They found the body curled up on a cracked shelf of black rock lapped at by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, down by the tip of the Malabar Hill peninsular.
Parking the jeep on a dirt track leading from the main road, they made their way over the rocks to the corpse. The sun floated high overhead, in a sky of electric blue. Light made an ever-shifting tracery of prisms on the water’s surface.
A crowd had gathered, though not of the human variety.
The smell of death had its own bouquet and to a certain cross section of Bombay’s population the noxious odour of a burned body was akin to the aromas emanating from the five-star kitchens of the Taj Mahal Hotel. A gang of rooting pigs had turned up, accompanied by a pack of stray dogs, a brace of langurs, a flock of gulls, ravens and crows, and a goodly contingent of Bombay’s ubiquitous rat population. They were being kept at bay by a wizened homunculus in a uniform so big it made him look like an overgrown child. Handlebar moustaches hung to his pigeon chest.
Persis watched the cut-price Zorro fence at the slavering menagerie with a bamboo lathi.
Birla exchanged words with the man and determined that he was employed as a security guard at the home of the individual who had found the body, a retired executive who lived in one of the imposing homes set well back from the rocky shore. The man had been taking his daily early morning constitutional and stumbled across the body, almost losing his breakfast in the process.
Persis focused on the corpse.
The cadaver was curled into a foetal position, burned black. A few wisps of black hair remained on the skull, but the face was burned beyond recognition. The rest of the body too had clearly been engulfed by flame.
Despite the heat, a chill ran through her.
Death had rarely rattled her. Even at the academy, she had maintained a relative indifference when confronted by cadavers in the training morgue, looking on as many of her male colleagues had turned various shades of green. Her mother’s death and Sam’s grim fatalism had infected her at an early age. Death, after all, was the ultimate democratic institution. It came for everyone, rich or poor, moral or wicked. There was little point in being frightened of it.
But anger, at the iniquitous nature of some deaths . . . Now that was permitted.
What had driven this man to his death? Was it, as Roshan Seth had supposed, a case of self-immolation? Across Bombay, many had chosen this form of protest of late, the last mode of self-expression left to the truly desperate.
Little good that it did.
In the city of dreams, the crowd that invariably gathered as yet another protestor doused himself in gasoline outside yet another government office was as likely to offer a match as it was to come to the poor fool’s rescue.
City of destruction.
Why had the boy whispered those words to her? The despairing lament of a dying man? Or had there been more to it? She couldn’t shake the conviction that he had been trying to tell her something –
Birla cut into her thoughts. “The last time I smelled anything this bad, an elephant had done its business over my head.”
She decided not to ask. With Birla, a tale of woe – of which he had an inexhaustible supply – could be counted upon to take the listener down the sort of dark and winding path that usually ended in a mugging.
She saw that the sub-inspector had tied a handkerchief around his mouth, giving him the look of a particularly inept highwayman.
He was a strange man. Relegated to Malabar House because his daughter had refused the amorous attentions of a senior officer, Birla, like Persis herself, was a victim of circumstance rather than incompetence. Though he would have been the first to admit that, prior to his banishment, his career had managed to achieve as much forward momentum as a car with square wheels. Some men were born to mediocrity, some achieved it, and some had it thrust upon them. Birla was the result when all three aligned in a single individual.
Nevertheless, of all of her fellow officers at Malabar House, Birla was the one who had been most willing to offer her acceptance. The fact that he was continually braced by two no-nonsense women at home had, perhaps, made it easier for him to do so. That and the fear that his wife might give him a good talking-to were he to adopt any other attitude.
What was she doing here?
With Blackfinch in hospital fighting for his life and the boy who’d shot him yet to be identified? Her every cell itched to be away from this godforsaken place, back in the thick of it. She should be out pursuing the real investigation, not standing here on this lonely slab of broken rock, surrounded by wild animals, mute witnesses to another chapter in the litany of human depravity that circumscribed the city they all called home.
But Seth was right. When you pulled on the uniform, you gave the dead and the dispossessed certain rights. The right to demand justice, for one.
Whether you could deliver it or not was a different matter.
‘Why come out here to do this?’ Birla’s voice was muffled behind his makeshift facemask. ‘What would be the point? You wouldn’t catch me setting fire to myself without an audience.’
She waited while he mentally traversed the winding pathway of his own question and arrived at the logical conclusion.
‘He didn’t do this to himself, did he?’ said the sub-inspector, quietly. ‘Someone did this to him.’
Excerpted with permission from City of Destruction, Vaseem Khan, Hachette India.
