The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  He opened his file and found only one relevant missive in a long list of messages: Maddy confirmed that she would pick him up at the airport, no matter that he would arrive just after dawn. He wondered how to tell his daughter-in-law that he would probably be turning around within forty-eight hours and heading back to North America.

  PART TWO

  Twenty20

  A variant of cricket, adopted into professional play in 2003. In the first Twenty20 World Cup, played in 2007, India beat Pakistan. Pakistan won the Cup in 2009, England in 2010.

  CHAPTER 14

  1998

  Alice crossed the Motihari Bridge in a state of contentment. She paused in the middle to appreciate the view in both directions of the Motijheel, which means “pearl lake” in Hindi. The Goddess Lakshmi had blessed her with 20/10 vision, what the ophthalmologist in Patna described as hyperacuity. It enabled Alice to see details at great distances. On a clear day like today, she might have turned around and imagined she could spy the top of Everest in the Nepali Himalayas, but she did not look back this time.

  This day, she found little to impress her in the lake. Squatters and unscrupulous builders had despoiled the waterfront for years — she could see both ends of the Motijheel — and fuzzy green islands of pollution-fed hyacinth had choked the oxygen from the water.

  With her sharp sight, she could make out the roof of the old cantonment, and next to it the crumbling go-down, the opium warehouse that George Orwell’s father, Mr. Blair, had supervised one century ago. Orwell’s birthplace, itself a decaying homestead, lay off to the west. She had visited the near-shrine the day before to say her goodbyes to the spirit of the Blairs. Alice looked forward to telling her mother back in Britain about her pilgrimage.

  Alice was leaving Motihari forever and with no regrets. The city held nothing for her. She planned to join her mother in Oxfordshire; she had been accepted into university for the fall term. The famous had left, too, she noted. Motihari was a place for leaving. Orwell and his mother, Ida, moved to England when George turned four. Gandhi had launched the Satyagraha revolution from Motihari, the independence movement based on civil disobedience tactics, but the Mahatma’s memory, fifty years on, was a flicker in Bihar State. Alice’s own mother had abandoned Motihari fourteen years ago.

  The floods had devastated the Terai, the grasslands outside Motihari, but the city was dry as cow bones, as they say. Alice passed the Shagun beauty parlour where her cousin worked, and the BSNL telephone exchange. She walked by the railway station, flanked by the bus terminal, where she planned to catch the daily to Patna. At the gupta store, she stopped for a bottle of aam jhora, the mango drink everyone consumed to protect against the heat.

  She had said goodbye to her relatives and teachers, and offered a last prayer to Devi, the goddess of knowledge, at the Gayatri Mandir. Alice’s father had taken offence at her announcement and had refused to see her off at the bus depot. Nevertheless, she headed to the garage for a final goodbye, if not for a reconciliation.

  Motihari boasted two fine movie theatres and Alice’s pride in this fact outweighed her regret that she would never sit in their cool darkness again. The Madhav Talkies offered Indian films from the Mumbai Bollywood factories. Just yesterday, Alice had attended the other one, the Sangeet, which showed first-run American pictures. Titanic, with Jack and Rose and the great ocean liner, was imprinted on her young mind forever; and today she daydreamed of a shipboard romance as she walked along the dry, rutted streets to the downtown.

  She glanced at the poster outside the Sangeet, which stood across the road from the garage where her father was a partner with her uncle, albeit a junior one. Both of the city’s cinemas were good-luck tokens, Alice thought. Madhav was one of the names of Lord Krishna and Sangeet meant “celestial song” but also referred to a Hindu pre-wedding celebration in honour of the bride-to-be.

  Alice entered the familiar dark garage and called out, “Aamon?” She addressed her father by his first name out of habit and respect. Her uncle, Vikram, who owned the shop, went by an invented name, Raji Bosh, a pretension she had never fully understood. The room was both hot and cool; the corrugated iron roof contracted and pinged in the hammering sun, while damp air rose from the service well, sending up oil and chemical smells that she knew well. She knew the cars, too: a poky Ambassador, a Tata Sumo, an Avenger, a Blaze, and the police commissioner’s yellow Scorpio, which sat astride the service pit.

  No one was working. She had expected to find her father in the office but he was off somewhere. The junior mechanic, Hashi, must be at lunch, she figured. Uncle Raji Bosh was notorious locally for minding the store 24-7, in case someone tried to steal one of the cars. He often slept on a cot in the corner or night-hawked behind his beloved computer in the office. Raji Bosh had worked himself up to prosperity in the small world of Motihari.

  Alice moved to the end of the garage, to the wall of tools and the diagnostic machine that was the pride of the commercial business. High on the wall hung three pictures. The first was a bright metal advert for Thums Up Cola (for years Alice had misspelled ‘thumb’), red, white, and blue. The obligatory Gandhi portrait hung in the middle. Alice recalled George Orwell’s ruling on the Great Man: “Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent.”

  For the first time, Alice took a close look at the third piece of garage art. A fierce soldier encased in armour rode the back of a huge bullock, prying open its jaws as if to kill it. She had always assumed the warrior was the god Shiva and the bull Nandi, who bore Shiva into battle.

  “That is the god Mithra,” a male voice said from behind her.

  She turned to meet her uncle, Aamon’s older brother. He had a ragged wisp of a beard and greasy black hair, slicked back from his forehead. He was smiling and held a plate of thekua pastries.

  “Who is Mithra?” Alice said. She had always found her uncle sly and haughty and wondered why her father put up with his arrogance.

  Raji Bosh came closer and gestured to the picture. “Zoroastrian divinity, mighty protector of the waters, and guardian of the harvest. He is slaying the bull as a sacrifice to the weather. I pray to him for a good growing season.”

  This revelation struck Alice as strange, since floods had devastated the plains of Bihar that fall, and besides, Raji Bosh had never been a farmer.

  Her uncle approached her and offered a thekua. She was about to refuse when she realized she was hungry. Raji Bosh leaned around her shoulder, too close, and picked up a bottle of thandhai, a sweet drink of sugared yogurt and spiced fruit. Alice took two of the deep-fried snacks and chewed them one after the other. She swallowed both thekua pieces before the dizziness struck her.

  The sugar that was laced into the coconut-and-wheat-flour treats masked the salty character of the dose of what her uncle had mixed in; gamma-hydroxybutyrate gives off a saline tang, but it is odourless, and he had added a large amount.

  Raji Bosh had not eaten any of the pastries containing the drug, but he was sweating and he drooled as he tipped the bottle of sweet thandhai to his niece’s mouth. She took a swallow to relieve the salty taste.

  Her dizziness moved in phases between euphoria and nausea. The sugar in the drink and the drug-laced snacks caused her gorge to rise but she did not vomit. The GHB made her delirious and pushed her into a floating netherworld. She was aware of her surroundings; GHB, unlike most rape drugs, builds slowly and relentlessly and does not produce unconsciousness.

  Nor amnesia.

  Alice felt the bonds on her wrists and ankles, even though she couldn’t remember her clothes being removed. She slid in and out of awareness of the assault on her body. Ropes bound her to a chair, perhaps a mechanic’s trolley of some kind, the bands crossing her belly and breastbone, and pinning her four limbs. Her uncle began to move her about the garage, between the cars, and Alice realized that he was positioning her for a further attack. Odd thoughts fluttered across h
er feverish mind, the first being that he couldn’t rape her while she was strapped down this way. This idea offered no comfort.

  He halted the trolley by the yellow Scorpio sedan that hovered above the below-ground work bay. The updraft of cool, oily air let her know where she was. She feared his pitching her into the hole. But Raji Bosh let her sit there a full five minutes. The drug half blinded her; it refused to weaken its grip. The man was suddenly mauling her, palming her face, scrunching her lips together and kissing them. He pinched her breast and poked his finger inside her. But Alice could sense his frustration, his immediate disappointment. She guessed that her rape would not be . . . traditional.

  Raji Bosh touched cold metal to her breastbone, just above the upper strap. Next she found herself recoiling at the focused agony of the teeth of the jumper cables as he affixed them to her breasts. The metal ends refused to grip her nipples and fell onto her lap. She felt the trickle of blood down her breasts. She tried to yell. He had pinned her to this weird chair, which was flexible at the waist, like an exercise frame. The pain came again but she failed in her first attempt to scream. The alligator teeth gripped her under her breasts and held fast the second time, sending hot pain into her lungs and heart.

  Her uncle did not speak but twice leaned his face against her ear and moaned. He exhaled warm, rancid spice. He did not try to kiss her again, which, in her demented panic, Alice found odd. There was a pause and then, a great distance away, a motor fired up. Simultaneously, the burn of the electrical charge coursed across her chest. It was a skittering, flaring pain that moved from the surface of her skin down into her fat cells, and worst of all, found the hard muscle and ropy tendons that make such good conductors.

  But it was this flesh, the muscle and sinew protecting her chest, that saved her. That and the voltage regulator on the small sedan. Alice’s scream broke through with the first jolt. Her uncle cut the ignition, came over, and tied a filthy rag across her mouth.

  He turned the key again and Alice vaulted against the straps. Her wail, despite the gag, approximated her first open scream, and Raji Bosh pounded on the dashboard of the car as if to silence her. She sensed his panic and anger. He stopped the engine. The filthy cloth must have offended him but she knew that he hated her screeching more. Alice, in her distress, grabbed onto a small truth. He wanted her perfection. Her body was a chalice to Raji Bosh; at nineteen, her figure was nearly flawless. For months he had watched her and now that he had her undressed, he would make her his toy. Alice understood his plan to possess her through pain. As long as he kept away from her eyes: it was never her body that she thought of as perfect. She treasured her eyes most. Alice Nahri had magical eyes that could see from the Motihari Bridge to the mountaintop of Annapurna at the end of the great Nepal trade route.

  He adjusted the claws and turned on the starter one more time. Alice screamed again but this time she knew that he would not hit her, or steal her eyesight, and with those eyes she fixed him with a look of hatred.

  Unlike a Taser, which releases 50,000 to 125,000 volts, a car battery typically shoots out about twelve, and painful as the current is, human skin and subdermal tissues are efficient at dissipating the flow. The danger lies in the amperage behind the jolt, but a car’s voltage regulator imposes limits on the amps that get through. Had Raji Bosh connected the cables to the ignition itself, the electrical force would have killed her.

  The mechanic, perspiring and agitated, pulled off the claw grips but he did not immediately release his niece from the bendable chair. The electrocution wasn’t working and Alice for the first time thought she might survive. Her uncle wheeled her over to a blacksmith’s trough, a long galvanized steel tank used to cool forged metal and clean dirty car parts. It resembled a horse trough from a western movie.

  But her attacker had seen other movies. He removed her gag and retied it as a blindfold. He also undid the straps from her chest. In an awkward but efficient motion, he tipped the chair forward, so that her upper body tilted into the water.

  Had he wanted a confession — to anything — she would have offered it. Waterboarding and dunking are forms of torture because they simulate the experience of death. Just stay away from my eyes, she prayed.

  He pushed her head into the filth. Alice’s mind hooked onto every shred of survival strategy. She began to count. She told herself that he was an amateur at this. His assault had no purpose. But a subsequent thought sent a chill to her heart, even as she fought to hold her breath: if he wanted to kill her without marring her outer perfection, this was the way. She would make a good-looking corpse.

  He kept her under for forty-five seconds before bringing her back. The human body’s reaction to oxygen deprivation is autonomic. As she sucked air into her throat, her uncle gripped her tighter, prepared for the next dunking. Alice hoped that she could count to one hundred and twenty, a full two minutes.

  A new, greater fear rolled over her, into her heart and brain. She saw the cables, the leads lying on the greasy floor, stretching back into the motor compartment of the yellow car. Twelve volts alone, she knew, would not kill her but twelve volts in water would shock her heart to a full stop.

  He held her under for two and a half minutes. And when he pulled her up, and as he realized that she hadn’t quite drowned, he gripped her again to ready her for a third immersion in the trough. Alice had reached her limit. It was not anger that drove her now but the grim understanding that she was done. Where was her father? He had abandoned her. She would survive one way only, and if her desperate plan fell short she would at least leave a telltale clue that even her spineless father couldn’t fail to note.

  Her lungs were raw. She gasped for control of her intake of air. She attempted the unexpected, the impossible. As her uncle leaned over the pool, Alice mustered a pocket of air and exploded the word “Rape!”

  Raji Bosh let her fall forward. As before, her upper body tipped below the surface and her head banged on the side of the steel container. But this time, all of her, bound to the chair, toppled in and she was engulfed.

  Underwater, she thought clearly, while fighting the conviction that there wasn’t enough time. The wrist and ankle straps held her tight. The withdrawal of the chest band allowed her to lever forward, but the motion neither loosened the waist strap nor enabled her to slip out of any of the bindings on her limbs. She hadn’t stopped wondering what he’d tied her to. At first she had imagined it to be some form of mechanic’s dolly, but now she realized that she was in an old-fashioned wheelchair, something colonial British, with multiple metal joints and levers and a flexible, tilting back, probably made of rattan and mahogany.

  She began to roll from side to side. She had no ambition to break the chair back or disjoint the hinges. Instead, she rocked and created waves that, though she could not see, sloshed four or five inches of water out of the tank. It wasn’t enough to overturn the heavy steel trough, but a piece of luck rewarded her struggle. She kicked her feet, which were not firmly fixed to the chair frame, down towards the foot props. As the left foot plate folded down, it struck the drain fitting, dislodging the bung and causing a flood onto the cement floor. It was almost not enough. She held her breath for a count of two hundred before the filthy water subsided below her nose. Her blindfold had sagged from her eyes and she was able to look down the length of the tank at her knees.

  Kicking some more at the bonds on her left ankle, she broke the pinion on that side of the chair. From there, Alice was able to worm her left arm from its wrist band. She freed the rest of her body as though she were an apprentice Houdini.

  Her uncle had panicked and fled. Her clothes lay over by the wall with the three posters. Gandhi and the god Mithra looked down on her bruised form. Pain tightened her ribcage; her hips and sternum ached. The wounds under her breasts were half burn and half scarring but she judged that the healed marks would each be less than an inch long.

  She saw no sign of her father a
nd she wasn’t about to seek him out for any kind of solace. She would gain her revenge her own way. She dressed and fled the garage. She tried not to think of anything as she came into the light outside and began to limp away.

  The water had nearly become her doom. Alice had been minutes away from leaving Motihari for good but now there was no chance of getting the daily bus to the state capital. She turned the corner into the roadway. There on the wall hung the poster of Jack and Rose, figureheads on the bow of the fated ship. Jack drowns; Rose lives. Which character would Alice Nahri be?

  CHAPTER 15

  For once, Heathrow Arrivals was subdued and the queues moved efficiently. Peter collected his luggage at the carousel, then returned to the Departures level, where Aviation Security kept the office he required. His Scotland Yard ID won him cooperation from the Met officer on duty, who suggested that he simply call the morgue facility rather than walking all the way over to the receiving hangar. Peter hesitated, feeling he was betraying the Carpenter family by not staying with the coffin. But he was weary and a call to the hangar confirmed that they had offloaded the body. The hearse would pick up the dead man later that day and he would reach home by evening.

  But then the distortion of red-eye flying kicked in and led to an impulsive decision. One thing he could do was offer reassurance to Carole Carpenter (though he would not reveal the report on Alice Nahri’s drowning).

  He rang up the house in New Bosk on his mobile, and Joe answered.