Chain of Custody Page 14

  ‘What are you talking about, sir?’ Pujary had used his silkiest voice, a swish of incomprehension and a swash of innocence.

  ‘That girl …’ Rathore had frowned. ‘She was a college girl and a minor. Do you realize the trouble I could have got into?’

  ‘Oh, I was told she was twenty-two,’ Pujary had replied.

  ‘No, she wasn’t. An innocent child like her …’ The lawyer had pulled at the arch of his eyebrow in consternation.

  Pujary had put on his most penitent expression. ‘Yes, if it had been anyone else … but Vittala took care of her, sir … what else can I say?’

  ‘Vittala? Who’s that? I took care of her,’ the man said, standing up.

  ‘Vittala is another name for Lord Krishna, sir,’ Pujary said. ‘The keeper of the universe.’ Then, in an almost sly tone, he added, ‘I hear the boys are not working out.’

  ‘Oh yes, useless idiots!’

  ‘What can I say, sir?’ Pujary threw up his arms. ‘These boys, one tries to help them but … I tried to get the contractor to talk to them but they say they want to leave.’

  Rathore flushed. Pujary was clever. He knew how to kick a man in his balls without lifting his foot from the ground.

  Stalemate having been achieved, Pujary had brought out the land document and the lawyer had pounced on the one name that was in the original deed but missing in the list of current heirs put together by the aggregator. Pujary had known he would. He was too sharp a lawyer to miss it. And it seemed that they couldn’t go forward till the descendant of that man whose name was in the original deed provided a no-objection certificate. MLA Papanna had access to that man, he had heard. But MLA Papanna would require something in return. What would it be?

  MLA Papanna listened to him. ‘My PA will tell you about the commission,’ he said, his plank teeth flashing.

  Pujary nodded. He had expected that. There was no such thing as free service among politicians even if they were your best friends. And MLA Papanna was just an acquaintance.

  ‘By the way, isn’t there a lovely morsel you can send my way?’ the MLA asked.

  ‘I am not a pimp …’

  ‘I know that. But you have contacts. Someone like you would, I know.’

  ‘I have to call the concerned people to make it happen,’ Pujary said in a flat voice.

  ‘Do that. I need it to happen tomorrow,’ the MLA retorted as he turned to leave.

  11 MARCH, WEDNESDAY

  Sometime in the wee hours of the day, Gowda woke Mamtha and made quiet husbandly love to her in that zone hovering between sleep and consciousness. A warm body, a pair of arms clasped around his neck, a familiar rhythm and a slaking of need. When he rolled off her, spent and wide awake, a deep shame filled him.

  The night before, they had made desultory conversation as they prepared to go to bed.

  ‘How is Roshan behaving these days?’ Gowda asked Mamtha as she sat on the edge of the bed coiling her hair into a topknot. He remembered his mother doing the same when he was a child. The clink of bangles and the rustle of hair; a fragrance that was an amalgamation of talc, turmeric, and toothpaste. His mother wore flowers in her hair; jasmine, he remembered, but Mamtha didn’t. That was the only difference.

  ‘Roshan?’ Gowda asked again, when Mamtha didn’t respond. ‘When did he go to Goa? And in the middle of a term? What’s happening there?’

  ‘He went three days ago. He said there was a college fest,’ Mamtha had said, turning on her side and curving her bottom towards him. Gowda had felt his heart sink. Mamtha was in the mood to make love and he didn’t think he was up to it. All he wanted to do was lie there, processing his thoughts and day, and go to sleep.

  ‘Oh,’ Gowda had said, crossing his arms beneath his head as though oblivious to her invitation.

  He had felt Mamtha snuggle deeper into him. What on earth was the woman on? Usually he would have had to beg and plead with her to get her into the mood. He had thought she would be relieved when he didn’t put his arm around her waist. Which was usually his cue for telling her that he wanted sex.

  He stroked her arm warily. ‘It’s been a long day, Mamtha,’ he said softly. It hadn’t been, save for a whole lot of paperwork, but he didn’t think he was the sort of man who could make love to his mistress and wife in the span of a few hours.

  He had felt her go still and then stiffen. He groaned in his head. Then he fell asleep.

  By morning, though, the sense of remorse had softened to a stoic acceptance – ultimately all marriages were such. A matter of routine. And Mamtha seemed happy enough, husbandly and wifely duty done and dealt with. She was humming as she poured hot water into the coffee filter, he noticed as he hid himself behind the newspaper.

  The call came just after breakfast. The health minister was planning to make a surprise visit to the primary health centres in Hassan district. Mamtha decided it was prudent that she return immediately. ‘I am going to need at least two days to spruce up the place,’ she said.

  Gowda was glad he had done whatever it was he had when he noticed Mamtha was still humming under her breath as she packed.

  ‘Roshan?’ he asked. ‘What time is he getting in?’

  ‘Sometime during the day,’ Mamtha said. They were sitting in the verandah, waiting for the cab to take her to the bus stand.

  ‘Should I call him and ask him to come to Hassan straight?’ she said suddenly. ‘If you are busy with this Nandita case, won’t it be a nuisance having him around?’

  ‘No, let him come. I hardly see him,’ Gowda said, lighting up a cigarette.

  ‘Why don’t you give up this disgusting habit?’ Mamtha said.

  Gowda felt a snarl grow in him and was fortunately saved from fracturing the peace of the moment by the cab drawing in. When Mamtha had left, Gowda continued to sit there, feeling a sense of disquiet. Mamtha’s arrival and departure, all of it seemed a little forced and feverish. Had she been checking on him? Someone had been talking. He wondered who.

  Santosh and Ratna were huddled together when Gowda walked into the station. They looked cosy as they sat sipping from their plastic cups of tea. Santosh felt Gowda’s gaze flick past them.

  ‘Shall we?’ Ratna asked, seeing Gowda go into his room.

  ‘Give him a few minutes to settle down,’ Santosh said, blowing the top of his tea. A thin layer of skin had already formed.

  Ratna’s eyebrows rose. ‘That’s what my mother would say when my father came in from work – don’t go to him till he settles down with his cup of coffee. Or he won’t give you a patient hearing. We are going to discuss work, not ask him for a favour.’

  Santosh glared at her.

  Last evening, he had thought Ratna and he had connected in a way that went beyond just two colleagues sitting in a little restaurant with a plate of Mysore bonda and two cups of coffee. She had told him about herself. A childhood that was just like his, in a small town. She had gone to college and opted for a master’s in social work.

  ‘What made you join the police force?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I started working for a small organization that dealt with child drug addicts. The first few days I couldn’t eat or sleep; I found it hard to even breathe. Have you ever seen a child addict, s … Santosh?’

  She had called him by his name, not the habitual ‘sir’. A little dove flapped its wings in his chest.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t, Ratna …’ He spoke her name as if it were an endearment.

  Her eyes met his. Then she dropped her head into her hands. ‘Six- and seven-year-olds who learned to sniff glue watching their parents or siblings do it. That vacant gaze, the slackness of jaw … everything becomes bearable for them. The hunger, the lack of joy, the scrounging through garbage, the sexual abuse … I met Kamalamma during those days.’

  Santosh nodded. He had his answer now about Ratna’s familiarity with that world.

  He had dropped her home, feeling like they had taken a step forward together.

  Santo
sh took a deep breath. ‘No, we’ll wait,’ he said in his firmest voice. It didn’t do to get too chummy with your juniors, he told himself. Give them an inch and they’ll want to run your life. She needed to know her place. In the official hierarchy, he outranked her. ‘You wait here. I’ll call you when Gowda sir and I have discussed a few things first.’

  Gowda was on the phone when Santosh walked in and saluted him. Gowda gestured for him to sit.

  Santosh gazed at a point on the wall just above Gowda’s head, trying to look disinterested in Gowda’s end of the conversation.

  ‘Did you find a good seat?’

  ‘Let me know when you reach. Take care … and … I wish you hadn’t gone back so quickly.’

  Santosh’s eyes met Gowda’s at that. Gowda blinked, a hint of mischief lighting up his gaze.

  How did he do it, Santosh wondered. Manage to keep two women happy while he couldn’t even seem to make one smile.

  Gowda put down his phone and asked, ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Let me call Ratna in, sir.’ Santosh stood up.

  Gowda cocked his head, watching Santosh almost race to the door. Was the boy in love with Ratna or in awe of her?

  Gowda looked at the disappointed faces. ‘So we are back to square one,’ he said, playing with the paperweight.

  ‘Yes and no … we at least know what happened to her,’ Santosh said.

  ‘That’s not going to do her or us any good, knowing that she was in that room,’ Ratna snorted with an impatience that made Santosh frown.

  Gowda gazed at her with a sense of déjà vu. The two of them reminded him of his earlier self split into two.

  ‘Did you speak to the tyre shop people?’ he asked.

  Santosh nodded. ‘They said they didn’t know anything. They have leased the shop from someone. They were quite surly, in fact.’

  ‘PC Byrappa wanted to bring the man in, and I am inclined to agree with him,’ Ratna said darkly. The tyre shop man had given her a head-to-toe dekko, returning to linger on her breasts. She didn’t wear a dupatta; never had. She found slinging a roll of gauzy cloth around her neck a frivolity and a nuisance. But for the first time, she wished she had worn one.

  Gowda said, ‘Get the details of the landlord. We’ll make a beginning there. And …’ His voice hardened. ‘No slacking. I want it ASAP. Do you hear that? As soon as possible, which means right now.’

  Gowda stood up. He took his Bullet keys from the tray on the table. Ratna and Santosh stood up. ‘I’m going out,’ he said, walking out.

  Neither of them said anything. They looked at each other.

  Ratna opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Don’t,’ Santosh said softly. ‘Don’t say it. Actually, don’t even think it. You don’t know.’

  Ratna looked at the paperweight as if she would like to hurl it at him.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said in her iciest voice. ‘Don’t second-guess me. All I was going to ask was, how can we track the landlord?’

  Santosh had seen Ratna and the station writer chatting and wondered what Zahir had filled her head with about Gowda.

  He thought then of the story his brother the writer had told him. Of the Sufi and his acolyte. The two men had met a woman waiting on the banks of a river. She wept that she had no way of crossing it and if she didn’t, her life would fall apart. The Sufi carried the woman on his shoulders and waded across the river. For the whole of the next day the acolyte wouldn’t speak to his master. Eventually the Sufi asked him what was wrong. ‘You who said we must be celibate carried her on your shoulders. How could you?’ the acolyte snarled. The Sufi smiled. ‘I let her off once we had crossed the river and forgot about her. It seems to me that you are still walking with her on your back.’

  That was him, carrying the burden of his past and his assumptions.

  Gajendra frowned, seeing their faces. Santosh looked unhappy and Ratna annoyed. The two of them, he thought, were like nursery school children. Best friends for a while and then hissing and spitting at each other like angry cats … it was time he brought this to Gowda’s attention. They were working on a case that needed the two young officers to be at their best, and not expending time and energy besting each other.

  The sun was fierce on his back, but on a bike the heat was tempered. Gowda felt the headiness of velocity that came with the sheer girth of the Bullet ploughing through distance and time. At traffic lights, when he paused, he felt eyes rake him. No other bike, the Harley or the Ducati or even the Triumph, drew the Indian eye as much as the 500CC Bullet. He knew that in his black Royal Enfield helmet he made an impressive sight – a 1991 Bullet was a coveted one with its right-hand gear. With the number plate draped over the front wheel, it made the newer model and their riders seem like me-too men. Gowda looked at himself in the mirror and thought he looked rather like Urmila’s Mr Right. He wore the smug expression of a creature fed on gourmet food and treats, went for walks twice a day wearing a bowtie and slept on silk cushions in a sunny balcony.

  The great sense of contentment evaporated as he drove past Manyata Tech Park. With the advent of tech parks, the rural districts of Bangalore had slowly become satellite towns. Highrise buildings, a gated community, an international school, restaurants, spas, a liquor store and a multiplex, so the techies didn’t have to travel into town to spend their hefty pay cheques. The god of disposable incomes had a soft corner for techies and they, in turn, propitiated him by buying up almost evetything in sight, without a second thought. Bloody upstarts, he thought, stopping to look at the notes he had made.

  A road to the right and down a dirt track, to a tract of empty land. Where was he? Gowda kick-started the bike again and drove down the dirt track, towards the lone building that Santosh and Ratna had described. There was nothing on either side of the road. Just vacant plots of land fenced with barbed wire and a yard with stacks of granite slabs.

  He chugged to a halt just outside the building. A boy was sitting by a heap of tyres, trickling water from a tube onto a tyre.

  Gowda cursed loudly at his bike and began examining it. He walked towards the boy. ‘Where is the nearest petrol bunk?’

  The boy looked up. ‘Two kilometres away.’

  ‘Sule magane,’ Gowda growled, kicking a tyre with his boot. ‘The man I borrowed the bike from didn’t tell me it had no petrol … What the fuck am I going to do?’

  The boy grinned. ‘I can go get the petrol for you,’ he offered. ‘But …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Will you give me a ride on the Bullet? I’ve never been on one.’

  Gowda frowned. ‘I was thinking I’ll give you a twenty for the effort.’

  ‘That and the ride,’ the boy said, flinging the tube down.

  ‘Hmmm …’ Gowda pretended to think. ‘All right then.’ He pulled out two hundred-rupee notes from his wallet. ‘Get me petrol for 180 and the bill. And keep the twenty’.

  The boy whistled as he grabbed an empty two-litre Pepsi bottle from a sack in the shop and ran towards a bicycle leaning against the side of the shop.

  Gowda climbed the stairs and stepped into a narrow open verandah that ran from end to end of the first floor. One day it would be rented out as an office or divided up into several small shops. For now it was an empty room with a door and windows and a tiny toilet with an Odisha pan. The walls were distemper washed and the floor was mosaic. Someone had made an effort to clean it but not very hard. Gowda walked from one end to the other of the dank sour-smelling space with a few paint tins and a blue barrel strewn to one side. He looked at the blue barrel thoughtfully. They had sent the bindi to a forensic lab. But he was quite sure it would come to nothing. Could a bindi provide tissue for a DNA or fingerprint match? He didn’t even know that. Clutching at straws – that was what they were doing.

  He heard the boy call. ‘Sir, sir …’

  Gowda went back. There was nothing much to do here.

  The boy stood holding up the Pepsi bottle.

  Gowda smiled. ‘That was
quick,’ he said. He hoped the boy hadn’t bought half a litre of petrol and peed into the bottle to make up the rest of the amber liquid.

  The boy grinned.

  Gowda opened his petrol tank and began trickling in the fuel. ‘You like Pepsi, do you?’ he asked.

  The boy nodded. ‘Very much. When I get it. Why?’

  ‘This bottle?’ Gowda said.

  ‘Oh, that … some people left it behind.’

  ‘Customers? And they didn’t give you any?’

  The boy made a face. ‘I don’t know who they were. They spent an afternoon and an evening in the hall upstairs. A man, a woman and a girl. They were the building owner’s friends, my boss said. I was asked to bring them biriyani and a bottle of Pepsi. They left exactly so much of the Pepsi,’ he said, holding up a narrow sliver between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Just enough for one swallow. I kept the bottle. I was going to fill it with water and drop it from the roof. Have you tried it? It explodes with a splash.’ The boy had a cheeky grin and Gowda reached out and tugged at the cowlick on his head.

  ‘Shall we go for that ride?’ he asked.

  The boy’s face fell. ‘I don’t know if the boss will let me go.’

  A man drove in on a scooter and parked. He eyed Gowda curiously.

  ‘Oi, what are you up to?’ He glowered at the boy.

  ‘Does he know how to remove a flat tyre?’ Gowda asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’ The man frowned.

  ‘My car has a flat. Let me take him with me and we’ll bring the tyre back.’

  The man looked at the boy. ‘That will be extra,’ he said.

  Gowda shrugged. ‘Give him your helmet,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the cops catching me.’

  The man made a face as he gestured to the boy to take the helmet. ‘Put a newspaper on top of your head. I don’t want the grease in your hair messing up my helmet.’ He watched the boy strap the helmet on. ‘Do you have lice?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘No, only camels,’ the boy murmured under his breath.