“You still do.”
“No, Ernest. Not any longer. Just fingerprints. Bloodstains. Fussy stuff like that. I only do police autopsies now. Earlier, till the end of the war, I checked every single corpse myself before I released it from the mortuary. Never missed any more testes. I put the fear of the noose in Bhiku.”
“And his son?”
“Mangesh? Dead. Never woke up from a weeklong trance in Liang’s chandol-khana.”
“Pity.”
Ramratan was silent. His city was built on opium. Libraries, hospitals, railway stations, and most other emblems of philanthropy—they were all built upon the wreckage of lives.
“Prescott came to a bad end, Ramratan. I am certain our hakim had everything to do with it.”
Hankin had sailed back to England with Prescott. They parted at the pier. He never saw Prescott again.
Last year the name cropped up in a conversation. Prescott, he learned, had run wild. His family, torn between embarrassment and despair, had finally ceded all hope of reforming him. He ended up in the madhouse and died gibbering in a straitjacket.
“Reformed? Did he behave like those rats he told you of? Did he run around naked? Old men do terrible things. I worry sometimes over what lies ahead.”
“I went down to Shropshire to find out. I visited the family—a son and a daughter. I told them I’d known Prescott in Bombay. He’d gone to pieces a year after his return from India, reeling about drunkenly with not a drop of alcohol in him. Lasted another six months in the asylum.”
“Poor man! Ernest, could it have been something entirely unrelated? You destroyed that extract Arif Khan gave us.”
“I asked them about medication. They were quite emphatic. No, he wasn’t taking medicine. Of any sort. But I can be devious too! I asked about his general health. Headaches, colds, fevers, that sort of thing.”
“Ah.”
“Exactly. He was a martyr to the common cold, the daughter said, and never without his little flask of nasal drops. I was, don’t forget, asking these questions nearly twenty years after. People can’t be expected to remember details.”
Ramratan pondered a long while.
“Even if Prescott kept receiving supplies from the hakim, why should the elixir drive him crazy? Any daughter would gloss over such embarrassments. Are you certain, Ernest, they didn’t mean randy when they said mad?”
“Yes, yes. I made quite sure of that. I read all the notes at the asylum. No sexual excitement of any kind. I wondered about that any kind!”
“So it didn’t work like that. It changed his behavior, his mentation, and his intellect. What do testes have to do with that?”
“Men often think with theirs.”
Ramratan nodded. The war had made cynics of them all.
He couldn’t let go of the story. It happened so soon after Prescott reached England. A yammering idiot in a year, and in six more months he was dead. He used nasal drops.
That’s as swift as injecting the drug into a vein. It had addled Prescott’s brain.
* * *
“The elixir turned you mad, didn’t it, Mr. Prescott?”
Prescott turned to Ratan in startled disbelief, and then laughed. “I’ve never felt saner. How would you know about the elixir, anyway?”
Ratan did not reply. He’d made a complete fool of himself. Prescott was dead. But this man—
“I think this gentleman is speaking about your grandfather, Mr. Prescott,” said the hakim. “And also, about mine.”
He scrutinized Ratan with astute eyes.
“Your name? Is it Oak?”
Ratan stared back, baffled.
“I think we better have a word, Mr. Oak—or is it Dr. Oak? I’m almost through with Mr. Prescott here. Permanently through. Please? Will you give me five minutes?”
Ratan nodded, walked back to his table and pondered the physics of breaking glass. It splinters in conchoidal fractures as shock waves ripple out. This was a mirror, not a windowpane. The dark space within it, he alone could explore.
Prescott—that Prescott—had gone mad from the elixir. This one might too. Madness is a convenient label for all things inconvenient. What exactly happened to Patton Prescott? Today it would be termed dementia, poor coordination, ataxia. A neurologist might not make the connect, but Ramratan Oak did—because he knew what the elixir really was. He lacked a name for Prescott’s illness, because in his time it had no name.
He, Ratan, made the diagnosis because Prescott’s illness now had a name. It was a prion disease, and the elixir had transmitted it.
Ramaratan’s cadavers were never robbed again. Yet Hakim Arif had ensured that Prescott in England received enough elixir to last a year.
* * *
Hakim Arif Khan Dehlavi walked over to Ratan. He was very different from the man who had made a gift of the vial to Ramratan. His light brown eyes, though gentle and lustrous, yet recalled that carnelian flash. He drew up a chair and sat down next to Ratan.
“You’re not Hakim Arif Khan, are you?”
“No. My name is Moinuddeen.”
“Moinuddeen Khan Dehlavi. Or Moinuddeen Khan Barmaki?” Moinuddeen’s face lit up. “Your grandfather knew! We were told he didn’t.”
“So, it is family lore?”
Moinuddeen shrugged and suppressed a smile. Ratan felt a lance of anger.
“The name meant nothing to Ramratan Oak, and it doesn’t to me.”
“Barmaki is the ancient name of hakims who studied medicine before Islam. Charak, Sushrut, Jalinoos. And also— the medicine of the pharoahs.”
Something glimmered in Ratan’s memory but he couldn’t place it.
Moinuddeen nodded.
“I see it begins to make sense. You are cleverer than your grandfather.”
A hook.
What did a hook have to do with it?
Ask him for the hook.
Ramratan’s urgent voice in his brain compelled Ratan.
“You have a hook, I suppose,” he said. “I’d like to see it.”
Moinuddeen gaped. “You knew?”
“He did. Ramratan Oak, the man who met your grandfather.”
Ratan looked down. He didn’t want Moinuddeen to guess what he had just realized. Vision or memory, call it what you will, he knew each word before Ramratan’s broad-nibbed Waterman set it down on paper.
… I can’t help thinking we were wrong all along about that elixir. I continued counting testes, I became obsessed with that, and it kept me from seeing the larger picture. It had nothing to do with testes at all.
I tell you, Ernest, it was the pituitary! Extracted with a hook, through the nostrils, in the ancient Egyptian manner, leaving no trace of intrusion. How am I going to live this down?
Every one of those cadavers I passed as legit was missing its pituitary gland. God forgive my ignorance, because I never can.
“How many more victims, Moinuddeen?” asked Ratan quietly.
“Prescott’s grandfather?”
“He died mad and demented.”
Moinuddeen laughed. “He was mad and demented to begin with, wasn’t he?” He nodded at the bullet holes. “Look at this Prescott! This one here, now. You think he looks mad or demented?”
“Actually, yes. He does.”
Prescott had recovered his magisterial calm. His back obliterated the bullet holes.
“Men like Prescott live on the edge of time,” said Moinuddeen. “No matter what age, they’re always on the edge of time.”
“What does that mean?”
“All they see is the abyss. Nothing registers but that emptiness. Nothing is real except their terror.”
“And you cash in on it.”
“Why not? The day after the Lashkar shootout, that very morning, he was waiting for me by the door. The corpses were still here and blood was everywhere. He didn’t seem to notice. Nothing mattered but his fix.”
“You were here too, weren’t you? Vial in hand, to offer him his fix?”
Moinuddeen lo
wered his eyes. “Yes, I was. Demand and supply.”
“Why did you break the vial just now?”
“Because I broke with him.”
“Why?”
Moinuddeen shrugged and looked back at the table by the mirror. Prescott responded with a quick grimace of pain.
“Look at him. Don’t you think he’s lived long enough?”
“He doesn’t think so,” said Ratan.
“Who is he to decide?”
“Who are you?” asked Ratan.
“I’m his timekeeper, that’s who I am!”
Despite himself, Ratan asked, “Does it work?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Thirty-five?”
Moinuddeen smiled. Ratan noticed a craquelure of gray on his pale skin, as if its depths abjured light.
“Was that your grandfather? Mortuary Oak?”
“Great-grandfather. Dr. Ramratan Oak, pathologist.”
“Your great-grandfather? There’s your answer! Pathologist, mortician—what’s the difference? They’re both doctors of death. We, on the other hand, are doctors of life. The elixir allows you life. You’ll want to know how it works. You’re a doctor too? Like Ramratan Oak?”
“Microbiologist.”
“Then you’ll know. I’ll make you a free gift of the idea— in apology to Ramratan Oak.” He patted Ratan’s shoulder in farewell. “Tell the world when you find out.”
Prescott intercepted Ratan at the door. “Do you know any others?” he asked in an urgent whisper.
Ratan looked at him with contempt.
“Any other hakims?” persisted Prescott. “He broke the vial! I have just enough for five more years.”
He stayed Ratan with a trembling hand.
“What’s five years?” He snapped his fingers. “Gone, like tomorrow.”
Ratan shook him off and stepped out into the bustle of Colaba Causeway.
Moinuddeen was astride a Bajaj Chetak. Morning light gilded his brown hair. He raised a hand in salute to Ratan.
“It’s goodbye to all that now. I’m done with the whole tamasha!”
“What will you do now?”
“What do you think?” He laughed. “I’ll live!”
THEY
BY JERRY PINTO
Mahim Church
These things don’t happen in Mahim,” Milly said angrily.
“What things don’t?” Peter asked mildly. He knew that his wife was not a morning person. She had never been. But now she was not an afternoon person either. Slowly her citric rages had begun to spill across the day. Eventually, she would not be a day person or a night person. The logical conclusion? She would not be a person at all.
“Murder,” she said, and waved the tabloid at her husband.
“It’s here already?” he asked, slightly disturbed. When he was a boy, the tabloids had come out in the evening. When he was an adolescent, they had shifted to the afternoon. Now they arrived, it would seem, with morning coffee.
Milly was reading the report with the concentrated attention of the dyspeptic.
“In your gym too,” she said, throwing it down amid the debris of the dining table’s morning meal. “In your very own gym.”
“EverFit isn’t my very own gym,” he replied. “I only exercise there.”
“Forgive me, senior copy chief,” she said. “I should be more accurate in my diction.”
She was laying a little trap for him. She wanted him to say that she had used diction in the wrong sense. Peter sidestepped it neatly. He knew the original meaning of the word.
“It’s time to go there anyway,” he said.
“I can’t see what a man your age wants with a gym,” said Milly. This was more formula than complaint. “Anyway, it’s probably closed. Scene of the crime,” she added. “I remember the time there was a body found in a gunnysack outside this very building.”
Peter did not point out that she had just remarked that murders did not happen in Mahim.
“A woman, no?” she continued with relish. “Cut into pieces, the paper said. But no one ever marked the spot or anything. They just arrested the gurkha. But now maybe they’ve got modern. Maybe they have yellow tape and lumen lights. Like CSI.”
Peter shrugged and made for the door.
“So where are you going?”
“I’ll walk around the park then.”
“Keep your eyes on the dogs,” she said, and grinned suddenly. “As if you ever could.”
“Looking is no sin,” he countered.
“And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hellfire,” said Milly, but her tone was mild.
“Hell must be crowded then,” he responded, as he picked up his mobile, his hand towel, and the bright blue identity card that certified him as another poor simp who had bought a complete health plan, valid until the end of the year.
There was a bunch of people standing around EverFit (Where Fitness Lives). When Peter was growing up there had been only two gyms in Mahim: Talwalkar’s was the big one; Slimwell was the little one. Neither had had a tagline. Now there was Cloud Zen (For Mind, Body, and Spirit) and Zai’s Health (From A to Zai) and Barbaria (Unleash Your Inner Conan), all fighting for the Mahimkar’s time and hard-earned. And then there was EverFit for those, like him, who wanted a treadmill and a patch of ground on which to do surya namaskars when the rain came down and turned the park to red soup.
Inspector Jende was standing outside the gym, wearing his habitual expression of carefully cultivated expressionlessness. The day had begun to heat up, sucking sweat from its citizens to turn into the acid rain that would be unleashed in a month or so. The gym was cordoned off. The paanwalla’s shop that stood to the left of it was open for business but the keysmith who had a little stand to the right of the gym had given up the fight and closed for the day.
“Pittr,” Jende said, “what you’re doing here?”
“Jay,” said Peter, “are you finally considering getting rid of that paunch?”
“Don’t be silly. Late last night. Body found. Don’t read papers now?”
“Who is it?”
“You’re not on the crime beat.”
“You came home for a drink the day I took voluntary retirement, remember?”
Jende beckoned to him and they walked into the gym together. Kalsekar, at the reception, looked shaken. It was the first emotion Peter had ever seen on his face which was usually set in surly uncommunicative lines, the face of Indians everywhere who found themselves in dead-end jobs. The only other time Kalsekar had shown any sign of emotion was a month earlier. He had been wearing a rather nice watch. “Great watch,” Peter had said. Kalsekar had smiled and shown it to him. It had three faces on it; one for local time and two for other time zones. What did Kalsekar need three time zones for? It was not a question you could ask. Perhaps Kalsekar had a son who lived in Los Angeles. Peter reached for the kind of question he could ask: “How much did you pay?” The smile dropped off Kalsekar’s face like a maggot off a corpse. “Khari kamaai ki hai,” he had said, sweat-of-the-brow earnings. He had not worn it again.
Now Peter was about to hand over his wallet when he realized he would not be actually working out and did not need a pouch into which to put his pocket contents. He nodded at the old man. Kalsekar tried to nod at him now; Peter saw that he was actually shaking. Death could do that to you; and murder was death rubbing your nose in your mortality.
They walked through the deserted gym, a long rectangular room. At its far end was a door that led to the changing rooms, a massage room, a sauna, and a couple of pots. The body was in the massage room. The back of its head had been smashed in, a fine mess of red and black. No gray matter, Peter noted, just streaks of yellow. That would be body fat. Ubiquitous: body fat. Ubiquitous, too, the war against it. The young man had been a foot soldier in that losing battle.
“Vishal,” Peter said. “Works here. Train
er.”
“The old man identified him.”
“Family?”
“Doesn’t seem to have any. Orphan.”
“Weapon?”
“I don’t know. We have to wait for the medics.”
Peter looked around. It was all very ordinary. The posters of Arnold snarling on the walls. The rows and rows of dumbbells. A sign that said, Please bring deo to the gym, and another that informed members that the establishment would be closed every fourth Sunday for maintenance.
“Come,” said Inspector Jende. “Thaane chal.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You will know when you’re under arrest. Come and have one cup chai.”
They headed to the police station across the road and settled themselves at Jende’s desk.
“Chai!” shouted Jende. “Maadherchod,” he said comfortably and meaninglessly when it was served. The man who brought it smiled pleasantly and sheepishly and left.
“Line pe rakhne ke liye,” said Jende. Peter wondered at how the city had slowly leached the meaning of these potent abuses. Now Jende could call his tea supplier a motherfucker simply to keep him in line. Peter also wondered whether the tapriwalla was a Bihari. He decided to let it go. The man looked pleased enough to have the police account. Then a thought struck him: Do the police pay?
Jende interrupted this line of thought: “Bola.”
Peter shrugged. “I don’t know much about the victim.”
“Who is asking about victim? I am asking about anything, everything. Full story of gym. Tell everything you know. I will see what-what to use.”
“Okay. It seems to be owned by Muslims but run by Hindus.”
“Jesus!” said Jende, unconsciously adding another dimension to the problem of religion in India. “Please, nothing like that, haan?”
“I hope not. Enough we have had. But there seems to be a Christian somewhere in the mess as well.”
“Jesus Loves You?”
“Indeed. Why would they have that sticker above the door?”
“I am the light of the world?”
“Yes. I saw that poster behind the reception.”
“Not you, na?”
Peter thought this too bizarre to merit a response. Tea arrived.
Mumbai Noir Page 21
