Dead Water by Simon Ings

works long hours on Yash Yadav. She could recite you the highlights of his police career without recourse to the file. Armed encounters with Islamist mafiosi. Police shoot-outs and legal kills. Roopa studies statements, photographs, autopsy reports, official denials. The legal kill: it is, she thinks, with a thrill of mischief, one hell of a way to get rid of your family’s business rivals.
    In bed at night, alone, she thinks of Yash Yadav: a big man, taking aim. Naked, self-aroused, she dreams the just blow and its aftermath. Shock and recoil. She pushes a finger inside herself as she comes. Afterwards, trembling, disgusted, she wonders how it is that she finds any of this erotic.
    She clambers out of bed. She moves around it, as you would shy away from a bad memory. What time is it?
    After midnight.
    After one.
    Where is her husband? Where is Hardik? Of course she knows the truth about Hardik by now. Any wife would. Once, in desperation, she tried to get him to watch her masturbate. What a farce that was.
    Roopa and Hardik have been married barely a year. In the beginning, they were gossip-worthy: the daughter of a decorated police martyr come to rub the rough edges off a gutter patriot! A fairytale of the city’s New Right. But it’s a dizzying time for the RSS and Hardik’s volunteer work has been keeping him out late. Roopa has been staying up for him, keeping his meals hot. It is not easy, in her line of work, to be always putting Hardik first.
    Hardik is riding the wagon of saffronist resurgence: a force that will soon transform Bombay down to its very name. He wants her to know that she is not part of this. He wants her lack of understanding established: a fact as secure and protective as a wall. He has been dabbling at the edges of political violence for years. Now he wants her to think he has been drawn into some sinister activity. How can a bourgeois girl like Roopa hope to understand the plight of the slums? It is Hardik’s very big alibi for betrayals that have nothing to do with politics.
    Under the bed, in a suitcase filmed with dust, Roopa’s old probationer’s uniform lies neatly pressed and folded. She shakes it out. She finds a shirt of Hardik’s which, at a distance, will pass for a service garment. She dresses the part.
    She is her father’s daughter: Kabir Vish, who never let the spoor of the Stoneman go, though many said he was just a fairytale the
bhangis
told to keep their brats in check. For a woman of such pedigree, tracking down her husband is a very small matter. Last night she followed him to Kamala Nehru. Tonight – she knows his habits by now – she will find him in Shivaji Park.
    Roopa’s old uniform prickles and sticks. Still, it is necessary. It gives her a reason for being here, a woman alone at night in Bombay’s biggest public space. The wildlife will leave her alone. At the same time, any upright citizen – any fellow officer, God forbid – will feel that he can call on her. Officer, I’ve lost my dog! My child! My service weapon! My mind! If she’s caught impersonating an officer, there will be hell to pay.
    It’s out of her hands. She follows her husband. She slides off the broad avenue after him, off raked gravel and on to mown dirt. She follows him into the dark, around cricket pitches, past the Scout hut and the temple of Ganesh, into ornamental shrubberies where abandoned cricket balls dome like fungi out of a salad of leaf-mould and tissues. She follows him past the tinkling of bells and the susurration of silks. The men who congregate here wear their make-up so thick its river-bottom smell overpowers any amount of cheap perfume. Roopa knows what goes on here. The
hijras
of Shivaji were her father’s eyes and ears. Each time a superintendent got it into his head to clean up the parks, Kabir Vish tipped off his fancydressed friends. It’s how he caught the Stoneman.
    What is Hardik doing here? What investigations does he pursue? Tonight, watching him, his antics