ANKUSH SAIKIA
MORE BODIES WILL FALL
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
MORE BODIES WILL FALL
Ankush Saikia was born in Tezpur, Assam, in 1975. He worked in journalism and publishing in New Delhi for over a decade and was shortlisted for the Outlook–Picador India non-fiction writing award (2005). He is the author of The Girl from Nongrim Hills (2013), Dead Meat (2015) and Remember Death (2016), among others.
Praise for Remember Death
‘Marvellously Indian . . . an authentic thriller’—Hindustan Times
‘Racy, eventful and twisted . . . [Remember Death] manages to elucidate the writer’s presence of mind and dexterity in crafting his thriller’—Pioneer
‘Unputdownable . . . Arjun [Arora] is a brilliant detective but flawed. His flaws make him more real, more relatable’—Asian Age
Praise for Dead Meat
‘Riveting stuff’—Tehelka
‘Compelling characters . . . and observations’—Indian Express
‘Gives you an image of Delhi that takes a while to shake off’—Mail Today
‘A page turner in every sense . . . uncovers the real character of Delhi’—Pioneer
‘Private-eye Arjun Arora is the star of this crackling thriller’—Eclectic NorthEast
‘Dead Meat makes Delhi come alive’—Assam Tribune
Praise for The Girl from Nongrim Hills
‘Packs a punch’—Telegraph
‘A gripping thriller’—Time Out
‘Dark and detailed’—Deccan Chronicle
‘The first noir thriller from India’s North East’—Mint
1
Ukhrul district, Manipur
February 1995
THE WHITE GYPSY CHURNS ITS way along the track, mud splattering on to its sides. It crests the top of the low hill, and halts before a long bamboo fence beyond which lies an empty field carpeted with dry brown grass. On either end of the field are goalposts made of bamboo poles, but there are no children playing today. On the other side of the field, where the ground rises up again, are tin-roofed houses among hedges, smoke curling up from a few chimneys into the grey sky. The driver is a middle-aged man with a dark, weathered face shaded by a brown cowboy hat. He lights a cigarette, and blows the car horn thrice.
‘Where are they?’ he mutters.
Next to him sits his fourteen-year-old son, on winter break from his school in Shillong. The boy is tall, with longish hair and his father’s sharp features, and is wearing a zipped-up parka.
‘There,’ the boy says, in their language, pointing at the houses. ‘I can see some men.’
‘Your eyes are better than mine,’ the man says, opening his door. ‘Come on.’
They get down, and watch six men in assorted camouflage wear emerging from among the hedges. As the men walk across the field the boy asks, ‘They’re carrying guns?’
‘They have to,’ his father replies. ‘Just last week there was an attack on this village.’
‘What about us?’
His father spreads his worn leather jacket to show an automatic pistol in a holster and a dao, or machete, in a scabbard hanging from the belt of his jeans.
‘Have you forgotten this? Nobody will mess with us.’
The men reach the vehicle, a mixed group in terms of age and the weapons they are carrying, from a double-barrelled shotgun to an AK-47. The boy’s father opens the tailgate of the vehicle to show them the sacks of rice, tins of oil and packets of potatoes and sugar and tea that he has brought them.
‘God bless you, Samuel,’ says the eldest among the group, a white-haired schoolteacher.
‘It’s the least I can do for my people,’ Samuel replies.
They embrace, and the white-haired man asks the others to unload the supplies.
‘Where are the rest of the men?’ Samuel asks.
‘Out patrolling,’ the white-haired man tells him. ‘This morning there was a column of Nagas heading back from up ahead. They attacked a village yesterday, burnt it down. Several killed.’ He points east, towards the nearby Myanmar border.
Samuel sighs, takes off his hat. He looks for his son, sees that he has gone towards the edge of the football field and is looking out across the hills rolling into the distance. He says, ‘This is the time for us Kukis to stand united. And we have to strike back! I wish I could do more to help.’
The white-haired man raises a hand. ‘You can help us more by being where you are, in the state government. Stay there. We have people fighting for us.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ the man says. He lights another cigarette and walks across to where his son stands. A chill wind blows across the hills, which are a dull green in the winter. As a child he had played football on this field, and roamed the hills with his friends, wild and free. Then his father had moved the family to Imphal. There is so much his son has lost out on!
The boy points into the distance, where a faint trail of smoke disappears into the overcast sky, and turns to his father.
‘What’s that?’ he asks, already suspecting what the answer will be.
‘They attacked another village yesterday,’ his father says.
‘What is all this fighting for?’ the boy asks. He has a secret, one that involves him in the ongoing Kuki–Naga clashes in the hills of Manipur and Nagaland in a way his father would never suspect.
‘Land, my son,’ the man says, tracing an arc across the landscape with his finger. ‘We’ve lived in these hills for nearly a hundred years alongside the Nagas. Now they’re fighting among themselves, and some of them say we are outsiders and want to chase us away. So we must be ready to defend ourselves. Do you understand?’
The boy nods, weighed down by memories, history, his own wild heart. His thoughts are on the photograph tucked inside one of his schoolbooks back at home. His father looks at him, then removes the pistol from the holster, cocks it and hands it to him.
‘Here. Fire this.’
The boy looks at the gun in his hand, then holds it up and pulls the trigger. The men ferrying the supplies to the village stop to look when they hear the gunshot, and see the man wearing the hat shaking the boy’s hand.
‘You’re an adult from today, Anthony,’ he tells his son.
They are back in Imphal, the state capital, by late afternoon, after the man stops at a friendly house near Yairipok to exchange the Gypsy for a van, and to drop off his gun and dao. The city shuts down at dark: no one wants to be outdoors to be a possible target for the police, the army, the paramilitary or the insurgents. Samuel and his son stay in a family compound in Canchipur, with the man’s brothers having houses there too. Their relatives are waiting to hear the man’s story. The boy listens to the talk, some of which he has heard be
fore: Nagas killing Kuki families in churches, Kukis burning down Naga villages and pushing a state transport bus down a hillside after raking it with bullets. There are some things he wishes he hadn’t heard: men being beheaded like in the old headhunting days, children burnt alive in huts. Now though his thoughts are elsewhere: firing the pistol, his father’s words and the photograph in his schoolbook.
Before dinner, which they eat early, the boy escapes to the room which he shares with his younger brother and takes out a few of his schoolbooks. He sits back on the bed and by the flickering light of a candle (there is no electricity again), opens his geography textbook. Between its pages is a photo: a young girl in a flowery dress and a denim jacket standing at a viewpoint in Cherrapunji, the sun on her face and long hair. As always, when he looks at it, he feels a strange emotion welling up inside of him. He has a classmate from Arunachal Pradesh whose sister stays in the hostel with the girl; that is how he got to know her. Now he runs a finger over her face, and whispers her name: Amenla. A Naga name, an Ao Naga girl from Mokokchung, younger than him, the girl he loves, supposed to be an enemy of his people. He has heard that her father is someone with links to what they call the UG, or underground, in Nagaland.
At the dinner table he hurries through the food, chicken stew and rice, before excusing himself. He goes to the now empty sitting room and, with his heart beating fast, picks up the phone receiver and dials the place code and number he has memorized—Mokokchung in Nagaland, impossibly distant for him, like a place on another planet, even though he has passed through Dimapur and Kohima in that state during the times he has come home by road from Shillong. The phone rings, and before he has a chance to collect his thoughts, a deep male voice answers. At the same moment his father comes in and asks him who is on the phone.
‘No one,’ Anthony says, quickly putting down the receiver. ‘It was a false ring.’
That night he is awake even after all the lights in the house have gone off. He wonders what she is up to during her holidays, what her room must look like. If only he could be with her! There is another month to go before he can meet her in Shillong. It is a long time before he can fall asleep.
2
South Delhi
September2012
AMENLA LONGKUMER EMERGED FROM THE steam-filled bathroom in her barsati, wiped her slippers on the mat and turned to close the door. The bathroom was small, packed with buckets of different sizes and bottles of shampoo and moisturizer, but neat and tidy. She hated disorder and tried to keep it at bay, at least in this single-room accommodation where she stayed. Which is why the black suitcase that had been sitting in her flat for a few weeks now disturbed her; it was out of place. She should have never said yes, she thought, standing before it in the alcove, and worse, she should have never allowed it to be opened.
Amenla tied the sash around her worn but comfortable cotton dressing gown and moved across her bed towards the tall steel almirah where she looked at herself in the mirror. She was of medium height, her strong, wide face unlined yet. At twenty-nine, she supposed she should be thankful to have the same figure as when she had first come to Delhi a decade ago. Unwrapping the towel from her long, black hair, she bent from the waist to dry it. Physically, she was almost the same as ten years ago. But mentally she sometimes felt she had aged several decades from when she was a naive young girl from Nagaland who had landed up here after school in Shillong. Of the initial excitement of staying with roommates and attending college, what was now left in her was a permanent sense of drift, a sense that she would never be at home anywhere. The routines set by her work kept her sane and occupied, but she felt unsure of taking the plunge with anyone as far as marriage was concerned, though God knew she had had enough suitors.
Amenla put on a pair of trackpants and a T-shirt, comfortable wear for an evening at home, when she could watch a movie on her laptop or read a book. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she was turning into someone who preferred to be on her own, something she would have never thought possible while growing up in Mokokchung, surrounded by family and neighbours and relatives. But that life was gone, she thought with some bitterness; except for the occasional visit home during Christmas or Easter, this was where she now was.
She went out to the terrace where she hung her bathrobe and towel on the clothesline, and spent a moment looking around at the night, the dark bulk of a couple of higher apartment buildings, dust-covered trees and the hazy night air by the light of the dim streetlights. Not much to look at, but still, even apart from her privacy, she knew how lucky she was to have been able to leave the cramped flat shared with friends in the nearby ‘urban village’, where their balcony opened out over a busy street below and other balconies on narrow buildings all around. No, she was thankful for this, in spite of what it cost her. She went back inside the room to unplug the charger attached to her phone, then came out and entered the kitchen. She plugged the charger in the point by the door and put on some music on the phone.
The weekend was when she cooked home food: rice, boiled or steamed vegetables, chutneys with dried chillies and roasted tomatoes, and smoked meat or fish cooked with more of the raja mircha from back home. The rest of the week she usually survived on Maggi, bread and egg and office canteen food, plus the occasional takeaway. She had got her start helping out her mother in their smoky kitchen back home, with the wood-fed hearth and the strips of pork and venison hanging above it, and it was something she enjoyed, but today, as she peeled the vegetables and then roasted a couple of small dried fish on the burner for the chutney, her mind kept drifting back to the black suitcase. She shouldn’t have allowed it to be opened, yes, but now that she knew what was in it, she would get rid of it.
While she was cutting a strip of smoked pork into small pieces, her phone, which had been playing Madonna tracks, started beeping. Seeing who it was, she wiped her hands on a piece of cloth and picked up. It was a call she had been expecting.
She listened for a while, then said, ‘Okay, I’ll open the door.’
Amenla went and unlatched the door that came up the steps to the barsati, and then returned to the kitchen.
She started pounding the dried fish in a wooden mortar along with the roasted tomatoes and chilli; the wood gave the chutney an added flavour. It was one small way of recreating home. The minutes passed as she got on with making her dinner, her mind not on her expected visitor, or the suitcase, but on someone she had known years ago, in Shillong. He had called her recently, they had met. And what he had told her she hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe, initially. But now . . .
Amenla was at the sink at the end of the small kitchen, her back to the open door as she scrubbed the insides of the wooden mortar. The phone was near her now, on the kitchen ledge. Then she paused for a moment, and raised her head. Some sixth sense had alerted her, not from any noise, but rather from the absence of it. She stood motionless for a few seconds, and then, just as she was about to turn around, a loop of thin cable was tossed over her head and pulled tight around her throat.
The shock made her drop the pestle and flail her arms. Her heartbeat raced uncontrollably. A knee dug into her back and a strong pair of hands, which had initially been one over the other, pulled hard in opposing directions, tightening the improvised noose around Amenla’s neck. She tried to grab hold of the wire, but those hands were on either side of her neck now, with no free wire, and the wire around her neck had dug in too deep.
As she was dragged back and out of the kitchen, the noose biting tighter into her windpipe, she felt herself losing consciousness . . .
3
South Delhi
November 2013
HE AWOKE JUST BEFORE 5 A.M., the dream still vivid in his mind: the army convoy grinding and rattling up the road from Jorhat to Mokokchung, him sitting beside the driver in the Gypsy, an AK-47 at the ready on his lap. A loud bang, and the vehicles screech to a stop, jawans already vaulting out of the backs of their trucks. Just a few months ago t
here had been an incident in Mokokchung, and they were still on high alert. But it turns out only to be a burst tyre of a truck and not the Naga guerrillas. The men relax, and as the tyre is changed, he walks down the road towards the back of the column. Where the hills rise up from beside the road is a small cleared patch with a scanty crop of some maize and pumpkin, a rough hut at the back. Two small children, a girl and a boy, dressed in faded old clothes, stand watching the vehicles solemnly. He raises his right hand and smiles at them, calling out a greeting in Nagamese, but they stare stonily back. What am I doing here? he thinks to himself.
That was all there was to the dream, but Arjun Arora was surprised at how vivid it had seemed: the high sun beating on the green hills, the sweat on his brow cooled by a faint breeze, a thin plume of smoke rising up from the hut, the chatter of the men in the vehicles. And it was an episode from his past, maybe the year 1995, a part of his life which he had thought he had forgotten for good. How had it come back to him now? The bedroom was dark, and he got out from under the razai and took a drink of water from the glass on his bedside table. He checked his phone: 5.05 a.m. Still an hour to go before he left for his Sunday football game in Gurgaon.
He went out to the narrow balcony with its wobbly plastic chair and dead flowers; his newspapers hadn’t been thrown in as yet. It was chilly outside, and a light mist covered the park in front of his second-storey flat. The light from an orange streetlight fell on an old man sitting on a bench, arms held high as he did his breathing exercises. What am I doing here? He still didn’t know the answer to that. Nagaland, Delhi and all the places in between—he had always been an outsider. Arjun went back inside to get his cigarettes and lit one, his first of the day. He had been off booze for more than a month now, and that had seen his nicotine intake go up. But, as they said, in the end it was life that killed you. As he stood there smoking, the bundle of the day’s newspapers came flying up. He raised a hand in greeting to his paper-wallah down below, picked up the bundle, stubbed out his cigarette in a flowerpot and went back inside.
More Bodies Will Fall Page 1
