Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Rubbish?”

“Out to the dump, over there behind the wall. He looked very tired.”

Now Mehdi Hassan sang the emperor’s old complaint about boat karni mujhe kabhi mushkil aisi to na thi , and Sartaj searched the car. He scraped under the seats and rolled the grit off the floor mats between his fingers. The glove compartment held a receipt book from a petrol pump in Santa Cruz, vehicle booklets in a plastic wrapper, a pack of playing cards, and, held together by a black metal office clip, a stack of parking receipts.

“Where was his office?” Sartaj said.

“Andheri East. Near Natraj Studio.”

The receipt on top was rubber-stamped “Colaba Parking.” Getting out of the car, Sartaj thumbed through the stack, and it seemed that Chetanbhai had gone to Colaba often. Sartaj opened the front passenger door again and knelt, trying to get as close to the floor mats as possible. A quick run of the forefinger over the underside of the front passenger seat, over the shiny metal at the very bottom, and then back, left an impression of some faint roughness, a texture across the metal. He reached into his pocket for the penknife on his keychain, and scraped with it and then held it up to the light, and there was a flakey rust on the blade, an innocuous brown the colour of farm earth after rain.

“Look at this,” he said, holding it up to Sharma.

“What is it?” Sharma said, peering. “Rust?”

Sartaj’s eyes moved, and Katekar caught Sharma by the collar, bent him suddenly forward at the waist, and with a full high turn of the shoulder hit him on the broad of his back with an open palm. The crack was shockingly loud and Sartaj hissed into Sharma’s astounded face, “Did you kill him? Why did you kill him?”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

Sartaj looked up at Katekar, and again Katekar’s broad hand went up and came down like a piston.

“This is blood,” Sartaj said. This was not a fact, it was less than a theory, but Sharma believed it. His eyes were full of tears, and he was panting, holding his chest with both his hands. “You didn’t know it’s very difficult to get blood cleaned, did you? No matter how much you clean there’s always a bit left. Did you wash the car?”

“I tell you I don’t know anything about this. I swear to you.”

“Why are you still here?”

“I get paid for the month on the thirtieth. Sahib, I’m just a poor man. I would have gone but I get my payment on the thirtieth. Nothing else.”

Sartaj was willing to wait and see who tried to flee. The guilty always ran. It was like starting an unknown animal out of a thicket. You tossed in a rock and waited to see what came out. “All right,” he said, and Katekar let Sharma go and stepped away. But Sharma stayed bent over, huddled to his knees, his face red. “But don’t speak to anyone regarding this matter. Don’t touch this car. Lock up the garage now and give me the key.” Sartaj said to Katekar, “Watch the garage until we can get somebody from the forensics lab down here to take a look at the car.”

“Sir,” Katekar said, nodding, still looking at Sharma. He took a blue-and-white checkered handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his mouth, his cheeks.

Sartaj bent over until his face was close to Sharma’s. “And you. Don’t go anywhere, friend, don’t leave the city. We’ll be watching you.”

*

We’ll be watching you, Sartaj said under his breath as he walked out behind the building. We’ll be watching you. This was a lie he had learnt to tell easily. It was an illusion that suspects believed in easily, and it worked even when there was absolutely no truth in it. Parulkar had once forced a confession, and a nervous breakdown, from a domestic-murder suspect who had started to believe that there were policemen everywhere, on the roof of his house, in his bathroom, and behind his new Godrej fridge. The dump was on a road built out into the swamp, past the buildings under construction and the sodden mounds of earth. At the very end of the road, as it petered out into the thick green bushes, it was covered with a thick layer of paper, bones, and things liquified and rotted. Flies buzzed around Sartaj’s head as he carefully placed one foot after another. Sartaj walked by two children with bags over their shoulders, picking out the plastic from the mixture. Further on, three yellow dogs stopped eating to watch him over their shoulders, not moving an inch as he edged past them with a flutter in his stomach. Ahead, there was a huge blackened ring that smouldered across the road. He could see the edges of it trembling with heat. He kicked at the wet surface of the waste and it fell away, and underneath the fire was working relentlessly. He put his hands on his knees, bent over, and walked slowly around the curve of the black circle. Faces and old headlines blurred away as he watched. He straightened up, took a large stride over the border, and went into the circle.

Now the ashes clung to his feet as he walked. Sartaj bent over a twisted piece of plastic and turned it over. It was the casing from a video tape, half melted away. The clouds shifted and suddenly the sun moved across the swamp. The smell filled his head, rank but full and rich. Two egrets came gliding over him and he turned his head full around to watch them. He was at the other edge, near the water. Leaves scraped across his face. He bent down and peeled a soggy curl of paper away from his shoe. It was a picture from a calendar, an almost-nude model in designer tribal clothes, smiling over her shoulder. He scraped at the muck with the side of his shoe and layers of paper parted. He bent quickly, then, to peer at the handwriting on a blackened fragment. “Patel,” it said, in the neat script from the chequebook. He squatted, and tried to turn it over, but it broke crisply in half. He took his ballpoint pen from his pocket and used it to poke at the debris. Under a piece of plastic he found a torn page with printing on it. He held it up between his forefinger and thumb. It was thick paper, and he could make out the writing. “… having got up in the morning and performed his necessary duties, should wash his teeth, apply a limited quantity of ointments and perfumes to his body, put some ornaments on his person and collyrium on his eyelids and below his eyes, colour his lips with alacktaka, and look at himself in the glass. Having then…” As he read, it tore across from its own weight and dropped. The sweat dripped down his neck. He could hear the dogs barking.

*

The wall in front of Parulkar’s house was crumbling even as Sartaj watched. As he waited at the door, he watched the rain carry away tiny pieces of stone and brick into the flowing gutter. But inside the floor was cool and polished as he bent to take off his shoes. Parulkar’s youngest daughter, Shaila, her hair swinging in two enormous plaits behind her, watched him gravely. She was fourteen, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles at the very end of her nose. When he had first met her she had loved to be tickled behind the ears. It made her weak with laughter. Now she was a very dignified young woman.

“You’re starting to look like someone, Shaila,” Sartaj said.

“Who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A model? A movie star? Madhuri Dixit, maybe …”

She looked at him sideways, but with a little smile. “I’ve decided I’m going to IIT,” she said. “I’m going to do computers.”

“Really?” Sartaj said. “No more Parulkars in physics?” Both her older sisters were physicists, one at ISRO and the other at Bombay University.

“Bo-ring,” Shaila said. “That’s old stuff, don’t you know? Computers are hot, hot, hot.”

“Which I don’t know anything about.”

“As if you know anything about physics.”