The Blue Bar (Blue Mumbai #1)(16)
CHAPTER TWELVE
Through the window of his study at the sprawling farmhouse, he stood gazing at the dense foliage that began right beyond the backyard, green and inviting. Years ago, Dad had taken him hunting in the teeming scrub jungle bordering the property, taught him to fish in the brook that once ran less than two miles away. It had dried up. He felt a longing to watch those silvery fish darting about in dark pools where the water collected in the rainy season.
Turning away, he headed to the wooden table and the task at hand.
He ran his thumb over the round splotches and took a swig of watered-down whiskey. He needed his wits about him for what he had in mind. This table had belonged to his father. For a forest officer, that man sure dawdled for long hours in his study.
From a drawer, he retrieved a key and unlocked the metal cabinet that was once home to his father’s magazines, some of them not suitable for children. The cabinet door opened with a screech that must have echoed in the rooms upstairs and through the wide courtyard, but the farmhouse was off-limits to anyone other than him and Bilal, and Bilal was away for the weekend. Piles of notebooks lined the paint-chipped, rusty shelves. They smelled of mold and dust.
He picked up a few of the notebooks—math, but also English and Hindi—and, turning a few pages, read his own scrawl. All his teenage years he had used the same notebooks as diaries, hiding them in plain sight on the shelves along with his workbooks for different subjects. He must get rid of them now, as well as the basement workshop—Bilal’s Bhai had screwed up. If his hands weren’t tied, he would have taught both of them a lesson, the fattus, the spineless pussies. How the hell did three rotting packages end up buried in the same lot? No one could connect them to him. Those two pussies wouldn’t dare open their mouths. Yet here he was, destroying his old shit.
He sipped his whiskey and dug through the diaries. While flipping through the pages, one caught his eye.
It is a sultry afternoon today, the kind that settles as sweat at your hairline, eyebrows, and above your lip if you’re trying to grow a mustache, like I am. Bilal has made sweet kheer, rice, sugar, caramelized milk, cashews, and raisins, boiled the way I like them. He remembers that it cheers me up. Ma used to make it. I need to be full before lunchtime, and the kheer works fine.
That woman is supposed to bring lunch, “cooked with her own hands.” She can’t cook to save her life, afraid to switch on the burner, the wimp. She’s terrified of fire. Dad doesn’t know and I can’t tell him. He believes whatever she tells him. Since she’s late, I want to check if Dad would be up for this new game he’s ordered from abroad. Maybe we can shoot up a few stick figures on a flickering screen.
When I get to his room, though, I hear voices, and wonder if he’s ogling one of those movies which he says he’ll let me watch in a few years, but not yet. I know what to do to sneak in a glimpse or two, so I sidle out into the backyard hemmed in by the forest on all sides. Shuffling through the shrubs, I make for his bedroom window. He’s not watching TV, but there’s a channel on, with a raunchy Hindi film song.
She’s not performing for the cameras. I can see the top of my father’s head over the windowsill. She dances to these numbers in short clothes, on shoots where Dad sometimes takes me along. The directors call them “item numbers.”
Hair down, she is gyrating to the music from the TV, but unlike a proper item number, she’s taking off her clothes at the same time, and soon, the only support for her breasts is her hands. Now this is an Item Number. Or she is. She saunters up to the bed, shimmies up to my father, and kneels over him. I can’t see them now, but I can hear him and the Item Number. And then she rises, her hair spread over her bare body, and sinks again, my father grunting in time to the song. I’m about to run away, when Item Number looks up, straight into my eyes.
He shut the notebook. So that’s when he’d named her Item Number, decades ago, in these books his man Bilal knew only a little about, but hated all the same.
Last week, the old housekeeper had taken stock of the mess at the workshop, the floor slithery with red, and rolled up his sleeves. “I’m not doing this again. You keep promising me, and it comes to this each time.”
“Not true. Most of them get away.”
“You know how dangerous it is. What you could lose. Your father told me to keep you safe. I promised him on—”
“His deathbed, I know. Make it all go away this time. It will never happen again.”
He liked that Bilal cared more about the word given years ago than the fate of the harlots. They came of their own will—he longed to argue with Bilal—they gave in to their greed, their sloth. They didn’t escape the railway station in time. Not even when they were allowed the luxury of not being tied, when they didn’t have to watch for who they were running from.
Dad would have been proud of me, he wanted to insist with this family confidant, Bilal, the true servant. He would have loved these clean cuts. See how well I get where the bones join. I can sever a foot at the ankle in a neat line. Like Dad, your sahab, who used to butcher some of the animals he was employed to protect. Cutting up a body is an art like any other, Dad once said. You agree, Bilal? Right?
But he hadn’t said any of it, because in that moment he’d needed the man.
He stared at the pile of notebooks now. He would take them all out and light them up on a pyre. This was as good a beginning as any, for that end Bilal urged him to aim for.