Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Drive to the police station,” Sartaj said. “I will follow you on the motorcycle.”

“Why?” Kshitij said.

“There are certain questions we must ask you.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Sartaj said. Just behind Kshitij his friends made a crowd, pushing against each other’s shoulders.

“Did your father own a Polaroid camera?” Sartaj said. In the boy’s silence, his absolute stillness, there was absolute fear. Sartaj leaned over to him and spoke in his ear. He could smell, faintly, hair oil. “I have the photographs, Kshitij. I could pull them out now in front of everyone and show them to you.”

“All right,” Kshitij said finally. His voice was loud. He turned to Pramod Wagle. “It’s all right. Just some questions.”

*

But at the station he refused to answer questions. Somehow, during the drive to the station, with Sartaj’s single light blinking and bobbing in his rearview mirror, he had decided that there were no questions he could answer. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, clenching his jaw. “Why are you asking me anything? You have the man in jail already. I want to see a lawyer.”

“Come on, Kshitij,” Sartaj said, leaning back in his chair. “Come on.” He had Kshitij sitting in his office, across the desk from him. Behind Kshitij, Katekar sat in a chair against the wall, slumped but alert. “We know everything. We don’t need you to say anything really. We know every last thing. We know what your mother and father did. Here, look at this advertisement. Strange, isn’t it? Good, ordinary people. Doing this kind of thing. Unbelievable, if we didn’t have it in black and white. Then, we have the woman who runs the house where they rented a room. A cheap whorehouse, really, it is. This woman, the manager, tells us all kinds of things. And also we have, finally, the photographs. Colour Polaroid photographs. Like life itself. Can you imagine? Disgusting photographs. Disgusting things they are doing with god-knows-who-all. To do things like that and then take photographs…. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if someone had told me. Only when one sees with one’s own eyes can one believe. Is that what you were burning in the rubbish heap?”

Kshitij was staring at the brass plate on Sartaj’s desk, which announced his name in blocky ornamental letters. He seemed to be reading it back and forth. Behind him, a slow and very faint smile spread across Katekar’s face.

“So what happened, Kshitij?” Sartaj said. “Did you find the photographs? Did you see them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kshitij said.

“Did you see your mother in these photographs?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“With other men, Kshitij?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Doing things, Kshitij?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“A mother is pure, Kshitij. After all she is a mother. But your mother, Kshitij. What is she? In a whorehouse? And your father? To take pictures? What did you see, Kshitij? We’ll find out, you know, Kshitij. We’re investigating, we have our people asking questions in Okha. We know she’s gone to her brother’s house near Dwarka. Samnagar, the place is called, isn’t it? We’ll bring her back. In handcuffs to jail. The world will know then. All your friends. Everyone will know everything about her. So you might as well tell us now. Maybe we can keep it all quiet. What happened? Did you see these photographs and get angry?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you see something horrible in the photographs, Kshitij? Of course it was horrible. Your parents. Your mother.” Sartaj stopped, swallowed. Then he leaned in close. “Did you see your mother with some stranger? Sucking on him?” The light in the room was yellow, and outside the stillness of night, and small sounds from far away. Sartaj could see the outline of his own head, his turban, in Kshitij’s eyes, and he knew he had on his interrogation face with the opaque eyes, and in his body, in his arms and legs, there was the uncurling of a virulent hunger, an angry need to know. There was also somewhere sympathy and disgust and horror, but all that was faint and far away and battened down, safely subterranean.

“I don’t know,” Kshitij said. And then he stopped. There was no motion in his body, but a kind of rippling, like the surface of water in which no current can be seen. Through the night he grew more inert, like a stone sinking into the worn cloth of the chair, and yet somewhere in the sunken eyes, in the base of the throat, there was that agitation. At two in the morning it had begun to rain, and Sartaj left him to Katekar and walked outside, along the corridor that ran beside the offices. There was that usual late-night talk and movement at the front of the station, the drunks on their way into the lockup. Sartaj stretched, and reached with an open palm into the rain. His kara moved slowly on his wrist. There was the steady drip of water onto his skin. He and Katekar would keep the suspect up all night, taking turns, wearing at him with the repeated questions, beating at him with half-knowledge and insinuations, until in the early day he broke in exhaustion. It was likely. Many did.

He heard a shuffle behind him, the sound of feet. It was the head constable, bringing the night’s phone messages. The first was a ten-thirty message from Rahul, asking for a call back. The second the usual late-evening call from Sartaj’s mother, and the third was an intimation from Cooper Hospital. Ghorpade was dead. He had died at midnight after a day of discomfort and difficulty with breathing. Sartaj put the slips of paper in his pocket, scratched at his eyebrows, and then he walked back into his office. Katekar was leaning over the suspect, looming over him and letting him smell sweat and tobacco. But Kshitij had found from somewhere a small reserve of fortitude.

“If you are going to charge me with something, charge me,” he said. “File an F.I.R., get a warrant. Otherwise what is all this? You’re doing this because I’m a member of the Rakshaks. ”

Sartaj sat behind his desk. He twisted his watch around his wrist, once, twice. His cheeks felt congested with rage. “Katekar, this chutiya thinks we’re idiots,” he said. “And he thinks he’s very smart. Take him down to the detection room and take some of his smartness out of him. Give him a good taste of what we do to smart chutiyas around here.”

Katekar had Kshitij by the scruff of his neck and out of his chair before the boy had time to react, even to open his mouth. As he turned Kshitij away, Sartaj forced himself to raise a hand: easy, no marks. Katekar slammed Kshitij through the swinging doors, and pushed him down the corridor. “ Chala ‚” he shouted, and there was a terrible anger in his voice.

Sartaj squared the papers on his desk and tried to work. It was raining heavily now, and the water softened all sounds. After a minute or two he gave up, sat back, and put his hands over his face. When the phone rang, he let it ring six times before he picked it up.

“Sartaj Singh.”

“Did you take money?” It was Rahul, and his voice was feathery and high.

“What’s wrong, Rahul? Are you crying?”

“Ravinder Mama came for dinner today. They were talking about you. They asked if you had signed the papers yet.”

“Yes?”

“Megha said not yet. Then Ravinder Mama said you probably were waiting for money. He said you were all for sale. So I called him a name. Daddy told me to shut up. I threw a plate on the ground and left.”

Sartaj shut his eyes. “No, I don’t take money.” But Sartaj then remembered all the things he had been offered because of his uniform, that he had taken, suits at half-price from a tailor near Kala Ghoda, meals with Megha at a five-star restaurant, miraculous train reservations in the middle of summer. A smiling road contractor had once brought over a cannister of ghee to Sartaj’s grandfather’s house as a Diwali gift, and the old man had tipped the cannister over the contractor’s head. But life moved in jerky half-moments, in the empty spaces between big decisions, and Sartaj had been unable to resist the specially discounted shoes at Lucky’s. Italian style, the proprietor of the shop had said again and again, Italian style. That evening long ago Megha and Sartaj had taken Rahul out for a birthday dinner, the thirteenth, and Rahul had noticed the shoes, and Sartaj had promised him a pair, and then told him stories of detection. Sartaj sat in his chair, and his lips moved: And I arrested a man for a crime he didn’t commit, and that man is dead, and life is very long, and investigation is one way to get through it, but to call it justice is only half the truth. “No, I don’t take money,” he said into the mouthpiece.