by Vaseem Khan
‘We are not part of the entertainment,’ muttered Chopra grimly. He bent down to Ganesha and looked the little elephant squarely in the eye. ‘Listen to me, my friend,’ he said. ‘I need your help. Don’t be afraid. I won’t let any harm come to you. You must trust me.’
He patted Ganesha on the head, then turned, walked forward… and was swiftly brought back down to earth again.
He swore under his breath.
The man in the red hat had vanished onto the level above. He knew he couldn’t just leave Ganesha in the lobby. There was nothing for it. He would have to give up the chase.
‘Here, try this.’
Chopra turned. An elderly gentleman held out a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate.
‘I do not require chocolate,’ he said, stiffly.
‘It is not for you,’ said the man with a kindly smile. ‘When I was young, my father worked in the Grand Kohinoor Circus. It was his job to train the elephants.’
Chopra took the bar of chocolate and examined it suspiciously. The old man nodded encouragingly. Unconvinced, he broke off a piece from the slab and offered it to Ganesha. The elephant sniffed at it with his trunk, then took it and put it into his mouth. He blinked. His tail twitched. His ears flapped. Then, with a shake of his head, he reached out his trunk for the rest of the bar. Chopra pulled it away, then backed off to the escalator. ‘Come and get it, boy.’
In this way, he managed to coax Ganesha onto the escalator, which, like everything else in the mall, was made to a gargantuan scale, easily wide enough to accommodate a nervous baby elephant. As they travelled up to the next floor, a buzz of laughter erupted around them.
On the first floor, Chopra followed the gallery of shops and designer boutiques around the curve of the mall. Benetton, Nike, Burberry, Marks & Spencer, GAP, The Body Shop. Suddenly, he came to a large store with mannequins in the window modelling stylish leather coats. He peered inside and saw the man in the red hat standing at the counter, chatting idly to one of the pretty young attendants. As he watched, a man in a well-tailored suit emerged from the rear of the store. The man in the red hat pulled him aside, removed the package from inside his jeans, and handed it over.
Chopra had a sudden idea of what was in the package. Cash. A very thick bundle of cash. To him the whole transaction smelled of one thing: payoff. But for what?
The two men finished their business and, with a last flirtatious leer at the salesgirl, the man in the red hat left.
Chopra turned and pretended to be looking into the store behind him, which was a specialist cake boutique. Immediately, a sales attendant ran outside and enquired: ‘Sir, is there some special occasion for which you require a cake? We can make any kind of cake you like. Any shape, also. Even in shape of elephant!’
‘No thank you,’ growled Chopra.
THE MAN WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD
Inspector Chopra and Ganesha followed the man in the red hat as he left the mall. Instead of leaving through the front lobby, he exited from the rear doors, which led onto a grand concourse packed with parked cars.
The man in the red hat wandered up to the taxi rank, where he spoke briefly to a driver. He was about to step into the cab when his phone rang. He signalled to the driver to wait, and lit a cigarette while he chatted. Chopra looked around. He didn’t have much time. There was no way he could continue to follow this man, unless…
Not far away an emaciated man in a grey uniform and shorts was standing idly beside a small truck with a drop-down tailgate. On the side of the truck was written ATLAS MEGA MALL DELIVERIES.
Chopra approached him and said, ‘Official police business. I am commandeering your truck.’
The driver, who had not been born yesterday, was instantly suspicious. ‘If you are a policeman,’ he said, ‘why do you have an elephant?’
‘It is a police elephant,’ said Chopra.
‘Pull the other one, sahib,’ said the man. ‘The police don’t use elephants.’
‘You have heard of police dogs?’ said Chopra, sternly. ‘Well, this is a police elephant.’
The man looked at Ganesha with renewed interest. Chopra looked around. The man in the red hat had finished his call, and was leisurely finishing his cigarette as he eyed the young girls passing by, occasionally making lecherous remarks.
‘Listen to me,’ said Chopra. ‘I am going to commandeer this vehicle. If you don’t help me, I am going to have you arrested. Do you understand?’
The man blanched. ‘OK, OK, no need to get upset, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I will have to answer to my boss, that’s all. If there is even one scratch on it, I will lose my job. Wherever you want to go, I will drive you.’
‘Let’s get the elephant into the back.’ The driver dropped the tailgate and, using the remaining chocolate, Chopra coaxed Ganesha into the rear of the truck. They were just in time.
They followed the taxi as it made its way towards the suburbs, passing through Ambedkar Chowk and onto the Western Express Highway. The taxi raced through Bandra, Santa Cruz and Vile Parle until they were back in Sahar. Once off the expressway and onto Sahar Road, the taxi turned into the old industrial sector that lay behind the abandoned Gold Spot factory.
This massive sprawl of derelict buildings was scheduled for gentrification and a planned ‘elevated road’ that would directly connect the nearby international airport to the highway, but the grand project had become mired in red tape and the unscrupulous machinations of politicians.
The taxi snaked into the interior of the derelict zone until finally it parked outside what looked like a gutted warehouse. Facing the warehouse was another, equally derelict-looking building.
The man in the red hat got out, paid the taxi driver and entered the warehouse.
Chopra ordered the truck driver to park out of sight around a corner and wait. Leaving the driver and Ganesha in the truck, he positioned himself at the corner of the alley so that he could keep an eye on the front of the warehouse.
Just when he felt it was safe to move in, the sound of an approaching vehicle stopped him in his tracks. As he watched, a large white Mercedes with blackened windows came bouncing along the rutted road.
It parked in front of the warehouse, and waited, engine idling.
After a while, the man in the red hat came out of the warehouse with two other equally rough-looking men in tow. A driver in a spotless white uniform jumped out from the Mercedes and held the rear door open. A man emerged, wearing a crisp white suit and sunglasses. He was tall, with short dark hair, and wheatish skin. His face was made distinctive by its long chin, partially covered with a stubbly beard. The man stepped forward. Chopra noticed that he used a cane; his right leg seemed to be troubled by a limp. Then the man removed his sunglasses and looked up at the sky. Chopra stood frozen in shock.
That face! He knew that face! It was a face that was supposed to be no more: the face of his old nemesis, the underworld crime lord known as Kala Nayak.
A man Chopra had killed nine years ago.
Poppy had been baking. As she herself would have been the first to admit, she was not the most skilled of bakers, but it was her favourite activity nonetheless, because it helped her to think, particularly when she was feeling anxious.
And right now, Poppy was more anxious than she had ever been in her life.
The idea that had come to her when she had sat with Kiran at her fancy home in Bandra had now had time to grow. As she considered it once again her arm became a blur, whisking away at the flour mix, whisking and whisking, and whisking some more.
A child! A child of her very own! That was what Poppy wished for, more than anything else in the whole world. And now fate had dropped the opportunity into her lap.
Oh, but how could she possibly! How could she hope to get away with it?
When she had first outlined the plan to Kiran, and then to Kiran’s daughter Prarthana, she had done so with a breathless feeling of incredulity. Surely they would not agree, she had thought.
But it made sense, cer
tainly on the basis of the facts that she had been given.
Kiran’s daughter was pregnant with an illegitimate child. She did not wish to abort the child, nor raise it. The child would be given up for adoption. Poppy had no children, and could not have any… Why then, should Poppy not become the mother of Kiran’s daughter’s child?
Wasn’t that preferable to sending the child to be raised by strangers in some impoverished orphanage?
After all, wasn’t Poppy the child’s great-aunt, anyway? Certainly, Kiran had leaped at the possibility of salvaging her family honour. She had already helped to convince her daughter who, though not without qualms, had reluctantly accepted the eminent practicality of the solution.
The problem, of course, was Chopra.
Her husband had made it clear that he would not entertain adoption. She did not understand why, but she knew him well enough to know that once he had made up his mind about something like that he was not going to change it. And if she tried to talk to him about adopting Kiran’s grandchild, then that would ruin any chance she had of putting her plan into effect. Because Poppy’s plan was this: she would pretend to be pregnant.
For the next nine months, she would carry out the charade of pregnancy. And then, when the baby was born, she would present it as her own.
It seemed, at first glance, absurd; every time she thought about it her heart galloped inside her. But when she considered it rationally, she realised it was not as far-fetched as all that.
Chopra was a detective, but in matters such as this men were renowned for their ignorance. As long as she put on a little weight, and feigned morning sickness and the occasional foul mood, he would believe that she was pregnant. This was not the West, after all, where men seemed to be involved with every aspect of what should be a woman’s private experience, and even attended the birth, something that struck Poppy as an affront to common decency.
Her mother might be harder to fool, but Poppy could manage Poornima. If necessary, her mother would become a grumbling co-conspirator; after all, hadn’t she complained for years about her daughter’s childlessness?
As for the birth itself, Poppy would insist on a good old-fashioned midwife, not a hospital birth. She would insist on moving in with her good friend and cousin Kiran for the final few weeks; Kiran who herself would have moved by then to a little cottage in Silvassa, just outside of Mumbai, to help her ailing daughter recover from her ‘illness’. The baby would be born a good three weeks before everyone had been told it was due; a premature birth. And then, finally, Poppy would be a mother.
Poppy believed that becoming a mother might also help dispel the feeling that was growing inside her that something was wrong in her relationship with her husband. She loved him dearly, but since his heart attack he had seemed increasingly distracted, even distant, at times. Perhaps that was understandable, given the upheaval in his life… But there were other changes in his behaviour that she found strange.
Take, for instance, the mysterious phone calls he had been receiving over the past months. Whenever the calls arrived Chopra would excuse himself, even if he was halfway through dinner, and retire to his study. And when Poppy asked, he would simply say, ‘Police business.’ But there had never been police business before that necessitated so many calls at home, and such secrecy.
Poppy was worried. And the answer to her worries, she now felt, had been delivered to her by Prarthana’s baby.
She paused and looked at the wall, where the framed and garlanded photographs of both her father and Chopra’s father were placed side by side. ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ she asked the two venerable and long-deceased gentlemen.
After a while she went back to her whisking.
Narendra ‘Kala’ Nayak had been just one of a number of gangland criminals who had ruled Mumbai’s underworld in the early nineties. Back then they had been arrogantly open about their activities, seemingly unafraid of the authorities. It was not uncommon for celebrities to be gunned down in the street after refusing to pay extortion money; or for local politicians to be similarly despatched when a crooked deal went awry.
By the standards of the Mumbai underworld Kala Nayak had been an entrepreneur. He had been the first to graduate from hashish to large-scale importing of cocaine, and, later, designer drugs such as ecstasy, acid and butterfly, feeding the growing market of hip young things in the newly fashionable suburbs. He had quickly built up a network of distributors, using the city’s beggars, eunuchs, and men recruited from the poorest segments of society. He had become incredibly wealthy, seemingly overnight.
But that much money attracts attention and it wasn’t long before Nayak was fighting battles on every front–with the police, with rival gangs, with dirty politicians unhappy with their monthly payoffs, and even with ambitious lieutenants from his own organisation.
Nayak had upset the old order: the dons who had ruled over their local neighbourhoods with iron fists, creaming profits from the old staples: extortion, gambling, prostitution and smuggling. Nayak had boldly moved into new enterprises: real estate, film production and waterfront commerce, all twisted in some way to add to his ever-fuller coffers. Because of his brashness, and because of his refusal to negotiate territorial arrangements with other gang lords, Nayak had trodden on the toes of almost everyone who mattered in Mumbai. He had made so many enemies that soon even his enemies’ enemies were his enemies.
Heedless, Nayak had continued to expand his organisation, throwing his ill-gotten money around; and where money didn’t get him his way, he resorted to violence. By the mid-nineties he was top of the Most Wanted lists, and had been declared a bona fide menace to the city of Mumbai in particular and the country in general.
A special citywide taskforce had been put together to tackle Kala Nayak. Because his stronghold had remained in the Sahar and Marol districts, Chopra had been seconded to the taskforce. They had put together a case, and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. But the panicked gangster had gone underground. The word was that Nayak was still in the city; the search was on.
One evening, when Chopra had been working late at the station, the eunuch Anarkali had come to see him. She had information about Nayak.
Over the years, Chopra had learned that little happened in the locality without Anarkali knowing about it. A six-foot-tall, muscular transgender individual in a purple sari, she was, he had discovered, an intelligent and thoughtful person who made the best of her circumstances. Like most eunuchs she was enmeshed in the world of petty crime, but Chopra had been willing to look the other way in return for the occasional titbit of useful information.
It was one of his few concessions. Chopra, as a rule, did not believe in compromising in such matters.
Above this, however, was another belief, one that he had held almost since the day he had first arrived in this fantastical city: that Anarkali, like millions of others on the lowest rungs of Mumbai society, was merely a product of the crushing poverty into which she had been born. Many years ago he had discovered her under the Airport Flyover where she lived, beaten and close to death after a gang of drunken men had violated her. He had taken her to the hospital, argued with the horrified doctor, and paid the medical fees himself.
Following Anarkali’s tip-off, that evening Chopra and a team of officers from the Sahar station had staked out an old garment warehouse in the heart of the area known as MIDC-SEEPZ, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation and Santacruz Electronic Export Processing Zone. The area was a hive of small industrial units, and, over the years, because of the preponderance of cash-intensive jewellery operations, had become a hotbed of criminal activity. Chopra and his men were no strangers to the bustling cantonment.
An hour into the stakeout, a face had appeared at one of the warehouse windows. Kala Nayak!
Chopra had wasted no time, leading his team in an all-out assault on the building. Immediately, they had found themselves in a pitched battle with Nayak’s men. The shootout had raged through the four flo
ors of the warehouse; then, out of nowhere, a fire had sprung up. The policemen had retreated and watched while the building burned down.
When they sifted through the ashes, they found a number of charred remains, including one body wearing the distinctive jewellery that Nayak had been famed for.
The case had been closed, and Inspector Chopra had subsequently received the Kirti Chakra.
In time, others had moved in to take Nayak’s place, but for Chopra there had been a deep personal satisfaction in seeing the back of Kala Nayak. Not only had Nayak been responsible for bringing a wave of crime to the area that he had made his home, but the gang lord had also been responsible for the death of a close colleague and friend from the station, Sub-Inspector Pereira, who had been shot dead by Nayak’s men some two years previously. Pereira and Chopra had passed out through training school together; Pereira had left behind a wife and three teenage children.
Chopra watched now as the man he believed to be Kala Nayak entered the warehouse. His every instinct was urging him to hurl himself after his quarry, but he somehow held himself in check.
The minutes ticked away. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and rolled down his back. He heard Ganesha noisily pacing inside the rear of the truck. He heard the truck driver wander up behind him and strike a match, and smelled the pungent whiff of beedi smoke.
He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes!
Just as he had all but decided he could wait no longer, Nayak re-emerged, trailed by the man in the red hat.
Briefly they exchanged words, and then Nayak got into the Mercedes. The vehicle left in a cloud of dust. The man in the red hat followed on a motorbike that he had rolled out from inside the warehouse.
Chopra turned back to the truck. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ he said to the driver, who was now crouching by the front right tyre.
