The Rat Eater

by Anand Ranganathan

  ‘And what’s wrong if I came along and wanted to do his job?’

  ‘But why? Why deprive him of his pride?’

  ‘His pride?’

  ‘Yes, his pride,’ said Ajay and turning to the waiter, asked, ‘What is your caste, waiter?’

  Before the waiter could register the question, Api, who was enjoying the table talk immensely, now asked for some calm. ‘Relax, people. Just pass the kadai paneer, please, AB.’

  ‘No no, this is interesting, Aps. His pride, AB? You think that by offering to serve myself I have hurt his pride?’

  Ajay pointed brusquely at the waiter. ‘Sure you have. He gets paid to do that. Those two buggers sitting there—munching all those breadsticks—they get paid to wait for their boss.’

  Akhil took a sip of his beer. ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘The guy in the sweltering humidity outside, polishing the lal-batti of our Ambassador. He gets paid to do that. We are all paid to do our job. And we should stick to doing our job—just our jobs.’

  ‘Ah. The division of labour. Tell me, do you guys follow the police manual or Manusmriti? Advocating the caste system, are you?’

  ‘No, not quite; I was just…’

  Akhil was beginning to get a little irritated. ‘Just what? There are people who get up every morning and walk the sewer lines. Some tie a cloth around their mouth and drop down a manhole—what’s the word—desilting. It is their pride, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Akhil had had enough. ‘You bastard…’

  Api came in quickly. ‘Hey, Aks, cool it. AB, stop all this. Please. People are staring at us.’

  There followed an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, and for the first time, the harmonies of Take Five being played live in the background reached their ears.

  Ajay touched his mouth with the napkin. ‘Hey, Aks, sorry yaar, I didn’t mean to…’

  Akhil was mollified but solemn. ‘Just one last thing—to set the record straight. Why I came back…’

  Akhil and Api inched forward sincerely.

  ‘In all my days and years at Cambridge, I never once felt it was my country, that it was where I belonged. I met many lovely people, made many good friends. But you know, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t escape the draw—that invisible draw, of my own country…

  ‘Of course, there were other reasons for coming back, too: to work on Indian diseases—malaria, tuberculosis, dengue, leishmaniasis; to try and do something for my people, my diseases. But the one single reason was always that one, the one which, I suppose, you can say is a universal reason—that feeling of wanting to be with your own, to not stand out. And in an alien land, when you are all alone and it gets dark outside at three in the afternoon and you know there’s only baked beans on toast for dinner, it is this feeling that draws on you.

  ‘…That is why I came back.’

  Ajay placed his hand on Akhil’s arm.

  ‘Now—some butter naan, please.’

  Api ran her finger round the glass rim, firming up to speak. ‘But where is all this worrying leading to, Akhil?’

  Ajay concurred. ‘Yes, she’s right, you know. You can’t go on like this, with an attitude that things are so wrong out here at every step, that everything is on its last leg—the buildings, the people, culture, system. You’ll go mad.’

  ‘I have gone mad.’

  ‘Instead of ignoring irrelevant things, you’ll start thinking about only them,’ Api added.

  ‘Yes, you know, you are right there, Aps.’

  Api replaced the napkin, then patted it absentmindedly. ‘Isn’t that being unfair to your students, to your research? For you to look out of your car window every time you stop at a traffic light, and then for hours on end you can’t stop thinking about how that one-legged kid was hopping from car to car, from one rolled up window to another, hopping like mad before the light turned green? And then you can’t think about anything else for most of your day. You can’t go on like this.’

  Akhil became animated. ‘Yes, yes, I can’t, Api. I know that, but what can I do? All my country’s failings touch me. They go through me. I feel them.’

  ‘And in doing so you may have ignored your own failings, don’t you think? The time that you spent thinking about that beggar, or million others like him, that time you might have spent, I don’t know, solving a scientific problem, curing diseases. No? Are you being fair to the people you are answerable to? Are you being fair to yourself, your scientific ideals? Are you? And then, next morning, you take the local train and see thousands of people squatting by the trackside—and there goes your whole day again.’

  Akhil gazed at his reflection in the spoon. ‘No, not for that particular reason—but I can see your larger point.’

  ‘Not for that? Why? You like it when people shit all around you? Sir Vidia would be delighted.’

  ‘Who? No, what I mean is, in a way, I accept it. I am not perturbed by it. But anyway, that’s beside the…’

  ‘No, no, not at all. Now I do want to know.’

  ‘You’ll laugh.’

  ‘It’s been ages.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Go on.’

  Akhil dragged his chair forward. ‘Look. Your DNA is 99% identical to a chimpanzee’s. We…’

  Ajay couldn’t resist the opportunity. ‘I have always suspected that of Api.’

  ‘AB, shush. Sorry Aks, go on.’

  ‘We might have gone on to eat with a fork and a knife, written books, invented computers, but what has made us do all of that is that tiny little 1%. In our heart of hearts, we are still 99% animal. Then why do we turn away when we see someone squatting and performing a natural, animal act? The thousands of pairs of asses have got it right. They do their thing right in front of a moving train, as though it wasn’t there. They see us as fellow animals but we insist on seeing them as something else.’

  Api sipped some nimbupani. ‘Deep.’

  ‘And Hitler didn’t squat on a railway line. No, he just turned out in the best suits and ate the best meals, with forks on the left and forks on the right of his plate, while the body fat of six million kept the fire in his living-room burning. So don’t tell me what is civilised and what is not.

  ‘What perturbs me most isn’t the uncontrollable poverty of our people, their nakedness, their obtrusive shitting—I can handle that to some degree. What gets me is the falling apart of the most unshakable scientific axiom: survival of the fittest. I know, of course, that I am contracting the evolutionary timeline, and moreover, it isn’t social Darwinism, which is nothing but a mangled misreading of the Darwinian evolution itself, that I have in mind. But hear me out for the sake of argument.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Here, the fittest are not the fittest in the true sense of the word. They have somehow bypassed the course of evolution. Found a loophole. The most unfit here have escaped nature’s fury, its test.

  ‘A neta siphons the money meant to provide toilets for those now sitting in unending lines. He slices his share from what was meant for housing, water, electricity, schools, hospitals. He gets fat, his people die. He gets fatter, the doctors advise rest. He gets fatter still, the doctors do a gastric surgery. He gets a heart attack, the doctors do a bypass. He continues to drink, his kidneys fail. His people gift him a kidney. He lives. He lives a long life. He is weak, but he survives. Look at the irony. The very person who believes in social Darwinism, who is apathetic to the misery of millions, to their suffering—rather, he is the one who inflicts the suffering—and he is the one who survives.’

  ‘But, Akhil, this is hopeless. You can’t possibly do anything single-handedly. What can you do except watch?’

  ‘What do we end up holding in our hands at the end of the day? Dust and shit. Nothing to take home. That man squatting, and me standing watching—we have become one and the same, one and the same. You, him, me, everyone—we shut our eyes. A small difference in lid pressure allows us to differentiate between what is worthless and what is wort
hy. For if we had just closed them gently and not shut them hard, in the soft darkness we’d have put ourselves in the shoes of those shitting millions. We’d have understood how impossibly difficult their lives are, and we’d have thought: what if that man, that woman there, was my son, my sister, my mother? But no, we shut our eyes, instead. Tight.’

  Akhil crumpled the tablecloth so hard the veins on the back of his hand stood out. ‘So damn tight that wrinkles gather on our eyelids. We get the darkness but not the thoughts—they fail to appear. But we intended that. And then we look away. We refuse to believe that empathy and compassion are as much evolutionary endowments as is the Darwinian principle of adaptation. In fact, empathy is a trait that has allowed us to survive great ordeals that have come our way during the course of human evolution. But we refuse to acknowledge this. Because we have turned Darwinism into Social Darwinism. Because we believe too much in the selfish gene and too little in the unselfish gene.’

  Api and Ajay were silent, their forks suspended in midair.

  Akhil threw himself back. ‘You’re probably thinking what I mad bastard I am.’

  ‘No no…But this is scary.’

  ‘She’s right, Aks. Bloody hell, man—you need to take a break.’

  ‘Arey, it’s alright, man.’

  Ajay squeezed Akhil’s hand. ‘But you can’t keep on like this—you’ll be a nervous wreck.’

  ‘AB’s right, Aks. Why don’t you quit science and maybe join Oxfam or CRY? Handle your dilemmas. Physically feel the pain.’

  ‘I haven’t been sitting idle. I am doing my bit. Every little helps, you know. Every little helps.’

  ‘That’s a nice way of saying it: every little helps. But what is this “little”. Both of us would like to know. Maybe we could chip in any way we could.’

  ‘Thanks but no thanks. It is my problem, my disease.’

  The subsequent pause in the conversation lasted a long while. The three were taking their time to reflect on what had been discussed.

  Ajay jerked into speech. ‘Boy, I tell you, all this talk has sapped my dal and chicken away. This is no way for friends to meet after fifteen years. No way.’

  Api couldn’t agree more. ‘We’ll find something nice to talk about on the boat to Elephanta tomorrow—something nice, like finding a wife for our Aks.’

  ‘Oh no, not again.’

  Ajay tugged at Akhil’s sleeve. ‘Akhil, my man. I don’t know if Aps has told you but I have this cousin in Washington.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘World Bank and all, yaar.’

  ‘Arey just stop this rubbish.’

  ‘No seriously, Aks. AB is right. Only problem is she’s a Bong.’

  Ajay glared at Api. ‘Why, dammit? What’s wrong with being a Bong. I am a Bong.’

  Api was waiting for it. ‘That explains it.’

  The table resounded with much-needed laughter. Akhil patted Ajay’s hand. ‘No, look, I am not ready yaar.’

  ‘You are bloody forty.’

  ‘Thirty-eight, you bastard. Thirty-eight.’

  ‘One and the same. So it is decided then—Elephanta tomorrow. Say we meet up at Gateway around one. And then we’ll talk of Akhil and Ipsita.’

  ‘Ipsita?’

  ‘Yes, Ipsita. You know what Ipsita means, don’t you? The desired.’

  ‘It is you guys who are mad—both of you.’

  ‘Ipsita, Ipsita, Ipsita, Ipsita.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it. And pay the bill—it’s late. Who is paying for all this anyway? Oh wait, don’t tell me…’

  Ajay chuckled. ‘Perks. These are called perks. And I deserve them.’

  Akhil reached for his drink. ‘Dare I ask why?’

  ‘For solving the case in two days.’

  ‘Is that right? And who killed Saane?’

  ‘It’s all hush-hush now. CBI wants to announce it first, but I’ll tell you. A bastard by the name of Kitla. At the behest of the opposition. Expect president’s rule in a week’s time. And all because of your dear friend AB.’

  ‘That big a story, haan? So how did you—where did you find the body?’

  ‘Arey, these SP, DSPs don’t know how to handle all this, man. Saane was shot in the head.’

  Akhil raised his eyebrows. ‘Was he, now? God. And all your evidence. Pucca?’

  ‘Of course. We caught the guy who did this. Actually, the bastard got popped off in an encounter. Still, we managed to get his sleeper and one thing led to another.’

  ‘Wow. And where did all this happen? Saane’s house?’

  ‘No no, a golf course. The bastard was stabbed and thrown…’

  Abruptly, Api caught Ajay’s arm. ‘A bit like Murder on the Links, no?’

  ‘What did you say, Aps?’

  ‘I said, it sounds like Murder on the Links—the Christie novel.’

  ‘What Christie novel?’

  ‘Arey DIG saab, the whole Saane affair that you described. I said it sounds every bit like Murder on the Links. Now, shall we? Or those two chums of yours will start turning to stone.’

  Ajay was lost in thought. ‘Yes, I see…Murder on the Links…You know, I had been wondering about the strangeness of this case. Why do it in the open? Why leave clues? Seemed to me as if the whole thing was a dare…Sorry, where was I? Yes, sorry…no, nothing.’

  ‘So I’ll see you guys tomorrow at one, then.’

  Ajay paid the bill and grabbed a fistful of saunf from the platter. ‘Yes, of course. Listen, can we drop you somewhere?’

  ‘Leave me and my Padmini alone. You go take your lal-battis.’

  Ajay and Api got up from their seats. Ajay was helped by the waiter who had stolen a quick glance at the generous tip. His taxes were coming back to him.

  From a distance, SP Kharbanda and DSP Sharma saw the table break up. As a reflex, they threw away the breadsticks they were munching and shot up from the sofa.

  Back at the table, Ajay gave a high-five to Akhil. ‘Hah, chal then, Aks, this was great, man.’

  ‘Ya ya, now get lost you two.’

  ‘Will call you tomorrow. You have a–?’

  Api answered Ajay’s unfinished question. ‘No, he doesn’t. Our professor saab here says who in their right mind would want to call him?’

  ‘Jackass. Well, I’ll call your lab number, then. Surely you have a student doubling up as a secretary.’

  Akhil grinned. ‘That’s the first passable joke you have cracked all evening.’

  Ajay grimaced while Api laughed and twiddled her fingers. ‘Bye, Aks, see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Take care, Aps.’

  As they left the table, the waiter, while clearing the dishes, noticed the map lying on a chair next to the one where Akhil was seated. He scrutinised it with a keen eye, then pocketed it.

  Meanwhile, Akhil approached the officers on his way out. He nodded his head in greeting, smiled, and moved on, which was convenient for the two men, as the real object of their affection was now next in line.

  SP Kharbanda touched his cap and cleared his throat. ‘Er, hello again, sir, madam.’

  ‘Yes, hello, Kharbanda, and er…?’

  DSP Sharma just about hid his disappointment. ‘Sharma, sir.’

  ‘Ah, yes. You had a good dinner, I hope, Kharbanda saab?’

  SP Kharbanda was speechless for a moment. ‘Er, yes sir, very good. All hunger, gone, sir…gone.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. Listen, it’s a bit late now to go to the HQ. If you could just drop us at the guest house…’

  ‘Of course, sir. This way, sir, please.’

  Api placed her hand on Ajay’s shoulder. ‘AB, you carry on. I’ll join you in a minute…Kharbanda saab, any idea where the ladies’ room is?’

  ‘Er…no, madam, sorry. But let me find out. Arey, Sharma. You heard.’

  DSP Sharma was about to run the errand when Api intervened. ‘Arey no no. No problem. I’ll ask that woman at the reception. You guys go ahead. AB, I’ll see you outside.’

  ‘
Alright then. Kharbanda? Which way, bhai?’

  You need to pick these little gems up from these bastards, Kharbanda, keep picking them up. Now look at this harami: he knows the way, of course he does—the ban-cho just walked in an hour ago—but still he asks me: ‘Which way, bhai?’ Beautiful. This is power Kharbanda, real power, and it is displayed thus, subtly.

  Kharbanda returned from his yeast-induced hallucination and responded. ‘Ji, sir, please, this way.’

  ‘Hmm. Arey, listen, Kharbanda, I need something from you. I have had a thought—might be nothing, but still…’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Er…Sharma, can you please…’

  DSP Sharma was sick to the stomach. ‘Oh, ji, sir. I’ll wait for you by the car.’

  Ajay waited till he had seen the back of DSP Sharma. ‘Haan, Kharbanda, listen. This is strictly between you and me.’

  ‘Of course, sir. As I said—over my dead body.’

  ‘Yes yes, listen, it is this: I want you to give me a list of all high-profile unsolved murders in Mumbai in the past ten years. You understand?’

  SP Kharbanda scratched the back of his hand. ‘Er, unsolved, sir? But there have never been any unsolved murders…’

  Ajay could barely hide his anger. ‘I am not your sadak-chhaap—I know how you solve unsolved murders.’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Don’t bloody “er” me, Kharbanda, this is too important. You want to be a DIG or not? Or better, join the ranks of the CBI? Up to you.’

  The dangling carrots tolled like temple bells for SP Kharbanda. ‘Of course, sir—over my dead body. Er, I meant…’

  ‘Shut up. And listen. I said unsolved because I have a hunch the murderer hasn’t been caught yet, and I feel that somehow—and it is my gut feeling—this Saane business is connected to one, or maybe even more of those unsolved murders. Because there are—there have to be unsolved murders. That list, by tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do get you now. But sir, please, not by tomorrow. I’ll get my ass on it twenty-five hours a day, but this thing cannot be done by tomorrow. You have seen the HQ, sir; there are files that are shut and tied off today and the ban-chos don’t know where they are tomorrow. And this business—all those files and names of years ago. Please at least give me three-four days.’