Authors: Bharati Mukherjee
A convoy of brightly painted trucks and a white van, all honking, careened into the semicircular driveway and parked under the carport.
ALL-KARNATAKA AUCTION HOUSE
announced the logo on the van, and standing by its open rear doors was Tookie's bad boy Rajoo, peeling off hundred-rupee notes from a wad, diverting—or was it bribing?—freelance looters into dumping their goods into his vehicles. Rajoo's crew placed the pried-off front door over the crumbling porch steps to use as a ramp, then directed the looters to ease bulky pieces from Minnie's public rooms—cupboards, sofas, dressers, hutches, a grandfather clock, even the dining table—down the angled door, wrap them in quilts and dhurries, and segregate them in numbered lots. Anjali wouldn't have given Rajoo credit for such organizational skills.
Rajoo's organizational skills! She was witnessing a premeditated, methodical dismantling of her only asylum in Bangalore. This was different from the occasional spontaneous looting of shops and the breaking of car windows with cricket bats by jobless young men that she had watched from her balcony in Gauripur. You could guard yourself against such sporadic eruptions of anger; her mother hoarded staple foods in her "just in case" bins; her father pasted a fake Red Cross decal on his bike. Rajoo was dispassionate, efficient. The moment Anjali acknowledged this, she went into a panic. By the time Rajoo finished stripping and wrecking Minnie Bagehot's property, she would be homeless and rupeeless. The little she possessed was inside the red Samsonite suitcase. She had to get to the suitcase before Rajoo's men found the cash Peter had given her.
Determined to salvage what she could of her own possessions, she clawed her way through the delirious throngs of scavengers. Tookie would be on her pre-shift pub crawl, and in any case she didn't own anything worth stealing. She trusted Sunita to be cool-headed enough to barricade herself in her room and call the police on her cell phone. Minnie would fall apart in a crisis, but where was Asoke? If anyone could negotiate safe passage for Minnie and her tenants, it would be Asoke, since everyone seemed to be related, or obligated, to him.
She found Asoke in the foyer, and he was acting more predator than prey. He had climbed halfway up a rickety ladder and was demonstrating to eager squatter kids how to rip Raj-era sconces off the walls without damaging them, so they could be sold by Mr. R's auction house. Farther inside the foyer, men she didn't recognize were dismantling an oversize dusty chandelier. She'd fantasized this scene of vengeful vandalism the afternoon she had discovered Maxie Bagehot's museum of colonial horrors, but now that she was witnessing the stripping of Bagehot House, it brought her little pleasure. Minnie and Maxie had been cantonment Bangalore's spit-and-polish opportunists. In Asoke and the auction house crew she recognized a twenty-first-century update. And what was she? Where could she go? Her best bet was to slip past Asoke and sneak into her room, stuff what she owned into her red Samsonite suitcase, and wait for the police to rescue her.
Asoke spotted Anjali as he was handing down an etched-glass wall bracket to a helper, lost his footing on the ladder, and yelled an obscenity as the glass shattered. She darted into the kitchen to avoid a confrontation. Women from the compound were emptying pantry shelves into plastic bins, buckets and cloth sacks. The squatter girl with the luxuriant hair invited Anjali to join her as she tossed large cans of ham and small tins of Spam and sardines into baskets held steady by two elderly women. Next, the girl turned her attention to rows of bottled olives, gherkins, capers and mayonnaise. The contents of a tiny jar mystified her. Anjali identified it: Marmite, Minnie's favorite sandwich spread. The women feigned disgust, and the girl put the jar back on the pantry shelf. She moved on to the shelves in which Asoke stored sweet-tooth Minnie's cans of condensed milk and packets of jelly-filled cookies.
Then Anjali stepped forward, dropped the jars of Marmite and four packets of cookies into her roomy pocketbook, and rushed out of the kitchen. Did that make her a looter too? No, no, she was a victim surviving on instinct. She could imagine her room already ransacked: clothes, shoes, toiletries, and costume jewelry heaped into a bed sheet and the four corners tightly knotted like a washer man's bundle, and her suitcase in which she kept what was left of Peter's gift of cash, her da Gama certificates, and the silver goblet wheeled away and hidden in a shed in the squatters' village. She bounded up the steps two at a time.
The home invaders were busting bedroom doors with their shoulders and with hammers, broom handles, and chair legs. Anjali's door bore gouge marks from claw hammers, but the heavy old-fashioned padlock was still intact. Sunita's room was open, but there was no trace of the tenant. Anjali dared not extract the key from her pocketbook to let herself in. Safer to pretend she was one of the mob, caught up in greed or revolutionary fervor. And it became easy to pretend. She was among the whooping marauders when they broke down the door to the tenants' bathroom and discovered Minnie.
Minnie Bagehot lay on the tiled floor between the bathtub and toilet, naked except for the wig and the rhinestone tiara on her head. The rioters fell silent, then drew away.
She must have collapsed while pulling on a corset. The stiff, sweat-stained undergarment lay on the floor by her feet. A wasp-waisted, pearl-studded ball gown hung from the showerhead.
What vanity!
Anjali thought, at first. And then it occurred to her that maybe Minnie had died from some crazy valor, thinking she could appear at the head of the stairs in a mildewed gown from her golden years and wave the rioters away.
Her prophecy about the gathering of evil forces had come to pass. Evil forces were sacking Bagehot House. But now, stung by this vision of its owner, they picked up their hammers and their booty and retreated down the main staircase.
No corpse deserved to be gawked at. Anjali latched the bathroom door and rested her head against it. Too late to call for an ambulance, and even if it had not been too late, she realized with shock that she had no idea what number to dial. In Gauripur, emergencies requiring intervention by police or firemen didn't happen to decent middle-class families. When Mr. GG had surprised her with her very own cell phone and asked her whom she wanted on speed dial, it had not occurred to her to include the police. How naive she had been until now!
What was it that Mr. GG had said about butterfly effects? Minnie's death meant a windfall of profitable antiques for Rajoo of All-Karnataka Auction House, whose crew was still loading Bagehot treasures into trucks. Now Anjali had in effect been dumped, because the house and its owner and everything it stood for had been dumped. She felt more homeless than she had while riding interstate buses from Patna to Bangalore. She punched Mr. GG's number on her cell phone. He didn't pick up, so she left a message: "SOS ... Girish, need your help ... desperate. Please, please hurry. Bagehot House is under assault, and I'm in the middle of it."
She waited and waited for the call back. Who else could she count on for rescue?
I'm sitting on the lid of the toilet in a bathroom in my rooming house, with Minnie's body inches from my toes:
she couldn't, she absolutely couldn't spring this on Moni Lahiri. Moni, the beautiful Bengali Svengali, belonged in her life of daydreams and her Photoshopped future. She called Mr. GG again and left another desperate message: "I'm ready for the trip to Mexico. Girish, please, please, come right now!"
Mr. GG would know how to right her upside-down world. He would insist she move into his apartment and his life. What was keeping him from calling her back? To give her hands something to do, she opened the bathroom cabinet and listlessly went through Tookie's and Sunita's toiletries. She dabbed an index finger into a jar of sandalwood face cream and massaged the cool, perfumed goo into her cheeks and forehead. She rubbed gel into her flyaway hair and squirted hairspray to keep every strand in place. She loosened the tiara from Minnie's tangled wig and tried it on. A cartoonish princess frowned back at her from the mirrored medicine cabinet. The tiara looked right on Minnie, so she stuck it back on her head. Minnie may have lived too long to be happy all the time, but she had died maintaining the illusion. Now Minnie was dancing a quadrille in her final durbar while Anjali again sat on the toilet seat, awaiting resolution.
SHE HEARD POLICE
sirens, but because the bathroom window looked out on the old Raj-era tennis court, now a desolate stretch of red clay sprouting clumps of weeds, she couldn't see how many cruisers had pulled up under the carport. She hoped the police convoy included a paddy wagon for arrested looters. She heard barked orders and boot soles crunching gravel. Asoke, followed by a tall, paunchy police officer and three constables, strutted into her view. They conferred by the ragged net on the tennis court. Asoke radiated a butler's air of obsequious expertise. From their body language, Anjali guessed that the officer regarded Asoke as a reliable informant and not a vandal.
As wary of the police as her parents and Gauripur neighbors were, she now worried about being discovered alone in the tenants' bathroom with the landlady's naked corpse. She pressed her forehead against the window grille, hoping the cool metal would calm her. Below, police put up barricades to control entrance to the tennis court. Asoke's squatter youths carried a small fussy writing desk, which Minnie had called an escritoire, and a chintz-covered wing chair into the court. Asoke eased the officer into the chair as though the officer was a high-ranking army guest at one of Minnie's cantonment garden parties. He dispatched four of his youths back indoors. They came back with hand fans, a tall glass of limbu-soda, and Minnie's favorite ginger cookies on a plate from Minnie's best china.
Asoke presented the refreshments to the officer before answering, at length and with extravagant hand gestures, the questions the officer snapped at him. Anjali couldn't understand a word of their speech, it being in Kannada. And wasn't that mousy little Sunita Sampath, suddenly resurfaced, helping to serve the food and drinks, talking to the police, and occasionally pointing up to the bathroom? Soon after he had finished interviewing Asoke, the officer sent his three constables back into the house. They returned with a long file of women in their midteens and midtwenties, taken from among the looters and squatters. The girls who had emptied the pantry shelves and sneered at Minnie's hoard of Marmite were at the head of the sullen file. Why weren't the men lined up when their plundering was so spectacularly brazen? "Hi, Girish, it's me again with an SOS!"
The interrogations had gotten well under way before she gave up on Mr. GG, opened the window, and yelled down to the seated officer in English, "Mrs. Bagehot's here! Heart attack!"
"That's her!" An agitated shout from Asoke, this time in English. He pointed at the window. "That's the tenant! There she is!" And Sunita stared as well, smiling but not bothering to point.
Before Anjali could duck, an angry woman, the first to be interrogated, scooped up a fistful of pebbles and flung it at the bathroom window. She inspired her friends. Some squatter men joined in, hurling chunks of concrete loosened from the front wall and broken bricks from the edges of wilted flowerbeds. The window grille, originally installed to deter burglars, repelled the large projectiles. Why had they suddenly turned on her? Anjali's distrust of the police softened into gratitude. Their duty was to protect her; they had no choice. She backed away from the window, crouched on the tiled floor, inches from Minnie's body, and prayed for rescue. When the officer, with a policewoman and two male constables in tow, finally burst through the bathroom door, that's how they found her. Asoke sidled in after them. He didn't shriek or wail at the grotesque sight. Instead, while the policewomen pulled Anjali to her feet and handcuffed her, he covered the naked corpse with the only bath towel, still damp from use, hanging on the towel rack, a servant's small gesture of gallantry.
"You are paying guest of this lady?" the officer demanded, and pointed his baton at Minnie's body. He had the sagging, full lower lip of a heavy smoker and sprayed saliva as he spoke. With her hands cuffed, she couldn't blot; she could only watch patches of spittle land on her silk clothing and spread. Like a Bollywood cop, the man wore oversize, mirrored sunglasses, like a mask, but the accusatory growl in his voice made her feel like a criminal. She'd already been judged. "Please to describe your relationship to the deceased."
"She was dead when I got here," Anjali blurted. "I don't know why all this craziness is happening."
"Please to make response only to question posed." The officer ordered a policewoman to confiscate Anjali's pocketbook, watch and cell phone before continuing his interrogation. "What is nature of connection you are having with deceased aged lady?"
"I had nothing to do with any of this. She must have died of shock. I wasn't here. Goondahs were breaking into her home and stealing all her property."
"You are putting my patience in jeopardy." The officer extracted a pack of cigarettes from one of his many pockets but didn't light up. "I'm asking one more time only. You are residing as tenant in the deceased's lodging, but owing rent money?"
She lowered her gaze from the officer's plump, moist lower lip to his heavy khaki socks and brown ankle boots.
"Yes or no?"
She said nothing. Why would the officer believe that the dead landlady had offered to run a tab for this handcuffed tenant?
"Your good name please?"
"Angie. Anjali Bose." It conferred no identity. She didn't own the name. She could have been anybody.
"Your name is Anjali Bose? Why your purse is saying
HS
?" He was pointing to the gilt letters on the leather strap.
"I don't know." She lied.
He made a dismissive gesture, a sweeping of his hand, and the two policewomen dragged her down the stairs, across the foyer, down the porch steps cluttered with Bagehot furniture, past the single-minded auction-house representative in the sky-blue suit and the screaming mob and into a police cruiser. Her foot crunched the photo of dead Sikhs, which lay on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history. There was no paddy wagon in the police convoy. There was no convoy.