BLOOD RED SARI (25 page)

She was on a concrete wall now, lying face down on the top. The wall was really massive – probably two feet thick and about six feet high – which set off warning bells in her head. Whatever lived behind this wall must be a tough ammepanni. But the men chasing her were worse motherfuckers. She heaved herself over the side of the wall. Given a choice between men and predatory animals, she’d take her chances with animals any day. Using the crutch to support her descent, she relinquished hold slowly until both the crutch and her good foot were on solid ground. Then she began shambling through the darkness, away from the growing sounds of approaching men and footfalls. In moments, she was plunged into a darkness deeper than night, or so it seemed at first. And moments after that, her good foot plunged into a shin-deep pile of what felt and smelt like only one thing in God’s own country. She had played enough football in muddy Varkala fields in the rain as a schoolgirl to know that this wasn’t wet mud. She was in deep shit. Animal shit. She took another step, the ooze sucking at her lovingly, reluctant to let go.
Please, please stay. I promise I won’t be clingy.
After at least a half dozen steps, she realized this wasn’t just any deep shit, this was an entire fucking land mass composed entirely of compost. How turdilicious. Something sparked in her pain-exhaustion-and-drug-addled brain and she found the words of an old poem springing to mind, one she had discovered with …
who else?
Lalima, and liked the sound of so much, she had gone around reciting it every time a boy was mean to her or just plain
boyish
. It was a way of saying ‘Fuck you!’ to boys and men, of slut-walking through their world, of raising her feminine voice deliberately to match and outmatch their loud masculine tones. There was something about this poem that was so deliciously offensive without actually saying anything that she remembered every single line word-perfect.

‘Call the roller of big cigars,’ she said now, wading through her private shit field, ‘the muscular one, and bid him whip/ In kitchen cups concupiscent turds.’ The original poem said ‘curds’, of course, but she had changed it just now – it was that play on words that had brought the poem to mind. She took a moment to grin in the darkness at that witticism, disgusting though it was –
but then again, so is life sometimes, Lalima, isn’t it?
– and wondering what creature produced offal in such copious quantities and had a fondness for depositing it in the same spot each time. Somewhat like a capitalist free market wealth-builder, building a bigger pile and relishing the aroma of sweet shit each morning. Man! I love the stench of crap in the morning, ain’t free markets great? ‘Let the wenches dawdle in such dress/ As they are used to wear, and let the boys/ Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers/ Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’

She was loud now, really loud. Loud enough to be heard across the whole habitat, for sure, probably even beyond that wall no more than a couple dozen yards behind her, quite likely loud enough to be heard across half the fucking Thiruvananthapuram Zoo, and she didn’t give a damn. If anything, she began reciting louder, at the top of her voice, as if challenging God in His Heaven to do his worst.

Send my brothers in to rape and beat me when I was fifteen?

Why not! They’re good Christian boys!

Force me to choose between staying and enduring their nightly rapes and beatings and become their bitch–whore or run away from home and eke out a living any which way I could in a city that considers lesbian minority girls to be a blot on society?

Sure, Father dearest, I’m just a perverted Christian dyke, why don’t you make me suffer some more!

Take my best friend Lalima, the sweetest, most god-fearing, humanity-loving person that ever lived, and kill her for godknowswhat reason?

Of course, because every bloody sundae needs a bright red cherry on top to make the Sabbath Special complete!

She was out of the shit pit now and moving across solid ground, but it was still hard going in the darkness. She stumbled more than once, almost fell but caught herself and kept going somehow, anyhow. All she knew was that she had to keep going, to get away from them, make them chase her if they wanted to get her, make them work for it, damnit. She had no illusions anymore. She had been up shit creek enough times – though not as literally as tonight – to know when things were beyond salvaging. This time she was going to bite the big one. She was going to buy the farm. Kick the bucket.
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, a hole in the bucket …

‘Take from the dresser of deal,’ she yelled, raising her fist in the air as she hobbled fast enough to qualify for a Special Olympic event. ‘Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet/ On which she embroidered fantails once/ And spread it so as to cover her face/ If her horny feet protrude, they come/ To show how cold she is, and dumb.’

‘Lalima’s dead,’ she whispered in the middle of the second, and last, verse. ‘She’s dead, and these bastards killed her. Fucking bitch!’

She could hear voices behind her now, sounds of men jumping the same wall, their feet thudding as they landed inside the animal habitat. She didn’t look back. She had come too far now. There was no turning back.
You killed your brother, Christ will judge you for it,
her mother’s blotched face raged at her, swimming out of the darkness ahead. What had that fucking doctor given her anyway? LSD? She hobbled on, feeling the pain return to her broken foot like the zombified shambling corpse of a long-loved friend.
Chakkare,
Lalima said, dressed in the same sari she had worn the last time Anita had seen her, two days before she had left Varkala.
Chakkare, come to me, let’s go down to the beach. It’s Papanasam.
It was Lalima’s first sari, sign that she was a young woman now, no more a girl, a beautiful hand-woven Balarampuram sari, deep red in colour. Blood red. Symbolizing the maturation of a young woman, her coming of age.

‘Let the lamp affix its beam,’ Anita cried, loud enough to be heard across Kerala. ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream!’

If God really was residing in His Own Country and happened to be visiting at that moment, he didn’t answer.

But something else did. Several somethings.

13.2

PINK’S
OFFICES WERE A
hive of activity. There were more young men and women in indigo blue jeans and dark coloured jackets coming and going than at a St. Stephen’s literary group meet. Nachiketa was taken aback at first, then processed it. ‘Must be some internship thing,’ she said, mostly for her own benefit. Rajendra Powar was pushing her wheelchair and wasn’t really listening. He manoeuvred her clumsily up the entrance of the three-storey building and somehow managed to get her into the lift without any major mishap. She was glad she had kept this spare chair in the dicky of her car all this while, just in case. Today was a bloody just-in-case day through and through, that was for sure.

Surprisingly nobody really paid much attention to her – the woman in the wheelchair with blood and urine all over her and bandages on her hands – or to the hulking Jat with matching bandages around his head and hands. Glancing at herself and Powar in the mirror of the cramped old cage lift, she saw that the two of them made quite a sight. Wheeling her through into the office, guided by her directions, Powar managed to improve his technique slightly, which impressed her. The man had actually learnt how to wheel someone around in just a few minutes. She had friends who had kept banging her elbows and knees for weeks. Maybe all Jat men weren’t assholes, after all; just the ones from that colony in GK-II.

And the bastards who did that to Shonali.

Except …

She was no longer certain they had been Jats.

Well, maybe the guy who called her had been a Jat but not the people behind this whole mess. There was something else going on here, something non-Jatty that she was still trying to figure out. The call from that woman in Kerala …
Anita?
had helped put a few things in perspective. Just knowing that Lalima had sent her the package had helped. But she needed some more brainpower focused on this problem. And
Pink
was the best brains trust she had access to right now.

She steered her own brain back on track as she caught sight of the familiar glass-encased cabin at the far end of the office. The whole top floor of the building was just one big open space, the kind of media office one saw in old Hollywood movies. Desks littered with files and papers – and laptops, of course. Shama and Tyron occupied a large cabin at the end, with glass walls as befitted their ‘open’ policy. But from the looks of it, they were moving. The office was bustling with young men and women in dark jackets and blue jeans, carrying boxes of papers and files out. And Shama and Tyron themselves appeared to be in some kind of meeting with a bunch of people in dark suits. What was going on? Had they finally lost the last of their financing? Were they being shut down for non-payment of dues? Those dudes and dudettes looked like bankers. Even the young men and women carrying stuff out seemed internship or postmaster’s age. The other thing was, all the young south Delhi Golf Links post-grad-types were carrying identical banker’s boxes, the kind made of heavy corrugated cardboard with cut-out holes for handles on either end. And all the banker’s boxes had the same logo on all sides. She recognized the logo as belonging to a major MNC accounting firm, the one that had taken top dog spot after Arthur Anderson’s bright star had waned in the wake of the post-Enron post-sub-prime double whammy. The odour of MBA finance degrees was so thick in the room, she could barely breathe.

She was stopped by a lady in a suit-and-skirt, a combination she had always hated and which, for some reason, always reminded her of FBI agents in B-grade action serials on a TV channel, one of those where the channel logo and English subtitles (for English serials) seemed to occupy most of the screen’s real estate. The lady in question was a dark brunette with lovely brown eyes and had about ten years on the post-grad types milling about her. She was quite lovely, actually, and when she saw Nachiketa, she smiled and Nachiketa smiled back at once, instinctively, like this was just a regular day and she was a regular visitor here on usual business.

‘Hello,’ she said in a distinct European accent that for some reason reminded Nachiketa instantly of the man who had come into her hospital room only a couple of hours ago, looking to kill her. Nachiketa’s smile slipped off and fell to the floor like a piece of dropped cutlery. ‘You must be Nachiketa Shroff?’

‘Er, yes,’ Nachiketa said, even more chilled by the similarity in the pronunciation of her name.
Natch-ee-quetta Schrauff?
The way he had said it would probably haunt her forever … or at least as long as she lived, which at the current rate, wasn’t expected to be very long. ‘Shama and Ty are expecting me.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the lady in the FBI-ish suit said, still smiling. She said something softly to the young groupies – adoring of and awestruck by her – and they dispersed reluctantly but efficiently. That left the woman alone with Nachiketa and Powar in this part of the office, Nachiketa realized. For some reason, the day’s events had made her hyper-aware of every detail of everything happening around her. She supposed near-death violent encounters had that effect. That, and the fact that she was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘I have heard so much about you,’ said the European woman. ‘I am an admirer of your work. You are an inspiration to women in law everywhere.’

She looked down at Nachiketa’s legs as she said that, which implied that she was praising Nachiketa’s ability to overcome her physical handicap and still achieve all that she had as a lawyer. Somehow, that didn’t make Nachiketa feel very loved. She didn’t like people who patronized her. Either she was a lawyer who had done her bit, or she wasn’t. The fact that she was in a wheelchair for life, or a woman, or both, were really beside the point as far as her achievements were concerned. Unless this was a self-empowerment seminar, which it wasn’t.

‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ Nachiketa began with less than good humour, still trying to be polite. ‘I don’t even know your name, Miss …’

‘Kylliki Kolehmainen,’ she replied, pronouncing it in a way Nachiketa could never hope to pronounce without a year of language lessons reinforced with rigorous incarceration.

‘Um,’ Nachiketa said, momentarily at a loss. This was usually the moment when the person smiled and proffered a more easily pronounceable alternative. ‘Can I call you … Klickie?’

The woman’s attractive face lost some of its beauty. ‘You may not. In Finland, we are very proud of our names. If you wish to continue living in a global economy, you must learn to pronounce such names.’

Nachiketa didn’t know whether to smile disarmingly or just tell her to go fly a Finnish kite up a fabulous fjord. She settled for trying to be civil. She had enough enemies already today. ‘Look, ma’am, I really don’t have time to sit and discuss international linguistic geopolitics. I’m here to see my old friends Shama and Tyron on urgent business.’ She used her elbow to nudge Rajendra Powar who moved the wheelchair an inch or two forward, preparing to roll by this hardass Nordic female once she moved her iron butt.