The Blue Bar (Blue Mumbai #1)(2)
Breathing hard, she stumbled once at a crack in the platform pavement before she took the stairs as fast as the crowd and her saree would allow her. The slanting afternoon sun caught the sequins, lighting her up. Blind to all but the gaps she slipped through, and the bodies she must kick or elbow past while not losing her balance, she kept up her pace. She must exit the station in precisely three minutes. Her boss had never told her what might happen if she didn’t. Forgetting her resolve to give up on prayers, she sent one up to Ma Kaali and raced on.
From the sixth-floor window of a nearby high-rise, a pair of binoculars stalked her progress as she ran.
CHAPTER TWO
ARNAV
Present day
Stuck in a traffic jam far away from the crime scene that would upend his life, Inspector Arnav Singh Rajput scanned the packed Chowpatty beach.
Ravan Dahan. At six stories tall, the demon Ravan awaited being burned to the ground during the popular festival of Dussehra—his cartoon-pink skin, ten heads, and golden crown glowing in the afternoon sun. Arnav sent Ravan a rueful smile. In his twenty-year career, no real-life demon from a Mumbai slum or skyscraper had ever tarried quietly for death. In five days, a crowd would watch this one explode in a bloom of firecrackers and celebrate the victory of good over evil while munching on spicy bhelpuri, as men in khaki uniforms made sure no one lost a wallet, a child, or life.
The thought of bhelpuri reminded Arnav he’d skipped lunch while trying to reach the Mantralaya, the seat of Maharashtra government. The Home Minister wanted to review security arrangements after a heightened alert, and Arnav’s boss had picked him for the lengthy trek downtown to attend the briefing afterward. Arnav sighed. Now he had to race all the way to Madh Island, near his office, the Malwani Police Station, in response to a call. Laborers had stopped working at a new construction site close to a scrub-forested area. The excavator had dug up what they suspected was a dead body.
Arnav had asked the driver to lower the windows of his white police jeep. The salty air clung to Arnav’s thick dark hair and mustache. He could switch on the siren and make the traffic part, but after a morning of long-winded speeches by the bigwigs, including Home Minister Namit Gokhale, Arnav craved a breather. He sent a message to his assistant, asking her to get ahold of a constable and meet him at the scene. Taking off the black-banded cap of his khaki uniform, he let traffic noises and the tinny song on the jeep radio wash over him, grateful none of his phones had rung for the past fifteen minutes. He’d reached home past 1:00 a.m. every night for the last week. His brain craved sleep.
His reprieve from work calls on his listed and unlisted numbers didn’t last long. He negotiated Dussehra arrangements. Coaxed informants. Withheld curses while noting impossible court dates. Hammered away at ongoing investigations. The scenery outside his window changed from crammed roads flanking iconic art deco buildings near Mumbai Central to the windswept length of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, which stretched across the Mahim Bay, to claustrophobic high-rises towering up in Bandra and then Andheri.
When the jeep hit the New Link Road in Malad and raced on to Madh-Marve Road, Arnav breathed deep. The air on Madh Island, a peninsula drooping off Mumbai’s western coastline, was cleaner. Also a few degrees cooler. Mumbai’s unforgiving sultriness remained, but trees flanked the road, providing shade. It looked pretty and innocuous, but local auto-rickshaw drivers spoke of hauntings on this road past midnight. Stories of a woman in a red-and-gold bridal lehenga, hitching rides. When Arnav had first heard the tale, he’d felt sorry for that bride, picturing her—kohl and lipstick smudged, her eyes wild.
Maybe she was indeed a ghost. It wasn’t entirely uncommon to find dead bodies washed up on the beaches and in the surrounding mangrove forests, though this was the first time in Arnav’s three years posted at the Malwani station that he’d heard of a body buried at a site. Mumbai’s gangs disposed of their ghatis and bhaiyas, troublesome peers and victims alike, in the coastal mangroves. They expected the tide to carry the bodies out into the waters. Sometimes, they miscalculated the moods of the sea, and decomposed remains turned up on the local beaches.
In what seemed like less than two minutes, Arnav’s jeep pulled up next to a large pile of bricks not far from the Aksa beach. A line of coconut palms swayed in the distance. A board in front of the site declared that Taneja Estate Holdings was building a sea-facing luxury spa for an established hotel chain.
When Arnav stepped out, the weak October sun lit up the straggly bushes under a few large trees. Assistant Sub-Inspector Sita Naik emerged from behind one of them, camera in hand. His assistant’s face looked haggard these days—shadows under her eyes—but her khakis sat crisp on her fair, squat figure, her hair neatly tied beneath her cap. Unlike his own occasionally rumpled appearance, Naik dressed professionally at all times.
“Set up the perimeter?” Arnav said.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she responded with a bright smile that clearly took effort. “Yes, we have.”
It had been anything but a good afternoon, but he stopped himself from snarking at her. He returned her greeting and nodded, striding up the gravelly slope toward a cacophony of raised male voices.
A faint breeze wafted in from the nearby sea, but Arnav’s shirt stuck to his back with sweat. Since this site was never a graveyard, the case could only be homicide, long concealed. He already struggled with a punishing workload, and didn’t need another case right now.