Six Suspects

A wave of happiness swept over my body, providing me with a more exhilarating rush than high-grade smack. I had more money in my possession than seven generations of my family would have seen. But even as I was rejoicing at my good fortune, the first doubts crept into my mind. What if someone had seen me take the briefcase and reported it to the police? What if a robber came into our hut and stole the briefcase? Desperate men know no bounds. The adjoining Sanjay Gandhi slum has plenty of hired killers willing to slit a man's throat for just five grand. To get their grubby hands on my briefcase, they would stop at nothing. The rich can sleep easy because they have money in the bank and round-the-clock guards and alarms in the house. But how can a poor man protect his stash of cash? I fretted, I sweated, I stayed up all night.

This is the strange thing about money – too much of it can be as problematic as too little.

When I was studying in the government school, we had a teacher called Hari Prasad Saini who liked to play mind games with the students. Once he asked us, 'What would you do if you suddenly got a hundred thousand rupees each?' I remember Lallan said he would buy an entire toyshop. Another boy said he would spend it all on chocolates. I said that I would give the money to my mother. But now, when I actually have much more than a hundred thousand rupees, the last thing I am going to do is tell Mother. She is quite capable of dragging me to a police station and making a public a

I had intended to keep the news of my fortune even from Champi, but within two days I knew that was impossible. I never keep secrets from her, and I have to tell someone. So when Mother goes to the temple for her daily chores, I call Champi to my side of the room.

'I have got money for your operation,' I tell her.

'How much?'

'Much more than we need to pay the doctor.'

'I don't want any operation,' Champi says. 'I am happy as I am.'

I know she is lying. She wouldn't mind the operation, if not for her sake then for Mother, who worries constantly about her marriage. 'Who will marry my Champi, the way she looks?' she frets all the time.

Mother is right. Who will marry Champi? She is a walking disaster. The nicest girl in the world, she is also the ugliest. She has a harelip which makes the lower half of her face a grotesque caricature. Her left arm is completely wasted, and she has pockmarks all over her cheeks. The good thing is she ca

Champi is known all over the world as the Face of Bhopal. There was a big industrial disaster in Bhopal more than twenty years ago. Poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked out from the Union Carbide plant and all those who inhaled it died, or went blind or became mad. Champi's mother Fatima Bee was living in Bhopal at the time. She too was affected by the gas, although she didn't know it then. She gave birth to Champi five years later. When the doctors saw the newborn baby, they told Fatima Bee that the gas had caused the blindness and all the deformities. It still intrigues me how the gas was locked up in Fatima Bee's body for five years and did nothing to her, yet pounced on poor Champi the moment she was born.

The people affected by the gas were promised some money by the government, but it didn't cover people like Fatima Bee who were affected later. So she joined an organization called Crusaders for Bhopal which has been fighting for compensation. As happens in our country, the case has been dragging on for over twenty years with no resolution in sight. Every three months Fatima Bee would come to Delhi, do the rounds of the Supreme Court, participate in a couple of rallies, and go back to Bhopal. Ten years ago she decided to move to Delhi permanently, along with her husband Anwar Mian and Champi. They lived in the Sanjay Gandhi slum in Mehrauli, which is full of Bangladeshi refugees. Anwar Mian found work in a cement factory in Mahipalpur. I am told he was a grim, taciturn man who drank like a fish, smoked twenty beedis a day and hardly ever spoke to anyone. One fine day, he went to work as usual, returned home in the evening as usual, and dropped dead during the night. Bole toh, heart failure.

It was a big blow to Fatima Bee, who now had to support Champi all alone. She was forced to start sewing clothes for a living. That is how she came into contact with Mother, who got a couple of my shirts stitched by her. She was a superb tailor. The shirts she made me fitted me more perfectly than anything I have worn since. Unfortunately, Fatima Bee also fought a ru

When Champi first came to live with us, Mother promised her that we would get her face set right. We even showed her to a plastic surgeon. He told us that the surgery would cost the astronomical sum of three hundred thousand rupees. Since that reality check we stopped having conversations about Champi's face. She accepted our helplessness just as we accepted her grotesqueness.

Now I am trying to rekindle that old hope, but Champi remains adamant.

'I don't want to benefit from gangsters' money,' she declares after I recount the full saga of how I acquired the briefcase.

'How do you know it belongs to gangsters?' I counter.

'Who else would leave it in a dustbin? And what if they trace it to you?'

'They won't. Now this money is mine. And I am bloody well going to enjoy it.'

'Ill-gotten gains can never lead to enjoyment. You have to think of the consequences.'

'Life is too short to worry about the future.'

'It may be for you, but not for me and Mother. She worries about you all the time.'

'You can tell her to stop worrying. From tomorrow she need not even work. I have enough to feed all three of us for a hundred years.'

'Don't let your head swell,' Champi cautions me. 'Better to lie low for a while before making your grand plans.'

Her advice is sound. 'You are right, Champi,' I nod. 'No one must know about this briefcase. I will not touch it for another week. And if no one comes looking for it by then, we can breathe easy, start spending some of the dough, get your operation done.'

'I don't want a pe