Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“No.”

“He’s dead, you know. Mr. Patel is murdered. You know?”

“I read the paper.”

“What is your idea about it?”

Mrs. Khanna was holding her cigarette carefully in two extended fingers. Nothing moved except the smoke. “I’m not curious,” she said. “Not my business. Don’t want to know.”

Sartaj searched the room. The mattress was clean, the floor underneath swept, every surface was clean and polished, and the rubbish bin empty. Mrs. Khanna was a good housekeeper. In a drawer in the bureau next to the bed there was an opened packet of Trojan condoms, “Ultra-Fine.”

“These? Mr. Patel’s?”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Khanna said.

“American. Very expensive.”

“He was shaukeen .”

Sartaj looked at the bureau, under it. He peered behind the headboard of the bed, then to the left, behind the bureau. It was close up to the wall. He put the tips of three fingers behind the wood and tugged. Then with a flicker of pain his fingers came away and the bureau sat, battered and unmoving. He squatted, gripped low by its legs and pulled. A grunt, another one, and it shifted. Now he was able to get behind it, to look. There was something between the green wood and the baseboard. He reached down into the crack, searched with his fingertips. He brought it up and saw that it was a photograph, a Polaroid. He wiped away the dust, and the colours in it formed an image, and he turned it this way and that, and saw then that it was a woman’s body, naked but blurred, the brown of the skin hidden in parts by a moving smear of white, as if a sheet had been pulled off and she had turned away, all the frame filled with fast motion. Her face was hidden by a hand, an upflung arm, the chin barely visible as a suggestion, but there was her hair, long and thick and luxuriant. And the curve of a naked hip.

“Do you know who this is?” Sartaj said.

Mrs. Khanna considered the matter. “No,” she said. She was bored. There was much in the world she didn’t want to know about, and the naked body was no news to her.

“Did you ever see Mr. Patel with a camera?”

“No.”

Sartaj was looking at the picture, trying to read what he could see of the forehead, the chin. Was it protest? Or laughter? Mrs. Khanna watched him, and he saw that she was faintly amused by his attention to the picture. He held up the family photo of the Patels. “Are you sure you never saw this boy?”

“Told you, I didn’t.”

“This is a dangerous position you’re in, you realize? Running a house of prostitution without license?”

“Nobody prostitutes anything here.”

“Still it would bear investigation.”

“Investigate if you want. I’m not involved.”

“You mean you don’t want to be involved.”

She shrugged. Sartaj shook his head, and turned away. When he was at the door, she said, “All right.”

He turned back to her. “What?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Because I didn’t like the little bastard in that photograph. He threatened me. But if you try and get me involved I’ll deny everything. I won’t sign anything, and I won’t appear anywhere.”

“Yes, fine,” Sartaj said. “Tell me. What about the little bastard?”

“He came here,” Mrs. Khanna said.

“When?”

“I don’t know, nine, ten days ago.”

“Alone? What did he want?”

“Yes, alone. First he wouldn’t tell me who he was, but said that he wanted to see the room that Mr. and Mrs. Patel hired. I said I didn’t know any Mr. and Mrs. Patel, and why should I let him into any room. Then he began to argue, and I told him to take himself out of my house before I had him thrown out. Then he asked if they had left anything in there, anything at all, and I said I was tired of talking to him, and called Jaggan from downstairs to throw him out. Then he started shouting, abused me. Randi , he said. So Jaggan gave him a shake.”

“Then?”

“Then he said he would come back. With friends. Come back with your whole paltan , I said. We’ll see you, he said. The Rakshaks will take care of your kind. They know you and your type. They know how to handle whores like you.” Mrs. Khanna studied the end of her cigarette thoughtfully.

“He said the Rakshaks? ” Sartaj said.

She tipped her head to the side. It was a strange gesture, full of resignation. “Yes, that’s what he said. They’re absolutely mad, those bastards. Capable of anything. So I let him see the room. Why take trouble on unnecessarily?”

“True,” Sartaj said. “What did he do in the room?”

“He went through it,” she said. “Just like you, searched it, opened drawers, looked under the bed, in the bathroom. Looked in the rubbish bin. Like he was checking it for something. Evidence. Clues. Things left behind.”

“I see.”

“But he was shaking and his eyes were red. Speaking under his breath to himself. Mad.”

“Yes, mad. Did he find anything?”

“No, nothing. He was their son?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Khanna stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Chetanbhai was a good man,” she said. “Poor Chetanbhai.”

*

On his motorcycle, with metal trembling against his thighs, Sartaj thought of bodies. He tried to picture his own, and found it curiously blurred, his knowledge of it dulled and patchy. He had known it forever, but what were his shoulders like in pain? The back of his thighs in sleep? Megha he knew, the pulse on her wrist and the one that beat hard on her throat, but each time they settled against each other, had settled, he had felt compelled to take stock anew. Like a man afraid of memory dying. The loud blatting of the engine beat on his ears. He tried to imagine Chetanbhai Ghanshyam Patel naked, as he had been under the sheet at the morgue, a round face and a sloping chest, a paunch, thighs splayed apart. In his life had somebody watched him in the morning, awoken him with an invading caress? Sartaj tried to imagine his own parents, and his mind turned. It turned and stopped, as firmly as the bike stopped in grinding rush-hour traffic, in front of the temple at Mahalakshmi. His mother he saw in her gentle plumpness, her slow walk, her pleasure in afternoon talk and tea. He remembered his father’s vigour, the energy the old man took such pride in at fifty, bounding up the stairs, roaring with unexpected laughter at his son’s infrequent jokes. But had they lain against each other late at night, satiated but unable to sleep? Touching with a holding hand? These were only words, and Sartaj was unable to see it. It was impossible to imagine. There was no photograph that he could construct, rising the colours out of his childhood, marking here and there with lines until the shapes became bodies.

Katekar was waiting at the end of the lane when he reached the Narayan Housing Colony, smoking a bidi near a paan -seller’s kiosk. Sartaj was wearing his dingiest civvies, but Katekar looked sceptical as Sartaj strolled up, relaxed and studiedly casual. Katekar was carefully nondescript in shiny rayon pants, and there was nothing in Sartaj’s wardrobe that could equal the bland horror of his shirt. Sartaj accepted the criticism, because since training he had known he was not very good at shadowing, and his turban was only part of the problem. It was his walk and the cast of his shoulders — he had found it difficult always not to swagger, to fade away into the crowd.

“The mother’s gone,” Katekar said, looking away and pulling on the bidi. They were two friends passing the time on a weekday evening. “He drove her to Bombay Central this evening. She caught the Saurashtra Express to Okha. That’s in Gujarat.”

“I know. They’ve started running,” Sartaj said. “That’s very good. Then?”