Living Hell

by Vivaan Shah

  A rectangular 8x10-foot chunk of the cement had been removed and, under the sedimentary layer of gravel and asphalt, lay the corpse of a full-grown adult male, placed between two converging underground pipelines that were connected to an adjacent manhole. The man was covered in soot and dust and was indistinguishably grey. His body was beginning to decompose, but three bullet holes scattered across the upper torso were clearly perceivable despite the apparent mess of his condition. There was one in the abdomen, one in the left shoulder blade and another in the ribcage. The blood around the craters had dried up, turning maroon, and clung ferociously to the vicinity of the wounds.

  Two municipal workers volunteered to lift him out of the pit and did so with a cast iron resolve. They could not help looking the other way when grabbing hold of his limbs, which hesitated to stay in one place. On getting a clearer look at his face, Nadeem instantly recognized him as Jayant Naagre.

  A police jeep pulled up near the site and a hawaldar got out, putting a handkerchief over his nose and casually walking up to the dug-up area to supervise what was going on.

  The excavation site had been a night-time operation. It was supposed to be cordoned off for traffic during the day, and it was now time for the labourers to begin work on it. The workers had just checked in for duty on the night shift when the man who drove the cement roller noticed something protruding from beneath the ground. The cement slab that covered the spot had not been reinstated firmly as yet. The cement on the upper layer of the slab had not even dried completely. It carried handprints scattered indiscriminately about it. The workers decided to call off the night’s work in view of the irregular occurrence. They would resume in the morning. The spot, however, was sealed by the police in case it needed to be checked later on.

  By the time the man Nadeem was waiting for reached the Goregaon telephone exchange, the cops and municipal workers had vacated the spot where the body had been found. It was covered with a series of boulders and shut off with a ramshackle tin covering. There were multiple excavations all around that section of the road, some for installing underground cables and pipelines, some for laying tar and cement, and others connected to obsolete MTNL switchboards that stood purposelessly on the corner of the road. Nadeem spotted a subway, which doubled up as an underground walkway, outside the entrance to the bus depot. The walkway appeared to be crossing the excavated section of the road where the body had been found. He was trying to trace the path when he heard a car careening into sight. He noticed a figure on the other side of the road stepping out of a totalled second-hand dark green Ford Ikon. It had a Maharashtra number plate: MH02NA0425. The entire front section of the sedan was heavily damaged, the windscreen had a crack on the top left corner, which spread out like a spider’s web, denying any visibility. The right mudguard was hanging off the side of the car like the flap of a puppy dog’s ear. The bumper was mutilated. The bonnet was dented and had a crease running all the way across it. It looked like at least Rs 80,000–Rs 85,000 worth of damage. The man who drove it seemed far from pleased at having to meet Nadeem.

  ‘You the guy I spoke to earlier?’ he slurred.

  ‘That’d be me!’ Nadeem stated, looking him over as he walked towards him, measuring each step with the stinginess of a salesman. He didn’t strike him as particularly distinctive in any way, shape or form. Just kind of regular, like the kind of faces one sees on the local train on the way to work. It did appear from his manner, however, that he was not entirely alien to being awake at so indecent an hour. Nadeem sized him up to be about five-foot eleven, noticed that he had on a crumpled, full-sleeved rayon shirt with the sleeves folded up to the elbows, and a pair of creased semi-formal trousers with the brown leather square toes to go with it. Nadeem studied the facial hair scattered about his face with bemused wonder, observing the wavy hair that stood still over his forehead, masking a receding hairline. He felt casually intrigued at the man’s appearance, which was just as bewildering as it was amusing.

  ‘So?’ asked Nadeem. ‘You do know Irshaad Ahmed Sheikh!’

  ‘Well, uh . . .’ he mumbled softly. ‘As I said before, he’s my client.’

  ‘What is your line of business?’

  ‘Criminal lawyer.’

  ‘I thought Razzaq Bhai was the family lawyer?’

  ‘Well, you see, Razzaq Bhai had a bit of an accident.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine! Just a torn ligament and slipped disc. He’s currently admitted in Holy Family Hospital. You ought to go visit him.’

  ‘So since when have you been handling their affairs?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ he sniffled, ‘I’m not exactly handling the family affairs. Just the minor scars and scrapes of Irshaad’s personal misconduct. We have a sort of understanding.’

  ‘I see, what’s your name?’

  ‘Hoseipha Khatri. You might have heard of me as HK.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of you,’ Nadeem smiled. ‘But if you’re Irshaad’s lawyer, I’m pretty sure you must have heard of me.’

  ‘You’re Nadeem Chipkali, aren’t you?’

  Nadeem’s smile retracted. ‘Talking to me is as good as talking to the cops,’ he snarled. ‘So, I suggest you gimme your statement or whatever it is that you can make up on the spot.’

  ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’ HK put his hands on his chest, giggling away like a delinquent child caught by a schoolteacher.

  ‘So, HK? When was the last time you spoke to Makhija?’

  ‘Well, he paid me off. I had no reason to be in touch with him.’ He began to cough, ‘Whatever . . . ugh . . . ugh . . . business I had with him . . . ugh . . . ugh . . . was over as far as I was concerned.’ He swirled the mucus around in his throat, trying to get enough to spit, but nothing came together in one piece. It was all floating around in his windpipe like a virus. He kept trying to clear his throat, making awful sounds that were more alarming than they were distracting. ‘So, as I said, I had nothing to do with him in an official capacity after my payment was cleared.’ He coughed again, this time managing to hurl a great big splotch of slime on to the sidewalk. Its colour was beyond description. Neither green nor grey. Black like the night.

  ‘But then,’ he continued, ‘a couple of days later he calls me up, out of the blue.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said he had some dirt on my client, some files which he was willing to sell provided the price was right, and if I knew anyone who was interested. I told him not to do anything of the kind. I, of course, didn’t notify my client that he was in imminent danger, as you know his reactions tend to be . . . uh . . . a bit drastic.’

  He spat again, this time with less vigour than before. ‘And I am known to quite frequently act upon my own discretion and, as legal counsel, I am entitled to do as I see fit, provided it is within the scope of the law. I figured that if I got hold of those files, I could quietly hand them back to Irshaad, without him having a heart attack. So I told Makhija to hold on to those files for me, and that I would outbid anyone who was willing to purchase them. I took Irshaad’s chartered accountant, Cheeku, with me to keep track of the expenses so that I would be duly reimbursed. You know Cheeku?’

  ‘Yeah. I know Cheeku. I used to work under him.’

  ‘So Cheeku and me got into my Ford Ikon and went over to Malad to meet this Makhija guy. We stopped at every ATM we could find in the area, scrounging together whatever dough we could pull out of our personal accounts.’

  ‘Cheeku must have kept track of every rupee.’

  ‘We managed to pull out about 40,000 bucks, which is the maximum withdrawal limit, and headed straight to Makhija’s with a briefcase full of notes.’

  ‘When was all this?’

  ‘Uh . . . I’m not too sure. A couple of days ago. I can’t remember the date.’

  ‘Did you two sign in the register?’

  ‘We did, at least we pretended to. But we didn’t want t
o give out our details, so, when the guard wasn’t looking, we pretended to write down our details and shut the register. He was half-asleep anyway, he probably doesn’t remember. He’d even forgotten to lock the gate. He just mumbled to us in his sleep to write down our names. Seemed like quite an irresponsible watchman, if you ask me. Cheeku gave me cover and I did the same for him. It isn’t all that difficult, you know. I usually never sign when I go into a building. Especially considering some of the buildings I find myself in. It’s a mere formality and can be easily avoided.’

  ‘Did anybody see you enter or exit the building?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was way past lights out when we reached. He opened the door in his underwear and vest. I told him to dress up decently as he had company and that if he’d like we could wait about five or ten minutes for him to get changed. But he said it was all okay and that he had nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘What condition was he in when you met him?’

  ‘He was heavily sedated. He could barely keep his eyes open. I remember he popped a couple of tablets and, sure enough, that straightened him out. But I couldn’t really tell. I’d done some nitro earlier in the evening and, in that condition, I can’t tell a horse from a donkey. But I know how to carry myself when I’m on a heavy dosage, unlike some people who just fall to pieces.’

  A gentle nip in the breeze lingered on Nadeem who wondered what next to say or add, but all that ensued was an awkward silence. The man looked down at the ground as if in resignation to the solemnity of the moment.

  ‘Well, sometimes, a person comes damn near to cracking even when he’s got all his faculties in constant motion,’ he reflected. ‘I’ve seen it in some of my clients. Take a guy like Irshaad for instance. He’s been seeing a shrink. I put him in touch with a guy by the name of G.D. Vengsarkar. A miracle worker. He can pull the sap right out of a withered banyan branch. He helped me through some sordid years. Turns out this Makhija character had been seeing him too. I told him he was doing the right thing, that good old Dr Vengsarkar would have him back in tip-top shape in no time. I put the briefcase containing the dough on a small side table and cracked it open for him to get a good look, hoping that it’d bring some happiness to his hapless stupor.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘At least temporarily. He went over to the kitchen and brought out the files from a cabinet. I saw the doctor’s name on the cover with the insignia of Healthy Mind Clinic. I recognized it instantly. But what lay inside of it, well, that was a different story altogether.’

  Uncertain Confession

  ‘I’ll admit from the start, I was wrong in what I did. And I guess Cheeku’ll vouch for me on that, considering he comes pretty close to being an accomplice. When I saw the files, I knew we were sunk. As long as they existed and this man had read what was in them, there’d be no peace. In this life or any other. It would forever nag at the consciousness. It would cloud even the happiest of thoughts, knowing that somewhere out there was a man who was fully aware that my client had been clinically diagnosed as criminally insane, that he came pretty close to be shipped off to Yerwada. He said that he smashed the A7 on the Eastern freeway and beat up the man driving it because he enjoyed it, that he’d beat up the psychiatrist if he came close. But, over the course of multiple counselling sessions, he began to thaw. And the good old doctor got to work on him. He got everything out of him, his whole life history, like a past-life regression therapist or hypnotist.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I don’t know how he got Irshaad to talk. I guess having someone who’ll listen is the only balm the good lord provided to any kind of illness, psychological or otherwise. That’s the only time I’ve seen him open up. But I wish I’d never opened those files. Inside the folder were transcriptions of some of Irshaad’s counselling sessions. Verbatim recordings of everything that he had said in the clinic. One of the pages contained a confession to the crime of assault and battery, given by him under oath following his incarceration. Now, how many judges and officials can you pay off to save a man from that kind of sentence? I’m known to do anything I can within a reasonable limit to get my client in the clear, but this was a lost cause. I know a little bit about the law, at least enough to get by, more so than an average person might be aware of. So, I’ll admit it to you: I killed him. I killed Chintan Makhija. Took his life out of my own volition. Exercising my own free will. I had the chance not to, but I did. I don’t know why. But it gave me a cheap thrill, like a child playing a prank on a schoolteacher and closing his eyes to the consequences. I locked him up in the bathroom from the outside when he went in to take a leak. And I left him there, thumping and banging on the door like a madman. Screaming at the top of his voice till it went hoarse. I stood there and watched. Cheeku looked at me like I was crazy, but then even he began to wonder. To him, it meant saving 40,000 bucks. We both smiled at each other with the camaraderie that mischief breeds and casually went about our own business, with our mouths firmly shut. We left him there to see if he would make it. Almost like a friendly challenge.’

  Nadeem gazed at him, perplexed, his mouth hanging open and his forehead stretching up in awe of the audacity of his claim.

  ‘Now I’m telling you all this,’ he continued, ‘but I challenge you to put me in jail for it. There’s no known soul but yourself and Cheeku who are aware of what I have just told you. It’s your word against mine. And you won’t be able to, I know it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know the law. I know you need witnesses. I’m not likely to say ever again what I said to you just now. And now that I’ve said it, I feel kind of cleansed. Kind of got it out of my system. As I said before, sometimes, all you need is someone to talk to.’

  Nadeem studied HK’s cavalier manner. He didn’t know what to make of him, whether he was telling the truth or gassing. There was something about him which seemed off-kilter.

  ‘I wish I could say “don’t worry”, “I’ll never do it again”, but I just can’t. I can never be too sure of anything, let alone myself. Not after I read what Irshaad had said. It kind of changed things for me, made me see things a whole lot clearer.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I don’t have all night. You really want to know?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then get in the car, let’s go for a little drive. I can’t tell you about it standing here in the middle of the road.’

  Nadeem thought twice about the proposition. Getting into the car with a man claiming to be a murderer was not the most sensible thing to do in normal circumstances.

  ‘Can I give you a lift till anywhere?’ he asked Nadeem.

  ‘No, thanks. I’d like to make it home in one piece.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he exhaled, looking back at the car. ‘Then you’ll never know.’

  Nadeem hesitated, standing motionless, surveying the damage on the car. HK coughed, drew out some phlegm and rolled it about in his mouth, like he was chewing paan. He spoke with his mouth full. ‘I guess I’ll be seeing you around,’ he gurgled. ‘If you ever need any legal advice, let me know. I could do a thing or two about your predicament.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  HK nodded, kicking a stone out of his path and pranced off towards his car, waving back.

  ‘What happened to it?’ Nadeem asked.

  ‘I smashed it into a silver SLR on Palm Beach Road.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was an SLR and I was driving an Ikon. I don’t like things I don’t have. That doesn’t mean I want to have them, but sometimes I feel like I’ve gotta destroy them to save someone else the misery of want. You could say that I did Makhija a favour by putting him out of his misery.’

  ‘What about the SLR guy? You put him out of his happiness.’

  HK leaned on the bonnet, his car keys rolling around in the palm of his hand. ‘I tend to simplify things by bl
aming it on envy,’ he turned slowly to face Nadeem. ‘There was an ulterior motive at hand. My client was in debt with him, so I just thought I’d put him in debt with his mechanic. I meant no harm. My client owed him a lakh of rupees over a poker game. Can you believe that? If he had an ounce of decency in him, he’d let it slide, but no. He insisted Irshaad pay up in a sporting fashion. So, you see, I had no choice. Anyways, I hate gambling, it’s for sissies.’

  ‘But you like to gamble with other people’s lives.’

  ‘What is a life? It isn’t a physical tangible thing. It can’t be measured. It has no real value in any quantifiable sense. It’s floating in thin air to an inevitable conclusion. The only thing that’s certain in life is death. Now, death has a physical presence. It hits like a sledgehammer, pops up out of nowhere and lays you down flat. You can hold it in your hand. But not life, life is like the wind. You gotta catch it or else it slips by.’