Next to the watery foliage of weeping figs and money plants, I sit and stare into the haze as if all that I say now is trapped in that timeless vagueness. The feeling that moving away from the city will make me one with those who abandoned it long ago settles somewhere within. Those faces pass by swiftly on unknown pavements in my mind’s eyes, sidestepping people and turning at corners. They wait for the speeding cars to move past the road. Sometimes they open the door of a store and vanish within.
Will I tread the same earth ever sodden in the sadness of distant footmarks? I feel like a child who is held back from the rainbow by a cavern of infinity. It remains arched at the edge of the hollow no matter how hard he moves. Fidgeting like a funambulist on the ropes of past there is the inevitable false step. I pirouette in mid-air and cling to the string by the skin of my toes, halting gingerly at the morning I had rushed to Ayesha’s door after the foul brush with Kamath earlier in the day.
The crisp, quite morning had become increasingly windy. Small tufts of clouds had settled into a grey sheet spread over the city. The curtains flapped listlessly as I coaxed the recalcitrant bolts and catches. There was a loud crash outside as a potted plant tumbled off a ledge from somewhere above.
I remember Mrs Pawar fidgeting about her door and muttering under her breath as I stepped out of the lift. Perhaps she would have entered her flat but stopped when she saw me and began rearranging the sheaf of newspaper. Ayesha had a faraway look on her face when she opened the door but she had her usual disarming poise. Her collarbones shone between the blackness of the nightgown and her hair falling in loose waves. If she was surprised to find me at her door, she concealed it well.
“Oh, good morning!” She said.
“Good morning,” I said. “Sorry to be bugging you so early.”
“No problem.”
“There is something…” I began groping for words.
Here she was in blood and flesh standing in the half open doorway, looking rock-solid and electric compared to the mist that had hogged me through the night. I felt my tongue shrivel and freeze for no reason. Where were all those questions I had planned to pin her down with? She didn’t invite me in so I stood there congealed and voiceless, wondering what to do next.
“Is it about that Spanish chapter?” She broke the spell with the faintest twitch of her eyebrow.
“Something about that, yes.” I grabbed the hint with both hands and gushed. “Perhaps I should come later?”
“Come at eight, then. I’ll be moving out at nine.” She smiled for the first time as she closed the door.
Mrs Pawar had been trying hard to make her presence felt all this time. “Something wrong with the newspaper?” I ventured. But all she would give me back was a frosty stare, or if it was something she had said I don’t remember a word, perhaps something about missing weekly magazines. I was already feeling a bit giddy when I took the stairs.
The wind picked and dropped as I sat with a cup of tea near the window. A group of teenaged boys seemed excited about going to some beach where swimming was forbidden. An hour slipped past as I kept thinking of what Shipra’s mother had filled me with, slowly but surely, about her husband, Kamath and Ayesha. I realised for the first time how complex people could be. Sometimes it is hard to fathom the façade people tote around. Either I was fooled by the mask Ayesha wore so naturally or there was that invisible side of the coin to the whole story. It might have been quite possible for Ayesha and Kamath to collude and fox people. It is done oftener than one gets to think about. Perhaps Mrs Parmar was pulling off a subtle blackmail using her plight as a scalpel on softer hearts. I had the vaguest notion of what Ayesha did for a living except what she had told me herself. There was always that chance she had never been to Cordoba or Spain or wherever. But then, there were all those Spanish books and music and the tongue buttery with the language. There was something not right about the idea of someone as suave and alive teaming up with a toad like Kamath.
I stepped onto the seventh floor with a buzzer in my belly an hour later. My confidence had drained off further since the morning. The closed door to Mrs Pawar’s home looked innocuous enough. I fancied her huddled behind the woodwork with her eye hard against the peephole and I couldn’t help smiling. It seemed a certainty.
Ayesha opened the door as I pushed the bell and closed it swiftly the moment I stepped in. She was holding a black hair dryer and her tresses smelt of blow-dried pears. For a few seconds we kept standing in the narrow space of the gallery saying nothing. She had a thoughtful, tentative look. A trance swept over me for the second time.
“So nice of you to have remembered me.” She said looking straight into my eyes. Her hair was now parted equally, the polished bangs bracketed her face.
I had never looked at her from such a short distance. She always had those kohl-lined eyes and perfectly chiselled lips but they seemed to have grown a life of their own recently. It was impossible to believe she had a sly, brazen side as Mrs Parmar insisted, overwhelmed and soured by her grief.
My heart was turning into liquid in my ribcage.
“Yes, we need to speak about people,” I managed.
A shadow passed her face like a veil. “Dead or living?” She asked, moving away from me.
As if I had been levitating in air, I returned to the ground.
“Perhaps, both.” I said.
“I’ve been thinking of speaking to you myself. About the dead and the living, as you say.” She traced the contours of the hair-dryer with her index finger. “Would you mind if I show you a small bunch of papers?”
She went to her bedroom. I heard the hair dryer whine back into action but it stopped soon enough. Something metallic was opened and closed, perhaps an almirah or a bureau, followed by a silence. The hair-dryer moaned back to life for a few seconds more. She seemed to have a fetish with that thing and her hair.
She had a pale green folder when she turned up. It had ‘Fraud File’ inscribed on its face in bold strokes. She was now dressed in black trousers and a slate blue top and looked rather prim.
“Have a look —I’ll whisk some coffee meanwhile.” She handed it over to me.
“Thank you,” I said.
From where I sat in her flat, the sky wore a pensive cast. The clouds seemed to have many more layers and a subtle texture. Strange, I thought, what a height of seven floors could do to your perspective. The glass doors of the balcony shook and hummed, shook and hummed. The wind that moved about the trees and the building in general on the ground had a personal presence there. Given a chance it would speak to you of things that lay ahead in future in misshapen whispers. Not that you would understand.
Neatly stacked in the ‘fraud file’ were copies of account statement and the cheque drawn for two hundred thousand rupees, pages of correspondence with the police. Some figures and rows were highlighted with a fluorescent marker. The papers were filed in a precise sequence and it was not hard to deduce what had transpired. She joined me back with two mugs of coffee and a bowl of sautéed cashew nuts. She sat across me to describe in detail as it all had happened, pausing at times not so much to steady her voice as to recollect the events.
In the February of the year Ayesha had realised she needed to pay more income tax and she sought help from the friendly tax consultant, Parmar. He suggested investing twenty thousand rupees in a government tax saving instrument. Since she had run out of cheques, Parmar asked her to hand it over to his partner as soon as she got a new chequebook. Kamath came over to collect the cheque a few days later and she drew a cheque of twenty thousand rupees and passed it on to him. She forgot about the whole thing till she went to the bank next month to withdraw some cash. Shocked when her withdrawal request for a small sum was declined, she asked for a statement of the account. To her disbelief, she found a hefty debit of two hundred thousand rupees from her account against a cheque she couldn’t recall having issued. When she remained insistent, the bank staff dug out the instrument and put it before her.
It turned out to be the cheque she had issued to Parmar but an extra zero had been inserted in the figure to make it 2,00,000. The amount in words too was suitably altered. Even the officials of the bank admitted the forged longhand was a giveaway but the damage was done. Ayesha tried to contact Parmar over phone but her calls remained unanswered. Things turned ugly when she tried to confront him at his home. Parmar grew abusive and charged her with teaming up with Kamath for trapping him in a scam. Kamath denied having any knowledge of the alteration in the cheque.
Ayesha had no choice but to knock at the doors of the police. Parmar was summoned to the police station for several days on end. Frustrated with the outcome, the police threw Parmar in a lock up and subjected him to third degree methods. Kamath had already disengaged himself from the partnership and slipped clean through the net due to his local clout. After a lot of hue and cry and mounting pressure from the neighbourhood, Ayesha agreed for an out-of-court settlement. Parmar did cough up ninety thousand rupees and she withdrew the case against him. He was to pay the balance ninety thousand in a month’s time but a few more such cases cropped up and Parmar slipped deeper into the cesspit. His health nosedived with the ballooning stress and he passed away before he could recompense Ayesha. She didn’t know what happened to others.
“Parmar is still the sacrificial lamb in his wife’s eyes,” I said reflectively.
“And I remain the butcher-in-chief,” said Ayesha.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“What do the daughters think?”
“They are their mother’s daughters.”
“You seem taken over by the idea.”
“I am not. But it seems the real villain is out there whistling by a stream.”
“I suspect so. Kamath’s roots go deep into both politics and mafia. It was he who introduced me to the bunch of boys who strangled a neighbourhood woman living alone. None of the boys was older than fourteen at the time. They are out of the reformatory now and enrolled for the project.”
“Perfect.”
“Please don’t get ideas. My research is aimed at tackling juvenile delinquency.”
“That explains Mrs Parmar’s conviction though.”
“I avoid Kamath like a leper now. Maybe he will become one soon.”
“What do the murderers do now?”
“Please check your emotions—they aren’t delinquent anymore. They live near a place called Gorai. There is a fine beach out there. Care to tag along? I happen to be headed that way today.”
“I’d love to.”
That is how I happened to accompany Ayesha to Gorai village that day. In fact, it turned out that I accompanied her to the place next nine days in a row. Each day we would take the twisting road to Marve in a taxi to catch the crowded ferry. Men, women, fishermen and motorbikes, all crammed in together and the damned thing would lurch and sway in the creek smelling of fish and gasoline. It would dump us across the creek in about twenty minutes and we would take an auto-rickshaw to Gorai village and find out one or more of those boys. Ayesha carried a grey notebook into which she would take down notes on separate pages alloted to each of them.
Once we walked eight kilometres in the rain from the wharf when the traffic was lean. There was a barely perceptible drizzle and our cloths kept dancing about our bodies and clinging hard against our chests and legs when the wind turned direction. Occasional bikers went past staring at us, some slowing down to have a good look at Ayehsa. Unaware of the distractions, she kept talking about boys from her college days. Then she spoke about someone she had met in Spain but it all sounded the same to me. It was just she and I walking along the narrow stretch and her words were the voice of freedom and togetherness. Something kept swelling in my veins and crashing harder and harder in my limbs and fingertips. I kept walking beside her step after mechanical step. Places in my body began craving for her scent. I wanted to clasp her hand tightly so that it could fuse into mine. I wanted to melt into the draft so that I could feel how her cloths clung to her body. I wanted to be the voice that was talking to me.
