Mumbai Noir (26 page)

Immortal? He hadn’t seen anybody looking this
mortal
of late. The man’s face was like crumpled parchment, his pale blue eyes brilliant chips of ice. He was tall, taller than Ramratan, but with a curious laxity of limb. His large hands were covered with tortuous veins tensed in blue knots against startlingly white skin. In contrast, his white ducks looked yellow. The many layers of linen beneath his khaki jacket were limp with perspiration. He removed his sola and dabbed preciously at his beaded forehead.

Ratan noticed the man was dressed differently, in kurta pajamas now. His long exquisite feet stuck out in beautifully crafted kolhapuris. In Ramratan’s time it was called “going native.”

He was waiting, as Ratan had seen him wait before—

Ratan’s bun maska arrived.

The waiter was a young man. He couldn’t know the dish was iconic, and with it should come a syrupy cup of Irani chai. Also, it was clear Leopold no longer baked its own biscuits. In his childhood, Iranis served biscuits with their chai for free.

Nankhatai, Shrewsbury, ginger, coconut—

“Coconut biscuits,” said Hankin. “These really are the best in the world.”

Ramratan bit into one. Rough and dry, but that might just be the waiter.

“Disregard the waiter,” murmured Hankin. “I’ll break his skull for you another day.”

The thought of Ernest breaking anyone’s skull was so implausible, Ramratan couldn’t help but smile. Meanwhile, the waiter had retreated, mollified by Hankin’s largesse.

“There, he won’t trouble us anymore. He isn’t a bad man, really, Ramratan, just—”

“Just a victim of the times,” Ramratan preempted Hankin’s words.

“Sorry I had to bring you here. You did want to see the man.”

“Yes, Ernest, I do. Forget the rest.” He stole another look at the man near the mirror. “How old did you say he was? He looks about a hundred to me.”

“That I can answer with accuracy. He’s exactly seventyfour years, two months, and two days old this morning. I’ve seen his papers. Patton Prescott. Born October 5, 1829.”

“Looks older.”

“He’ll look younger the next time we see him. If the rumor is true.”

Ratan no longer had any doubt. This was the same man. The man Ramratan and Ernest Hankin were talking about. The man whose shoulders were on the other side of those bullet holes.

Today was December 8, 2008.

In the mirror, Hankin was reading the
Times
. The date on the masthead was December 8 too. But the year was 1903; Ramratan had just turned forty, and Hankin was younger. Ratan rummaged for a sense of what it had felt like then, wondering what the moment’s sting had been, and why it had marked him thus, with memory.

Prescott. The man’s name was Prescott.

“Patton Prescott,” said Hankin.

Could Ramratan see him through the bullet hole? Was that all it took to be able to see through the mirror? As if in answer, Ramaratan took off his spectacles and looked at him.

And, all at once, Ratan was there.

Patton Prescott had been evicted from Watson’s Hotel for creating a disturbance. Naturally, Mrs. Biggett took him in.

In the world of lodging houses, Biggett’s had a reputation for dullness. A neat narrow building in Byculla’s Clare Road, it had once been a baniya’s pleasure house. Bankruptcy, and a strong attack of religion, had forced the baniya to sell the place. Mrs. Biggett, recently widowed, bought it for a song.

It had few graces and she ensured none of its former airs endured. There was no drunkenness, no lechery, no conversation, and nothing to eat. And whenever he was in Bombay, Hankin boarded here.

“It’s a well-kept secret, Ramratan, but the woman has a kind heart. I’ve never known her to turn away rejects. She’d heard of the incident at Watson’s, and asked me to vet Prescott’s papers. Everything seemed in order, so there was no reason to turn him away.”

In the dead hour before dinner, when Mrs. Biggett serves no aperitif and hungry boarders shuffle between carom and planchette without hope, Hankin began a conversation with Prescott.

Initially, Prescott wasn’t forthcoming, but it did emerge he wasn’t here on a pleasure trip. He was in Bombay for his health.

“He began questioning me about native medicine. A misleading label, I told him, and—”

“—lectured him for an hour about Unani tibb and ayurveda—”

“I did no such thing! I merely answered his questions.”

“Right, right. Go on.”

“He was undergoing a native treatment, he said, which would be of great interest to European scientists. I wanted to learn more. He was reticent at first. Then said he had been given an elixir. You know, Ramratan, I’m always suspicious of terms like
elixir
and
tonic
—”

“Balamrut. Liver pills.
Tono-Bungay
.”

“Exactly! The market’s thick with them. I asked him if he knew what this elixir was. The elixir of youth, he recited with a trusting smile. All done very scientifically. His doctor had shown him rats that were two hundred years old. He said they were tireless.”

“He meant they fucked like crazy.”

“No. I don’t think it was that—but he’s signed up for the elixir. Said he felt twenty years younger already, and all he’d had so far was the introductory dose. Is it a pill? I asked. He smiled. Nothing like a pill, he said. It was a curry, a delectable curry. And the coin dropped. Goat’s testes! This hakim has fobbed him off with gurda kapoora. Have you tried it? Very popular among the bucks in Agra.”

“Here too. This nation’s eaten it for centuries. Yet look at us. No. Prescott’s doctor has something more exotic on offer. The next phase of therapy will probably involve rhinoceros urine.”

“Well, he did say the treatment goes from solid to liquid to gas. He’s ready for the liquid phase now. The hakim administers the dose right here. Every morning at exactly half past eight.”

“Why here? And not in his dawakhana?” Ramratan posed the question, only to answer it himself. “I suppose it would be undignified for Prescott to visit him there.”

He stole another glance at Prescott, but couldn’t for the life of him discern the faintest sign of youth.

“Why?” asked Ramratan. “Why is he doing this, Ernest?”

“I asked him that, in fact. His answer was peculiar. On his seventieth birthday he realized, at last, he was rich enough to enjoy youth.”

“Someone else’s youth, you mean. Are you sure he’s meeting a doctor and not a pimp?”

“Heavens, I didn’t think of that!”

Despite his raging battle with the Indian Medical Service, Ernest Hankin could never believe the worst of his fellow men.

“So that’s the hakim!” Hankin whistled softly.

A burly man in flowing muslin djibba and grubby churidar pajamas had joined Prescott. Something about him seemed faintly familiar. His back to them, he listened to Prescott, who had a great deal to say. The red tassel on his fez swung a fraying pendulum, like time dispersed to the frequency of his approving nods.

Holding up a finger for silence, he ceremoniously measured Prescott’s pulse. Charisma or coincidence, he induced absolute silence. The air seemed to congeal, and then his voice was heard.

“One drop of semen, Prescott sahib,” he said, “one drop of semen is equal to seven drops of blood.”

Then that finger again, this time cautionary.

“Count your drops, Mr. Prescott. Count—your—drops.”

Hankin reddened with suppressed laughter.

“Mustaches,” murmured Ramratan in mirth. “Mustaches, Ernest, were invented for moments like these.”

Was Prescott embarrassed? He didn’t look it. Oblivious to all else, he was tuned to the hakim, as if mesmerized.

The hakim stood up and walked around to Prescott’s side of the table. A small vial gleamed in his right hand and Prescott leaned his head back as he bent over him. When the hakim stood upright again, Ramratan saw his face for the first time.

He leapt up and would have rushed at the man if Hankin hadn’t gripped his arm and forced him back into his chair.

“I know this rascal!” Ramratan was furious. “I’ve seen him hang about the mortuary. That wasn’t goat he fed Prescott! Hurry, Ernest, before it’s too late—”

“Anything else, sir?”

Ratan returned to the present. The bun maska sat untouched before him. He ordered another coffee to get rid of the waiter, then turned anxiously back to the table by the mirror where Prescott still awaited his guest.

In the mirror Prescott’s hakim now had his back to Ratan. The vial put away, he was taking his leave.

He glanced over his shoulder behind Prescott and through the bullet holes into the room. His light brown eyes sparked carnelian as they focused on Ratan. He ignored Prescott’s farewell and hurried out.

Ramratan and Hankin had disappeared. Only Prescott kept his seat, back to back with his twin, on Ratan’s side of the mirror.

Ratan sipped the coffee. It helped steady him. He became aware of a soreness in his calves. Odd. He’d barely walked a mile. No, not odd at all—it was very long since he’d raced on a bicycle.

Ramratan was peddling hard with Hankin weighing down the Raleigh. Still, quicker than a tram! They reached the mortuary in half an hour.

Eight-thirty on Saturday morning. The place was deserted. Ramratan peered into the autopsy room. The four cadavers from the day before lay exactly where he’d left them.

“Bhiku!” he thundered.

An alarmed clerk from the coroner’s office popped his head out and retreated hastily.

“Bhiku!” Ramratan bellowed again, louder.

This time, Bhiku’s son Mangesh slunk out. He was a gangly lad of sixteen, with a taste for chandol. Twice in the last year Ramratan had hauled him out of Liang’s chandol-khana, the sleazy opium den in Safed Gali.

“Where’s Bhiku?” he demanded.

“He’s ill.”

“Get him! I’ll cure him when he gets here.”

The boy did not budge. Last night’s revels showed in his pinpoint pupils. “He said I was to do his work today.”

Bhiku, then, was too drunk to even stand up.

Ramratan snarled and strode past the boy’s inane smile.

Hankin followed him into the autopsy room. The air smelled of carbolic and bleached blood. Tall windows, fierce with morning, blazed over the four dead men. They stared straight up, sightless. The marble slabs gleamed in milky opalescence.

“Lock the door, Ernest!”

Ramratan was already bent over the first cadaver, a mason who had fallen off a scaffold and died on impact, the contrecoup shearing his brainstem. He looked young in death, the burden of life lifted off him.

Ramratan whispered an apology that would never be heard and dipped his hand between the man’s legs to heft the scrotum. It settled cold and soft in his palm. He pressed down with his thumb. It sank right in.

Hankin met his eyes; Ramratan nodded.

So too the next. The one after. And the last.

“All?”

“All four. Cotton wool.”

He strode out and collared Mangesh.

“Come on!”

He half-lifted, half-dragged the terrified boy, bumping his knees along the sloping corridor.

“Walk, will you? Take us there!”

Mangesh led them, as Ramratan expected, to one of those green-curtained cubicles that line the pavement on Shuklaji Street.

“He won’t be here,” said Hankin. “May still be at Leopold’s.”

But Ramratan was beyond counsel.

Above the green curtain a neat sign in English announced:
Clinic of Confidence.

Clinic of Confidence!

Ratan laughed out loud. Why, he knew that! He remembered staring at it from the upper deck of the 4 Ltd. in Dongri. Never those local trains for him, he was a BEST man all through his undergraduate days when traffic inched its way along Mohammad Ali Road giving him time enough to memorize the blackboard list outside the Clinic of Confidence. He recalled it now, verbatim.

Hydrocele, piles, fistula, small size increase, weakness, lack of interest, debility, thin semen, thick semen, semen block, semen loss, all kinds of venereal diseases.

And then in tall red capitals:

LIFELONG GUARANTE OF FUL TENSION
SATISFACTION TO EXTREME OLD MEN
AND
MIDLE AGES.
HAKIM ARIF KHAN DEHLAVI B.U.M.S.

The Medical College knew him simply as Bums and Cums.

Ratan hadn’t seem that board since the flyover opened to traffic. Like many things that had lasted a century, it did not cross over into the new millennium.

But Prescott was here. Patton Prescott. He could be nobody else.

It had worked then, the elixir of youth!

That wasn’t how he remembered it. They had kept it from Prescott, hadn’t they, after they burst in on the hakim?

Into the Clinic of Confidence, then up a staircase. No—a
ladder,
wedged in a dark alcove. And above, way above, a skylight that glared like a malignant ocellus. His fingers hooked onto Mangesh’s collar, Ramratan urged the boy forward as Hankin lumbered slowly behind them. They trudged up five stories to emerge on a loft right beneath the tenement rafters.

This was no attic. It was a laboratory busy with flasks, angled glass tubes, stout jars, alembics, and shelves. Rows and rows of wooden shelves, all ancient, cracked, bursting with secrets in the frigid stagnant air.

A blue flame leaped, and there he was, their quarry, and if the signboard was to be believed, Hakim Arif Khan Dehlavi. His agate eyes, dilating over the wild tangle of beard, stabbed Ramratan with fresh rage.

A small alembic hissed and sputtered over the flame. In its blue flicker the table shimmered spectral, as if covered with nacre. But it was something else.

The table was heaped with testes—big, small, gray, pink, glistening, dull. A mound of gonads crowded and jostled for space, as if a massacre raged outside these walls and a maniac loosed upon the dead had cached his spoils in here.

Strange, the cold air held nothing of the feral odor of dying tissue.

This registered in the blink before Ramratan sprang at the man. Hankin had to pull Ramratan’s hands off the hakim’s fat neck.

“I got these from the abattoir,” the man rasped when Ramratan let go. “There’s no law against that.”