I waited.
Twenty minutes, which felt longer; staying there till the voices and the noises stopped. Eventually, my head began to clear and I crawled out and slowly stood up. Going back to check on the corpse was out of the question. Callaghan and his goons might have gone, but they’d have left men behind to secure the place, luckless local constables from the closest police thana, most likely. I didn’t envy them. More than one native copper had had his throat slit in the dark in Tangra.
No, my first task was to get rid of the knife. I still wasn’t sure why I’d picked it up. It certainly hadn’t been through any urge to preserve evidence. The attacker’s fingerprints might have been on it, but now so were mine. Maybe it had something to do with the shape of the thing: a blade, more bent than curved, about ten or eleven inches long, like the kind the Gurkha regiments had carried during the war, only with an ornamental hilt that was wrapped in black leather and inlaid with the image of a small silver dragon.
The smart thing to do would be to throw it in the Hooghly. Only the river was several miles away, I was covered in blood and I wasn’t going to get far in my current garb. What I needed was a change of clothes. I set off across the rooftops scouring the vista until I found what I was looking for. Moving silently, I covered the distance in a matter of minutes, and was soon rifling through the articles on a washing line like a housewife examining the wares at Chukerbutty’s Fine Clothing Emporium on Bow Bazaar. Hindus have a fixation with ritual cleanliness, not just of their bodies but their clothes too. That preoccupation seemed to have infected all of the town’s other non-white residents too, and at any given time, half of Black Town seemed submerged in a sea of drying laundry. Picking out a shirt, I quietly slipped off my own and wrapped it around the knife. The shirt from the line was old, faded and a size too small, but I buttoned it as best I could and rolled up the sleeves. To complete the ensemble, I stole a black shawl, which the locals called a chador, and wrapped it round my head and shoulders like an old woman, then continued over the rooftops until I found a place low enough to jump down to the street. From there I headed north to the Circular Canal where, weighing down the knife and my shirt with a brick, I deposited the package in the black waters below, like a Hindu devotee making an offering to the gods. Then I set off west, stopping at a tube-well to wash my hands and face, before continuing the mile or so to the all-night tonga rank at Sealdah station.
As I walked, my head buzzed with only one thought. I had to find out why the raid had taken place. It couldn’t be coincidence that a man had been murdered as Vice Division, without warning, launched its first raid in months on a den, just at the time that I happened to be there.
The clock in College Square read a quarter past three, and I was back in Premchand Boral Street soon after. I was early. Most nights it was at least 4 a.m. by the time I made it home from Tangra. I’d have laughed at the irony if it wasn’t for the dead man I’d left lying back there.
Trudging up the stairs to my lodgings, I slipped the key into the lock. The apartment was in darkness. Nevertheless, I had to tread carefully. I shared my lodgings with a junior officer, Surrender-not Banerjee, and he was a light sleeper. His real name wasn’t Surrender-not, but Surendranath. It meant king of the gods apparently, and like the names of many of the kings I remembered from my history classes, its proper pronunciation was beyond me and most of the other British officers at Lal Bazar. A senior officer had rechristened him Surrender-not. That man was dead now, but the name had stuck.
He knew of my opium habit, of course. We’d never discussed it but the boy wasn’t an idiot, and in the early days he’d couched his concern in vague, open-ended questions as to my health, all framed with the sort of disappointed look a mother might give you when you came home from having been in a fight. Not that it had changed anything, and these days, he’d given up the questions, though I still encountered the stares from time to time.
The more pressing issue was our manservant, Sandesh. He too slept in the apartment, though generally on a mat under the dining table. He was supposed to sleep in the kitchen but claimed it was too large and that high ceilings gave him insomnia. Waking him was not normally a concern, for even if he did care as to where I was going most nights, he was mindful enough of his station never to voice an opinion on it. Nevertheless, seeing me wandering in dressed like a Spanish fishwife might just challenge even his monumental indifference.
I crept along the hallway to my room and once inside, locked the door. Light from a crescent moon bled in through the open window and fell like a veil on the furniture. The darkness felt like protection and, dispensing with the lamp, I removed the chador and pulled a crumpled pack of Capstan and a box of matches from my trouser pocket. I extracted a cigarette, lit it with shaking hands and took a long, steady pull.
In one corner stood my almirah, the large wooden wardrobe that was a fixture of most Calcutta bedrooms. With a mirrored panel inlaid in one of its two doors, the thing was unremarkable, save for the lockable steel compartment inside, which occupied a quarter of it and contained the few valuable possessions I owned, together with a larger number of more questionable ones. Placing the fag end in the old tin ashtray which sat on my desk, I stripped out of the borrowed shirt and, together with the chador, bundled it into the almirah’s steel compartment before locking it again. The clothes would need to be burned, but for now this was the best place for them. With the evidence concealed, I sank onto the bed and covered my face with my hands as, on the desk, the cigarette burned down to nothing.