‘He’ll bore you with some American racing movie,’ Kamala said. ‘Cars going around and round for two hours.’
‘No, no.’ Umesh dismissed her with a manly chopping motion of his right hand. ‘We can watch a police film. I told you, I like detective stories.’
Sartaj was still trying to imagine a fourteen-foot screen and a projector in a Bombay apartment. ‘You have a special room for this screen?’
‘No, yaar, in my bedroom only. You don’t need a lot of space, the projector is only this big, like this. You just come and see.’
‘Maybe some time,’ Sartaj said. He stood up. ‘Too much work right now. How much does a thing like that cost, projector and sound and everything?’
‘Oh, not so much,’ Umesh said. ‘Of course it’s all specially imported, so you have to be prepared for some cost. But not as much as you think.’ He patted at his face with the tips of his fingers.
‘What?’ Sartaj said.
Umesh said affectionately, ‘My friend, you have foam on your moustache.’ He held up a paper napkin in one hand, and the brown envelope in the other. ‘Take.’
Sartaj took both. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Kamala, wiping at his face. ‘We are on the case.’ Kamala tried to look reassured, but her doubts swam just under the lovely lustre of her cheeks. Sartaj hesitated, then added, ‘And yes, some of the progress has been with Rachel. As I said, don’t worry.’
Kamala’s back straightened, and she smiled and nodded. Umesh was gratifyingly pleased as well. Maybe he loved Kamala in his own way, Sartaj thought. A pretty fellow, but likeable. ‘Okay,’ Kamala said. ‘Thanks.’
Sartaj left her with Umesh murmuring into her ear. Endearments, maybe, or whispered memories of their shared past. No, Sartaj was sure that Umesh was talking about the uncertain competence of the investigator she had acquired. Sartaj got a fragmented glimpse of himself in the glass door of the coffee shop as he slung a leg over the motorcycle. It was a stylish move, but the man doing it was out of shape, dressed in a sadly out-of-date checked shirt and blue jeans. The turban was still tight and just so, but the face under it had been broken down by time. The detectives in Umesh’s foreign movies were no doubt better-looking, better-dressed, better men altogether. That much was undoubtedly true.
On the road north, past the Santa Cruz airport, Sartaj thought about other truths. He was, in fact, Kamala’s employee. He was paid by the great Government of India, at skimpy GOI rates, but it was nevertheless true that his salary cheques came in part from Kamala Pandey, citizen in good standing. Her cash payments in brown envelopes made him doubly her subordinate, and yet he had stood up, and had proclaimed that he was not her worker, her peon, her coolie. A light plane took off to the left, and Sartaj watched it soar past him, into the blue. The traffic was moving quickly now, and for a few seconds Sartaj had the illusion that he could keep up with the plane. Then it was away. He had thought he was past competing with people like Umesh and Kamala, that he had stumbled away from the siren call of success and victory, but apparently his pride was still alive. He could still get angry over being reminded of what he really was, a civil servant, a servant, no more, no less. Bloody sardar, Sartaj thought. Bloody policeman.
Kamble was enjoying being a policeman this afternoon. He had solved a burglary case – it was the building watchman and his two friends – and he had made money from an embezzlement case, from the defendant. He was writing up a report in the detection room when Sartaj found him. ‘Saab, come, come,’ he said. ‘Please sit.’ Then he wrote with one hand, drank noisy slurps of chaas with the other and told Sartaj all about his triumphs. After he had finished and filed his report, they walked to the back of the station, and took a stroll around the interior of the compound wall, around the temple. They stood under a droopy sapling and talked.
‘The phone number that Taklu called is registered in the name of –,’ Kamble said. ‘But wait – you won’t believe it. Tell me who you think it is.’
Kamble had contacts in the mobile phone company. He had made much noise about how difficult it was going to be to get any help and information, this being an unofficial investigation, and how he was going to need more cash to move things along. Now he was very satisfied with himself, with the quickness of his sources and their reliability. ‘Come on, Kamble,’ Sartaj said. ‘It’s hot out here.’
The saplings that Parulkar had planted had grown, they had got taller but they were sadly shredded-looking, stripped of leaves and branches. They gave no shade. There was a splattering of sunlight across Kamble’s shoulders, and he was sweating. ‘Boss, really you won’t be able to tell,’ he said. He ceremoniously took out a wad of folded paper from his pocket, computer forms with the holey strips still attached. He shook out the sheets. ‘Try once.’
Sartaj shrugged. ‘Minister Bipin Bhonsle?’
Kamble bent forward and hacked out a laugh. ‘Yes, he’d want to lock up all the loose women in India. But no, it’s not him. Listen. The address is a made-up one in Colaba, it doesn’t exist. But the name is…Kamala Pandey.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. That’s what it says here. Kamala Sloot Pandey.’
‘Let me see.’ Sartaj took the top printout. ‘That’s not “sloot”,’ he said. ‘That’s “slut”.’
‘Which is?’
‘An English word. It means like a randi.’
‘A raand?’ Kamble ran a hand over his head, backwards over the clipped hair. ‘Taklu is calling his boss, that kutiya Rachel, and that saali is laughing at us.’
‘At Kamala, I think,’ Sartaj said. ‘I don’t think that Rachel expected anyone to get to the number, really. She thinks she’s real smart. This is all a joke to her.’
‘Bhenchod. Now I want to catch her,’ Kamble said. ‘Not even for the money.’
Sartaj handed Kamble the brown envelope, which was now lighter by half. ‘We’ll catch her. What else did you get?’
‘One month of calls to this phone, incoming and outgoing. They’re all from the same mobile, and all to this same mobile. That’s got to be Taklu’s handy, the one he used at the cinema.’
So Taklu and his partner had a mobile phone, and they used it only to call this number, to reach their boss. And their boss – who, judging by this extra bitchery of ‘slut’, was Rachel Mathias – used her mobile phone only to call them. Very efficient, very careful. ‘The other phone, Taklu’s phone, is in what name?’
‘Same name, also hers. Same to same, sloot and everything.’
So Kamala was a slut twice over. Now Sartaj wanted to catch Rachel too, and not for the money. But the two mobile phones calling each other presented a problem. The addresses they were registered to would be fake, and the payments would be made in cash to add phoning minutes to the SIM cards. It was a closed system.
But Kamble had a feral stretch in his jaw, like a wolf that had just eaten a gulp of fresh flesh. ‘Don’t look so worried, my friend. Someone made a mistake. There is one call from Taklu’s phone, to a land line. This was three weeks ago, just one call one and a half minutes long. It is a residential line. I have the name, and the address. And it’s all real.’
They went out to the real address that evening. It was a long drive, with rush-hour traffic all the way to Bhandup. Kamble rode behind Sartaj, and Sartaj felt his weight and his impatience. Every now and then Kamble pointed out openings between the jammed vehicles, and urged him on, faster. Sartaj kept up his usual steady pace, refusing short-cuts that he knew would finally slow them down. They stopped behind a long line of brilliantly coloured trucks at a crossroads, and Sartaj turned his face from the steady heated flow of foul exhaust. There was an orange bubble of light that hovered over the road, from the streetlamps, and above it the hard black of the sky. To the right, across and above the moving cars, Sartaj could see the low sprawl of lights, spreading densely to the east and north. Beyond the lights, barely there, the rise of hills. Out here, you could see the city spreading, working itself out into the soil and through the earth. May
be there were still some tribals in those hills, hanging on to their little patches of land and quaint customs. These trucks would bring out cement and machines and money, and long legal documents, and the tribals would sign and sell, or be moved out. That’s how it worked.
Kamble was laughing. Sartaj twisted to look, and Kamble was squinting at the back of the last truck. ‘Gar ek baar pyaar kiya to baar baar karna,’ the fancy white Hindi script proclaimed under the usual Horn-OK-PLEASE, ‘agar mujhe der ho jaye to mera intezaar karna.’ The mudguards had been painted red and orange, with an edging of a leafy pattern in green. ‘There’s four spelling mistakes,’ Kamble said. ‘In two lines.’
There were indeed. ‘Poor poet,’ Sartaj said.
‘Not bad lines, either,’ Kamble said.
The lights changed, and the trucks came to life with a great roaring of horns and engines. Sartaj rode behind the last poetic one, and thought about the troubles of poets and clever lawbreaking masterminds. You could carefully turn out the most elegant crime, and hide behind layers of mobile phones, but the trouble was that you had to work with idiots. It was hard to hire good help. Somebody always disobeyed the simplest of instructions, and made a mistake, many mistakes. Detection made detectives look clever, but often solutions were gifts from fools. Sartaj now remembered Papa-ji holding forth on the general decline of the criminal classes, expounding his theory that the newer boys were all muscle and no subtlety, that using an AK-47 instead of a sleek Rampuri blade made you a lesser villain and a smaller man. Papa-ji always had examples – reaching back to the nineteenth century – of legendary burglars and conmen who worked crimes of wit and bravura. A generation always gets the apradhis it deserves, he used to say.
It was deep evening by the time they came to their apradhi’s two-room kholi at the back of the Satguru Nagar basti, at the end of a winding lane. They had followed an inspector named Kazimi, who had mehndicoloured hair and a stiff walk. Kamble rolled his eyes at Kazimi’s pointy-toed prance, his high step as they went over a clutch of water pipes. Kazimi was a friend of a friend, and Satguru Nagar was part of his beat. He hadn’t asked any questions about their investigation, and a thousand rupees had made him very flexible about accommodating their schedules. This was not a policeman in a very profitable posting, and Sartaj was sure that he had children, almost-grown children who needed to be settled. He had that harried air, those slumping, burdened shoulders. Kazimi was efficient, though. He had recognized the name, Shrimati Veena Mane, right away, and now he was leading them through nameless alleys without hesitation.
‘How much more?’ Kamble said. He had stopped, and had a hand out on a post, and was scraping the bottom of a shoe against an angle of a wall. ‘I hate coming into these places. Bhenchod.’
‘Not so far,’ Kazimi said. ‘One, two more minutes.’ He was rubbing at his hip.
‘What happened?’ Sartaj said, meaning the hip.
‘I got shot,’ Kazimi said. ‘During the riots. It hurts after a day of walking. Even after all this time.’
Sartaj didn’t need to ask which riots, and he didn’t want to ask how and why Kazimi had been wounded. Kamble was upright now, and they were moving.
‘This basti has grown a lot in the last two years,’ Kazimi said, his profile lit up from the doors they were passing. ‘There are now almost five hundred kholis.’
Five hundred cramped little homes, brick and wood and plastic and tin making small spaces for many bodies. Kamble was probably one generation away from a home just like these, maybe two, but he had the superiority of the escapee, the emigrant. He was on his way to somewhere else, and he didn’t like being drawn back. Sartaj was trying to be careful about his own Italian masterpieces, but if your shoes got dirtied, you had to accept the smear and deal with it. People lived here, and this was their life. Actually, this basti was better than many Sartaj had seen. Its inhabitants had progressed, they had escaped the tattered lean-tos that new immigrants built, the temporary arrangements made out of discarded cardboard boxes. Here, there was pumped water, and bricked-up gutters, and electricity in most of the kholis, and Shrimati Veena Mane had a phone. Sartaj had even seen a rank of five toilets near the front of the basti, with a blue NGO placard over them. These were people moving up, slowly but surely.
But they didn’t like policemen, these inhabitants of Satguru Nagar. Two teenage boys sat on a ledge between two kholis, their arms intertwined, and they glared at Kazimi, and Sartaj caught the rest of their hostility as he walked past them. A balding grandmother sitting in a doorway, a thali laden with rice grains held between her knees, called out to them, ‘What sin are you going to commit today, inspec-tor?’ There was enough stinging contempt just in her ‘tor’ to curdle the milk that she had boiling on the stove inside.
‘I’m not after your son today, Amma,’ Kazimi said, without looking back. ‘But tell him I said hello.’
She had more to say, but Sartaj lost it under the tinny blare of Yeh shaam mastani, madhosh kiye jaye, which came from a television to the left, turned up very loud. They were almost at the end of this lane, which stopped abruptly at a grey concrete wall. There was broken glass on top of the wall, and curls of barbed wire. There was empty space beyond, trees and empty land.
‘There,’ Kazimi said. ‘Second door before the end, on the left.’
‘All right,’ Kamble said, edging past Kazimi. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Slowly,’ Kazimi said. ‘Slowly.’
Sartaj put a hand on Kamble’s back, to restrain him, and then drew it back from the sweat. ‘He’s right,’ he said, wiping his hand on his jeans. ‘We don’t know who the apradhi is. Or if he’s one of the taporis we passed on the corner. Go gently, Kamble. Gently.’
Kamble wasn’t convinced, but he let Kazimi go on ahead. This second door on the left was freshly painted a gay orange, and had a Ganesha in white above the lintel. The door was open just a crack, and a faint electronic babble came through. Kazimi ambled up the lane, looking as if he was headed towards the very end. Then he turned abruptly, and put a hand on the orange door, and shoved.
There was a sharp crack, of wood on flesh, and a grunt of pain. Sartaj could see, past Kazimi, a hand clutching a knee, a bare back, skinny calves. There was a man on the floor. He had been sitting with his back to the wall and the door, watching TV. He came up to one leg, hobbling, and said, ‘Who? Who are you?’
Sartaj, who was half-way through the door, felt Kamble’s warm exhalation on the back of his neck. ‘Bastard,’ Kamble said. ‘It’s Taklu.’
This was certainly possible, that this lean, hollow-chested specimen was the Taklu that little Jatin had described. He was of the right age, the right height, and his hair had retreated up to the very dome of his head. Kazimi had him backed up against a shelf.
‘You are new here,’ Kazimi said. ‘Otherwise you would know me. What’s your name?’
‘Who are you?’ Taklu insisted.
‘We’re your baaps,’ Kamble said from the door. ‘Don’t you recognize us?’
Sartaj moved past Kazimi, to the back of the kholi. There was another room there, with two wooden cupboards, and three steel trunks stacked on top of each other. A fuzz of grey light came through a thickly-barred ventilator high up on the brick wall. Altogether it was a fair-sized home, well-kept and clean. The kitchen area, in the front room, had a suspended grill with rows of utensils, and a stove with two burners. To the left, near the door, a green phone sat resplendent on a white lacy cloth, on a small wooden stool.
Taklu was now quiet. He had let go of his knee, and he had his arms across his chest. Under his blue knit underwear, his legs were shaking, right next to the Sunil Shetty movie on television. ‘My name is Anand Agavane,’ he said. He knew now that he had three policemen in his house, and his voice was shaky.
Kazimi took a step up to him. ‘Who are you, Anand Agavane? Why are you here, in Veena Mane’s house?’
‘She is my aatya. This is my aatya’s house. I come and stay here sometimes. I drive an auto
for a seth who has his garage near here. Sometimes I have to return the auto late at night, so I come and sleep here.’
‘Your aatya is rich, eh?’ Sartaj said. ‘She’s got a phone and everything.’ He was squatting next to the stool. The phone had a guard-lock on the dial, and a box full of coins and small notes next to it. Veena Mane took money from her neighbours, to let them make calls and receive them. ‘What’s the number for this phone?’
‘The number?’
‘Yes, the number. You don’t remember your own aatya’s number? What is it, Kamble, the phone number?’
Kamble was in the back room now, and Sartaj could hear him tipping over trunks and flinging cupboards open. He called the number back, singing out the digits.
‘Is that it, chutiya?’ Kazimi said. He was standing very close to Anand Agavane now, nose to nose. ‘Is that your aatya’s number?’
‘I haven’t done anything.’
Kazimi slapped him. There was a moan from outside, from the row of faces that now crowded the lane. Anand Agavane hunched against the television, holding his face.
Sartaj thrust his head out of the door. ‘Get away from here,’ he snarled. ‘Or I’ll take you bastards in as well. You want a lathi up your gaand? This is not some cinema show.’ Veena Mane’s neighbours retreated, and then turned away. But Sartaj knew that they would be listening, that what went on in one kholi was loud in the next. He came back into the room, turned up the television. A model in a green sari sang about exquisite coffee.
‘Look at this,’ Kamble said as he came through the narrow passageway from the back room. He held up a cubical black plug and a dangling wire. ‘This looks like it should plug into a mobile phone. How many phones does your aatya have, after all? What is she doing, calling the Ambanis every ten minutes?’
Sartaj took the plug from Kamble. He put a comforting hand on Anand Agavane’s shoulder, close to the neck. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘We’re not after you. We know about the calls to the woman, we know that you sent those chokras to pick up money at Apsara.’ Sartaj could feel Anand Agavane’s pulse under his fingers, as high and fast as a bird’s. ‘We just want you to tell us your boss’s name yourself. Who do you call? Just tell me. It’ll be all right, nothing will happen to you.’