Garden of Dreams, page 22
‘Eli!’ Sanjana shouted back to him. ‘Come!’ She waved her hand, beckoning him. Shut up, Sanjana! He slunk through the shadows quickly and silently, wishing he could disappear.
In a few minutes they were in Nepal. No big deal. Another illuminated sign read ‘Welcome to You’, and some people were bothering to file into the Nepali immigration office, a small white bungalow just in front of them. Most people kept walking, past the trucks grinding out of their lower gears to drive away from the border, weaving around the rickshaw drivers, motorbikes and cows. Just like on the other side. Noisy, smoky, fumy and dark, just little fires burning on the side of the road and the vehicles’ headlights. He could blend in, he was sure, if he just kept moving.
As they joined the fray in the street, still thick at nine o’clock or so, he pulled Sanjana close. He didn’t want the younger girls to hear. ‘They’re after me here.’
‘Who? What do you mean?’ Her eyes widened and she cocked her head, like a dog tuning in to a strange pitch.
‘The poster – the same photo of me that was in the newspaper. It’s right on that pole by the gate into India.’
‘Oh no, oh no, this very bad. We must get off the street now.’
But get off where? Nothing looked habitable, even sleepable, though little guest house signs were cropping up and getting thicker and thicker, competing with each other in size and brightness.
‘They all bad here, all same. Pick one,’ Sanjana said. ‘Or I do it.’
She walked ahead, threading through cows chewing contentedly on chapattis. He loved how the local people fed them. He would kill for a chapatti now, fresh and warm, and thought of begging one off an old man feeding a cream-coloured bull. Then Sanjana squeezed through a group of rickshaw drivers sitting on the front steps of her selected guest house, Himalaya Heights, which they could probably afford. It was just three storeys high, a far cry from the pure mountain scenery on its sign, a hand-painted version of Everest. The drivers, steeped in a haze of bidi smoke and something stronger, he suspected, inched their bums over minimally so they could pass.
There were two beds in the room, a small double and a single, both covered in pink floral spreads so thin you could see the sheets through them. The sheets were brown, not meant to be, soiled from all the bodies that had lain there, passing through. He didn’t see any bugs but was sure there were some lurking in the shadows thrown by the single light bulb in the centre of the room. A sliding plate-glass window behind beige curtains didn’t open. The one decoration was an unframed painting of that temple in Kathmandu with the big blue-rimmed eyes, Swayamsomething. The one in his father’s postcard all those months ago.
He was exhausted, they all were, but sleep seemed unlikely until the chaos on the street outside subsided a little.
‘I’m finding the shower,’ he announced, wanting to escape the girls who were already undressing, and walked out of the room and down the dark hall.
There had been only a trickle of warm water, but enough to clean and revive him. He’d hated to put on his dirty pathan suit again, but there was nothing else; his few other garments were probably still with Sanjit Baba in Varanasi. He’d left in too much of a hurry to collect them. So after patting himself dry, he washed his underwear and suit top, putting on just the trousers, no shoes. The men had taken them.
He walked up a narrow staircase and pushed open a heavy metal door to the roof. In the dark he could see several clothes lines strung between two freestanding poles, with all sorts of garments hanging there like dead souls. Off in a corner under a lean-to of boards was a snoring hump, perhaps a night watchman. Convinced the watchman wouldn’t wake up, and seeing no one else, Eli yanked a pair of striped cotton hippie pants off the line, and a T-shirt next to it. About his size; who knew what colour they were. Who cared.
He rolled them up in a ball and was about to go downstairs again, when someone else came out on the roof. Towards him. What are you doing here? she whispered, coming closer and holding out two oblong objects in her hands. When they came within inches of his face, he smelled that they were mangoes, bursting with ripeness. She noticed the ball of clothes in his hand, glanced at all the clothes on the lines and smiled.
They sat near the edge of the roof, watching the fairy lights blinking on the shops and the constant flow of life in the street below. Music still playing on boom boxes or radios, sounded like the same old Bollywood whining. But Nepal must have its own music? Monks chanting or something? Hadn’t anyone heard of Jimi or Slash or SRV or anybody good over here? Maybe he was getting a little used to it, though, the mysterious songs, sounding like a cat in heat or something. The drums weren’t bad – the tablas – and the sitar was cool.
‘Here,’ Sanjana said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘Eat this.’ She handed him one of the mangoes, plump and easier to peel than usual, and a small knife. He still got juice all over his pants, his hands, and, when he tasted the first luscious golden slab, his mouth.
Sanjana was eating hers daintily, whole, taking little bites out of the peeled fruit. But then she lost her grasp, and the mango came hurtling towards him like a missile and landed in his lap. She quickly grabbed it back, laughing as he was, and began to eat it again. ‘It fell on your smelly trousers,’ she laughed, ‘not the dirt.’
When they finished the fruit they both hung their hands over their knees to let their sticky fingers dry in the air. Their knees were nearly touching, so it wasn’t far for him to stretch two fingers of his left hand and play with two of Sanjana’s. They didn’t speak, he didn’t know what to say; they just sat listening to the sounds of the night, a few dogs barking.
‘I am not believing it …’ She broke the silence.
‘What?’ There had been so many unbelievable things.
‘I’m going home. My village, my family.’
Oh, God, he thought, I just hope we get there.
‘This is where they take me,’ she continued, in a very soft voice. ‘This place, border. You cross and then, most people, you don’t come back. I lucky, I guess. Right, Eli?’
She smiled unconvincingly then dropped her head to her knees, her dark hair slinging across her thighs. She barely made a sound but he could tell she was crying, by the small heaves of her back. When he reached out to touch it, her hair was coarse but smooth, damp, freshly washed. He didn’t know what to say other than We’ll make it, we’ll be all right, or something like it, but ended up saying nothing, just stroking her hair and humming along to the sinuous song now playing down below, no doubt a girl singing to her lover.
Chapter 31
The goonda mugshots stared at him from his office wall like an inanimate challenge. A taunt. A threat. A fuck-you-V.J. Gupta insolence. He’d started decorating them: smiles for the ones still at large, frowns for those captured or dead. He stuck another face on the wall with glue stick, a sleazy bugger with mirrored shades and messy long hair, and drew an inverted ‘U’ where his mouth used to be.
Gupta leaned against his desk, still looking at the wall, and lit a Gold Flake, immediately exhaling a mushroom cloud of smoke. A deep sigh welling up, releasing. No news, or leaks, about the De Villiers boy, in spite of the tip from Bianca. In spite of sending more of his men on to the Road undercover, into the kothas as paying customers and into surveillance on the street. He still hadn’t replaced Ojal, though it had been a month since her murder. Potential candidates, fellow hijras, had so far been too full of stories about all the other events where their presence was requested, and rewarded handsomely. He’d never be able to pay them enough.
The newly dead goonda might be just the ticket, though. After they’d found his body half-eaten by dogs in a G.B. alley, it didn’t take long to identify him as Lakshmi’s boy, Anand Bhatnagar, and it didn’t take much longer to connect him to Ojal’s murder. All right, the evidence was a little thin, but he wouldn’t be going to trial any time soon. Gupta was vaguely curious who had killed Anand and disposed of his body with so little heart; two guesses and he needed only one. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that with Anand’s death, a small window of opportunity had opened; he could feel the air coming through. It was risky, he didn’t know exactly what these bastards knew, how recently they had been in touch with Lakshmi, and if word had gone down that she had whacked him (as they said on the American cop shows). Because he was sure that’s what she had done.
His men had been doing their homework. Gautam and Sanjay Singh were now on his wall. Bloody ugly brothers. Not the most adept traffickers in the city, but doing well enough in their factory front out in Okhla Industrial. He’d been sitting on the tip-off for too many weeks now; time to strike. He didn’t have an absolutely certain link between them and Lakshmi, but had heard that they had an abnormal lot of children at work on the factory floor, many with the Asiatic looks of the Nepalese. And, rumour had it, they’d ‘owed’ Lakshmi for a shipment of Nepali girls they’d lost and had tried to humour her with the gift of another child. Girl, boy, he didn’t know, but he was ready to place his bets.
He pulled a midnight-blue pathan suit out of his bottom drawer, plus a pair of patent black loafers and black aviators. He’d forgotten a thinner pair of socks, the police-issue were like burlap bags. No matter. When he finished dressing he looked at himself in the long mirror on the back of his door – there to measure the authenticity of his disguises. Well, perhaps also to sneak a peek of himself in uniform now and then. He slipped the shades down to the tip of his nose and liked what he saw. Goonda Gupta.
On the way out he stopped to give Hita the address where he was going. Just in case. A smile was trying to escape, he knew what it was saying. But she bit her lip and wrote down the address he gave her. ‘And, Hita,’ he added as he walked out the office door, ‘if I’m not back by three p.m., send in the cavalry.’
He hailed a cab, couldn’t bear to drive out through all that mess in the southern part of the city. It depressed him – first the slums where many of the factory workers lived, then all these factory blocks surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Nefarious activities going on in many of them. Child labour violations, at the very least. When he saw the extent of the rot in this place, it either fired him up to hyperactivity or nearly paralysed him. But he couldn’t stop, could he? Even though it was pretty bloody clear that some higher-ups, maybe even in government, were orchestrating hits on his men. He’d lost three in the last month, in inexplicable shoot-outs after mysterious call-ins. He could be next. Even today.
As they approached the Singhs’ factory he prayed his deception would work. The cab driver had been eyeing him uneasily in the rear-view mirror throughout the half-hour trip, so the get-up was convincing. But once he spoke to the Singhs, in person?
He paid the cabbie quickly, not waiting for change, and approached the drab olive guard box at the factory entrance. A guard popped out, rifle slung over his shoulder, but also half-asleep. He said nothing, just peered from under the brim of his cap, scrutinising.
Make the move.
‘I’m here to see Gautam and Sanjay,’ he said, trying to sound familiar. The guard looked unmoved. ‘Lakshmi sent me.’
The guard went inside the box and picked up the phone. One of Lakshmi’s was all he heard, but it seemed enough to gain him entrance. The guard came out and half-heartedly frisked him; it tickled in certain places and he swallowed a giggle. He was then waved through unceremoniously, as though he were a fly.
He couldn’t find a front door, so went round the back. Inside the building – falling apart, smelly and windowless, a real fire trap – was an equally decrepit elevator operator who took him to the top floor. Door at the end of the hall, the old chap said, so he walked down the dank, mouldy corridor, appreciating the lack of light. For the moment.
He knocked on the door and a voice shouted, ‘Who is it?’
‘Pradip,’ he said without hesitation. ‘The new Anand.’ He regretted saying that, too flippant. But it opened the door.
Worse than the mug shots. One of them stared at him with the door half-open, before opening it fully. His sallow face probably rarely saw the sun; a long, pink scar tracked across his neck, like a giant slug, unobscured by the gold chain. Revolting. He looked slovenly, unfit, in his tight jeans, his red Guess T-shirt pulling out from the waist. A pair of shades, oversized and almost Jackie-O, hid his eyes. He took another sip from the whisky in his glass and sneered. ‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘Gautam, let him in!’ yelled a voice from inside. Commanding.
‘Lakshmi’s been trying to reach you,’ Gupta said, stepping through the threshold into a dim room, opulent, with curtains drawn and chandeliers faintly glowing. The other brother was sitting with his back to him on a giant velvet sofa, watching cricket on the telly. Also drinking. The infamous Sanjay. Smoother and more intelligent than his brother, and much more brutal. So he’d heard.
He could feel Gautam hovering behind him and wasn’t sure he hadn’t trained a pistol on his back. Sanjay wouldn’t take his eyes off the cricket. ‘Bloody chutiya,’ he yelled, shaking his fist at the screen, ‘learn to bowl properly or get your arse into retirement!’
Then Sanjay looked at him, scanning him up and down. ‘What happened to Anand?’
‘You don’t know?’ Bloody hell. He’d guessed they did.
Gautam circled around and stood next to the television, turning it down. Arms folded. ‘We heard he bit it.’
Bit it? These boys had been watching too much CSI or something. ‘You heard right. I’m his replacement. Lakshmi sent me …’
‘To check up on us,’ Sanjay snarled, eyes on the cricket again. ‘Bloody bitch doesn’t trust us.’
‘Well, Sanjay-ji,’ Gautam said, shaking his head, ‘should she?’
Sanjay stood and faced him, clicked off the TV with the remote and threw it on the sofa. Taller than his brother, also in tight jeans but with a more refined Oxford shirt. Terrible eyes, flaying. ‘Let me guess – she’s sent you to check up about the boy.’
How stupid could they be? They were making it easy for him. Easy to have this conversation, at least. Executing a plan was another thing entirely.
‘The boy, yes,’ he said. And then, feeling bolder, ‘May I have a glass of water?’
Sanjay flicked his head towards the bar, where Gautam went to oblige his request.
‘It was your fault, Gautam,’ Sanjay said without looking at him. ‘We shouldn’t have left him alone.’
Gautam returned with the water, in a foggy glass, and handed it to him. He looked hurt. ‘My fault? You’re the one who tied him up. And I wasn’t the one deciding to leave him unguarded. You’re de-… delusional, Sanjay.’ Ouch. A big word for this one.
‘Ha!’ Sanjay laughed, sort of, the kind of laugh measuring victory over lesser people. He obviously thought his brother was a dolt.
‘Where is he now?’ Gupta asked. Knowing they’d have no idea.
‘He’s left Varanasi, that’s for sure,’ Gautam said, trying to claim authority. He headed back to the bar for another drink. ‘I’m sure he and those other little twits are over the border by now.’
‘Why didn’t you follow them?’
Leaning against the back of the sofa, Sanjay watched his brother pour a tall Johnny Walker. ‘Gautam, offer a drink to our guest.’
He took the drink, equally tall, and slugged back some of it. Not normally a drinker, so it felt like kerosene going down his gullet. Burning. But Goonda Gupta had to drink.
‘Why didn’t we follow them, Gautam? Tell our friend here. You seem to have the answers to everything this morning.’
Gautam dropped into a plush red velvet chair, matching the sofa. ‘We didn’t follow him, or them, because we wan – I mean ran – out of time,’ he said, slurring his words. ‘Sanjay-ji, isn’t it? Tell him. We have too much here to do, we can’t go running that bloody bitch’s errands whenever she wants.’ Satisfied with himself, he drained nearly half his glass.
Sanjay appeared to be meditating. Silent and contained, still. ‘Tell her we nearly got him,’ he said finally. ‘We’ve put the word out along the line to the north,’ he said, and, as though he really believed it, ‘and we will get him.’
As he left the brothers to their feelings of incompetence, richly deserved, Gupta hummed a little tune, one of Bianca’s love songs from one of her countless films, and walked down the dark hallway, grateful to be leaving, moving towards the light. He’d ask the useless guard to call him a cab, and when he returned to Indraprastha, he’d tell Hita of his triumph and she’d put it all on the computer. Maybe one day it would be bigger than that – in the newspapers, even.
It took him only a few days to dream up the next move. Slightly diabolical, he admitted, but then he was tired of restraint. The following Monday found Gupta sitting in what qualified as an unmarked car, Hita’s old Ambassador, about twenty metres from the entrance to the factory. From there, he could watch ‘the fire inspector’ and a handful of ‘firemen’ – goondas he’d got off the street – file past the guardhouse, on to the property, and march around the back to enter the building. The factory was in disrepair: broken panes on the lower levels, graffiti on the walls, and the maze of inescapable corridors inside. Logical that it needed periodic inspections, in this case a much-needed fire drill.
The children were running and skipping as they emerged from the factory. Two of the goonda-firemen shepherded them through the gate and tried to contain them – at least a hundred of them – in a group on the other side of the fence. He’d never seen so many urchins in one spot, barefoot and ragged. When had they last seen the light of day? Some were shielding their eyes from the afternoon sun, others looking wide-eyed around them, probably scared out of their wits and wondering where they’d be taken next. One little boy about six had sat down on the dirt and was crying uncontrollably. No one went to him.
When the Singhs came out they were both shouting at the ‘fire inspector’, waving their arms at him like helicopters readying for takeoff. Admirable, the ‘inspector’s’ gravitas and professionalism. Gupta imagined him telling the brothers how this was standard procedure, critical for their own safety and that of the children. Ha! For the good of the children. Bloody hell.
