BLOOD RED SARI Read online

  She knew right away that they were trouble. For one thing, men weren’t allowed on this floor or the one above – strictly. Their entry meant that they had roughed up the receptionists to get in, because that was the only way Shailly and Meenakshi would have let them past. Then there was the way they looked. Two of them moustached, one bearded, two clean-shaven but with badly groomed oily hair. They were dressed in pant–shirts – except for the guy leading them who was in the staple white kurta–pyjama that most politicians favoured – all chewing paan at eight in the morning, and had that certain macho swagger that she knew well. It was the strut of political party workers or uniformed policemen, of off-duty military men or gangsters, men whose job entitled them to the use of force and violence, and who thought that hurting other people made them more powerful, superior in some way.

  She watched as they strolled through the gym floor, looking at the women working out, ogling openly, exchanging lewd glances, wiggling eyebrows, staring openly at breasts in sports bras and bums in cycling shorts. Several of the members stopped working out to gape disapprovingly at them, and at least one snooty Park Street princess unleashed a barrage of Bengali, complaining about the invasion of her privacy. One of the men made a comment in street-crude Bengali about how he would like to really invade her privacy and the other men laughed.

  What the fuck?

  Sheila lowered her feet to the floor and rested her butt on the bench, watching them make their way towards this side of the floor. Mits glanced at her nervously and asked if she wanted her to go upstairs and fetch Ashutosh and the others. She meant the male trainers on the mixed floor, the only other men in the building apart from Jiteshkaku, the security guard who wasn’t really old but not quite in his prime either.

  Sheila shrugged and said okay, then reached out and gripped Mits’s forearm. ‘But quietly jaabo, no panicking, huh.’ Mits slipped out discreetly, glancing back anxiously over her shoulder as she went.

  The men were amongst the Dakshineshwar boxers now, who were neither intimidated nor upset by their presence. These were girls who had risen from the toughest backgrounds, many of them brutally abused by close family members, male relatives, or total strangers, brought up in the filthiest, poorest slums and backwaters: to them fitness and sports were survival, not a means of looking good or some macho power game. They fought to survive, to live. They had seen the likes of these assholes all their lives; they had dealt with them. They knew how to take care of them. The men seemed to realize this and their stances altered subtly. Instead of the open catcalling and eyebrow twitching, they resorted to verbal insults, questioning the feminity of the boxers, wondering aloud if there weren’t penises – the Bangla word was ‘boga’ – in the girls’ pants, challenging their womanhood. The girls drew closer, fists tightened, ranks closed, and just when violence threatened to explode, Sheila stood up and identified herself.

  ‘Aami Sheila Ray aachey, owner of this establishment,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for me?’

  The man who seemed to be in charge, a hefty fellow with mutton moustaches and a mouthful of paan, glared one final time at the boxers, then looked at Sheila with calculating, droopy eyes. Sheila thought he might be high on something other than just the tobacco in the paan.

  ‘We are come to tell you shut up,’ he said in horribly accented English. It was obvious he was trying to demonstrate that he was no less familiar with the language of Bengal’s past oppressors than anyone else present.

  It took Sheila a moment to absorb this. ‘Shut up?’ she asked, resisting the impulse to laugh because that would have been a disaster.

  He waved his kurta-clad arms around. ‘Gym! Shut up. Bandh koro! Closing time. Finish.’

  That was clear enough. ‘On whose authority?’

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a chai-stained sheet of pulp paper, folded into a small irregular square. A loose cigarette fell out when he pulled out the paper and opened it. ‘Kolkata Municipal Corporation. KMC. Myself Assistant Ward Commissioner Raghuvendra Choudhry. Myself authority.’ He sneered as his companions agreed loudly.

  Sheila was at a loss for words. What was that short form everyone used in text messages and on Twitter and Facebook these days? WTF. This was a WTF moment, if ever. She started over to the man, reaching out for the paper, even though she knew already that she had been fucked over but good … but by whom, and why?

  Three

  3.1

  ANITA BENT HER HEAD to duck beneath the trajectory of the approaching gunstock, moving diagonally off to Isaac’s right in the same motion. This put her out of the approach of the heavy wooden grip aimed at her skull, along with taking her just out of easy reach. As she passed him by on his right, she reached up with both hands, gripped his arm which by then was stretched out and starting to turn to adjust to her movement, and yanked upwards, hard. She pushed her hip into his groin, overstepping his right foot with her own, and anchored his lower body to the ground, even as she shoved his upper body up and back as hard as she could. Isaac’s snarling expression changed to a look of shocked surprise as he found himself flung back and bent over. A sharp twist to his wrist and he lost the grip on the shotgun, issuing a small yelp. Then she stepped back, removing her foot and releasing his lower body while turning sideways and kicking his foot with her left boot. Bent over backwards at a thirty-degree angle, one foot kicked out front, he tottered for a moment like a slapstick character on freeze, then fell with a crunching of dried leaves to the ground. He stared up uncomprehendingly for a moment at Anita, who was now holding the shotgun that he had released. She pointed it at his chest and cocked both barrels before putting her finger on the trigger.

  Isaac’s hands shot up in front of his chest. ‘Hey, kutta! I was just … fooling with you, men!’ He used the Malayalam term of endearment for a sibling – when used for a girl, it implied a mocking tone.

  She looked down at him down the length of the barrel. ‘Of course, kutta dearest,’ she said, giving it back with interest. ‘Same old Isaac. Always a bully, no? I think maybe you forgot that last time you tried to bully me, I taught you the lesson of your life. Remember?’

  Anger flared in his eyes even as the colour deepened in his fleshy jowls. He had put on weight, a lot of it, and was running to fat now, she saw. Isaac, who had once been so vain about his appearance, so proud of his muscle tone and physique; who had strutted in his bikini briefs on the beach during tourist season, showing off his Charles Atlas bod to the blonde aunties and more than once rented out the use of his masculinity in exchange for a few days of five-star comfort, room service and a crumpled $100 bill at the end. Isaac, who had tried more than once to fumble with her breasts or caress her ass – and Lalima’s too – when he’d had a few too many, bought with the remnants of those aunties’ ‘tips’. Her big brother, asshole of Varkala.

  She racked the shotgun, enjoying the way the sudden movement and sound made him – hands held up before his face – cringe and whimper. The shells popped out and she caught them easily in her right hand. She racked it again, but there were only the two shells. She tossed them high into the grove and saw them disappear into dense shrubbery, then swung the shotgun back to rest on her shoulder. He had opened his eyes briefly to peer up between his fingers once he realized she wasn’t going to shoot him, but when she swung the gun, he cringed again, until he realized she was laying the gun on her shoulder, not swinging it down like a club as he’d thought. He relaxed then and his face changed again to a snarl as his fingers turned to claws.

  ‘Bitch-cunt,’ he said. ‘Back from whoring yourself in the big city and acting like you are Queen of Sheba! Purakottu poku! Why don’t you just go back to your whore-city!’

  She grinned at his sudden revelation of his true feelings. ‘Kshamikkanam, kutta. I am so sorry! Did I injure your big strong shoulder?’ She clicked her tongue sympathetically. ‘Jnaan maappu chothikkunnu. Please, please forgive me kindly.’

  His eyes flicked past her and she turned at once, just in
time to see her mother emerge from the back door of the house, the one that led through the storeroom and kitchen. Iris Matthews – face wrinkled like a prune, dressed in a sloppy nightgown with rubber flip-flops on her feet – looked like she’d aged thirty years rather than just thirteen, her hair wild, tangled and completely white. A half-burnt cigarette smouldered between her fingers which resembled a chicken’s claws and were stained almost as yellow from nicotine. She stared at Isaac, then raised her eyes to Anita’s face, and in that short action, Anita saw her countenance change so dramatically, it was as if a switch had been turned on.

  ‘Ente kutti! What have you done to my son, you bitch?’ The voice was cracked from smoking and nowhere near as husky or Shirley Bassey-ish as Anita remembered it.

  ‘He was the one who tried to bash my skull in with this thing,’ Anita retorted. ‘What the hell are you ’ll doing with a shotgun, anyway? Who keeps guns in Varkala for Christ’s sake?’

  Iris Matthews crossed herself as she clutched the crucifix dangling from her neck. ‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, you … you vaishya!’

  Anita sighed. ‘The whore references are quaint but really quite inaccurate. Just so you know.’

  Her mother approached her from a wide circling angle, like a fisherman looking to toss a net across a school of fish without frightening them away. She looked drunk or drugged or both. Anita stepped back, putting a distance of a metre or two between herself and Isaac so Iris could approach her. The back door opened again and a man who closely resembled her father in his younger days came out, and for a moment Anita actually believed it was him; but of course, it was only Graham, her older brother who was younger than Isaac, looking more like Achchan than ever, right down to the pale skin with mottled red cheeks and prodigious beer belly. He was snapping on his belt, and had a crumpled magazine under his arm, as if he had just come out from the WC; he stopped short at the sight of Anita with the shotgun on her shoulder.

  ‘Hi Graham, killed any kittens lately?’

  He flushed, his acne-scarred cheeks turning bright red under his European-fair complexion. Graham had taken after their Anglo father unlike the rest of them who were as Indian-dark as their Malayali mother, and it made Anita sad to see him look so much more like Achchan as he grew older.

  ‘Philip said you were coming,’ he said, snapping the belt buckle. He had missed a loop, but Anita didn’t bother to inform him of the fact. ‘What is it you are wanting from us now?’

  ‘She has come to disgrace her Achchan’s name, shameless vaishya that she is,’ cried their mother, squatting beside Isaac who was now sitting up, holding his arm and wincing. ‘She will not rest until she prints her whoring stamp on this good family’s reputation. I always told her father he should have taken her and thrown her into the tide the night she was born. She is the devil’s get, on account of your father covering me during Lent. Good for nothing but whoring and blasphemy. Look at how she attacked her own kutta! Witch!’

  ‘He attacked me, actually,’ Anita said calmly, though her heart was pounding at sprinting speed and bile churned in her belly. Why had she ever thought that things might have changed here? Everything was the same as it had been when she ran out thirteen years ago. Home sweet home.

  ‘Bitch broke my arm,’ Isaac said, getting to his feet by pressing down on his mother’s shoulder. Iris promptly lost her balance and thumped down on her ass, legs splaying out and nightie riding up to reveal heavy cellulite-jellied thighs marked with thick green varicose veins. Isaac ignored his mother as he stood up to glare at Anita murderously, squeezing his shoulder with his left hand.

  ‘Illa, it’s not broken,’ Anita said, ‘you probably just pulled a muscle.’

  ‘What do you want here?’ Graham shouted, going over to help his mother up. Iris cursed him with a very un-Christian-like epithet and struggled to her feet on her own, hawking and spitting a gob of phlegm in Anita’s direction. ‘Why didn’t you just stay away? There’s no share for you in this, you know! You might as well just leave now. Purakottu poku!’

  ‘Shut up, Gram,’ Isaac said, glaring at his brother. ‘Just shut your trap.’

  Graham frowned near-sightedly at his brother. Anita realized that there was another reason why he resembled Achchan so much at first glance – he wasn’t wearing his spectacles. Must have left them back on the washbasin in the WC. ‘Is it not obvious? From someone or the other, she heard about the offer and now like a vaishya she comes to claim her pound of flesh! I am simply saying—’

  ‘Bitch!’ Both Isaac and Iris shouted at once.

  Graham stood breathing heavily, then turned back to peer at Anita again.

  All three looked at her with varying expressions of hatred and loathing. Anita sighed inwardly. Coming here had been a mistake after all. She should have known better.

  She began to walk away without saying anything – there was really no point in bandying words with them – when the sound of a motorbike grew louder and Philip came in sight, riding Achchan’s old Norton that looked as if it had been well cared for and sounded well maintained. Even with the bike goggles on, she could see him reacting to the sight of the family reunion.

  He got off the bike, put it on its stand and stood looking at the four of them.

  She looked at him, shook her head wearily and tossed the shotgun to the ground at his feet before walking away. She headed in the direction of the dirt road that led back to the main road which in turn led back to the highway, and didn’t stop even when she heard their angry voices shouting, arguing, bickering behind her.

  After a while, she was out of earshot and there was only the sound of the wind in the palms and the distant calling of gulls on the beach.

  She walked on without looking back.

  3.2

  IT TOOK NACHIKETA SEVERAL minutes to fully comprehend what the judge had just said. He seemed to realize that she hadn’t responded to his last query, paused to glance down at her from the bench over the rims of his half-spectacles, and asked if she was all right. His tone was kindly and that, more than anything he said, cut through the blurring noise that had begun to fill her head as he had read the summary judgment. She found that she had been holding her breath and let it wheeze out in a whistling rush, then gasped and breathed several more times, finding it hard to resume a normal breathing pattern. She had never been able to breathe quite as naturally since the attack and, from time to time when under duress, she tended to wheeze, sounding to herself like a battered tea kettle with a faulty whistle. But this was the first time she had let it happen in court and it was a measure of the shock she had received that she found herself not really caring about what the courtroom thought.

  Her brain, which had frozen stiff somewhere in the first few minutes of the judge’s reading of his own judgment, suddenly restarted with a diesel chugging, and she felt her motors coming back to life.

  Did he say he’s found for the complainant? He couldn’t have said that, could he? No, no, no, no, it’s not possible.

  But it was indeed possible. And he had said exactly that.

  After eight years of legal wrangling, of judgments and appeals and counter-appeals, stay orders and legal manoeuvring and blocking and tackling, after all these court dates and filings and procedures and struggle and toil, after all the seemingly futile and endless scrabbling at the pitiless stone feet of the blind bitch, could it be that she had finally, ultimately, eventually, inevitably … won?

  Could it possibly be?

  Apparently it had.

  She had.

  He had.

  The verdict was in at last. The ‘phinal-phinal’ verdict as Shonali always said, deliberately mimicking the Hindi ‘ph’ mispronunciation for the English ‘f’ sound. Oh, there was still the Supreme Court after this, and quite likely, the Shahs would go on to batter at the stone feet of that blind bitch as well. But for now, quite conclusively, decisively, she had, it seemed, won.

  ‘… in full, with interest, legal fees … and reparations!’


  The magic words, glowing in foot-high 3D alphabets as they floated above her eyes in mid-air now, like superimposed titles in an American TV series, dancing across the courtroom from right to left looked good enough to pluck and eat.

  Reparations!

  Not just the amount she’d demanded for the medical expenses, plus the money and other gifts her parents had been compelled to give the Shahs under duress during her marriage – now regarded by the court as ‘dowry’ and therefore illegal – plus legal fees, plus a fair allotment as per alimony awards for a daughter-in-law of such a family as the Shahs, but also reparations in lieu of the mental, emotional, anguish she’d suffered! All of which amounted to … how much? Well, equivalent to all the declared and known assets of the entire Shah family – which, being a Hindu Undivided Family, perforce possessed joint assets and cash holdings under income tax laws – which of course represented probably a third of their total value, two-thirds of the bulk almost certainly being socked away in black money and grey investments. The judgment even hinted at this without actually stating it up front in so many words, but implied that even after awarding their entire ‘official’ holdings and assets to their aggrieved ex-daughter-in-law, the Shah family would no doubt still be able to manage quite comfortably with their ‘savings’.

  There were the expected noises of outrage from the smartly turned out young lawyers of the big MNC law firm, and much hand-wringing by the Shahs themselves, and even a few tears and wails of grief, but Nachiketa saw from the stunned glassy eyed expressions on the faces of her ex-husband and ex-mother-in-law and ex-sisters-in-laws that whatever they might have expected, this was not it.

  In a rush of blood to her own befuddled brain, it all made sense to her.

  This judge, R.K. Jain. He was the honest one.

  It was the previous one, whom he had replaced at this late juncture, who had been the one the Shahs must have bribed, and about which they had hinted heavily to Shonali in the last settlement conference – which Nachiketa had routinely refused to attend on principle and which she had permitted even Shonali to attend only because the judge had demanded it over the years. The judge had recently fallen prey to the Judges’ Assets scam that came to light thanks to a public interest litigation filed under the new Right to Information Act. The Shahs had expected this to be their day in court; instead, it had turned out to be Nachiketa’s all the way.