BLOOD RED SARI (18 page)

9.2

ADVAITA SET UP CAMP
in Nachiketa’s room. Her cell phone rang constantly, both calls and messages, and she took every single call and replied to every single message, as well as called and sent out several dozen herself. The hospital staff protested more than once, but she intimidated the nurses and bullied the doctors into submission, forcing them to back off and leave her alone. Nachiketa wondered how she could concentrate on the documents at all, but after a while, Addy settled down and read with almost no interruptions, except for an occasional glance at her Blackberry when the message tone went off.

It was dark outside when she finished. She put down the last sheet and held her head in her hand for a moment, then sighed heavily and shook her head, as if trying to clear it.

‘What is it?’ Nachiketa asked. She had tried to glance at a few of the papers, but between her bandaged hands and the way her medication made her head swim, it was all she could do to stay conscious and concentrate at all. It frustrated her not to be able to go through the package herself, but she had had no choice in the matter. She missed Shonali bitterly, then felt very small, realizing that she was only thinking of herself.
Sure, you miss Shonali – you miss her not being here to help you go through those documents!
Still, even in that moment of selfish need, there was an element of genuine sadness. Numbed by pain medication and still in shock from the previous night’s events, she knew that she did sincerely miss her and part of what was driving her to figure out that damned package was Shonali’s death.
And Justicebitch too.
A life was a life, after all. And those bastards had murdered more than one as far as she was concerned. Powar had told her that all the puppies had died, save one, the eldest female, alpha of the litter. That poor thing had lost some fur and been singed by the fire, but had survived and been taken in by an animal shelter. Nachiketa had already had them contacted and asked to care for the pup until she was well enough to take it home.

Now, she looked at Advaita’s face and tried to read it.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘I could see there are a lot of figures and accounts statements and ownership deeds, but what does it all add up to?’

Advaita spread her large hands, her bangles jangling. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Come on, Addy,’ Nachiketa said impatiently. ‘You’re a B.Com, LLB, you must have some idea.’

Advaita sighed and put her hands heavily on her thighs. She got to her feet, slipping on the sandals she had kicked off hours earlier. One foot slipped in wrong and she had to nudge it against the leg of the hospital bed to get her foot all the way in. She walked to the window and raised the venetian blind. It clattered noisily. From the bed, all Nachiketa could see was the night sky and the deflected light of the sodium vapour street lamps, but when she had sat up earlier she had glimpsed Park Hotel. She knew Advaita must be looking at the lights of the traffic going by on nearby Park Street.

‘Nachos,’ Advaita said at last. ‘Who sent you that package?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nachiketa confessed. ‘I told you, it just arrived.’

‘And later this bastard called you and threatened to kill Shonali if you didn’t give it to him. This package?’ Advaita stabbed a silver-ringed finger at the envelope and papers piled haphazardly at the foot of Nachiketa’s bed. ‘You’re sure he meant
this
package?’

Nachiketa frowned, struggling to think. ‘What other package could he have meant? He said he was calling from the office. They had obviously torn the place apart searching for something already. If it had been there, they would have found it. The only reason they didn’t find this one was because it had fallen under the—’ Nachiketa stopped. ‘I’ve
told
you all this.’

‘Isn’t it a little convenient?’

‘Convenient? How?’ Nachiketa didn’t follow what Advaita was trying to say.

‘That the package they were searching for happened to have fallen under the table and even though they “tore the place apart”, as you say,’ Advaita crooked one finger to indicate quote marks, her bangles sliding down that raised forearm, ‘they still couldn’t find it?’

‘I don’t know, Addy. Shit happens. What are you driving at anyway?’

Advaita sighed and came over to the bed, sitting on the window side beside Nachiketa. ‘Nachos, don’t you find it a little bizarre? A strange package? Jat bastards? Shonali raped and killed? Your office set on fire?’

‘With me in it, don’t forget,’ Nachiketa reminded her. ‘They probably figured they would get rid of me and destroy the package together.’

‘Two birds with one stone, I get it,’ Advaita said. ‘What I don’t get is why. Why would strange Jat men go to such lengths? For what? Even for Delhi, even for Jat men, raping and killing isn’t an everyday thing, you know.’

‘Of course,’ Nachiketa said, puzzled and a little angry now. ‘These guys were obviously criminal elements. The man on the phone sounded really nasty.’

‘Yes, but still. Burning down a … challenged person in her office? Just to get rid of a few documents?’ Advaita shook her hairdo. ‘I don’t buy it, sweetie. It’s like something out of a Ram Gopal Varma film, a
bad
RGV film.’

‘Well, it happened,’ Nachiketa said, a little coldly. ‘Shonali’s dead. So is Justice and her pups. My office is down to ashes. It’s not a film set, you know.’

Advaita put her hand on Nachiketa’s thigh, squeezing. ‘Sweetie, I’m not trying to belittle your trauma. I know what you went through is terrible,
awful
. Whoever did this is a bloody motherfucking lauda. Shonali’s death is a tragedy. NDTV is doing a special
We the People
show on violence against women and they want us both to be on it. And HT asked if they could …’ She shook her head, long earrings swinging. ‘But we can talk about all that later. I’m just saying …’

Nachiketa was feeling frustrated now – and more than a little pissed off. ‘What
are
you saying, Addy? I don’t get what you’re saying. Can you spell it out clearly for me? I’m on painkillers, you know. My thinking is a little fuzzy. That’s why I asked
you
to look at those documents for me. What do they add up to? Is it another defence spending scam? Should we take it to Tarun? What
is
it?’

Advaita sighed again. Nachiketa was getting irritated with her sighing too.

Advaita leaned over Nachiketa, her breasts pressing against the recuperating woman’s feet, which of course had no sensation at all. But Nachiketa could feel the whole bed shift with Advaita’s weight. She was a heavy woman. She reached out and took hold of the pile of documents, pulling them over, then realized she was pulling them over Nachiketa’s feet and so picked them up and dumped them on her side of the bed. She sifted through and pulled out a sheet or three. She held it out in front of Nachiketa.

‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘Do you see this?’

Nachiketa tried to focus. The pages appeared to be a list of names of companies. She squinted, trying hard to make her eyes coordinate. ‘It’s a list of … corporates?’

‘NGOs,’ Advaita said. ‘Indian NGOs.’

‘So?’

‘So the Collective is on it. So is …’ she rattled off the names of a dozen NGOs that Nachiketa and she either worked with or whose managers they knew. She ran a long fingernail – painted black with silver dots – down the side of the sheets; they gave off a rasping papery sound. ‘These are most of the major NGOs in the country, and most of the minor ones too. Everyone I know is involved with one or more of these.’

Nachiketa shook her head slowly, still not understanding. ‘So what does the list indicate?’

Advaita picked up another paper, and another, holding the sheets up gingerly by the corners, as if touching them would dirty her hands. They trembled in the draft from the air-conditioning vent. ‘According to these documents, every single one of those NGOs is ultimately financed and controlled through a series of shell companies and other NGOs.’

She put down the pages and picked up another, continuing to pick up and drop papers to illustrate her point as she went on. ‘Ultimately, if you follow the financial trail back, these documents claim that all these NGOs, which make up most of the major charities in the country, are being financed by these hedge funds and corporate investment funds.’

Nachiketa’s head was beginning to throb, and so were her hands and the side of her neck and her cheek where she had been mauled by the flames. ‘You’ll have to spell it out for me, Addy. I still don’t understand. So all these NGOs are connected financially in some way. So?’

Advaita dropped all the papers back on the bed. ‘So if you believe these documents, all of them are being financed by the same interlinked investment funds in the US, Europe and Asia, and that these funds are basically using these NGOs to recycle their profits and launder them.’

Nachiketa lay back on the bed, her head swimming. She still didn’t get it. ‘So where are they getting their profits from, these funds? I mean, why do they need their profits laundered? Aren’t these funds legitimate?’

Advaita nodded slowly. ‘The funds are legit. But the source of their profits isn’t.’

She was about to continue when the door of the private room opened and a man came in.

9.3

THE ROOM WAS THE
way she remembered it. Though she’d been here about two years earlier, the room had looked this way even when she was a child. The same old-fashioned furniture, rolltop desk and carved wooden bed, rosewood side table and carved Queen Anne chairs, all worn from decades of use and badly in need of polish. It would have looked classy if well-maintained and viewed in a house in Alipore or Golf Links, but here, in this dingy, dimly lit room with the torn cotton mattress and cheap sheets and clothes lying higgledy piggledy, it only looked impoverished.

The professor was seated in his armchair, the one with the wooden slats that swivelled outwards so you could hook your feet on them and lie back. He was doing that now, dressed in the same old kurta–pyjama, an old clothbound book lying open on his lap, reading by the light of a single lamp in the corner. Probably reading one of the same old books she had always seen him reading, one of a set of Modern Library Classics as old as the furniture in the room. He looked older and thinner than ever, if such a thing were possible. How old was he now? She had no idea. But it had to be over ninety.

‘Sheila,’ he said. ‘Come, come.’

‘I have a taxi waiting down,’ she said. ‘I won’t stay long. I have to see the Hakkadi also tonight.’

He pursed his thin lips as he straightened his legs, lowering them slowly to the ground. ‘The Chinaman. Your trouble must be very bad, huh? Big trouble, aachey?’

She nodded slowly. ‘Big trouble.’ She held out the envelope. ‘This is the file I was talking about on the phone.’

He indicated the bed. She put it down on the corner of the bed, then sat beside it. She respected the professor too much to just leave like that. He was one of the last links she had to her mother’s family. He was her mother’s uncle, her matula mama, although she had always called him ‘professor’. He looked at the envelope and she could see the eagerness in his eyes. Even at this age, he relished a new puzzle, a challenge. That was why he chose to live here in this seedy rundown one-room, half-terrace flat on Shakespeare Bazaar, rereading his old classics and earning a rupee or two by tutoring a graduate student from time to time. ‘One of the great economic theorists of his time’,
The Telegraph
had called him –
Telegraph
London, not Kolkata, although the Kolkata
Telegraph
had printed a fair share of hyperbole about him as well over the years.
The Guardian
had blamed the commercialization of economics for the vanishing of the great economic theorists, naming him in the very brief list. But that had been twenty-some years ago. Now, he was just an old man who spent his last years rereading books and eating hidol-shidol because it was cheap and nourishing.

‘You could feed the whole country putimaachi,’ he had told her once. ‘Every Indian would be fed daily, we would all be healthier and better nourished, and we would be able to focus our energies on more important things. Like ending war and replacing the capital-free market with a more sustainable long-term system.’ She had been eleven at that time but had listened intently, absorbing every word. ‘Don’t take everything your matula mama says seriously,’ her mother had told her in the rickshaw on the way back home – this was back when rickshaws were still drawn by men, not motors, in some parts of Kolkata, and were cheaper than trams or buses. ‘He means well, but he thinks about economics so deeply, he forgets that there are other things in the world.’

He leaned forward, reaching for the envelope. She picked it up to hand it to him, then paused. He looked up at her, frowning, teeth bared because he was leaning so far forward, he was almost bent double. ‘Professor, men tried to kill me for this package,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you have these documents, don’t discuss this information with anybody. Do you understand?’

He grinned, showing the last seven or eight teeth he had left. ‘Who I will talk to, rey? You see any economic planning committee convening here?’