Living Hell

by Vivaan Shah

  Nadeem let go of her shoulders, slowly pulling back, his clasp still hovering over her. She stood face-to-face with him, yet her eyes were on the fifth floor. He tilted her head down. ‘I’ve heard that you spend a fair bit of time on the phone yourself,’ he muttered, his peripheral vision scanning the living room. Warren was wiping the drops of water that had spilt on the floor from the ice tray. Kishorie Lal was still fussing over his black eye, trying to convince Mangesh that it was a serious injury.

  ‘Well, that one lakh wasn’t the only thing Irshaad gave him,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, pointing towards the living room. ‘According to Mangesh out there, Irshaad had been supplying him smack.’

  ‘I don’t know about that . . . when I was with him, he was clean. He wasn’t doing any narcotics, but what he was hooked to was far worse, I can tell you that. I happen to know . . .’ she paused, exhaling heavily through her nose, ‘. . . because soon enough I got hooked to it too.’

  ‘What?’

  Her eyeballs quaked hesitantly into a blink. She looked over her shoulders and closed in towards him, murmuring softly. ‘Show me your phone,’ she said, glancing at his pockets.

  ‘I don’t have one . . .’

  ‘Okay, show me any phone, any other. Does your friend have a smartphone?’

  ‘Warren!’ Nadeem called out to the living room, popping his head in from the balcony.

  ‘Huh?’ Warren responded. Mangesh and Kishorie Lal immediately looked towards him as he asked, ‘Anyone got a smartphone?’

  ‘Mine’s a smartphone,’ Warren mumbled.

  Mangesh instantly fished out his Motorola G6 and began to examine it. ‘Is this a smartphone?’ he pondered, displaying it.

  ‘Mine’s a Nokia,’ Kishorie Lal mentioned, producing an obsolete 3310 from his chest pocket.

  ‘Na, thanks,’ Nadeem shook his head. ‘His’ll do.’

  Warren tossed him his Samsung, which he failed to catch, dropping it on the floor and nearly cracking the screen. ‘Uh . . . thanks . . .’ he nodded, picking it up and stepping back into the balcony.

  Warren remained expressionless.

  As he stepped out and tried to unlock the screen, an incoming call caught his attention. It was Inspector Gaekwad’s number. Nadeem cut the call, pressed down firmly on the right button and handed it over to Rohini.

  In a matter of a few seconds, a phone began to ring in the living room. Nadeem turned back to see whose it was. As he had anticipated, it was Mangesh’s.

  She unlocked the screen and went straight to the App store. She typed in Q . . . then U . . . A . . . all in uppercase letters. A couple of options showed up. ‘It’s this new app that Irshaad introduced him to.’

  ‘You gotta be kidding me . . .’ Nadeem laughed. ‘What was he addicted to? Some kind of a video game?’

  ‘It’s not a video game. It’s a programme, a software.’

  ‘What is this?’ Nadeem wondered, looking at the screen.

  ‘It’s a morality calculator.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An app. It’s called QUANTRA. It hasn’t been launched yet, this is just the beta version.’

  ‘What’s so special about it?’

  ‘Well,’ she breathed, ‘I wouldn’t know how to begin.’ She crinkled her lips, looking on into the distance.

  ‘Suppose you begin from the very beginning.’

  ‘Well, according to Chintan it was a thing Irshaad had picked up from the officials at the institution where he had been admitted for a while.’

  ‘The Nandlal Pramod Functionality Centre?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he said the authorities had given it to Irshaad to help him out. He claimed that if utilized correctly, it could revolutionize law enforcement, render lie detector tests obsolete and be a mathematical judge that can measure right and wrong up to an accuracy of 85 per cent.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘It calculates your moral wavelength and gives an approximate estimate of your morality index in accordance to your income group, the amount you donate to charity and what service you provide to society through your occupation. Your count, statistics, points, whatever you want to call it. There are three separate versions as per religious denominations. There’s QUANTRA 3.1 for Hindus, QUANTRA 7.86 for the Muslim community, and a deluxe edition for Sikhs and Christians. The one for the Parsi community has not been developed yet. Apparently, they’re in the process of studying the Zoroastrian scriptures. The Buddhist edition has been outsourced to Hong Kong. It measures each and every action of yours and tallies it with not just standardized measures of right and wrong, but also in comparison to what others are doing, and then imparts penance.’

  ‘If you’re taking an interest in my moral welfare, it’s a lost cause,’ he snapped, snatching the phone from her over-demonstrative claws. ‘It’s for sale. I’d be willing to loan it out to you at compound interest. Not at the cost of my convenience.’

  ‘Well,’ she smiled reassuringly, ‘we’ve all done some things we’re not proud of, Nadeem. Things that stay on one’s mind and merit their worth once the deed is done. After the dust of excitement and the passing moment has settled. Maybe an act or an oversight or a simple convenience, but committed for the sake of one’s own interest, disregarding that of the other, well, I think that constitutes a crisis of conscience.’

  ‘Is that what you’re trying to do then? Clean your slate? Wash away your sins? Get brownie points with that metal detector of right and wrong? That digital dogma? Is that why you helped me out earlier? So you could increase your score?’

  ‘I helped you out because you needed the help. Not because I wanted to.’

  ‘Must be quite a change for someone who’s used to helping themselves,’ he muttered, chewing on his fingernails and gently letting out a thought. ‘The word on the street is that you emptied the one lakh out of him and bounced.’

  She coiled up like a spring wire, the nerves poking out of her forehead and beginning to writhe up and down in intolerance. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Someone.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she insisted, her nostrils flaring.

  ‘Irshaad. But don’t tell him I told you.’

  ‘I’m not ever going to be meeting him to tell him anything.’

  ‘That’s what your husband told him, possibly to use as an excuse. But then they would have been after you.’

  Her eyebrows curved up, slithering through her forehead. ‘Tell me something,’ she chewed on her lip, ‘you sound like you have experience with what it’s like to be in debt with the man.’

  ‘I have more than that. I have the scars to show for it too. And a deficit on my chest that weighs more than twelve lakhs in rupees and sixty-four in kilos. It makes the time pass much slower, all that weight. Knowing that any second someone could walk into the room and lighten the burden.’

  ‘You owe him twelve lakhs?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I could help you with that.’

  ‘First, you help him out with the one-plus interest, otherwise he’s not going to be off your back. Isn’t there anything you could sell of Chintan’s to raise some money?’

  ‘His car?’

  ‘It’s stolen. Tell me something. What about the seven lakhs he embezzled? Where’s that?’

  ‘He had to return it.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nadeem sighed. ‘What about you?’ he winked. ‘What about the proceeds from your various escapades? I bet you’ve sent many a man to the cleaners in your time, baby!’

  One smack landed flat on his left cheek. Nadeem turned back, slightly less cocky and more polite. ‘You’ve got the palm of a kleptomaniac,’ he spat, touching his cheek.

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ she smiled, gesturing towards the couch in the living room.

  ‘We could make a hell of a team.’

  ‘No, thanks. I held a joint account with my husband, and the more there were of us, the less there was in it. On our own we happened to get by, but
as a duo we were a disaster.’

  ‘You got the account dissolved?’

  ‘After he was notified by the bank that I withdrew my share, I got a call from K.L. Hospital saying that he had been admitted for throat cancer and needed one lakh for chemotherapy. I asked them to courier me the medical reports. I received an envelope with an MRI scan, ENT X-ray and blood tests. I had them examined by a specialist to determine their authenticity. They were fakes beyond a doubt, or quite possibly someone else’s, an actual cancer patient. I went over to the hospital, where he was supposedly admitted, and found out that he had made a deal with the staff to prepare the phony medical reports in exchange for blood donations. As expected, he was nowhere to be seen in the hospital. They had couriered the original tests and actual results to his home address for the sake of his own health. Trying to fake everyone with fractures, concussions, heart attacks and throat cancer, he had failed to realize what had actually happened to him.’

  ‘What was wrong with him?’

  ‘I saw the tests, with my very own eyes. The doctor showed them to me. He said he had been trying to get in touch with him urgently. He still had an outstanding debt at the pharmacy for a bottle of Phensedyl, which I had to clear up for him. But according to his CT scan, biopsy and chest X-ray, an abnormal outgrowth had been detected around his neck.’

  ‘What!’ Nadeem scowled, cupping his palm over his mouth.

  ‘It was in the shape of a tumour, which was neither malignant nor cancerous, but was instead eating away at his respiratory system like a parasitic organism, not of a traceable origin, possibly a mutation of some sort. The doctor’s theory was that this had been occurring ever since he started taking Synahydraloxide, an experimental drug that he had prescribed to him. It was causing an acute inflammation of the sinuses and windpipe, which required him to spend a considerable amount of time in the loo for nasal and throat discharge.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Nadeem muttered under his breath.

  ‘I immediately called him up for the sake of his own safety, to tell him what the matter was. But he kept crying, howling like a wild animal. I tried to hush him up and calm him down. I tried to console him even and tell him that everything would be all right. He kept begging me into talking to Irshaad, suggested I go see him even, but I told him it was out of the question. I knew he was in deep trouble, so I offered to help. I called up Irshaad but he didn’t listen to me. He got angry; he gets crazy sometimes. He started yelling on the phone, saying he had been looking for Chintan for days. Finally, I decided the only course of action left was to go to the police. It was my idea. And it was my mistake.’

  ‘Does Irshaad know this?’

  ‘He doesn’t know that I told Chintan to go to the police.’

  ‘What did he say when you spoke to him on the phone that day? Did he ask you to clear your husband’s debts?’

  ‘I didn’t have the money to do it. I was flat broke. The next day, he called me up when he was calmer and back in his senses, and asked me to pass on a message to Chintan.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘It was a mobile number. He also sent me a message with someone’s bank account details, which I forwarded to him. So, he simply asked Chintan to pay off one of his debts and Chintan gladly obliged, since he had enough money to do so at the time. That bought him some time until Irshaad started calling again and again and again. It reached a point where I started getting calls from random numbers asking for Chintan, saying that he owed them money.’

  ‘Those were Irshaad’s creditors,’ said Nadeem. ‘The son of a bitch owes money all over town. He transferred them to Chintan Makhija. That’s the loan-sharking food chain. The circle of life. If he owes them and your husband owes him, technically your husband owes them too.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. The last time I spoke to him, he said he was feeling better since he had been able to procure his medication from the pharmacy, thanks to some friends.’

  Nadeem looked back into the living room through the balcony, throwing a narrow glance at Mangesh.

  ‘I told him not to take the medication,’ she said, ‘that the doctor had said it was causing harm, but he didn’t listen. He said he was feeling fine after taking it and that he was in the pink of health. He claimed he had found the answer to all his troubles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He told me he had the goods on Irshaad, and that he had something that could be used to blackmail him and extort money. Some files. He said they could be used to make a deal with the people who had been calling him.’

  ‘Where are those files? Did he sell them?’

  ‘Well, he told me everything was going to be all right, that he had made arrangements to sell the files to one of Irshaad’s creditors, and that the person was going to meet him that evening.’

  Nadeem took out Warren’s mobile phone and proceeded to dial the number he had jotted down from the dhobi in order to clarify his suspicions. Thankfully, he had remembered it by heart, since the contacts on his phone were no longer available.

  ‘Hello!’ a sleepy voice answered.

  ‘Hello,’ Nadeem whispered politely.

  ‘Speaking?’

  ‘I don’t think you know me, but I know a friend of yours.’

  ‘Listen, can you call back in the morning?’

  ‘No, excuse me! I’m afraid it can’t wait. It’s rather urgent.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘My name is Nadeem Sayed Khatib. I used to work for Irshaad Batla.’

  ‘Irshaad who?’

  ‘He’s a friend of yours! Or if I’m not mistaken, the last time we spoke, you referred to him as a client.’

  ‘I don’t know any Irshaad.’

  ‘He owed you some money, which he had asked Chintan Makhija to pay off for him.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘Your name has come up in his murder investigation.’

  Nadeem could hear a pin drop in the silence that ensued. The man breathed heavily on the other end, thinking hard about what to say next.

  ‘Are you with the police?’ he stammered.

  ‘I’m afraid I am,’ Nadeem looked at Mangesh.

  ‘Did you call me up earlier today with regard to Chintan Makhija?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you cut the call? I was about to mention that Makhija had cleared his debt; he had wired the money to my account.’

  ‘How much?’

  The man seemed to think twice before answering. ‘Twenty grand.’

  ‘Would it be possible to meet?’

  The man took a long tentative pause. ‘Where?’

  Nadeem thought a second. ‘Goregaon telephone exchange.’

  ‘Okay,’ he breathed heavily.

  ‘I’ll see you there in around twenty minutes?’

  ‘Gimme thirty.’

  ‘See you in half an hour.’ Nadeem cut the call.

  ‘Who was it?’ Rohini asked.

  ‘The person your husband wired the money to. It’s got to be one of the creditors.’

  Nadeem felt no need to continue the conversation and so he brought her back into the living room. Warren sat sullenly in front of the television. Kishorie Lal and Mangesh were arguing about what course of action to take. Mangesh insisted that the third floor be sealed and made out of bounds, as the ballistics experts were on their way to collect samples. By now, even Machhiwaala had been disturbed from his slumber. He stood outside the broken door, grumpily listening to every word.

  ‘What’s all the commotion about,’ he quibbled.

  On noticing the late Mr Makhija’s wife, he immediately snapped out of his casual posture, conducting himself with the decorum expected of the esteemed position of landlord.

  ‘Inspector V.M. Gaekwad of the Crime Branch should be here any minute!’ Mangesh informed him.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Machhiwaala,’ Nadeem greeted him sarcastically. ‘You’re going to have a fair bit of explaining to do. Not like yesterday. I s
uggest you stay awake till Inspector Gaekwad of the Crime Branch gets here. He’s not going to let you off that easy.’

  ‘Inspector who?’ frowned Mr Machhiwaala. ‘I don’t know him. I only know Inspector Nagpal from Malwani police chowki.’

  ‘Is he coming down here too?’ asked Nadeem.

  ‘Nope,’ said Mangesh. ‘He’s officially transferred both the homicide cases over to Inspector Gaekwad. It’s a Crime Branch matter now.’

  ‘Tell him to ask Nagpal for Makhija’s phone. He’s sitting with him right now at the station.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Mangesh protested. ‘I’m not taking any orders from you.’

  ‘It’s our only chance. We’ve got to get hold of Makhija’s mobile phone. He had been receiving threatening calls from people Irshaad Batla owed money to. He tried cutting a deal with them for the files in order to save his own ass. Obviously, one of them turned on him. Narrow down on the numbers you can get off his phone. One of those numbers on that phone belongs to the killer. Check the messages and all calls made and received in the last week. Rohini, you check if you can recognize any of the numbers. Also, do you have any of those numbers on your phone? You said they called you as well, didn’t they?’

  ‘I’ll have to check in my call log. It was a while ago. The numbers may have been automatically erased as I didn’t save any of them.’

  Nadeem tossed the phone back to Warren, leaning out of the doorway with his feet on the shoe rack.

  ‘Where you off to?’ Warren asked Nadeem as he put on his shoes.

  ‘To the Goregaon telephone exchange.’

  Rendezvous with the Voice of Reason

  Nadeem scooted out of the building without much explanation, leaving everyone unreasonably baffled at his doorstep. Much to Mangesh’s protest, he had left him there to settle the matter pretty much all by himself. He promised he’d be back in the building before dawn, but he had nothing more than his own word to go on.

  There was no one down in the lobby. Droplets of blood had trickled all over the white tiled floor of the small entrance to the building. The sewage pipes that hung over the protruding balconies were leaking fiercely all over the compound. He ran out of the unlocked gate, caught the first autorickshaw in sight and ordered the driver to speed to the nearest bus stop, where he hopped on to the 223 bound for 4 Bungalows and got off at the Goregaon telephone exchange. He waited at the signal for over half an hour. There was still no sign of the man. It was now getting frightfully late. The bus depot across the road was closing for the day and the entrance gate was being locked as all the empty buses lined up in their sheds. The traffic roared past Nadeem who stood on the main road on the divider, keeping a look out for the approaching vehicles. He kept fidgeting with his watch to check the time, looking out on to the road, hoping the next vehicle that took a turn at the distant signal for the Goregaon telephone exchange would be the one he was waiting for. He sat down on the divider in despair, sighing despondently, twiddling his thumbs and looking down at the road, having abandoned all hope. As he turned, kicking a stone in agitation, he noticed a small gathering of people about a hundred metres behind where he was sitting. They had congregated around a fenced-off construction area in the middle of the road. A section had been dug up and amidst the drills and other excavation machinery stood several municipal workers staring into the ditch in perplexity and amazement. Nadeem rushed towards them to see what all the fuss was about.