Half of What I Say Read online

  ‘That’s unusual, giving a luxurious apartment rent-free to a mere acquaintance. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes. I’m an unusual woman.’

  The officer smiled. ‘So this somebody who told you he needed a place? A mutual friend? Would you mind sharing this person’s name?’

  ‘No.’

  Another smile. ‘My apologies. I’m asking multiple questions. Very well, one at a time. Who interceded on Dhasal-ji’s behalf ?’

  She pretended to ponder. She was going to relish her answer but in private. It wouldn’t do to make this man an enemy.

  ‘Actually afsar-sahib, this I do remember. It was General Dorabjee who told me about Dhasal-ji needing a place to stay. I think he said Durga Dhasal was a former teacher of his. Bastards? Brigadiers? Some such school. Dodo didn’t ask me. He happened to mention the problem and it struck me I could help. Dodo never refuses me anything, so how could I not help? I didn’t have to do much; Dhasal-ji furnished it, lived in it, took care of it. Should I call the General so that he can confirm I’m telling the truth?’

  The officer shook his head, raised a protesting hand. He looked unperturbed, but she could tell. She was an actress, of course she could tell. He hadn’t expected this particular answer.

  The officer was done with questions. He regretted the inconvenience, stressed the visit was an act of courtesy, nothing more. A search warrant had been issued for Dhasal-ji’s apartment—her apartment. Since there were several charges against the great man, the law required an investigation. They would investigate his circle of close friends, look into their works, their activities, make sure justice was done. Pure formality. The apartment would be returned to her as soon as possible. He prayed she would understand he was just doing his duty.

  Of course afsar-sahib, she said, smiling. Of course. And she thought: if terror is your duty, you do it well. The officer hesitated. His expression subtly relaxed, as if he was loosening an overly tight tie. She was familiar with that shift, observed it on her own face and those of her fellow actors a million times. He hadn’t entirely sold his soul.

  The officer’s departure brought with it a wave of depression. It was impossible to relax in life. Just when everything seemed under control, something would happen to upset all calculations. Maybe she should just pack her bags and go to Dubai or Seychelles, some such place.

  So now the Lokshakti had issued a search warrant? What would their investigation uncover? Durga had generated words as copiously as a cow generated dung. Who else would get dragged into the witch hunt?

  Mir Alam Mir was sure to be dragged in. Every project they’d ever done together with Durga would come under examination. There was no telling what mountains would be built from which molehills. Especially if a certain Urdu-loving poetic mole insisted on imagining it could build mountains.

  There was nowhere to run. She’d never be left in peace. She had properties, lawsuits, pending projects. And she simply couldn’t live anywhere else. She’d always possessed this truth but hadn’t known it until those four homesick months she’d spent shooting Mona Darling in England. The fussy English, the Harry Potter buildings, the depressing weather, the tiny-tidy landscapes, the dislocated NRIs: all very familiar, which also surprised strangers when she mentioned it, though their surprise was she hadn’t visited England before and not that she remembered the place without the affection she’d expected to feel whenever she’d contemplated visiting the country. If it hadn’t been for Mir’s nightly calls to read from his Coriolanus adaptation, she would’ve disintegrated entirely. She herself was safe. They wouldn’t dare touch her. Mir Alam Mir was a different matter. He would court martyrdom. For all his cowdung about being a world citizen and what not, he was Indian through and through. Not to mention a fool. Not to mention he loved her. Not to mention she loved him. So this Dhasal-investigation nonsense had to be shut down as quickly as possible. Perhaps the afsar-sahib had been speaking the truth and the investigation was only a formality. The Lokshakti had nothing to gain from wasting resources on a dead man. But still. How to make sure the dead stayed dead?

  Where was that Bindu? General Dorabjee had sent a card and flowers. At the very least he deserved a call. But first, she had to tell Sid to reshoot the scene.

  5

  JUDGING FROM MY RATHER EXTENSIVE STUDY OF DURGA DHASAL, I had expected his apartment to reveal someone who’d lived in many places but resided at none, not unlike the mathematical genius Paul Erdos who had moved from conference to conference carrying only a suitcase and an old mother. In short, I had expected a creature of situation, not place. I was wrong.

  Dhasal was no Erdos. Dhasal had lived well, even luxuriously. The deluxe furnishings of the 4-BHK flat in the Trocadéro Residency, an upscale apartment complex in Gurgaon, were all his. The actress Saya had made it clear she’d only been his landlady, not his interior decorator.

  In decreasing order by size, Dhasal had set up the apartment’s four rooms as a library, guest room, office room and main bedroom, respectively. The apartment had the hungry look of places that have more space than furniture. Rectangular objects seemed to float. The chairs didn’t have arms. There was space in and around everything. The high-end furniture made the high-ceilinged rooms seem even more gaunt. The kitchen had a Norcool cabinet fridge with light steel-gray panelling. I’d never seen one before, and opened and closed the fridge a few times before developing a dislike for it. It required too much bending. The fridge was well stocked even though most of the stuff had gone bad. I checked the expiry dates. All brought recently; Dhasal had expected to be around.

  He clearly had a taste for the Scandinavian style: hairless cylinders, gentle arcs, gaunt rectangles.

  And rugs. Lots of rugs.

  He’d liked oriental rugs. There were rugs everywhere, gorgeous splotches of warm colour that offset the chilly ambience of the eggshell-white walls and marble tiles.

  There was almost no art. No framed pictures of gods and goddesses, no Van Gogh reproductions, no tribal art. No paintings, no handicraft quilts, no wall accents, no useless knick-knacks of any kind. Dhasal must have picked up his aesthetic from the Swedish woman who’d saved him from the slums. A complex amount of money had been spent to effect a spartan simplicity. Yet the decor failed to impress my assistant Rathod:

  ‘This is a coffin.’

  I continued my walk, amused by Rathod’s allergic dismissal, its vehemence. Perhaps a romantic lay hidden beneath his macho posturing after all. I hoped not. One romantic on the team was more than enough.

  I knew what Tanaz would make of the apartment’s interior. She’d be with Rathod on this one. She too was a creature of situation, not place. Home was where we were, not where we were; that is, in our apartment, nothing was where it was supposed to be. This kind of room would make it difficult for the missus to abandon hair clips, coins, panties, socks, lipstick tubes, crumpled jeans. At least pick up the jeans! I picked up the mail on the floor but other than bills and junk mail, there was nothing personal. Some official mail, but equally insignificant. Mostly requests for some favour or the other, a few fan letters. His lack of mail wasn’t surprising. This was a man who had lived for conversation.

  ‘Not a family man, was he, our Durga-ji?’ I wasn’t really speaking to Rathod.

  ‘I don’t know, sir-ji. This is a waste of time.’

  ‘Welcome to police work.’

  ‘I’m a Lokshakti officer, not a police officer.’ Rathod was unable to hide his scowl.

  I shut the sidetable’s drawers, centered the bowl of wrapped chocolate nuggets that sat on top, and gestured towards the guest bedroom.

  ‘Collect anything that looks like a letter. It is quite thick. About thirty pages. Maybe it’s in a KKM courier packet or a Lokshakti manila envelope; you know the kind we use.’

  ‘I already searched the guest bedroom.’ Rathod’s scowl was getting to be familiar. ‘Nothing’s there. It’s useless.’

  I was in no mood for insubordination. ‘Do you have childr
en?’

  ‘Yes.’ Still sullen.

  ‘So you must be married?’

  I watched his eyes dart as he tried to figure out what I was getting at. He nodded finally.

  ‘Punjabi, isn’t she? Yes, I remember you telling me. Good, good. She must be an attractive girl. My type too, girls with big hips. She’s obedient, I’m sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir-ji. Sir-ji, I—’

  ‘You’re probably tired of fucking her in the ass at will. Is that why you’re trying mine for size?’

  ‘Sir-ji, if I have offended—’

  ‘Bhenchod, if you offend me, your balls will deliver that information to your brain personally. FedEx. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir-ji!’

  ‘Good. Now search the guest room.’

  As expected, far from demoralizing Rathod, the abuse boosted his spirits. Hindus worship strength. Shakti, not virtue, is what our thirty-three crore gods and goddesses are all about. Rathod had needed reassurance.

  Dhasal’s library had been his real home. The bookcases, arranged like the blocky segments of a ‘C’, left little room to manouevre in. Bridging the C’s pincer-gap was a battered wooden desk with a large Apple display. Behind the desk was a world map in which Russia was still the USSR. There were two leather club-chairs, the type that always reminded me of dressing gowns and sideburns. As if apologizing for these nods to comfort, the office chair was the standard Aeron misanthrope. I failed to see how Dhasal and his potbelly could have possibly fit into this contemporary corset.

  Circling the room, my attention was drawn to a large frame that had fallen face down. I picked it up. The front was just a large white sheet of paper, now torn, with a complex geometrical pattern. At first I thought it was a lovely fractal marked with an equally striking labyrinth of white dots, but when I peered closer, the continuous curve of the fractal resolved to tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny disjoint lines. The white dots were simply the gaps in between. At the lower right of the page was a label: ‘Closure’ followed by a few lines of formulae, and below that, a signature in Tamil. Oh. I’d thought it art but it was only computer-generated mathematics. I moved on. Near the window, next to one of the bookcases, was a planter stand with lathed cylindrical legs supporting two circular shelves. A matka had sat on the top shelf; the lower shelf supported a house plant. I pushed the broken matka into a corner with my foot. There were plants stashed all over the house. The plants appeared thirsty but otherwise in good condition. Dhasal had loved vegetation.

  And books. Obviously, Durga Dhasal had never met a book he hadn’t wanted to own. If we are what we read, the man must have been ninety percent woodpulp.

  The collection showed no rhyme or reason. It wasn’t clutter. Clutter is a pounce of postponed decisions. Dhasal could make decisions. But such odd decisions! William James’ works on pluralism and pragmatism sat next to Sherlock Holmes. Asimov’s oeuvre supported Benjamin Bennett’s Goethe As Woman. A translation of Pingali Surana’s Kalapurnadayamu was bookended by the first two Twilight books, and judging from the curry stains, all three seemed to have been snarfed at one go. Leaning against a file cabinet was a stack of some sixty M & B novels, all by Kavita Philip.

  Many books bore a rubber stamp: ‘This book belongs to:’ followed by Durga Dhasal’s signature. The stamped books, I supposed, were the ones he’d fingered.

  Effing breasts. My attention was caught by what seemed to be six octavo copies of the same book. Twelve effing breasts. All signed. Six copies of one book seemed self-indulgent. Three copies would have been quite enough. As 19th-century bookfiend Richard Herber explained, what was true of mistresses was also true of books: one volume for the drawing room, one for private consumption and one for lending out to friends. What was this book that Dhasal had loved so much? It turned out to be a novel. I was wrong about the effing breasts. It was Theodore Fontane’s Effi Briest. German Literature In Translation Series, Max Mueller Society. 224 pages. Effi Briest, the blurb claimed, was the tale of an impressionable young girl married to Baron Instetten, a much older, career-minded and rigidly virtuous man. A story that practically wrote itself.

  I worked my way through the room, marveling at Dhasal’s slutty mind. He even had a copy of my book. Squashed between Tom Tyler’s Ciferae: A Bestiary In Five Fingers and Vogel’s The Goose In Indian Literature and Art was my one published work: Ajaya. I unclenched my buttocks. Reckless young men sow wild oats; I had written a book I didn’t want to acknowledge. It had been published fifteen years ago by a now-defunct commie press in Mananthavady, located in Kerala’s picturesque Wayanad district.

  Using the Ramayana as a running example, my ninety-six-page volume held forth on the following question: does a story’s essence lie in its moral decisions? Three words would have sufficed: I don’t know.

  I riffled the poorly printed pages. Three hundred copies had been printed. I had destroyed all but fifty copies when I’d shut down the press. Books were hard to erase from the world. I scanned the cover page. No rubber stamp. It didn’t matter now, but I felt relieved Dhasal hadn’t read my book. And disappointed.

  I added my book to the stack I intended to steal and continued searching the room. I scanned every piece of paper I could find. It took me another hour to conclude my compromising letter wasn’t in the library. Fuck.

  It was obvious the office room was his PA’s office. But it could have been anyone’s office. Other than a photograph of Dhasal and his beaming secretary, it had no personal effects. I checked the file cabinets thoroughly. Nothing. Pinned to the cork board was a list of phone numbers for the dhobi, Smoking Joe’s pizza, the local grocer, his doctor, and in large font, presumably for Dhasal’s benefit, the number of Shabari Khargane, his PA.

  Shabari would have handled the letter I’d sent him. I had hoped to end my search here, but now I would have to pay her a visit.

  I heard sounds—moaning sounds—from the guest bedroom.

  ‘Rathod?’

  ‘Sir-ji, you got to see this.’

  Rathod had found a porno collection. The TV showed Risa Murakami going at it with two Japanese men. Set to one side was a sizeable stash of DVDs Rathod probably intended to flick.

  ‘Professor saala turned out to be a chuppa rustom.’ Rathod sounded like he wanted to shake Dhasal’s hand. ‘Very interesting collection sir-ji, real variety.’

  Who collected pornographic DVDs in the age of the internet? And why were they stashed in the guest bedroom and not safely hidden behind some books or in a carton? It was hard to believe Dhasal had watched porn.

  I checked the sidetable’s drawers. Napkins, batteries, a torch, a defunct remote, a few pencils. No letter. I sifted through the wastepaper basket. Food wrappers, the kind used to wrap sticky energy bars. Couple of coke cans. Tissue paper. No letter. Rathod handed me a few DVDs, beaming like a generous child for whom sharing doubled pleasure. Mia Lelani, Tabitha Cash, Raven; I recognized some of the pornstars but feigned indifference. The pornos were hidden in regular Hindi movie cases. Someone had wished to camouflage his tastes. Or her tastes. No, that was unlikely. Anyway, Shabari Khargane would be able to clarify who’d stayed in this room.

  Most men developed quite specific tastes when it came to porn. It quickly became all about midgets, leather, Noam Chomsky, whatever. What was this fellow’s fetish? If he had a fetish, he had a provider, and if we found the provider, we could find our horny toad.

  For the first time, I was glad to have Rathod with me. I clapped him on the back. ‘Take the lot. Watch them and tell me if you notice a pattern. What kind of sex did he like? A certain kind of women? Men? Any colour preferences? Or race: blacks, Chinese, that sort of thing. Can you do it? You can claim overtime.’

  ‘Yes, sir-ji!’ Rathod’s face tried to stay solemn. It wobbled. The wobble split into a grin, the grin became a smile, and then the laugh exploded out of him. He shook silently for a few seconds. ‘Yes, sir-ji. I’ll do research.’

  My cell began to vibrate. It was Dorabjee.
/>   ‘Vyas. Lad! Call me a lucky bastard!’

  ‘So the date went well?’

  For some reason, perhaps because I’d read Romeo & Juliet, Dorabjee seemed to think I was interested in his romantic sorties. I’d concluded that in his mind I was the equivalent of the King’s clown-advisor in Kalidasa’s plays. I was surprised he hadn’t yet ordered me to develop a pot belly, Brahmin’s tuft and a fondness for free sweets.

  ‘Bloody right it did. Saya’s simply divine, lad. Aphrodite herself. You know I’ve had a woodie for her ever since I saw her at the Republic Day parade, so last night was simply brilliant. By the way, you terrified her; what did you say to her?’

  ‘Nothing! She told me you’d told her to rent the apartment to Dhasal. After that, I did my best to set her at ease.’

  ‘Yes, that must have done it.’ He chortled. ‘I was trying to get Dhasal on board at the time, but the ungrateful bastard didn’t understand the meaning of quid pro quo. Anyway, I told the Divine Saya not to worry, yours truly would take care of said matter, you would be sternly reprimanded et cetera and then we chatted away like a house on fire. Jolly girl, underneath all that glam. Damn jolly girl. By the way, open a PFR on her lapdog. Struck me as a radical type.’

  ‘Lapdog?’

  ‘Mir Alam Mir. A poet and screenwriter. He hangs about her a lot. He’s a hijra, drives stick, if you know what I mean, so not a threat to me personally. But he’s probably a commie, like all these loafers. We’re going to have to deal with them sooner or later.’

  If I defended Mir Alam Mir that would only make Dorabjee even more determined to get rid of him. Perhaps distraction would work. But before I could drum up something, Dorabjee solved the problem for me.

  ‘Don’t pick him up just yet. I need to be in the lady’s good graces. I’m besotted Vyas, completely besotted. She has a soft corner for the hijra, seems he helped her out early in her career, get the violins; you know how tender-hearted fems are in these matters. Have you found your epistle? Tell me yes.’ ‘It’s not here. But I’ve one more lead, and if that fails, I’ll wrap this up.’