Murder in Mumbai
Authors: K. D. Calamur
A
DUTTON
GUILT
EDGED
MYSTERY
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, July 2012
Copyright © 2012 by K. D. Calamur
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARKâMARCA REGISTRADAISBN 978-1-101-58748-5
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidentzal.
For R. and A.
A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
Anyone who's lived in Mumbai
1
will understand this: You love it; you loathe it; you embrace it. In return, the cityâin all her splendor, in all her munificenceâmakes you hers.
Technically, Bombay shouldn't work. It's home to 14 million people, a creaking infrastructure, simmering tensions, and corruption. Yet, it remains cosmopolitan in spirit, mercantile in philosophy, optimistic in outlook. Unlike the rest of the country, it's unburdened by history. Caste, religion, and gender aren't barriers. It boasts of India's largest stock exchange, the most muscular film industry, the richest cricket team. It's at once New York and L.A. and Dickensian London. It's among the last of the world's great cities: raw and real, unhindered by finesse, bolstered by
jugaad,
2
and pulsing with what's only known as Mumbai Spirit. And it was in this city that I began my journalism career.
Bombay was different then, of course. No malls or multiplexes; no call centers or Porsche showrooms; no Westerners living or working. What it did have then, as now: characters. Venal politicians, crime bosses, hustlers, broke cops, migrant workers, and salarymen all seeking a place in the relentless, chaotic march toward success. Mumbai also had booksâeverywhere. There were established stores like Strand and the now-shuttered Lotus; there was Smoker's Corner hidden away in the old part of the city and A.H. Wheeler at the railway stations; and there were the
raddi
wallahs
3
and street-side bookshops in Fountain with collections carefully curated from the estates of old Parsis. It was among these that I discovered Pulp: Chandler and Hammett and James Hadley Chase and Edgar Wallace and countless others. So it's no exaggeration when I say that being the first to be published in a new imprint along with Mickey Spillane is a little like getting a guided tour of the moon with Neil Armstrong.
It's this city and those stories that planted the germ of an idea in my mind. The idea lingered and grewâslowly. Over the years, as Mumbai changed, for good and ill, the idea took shape and became the story you're about to read. The format adds to my excitement. The question is no longer “Are eBooks the future?” because that future's here. I hope Dutton's revival of its Guilt Edged Mysteries imprint reinvigorates the genre, produces a new stable of writers, attracts a new generation of readers, and inspires someone else half a world away.
I hope you enjoy
Murder in Mumbai
.
Krishnadev Calamur
Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries
www.duttonguiltedged.com
Prologue
The two men waited in their car looking at the rain come down in sheets. No one had anticipated the showers, which broke the spell of the oppressive summer. The men watched as cars snaked their way in a seemingly never-ending procession past St. Michael's Church, past Mahim Creek with its ever-present odor of rotten eggs. If you were flying over the city, this would be a marvelous sight: miles of cars illuminating the arteries that took weary workers home after a long day. But if you were one of the unfortunate souls stuck in the bedlam, calling home to say you'd be late, yet again, then there was nothing romantic about it. In fact, the two men in the car, longtime Mumbai residents, had long ago given up any romantic illusions about the first rains. True, it brought respite to the city, which was sweltering through every pore, but they recognized it for what it would soon do: flood the streets, wash away homes, stop trains, bring chaos.
Inside the car, there was piercing silence. Outside, anything but. People were still going home. The city was still adding new residents: human, canine, bovine, and even porcine; new additions that would be swallowed up by the belly of Bombay. But the two men were oblivious of all this; oblivious of the Siberian cranes that stopped just a mile up the road each year to escape the cold winters of their home; oblivious of Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, which bustled even at this hour, even in this rain. All they could think about was the content of the trunk and how they could dispose of it.
Neither man spoke. It was as if they couldn't bear the words that would pierce the silence. The last thing either wanted was to say something he'd regret. Not tonight. Tonight, they had to be quiet. One of them wanted to smoke, but knew the other hated the habit. Instead, he scoured his pockets for chewing gum. None was to be found. There wasn't supposed to be a body in the trunk. It was not supposed to be like this. The job was supposed to set them up for retirement: break in, take the electronics, leave. They had planned to pull the contents of the laptop: credit card numbers, business secrets, bank accounts and frequent-flier data, passwords and pins. They had a buyer in Dubai waiting to send them the rest of the money into an offshore account. Their routine, perfected over several jobs, had been foolproof. Until now. After watching their target for an eternity, they had ascertained her work habits, her daily schedule, her husband's infidelity and even the days of his assignations. And when they went to the apartment building, they had expected it to be a smooth job. Instead, they had a body stuffed in a bag lying in the trunk.
They were waiting for the traffic to ease so they could get rid of it. They couldn't take the risk of being spotted.
I wish I'd never taken the job
, thought the man riding shotgun. He'd been doing this a few years, and it was lucrative. But nothing was worth this kind of riskânothing. He found himself in a precarious position. It wasn't as if he could call the police and tell them that he had found a body while burglarizing an apartment. Questions would soon arise about what he was doing in the flat and his presence there was enough reason for him to be a suspect.
After all
, he thought,
who would believe a bloody thief?
The rain began to abate after what seemed like an eternity, though in fact it was only an hour. Pedestrians trotting through the glistening streets with umbrellas that did little good in this weather slowed down in relief. The cars began to move, their occupants eager for the comfort of hot chapatis, rice and dal, fried fish, a glass of scotch to ease away the worries of the day.
Traffic soon thinned to a trickle. The time was right. The two men got out of the car. The driver walked to the trunk and pulled out the large, unbearably heavy red Louis Vuitton suitcase. The passenger did his best to avoid the little rivulets running down the street, carrying with them all the bits of food, plastic, condoms, and rotting garbage they had encountered. It was as if the rains had washed the city's sins away, but left the most unappealing evidence of those misdeeds behind.
The driver dragged the bag to the overflowing rubbish heap. Now that the downpour was over, the dogs had returned, rummaging through the fetid trash for scraps of food. One of the dogs growled as they approached. The driver picked up a bottle from the heap and threw it with force. It hit the animal, which yelped and scrammed away. The other dogs moved to another part of the dump where they could scavenge undisturbed.
The passenger felt bile rise at the sight of the damp grime and the smell emanating from the decomposing rubbish. He wished he were somewhere else. He wished he hadn't taken this job. He wished he didn't have such a conspicuous bag.
Almost as if he read his thoughts, the driver spoke: “We should have used another bag.”
“You're right,” the other said.
“What if someone finds it?” The driver sounded worried, but the other man did not answer, though those were the same thoughts running through his mind.
They dug through the trash, swatting the flies and mosquitoes. Both looked around, but except for a few cars that drove straight past them, assuming them to be some of the city's countless ragpickers finding treasure in someone else's trash, there was nobody about. The two men concealed the bag under the trash and got back into the vehicle. If either was repulsed by the smell he had brought back, he didn't bring it up. The driver started the car, looked around carefully to see they hadn't been noticed, and drove away, just in time for the heavens to open up again.
*Â *Â *
Later, the newspapers said that it was the most rain that had fallen on the city in more than twenty years. Except for brief respite, it rained almost constantly for a week. One week of leaky roofs, blocked drains, closed schools, urchins playing in waist-deep water, cars submerged. But despite all the pain, the heat was broken, and the city fell in love once again with the monsoon.
The boys were all around twelve and for them the rain brought with it adventure. They gathered at daybreak after a long nightâlast night had been the worst; the storm before the calm. Most of the roofs of their squalid homes had leaks. They had spent much of last night covering them with plastic sheets, aware of the futility of the task but ignoring past experience. Just as they had anticipated, the sheets made little difference. They spent the rest of the time in the Sisyphean task of ferrying buckets to place under the leaks, periodically emptying them, starting over. The boys weren't sure when they fell asleep or even how long they had managed to rest, but when they awoke they were glad the rain had stopped, even gladder the sun was out. They stood around their makeshift playground, separated from the passing traffic by an imaginary line that seemed to protect them from errant drivers. The boys had bare feet, their rubber slippers utilized as stumps for their impromptu game of cricket. Everyone wanted to either bat or bowl. Fielding was never desired unless it meant you could be close in and be part of the action; being nearby also meant you could with sufficient bravado claim bat or ball. All this meant that the youngest boy, seven years old, got the job no one else wanted: to field at the far end. His job: to retrieve the ball on the rare occasion that it was hit toward the overflowing garbage dumpâoverflowing because the ragpickers who sifted through the rubbish with their bare hands, prospecting for recyclables, weren't due there until later in the day. The boys might have lived in slums and might have queued up every day to shit in a squalid shared public toilet or bathe by the train tracks, but by God, even they had standards, which began and ended at rummaging through the garbage heapâthere was, after all, an entire group of people in the abstruse caste system whose job it was to do just that. The little boy waited endlessly. The others seemed to have forgotten about him. He thought about running back home, but he knew that meant that his brother, who was now batting, would mock him mercilessly later. He began daydreaming, thinking of an age when he could claim the bat and ball and shine with both. He daydreamed of flying away from here, like a bird, and stretched out his arms. In his reverie, he didn't hear the cries of “Catch it” being shouted. He was whirling around like a dervish and then sensed someone nearby. When he looked up, he saw two others running toward him, their eyes fixed on the ball that was rocketing past them, their hands at the ready should they be able to dive and catch it. He froze and looked at them. “Catch it,” one of the others said. He ran toward the others and in his excitement tripped and fell on one of them who stumbled and hit the other, leading all three of them to collapse in a heap on the ground. He watched as the ball sailed past them and landed gently in the midst of the rubbish pile before rolling down to some invisible orifice.
“
Chootiya
,” the boys yelled. One of them clipped his head. He cowered and looked at his brother, who was laughing.
“You're a real
chootiya
,” he said.
“And you're all
badwas
.”
“Go get the ball or you'll have to pay for the next one.”
Buying a new one wasn't even an option so the boy looked at his only choice: climbing a mountain of rotting, stinking garbage. He looked at his brother.
“Go get it.”
Arse
, he thought.
He slowly walked toward the dump. The smell was overpowering. He had gotten used to the smell of fresh shit on the side of the roads every morning, but this was something that he just couldn't bear. Still, reluctantly, he climbed the dump, past bottles, plastic bags, items he didn't recognize, to the spot where he saw the ball land before it disappeared.
He pretended he was a mountaineer, making sure he didn't lose his footing. He was finally at the spot where the ball landed before it rolled down.
“See anything?” his brother asked.
He shook his head.
“Look closely,” one of the others shouted.
“I'm looking, right.”
He scanned the ground, straining his eyes to see the red ball. It was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, except this was a rubber ball in a garbage dump. Bottle after bottle after bag after bag after newspaper lay below him. And then he spotted something red sticking out.
“I think I see it,” he said, as he walked down carefully.
The other boys waited. Once the ball was retrieved, their game could continue and the little runt could continue fielding where he was or he could go home. Either way the story of him diving through trash would be a good one for years to come.
“Akhil,” the boy shouted to his older brother.
“What?”
“You guys better come here.”