Kshitij looked up from his laces, startled. He blinked twice and then said, “I will tell my neighbour.” Sartaj noted his thick black Bata shoes, his well-worn white shirt and brown pants. When they came out of the bedroom Kshitij shut the door firmly behind him. “I’m ready,” he said.
“I need a photograph of your father,” Sartaj said.
Kshitij nodded, turned, walked away. The photograph he brought back was a picture of a happy family, Chetanbhai and his wife in front, stiff and square shouldered in a blue suit and green sari, and Kshitij behind, standing straight in a white shirt, his hand on his mother’s shoulder.
*
He was remarkably steady at the morgue. Sartaj was impressed by his self-possession in the face of the damp walls, the yellow light, and the searing smell of formaldehyde that brought tears to the eyes. Sartaj forgave him a little then for his drab owlishness, his youth entirely lacking in dash or energy or charm. There was a sort of blunt and unprepossessing iron in him. Sartaj had brought some there who had been broken down by the dark corridors even before the room with the rattling metal trolleys and the atmosphere of congestion, but Kshitij identified his father without a tremor. He stood with his arms folded over his thin chest and said, “Yes. Yes.” Outside, as they swayed in the police department Gypsy jeep, on the pitted roads, he asked, “Has the police found out anything about the murder?” When Sartaj told him he couldn’t talk about the investigation he nodded understandingly and lapsed into silence. But afterwards, at the station, he couldn’t stop talking. He drank cup after cup of tea and told Sartaj that he was premed at Pateker. He was an only son. He wanted to specialize in neurology. He had been second in the state in the H.Sc. exams, falling short by three marks mostly because of a bad mistake in Physics, which was his worst subject. It had been a sort of trick question in electricity. But other than that everything was moving according to plan.
When Sartaj asked about Chetanbhai Patel, Kshitij fell silent for a minute, a cup suspended halfway to his lips, his mouth open. Then, looking down into the cup of tea, he talked about his father. Chetanbhai was mostly a textile trader. He travelled often, to the interior sometimes, and they had thought he was late coming back from Nadiad this time, which is why they reported him missing two days after he was supposed to have returned. He did some export, mostly to the Middle East, but some to America and of course he wanted more. It was a long-established business, from before Kshitij’s birth. Like many businessmen he had sometimes been the victim of petty crime. Once a briefcase with cash in it had been stolen from a local train.
“Did he seem afraid?” Sartaj said. “Any enemies that you know of?”
“Enemies? No, of course not. Why would he have enemies?”
“Somebody in business that he had a quarrel with? Somebody in the locality?”
“No.”
“What about you?” Sartaj said. “Do you have any enemies?”
“What do I have to do with it?”
“Sometimes people die because they get caught in their children’s fights.”
Then there was again that flare of resentment in Kshitij, muted in the eyes but so strong in the shoulders and in the coil of his body that it was a kind of hatred.
“Do you have fights? Quarrels?” Sartaj said.
“No,” Kshitij said. “Why would I?”
“Everyone has enemies.”
“I haven’t done anything to make enemies.” He was now assured and confident and calm.
“Right,” Sartaj said. “I think now we will look around your house. And I would like to meet Mrs. Patel.”
*
In the jeep Sartaj considered his own vanity. He was sensitive to other people’s feelings about him, and had still not learnt to be indifferent to the fear he caused, to the anger of those he investigated. He hid this uneasiness carefully because there was no place for it in an investigator’s craft. To be hated was part of the job. But in college he had wanted to be loved by all, and Megha had teased him, you’re everyone’s hero. Then yours too, he had said. No, no, no, she said, and she shook her head, and kissed him. You have a terrible Panju accent, she said laughing, and your English is lousy, but you are just beautiful, and then she kissed him again. They had married out of vanity, their own and each other’s. He had been the Casanova of the college, with a dada’s reputation that her friends had warned her about. But she had been so very sure of herself, of her very good looks like a hawk and that shine she had of money, and they were so handsome together that people stopped in the streets to look at them. After they married they liked to make love sitting facing each other, his hair open about his shoulders so they were like mirror images, hardly moving, eyes locked together in an undulating competition towards and away from pleasurable collapse. The memory rose into his throat and Sartaj shook it away as the Gypsy rocked to a halt. A double line of young men in khaki shorts was plunging across the road.
“Bloody idiots,” Sartaj said. “Won’t even stay home in the rain.”
“They’re Rakshaks, sir,” Katekar said, grinning. “Tough boys. A little rain won’t stop them. After all they want to clean up the country.”
“They’ll all catch colds,” Sartaj said. The banner carried at the rear of the procession was soggy and limp, but Sartaj could see one of the crossed spears. “And their mothers will have to wipe their noses.”
Katekar grinned. He rattled the gearshift to and fro and the Gypsy jerked forward. “How is Mata-ji?” he said.
“She’s very well,” Sartaj said. “She remembers you often.” Katekar was a great devotee of Sartaj’s mother. Every time she stayed with Sartaj, Katekar made a special point of coming up to the flat, and touching her feet, not once but three times, bringing his hand up to his throat. Sartaj knew Katekar’s mother had died just after Katekar had joined the force.
“Please tell her I said pranaam.”
Sartaj nodded, and looked over his shoulder. Kshitij was staring dully at the window and crying. His hands were locked together in his lap and the tears were sliding down his face. Now Katekar cursed softly as the jeep growled through a long patch of flooded road, leaving a wake behind. Sartaj turned away from Kshitij and shifted in his seat. Katekar was leaning forward, peering through the regularly spaced waves of water that the wipers were making on the windshield. He was cursing the water, the streets, and the city. His hands around the black plastic of the steering wheel were thick, with huge bulky wrists. He looked at Sartaj and smiled, and Sartaj had to grin back at him. In the rearview mirror, Sartaj could see Kshitij’s shoulder, the line of his jaw, and he thought, it’s always hard on the serious ones, they were always tragic with their earnestness and their belief in seriousness. He remembered two boys who were the grandsons of farmers in his grandfather’s village near Patiala. He recalled them vaguely from a summer visit to the village, remembered them in blue pants and ties. There had been a celebration of their results in the seventh class exams, and he had tried to talk to them about the test match that everyone was listening to but had found them boring and uninformed. After that he had never seen them again and had not thought of them for years until his father had mentioned them during a Sunday phone call. They had been caught by a BSF patrol as they came over the border in the dunes near Jaisalmer laden with grenades and ammunition. They had tried to fire back but had been neatly outflanked and machine-gunned. The papers had reported the death of two Grade-A terrorists and had reported their names and their affiliations. There had been a grainy black-and-white photograph of sprawled, bloodied figures with open mouths. Sartaj had never heard of their organization but had no doubt it was a very serious one.
*
The Apsara stood among a crowd of mourners, holding her pot tipped forward. The door to the apartment was open and Kshitij was surrounded by young men as soon as they stepped from the lift. In the front room neighbours sat and talked in whispers, and an older man embraced Kshitij for a long moment. Then Kshitij stood facing the door to the bedroom at the back of th
e house, and the seconds passed, and in his shoulders there was a huge reluctance, as if the next step were from one world into another. Finally the old man took Kshitij by the elbow and led him forward. Sartaj and Katekar followed behind closely, and over many shoulders Sartaj saw a woman sitting on the ground, surrounded by other women. They were holding her by the shoulders and arms, and she had one leg curled under her and the other straight out in front. She looked up with a blank face and Kshitij stopped. Sartaj wanted very much to see the boy’s reaction, and he started to push gently past the old man but suddenly the woman started to keen, it was a long wailing sound that arched her back and the others strained to keep her still. It came again and Sartaj shivered, it was somehow quite expressionless, like a long blank wall stretching forever, and as stunning. Kshitij stood helplessly before it, and the room was very close, bodies pushed up to each other and the light broken up somehow into fragments of faces, and then Sartaj turned and walked out of the room. It was bad technique but he couldn’t bring himself to look at them any more. The rest of the house was also filled and stifling, and Sartaj jostled shoulders and pushed until he was out.
*
Sartaj sat wrapped safely in the loneliness of his flat. It was very dark, moonless, and the small space between the gleams on the furniture held him comfortably in its absolute silence. He knew that if he disturbed nothing, not even the shadows on the floor, he could hold on to the madly delicate balance of peace that he had struggled himself into. He was trying not to think, and succeeding from moment to moment, and then the phone shrilled across the back of his neck. He held on for an instant, but on the third ring he turned his head and reached behind and picked it up. His hand was damp on the receiver and now he felt the sweat running down his sides.
“Ride?” Rahul said. Rahul practised a terseness which he had picked up from watching at least one American film a day on laser disc.
“I don’t know, Rahul,” Sartaj said.
“I’m ten minutes away.”
Sartaj took a breath and tried to recall the thin quiet from a moment ago, but already there was laughter, and tinny music, spilling in over the windowsill. He was dizzy suddenly from the pounding in his head. “All right,” he said. “But I have to dress. Give me twenty.”
After a quick shower, and with the crisp collar of a freshly starched white kurta against his neck he felt cool again: it was a simple Lucknowi kurta, but the very thin gold chain threaded through the tiny gold studs made all difference. The studs had belonged to his grandfather and he always stood a little straighter when he wore them. Rahul arrived with his customary honk downstairs, and he came up and they regarded each other acutely. This was a ritual of noticing each other’s style, but this time Sartaj was aware only of the boy’s long chin, of his nose which suggested his sister so strongly that Sartaj felt again that mixture of anger and longing. Finally he had to make a conscious effort to note the new haircut with sideburns, the loose red shirt, and the slightly flared black jeans.
“I have seen the look before,” Sartaj said. “A long time ago.”
“Yeah?” Rahul said, without interest. “I guess.”
“Yes,” Sartaj said. He thought, suddenly and apropos of nothing, that too young to know cycles is too young to know anything.
Rahul drove fast and well, with the assurance of the moneyed in a good car, or in this case a new red Mahindra jeep with a very good removable tape player. The music they listened to was completely foreign and remote to Sartaj, and as always it was played with a loudness that hovered on the edge of real pain.
“So how’re your girlfriends?” Rahul shouted above the music.
“My what?”
“You know. Women.”
“I don’t have any.”
“None? Such a big famous cop and all?”
Sartaj had been in the afternoon papers twice, both times for encounters with minor gangsters. The second confrontation had ended with gunfire, and a dead body on the floor in a dark corridor. Sartaj had fired six shots, and only one had hit. He had crouched, blinded and deafened and trembling, spilling shells onto the floor, but he had never told Rahul about that, or about the small spot of urine on the front of his pants. His picture, a formal studio portrait with retouched lips, had been in MidDay the same afternoon. “No, not even one woman. Slow down.” Rahul was speeding and then braking the jeep with a violence that was rattling the sleek little tape player in its housing.
“You’re a real sad case, you know,” Rahul said.
Rahul had girlfriends and broke up with them and then had others with a speed and complexity that dazzled Sartaj, and he was worldly in a way that had been impossible all those years ago when Sartaj and Megha had been the talk of the campus. They had twisted against each other in cinema halls, desperate and hungry, but now Rahul and his friends were too bored with sex to talk about it. It had all changed and he had never seen it change. “I’m just a poor old fogey, what to do, yaar?” Sartaj said with a laugh, and Rahul looked at him quickly but then had to swerve around a green Maruti 1000.
“Let’s get a beer,” Rahul said.
“How old are you, sonny?” Sartaj said and Rahul laughed.
“Don’t do the tulla thing on me now, Inspector sahib,” he said. “I need a beer. You do too.”
“I do?”
Rahul ignored the question and sped past a timber and wood merchant’s shop into a parking lot full of cars. A blue neon sign announced loudly that this was The Hideout, and inside the walls had been painted to look like the walls of a cave, and the floor was littered with barrels and crates. They were seated by a waiter in a black leather jacket, and above their table there was a large black-and-white print of Pran standing with legs wide apart, in black boots, flexing a whip. On the opposite wall a black-hatted foreign villain, one that Sartaj didn’t know, glared over his left shoulder, caped and sinister.
“I arrested somebody on this street once,” Sartaj said.
“Yeah? A bad guy?” Rahul said, waving to somebody over the heads of the sleek and the young.
“Bad?” Sartaj said slowly. He was staring down at the price of the beer. “Not really. He was greedy.” It was actually a quite dusty and unprepossessing commercial street, full of trucks and handcarts and the smell of rotting greens. The man Sartaj had arrested had been named Agha, and he had worked as a clerk for a company dealing in plastic goods. After they put the handcuffs on him he had looked at the owner of the company and said quietly, I have five children, and it was hard to tell whether that was an explanation for taking money or a cry for mercy, but it didn’t matter anyway. “I think he must still be in jail.”
“Everyone’s looking at you,” Rahul said sullenly. “Why do you dress like a Hindi movie?”
“This?” Sartaj said, running a finger over the collar of his kurta. “You’re the one who brought me here.”
The waiter brought their beer in what was obviously some designer’s idea of roughneck tin mugs that belonged in a low den, and Rahul bent over his beer. Sartaj took a long gulp and was shocked by the pleasure of the thick cold curling against the back of his throat, and he wondered if things tasted better when you paid more for them. He took another long drink and sat up, revived, to look around and to listen to the pleasant buzz of music and the hum of voices that sounded sophisticated even when it was impossible to tell one word from another. He was trying to pin what it was exactly, and after a while he decided it was that they sounded smooth, like there was a lubrication over it all, an oil that eased everything except that it was of course not greasy.
“She’s getting married,” Rahul said.
“Who?” But even before he spoke it the frightening pitch and yaw of his stomach told him who it was.
“Megha.”
“To?”
“She told me not to tell.”
“I’ll find out.”
Rahul looked up then. “Yes, you will.” His Adam’s apple ducked up and down and his face trembled, but then with a shake of his
shoulders he said, “Raj Sanghi. You know.”
Sartaj knew. This was the son of a friend of Megha’s family, and Megha and Raj had known each other since childhood and the families had always thought that they were good together. He knew about all this. Now he sat with his hands on his thighs and found himself looking for a way to stop it, for a place where he could apply pressure until something snapped.
“Sorry,” Rahul said, and Sartaj saw that he looked frightened, terrified. He knew why: during one of their quarrels Megha had screamed at him that in his anger he had a face like a terrorist, looked as if the next thing he said or did would be complete and irrevocable, forever. He had looked at her then dumbly, made desolate and foreign by her choice of words. She had cried then and said she didn’t mean that at all. They had broken parts of each other like that all through the time at the end, and he tasted these strange victories that left him empty and wishing for nothing more than endless sleep, like the last man on a battlefield where even the blades of grass were dead. Finally it had seemed better never to say anything at all.
“No, no,” Sartaj said. “It’s all right.” He reached across the table and awkwardly patted Rahul’s wrist. He had to swallow before he could speak again. “I don’t think I should drink any more.”
*
It was morning and sparrows swirled madly through the arches of the police station. Ghorpade was sitting on the bench with his eyes closed when Sartaj and Katekar came into the detection room.
“Wake up,” Sartaj said, kicking one of the legs of the bench sharply. Ghorpade opened his eyes and Sartaj saw that he was not sleeping, or even sleepy, but that every moment was a struggle against some monstrous hunger. He had both his hands squeezed between his thighs, and he looked at Sartaj as if from some great distance. Katekar took his usual interrogation stance, legs apart and behind the suspect.