by Neil D'Silva
It was the horror of it that struck her first. An immense, acute horror, of a piece of her mass being whisked away from her body. Just like that; and now it hung from the knife like it were a fillet of fish.
She found her voice back to howl.
The howl could have brought the roof down. But that was only a momentary respite. Midway through the scream, her voice failed her and she went mute, fully mute this time, not believing what she saw—the man lashing out his tongue to dig into her filleted meat and smacking the blood that laced his lips.
“Would you like it raw?” he asked, the smirk refusing to leave his face. “Oh, what a stupid question to ask! Of course, you won’t like it this way, would you? You are one of those sophisticated high-society bitches who eat with spoon and fork and all that. If you hold out a little more, I will whip up a good dish for you. Will you stay awake for me? Will you? Pretty please?”
***
Anuradha hadn’t ever waited so long in one place for anything, not even in those shabby bureaucratic offices of the municipality, but today it held her deep interest to know what the man she had followed was doing in this desolate area. He was the man supposed to take care of her daughter, and she wanted to make sure there was nothing about him that necessitated worry.
A cramp arose in her leg, and she kicked her foot till her flat silver slippers threatened to fly off, and then she suddenly became aware of the awkwardness of the situation.
It was then that she heard the scream.
Though it came from a distance, it was full-throated and piquant. It was a woman’s scream and that woman was in distress.
An uncomfortable feeling arose in her. It was the feeling of familiarity. Something told her she had heard the voice before.
Her ears perked up now, attempting to catch any further strain that floated in her direction. A faint sharp scream fell on her ears again. Anuradha’s hearing was acute, just like her other senses. Was that a sniffle now?
She wanted to go closer to the junkyard and investigate. The sound surely came from the garage her son-in-law had just entered into, for there was nothing else resembling a habitat in sight. She looked around for a door, but found none. And then, her gaze went upwards, towards the place in the roof where her son-in-law had disappeared. What was hidden inside?
Anuradha stood like that, completely engrossed in her thoughts, when she felt a shadow fall upon her. It was a dark man with a large mustache who stood looking quizzically at her. He was some stray drifter, a laborer perhaps who was accustomed to using this dump as an open-air toilet. The sight of a well-dressed lady in this derelict heap had evidently unnerved him. Anuradha felt the embarrassment too, she became aware of the awkwardness of her stance and the situation she was in.
“Sorry,” she mumbled to the man, though she did not know why she owed him any apology.
“Looking for something, madam?” he asked. Anuradha could not fail to notice the glinting silver caps in his teeth.
“I… I…” Anuradha found there was nothing plausible she could say. So she said the least implausible thing. “I wondered if these cars were for sale. Am looking for a secondhand car and saw this garage.”
The man laughed aloud. “This place dead, madam. Dead! No cars for sale here. Cars been dead since ages.”
“Is there a place to go inside this garage?”
“Don’t understand me, madam? This no garage. No door here. No one come since ages. Municipality will come, break this down, build new building.”
“All right, I should go then,” said Anuradha.
“Go fast, madam,” he said. “This place not good. You lucky I no pervert. I decent, you know. But, lovely purse, madam. Money inside? Yes, yes, I only want that.”
“What?” Anuradha clutched her purse tighter.
“Give me money, madam,” the man said, now with an edge to his voice. “You know how deep that gutter is? Things go in, never come out. Want to come and see?”
The old woman was sensible. She knew when things weren’t working her way. She knew when she had to give up. This was one of those times. It was lucky she never carried much cash.
***
There were no detours now. Maya’s house loomed ahead and Anuradha paused only to buy a box of sweets from a shop she passed on the way. She hadn’t lost all her money. Like a true-blue middle-aged Indian woman, she had the habit of stowing away some cash in the recess between her bra and blouse.
Finally reaching Maya’s house, she rang the doorbell.
“Ma,” Maya said as she opened the door, “is that really you?”
Anuradha walked inside without acknowledging the doorstep greeting and immediately threw her hands in the air. Completely forgetting that she had just been robbed, she burst out, “Is this the house you are living in? Maya, what have you come to?”
This sudden denouncement of her state put Maya on the defensive. She had no illusions about her current standard of living, but she did not want to admit that to her mother. She took the box of sweets from her hand and said, “It is okay, Ma. This is the life I have chosen. I am fine here.”
“Does anyone even come to meet you here?” Anuradha asked, gingerly sitting down on the chair in the room.
“Namrata came yesterday, and a school friend was supposed to come but she didn’t turn up.”
“Who?”
“Padma, the one who teaches English.”
“Yeah, the one who had come home last year,” recalled Anuradha. “The one with the mad son.”
“He’s not mad. He’s dyslexic.”
“Why didn’t she turn up? This is anyway too far for anyone.”
“I don’t know,” said Maya, ignoring the complaint in her mother’s voice. “She isn’t even taking calls now. Why don’t you sit down?”
“Where?” asked Anuradha. “That chair? Will it hold?”
Just then, there was a knock at the door.
“Is it Bhaskar already?” said Maya, looking at the staircase through the window. “He doesn’t usually come back this early.”
“He is indeed quick. He was still in that garage when I left.” said Anuradha.
“What garage?” asked Maya and opened the door.
Bhaskar strode into the house, sweating all over his shirt and filled the room with his strong odor. Anuradha looked at him and was aghast. She had just seen him on the street outside, but now here he was in a state of complete disarray. His clothes seemed tattered, his hair unkempt and his eyes bloodshot. Anuradha wondered how her daughter could not see these things in her husband; or, probably she saw everything but chose to ignore them just as she was now ignoring the state of the house.
“Ma is here,” said Maya.
Bhaskar smiled at his mother-in-law. “I am sorry,” he said, “but I will have to change these clothes.”
He went behind a wooden partition that was supposed to carve out an inner room within the larger room and removed his sweaty shirt. He took a clean white kurta that hung from a nail and put it over his head, tugging it into place.
“Where did you see Bhaskar, Ma?” Maya asked.
Bhaskar’s kurta was already over his head when he heard that, but Maya’s words froze him. His wife who stood next to him did not see the reaction. Suddenly conscious of the pause he took, he pulled the kurta all the way down.
“Yes, where did you see me, aunty?” he asked, a mirthless smile playing threateningly on his lips.
“I saw you?” asked Anuradha, with a very curious expression on her face. “When?”
“You just said some garage—” began Maya but was immobilized midsentence, for her mother made a sign to her to keep quiet. It was a well-known gesture, understood by her daughters. It had been used several times over the years. But it wasn’t much of a deception and Bhaskar, who was watching his mother-in-law’s every expression like a marauding hawk, caught the slight wrinkle of caution that flashed over her eyebrows.
~ 15 ~
The Immobile Ascetic
Anu
radha harbored no illusions about her age. The long trip to her daughter’s place the previous day was now taking its toll on her. The realization was slowly dawning upon her that she wasn’t meant for long train journeys anymore. Then there was the robbery too. It hadn’t caused much monetary loss but had riled her all the same. She had decided not to tell anyone about that shameful incident. It wasn’t an achievement to be bandied around loosely anyway.
Lying prone on her couch most of the day, she ate little and didn’t do as much work around the house as she usually did. The only thing she did was to watch television constantly.
After her daughter’s wedding, she had been hooked to at least three more television shows and she watched them religiously every afternoon. She was engrossed in one of them at the moment, when it was disrupted by a commercial break. That meant she had to surf to the next channel and watch the other show that went on there.
She hadn’t yet mastered the trick of directly pressing the channel numbers on the remote to reach her destination; so, she manually browsed through each channel in sequence.
However, she didn’t reach her channel. Halfway through the surfing rigmarole, her mind was captured by a picture that flashed on one half of the screen.
A news reporter covered the other half.
“This is Padma Murthy,” said the announcer, “who is missing since two days. The woman is 38 years old and was wearing a green saree with white floral print when she left home last. She was last seen leaving the Madam Somdevi Khanna School of Boys, where she teaches English. Anyone with any information on her whereabouts may contact her kin at the number given below.”
Anuradha sat up straight, quite forgetting that her back hadn’t been her best friend that day. She realized that Maya’s house didn’t have television and promptly took her cellphone and dialed her number.
Maya took the call midway through the second ring.
“Maya,” whispered Anuradha, “Maya, is that you?”
“Yes, Ma, who else would it be on my number?”
“Maya, your friend Padma—”
“What about her?”
“She is missing, Maya.”
“Oh, is she?”
“I mean,” said Anuradha impatiently, “really missing. I just saw it on television.”
Running a missing ad on the cable network meant serious business. Maya sat down. The situation was indeed grave. “What does the ad say?” she asked.
“Missing since two days. Didn’t return home from school at all that day.”
That was the day she was to visit her. Maya’s heart skipped a beat when she realized that. “I’m coming there. I’ll ask Bhaskar to bring me,” she said.
“No!” Anuradha stopped her. “Don’t trouble him for this.”
“It will be okay, Ma,” said Maya. “I can bring him.”
“Don’t.” Anuradha pursed her lips, hoping her daughter would understand and not prod on any further.
“There you go again, Ma. You always want things your way, don’t you? You hate him and so you don’t want me to bring him. But, he’s my husband now. I hope you understand that simple fact.”
“Listen to me, you stupid girl.” There was insistence in Anuradha’s voice now. Maya realized this wasn’t just one her mother’s fastidious tantrums. This time she meant serious business. She had something to tell.
“I am listening,” said Maya.
“I saw him yesterday.”
“Yes, you told me that.”
“You didn’t ask where.”
“Where?”
“Does he have anything to do with an abandoned garage near your house?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“And yet, he spent a lot of time at this place near your house. Don’t you keep any track of your husband? Don’t you ask him anything?”
“That’s not the way it is, Ma.” There was a twinge of annoyance in Maya’s voice.
“Something is not right about him,” said Anuradha, “and this is my worry speaking for you. He went inside an abandoned garage. I saw it all. I was following him. But he doesn’t know I was there, don’t tell him.”
“Were you snooping on him?”
“Yes, and I have no shame in confessing to that. For the first time in my life, I am scared.”
“Scared for what? I am sure if you snoop on a priest, you will find something scandalous about him.”
“Why are you so obstinate, Maya? How would you take it if I told you that I heard the screams of a woman from the garage? A familiar woman? They were coming from inside the place, Maya, and Bhaskar was in there. People told me the place has not been used since years. Then why did he jump into the place from a hole in the roof with a bottle of alcohol in his hand?”
“A hole in the roof… alcohol… a screaming woman… What’s all this? Some new show you are watching?”
“Don’t mock this, Maya,” said Anuradha. “You don’t know anything about the man. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know where he has come from, what he really is. But I saw him going into that godforsaken place, and there were a woman’s screams.”
“What woman?”
“How the hell am I to know?”
“So tell the police.”
“Why would they believe me? I am just a drifter. If anyone should go, it’s you. Find out something concrete about him.”
“Who was this woman?” Maya asked.
“I don’t know, Maya,” said Anuradha, but her tone said a lot of unspoken things. “I will only say that the voice was familiar. I felt as though… as though… I had heard the voice at least once before. Exactly once before, to be precise, in fact.”
“You met Padma only once.”
“I am not saying anything. But there is something in there.”
“What must I do? Where is this garage? I’ll go right away.”
“Along the street under your house, go right ahead till the chawl ends. After the butcher’s shop, there’s a desolate patch. Take someone with you, and not a word to Bhaskar. But be careful, Maya. Just be careful.”
“I will be careful,” said Maya.
Maya ended the call with her mother and dialed Padma’s number. The phone rang and went on for a while without being answered. She held it to her ear all through, till it disconnected. She tried the number once again. It wasn’t answered this time either. Next, she checked her messages. She had sent Padma at least a dozen messages over the last two days, but none of them had been replied to. The last message from her had arrived two days ago:
Reached Naigaon. Taking a rickshaw to your place now.
She had missed the message when it had arrived, but now when she saw it, she became agonized with worry. Here was proof that her friend had reached Naigaon to meet her, but the meeting had never taken place. Where was her friend?
Without wasting another moment, she went through the contacts on her phone and found the number of her husband, Saurabh Murthy.
When Maya announced she was Padma’s friend, the husband’s voice became excited, hoping that she would have some news of her. Maya told him how Padma was en route to her house in Naigaon and had even reached the station, but never reached her place. Saurabh heard it, asked her gruffly why she hadn’t spoken about it for two days, and then said he’d go to the police station and give them this new information. Maybe, if they didn’t have much workload on their shoulders, they could launch a manhunt in the area and find out about his missing wife.
***
Maya continued sitting in her bed for a long time after the phone call. The more she thought of Padma—the friend with whom she had shared her most intimate secrets—the more distressed she became. She was still in this gloomy mood when there was a knock on the door.
It unsettled her; she hoped it wasn’t Bhaskar back early from school. She did not know how he would react on seeing her brooding thus. It were better if he came at night as usual when he wasn’t much interested in her face.
However, it wasn’t
him. It was Akram, and he rendered an apology at the door itself. “Sorry, but I’ll need to measure the kitchen once again. The numbers didn’t add up, perhaps I made a mistake. You can call me a dunce.”
Maya stepped away from the door so that he could come in. He was all business when he entered and took the measurements again. Quite soon, he figured out the reason for the goof-up and smiled to himself.
“Akram,” said Maya when he was about to go out. It was evident she had put a lot of thought into what she was going to say. “Could you take me to the police station?”
Akram stopped in his tracks on hearing the words. He had grown fond of this lonely woman. That morning, when his father found the mistake in his calculations and asked him to go back and re-measure, he had felt the tinge of pleasure course through him. But he was aware that this woman was another man’s wife. He had to keep his pleasure within his pants.
However, the woman had asked him for something, even though it sounded ominous. It wouldn’t be his error if he let go of this opportunity, but a trip to the police station was hardly a romantic idea.
“Why do you want to go to the police?” he asked warily.
Between bouts of hesitation, Maya recounted to him everything she knew about Padma’s journey to Naigaon to meet her, everything except her suspicions about her husband.
“What do you mean your friend never reached here after reaching the railway station?” Akram asked.
“Look here, this is the message,” Maya showed the message to her. “She sounded nervous when she called. I am really worried, Akram. Don’t know when Bhaskar will return. I have to go look for her.”
“What will you do?”
“I will tell the police what I know. I think it’s very important I do that.”
“But… shouldn’t you wait for Bhaskar?”
