Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Turn around,” Sartaj said to the driver. “What’s your name?”

“Raju.”

“Raju, take a look at him quickly. Do you know him?” Finally Sartaj had to take Raju by the elbow and steady him. “Look,” Sartaj said. Raju was in his early twenties and Sartaj knew that he had never imagined his own death. Now in the early morning he was looking at a corpse. He shook his head so violently that Sartaj felt the jerks in his arm. “All right. Go over there and sit down. We’ll need your statement.”

“Robbed, sir,” Katekar said as he pulled on his boots. He pointed with his chin at the white band of skin around the dead man’s wrist, which showed up clearly even after his colour had drained away into the water. “Must have been a good watch.”

“It was a big one anyway,” Sartaj said. “Big enough to get him killed.”

*

He had been dead at least eight and not more than twelve hours when he was found. The cause of death was a single stab wound, under the sternum, only an inch and a quarter long but deep. The blade had pierced his heart.

“What was taken?” Parulkar said. Parulkar was Sartaj’s boss. He had been promoted up to deputy commissioner from the Maharashtra police service, and still lived in Ghatkopar in what he called his ancestral abode.

“Wallet,” Sartaj said. “And a watch.”

“Ah, I see,” Parulkar said. “Bombay was never like this.”

Sartaj shrugged. “It’s a new world. He was fifty or thereabouts, no distinguishing marks.”

He looked up and Parulkar was smiling. Sartaj had been cleaning his boots with a moist rag, scrubbing away the mud caked around the tread and the ankles.

“It’ll get on again as soon as you go out,” Parulkar said.

Sartaj nodded. “Yes, sir. But the point is to keep trying?”

“Of course, of course,” Parulkar said, standing up and hitching his pants over his considerable belly. His uniform was always bunched up somehow, looking as if it had been made for someone else. “Young fellows must be tip-top. Carry on, carry on.” But he was still smiling as he walked out of the room.

Sartaj stood up and walked across the room to a map of the state. In the glass, over the dark borders and the blue roads, he could see himself, and he checked his shoulders, the tuck of his shirt, the crispness of his crease. Now when the moisture hung in the air it was difficult to come close to the perfection he wanted to see in the glass, but he patted his turban and ran a finger over his sagging collar. He did not mind Parulkar’s smile at all, because he was a dandy who came from a long line of dandies. His father had retired as a senior inspector in Zone 2, and every street urchin had recognized the swagger stick with the shining steel tips and the gleaming black boots. Sartaj’s grandfather’s upturned moustaches had been acknowledged as the most magnificent in all of Punjab, and he had died in service as a daroga , in a gun battle with Afghan smugglers near Peshawar. The legend went that when he was hit he was eating a dusseri mango. He sat down, not far from a babul bush, finished the mango, crossed his legs, held out his hand for a napkin that his seniormost havaldar was holding for him, wiped his fingers, dabbed at his mouth, twirled his moustaches, and died.

Sartaj had never been able to eat a mango without thinking of the old man, who he had met only through the garlanded portrait that hung in his mother’s house. Next to that picture was a portrait of Guru Nanak, another one of Guru Gobind Singh, and then one of Sartaj’s father, who had made it to retirement and had passed one night in his sleep, resting on his back with his hands folded neatly on his chest. Sartaj was eating a mango now, holding a slice with his fingertips as he leafed through the reports from the Missing Persons Bureau with his other hand, stacking the probables to the left, face down, and the rejects to the right. He was looking mainly for the age, but also for the kind of man who would have wanted what the dead man wanted. He had it down to fifteen when the phone buzzed angrily. In the quietness after the rain it was very loud.

“Are you still in the office, you sad man?” a boy’s voice said.

“Yes, I am,” Sartaj said.

“Doing what?”

“Eating the last alphonso mango of the season.”

“You should go home.”

“You’re still up. You must be very happy or very sad.” It was Rahul, his wife’s younger brother, who was now in his second year at Xavier’s and therefore always falling in love with someone or out of it.

“Happy, actually,” Rahul said quietly. “I bought a new shirt at Benneton today.” They had a mutual interest in clothes, although they mystified each other with their choices. They talked for a while about this shirt, and then suddenly Rahul said, “When’s the exam tomorrow?” Sartaj flipped over another report as Rahul talked nonsense about college. What that meant was that someone had come into the room, and Rahul was pretending that he was talking to a college friend. Finally Rahul said, “See you at college tomorrow. Go to sleep soon. Night,” and hung up.

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. “Hello, Sartaj,” his mother said. “I just called home and of course you weren’t there.” She lived alone in Poona, with a rose garden and one aging Alsatian. When Sartaj’s father had been alive, they called every Sunday, but now she allowed herself a daily call.

“ Peri pauna , Ma,” Sartaj said.

“ Jite raho, beta ,” she said. “Did you find a cook?”

“No, not yet, I’ve been busy.” Which, of course, was no excuse. Sartaj held the phone loosely against his ear, and turned pages, and his mother spoke at length about bad diets and nutrition. He could see clearly the sofa she was sitting on, the little table next to it, her small feet which he had just touched in devotion, her hands with which she had blessed him, and the sari wrapped around her plump shoulders, and the garlanded pictures on the wall.

“It’s too late, Sartaj,” she said finally. “Go home and rest.”

“Yes, Ma,” Sartaj said. But he stayed for another two hours before he walked home. Even then he walked slowly, stopping sometimes to watch the water as it roiled around the gutters and made whirlpools. He leaned against a wall and scanned the layered many-coloured mess of movie posters and political slogans, dominated by the latest broadside bearing the crossed spears of a right political party. He read all this with the concentration of an archeologist smoothing away layers of ancient dust. What he was avoiding was the small bundle of foolscap paper that sat on his dining table, wrapped in a white ribbon. Rahul’s sister had sent him these papers, and he couldn’t bring himself yet to say the word for what she wanted. But he was supposed to be distinct now from her and her family, disengaged. He had been told that they considered him dead. Which was why Rahul made phone calls late at night: maybe that’s when you talk to the dead.

*

Sartaj found the next of kin, whose name was Smt. Asha Patel (“wife of missing person”), but not on the batch of missing persons reports that he had. It was in another stack that came three days later from the Missing Persons Bureau. The name of the dead man was Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel and the age was right, but what clinched it of course was the entry under distinguishing marks and features: “Wearing a gold Rolex watch, value Rs. 2,18,000/-.” Chetanbhai was then a man who liked people to know the make of watch that he was wearing and its exact and precisely calculated value. Sartaj did the missing-property paperwork (in triplicate as required), and out of habit made some phone calls to his usual official and non-official sources, although he had no hope that he would ever see this grand keeper of time, but in this he was wrong because that same afternoon there was a phone call from the station at Bandra. Two of their constables, at seven that morning, had picked up one Shanker Ghorpade, a known bad character, beggar, suspected pilferer, and drunkard. The suspect had been observed in the very early morning hours to be staggering proudly through the bazaar at Linking Road, wearing an ornamental timepiece clearly beyond his means and needs. Since he was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation they had brought him in, and had already been commended for their alertness.