Free Dead Water by Simon Ings

darlings’ beds – banyan trees, Hindu swastikas, bad typography – are nothing to do with the RSS.
    The boys wrap up their sandwiches as they enter the hall. One of them disappears through a door into the little galley kitchen at the rear of the room. He comes out with a rubbish sack. The boys throw their half-eaten sandwiches in the sack. The sack disappears into the kitchen and the boys set out the chairs. The first residents arrive to find tea already hot in the urn, the room already arranged.
    They’re not grateful. These are the old, the halt, the lame. The ones who come just for the free cups of tea. Had the boys repainted the hall saffron-yellow and thrown rice at their feet, it wouldn’t have made any difference to them. No one of any significance turns up until the room is already half-full and by then it is no longer obvious that the boys had anything to do with the setting up. Outnumbered, the RSS boys gather at the back of the hall. They haven’t a clue how to work a room.
    Hardik meets Roopa’s gaze. His friends whisper in his ear. She watches him, his face, his small mouth, and for some reason she recalls the moment they touched: the warm, dry grip of his hand in her hand. The memory is shockingly vivid. She tries to get rid of it, wiping her hand against her nasty nylon slacks – the dismal uniform of the police probationer. The meeting is called to order. Hardik watches as people take their seats. As though he were waking out of a dream, he approaches the lectern.
    He is not used to this. He’s on the defensive before he’s even begun. His voice is pitched too high, hectoring people. He tells his audience he’s a
pracharak
: a full-time RSS volunteer. He tells them enough about his life, and with enough humour, to establish his rough-diamond credentials, but the tone of his voice tells a different story entirely. It is the voice of someone frantic for respect.
    Seated at the back of the hall, Roopa loses the sense of what Hardik is saying. His words are being drowned out by the rattle of the airconditioning unit. It’s not even keeping the room cool. Roopa squirms in her hard chair. Her slacks are sticking to her legs, it’s disgusting. She gets up and goes to the back of the hall. Now that she is nearer the airconditioning unit, Hardik’s speech is completely inaudible. This is good. There is something sad and small and vulnerable about Hardik. She does not want it to touch her.
    Plenty of Sion’s residents have turned out to hear the RSS put their case. But there are no teenagers here. This meeting is about them, so why aren’t they here to fight their corner? Have their parents told them not to come? And if they retain that much authority over their children, why are they so worked up about the RSS? A few yoga exercises? Advertisements for a wrestling tournament?
    Then the meeting is over and, again, here they are, Hardik and the boys, ostracized in their corner while their audience mills around the tea urn. The boys are learning that they are not so controversial, after all.
    The next time Roopa sees Hardik he is in an American magazine, covered in blood. His picture accompanies an article describing the worst terrorist atrocities yet perpetrated in post-Partition India: the bombs let off across Bombay on 12 March 1993 by Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company.
    Roopa has been taking witness statements. Every day, she visits a different hospital. Two hundred and fifty people killed, seven hundred injured. Roopa thought that the more she heard the clearer her picture of events would become. (She is her father’s daughter, youngest child of Kabir Vish, who caught the Stoneman, who beachcombed the streets of Matunga for meaning – pure police.) But each statement she takes is virtually identical to the last. There was a loud bang. I fell over. I saw blood. Impossible to get frustrated with these people. Impossible to despise the recall abilities of a man without arms or a mother mourning a child. They