Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“You’ll have to teach me.”

She took him, with both her hands, by the wrist and pulled him down the corridor to the drawing room, which was large and sparsely filled by its two divans and chatai. This forward-leaning walk, at least, was something she hadn’t decided to outgrow yet.

“Sit,” she said, as she went back into the corridor. “Papa will be out in a minute.”

Sartaj didn’t mind the minute, or more, at all. He had always liked this room. It was long and opened out on one end into a small garden, which actually had a tree in it. The branches hung over the window and now the water dripped slowly, and the light was gentle and green. This light was the surprise the house hid behind its shabby walls, and today Sartaj was particularly glad for it.

“Anything new?” Parulkar said, as he came in, rolling up the sleeves of his kurta, which was a starched bluish white. He looked very elegant when he was not in uniform. Sartaj told him about Ghorpade and Kshitij and the mother.

“The forensic report came from Vakola this morning,” Sartaj said. “The interior of the Contessa seemed to have been washed with a three-ten mixture of hydrogen peroxide. There were no traces of blood, or any other suspicious substance. The car was scrubbed down, clean. It was wiped down very professionally. No fibres, nothing

“But what has the car to do with any of it? You could close the case really,” Parulkar said. “You have the watch, and so physical evidence and a motive, and the suspect, what’s his name, Ghorpade, places himself at the scene. What else could we need? What are you looking for?”

“Nothing, sir. I mean I don’t know.”

“These are delicate times, Sartaj,” Parulkar said. “Pushing too hard, without sufficient reason, on that family could lead to, let us say, sensitivities.” What he meant was that for an outsider, a Sikh, to push a little was to push a lot. It was true, even though the Patels were Gujaratis and so outsiders themselves. There were outsiders and outsiders. To say, I was born in Bombay, was very much besides the point. Sartaj nodded. “Meanwhile,” Parulkar said, “there’s something else I have to speak to you about …”

He stopped as Shaila came in with a tray. Sartaj watched him as he bent forward to pick up his steaming mug of tea, because he had never known Parulkar to be delicate about business around his daughters. In this house filled with women they were clinically straightforward about death and mayhem.

“There is something else,” Parulkar said after Shaila had swung her plaits out of the room.

“Sir?”

“I got a call from Shantilal Nayak last night.”

“Sir.” Nayak was an MLA who lived in Goregaon. He was the sitting home minister, and he had come to Sartaj’s wedding mainly as a guest of Megha’s family.

“He mentioned some papers.”

“Papers?”

“That you were to sign?”

Sartaj felt, suddenly, a rush of hatred for the rich. He hated them for their confidence, their calm, how they thought everything could be managed. But he said, “Yes, sir.”

“Sartaj,” Parulkar said, leaning forward a little. “Sartaj. If I could, I would have given anything to change it all.”

“Yes, I know,” Sartaj said finally. It was true.

At the door Parulkar put a hand on his shoulder, and Shaila came running out to take his wrist again in both of her hands.

“Don’t get wet,” Parulkar said. “It’s cold.”

Sartaj nodded and splashed down to the gate. Then he turned around and came back. “What is alacktaka? ”

“What is what?” Parulkar said.

“ Alacktaka .”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s something you colour your lips with,” Sartaj said.

“My lips?”

“Not yours, sir. I meant generally. Men use it to colour their lips.”

“This is general somewhere?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Sartaj said. He felt absurd standing there with his raincoat flapping around his knees and the water dripping from his eyebrows, and he turned abruptly and left them there, feeling their looks of enquiry on the back of his neck all the way down the lane. On the way home, under the bleak surges of anger, there was a nibbling doubt, an obsessive circling around something that was unknown and elusive. He now had facts about the deceased and his family, and these were quite ordinary and commonplace, repeated in any other family down the street or somewhere across the country. He knew something about the killer, if that was what Ghorpade was. They were two ordinary men who came together on a Bombay street corner one night. But Sartaj remembered the Rolex watch, and he was certain he knew nothing about the man who wore it, nothing that would explain the silky artifice of the thing, that would show how the commonplace and ordinary became Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel. He didn’t know this and somehow it felt like a debt.

*

Sartaj had put aside notions of debt the next time he went to the Bandra station. There was no option other than winding up the investigation and charging Ghorpade with murder, this was clear. He said this to Moitra‚ who nodded and said, “Yes, well, you’d better take a look at him.”

In the lockup the three other occupants were leaving Ghorpade well alone. He was lying on his side, his face against the wall, curled up. The air in the cell was cool, still between the old smooth stone of the walls.

“He can’t keep any food in his stomach,” Moitra said. The whole holding area smelled of vomit.

“Ghorpade,” Sartaj said. “Eh, Ghorpade.” Ghorpade lay unmoving.

“We’ll send him to Cooper Hospital this evening,” Moitra said. “But we have his statement anyway.” She meant that the hospital was no guarantee of his survival. “Come on, I want to finish up early tonight.”

In her office, while they stamped and signed papers under a picture of Nehru, the phone rang. “Hel-lo,” Moitra said softly. Sartaj looked up at her, and she changed to her usual clipped voice, “Hello.”

“Is that Arun?” Sartaj said.

“Yes,” she said, holding a palm over the mouthpiece and regarding Sartaj with a steady glare that dared him to be funny. “So?”

“I have a question for Arun.” Arun was her husband, a professor of history at Bombay University.

Moitra was still wary. “You do?”

“Yes, ask him what alacktaka is.”

She mouthed the word, feeling it out to see if there was a joke in it. Then she took her hand off the mouthpiece and asked. “He says he’s never heard of it,” she said after a pause. “He says what’s the context?”

“I’ve forgotten,” Sartaj said. “It’s not important anyway.”

*

So after all, on paper, it was going to be an open and quickly shut case, not even worth a headline in the afternoon papers, but still Sartaj studied Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel’s chequebook as the jeep wound its way north through afternoon traffic. The entries were routine, three hundred and eighty-three rupees for electricity to BSES on January 28, nine hundred and ninety five rupees to the ShivSagar Co-op. Building Society on January 29, one hundred and twenty-five rupees to the Jankidas Publishing Company on February 1, two hundred and ninety-two rupees to the Milind Pharmacy the same day, and Sartaj bent the book and the pages flurried by, the same names and the same little amounts again, BSES, Hindustan Petroleum for cooking gas cylinders on April 15, one hundred and twenty-five again to the Jankidas Publishing Company on May 1, two hundred and forty-eight to Patekar College on May 14. There were no large amounts, no huge payments to cash, nothing that indicated danger, or even excitement. Finally Sartaj took a deep breath and closed the book and put it back in his pocket. It was time to give it up. There were other cases to follow, which meant, he knew, other puzzles that would distract him from himself, so there was no reason to cling to this one. It was time to give it up.