Truth Lake
Authors: Shakuntala Banaji
TRUTH LAKE
A novel
by
Shakuntala Banaji
Masala Books 2015
First published by Masala Books, London, 2015
Copyright © Shakuntala Banaji 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this production may be made without written permission.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act of 1988
Cover design by Zinedine Banaji
ISBN: 978-0-9933476-0-3
The content, characters and events depicted in this novel are entirely fictional, although many of the places are not. Any resemblance to persons living or dead are purely accidental.
A foreign corpse in an eerie village. A paranoid detective. Who dies next?
In the sweltering heat of a Delhi summer, Sara and Adam, two British backpackers, arrive in Delhi in a state of fear and exhaustion. Their story appears simple: trekking near an isolated lake in the high Himalayas, they have encountered a forest village full of hostile women, and stumbled on a grotesque corpse, almost certainly a White male.
Their host in Delhi is Antonio Sinbari, an expat Italian tycoon with an interest in acquiring Himalayan land for his latest development project. He insists that acting police chief Hàrélal should investigate, and do it discreetly. Hàrélal who is beset by personal demons – a disobedient daughter hellbent on becoming a lawyer and getting laid, a desire to be promoted – agrees. A suspicious death in India does not look good for anyone.
Propelled by police chief Hàrélal’s ambition, and a sense that Adam and Sara have lied about their misadventure in the mountains, maverick detective Kailash Karmel finds himself
en route
to the Himalayas, to a village called Saahitaal. Truth Lake.
It is there in the pouring monsoon rain, surrounded by lonely women, and maddened by a growing infatuation for one of his suspects, that Karmel’s morbid investigation will trigger violence, paranoia, and another murder.
Truth Lake
was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger.
When the rain began to fall and fall and the ground was a single lethargic, then cascading – but surely not dead – thing of mud, the stranger said to himself that enough was enough; it was time for him to leave the area. He had been there since July and had spent more than his fair share of nights under the glowering skies of these Himalayan slopes. A blanket of crisp air makes poor company.
Left alone in the evenings with the scent of cow-dung, wood smoke or the acrid tobacco of old women, he'd had plenty of time to mull over his problem and to decide that if it was worth solving then he would have to do so in another space and time for the one he occupied was no longer friendly, no longer, so to speak, able to guarantee his survival. He had, in his own slow way, reached the only conclusion that made any sense: if he stayed he would fail because he would either cease to care about the answer to his problem or he would die and thus lose the choice of caring. With this conclusion, his palms became suddenly damp and he yearned for the foul-smelling weed that so many of his compatriots chewed. He recognised his fear and breathed it in with every breath.
The stranger had a name but many in the village stubbornly refused to use it, calling him instead by informal terms of kinship – son, brother, uncle – or behind his back by the label he had acquired when he first arrived in their village, panting and sweat-soaked:
stranger
. So he felt as if his own name – Kailash Karmel – was becoming as unreal as the one he had assumed for the sake of this visit; each name was equally sterile or equally valid; neither was ever spoken aloud after the first week, when he strove to forget that he was Karmel and tried to be Arun Doshi, a soil analyst from a dust-covered government department in New Delhi.
The rains had taken a turn for the worse. After days of stubborn trickling, fleshy banks of dung, grass and roots melting into each other and building in threatening ridges along the sloping paths of the village, houses damp, food never hot enough because no fire would stay alight long with the continual wearing drip, suddenly the clouds had given up and shed their load, in the half light of one asthmatic dawn, on the waiting body of the earth. It was so final, this rain, that no living thing could plead ignorance; there was no sky left; all that he could see when he looked up or around him were the flapping wings of water.
To add to his city-dweller's misery, a motley band of insects gathered with him to share the stale interior of his cabin: spiders larger than Delhi mice appeared and clung plaintively above his sodden cot; moths like discoloured flowers sailed and hovered near his fast diminishing lantern or fluttered their wings across his face; and worse than all of these were the piteous and yet absurdly repellent crickets that piled onto each other's backs on every dry surface, cascading off and shrieking as the gloom deepened.
Amidst the chaos of his small cabin, the stranger seemed to dwindle in authority. His carefully collected plastic bottles of soil, compost, mossy residues and other unmentionable substances looked forlorn on the wet window ledge. His carefully compiled, meticulously detailed and utterly implausible charts that had at first shone crisply from a wall of the cabin were now no more than papier-mâché pretexts, impossible to decipher or to rescue from their watery prison. He frequently sat and stared into space or into the lack of space that was beginning to torture him; he only left the shelter of his roof when he needed to relieve himself; more and more often now, he did as the other residents of the area and dug a pit a few metres from the cabin instead of trekking the half kilometre down to the privy that was almost buried in sprayed off slush from the stream that had become a river.
Stitching Woman often sat just inside her doorway in the evenings, but did not hold in her hands any cloth. When the stranger had descended past on his way to Saahitaal's only walled privy, he would catch a glint from within her doorway as of light striking glass and being thrown purposefully at him. This he thought of as the signal for him to bow his head and enter her space or at least to cough and nod to her if his need was too urgent to brook the demands of a long conversation. Silent conversation, he reminded himself; he had noted of late how little she actually said when he was with her and how quietly she watched him. It felt to him almost as if she were absorbing something from the air and did not need to use speech to communicate. A few seconds before he rose to leave, on each occasion, she would raise her hand in a gesture of dismissal or farewell and would turn away into an interior darkness so intense that he could only guess at its extent from the external proportions of her mud and stone dwelling.
With the cessation of these journeys, the stranger's grasp on his own fear slackened; it slid away from him and ballooned into a monstrous creature taking on sometimes the shape of Stitching Woman and sometimes the colour of the rotted corpse that had brought him to this village in the first place. The fact that he was unable to see these two entities with his corporeal eyes meant nothing; his mind conjured scenes far more terrifying than any he had witnessed in daylight and he was even tempted towards prayer to ward off the webs of hostility emanating from some hidden source in the village down below.
Images from his past haunted him and drove him to dissect, one by one, the foolish actions and the unforgivable hubris that had brought him to this place. He could not sleep but lay shivering on his cot, eyeing the spiders, listening to the crickets and, when the rain thundered over their cries, crying himself in terror at his proximity to death.
July had not been a good month for the Delhi police department. Their top man had inexplicably been struck down by a terrorist bomb, crime figures soared and, because of looming elections, they had every heavyweight in the city breathing down their necks demanding protection – twenty-four hour, round the clock, do or die stuff, made up of crack teams from 'The Academy', sir, not those shitty little peasants who'd practised killing dogs at some village school and thought that qualified them for a State pension! They were mistrusted and poorly remunerated and a number of complaints had been made about wrongful arrest, brutality in cells and corrupt officers.
Acting Chief Superintendent Hàrélal was sweating. It was the nineteenth of July and he was in a particularly jittery, ungracious mood. Every fucking thing in his world was going wrong: his daughter – whom he was having conspicuously tailed by two of the best – had been spotted allowing Jimmy Parikh's darkie son to slobber all over her outside the Plaza cinema; his wife thought she had cancer of the colon and had put the whole family onto a regimen of fruit meals because her guru recommended it – privately their family doctor assured him that a very minor case of piles ailed the love of his life; and now this. He turned, with a barely concealed grimace, to face the two waif-like strangers seated in front of him.
He had been sipping his morning cup of tea when he was handed an ‘urgent’ message – before his liquid-fruit breakfast, thankfully – from Sadrettin, personal assistant to Antonio Sinbari. He’d dutifully patted his wife's fading hair, then gone to his luxuriously appointed study to make the call.
Staring at a bronze nude on one of his bookshelves, Hàrélal smiled a little and dialled the number he'd been sent. Sinbari, a close friend of the deceased Chief's, and millionaire director of a chain of hotels, had sounded morose when he finally came on the line; he had with him, he assured Hàrélal, two of the most shocked young people he had ever met.
They were friends of his son and were entirely under his protection while they stayed in this country. They had come to India to experience its purity and astounding natural beauty: they had found instead something so horrible that he was unable to speak of it over the telephone; they'd been, in fact, so traumatised that they were quite prepared to write about it in
Globetrotter
, a distinguished travel magazine for which they occasionally freelanced. Did he, Acting Chief Superintendent of Police, understand what the implications of this might be for the chain of Randhor-Sinbari hotels that stretched across the Northwest? Would it be possible for Hàrélal to handle the case personally and off the record? Nothing else would do. An affirmative answer would be taken as an assurance of the continued good relationship between Sinbari and The Department, for he had been sorely grieved at the death of his dear friend, the Chief.
The conversation with Antonio Sinbari had not been to Hàrélal's satisfaction but by the end of it he had agreed to see the two young tourists who were so clearly upsetting Mr. Sinbari's digestion.
Fluffing up what little remained of his hair so that it covered the shiny patches on his skull, Hàrélal was aware of the day's oppressive heat. His clothing felt damp and uncomfortable. His neck, always troublesome because of its girth, was particularly vexatious on such humid days. In their youth, Mrs Hàrélal had had to remove the top button from each of his department-issue uniforms to prevent a rash developing where the cloth chaffed his flesh at the juncture of neck and chin.
As he stared at himself in the ornate mirror, Hàrélal wondered if it was absolutely necessary to wear a tie. It probably was. Finally he selected a deep blue one patterned with golden elephants and knotted it loosely before calling to his chauffeur on the intercom.
The drive from Hàrélal's home to police headquarters lay through an area of town that he had always admired. Populated mainly by government ministers and foreign diplomats, its streets were wide and clean, the houses painted in pale colours or still in their original stone, the gardens impeccably verdant, whatever the weather. The car halted at a crossing and Hàrélal sat back in his seat, aware that he relaxed only when out of the company of his wife and daughter. The thought caused him some guilt.
A man and a woman in expensive clothing strolled across the road, casting disdainful glances at his darkened windows. The woman turned to her husband and made a remark. His answering guffaw was audible even above the purring of the car's engine and made Hàrélal frown. The police were not highly regarded by some of Delhi's élite. He was reminded of the time a South Indian professor at the university had insisted on calling him 'Harry' throughout a conversation. He had been trying to help the man discover who had stolen some rare prints from their faculty library. Irked by the man's contempt, he'd caught the thief – but the professor had never been informed. The prints in question now hung in Hàrélal's own drawing room.
Harry
. Suddenly disgruntled, he began to ponder the job that lay ahead, trying to work out how to handle the two young tourists Sinbari was sending to him.
When he came face to face with them, he decided that they were not English. Northern European, perhaps? Or Irish. Whatever his failings, he did watch television; and he knew a BBC accent.
He allowed his eyes to wander over them, from their worn sandals to their matted hair and then back again down to the two slightly protruding nipples of the young woman who was wearing a white cotton T-shirt in a size that might have accommodated anyone's eleven year old son. He pursed his lips and looked at the young man. This specimen was little better. He wore a nose-ring and his eyes were blood-shot. They both looked very young – probably mid-twenties, however, judging by their eyes.
He could not rid himself of the feeling that they were secretly afraid of him, despite his many reassuring grunts and his paternal offers of tea. And their fear was the thing he most wanted to allay. If he desired the words 'deputy' and 'acting' – which had clung so effetely to his title through thirteen years of service – to disappear, then he might have to count on Antonio Sinbari's influence with the local party office. It would not be a good idea to disappoint or antagonise him in any way.
Summoning his meagre stocks of patience, Hàrélal smiled at the girl. She seemed more likely to talk sense and it was at least pleasant to look at her body, even if her face was chalky white and puffy from lack of sleep or weeping.
'Feel free to tell me your whole story. I am at your service, miss.' He gritted his teeth when she did not reply and looked at the boy who shifted uncomfortably, opened his mouth and then shut it again like a dying Pomfret. Finally the girl spoke. Her voice was hoarse and the accent continued to gnaw at Hàrélal's well-tuned ears.
'We were going climbing, see,
in Chaarpaani, you know
. . ..'
And so the tale had begun.
As the girl's story progressed, Hàrélal became increasingly anxious. He wondered whether Mr. Sinbari was subtly testing him, not trying to ascertain where his loyalties lay, as he had suggested over the phone, but actually checking to see if he had his wits about him. He swore under his breath at this thought, for though he had always been shrewd about public speaking and announcements, he was never sure of himself with eccentric or educated people. He wore his authority with outward calm but in his heart he still thought of himself with uncertainty. His wife's guru had told him that if he had been born to rule then the words 'deputy' and 'acting' would not have been attached to his name in the first place. He dealt with his insecurity by pretending that those surrounding him were inferior to him in every way.
Or else he sent them to Kailash Karmel.
And this case, he decided, when the monotonous drone of the girl's voice finally ceased and he could hear his air-conditioner again, was definitely going to be Karmel's business.
Kailash Karmel was still in a half world between intense vision and vague reality when his beeper went off. He had not returned home until nearly four in the morning, completing paperwork after the arrest of two adolescent streetwalkers, accused of bludgeoning a violent customer. Karmel felt a mixture of revulsion and compassion for the sobbing tribal beauties with the bruised cheekbones. He knew that they were both due for a long period of captivity in one of the most wretched dwellings the city had to offer and, despite the irritable mutterings of his colleagues that he should keep his dick out of other people's business, he had come down to the cells to ensure that the women were left unmolested, at least for a few hours.
When he finally drove himself home and bathed, his retinas still retained the image of the two bloody and shivering creatures with their arms around each other: neither could have been a day over fourteen. Wasteful, shameless society, he thought, allowing soap to drip into his eyes, staring through the pain,
with the pain and beyond it
as he had taught himself to do, so many years ago in an institution for those whose only kindred were vermin and disease.
Sorrow put him off his food and he dropped onto his bed wearing nothing but a damp towel.
The beeper was a new inspiration of Hàrélal's. Karmel could still see the light flare beneath the older man's eyelids when he'd realised that he had yet another way to control his young deputy, a device which, unlike a mobile phone, could never be switched off. Were he simply to throw the thing away, then he would be held accountable for destroying government property. And anyway, Karmel knew, he could not afford to offend his boss. The tenuous authority to which he had risen could only be maintained if he made himself indispensable. He'd had enough of being kicked around by many masters and Hàrélal was not as bad as others. So he hurried, naked and shining in the dusty morning sunlight, to his silenced mobile phone. His eyes felt heavy but Hàrélal's voice acted like spray from some particularly pungent citrus fruit.
'My office. Ten minutes, Kailash.'
'Sir . . .. I'm at home. Give me thirty.'
'Home? It's five minutes past ten. How long does it take to wipe your arse? Over here.
Now!
' The connection was cut.
Assaulted by the light pouring into the apartment all around him, Karmel blinked. This was his designated fortnightly day off but he knew that such trivialities would never occur to Hàrélal, whose only concern at the moment appeared to be the next set of crime statistics and the next chance at promotion to the post of Chief Superintendent.
Karmel felt his stomach rumble as he pulled on his clothes. He hadn't eaten for twenty hours. He would have to eat on the way for he couldn't face a day of mindless chores without physical sustenance. He decided to stop at a stall that hawked hot pastries to passing motorists at one of the busiest intersections in the city. He'd become acquainted with the owner when he was sent to close this illegal business down. Karmel had persuaded his boss to try one of the pastries and, to the owner's gratitude, the stall had been granted a temporary reprieve. They'd been friends ever since, the steam of pastries mixing with noxious vapours and car emissions to remind them of life's fragility.
Combing his hair in front of the mirror, Karmel examined a small lump on the side of his neck. It had been causing him sharp pain lately. A local physician had told him it might signal a hereditary disease. He was scheduled to have a biopsy done but perhaps the disease that awaited him lay not there but somewhere else. The heart, the lungs, the blood, the brain?
His polished mirror reflected his symmetry as calmly as it always did: ironed cotton shirt, buttoned to the top, dark brown skin, stubble, silky black hair, large dark eyes, the left one with a barely perceptible cast to it. He cleared his throat, lifted the keys to his motorbike from the neat dressing table and left his flat, slamming the door behind him.
His landlady peered from her barred window into the street below to see him riding off on his gleaming Honda. She had a strange feeling of affinity for this tenant of hers, but that did not stop her from taking the spare key that he left with her and entering his space as soon as he was out of sight each morning. Often in the darkness when he returned and padded around his flat he felt that things were eerily out of place, that his own feet were treading a path that had been warmed by other feet before his; he put these sensations down to exhaustion and never once thought that the fleshless grandmother who rented him the apartment might slip upstairs in the heated afternoons to sniff around his personal belongings, his comb and books and neatly polished shoes.
He knew no mother, no father, no sisters, aunts or concerned cousins and his only visitor never revealed her purpose or her presence.