Six Suspects (5 page)

For close to eight hours, Melame and Pemba watched over
Nokai's body, as inert as a stationary turtle, while shadows lengthened
outside the hut. It was late evening when the
torale
finally
woke up with a start. He seemed groggy and disoriented. His eyes
were bleary and there were numerous small cuts and bruises all
over his body.

'Water, quick, get me some water,' he cried. Pemba had a jug
of water handy. The
torale
drank greedily, half the water cascading
down his chin. Catching his breath, he announced dramatically,
'
Ingetayi a-ti-iebe
. Nokai has seen the sea-rock!'

Weary from his ordeal, Nokai narrated his journey in fragments,
with Pemba and Melame having to tease out the details
from him. This, he told them, was the longest trip he had ever
undertaken. One that took him across the four oceans to the land
of the
inene
. Soaring high in the sky, he had passed over snowcovered
peaks and long, winding rivers. He had crossed barren
sandy deserts and lush green valleys. He had seen metal birds flying
in the sky and long iron snakes moving on the ground, smoke
billowing from their hoods. The spirit of Tomiti himself had then
led him on the trail of the
ingetayi
, crossing dense mangrove
swamps, honing in on a vast bustling city teeming with people,
where concrete buildings stood taller than the tallest mountains
and where the night was lit up by the light of a thousand suns. He
had swooped down to a small green-roofed house next to a small
pond and that is where the
ingetayi
was, sitting atop a pedestal in
a small room, surrounded with images of the
inene
's gods.

'Tell us who lives in the house, Wise One. He must be the one
who stole the sea-rock,' Melame urged.

'I saw only two people in the house. An old woman, wearing a
white dress, and a short, bald man, with bushy eyebrows, thin lips
and a bulbous nose,' Nokai replied, adding, 'He also wore glasses.'

'Banerjee!' Melame and Pemba exclaimed simultaneously,
recognizing the description of the senior welfare officer who had
left the island two months ago in an unseemly hurry.

'Puluga be praised. All our troubles will now be over,' Nokai
declared. 'As soon as the sea-rock is returned, the spirits will be
propitiated. We will have enough honey and pigs and cicadas and
turtles. No one will die and become an
eeka
.'

All three men stepped out of the hut and Melame broke the
news to the other members of the Council of Elders, who had
been waiting patiently since morning.

'The only issue now is who will undertake this mission? Who
will go to the land of the
inene
and recover the sea-rock?' Pemba
tossed the question.

The elders looked at each other's faces and looked away. A
profound silence fell over the assembly. The wind dropped. Even
the children running around with their toy bows and arrows
ceased their sport and stood still, nervous and confused. The only
sound was that of the distant waves breaking against the reefs. The
air became heavy and dark with tension.

Suddenly, an empty bottle of Kingfisher beer dropped from
the sky and crashed at Melame's feet, narrowly missing Tumi, who
was breastfeeding her baby. Everyone looked up in alarm,
wondering what new punishments the spirits sitting up in the
heavens were doling out for them. They frowned when they
spotted Eketi relaxing up in the
garjan
tree. He waved at them.

'You leg of a chicken. Come down immediately,' Pemba
bawled. 'Otherwise I will become the first father to ask Nokai to
turn his own son into a dog.'

Reluctantly, Eketi shinned down the tall tree. His movements
were quick and nimble, like a monkey's. He jumped to the ground
and stood before his father, a sheepish grin on his face. He was tall
by the standards of his tribe – a good five feet – and muscularly
built. He wore red shorts which were torn in a number of places
and a dirty white T-shirt bearing the logo of the Dallas Cowboys.
A small plastic bottle containing chewing tobacco dangled from
his neck.

'None of you have answered the most important question our
tribe has been asked,' Melame addressed the elders again. 'Who
will volunteer to recover the sacred rock?'

The question was met again by a wall of silence.

'What has happened to your people, Chief?' Nokai berated
Melame. 'Is there no one prepared to defend the tribe's honour?'

Melame stood like a condemned prisoner, silent and impassive.
It was Eketi who finally broke the impasse. 'Eketi will go,' he
announced calmly.

Melame looked doubtfully at him. 'Do you think you will be
able to handle this task? All day long I see you loitering on the
beach, drinking beer and coca, trying to palm money off
the foreigners.'

Nokai stepped in. 'Puluga be praised. Eketi is cleverer than you
think. For three seasons I taught him my secrets. But he has no
interest in becoming a
torale
. He wants to conquer the world.
Nokai says give him a chance.'

Melame turned to Pemba. 'You are his father. What do you
say?'

Pemba nodded sagely. 'I agree with Nokai. If Eketi stays here,
the welfare staff will make him their slave. He will be doing chores
for the
inene
all his life. Let this be his initiation ceremony.'

'Yes,' Nokai concurred, 'the ultimate
tanagiru
. It will
rejuvenate the entire tribe. And when he returns with the sacred
rock we shall give him a hero's welcome, just like our ancestors
gave Tomiti when he first brought the rock from Baratang Island.'

Melame turned to Eketi. 'You know it will be a hazardous
journey, don't you?'

'It is a risk Eketi is prepared to take,' Eketi replied, sounding
more mature than his years. 'It should be a risk the tribe is
prepared to take. Our very future depends on it.'

'Don't worry, Nokai will protect you,' the medicine man said
reassuringly. 'I will give you tubers which have the protection of
the spirits, and pellets which can cure any ailment.' He stepped
inside the hut and returned with a decorated jawbone on a black
string. 'Once you put this sacred bone around your neck, Puluga
himself will become your guardian. No harm will come to you.'

Eketi kneeled before the medicine man and accepted his
blessings. Then he took off his T-shirt, ripped the tobacco pouch
from his neck, and put on the jawbone which glowed like
phosphorescence against his coal-black skin.

Pemba injected a note of caution. 'What if the welfare staff
catch my son?' he asked. 'You know the hiding they gave Kora
when he tried to get into the speedboat without their permission.
That man Ashok is very clever. He can even speak our language.'

Eketi dismissed this with a wave of his hand. 'So what? I can
speak English better than him. The welfare staff are fools, Father.
They are interested only in making money. They have no interest
in me. But how will I go to India? Eketi cannot fly like Nokai.'

'We will make a canoe for you,' said Melame. 'The best boat
we have ever made. You will leave at the time of the moon of full
dark. No one will spot you. Within a few days I am sure you will
be able to reach the land of the
inene
. Then you just have to find
that rotten egg Banerjee and recover our stolen rock.'

'And how exactly will Eketi find Banerjee?'

'By finding the green-roofed house.'

'Do you have any idea how big India is?' Eketi cried. 'It is
bigger than the sky. Searching for one green-roofed house will be
like looking for a grain of salt in the sand. What I need is something
called an address. Everyone in India has one. That's what
Murthy Sir taught us in school. Now who has got Banerjee's
address?'

'Oh, we didn't think of that,' said Melame and scratched his
head. The assembly fell silent.

'Puluga be praised. I believe I may be able to help,' a voice rang
out. A shadow detached itself from the trees in the background
and stepped forward.

The islanders recoiled in shock. It was Ashok, the junior
welfare officer.

'
Kujelli!
' exclaimed Pemba, which was the Onge equivalent of
'Oh shit!' though its literal meaning was 'The pig has pissed!'

'I come in peace,' Ashok declared in fluent Onge as he
approached the gathering. A clean-shaven man in his early thirties,
The Tribal
49
he was of average height with a thin build and short black hair. 'I
will take Eketi to India,' he said. 'I know Banerjee's address in
Kolkata. I will help recover your sacred rock. Will you describe it
to me?'

He took out a pen from his bush shirt and opened a thin black
diary.

I
WILL BE DEAD
in approximately six minutes.
I have consumed a full bottle of Ratkill 30. The powerful
poison is making its way through my bloodstream. It takes only
three minutes to kill a rat; double that for a human. My body will
be paralysed first, then it will slowly start turning blue. My heartbeat
will become irregular, then it will stop completely. My
twenty-one-year-old life will come to an abrupt end.

This is the time, Mother would say, to remember God. To
atone for my sins. But what's the point? Lord Shiva is not going to
come down from Mount Kailash to get me out of this jam. He
never helps us poor people. He belongs only to the rich. That is
why although I live inside the temple, I don't believe in God.

My late friend Lallan would have surmised that I am pretending
to commit suicide to impress some chick. But this isn't a
drama. And it isn't even suicide. It is murder.

Mr Dinesh Pratap Bhusiya is standing in front of me, pointing
a revolver directly at my stomach. An expensive imported piece.
He is the one who ordered me to drink the rat poison. Given a
choice between dying by bullet and dying by poison, I chose the
latter. At least it will be painless, though that watery brown liquid
had a terrible taste; it was like swallowing mud.

There is a manic glint in Mr D. P. Bhusiya's eyes as he watches
me die. Of all the Bhusiya brothers he is the most dangerous. I saw
him the other day, torturing his pet dog, poking him in the eye
with a pointed stick. In fact, there is a mad streak in the entire
Bhusiya clan. His elder brother Ramesh is a serial adulterer, trying
to bonk every girl in the neighbourhood, from the sweeper to the
washerwoman, while his fat wife spends her time at the beauty
parlour. And his younger brother Suresh is a serial adulterator, selling
impure goods to unsuspecting customers. Everything in his
general provision store on Andheria Modh is adulterated. He
mixes crushed pebbles in pulses, sand in rice, artificial colours in
spices, chalk powder in flour. He sells fake milk, fake sugar, fake
medicines, fake cola, even fake bottled water. Come to think of it,
it is difficult to figure out which brother is the worst. Partly
because they all look like carbon copies of each other. At times
even I get confused which of the three brothers I am talking to.
Their father, Mr Jai Pratap Bhusiya, also looks exactly like his sons,
simply an older model. It is almost as if the Bhusiya women have
a factory where they have perfected a mould which makes
succeeding generations of Bhusiyas look exactly alike. If you were
to meet a member of the family in the street you would be able
to say immediately, 'There goes a Bhusiya,' just as you would be
able to identify a black buffalo in a herd of cows.

If only the Bhusiya women were as ugly as their men I
wouldn't be in this situation. The main reason I began working in
this house was because of Pinky Bhusiya, the only sister of the
three brothers. She has skin like honey and a body like a BMW. All
sleek curves outside and smooth upholstery inside. I saw her in the
temple complex one day and foolishly laid a thousand-rupee bet
with Jaggu, the flower-seller, that I would start an affair with her
within sixty days.

Working as a servant was way beneath the dignity of a
university graduate like me, but that was the only way to gain
entry into the Bhusiya household. Luckily, the Bhusiyas were in
need of a servant. As a matter of fact, every rich family in the
capital is in need of one. Good servants are as hard to find these
days as spares for the Daewoo Matiz. The fact that I lived on the
temple compound was enough to convince the Bhusiyas that I was
honest and God-fearing, and they employed me on a salary of
three thousand a month.

In hindsight, it was the biggest mistake of my life. A high-flying
ex-mobile-phone thief, used to dealing in Nokias and Samsungs,
was always going to struggle with Pril dishwasher and Rin soap.

And the Bhusiyas didn't help matters either. They had seemed
law-abiding, religious types, who came to the temple every
Monday and donated large sums to Lord Shiva. It was only after I
started working for them that I discovered they were first-rate
crooks and cheats. Uncouth, uncivilized and insensitive, they
constantly reprimanded me for some act of omission or
commission.

I could have tolerated their boorishness, but what I couldn't
stand was the bossiness of the Bhusiya women. They acted as if
they owned me. Mr R. P. Bhusiya's wife would send me off to get
a DVD from the video parlour and Mr S. P. Bhusiya's wife would
demand that I get her dry-cleaning at the same time. Worst of all,
Pinky Bhusiya remained completely immune to my charms. I had
thought a girl like her would be easy to entice. The way she
dressed, she seemed neither too hep nor too staid. Neither too
worldly-wise and canny, nor totally timid. I enacted several
hero-type roles to attract Pinky's attention, from the sensitive
aashiq
to the dignified servant with a heart of gold. I tried to
impress her with my wide knowledge of mobile phones and my
deep understanding of national politics, but nothing seemed to
work. She treated me just like a servant, angry one day, amiable
another, but never seeing me as a man. All she was interested in
were her silly girlfriends and her CD player. Even the bathrooms
in the house were so constructed that there was no possibility of
peeping in. Within a month I realized that it was a waste of time.

I would have quit my job, given Jaggu the thousand rupees and
willingly conceded defeat, when a dramatic new development
made me stay on. Asha, better known as Mrs Dinesh Pratap
Bhusiya, developed the hots for me. One sticky afternoon, as I
walked into her bedroom to deliver some toiletries, she caught me
by the shirt, closed the door and began kissing me all over. Thus
began our affair.

*

Servants are the most under-appreciated class of people in the
world. They don't demand the affection or compassion of their
employers. They only seek respect. Not for what they do, but for
what they know. Just attend a gathering of servants in front of the
Mother Dairy booth at six in the morning, and you'll hear more
hot gossip and insider info than on Breaking News on TV. That is
because servants see everything and hear everything, even though
they may pretend to be as ignorant as cows. Their own lives are so
tedious, they get their kicks from prying into their masters'. When
the family is watching soap operas, the servants are watching the
family. They catch little gestures and nuances which escape other
members of the clan. They are the first to know that the boss is
about to become insolvent, or the boss's daughter is going to need
an abortion. They have the low-down on what really happens
inside a family: who is bitching about whom, who is plotting
against whom.

And beware a servant's revenge. There are so many elderly
couples in Delhi whose throats have been slit by their Bihari cooks
and Nepali guards. Why? Because the servants were driven to
the limit by their employers. I, too, have taken my revenge on the
Bhusiyas. Mr S. P. Bhusiya, the adulterator, for instance, has no clue
that the chicken curry he has been eating at dinner time is also
adulterated. I spit in it liberally before laying it on the table. And
the elderly Mr Bhusiya, with his diminished sense of taste and
smell, happily drank the vegetable soup which I had garnished
with bird droppings, and even asked for a second helping!

But I received the biggest thrill of all from thumbing my nose
at Mr D. P. Bhusiya. He pretended to be as tough as a bulldog, but
his wife confided in me that in bed he was like a mouse, as useless
as a camera without film.
Bole toh
, fully impotent. My affair with
his wife lasted two months. The icing on the cake was that she
even paid me after every 'performance'. So while Mr D. P. Bhusiya
was at his brick kiln in Ghitorni, I would be in his bed with Asha,
earning an extra hundred rupees.

I was in his bed this afternoon, when he happened to make an
unscheduled visit to the house. It was exactly like they show in
films. The husband returning home and opening the bedroom
door and his jaw dropping on seeing his wife with another man –
worse, his own servant.

'Whore!' he bellowed as I scrambled out of bed and ran into
the en-suite bathroom where I had left my clothes. I heard a
scuffle and the sound of Asha being slapped. Two minutes later
the bathroom door was kicked open and Mr D. P. Bhusiya stepped
in with a revolver in one hand and a bottle in the other.

'Now I shall sort
you
out, you bastard,' he hissed, and ordered
me at gunpoint to come out.

He took me to the garage on the ground floor, backed me into
a corner and forced me to drink the bottle of Ratkill 30. And that
is where I now stand, counting the seconds till my death. A
murder which will be presented as a suicide.

I look around the large garage, at the empty space marked by
grease stains where Mr R. P. Bhusiya's silver Toyota Corolla will be
parked this evening, at the stacks of cartons in the corner containing
spices and pulses which Mr S. P. Bhusiya will proceed to
adulterate, at the steel ladder, the half-empty plastic bottles of
coolant and engine oil lying on the wooden shelf. I try not to think
of Mother and Champi.

Mr D. P. Bhusiya is looking at his watch with a worried look. It has
been twenty minutes since I polished off the bottle. The poison
should have done its work by now. But instead of a creeping
paralysis, my stomach is experiencing a bubbling effervescence,
like you feel after drinking Coca Cola. Something is rising up in
my throat. Seconds later, a jet of vomit shoots from my mouth and
lands on Mr D. P. Bhusiya's white shirt.

He gets so flustered, the revolver slips from his hand. That is
all the opening I need. I kick the gun away and dash out of the
garage.

It is amazing what fear of death can do to the human body. I
run like an Olympic champion, glancing back from time to time
to see if Mr D. P. Bhusiya is following me.

As I near the temple, I marvel at my extraordinary luck. I had
stared Death in the face and Death had blinked. But perhaps this
is being too dramatic. By now I have figured out that my death
would have been a fake one. As fake as the rat poison Mr D. P.
Bhusiya must have obtained from his brother's store!

There is nothing fake about the smile on my face as I burst
through the temple gates, see Champi sitting at her usual place on
the bench beneath the
gulmohar
tree in the back garden and crush
her in the biggest bear hug of my life.

'
Arrey
, what's the matter? You are acting as if you have won
the lottery,' she laughs.

'You could say that. I have decided two things today, Champi.'

'What?'

'One, that I am never ever going to work as a servant again.'

'And the second?'

'That I am going back to my old profession. Stealing mobile
phones. But don't tell Mother.'

There was a time when I actually liked my name. It was a hit with
the girls in the locality, who considered it quite cute. And it was a
considerable improvement on just plain Munna, which immediately
brings to mind some lowly tea-boy or struggling car
mechanic. Munna Mobile had a certain ring, a definite charm to
it. That was when mobile phones were a high-society item. Now
even the bloody washerman has one. What self-respecting youth
would like to be called Munna Mobile today? They might as well
call me Vodafone or Ericsson.

I acquired the moniker four years ago, after I filched my first
mobile phone. I had taken it off a very fat lady who had driven
to the temple in a white Opel Astra. She seemed to be in a big
rush, the way she wheezed up the steps, as if she had fifty errands
to finish that day. It happens. You are very busy. You just want to
make a flying visit to God and in your confusion you forget minor
details, like locking your car. And leaving your brand-new Sony
Ericsson T100 on the driver's seat.

That was the first mobile I had ever touched. Before that I
used to steal the shoes and slippers of devotees who were foolish
enough to leave them at the bottom of the steps rather than give
them for safekeeping to the old lady who charges a mere 50
paise
per pair.

If truth be told, my exploits as a slipper thief were nothing to
write home about. The pickings were slim, though I did manage a
couple of pairs of almost brand-new Reeboks and Nikes. Had they
not been in sizes nine and ten, I would have kept them for myself
instead of selling them to the cobbler at one tenth of their price.

I took the fat lady's mobile to Delite Mobile Mart, the mobilephone
shop just outside the temple. Madan, the owner, gave me
two hundred rupees for it, ten times what I received for a used
pair of slippers. That first mobile introduced me to a whole new
world of SIM cards and PIN numbers. Bata shoes and Action
sandals soon gave way to Nokias and Motorolas. That was when I
formed a partnership with my best friend Lallan, realizing that
stealing mobiles required much greater coordination and planning
than stealing shoes. Our favourite targets were cars stopped at red
lights with rolled-down windows and mobiles glinting on the
dashboards. While Lallan would divert the driver's attention, I
would creep up on the other side, snatch the phone from the
dashboard and then run like mad through the meandering alleys
and side roads that we knew like the back of our hands.

I have kept a record of each and every mobile phone we stole
over a three-year period. The total came to ninety-nine. It was
good while it lasted. It gave me enough to live a modest life, buy
a few decent clothes, have flings with a couple of girls from the
locality. The funny thing is, I didn't have to sell the girls any fake
story about my being a medical rep or some shit like that. They
got their thrills from hearing about my exploits as a mobile-phone
thief. And a handset makes a much-sought-after present. A girl
will let you touch her breasts for a Motorola C650. She might
even open her legs for a Nokia N93.