BLOOD RED SARI (7 page)

She had won!

Everything!

They would have to pay their entire official ‘white’ fortune to her now, even if they still had unofficial ‘black’ assets tucked away. The resulting public shame and community embarrassment would be even more expensive, because in their Ahmedabadi sub-caste, if dowry murder by itself was not considered a blot on a family’s reputation, financial loss certainly was. For them to have been defeated in open court by her, the ‘pagli’, the mad daughter-in-law, a woman who had dared to go up against the might of the community, was the ultimate humiliation. It would blacken the Shah name forever. They would be the laughing (sniggering) stock of the community and of Ahmedabad at large.

She had won!

Nachiketa spun her wheelchair around in a dizzying circle, startling the lawyers – waiting for their matter to be called next – standing behind her, and pumped her fist in the air, throwing her head back, tossing her hair off her face, and yelling to the packed courtroom: ‘Yes!’

3.3

IT WAS PAST NINE
that night when Sheila returned to the gym. The building was in darkness and neither Jiteshkaku nor the night watchmen were anywhere in sight. She assumed they had simply walked away rather than get involved in a possibly sticky political situation. Politics is a life-or-death matter in West Bengal, even in this second decade of the 21st century. And if there was one word that terrified people more than even the dreaded T-word – which denoted terror and its associated activites – it was the mighty M-word: Maoism and its various manifestations. Maoism is to India what the Irish ‘troubles’ had been to Britain in the last century. If she had had any doubts this morning, she had no doubt at all now: she was up against the dreaded might of the Maoists, albeit their most genial public face, the CPI (M), Communist Party of India (Maoist). But the genial party face was just the front for the hydra-heads of the biggest grassroots-level violent armed rebellion India has faced in its history. And if she didn’t lie back and take it now, the main body would rear up and crush her like a mite. That much had been made clear to her this day itself.

She stood for a moment on the gym floor, letting the events of the past several hours sink in. She had spent the whole day running from one bureaucratic office to the other before finally ending up back in front of the same asshole, Raghuvendra Choudhry, who had laughed uproariously when she entered his cabin, and had then proceeded to lay out the facts of the entire affair. She had still not absorbed everything he had said, and that was why she had returned here – to try and make sense of the whole mess. If things went badly for her – and by today’s reckoning, they had already hung a sharp turn past Fucked and were well on their way to Totally Fucked via that picturesque old detour Royally Fucked – then she would probably lose the gym altogether. She had had to come back if only to try and figure out how things had gone pear-shaped so suddenly.

The glass windows let in enough ambient light to illuminate the outlines of the equipment. Without people working out, without the constant ambient chatter of voices talking and weights clinking, without the bright lights, pounding music and plasma screens flashing music videos and Bengali soaps, the gym was nothing more than a graveyard of hard-core branded tombstones.
She’s Here
had been proud of the fact that it was the first gym in the neighbourhood to stay open eighteen hours a day, and was shut only between midnight and 6 a.m. Situated on the edge of Sector V, Salt Lake City’s IT hub, it drew a number of members who worked odd shifts and liked to workout immediately before or after.

Sheila herself had grown accustomed to staying around till closing time, and even kept a cot, TV set and bookshelf in her office where she had begun routinely spending the night several times a week of late. Her flat in Sector I wasn’t that far, especially with the roads being good and the traffic in Salt Lake City being minimal at night, but she found the still, empty flat in a dull residential-only neighbourhood boring after the vibrant hubbub of the gym. Besides, she couldn’t cook to save her life, apart from the fact that eating alone only underlined the loneliness of her private life. She enjoyed eating in the locker room at night with whichever trainers and staff were on their dinner break, catching up on their personal updates, local gossip, or just chit-chatting and kidding around. At times they would discuss sexual matters and all the women’s voices would grow hushed until a new arrival entered and enquired quizzically if there was a séance in progress, which comment would be greeted by embarrassed peals of laughter. It was during these sessions too that Sheila learnt what was in fashion and what was not, which were the best places to shop for cheap accessories, or knock-off winter wear from Tibetan immigrants, cheap Chinese electronics on the grey markets, and even the latest Sabyasachi formalwear worn on the ramp by the season’s reigning supermodel. On one occasion her staff, egged on by a member who owned a beauty salon, had even attempted a makeover for Sheila. She had run laughing from the room when she realized they intended to turn her into a replica of the current Bengali actress who had recently scored a major hit in Bollywood; she had locked herself in the toilet and they had banged on the door of the stall and attempted to coax and cajole her out unsuccessfully for the next half hour.

She smiled now, remembering that horseplay. After her workout, that was her next favourite part of the day. After the last members had left, she would oversee the closing up, wave goodbye to the departing staff, and let the night watchmen fill their water bottles from the water cooler before locking the glass reception doors from the inside and retiring to her office. She would watch TV for a while if there was something on she was following – she had started to enjoy a couple of Bangla soaps of late – or read a book till she fell asleep. There were days she considered giving up her apartment and simply staying at the office. But she retained the lease on the outside chance that she would have a relationship again; one that lasted more than the three-week average of her past relationships. Until then, she felt more at home sleeping at the gym, and if that was pathetic, so be it.

Now, she sat on the cushioned seat of a lat-pulldown unit, surrounded by the ghostly shapes and silhouettes of the machines that were her livelihood, and realized just how good the past couple of years had been. Perhaps the best ones of her life, barring maybe those few years of middle childhood back in Daman when her mother was still around and before her father had been transferred to Mumbai and begun doing undercover work and everything had fallen to pieces. Now her life was beginning to crumble again, and though she was a grown woman now, there seemed to be almost nothing she could do to tackle the situation.

There’s always something you can do. Always.

Yeah, sure.

The roots of her present predicament lay not in the superficial municipal licensing laws and regulations she had allegedly violated, as today’s notification listed out, but with a case she’d worked on several years ago, back in Dakshineshwar. At least, it had ended in Dakshineshwar. The case had begun in Assam where she had been hired by a very eminent north-eastern politician, ex-chief minister of Assam, now a wealthy industrialist and head of the party’s north-east office, to find and retrieve his runaway seventeen-year-old daughter. Sheila had tracked the girl through the region for a month, finally locating her at Dakshineshwar in east Kolkata where she found her living in a contented same-sex relationship with a woman boxer of Bangladeshi origin. She had got to know both young women better and soon realized that running away from home had been the smartest thing the young girl had done in her short life. The father was knee-deep in dirty political dealings and underworld activities, and was that certain noxious type of Indian male whose one-sided sense of morality had frozen fast around the time that Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to whom same-sex relationships were a gross aberration, incomprehensible and unacceptable under any circumstance. What made the situation even worse was the fact that the young woman boxer his daughter had chosen to leave him for happened to be a Bangladeshi Muslim. Sheila knew that once she reported back to him that his precious only child was spending her nights in bed with a lesbian Muslim Bangladeshi, if the bastard survived the shock, he would almost certainly want the other woman killed on the spot. He would then force the daughter into marriage with a suitable boy of his choosing, no doubt managing to find an alliance that furthered his own political and business interests at the same time, and that would be that. Sheila had done her share of bad things and had seen worse done, including some done to her. She had no intention of being part of the summary justice that the father would undoubtedly mete out to his daughter and her lesbian lover once he came to know of the truth.

Sheila made her choice. The daughter was five weeks shy of turning eighteen and becoming a legal major under Indian law. Sheila called Shillong and told the father’s secretary that the daughter had gone to Pondicherry with a boy. Shortly after, she had gone down the east coast herself in hot pursuit, sending back periodical updates and increasingly optimistic reports as she apparently narrowed the chase. Once the daughter was legally eighteen, Sheila abruptly reported back to the father’s sprawling Shillong tea estate mansion that the girl was not in Pondicherry and had probably changed her name to marry a man from another community, perhaps even departing the country for foreign shores under the new name.

The father had ranted and raved and refused to pay her the last part of her fee, which Sheila hadn’t given a damn about; beyond that, there wasn’t much more he could do. But Sheila knew that the father suspected, and the secretary was near certain that she had played them. In truth, the daughter
had
changed her name and religion – but she had converted to Islam, which they weren’t capable of even dreaming of, so they never did track her down despite their subsequent efforts with other investigators. But over time, they had learnt enough through their independent enquiries to know that Sheila had led them up the garden path and, quite naturally, they had borne her a blood-grudge the size of a shopping mall.

Now, it was payback time. She had learnt today that the paan-chewing feudal-age bureaucrat who had strolled into her gym and shut her down today was the nephew of the politbureau chief of the eastern division of the CPI (M). And that gent was married to the sister of none other than the same ex-chief minister-turned-aggrieved-father and Sheila Ray’s former client. What was more, the secretary of that aggrieved father was now in Kolkata heading the group’s new thrust into realty development and IT. He had moved here from Shillong quite recently, less than a month ago. As it appeared, he had wasted no time in settling the score with Sheila and he had all the power and weight of his employer’s considerable political and allied network to do to her as he pleased.

There was still one way she could appease them and be spared complete ruin. The nephew, aka Raghuvendra Choudhry, assistant ward commissioner, KMC, had spelt it out to her in no uncertain terms: if she could lead them to the long-lost daughter even now, she would be spared. All she had to do was write down the address on a chit of paper. Email it. Fax it. Text it. Write it on a pair of pink panties and drop it from a passing Kolkata metro train. Just tell them where to find the absconding bitch and they would do the rest. She would play no part in it; in fact, he had told her quite reasonably as he chewed his paan noisily, she would only be completing the assignment that she had begun four years ago. What could possibly be the harm in that?

She sighed and pushed herself to her feet, heading in the direction of her office.

The bright fluorescents made her blink owlishly after the past hour spent in near darkness. She felt like switching them off, but needed the light to get around. Her room always had a few boxes of unpacked equipment parts lying around and she didn’t need to break a toe or twist an ankle moseying around in the dark. She waited till her eyes adjusted, then spent the next half hour pottering around pointlessly, trying to think what she should do next. She knew that the one thing she could
not
do, absolutely
would not
do, was give up Gauri and Tasneem. Or Marhabha and Tasneem as they were now named. She would rather have her own teeth and nails pulled out with pliers one by one than give them up to these bastards. Which left … what? Go to war? Against whom? The entire CPI (M) cadre in West Bengal? The entire nationwide network? She almost laughed aloud at the idea.

She realized that she hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing all day and that she was dehydrated. She reached for the bottle of packaged water on her desk and when she picked it up, the bottle hit something and knocked it off the edge of the desk. She bent to pick it up and saw that it was a hefty yellow manila envelope.

Four