Hadal

By C P Surendaran

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Miriam is young, attractive and unhappily married. Taking a break from her job as internal security officer at the palace of the Maldivian president, she comes to Trivandrum to write a novel. Honey Kumar is a police officer on a punishment transfer from Delhi to Trivandrum for a spectacular act of graft. When Miriam refuses to comply with Honey Kumar's demands for sexual favours in return for extending her visa, he fabricates an espionage charge against her and arrests her. Before long, Miriam, who has secrets of her own, realizes that the tropical vacation spot she has landed in is like a hallucinogenic dream, where everybody has a tale to tell. They collectively contribute to a fable about her as a spy and a honey trap, shaking her up and shaping her struggle. Inspired by a real-life incident, Hadal is an incisive critique of the rot at the heart of India and the corruption, physical and spiritual, that permeates the structures of authority.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351770121

C P Surendaran

C.P. Surendran is a poet, novelist, journalist and screenplay writer. His poetry collections include, Gemini II, Posthumous Poems, Canaries on the Moon and Portraits of the Space We Occupy. He is the author of the novels An Iron Harvest and Lost and Found. His first screenplay, Gour Hari Dastaan, has been selected for the Kerala International Festival and the International Film Festival of India. He is currently working on a collection of poems called Repeat Radio. He divides his time between Bombay and Delhi and is the editor in chief of DNA.

Book preview

1

A Facilitator of Fatalities

When first light flared and the abattoirs of Old Delhi came alive with the dying of animals, Honey Bhimrao Jaspreet Kumar wakened to a phone call that broke his recurring Monday nightmare in which, as a boy of twelve, he ran endlessly by a black lake because he no longer knew how to stop. In the dream, he had traded his ability to control his limbs so he could save his mother’s life. When this did not happen and he was informed she could not survive the accident, he had opened his eyes in protest but had continued to run breathlessly in his head. Such violence in our dreams, he thought, sitting up.

The caller said Honey Kumar should think twice before taking his mother to a doctor. Over the years, Honey Kumar had developed an acute sense for the sulphides of decay, and he could tell from the smell and sound of the words that the man at the other end was rotting. Honey Kumar rubbed the triangular patch of his forehead, a tiny clearing at the centre of a teeming forest of curls, with the back of his fist. He was all right with rot; corruption was the natural state of the people he normally came across, but he had to exercise caution in the prospective act of sharing the spoils, the fraught, violent process of profit distribution that forges human fate.

‘My mother died years ago. Who are you?’

Though it was the end of March, it had been an unusually extended winter, and the woollens had not disappeared into trunks. Still, Honey Kumar’s face streamed with sweat from the dream. Dreams were real, he thought, why else was his heart pounding at the mere hologram of a few mismatched memories?

‘I’m a whistle-blower.’ The voice was bitter as if a fateful meeting had gone wrong the night before. ‘A facilitator of fatalities, you might call me. Imagine, your mother and sister being examined by doctors who can’t tell tongue from tympanum? Can you imagine that, officer?’

Honey Kumar shook his head and the million black springs on his head unwound a little, like an alarm going off. Often he had thought of his head as the face of a clock, his long nose the hub, his hooded eyes 10 and 2, his thick lips fallen low at 6, his tongue the cuckoo bird. He noted that the whistle- blower did not mention father and brother as characters in the unfolding medical tragedy. Perhaps pathos was direr if exemplified by women? ‘Please be clear.’ Honey Kumar was fully awake now, ready to usurp the day and wade into the mud.

‘It’s anaesthesiology exam today. At least six students at the medical institute will be clearing it through high-tech copying.’ The voice paused to underline the word high-tech. Honey Kumar imagined he could hear the man run the tip of his tongue over his lips, thinking. He was fascinated by mouths. He knew he stared at mouths when people spoke, the way the lips moved in amoebic frenzy, keeping pace with the tongue.

‘Very high-tech. These are the craftsmen of our long night. Imagine them administering anaesthesia. Picture your mother waking to a knife in her bones on the operation table. That’s pain.’

‘Why are you calling now?’

Did pain come from ignorance? The sources of pain were many: thoughts, objects, mothers, babies who defenestrated themselves from sixth-floor windows while parents bickered over coffee.

Honey Kumar’s  eyes  came  to  light. Incredibly,  the gossamer world was visible yet again like a trick of light. He coughed. The objects in the room shook. He reached for the cough syrup on the side table, downed a mouthful. He opened and closed his eyes, willing things to go and come back so all was real. The near wall lined with leather-bound books, most of which he had opened only once to put down his signature and date—a meticulous exercise in acknowledging himself at the expense of well-known authors. Above the window was a fine-framed reprint of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms, electric with the temporary insanity of life, and, right next to the door, hung the gleaming old-fashioned wall clock with its elusive eleven o’ clock chimes. He had moved into his new apartment only a month ago—it had taken a lot of money and effort—in the quiet and verdant Jorbagh area where the old rich lived as if the world was an inheritance; the designer jewellery, walnut tables, sapphire grass and opal sunlight their right.

Honey Kumar had done up the room just like the Interior had told him. Go for wood, they had recommended. A cut- out coupon in the magazine had guided his way to a shop where he could buy teak furniture at a discount, and he had bought the stuff in a trance because shopping made him feel as if he was a tired someone else. The only variant in the recommended decor of his bedroom was a large, rectangular, framed, black-and-white photograph of a snarling Muhammad Ali standing tall over Sonny Liston—‘Get up and fight, sucker’—in the first round of their second match in 1965. It was a gift from his boss, Aladi Ram Mohan, and Honey Kumar had mixed feelings about it for, from some angles, he thought he looked like the legendary loser. Maybe today he would remove it. But what would he do with the empty rectangle, the space the portrait of the boxers occupied? Everything, like crime, left traces.

‘The exams have been going on for some time. Why now?’ ‘A whistle-blower can call anytime,’ the man said, clearing  his throat. ‘No matter when I called, you could always ask that question, couldn’t you?’

‘Hmm, give me the details.’ Most likely the whistle-blower, a doctor himself, had been done out of a deal. People who clamoured for truth almost always were those who had failed to be a part of the lie. Honey Kumar jotted down the exact location of the exam hall and the ticket numbers of the suspect students and then drew a firm line under it, putting two dots below. He always put two dots to indicate conclusion. It was only later he realized that when he was doing one thing, he was actually doing another. Life worked out its tricks simultaneously on at least two fluid fronts: you drew a line and you thought it vertical; then someone came along and held the paper the other way and the line turned horizontal; in time, he would think, dimensions changed.

In a slow tone of barely suppressed agitation, the whistle- blower explained how the students operated. The invigilator had been bought off. The students strapped cell phones to their wrists, under their sleeves. They photographed the question papers and sent them to their helpers—three fellow students and the medical college dean—in a cramped room in Daryaganj, Old Delhi.

It would be Old Delhi, wouldn’t it, the caller said, as if his perennial source of personal grief was Old Delhi, the phantasmal, forted capital of the Mughals, where a decrepit, disinherited king in grey beard and a long, fraying, white muslin gown might still be caught peeping out of a blown-out window of one of the old havelis, a one-dimensional form with maybe one glittering eye and a dark hole for a mouth, emerging uncertainly from the hollows of time, the rest of his features erased by the fierce moonlight, while outside, against the curtain of blue night, the palaces, mosques and moats rose like shadows of history, and you couldn’t walk past Red Fort—from where ruled the foolish and tragic Bahadur Shah Zafar, the only emperor in history destined to lead a revolt inspired by cows and pigs, the grease of which mythical animals loosened the nuts and bolts of the blasphemous East India Company and led to its dissolution in 1858—without hearing the bestial cries for alms of a famished beggar stretched to his limits on the rack of life, the same helpless sound that must have rung off the walls of the ancient city of Delhi as a thousand slaves pulled stones and chipped away at their lives as the monster fort rose.

‘Well, back to our little fraud, then,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘our little operation, our little secret that keeps this country poor for eternity. Listen now. The answers were read out on a conference phone and picked up by tiny wireless hearing aids. How is that for advancement of our great Vedic civilization?’

It’s a cesspool, he continued, whispering hoarsely, a cesspool, you understand. Doctors who know nothing of pain! Deans who are better off dead! Hippocrates and his impractical oath! And here, take down the address of the base camp. ‘Look at what we have come to, officer. The system is not corrupt. Corruption is the system. This is what we have got at the end of all that history, mad kings, the Brits, netas, and a million dead.’

Honey Kumar had a natural, vertical frown between his eyebrows, like the third eye of Shiva, and it now narrowed in concentration as he listened to the rasp of apocalypse. The fraud, the whistle-blower said, worked out to Rs 5 lakh per student. A bit steep on the face of it, but it all worked out just right in the marriage market as whole hospitals fell in place, pillar and post, between exchange of rings; a doctor in the family is like an ATM in your parlour and I admit I am speaking from my personal experience, he said, expelling his breath suddenly by way of a short, brutal, valedictorian bark, a breathy, corrosive punctuation that ended their early morning conversation.

Honey Kumar got out of bed and walked to the window. A cold day, not good for his cough, he thought, looking out. The good men and women of Jorbagh allowed themselves to be visible in their warmers and caps between trees and beside flowers like inexplicable vignettes of life, darkening light where they stood, occupying space, their breaths pluming the air as they greeted each other, their transience cloaked in constitutional activities.

He pulled on his trousers, got his jeep out.

hadal

From near a window, Honey Kumar watched the proceedings in the exam hall with an appreciative eye. The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in south Delhi was a sprawling complex of squat concrete structures, exhaling odours of decay and mend. The institute trained and employed some of the best doctors in the world, quite a few of whom eventually ended up super-specializing in the body behaviours of just one patient, a minister, a tycoon, a wealthy father-in-law. The anaesthesia department was in the far back, on the fourth floor. A broad veranda ran by the exam hall. Thick pillars threw shadows on the cracked floor. In the distance, an ambulance suddenly cut its wail, perhaps unable to find a way ahead in the milling traffic.

A full-bodied nurse went past Honey Kumar with military precision in her gait, and the click of her shoes on the floor struck him as exaggerated and invitational. He stared after the parade and was momentarily distracted by the festive mysteries of the female form. He planted his gaze back in the hall with its twenty-three students. At least five of them, he could see, were making minute movements with their hands, unwarranted in answering a question paper. A good fraud approximated art; like a painting, a whole industry grew around it. It created its own world with its own priorities and values; actual people inhabited it, and there was no way to know it was less real than the one it supplanted or extended. Across the quadrangle, a black cat chased a squirrel up a tree in a silent movie of life and death. The cat crouched, claws out, muscles taut, tail swishing, looking up at the tree for justice.

Honey Kumar withdrew from the sanitized surroundings that smelled of detergent and medicines and, for some reason, oranges that were slightly off, and drove fast to 11 Daryaganj, near Jama Masjid, past a chaotic main road, one side of which was dug up. Red earth formed little hills over which thick telephone cables snaked, and barefooted men without helmets worked deep in the pits. So the traffic piled up both ways on the other, good side of the road. Honey Kumar cursed, found a window, and turned into a lane lined by dilapidated two- and three-storey buildings whose ground floors were shops. The houses almost leaned on each other for support. From a broken drainpipe jutting into the air on a second floor, the first leaves of a banyan tree fluttered like the eyes of an invisible hanging garden.

Owing to a storm in the night—Delhi froze if the mountains up north gathered snow—the morning was like a sepia photograph. Wet cars, glistening lights and shrouded people, the odd dog and the elephantine bull appeared embalmed in brown ether. Beneath their skin, blood flowed, Honey Kumar thought,  in  drains  so  perfect  not  even  the  Dutch  could engineer. Honey Kumar parked the jeep on the wrong side of the lane of tall houses with tiny windows and carved doors and entered the portals of one that looked deserted. He went up a flight of wooden stairs that creaked and groaned with its remembered passages, a fading memory echoing with footfalls, of arrivals and departures, of thieves, soldiers and psychopaths. Dust laid a downy coating on the wooden rails. On the second landing, he kicked down a blue door. His big form filled the frame. ‘Police, and freeze, you bhenchods,’ he roared after a strategic clearing of his throat, his revolver out and sweeping the air before him in an arc of caution. Anything could happen in this democracy of, for, and by sister-fuckers; this brotherhood of bhenchods. He was ready for extreme violence, or abject appeasement; he could see and hear himself changing, every which way, like a man made of mercury, fully equipped for the emergencies of the moment, and his head grew antennae, his face multiple eyes, and his nostrils flared.

Honey Kumar scoped the room that turned medicine into murder.

It was a very tall cubicle, a tube sock of a room, with one high, latticed window  through which  a sad,  murky light filtered in. On a makeshift counter next to the wall were three laptops, several medical texts and guidebooks; a bunch of wires lay inert on the broken cement floor. A small, green iron safe brooded to a side of the wall. On it were cans of Coke and packs of Lays potato chips, whose jingle, Honey Kumar remembered: ‘No one can eat just one.’ That’s so true, he thought. In the craquelure on the wall, iron filings of ants ran magnetic fields.

The dean, a thin, short, elderly man with neat hands and bushy white eyebrows, looked surprised. He had kind eyes. The young men stopped what they were doing and shook their heads: India interrupted, the story of a 5000-year-old civilization where nothing would go smoothly. The dean delicately removed his earphones like he would a stethoscope that had detected strange auscultations. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course. I should have expected. How much?’ A good man, Honey Kumar thought, the kind of man who might say into his cell phone that he didn’t need another credit card, thank you, while considering what to do with an enlarged heart beating its last inside a chest freshly cut open. ‘Honey Kumar, assistant commissioner of police,’ he said; it was both a statement of fact and a philosophy of life that expected the world to owe him a living. Honey Kumar had calculated his price on the way. He had known it would come to this. Everything came to this, the point when a number would be mentioned; a number was the end of all letters. He mentioned it.

The dean closed his eyes and hummed a song. He got up from his chair, went to the safe and opened it. He stood there for some moments, cracking his fingers; finally he turned with an open briefcase full of cash. ‘There’s nothing to worry, the money is clean.’

When the dean smiled, his face changed drastically. The lines on his face mellowed and it seemed possible that he might have been someone else—someone he actually wished to be. Ah, yes, Dr Chiranjeev Chibra, Honey Kumar thought. Surely, this was the doctor who had been in the news a couple of years ago? All through his TV interviews then, he had kept smiling, painfully amused at the turn of events that had brought him before the cameras and turned him into an actor for the duration of the episode. Honey Kumar had later learned that a fifteen-year-old girl had been wheeled unconscious into ‘emergency’ to the clamour of her twenty- odd relatives and friends. They were from the Turkman Gate area, the oldest Muslim ghetto of the city, and prayed loudly between plaintive cries for help. The girl had complained of fever and body pain, and suffered from a distended abdomen. She was still when she was brought in. Dr Chibra considered the girl, pale and pretty like an anaemic angel, and said quietly to the young medical resident officers milling around him: cardiopulmonary cerebral resuscitation. He started rapidly pressing down on the girl’s chest and exhaling into her mouth while his juniors set about the task of defibrillation. The relatives huddled in conformity with the first condition of a riot, and then revolted against what they saw as an act of perversity on the part of the doctor. It took less than a couple of minutes to break Dr Chibra’s fine surgical fingers, which would never again hold a scalpel, and damage the medical equipment in the room. By the time things quietened and the staff had got around to attending the girl, she had died of the infectious idiocy of her family.

‘If we are not in it for the money, what are we in it for?’ Honey Kumar asked, holstering his revolver.

Dr Chibra closed the doors of the safe. He came back, sat in his chair, glanced at his watch, and put the earphones back on. ‘Let’s get back to work,’ he said. He had lost valuable time. But he would go on with the operation for what it was worth. He was a practical man who believed in appearances. One evening he had returned home to find his wife’s lover walking out of the gate wearing one of his sun hats, which he had bought on a beach in Goa. Dr Chibra had continued with the arrangement. He thought the saddest marriage was one that cried shy of divorce every day. After that night, he had taken care to avoid going back home at that hour.

Honey Kumar felt out of place. He turned towards the broken door. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He meant the door. ‘Things happen in the line of duty.’

Dr Chibra looked up and smiled again. ‘When you wear a mask, you don’t lie.’

hadal

Honey Kumar got into his jeep and drove out along Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, named after the ruined last emperor of sepoys that the city kept coming back to book after book, seminar after seminar. He went past the historic Dilli Gate, which, after a fevered fit of renovation, resembled an ornate toilet in sandstone and certainly smelt like one because people urinated freely on the spot, uric autographs evaporating on a mineral page of history, past a series of squat newspaper offices, towards the traffic-choked Income Tax Office junction. From here, the road widened under the great, black trees bare of leaves and still like sculptures towards the monumental India Gate circle, around which was distributed the Parliament, the president’s palace, North Block, South Block and the other great offices of the Indian government. This was the nub of Lutyens’s Delhi, its vast plain occupied by hostile armies of buildings and phalanxes of bungalows housing India’s most powerful people. Honey Kumar made it a point to meet his boss at his residence right after an exploit. Aladi Ram Mohan, director general of police, was more a mentor than a boss. A quarter of all he earned on the side went to Aladi Ram Mohan. Honey Kumar owed him his career.

As the lights turned red, Honey Kumar stopped the jeep at the India Gate junction, took his hands off the wheel. He wagged his finger in warning at a large man straddling what seemed a toy motorcycle, planning to break the light, and watched as the biker shook his head apologetically and wheeled back. Honey Kumar clasped his hands behind his head. People should follow rules, shouldn’t they? Honey Kumar felt good obeying the traffic rules himself, though he could have easily broken them. He was the law. ‘Save fuel, save the world,’ said a huge petroleum billboard to the side of the road. He cut the engine. Honey Kumar felt good saving the world. He could do it just by doing nothing.

hadal

Two days later, the whistle-blower called again early in the windy morning. But unlike the earlier occasion there were no historical references, no handwringing over corruption. ‘You can read about yourself in the City Today. You think I would let it go like that?’ The voice burst in bubbles of suppressed fury. ‘I wanted you to bust the dean and you profited from my tip-off. Don’t miss tomorrow’s edition for anything. It’s a collector’s copy, choot!’

Honey Kumar didn’t mind being called a cunt, because it didn’t mean what it said. Shit meant great. Fuck was oh god. But he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him to offer a share of the spoils to silence the man in the first place. The fact was he had become complacent, an occupational hazard that Aladi Ram Mohan was always at pains to emphasize. ‘Wait, we can work this out.’ Honey Kumar’s third eye was now fully open, and he could see his future dimming. ‘You can always have a cut. Where’s the problem?’

‘If I wanted a cut, I would have taken it from the dean. If I had a gun, you would be dead by now.’

What’s this, Honey Kumar thought, an honest man? Or worse, a man who did not know his own true motives? ‘I’m sorry if you felt I was doing you out of it. That was never the intention. Never. Look, we two can still live this story.’ Honey Kumar marvelled at how people were so energetic so early in the morning. It was the sunlight, of course. In the far-off land of his childhood, Honey Kumar would go around his house by the lake, closing windows and doors, extending the hours of the dark, so the family could sleep a little more and he could get a bit more time to be himself. Sometimes, in an effort to hold on to time, he had walked the hour hand back to its beginning so it struck four again when it was six; on a good day, the sun would not rise.

The voice at the other end dropped, but the words were clear, as if the line worked just for the two of them. The world stilled all around Honey Kumar as he listened. ‘I truly hope that one of those students gets to operate on you while the anaesthesia runs out.’

The whistle-blower made anaesthesia sound like an elusive woman. Honey Kumar groaned as if he was already on the operation table. Before he could say anything, the whistle- blower had rung off. Honey Kumar kept calling back for a while, but it turned out to be a public telephone. It looked disturbingly certain that truth would triumph. Honey Kumar switched off his cell phone and stared at it. A quivering message from the service provider warned him of silence if he did not pay his bill. He got off the bed and stretched his ever hostile left foot that had gone to sleep. It was the bunch of nerves leading to his little toe. Inside a shoe too, the foot felt squeezed. He had experimented, to the merriment of shopkeepers, with a larger size for his left foot, and a smaller one for the right, but it was no good. He bent over and pressed his foot to awaken it. There seemed no alternative but to share the bad news with Ram Mohan before the tabloid hit the stands.

hadal

‘You’d better lie low for a while; I’ll try to manage a transfer for you to somewhere,’ Ram Mohan said at last, with a touch of exhaustion in his voice. When Honey Kumar had gone in unannounced minutes back, Ram Mohan was standing at his office window, looking down at the city crawling about sixteen floors below. Can’t make out one face in the crowd from here, he was thinking; even the cars looked the same: shining, brightly painted coffins on wheels. This is what distance does, Ram Mohan thought; the haze of space erased individuation like a