Bloodbath At The Brothel

I was thirteen when a man came from Kolkata with job offers for girls in the tenement. He told people that we were required as cleaners in a housing society.

Why would any housing society employ Rohingiya?

To pay less. The man looks genuine.

People’s conviction of the man’s sincerity was directly proportional to their desperation. I for one had been a burden on a charitable couple for too long and was most desperate to extract myself from the situation and therefore was the first one to give my assent for the dream job. My benefactors did not show any eagerness to send me away but neither did they have any objection when I announced my plan to them.

The next time the man showed up he was accompanied by another man. This one looked dreadful and smelled deadlier and I hated him the moment I set eyes upon him. He eyed me from head to toe in a way that made me most uncomfortable and said to his companion, ‘This one is too young.’ I was thin, pale and bony. Sensing my job opportunity slipping away I was quick to refute him. ‘I look small but there is nothing I cannot do. I will do anything you ask me to do.’ At that the man gave me the slyest of smiles and asked me to get into the van they had arrived in. That day five of us with varying degrees of desperation left the tenement never to see it again.

After a journey lasting more than two hours, the van arrived at a dreary lodge. During the journey, we had been instructed not to speak to each other and keep our heads low. All of us had carried out the instruction to the hilt not speaking a word to each other and seldom raising our heads to see the scene rushing past us. Among the five of us, I had been the youngest and the oldest was around eighteen. I was passing acquainted with each of them and knew that all of them were half-orphans- three did not have a father and one did not have a mother.

At the lodge, we were asked to get down and follow the men in a single file. The iron channel that had been open upon our arrival was shut and locked the moment the five of us stepped inside. I was immediately ceased with dread but it was too late. We stopped midway in the dim musty passage and looked at each other with apprehension, ‘Hurry up! Keep walking,’ the original man barked and we fell into the file again and followed his instruction. His sudden change of temperament took me by shock but there was no way to convey any of my shock and dread to others with me. 

The passage which was about twenty meters long opened into a relatively brighter lobby. It was empty except for a scrawny man sprawled onto a tattered sofa. I could make out a female voice emanating from somewhere. The idea of the presence of other women momentarily lifted my spirit. ‘If others were here too it was ok for me too to be here,’ I consoled myself.

The four of my companions were asked to follow the original man to the first floor while I was asked to wait. ‘Can I have water?’ I asked, my throat parched with fatigue but mostly due to stress.

‘No.’ he snapped and asked me to follow him. He walked into one of the many doors in the lobby, pushing it away without knocking and I followed him inside. It was a dark windowless room with an acrid smell. He asked me to sit on the bed. It felt damp. He walked up to the door and bolted it from inside. I began to cry and he slapped me so hard that my head hit against a bedpost and swelled up within seconds. I started to cry louder. ‘Useless bitch,’ he said and walked away in disgust. I ignored the soaring pain and made up my mind to escape. I instinctively reached the door but it had been bolted from the outside. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach as I realised that I had been imprisoned. I slumped near the door and placed an ear to the ground hoping to hear footfall approaching me. For the longest time, there was pin-drop silence outside. Then I heard steps at first a fade thud which gradually grew louder and when I was sure that the steps were approaching in my direction I gathered myself up from the ground and position my body such that I am behind the door when it    ulklh15 seconds in that position and the steps kept growing louder till they were right on my doorstep. But they did not stop there. The footfall continued and this time instead of increasing its sound receded and faded away. I have filled with despair once again and began to cry. I wondered how my companions were doing and I remained slumped against the door fatigued and scared. I don’t know how many hours passed away as that and I fell into a stupor. I woke up feeling the force of the door against my body. Someone was pushing the door open. I jumped to my feet and the door flung open barely missing my face. Outside the lobby was dark except for a zero watt bulb on the wall right opposite me. Two men in their twenties barged into the room followed by the original man who had recruited us from the tenement.

‘This is the one.’

‘Yes.’

‘I hoped against hope that the two shabby men smelling of bear and sweat were here to recruit me as a cleaner in their house or shop. Although by now I knew better than to let my natural optimism take charge.’

‘Alright, you go.’

Soon the men went out and I heard loud sounds. They were arguing with each other about who would use me first. Soon the argument escalated and they graduated to abuses and finally fists. The door swung open once more and banged into the wall behind it. The men tumbled inside locked into each other. One of them had their arm around the other’s neck and the other with his neck in peril was trying to uproot the first one’s leg so he may fall. I heard footsteps on the staircase up which my companions had disappeared several hours ago. The men who had brought me here soon entered the scene as peacemakers. While the futile negotiations we going on I considered escaping but the men were blocking the doorway. While I was estimating my prospects of the escape the guard I had met at the mouth of the dark passage appeared and appointed himself as the third arbitrator. I noticed he was not carrying his bunch of keys that contained the one with which he had opened the channel in the morning. If the keys were at the channel and the men were here then my chances of escaping were considered positive. There was just one glitch. I wouldn’t know which of about two dozen keys are of the channel lock. Even if I succeed in slipping past the men unnoticed they will certainly diagnose my absence by the time I figure out my key in the bunch and catch up with me. That risk I couldn’t take considering how the tempers were already at the point of explosion. While I was considering my prospects the arbitrators had joined the warring parties and now it was a match of power between two men on one side and three on the other. Interestingly I was not the bone of contention anymore. They were heatedly seeking to settle past disputes which they had overlooked at the time of occurrences. Apparently, there had been a girl called Reena who was found dead the morning after the taller man had been with her. I felt my blood going cold. The managers as they liked to call themselves had borne the loss quietly but now if he went about fighting in this place he will make him pay for the previous loss and tell him to get out. This one-year-old incident was dug up after one of the managers sided with the shorter man’s right to sleep with me first as he was ready to pay three hundred rupees extra while the taller man had insisted on not paying a penny extra.

During my years at the tenement, there was nothing I did not know about man and woman relationships but I had never imagined myself in a situation as precarious as this. As long as my mother was alive no one dared to raise his eyes and look at me. She was a ferociously protective mother. By the time she died her qualities had begun to manifest themselves in my temperament and no one dared mess up with me. And here I was witnessing five men in a fight that had started with the quest to sleep with me first. It occurred to me much later why sleeping with me first was such a big deal. At that time I wasn’t scared of getting raped. We obsess with problems and scenarios when they are nowhere in sight but when they stand facing you the fear suddenly vanishes and this extraordinary organ called the brain busies itself finding the solution, the escape or getting ready for a fight. I stood there listening to the men's deafening curses and expletives they fired at each other intermittently with blows and kicks and placed my odds of a successful escape vs a successful fight on my mental scales. Escape outweighed the fight obviously but despite the apparently favourable circumstances, an escape looked impossible. And just when I was beginning to slide into despair a miracle happened. The shorter man took out a country pistol and shot the taller man into the face. As the bullet hit his face near the eye and rummaged through his skull his body straddled back on its unsteady feet for a few moments before finally collapsing to the ground. The man with the pistol aimed at the dead man’s two supporters who besieged him with folded hands. For a moment his features softened and I thought he was going to spare them. Surely the men to have thought the same but just as they were beginning to relax two shots rang out in quick succession and three lifeless bodies lay huddled together on the damp musty floor. There was pin-drop silence and no sound emanated from anywhere. It seemed that the entire building had been silenced into shock. I could hear my heart pumping as I stood facing the two men, one of them a murderer and the other his accomplice. The assailant wiped his brow with the back of his hand and looked menacingly at me.

‘She is the root of all this,’ he said lunging towards me. He threw the pistol on the bed and with his right hand now free he grabbed my hair and pushed me in the opposite direction. He took a step backwards and extending his left hand he banged close the door behind him leaving his companion outside. His thrust made me land near the foot of the bed. I wondered what he will do to me now that I was also a witness to his crime. Probably first use me then finish me off? That thought propelled me to pick up the country pistol lying 3 feet beyond me and as soon as he stepped forward he was greeted with a shot in his face. His skull exploded and his brain splattered on the dirty wall making it dirtier. I crossed over his body and opened the door. The other man was nowhere in sight. I rushed towards the channel gate and found the bunch of keys lying in the stool I struggled with them for three minutes. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I had just killed a man. At long last the lock clicked open, I unlooped the thick iron chain its rattling sound I still hear in my sleep sometimes and rushed out. The first thing I did was to throw the country pistol in a naala and then I began to run. I don’t know how far or how long I ran before passing out. The next day much to my horror I opened my eyes to the police station. I was lying on the floor of the police station covered with a thin blanket. It turned out that I had been spotted lying in the middle of a road by a police patrol vehicle and sub-inspector Purnima Singh had brought me here. They gave me tea and their mannerism suggested that I was not a murder suspect in their eyes. Not yet at least. At the station manned by a male inspector and a female sub-inspector, they asked me about my background, parents and where I lived. I remained silent not because speaking up would give me away but simply because I did not know what to say. Words failed me and my mind refused to coordinate. I had not had food for more than twenty-four hours.

First, give her something to eat then ask her.

The sub-inspector went out and got poori sabzi in a dona. Just as I was eating a police vehicle stopped outside and two constables entered. There had been multiple murders at a brothel last night. Out of the four bodies two are identified as those of local goons and one of the brothel operators and one of the guards. The brothel is apparently run by the nephew of a local politician cum strongman. The second brothel operator is missing and he is the suspect. Sub-inspector Purnima shot a glance at me. I was found unconscious in less than a three-kilometre radius of the brothel shortly after the murders are supposed to have taken place. Sub-inspector Purmina walked up to me and asked ‘Are you a prostitute?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Were you at the brothel last night?’

I remained silent, my head hung low. Just then for the first time, I saw blood at the root of my toenail. Instinctively my eyes travelled further up my foot which was ridden with dust but the hem of my churidar shalwar was darker than the rest of it. It was blood. Of the tall man, I had killed with my own hands barely hours ago.

‘Have you witnessed the murders?’

I remained silent, not raising my head even once. She placed a finger under my chin and lifted it up. Momentarily my eyes met hers. I averted quickly. I must have been shaking because she placed her hands on each of my arms and pressed gently. ‘Don’t be scared,’ she said.

‘The inspector walked up behind her. You have to come with me to the murder site. There are women there Prostitutes. Has this one given told you anything?’

‘She lives in the nearby Bengali slums, sir. She had left the house in anger because her parents were fighting too badly. Says, she can find her way.’

‘Ok. Go then. And you Purnima quickly follow me,’ the inspector said walking out in quick strides.

 ‘Go to the station. Sit on the train that’s first to exit the station and never come back. Here take this.’ Purnima said pressing a hundred rupee note in my palm.

How far is the station?

‘About two km from here. Take a rickshaw,’ she said and rushed out.

I never saw her or my city ever again but I think of her every day. How different my life would have turned out to be had she not done what she did. She knew I was a part of a massive scandal and she rushed her own job and reputation for saving me. Bloodbath at Brothel, they called it. I heard of it for many days after leaving the city.