A Cut-Like Wound (46 page)

She propped him up so he was sitting straight. Then she took a length of cord and tied his legs and arms. ‘There, let’s see what you can do with your hands and legs tied.’ She giggled, peering down at him.

A chill went down his spine as he stared at her through a haze of pain. Suddenly it fell into place.

He saw that she had seen realization dawn in his eyes.

‘You are,’ he croaked but she wouldn’t let him speak further.

She walked behind him. She didn’t like looking at them. She didn’t like the thought that they would see how it made
her feel. Pleasure had to be private, for oneself rather than to be shared. All that kicking and writhing, screaming and struggling turned it into a disorderly thing. This was how she liked them. Powerless, acquiescent and hers to do with as she pleased.

She hadn’t thought she would find so much pleasure in it that first time. To slip the ligature round the neck and let it do its work while she just tugged and tightened. It felt a little like flying a kite but with better results. In that last moment, as life ebbed out, she was the kite. Soaring above the world. Queen of the moment.

Santosh felt a cord tighten around his neck, glass slice into his throat. And as he felt blood spurt, he struggled.

Through the fear and the pain, he heard a voice. ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

She turned and the ligature slipped out of her hands.

‘Why is it you always walk in just when I am beginning to enjoy myself?’ she demanded furiously.

‘What? Who?’ The corporator walked in, brandishing a gun. He stopped abruptly, unable to believe what he was seeing.

‘Yes, Anna, it’s me,’ Chikka said.

The corporator stared at the unconscious man bleeding almost certainly to death; at his brother in the guise of a woman. He had heard that sometimes someone came to the factory at night. A woman had been spotted. Chikka was the only other person who had access to the key. When the call came a little earlier, he had decided to investigate for himself. Was that little idiot taking his slut there to fuck her?

What bizarre madness was this?

‘Where’s the ape? King Kong? Your loyal arselicker …
you thought he was your brother from another mother…’ Chikka asked.

The corporator slumped on a chair. He threw the gun on the table. King Kong was still at the bar near Kothanur where they had been when the call came. ‘You were the one using this place. What is this, Chikka? What’s going on?’ He sank his head into his arms. ‘What madness is this?’

‘You,’ Chikka said. ‘You started it all.’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Didn’t I beg and plead with you to not buy the factory? But you wanted it. And you brought back the past. My past that I so wanted to forget. Did you know Ranganathan would fuck me here? I liked it. I liked being fucked by him. I liked being able to pleasure him. Till you walked in on us. And the look I saw in your eyes … the disgust … something in me died, do you know that?’

Anna saw in his mind again the old man’s open mouth, the desire in his eyes; he saw his little brother on the sofa, almost naked, and how his fingers were curled into a fist.

Chikka closed his eyes, seeing again the anger and disgust in his brother’s eyes.

Everything came back in a rush. Ranganathan falling to his knees. The sound of glass breaking. The tearing of fabric. The clang of metal hitting the ground. Ranganathan groaning, and Anna screaming, ‘You dirty old man, is this what all your niceness was for? You bastard.’

Chikka heard the sound of slaps … flesh against flesh. He curled into a ball when Anna drew close to him. ‘I … I didn’t…’ Chikka whispered.

‘Don’t … it’s not your fault … don’t worry, I am here, your Anna is here to deal with it … punish him for what he did,’ Anna’s voice had whispered as he pulled Chikka up
and helped him dress. ‘Come, Chikka,’ Anna said gently, furiously. ‘This scum will never hurt you again.’

Chikka let himself be led away. He felt numb and sickened at the disgust he had seen in his brother’s eyes. How could something that felt so good be so wrong?

It suited Anna and everyone else at home to have Chikka as the victim of an old man’s perverse lust. It suited Chikka to believe it. Anything else would make him want to seek that wonder he had found in Ranganathan’s clutch. That spiralling wonder that made him forget all his fears and shrug off his demons … but what if Anna found out? Chikka shuddered at the thought of what he would encounter in his brother’s eyes.

Chikka, or was it Bhuvana, or was it Kamakshi … she didn’t know any more who she was … peered into Anna’s face. Anna had said you can forget. All you need to do is decide to forget. She had. She had taught herself to forget.

It had begun with killing Ranganathan. The old man had waylaid him a couple of times and they had gone back to the factory. Chikka couldn’t say no to him, much as he wanted to.

Anna heard about a car picking up Chikka from school. ‘Amma said you went to a friend’s house in his car. Which friend is that?’

‘Sailesh,’ Chikka lied. ‘His father has a used-car business. So we went in this car he was taking to a customer.’

Anna nodded but Chikka was afraid. If he never saw Ranganathan again, it would be over, he decided. He planned it carefully, using Anna’s own speciality – the golf ball in a sock, and some more. A ligature like no one had ever seen before. He had seen how the kites with manja thread sliced the kite strings of rival kites. He had ground the glass
himself and mixed it in with Fevicol and applied it to the string, leaving it to dry on the roof of the house, away from everyone else’s gaze.

‘I was young and not strong enough. He escaped me and was run over when crossing the street. And I thought it had come to an end. I was free. But then you had to do this, didn’t you? If you hadn’t bought this damn factory, none of it would have come back to me. And then you dragged me here to view it. I saw how your face tightened when you saw this sofa.’ Chikka kicked the side of the sofa on which Santosh was slumped.

‘I knew you were thinking of what had happened here … and I knew it too. The stillness of the factory. The silence. Ecstasy followed by guilt. I wanted that pleasure. Even more than before. Then the goddess came to me. You thought that only you could summon the goddess, didn’t you? Well, I can too. She comes to me on her own. She seeks me out because she knows that I am twice as strong as you are. She showed me the way. She taught me how to dress and who to be. And she leads me to them.

‘They are everywhere. Jaded men. Eager boys. I find them or they find me. Our need is the same, you see. But when it’s over, I see it again … that disgust in your eye … it haunts me. The goddess said all I have to do is erase that memory. So I kill them … Because, like you said that night, Anna, it’s not my fault. They made me do it! And so they have to be punished for it!’

The corporator shook his head, unable to believe his ears or eyes.

‘What are you saying, Chikka?’ he asked weakly.

‘You can’t believe this about me. You think only you have it in you to play god, to bless or punish. Like you did
with my Sanjay! You took my Sanjay’s life without a second thought. God didn’t decide that Sanjay’s time on earth had come to an end. You did. And simply because Sanjay may have posed a threat.’

‘Sanjay?’ The corporator raised his head.

‘My Sanjay loved me. Do you hear that? But you took him away as well. And you don’t even know his name. Everything to you is dispensable … everything!’

The corporator heard the click first.

Chikka had the gun in his hands.

‘How does it feel, Anna, to know that you are powerless? How does it feel to know that your life is not in your control? How does it feel to be Chikka?’

‘I…’ the corporator began. The bullet made only a soft plop as it pierced his heart.

9.36 p.m.

Gowda and Urmila saw an auto drive away as they turned into the lane the factory was in.

Gowda had called the control room and asked for reinforcements to be sent to the factory. ‘It’s an emergency, send a patrol vehicle immediately,’ he had hollered, hoping a Hoysala would get there in time. He had then called Gajendra and asked him to rush to the factory.

Gowda frowned as Urmila drove into the factory yard. Where was the Hoysala? Only the corporator’s white Honda CRV. Urmila parked behind it.

Gowda rushed in, unheeding of Urmila’s call for caution.

On the sofa Santosh was slumped with his throat cut. On the chair sat the corporator with a look of stupefaction on his dead face.

On the floor sat his younger brother, his chin on his knees. A gun lay on the ground. And further along, a puddle of clothes. A woman’s sari and a wig.

Chikka raised his tear-stained face to Gowda. ‘I had to kill him. It was Anna, sir, it was him all along. All those murders. But I was too late to save your colleague…’

Gowda stared, unable to believe what he saw.

A Hoysala vehicle arrived. A team of policemen trooped in. Gowda gestured to them, and one of the policemen stepped forward to take the corporator’s younger brother away.

Gowda watched him as he turned and gazed at his dead brother and into the darkness that was the factory floor. There was a remarkable calm in his gaze. Gowda frowned. What had happened here?

Then he saw Santosh’s mobile on the table.

He picked it up. It seemed to have been recording something. He clicked shut the phone and slipped it into his pocket. He would look at it later.

A police van arrived to take the dead corporator. The CCB men were on their way, Head Constable Gajendra said, walking in.

‘Santosh, sir?’ he asked, unable to finish the sentence.

Gowda nodded. He walked towards Santosh and looked down at the boy. Guilt tussled with regret. How transient life was. This was the first time he had lost a colleague, he realized. And he had been responsible for it. He shouldn’t have let Santosh go into this on his own. He was only a boy … a few years older than his son. Gowda closed his eyes. Then he heard a faint groan.

‘He’s alive,’ Gowda shouted. ‘He’s alive. We need to get him to a hospital. Immediately. Now.’

Gajendra leapt forward, calling for assistance to take Santosh to the hospital.

Gowda followed them as they carried Santosh into the van. A first-aid box was opened and a wad of cotton wool plugged into the wound. Gajendra, who seemed to have lost his habitual apathy, was making sure that Santosh was laid on his belly. He grabbed a bunch of files and placed it beneath Santosh’s chest so that his head inclined downwards. He turned Santosh’s head to a side and prised his mouth open so he didn’t choke on his own blood. ‘I’ll go with him, sir,’ Gajendra told Gowda as they slammed shut the van doors.

Gowda turned to look at the factory once again.

He would ask Urmila, who was waiting for him in the Scorpio, to follow the police van to the hospital. He would bully the doctors, the staff, make sure Santosh had the best medical attention to drag him back to life.

And when Santosh woke up, Gowda would be there, waiting for him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCE MATERIAL

Books and Journals

Narayan, K.S. Dr,
The Essentials of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
(XI edition)

Banerjee, A.K.,
Police Diaries
(1993)

Rakesh P., ‘Setting Tongues Loose’,
Deccan Herald
, Sunday, 4 January 2004

Police Manual [
http://www.ksp.gov.in/home/policemanual/index.php
]

Websites

http://www.hindu.com/2011/01/19/stories/2011011963810300.htm

http://www.cidap.gov.in/documents/FAKE%20CURRENCY.pdf

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I began work on this book in May 2010 on a whim. A page later, I realized that it was going to need more than just bookish research. There are several people I would like to thank for their help in making each aspect of information gathering that much easier and bringing this book to completion, foremost among them Mr Nizammudin, Former Director General and Inspector General of Police, Bangalore, and P.K. Hormis Tharakan, Former Director General of the Kerala Police. Several officers of the Karnataka State Police offered suggestions and inputs that made all the difference. However, for reasons most obvious, they do not wish to be named. Thank you, gentlemen, you know who you are!

Dr P.K. Sunil for first leading me into the possibilities a forensic textbook can offer to the imagination of a writer, and then offering me the title; Dr Rajamani MD, Forensic Medicine, for answering my questions with patience and great humour; and Dr Naresh Shetty, Medical Director, MS Ramaiah Hospital, and his team at Ramaiah Medical College for taking me through the intricacies of a post-mortem.

Naseer Ahmed for taking me on that marvellous nighttime walk through Shivaji Nagar in Bangalore and opening my senses to a world that I didn’t know existed.

Jayant Kodkani, this time for not just being my first reader, but also for taking the time out to pen memories of a Bangalore in the 1970s.

Sunil Koliyot for being such a great buddy and a useful one at that, and especially for providing me the know-how on how to clean stubborn shower heads.