BLOOD RED SARI (24 page)
Authors: Ashok K Banker
‘He’s on his way. We’re closing tomorrow, so it’s the usual all-nighter.’ Shama Kidwai was the editor and her significant other Tyron Bose was the publisher/co-editor of
Pink
, an almost-fortnightly magazine that had once broken a major news story about government corruption in a telecom scam that made both of them famous for a while – and unemployable ever after. They had a hard time getting sponsors or advertising, and eked out a living on subscriptions and donations from well-wishers. They survived because Tyron came from a moneyed family with political connections and they ran the magazine out of a rented place in Daryaganj with the money he got from renting out his own bungalow in South Ex. to some MNC on a long-term lease. The lease brought in enough to cover expenses and they managed to survive from issue to issue. Enough of their stories got picked up and commented on and talked about for them to have some clout in Delhi hifi circles. Firebrand journalist–politician Arun Shourie had once called
Pink
‘the liberal conscience of India’. The line ran beneath their logo on the masthead, with a credit line at the bottom of the masthead.
Shama was referring to their usual all-nighter before closing an issue. That was a bit of luck, the fact that they were closing an issue the very next day. Just enough time to change the cover, maybe. Perhaps even redo the whole issue. But that was getting ahead of herself. First she had to get there and show them the documents and see what they made of the whole pile.
‘You guys sit tight, okay? I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Tell Tyron it’s big, really really big.’
‘Fuck me,’ Shama said. ‘Yeah, sure. We’ll be here. I’ll tell him. TC, TTYS.’ Shama was forty-four, with two teenage daughters, but she was still sixteen at heart, a perennial hippie.
Nachiketa disconnected the call and looked around. Where the hell were they? Was that Nirula’s?
Rajendra Powar raised both hands despairingly, taking them off the steering wheel. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t shout, madam. I go wrong way. Please to guide now.’
THE HAKKADI’S NAME WAS
Stanley Wu. He was in his early thirties, handsome in a glamorous Eurasian Tony Leung kind of way, dressed suavely in immaculately tailored suits, smoked herb cigarettes that lent him an old-world ambience without the tar and nicotine punishment of real tobacco, and was the last Chinese Indian tycoon in the country. Some said he ran the Triads from Kolkata and she guessed they might not be far from the truth. Others said that over the last hundred years, his family had helped the two hundred thousand Chinese Indians settled in Kolkata migrate farther west, to the US and UK and Europe, and in exchange they had ‘inherited’ all the properties and establishments the emigrants left behind in the subcontinent. His great-grandfather (or was it his great-great-grandfather?) had perfected the blending of Cantonese cooking with Indian ingredients and spices that came to be called ‘Hakka’ after the predominant clan of Chinese immigrants that first settled in India. Over time, by inheriting, buying out, or simply taking over establishments, the family had come to possess a chain of Hakka restaurants across Kolkata, then across India that became the spearhead of his family’s growth in fortunes. Adding the word ‘di’ to a Chinese name conveyed great respect, elevating the person thus titled to the stature of a great being or God. Hence, Hakka-di. There had been many inheritors of the wealth, the fortune, the power and the title over the last hundred-odd years, but they were all just ‘Hakkadi’ to the world.
Stanley was enough of a gentleman to rise when greeting Sheila. For a man of his stature there were no small or big people, only people or not-people. He had told her this the first time they met, when she expressed surprise at the same thing. If you didn’t fit Stanley Wu’s definition of a person, you didn’t exist, period. If he acknowledged you, he would give you his full attention. He was a man who either did or didn’t. There were no greys with him.
He bowed graciously to her and she bowed as well, feeling ridiculous in her faded jeans, muddied Converses and wrinkled tee shirt. Fine way to meet a billionaire.
He excused himself from the company without offering to introduce Sheila, for which she was grateful, although he didn’t do it out of consideration for her, she knew.
‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to a hostess, ‘go ahead, I will join you in a minute.’
Sheila turned her head to watch him go around an undulating curved wall and out of sight. She tried not to gawk at the celebrities in the party crowd, and to make herself as small as possible to avoid being noticed. She felt shabby and cheap in this environment. She shouldn’t have cared a damn, but damn it, she did. Why hadn’t she put on some lipstick at least before coming? Brushed her hair. Lined her eyes. Maybe slipped on a pair of earrings. Something to identify her as a woman.
Because you were more concerned about staying alive and that meant staying out of sight.
Yes, but damnit, she had gone to Shakespeare Bazaar to meet the professor. She could have picked up a few things right there. Would it have killed her?
Well, yeah, it might’ve!
She hadn’t known she would be seeing him at a swanky party for the Who’s Who of Kolkata high society. She had thought the address was an office in an under-construction building off the E.M. Bypass – that was what it had been the last time she had come to see him here. How was she supposed to know that the construction was done and
this
was going to be the scene?
She told her feminine side to shut up and followed the hostess. The woman’s tantalizing length of thigh played peekaboo beneath the generous slit as she led Sheila up the marble spiral staircase that she had passed earlier, by the elevators. She couldn’t help but be presented with an excellent close-up view of the woman’s bum clenching and unclenching beneath the body-hugging sheath, and took a professional interest in the view. Based on the gluteal definition and muscle form visible, Sheila concluded that the woman must do a lot of lunges and pullovers but not enough squats. Swimming would be good too, or maybe kickboxing. Still, she sniffed mentally, they weren’t that great, just better packaged. She resisted the urge to pat herself on the backside: she wasn’t in that bad shape herself. Just not dressed as showily.
They reached the top of what seemed like two or three storeys worth of winding spiral stairs and found themselves in a palace of white and gold with flourishes of emperor’s purple and empress red in the form of paintings and wall hangings and objets d’art. The ceiling was easily ten metres high and the entire floor was one vast open luxuriant jewel box encased in crystalline glass. It was breathtaking. Sheila was still staring when the hostess smiled and bowed and began descending the staircase. She took several moments just looking around, trying hard to be casual and failing.
She reacted with a start when Stanley Wu said, ‘You’ve been a bad girl, Sheila.’
She turned and saw that he had been standing by a pearl-encrusted bar, smoking, since before she had arrived. He must have another way to get here, a private way, because he had been heading in the direction opposite to the stairs that she had taken.
Reading her confusion, he gestured behind himself. ‘Private elevator. Runs through the whole building. On its own power generator, separate from the building, the grid, everything else.’
She felt her brows twitch. That made sense. A man like him would make sure his lift would run even if there was a war, a riot, the end of the world. ‘So this is what you used to call your “new project” back when we used to meet?’
He shrugged. ‘I told you I was getting into real estate.’
He gestured to a couch lined with what looked like panda fur, in black and white. ‘Please.’
She sat, he sat.
He offered her nothing, she asked for nothing.
He smoked and watched her.
She waited.
They sat that way for a long minute.
Finally he nodded. ‘Nice job, the way you handled the American shooters.’
That didn’t surprise her. It was the reason she had come to see him. ‘You heard?’
He gestured vaguely towards a wall. ‘I saw. CCTV footage grabbed from the KMRC cams.’
She realized he was indicating a wall where there must be a screen. It probably popped out or slid down when activated by remote. Right now, though, it was just a blank space on a pearl wall. ‘So the police have the whole thing on camera?’
He shook his head, smoke blurring his face. ‘Only me. I had the discs wiped. Nobody but I saw.’
‘How—’ she began, then remembered.
He watched her remember and smiled, nodding. ‘The Chinese built the railways across the world. Now, we own a few too.’
She knew he didn’t mean that literally. He didn’t actually own the KMRC. His name probably didn’t appear on any paperwork anywhere, nor did the names of any companies he owned. But somehow, through a series of shell companies or ghost entities or proxies and surrogates, he owned a piece of the metro. Enough to call it his own. Enough to have a CCTV flash drive’s contents dumped, then wiped. It had been another of his ‘new projects’ only a few years ago. She was impressed by how much he had achieved and how far he had come in that short time.
‘Who were they?’ she asked.
He smiled. ‘She comes to my house and interrogates me. My men would have anyone else chopped and minced just for that.’
Again he gestured with a slight nod, again she saw nothing.
She guessed he meant the men who were watching them, just out of sight, somehow positioned so they could see him, or her, or both, without being seen themselves.
She smiled back while using her peripheral vision and tactical knowledge to guess where they might be positioned, keeping her eyes on Stanley. ‘It’s the reason why I came to see you, Stanley Wu,’ she said.
He released a carefully timed burst of laughter and herb smoke, revealing a perfect pearly thirty-two, a pink tongue and a beautiful tapering throat. ‘She calls me by my name, informally! Even the chairman of Lehman Brothers doesn’t dare call me by that name. He says “Mr Stanley”, so careful to use the correct formal form for a Chinese. But you, you say “Stanley Wu” as if you are my relative … or my …?’ He gestured, inviting her to finish the sentence.
‘Your one-time fuck-buddy?’ she said casually. ‘Your dial-a-cunt? Your friend-with-a-benefit? Your pussy pal?’
He laughed full-throatedly, slapping both his thighs, shaking his head and torso vigorously like a character in a Jackie Chan movie whose automated suit had gone out of control. ‘She blasphemes in church! She is a potty-mouthed slut! She is a bad, bad girl. Oh, I love this woman.’
She got up and walked over to his couch, unbuttoning her shirt. She yanked the shirt out of her jeans and slipped it off her shoulders, reaching back and unhooking her bra. Her breasts spilled free, hot and sore from being kicked or punched the day before, she didn’t remember what. She kicked off her Converses, the lush white pile carpet feeling like she was walking on water. Then she unzipped the jeans, and peeled them off, the end of the left foot getting tangled in her toes, then coming free. She stood before him, presenting herself in just blue bikini briefs, pushing her groin forward until it almost touched his face. She could smell herself. She knew he could.
He had stopped laughing by then. He was watching her with a lingering smile and a light in his eyes. She had seen that light before. She liked that light.
‘Prove it,’ she said.
Slowly, delicately, almost reverentially, he peeled off the panties.
ANITA WAS IN DEEP
shit. Not figuratively – although that was true too – but literally. Emboldened by the kicking in of the sedative the zoo doctor had injected her with, she had decided to climb a wall. So long as she stayed on a walkway, they were bound to find her. She didn’t know how many there were, but judging from the torchlights waving around, there were enough to hunt her down and nail her ass. ‘Bitch!’ It came out louder than expected in the quiet of the zoo and she clapped a hand over her mouth. Somewhere to her left, in a row of cages with long vertical bars on the front, something growled. It occurred to her that she had just said the word aloud in an environment where it might be taken literally. ‘I meant myself,’ she clarified, even pointing at her own chest in the darkness. Yup, those sedatives had kicked in with a vengeance, no doubt about it.