Chain of Custody (4 page)

‘Yes,' the man called Shankar said into the phone.

Shastri pretended to be busy even as he listened.

‘My client is a very important man,' Shankar said. ‘So we are looking for someone very special too. Good … Seven in the
evening … What's your name again? Siddharth? I'll text you the name of the hotel. It's a little boutique hotel near the airport. Just Google it.'

Shastri couldn't believe his luck when the man finished his call and left a fifty-rupee note on the table. He watched the man type something into the phone. He pretended to not see him open the back of the phone and remove the sim card within. He looked away pointedly and walked to the entrance of his little booth. He was quite sure that some strange nefarious deal had been transacted in the past few minutes. And yet it had all seemed quite innocuous.

He saw the man snap the sim card and drop it as he walked away.

Dr Sanjay Rathore glanced at his watch. It was ten past six. His next appointment was due in five minutes. He frowned. He hoped the man would be on time. He didn't like to be kept waiting. And it wasn't even a client. Merely a middleman, a land broker who had promised him access to the aggregator of the land one of his clients was very keen on acquiring. The clock struck the quarter hour. He had sought to intimidate the broker by asking him to reach at 6.15.

He had seen that in a movie on a flight last week. He didn't remember much about the film or the trip. After a while all international flights, destinations and movies seemed alike. But this had coded itself firmly in his hippocampus. He disliked sloppiness and when people said silly things like ‘Keep a memory in your heart,' he was inclined to shake them rudely and say, ‘The heart holds no memories. It's just an organ that serves as a pump. Memories are received and stored in the brain.'

All of corporate law was war and he sought for his arsenal any weapon of intimidation hitherto unused. An appointment at the quarter hour was a brilliant manoeuvre. No one would ever manage to arrive at the precise time and he would have the moral advantage of having been kept waiting. That would allow him to set the tone of the meeting. And he needed a decided advantage for this one.

Land brokers were as vicious as sharks, with the tenacity of an octopus, as hard to budge as sea urchins and as slimy as seaweed. Rathore grinned at himself in the ornamental hallway mirror. He liked the neatness of his thought, of how he had stayed within the ocean as he listed out the metaphors.

His eyes swooped on the table in front of the mirror. The stone Khmer Buddha he had picked up in Cambodia had been moved from its place by two inches, skewing the arrangement. The woman who came in to clean was a slovenly creature. It was time to get rid of her, he decided, even as he shifted the Buddha back into place. Then he peered at himself once again and twirled the hair at the arch of his eyebrow.

He was a good-looking man with a strong face of planes and shadows. His eyebrows were heavy and, as if to compensate for them, he kept his face clean-shaven. He played squash twice a week and swam fifteen laps every day. He was considering joining a Krav Maga class to enhance his combat strength.

He knew the impression he made: good-looking, strong, fit and on the go. There was just one thing he could do nothing about. He was short. At 5″4′ in his socks, he felt at a disadvantage if the man opposite him was taller. He liked tall women though. He found them sexy.

The bell rang. He switched on the intercom. ‘Who is it?'

There was a pause and then a low husky voice enunciated in clear unaccented English, ‘Dr Rathore, this is Pujary. I am here about the hundred acres in Hoskote.'

There were just a few minutes left before the temple closed after the evening puja. He had apologized all the way from the house to the temple until she had put her hand on his arm and murmured, ‘It's fine. We can always come back another day.'

‘No, it's not fine,' he said, his mouth twisting into a grimace. ‘I know you had a reason for wanting to go there this evening, and I shouldn't have cluttered the hour with appointments.'

‘Husband, shut up,' she said softly.

He looked at her and smiled. ‘Yes, wife!'

She squeezed his arm gently. They had met in school when they were both eight years old. She, the schoolmaster's daughter, and he, the temple priest's son, at a little village near Latur. Since then they had been together, through school and college He had gone on to study further while she waited at home, working on her trousseau until he came to claim her. There had been no one else anyway.

During one of his trips home, they had sneaked out for a bike ride to the Kharosa caves. An oil spill on the road caused the bike to skid; he escaped with minor injuries, she was paralysed waist down. Any opposition her family may have had dissolved when he took full responsibility for the accident and her life. They were only twenty.

They moved to Bangalore a year after they were married. Thirty-two years of marriage and forty-seven years of togetherness. She knew how the hair in each pore of his skin grew. She knew he felt the same way. And that worried her.

‘Aren't you sick of this?' she asked.

‘What makes you say that?' His hands clenched the steering wheel. ‘Do I give you that impression?'

‘How can anyone be like you? Every day, and this is the truth, almost every day I ask myself if I have ruined your life, your happiness …'

‘I am the happiest man on this earth. You are all I ever wanted. So stop this silliness,' he said with a mock growl. He had wooed her with it when they were eight. He the prowling lion, she the lost deer.

He parked near the entrance of the temple. Then he lifted her into his arms carefully and carried her inside. There was hardly anyone else there, but the priest was waiting.

He sat her down on the floor against a wall and went back to the car to fetch the offerings.

‘Who is he?' one of the devotees asked.

The other man shrugged. ‘Somebody very rich. Why else do you think the temple is open this late? I've seen him and his wife here a few times.'

Pujary came back with a platter laden with fruit and flowers, a coconut and a small wad of notes. The priest's eyes widened. Whatever was on the archana plate was for him to take. There were about a thousand rupees in there, he thought, unable to hide his joy.

The priest took the platter from the man. The woman said to the priest, ‘Please do the archana in the name of Sharad Pujary, Revati nakshatra, Bharadwaja gotra.'

The priest lit the lamps and rang the bell. He raised the lamp to the deity and began chanting her names, one hundred and eight of them, as he circled the deity's figurine with the lit lamp. Divine powers were invoked to keep Sharad Pujary able, well, prosperous and content.

‘Happy?' he asked her as they drove back home.

‘When am I not, my husband?' She smiled back at him. ‘As long as you are with me …'

‘I have to go to Chennai for the day tomorrow,' he said. Gita nodded without looking at him. She hated it when he had to leave town. ‘I'll be home for dinner,' he said cajolingly.

‘At eleven p.m.'

‘No, our dinner time. Promise.'

Later, when they'd had dinner and he had settled her in bed in front of the TV, he walked downstairs to his study and switched on the laptop and the mobile phone kept there. He sat at his desk, looking for the barrage of mails in his inbox and the log of missed calls on his phone.

The phone trilled. He glanced at it and picked it up. ‘I don't want any excuses or explanations. Just give me the report for the day,' he said. His husky voice didn't rise a decibel higher than usual.

The man at the other end of the line felt the hair at the nape of his neck rise at the menace in the tone.

6 M
ARCH
, F
RIDAY

T
he train jerked to an abrupt halt with a long groan and shudder. Gowda opened his eyes and stared at the metal ceiling of the railway carriage, unable to remember where he was.

Then it came to him: Prashanthi Express from Bhubaneshwar, on its way to Bangalore. He glanced at his watch. It was half past eleven in the morning. How long had he slept? He hoisted
himself on his elbow and peered down from the sleeping berth. Police Constable Byrappa was studying his mobile phone with great concentration and Police Constable Devraj was playing Sudoku.

Byrappa's eyes rose above the mobile phone and met Gowda's gaze. ‘Where are we?' Gowda asked.

‘We just pulled out of Cantonment station, sir,' Byrappa said.

Gowda looked at him, incredulous. ‘But why didn't you wake me up? We could have got off.'

‘I tried,' Byrappa muttured. ‘But you told me to shut up or you would shut my mouth for me.' Devraj joined in with a fervent nod of his head. ‘Besides, sir, you looked so peaceful in your sleep that we thought we mustn't disturb you.'

Gowda groaned and lay back on his pillow. The PCs ought to have been in the sleeper coach they were eligible to travel in. But he had found two vacant berths in the air-conditioned coach he was entitled to and had organized for them to be upgraded, paying the difference himself. For which the numbskulls, in some misguided sense of gratitude, hadn't bothered to wake him up.

They had got in at Markapur Road station a little past eleven the previous night. Gowda had been unable to sleep till about three in the morning. Once again it had been a wasted trip. And he had known how it was going to turn out even before they left for Markapur. They had received a report of a man apprehended for an ATM dacoity. The MO had indicated that it could very well be the gang that had looted two ATM booths in his station precincts. Assistant Commissioner of Police Vidyaprasad had decreed that Gowda investigate and bring back the accused if he was the one. A
sub-inspector could have done the job but ACP Vidyaprasad hadn't forgiven Gowda yet for the egg on his face from the Corporator Ravikumar mess. So Inspector Gowda had to go on a fact-finding mission with two constables in tow. He would have protested in the normal course of things but there had been something else that had to be looked into. And an official trip had been a perfect pretext for some unfinished business from seven months ago.

Every now and then, he thought of it. The series of seemingly unconnected murders, except for the cut-like wound in the victim's throat. And how, by the time he had it all figured out, it was too late. All he needed to do was let his mind wander back to that horrific moment on the factory floor and he would feel again the clammy clutch of fear.

He closed his eyes and held his breath. Slow down, slow down, he told his heart that beat frantically. Seven months had passed but it felt as through the events of that night had just happened. He knew it would be that way until such time as Sub-inspector Santosh was back on his feet, and the murderer was back in jail awaiting trial instead of an accused out on bail and now classified as ‘absconding'.

It was a few minutes past noon when the train shuddered to a halt at platform 3 at Bangalore City station. Gowda pulled out his suitcase from the space beneath the lower berth and hurried to the door. His mouth felt furry and his eyes bleary. First a coffee and something to eat. Meanwhile, PC David would arrive with the jeep.

Byrappa and Devraj waited on the platform watching Gowda as he stood at the door of the compartment surveying
the goings-on. The Bosco Rescue Unit was just a few feet away from where they were. As they walked past, Gowda peered in. The cubicle was small, crammed with a table, a few chairs and a long bench. A wall-mounted fan stirred the hot air. Two children of indeterminate age were seated and a woman and a man were talking to them. A dog was asleep under a chair.

‘The railways charge the Bosco people for the space like they charge a vendor. It's criminal, sir! Twenty thousand rupees a month, I hear. Someone should take it up!' Devraj leaned forward to tell Gowda.

‘How do you know?' Byrappa asked, looking at the posters.

‘My sister is a staff here. She was telling me.'

Gowda nodded in agreement. Michael, his college-mate, had mentioned it to him as well. Michael Hunt, who had come back to Bangalore seven months ago to sell a house he had inherited in Whitefield, had decided to stay on in Bangalore. ‘What's there in Melbourne for me anyway?' he had said when they spoke on the phone two months ago. ‘Bob, I need to get out and do something.'

Gowda had smiled at that word, Bob. ‘Like what, machan?'

How easily they had slipped into the boy-speak from those faraway years in St Joseph's College. Sometimes he thought that only Michael and Urmila remembered him as he once was. The tall strapping basketball hero who never missed a step or failed to shoot a basket.

‘There is this NGO that works with young children. Bosco,' Michael said. ‘This isn't the city that you and I grew up in. The Bosco people work with the young at risk and there are so many of them – child labourers, abandoned or orphaned children, victims of drug abuse, victims of child abuse, beggar children,
rag pickers. They have seven rehabilitation centres and six street points to locate these children. It's not easy to staff these places or keep them running. So I thought I would volunteer. Besides, I can't just sit at home eating the food Narsamma serves up every few hours.'

Gowda had tapped his fingers on the table as Michael continued to tell him about the volunteer work he was doing. ‘Machan, I think you should ask Urmila to volunteer too,' he said softly when Michael ran out of breath.

At the other end of the line, a silence. A studied pause, Gowda thought. ‘All well between the two of you?' Michael asked.

‘We are fine. But she does have too much time on her hands and too little to do,' Gowda said. ‘Besides, it's exactly the kind of thing that will make her happy.'

And give me some breathing space, Gowda thought ruefully. The trouble with women was that they expected the honeymoon to stretch forever. The soaring adrenaline, the excitement, the calls, the texts, the clandestine meetings of the first few months had settled into something more permanent, but sedate.

Urmila, he could sense, wasn't pleased. But he could keep up the frantic pitch, the teenage feverishness, only so long. ‘I am a cold unemotional sort of person,' he had said to her again and again.

He saw how her gaze demanded total honesty of him. But he didn't know how to say what she wanted to hear. What words or cadence could he use? The truth was, Gowda hadn't expected his affair with Urmila to last. He had expected that, like most women, sooner or later she would demand he choose between her and his wife. And his inability to do so would end the relationship. But Urmila was loath to even mention Mamtha by name. It was as if Mamtha didn't
exist. It helped that Mamtha was a doctor at a primary health centre in Hassan, one hundred and ninety kilometres from Bangalore. A posting she had demanded Gowda organize for her as their son Roshan was studying at the Hassan Medical College and someone had to be there to keep an eye on him. Both of them had known that the truth was she hated the area Gowda had chosen to build their house in. This was her way of protesting.

Urmila asked very little of him except for companionship, and he had thought she would eventually tire of him. Their worlds were so vastly different. And yet, he woke up thinking of her most days; he missed her when he didn't hear from her. It was Urmila he felt protective about. Was this love? He hated categorizing his feelings, so he shut the door on that word.

She had shaken her head almost sadly, watching the play of emotions on his face. ‘You aren't cold, Borei. Is it me? Are you no longer attracted to me?' she asked in a flat voice, and Gowda had felt guilt for hurting the woman sitting alongside him.

He took her hand in his. ‘Don't,' he said. ‘You know that isn't true.'

She needed to do something more meaningful with her time, he had thought then. That's how love survived; by a couple doing their own things instead of turning each other into a project. She needed to have something more relevant in her life than just him.

‘You always had time for me. But now, it's almost as though I have to beg to be able to see you,' she had said the last time they managed to spend a couple of hours together.

‘It's just that the workload has increased to twice as much,' he tried to explain. But she hadn't been persuaded.

‘Call her, machan,' Gowda said again to Michael, knowing that here was the solution to unravel the knots between Urmila and him.

Michael didn't need much prodding. ‘It would be good to have someone like her on board.'

Gowda looked at the platform, wondering if either Michael or Urmila was on patrol. Friday was when they came in usually. He looked at the trusted HMT hand-wound watch he continued to wear despite having been gifted three other watches. It was time to go.

‘Let's go,' he said, rousing himself and walking briskly towards the staircase.

Outside the station, groups of people were huddled by the pillars of the portico. As David pulled the police vehicle out of the parking lot, Gowda's gaze fell upon a group of migrant workers. Men, women and children with bags, baskets and bundles. Some fast asleep while a few others chatted and a baby crawled amidst the sleeping bodies.

Gowda got into the front of the jeep, Byrappa and Devraj in the rear. He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen. Two messages. One from Urmila: ‘G, you here?' And the other from Mamtha: ‘Reached?'

Gowda swallowed hastily. ‘On my way home. Call u later.' He sent the same message to both women. How had it come to this, Gowda asked himself with a little flurry of disgust. How had he become the sort of man who had a mistress and a wife? One who sent them both the same message as if he couldn't even be bothered to type out two separate texts. A great slough of weariness wrapped itself around him.

No one spoke until they stopped at the Adiga restaurant on K.G. Road.

‘We may as well have lunch,' Gowda said.

The two constables looked at each other, unable to hide their dismay. ‘Sir,' Byrappa said. ‘It's been almost five days since we left home. We would prefer to eat at home.'

Gowda nodded. ‘In which case I'll take a parcel,' he said, placing his order. ‘I didn't let my maid know we were returning today, or she would have cooked something,' he added as they waited.

And again that disturbing thought struck Gowda: how is it that I have become a man who has two women in his life and still no one to share a meal with?

‘Sir, why don't you wait in the jeep?' Byrappa said hastily, seeing the sternness in Gowda's expression. It seemed the laidback, almost gregarious and easy-to-be-with Gowda of the past five days was retreating.

Gowda climbed back into the jeep. David put his phone away. I wonder what's going on his life, Gowda thought, seeing a strangely guilty look on the man's face.

‘So what's been happening at the station?' Gowda asked.

‘There is some good news, sir!' David beamed.

Gowda's eyebrows rose. Unless ACP Vidyaprasad had quit the police force, he didn't think any news would be good enough.

‘But I can't tell you, sir!' David said in an almost coquettish tone.

‘What do you mean?'

‘No, sir, you have to wait till we reach the station. Head Constable Gajendra said I was to bring you back to the station straight from here.'

Gowda frowned. What was going on? They had been sanctioned a water cooler to replace the old one. Was that what this was about? Or had they received a new evidence kit? That was pending too. Or was it the swivel chair he had put in a requistion for?

Byrappa and Devraj came running down the steps and got into the jeep. David, unable to hide his grin, said, ‘Shall we go?'

A little fan mounted on the dashboard was turned on. David adjusted the radio controls to find the FM station that played Hindi songs. It was a compromise of sorts. Neither Kannada nor English music; instead, new Hindi songs that sounded like cats yowling while monkeys clanged tin drums. Gowda sat tight-lipped as David sped through the traffic. In the last five days David seemed to have transformed to Ayerton Senna who saw the city roads as his Formula One racing track. When they almost mowed down a scooterist, Gowda finally snapped, ‘Slow down … whatever be the news, it can wait!'

David flushed but didn't say anything.

It was almost half past one when the jeep turned in through the gates of Neelgubbi station. The green building seemed to be bustling with activity.

Neelgubbi village had changed in the last few months. From a sleepy little hamlet of cowherds and small farmers, it had become one of landlords and real estate brokers. While Bangalore had grown and expanded in all directions, the northeast had remained relatively untouched until the new airport sprung up at Devanahalli and big developers discovered that the possibilities were immense even in villages like Neelgubbi.