The Moor's Last Sigh (38 page)

days of his Nadia Wadia intoxication, he would sometimes dance around the house, holding up, like a mask, a full-page colour photo of Nadia Wadia into which he had cut peep-holes, so that he could see the world through her eyes; and he would sing the latest movie hits in a girly falsetto voice.' What is under my choli?' he sang, jerking his torso suggestively. 'What is under my blouse?' One day, Dhirendra, driven mad by the interminability of his companion's fixation and also by the appalling quality of his voice, had yelled back, 'Tits! She's got tits under her fucking choli, what do you think? Bleddy party balloons!' But Sammy, unshaken, had gone on singing. 'Love,' he warbled. 'Love is what's under my blouse.' Now, however, his singing days seemed to be over. Little Dhiren ricocheted around the room, cooking and joking, doing his party tricks--handstands, backflips, contortions--trying to cheer Sammy up, even going so far as to sing the naughty blouse-song, setting aside his own resentments of Nadia Wadia, this pinup fiction who had materialised from nowhere and, in short order, ruined their lives. Little Dhiren was careful not to share the thought with Sammy, but Nadia Wadia was a female to whom he personally would willingly cause harm. Finally, Dhirendra found the word of power, the open-sesame, that restored animation to morose Sammy Hazare. He leapt up on to a table, posed like a little garden statue and spoke the occult syllables. 'RDX,' he announced. Divided loyalties had never been a problem for Sammy; had he not taken my father's money and spied on Mainduck for years? A poor man must make his way, and backing both sides is never a bad idea. No, divided loyalties were OK: but no loyalties at all? That was confusing. And this Nadia Wadia business had somehow broken all the Tin-man's bonds--to Fielding, to 'Hazare's XI' and the MA as a whole, to Abraham, and to me. Now he was playing for himself. And if he could not have her, why should anyone? And if his house was not to be permitted to stand, why should not other mansions and towers also crumble and fall? Yes, that was it. He knew secrets, and he could make bombs. These were his aptitudes, his remaining possibilities. 'I will do it,' he said aloud. Those who had hurt him would feel the weight of the Tin-man's hand. 'Stunter-Stuntess can guarantee,' Dhiren was saying. 'Grade A, and to old customers, discount price.' The husband-and-wife team of action-sequence specialists at the nearby film studio--purveyors of harmless flashes and bangs--were also, more privately, involved in enabling the real thing. Small fry they undoubtedly were, but for many years they had been the Tin-man's most reliable suppliers of gelignite, TNT, timers, detonators, fuses. But RDX explosive! Stunter-Stuntess must be going up in the world. For RDX, a person's pockets had to be deep, a person's contacts had to reach pretty high. The action-sequence couple must have been recruited by a bunch of heavy hitters. If RDX was being brought into Bombay, in sufficient quantities for the stuntists to be able to sell off a little on the side, there was serious trouble in the air. 'How much?' Sammy asked. 'Who knows?' cried Dhiren, capering. 'Enough horses for our hobby, that is certain.' 'I have gold saved,' said Sammy Hazare. 'Also, there is cash. You also are having a nest-egg.' 'An actor's life is short,' protested the dwarf. 'Will you let me starve in twilight years?' 'No twilight for us,' the Tin-man replied. 'Soon we will be fire, like the sun.' My 'brother' and I enjoyed no more lunches together. And for 'our' father, too, the years of feeding off the lifeblood of the country were almost over. My mother had already come a cropper. It was time for the paternal plunge. The story of the headlong fall of Abraham Zogoiby from the very pinnacle of Bombay life has become all too well-known; the speed and size of the crash ensured its notoriety. And from this sorry tale one name is entirely absent, while another name recurs in its chapters, time and time again. Absent: my name. The name of my father's only biological male child. Recurring: 'Adam Zogoiby'. Known before that as: 'Adam Braganza'. And before that: 'Aadam Sinai'. And before that? If, as the admirable sleuths of the press discovered and afterwards informed us, his biological parents were named 'Shiva' and 'Parvati', and considering his--forgive me for harping on them--really very large ears indeed, may I suggest 'Ganesh'? Though 'Dumbo'- or'Goofo', 'Mutto', 'Crooko'-or let's settle for'Sabu'--might be more appropriate in the case of the detestable Elephant Boy. So, that twenty-first century kid, that fast-track Infobahni, that arriviste crooning I-did-it-I-way, proved to be not only a scheming usurper, but a moron--who thought himself uncatchable, and therefore got caught with laughable ease. And a Jonah, too; dragged the whole shooting-match down with him. Yes, Adam's arrival in our family unleashed the chain-reaction that knocked the great magnate of Siodicorp off his high perch. Permit me, if you will, to recount, while keeping all traces of schadenfreude out of my voice, the principal highlights of the gigantic debacle of the family business. When the super-financier V. V. 'Crocodile' Nandy was arrested and arraigned on the extraordinary charge of bribing central government ministers to provide him with crore upon crore of public-exchequer funds, with which he actually intended to 'fix' the Bombay Stock Exchange itself, a simultaneous arrestee was the above-named--the so-called--'Shri Adam Zogoiby', who had allegedly been the 'bagman' in the affair, carrying suitcases containing huge sums of used, out-of-sequence banknotes to the private residences of several of the nation's most prominent men, and then, as he subtly put it in his evidence for the defence, 'accidentally forgetting' them there. Investigations into the wider activities of'Shri Adam Zogoiby' -carried out with great zeal by the police force, fraud squad and other appropriate agencies, under intense pressure from, among others, the highly embarrassed central government, and also the MA-controlled Bombay Municipal Corporation, which, in the words of the MA President, Mr Raman Fielding, demanded that 'the nest of vipers must be cleaned with Flit and Vim'--soon revealed his involvement with an even more colossal scandal. The news of the vast global fraud perpetrated by the chiefs of the Khazana Bank International, of the disappearance of its assets into so-called 'black holes', and of its alleged involvement with terrorist organisations and the large-scale misappropriation of fissile materials, delivery mechanisms and high-technology hard- and software was just beginning to reach the public's incredulous ears; and the name of Abraham Zogoiby's adopted son cropped up on a series of forged bills of lading that had been issued in connection with the ticklish affair of the smuggling of a stolen supercomputer from Japan to an unstated Middle Eastern location. As the Khazana Bank collapsed, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from the drivers of hypothecated taxi-cabs to the owners of newsagents and corner shops all over the NRI world found themselves bankrupted, details continued to emerge of the close involvement of Siodicorp's banking arm, the House of Cashondeliveri, with the crashed bank's corrupt principals, many of whom were languishing in British or American jails. Siodicorp stock went into free fall. Abraham--even Abraham--was all but wiped out. By the time the cash-for-armaments scandal broke, and the strong allegations regarding his personal involvement in organised crime brought him to court to face criminal charges including gangsterism, drug-smuggling, giant-scale 'black money' dealings and procuring, the empire he had built from the da Gama family's wealth had been smashed. Bombayites pointed at Cashondeliveri Tower in a sort of revolted awe and wondered when it would crack, like the House of Usher, and come toppling down to earth. In a panelled courtroom, my ninety-year-old father denied all charges. 'I am not here to participate in some masala-movie remake of The Godfather, like some made-in-India Bollywood Mogambo,' he said, standing defiantly erect, and smiling disarmingly, the same smile that his mother Flory had recognised years ago as the rictus of a desperate man. 'Ask anyone from Cochin to Bombay who is Abraham Zogoiby. They will tell you he is a respectable gentleman in the pepper-and-spices business. I say here from the depths of my soul: that is all I am at heart, all I have ever been. My whole life has been spent in the spice trade.' Bail was set at one crore of rupees, in spite of the prosecution's strenuous protests. 'One does not send one of our city's highest persons to the common lock-up until guilt is proved,' said Mr Justice Kachrawala, and Abraham bowed to the bench. There were still a few places into which his arm could reach. To make bail, the title deeds to the original spice-fields of the da Gama family had to be given in surety. But Abraham walked free, back to Elephanta, back to his dying Shangri-La. And sitting alone in a darkened office next to his garden in the sky, he came to the same decision that Sammy Hazare had made in his condemned Andheri shack: if he was to go down, he would do it with all guns blazing. On the radio and TV, Raman Fielding was crowing about the old man's fall. 'A pretty girl's face on TV will not save Zogoiby now,' he said, and then, astonishingly, burst into song. ' When they come big, then they fall hardia,' he croaked. 'Hardia, Nadia Wadia, hardia.' Whereupon Abraham made an unpleasant, conclusive noise and reached for the phone. Abraham made two telephone calls that night, and received just one. The phone company's records afterwards showed that the first call went to a number at one of the Falkland Road whorehouses controlled by the gang-boss known as 'Scar'. But there is no evidence that any women were sent to Abraham's office, or to his Malabar Hill residence. It seems his message was of another sort. Later that night--well after midnight--Dom Minto, now over a hundred years old, was Abraham's lone caller. There is no verbatim transcript of their conversation, but I have my father's account of it. Abraham said that Minto had not sounded his usual cantankerous, ebullient self. He was depressed, despondent, and spoke openly about death. 'Let it come! For me, all of existence has been a blue movie,' Minto reportedly stated. 'I have seen enough of what in human life is most filthy and obscene.' The next morning, the old detective was found dead at his desk. 'Foul play', said the investigating officer, Inspector Singh, 'is not suspected.' Abraham's second call was to me. At his request I arrived at the deserted Cashondeliveri Tower in the deep of the night and used my pass-key to enter and operate his private elevator. What he told me in his darkened room made me less certain than the Inspector about the nature of Dom Minto's demise. He confided that Sammy Hazare--apparently unwilling to be seen in the vicinity of Abraham's usual haunts--had visited Minto and sworn an oath on his mother's head that the death of Aurora Zogoiby had been a contract killing carried out by one Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite at the behest of Raman Fielding. 'But why?' I cried. Abraham's eyes glittered. 'I told you about your Mummyji, boy. Have a taste and then discard unfinished, was her policy in men as well as food. But with Mainduck she bit the wrong fruit. Motive was sexual. Sexual. Sexual... revenge.' I had never heard him sound so cruel. Obviously, the pain of Aurora's infidelity still twisted in his gut. The barbarising pain of having to talk about it to their son. 'Then how?' I needed to know. The answer, he told me, was a small hypodermic dart in the neck, of the size used to anaesthetise smaller animals--not elephants, but wild cats, perhaps. Fired from Chowpatty Beach during the madness of Ganpati, it made her head spin, and she fell. On to the tide-washed rocks. The waves must have swept the dart away; and in all that damage, nobody noticed--nobody was looking for--a tiny hole in the side of her neck. I had been in the VIP stand with Sammy and Fielding that day, I remembered; but Chhaggan could have been anywhere. Chhaggan, who, with Sammy, was the joint blow-pipe champion of Mainduck's indoor Olympiads. 'But this can't have been a blowpipe,' I thought aloud. 'Much too far. And shooting up as well.' Abraham shrugged. 'Then a dart-gun,' he said. 'Details are all in Sammy's deposition. Minto will bring it in the morning. You know,' he added, 'that it will not stand up in court.' 'It won't have to,' I answered him. This matter will not be decided by any jury or judge.' Minto died before he could bring Sammy's testimony to Abraham. The document was not found among his papers. Inspector Singh did not suspect foul play; but that was a matter for him. Me, I had work to do. Ancient, irrefutable imperatives had claimed me. Against all expectation, my mother's perturbed shade was hovering at my shoulder, crying havoc. Blood will have blood. Wash my body in my murderers' red fountains and let me R. I. P. Mother, I will. The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, 'fanatics', or, alternatively, 'devout liberators of the sacred site' (delete according to taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart with their bare hands, with their teeth, with the elemental power of what Sir V. Naipaul has approvingly called their 'awakening to history'. The police, as the press photographs showed, stood by and watched the forces of history do their history-obliterating work. Saffron flags were raised. There was much chanting of dhuns: 'Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram' &c. It was one of those moments best described as irreconcilable: both joyful and tragic, both authentic and spurious, both natural and manipulated. It opened doors and shut them. It was an end and a beginning. It was what Camoens da Gama had prophesied long ago: the coming of the Battering Ram. Nobody could even be sure, some commentators dared to point out, that the present-day town of Ayodhya in U. P. stood on the same site as the mythical Ayodhya, home of Lord Ram in the Ramayan. Nor was the notion of the existence there of Ram's birthplace, the Ramjanmabhoomi, an ancient tradition--it wasn't a hundred years old. It had actually been a Muslim worshipper at the old Babri mosque who had first claimed to see a vision of Lord Ram there, and so started the ball rolling; what could be a finer image of religious tolerance and plurality than that? After the vision, Muslims and Hindus had, for a time, shared the contested site without fuss... but to the devil with such old news! Who cared about those unhealthy, split hairs? The building had fallen. It was a time for consequences, not backward glances: for what-happened-next, not what might or
might not have gone before. What happened next: in Bombay, there was a nocturnal burglary at the Zogoiby Bequest. The thieves were swift and professional; the gallery's alarm system was revealed as hopelessly inadequate, and, in more than one zone, totally dysfunctional. Four paintings were taken, all belonging to the Moor cycle, and plainly pre-selected--one from each of the three major periods, and also the last, unfinished, but nevertheless supreme canvas, The Moor's Last Sigh. The curator, Dr Zeenat Vakil, tried in vain to persuade radio and TV stations to carry the story. Events at Ayodhya, and their bloody after-effects, swamped the airwaves. Had it not been for Raman Fielding, the loss of these national treasures would not have made the news at all. The MA boss, commenting on Doordarshan, linked the mosque's fall and the pictures' disappearance. 'When such alien artefacts disappear from India's holy soil, let no man mourn,' he said. 'If the new nation is to be born, there is much invader-history that may have to be erased.' So we were invaders now, were we? After two thousand years, we still did not belong, and indeed, were soon to be 'erased' -which 'cancellation' need not be followed by any expressions of regret, or grief. Mainduck's insult to Aurora's memory made it easier for me to carry out the deed upon which I was resolved. My assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though inspired by my mother's death, this was scarcely a recurrence of characteristics that had skipped a few generations! It might more accurately be termed a sort ofin-iaw inheritance; for had not match after match imported violence into the da Gama household? Epifania brought her murderous Menezes clan, and Carmen her lethal Lobos. And Abraham had had the killer instinct from the start, though he preferred to employ others to carry out his commands. Only my true-loving maternal grandparents, Camoens and Belle, were innocent of such a charge. My own amorous liaisons had scarcely been an improvement. I cast no slur upon sweet Dilly; but what of Uma, who deprived me of my mother's love by persuading her that I harboured indecent passions? What of Uma the would-be murderess, who only failed to kill me because of the head-banging intervention of slapstick comedy in a scene of grand guigno K But, after all, there is no need to lay the blame on forebears or lovers. My own career as a beater of men--my pulverising Hammer period--had its origins in a sport of nature, which had packed so much punching power into my otherwise powerless right hand. It is true that I had, thus far, never killed a man; but given the weight and extended length of some of the poundings I administered, that can only be put down to luck. If, in the matter of Raman Fielding, I took it upon myself to be judge, jury and executioner, it is because it was in my nature so to do. Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves. My hand, gentle reader, lacked sleight; but it knew what manner of thing it was. So, blood-lust was in my history, and it was in my bones. I did not waver in my decision for an instant; I would have vengeance--or die in the attempt. My thoughts had run constantly on dying of late. Here, at last, was a way of giving meaning to my otherwise feeble end. I realised with a kind of abstract surprise that I was ready to die, as long as Raman Fielding's corpse lay close at hand. So I had become a murdering fanatic, too. (Or a righteous avenger; take your pick.) Violence was violence, murder was murder, two wrongs did not make a right: these are truths of which I was fully cognisant. Also: by sinking to your adversary's level you lose the high ground. In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, justly enraged Muslims'/'fanatical killers' (once again, use your blue pencil as your heart dictates) smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and in Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, 'Who started it?' The lethal conjugations of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone justice. They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other's plagues. I do not exempt myself. I have been a man of violence for too long, and on the night after Raman Fielding insulted my mother on TV, I brutally put an end to his accursed life. And in so doing called a curse down upon my own. At night, the walls around Fielding's property were patrolled by eight paired teams of crack cadres working three-hour shifts; I knew most of their inner-circle nicknames. The gardens were protected by four throat-ripping Alsatians (Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Mankad and--as evidence of their owner's lack of prejudice--Azharuddin); these metamorphosed cricket stars came up to me to be caressed, and wagged happy tails. At the door to the house proper were further guards. I knew these thugs, too--a couple of young giants going by the names of Badmood and Sneezo--but they searched me from head to foot anyway. I was carrying no weapon; or, at any rate, no weapon that they could remove from my person. 'Id's lige old tibes today,' Sneezo, the younger, permanently bung-nosed and--perhaps in compensation--less tight-lipped of these friskers told me. 'The Tid-bad stobbed by earlier to bay his resbegds. I thig he was hobig to be tagen bag on, but the sgjbber is a tough-binded guy.' I said I was sorry to have missed Sammy; and how was old Five-in-a-Bite? 'He feld sorry for Hazare,' the young guard mumbled. 'They wend off dogether to ged drung.' His colleague smacked the back of his head and he fell silent. 'It's odly Habber,' he complained, squeezing his nose between thumb and forefinger, and blowing hard. Mucus sprayed in all directions. I backed hastily away. It was a stroke of luck, I knew, that Chhaggan was not on the premises. He had a sixth, even a seventh sense for trouble, and my chances of overcoming him as well as Fielding, and escaping without raising a general alarm, would have been nil. I had come expecting no better; this fortuitous absence gave me a chance, at least, of getting off the premises alive. The taciturn one, the head-smacker, Badmood, asked me my business. I repeated what I had said at the gates. 'For skipper's ears only.' Badmood looked displeased: 'No chance.' I made a face. 'Then it's on your head, when he finds out.' He gave in. 'Fortunate for you, skipper is working late on account of national happenings,' he said furiously. 'Wait on and I will enquire.' And after some moments he returned and jerked an enraged thumb towards the inner lair. Mainduck was working by the yellow light of a single Anglepoise lamp. His large bespectacled head was half-illuminated, half in darkness; the great bulk of his body merged with the night. Was he alone? Hard to be sure. 'Hammer, Hammer,' he croaked. 'And how have you come tonight? As your father's emissary, or a traitor to his fucked-up cause?' 'Messenger,' I said. He nodded. 'Then, deliver.' 'For your ears only,' I told him. 'Not for microphones.' Many years ago Fielding had spoken admiringly of the American President Nixon's decision to bug his own office. 'Guy had a sense of history,' he'd said. 'Guts, too. Everything on the record.' I'd pointed out that these tapes had helped to terminate his presidency. Fielding pooh-poohed the objection. 'What I say cannot undo me,' he proclaimed. 'My ideology is my fortune! And one day the kiddiwinks will study my statements at school.' Therefore: not for microphones. He grinned from ear to ear, looking, in his pool of light, more Cheshire Cat than frog. 'You remember too damn much, Hammer,' he chided me fondly. 'So come, come, my dearie. Whisper sweet nothings in my ear.' I had grown old, I worried as I walked over to him. Maybe the old KO punch had gone. Give me the strength, I prayed to nothing in particular: to Aurora's ghost, perhaps. One last time. Let me still have my hammer-blow. The green frog-phone stared up at me from his desk. God, I hated that phone. I bent towards Mainduck; who flung out his left hand, at high speed, caught me by the hair at the nape of my neck, and jammed my mouth into the left side of his head. Off-balance for a moment, I realised with some horror that my right hand, my only weapon, could no longer reach the target. But as I fell against the edge of the desk, my left hand--that same left hand which I had had to force myself, all my life, and against my nature, to learn how to use--collided, by chance, with the telephone. 'The message is from my mother,' I whispered, and smashed the green frog into his face. He made no sound. His fingers released my hair, but the frog-phone kept wanting to kiss him, so I kissed him with it, as hard as I could, then harder, and harder still, until the plastic splintered and the instrument began to come apart in my hand. 'Cheap fucking gimmick item,' I thought, and put it down. How Lord Ram slew the fair Sita's abductor, Ravan, King of Lanka: Still the dubious battle lasted, until Rama in his ire Wielded Brahma's deathful weapon flaming with celestial fire! Weapon which the Saint Agastya had unto the hero given, Winged as lightning dart of Indra, fatal as the bolt of heaven, Wrapped in smoke and flaming flashes, speeding from the circled bow, Pierced the iron heart of Ravan, laid the lifeless hero low... Voice of blessing from the bright sky fell on Raghu's valiant son, 'Champion of the true and righteous! now thy noble task is done!' How Achilles slew Hector, Patroclus' killer: Then answered Hector of the flashing helm, His strength all gone: 'I beg thee by thy life, Thy knees, thy parents, leave me not for dogs Of the Achaeans by the ships to eat... ' But scowling at him swift Achilles said: 'Do not entreat me, dog, by knees or parents. I only wish I had the heart and will To hack the flesh off thee and eat it raw, For all that thou hast done to me! there lives None who shall keep the dogs away from thee...... but dogs and birds shall eat thee utterly.' You see the difference. Where Ram had the use of a heavenly doomsday-machine, I had to make do with a telecommunicative frog. And, afterwards, received no heavenly words of congratulation for my deed. As for Achilles: I had neither his innard-munching savagery (so reminiscent, if I may say so, of Hind of Mecca, who gobbled the dead hero Hamza's heart) nor his poetic turn of phrase. The Achaeans' dogs, however, did have their local counterparts... ... After Ram killed Ravan he chivalrously arranged a lavish funeral for his fallen foe. Achilles, much the less gallant of these high heroes, tied Hector's corpse to his 'chariot-tail' and dragged him thrice round dead Patroclus's grave. As for me: not living in heroic times, I neither honoured nor desecrated my victim's body; my thoughts were for myself, my chances of survival and escape. After I had murdered Fielding I turned him in his chair, so that he faced away from the door (though he no longer had a face). I set his feet up on a bookshelf and folded his arms across his pulpy wounds, so that he seemed to have fallen asleep, exhausted by his labours. Then quickly, quietly, I searched for the recording machines -there would be two, to back each other up. They were easy enough to find. Fielding had never made a secret of his recording zeal, and his office cupboards--which were unlocked--revealed to me the spools whirling slowly, like dervishes, in the dark. I ripped out lengths of tape and stuffed them in my pockets. It was time to go. I left the room and closed the door with exaggerated care. 'Do not disturb,' I whispered to Badmood and Sneezo. 'Skipper's catching forty winks.' That held them for the moment, but would I have time to leave the property? I had visions of yells, whistles, shots, and four transmogrified cricketers, snarling loudly as they leapt for my throat. My feet began to hurry; I slowed them down, and then came to a halt. Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Mankad and Azharuddin came up and licked my good hand. I knelt and hugged them. Then I rose, left dogs and Mumbadevi statues behind me, went out through the gates, and got into the Mercedes-Benz I had taken from the Cashondeliveri Tower car-pool. As I drove away I wondered who would get to me first: the police, or Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite. On the whole, I would prefer the police. A second dead body, Mr Zogoiby. Careless. The slackfulness is terrific. There was an animal noise behind me, except that no animal ever roared so loud, and a giant's hand spun my car around, twice, and blew out my rear windows. The Murs'deez stalled, facing the wrong way. The sun had come out. The first thing I thought of was The Walrus and the Carpenter. 'The moon was shining sulkily,/Because she thought the sun/Had got no business to be there/After the day was done./"It's very rude of him," she said,/"To come and spoil the fun!" ' My second thought was that an aeroplane had crashed on the city. There were high flames now, and screams, and for the first time I realised that something had happened at the Fielding residence. I heard Sneeze's voice again: 'The Tid-bad stobbed by earlier to bay his resbegds.' His last respects. His sacked old warrior's respects. How had Sammy the bomber smuggled this device past the searching guards? I could come up with just one answer. Inside his metal limb. Which meant it had to be pretty small. No room for dynamite sticks in there. What then? Plastique, RDX, Semtex? 'Bravo, Sammy,' I thought. 'Miniaturisation, eh? Wah-wah. Only the best, latest stuff for Mainduck.' Who would not be giving anyone else the sack in a hurry. It occurred to me that I had murdered a dead man. Even though he had still been alive when I got to him, Sammy had beaten me to the knockout punch. It took me a few more moments to work out that there wouldn't be much left of Mainduck. Sammy was good enough to have made sure of that. It was quite possible, therefore, that I would not come under suspicion of having committed any crime at all. Though, as the last man to have seen Raman Fielding alive, I would no doubt have questions to answer. The car obediently started first time. The air was horrid with smoke and all-too-identifiable stenches. Many people were running. It was time to leave. As I reversed down the street I imagined I heard the barking of hungry dogs who had unexpectedly been thrown large chunks of meat, mostly still on the bone. That, and the flapping of vultures. 'Get out,' said Abraham Zogoiby. 'Do it pronto. And stay out.' It was my last walk with him in his aerial orchard. I had made my report about the fatal events in Bandra. 'So Hazare is a loose cannon,' my father said. 'Doesn't matter. Side-issue. Some