Banquet on the Dead (22 page)

‘Ah, indeed!’

‘Yes, and he was staring after her, but that’s no surprise because Ellayya stares after every woman, especially when he’s not “feeling well”.’ Lakshman mimed upending an imaginary bottle into his mouth. ‘I have seen Durga give him a dressing-down a few times about that. But she loves him.’ Again Nagarajan saw a quick flash of affection on the man’s hard face. ‘She did not stop for him that day, though. He took a few steps in the direction she was speeding away, stopped, scratched his head a couple of times, and staggered away.’

‘Ah, yes,’ declared Hamid Pasha. ‘This is probably the most important detail in this whole case—the
most
important detail!’

Nagarajan almost rolled his eyes. Hamid Pasha, he knew from experience, was a man given to hyperbole. On this very day he had heard him make that declaration at least once before. Now he took only a cursory interest in its repetition and put it out of his mind. If it was important, he thought, it would come up again.

‘Do you think so?’ asked Lakshman skeptically. ‘I don’t see how, but you’re the boss.’

‘Yes,’ said Hamid Pasha as if he were in a dream. ‘I do not see how either, but I
do
see that it is important. But no matter, I will see how—very soon. It is not very often that I do not see all, you know.’

Lakshman shrugged and said, ‘I don’t really care. I’m just telling you all this because I am not the only one in the house who could have killed the old woman. I may have said that I would love to kill her, and maybe I would have if I had the chance, but I did not.’

Hamid Pasha said, ‘I think I believe you.’

‘Yes,’ said Lakshman. ‘My methods would have been a little—blunter.’

Hamid Pasha nodded absently and walked past Lakshman. He signalled to Nagarajan and said, ‘Come, we have to go.’

16

N
AGARAJAN SLIPPED HIS
bike into third gear and sped past Vijaya Talkies. It was nearing six now, fifteen minutes before the evening show, and though the movie running in it was an old re-run, it was a favourite, and any moment now the road would start to choke with people from all corners jostling forward to watch it. With the new multiplex coming up where Sridevi Talkies once stood, Vijaya’s days seemed numbered, though it had to be said it had been running on its last legs for nigh on three years now. Every time Nagarajan drove past he saw either advertisments for an old devotional re-run or sleazy posters on the walls. The people who owned Vijaya couldn’t be doing too well if they were putting all their eggs in those two baskets.

At least they were evening out their spread, he thought, and wondered what the road would be called once Vijaya Talkies was levelled to the ground—surely what happened with Sridevi was only the first of a series, and soon Vijaya and Ashoka and would follow suit. Maybe the name will stick, he thought almost hopefully; fifty years ago he had seen his first movie in this theatre. He did not want to see Vijaya go. He liked the samosas there.

Maybe it will be just like Alankaar, another movie theatre right in the middle of Hanamkonda and Warangal, which had given way to first a function palace, then to a food supermarket. But even today, seven years after it closed down officially, auto-drivers and rickshaw pullers
knew
where ‘Alankaar Talkies’ was. It would be at least five more years, Nagarajan estimated, before ‘Reliance Super’ replaced it in people’s memories. Maybe the next generation of people—who had never seen or known Alankaar Talkies—would call it Reliance Super instead.

The bike moved forward as if it had a mind of its own, and his thoughts returned to the present when it stopped by the little lane which branched off the mouth of Vijaya Talkies Road. Two dentists, a gyanaecologist and a neurologist occupied the ground floor of the building by which he parked. The owner of a medicine shop, also on the ground floor, raised his hand in a respectful salute when he saw him alight. Nagarajan nodded at him and said to Hamid Pasha, ‘Praveen’s office is on the first floor.’

‘Ah,’ said Hamid Pasha, clutching at his hips and looking distastefully at the flight of stairs confronting them. ‘Do we have to climb again? Why is there no light in that room, miyan?’

Nagarajan looked up and immediately thought there was something wrong. To be sure it was not yet dark enough to preclude vision, but every shop in the locality and every house in the opposite streets had their lights on. This one room stood out—although not in complete darkness, Nagarajan noticed. A smudge of orange light flickered from behind the closed windows. Whether it was reflecting off the street lamps or whether it was coming from inside, he could not tell.

‘Come,’ he said, and jogged to the stairs and began to bound up them, two at a time.

‘Ah, wait,’ Hamid Pasha protested feebly.

Nagarajan did not listen to the older man. The closer he got to the top of the stairs the more he could feel that tingle in his nose; something was not quite right. He heard the voices of the crowd swell at the gate of Vijaya Talkies, and downstairs, too, people were assembling in front of the medical shop and dragging up chairs to sit on; all of them with weak, vacant expressions. Behind him, he heard the clunky tread of Hamid Pasha, slow and unsteady, but right behind him.

When he got to the top he pushed the door once, twice; it did not give. He ran along the balcony and peeped in through the window. Nothing was visible except that reddish-orange light within, checkered against the frosted glass. For a moment he considered putting his fist through the window.

No, he thought immediately, bad idea. He bounded back in two strides to the front door, and heaved back against the railing for momentum. From behind the clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk of Hamid Pasha’s steps rang in his ear. He rushed forward towards the door; no,
at
the door, aiming his right shoulder and the right side of his head at it.

He heard Hamid Pasha beginning to protest before everything went quiet, especially in his right ear; then he realised it had not gone quiet, but there was a distant, continuous buzz that he could hear, and in front of his eyes the figure of a man danced and waved from left to right. Oddly enough, the man was not standing on the ground. It seemed he was floating in the air like a guardian angel. Nagarajan almost smiled and waved back at him as he staggered and held himself steady against—against something. He looked down at what he was leaning against; yes, a chair. The door, he saw then, was lying flat against the floor.

‘Hai Allah,’ he heard someone say, and cleared his head with a violent shake. ‘Hai Allah!’ the voice exclaimed again.

And Nagarajan saw what it was that Hamid Pasha saw. The floating, waving angel now disappeared from his eyes and became a hanging, drifting man, shoulders hunched up to the neck and turning, slowly, turning, turning, turning... his shadow cast long and dark against the orange wall on the side.

With a leap Nagarajan was at the man’s legs, his arms wrapped around them and lifting him up. He felt a little chill wash through the body, and he yelled, ‘He is alive!’ Hamid Pasha had brought the chair to where he was and he was upon it in a flash, and out came his pocket-knife and set to work on the rope.

The man collapsed on Nagarajan’s shoulder. The Inspector checked for a pulse. It was there; it was weak, but it was there. Nagarajan murmured a prayer, then checked the back of the neck for cuts. All he felt was a rough bruise. ‘The light!’ he shouted. ‘Get a light!’ In a second a light came on. ‘Do you have brandy on you?’

‘I do not drink, miyan.’

Swearing, Nagarajan started slapping the cheeks of the boy. ‘Oye!’ he called out. ‘Oye!’ Over his shoulder he said, desperately, ‘CPR?’

He felt Hamid Pasha’s hand on his shoulder as he bent over the prostrate body. ‘Miyan,’ he said. ‘See. He is breathing.’

Nagarajan tore open the boy’s upper buttons and felt his chest. There was a beat. There was a heave. The lips parted once, and a second later, quivered.

‘He will live,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘Why do you not go down and get some sodas?’

Suddenly Nagarajan felt there was too much light. Everything in the room was sharply lit now. The table and the chair had evidently been pushed away to the corner. On the table-top a hurricane lantern stood, wick burnt halfway, now overshadowed by the harsh light of the mercury tube. The door lay in between the three of them, old and thin and rotting. A rusted lock hung by the bolt.

Up by the mercury tube Nagarajan saw a lizard scamper after an insect, trap it, chew on it. He felt a little normalcy return. He heard the whining of the patients downstairs, their irritable slapping at mosquitoes while they waited for their doctors. He heard the music for the movie’s first song float his way from Vijaya Talkies across the road. Down below, Shankar, in his dhaba, threw some eggs into a pan; Nagarajan smelled the frying onions and chilli.

He swallowed and cast another look at the boy. His breathing had become more regular; still slow, but regular. Hamid bhai was right. He would live. Nagarajan got off his knees and dusted himself. When he stepped out into the open and took a full breath of nightly breeze in his face he suddenly realised he was drenched in sweat.

‘Make mine a lemon-soda, miyan,’ Hamid Pasha said from inside. ‘And ask Shankar for a pinch of salt to go with it.’

Praveen was a good-looking chap, Nagarajan decided. Even with that puzzled, forlorn expression on his face, the dirt in his hair and on his hands, the crumpled, soiled clothes, his natural beauty shone through. His features were aquiline, his skin was light, and his jaw curved down from his temples to his chin in a perfect, smooth arc. His lips were thin, and even without ever having seen it Nagarajan knew that his smile would be beautiful. His eyes were dark, large and rounded, with delicate eyebrows above them.

He sure had the
looks
of a hero, Nagarajan reflected, and sipped at his soda. The three of them sat around the table, which Hamid Pasha had dragged back into the middle of the room by the door. Praveen and Nagarajan sat on a chair each while the older man leant against the table itself, half-sitting, half standing.

‘So I guess that did not work, huh?’ Praveen said, and though his voice was weak from his recent ordeal, Nagarajan heard the intrinsic richness of it.

‘It almost did,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘If we had been a little late in coming, by as little as five minutes...’

The boy sighed. ‘Maybe I would have deserved it. It would have been nice to die.’

‘But my boy,’ said Hamid Pasha, ‘why did you want to punish yourself so?’

Praveen stared at his bottle of soda and turned it around in his hands. ‘The guilt was getting too much. I was seeing blood on the walls... everywhere,’ and then he smiled, an open, inviting smile. ‘Like Lady Macbeth.’

‘I must tell you,’ Nagarajan said in an automatically cold, official voice, ‘whatever you say can and will be used against you... ‘

‘Oh, what do I care when she is gone? And all because of me, too.’

‘Did you kill her, miyan?’ Hamid Pasha asked softly.

Praveen looked straight at him and grinned; the same cynical, lopsided grin Nagarajan had seen on Lakshman’s countenance. He would never have believed that these two were brothers until now, when the grin broke out on Praveen’s face. ‘I did,’ he said simply.

Hamid Pasha narrowed his eyes into slits, and his lips protruded. Nagarajan knew what he was thinking. Did this boy really climb the wall and get into the compound, without anyone noticing, so that he could kill his grandmother? Was it possible? And if he did do it, what did he do it for?

‘But I guess you could never tell, could you? I mean, why do people kill themselves? Can one person ever take responsibility for another person killing themselves?’ He moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘Now that I think of it, I feel I have been a bit absurd. But then maybe I
am
responsible.’ He sighed. ‘Who can tell?’

‘You think your grandmother committed suicide,’ said Hamid Pasha quietly.

‘And you think she did so because of you?’ Nagarajan added.

‘I am
almost sure
that she killed herself because of me. Funny, that, because until this afternoon the very idea did not strike me—that I could have hurt her so much that she wanted to kill herself for it.’

‘And what happened this afternoon to give you that idea?’ Nagarajan saw Hamid Pasha bend forward as he asked that question.

‘Oh, that’s not important. Or maybe I am not the only one responsible for her death. Maybe I was only the last straw, you know? Maybe things pushed her closer and closer and I was the one who pushed her at the very end—over the edge, you know?’ He lifted his bottle of soda to his lips. ‘Do you think there is something to that theory?’

Hamid Pasha asked, ‘Do you?’

‘There might be. But I have no doubt I have
some
say in her death. I said some very nasty things to her that day.

I told her that I wished she was dead.’ His tongue came out to slide over his lips. ‘Thing is, I meant it—oh, yes, I meant it. And she knew I meant it. She probably saw it in my eyes. I saw it in hers.’

‘Why did you wish her dead, then?’

Praveen smiled faintly. ‘Even
that
may not have been a result of just one thing, you know. Things built up, one on top of another, and I got pushed over
my
edge. Say, maybe there
is
something to that theory.’

Hamid Pasha did not say anything. He waited for the boy to speak again. Praveen seemed to Nagarajan to be one of those people who spoke rarely, and when they did, meandered a bit—as though they were just blindly following their thoughts. It was best to let such people talk, only interrupting when the tangent went too wide off the mark.

‘I always did what she asked me to do,’ said Praveen. ‘She seemed to take a liking to me right from the start. I was her favourite grandson; though Kotesh Bava might have something to say about that. It was different with him. She loved him too, of course, but with him there is always a sense of awe, you know? He is one of those people who are good at everything they do.’

Once again there was no answer from Hamid Pasha; only a nod to acknowledge what Praveen had said, and a sip of his own soda.