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By Root 1329 0

Some squatter men joined in, hurling chunks of concrete loosened from the front wall and broken bricks from the edges of wilted flowerbeds. The window grille, originally installed to deter burglars, repelled the large projectiles. Why had they suddenly turned on her? Anjali's distrust of the police softened into gratitude. Their duty was to protect her; they had no choice. She backed away from the window, crouched on the tiled floor, inches from Minnie's body, and prayed for rescue. When the officer, with a policewoman and two male constables in tow, finally burst through the bathroom door, that's how they found her. Asoke sidled in after them. He didn't shriek or wail at the grotesque sight. Instead, while the policewomen pulled Anjali to her feet and handcuffed her, he covered the naked corpse with the only bath towel, still damp from use, hanging on the towel rack, a servant's small gesture of gallantry.

"You are paying guest of this lady?" the officer demanded, and pointed his baton at Minnie's body. He had the sagging, full lower lip of a heavy smoker and sprayed saliva as he spoke. With her hands cuffed, she couldn't blot; she could only watch patches of spittle land on her silk clothing and spread. Like a Bollywood cop, the man wore oversize, mirrored sunglasses, like a mask, but the accusatory growl in his voice made her feel like a criminal. She'd already been judged. "Please to describe your relationship to the deceased."

"She was dead when I got here," Anjali blurted. "I don't know why all this craziness is happening."

"Please to make response only to question posed." The officer ordered a policewoman to confiscate Anjali's pocketbook, watch and cell phone before continuing his interrogation. "What is nature of connection you are having with deceased aged lady?"

"I had nothing to do with any of this. She must have died of shock. I wasn't here. Goondahs were breaking into her home and stealing all her property."

"You are putting my patience in jeopardy." The officer extracted a pack of cigarettes from one of his many pockets but didn't light up. "I'm asking one more time only. You are residing as tenant in the deceased's lodging, but owing rent money?"

She lowered her gaze from the officer's plump, moist lower lip to his heavy khaki socks and brown ankle boots.

"Yes or no?"

She said nothing. Why would the officer believe that the dead landlady had offered to run a tab for this handcuffed tenant?

"Your good name please?"

"Angie. Anjali Bose." It conferred no identity. She didn't own the name. She could have been anybody.

"Your name is Anjali Bose? Why your purse is saying HS?" He was pointing to the gilt letters on the leather strap.

"I don't know." She lied.

He made a dismissive gesture, a sweeping of his hand, and the two policewomen dragged her down the stairs, across the foyer, down the porch steps cluttered with Bagehot furniture, past the single-minded auction-house representative in the sky-blue suit and the screaming mob and into a police cruiser. Her foot crunched the photo of dead Sikhs, which lay on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history. There was no paddy wagon in the police convoy. There was no convoy.

11

So long as she'd been in Bagehot House, Anjali had felt in control. Surely there was someone around to vouch for her, a Tookie to say "Hi, girlfriend." She was a Bagehot Girl, after all, but in the back of the police car, handcuffed to a grille behind the driver's seat, she realized there was no one in the world she could reach who knew who the hell she was.

In an interview room in the Central Bangalore Police Station, as she sat across a table from a square-jawed, sari-clad policewoman, waiting to be interrogated by a senior detective, Anjali Bose finally broke down. On the ride to the station in the police cruiser, she had acted composed, almost cocky, demanding to know the charges against her. But in that small windowless room, guarded by two uniformed women, one of them about her mother's age, she started to cry, and in crying,