by Shamim Sarif
“You get anything?” she asks.
“I got interrupted by an obnoxious police detective,” I sigh. “But Amber’s working on the hard drives from the school, and there’s this. . . .” I show her the plumber contract on my phone. She zooms in on it, looking for the date.
“They waltzed in there two days before the attack?” Caitlin frowns. “That looks more than suspicious.”
“Yeah. I want to talk to the headmistress about it.”
“Her name is Jaya,” says Caitlin. “You’ll find her at the hotel where they evacuated the girls. It’s like, five minutes from here.”
“How long are the girls going to stay there?”
“Just till tomorrow. Then they’re coming back to the school,” Caitlin says.
Hala catches my skeptical look. “Peggy’s hired private security,” she says.
“The Indian ambassador recommended them, and she trusts him,” Caitlin adds. “But she’s also got a couple of former Navy SEALs that she knows personally coming out to India from the States tomorrow.”
I smile to myself. Of course Peggy has the most highly trained military men in existence on speed dial. Why wouldn’t she?
“But still,” I wonder. “Wouldn’t a safe house be better?”
“It’s been tough to find something secure enough so far,” Caitlin replies. “Plus, even if lessons were stopped, some adults would need to be trusted to supervise them. Food and water would still have to be brought in. There would be some supply chain that could still leave Family First a way to find the girls, if they’re looking.”
“As far as we know, this attack was a one-off,” Hala reminds me.
I nod. I also know Kit is not keen to bow to terrorists by abandoning her existing school buildings. With the extra security, plus some kind of uniformed police presence, I suppose terrorists would be deterred from trying to strike the same type of target twice. I gulp down my macchiato. It’s time for me to go and interview the headmistress.
I’m reassured by the fact that it takes several minutes for me to get past the police that are guarding the hotel where the girls are currently staying. Only by cross-checking my ID with a list of trusted names that Kit has sent through will they eventually let me in to speak to the headmistress.
A uniformed officer walks me into the hotel lobby, a cozy space that is now deserted. Down one hallway, I catch a glimpse of hotel meeting rooms. The doors are ajar, and I can hear the sounds of lessons going on. The policeman leads me farther back, into the dining room, where the furniture has clearly been rearranged. Instead of intimate tables of two and four, there are now two very long tables stretching down the length of the room, transforming a hotel restaurant into a dining area that feels more like a school lunch hall. These tables are empty except for two women sitting at one end, talking. The officer points them out and leaves me to make my approach alone.
I can tell immediately which of the two is Jaya, the headmistress, because the other woman is none other than Riya Kapoor, the detective who so recently put me in my place. Great. I take a breath and stride over, holding out my hand and introducing myself to Jaya. In my mind, I’d painted the headmistress as stern and ancient, but the reality is that she is probably late thirties, no more than five feet tall, somewhat round, and carrying so much nervous energy that even while she just sits here, it feels as if the edges of her are slightly blurred. Her eyes are rimmed with red, probably from exhaustion and crying.
“So marvelous to meet you, Jessie-ma’am,” Jaya says. She grasps my hand firmly and has a ready smile. “And I am so deeply, deeply sorry that this tragedy has occurred, and on my watch.”
“It’s not your fault,” I assure her. “And I’m sorry for your loss. The girls . . .”
As tears spring to her eyes, Jaya looks for distraction and turns to her companion.
“This is Detective Kapoor,” she says, introducing us.
“We’ve met,” the detective says to her before turning to me. “And, you can call me Riya.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, deadpan. “I don’t want to rush our relationship, you know, if you’re not ready. . . .”
Riya tosses out a tight smile before fixing me with a focused stare. “What are you doing here?” she demands.
“I have some questions for Jaya,” I reply.
“Great. I’d love to hear them,” Riya says, pulling a notebook from the inside of her suit jacket.
Suppressing a sigh, I sit down beside her, so that we are both opposite the headmistress, who’s keen to offer me a beverage. I decline, politely. Nevertheless, small glasses of milky tea appear before us within minutes. Riya picks hers up and knocks it back quickly, while I focus on Jaya.
“Can you tell me if there was any maintenance done at either school recently? Like, annual checks or any equipment that needed servicing . . .”
Jaya nearly bounces out of her chair. “Yes, yes, there was. The detective just asked me the same. There was a plumbing company that came to the school just a few days ago.”
I don’t feel I ought to whip out my purloined photos of the contract right in front of Riya, so I ask Jaya for the company name. No surprise, it’s the same one that I found the paperwork for.
“Is this a company you used before?”
She nods. Not that using an established firm means anything at all. It would be the easiest thing in the world to pay off the contracted workers to go and have lunch while someone else dressed in their overalls got access to the schools. Or for any company to hire in a temp worker.
Jaya looks stricken. “It didn’t connect for me as a problem. Till now.”
“It still might mean nothing,” Riya reassures her.
“Did your staff take any copy of an ID for the maintenance men?” I continue.
“It was only one man, and yes. Our practice is to take an ID copy and a cell phone number for anyone who enters the building where the girls are. It’s routine but we always do it.”
Riya looks at me, as if she’s just ever so slightly impressed that my opening questions were not completely idiotic. I take a sip of my tea, which is a troubling combination of scalding hot and tooth-achingly sweet.
“They scan the ID and store it digitally on the desktop computer in the office,” Riya says. Clearly, she’s decided she may as well save me the same line of questioning she’s just gone through. “I sent our tech guys in there just now to find it but the folder it should be in doesn’t have anything new from the past few weeks.”
Jaya wrings her hands. “I hope the administrator didn’t fail to follow procedure,” she says.
“I’ll talk to your admin person next,” Riya tells her. “Unless you want to?” she adds dryly, looking at me.
“Nice of you to ask,” I comment. “Does this mean you’re starting to trust me?”
“Not in the least. I was being sarcastic,” she returns.
I feel like she’s always got me on the defensive. She’s still watching me, and somehow her gaze makes me self-conscious. I pull out my phone and ask Riya to let me know what she finds out. Whether she will bother to keep me updated or not, I can’t be sure yet, but I give her my temporary Indian cell number, one that no one else contacts me on. To my surprise, she gives me hers in exchange.
“In case you turn something up,” Riya tells me. She glances down at the table for a long moment and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are dark and serious. “Those girls have had their futures taken from them, brutally,” she continues. “Their families will never recover from the loss. I want to do everything I can to find the people who did this and to make sure they don’t do it again.”
Across from us, an audible sob escapes from Jaya. I pass her a tissue and she blots away the tears in her eyes. I watch Riya, who looks younger now, even vulnerable. Her earnestness feels honest and it makes me like her more.
“Please know that I feel the same way,” I assure her. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything.”
7
&nb
sp; IT’S NOT GREAT THAT THE maintenance man’s ID scan appears to be missing, but I’m hopeful that Amber might have found it somewhere, maybe misfiled on the hard drive. Or it could be that she’s tracked down the plumbing contractor and we can trace the guy from that. While I’m stuck in traffic on the way back to my hotel, I check in with Amber. She sounds animated, the way she does when she’s got something up her sleeve.
“Good timing,” she says. “I was getting ready to call you.”
“The police say the plumber guy’s ID is missing,” I tell her.
“Utter nonsense. I found it within ten minutes, sitting in a folder on the computer’s desktop, which has a hundred other pieces of crap in it,” Amber replies. “Someone was just too lazy to file it.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“Because the ID is all but useless. The name on it is fake.”
That’s hardly surprising, but still, it’s a letdown and I sigh, looking out of the window. In the distance, row upon row of slums whip past as we drive by. Closer to me, blurs of color strobe, attracting my attention: clusters of women in technicolor saris walking along the road; massive billboards advertising the latest Bollywood blockbuster movie.
“However,” Amber continues, “the cell number the plumber gave the school, though no longer in use, was once connected to a social media account. And that account belongs to the man in the ID photo; so the same guy. I imagine he couldn’t resist checking his feed even while doing something dodgy. His real name is Hassan Shah.”
“Great! Did you find him?”
“Well, there’s good and bad news. The bad news is, Hassan Shah there is like the name John Smith here. There are hundreds of them in Mumbai alone.”
I get the impression, just from her tone, that she’s already cracked this problem, but the thing with Amber is, she delights in giving you every little detail of how she did it. I try my best to be patient.
“And the good news?” I ask.
“Our Hassan’s social media account shows that he has two kids. A fourteen-year-old son and a younger daughter. Now, the son’s got a social profile that geo-tracks him, you know, so his friends can find him when they go out. . . .”
“Yeah, thanks, I get how that works, Amber.”
“Well, within the past week, he’s also geo-linked to three places that he’s been with his family, including his father. So, I’m hopeful that the next time Hassan hangs out with his son, we’ll get an alert on the son’s social media.”
I smile. “You’re a genius.”
“Yes, it does feel that way, doesn’t it?” Amber says.
“And modest too,” I add.
“I’ll let you know when I have anything more,” she says, and hangs up.
I make it to the hotel just after Kit and Peggy have checked in. On the street outside the driveway, reporters and TV cameras jostle for position. I hope they are here waiting for some Bollywood superstar to emerge and not hoping to get pictures of my mother on her way to see the deceased girls’ families or the schools.
I stop in at Kit’s room. She greets me with a long, hard hug. It’s clear from her bloodshot eyes, shadowed with dark circles, that she’s hardly slept, and when she pulls back to look at me, her face holds a manic, strained energy that I haven’t seen in her since the days when she was drinking. When alcohol was the only way she felt some relief from the sharp edges of pain. It makes me very uneasy.
“Mum, are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“Are those paparazzi outside waiting for you?” I ask.
“Like vultures circling their prey,” she remarks, disconsolate.
“I’m sorry.”
She waves off my concern. “Here, give me a hand, Jess.”
She turns away and starts dragging a sofa across the polished wood floor. The hotel room that she has is miles bigger than mine, a suite really, with enough space to hold a small soccer match and possibly a stand for the audience too.
“Mum, not this again . . . ,” I plead. But I go over to help her.
Once Kit is happy with the placement of the sofa, she makes me help turn the desk around. She does this often when she travels—rearranges hotel rooms to facilitate the flow of chi, or positive energy. It’s a feng shui thing, and I’m not convinced it makes any kind of difference, but Kit looks so stressed out at the moment that I just keep quiet and help out.
Next, she starts unpacking. I help her hang up floaty shirts and printed jackets. Along with them are a couple of white shalwar kameez outfits—long tunics that go over fitted trousers.
“These are nice,” I say, trying to cheer her up, but it seems like I fail epically because Kit sits heavily on the end of the bed and just starts to cry.
“They’re for the condolence visits and the funerals,” she says, her voice breaking. Sitting beside her, I put my arm around her, but it feels pretty meaningless and not much help compared to the grief, or guilt, she’s going through. Finally, the weeping subsides, and I take her hand.
“When did you last eat anything?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“Mum?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Then let’s get Peggy and find some food.”
An hour later Kit’s taken us all out to a small restaurant with a patio that’s open to the baking late-afternoon sun. A long line of commuters and local residents stands waiting for their turn to be served for takeout, but Peggy has managed to grab us a table, and within minutes, a waiter deposits our food in front of us. We are each given a large thali platter. Arranged upon it are lots of small bowls filled with different vegetarian curries—smoky lentils, chopped eggplant, paneer cheese, and spiced cauliflower. On the side are dishes of rice, pale green coconut chutney, and paratha bread, hot out of the oven and oozing with butter.
“This looks divine,” Peggy says, surveying her plate.
“I’ve been coming to this place since the nineties,” Kit says. She’s been to India tons of times, for the schools that she founded, but also from years ago, when she was searching for enlightenment but mainly found dodgy gurus. I’m super hungry. Peggy watches with a small smile as I tuck into my meal. I glance up at her, questioningly.
“How does this fit with your diet sheet, Jessie?”
Li’s nutritionist provides Caitlin, Hala, and me with an individual eating plan that gives us perfectly measured amounts of each food group, tailored to our specific body shape, blood types, metabolism, and general food tolerances. It’s all wrapped up in a sexy app that Li has had coded in-house that combines data on our sleep, movement, heart rate, and body temperature, all of which is taken from a regular tracking ring. It’s all very impressive and we’re all super fit, but sometimes you just need that burrito, or a bag of fish and chips. Or rice and curry.
“I don’t think there’s anything here that’s off-limits,” I say.
My brazen lie makes Kit smile at least, and even though she only nibbles at her plate, the food seems to help restore my mother a little too. Meanwhile, I ask Peggy if there’s any news on Jake Graham.
“On the face of it, he still doesn’t have enough for us to panic about. But he’s persistent,” Peggy sighs. “He called me and left a message, just yesterday.”
“Did he say what he wants?” I ask.
“No.”
“But it was right after he came to see me,” says Kit. She falls silent, brooding.
“Amber’s still working on it,” Peggy says, trying to be upbeat. “There’s no point tying ourselves in knots. We all have enough on our plates right now.”
I nod. Just as I contemplate starting in on Kit’s leftovers, a new message from Amber comes into my earpiece. I’ve been wearing the comms unit since after our last conversation, to make sure I don’t miss anything.
“Is it Hassan?” I ask.
“Yes, I’ve found him,” she replies. “His son just checked in on social to say he’s helping his father by working after school. It appears that Hassan owns a s
mall car repair place over in the Santacruz area of the city.”
“So, he’s there now?”
“Right now. I’ve sent details to all of you. Caitlin’s going to stay and keep an eye on the girls at the hotel, but Hala will meet you there.”
I arrive at the car repair shop by auto-rickshaw. Rickshaws are just that bit narrower and more nimble than a taxi, and I don’t want to risk losing our target by being snared in traffic jams. On the way over, I imagine how it would go if I shared the information we just gained on Hassan and his whereabouts with the police, with Riya. The problem is, even if the police manage to get to him, whatever they learn would never be passed back to us. And Hassan is most likely a cog in a big Family First wheel. And it is Family First that we really want to cripple. Delivering the man who may have planted the bomb and giving him a big, splashy trial would be a huge win for the police in Mumbai—but the truth is that people like Hassan are the hired hands who execute the strategy. We need to find out who’s pulling the strings.
The garage is wide and deep, with two cars cranked up so that mechanics can work beneath them. Several other cars are scattered around, with their hoods open. Hala joins me outside the place. She and Caitlin hired motorbikes and she’s managed to arrive ten minutes ahead of me, giving her time to spot and watch Hassan.
“He’s the one in the banana shirt and shades,” she says. Indeed, Hassan is in oversized sunglasses and a short-sleeved yellow shirt with green bananas printed all over it. It’s a depressingly memorable style choice. Currently, Hassan seems like he’s on a break. He lounges against the back wall of the garage, chugging back a bottle of orange soda, and talking to a young boy in overalls, possibly his son. After a minute, the boy slides beneath one of the cars to work on it, and Hassan leans down to give him some advice. Then he finishes his soda and saunters out toward the front, toward us, where he stretches and takes in the street, which is jam-packed with cars inching slowly along.
