We drove the two short blocks to the Colaba police station, across the road from Leopold's. As we entered the police compound, I noticed that the street in front of Leopold's was deserted. Ulla wasn't there, where she'd said she would be. Did she set me up? I wondered, my heart thumping with dread. That made no sense, but still the thought became a worm that gnawed through all the walls I put up in my mind.
The night duty officer was a squat, overweight Maharashtrian who, like many of his colleagues in the police force, squeezed himself into a uniform that was at least two sizes too small for him. The thought occurred to me that the discomfort it must've caused might help to explain his evil disposition. There was certainly no humour in him or any of the ten cops who surrounded me, and I felt a perverse urge to laugh out loud as their scowling, heavy breathing silence persisted. Then the duty officer addressed his men, and the laughter in me died.
"Take this motherfucker and beat him," he said matter-of-factly.
If he knew that I spoke Marathi, and could understand him, he gave no indication of it. He spoke to his men as if I wasn't there. "Beat him hard. Give him a solid beating. Don't break any bones, if you can help it, but beat him hard, and then throw him into the jail with the others."
I ran. I pushed through the circle of cops, cleared the landing outside the duty room in a single leap, and hit the gravel yard of the compound, running. It was a stupid mistake, and not the last I was to make in the next few months. Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they'd never happened. My mistake that night took me to the front gate of the compound, where I collided with a round-up party, and collapsed in a tangle of tied and helpless men.
The cops dragged me back to the duty room, punching and kicking me all the way. They tied my hands behind my back with coarse, hemp rope, and removed my boots before tying my feet together.
The short, fat duty officer produced a thick coil of rope, and ordered his men to bind me with it from ankles to shoulders.
Puffing and panting with his rage, he watched as I was trussed in so many coils of rope that I resembled an Egyptian mummy. The cops then dragged me to an adjoining room, and hoisted me up to hang me at chest height from a hook, face down, with the hook jammed through several coils of rope at my back.
"Aeroplane..." the duty officer growled, through clenched teeth.
The cops spun me around faster and faster. The hook held my bound hands in the bunched ropes, and my head hung down, level with my drooping feet. I whirled and spun until I lost my sense of up or down in the twirling room. Then the beatings began.
Five or six men hit my spinning body as hard and as often as they could, cracking their cane lathis against my skin. The stinging blows struck with piercing pain through the ropes, and on my face, arms, legs, and feet. I could sense that I was bleeding.
The screaming rose up in me, but I clenched my jaws and gave the pain no sound of my own. I wouldn't let them have it. I wouldn't let them hear me scream.
Silence is the tortured man's revenge. Hands reached out, stopping my body, holding it still, while the room continued to whirl. Then they spun me in the opposite direction, and the beating began again.
When their sport was done, they dragged me up the metal steps to the lock-up-the same metal steps I'd climbed with Prabaker when I'd tried to help Kano's bear-handlers.
And why was I arrested? The questions buzzed and swarmed in my whirling mind. Did they know who I really was? If they didn't know-if it was something else, if it had nothing to do with who I really was-there would still be questions, identification procedures, maybe even fingerprint checks. My prints were on file all over the world, through the Interpol agency. It was only a question of time before my real identity emerged. I had to get a message out to... someone. Who could help me? Who was powerful enough to help me? Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. With all of his contacts in the city, especially in the Colaba area, he would surely find out that I'd been arrested. In time, Khaderbhai would know. Until then, I had to sit tight, and try to get a message out to him.
