“Take out your wallet and put it on the dashboard.” The boy in the Klashni jacket looks sideways as he barks his orders. A newspaper hawker, an old man in a tracksuit, hurries towards Inspector Malangi’s car waving a copy of The Daily Ummah, but then sees the robbery in progress and swiftly crosses the lane using the newspaper to fan himself and continues to hawk his paper on the other side of the road.
Inspector Malangi feels a pang of nostalgia for the life he has left behind just this afternoon. The days and nights that he spent hunting them down, talking to them late into the night, testing their supple young bodies to the limit. He’ll miss these boys. This one looks quite jittery and nervous, someone new at this, someone still not sure whether what he is doing can be a long-term career option or just a one-off for tidying up his monthly budget. Inspector Malangi looks past the boy in the Klashni jacket, and, as he expected, he sees another boy on a motorbike, poised to take off, revving the engine, looking at the traffic building up behind them, then looking at the traffic light, where the red-digit countdown continues in slow motion. A baseball cap is pulled over his face, and Inspector Malangi has that veteran policeman’s premonition that he has seen this boy before. But boys this age all look the same; fashion victims with no individuality.
For a moment Inspector Malangi thinks that it’s ironic that he is being waylaid by boy robbers on the very day that he has quit the G Squad, hung up his uniform, returned his government-issue Beretta and started his life as a law-abiding civilian, the kind of harmless, responsible citizen they show in life-insurance advertisements. He looks at the lone traffic policeman standing on the roadside, cooling himself under the shade of a tree. Inspector Malangi realises that there’s nothing ironic about his situation. There are probably a few hundred people being held at gunpoint across the country right now; what is so special about him? Boy robbers can’t look at your face and tell that only two hours ago you were a feared cop, heading an elite police squad in the city. And isn’t that a relief, because if they knew who they had got at gunpoint, what ideas might they get in their young, hot heads?
♦
Inspector Malangi has spent his last afternoon at work tying up loose ends: two prisoners are transferred to judicial custody, another one is told to walk. He runs fearing a bullet in the back of his neck, but Inspector Malangi just stands there waiting for him to turn the corner, then returns to his office and starts clearing out his desk. He is going through his drawer when Teddy shows up looking lost, like a pet whose owner has suddenly decided to move house and has no plans to take him along. Inspector Malangi remembers that here is one more person who needs to be sorted. He can’t tell Teddy to just walk out, that he is free to go. Where will he go? Other members of the G Squad have their careers; they can take care of themselves. This boy needs his help. Teddy’s left arm is in a cast and perched in a sling around his neck. Inspector Malangi observes his plastered arm mournfully but doesn’t ask him how he got hurt. With his career over, all curiosity about human affairs has drained out of him. Who cares why people shoot each other or themselves. There is always a reason. A good reason. Or a bad reason.
Here is yet another man who is not sure any more if he is a man or not, Malangi thinks. A woman can do that to you, especially a woman you have loved. It is unpleasant to talk about these things, especially on your last working day, but Inspector Malangi feels he can’t just walk out of this life without passing on the knowledge he has acquired in thirty-six years of working and loving.
“Sit down,” he says, and then resumes clearing out his drawers and starts talking with his head buried in the desk. “Do you know what a woman in love is like? You probably knew it once but now can’t remember. Have you ever seen a mad filly? When a filly goes mad, there is not much you can do. The best rider can try and mount it and it’ll still kick up a storm. You can chain it to its bones but it’ll still run away in the middle of the night. That is a woman in love for you. What do you do when everything fails? They need to be put down. For their own good. There is no other way.” He produces a velvet pouch from the bottom drawer and begins to untie the shiny silver wire securing it.
Teddy’s arm in the cast has developed a really bad itch. He desperately wishes he could scratch it just once. He also wants to ask Inspector Malangi how he knows, about him and Alice, but then decides against it. You don’t ask the head of the G Squad about his sources. And then it occurs to Teddy that if a common ward boy in the Sacred knows, then probably the whole city knows.
“Yours is only a domestic situation. Things always blow up around the house. The gas cylinder, a leaky oven, a cupboard can fall, someone slips out of a window. It happens every day.”
“We are not living together any more,” says Teddy, his gaze fixed on the velvet pouch with expectant eyes, as if Inspector Malangi is about to produce a solution to his life’s problems, or at least give him an expensive watch as a farewell present. Inspector Malangi produces two solid gold bracelets from the pouch and caresses them gently, as if trying to remember the texture of the soft wrists these bracelets might once have adorned.
“Where is she now?” he says, stretching out his hand so that Teddy can see the bracelets closely. “Dead. Rage of youth. Is there a single day in my life that I don’t remember her? Yes, there are days when I actually don’t. But here,” he knocks his forehead with his knuckle, “she’s always here. And what was her punishment? A bullet in the head, two seconds of flashback and now she doesn’t even remember that she was the most beautiful woman that G Squad ever put handcuffs on. And what do I get? A lifetime of heartache, a career destroyed, children who keep failing in maths. A wife who keeps taunting me that I am not man enough for her. But you don’t have to suffer what I suffered. Let them share our suffering a little bit.”
Inspector Malangi pauses for a moment, not sure if Teddy is following him. “Come with me.” He puts the gold bracelets back in the pouch, ties the silver wire, takes out a bunch of keys and starts walking. Teddy follows him to the maal khana. Inspector Malangi flicks the light switch on; the storeroom is still semi-dark, full of shadows and strong, pungent smells.
“Let me show you something,” Inspector Malangi says, removing a bedsheet from a wooden coffin with a glass cover. In the dimly lit room Teddy can see a mummy, the kind they show in tourist advertisements for Egypt. The mummy has the rosy cheeks of a young mountain girl and the mournful eyes of an old woman who has seen all her offspring die in her lifetime. “It’s a fake, of course. Only seventy years old, but a true artist manufactured it in his backyard and then was trying to pass it off as booty from Balochistan, some minor pharaoh’s runaway cousin who ended up here. A British museum almost bought it.” He pulls the sheet back on the coffin. “Do you get my point? They are fakes even when they are dead. These women, I tell you, they continue to peddle these fantasies from their coffins. You can’t trust them even when their hearts stop beating.”
Teddy is not really sure what a fake Egyptian mummy has to do with him and Alice, but suddenly he feels an acute sense of loss. He feels he was promised an authenticated five-thousand-year-old love from the very depths of some pyramid. What he got was a fake from someone’s backyard in Balochistan.
“Take whatever you need,” Inspector Malangi tells Teddy, his hand sweeping the room. Teddy has been here before, but only to pick up a weapon that can’t be traced back to the G Squad. Standing in the shadow, he wonders what he could possibly do with two tonnes of hashish piled to the ceiling, or crates of DVDs or boxes of fake Indian currency or rocket launchers without any rockets.