Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

  ‘You’re begging for a heart attack,’ she said, as he pushed her away. ‘Waking up like that at your age. What’s wrong with you? It was just a dream.’

  But it wasn’t. He clearly remembered going for the door, not too long after the Deputy Commissioner left to personally attend to Salim Ali, but it was locked from outside. And anyway it was too late. Ernst remembered three loud gunshots reverberating off the chowki walls. He remembered thinking the leaky roof would come down. And just because all he wanted after that happened, was to crawl into bed and pretend nothing had happened, doesn’t mean it didn’t.

  40

  Swastikas & Synagogues

  The closer to a synagogue, the farther from God.

  —Some smart-assed rabbi

  He tried explaining to Parvatibai he wasn’t dreaming, that he had seen the body. They had even let him curl up at Salim Ali’s feet, with its overgrown, black nails extending from shrivelled toes. Seated against the wall at the other end with Salim Ali’s head on his lap, Tsering Tufan showed no signs of life. Unlike the dead comrade’s head on his lap with halo intact. That smile on Salim Ali’s face—as if chasing Americans in his sleep.

  Having said that, there was havoc all around the smile that didn’t belong to any Salim Ali anyone knew. However beatific the smile, it was unable to distract from the tears to the chest and neck, and the small, neat hole between the eyes. Ernst had to wonder if once again, the bullet-hole was only meant for him, or whether others could see it too. As with the Headless Sikh and Arjun, so with Salim Ali. An autopsy would be an absolute waste of time.

  The lockup had been emptied of detainees and shemales, although the rest of the police chowki was packed with mourners. Ernst’s workers from Goregaon overflowed into the compound. Slowly, more began to show up. The police looked on nervously as the crowd started assuming proportions disproportionate to Salim Ali’s size. It was as if Lenin had died .

  Bhairavi was in a white sari of the kind worn by Partition widows all over Sindhi Camp. Seeing her, one couldn’t tell that only just now she had been all in red, face plastered with whitening makeup and engaged to be married. Standing by the wide-open grill, she clutched at Salim Ali’s blind mother to save herself from drowning. Holding up the old lady’s other arm was Princess Kirti, as if keeping the three of them afloat. The other shemales were nowhere around but princesses don’t disappear that easily. Any other day, and Ernst would’ve lingered over the black and white contrast between brother and sister, two sisters, whatever.

  Salim Ali’s mother was in black as always. She had her goggles on, and muttering away in Malayalam.

  Ernst found himself mumbling a Sahajiya prayer in Bangla that the Purandhar gardener’ s wife—his Tantaji—had taught him in another life.

  ‘Please don’t,’ Tufan said from where he sat holding his comrade’s head.

  ~

  They brought a worn-out, white bed sheet and shoved it at Ernst. Johnny Walker had a bored look pasted across his face. He wasn’t even trying.

  ‘Detainee used this to hang himself.’

  ‘Look over there. That’s a bullet hole in his head. Two to his torso.’

  ‘Who says? Are you an expert?’

  ‘Where’s the bed?’ Ernst asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where did he get that bed sheet to hang himself? There’s no bed in the lockup. Let’s ask the other detainees. They must have seen it happen.’

  The Deputy Commissioner swooped in. Returning after a massage, that’s how relaxed he looked. Tension released by doing whatever he had done, his eyes sparkled, but he remained solemn.

  ‘This man’s an idiot. No idea how he became a policeman. There was no bed in there and of course, no bed sheet. Mr. Ali hanged himself from a ventilator in the toilet, using his vest. Our fault. We take full responsibility. We allowed him use of the private latrine as a special consideration. I see now why we shouldn’t have.’

  Deputy Commissioner Jahagirdar then took some time to stand sombrely before Salim Ali’s bullet-ridden body. He wasn’t the type to leave loose ends, and would, ‘personally make sure everything was in proper order and verifiable.’

  He hoped they were completely satisfied.

  ‘Salim Ali didn’t wear a vest. I left him bare-chested after he took off his shirt.’

  ‘Did I say vest? I meant his shirt.’

  ‘You know his family and friends too can see the bullet holes on his body. This time, it isn’t just me.’

  ‘People see what they want to see, Mr. Steiger. It takes professionals to decide how death occurred.’

  ‘Look at you,’ Ernst said. ‘So confident you will prevail.’

  ‘The truth, Mr. Steiger. Ultimately truth prevails.’ The Deputy Commissioner pointed to a black-and-white Gandhi smiling from the wall.

  ‘I’ve seen it before, Commissioner. Confident people like you. So confident, they kept meticulous records on the Jews they killed. You should read up on what happened to them.’

  ‘I hope they were dealt with the utmost severity,’ the Deputy Commissioner said.

  ~

  When Ernst tried getting Tufan to stand, he refused to budge. Looking into his eyes, it wasn’t just Salim Ali who had died that evening. Giving up on Tufan to edge past Bhairavi, Ernst mumbled words of comfort to Salim Ali’s mother who remained stone cold unlike her dead son with that smile of his. As for Bhairavi, she wasn’t adamant or anything this time, or demanding Ernst does something about what was visited on her Salim Ali. She didn’t even notice him wearing her gold, swastik pendant from the other day. Princess Kirti was another matter, and her eyes flashed to ask: What do you plan to do?

  Crawl into bed and die .

  The one-eyed Fiat was waiting outside with Mohan Driver gunning it to whisk the Mian away. Where to, no idea, but one look at Ernst’s face and Mohan Driver could tell it didn’t matter anymore.

  ‘Man, ich will nach Hause,’ Ernst muttered, stumbling in through the car’s rear door; numb with shock, and tired from loss after loss, one after the other, tired from being sickly, and from this and that; from the fact that there was no respite at all. Listening to Ernst mumble, Mohan Driver shook his head at the rear-view and turned the ignition off. The engine choked and died. After all these years, and despite it being clear something must have happened, there was still a part of him that expected white men to be white men, and for Ernst to behave like one.

  Wide awake after Parvatibai woke him to put an end to his screaming, Ernst remembered swearing at Mohan Driver for refusing to re-start the engine. He needed to go home, fall into bed and die.

  ‘Sa’ab,’ Mohan Driver had said. ‘If you behave like this, how do we get even?’

  ~

  The next day, Salim Ali’s mother refused to listen until they all had chai.

  She got busy in the kitchen over an open flame with tea leaves, sugar, milk, and no eyes. When she returned to the crowded living room muttering in Malayalam, she looked directly at Ernst. It didn’t surprise him anymore.

  ‘She wants you to cremate Salim Mian as quickly as possible,’ a workshop fellow translated.

  Mohan Driver corrected the man. ‘Chutiya. You mean she wants Salim Mian buried. They’re Muslims.’

  ‘I know.’ The worker was belligerent.

  ‘You know what?’ Mohan Driver asked. ‘Idiot.’

  There was a stream of Malayalam from the old woman, who kept facing Ernst through the rapid fire. Then it was the translator’s turn.

  ‘She says, I am Muslim. My son wasn’t. He wanted to be cremated. So cremate him.’

  ~

  The smallish doors to the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue at Kala Ghoda in South Bombay looked west, past the Gateway of India and across the Arabian Sea toward Jerusalem. It was a hole of an entrance and not worthy of either the stylish pediment above it, or the building. Indians called it the Kala Ghoda Synagogue, after the statue of a black horse sporting King Edward (VII) erected nearby by the Sassoons. Others called it t
he Gora Temple, since only white people were welcome. Brown Jews—here since antiquity—worshipped more modestly at Jacob Circle near the city jail, in their own synagogue adorned with “good luck” swastikas. Ernst envied the untainted bastards.

  There being no set blueprint for synagogues, the Keneseth Eliyahoo choose to look like a blue, birthday cake with white icing—a large, ornamental, neo-Baroque, Christopher Wren of a cake that Ernst found hard to swallow. In Berlin, synagogues would face into courtyards, ashamed of themselves and resisting the urge to show off. This building was an open declaration of Jewish wealth in British India—not so much these days, but still.

  Inside the doorway was an old armoire—thin and narrow, minus doors—remodelled ages ago to hang outerwear no one wore anymore. The mirror inside remained unobstructed by coats or jackets. Mottled with large, red oxide spots where the spluttered aluminium had worn off, there was still enough mirror to confirm Ernst’s decline from rock bottom. His face a shock—as much by its age and sickliness, as by disarray and defeat. It was a reminder he had thrown himself into bed after Salim Ali’s cremation without taking a shower. He had woken up, brushed aside Parvatibai’s chai, brushed his teeth, not bothered with much else and walked all the way to Kala Ghoda clutching the earthen pot with Salim Ali in it.

  ‘You’ll know what to do. Just make him happy,’ Salim Ali’s mother had said, refusing to keep the ashes.

  It took him twenty minutes or so to get to Kala Ghoda past the stares and with passers-by giving him wide berth. Looking into the mirror in the armoire, he could see why. Hair stiff with dirt, his eyes were bloodshot from illness and everything else. He looked befuddled and not particularly sane holding an earthen pot to his chest. People had edged away from him on the pavement. India has no time for slovenly, white men. The least a gora can do is look like one.

  ~

  The synagogue’s cantor was winding up. Bobbing yarmulkes lifted the Torah to take it back to the Ark, placing it against the wall nearest to Jerusalem. It was a full minyan today, crowding wooden benches around the raised Tevah. Looking out for the divine presence that hovers over any gathering of ten Jews or more, Ernst found Adam Sassoon holding court.

  ‘Quite a Shabbat,’ Sassoon offered loudly, and waved. When Ernst walked over to him amidst the chattering yarmulkes, the great man said, ‘Every bloody Jew in town’s here.’ He, of course, meant the white ones.

  Ernst couldn’t help but notice every one of them staring at him. He took in the interior, built by one Jacob Sassoon—1885, it said on the pediment—to commemorate his father, one David Sassoon, the original prophet from Baghdad who dressed like one—turban and all—preferring to speak in Farsi even after buying himself a baronetcy.

  ‘By the way, Old Chap,’ Adam Sassoon said, all pukka and plummy and with no signs of Baghdadi ancestry, ‘you do realise you’re wearing a swastika around your neck.’

  ~

  She had removed and asked he place her swastika pendant on the dining table the other day at Tufan’s flat, so she could practise with the sword. Instead, he didn’t just keep it, but was now wearing it. Inside a synagogue. Still, why the fuss?

  A yarmulke stepped up to tell him. ‘You are, after all, inside a synagogue.’

  The sun broke through the lights on one of the stained glass windows behind the Ark. It caught the gold in her pendant and set the swastika aflame. Lit, it took on a life of its own, spreading its presence amongst the Anglicised Sephardics like wildfire. When Ernst followed Sassoon’s gaze, the women were lined up along their gallery—a clutch of pursed lips looking down at him. Cathy Sassoon stood out in stark relief.

  ‘Please remove the swastika,’ the yarmulke requested. ‘It’s causing offence.’

  On the face of it, a reasonable request.

  ‘It’s a Hindu swastik. Got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Is that a German speaking, or a Jew?’

  Not bad. The yarmulke couldn’t help looking pleased with himself. The outrage he fanned was silent, but it was sucking up oxygen from the room and it scoured Ernst’s skin. When Cathy Sassoon chirped in from above, her voice was like an angel from heaven—the disapproving kind.

  ‘If you won’t remove that thing, Ernst, please leave. Don’t spoil Shabbat for us.’

  When her husband stepped up, Ernst didn’t know whether to be surprised or not.

  ‘You heard the man,’ His Divine Presence said to the congregation. ‘It’s bloody Hindu. Got nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Moving on,’ he continued, ‘What’s that you’re clutching, Old Chap? Makes me nervous.’

  ‘Salim Ali.’

  There was a pause while Sassoon struggled.

  ‘Know who’s that?’ Ernst asked.

  Sassoon admitted he didn’t.

  ‘My communist darkie. He’s dead. These are his ashes. I loved him like a son.’

  ‘Forgot his name for a second there. I’m sorry.’

  He did recall Arjun’s name though—the boy killed at Fertilisers. The darkie’s friend. Thick as thieves, they were. On the other hand, the great man had no idea they knew the Sindhi Camp girl, Bhairavi.

  ‘The one doing accounts and filing for you.’

  ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Great men however stay on point. ‘Your man. What was it? Suicide?’

  ‘Funny you should say that. Because there’s this Deputy Commissioner who absolutely insists it is. Man named Jahagirdar. You may know him. Fond of aiming between the eyes, cowboy style. He shot that truck driver they scrapped off the burner, and he shot Salim Ali. There’s a bullet hole through his forehead, but the Commissioner tells us he hanged himself.’

  Ernst had forgotten about Cathy Sassoon, who hadn’t forgotten about him.

  ‘Adam! Are you going to have him put away that awful swastika or not?’

  ‘Bloody had it with her,’ the great man muttered and reaching into his breast pocket, took out a gold-plated coin, the size of a rupee hanging from a thin chain. Looking straight up at Cathy, he put it around his neck. The cheap, gold-plated swastika had a glint to it while smiling to demonstrate the meaning of friendship, or maybe tell the wife go fuck herself; Ernst couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Sassoon asked. ‘About this Jahagirdar bugger?’

  ‘Pretty much. Man gets off on shooting people.’

  ‘So what do you plan to do about it?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘I’ll have someone look into it,’ the great man promised, the swastika pendant still around his neck.

  Jews wearing swastikas, Ernst thought, and almost asked Sassoon where he got his. But it would ruin the moment, so he let it go.

  41

  Salim Ali’s Happy

  Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.

  —Herodotus

  Ernst woke up coughing blood. He saw himself shrinking by the day while this thing inside him grew bigger—sometimes corking his arse, sometimes giving him stomach cramps, at times a fever, and now there was blood in his spittle. Yet, given the circumstances, he felt calm and generally fine. One day, he wouldn’t. He didn’t need Andhi Ma to tell him no amount of radiation therapy could stop that day coming.

  Knowing the final outcome, to then say, ‘No’; to say, ‘I decline this needless treatment’; to say, ‘I’ll be fine, I’ve lived with this for so long it’s now a part of me—just my own cells going a little nuts, wandering off and continuing to just do what they do’; and then to go on to say, ‘I don’t wish to fight my own body, so thanks, but no thanks, I won’t bombard myself with X-rays’; it was beyond his powers to do that. Come September, he knew he would be on an aeroplane to West Berlin and the Jüdische Krankenhaus, where they could go ahead and irradiate the shit out of him as long as it bought time. Having said that, he still hasn’t sent them his file with those X-rays.

  Outside, the monsoons pondered their next move and the sun took charge back after two weeks in purdah. Roads surrendered their moist
ure and looked like mirages in the kind of cowboy Westerns Deputy Commissioner Jahagirdar loved. Humid and hot once more, Sindhi Camp reeled after two weeks under a waterfall. Even the dead Chhote Bhai’s all-pukka, concrete Mian Building had had enough, while the rows of leaky Nissen huts across from it looked buggered beyond repair.

  Over at Sion Hospital, portions of the roof caved in, and it started to rain bronze-back snakes from the nests they had built between the tiles. Dr. Waller stalked the screaming wards collecting terrified reptiles. He used his stick to prod them out from hiding places, then to press the head down while the snake whipped and coiled and people ran. In an impossible feat for a drug addict, he would then snatch it, fist just behind the head while the snake licked at the air with its darting tongue like, what the fuck just happened?

  Salim Ali’s mother came out to the balcony when Tufan and he stepped out from the Mian Building. They had met her up there in Salim Ali’s flat one last time before leaving to deal with his ashes.

  ‘What’s she saying now?’ he asked Tufan.

  ‘Spread his ashes properly, she says. Make him happy.’

  Staring directly at him, the blind woman went to town. She wagged a finger while declaiming in her nasal Malayalee, so even the roadside cows looked up. Perched on the temple patio, Andhi Ma appeared totally impressed at how her role had been usurped; how someone else was ranting for a change.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘She says you’ll know what to do.’

  ‘Since when do I know anything? There, she’s still at it. What’s she saying now?’

  ‘That’s about the gist of it,’ Tufan said. ‘That you’ll know what to do. Also, she thinks you know who did this to her son.’

  ‘Sure, I do. So does everyone. It was the Deputy Commissioner of Police. She wants me to arrest him?’

  ‘She’s saying hell with the police. She says you know for real.’

  ‘I know what, for real?’

  ‘I don’t know. My Malayalee’s not that great.’