[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 49: The Parking Lot

Fatima called me on Saturday morning while I was standing in the queue at the vegetable market in Lake Market with Nupur on my shoulders.

"Your wife came to see me yesterday," she said without preamble.

I lifted Nupur down and gave her twenty rupees for the man selling roasted peanuts in paper cones, and moved away from the queue.

"Came to see you? She has her own lawyer."

"She didn't come about the divorce. She came with her mother. A very formidable lady, by the way. I would not want to be cross-examined by her." Fatima paused. "Ranjeet, she brought me a recording. A phone call from Rahul, on Wednesday at noon. Eleven minutes. I've listened to it four times."

I watched Nupur at the peanut seller's cart, standing on tiptoe, explaining something to him very seriously.

"What's on it?"

"Rahul demanding that you write to Compliance and say you gave him your password voluntarily. That his changes to your contracts were authorised. That you're withdrawing your complaint." Her voice was cool and precise. "In exchange for deleting an intimate video of your wife, recorded without her knowledge. If you don't, he says he'll send it to you, to Mrs. Chakraborty, and to her father."

The noise of the market, the shouting fish-sellers and the honking and the crows, seemed to fade out for a moment.

"He wants Poroma to make me do it."

"Yes."

"And she brought the recording to you instead."

"Yes," Fatima said. "She came to the lawyer who is taking her children away from her, and handed me evidence of extortion against the man she's been sleeping with for nine months. Without being asked. Without conditions." She paused again. "In fourteen years of family law I have not seen that before."

I did not know what to say.

"I've advised her to file a complaint with the Cyber Crime cell at Lalbazar," Fatima went on. "Section 308 of the new Sanhita for extortion, and the IT Act for the video. Her mother is taking her on Monday. I've also sent a copy of the recording to the Compliance head in Mumbai, with her written consent, because it's an attempt to interfere with a witness in their inquiry. If I know corporate lawyers, Rahul's own lawyer will drop him before Tuesday."

"Fatima—"

"There's one more thing." Her voice changed slightly. "She asked me to tell you that she wants to see you. Not about the custody. Not about the divorce. She says there's something on the video that you need to hear about, and she wants to be the one to tell you. Before anyone else does."

Across the market, Nupur had got her peanuts and was walking back towards me, holding the paper cone in both hands like something precious.

"I'm not ready to see her," I said.

"I told her you'd probably say that." Fatima was quiet for a moment. "Ranjeet. I'm your lawyer, not your friend, so you can tell me to mind my own business. But whatever is on that video, she was more frightened of telling you than she was of Rahul sending it. I watched her face. And she's going to tell you anyway."

I thought about it all day. Through the vegetable market and lunch and Rajiv's nap and an hour on the floor building a train track with Nupur that went under the sofa and out the other side.

Something on the video that you need to hear about.

What could there possibly be? I had seen her through the window at the Holi party with him. I had heard about Mandarmoni in more detail than I had ever wanted. I had seen the hickeys, the CCTV from our own bed, the nanny-cam. I had heard her describe his size and his stamina and the way he made her come, in our bed, to my face, while she rode me. There was nothing left that a video could show me.

And yet she had gone to Fatima. And she was more frightened of telling me than of Rahul.

By six in the evening I had decided I did not want to know, and by half past six I had decided I had to, and at seven I put on my training clothes and left the children with Didi and went to the gym, because it was Saturday and on Saturday evenings there was Kimi's advanced class, and the one place in the world where I could stop thinking was on that mat.

The class was hard. Kimi was in one of her moods. She worked us through ninety minutes of sparring drills until two of the college boys were sitting against the wall with their heads between their knees.

She paired herself with me for the last round. She did that sometimes, when she thought I was holding back.

"You're somewhere else tonight, Ranjeet-da," she said, circling. She was twenty-two and came up to my chin and could put me on the floor in about four seconds when she wanted to. "Your shoulders are up by your ears. Breathe."

"Sorry."

"Don't say sorry. Fight."

She came in fast and low, and I blocked her and stepped off the line and turned her, and for once in seven months, instead of finding myself flat on my back looking at the ceiling fan, I had her wrist locked and her arm extended and she was the one who had to tap.

Kimi straightened up, rubbing her wrist, and looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

"Well," she said. "Whoever you were thinking about just then, keep thinking about them."

The class laughed. I did not.

The gym's parking lot is a narrow strip of broken concrete between the building and the railway embankment behind Gariahat. There is one sodium lamp at the far end that has been flickering since before I joined, and the rest is dark.

I was unlocking my car when I heard footsteps behind me on the gravel, and a voice.

"Sen."

I turned around.

Rahul was standing about ten feet away, between my car and the building. He was in jeans and a leather jacket. He looked different. It took me a second to understand why. He had not shaved in several days, and his hair, which was always so perfect, was flat and greasy on one side, as if he had been lying down on it. In the orange light of the flickering lamp his face looked swollen. When he moved closer I could smell the whisky from six feet away.

"Rahul," I said.

"You fucking clerk." He said it almost pleasantly. "You fucking little clerk. You think you've won something?"

"I think you should go home."

"Home." He laughed. "I don't have a job, Sen. I don't have Patel. My lawyer called me this afternoon to tell me he's no longer comfortable representing me. Comfortable. Some security officer inspector from Lalbazar has left two messages on my phone asking me to come in for a chat about a complaint." He took another step. "You did that. You and your slut."

"I didn't file the security officer complaint," I said. "She did."

That stopped him for half a second. Something moved behind his eyes, surprise, then fury. Then he smiled, slowly.

"Oh, I know. She's very brave all of a sudden, your wife. Very brave." He was close enough now that I could see the broken veins in his eyes. "Has she told you yet? Why she's being so brave?"

I did not answer.

"She hasn't." He laughed out loud, delighted. "She hasn't told you. Oh, Sen. You poor bastard. Nine months. You took her back after the party. You took her back after Mandarmoni. You said thank you. Do you know why you took her back?"

"Rahul. Go home."

"You took her back because you watched her fight." He leaned in, and his voice dropped to a whisper, and it was the most intimate thing anyone had ever said to me, and the most obscene. "Ask her what she promised me on Valentine's night. In my bed. Ask her how many minutes she said she'd fight me for, before she gave up. Ask her who she was performing for."

The lamp at the end of the lot flickered and went out and came back on.

I understood. Not all of it, not the details, but the shape of it, the way you understand from one sentence on the phone that someone has died. I understood what Poroma was afraid to tell me. And for one second I felt the ground go out from under me, exactly as it had on the night of the party, standing in Sutapa's hall with four pairs of hands holding me down while my wife walked past me without turning her head.

Rahul saw it in my face. He had been waiting for it. He stepped back, satisfied, and spread his hands.

"There it is," he said softly. "Now you know what you are."

And then, because he was drunk and had lost everything and wanted one last thing to take with him, he swung at me.

It was a big, wild, looping right hand, the kind of punch a tall man throws when he has never had to fight anyone his own size. Seven months ago it would have broken my jaw.

Seven months ago I had never run two kilometres at five in the morning. I had never spent ninety minutes a night being thrown onto a mat by a twenty-two-year-old girl who told me to breathe.

I did not think. I stepped inside it. The punch went over my left shoulder. My hands closed on his wrist and his elbow, and I turned with him the way Kimi had shown me two hundred times, using his own weight and the whisky and the momentum of that huge swing. Rahul Mehra, six foot three, the man who had been my boss and my wife's lover and the author of a year of my humiliation, went down on the broken concrete face first with his arm locked straight up behind him and my knee in the middle of his back.

He yelled. I put a little more pressure on the wrist, exactly as much as Kimi had taught us, enough to hold and not enough to break, and he stopped yelling and lay there gasping, his cheek pressed into the gravel.

"Get off me," he said. "Get the fuck off me—"

"Breathe," I said.

I do not know why I said it. It was what Kimi always said.

The gym's back door banged open. Running footsteps. Kimi, still in her uniform, and behind her two of the college boys and the old watchman with his lathi.

"Ranjeet-da!" She skidded to a stop and took in the scene: me, the man on the ground, the arm lock. Her eyes narrowed. "Is he armed?"

"No. Just drunk."

"Did he hit you?"

"He tried."

She crouched down next to Rahul's face and looked at him with professional interest, the way she looked at a student who had done something stupid.

"Bad technique," she told him. "Your weight was on your heels. He could have broken your elbow." She glanced up at me. "You could have broken his elbow."

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

I looked down at Rahul. His face pressed into the dirt. His expensive leather jacket torn at the shoulder. The smell of whisky and sweat and fear. This was the man who had carried my wife up a staircase in front of a cheering room. Who had stood in the doorway of my bedroom at home and squeezed her breasts as he left while my daughter cried on the floor.

I thought about breaking his arm. I thought about it very clearly for perhaps two seconds.

"Because my children have to grow up knowing their father," I said. "Not visiting him."

Kimi looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, as if I had passed some test I did not know I was taking.

"Arjun," she said to one of the college boys, without looking round. "Call 100. Tell them there's a drunk man who assaulted one of our members in the parking lot. Tell them we have four witnesses and a CCTV camera." She pointed up at the corner of the building, where I had never noticed a small black dome tucked under the eaves. "Raju-da, hold his legs."

The security officer came twenty minutes later in a white Gypsy with a blue light. Two constables and a young sub-inspector who wrote everything down in a notebook and checked the CCTV on the gym owner's computer. He watched Rahul's swing three times. Then he asked Rahul his name, and when Rahul told him he looked up sharply.

"Rahul Mehra? Flat 701, New Alipore?"

Rahul said nothing.

"There's a complaint against you at Lalbazar, sir," the sub-inspector said, almost apologetically. "Cyber cell. Inspector Banerjee has been trying to contact you." He closed his notebook. "I think you'd better come with us tonight."

They put him in the back of the Gypsy. He did not look at me as they drove away.

Kimi came and stood beside me in the flickering orange light.

"Who was he, Ranjeet-da?"

I thought about how to answer that. There were so many true answers.

"Someone who used to be very important in my life," I said finally. "And isn't any more."

She nodded as if that made perfect sense. Then she punched me lightly on the shoulder.

"Monday. Six o'clock. Don't be late. And next time you lock somebody's elbow, keep your back straighter."

I did not go straight home. I drove around for a long time. Down Rashbehari Avenue, along the lake, past the old house in Behala where the lights were on in the kitchen window and two figures were sitting at the table, an old woman and a younger one with her head in her hands.

I did not stop.

Ask her what she promised me on Valentine's night.

I parked by the lake and sat in the car with the engine off and the windows down, listening to the frogs, and I thought about the night of the Holi party. I had replayed it a thousand times. Sutapa forgetting to start the stopwatch. Poroma's eyes flickering to mine and away. The way she had untied her own blouse. The way she had held out, and held out, until exactly forty seconds before the end.

Forty seconds. Of ten minutes. I had thought it was the most heroic, heartbreaking thing I had ever seen.

At a quarter to eleven my phone buzzed. A WhatsApp message. Not Poroma. Sutapa.

Rashmi just told me what happened at the gym. Are you all right? I'm at home. Dilip's in Mumbai till Thursday. Come if you want to. Or don't. Either way, I'm here.

I sat looking at it for a long time. Then I started the car.