Mrs Bandoshi finds fame

They had found the corpse face down in red soil, still recognizable but stinking to hell. It was the stink that had driven them to it, in an effort to find out which factory could be polluting the place, discharging its effluent into the river unfiltered. This feeble excuse of a riverside park was the only refuge left for the harassed city dwellers, and the couple had come here frequently for their evening walk. It was only that day that they had ventured so far, looking forward to an extra treat to compensate for this extra exercise on behalf of the Society for Prevention of Pollution. Hitherto they had been conscientious but passive members, but today, a faint stench had aroused the sleuth in Mrs Bandoshi. Who knows which sewage drain was open or which factory discharging its effluent untreated? By the time they reached the deserted tangled patch near the river, Mr Bandoshi was already getting nervous of causing trouble, but his wife would have none of this cowardice. It would do the world some good, she said, if more people took care to not pollute the environment. And who knew, perhaps their exposé may bring them the amateur eco-warrior award. As it turned out, it did nothing of that sort and Mr Bandoshi never let her forget that. To which Mrs Bandoshi always countered that their story had been carried on the third page of the local daily, and if that wasn't fame,   what was? It was true that they had connections that enabled them to approach the editor with confidence, but still, there it was: you had to first do something if you wanted to be in the paper, which they had, so it was alright after all. For months later, Mrs. Bandoshi laced her conversations with what she thought were inspired accounts of the event, in a suitably horrifying way of course, but which invariably made her audience wish she was elsewhere.

It had happened this way.

Moti used to be a milkman of the usual sort, diluting his milk with quantities of water from the river before supplying it to the gullible city slickers. Those who dared question, he simply ignored, for was not the river water holy as the scriptures said? He was doing the poor sinners a service, he was. He was a contented man; he had a fair income and sufficient savings for his only child; his cows were cared for and he duly worshiped the river deity as required. But fortune turned her back on him in due course, and his son was pronounced dead because of the chemical waste in the river near his home. From then on, Moti was devastated by degrees. As they say, those whom Gods wish to punish, they rob of reason first. And so it was with Moti. His loss of reason took the form of honesty, a fault hitherto unknown in his community. He went to his customers and confessed to having fed them polluted milk, offering to make amends by charging them less for the pure milk than onwards. Naturally they refused to believe in his sworn word for future good conduct while trusting implicitly his statements regarding the past misdeeds, and his customer base was severely reduced. In any case, the undiluted milk supply could not support many, and with the lower price he now asked, his life steadily went from bad to worse. His wife died of grief, exacerbated by her husband's madness, and if there was a suggestion of the same pollutant being responsible, it was not taken seriously by the raw doctors in the PHC. Moti dispensed sermons and requests for cash equally among his friends, and neither of these being welcome, he lost them too. His family planned to ostracize him, as soon as they could find a socially acceptable reason to do so.

It was then that Moti made the acquaintance of country liquor. It fired through his veins, it dulled his pain, and brought him new friends of a sort. Best of all, it was cheap. Moti spent many nights, and then evenings, and days, with this new companion, and his family went so far as to welcome him back into the fold with loud curses and free food, for this was understandable, and familiar, and erased the stigma of his painful honesty. He saved no more; his cows were neglected, and the customers unhappy, but honest Moti tumbled along life changing nothing. One day he was told he had T.B. of the lungs, and cirrhosis of the liver and something else besides, and if he wanted to live, he must give up this Bacchanalian lifestyle. Over this Moti pondered deeply. He found that he did not agree with the diagnosis and prognosis given to him, and that he wished for a swifter, easier death. So he made his alcoholic plans, and killed, and waited to be arrested and hanged. When no one came to where he had hidden the body, he dragged it out, vomiting a little with the stench, to where it would be seen easier. And where it was found by Mrs. Bandoshi.

Once the news broke, the politicians had a field day trading accusations and counter allegations, as did the religious zealots, and the police were hard pressed to maintain peace and order till the matter died down and the inquiry amounted to nothing. To Moti's consternation, nobody, it seems, connected the murder of his cow to him. He went to the police station to stake his claim to this foul murder and express his guilt at this killing of his 'mother'. The local constabulary investigated, and duly dismissed him as being of unsound mind based on the community opinion. At last he returned as he had gone, bloody lunged, pot bellied, empty handed, resigned to a slow death. And Mrs. Bandoshi had her five minutes of fame.

Note: Found this among old papers and edited it slightly. I had written this in 2000 or so I think, but I really can't be bothered just now to strain my memory, sorry!

Murder in ward 54

For those friends who asked,
fo' a murder tale gruesome and grim,
'ere, have your fill, and while at it,
acquit me for a fancy whim!

It was cool that October night, unusually so, for even Dusshera had not been celebrated yet. It is one of the two things I remember most vividly from that night - the cold like a slow setting of yogurt, a gradual chilling of limbs progressively unable to move; and the scent of lemon. The windows of the ward had been open, and uncurtained for the most part, so through the grime of the unwashed panes and the obscuring tangle of wires outside, we could still glimpse the dusty trees of the nursery across the hospital wall. We were lucky in ward 54 that way, to have something other than walls and roads and other windows to look at, a view.

The last round was over, later than usual, owing to the unexpected bleeding in the last surgery. Well, perhaps that should have been anticipated, that bleeding, for it was a massive tumour, and it was, after all, right next to the IVC, but that is neither here nor there. But that was not in ward 54, and technically, not a murder. The only relation it had to this story was this - it had made the consultant late. And so the evening round had been one long torture for all: the junior consultants, the residents, senior and junior, and those clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder - the interns. Perhaps it was his way of atoning for the death in the OT, or perhaps he was just too tired to make judgements and decisions quickly. Or, if the rumours were true, he could just have been trying to avoid facing his wife who was said to have found out about his girlfriend. Who knows? At any rate, it was well past nine when the procession left the ward, the single assiduous intern leading her group of straggling slothful comrades as a sort of giant full stop at the end of a moving sentence.

Like I said, it was a cool night. As soon as the doctors left, the ward nurses sprang into action, trying to catch up to their evening routine. You know the drill. Their rounds were, if anything, worse than the ones that preceded them, all full of injections and medicines and thermometers and so on. Whether the autumn chill lent an extra vim to their movements, I couldn't say, but it certainly made them deviate from that routine enough to insist on closing the windows. It was not an easy task, mind you. I expect the matron would have, in the ordinary course of events, got someone to oil the hinges within the next fortnight, before the windows needed to be closed nightly, but this level of frigidity was unseasonal, and therefore, dangerous. There was quite a bustle that night. As the wardboy went about laboriously pulling the shutters close, complaining against the rust and dust while raising clouds of each in equal measure, he managed to provoke a couple of patients into coughing fits. Oxygen cylinders and their festooning tubings were brought in by others just as the dinner trolley arrived (late, and much awaited despite the horrendous food it brought) and while these two narrowly avoided collision, someone managed to topple a bedside table on which had stood a pitcher full of water. Naturally this called for more staff, for cleaning up. It wasn't anyone's fault really, that while the spill was being mopped up on one side of the bed, the nursing aide on the other side stepped on a banana which had somehow managed to roll or slide across from under the bed. His glide across the ward width was stereotypical, ending in a forced landing on his bottom, which was good for his health, but unfortunately, not for his dignity. He called the cleaner a moron for not being able to clean, and in turn was accorded other names, and if the relatives and nurses had not intervened, there would have been rather a spectacle for the patients to watch. Both staff members were removed from the scene expeditiously, however, as the night matron arrived on her rounds. No matter what they might have thought of each other, neither cared for a ticking from the strict superintendent, so when the dust settled after her round, the ward was getting ready to sleep, apparently at peace with itself.

But death always delights in hospitals, choosing, as it were, which delicacy to quaff today, and tomorrow. When you are a patient, you live with it, hoping it won't be your turn today, tomorrow, or the day after and being thankful when it isn't. Illness at least has a reason, a kind of logic to explain that quenching of breath. Not so murder.

Plates had been cleared away, medicines dispensed and blankets distributed to those who wished for more. The lights were dimmed, curtains drawn, and only a single nurse now remained visible with a stack of registers while her colleagues withdrew for their own meal. Patients were beginning to doze, albeit with difficulty because the attendant of bed 9 had a tendency to snore. The bright industrious intern popped in with her own register and sat with the nurse for a while before making her private round of the ward. But she did not disturb the night, quietly touching a hand or feeling for a pulse before moving on, and so the ward sank deeper into slumber. Even the midnight recording of pulse and temperature and blood pressure, so annoying a habit otherwise, somehow was easier tolerated this night. The night was still, and cool, and smelled of lemons...

For in the frenzy of activity earlier, one window had either been forgotten, or had swung open again after being closed. Being at the far end of the ward, there was no patient nearby to complain of a draught, and a dark wind blew the scent of lemons from heaven knows where. Certainly the nursery opposite had no blossoming lemon that we had seen. No light was on in that part of the ward. Shadows merged into shadows, and if there was one shadow more active than the others, that moved not with the wan moonlight but free of it, no one saw it. The hours ticked on.

They say it is toughest to stay awake at 4 am when you are on night duty, and it is true. That is when the night work is done, the morning work prepared for, and with no adrenaline rush to prop it up, the body slumps, craves sleep. And so it was that those who should have been awake were asleep too, uncomfortably perched on chairs and heads hanging at odd angles or cradled on tables, and there was not one witness to the grisly suffocation of that poor innocent.

In the end, it was just the wind, that rising evil black wind, which called attention to what the night had wrought. As the far end window pane shuddered and smashed into the sill, the sounds merged into one another. The roar of the wind, the distant thunder, the banging of the windowpane, the sharp shattering of its glass and the girl's scream.

A little away from the centre of the ward, just beyond the pool of light that had illuminated the central nurse's desk, lay the limp body, and, perhaps that was a small pool of blood near the throat.

The entire ward was awake now, startled, shocked, stunned, hearts racing from the scream that had dragged them away from dreams and slumber. Tousled heads turned towards each other, wondering, asking, questioning. And yet it felt like nobody moved, that the whole ward was frozen. Fingers pointed till one by one, till their lines of sight tautened like spokes around a single point in the ward: the girl who had screamed.

It was only she who stared still at the floor, and when she spoke, she broke the shell of stillness that had appeared to envelop everyone. With outrage and disgust in her voice, she exclaimed, "Who killed that cat in the ward?"