Flesh Songs: A Sheila Ray story

Way back in another lifetime, in a galaxy far far away, before I began writing my Ramayana retelling, and my Mahabharata retelling, and even my Devi stories, I used to write contemporary fiction.

Flesh Songs
by Ashok Banker

A Sheila Ray story

The police gave her a bitch of a time. They wanted answers. She didn’t like the questions, and the way they asked them.

There were a half dozen of them in the lock-up, constables and a couple of sub-inspectors. One man stood behind her and when she didn’t answer, he boxed her ears like a man in a band clashing cymbals together.

She’d been expecting it, had clenched her jaw tight and her lungs emptied of air, but it still drew trickles of blood that dripped from her earlobes. Later, they handcuffed her hands over her head, tied her feet together and someone punch-jabbed her kidneys from behind. Flashes of red lightning exploded behind her eyelids. She knew she would piss blood for days.

Then one of them mauled her breasts, and that got them started. A constable with a gut like a sumo wrestler started to unbutton his khaki shorts. The others whistled and egged him on in guttural Marathi. The sub-inspectors didn’t give a damn.

She turned her face away. She had no doubt what would happen next: Either she would play along and they would use her brutally, leaving her bleeding and mauled. Or she would fight them, as she knew she would, and they would punch, gouge, claw and flay her within an inch of death. They wouldn’t kill her–not deliberately, at least–because while a gang-rape in custody was one thing, murder was a tad more difficult to brush away. Just a tad.

But it never went that far. Just then the door slammed open for a new arrival. A khaki uniform again, but the epaulets and sleeve-stripes were way beyond any of the ranks already in the interrogation room.

It was the Assistant Commissioner, Crime Branch, D Ward. At the sight of his rank, all the other cops scrambled to attention. The hawaldar mauling her breasts, his other hand unbuttoning his shorts, muttered a familiar abuse and stepped away from her. The ACP scanned the room. He didn’t seem to care about what had happened, or what had been about to happen. He gave a terse order, turned and left the room, leaving the doors open.

~

When she was brought in, dressed again, he offered her coffee. Her clothes were ripped and without the tampon, she could feel the wetness oozing through her panty and soaking her jeans. Everything hurt. She sat in the high-backed wooden chair and waited.

“Sheila Ray,” he said, reading from a file. “Ashok Ray’s daughter.” He glanced up at her, as if trying to compare his memory of Ashok Ray with this battered slut who sat before him.

“Your father was a very good policeman,” he said.

She waited for him to get to the point. She had to pee– again. Though they had let her pee before bringing her to the ACP, she had been unable to relax enough to let her sphincter open.
Now, she felt like she would burst at any moment.

He sipped coffee. She drank down the glass of water before picking up hers, Indian style. Her hand didn’t tremble, but her forearm was so taut, she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. Her lips blazed where she had been bitten by the fat hawaldar.

“A child has been kidnapped,” he said at last. “An important man’s child.” He named an industrialist, a name she had read in the newspapers in connection with a billion dollar power project, an Indo-US joint venture.

Her forearm was so taut she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. She had lived with a venture capitalist once, for two brief months: satin sheets and Baskin Robbins, a laptop or Palm-held always within reach, room service and lots and lots of sex, especially when the Nasdaq closed high, at 6 a.m. Indian Time. She remembered the name from those days, from pink-sheeted financial papers and glossy American magazines with pompous single-word names.

The ACP explained the deal. The kidnapper had been caught and killed in a police encounter when he tried to retrieve the ransom. They knew the address where the child was being held. An apartment in a chawl, a windowless two-room apartment with only one door. But somebody was there with her, an accomplice. And he would kill her if they tried to break in. They needed someone who could talk him out.

She didn’t ask the obvious question. The coffee was too sweet and too strong, made with chicory, South Indian style. She drank it all down. She hadn’t eaten a morsel for a day and a night, had no idea when she might eat again, and the sugar, milk and caffeine would bolster her for a couple of hours.

He answered the unspoken question. “You know the man, the accomplice.” He had left his coffee too long on the desk and when he sipped it, a skin of cream came onto his lip, hanging like cobwebs. He exclaimed in irritation and dabbed it away with a tissue from a box on the desk, rubbing hard.

“His name is Bhasker,” he went on after he had wiped away the cream. He now had flecks of tissue on his lips, but didn’t know it. It was evident what he expected her to do. He didn’t specify what she would get in exchange; they both knew what it would be. She had done this before.

She said she would need one thing before she agreed to do it.

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“A sanitary pad,” she said.

His clean-shaven face twitched reflexively. She realized then that he didn’t have a moustache.

~

The chawl was one of the many vast, sprawling Government-built monstrosities that festered like leprosy sores across the suburbs, built to provide accommodation to relocated slum dwellers and homeless paupers, back in the Eighties when saving the poor was still fashionable in Bombay high society and political circles.

The slum dwellers and homeless, brought in garbage trucks by the hundreds of thousands, had stayed long enough to sell the tenements for hard cash. In less than six months, they had all moved back into the inner city, raising new plastic-and-tinfoil lean-tos and huts to replace the old. After three tries and three changes of Government, the project had been shelved. Now, the tenement structures were worse than slums.

She made her way around a paved area occupied by dozens of little children, some nearly infants, others almost teenagers, squatting for their daily business. Some younger ones squatted on the highway, boldly sticking out their tongues at the passing truckers and motorists who slowed or swerved to avoid them. This was the route to the international airport. A happy sight to greet foreigners arriving in the city for the first time.

The chawl was dark, filthy and stank of the usual assortment of Bombay chawl smells: all the fluids and solids the human body could possibly produce lay on the stairs and in the hallways. The apartment she was seeking–kholi, they called it here–was on the third floor.

On the top step, a gangly young boy with a large goiter lump on his neck, sat studying a school textbook. It was probably the best light in the place to read. She had to step over him and she glanced down at the book. It was a history book, opened to a page on Clive of India.

She ignored the Marathi women sitting on the floor in the hallway, churning a grinding stone in tandem as they jawed tobacco and occasionally spat out onto the veranda.

Like most Government-built tenements, the building was a giant cube, with verandas running around the perimeter of every floor. The tenements were grouped in a cube within the cube, clustered right next to each other as close as cells in a hive.
This meant that no room could have access to light and fresh air, and the ones on the extreme inside didn’t even have ventilation, except for a central chute down the length of the structure that was used as a refuse dump. Windows that opened into this central tube had to be kept closed to keep out the stench and the rats. It was worse than not having any windows at all.

She found the number she wanted and knocked on the door, softly. There was no response.

Further down the hallway, the sound of a tape recorder playing a Hindi film song blared through an open door, and a baby’s crying was punctuated by the angry voices of a man and a woman.

The song was an oldie by Mukesh, a dead singer with a nasal voice that made the soul twist in delicious agony. He sang about time and how it changed everything, even the face of love. The same song was also playing somewhere else, more softly. Radio then, not tape. In yet another kholi, a TV tuned to MTV was blaring out a nauseatingly familiar Indipop hit, a direct rip-off of “In The Summertime”.

She focussed on the low, mournful lyrics, shutting out the louder music and the other chawl sounds. Seeking a small, momentary envelope of privacy, Mukesh’s spine-creeping voice and the tortured songs of her own silent flesh.

From within the apartment, she heard voices. A man’s low tones. And a little girl’s whining complaint. They were muffled by another door. She knocked again, much harder.

“Bhasker,” she said, putting her mouth to the metal-framed mail slot… “Mee aahe, Sheila.” It’s me, Sheila.

There was absolute silence from inside. The Mukesh song ended and a radio deejay’s low silky voice spoke inaudibly for a moment. Then, as another song began–Geeta Bali, not her favorite, but an oldie at least–she heard the faint scuff of cautious feet as they approached the door.

“Kashasaati Sheila,” he said softly in Marathi. “Tuzha aiicha janam diwas kai?” If you’re Sheila, then tell me your mother’s birthday.

A memory flashed like a television screen switched on and then off: Her mother in a brand new red saree, laughing, for once unconcerned about her teeth showing, Sheila’s father on her left, Bhasker on her right. “Thirty-first August, Nineteen Forty Six,” she said.

There was a pause, as if he experienced a flash of memory too. Then he said quietly, switching to Hindi. “Sapnon mein bhi nahi socha tha ke tumko bhejenge.” You’re the last person I expected them to send.

She glanced at her watch. She had less than half an hour left. “Open the door,” she said. “I have a deal for you.”

She heard the child cry from inside the apartment. It sounded muffled, as if she had been gagged.

He opened the door.

~

They sat on the floor in a room that was completely bare, but clean. A ridiculously small fan–each span barely six inches long–spun like a dirty CD on the ceiling.

The girl was in the corner, gagged and tied, eyes bulging with curiosity but otherwise unharmed.
There was nobody else in the place. A peculiar odor hung in the air, something undefinable but vaguely familiar. It seemed to come from the direction of the little toilet, so she paid it no attention.

“It’s a set-up,” he said. “We were assigned to guard the girl from a kidnapping attempt. The ACP told me to take her away and keep her in a safe place for two days, where nobody would think to look for her.”

He gestured at the empty room. “This was my kholi, until I shifted to the police quarters in Worli after the promotion.”

She noticed the sub-inspector’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform. “We brought her here on Monday morning, and were told to wait for further instructions. The next thing I knew, Vardhe and Sahu had some argument about how much ransom to demand, and then they shot it out. Vardhe’s body is still in the toilet. Then Sahu said he was going to collect the ransom and we would split it 70-30 when he returned, and he never came back.”

He glanced at the girl and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked older and wearier than she remembered, his hair shockingly more grey. Plus he had lost a lot of weight.

“I never intended to take the ransom, but I thought I’d have it out with him when he came and then take the girl over to HQ and explain everything…”

She spread her palms.

He nodded. “I know, I know. They won’t believe a word. Because the ACP set us all up. He lured Sahu and Vardhe with the promise of money, and me…” he paused, flicking at a fly that was trying to sit on his ear, “with me, he knew money wouldn’t work, so he used duty to get me to help. I was an idiot not to see through him in the first place.”

His face had a keening, desperate look, and he gazed at her as if he felt she had the answer to everything in her head and might tell him at any moment.

“So what to do now?” he asked.

She stood up. “Get up,” she said. “They’ll be here any minute. To kill all three of us. That’s the plan, obviously. Let’s go.”

He blinked and stared. “All three of us?”
His eyes went to the child.

“She’s a witness,” she said. “Besides, they’ve got what they wanted, the money. No point keeping her alive.”

An expression of utter darkness came over his face, like a cloud blotting out an already weak yellow sun. “But then why send you?” he asked. “Why not just come and kill me.”

She sighed. “I was supposed to kill you and save the girl. In exchange for my being released of all charges.” She showed him the blade hidden in the lining of her jeans. He blanched, and looked up at her face. She smiled and shook her head.

He started towards the front door. She stopped him. “This way,” she said, and led him to the toilet.

~

It took them several minutes to break through the bathroom ventilator. And even then, it would be a tight squeeze for Bhasker’s wide shoulders. She hammered at the crumbly concrete on the sides, trying to widen the hole. Then she heard them banging on the front door. Bhasker flinched, his sweat-washed face quivering. He stood astride the body of the dead inspector, Vardhe, his shoes squishing in the sticky pool of dried blood.

“Okay,” she said. “You go first, I’ll hand you the child.”

“No,” he said, pointing at the hole. “No room for me. You go. I’ll hand her up to you.”

She hesitated. The sounds at the front door stopped, replaced by ominous silence.

“Go!” he urged.

She went. The girl whimpered in fear as Bhasker handed her up, and when she saw the three-floor drop, she moaned softly, and started to cry. Sheila went out the hole backwards, the girl followed and clung to her neck, almost choking her.

Gunshots rang out at the front door. They were shooting the lock. But there was still one more door, the one to the inner room, to get through.

Bhasker called out to her as she was about to dip out of sight. “The blade,” he said.

She hesitated again, knowing what he meant to do, then pulled it out with one hand and threw it at him. It stuck in the thigh of the corpse, and the last sight she had of Bhasker was as he bent to pull it out. She climbed down the water pipe, praying it would hold her weight and the kid’s, and gunshots rang out at the door of the inner room.

She hid in a latrine on the ground floor, keeping the child quiet for the two hours it took them to search the chawl. She narrowly missed being found at least thrice. Finally, they assumed she had escaped–there were many entrances and approaches–and went away.

~

The industrialist was grateful but somehow resentful, as if he had already accepted his daughter’s death and couldn’t deal with the fact that she was alive. Or maybe it was just the fact that she was covered in excrement that prevented him from hugging her on sight.

But he paid a hefty reward. Sitting in an office on the ground floor of the bungalow–the girl had been taken away by servants to be bathed and cleaned and sterilized and fumigated presumably–he counted out crisp new bundles of 500-rupee notes. She shoved them carelessly into her duffel bag and zipped it up.

“It’s all politics,” he said, evidently feeling the need for some explanation. “To do with bureaucratic corruption. I didn’t pay the right people the bribes they wanted at the right time, so they thought they could shake me down this way. It’s all politics in the end, everything is politics.”

“I know,” she said, sliding out the gun she had deliberately not shown Bhasker. “So is this.”

She shot him twice in the head, and then once more in the groin. That was for not hugging his daughter.

~

The ACP banged his knee against a chair in the darkness and cursed in English. She had deliberately set the chair in the way. He fumbled for the light and switched it on, putting on the desk-lamp instead of the overhead tubelight by mistake, then stood there, swaying drunkenly.
She had heard about his drinking problem: He liked to drink Scotch in five star hotels. In exchange, he turned a blind eye to certain irregularities–like prostituition. Once in a while, he made use of those same irregularities himself; she had heard it all from an old friend who was now a prostitute.

When he saw her and the gun, he jerked back, startled. The chair caught him in the backs of his knees and he sat down heavily, grunting.

“Bitch,” he said. “Took all my money.”

She shook her head. “He paid me the money, as a reward for bringing the girl back.”

He snorted, letting her know how much he believed of that.

“Anyway,” he said. “You did good job with Bhasker. He looked like someone had tried to cut his throat three times to find the vein.”

“Artery,” she corrected automatically, then was silent, trying to picture Bhasker’s last seconds in that toilet with the rotting corpse, trying to slice through his own neck, having to do it again, and then yet again, hands growing slick and slippery with his own blood, collapsing to the floor as the corrupt cops came in with their guns ready to shoot anything that moved.

He was wagging a finger at her admonishingly. “But you were not supposed to kill Singh. That was not part of your brief. Now there is going to be big trouble for you.”

She raised the gun. It gleamed faintly in the dull yellow light of the desk lamp.

He started to laugh. “You will shoot me? You bitch, the day you shoot an Assistant Commissioner of Police, your life will be worth two-kaudi. You understand? Two pennies!”

She shot him in the teeth. His mouth shattered and turned red, half his face disappearing. He slumped in the chair, his shattered head falling onto the desk. Perfect.

She wiped the gun clean of her prints, put it in his right hand, fired it once into the wall as if his first shot had gone drunkenly awry–now he had the powder burns on his hand–and then dropped the bagful of cash beside him. There was no need for a suicide note: The industrialist’s visiting card was inside the bag. The afternoon tabloids had already speculated on a possible ‘inside link’ in the police department to the kidnapping.

“You’re the do-kaudi ka bastard,” she said as she walked away. “But this time you earned your two pennies.”

~

She drove all that night, the next day, and the next night, stopping only to relieve herself by the roadside and to snatch occasional naps in the back seat. She knew no search would be made for the stolen car for at least a week, if ever, but to be on the safe side, she switched license plates at a trucker’s diner–a dhaaba–outside the Rajasthan border.

When she reached Pokharan, the tiny desert village where the Indian Government had tested their nuclear devices, she stopped and slept for two straight days in the car.

A month later, she was in Delhi, and heard from a local blackmarketeer that she was accused of the kidnapping as well as the murder. Luckily, the Delhi police had bigger fish to fry, what with protests over nuclear testing and the national and state elections. She wasn’t afraid of being recognized.

Sometimes, when she soaked in the whirlpool tub in the Delhi Regency’s Princess Suite, sipping cold beer, and listening to old sad Mukesh songs on the brand new CD player, drifting in that dream-state between sleep and sobriety, she thought, not of Bhasker, although that last sight of him bending to pick up the blade in the toilet was mixed up in the memory too, but of the industrialist’s daughter.

And then, for some reason, she remembered the goiter-neck boy she had passed on the chawl staircase. She wondered which of those two would grow up less twisted, better able to resist the seductive warped lusts of the body, those luring siren songs of the flesh.

She was betting on the goiter-neck. He had less to lose to begin with anyway.

(c) Ashok Banker 2005. All rights reserved.

Apr 28, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Talking about Thrillers: A word from Thomas Abraham, CEO, Penguin Books India

Interesting development resulting from yesterday’s post It’s a Crime.

I had a call from Thomas Abraham, CEO of Penguin Books India.

Incidentally, he happens to be my publisher, but we haven’t had the pleasure of actually meeting.

Which is not as uncommon as you’d think, since authors very rarely meet the people who bring out their books. And the one occasion when we might have corrected that lacuna, during the launch of Prince of Ayodhya in New Delhi in 2003, he was out of Delhi.

Anyway, the reason he called was to correct the misimpression created by his interview in the Indian Express.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll recall my mentioning his comments about crime fiction authors in India and my being surprised that I was even mentioned, twelve years after my last (and only) crime novels were published.

Well, it turns out that he was misquoted in the interview.

What he actually intended to say was that while Ashok Banker had pioneered Indian English crime writing in India, and Aniruddha Bahal had most recently come out with a fairly decent thriller (in Abraham’s opinion, not mine – I haven’t read Bunker 13), there was still a huge void in the genre locally.

It’s a sign that India still awaits the kind of multiple-choices readers have in a mature publishing market such as, for example, the USA, where you have a Nelson De Mille, a John Grisham, a Tom Clancy, and five hundred and fifty other authors, all producing different sub-genres of crime or thriller fiction.

All of it selling in considerable numbers.

The part about “intellectual pretensions” was quite likely the interviewer’s own masala addition.

In any case, I found it interesting that Penguin is so positive about crime and thriller writing. Frankly I always felt it didn’t have much scope in India.

Crime has never sold very well here, barring the exceptional Agatha Christie or James Hadley Chase, or now, Grisham, et al. My reasoning is (still) that it’s because the readers who read those authors in such large numbers are actually seeking fantasy, not realistic crime writing.

So the firang settings, characters, etc are what they want. The moment you write an Indian thriller, it becomes too close to home for comfort. The fantasy-comfort factor is lost completely.

That’s my opinion, of course.

What I like is that Thomas Abraham, and the publishing house he manages, are still so open to testing the waters.

As I said before, if there are talented crime authors out there with zinger manuscripts, they should run, not walk, to the nearest post office and send off their mss to Penguin.

(And no, I’m not being paid to say this, just as I didn’t get my royalties cut for criticizing them yesterday!)

If Indian English crime fiction can produce a local De Mille, Grisham, Clancy, or whomever, hell, I’ll be one of the first to read those books!

Although my personal choices would veer more towards a desi Greg Iles, or Michael Connelly, or John Sandford.

But the point is still valid.

Indian English crime fiction can rock.

Given the right talent.

Apr 28, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »