The Crooked Bullet. Rotimi Ogunjobi

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       “Oh no, she has done quite well. All that you see here in this shop means nothing to me. This shop, Bhatti’s Jewellery belonged to Sangita, and she made it a success by hard work. Only she taught me enough to be able to make it prosper still. This shop we bought the shop from her uncle Shami “Bhatti” Bhatnagar. He was widowed, quite fed up with his bad arthritis, and going back home to New Delhi. We came here poor, she determined to make us rich, and rich we became. Bhatti’s belongs to Sangita, my son, Rupinder is my only success. You will take care of Rupinder for me when you eventually get married will you?” Raj asked

       “I promise Papa; I promise.” Kalyan patted his hand.

       Raj opened a solid wood locker and brought out a black box, expensively decorated with black velvet and gold trimmings and about the size of a medium-size pizza box. Inside, the box was lined with purple satin. It contained a gold pendant attached to a gold chain. The pendant has the shape of a bent bullet.

       “Look at this; what do you think?” Raj eagerly asked.

       “It is beautiful Papa, and it looks very valuable,” Kalyan confessed.

       “Yes, it is valuable. It is the Crooked Bullet. It is supposed to bring peace to the marriage. By family tradition, it must be passed to the first son to get married in the family as it had been passed down for five generations. But since I do not have a son, I will give it to you”.

       “Thank you, Papa. I will take care of it and cherish it.”, Kalyan was pleased to learn.

       “The pendant must not be lost though, else the result will be a life plagued with great hardship for many generations following.” Raj Desai warned.

       “It will not be lost, Papa. I promise to keep it and also give it to your grandson when the time comes.” Kalyan promised

       Raj closed the box, quite lovingly tucked it away again in the locker, and turned the key. Then he opened a big steel safe door to put the key in. The safe contained a lot of money that had been carelessly thrown in. He changed his mind; opened the locker once again, took out the box, and put it in the safe, nodding his head in the satisfaction that this made more sense.

       “You have too much money in that safe Papa; you ought to take it to the bank at the end of every day.” Kalyan worried.

       “Yes, I know. There must be more than a hundred thousand pounds inside there, which are the cash sales for the entire day. Too many customers prefer to pay cash for the jewelry you know. Sangita would have insisted that the cash should be taken to the night deposit at the bank down the road, but never mind I will do that in the morning. Nobody is coming to steal a safe my son, this is London.” Raj reasoned. Up on the wall, the scowling picture of Sangita seemed to accuse him even more and to make him momentarily nervous.

       “After you and Rupinder are married, I think I will sell the shop and like old man Shami “Bhatti” Bhatnagar, return home to Mumbai.” He declared

       They both exit the office, switching off the lights behind them. Raj engaged the shop security system, after which they both exit the shop through a side door, which Raj also locked. Raj’s car, a Mercedes, was parked a few yards away, and both walked slowly toward it.

       There was still a bit of a chill outside; summer was still several weeks away. Raj pushed his wool cap tighter on his head and wrapped his coat tighter around him. He had been thinking of what to do next. When you were nearly sixty, life seemed to become so routine, and the choices available for nearly everything became so few. Before Kalyan arrived, he had been trying to make a choice between having dinner at the Hyderabad Darbar Restaurant down the road or going nearer home at Romford to Aroma on High Street. And maybe thereafter going to The Bitter End pub for a pint or two and a chat with the denizens. Now he wasn’t quite sure anymore what to do with himself, his coveted companionship with loneliness suddenly broken

       “Give me the key Papa, I will drive you home,” Kalyan suggested. They both entered the car and drove away into the darkness.

       Later that night, a grim conference took place at an upmarket health spa known as Woodstock. The place, located near Chigwell had previously been a farm. Now it was a celebrity hideout – where the annual membership was rumored to cost nearly as much as a brand new Rolls Royce. The rules inside Woodstock were for those to whom money meant very little – the primary of those rules being that shoes were not permitted to be worn within the grounds of the estate.

      The office in which the night conference took place looked quite like it had been time-warped from the sixties. Moses Samuel or Rabbi Zulu as the proprietor of Woodstock was more fondly called, was having a discussion with four men of Eastern Europe stock. Also in his office were three other people, one of them his closest aide Sasha Cohen, a slightly plump lady who habitually wore dark John Lennon glasses.

      The huge room was completely decorated with vintage furniture and fittings; including a large Beatles grandfather clock and an RCA radiogram. On one of the walls were two huge posters each of them about eight feet tall. One was of the singer Isaac Hayes playing at the Sahara Tahoe in the “70s – with dark aviator sunglasses, a heavy chain around his neck, naked to the waist and looking so sweaty sexy. It was an image Moses Samuel always faithfully tried to imitate to the limit that his own white skin would permit. The other poster was of a barefooted Masai warrior in a full battle leap. This was the one around which he had built the new philosophies behind his life and business.

      Only one of the four men in attendance spoke English, but they all nevertheless understood the instructions that were being passed to them.

      “The bank is in Hackney. It was in there that a person I knew, a hard-working man, lost his home to them way back and killed himself as a consequence, do you understand?” The men nodded.

      “Yah! Yah!”; they understood. They also still understood the intolerable iniquities of uncontrolled capitalist economics.

      Moses Samuel pointed to a television camera on the table before them.

      “See this thing? Real techie stuff. I had it specially made for me in China. It is not only a camera; it will also scramble all CCTV signals and disable all other security equipment, and so nobody will be able to understand what happened. After the job, you will drive away to Dover from where you will cross the channel and then get a plane to Brazil. By the time you return home in a couple of months, you will have no worries. Plus you will be rich.”

      Sasha gave the leader of the men a large envelope which contained plane tickets, some fake travel documents. They nodded quietly and left with the television camera.

      Moses Samuel switched on the huge gleaming imitation vintage RCA radiogram standing in a corner of the room, and eagerly twiddled the tuning dial till he found the channel he was looking for. It was a rogue radio channel. A hip-hop remix of an Earth Wind and Fire ballad seeped out of the large speakers of the retro-modern music center.

      You will find peace of mind

      If you look way down in your heart and soul

      Don’t hesitate “cause the world seems cold

      Stay young at heart “cause you’re never (never, never, ..) old at heart

      “He’s good, isn’t he?” Moses Samuel nodded his head, and at the same time seeking the ladies” approval.

      “Yes, He’s cool,” Sasha said. The other girl in the room was not so committal; neither was the small, СКАЧАТЬ