Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

*

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.

“Have you been thinking about what you did?” Sartaj said.

“I didn’t do what you said,” Ghorpade said. His eyes were yellowish, rheumy.

“You better decide to tell me the truth,” Sartaj said. “Or it’ll be bad for you.”

Ghorpade shut his eyes again. Katekar widened his stance, and flexed his shoulders. But Sartaj shook his head, and said, “Ghorpade, where do you live? Do you have a family?”

Ghorpade spoke without opening his eyes. “I don’t live anywhere.”

“Do you have a wife?”

“I had.”

“What happened?”

“She ran away.”

“Why?”

“I beat her.”

“Why?”

Ghorpade shrugged.

“How old are you, Ghorpade?”

Sartaj could hear the sparrows in the yard outside. Then finally Ghorpade spoke: “I was born the year before the Chinese war.”

Outside, under the sky which was clouded again, Sartaj considered the slight possibility that he and Ghorpade shared birthdays. He had no idea why it seemed important. Now Moitra, whose first name was Suman, roared into the yard in her new Jeep. They had been batchmates in Nasik, and on the first day of the course she had let them know that she was twice as intelligent and thrice as tough as any of them. Sartaj had no problems with this, especially since it was probably true.

“Did he confess?” she said, bounding up the stairs. “Closing the case?”

“I’m investigating,” Sartaj said. “This is an investigation, Moitra. Remember?”

“Investigating what?” Moitra said over her shoulder as she sped down the corridor. “Investigating whom?”

*

“Where is your mother?”

Kshitij was standing square in the middle of his doorway, his shoulders taut.

“What do you want with my mother?”

“Where is she?”

“She’s here. Resting. She’s not well. She’s sleeping.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“Why?”

“This is a murder case. We talk to everyone concerned.”

“What does my mother have to do with a murder case?”

“She was married to your father,” Sartaj said, stepping forward. Kshitij stayed where he was and Sartaj put the palm of his hand against the boy’s chest and pushed. Kshitij stumbled back, and Sartaj went past him into the drawing room.

“What do you want? Do you have a warrant? Why are you here? I heard you have a suspect in custody,” Kshitij said, following closely, but then Katekar had him by the arm and against the wall. Sartaj turned and Kshitij swallowed and subsided. Sartaj leaned forward and put his face close to Kshitij and watched him for a long moment, let him look and feel the pace of his anger as they listened to each other’s breathing. Then he turned away abruptly and stalked through the room, towards the bedroom. Inside, the cupboards stood open, and the double bed and the floor were littered with paper. She was sitting on the balcony that opened out onto the swamp, and far away across muddy patches of green, the silver haze of the sea.

“Mrs. Patel?”

When she turned to him her face was dense with grief. He cleared his throat and set forth briskly into his questions, when did you last see your husband, did he seem worried recently, were there any phone calls that upset him, were you aware of enemies and quarrels, were you aware of money difficulties, were you. She answered each time with a shake of the head, holding a hand at her throat. Her age was forty-nine, but her hair was a brilliant black, lustrous even in its disarray, and Sartaj looked at her, and thought that just a few days ago she must have been very pleasantly attractive, and that fact also settled into the confusion that surrounded the life and death of Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel.

Finally he asked: “Can you tell me anything else? Is there anything else I should know?”

“No,” she said. “No.” But the word was heavy with regret, and Sartaj followed her glance over his shoulder to the doorway to the bedroom, past Katekar, to the corridor where Kshitij’s shadow lingered. When he turned back to Mrs. Patel she was weeping, holding the end of her pallu to her eyes. And Sartaj, to his own surprise, felt a swell of emotion, rising like a knot in his chest.

In the bedroom, two of the cupboards were stacked full of shirts. Sartaj ran a finger up and down the row of the suits, rattling the wooden hangers against each other. The two other cupboards, against the opposite wall, were empty. He squatted and picked up a small booklet and flattened it out against his knee. It was a bank chequebook, with neat little tick marks in blue pencil next to the cheques and deposits. The closing balance was one lakh forty-six thousand rupees. He put the bank book in his pocket, and straightened up. There was a kind of grief in the wild litter across the room. Over these debris Sartaj began a quick but methodical survey, in a back-and-forth grid. In this practised routine there was a kind of relief.

“Aren’t you supposed to have two witnesses for a panchnama if you do a search?” Kshitij said from the doorway.

“Am I doing a search?” Sartaj said.

“It looks like you are.”

“I’m just looking around. Why is all this on the floor?”

“I, I was just cleaning up. Sorting things out.”

“Yes, I see,” Sartaj said. After a murder some people tidied up. Others cooked, made huge quantities of food that nobody would or could eat. But every time there was an attempt to find one’s way back to ordinary days. And all the paper on the floor was a record of the most innocuous kind of life: birth, insurance, deposits, loans, payments, the bills for hard-won purchases kept carefully for years. Now it was over. Sartaj looked across the room, towards the balcony, and she was staring out at the sea again.

Outside, in the hall, Sartaj ran his hand over the small row of books. The biography of Vivekananda, two Sidney Sheldon novels, How to Be a Better Manager.

“He was robbed, wasn’t he?” Kshitij said, behind him. He looked tired and slight in his white shirt.

“We are investigating,” Sartaj said. The Apsara was gone, disappeared from her space by the wall.

“Is there any progress? What about this suspect? Who is he?”

Sartaj was thinking about the curve of the Apsara’s shoulder. He turned his gaze with an effort and then said very directly, in his policeman’s voice, “We are investigating. We will let you know as soon as we find out anything.”

Outside, in the stairway that wound around the lift shaft, Sartaj leaned against the wall, breathless, hunted by something he had never known.

“Are you all right, sir?” Katekar said.

“I’m fine,” Sartaj said. But it was a loneliness so huge and so feral that he wanted to give up and collapse into the thick green swamp he could see far below, through a barred window. Even after the papers had come, after they had been sitting on their dining table for a week, he had never believed that the word “divorce” meant something real. In his whole life he had never known anyone who had been divorced. He had never known anybody whose parents had been divorced. He couldn’t remember a friend who had known anybody who had been divorced. Divorce was something that strange people did in the pages of Society magazine. His breath came dragging through the pain in his throat. He took a step forward and the green swirled dizzyingly under him, and he lurched forward and it pounded in his head, but then the white wall scraped across his shoulder. Katekar put a hand under his elbow. Sartaj followed his glance: on his own uniform, there was a streak of plaster from the wall, bright against the khaki.