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[9]Policeman's Day
A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in
Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter's
scaffolding still around it. Fluffy screamed in her little lap-dog
voice all the way down, like a little white kettle losing steam,
bounced off the bonnet of a Cielo, and skidded to a halt near the
rank of schoolgirls waiting for the St Mary's Convent bus. There
was remarkably little blood, but the sight of Fluffy's brains did
send the conventeers into hysterics, and meanwhile, above, the man
who had swung Fluffy around his head by one leg, who had slung
Fluffy into the void, one Mr Mahesh Pandey of Mirage Textiles, that
man was leaning on his windowsill and laughing. Mrs Kamala Pandey,
who in talking to Fluffy always spoke of herself as "Mummy", now
staggered and ran to her kitchen and plucked from the magnetic
holder a knife nine inches long and two wide. When Sartaj and
Katekar broke open the door to apartment 502, Mrs Pandey was
standing in front of the bedroom door, looking intensely at a dense
circle of two-inch-long wounds in the wood, about chest-high. As
Sartaj watched, she sighed, raised her hand and stabbed the door
again. She had to struggle with both hands on the handle to get the
knife out.
"Mrs Pandey," Sartaj said.
She turned to them, the knife still in a double-handed grip, held
high. She had a pale, tear-stained face and tiny bare feet under
her white nightie.
"Mrs Pandey, I am Inspector Sartaj Singh," Sartaj said. "I'd like
you to put down that knife, please." He took a step, hands held up
and palms forward. "Please," he said. But Mrs Pandey's eyes were
wide and blank, and except for the quivering of her forearms she
was quite still. The hallway they were in was narrow, and Sartaj
could feel Katekar behind him, wanting to pass. Sartaj stopped
moving. Another step and he would be comfortably within a swing of
the knife.
"Police?" a voice said from behind the bedroom door.
"Police?"
Mrs Pandey started, as if remembering something, and then she said,
"Bastard, bastard," and slashed at the door again. She was tired
now, and the point bounced off the wood and raked across it, and
Sartaj bent her wrist back and took the knife quite easily from
her. But she smashed at the door with her hands, breaking her
bangles, and her last wiry burst of anger was hard to hold and
contain. Finally they sat her down on the green sofa in the drawing
room.
"Shoot him," she said. "Shoot him." Then she put her head in her
hands. There were green and blue bruises on her shoulder. Katekar
was back at the bedroom door, murmuring.
"What did you fight about?" Sartaj said.
"He wants me not to fly any more."
"What?"
"I'm an air-hostess. He thinks . . ."
"Yes?"
She had startling light-brown eyes, and she was angry at Sartaj for
asking. "He thinks since I'm an air hostess, I keep hostessing the
pilots on stopovers," she said, and turned her face to the
window.
Katekar was walking the husband over now, with a hand on his neck.
Mr Pandey hitched up his silky red-and-black striped pyjamas, and
smiled confidentially at Sartaj. "Thank you," he said. "Thanks for
coming."
"So you like to hit your wife, Mr Pandey?" Sartaj barked, leaning
forward. Katekar sat the man down, hard, while he still had his
mouth open. It was nicely done. Katekar was a senior constable, an
old subordinate, a colleague really – they had worked
together for almost seven years now, off and on. "You like to hit
her, and then you throw a poor puppy out of a window? And then you
call us to save you?"
"She said I hit her?"
"I have eyes. I can see."
"Then look at this," Mr Pandey said, his jaw twisting. "Look, look,
look at this." And he pulled up his left pyjama jacket sleeve,
revealing a shiny silver watch and four evenly spaced scratches,
livid and deep, running from the inside of the wrist around to the
elbow. "More, I've got more," Mr Pandey said, and bowed low at the
waist and lowered his head and twisted to raise his collar away
from the skin. Sartaj got up and walked around the coffee table.
There was a corrugated red welt on Mr Pandey"s shoulder blade, and
Sartaj couldn"t see how far down it went.
"What's that from?" Sartaj said.
"She broke a Kashmiri walking stick on my back. This thick, it
was," Mr Pandey said, holding up his thumb and forefinger
circled.
Sartaj walked to the window. There was a group of uniformed boys
clustering around the small white body below, pushing each other
closer to it. The St Mary's girls were squealing, holding their
hands to their mouths, and begging the boys to stop. In the drawing
room, Mrs Pandey was gazing brightly at her husband, her chin
tucked into her chest. "Love," Sartaj said softly. "Love is a
murdering gaandu. Poor Fluffy."
"Namaskar, Sartaj Saab," PSI Kamble called across the station
house. "Parulkar Saab was asking after you." The room was some
twenty-five feet across, with four desks lined up across the
breadth of it. There was a six-foot poster of Sai Baba on the wall,
and a Ganesha under the glass on Kamble's desk, and Sartaj had felt
impelled to add a picture of Guru Gobind Singh on the other wall,
in a somewhat twisted assertion of secularism.
Five constables came jerkily to attention, and then subsided into
their usual sprawl on white plastic chairs.
"Where is Parulkar Saab?"
"With a pack of reporters. He's giving them tea and telling them
about our new initiative against crime."
Excerpted from SACRED GAMES © Copyright 2011 by Vikram
Chandra. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights
reserved.
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Sacred Games