Vinayak didn’t trust Gokhale with the wheel. To be honest, he wasn’t sure if he could trust him with a walking cane either. After all, there wasn’t a single bodily function that the man could perform without the assistance of medical science. His corrective lenses had corrective lenses. His knees and hips were metallic replacements of the originals. His teeth were in the glove compartment. But Vinayak knew better than to tell a superior what to do in his first week on the job. The old man would be off the force in the coming week anyway. If he didn’t ram them into an oncoming truck, that is.
The seaside had thickened the city’s salty flavor. Vinayak leaned back, constricted his shoulders and scratched his nape across his shirt’s collar. Fresh sweat streamed past the bed of dried sweat. He thought about the cozy winter that must’ve been blooming in poorer parts of the country. It was like what his father used to say, there’s no making a living without sweating.
“What is up with the outfits?” Gokhale squinted through his thick glasses, his head tilting from the windshield to the window on his side.
Vinayak followed his stare warily, one cautious eye still checking the ignored street in front of them. Two college-age boys strolled past them on the footpath. Both of them had tall walls of hair, wavy strands that shot out of their scalps like wild flames. The one with the orange-dyed hair wore an orange and blue outfit. His companion, black-haired, wore a blue and black outfit.
“No idea, boss,” Vinayak shook his head.
Gokhale snarled, “Third time I’ve seen something of the sort this night. Only see stuff like this in South Bombay. Scummy rich fathers and their fancy rich kids.”
Vinayak didn’t respond. Old man rants were better left alone to die natural deaths. He left a sigh of relief as the old man’s eyes shifted back to the street.
“Where’re we headed?” He nodded at one of the policemen standing guard by the barricades shielding South Bombay from the indigence of the rest of the city.
“Back to the Bombay I know,” Gokhale’s eyes glinted with a perverted sort of wistfulness, “To the Bombay of my past.”
“But_” we’re assigned the patrol of this side of the city, were the words that Vinayak aborted mid-sentence.
“But what?” Gokhale gazed at him and chuckled toothlessly, “Afraid of upsetting the bosses in your first week? You’ve got to start early, kid. Get them used to it.”
Vinayak nodded, forcing a smile.
“There goes another one,” Gokhale pointed at a girl in a black leotard and cat ears on her head, walking by the opposite street.
Vinayak braced himself for another tirade. But the distorted intercom voice beat Gokhale to the chase.
“Colgate, come in,” The voice called, “Come in, Colgate.”
Vinayak stifled a laugh. Killing his smile, he inspected Gokhale out of the corner of his eye, to see if he had noticed it.
“You go on and laugh,” Gokhale shook his head, “They used to respect elders in this country once.”
He answered the intercom, “Here.”
“Public disturbance complaint from Harmonia Complex, Colaba East. One male, one female perpetrator.”
Gokhale grunted. Then, clearing his voice to a more soothing timbre, he spoke, “Uhm, we were headed out. Can somebody else take care of it?”
“Negative, Colgate. Take cognizance at once.”
“Asshole!” Gokhale screamed into the intercom and swerved the car around in a spiteful U.
Vinayak took the wheel after they had shoved the perpetrators into the back of the Jeep. Gokhale glared at them through the rear-view mirror, absently applying Colgate on his lower teeth. The boy- a baby-faced skinny teen, wore an oversized black coat. His face was painted white and his hair slicked back. His mouth was stuffed with fake teeth with pointed long canines. The girl wore a short black dress. She was painted white from head to toe. Her hair was a pale white. Red contact lens rendered her eyes the shade of fresh blood. A tiara of wilted flowers adorned her head.
“Like scaring little kids, huh?” Gokhale sighed out a low growl.
The couple stayed silent.
Gokhale turned around and pointed at the boy’s mouth.
“Where’d you get the teeth?”
The boy stayed quiet. Gokhale dangled his teeth in front of him.
“Exchange offer?” He broke into a wheezing chortle.
The boy responded with a faint smile and nodded. Gokhale landed a tight slap on his face that made the plastic teeth fly out of his mouth and land in the girl’s lap.
“Like scaring little kids, huh!” He shouted.
The boy, palm cupping the slapped cheek, kept staring back at him with dumb shock. The girl’s voice uttered something unintelligible.
“What?” Gokhale turned towards her.
“It’s Halloween,” she pierced his stare with her cold, red eyes.
“Halloween?”
“It’s the festival of fear.”
Gokhale chuckled. “Festival of fear,” he nudged Vinayak, who chuckled in return.
“It’s the night of Samhain,” the girl muttered, “it’s when the boundary between the world of the Aos Sidhe and our is the thinnest.”
Gokhale nodded in mockery, grinning, then asked, “What’s the name of Lord Ram’s mother?”
She kept staring at him, lips pursed.
Gokhale nudged Vinayak again. “This. The stewardship of our culture. They’ll recite an entire essay on this festival of fear but they can’t name Lord Ram’s mother.”
“Kaushalya,” the boy interrupted his oncoming tirade.
Gokhale’s nostrils flared. His palm was overcome with a maddening itch. He cured it at once by balancing the swollenness of the boy’s cheeks.
“Did I ask you?” He raised his hand once more, just to see the boy flinch. Then, asked, “What’s your name?”
“Rohan.”
“Rohan What?”
“Joshi.”
“And yours?” Gokhale turned to the girl.
“Valerie.”
“Catholic?”
“Wiccan.”
Again, the nod, the nudge and the chuckle.
“Informative day today, huh? What’s this now?”
“We conduct pagan rites and rituals for worshipping flora and appeasing the Aos Sidhe.”
“Eee Shee!” Gokhale enunciated like a petulant child, “That’s how my granddaughter reacts when her mother cooks bitter gourd.”
“It’s spelled differently,” Valerie gazed at the Tower of Silence slipping past them on her right. “This is the original Irish pronunciation.”
“Irish-Phirish Motherfu_” he cut himself off and growled, “Why don’t you take interest in something Indian?”
“This isn’t Indian to you?” She pointed at a fast-blackening Victorian Gothic structure replete with arches and pointed towers towards which the Jeep was headed. Then, grazed her fingers across the outline of Marine Drive formed on her window by the refracted yellow-streetlamps adorning the city’s neckline. “Nor this?”
Gokhale puffed out a bitter scoff.
“Well, there’s none of that where we’re headed. Right, Vinayak?”
Throughout the entirety of their way, they kept on their back and forth, Gokhale and the girl. The hoarse scorn of his voice, coupled with the twisted placidity of hers was enough to send Vinayak teetering on the edge. He could feel for her twice-slapped mute partner but wasn’t sure if the feeling was mutual. Gokhale had kept prying her about her festival of fear and she had patiently satisfied all of his derisive inquiries.
“Am I supposed to be scared of him?” Gokhale pointed at a boy wearing a skintight blue leotard and red underwear on top, “He’s wearing underwear on top of his pants.”
“In time, all rituals are corrupted by capital,” she muttered a rare line with which Gokhale could agree. “But it is all the same to the Aos Sidhe.”
A-O-S S-I-D-H-E, she had spelled them out. People of the Mounds. Apparently, there were these earthen mounds in the Irish countryside, long-abandoned battlements from dusted kingdoms, now reigned by grass and vines. There resided merry-making magical creatures, spending their time frolicking in circles and singing old hymns of the old gods. Ill-advised humans, whiffing long-buried treasures, often invaded their private gatherings, incurring their ire, which they expressed through nasty pranks.
Valerie told them a tale about a man who once ventured into the Sidhe to gather jewels for his wife, slashing vines and trampling over toadstools. Next morning, his wife discovered that all of the jewels in her rings and necklaces had been replaced by gnats and bees. When her husband returned home, nubile white toadstools had sprouted out of his eyelids, nostrils, ears and tongue.
Valerie told them that on Halloween night, their proximity to us increases tenfold and this is when they can play tricks and pranks upon anybody that they wish in any way that tickles their fancy. So, one must always be wearing a costume, indoors as well as outdoors, so as to disguise themselves from the Aos Sidhe. Gokhale had scoffed and guffawed through it all.
“But they’re in Ireland, beta,” He had patronizingly smiled at her. “How come you’re scared of them in Mumbai?”
“The English brought here tea from China and Eucalyptus from Australia. Who’s to say what else climbed aboard those circumnavigating East India Company ships?”
A decrepit stone structure flickered past Vinayak’s peripheral vision. It was a two-storey building sandwiched between newer, taller, somehow more dilapidated buildings. It grew smaller and smaller in his rear-view mirror, and he felt like it would continue doing so till infinity, growing tinier, perpetually outrunning the horizon, an indelible splotch on his rear-view mirror. As if from far away, a cantankerous voice called out his name, summoning him back to the windshield. He stomped the brake, jerking them to jerky halt.
Half-digested dinner scaled up a quarter of his throat and retreated. A viscous, slimy odour had drowned them. In the car’s yellow headlights, was a mountainous range of garbage, towering above them, stretched into the horizon. Gokhale gave his teeth one final wipe and set them over his bald gums. Then, inhaled as deep as his withered lungs would allow, turned around, grinned at the squirming Valerie and exhaled.
“This is Indian to me.”
He tossed his handcuffs to the boy, signalling him to cuff her to her door. Then, cuffed him. Both of them were too nauseated to open their mouths for protest.
Vinayak tripped over flattened plastic bottles and slipped over half-rotten vegetables. Time and distance had rendered the odour invisible to his nose. He turned around, to see that their way in was lost to him, in the plastic peaks and biomedical valleys. A headache had settled above his eyes. It writhed and twisted in his forehead, his breaths gushing in and out in rapid spurts.
“Where are we going?” he asked the largely unbothered Gokhale.
“Not far,” Gokhale showed his whitened teeth, “Have you heard of Azghar Bhai?”
“No?”
“Good. But there wasn’t a policeman in 1988 who hadn’t. He ran a scrap business out of here. Deep in the gullet of this dump. Only he didn’t just deal with your regular sheet metal chippings and defective gearheads. Not the ones made of your regular metals anyway. Have you heard of Titanium?”
Vinayak shook his head through squinted eyes. Enough information had been drilled into his aching head for the night.
“It is to engineers what diamonds are to jewellers. That’s what Azghar Bhai dealt in. Scrap that defence undertakings aren’t supposed to sell for national security reasons,” He unholstered his pistol and dangled it by the barrel. “This is what I shot him with,” He looked around. Then, finding the spot hopped weakly, “Right here! Before that, we plucked out three toenails and all of the eyelashes on his left eye, asking where he had stashed his inventory, all in vain. So, of course, he had to be shot thrice in the face for trying to evade custody. Now, we just have to find a pallet or two and my retirement will be smooth-sailing.”
“Can’t we do this in the day?” Vinayak thought he heard rustling in the plastic. The thought of the rats hadn’t entered his mind till now.
“Too much attention. It’s not about acquiring permission. It’s about splitting profits. I’ve spent too much time_”
Before he could utter the next word, two hands, small and deft, emerged form behind him and whisked the teeth out of his mouth. Vinayak saw a shiny black face-shape slip behind him and scuttled away into the refuse. Gokhale tightened his grip on his pistol and turned around. Vinayak’s virgin pistol shivered in his grip. The sound of plastic bottles crunching revolved around them.
“Who’s there!” Gokhale shouted, slamming gums against gums and raised his pistol in the air.
A plastic bag rustled in the dark. Gokhale felt a gurgle rise in the pit of his stomach. The upheld hand dropped to his thighs, the pistol falling to the ground. He bent, his back clicking. His chest pulsated; his belly undulated. A lengthy belch croaked out of his mouth, making him heave on its way out. Something shot out of his mouth and fell next to his pistol. He squinted through his telescopic glasses to see the tiny white spot lying next to his revolver’s cylinder. It was a loose tooth.
Then, an even longer belch. A bitter wringing of the belly. Salivary glands flooded his mouth and he retched. A deluge of teeth sprayed out of his mouth, clattering in a mound over his revolver. He stopped to catch his breath but they sliced up his throat, pressing against his cheeks, and he opened his mouth again. Blunt incisors and sharp canines and rugged molars slid up his tongue, lacing it with the sour copper taste of blood. His knees caved in and he fell to the floor, his frail arm breaking his fall and snapping to bend at the elbow. The teeth chattered against each other as he vomited them. His face drew closer and closer to the rising hill of teeth and blood till his lungs stopped the arduous cycle of inflation and deflation and he crashed into the pile of teeth and went stiff.
Vinayak’s legs were frozen. The pistol shivered in his grip. Sweat drenched his hair and neck and back. The plastic rustling again. Then, chattering of teeth. He fired the first shot of his career. The muzzle flash briefly illuminated a tiny figure, sporting the size and spirit of a child. Its mouth was the only thing that was visible, spiked with short pointed teeth. The rest of its head was wrapped in a black garbage bag. The rest of its body was covered in bubble-wrap. Its naughty childlike cackle blended with the sound of plastic crinkling. Vinayak fired another shot. Now, it stood, unfazed, upon Gokhale’s corpse, holding his ceramic teeth in one hand, chattering the jaws against one another.
Vinayak unloaded the rest of his bullets. The creature grew closer with the muzzle flashes, without moving out of the bullets’ way. At one point, Vinayak thought that he saw the last two bullets enter the barrel instead of leaving it, shooting inwards from his target before turning into gunpowder at the hammer. The gun confessed its emptiness with a harmless clink. He could still see its silhouette through the moonlight, standing a foot away from him. He flipped the pistol in his hand and raised the hammer into the air. But before he could launch at it, it latched itself on his torso with a spry leap. His body recoiled at its wet, rubbery touch and folded upon itself. Gokhale’s teeth dug into his throat and swung away with a full-mouthed bite, sending him gurgling to the ground.
The couple sat huddled in tight embrace, as tight as their cuffed bodies allowed anyway. Rohan had reinstalled his plastic fangs over his teeth almost as soon as the cops left them alone. They breathed short and quick breaths with their mouths open. The sound of distant gunshots had made the stench irrelevant. Valerie peered through the windshield, at the garbage hills. Then, turned to see a confounded Rohan. He was staring out her window, visibly quaking. She turned to the window and shook with a jolt. A plastic covered head was pressed against the glass. Its tiny green hands, were cupped around its face. Long, yellow nails curled out of its thin fingers. It inspected both of them from head to toe, then spoke in a screechy high-pitched child-voice, exposing rows of triangular teeth.
“Sister keener of coming corpses, brother betrothed to bloodlust,” It addressed them, “I, Old Garth, wish you a fruitful Samhain. Revelry and frolic, hymn and dance call your attendance in our abode. Will you care to join us?”
It extended its hand through where the window once used to be. Fear shed itself from Valerie’s face, inordinate joy taking its place. She looked at her wrist and saw that the handcuffs were gone as well.
“Happy Halloween!” She giggled at Rohan, took Old Garth’s hand, and hopped out of the Jeep, prancing and giggling towards the muck mounds, where much revelry and frolic awaited.