by Vivaan Shah
‘That’s not entirely true,’ Kishorie Lal waved his hands. ‘I did inform Mr Machhiwaala. We just didn’t realize it would amount to this.’
Feroz Machhiwaala turned to Inspector Gaekwad thoughtfully. ‘Look, inspector’ he began, ‘let me start out by saying that had I known what kind of person Makhija was, I would have never accepted him as a tenant in the first place.’
Inspector Gaekwad looked at Nadeem and Warren. ‘You have pretty high standards,’ he remarked.
‘I confess that I didn’t want to have to deal with him any more than I had to. Would you? Who wants to have to deal with an undesirable? None of us,’ he exclaimed.
Then, gesturing at the watchman and the plumber, he said, ‘All three of us are as guilty as the next person in what we did, or in this case, didn’t do. It was our negligence that resulted in his death. But what caused it we cannot be held accountable for. That’s why I sent up another undesirable to deal with him.’ This time, he pointed at Nadeem. ‘I sent him to find out just what the hell was going on in that house. I didn’t want to go myself, but I did want to know. It is my duty as his landlord to . . .’
‘Cut out the “it is my duty as his landlord” crap,’ Inspector Gaekwad snapped. ‘You did the right thing by doing nothing about it. One Makhija more or less in the world doesn’t make any difference. No one’s gonna lose any sleep over it.’
He walked over to the door, fidgeting with his mobile phone. He shook his head, blinking at Mangesh, who promptly strolled out of the doorway in response. ‘You made me stay up till 5:45 in the morning for this?’ he yawned at Machhiwaala. ‘For a moment, I thought we actually had something.’
‘I’m sorry, sir!’ the plumber said.
‘I guess we can all close the books and call it a night,’ he stated. ‘Whatever your personal misgivings are about this mess is none of my concern. Keep them to yourself. I suggest you all keep your mouths shut about this. Don’t go around propagating folklore about that flat just because someone died in it. After all, you do want to give it out on rent, don’t you, Mr Machhiwaala?’
‘I most definitely do.’
‘Then start getting it ready for the next tenant. You wouldn’t want to discourage people from considering it. If I was you, I’d try and sell it.’
‘Thank you, sir!’
‘Who knows, someday a big, bright and happy family may occupy it, or perhaps an enchanted couple, or a hard-working person who wouldn’t spend all his time at home. I’m sure they’d look after it better.’
Inspector Gaekwad shook hands with everyone individually before heading out. The ballistics experts followed him.
‘Can I go home now?’ asked Dr Vengsarkar, sheepishly.
‘Where do you live?’ Inspector Gaekwad asked. ‘I’ll drop you home.’
‘No, thanks! I can easily make it back myself.’
‘I insist. I’ve kept you up all night. I owe you that much at least. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of tea.’
‘Look, inspector . . .’
‘Come on! Let’s go. Never refuse a kind offer, you may not be so lucky to receive one the next time.’
‘I know that only too well,’ Nadeem snickered.
As Inspector Gaekwad was about to make his exit, Nadeem stalled him at the door with a casual inquiry, one that was still unsolved.
‘What about the money?’ he asked.
‘What money?’ Inspector Gaekwad retorted.
‘The man I met earlier claimed to have left behind a sum of 10,000 rupees.’
‘Quite careless of him.’
‘Nonetheless,’ said Nadeem, looking at the plumber and the watchman. They looked at each other.
‘We don’t know anything about that, sahib,’ the plumber responded.
‘We?’ Nadeem wondered.
‘We . . . as in me . . .’ he blurted out.
‘Speak for yourself,’ Kishorie Lal moaned.
‘One of you stole that money. I know it,’ Nadeem smirked.
The two of them turned towards Machhiwaala.
‘Well . . . uh . . . you see . . .’ he began an evasive cough, a clumsy attempt at deflection. But as the cough fizzled out, it was dreadfully apparent that Inspector Gaekwad’s attention had been alerted, and that his antenna had come back up. He hung on to the landlord’s uncharacteristic pause in anticipation of an explanation. He had been quite adept at explaining himself earlier, almost suspiciously so.
‘I forgot to mention that I had been into the flat earlier.’
‘I see,’ clipped Inspector Gaekwad, tight-lipped to the point of insincerity. ‘When would this be?’
‘The night before he was found,’ he shamefully admitted, not particularly proud of what he had to share.
‘I didn’t see him anywhere around, so I . . . uh . . . left. It was dark, pitch-black. I couldn’t see a thing. I could see his phase had blown, so I went up to the switchboard, opened the panel and turned on the main switch to get some light.’
‘That is right,’ Inspector Gaekwad agreed. ‘According to the report, the first place the fingerprints expert checked was the switchboard, since all the electricity had been turned on. And apparently your fingerprints might have shown up on it. They’re still confirming.’
‘Well, I just picked up the fallen bundle and kept it for him, for safety, so to speak.’
‘10,000. That’s too much safety to be safe.’
‘Well, I intended to return it to him, of course. Obviously.’
‘There’s nothing obvious about it,’ Nadeem butted in.
‘Chi, chi!’ Inspector Gaekwad whistled at Nadeem under his teeth, referring to him the way he would address a stray dog. ‘You keep out of this.’
‘I swear. I was going to return it,’ Machhiwaala insisted, his plea gradually degenerating into a pitiful appeal.
‘You have it with you?’ Inspector Gaekwad asked him in a decidedly different tone.
‘Yes,’ he whispered, looking left and right.
‘I’d like it, please,’ he instructed, as he stretched out his palm before him.
‘Sure,’ Machhiwaala conceded, putting his hands into his pockets and producing a rather large and overstuffed wallet.
‘This is an incidental murder,’ Inspector Gaekwad concluded, counting the cash, ‘where circumstances were manipulated to appropriate convenience. Not premeditated, but a murder nonetheless, one that doesn’t qualify for reassessment and one that does not, by any measure, deserve to go into the books. Plenty of them happen every day in the city.’ He delivered his summation to a somewhat bewildered audience who were spread out in different corners of the living room. No one spoke; no one had anything to add. It is possible that the night’s events were enough to shut a person up for good.
‘Hmm . . . simplifies things for you, doesn’t it?’ Nadeem reflected, the sole voice of dissent in a room full of obedient stragglers. ‘If we can all close up the books and get a night’s sleep, forgetting all about whatever happened. Makes it easier for you, but not necessarily for us. We still have to live here.’
‘Someday, come around to the place where I live,’ Inspector Gaekwad smiled. ‘See if you can call it home.’
‘I guess I’ll be seeing you . . .’ Nadeem waved at Inspector Gaekwad after seeing him out of the door.
‘I don’t know about that, Nadeem,’ Inspector Gaekwad sighed, pulling the elevator door shut. The lift shot down, carrying all the people who were in the building in an official capacity. Only the residents were left behind, those who actually had to conduct the rest of the day there. With the exception of Rohini, who didn’t live there and was just passing through.
‘Do you have the keys to my husband’s flat, Mr Machhiwaala?’ she asked him.
‘Well…uh,’ he fumbled. ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’
‘I would appreciate it if it were possible for me to take one last look at the place?’
‘Uhh . . .’
‘Well,’ said Nadeem, ‘I suppose we can permit that, can’
t we, Mr Machhiwaala?’
‘Uh . . . well, yes, I suppose we can.’
Living Hell
The sound of the lock clicking open echoed through the corners of the empty apartment. The flat was excessively stuffy as all the windows had been shut since the forensic lab inspection. It was a fully furnished flat complete with microwave, sofa, cushions, lamps and cupboards. It seemed weathered, stayed in and weighed upon. Like a tired traffic cop wiping the sweat off his brow in the scorching heat of day. As if it had borne the brunt of many a human misery.
Next to a bookshelf beside the television stood a pile of discarded envelopes and old newspapers. Nadeem went through it and fished out a wrapped parcel from the very bottom. It was a courier addressed to Chintan Makhija, 501, Little Heights, Jankalyan Nagar 2, Pin code: 400053. The sender’s address was 234, Shakuntala Building, Block number 3, B-Wing, Juhu Tara Road.
Nadeem tore open the packaging. There was nothing inside. Below it in the pile was an envelope, unmistakably bearing the insignia of K.L. Hospital, which contained his medical reports. All his bodily characteristics were neatly assembled in an authoritative document that aimed to be the final word on his predicament—the medical manifestation of all his internal maladies. It had taken the shape of a mutation; an aberration from what is usually considered normal, straying from the path of the straight and narrow.
How feeble was he in comparison to all that had been done. For what? And by whom? A lawyer pathologically incapable of following the very law he sought to practise or those who sat in judgment of people who broke the law or those that doled out salvation in the form of a supposed science, namely, medicine for those who needed a cure.
Nadeem looked at Rohini as they examined the medical reports, his eyes filled with the most awful knowledge. There were certain truths even she didn’t want to know, and she probably figured there was a lot that was better off unsaid. She slowly walked away from the living room towards the terrace balcony. She opened the sliding door to look at what kind of view her husband had enjoyed in his brief stay.
It was nothing to write home about—just a couple of neighbouring buildings, the odd bungalow here and there, and just about enough greenery to ease the eyes every once in a while. The house had nothing to do with her. It was a part of his life she had never known. He had put it together with his bare hands, every lamp on every table and each picture on each wall. It was the hand of a man significantly different and deformed from who she had known. He was once a good man, an honest man, a person with the potential for kindness, who did all the things a good human being ought to do, all until being a human wasn’t enough and began to entail more than goodness and more than kindness, more than generosity and more than what money could buy. Peace of mind. Reduced to what he was by the vagaries of circumstance, with the world by the tail on a downhill slide.
When they were together, he always paid up on time. He wasn’t a miser in his more benevolent days. She always liked to say, it’s the love you give out that counts, not the money. After all, he wasn’t doing all that bad, his reputation was at stake and that takes money. To buy a reputation you have to sell a lot of guts! Maybe, that was why he got an ulcer so soon in life. Because he hacked his intestines out. He had pretty much lived in an office all his life. He liked the sickness of it all. The buzzing sounds and beeping electronics. It was like the sound of those planes taking off over his head every time he lay down for a wink’s rest, when he used to shack up in a one-BHK in the Reserve Bank Quarters in Santa Cruz. Background music to the main concert! But no one played any violins to his sadness. It was swept aside, brushed under the carpet by his reassuring smile and instinct for self-preservation. But it wasn’t just himself he thought about. In fact, he had put himself last on the priority list. He had better things on his mind. A happy family, a dog, a house with more than one bedroom, the roof higher over his head, a trip to the Bahamas, Sundays in the park walking with a baby carriage. What he wanted was the five-star package all wrapped up with a fancy bow on it. And here he was, on a one-way trip to oblivion.
Of all the ones to whom life had dealt out a bum hand, his had been the simplest and the plainest. Nothing fancy, nothing big. Imprisoned by the mundane, only stripes and squares all the way through the day. Choking under a starched collar.
She thought it seemed like a nice, happy house. A place worthy of living in. One that ought to be appreciated. It had the right layout, the right nooks and corners, all the Vaastu sorted. It was a place she thought anyone ought to be glad to occupy and Machhiwaala agreed with her most vociferously.
But to the tenant who had occupied it, it was just four walls and a ceiling. A cage. An enclosure from all his worries, a place to measure his deeds and live in silent contemplation. A living hell.
Whoever had killed him had robbed him only of the sanctuary and subterfuge of the passing moment, as the wheels of fate turned and conspired to bring him a day closer to his own doom, and to drown his fatal assassin in a sea of anonymity. The answer to which lay in the hundreds of debts of a hundred accounts, and in all the hundreds and thousands of phone calls made to restore the balance. To even things out and keep the essential equilibrium.
Acknowledgements
At the risk of sounding sappy, I would like to thank my parents for introducing me to the classics, and for always encouraging and nourishing any kind of artistic pursuit whether it be drawing comic books or even trying to put up a play, and my brother and sister for putting up with me, reading my work and introducing me to all kinds of cool stuff.
I would really like to thank the editor of this book, Anushree Kaushal, for her constant encouragement, patience and insightful feedback, and also for being a fellow crime fiction buff and sending me many interesting books. I would also like to thank the copy editor, Aslesha Kadian, and Aditya and Vaishnavi for their guidance.
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published 2018
Copyright © Vivaan Shah 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Devangana Dash
ISBN 978-0-143-44576-0
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05453-3
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
