True, they were after Salim Ali. Gomes had said as much. But then, who wasn’t? Still, Ernst had to ask how the great man knew. And by the way, who were they? Iyer? Hanson? The police? Chhote Bhai and Gomes? The one thing they all had in common was, nothing.

  Hell with all that. The only thing Sassoon wanted was Ernst’s safety. ‘You win. I’ll have Punjabi deliver those bloody pipes along with the damn advance. Satisfied? Just be safe.’

  Ernst assured him he was satisfied and safe. Sassoon was unconvinced.

  ‘That darkie of yours. Get him to return what he’s got, or he goes. No argument.’ Ernst didn’t argue and placed the handset back. As he walked to the bedroom, Parvatibai followed right behind, breathing down his neck like his very own, three hundred pound grim reaper.

  Inside, he found Schwester Ingrid afloat on the bed. It was the Western Classical Hour and AIR no longer mourning the PM. Delibes’ Lakmé poured from the Grundig Radiogram. Not the ‘Flower Duet’ that got that teacher of his killed along with his dachshund, but the ‘Bell Song’ with Lakshmi standing in the town square, forced by her Brahmin father to sing and lure her English lover out in the open. Schwester Ingrid had her eyes closed, caught up in the deceit.

  ‘You should clean up first,’ Parvatibai said. Ernst ignored her. Sensing the mood, Parvatibai shut the door behind him.

  It had been a long day and yes, he needed to clean up first. The plan was to then dwell on Bhairavi. How and why she walked into a gora watering hole like a Goddess and straight to Sassoon’s table. Then later, stood alongside her brother, watched Chhote Bhai cradling Ernst like a child, placing him in the one-eyed Fiat, kicking the shit out of Gomes.

  Schwester Ingrid, however, was spread before him, bringing on Christmas early and so nothing else mattered. Not the torn lip, nor the flopping nose or the taste of blood. Not Arjun, or how Salim Ali or Tufan was doing. Not Chhote Bhai, not the Seth or the Lala or the cheque, nor the sister or the brother—the black-and-white duo
. Not even the fact he was back in business with the great man, who was worried about him.

  To set the mood, Ernst went to his ragged row of seventy-eights lining one side of the shelf above the bed. He switched off the radio, picked out and placed an Emmy Destinn on the turntable. Not one in her native Czech, but from the time she sang ‘Rusalka’s Song To The Moon’ in German to a hysterical Berlin audience.

  The Aryans loved her across generations and listened to her encore performances ad nauseum over their subsidised, little Volksempfängers. That is, until Mein Führer decided on Czechoslovakia for dinner. After that, the next time any Berliner would hear her sing ‘Rusulka’s Song To The Moon’, was when his father had played it from his window ledge at the Jüdische Krankenhaus overlooking Iranische Strasse—the Victrola dangerously resting on the ledge to allow the Czech opera singer continue soaring over the city she once owned.

  The sight of a big, fat, Jewish Göring playing a Victrola on the window ledge drew passers-by. The gathering crowd in turn drew soldiers and a couple of SS men from the Sammellager who couldn’t believe their eyes. When his father started to dance a jig, it was too much, and the SS officers commandeered the gawking soldiers to charge the hospital. Seeing them rush the compound, Siegfried had gone inside and stripped, to famously wait for them in the bathtub.

  A young Ernst had once asked his father what ‘Rusulka’s Song To The Moon’ was about? ‘It’s about sacrifice,’ his father had explained. ‘Not the Wagnerian bullshit. But how it’s always fucking futile. Remember that.’

  Reclining on the bed with the record wobbling to Emmy Destinn from the radiogram, Schwester Ingrid was not amused. Is this how he planned to seduce her? It was impossible to hear that song, and not think of his father playing it in his bathroom while the Nazis were at the door.

  After the incident, Schwester Ingrid had helped move Siegfried’s body to the morgue in the basement of the Jüdische Krankenhaus, under the Pathology section. Below the garden that they cordoned off with barbed wire for their Sammellager holding area, from where they packed and shipped Jews. The Sammellager is where his father should have been in the first place, waiting to be shipped East like the other Jews, she wrote, the familiar vitriol rising from the priceless onion paper like fumes.