Chain of Custody Page 18

  But one night, he wanted to try something new. I slashed the kitchen knife across his belly and fled. I jumped the wall and saw a car parked on the road. I thought the doors would be locked but for some reason, when I tried the rear door, it opened. I slipped in and lay down in the space on the floor between the front and back seat. A little later, a man came and started the car. He put on some music. I felt him slowing down; I heard him slam his fist on the steering wheel. Bloody thullas, I heard him mutter.

  I felt a grin grow on my face. If the sight of policemen bothered him so much, he had something of value in his car. Something that wasn’t entirely legal. When the car stopped, I was seated on the back seat. A policeman peered in. He looked at the man and me and called out, ‘Not the one we are looking for. This is a father and son.’ He waved at us to keep going, ‘Hogo, hogo …’

  When the man moved away from the police blockade, he stopped the car and looked at me. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘I can be anything you want.’

  He gave me a strange look. ‘Who taught you to say that?’

  I shrugged. And so I became Krishna and he my thekedar. He was a patient teacher and I was eager to please; and I wanted him to be proud of me. Soon, everywhere he went, I went too. Anything he wanted done, I did it, or made sure it got done.

  My rage grew. I didn’t know what I was angry about. That the thekedar thought I could be dispensed with? Or that he was going to take away my Nandita even though he knew how I felt about her? Or that he had let even that scum Daulat Ali know that I could be treated with such disrespect?

  I touched my jaw. It hurt where his fist had landed. I probed my mouth with my tongue. I could still taste the blood.

  I stopped at a bar and picked up a half of Original Choice whisky. I needed something to numb my anger and my pain. All these years I had done everything he asked me to, without question or complaint. Clearly, none of it had mattered to him.

  And he had the gall to quote the Gita to me.

  Suddenly I felt light-headed. There is a way. There is always a way. Well, here’s one for you, thekedar: The heat of the sun comes from me, and I send and withhold the rains. I am life immortal and death; I am what I is and what I is not.

  Two lakh rupees, he had said. I had twenty-five thousand. I could raise another twenty-five. I needed a lakh and fifty. And I knew how to get it.

  Jogan and Barun looked at me wide-eyed. They reminded me of bedraggled kittens. If I were to shine a torch into their faces, they would stare at me with the same helpless fear I would see in the kittens’ eyes. ‘Dada,’ they said. ‘What is this place?’

  The bus ride from Hennur to Hosur took us more than two hours. The boys had been quite relieved to leave the lawyer’s home.

  When I took them there, they thought they had stumbled into heaven. The lawyer’s house was beautiful and enormous. There were no children or pets to mess it up and everything stayed in its place. The floors were a pale marble and the walls an endless white. And when they lifted the dusty sheets and peered beneath, they could see dark wood furniture upholstered in real silk. The coffee table in the sunken living room was as big as a bed and there was a giant glass on it that could quench the thirst of a whole family for a day. In it were tall flowers that looked like crab claws. And this was just the front room. There was a dining room, a room with three walls of books, a giant kitchen that was as big as the shelter that they had been relocated to during the last cyclone in Satpada. And on the floor above were four bedrooms, each one with a big bed and a TV and its own bathroom. How rich the lawyer must be, they whispered to each other, we will live like princes here.

  They were then shown the room allotted to them in the back of the house with its grey-washed walls, cement floor and two camp cots on which were a mattress and a thin pillow rolled up. And they thought, even if we don’t live like princes, we will have three full meals every day and just as much work as we are capable of. They had it all chalked out in their heads. They wouldn’t have to pay any rent and the food would be free. They would save every rupee of their salary. Half to send home and the rest to keep till they had enough to open a small shop in Satpada. They told me all this when I went to visit them the day after I took them there as per the thekedar’s instructions.

  ‘Don’t forget my commission,’ I had said pleasantly enough.

  ‘No, dada, every month, one-fourth of our salary is yours,’ Jogan had said.

  He hadn’t known that the salary would be paid directly to me and that I would decide if it was to be one-fourth, one-third or half.

  I was busy for the next three days. One of my contacts had been pestering me to source some boys for him. There was a man in MLA Pappana’s employ, who had tentacles in Gulbarga. He would be able to provide me with a group, he had said. On my way back from meeting him, I had called in on the lawyer’s house to check on my boys. I waited for the lawyer to leave before knocking on his door. The boys greeted me with sullen faces.

  The lawyer had returned from Delhi and the easy time the boys had the first day had changed into a nightmare of excessive demands and miserly portions of tasteless food.

  ‘He keeps saying, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t touch this, don’t sit there …’ Jogan said.

  ‘And gives us very little food, dada,’ Barun added. ‘We may as well have stayed home if we have to starve here.’

  They thought me responsible for their plight. I wanted to tell them that no one was responsible for the life we led and the situations we got ourselves into. Just ourselves.

  You can rest your head on another person’s arm for a while, after which they will shrug you off. The only arm you can rest your head on for as long as you live is your own. Who told me that? I don’t remember.

  My contact had asked for eight boys and I had been able to source only six.

  ‘I have found you something else. But it will be hard work,’ I said.

  ‘Anything would be better than this!’ Jogan muttered. The previous evening, the lawyer had given him an old sock, a mug of water and asked him to clean the leaves of the plants within the house. ‘Change the water in the mug after you finish a plant,’ the lawyer had said, twirling his eyebrow. ‘And don’t snap a leaf or tear one!’

  Jogan had wondered if the lawyer was mad. Barun had been given a toothbrush and asked to work on the grouting of the tiles in the kitchen. It was spotless but the lawyer seemed to see lines of dirt and specks of dust everywhere.

  ‘What time does he leave in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘By seven-thirty,’ Jogan said.

  ‘He starts eating his nashta at seven,’ Barun had butted in. ‘A whole papaya that has to be chopped into cubes. A hardboiled egg and a big bowl of some grain he pours milk over. And we get to eat the previous night’s rotis and a glass of black tea. No milk! No sugar! Black tea!’

  Jogan cuffed him. ‘Is that all you can think of? Food?’

  ‘Get ready. Let’s go.’

  The boys put on the new t-shirts the lawyer had given them. I could barely hide my disgust. Ungrateful wretches, I thought. They deserved everything they got. I had told the thekedar that the boys were unhappy at the lawyer’s.

  ‘It’s the nature of that class,’ he had said. He had forgotten that I was and perhaps still am of ‘that class’. I saw it as a compliment that he had forgotten how I had pulled myself out of the gutter I had been born in.

  ‘The first few days they are eager to please, then nothing satisfies them. But in this case, I am not surprised. The lawyer is an asshole too.’ Had he even met the lawyer, I wondered. But the thekedar was like that. Sometimes he would take a violent dislike to people for no real reason.

  It was a dusty road and the heat of the noonday sun was relentless. But the boys seemed unmoved by the heat or dust. Instead, they drank in the sight of the eucalyptus groves and the open spaces. I wondered what was going on in their minds.

  There was a barbed-wire fence around the compound. The bu
ilding itself was some way from the gate. From the distance nothing was visible. It looked run-down and unoccupied. A burly man peeled himself from the shadow of a tree and came towards the gate where I stood. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. The brusqueness of his tone scared the boys. I smiled. My smile that can melt ice, open locks and douse a fire. His next question was less abrasive. ‘Who sent you?’

  ‘Nagu Reddy,’ I murmured.

  His brow cleared and he went back to a little room by the gate. A room made of unplastered concrete blocks and a tin roof. It was probably baking in there, which was why he had chosen to sit under the tree. He came back with a bunch of keys and opened the lock on the gate.

  ‘Where are the boys from?’ he asked, giving Jogan and Barun a cursory look.

  ‘Odisha,’ I said.

  The man made a face. ‘Sneaky bastards! All of them! The moment they come in, they are looking for a way to run away!’

  Jogan and Barun looked at my face, trying to read my expression. Not a muscle on my face moved. The watchman and I could have been discussing the weather for all they knew.

  ‘What about Ikshu dada?’ Jogan asked.

  ‘Can you bring him here to us?’ Barun asked. All three of them had grown up together but Barun and Ikshu were cousins.

  ‘Let me see. I’ll do my best,’ I promised them, knowing very well that I would never see them again.

  I led the boys towards the building. It was a child’s drawing of a factory – a long low shed with a tin roof and boxes cut out for windows. The windows were boarded up on the side that faced the road. And the door opened to the other side, where there was a high wall. Beyond that was a quarry. I could hear the sound of machines at work.

  A green tin door was set into the wall. It was latched from within. I rapped on the door. The metal made a hollow noise. The door opened and a man stood framed by the shadows.

  ‘Nagu Reddy sent me,’ I said. ‘I have two boys.’

  I felt a slight tug on either hand as the boys stepped back. ‘Maybe we should go back to the lawyer’s house,’ Jogan said. ‘I think we were too hasty.’

  I pulled in the boys. ‘It’s a big factory,’ I told them. ‘A place where they make school bags. The more bags you make, the more money you’ll earn.’

  I could hear a humming, the whirr of sewing machines, the rustle of plastic sheets, the shadows. But not a human sound. They were ordered to not chat or laugh. I pushed the boys in towards the man.

  ‘They get scrawnier by the day,’ the man said, eyeing them.

  I shrugged. ‘This is the best of the lot.’

  The man shut the door and I walked back to the gate. I had made thirty thousand rupees for a morning’s work. Once upon a time, fifteen would have gone to the thekedar. But this was mine. Every rupee of it.

  Once, someone asked me if I felt guilty about what I did. No, I said. Guilt is a luxury for the poor. When one seeks to survive, a man has to put his interests first. It is his breath he safeguards before he thinks of anyone else. That was what the thekedar taught me. It was in the Gita as well. To die in one’s duty is life; to live in another’s is death.

  I needed to make another lakh and forty-five in twenty-four hours. That was all I could think of now. I began counting the number in my head. By the time I reached 1,45,000, I knew I would have a plan.

  Pujary glared at the TV as he ate his lunch. Gita still wasn’t speaking to him beyond the bare essentials. But at least the tension between them had simmered down to an uneasy silence. In a few days, she would come around. He knew that.

  When he had finished his lunch, Gita said, ‘I want you to tell me what is going on.’

  ‘What’s going on where?’ He put on a mock frown as he laughed.

  ‘What you are doing?’ she began and stopped. ‘How can you?’

  ‘All of this …’ He waved his hand around to indicate the 55-inch LED TV, the enclosed garden, the marble floors and the cunning little elevator she could use to go upstairs if he was not around to help her. ‘Where do you think it comes from? I do it for you, for us,’ he added in a gentle voice.

  She shook her head furiously. ‘I don’t need any of this. Neither should you. We have each other. Isn’t that enough?’

  He smiled. His Gita was such a naïve child. Her body may have given up on her. But her mind was that of a young girl’s. Radiant with hopes and ideals. Except that he knew when you were trying to make a life for the one you loved, you tossed out ideals and did what you had to do. Nevertheless, he had given in as she wanted him to and caressed her cheek. ‘That is enough, wife!’

  ‘You will stop what you are doing?’ she had persisted. ‘Husband, you must … we don’t need the money you earn this way.’

  ‘Gita,’ he said quietly, moving to sit by her side. ‘What is it you think I do? I am not a bloody pimp.’

  She flinched.

  ‘I deal in real estate. That’s all.’

  ‘The girls you were referring to …’ she said haltingly. ‘The twelve-year-old …’

  ‘Vittala, Vittala,’ he guffawed, ‘is this what you are so perturbed about? Those were girls I had said I would help locate for someone I know who is making a video.’

  She looked at him for a long moment. He held her gaze. She said nothing thereafter. He knew she was ashamed of having doubted him. But that too would pass.

  She pressed the button of her wheelchair and rode into the kitchen. She returned with two small bowls of shrikhand.

  He smiled. She knew it was his favourite sweet. This was a peace offering.

  ‘Husband, what is this business with the lawyer and the girls?’

  He looked at her. She met his gaze. ‘The lawyer was supposed to help with the sale of a land but he changed his mind. The MLA is furious. It’s a really huge deal. Two hundred crores. If it had gone through, I may never have needed to work again. So I spoke to a few contacts. One of them knows a buyer but he said the buyer is a strange man who likes watching young girls play. Hopscotch. Skip. On a swing. Down a slide. Up and down a seesaw. People, eh?’

  She frowned. ‘Just play?’

  ‘Just play,’ Pujary said. ‘I am corrupt, Gita, but not evil.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound right,’ she said.

  ‘What can I do to convince you?’

  ‘Nothing. But there’s something else you can do,’ she said, spooning the shrikhand and holding it to his lips. He licked the sweet off like a cat. She smiled.

  ‘What?’ he asked, smiling back.

  ‘Take me to the lawyer. Let me talk to him,’ Gita said.

  Pujary stared at her in surprise. ‘He won’t listen to you, wife. He is a shark. A shark with the soul of a python, wanting to swallow everything whole.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let me try and persuade him. I would prefer it if you had nothing to do with this girls business.’

  I went to the building where I had left the three items last evening. There was no one there. I called the thekedar.

  ‘What do you mean they are not there?’

  ‘There’s no sign of them. Neither Mohan, nor the girl and boy he brought with him. I asked the man who runs the petty shop in the corner. He says he doesn’t know. He mentioned that a police jeep was there last night,’ I added.

  ‘Mohan is an experienced man. He knows how to handle situations.’ The thekedar exhaled. ‘He’ll get in touch. He knows what to do. Where are you now?’

  ‘Near the shop.’

  ‘There is something else I want you to do,’ he said.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ I asked.

  I heard the silence at the end of the line. But I refused to be intimidated. He was the one who taught me that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

  Sid sat in the food court of the mall. He hadn’t been here before. He glanced at his phone. It was almost two. The person he was supposed to meet was late.

  A man had called him in the morning.

  ‘What happened?’ he had asked. A polite, concerned, avuncu
lar voice, almost as if it were enquiring about his ailing grandfather in Thrissur.

  Sid had felt his heart beat faster.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I really don’t know. She promised to meet me outside Koshy’s, but she didn’t show up,’ he stammered. ‘I really don’t understand, sir.’

  ‘Did you call her?’

  ‘I did. At least twenty times. I messaged her. WhatsApped her. I saw she had read the messages. After a while her phone was switched off,’ Sid had tried to explain his helplessness. ‘Sir, I think the lawyer she went to meet the last time must have told her not to take my call.’

  The voice at the other end of the phone had sighed. ‘These things happen!’

  Sid had felt the knot in his chest loosen. ‘I am really sorry. She does everything I ask her to. I don’t know why she didn’t turn up last evening. Maybe …’

  ‘Maybe … what?’ the voice had asked.

  ‘I don’t know if her periods started. She acts weird then …’ He had added quickly, ‘Sir, I’d like to return the advance.’

  ‘Yes, you must,’ the voice said.

  ‘Where can I drop it off?’ Sid asked, swearing to himself this would be the last time he did anything like this. And then, not wanting to take chances, he had decided to ask that they meet at a public place. ‘What about a mall, sir? With so many people there, no one will notice the money changing hands.’

  ‘Hmm …’ the voice had said. ‘That’s rather clever of you. One of my boys will come and pick it up. Make sure you are at Elements mall at the food court by 1.30 p.m.’

  ‘How will I know him?’ Sid had asked, wondering where on earth Elements mall was.

  He had hoped they could meet at one of the more central ones.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. He’ll find you. Just make sure you are there,’ the voice had said and the phone had gone silent.

  Sid looked at his FB timeline. He had posted a selfie yesterday afternoon and the number of likes had crossed 235. There was a whole bevy of friend requests as well.