by Vaseem Khan
‘I’m sorry, sahib, but we cannot go anywhere,’ said the driver ruefully. ‘Puncture.’
Chopra looked down and saw the flattened tyre. He swore under his breath, and trotted back to the corner. But the Mercedes had vanished.
Dammit! He hadn’t even noted the vehicle’s registration plate! It was the sort of oversight for which he would have roundly berated a junior officer. But he had been so disoriented by the fact of Nayak’s reappearance that he had not been thinking straight. There was nothing further he could do, not now. At least he had the location of this warehouse, whatever Nayak was using it for.
Now he needed time to think.
THE RAIN FINALLY ARRIVES
Inspector Chopra dreamed. He dreamed that he was inside a mall, a mall so vast that it took up the whole world. The mall was brightly lit; everything–walls, floors, ceilings–shone with a pearly white light.
As he wandered around the mall, people jumped out at him, offering him incredible bargains. Would sir like to purchase a brand new soul, special offer this week only, ten per cent off with your loyalty card?
He arrived at a long counter. At the far end of the counter, he could see the tiny outline of a man. He walked towards the man; it seemed to take for ever.
Finally, he reached the man, who had his back turned to him, as he stood facing a row of shelves that stretched upwards to infinity and were crowded with shiny, indistinguishable packages of all shapes, sizes and colours. The man was dressed in white, but had very dark hair. ‘Excuse me,’ said Chopra, ‘can you tell me where I am?’
The man turned around and Chopra saw that it was Kala Nayak. Nayak grinned, and as he did so flames erupted around the outline of his body. But he did not burn. Grinning in the centre of the fire, like a maharishi, he said: ‘Didn’t you know? They made me a god. God of the new India. You can’t kill me. Nothing can kill me.’
Chopra woke up, his heart hammering inside his chest. For a second he thought he was having another heart attack… and then he realised that the hammering was not his heart–it was the rain hammering against the windows of his bedroom, hammering loud enough to drown out even the noise of the air-conditioning unit.
Rain! At last, the long-awaited monsoon had broken! Chopra felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He had grown up on a village farm, and although he was now a city boy through and through, something inside him, some creature of the fields, still yearned for the annual deluge. It was inside every Indian, he supposed, this primeval connection to the ancient rhythms, the cycle of planting, inundation, harvest; the cycle of life on the subcontinent.
He got up and went into the living room. Here the rain hammered even more fiercely on the windows. It wasn’t really rain, thought Chopra. This was a vertical flood!
Sheets of water raced down the windowpanes, torrents of wonderful, life-giving water, blasting away the heat and humidity of the prolonged summer.
The water made him thirsty, and he fetched a glass of orange juice from the fridge.
His thoughts turned now to the extraordinary day he had had. He realised that his leg muscles ached; all that walking! He hadn’t walked so much in years. And the revelations, one after the other, that had surprised and shocked him throughout the day, culminating in the final, incredible possibility that Kala Nayak was still alive.
Now, in the dead of night, Chopra considered the evidence of his own eyes. He had never doubted himself before, but now… could it really have been Nayak? Surely he would have heard something before today, through his network of street informants, if Nayak had somehow survived the police raid? And how had he done that, anyway? Whose was the body they had found wearing Nayak’s rings and gold chains? A body too burnt for identification.
Conveniently too burnt? wondered Chopra, now.
And if it was Nayak, what did he have to do with the death of a poor boy from Marol? Or did one thing have nothing to do with the other? After all, what really tied them together? A visiting card? A red beret? Had he put together a chain of evidence that in fact was as full of holes as the average Bollywood potboiler?
He shook his head and moved to the windows. One of them had been left open to allow a breeze into the flat. He peered out. He could hardly see anything, such was the ferocity of the rain. He looked down: Strange… the ground, fifteen floors below, appeared to be moving. He peered closer. Not moving, swirling.
The water was rising, flooding the rear of the courtyard, that odd declension that sloped down to the guard hut, creating a sort of shallow pool. Poor old Bahadur, thought Chopra. He would have had to abandon his guard hut and was probably even now shivering on the ground-floor landing wondering when he would get his hut ba—
Chopra froze. Oh no. Surely, Bahadur would have—?
He raced across the room, slapped down the glass of juice–spilling some onto the antique sideboard–and flung open the front door. Still in his shorts and vest, he raced to the elevator.
Which was not working.
Cursing, he turned to the stairwell. Fifteen flights! He had never really considered it much of a challenge, not for a man who had always prided himself on his fitness, but now it seemed to take for ever.
He reached the ground floor, huffing and panting. His heart really was pounding now, dangerously so.
He found Bahadur leaning against the wall at the top of the ground-floor stairwell, staring, as if hypnotised, at the fast-rising tide. The water, inky black, had already crested the fourth step. ‘Bahadur!’ gasped Chopra, massaging his chest. ‘Where is Ganesha?’
Bahadur looked at him in incomprehension. He had his answer. ‘You fool!’ he raged. He looked down. The water was now at the fifth step, and rising fast. That meant about two feet. Add another two feet for the declension at the rear of the courtyard. Four feet. How tall was Ganesha? Three and a half feet? Maybe three ten?
Chopra knew he didn’t have much time.
‘Give me the key to his chain.’
Bahadur shivered to life, and rummaged in the pocket of his trousers. His face blanched. ‘Sahib, I have left it in the hut.’
Chopra swore. He turned, and, without hesitating, waded down into the water.
By the time he got out from the entrance it was up to his crotch. The water swirled around him, making it difficult for him to keep his footing. He could barely see a few feet in front of him.
How long could elephants breathe underwater?
He worked his way around to the rear of the courtyard. Suddenly, he slipped as the declension fell away below his feet, and tumbled forward into the water. Gasping, he leaped up again, splashing wildly around him with his arms. Now the water was up around his chest. Chopra felt panic take hold of him, paralysing his muscles. The realisation that he had been forcing himself not to acknowledge now came home to him: he did not know how to swim.
Was it possible to drown in your own courtyard?
He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. Above him, the blue lantern that Bheem Singh and Bahadur had strung over the rear courtyard shone down, illuminating the heaving water with a ghostly light. Suddenly, he was confronted by a strange sight: it looked for all the world like a snake balancing on the water by its tail! The snake was moving from side to side, as if searching for something, or performing a dance.
That is no snake, thought Chopra. That is my Ganesha. And if his trunk is above water then the little elephant is still alive.
The thought spurred Chopra out of his paralysis. Hot on the heels of this thought came another one, courtesy of Dr Harpal Singh: ‘Contrary to common perception, elephants are thoroughly accomplished swimmers. Their large bodies provide excellent flotation, and they are able to use their muscular legs to swim long distances with ease.’ He held onto this thought now as he surged forward, hopping against the current, using his powerful arms to muscle his way through the water, now up to his armpits.
Chopra reached the guard hut and pushed his way inside. He knew Bahadur kept the key to Ganesha’s chain on a nail on the wall just inside the door. Q
uickly Chopra looked for it. It was not there. Damn! But Bahadur did not have it either… There was only one other possibility. Taking a deep breath, Chopra dove under the water. He crouched down and moved his hand along the base of the wall. Nothing. He turned and moved it along the base of the wall in the other direction. His hand hit something, something cold and metallic. He had it!
Gasping, Chopra broke the water’s surface. He waded back out of the hut and over to the metal pole to which Ganesha was chained. The elephant’s trunk reached out and touched his face. It tried to wrap itself around his neck, but he forced it firmly away. Taking another deep breath he dove into the water again. His hands found the chain. It was stretched taut; Ganesha had been trying to get away, but did not have the strength to break the chain. Chopra fumbled for the padlock. Precious seconds were lost as he tried to insert the key into the lock, performing the action blind… and then it was done. The lock fell away, and Ganesha surged ahead.
Chopra pushed himself out of the water, which was now up to his neck. On tiptoe, he splashed and slid his way to the front of the courtyard.
Gasping and shivering, he struggled out of the water and up onto the ground-floor landing, dragging Ganesha behind him using the chain around the elephant’s neck.
For a while he just lay there, flat on his back, listening to the erratic beating of his heart and the hammering of the rain on the water. He was conscious of Bahadur’s concerned face hovering above his own, but he could not hear anything the man was saying. He was surrounded by an amniotic silence, as if someone had stuffed cotton wool in his ears. He turned his head. Beside him, slumped against the wall on all fours, was Ganesha. The elephant had closed his eyes, and his trunk was wrapped in a tight curl under his face. His body trembled–from terror or cold, Chopra could not be sure.
Eventually, he staggered to his feet. ‘Come on, boy,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you warm.’ Bahadur looked as if he was going to protest, but then thought better of it.
Chopra led Ganesha to the lifts. They were working again, he was glad to see. He was also glad that the building had such expansive elevators.
They got off on the fifteenth floor. Chopra opened the door to his apartment and led Ganesha inside. The elephant became wedged in the doorframe. Sensing an opportunity to make up for his earlier negligence, Bahadur put his shoulder against the little elephant’s backside and pushed. Ganesha surged forward, and into the flat, taking a section of the right doorjamb with him.
‘Over here, boy,’ said Chopra. Ganesha collapsed in the middle of the living room, in front of the sofa, on Poppy’s faux Persian rug.
Chopra fell onto the sofa. He felt completely drained. A shroud of darkness rushed at him.
Moments later both man and elephant were fast asleep.
NO PLACE FOR AN ELEPHANT
The next morning Poppy awoke to find an elephant had taken up residence in her home.
‘But this is too ridiculous!’ she admonished her husband. It was all very well fighting to keep the elephant in the complex, but to see a wild animal parked in the centre of her living room on her best rug, like some sort of living sculpture, was quite another matter.
‘Madness,’ muttered her mother, who had been rudely surprised that morning when she had wandered into the living room and tripped over the creature. ‘Cracked, cracked in the head.’ This last was directed at her son-in-law, against whom she had always held a grudge for not being Jagirdar Mohan Vishwanath Deshmukh, landowner and erstwhile suitor of her daughter.
The source of all this consternation lay folded up on the floor, wrapped in Poppy’s warmest winter quilts, looking none the worse for wear after the excitement of the previous night. Occasionally, the little elephant would shudder and, with a preparatory sniff of his trunk, unleash a sneeze into the room. A drift of Dairy Milk chocolate-bar wrappers lay strewn around him, as if a children’s party had just taken place.
Chopra frowned at his wife and mother-in-law. ‘This elephant is my responsibility, just as you both are. If his welfare requires that he stay in my home for a day or two then so be it. I do not wish to hear another word on the matter,’ he added crossly as he headed towards the door of his office.
Earlier that morning, Chopra had sent Bahadur to the hole-in-the-wall grocery shop across the road to buy the chocolate. Bahadur had returned not only with the chocolate but also a breathless report of what was happening in the city.
The intense rain had flooded many parts of Mumbai. Such had been the delinquent monsoon’s ferocity that flash floods had claimed more than one hundred lives. Bloated bodies lay in the streets, like the fallen dead from some forgotten war. Vehicles had been abandoned at junctions and in the middle of the roads. In some cars, dead bodies sat in the seats, staring glassily out into the afterlife; so fast had the water risen that their occupants had not had time even to undo their seatbelts before they were engulfed. There was an air of shock around the city; a strange silence hung over the malls and call centres, the glassy offices and fancy restaurants, the slums and the high-rise towers. For the first time in living memory, Mumbai had been brought to a standstill.
The authorities were slow in responding, and would later be accused of gross incompetence, charges that they would dismiss as uncharitable. After all, it was not every day that Mumbai was struck by such severe flooding.
In the courtyard below, the high sun had already dried the concrete. Bahadur had hauled his charpoy out into the centre of the courtyard to allow it to dry. It gave off great curls of steam, a potent symbol of the tempest of the night before.
Chopra had received a number of calls from friends eager to talk about the rain. He did not find the subject as fascinating as many of his friends appeared to. His mind was preoccupied once again by the events of the previous day: Kala Nayak, and the man in the red hat.
His first instinct was to contact his old colleagues on the force, in particular Amit Ghosh of the Detection Crime Branch. The DCB unit was specifically responsible for tackling organised crime in the city. The media loved to call it the ‘Mumbai Encounter Squad’ because of its reputation for prematurely retiring known gangsters in shooting incidents. He could ask Ghosh if any rumours of Kala Nayak resurfacing had been doing the rounds. But then he would have to explain why he was asking these questions. He was very reluctant to offer himself up for ridicule to his old colleagues. He imagined how the conversation might go.
‘So you say you saw Kala Nayak?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are aware his body was identified and cremated nine years ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were there any other witnesses who could identify Nayak?’
‘No.’
‘Did you obtain any physical evidence? A photograph, for example?’
‘No.’
‘Did you note down the registration number of his vehicle?’
‘No.’
He could imagine the looks that would be exchanged by his old colleagues. He could imagine what they would be thinking. Chopra was a good officer, sincere and committed to his duty. Now he has retired, and like many who retire before their time, he is struggling to manage his new circumstances. He is seeking attention, perhaps, some means of staying involved…
No, Chopra could not face the prospect of his colleagues thinking of him in this way. Everything he had achieved in his life would be undone. They would remember him not as the fine officer he had been, but as that sad specimen who had started seeing the ghost of Kala Nayak.
Just before lunch there was a loud knocking on the front door. Chopra opened it to find Mrs Subramanium blocking his view, Bahadur peering nervously over her shoulder.
‘Mr Chopra,’ said Mrs Subramanium primly, ‘I have heard a very disturbing thing. I have heard that the elephant that you have forcibly lodged in the courtyard, against the regulations of this building, I might add, has now been brought into the actual living premises. In fact, I have heard that this creature is even now inside this very apartment.’ H
er voice seemed to indicate her utter incredulity.
‘You have heard correctly,’ said Chopra calmly. Not for the first time he thought that Mrs Subramanium, with her short hair and her severe manner, reminded him of Indira Gandhi.
As a young man Chopra had greatly admired Mrs Gandhi, but then had come the Emergency Years when Gandhi, following her conviction for electoral malpractice in the 1971 elections, had refused to step aside and instead imposed President’s rule and ordered the arrest of her opponents. Those had been black years when the police, mandated to defend the central government’s position, had been given extraordinary powers to detain ordinary citizens and to ensure that the curfew was upheld. Chopra knew of many officers who had enjoyed the new powers immensely, and committed terrible acts of injustice simply because they knew they could get away with it. He himself, as a young officer, had often been put in a position where he felt that he had compromised his own high ideals. He had never forgotten that time, and had never forgiven Mrs Gandhi.
To his amazement, Mrs Subramanium did not respond with a tirade, as he had half expected her to do; instead, she merely pursed her lips. ‘Please step aside, sir.’
Chopra found himself automatically moving aside.
Mrs Subramanium marched into the apartment. She stopped short as she caught sight of Ganesha. Only the elephant’s head was visible from inside the igloo of quilts that were piled up around his body. Mrs Subramanium stepped in front of the little calf and looked down at him. Ganesha tilted his head upwards as if determined to meet the old woman’s disapproving gaze head-on.
‘This is completely unacceptable, Mr Chopra,’ said Mrs Subramanium, finally. ‘Completely unacceptable. I cannot even begin to tell you how many building regulations are being flouted here.’
‘Please explain to him!’ came the voice of Poornima Devi, who had suddenly appeared at Mrs Subramanium’s shoulder. ‘He will not listen to us. The beast almost trampled me to death this morning!’
