“What’s going on?” I asked. A small plastic bag with the words Kunal Medicos printed on it lay on the card table. Gautam must have picked up some opiates in Yusuf Sarai, where nobody needs a prescription for pills.
“I like your shawl,” was all he said back.
He took another hit from his chillum and tried to pass it to me. When I pushed his hand way, he attempted to force the thing to my lips. I’d never seen him like this before.
“Have you gone crazy?” I snapped.
“Just have a hit, try a little,” he kept on going.
When I slapped his face, the demons that had been inhabiting his eyes suddenly fled, and a look of panic replaced them.
Then, looking away from me, he drew his hand behind his ear and hurled his pipe at a spot on the wall beside the poster.
The chillum smashed into half-a-dozen pieces, and the puppy started whimpering. Gautam began crying too, and he buried his head in my bosom. I held him tightly. It was upon my urging that he slid himself into me that night.
In the morning, we remained naked under the covers despite the cold, and it was then he confessed that Lauri had given birth to his child. He also told me about Kumar’s proposition.
Gautam didn’t speak about his fear of fatherhood, he just said he was uncomfortable sacrificing the truth for his own selfish ends. “Picking Ashok Kumar over Lakshman and Satya is like picking evil over good. It should be that simple.”
My response to his dilemma should have come quickly to my lips. But I said nothing. We moved out to the terrace and stared at some local children playing hopscotch and chattering in Hindi on the street below. In front of a neighboring house some laborers were assembling a shamiana for a wedding. “Imagine if that were for us,” Gautam said, a faint, wistful smile on his face.
“Nothing could make me happier,” I told him.
When he was alone that night, Gautam called Lakshman and told him the article was off. “It’s going nowhere, and I’m tired,” he said. There was some back and forth, during which Lakshman tried to appeal to his sense of justice and democracy. But Gautam was firm in his resolve to abandon the project.
I was volunteering at the school the next morning when a student stormed through the courtyard and screamed at the principaclass="underline" “Gautam sir is lying dead in the park, Gautam sir is lying dead in the park!” I ran there as fast as I could.
A crowd was staring from a safe distance: servants walking sweater-clad dogs; prickly old men holding sticks to beat away strays and poor people. I pushed through them and his body came into view. Damaged but not dead, he was sprawled beside an earth-colored Lodhi tomb he often loafed around. An enormous gulmohar tree hung over him. It wasn’t Lakshman himself who’d sent the goons with cricket bats to Gautam’s flat before dawn. His C Party colleagues had taken care of that.
The sight of his bloodied, maimed face sent a wave of anguish through me.
Two security guards, uniformed UP-wallahs, were attending to his body. A wiry one was dragging Gautam by an arm and his curly locks, and a paunchy one was using a rifle to prod him. The butt of the gun met my leg with a considerable amount of force, and I let out a howl that snapped them out of their sadistic fever.
Once I had their attention, I shouted a series of reprimands in English peppered with words like “idyot.” Had Gautam been more alert, it would have unnerved him to hear how naturally such bilious Angrezi spilled from my tongue. But in the nation’s capital, the Queen’s language is still a deadlier weapon than a Mauser.
After eyeing me up and down, the head guard decided I wasn’t a force to reckon with. “Didi,” he said, his gaze now inflected with leering. My dress code for this assignment had meant my demotion from “madam” to “sister.” “We’re going to take him to the police thana. Just listen to me and you’ll remain unharmed.”
When I dropped the name of some fictitious high-level official, my mamaji the High Court justice, the guards became uneasy. But what really got them was the sight of the Black-Berry I pulled from my pocket. They couldn’t have known what exactly it was or how much it cost, but even they knew it was far more expensive than the toys of the casually rich. I’d kept it concealed from Gautam all these weeks.
The guards helped him up, and I walked out of Deer Park supporting the weight of his semiconscious six-foot frame. After bringing him home, I stayed by his bedside for the next twenty hours. I only left when Ashok called me in for a meeting.
Kumar received me in his mahogany study. He was in a bathrobe and had a stoic look on his face. It was meant to communicate his disappointment in me. “Things have gotten very complicated,” was all he said. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but it’s best to just finish this now. And obviously destroy all his papers.” Those were my orders, and they weren’t unreasonable ones.
I got up to leave, but Kumar motioned for me to stay. He picked up one of the three phones before him and said, “Bahadur, I’m not to be disturbed for twenty minutes.” Then he got up and walked over to the expensive leather chair I was sitting on and untied his robe. There was nothing underneath it, just his hairy body, a gold chain, and the limp organ I was to make hard with my tongue. This was my medicine. I had to win back my place in his good books.
I took the length of him into my mouth. No matter how far I moved away from Sonagachi, this man would never let me forget about the whore I once was.
I returned to Green Park early the next morning, and as I climbed the stairs to the barsaati one final time, the dog began making noise, a series of shrill yelps, the sound of a puppy in distress. When I walked in, the thing pissed on the flats I was wearing, ethnic ones I would’ve gotten rid of anyway.
Gautam’s eyes were closed and his mustache was caked in vomit, but he was still breathing. On the floor was an empty strip of oxycodone, and next to it a brown envelope. Lakshman’s people had sent it to him during my brief absence. I thumbed through its contents, five black-and-white photographs.
In one of the pictures I was getting out of a car at the Kumar farmhouse. In another I was wearing a bikini on the beaches of Goa. But strangely, these pictures of me seemed in pristine condition, as if he’d barely glanced at them. Only one had been soiled by tears and fingerprints; it had clearly been too much for him. For me the photo confirmed how tired I’d grown of this life I was supposed to be grateful for.
The photo showed the mother of Gautam’s child. She was sitting on a bench having a conversation with my boss. I didn’t know it then, but Ashok Kumar and Lauri Zeller had known each other. He’d paid her for knowledge of Khem’s movement, and she’d used the money to help finish off her movie. I never confirmed that they’d been intimate, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Staring at the photographs, I contemplated sparing Gautam. Images of us starting a new life together passed through my mind. That’s what would have happened in a film. But I knew he’d be more useful dead than alive.
I took out a syringe from my bag and filled it with potassium chloride. Then I jabbed him between the toes. This was the only way I’d ever killed somebody, it was painless and civilized. With all the opiates and benzodiazepines in his system, the coroner would pronounce Gautam dead from an overdose. Nobody would lament the passing of this confused orphan. After shoving Gautam’s notebooks and computer into the jute bag he’d used for sabzis, I leashed the puppy and left the barsaati with it.
When I contacted Lakshman, he was surprised to hear from me. It took some arranging, but eventually he was more than happy to print Gautam’s exposé on Kumar, which implicated my boss, the B Party, and the Canadian Aluminum Corporation in the murder of Khem Thakur.