Chapter One

The first time I heard about the Bombay Lovecraft Society was the year the news broke of the Rockman serial killings. By the time that long, wet Indian summer ended, the anonymous killer’s murderous rampage would forever be supplanted, in my mind at least, by the horrors that I personally witnessed but as I attempt to set down this narrative I find that the two events are bound together in an unbreakable knot. The common factor that links them, of course, is blood, violently spilled. Apart from that superficial similarity, they are nothing alike. Serial killers, horrible as they are and inarguably evil in their own, inhumane way, must still be considered a part, however despicable, of the fabric of modern urban society, while the events I witnessed at the Lovecraft Society in Bombay that year are the closest I have ever come to pure, unmitigated, otherworldly evil.

At the time of these events, I worked at offices in the Fort area of South Bombay, first for a perfume exporter and later for an advertising agency.

I’d interned briefly at a newspaper office as a young graduate fresh out of art school, still bright-eyed with idealistic dreams, but that stint only lasted the duration it took me to come to my senses and acknowledge the necessity of earning a decent living, or at least decent enough to support myself and my family.

It was only Dippy and me at the time, our heads still spinning from our seven pheras around the sacred fire, but we had plans to expand the paltan and for even the two of us to survive on the pittance that I was offered at the end of my internship with The Times, let alone raise a family, was untenable.

It was a blow to me because as a young left radical, I had harbored visions of wielding my brush as an instrument of social justice, drawing attention to the marginalised and neglected sections of our deeply structured, caste-and-class biased society, but were I to have accepted the salary offered to me by The Times, I would barely be able to afford the India Ink and Japanese brushes I favored for my political cartoons, let alone afford to buy rations for Dippy and myself for a whole month.

Perhaps it was my caste that influenced the amount of emoluments offered to me—no, let me say it plainly: it was of course my caste that influenced the amount of emoluments offered to me by that snide Personnel Manager with the brahmin caste marks slashed boldly across his forehead. I might possibly have complained to the owners of the institution in the hopes that they would rectify the wrong, but knew that they would be more likely to view me as a potential troublemaker and side with their Personnel Manager.

And so, I declined the offer, as I suspect it was meant to be declined, and the Grand Old Lady of Bori Bunder, as The Times was then and still is known, went her way and I went mine.

It was boom time in Rajiv Gandhi’s liberalized India and finding paying work even for an artist fresh out of art school, was easy peasy as my American friends would say. I found work almost immediately after declining the offer from The Times. A friend told me about an acquaintance, a fellow JJ College alumna, whose firm was looking for an illustrator. I went for the interview and was hired on the spot.

Within the week, I began work at my new job. My employers were two perfume exporters, brothers, who had their own building in the prestigious Fort area, barely a stone’s throw from my first employer, The Times, and within a few minutes of grand old Victoria Terminus where I could take the Harbor Line home to the flat Dippy and I rented in Bandra West. I say they had their own building, but really it was a tiny structure, just two floors, and built to fit into a narrow plot they had inherited from their great-uncle, sandwiched between two of the historic Edwardian brownstones that gave downtown Bombay its Indian Gothic character. Its frontage was no more than fifteen feet wide, and if you were to add twice that number in length and multipy the two numbers, you would have the entire area of the lot and the building on which it sat.

Downstairs was a small reception area and behind it were the packing and shipping departments, upstairs was inventory, accounts, and the cabins of the two owners, Kirit Parekh and Manas Parekh. There was a tiny space upstairs, no more than ten feet by eight feet, earmarked for the grandiosely named publicity department. At the time when I joined, this space was piled high with rolls of packing materials, stacks of printed posters and sheets of labels, printed flats of perfume boxes, and other miscellaneous items.

There was also a five foot high standee, a cutout of a shapely young woman in a daring Middle Eastern outfit with veils and lace and curves working hard to add the element of sex appeal that couldn’t be demonstrated by the usual display of skin. From the first time I laid eyes on her, I called her Mariam, don’t ask me why, and after Arukutty’s tragic departure, she became my sole companion for the duration of my tenure there.

I shall tell you about Arukutty in a moment, and the grisly fate that befell him, but to be honest, I have a clearer, more vivid and lasting memory of Mariam, that plywood beauty, than the flesh and blood man who worked alongside me for those first weeks in that cramped space.

I can still remember Mariam’s dusky eyes, lurking behind that painted veil, watching me as I came up the spiral stairway every morning, and then her life size figure seeming to leap out at me as I switched on the lights. She seems more real, more alive, to me today, than that poor man, the first victim in what would be a long summer of carnage, even though she was only a fantasy dreamed up by some other artist working for a buck just like me, while he was real, flesh and blood, with a real family, childhood, background, home town, history.

Even after all these years, decades, it is Mariam I still remember, while I have only the faintest recollection of poor Arukutty’s features or physical appearance, apart from a vague memory of a headful of frizzy black hair and a pair of large brown spectacles. Such are the vagaries of memory in the aftermath of extreme trauma. Even trying to summon up a recollection of his features fills me with dread, the kind of aversion a person who had almost drowned to death once might feel when confronted by a vast body of deep water, but for the purposes of this narrative, I shall endeavor to recall as best as I can.

“Where are you off to?” I asked, setting down my Rotring and wiping my ink-stained hands on a rag.

Arukutty paused, his brown faux-leather satchel hoisted over his shoulder, and turned back to me. He wore large, brown-framed plastic spectacles with thick lenses behind which his eyes were always distorted. There was an air of furtive intention about him, the way he turned back, a stealthy hand-in-the-cookie-jar look on his face that made me wonder.

He glanced quickly in the direction of the bosses’ cabins. Both doors were shut. The sound of their Gujarati-accented English carried through the cabin doors: they were on their weekly long distance trunk call to their sales agent in Dubai and as even I knew by now, that meant they would be tied up for at least another hour or two. Arukutty had picked the perfect day to slip out early, but it wasn’t the first time he’d done so since I’d joined two months ago, and I was starting to get curious.

“You make some excuse for me,” Arukutty said. “Tell them I had to go home early to my sick son.”

It was a simple statement of fact, not a request. Typical Arukutty. Today, I’d wonder if he was on the spectrum, but back then, I interpreted his brusque communications as simple rudeness. I didn’t react to the tone; it was his customary way of speaking to everyone, even the bosses who seemed to take no offence, so why would I?

Even though Arukutty had graduated only two years senior to me from JJ School of Art, he was my immediate superior here at Exotic Exports. It was on his approval that I had been given the job. It was he who took the briefings from the Parekh Brothers and then briefed me on what and how he required illustrated. Effectively, he was my boss.

“You made the sick son excuse just two weeks ago,” I said in response. “Maybe today you left early to take your wife to visit her mother in hospital before her surgery?”

He thought for a moment, his eyes occluded by those thick lenses, then nodded. “Yes. Better make my mother-in-law sick than my son. Cut her open!”

He cackled, amused by his own phrasing. I don’t just mean that he laughed. Arukutty had a way of making laughter sound like something deviant, the way pubescent boys might cackle over a dirty joke while sharing an illicit cigarette in a school bathroom stall. I ignored this unpleasant reference.

“But where are you going?” I asked. I made a show of glancing at the cabins too, then leaned over my artboard, lowering my voice. “You can tell me at least.”

He stared at me for a long moment, as if debating something of great importance. It was the kind of look Kissinger had in his picture in Time Magazine when called upon by the President to weigh in on a crucial, yet essentially unsolvable issue, like the oil crisis in the Middle East.

Finally, he shook his curly head and said, “I’ll tell you later.”

And left, without so much as a thank you for my part in his truancy.

Now, had I left well enough alone, I probably would not have a story to tell at all. Then again, perhaps I was destined to find my way to the Lovecraft Society, by one means or another, and perhaps Arukutty was merely one gateway opened up to entice me to enter down that twisted pathway to horror, and even if I’d shunned it outright, another, and then another would have opened up in time, and sooner or later, even inadvertently, I would surely have been enticed into following that dark road to its inevitable conclusion. But it didn’t take that much enticing: right from the start, I was a pushover. My curiosity about Arukutty’s truancy was too strong to ignore, and simply had to be quenched. They say a gambler doesn’t need an excuse to place a bet, he’ll just make one up himself; the same goes for any addict: they don’t need seducing to fall off the proverbial wagon. And in my own way, while neither a gambler nor an alcoholic, I was an addict too, and it was that addiction combined with my curiosity about Arukutty’s disappearances that caused me to take those first steps down that twisted pathway.

Which brings me to my addiction.

This was the era when such paperback pulp novels known as jasoosi kahaniyan—a catch-all term that included a mishmash every subgenre of crime—mystery/detective/thriller/spy/horror/science fiction—sold by the lakhs (hundreds of thousands) across urban and semi-urban India. Authors like Gulshan Nanda and Surendar Mohan Pathak sold half a million of their series every month, staggering numbers compared to today, when even the recent International Booker Prize Winner, Tomb of Sand (Reyt Kabrastan, in the original Hindi) struggles to sell even a few hundred copies.

Think of it as a form of binge-entertainment for the desi masses almost thirty five years before the advent of Netflix and streaming. Everyone from security guards on night shift, drivers waiting for their bosses, even peons and clerks in government offices, seemed to have one at hand. On the Harbor Line train I took each day from Bandra to VT, I would lose count of the noses buried in those cheap, disintegrating pulps, and would take pleasure in the knowledge that that cover, or that one, and that one over there, was my handiwork. They were cheesy, they were pulp fiction, they were disposable trash, but they were also fun, in a kitschy, innocent-macho-Indian kind of way, and some of them could get pretty dark and macabre.

Like I said, it was a different world, Bombay a different city.

By the by, if I use the old, British era name for the city of my birth as well as others in this narrative, it’s because all this took place almost two decades before the name changed to Mumbai in 1995.

It also seems fitting because Bombay as she was then was a very different city from the Mumbai of this twenty first century. A far cry from the maximum city, the blue eyed capitol of late stage capitalism she is today.

That was a darker, more closeted Bombay, with shadowy corners and meaner streets. She had a secret history, one never to be found in the tourist guides or history books and what occult mysteries she possessed, she held close to her dark veined Gothic heart.

The millions of readers who bought those lurid paperbacks did so because they knew that the city where they had come to seek their fortune, often from far flung remote villages without electricity, toilets or roads, had two faces. There was the bright, commercial face of the city that never slept, where everybody could find paying work and had a Hindi film song on their lips even after 12 hour workdays, where the glittering promise of fame and fortune lay around the next corner.

And there was the secret, veiled, grinning face that she showed only after dark to a few, very few, unfortunates, and those who had suffered the misfortune of glimpsing it even once left trembling by the first train out of Victoria Terminus, never to return.