Delhi Noir

Yesterday man by Omair Ahmad

Ashram

The call, when it came, was unexpected, but then most calls in her life had been. She’d been looking up a number in her cell phone when it suddenly started blinking and vibrating. Her thumb punched the answer button before she had time to process things, and the thin, tinny voice said, “Suhasini? Suhasini?”

The little screen showed Sunny’s name, but she didn’t really feel like raising the phone to her ear. Even in the afternoon it was too early in the day for Sunny. Irritated, more at herself than anything else, she punched the speakerphone button and cut the caller’s desperate “Hello?” with her own voice. “Tell me, Sunny, you need money?”

For a moment there was no answer, and she thought he’d hung up on her. Sunny had never hesitated to say anything but a hurried “Yes” when asked if he needed money. It was what made him such a good snitch.

But his voice came through again, hesitant now. “Suhasini?”

“Yes, baba, Suhasini,” she said, speaking to him as if he were a small child. “Damnit, you’re calling me, you should know who you’ve dialed. Or are you stoned again?” He might have been one of her more reliable informants, but this didn’t mean she liked him.

“Listen, Suhasini, Triloki gave me something for you.”

“So?” She thought it was odd that Triloki would give

Sunny anything for her. Triloki knew where her office was if he needed to send anything. He’d been her senior partner, after all, until she’d found him blackmailing one of their clients.

They hadn’t been in touch for the last two years despite the fact that the private investigator community in Delhi was such a small one. Her annoyance with Sunny became one pitch higher. Sunny had always been a resource for Suhas-ini. She was the one who had found him stealing the drugs from the hospital and decided that he was better use as an informant than in jail. It was bad form to tap somebody else’s snitch. It made the informants uncomfortable and more nervous than they already were. But Triloki had always taken liberties; she liked to think it was his way of flirting with her. Maybe she had been eager for that, for him to cross boundaries, to be more than just business partners, which was why the betrayal had hurt so badly.

“He said to get it to you quick. Gave it to me yesterday.

Said it had to do with Arjun Singh.”

“The politician?”

“No, no, the collector — you know, old things, what do you call them, un-teek things...”

Un-teek? she thought, until the sounds rearranged themselves. Antique. Arjun Singh, the antique collector. She’d heard of him.

“The one who lives near Nizamuddin?” she asked.

“Closer to Ashram, in a haveli near Hotel Rajdoot.”

“Yeah, yeah, near the railway station, not the dargah. Why don’t you bring it over and stop pissing yourself?”

She’d been pushing him since the mention of Triloki’s name, but even she knew when she’d gone too far. This wasn’t her usual style. Detective work, like all good intelligence, relied on confidence building. You didn’t build much with rudeness and insults.

“Busy, I’m busy. You want it, you come yourself.” His voice was brusque, the whine gone from it in his attempt at manliness.

“Right, right,” she tried to be soft, but it was too late now, and after some useless information that was a waste of her time, he hung up. She would catch him for lunch, and maybe he would speak after being fed. It was only much later that she realized that he hadn’t asked for money for the information, or even hinted at it.

Had she realized this immediately, it might have saved her from something, but then again, maybe not.

Arjun Singh rang right afterwards, almost as if they’d coordinated it.

“Hello?”

“May I speak with Ms. Das?” the voice on the other side said. The language was impeccable, intonation precise. She could hear money, great amounts of it, in that voice. Old money. This was a voice nurtured by wealth and generations of connections.

“Speaking,” she said, trying to clear the crudeness that had come from speaking with Sunny from her own voice.

“Ms. Das, I hear you are the best detective in Delhi,” the voice said.

“The agencies are always the best,” she found herself saying. “They have the resources. And Jaidev Triloki has a good reputation.” The last bit surprised her as it came out, and she wondered why she was still defending the man’s reputation.

There was an intake of a breath, almost a sigh. “I am old-fashioned, madam, and I prefer to employ people rather than agencies.” There was a pause, another intake, another sigh.

“And I’m afraid Mr. Triloki can no longer help me. He’s the one who suggested I contact you.”

What the fuck? she thought, but the words that came out were professional. “Could you tell me who you are, sir, and why you need a private detective?”

“My name is Arjun Singh, Ms. Das. I am a collector of time.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Singh,” she replied sarcastically, “I can’t help you find time.”

There was a moment of silence, and she cursed herself inwardly. She couldn’t afford to speak to a client, and a potentially rich one at that, like this. Most of the old clients had gone with Triloki, and new ones had been hard to find.

When Arjun Singh broke the silence she could hear the edge to his voice. It wasn’t anger as much as strain. Something was riding him hard. “Only God can give us time, and He is hard to find these days,” he sighed. “But I believe you can help me.”

She bit down on the next sarcastic reply that came rushing to her lips, and only said, “How, exactly, can I help you, Mr. Singh?”

“I need help finding someone. I would like to speak to you about it in person, if that’s all right with you.”

“Of course,” Suhasini said. “My office is in CR Park—”

“Could you meet me at my house this evening?” he interrupted. And as she hesitated, a note of pleading entered his voice. “Please, it’s terribly important.”

And somehow she couldn’t say no. She jotted down Purani Kothi, behind Hotel Rajdoot, although she didn’t need to, not after Sunny’s call.

The address confirmed he was rich, to own a whole building like that, but also that he wasn’t one with a taste for the flashy. The area was old, and built-in, with such tangled alleyways that she had always referred to it as Jalebi Central. It was twisted up, like the orange-colored sweets they sold there.

The only case she’d ever investigated in that area was for the government, or at least that was what she had assumed. Triloki had been with the Intelligence Bureau before, and they had received a number of cases through that route. Though he’d never explicitly told her that was who it was for, and payment came in tax-free bundles of cash. He’d always been the one introducing her to these things, and she’d walked right along, Mary’s fucking little lamb.

They’d been hired to take pictures of a Kashmiri politician. A meeting had been arranged for him with a young woman. A classic honey trap, it was assumed that the politico would have one night of fun, and the government would have enough embarrassing photographs to make sure that he didn’t have any more fun afterwards. Except that he just wasn’t up to it. The government had a habit of overkill, and this politician had been worked over so many times in custody that, although he invited the nubile young thing to his room, he only wanted to talk. It was all rather pathetic, and Suhasini, in the next room with the video lead showing her the pointlessness of it all, had been overcome with a strange feeling. It was the only time she’d ever felt any sympathy for the militants.

“I’ll see you at 7 in the evening, Mr. Singh,” she said, and hung up. But after she put the phone down, the remark about Triloki came back to her. She located his number on her cell phone and was about to dial when a sense of caution stopped her and she set the phone down, again. Then she pulled out her second cell phone, the one that didn’t reveal her number on the receiving end, and called Triloki.

There were only two rings before someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a rough voice that wasn’t Triloki’s.

“May I speak with Jaidev Triloki?” she asked.

“One minute,” said the voice, and then there was the sound of muffled voices in the background.

“Hello, this is Jaidev,” said another voice, smooth, full of authority, and so confident that she almost answered despite knowing that it wasn’t him.

“Hello?” the voice said again.

“Mr. Triloki?” she finally asked.

“Yes, this is Jaidev Triloki,” the voice lied, smooth as an oiled snake.

She was so baffled that she did what she had always done as a child when caught by surprise: She lied. “This is Aparna, Mr. Triloki, from the Academy of Investigators in Vasant Vihar.”

“Yes?”

“We wanted to invite you to be one of the keynote speakers at our inauguration ceremony on February 17. The home minister has agreed to be the guest of honor.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll be out of the country at that time,” the man who wasn’t Triloki said. “But thank you for calling.”

Suhasini just stared at her cell phone for a while, trying to make sense of things.

At that moment her first phone started vibrating. The screen glowed, telling her it was Triloki calling.

She didn’t know what to do and watched the phone vibrate slowly across the table. Then she grabbed it, stabbing the cancel button. A moment later it started vibrating again, again from Triloki’s number. She canceled the call a second time and quickly text messaged him, In meeting. Problem?

There was no reply for a few minutes, and she told herself to relax. Maybe Triloki was in some sort of trouble and had asked a friend to answer his phone while he dropped from sight. Maybe he was just calling up to tell her that, and also to notify her about the package with Sunny. He’d served with India’s premiere investigating agency, after all. He knew what he was doing.

The message that came back from his phone shattered the idea: Are you attending inauguration of Academy of Investigators?

What’s that? she messaged, and there was no reply. She waited, watching the phone suspiciously, but even after a good quarter of an hour there was no reply. Whatever Triloki was involved with, he was in big trouble.

Picking up the phone, she called Sunny and received a suspicious “Yes?” for her pains.

“Where are you?” She was in no mood for his tantrums, and just wanted to get to the point. The brusqueness must have had its effect, and he replied tamely enough, “Nizamuddin.”

“I’ll be at the railway station in half an hour, at 5 o’clock. Meet me there. Bring the package.” She sensed him about to protest and added, “Sunny, it’s not a good time.”

It took her five minutes to lock up. The guard at the gate nodded to her and she asked, on impulse, “See anybody strange, Altaf?”

He shook his head, “No, madam. Nobody strange.”

“Keep an eye out, all right?”

He nodded back at her. Altaf and his brother, Abdul, had been hired by Triloki six years ago, when the agency had first opened. They knew what kind of people could come looking for private detectives.

There was very little traffic on the roads, and she was happy that it was a Sunday. It took her barely fifteen minutes to get to the Nizamuddin Railway Station but another five minutes to find a decent place to park. It was a long walk to the station, and the damned road smelled of piss. But at least the walk allowed her to make sure nobody was following her.

Sunny was already there, looking anxious and shooting suspicious glances at the policemen around him. She rarely met him like this. He was guaranteed to attract the wrong sort of attention. The policemen gave Sunny the once-over, and then her too.

“What is it?” she asked, and he thrust a grubby envelope toward her. “Just this?” and he nodded energetically. “Okay then,” she said. She wanted to tell him to fuck off but restrained herself from being stupid with anger again. “You’ll find the packet in the usual place,” she added, letting him know he’d be paid.

He nodded, scuttled off, and was lost among the crowd in moments. She thought about going inside the station to read Triloki’s letter and have a cup of tea. There was a certain anonymity to the crowds there. But Sunny’s antics meant that she could be assured of the policemen paying close attention to her.

Instead she strode back to her car, and then over the bridge. On a whim, she decided to walk into the alleyways of Jalebi Central, midway between Nizamuddin and Ashram. Itasn’t the sort of place you found women on their own, certainly not ones dressed like her in a shirt and jeans. Had it been later in the day, after the sun had gone down, she might have driven elsewhere, but she just needed to walk.

This had been a prosperous part of town at some point in time; you could tell from the bits and pieces of old buildings, the edges of bungalows now gone. It had become a refugee zone after Partition, and the construction had the hallmark of the era’s ugly structures. These places were to be lived in and nothing more, small boxy buildings with unfinished brick surfaces everywhere. Now it was full of pushy Punjabi families; large, loud, and boisterous. Usually she couldn’t handle it, but right now the shouting, the four-story buildings with barely any space between them, and all the hefty women somehow made her feel better.

Yet after a few moments the claustrophobia got to her, and she was relieved to finally make it through to a tea shop near Mathura Road, with Hotel Rajdoot looming nearby and the flyover to the Ashram crossroads just beyond it. It wasn’t that big of a building, but here, in the tropical jungle of alleyways and bylanes, it looked much larger than normal. Nevertheless, it still maintained a grubby air, as if the paint just couldn’t hold, or maybe the combined sweaty existence of everybody living in Jalebi Central somehow tarnished all the buildings in its vicinity.

Right next to the hotel was a bungalow which you couldn’t really see from the road. Purani Haveli, where Arjun Singh lived.

She ordered a cup of tea and tore the envelope open. The tea stall owner gave her a look — she wasn’t the usual sort of customer — but she ignored it.

There was only a single sheet of paper, with Triloki’s spiky handwriting.

She folded the letter and put it in her packet. Taking a sip of her tea, she thought coldly that whoever Triloki had gone to confront hadn’t been very impressed by his IB background.

She recalled the voice over the cell phone this morning and figured that if it was the same man, Triloki hadn’t stood a chance.

Suddenly, unexpected tears came to her eyes. Such a waste. The poor fuck. What was the point of doing penance now? So he had blackmailed Suparna for a few lakhs — big shit. Her husband was a property developer; God only knew how much of their money was stained with blood and deceit.

In a burst of sudden anger she punched Arjun Singh’s number into her cell phone. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hello? Mr. Singh, this is Suhasini Das. I am already here. Can we meet now?”

He didn’t ask why, just told her to come. There was some satisfaction in that, in getting on with work rather than having to wait. She reached the gate of his house in five minutes. The guard had been forewarned of her arrival, and he escorted her down the long driveway to the house.

Something was subtly wrong here. She could just sense it, like something glimpsed out of the corner of her eye. There was a long car parked in front of the house, a canary-yellow Chevrolet, beautifully maintained and at least a couple of decades old. And the house too seemed somehow old and yet new, like something from a classic film. It was a beautiful bungalow out of place here and maintained in a way that had gone out of style twenty years ago.

The guard let her into the house and asked her to sit in the drawing room. As soon as he was gone, she got up to look around. Things felt even stranger here. The calendar hanging on the wall was out of date — in fact it showed the months of 1984. But it was brand-new, as if somebody had just unpacked it. There was a large poster for the Hindi film Naam that she remembered from her college days, but again the thing looked almost untouched, un-aged.

“Thank you for coming here, Ms. Das.”

When she turned to face the person entering from a side door, her voice caught in her throat. He could have been an actor in some period film. The hairstyle and the cut of clothes were perfect for the early ’80s. What was even more disconcerting was that she knew Arjun Singh was in his late forties, yet the man standing before her looked like a twenty-year-old. It was only when she stepped up closer to shake hands that she noticed the small wrinkles, the skin at the edge of his neck, the very subtle signs of age almost perfectly hidden.

“I’m sorry for the rush, Ms. Das, but I have very little time. Mr. Triloki has been working on a case for me for five months. There is a man who I have been looking for... for a very long time, someone who took something very precious from me.”

Suhasini nodded. It sounded a not-too-unusual story.

“Mr. Triloki located that person,” Arjun Singh said, “and was supposed to set up a meeting in two days. Except then Triloki disappeared.”

“Who was he searching for?” she asked.

“Rajan Pandey,” Arjun Singh said, and seeing the blank look on her face, explained, “He isn’t a high-profile person, just a party worker, a fixer.”

Surprising herself, she nodded. “I’ve heard his name.” She couldn’t remember when, but the reference seemed familiar.

She’d always been good with names and numbers, just not very good at linking them together. Triloki had called it her best asset and biggest flaw.

Arjun Singh looked at her oddly. “It took Mr. Triloki four months to even find where he was.”

“He’s in Delhi, lives in a big place in Greater Kailash II,” she found herself replying, unsure where the information came from, just that her brain had secreted it away at some point from some investigation. “In K-block. Lots of money and manpower.”

Arjun Singh’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Maybe I should have come to you first.”

“What do you want him for?” she asked.

“It’s difficult to explain,” he replied.

“Try, Mr. Singh, try.”

He sighed, and then suddenly realizing they were still standing, said, “Why don’t we sit down, Ms. Das?”

She did but remained at the edge of her chair. Arjun Singh took off his watch and gave it to her. “Do you notice anything about this?” he asked.

It took her only a glance. The second hand was moving backwards, and as it completed a full sweep, she saw the minute hand move back. Looking up, she said, “What is this?”

“Do you know what today is?” he asked, and at the shake of her head, answered his own question. “It is the twenty-fourth anniversary of the day that Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards because she had ordered an assault on the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines. This was also the day that her son, Rajiv Gandhi, assumed the leadership of the Congress Party, and during the days that followed hundreds, thousands, of innocent Sikhs were killed by mobs while his administration did nothing.”

Suhasini nodded her head. She was still in Calcutta at that time, but she remembered when the news of the assassination had come through. There had been mob violence in Calcutta, but nothing like what happened in Delhi.

“You may not realize, Ms. Das, but I too am a Sikh. I started shaving and cutting my hair after my involvement with left-wing student politics in college. I became an atheist and rejected all of that. But I was still a Sikh in some ways at that time, something I understood when, that day in Delhi, they started killing people of the religion I no longer believed in.

“For two days I waited, safe in my apartment two blocks from here, where people only knew my name and had never seen me as a Sikh. But then I decided I’d hidden for too long and that the world posed no threat to a rational man. My faith in rationality took me out for a walk.

“Nevertheless, despite my rationality, I was fearful. I may have been clean-shaven, but other Sikhs had also tried to save themselves by shaving. Often this act had not been enough though. They had been recognized and attacked, sometimes by their very own neighbors. So just to hide that small fear from others, from the mobs that were hungry for blood, I did one more thing. I walked out with a lit cigarette in hand, explicitly breaking the Sikh taboo against tobacco. To hide my identity, to identify myself as only a man and nothing more.

“But they were burning Sikhs that day, and the smell of burning hair is deep, cutting. The weak stink of tobacco cannot compare. The smell of charred flesh is enormous, and swamps your senses. And the screams, they are of a different register than the fizz and spark of a match lit for a cigarette.

“The first five minutes revealed nothing. And the cigarette died. Emboldened, I lit another, walking farther out of the inner alleyways of this place. And then another, as I walked farther still.

“It was at my fourth cigarette that I faltered. The wind was strong and snuffed out the match. I moved a little way to try and find shelter, but none was to be had. I could hear screaming now, and was beginning to get scared again. I needed a cigarette. It was my only shield.

“So when I saw an alleyway in Nizamuddin, just before Humayun’s Tomb, I turned into it, cigarette on my lips, matches in hand.

“They were gathered there. All five of them. Four killers, and one sacrifice. Quiet and isolated from the world. The man kneeling on the ground had been beaten and kicked. His clothes were torn and blood oozed from the wounds on his face. There was blood on the steel rods that the other men held, and over it all was the smell of kerosene. It had been poured on the pleading, weeping man huddled in the corner, into the used car tire draped around his neck so that it sloshed around as he tried to move. But in the endless animal stupidity of the mob, the murderers had forgotten to bring the matches.

Or maybe one of them had remembered and lost them, and they had been caught with their bloodlust high, like rapists rendered suddenly impotent.

“And then I arrived in the alleyway, and even before my eyes had registered what was there, I lit the match and brought it to my cigarette, to the profanity that was to save me that day.

“Maybe it saved me from something, maybe it didn’t.

“The cigarette fell from my open mouth, but the matchbox was still in my hand. The leader of the gang held out one commanding palm.”

Arjun Singh paused and summoned the will to continue. Despite the care he had taken at maintaining the youthful façade, he looked old, very old. She could now see the signs of the artificial stiffness caused by botox injections.

In a soft voice Arjun Singh continued: “It has been almost twenty-four years now, but I saw God that day, in the eyes of the man I betrayed. I heard him plead, ‘Bhagwaan ke naam mein...’ (‘In the name of God...’)

“But I was carrying profanity that day, hiding behind it, using it to keep myself safe. And when that one hand stretched out to demand the matches, I gave them.”

Arjun Singh stopped again, taking a long, shuddering breath.

“Twelve years went by until I could find the courage to make my way back to that alleyway. It was blackened and sorrowful still, and something spoke to me. And for another twelve years I retraced my steps, day by day, week by week, year by year. I’ve made myself back into the man I was at that time. I have even watched all the films backwards from then to the present.

“Look,” he pointed at a large framed photograph on a wall. “Isn’t that me?” And Suhasini had to agree. From a distance, Arjun Singh had walked backwards in time and looked like the man he had been twenty-four years ago. In a soft voice, he concluded, “Only two days are left, and I need to walk back that way. I need to go back there and say ‘No’ to the man who had asked me for the matches that day, to Rajan Pandey.”

For a few long minutes Suhasini just sat there. As the story had unfolded she had found herself leaning back in the chair, leaving way for the tragedy to spill out. She could find no words to respond. It was all mad, fucking mad. She had heard her own mother talking about being forced to flee the area of British India that had become East Pakistan. This part of the world was full of tragedies and full of mad people. Arjun Singh’s insanity was just of a different flavor. Triloki must have thought it was manageable and worth it if he had taken on the job. Nevertheless, she couldn’t figure out how to react. It was Arjun Singh who broke the long silence.

“I thought I was going to have my chance to face him. Triloki found him, identified him. But now Triloki has disappeared.”

It was then that she asked, “What about the diary?”

And suddenly she saw the shrewdness flash in his eyes. The man might be insane, but he hadn’t earned this money or his reputation as an antique collector by being stupid.

“What do you know about the diary?” he asked suspiciously.

“Triloki left me a note,” she offered, and it only made him more suspicious.

“You’re all in this together!” he suddenly shouted. “Get out! Get the fuck out! I told him I wouldn’t give up the diary. I told him. Get out!”

She rose slowly. There was no idea what he was going to do. “All right, Mr. Singh, I’m leaving. But you called me, not I, you.”

Arjun Singh just glared at her. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Triloki,” he muttered.

And that was just one step too far. “You trusted him? I don’t know what the diary is, but one thing I know for sure is that you didn’t trust him with it.” Furious, she pulled out Triloki’s letter from her back pocket and threw it at him. “Read it, you mad bastard. Triloki thought he was doing something for nothing. He risked his life for you, and he lost. I’ve been calling him on his cell phone, and some person pretending to be him picks up the phone. In all likelihood he’s dead. All for you and your fucking weird crusade. Keep your motherfucking diary, and rot!”

She turned and stormed out of the house, too angry to think. As she made it out of the gate, she felt a thrust of regret. She shouldn’t have thrown the letter at Arjun Singh. It was probably the last thing Triloki wrote, and now that crazy antique collector, that Sikh-in-denial, would have it.

Jumping into her car, she revved the engine and left the streets of the area, of Jalebi Central, in a burst of exhaust smoke.

It was late evening and she was back at her office when Arjun Singh called. She didn’t pick up. He tried three more times until she finally answered. “Mr. Singh,” she said, “I’m not interested in working for you. Get somebody else.”

“Ms. Das, please.” There was terrible strain in his voice. “I apologize. I have worked all my life toward this day. I’m sorry I overreacted.”

“Mr. Singh, you are a rich man, no doubt you can hire many private detectives. Please do so, and stop bothering me.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t understand about the diary. It’s the private diary of one of Rajiv Gandhi’s personal secretaries. It’s a record of everything that happened during those riots, seen from the prime minister’s office. After I rescued myself, after I confronted Rajan Pandey, I planned on helping all of those who died in those days to find some measure of justice, and this is my only tool.”

And now it all became clear to Suhasini. “And it would be the perfect bait for a person like Pandey,” she said.

“But I can’t sacrifice the justice of thousands for my own deliverance.” She could hear the anguish in his voice, but her mind was already running ahead of her. She could see how Triloki must have planned things, how he had failed without the diary.

“You don’t have to sacrifice anything,” she said. “You can offer to sell it to him, and he’ll come to you. He has to. The diary is political dynamite, and all he knows about you is that you are an antique collector, somebody who can be paid off with money. Triloki set things up with an inspector at Nizamuddin. I’ll make sure he’s there. You can lure Pandey with the promise of selling him the diary and then confront him. We get Pandey, and you don’t lose the diary.”

When Arjun Singh didn’t answer right away, she said, “Mr. Singh, this is the only way,” and was surprised at the pleading in her own voice. It seemed very important to her now to complete this thing, to make sure that Triloki’s last assignment was finished properly, his penance completed.

Maybe it seemed that way to Arjun Singh as well, because he said, “I should have trusted Triloki. I’ll trust you instead.”

“Thank you, Mr. Singh.”

“Please,” he replied, “please, just make this work,” and hung up.

She looked at her phone and didn’t know what to do next. The name Rajan Pandey niggled at her, and she realized that she didn’t know how to contact him. If he was the fixer he was supposed to be, then there would be no real way to access him, not for somebody like her. On an impulse she dialed Triloki’s number on her second cell phone.

This time it was the smooth voice that picked up. “Hello?”

“Rajan Pandey?” she asked.

If she hadn’t been concentrating she would have missed the hesitation, and the slight rise in the pitch of his voice, as he replied, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.”

“No, I don’t, Mr. Pandey,” she said. “It’s you that has the wrong number. In fact, you have the wrong phone, Triloki’s.”

“Suhasini Das,” the voice said.

“Very good, Mr. Pandey,” she answered.

“You aren’t inviting me to an inauguration again, are you?”

The voice was so cool, so controlled, it made her ears burn. “No, Pandey.” And now she spoke in anger: “I’m inviting you to look at a diary.”

“You have it?” Now he was dead serious, no jokes at all.

“You haven’t even asked which diary,” she said.

Laughter erupted from him, hard, cold, bitter laughter. “I know which diary,” he said. “Triloki was most... cooperative.”

Bastard, she thought, I’ll enjoy taking you down. “Day after tomorrow. Morning, at 10 o’clock, near Hotel Rajdoot. You know where that is?”

“Yes, I know where that is,” he said. “Where exactly?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said, and hung up. And then she called Arjun Singh. He was both elated and panicky, but she managed to draw from him the address where he wanted to confront Pandey and the promise that he wouldn’t step out of his house until she arrived.

She made one final call.

“Hello, Inspector Ramdev?”

“Who is it?”

“This is Suhasini Das, Jaidev Triloki told me to call you.”

“Yes, yes, he said you’d call.” Ramdev sounded far too hearty. “What’s the matter?”

“I need your help. There’s a meeting where there will be a person turning up. He’s well connected, Triloki probably told you about him,” she said.

“You want security?”

“Yes,” she answered, and gave him the details. He reassured her that he would be there, and he sounded happy. Ramdev probably had no idea of how badly things had turned out for his friend Triloki, and this was no time for her to tell him.

She spent the next day with Arjun Singh, walking the streets of Jalebi Central. She checked the place where the killing had happened so many years ago, and all the approaches to it. She wanted to make sure that there was nowhere that Pandey could run, and no direction from which he could catch them unawares. She met Ramdev, who, despite the hint of delight on his face, seemed like a reliable man in a tight spot, competent and tough.

She spent the night at Arjun Singh’s house, traveling backwards in time at every moment, full of oldness and oddity, and could hear the man pacing upstairs as she slipped into sleep.

She woke up in the middle of the night, groggy and ill at ease, to the sound of something smashing. She rose from the bed and quietly made her way to the door. Opening it softly, she looked around until she spotted Arjun Singh. He was walking purposefully with hammer in his hand, and she saw him stop before a clock and take a mighty swing. Then smash it again. He was done with time marching backwards.

She crept back to bed, but her sleep was filled with bad dreams, and she rose in the morning feeling more tired than when she went to bed. When Arjun Singh appeared he was wearing clothes that were precisely twenty-four years old and had a small brown diary in hand. They walked to the alleyway, and from there she called Pandey.

“I’ll be right over,” was all he said.

As they waited, she saw the policemen slowly arrive, filtering in one by one as if they were there by chance. Ramdev parked his jeep ten feet away and gave her a grin, tipping her anxiety to fear. There were too many of them, and they were far too close. Pandey would see them and escape. She was getting ready to signal them away when the sleek Mercedes arrived, precisely at 10. She recognized the numbers on the license plate, and suddenly she remembered where she had seen Rajan Pandey’s name before. It had been on a file on Triloki’s desk, a case he had been investigating.

And then the car door opened and a man stepped out. She recognized him from the photographs in that file on Triloki’s desk. Rajan Pandey, the man that Suparna, the builder’s wife, was having an affair with. Rajan Pandey, whose pictures had been used by Triloki to blackmail Suparna. Rajan Pandey, the seed that had destroyed Suhasini and Triloki’s partnership.

Pandey looked past her and waved to Ramdev, and Suhasini knew she had been tricked, badly beaten. She turned to Arjun Singh, wanting to warn him, but he was already rushing ahead toward the culmination of his long dream. “See!” he shouted, waving the diary. “See! This is the truth, the truth that you can’t burn. I won’t give you any matches today!”

And then the driver also stepped out of the Mercedes. It was Triloki. “You can always find matches,” he said, “if you know where to look.” And he tipped his hat at Suhasini.

How I lost my clothes by Radhika Jha

Lodhi Gardens

Until I lost my clothes I was a regular sort of guy: lots of clothes, lots of problems, a little luck — mainly with women. I had a family that was insisting I get married again, a dog with a chronic skin disorder, a flat with a mortgage, and a growing infatuation with heroin, better known as brown sugar or “sister” on the streets. On the plus side, I was the educated, intelligent CEO and sole employee of a global consultancy company. My three ex-bosses back from when I was still a salary slave were all women who believed in me and continued to give me enough work to keep me dancing with sister all night long.

The night before I lost my clothes was a night like any other. I had a report to finish, a feasibility study of a new iron ore extraction process the Koreans wanted to sell to an Indian company. The report had been due the previous week. I’d done all the work and only had the conclusion left to write, so I’d gone to the bar at the Habitat Center at 7:00 to celebrate. By 11:45 p.m. I was home, well lubricated, a little horny, and ready to earn my next few hits of sister.

I opened the computer and went to My Documents. But the file wasn’t there! Believe me, I looked for the file everywhere — in every single directory, folder, and subfolder, even the hidden ones. I searched for it by keyword, by date, by name, by subject. But it was nowhere to be found. I stared at the computer and suddenly felt certain that my ex-wife, the custodian of our only child, had somehow gotten to it and erased it. So certain was I that I sent e-mails to my lawyers and hers, to her parents and to mine, to her bosses and to mine, to the police, the supreme and high courts, the prime minister, and a few friends of the family who happened to be ministers at the time. Then I sat back and waited for news of her arrest to arrive.

My mobile phone rang after fifteen minutes.

It was one of the she-bosses, Sheena, the one for whom I was doing the feasibility study.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m telling you, it’s true,” I insisted, raising my voice. “I was going to print it out and mail it to you tomorrow, but the bitch got to it first. She must be spying on me.”

“And how is she doing that?” Sheena asked sweetly.

“I don’t know.” I looked suspiciously at the walls. “Maybe she bribed the maid again.”

Silence on the line. I could see Sheena shaking her head, her shoulder-length iron-gray hair brushing her cheeks.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked for the second time.

I looked at my watch. 1:29. “Time? What has time got to do with anything? This is an emergency, we need to find her and put her in prison,” I said impatiently.

“It’s 1:30 a.m.” she continued in the same deadpan voice. “I have to work tomorrow morning, you know. I can’t sleep till 11 like you do.”

I sensed a lecture coming and groaned. “But you’ve got plenty of time to sleep. Stop talking and go to sleep now. I’ll find her and the file and get them to you tomorrow. Promise.” The moment the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake.

“You won’t,” she sighed. “You won’t because you haven’t done it. You’ve just been boozing and womanizing instead. How can you be so irresponsible? Think of Akshay, for God’s sake.” She went on for another five minutes, telling me how I had mucked up my life, finishing with, “Do you have a death wish? If so, just tell us and we’ll leave you alone. But remember, you have a son to think about.”

“I know, I know,” I said when she’d finished. “Just go to sleep. I’ll find the report and get it to you tomorrow. Promise.”

The phone went dead. I got up and threw it off the balcony. Then it struck me that if the police called I wouldn’t know, and if they couldn’t find me they would let her go. So I decided to go to the police station myself. I left the house and began walking. I had no choice. My car was gone, not stolen or sold as normally happens in this city, but simply misplaced. It would turn up eventually. It always did — for the car was so filthy no one wanted it in front of their house.

I walked along National Highway 3 toward Delhi, past the NOIDA golf course, the shopping malls, and the beehive colonies with their peeling façades. People in cars honked as they drove by. Truckers flashed their lights and motorcyclists cursed. But I hardly noticed. I was a man on a mission, filled with a superhuman strength. I walked over the sewage drain that was the Yamuna by way of the Japanese Bridge. As I entered the city, Humayun’s onion-shaped dome glowing palely in the moonlight, my objectives changed and I headed up Mathura Road to the roundabout with the little Lodhi tomb and then turned left toward the Oberoi flyover. I was going to score some sister.

There was a party going on under the flyover. Four men had just scored some sister and were huddled over a small scrap of paper. One man, his hands trembling like a fish out of water, was trying to light a match, cursing fluently in a mixture of English, Bengali, and Assamese.

“Hey, even your language smells like fish,” I told the guy trying to light the fire. “You can’t light a fire like that. Let a real man from the north do it for you.” I grabbed the matchbox from him. Oberoi Hotel, it read. I looked at him again. How had he gotten his hands on it? His clothes were in tatters and his hair was matted. I couldn’t tell when he had last bathed, but it must have been some time ago. He smelled pretty bad. But he still had his shoes. Surprising, for someone in his condition.

The matches were damp and smelled of urine, which is why they wouldn’t light. So I threw them away and took out my lighter instead. I also took out my stash and added to the stuff on the foil. The others looked at me jealously, or, to be more accurate, they would have been jealous if there had been space for that in their minds. But in the world of sister, once the flame gets going everyone goes really quiet. All shivers, shakes, and itches stop. All feeling melts away. We become the flames, making love jointly to our sister. The world is forgotten along with the itches.

Soon she was warm and ready and we prepared our needles. The fish-eater leaned sideways and pulled out a needle from his shoe. I shuddered, wondering what diseases he had living inside him. He was going down really fast, it was obvious. I wondered if he still had links with his family, or whether he was even educated. As if he’d read my mind, he looked straight at me and asked, “Didn’t you go to Doon School?”

A burst of sunshine warmed the night. Doon School was the place I had loved most in the world. All my nicest memories were associated with it. When I was full of sister I invariably went back to those cedar-paneled rooms where twenty boys slept together, the sweet scent of our slumbering bodies filling the air. I gulped, nodded. “Yes, yes, I did. I am a Dosco,” I said proudly, my eyes becoming misty.

“Which house?”

“Hyderabad,” I replied.

“Kashmir,” he said.

A brother.

Okay, you guessed it. It was the brother who stole my clothes.

When I woke up, I couldn’t recognize the roof over my head. It seemed all broken in places and there were two ugly brown lampshades hanging from it that were closed from the bottom like socks and gave no light. What light there was came from above them. I just couldn’t figure it out. So of course I panicked. Waking up after a night with sister is a serious matter in any circumstance, but when one doesn’t recognize the roof over one’s head, the panic button gets pushed down hard and stays down.

I couldn’t move or breathe. It was as if rigor mortis had already set in. Only my brain refused to stop. If anything, it worked with lightning speed: If my house had miraculously grown mold, it calculated, then it meant that the Yamuna, toxic and polluted, had flooded, and the mold on my ceiling was toxic and polluted and the dappled light above it was actually a phosphorescence even more toxic and polluting. In short, I had to get out. But my legs refused to obey me. I looked down at them — and a stranger’s legs stared back at me.

Then it all fell into place.

He’d taken my clothes and he’d taken my legs too, so I couldn’t go after him. That was my first really clear thought.

But what made me really mad was that he had taken my underwear as well. He should have left it for me, it wasn’t even clean. Yet I couldn’t hate him. For that’s what brothers do, don’t they, wear each others’ dirty underwear?

It took me a little while longer to realize that I wasn’t in my house either and that what I had taken for a roof was a canopy of leaves, and the strange moldy things were in fact beehives. The brother must have woken up before me and seen me lying there in my nice clothes and decided to swap. Dragging me into the junkies’ park next to the Oberoi Hotel, he had stripped me of my clothes and abandoned me.

I lay back on the grass, stared up at the sky, and wiggled my bare toes. Indeed, they were mine. Then I wiggled my shoulders, and the cold tickle of grass told me that I wasn’t dreaming. I looked down, and that’s when I felt the full impact of my nakedness.

For till that moment I had never really looked at my body. I knew what I could do with it and I knew what I couldn’t do with it. But as an object in itself, it was a stranger to me. Women hadn’t seemed to mind it too much and they’d certainly liked what it did to them. But as I looked at my body in the full light of day, I knew that it was really nothing to be proud of. My dick, curving a little to the left, seemed lost, a steam engine trying to hide in a scantily clad hillside.

I got up and looked around for the brother’s clothes. But they were nowhere to be found. Beneath my feet, condoms, bits of old newspaper, plastic wrappings, rags of all sorts, and needle cases crunched and scattered, just the usual garbage. I dropped onto my hands and knees and pretended to search. I knew I wouldn’t find anything though. A junkie sold his underwear long before he sold his outerwear. It was less necessary.

Ten minutes later I gave up. As I suspected, I had found nothing. The brother had either sold his old stuff to someone else or he’d left it under my head and someone even more desperate than him, possibly one of the silent guys he had been with, had taken it. I took a deep breath and the scent of urine and other waste filled my nostrils. The park was empty, most of the junkies having abandoned it for less smelly pastures. I wasn’t a junkie, I thought angrily. I was a victim. I should go and report the theft of my clothes at the police station. So I climbed over the low iron rail separating the park from the road and stood on the pavement.

It was still early and cold. I had goosebumps. I thought about going to the flyover where several hundred people lived, ate, had sex, and slept in tightly wrapped bundles. Someone there was bound to have some extra clothes. Yet I hesitated. What could a naked man offer a poor man in exchange? So I stood on the pavement and stuck my hand out for a lift instead.

No one stopped. That didn’t surprise me. What did, though, was that many didn’t even notice I was naked. I persisted, sticking my hand out and waving it ferociously. How dare they ignore me like that? I was no domesticated chicken, I was a man. I had my pride.

Suddenly, as if God had heard my silent complaint, all the cars froze like they were waiting for me to choose which one I would get into. Then I realized that the traffic light had changed. The drivers had their faces turned forward like robots. Lost in their own private worlds, they never even saw me, not even when the light changed.

I was getting a little desperate when a brand-new Lexus pulled up right beside me and inside it I noticed one of my ex-she-bosses, the nicest one. “Sharmilaa, Sharmeelaa,” I called happily, feeling my luck kick in.

She was listening to Indian classical music, the window rolled down. Her famous Bengali lips were pursed as if she were about to kiss someone. She was frowning slightly, the way she always did when she was worried. Probably her husband, I thought. The man was a serious handicap and I’d told her to ditch him many a time.

“Sharmila,” I called again, approaching the window.

She heard me before she saw me and her head began to turn. I can never forget that moment. Me, rushing to the passenger side of the car full of hope, her face as she got a glimpse of me. She leaned over and quickly locked the door. I grabbed the handle and tried to open it.

“Sharmila, it’s me,” I said urgently, tapping on the window a little harder than I’d meant to, “don’t be scared. I have been robbed. You must take me home.”

She wouldn’t answer, struggling with her window instead. I rushed around the front of the car to her side and bent down so she could see my face. “Sharmila, don’t be a fool. Someone robbed me of my clothes. It’s me. You know me.”

She refused to look at me.

“Sharmila, don’t be stupid now. I don’t have time. You have to take me home. I have a report to hand in,” I said impatiently.

She didn’t budge. Just stared angrily at the car in front of her.

“I don’t know you,” she said at last through tightly pinched lips, “why are you embarrassing me like this? If... if you don’t get away from my car I’ll call the police.” Her face took on the stubborn expression I knew well.

“Sharmila,” I cried, stepping away from the car, “don’t do this, you’ll regret it later. Where’s your heart?”

She looked me full in the face then. And the truth struck me like a bolt of lightning. For that’s when I realized that in fact we were no longer people but animated passport photographs. If our bodies were allowed to assert themselves at all, they could only do so under the cover of night — and their needs were quickly dispensed with. But now that my body had been unveiled in broad daylight, my head had become invisible. I had ceased to be me. I was just a body, not a person with rights or brains.

I saw this clearly then, as I stepped back onto the pavement and watched Sharmila drive away. Strangely, what upset me the most is that she hadn’t been in the least curious about my body. After all, we’d worked together for years. I’d fantasized about making love to her any number of times — even though she had a distinctly pear-shaped behind. And she must have done the same. And yet, when I was there in front of her, she didn’t even sneak a peek. I sat down on the pavement, my knees clamped together. I must be really ugly, I thought sadly.

My pride in tatters and along with it my self-confidence, I wondered what to do. Who could I go to next? I had friends, or at least acquaintances, right there in Nizamuddin, two hundred yards away. At this time they would all be rushing their kids to school or getting ready for work, drinking that last cup of badly made masala tea, shouting at their wives to release a little of their pre-work tension. I bet if I just waited where I was, at least a half-dozen familiar faces would show up. But after Sharmila, this thought made me shudder.

I sat down on the edge of the pavement, making myself as small as I could, and watched the cars go by. It was rush hour. No place for a human on the road, especially a naked one. A traffic cop had arrived, creating more confusion than there had been before. But unlike the drivers of the cars who simply ignored me, he must have felt proprietorial about the crossroads and shouted, “Hey, what are you doing? You can’t sit like that. You’re troubling the traffic.”

Troubling the traffic? How could I have been troubling the traffic? He was the one troubling the traffic. Since his arrival the traffic jam had quadrupled in length. I’d have explained that to him if he’d given me half a chance. Instead he called the other cops, the ones who wore khaki uniforms and sat around in white Maruti Gypsies that had the words With You, for You, Always painted in red on them.

There were three of them inside, all in khaki, two in front including the driver and one in the back.

“So you are the one troubling the traffic?” the policeman on the passenger side shouted out of the window.

I smiled at him. “No, officer. I am just sitting here thinking about what to do.” I smiled again. It wasn’t worth antagonizing an enforcer of the law — especially when you were naked and had needle pricks dotting your arms.

“He’s thinking of what he’s going to do,” the policeman on the passenger seat said, turning to the others. “What do you think he should do?”

There was a short silence.

The man in the back, who was writing something down in his book, said, “He should come with us.”

The policeman in the passenger seat leaned out of the car and said, “Hey, you’re a lucky guy. My boss likes you. You can come with us. We’ll help you think.”

I didn’t like the look in the man’s eyes. “No. I have to go home,” I said. “I have important things to do, a report to hand in. Thank you for your offer though,” I added.

The policeman didn’t smile. “And how are you planning to get home? Is it nearby?”

“No,” I answered fatally, “I live in NOIDA.”

Suddenly the man in the back who wasn’t wearing a uniform leaned forward. “Get him in,” he ordered.

The passenger door opened and the khaki uniform got out. Did they have extra uniforms in the police station? I wondered.

I was forced to sit between the silent driver and the one in the passenger seat, my knee jammed against the gearshift.

“I have a car too,” I said as the jeep started. “Why don’t you let me go home and I’ll come back to visit you in it? I really have to hand in my report or I’ll lose a lot of money.”

The fat one who seemed to do all the talking shook his head gravely. “We can’t let you do that,” he said. “You’ll catch a cold. And you’ll be a traffic problem. There could be accidents. Let rush hour pass and we’ll take you home.”

I looked out of the front of the jeep. It was nice being so high above the ground. The early November mist still hadn’t cleared. “That’s okay. I’m quite used to the cold, in fact I like it. I went to boarding school in the mountains; in the mornings we exercised in shorts. God, it was cold, but I liked it.”

No one said anything. Behind me, the man was writing away, his pen making a scratch scratch sound. The driver changed gears noisily, jamming the gear shift into my knee even harder.

“You’ll like the station too. We’ll give you food and clothes and take you home later,” the policeman said, laughing. “Isn’t that right, sir?”

The man in the back didn’t reply, but his pen went on scratching.

Food and clothes sounded good to me, so I gave in. We drove to the police station and came to a jerky halt under the porch. There was bougainvillea growing up the side of it and over the top, a riot of purple and white like a fancy lady’s hat. I studied the building critically while the fat guy went around the back and opened the door for his superior. It was a nice piece of colonial architecture. Two women in khaki saris came outside and, seeing me, covered their eyes, giggled, and ran back in. Suddenly I longed for a really stiff drink.

The driver came out with a filthy old blanket which he threw to me. “Cover yourself,” he said roughly.

“I thought you couldn’t speak,” I said, grabbing it. Then I added, “Hey, this is filthy, give me something else. I could get leprosy or something from this.”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” he replied.

I was taken into a reception area where a rather bored policeman fingerprinted me.

“Why are you fingerprinting me? I’m not a criminal. The criminal is out there somewhere, wearing my clothes. I’m a victim,” I protested.

“We fingerprint everyone,” the man across the desk replied laconically.

The fat policeman who’d brought me in said, “He’s dangerous, this one. Got a big mouth. The boss wants him kept carefully. He’s probably a Muslim terrorist.”

I was led down a corridor, my hands handcuffed behind my back, then down some stairs into another dark, featureless corridor that smelled of toilet. We came to a cell and the policeman fished out his keys and threw me in. The blanket slipped off my shoulders and I was naked again. There was no one else in the cell — I was alone.

I don’t how time passed. When someone eventually came, I had lost all track of it. Time and clothes. The two were closely related in this case. The brother who had stolen my clothes had stolen my watch as well, the bastard. It was a Seiko. A final gift from my wife.

The interrogation began. I was tied to a rope, which was tied to a loop in the ceiling that must have once held a fan. They beat me with their belts.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“I already told you! It’s in your register!” I shouted.

“Are you a terrorist?”

“You crazy? I’m a businessman, a CEO. You’re making a big mistake. I came willingly, I’m a victim. You’ll pay for this.” Already I felt less certain. No clothes, no watch, no wallet. Even I didn’t believe myself.

The beating went on for a while. I stopped speaking. They quit when they grew tired. Beating someone is an exhausting job, like manual labor, I guess. And none of them were in good shape.

One peed into a bucket of filthy water and the other threw it over me. They left.

I shivered in the dark and began to sneeze.

Much later I was fed some stale chapattis and a bowl of watery daal. Then I was given a pail and a filthy rag and told to clean the cell. After the cell, they made me clean the toilets.

I’d never cleaned a toilet in my life, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. But they didn’t care. The idea that they’d made me, a Brahman, clean their toilet was what really pleased them. No one really cared if their toilets were dirty, they just wanted to see me, a “sahib,” cleaning them. It proved what I had always believed, that India is a country of ideas, not actions.

As I was working on the last one, there was a commotion outside — sirens, lights, agitated footsteps. “Sonia Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi,” someone called. The place emptied. The man who was supposed to be guarding me ran too. I followed him, not wanting to be alone with the rats, and arrived at the front door just in time to see a convoy of Maruti jeeps racing away from the station. I simply walked out after them. No one stopped me. It wasn’t even dark.

On the street, the cars were still packed like sardines. I dodged between them, not giving them a second glance, until I came to the red light under the flyover where the policemen had picked me up that morning. I saw a bus in front of me and leapt inside.

At first no one reacted. The people in the last seats in back looked at me in surprise when I got in, then quickly turned away, confirming my belief that naked, I was not impressive. But there were too many of them to be scared. I was simply not their problem, I was the ticket collector or conductor’s problem. They stared stonily in front of them just like the drivers of the cars had.

The bus was fairly crowded. Not packed like the Delhi Transport Corporation buses, but profitably full, like the privately owned bus lines always managed to be. The aisles held a decent number of standing passengers, the conductor somewhere in the middle. The moment he saw me he came charging toward me with all the aggression of a raging bull.

“Get out of the bus,” he said without preamble.

I ignored him, staring longingly at his jacket, a cheap Chinese windbreaker with London Fogg written in red.

“I said I want you off the bus,” he repeated, puzzlement creeping into his eyes.

“Why? Can’t you at least let me stand on the step? I’ve been robbed, my clothes have been stolen. I need to get home. I’ll get off soon.” My voice came out all thin and whiny. Not at all like my usual confident foghorn.

“I don’t care. You just get off the bus or I’ll throw you off,” the conductor said loudly. Other passengers turned around to look.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Letting innocent ladies see you like this,” an older man, a government clerk — type, told me.

“I am, I am. Give me your clothes then, I’m sure you have more,” I replied.

A murmur of disapproval passed through the crowd.

“Hey, hey. Just joking. I’m getting off at the next stop, promise,” I said placatingly.

Hearing this, the conductor leaned out a window and banged hard on the side of the bus. But the driver didn’t react. He’d just built up a head of speed which he wasn’t going to lose till the next scheduled stop.

Now it was my turn to smile and the bus conductor’s to feel stupid.

“Have you no shame? Get off this bus now,” he ordered.

“But how can I? The bus is moving. Have you no pity?”

“Pity-shitty chodo, that’s not my problem. You cannot be in this bus without a ticket, that is all.”

We’d just passed the Lodhi Road Crematorium at this point, and I was hanging onto the railing on the top step when the bus came to a crashing halt, squealing brakes and all. We peered out of the windows to see what had happened, expecting to see a dead man.

And that is exactly what we saw — but not quite as freshly dead as we expected.

A dead man was crossing the street along with an enormous cortege of the living, that’s why the driver had been forced to stop. Inside the bus, everyone’s lips began to move in prayer and fingers clutched at lucky charms hidden under shirts and sari blouses.

I had an idea. The dead were generous people. They didn’t need their clothes.

The bus began to move slowly. I didn’t wait. I leapt off it and joined the marchers. They pretended not to notice me, or perhaps they were so lost in their grief that they really didn’t care about the naked man in their midst. Or perhaps death made them look at such things in a more tolerant, philosophical light.

As soon as I was through the gates, I was quite literally pushed aside by an even larger mass of mourners who had obviously been waiting for the deceased. Must have been an important man, I thought. But he was dead now. Luckily for me, he wasn’t getting an electric cremation, for then I would have lost the clothes. Instead he was being given the full treatment, with priests and incense and oil and wood. I climbed a nearby tree and watched.

Beneath me, the cremation ground was a sea of white. The man’s family, who’d been standing at the entrance greeting everyone, arrived — two sons in their forties, and a sister or wife who took one look at the body on its bed of wood and fainted.

The sea of white parted as the woman was carried away. The pundits began to mumble and the sons, their flabby bodies pale in the smoggy light, began to throw ghee on the pyre. The smell made me hungry and sick at the same time and I wished they’d hurry up. I watched the cloth anxiously. If my calculations were right, while the top cloth would be a goner, the sheet on which the body lay would be all right.

The flames rose high. It struck me suddenly that the dead man and I were similar. We had both been robbed of our clothes while we were defenseless and dreaming. I wondered what would happen if the man came alive after the crowds had left and found his body half-burnt and naked. Would he lie back down and ask for more wood and oil, or would he demand some clothes? I knew what I would do. I would demand clothes and go a.s.a.p. to find my son.

But the man didn’t move a muscle. The smoke thickened and grew bitter and people began to drift away. The pundits finished their work and the family moved to the entrance to say goodbye to the guests. Soon there was only an attendant left, a grizzled old man with coal-black skin who was no doubt paid by the family to make sure the body burnt till the end. Bones, I vaguely remembered, took a long time and a lot of oil and wood. The body would take four or five hours, and then the family would return for a box of ashes that they’d carry to the polluted Yamuna, where they would pay more money for more prayers.

Up in the tree, I shifted uncomfortably, the bark rough against my skin, the mango leaves filled with dust and diesel exhaust, praying that the old watchman would leave to take a pee or have a smoke. But to my surprise, he didn’t. He remained where he was, morosely watching the pyre, the white hairs on his beard and head getting picked out by the flames.

The fire burnt well. The ghee, it seemed, had not been adulterated. I heard the bones crack and a new, truly awful smell filled the air. I began to cough and the old man looked up in surprise. But the leaves of the tree must have been dense and plentiful or his eyes were weak, because he didn’t spot me. I decided to abandon my post and rescue my sheet straight away. What if there were secret caches of oil in the wood that were even now destroying it?

I got down on the ground and armed myself with a piece of wood from the pyre. Then I crept around the old man and hit him on the back of his head. He turned just as I swung, perhaps his hearing was especially sharp or else it was pure coincidence, and the branch smashed into his face, breaking his nose. He let out a cry and then fell slowly, like in a movie. I dropped the branch and dashed around to the other side of the pyre, scrambling up the unburnt logs even though the heat was something terrible.

Through the smoke and my tears I saw the edge of a sheet gleaming whitely just above my left hand. One more foothold, and I had the sheet grasped firmly and pulled.

I hadn’t thought it out at all though. I could have saved myself the trouble by simply stealing the clothes of the unconscious guard. Instead I burnt my hands and feet and almost got myself killed. When I used a burning branch to free the sheet, the body came along with it. We both tumbled to the ground, the body’s half-burnt face on top of me. I don’t know how but his eyes were open and staring into mine expressionlessly.

I threw the body off me — it was unbelievably heavy — and grabbed the sheet on which it had lain. The sheet still smelled sweet like rose water, and I wrapped it around my waist like a lungi, taking care to conceal the burnt bits. Then I ran, I ran as fast as I could out of that place of death.

I made it to the Lodhi Hotel compound on the other side of the road. Of course, there was no Lodhi Hotel left. It had been bought and torn down, Russian kitsch to be replaced by modern kitsch. Back in the old days the hotel had belonged to the government and was filled with pretty Russian hookers. I had liked it then — the idea of a government building filled with hookers always managed to stir my desire. Now it was a construction site.

At first no one bothered me. I wandered amongst the screens and piles of rubble, drinking in the sweet music of many chisels hitting stone. Then I heard a voice behind me. “Hey, what do you want? This is private property,” it barked. I ignored the bark. That’s what you do, ignore dogs that bark. I had a lot of experience with dogs.

The music of the chisels stopped. Everyone was looking at me.

“This is no dharamshala, this is a hotel. You will get no money or food here. Get going!” the guard shouted, banging his stick. I noticed that his uniform was black and red and he looked out of place in that world of sandstone and cool white marble.

“You get going,” I said calmly, “you don’t belong here.”

The man raised his stick and would have struck me but I was saved by the appearance of a pretty blond creature in a kurta and hippie skirt. “Stop, stop!” she called.

The guard immediately became deferential.

“What does this man want?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know, madam,” he replied dubiously. “But don’t worry, I’ll chase him away. He’s probably a thief.”

“I am no thief.” I said scornfully, “I was just looking.”

She turned to me, and to my surprise she actually looked at my body and my face. And I felt them respond to her.

“Work, I want work,” I said in English.

She seemed taken aback. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. She was no fool. She had seen the junkies in the park by the Nizamuddin Bridge underpass. She looked at my lungi. “But you have no clothes,” she muttered.

“They were stolen,” I replied.

She peered at me sharply, suspicion hardening into conviction. “Then go get some,” she said coldly, “and we’ll consider you.” The wall that all white women had inside them had gone up. It felt harder than stone.

The guard wasn’t following any of this, but he understood, like all good guard dogs did, her change of tone. Grabbing me by the shoulder, he hustled me out. At the gate, maybe because he had a sense of humor or else because he was genuinely sorry for me, he picked up a sheet of pink plastic and handed it to me. “Here, you can make this into a shirt,” he said.

I clutched the plastic to my chest, tears blurring my vision. Once outside, I found I was right by ground zero, the place it had all begun. But this time I decided not to go back into the park. Instead I walked along Lodhi Road, past the church, past HUDCO where Sharmila sat each day on the twelfth floor, giving misguided middle-class couples extremely expensive housing loans, past the gas pump that sold Norwegian smoked salmon and pork chops, past the Islamic cultural center and the Ramakrishna Mission, past Tibet House and the Habitat Center — all the landmarks of Delhi’s cultural life.

I came at last to Lodhi Gardens. The sun was almost gone but inside the gardens the privileged continued their leisurely parade — ayahs with children, bored overweight mothers, joggers, sedate couples, bureaucrats, cell phone — wielding politicians, upwardly mobile businessmen. No one gave me a second glance as I slipped into the garden. They were all too interested in watching each other. The ministers and bureaucrats pretended not to see anyone. The others watched the ministers and bureaucrats. I walked amongst them till I came to a hexagonal tomb encircled by palm trees and slipped inside. There I would wait for darkness to fall, thinking about my old life and what a sad mess I’d made of it. Footsteps interrupted my thoughts. Voices, giggles.

I looked around desperately for somewhere to hide

The only place I could see was between the two tombstones in the middle of the room. I had barely squeezed myself in there when the lovers arrived. She had a terrible shrill sort of giggle which was nasal and unmusical. His voice was okay.

“Ao na,” he was saying.

Giggle, giggle. “Na, na.”

“Ao na.”

“Na, na.”

“What are you scared of? Do you think your mother will jump out from behind a pillar?”

Giggle, giggle again. “Na, na darling. I was just—” She stopped.

“Just what?”

“Thinking.”

“Let me do the thinking for both of us, okay?”

“Okay, darling.”

Naturally, thinking is the last thing a man does when he is with a woman he desires. Women are different. They can think anytime because nothing rears up between their legs to block the forward march of their brains.

Footsteps. Giggle, giggle, silence. I raised my head carefully. Long hair, plastic heels, socks with sandals. A silly pink woolen hat with bunny rabbits and a pom-pom dangling from the top. Take it off, I begged the man silently, she’ll be much prettier without it. And sure enough, as I watched, the man lifted his hand and swept the hat off. But that was only the beginning. Before my astonished eyes, the coat came off too, and the shoes. And then the rest. When they were down to their underwear, the clothes in a heap beneath them, the woman made a feeble protest which was just as soon disregarded. Then I was watching the man’s naked butt go up and down, up and down, between her naked knees, and I swear to you they both seemed far more naked with their underwear around their ankles than I had seemed with nothing on.

Afterwards, she cried a little and he held her in his arms looking bored. Then, while she finished dressing, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Night fell and the tomb went silent. Just as I was about to get up and go look for food, another couple arrived. They were quicker than the first, more experienced. They didn’t even bother to take off their clothes. After they left another pair entered. This time they were both men. I didn’t look. When they were finished, I dashed to one of the open arches and leapt out. All that copulation was beginning to stress me out.

Now, a different Lodhi Gardens met my eyes. Gone were the self-important bureaucrats, the children, the ayahs, the sedate lovers, the exercise freaks, and the tourists. In their place, under each halogen lamp, there stood a couple in a perfect Khajuraho pose.

Soon I began to feel really cold and a little uneasy. There were only men left, many of them alone, and they seemed to know I was wearing nothing underneath. One approached, expensively dressed.

I had an idea and let him follow me into the Mughal sentry tower beside the rose garden. When he arrived, I told him abruptly to take off his clothes. “How much?” he asked first.

“Free if you take off all your clothes first,” I replied.

“You want to see my jewels then?” he asked.

I didn’t know what he meant, so I nodded.

He began to take off his clothes.

I didn’t move a muscle until they were in a pile on the floor and he was naked before me. Then I took off my dead man’s sheet, threw it over his head, kicked him in the groin a few times, and stole his clothes.

Decently clothed once more, I said goodbye to my days of consulting and ventured into the hospitality industry. Lodhi Gardens’ lovers paid me to ensure an uninterrupted session in a tomb. I provided a bed, water, and talcum powder for after, and I even charged those who were waiting to watch.

After all, they were one big family of lovers, weren’t they? And watching others gave them ideas. So everyone was happy.

As for me, I invested in the stock market, stopped taking drugs, and grew rich. My son and wife eventually moved back in with me and we all lived happily ever after in a brand-new flat on the right side of the Yamuna.

And every once in a while, when I find myself on the Japanese Bridge to NOIDA, I think about the man whose clothes I stole. And I wonder whether he ever realized the gift I’d given him or whether he simply wrapped the dead man’s sheet around him, crawled back into his car, and drove home to his empty life.

Last in, first out by Irwin Allan Sealy

Delhi Ridge

A wise man would have gone home when he heard the tube light smash, but my wife calls me an unwise man and I must be, since I smoke as well as drive an autorickshaw on Delhi roads, and I butted in.

For that matter, a wise man would have finished his BCom and gone into marketing, but I thought: No office for me, no boss for Baba Ganoush. And this looked like the life back then, not that I’m saying it isn’t still, some days, maybe even many days. But autorickshawry has its own traps and it’s always tempting to get that last fare, just one more, and that’s the one that takes you out of your way — when it doesn’t land you in trouble.

God knows there’s trouble enough by day on Delhi roads. And three wheels aren’t the steadiest undercarriage when the going gets rough. Better than two is all you can say, and probably not all the time either. You see some sights on the road that you’d like to forget, and when it comes to the crunch, the guy with the least steel is the loser. I’ve seen some two-wheeler accidents where the helmet didn’t help much more than the severed head. Bastard Blue Line buses! people screech, me too, but might is right in the jungle.

Keep well in, I tell my passengers, and they do. (As if it would make a whole lot of difference when the bus rams you.) But a wraparound shield is better than nothing — even if the dents are starting to join up on my Bhavra. The Bee is what I named her in the good old black-and-yellow days before this greenie shift.

You could say I own the buzzer. I’ve paid back most of the deposit on her to the Punjab National Bank, and I can usually go home by 9, maybe 10. Mornings I start early with schoolkids, twelve monsters packed in with a little removable wooden bench, schoolbags outside. And I don’t always work late. I’ve saved a bit of money in term deposits at the PNB. If I overdraw on the current account, they automatically take it out of the next deposit: last in, first out.

Most days I wear a clean white polyester safari to work. Impractical, I know, and the wife never fails to remind me, though secretly she likes me in it. No pen in my pocket, no comb either. Good Agra sandals, size eleven, and I don’t tuck one foot under me as I drive. It’s hard enough having to double over just to get into the driver’s seat. No holy pictures along the top of the windscreen, just the Shah Rukh poster at the back on the one side and Deepika on the other. I have noticed men sit right up against my life-size Deepika, the shot in the black negligee that got everyone going. Women cozy up to the King.

Anyway, this night I was cruising along the busy Mall Road in Civil Lines looking for a last fare when something about the peace of University Road pulled me in toward the Ridge. I left the rat race behind and sailed along past those sedate college gates in top gear, engine purring. All the walls have gotten higher since I was a student — maybe that’s saying something, if only that I haven’t gotten any shorter. I switched off the stereo.

I was one of the first to install a system back in the twentieth century when the vehicle was new. There was always a Sufifat-boy tape rolling to drown out the noise of the day. Nights nowadays you want to listen to the silence, when you can.

Directly opposite the main gate of Delhi University, where the road goes straight up to Flagstaff House, the hill stretch has been closed to traffic and an autorickshaw stand has sprung up at the barrier. A handful of peanut vendors and ice-cream carts congregate there during the day. At night, of course, it’s deserted, and so it was this night, but sometimes you can pick up a late fare. I did a U-turn and drew up beside the gate. Ten or fifteen minutes under the entrance lights might be well spent, I thought. People don’t like to walk along the Ridge.

The Delhi Ridge is a wilderness of rocks and thorn trees, nature’s last stand in this gray city, the nearest thing we have to a forest. A hundred years ago they planted this barren upland with a Mexican tree that ran amok. Up along the crest are paved paths the municipality has laid in an attempt to tame the manmade jungle. Monkeys use the watershed as a safe base for raids down either side; peacocks honk at first light and then retire, leaving the field to a treepie with a harsh call — half heckle, half jeer. Morning walkers do their laughter therapy up there, and power joggers go by in pairs, tugging at the elastic bands of their tracksuit cuffs to consult expensive watches. But a careless jogger could ruin a pair of Nikes on the broken glass of last night’s rumfest, if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, say he was working late, there’s a higher price he could pay among the syringes and condoms and gutka sachets that lie strewn in the red-brick dust. Even by day you’d jump if someone came up behind you on those paths. You don’t go there after dark unless you have a minder. Or unless you are the minder.

Of course, lovers go there because there’s nowhere else to go. Students mostly, from the DU campus. There are park benches where they can sit and make out by day. I used to go up the Ridge during my spell as a student, before the old man realized I was getting ideas and married me off. In the early days the wife and I took the boys there for a joyride once or twice, before they grew embarrassed about an outing on the workhorse. We’d sit and watch the monkeys by Flagstaff House. In winter they sun themselves and pick one another’s fleas. A big male will turn up and simply roll over in front of a lesser creature, and the chosen one will leave whatever it was he was doing. I tend to believe in the chosen.

The newest tribe are the gardeners who arrived when Nehru Park was created. But joggers and gardeners and canoodlers and watchers tend to move on once the sun sets. Everyone does except for the diehards, or those who blithely believe a special dispensation hangs over them like a royal parasol. And who knows, maybe they’re mostly right.

They can be wrong. Every once in a while you read in the paper about a rape on the Ridge. I used to pay special attention to these snippets, partly because of my old association with the university.

That evening, I was parked outside the gates and starting to look at my watch when I heard the tube light smash. Few night sounds are more chilling, none more deliberate. After all, a tube light is something we carry with special care when we must, upright beside us. As if it were the body’s ideal twin, smooth and colorless and fragile. It breaks in a shivering white cascade with the sound of heaven collapsing. If spirit had substance it would shatter like this, something between a gasp and a cry. And that’s how it sounded, scary but somehow, how to put it, binding.

I sat up in my seat and looked at the Ridge, studying the darkness. Curiosity, of course, but partly the witching of that weird sound. In a minute I thought I heard a sort of cry, an earthly pain. I didn’t stop to think. I started up the auto and zipped across the road, made an S around the double barrier, and headed uphill in the direction of the noise.

Next thing I heard was running feet, the stamp-stamp-stamp of cheap shoe leather. I pulled over and keyed off and waited. It was a young man and he ran straight into me. It wasn’t that my dim headlight was switched off, just that he was running downhill and used the machine as a brake. He slammed into the windshield and stood there bent over and winded. Even by the faint light of my beam I could see he was bleeding. His face was cut up and he looked frightened. So frightened he’d lost his voice and could only point back up the road the way he’d come.

In the background I could see Flagstaff House like a stage set, a black cutout of a tower against the gray of the November sky.

“Get in,” I called, and shoved him into the passenger seat, “and hang on!”

I turned the auto around on a five-rupee coin and was about to get the hell out of there, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and found his voice.

“She’s still there!”

So he wasn’t alone. I armlocked the handlebar till we were facing uphill again and began the slow climb in the old machine. Come on, Bee! Even to me, the journey seemed to last forever.

At the top of the rise the boy jumped from the auto and ran a short way toward the tower calling the girl’s name, but his wild turns of the head said she was not where he’d left her. I looped the tower in the machine, leaning on the horn and shouting words of support and threat into the dark. It must have been the purest gibberish, and a greater silence was the only reply.

“Get back in!” I called, and the boy obeyed but hung out of the auto scanning the side of the road. I’ve made a career of watching people’s faces in the rearview mirror and his was intent, as if unaware of the volume of blood trickling down his forehead. The pain wouldn’t have hit him yet. He seemed to be reading the night, willing it to disclose his harmed lover.

And then she appeared, or a figure appeared that the boy recognized, because he hopped out again and ran toward the brush. She was walking very slowly, smoothing down her kameez over and over again. The dupatta, if she wore one, was gone. The boy took her hand and led her tenderly toward the auto.

I took them straight downhill, jinked back around the traffic barrier, and turned left onto University Road. It was a clear run to the next corner where the road climbs back over the hill to the Hindu Rao Hospital. But a 212 bus coming the opposite way strayed across the white line and broke our momentum. “Blue Line bastards!” I shouted, but we’d lost it and had to toil the rest of the way up to the crest. Then we raced down the other side of the Ridge and into the hospital gates.

Well, that’s it, I thought as I headed home; you don’t see people twice in the big city. But of course you do, maybe just the ones you think you won’t. I told you I read people’s faces in the mirror and it’s true you can tell straight off the talkers, the tippers, the nasties, the hunted, the doomed. I had watched the girl in the mirror whenever a car came the other way and I guessed she wouldn’t report the crime. She still had her silver chain, a necklace of eyelets each with its little silver tear. The pain had finally struck the boy, and last I saw them she was leading.

The next day and the next day and the next I looked in the papers, but there was no report. Ah well, I thought, you lose some, you lose some.

Then there was a story: a savage rape on the Ridge. But the description didn’t match and the date given was for the day before, a whole week after my little adventure. Over the next fortnight there were two more incidents; in both cases the girl’s dupatta was taken and the boy’s face messed up. The police issued descriptions of the assailants, two men in their late thirties. People were warned off the Ridge at night. An officer criticized trends in women’s garments with words I remembered from twenty years before. And the general suggestion was that these things wouldn’t happen but for the foolishness of the couples. Well, I thought, clipping out the stories, maybe all that hot young blood buzzing in the brain does make you a little careless.

Next morning I was tooling along University Road when I saw the boy. He didn’t return my look — maybe after a month he really didn’t recognize me — and ducked in at the main gate. On an impulse I parked the Bee and gave chase. It was him all right and he remembered me, but he didn’t want to be reminded of that night.

“Well,” I said, “you might want to forget it happened, but whoever did it hasn’t stopped.”

He looked genuinely surprised, like he hadn’t read the newspapers. I invited him for a coffee. In my day I used to wonder — a tea man myself — what drew people to the university coffeehouse, although the place had an undeniable glamour. I still don’t know. As we sipped the filthy stuff I took out the news clippings from my pocket and laid them on the table between us. He glanced over them with a troubled expression. The scars were healing nicely on his face; with a bit of luck they would melt into worry lines.

“Look,” he said, when he had read enough, “what’s it to you?”

My heart contracted. I hadn’t imagined he needed winning over. I’d steered clear of asking after the girl, figuring she’d slipped out of his life.

“Just tell me if you could recognize the guy again.”

“You mean the guys,” he said, stressing the plural in a defensive way.

“The guys. Have you ever seen them again?”

He searched my eyes as if looking for a handhold, then gave up. “They hang around the metro station in the mornings. The main guy is built like a bouncer. He wears the same safari suit every day.”

“What color?”

“Sort of a darkish color.”

“Black?”

“Not quite black.”

“You mean like gray?”

“No, no, darker than that.”

“Sort of a blackish gray?”

“More like a grayish black. But darker.”

“Blackish black?”

“Ya. Almost.”

I saw I was getting nowhere fast. I made a last bid. “Listen, I’ll be at the metro station in the morning. Just point him out and I’ll take it from there.”

“Take it where?” he asked despairingly, and I let the question dangle.

I didn’t really expect him to be there the next day but he turned up.

“The safari wala’s not here,” he said, “but the other guy is. By the sweet potato vendor, pink shirt.”

He pointed toward the granite steps where the metro terrace descends to street level. A small sleek mongoose of a man in a red cotton overshirt was stabbing at a leaf plate with a toothpick while sweeping the concourse with his eyes. I dropped my gaze as the little pointed head swiveled toward us. When I looked up it had darted away. His bottle-brown hair was topped by a blue-and-white baseball cap worn the right way so the brim hooded his eyes. Fake Diesel pants with faded chaps were standard, I assumed, but the bulge in the back pocket could have been either a cell phone or a knife. I had never seen a man wear three shirts before, four if you counted the tee. True, it was winter and the outermost, a florist’s dream of canna lilies, was zippered.

I was already moving toward him through the horde of students. I must confess I didn’t stop to thank the boy, nor did he seem keen to stick around. I’m not a big sweet-potato fan myself but the other item on the menu was a salad of yellow star fruit, sour to frizzling insanity, and I stood six inches from the sidey and ate it without turning a hair. Right then a Mallika bombshell went by and I groaned and staggered theatrically and caught Sidey’s eye. He winked at me and grinned and I left it at that.

It wasn’t till the next day that I saw the bouncer. I arrived there early and had to wait. I’d dropped off the schoolies and gotten rid of the little bench so I sat in the back of the Bee in the Deepika corner and smoked. Tobacco first, then a sweet cigarette. Back in the ’90s I’d taken to sucking on them whenever I felt tempted and now I had two habits (three if you count stopping by the flat to trouble the wife when a fare brought me within stroking distance). Same red-and-white Phantom pack from childhood, little smooth white sugar sticks with a red dot on the end. Some days if you suck hard enough the red dot actually glows.

A cobra — that was my first thought when the villain appeared. I swear I expected all the cool university chicks to go into a frenzy of squawking the way forest birds do when a snake appears. But they stalked on by in their hiphug Pepe jeans with their video cell phones gripped tighter than their textbooks, and the cobra watched them pass with a bland insouciance only Sidey, stationed at the sweet potato stand, could rightly read.

He wasn’t in a safari suit (I felt a little vindicated in mine) but in white drill pants pressed to a knife’s edge, elastic boots, and a black balloon jacket that gave him a slightly unmoored look. Or maybe that was his natural walk, weaving a little, like a wrestler, not a drunk. Sidey fell into step beside him and the two of them walked up University Road without bothering to take in the scenery. I had expected to watch them ogling, but instead I found myself tailing them in the Bee, hanging a good way back. What surprised me more than their disinterest in the girls was Sidey’s face. You expect a planet to light up when the sun appears, but Sidey’s face fell into a total eclipse. His eyes took a haunted half-shadow and even the cap looked crestfallen.

I parked the Bee at the Flagstaff Road barrier, told the ice-cream wala the wife needed a branch of babul leaves, and trailed them uphill. At the top they took Magazine Road and I waited at Flagstaff House pretending to watch the monkeys. The road, once simply a path, follows the crest of the Ridge through the man-made jungle, low dusty thorn trees with twisted gray trunks and a canopy like mustard gas. On either side, beyond the park benches and half hidden by the brush, are power substations and water tanks and gardeners’ tool-sheds like bunkers. Also ruins from Muslim times, tombs and such. Built with a prospect on what would have been a barren ridge, they now huddle blindly in the jungle, peculiarly functionless unless to conceal a walker caught short by nature. Turds and worse await the unwary foot.

Cobra and Mongoose sat down on a bench and looked about them. A gardener had set a hose with a ratchet spring to green the grass by the caged bougainvillea and was standing back to inspect the spray as it ticked around in a wide circle. Satisfied, he drifted off to join his fellow workers for a smoke by the garden gate at the far end of the park. Cobra and Mongoose watched him go, then idly observed the itinerant spray. Idly I imagined the eye of the hose coming around to fix them with a stare. Stray walkers came and went along the long park road; a couple sitting on a nearby bench rose and made for the far gate where the 212 goes by.

When the coast was clear Cobra got up and vanished into the forest, Mongoose trailing after. I stayed put. I knew there was no way out of the park except at the far end or back in my direction. They were gone ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I was getting restless when they reappeared and took the road to the far gate, strolling side by side as before.

I went to their bench and sat a moment to see what they saw. Rising out of the bushes opposite was one of those curly-wurly ocher buildings from Mughal days, a hunting lodge maybe. I sauntered into the forest and entered the ruin from behind to find two rooms; the roof of one had fallen in and the floor was grassed over. In the inner room hung a musky odor that told its own tale. A stair led up from the outer room but the way up was barred by an iron door; a heavy padlock hung from the hasp. I picked up the biggest stone I could find, lifted it with both hands, and brought it crashing down on the lock. The lock gave and hung there broken jawed; I unhooked it and threw it into the bushes downhill. (Any crook can remove a government padlock and replace it with his own, a nice rusty old job, and people will walk on by thinking: official.) Upstairs I found an empty chamber with a pillared balcony: nothing but fallen birds’ nests on the floor. On the way back down I noticed a loose slab at the landing and lifted it. Underneath lay a yellow cement sack neatly folded in half. I took it back into the chamber and looked inside. There were four lengths of fabric in there, three colored and one white. They were not new but clean, some printed, one embroidered; together they seemed a strange valueless hoard. It was only when I unfolded one that I realized what it was: a woman’s dupatta.

I went straight back down to the Bee.

“Wife’s going to be angry,” the ice-cream wala forecast.

“What?” As I drove off I realized he meant I’d forgotten the babul leaves.

I headed over the hill past the Hindu Rao Hospital along the 212 route, cursing the Blue Liners as I flew; sharing the same prey, buses and autos are natural enemies. I hung a left at the chaiwala by the cell phone tower, then hard left again, and cut the engine, rolling to a halt right where the silk cotton tree that overhangs our whole neighborhood is anchored. Just short of home.

I hadn’t come to trouble the wife. I was there to call on a man dead five hundred years.

He stood nine feet tall, my ancestor, going by the grave. Called the Grave of the Nine-Foot Saint, always freshly painted green, it sticks out two feet into the main road, the remaining seven closing off the sidewalk. Huge blood-orange flowers flop down on it in summer, followed by a delicate rain of cotton that whitens the precinct like snow. It’s an island of peace for a military man.

He was a military baba, my ancestor, the man whose name I bear. Baba Ganoush. Baba G., my wife calls me for short, or just Baba, though I don’t really qualify. Babas were either plain holy or soldierly holy, and I’m neither. My military baba had no secret weapon: He was the weapon. He moved the army. He had a retinue of 786. Baskets of purple eggplants and potted marigolds moved before him in the field; caged songbirds and urns of rose water came behind. The night before a pitched battle, his linked light-boys dressed up as houris and oiled their bodies and did calisthenics for the host. Before the phalanx of warriors he drew a box in the dust with his ring finger and danced a victory dance that spun every watching soldier into heaven.

I stood by the grave and felt my shirttail begin to lift and billow. His spirit clad me, sliding over my skin like a lover’s hand. The air grew red and I was racked with pain and filled with heretical notions. Blood is our element, I remember thinking, not water. We swim in it from one life to the next, passing like a wet flame from wick to wick. So little to the body, I was thinking the other day while I bathed, the soaping is so quickly done, so little to do.

Go! I heard my Baba say. Fight, with love in your heart.

I went to a hardware store and bought a quarter-inch brush, a small tin of enamel blue, a cheap screwdriver, and a key ring with a red disc; on the sidewalk I bought a secondhand padlock. Then I went home and parked the Bee and kissed my wife. Not now, I said, detaching myself when she sent the boys out to play. I opened the paint can and outlined eggplants and marigolds on the nose of the Bee and rose water urns and caged bulbuls on her tail. The paint was still wet as I rode over the hill again and padlocked the iron door in the curly-wurly ruin.

Next day I tailed the pair again. They did a repeat of the hill walk and parted at the gate on the 212 route, Sidey looking more depressed than ever. I tailed him home to a Maurice Nagar flat and made some inquiries with neighbors.

The morning after I was at the DU metro station early. This time I braved the sweet potato but asked for an extra squeeze of lime.

Mongoose turned up in his floral jacket and ordered the same. We exchanged a wink when a Bips lookalike passed by on gel-pen refill heels. I chucked my leaf plate and ordered another.

“And one for my friend here!” I said.

“No, no,” he protested, but only formally. He was already chucking his leaf.

“Something else, these babes, no?” I said, strolling him gently away. He was walking before he knew it.

We drifted up University Road toward the gates. He seemed happy to get away from the metro, but kept looking back all the same.

“So, Mr. Raju,” I began.

Mongoose stopped dead in his tracks. “How do you know me?”

“Oh,” I brushed away an airy cobweb, “we have our ways.” At the we I drew myself up to my full height, laid a long finger on my shoulder, and tapped twice where some silver might adorn my epaulettes. He remained standing so I prodded him along with little shocks of home address and house history, even a little detail about a tiny nephew who might need a polio shot. (I picked that up from two door-to-door health workers.)

“And how is the, um,” I gestured up the Ridge, “shikar these days? Happy hunting?”

His eyes bulged. Sideys break down more or less right away so I was at pains to let him know I knew he was just the accessory. “And your friend, the big gun?”

He was dumb and dry-mouthed. I walked him up the slope past the tower to the curly-wurly lodge in the forest.

“We’ve had to change the lock on your door, I’m afraid.” I produced the key ring that my older boy had painted in police blue-and-red; he had added off his own bat the sinister Delhi Police motto: With you, for You, Always. “Go on, open it.”

He undid the padlock but lacked the strength to climb the stair.

“Don’t you want to go and see?”

“I believe you.”

“All right. What can you tell us about your friend?”

Right then the cell phone rang in his cargo pants. Mongoose jumped where he stood. It was Cobra, I could tell. The timing shook me too; the sidey simply came unhinged.

“If it’s our friend,” I said, “tell him you’ll meet him tomorrow.”

He obeyed. But Cobra had other plans and after hearing him out, Mongoose hung up in an ecstasy of fear.

“What’s up?”

He looked unseeingly at me, his finger and thumb worrying a burr on the cotton jacket.

“Hey.” I frowned and slapped him.

He began to whimper, edging away from me and then back as if pushed from the other side by an unnamed force. The phone slid into his pocket and he gripped the barred door like a prisoner who doesn’t realize he’s on the outside. “He’s crazy,” he wailed. “He’s mad!”

“What’s this drama-shama?” I growled.

He slid down the door like a bad actor and squatted there with his forehead lodged between two bars.

“Hoy!” I booted him in the bum to no effect. I was aiming a harder kick when he began to speak.

“He’s going to kill somebody. And he wants me to help.”

“Kill who?”

“Somebody. Anybody. He says no more fooling around. He says next time we use the knife. He says finish off the bastards. He says they need to be taught a lesson. They keep coming here and polluting the morals of the nation. But then he himself...”

“He himself what?”

He hung his head.

“He himself what?”

“Brings me here.”

“When are you seeing him?”

“He says we’ll have a drink this evening. He says we’ll want a bit of warming up. He wants me to bring a bottle of Walker. Where am I supposed to get the money?”

I thought for a bit. “Okay, you get a bottle of Patiala whiskey and go to the rebottlers behind Kashmiri Gate. They don’t charge much. Your job is to get him drunk, okay? You don’t drink in here?... Good. Get him drunk and then walk him to Flagstaff House. I’ll be waiting there at 10 o’clock. In an autorickshaw. We’ll take him for a ride. Just get him drunk. And keep yourself sober. Do you think you can manage that?”

He seemed to come to life and we parted at the 212 bus stop.

“Ten o’clock!” I called as he climbed on his bus.

At half past 9 I was parked and waiting. I moved a couple of lovers on in a gruff policemanly voice and, as I watched them go, wondered where the knife would have gone in. Then there was nobody. I sat in the Bee and twiddled my thumbs and watched the night. The tower looked bleak and aloof, the Ridge close and unfriendly. Another feather of gray would have tipped the night sky into blackness. Brooding on my ancestor I realized that at this hour before the battle he would be drawing his mystic box in the dust and beginning his slow dance of death and transference. I simply sat and nibbled at a sugar stick. Before I knew it I had emptied the box.

At 10:10 I heard voices. They were singing but they were not houris. It was my quarry, drunk, both of them. Cobra was spitting threats at the world in between lines from an old song.

“Get in, you idiot!” I whispered to Sidey, who was busy playing the Lucknow game of After You. He obeyed and snuggled up to King Khan.

Cobra needed help and I brought myself to touch him. His balloon jacket felt dry and scaly, so I pinned him by the neck, bent him in two, and simply sprung him in. He turned to Deepika and began to slobber all over that sheer black negligee. I got in at once, started up, and took off, veering clockwise around the tower. My passengers were thrown left in a crazy centrifuge, Cobra leaning precariously out of the Bee.

“Hang on!” I yelled, and we plunged downhill, racing the way the boy had run the night of the tube light. Down below I jinked around the traffic barrier and left onto University Road. It was a repeat of the hospital ride, only this time I had the villains.

The Bee buzzed like the beauty she once was. I felt I was playing an instrument whose dark sweet drone underlaid the pair’s drunken bawling. In days past I could tell the engine’s semitones up and down the scale. I swooned to certain piston tremolos and awoke in time to pump a sweet glissando on the brake. Bee and I were partners in a dance whose music was in our blood. We moved in unison: I could trust her with any step, and she responded with an enabling precision; I could jiggle the schoolkids into giggling hysteria, sway a pouting beauty, or hit a bump at speed and bounce a snark straight up into the iron beam.

What to do? I was thinking as I sped through the dark. I had no plan. I watched the two men in my rearview mirror, but really I was looking a lot further back. Rape is a tricky business to judge. Unless you’ve felt the hot blunt thorn of it in your own flesh, your opinion isn’t worth a lot. For a moment the mirror showed me just one face in the backseat, then as the bastard split in two I knew what I would do.

At the corner where the road goes over the hill, a northbound 212 was about to take the curve onto University Road. There’s no median strip there and downhill buses always cut that corner. There’s a moment when their headlights are shining clear up the Hindu College Road when in fact the bus is heading down toward the university gates. I switched off my light and spun the Bee around in a tight U-turn. Cobra flew out into the bus’s path. Last in, first out.

I watched him go in the mirror and thought he flew a little further than I intended. Well, that’s destiny, I thought: He’s meant to lose a little less. I turned the U into an O and sped off into the night, but not before I saw the bus drive over his feet.

Enough to put him out of action, up on the Ridge anyway. Then I dropped the Mongoose home. As in dropped.

Well, that’s that, I thought. You don’t see folks again in the big city. It’s getting bigger all the time. That’s progress: fluorescent lamps replacing tube lights, four-wheelers replacing three.

But maybe a month later I did see Sidey again. I had a passenger so I couldn’t stop, but he was looking fresh and expansive on the sidewalk and he gave me a long cool wink as I went by.

It wasn’t till I arrived home that I got to thinking about it. The wife had made baba ganoush after scorching the eggplant skin on a naked flame in her painstaking way. It’s the family favorite, picked up from an aunt in the Gulf, and it usually goes down in a great hurry, no chewing, but I was about to swallow when I saw that wink again and then all I remember is the wife and boys looking strangely at me because I just kept chewing on that mouthful.

I haven’t seen Mongoose lately but I often see that shrewd little pair of eyes fixed on me. Then one of them closes in the blackest wink, and I’m left wondering: Which of us was the sidey?

Parking by Ruchir Joshi

Nizamuddin West

The cop van, slowing down on the street below, he doesn’t like, even though he doesn’t really notice at first. He’s not planning to spend long on his terrace, just enough to catch one more shot of her walking away with that young ass of hers, maybe exchange a wave as she gets into daddy car and drives off. There’s music playing behind him, on his comp, and the just-opened bottle of vodka waiting. It’s what you do after a good love session, except she’s young and doesn’t drink what he does, doesn’t listen to what he does, and on top of that, the Aunty is waiting at home, dinner ready, while the owner of daddycar is away, businessing out-of-country.

There’s all kinds in this neighborhood, the semi-rich retired, the Government Service Detritus, the bourgeois Mosey refugees who’ve been forced out from other parts of Saarey Jahan ka Kachha, the old ’47 rehvaasis refusing to die, the solid slum-class that’s accrued around the Dargah, the Sufis and qawwalis who’ve dittoed, and now the new hippies, do-gooding goras with their blond and barefoot children kicking up dust as they trail along behind their crazy rent-paying momdads.

This afternoon they’ve decided this is also where Osama’s hiding — totally best place for him, actually — and they’ve been fucking for him, doing it for O Bloody Laden, hoping he can hear them in his lonely hole, maybe even see them from one of the high mosque turrets near the tomb. It’s been good, great even, and funny too, especially when she’s shouted, “Oh, Sam, let’s do it for Osama!” and then when they’ve collapsed in a postcoital heap of sweat, laughter, and sheets. He hasn’t wanted it to end just yet, but she’s pulled the plug, both on the Most Wanted Man on Earth, and on him, suddenly the Least Wanted Man.

“Babe!” He hates that “babe,” coming from her, which is not the same as coming from the Yankietta who had a right to use it — same as we, us, have a right to use “bhenchod” and goras, like, don’t.

“Babe, you know, na, if I make it back in time for dinner then we peacefully get another whole day before Dad returns, right?”

“Right...didn’t know you were still in Class Ten, but yeah, okay, go.”

“Fuck you, uncle, I might as well be in Class Eight, okay? For you I’ll always be in Class Eight, a horny Class Eight thirteen-year-old, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ll take what you get, na?”

“Yeah. Now go.”

“And dude, I’ve been here from 1:30 to now, 7:30, which is six hours, so you’re not seriously complaining about what you get and take, ya?”

“No. Now go.” He hates the “dude” even more than the “babe.”

“I’m not complaining about this either, na? So, like no complaints and see you day after?”

“Ya, ya, ya, now GO!”

She places a goodbye tongue in his mouth, like she’s depositing cash at a government bank — rightful, superior, slightly disdainful of the clerk on the other side of the counter — and goes. Bolt door behind, turn around, and, like, beautiful choice: Go to kitchen, pour second drink vs. Go to computer and carry on hitting the downloads and get the rest of the Joy Div stuff before the broadband does its late-night slowdown.

He goes out to the terrace to get one last visual taste of her, catches her as she walks into sight under the lamppost, fixing her spaghettis, pulling uselessly on her low-low sal-war bottoms, sees her turn right into the little gali across the way where he’s told her to avoid parking, and then he sees a bloody thana Qualis, blue-light mundu spinning as it casually, absentmindedly crawls up and blocks the gali where she’s parked. The blue light goes off but neither of the two thullas sitting inside makes any move to get out.

It’s not that she can’t drive, problem is she tries to drive like she’s Schumacher’s little sister, bloody Ferrari sitting in an Indica. That’s also fine, it’s just that her slow-driving is pretty bad: the parking, the backing, the maneuvering in narrow situations — it’s the opposite of watching her on a dance floor, where she mongooses through a maze of groping hands with nothing really managing to touch her. Here she’s liable to touch everything, including the cops’ Qualis. If she had any sense she would drive the way her car’s pointing, straight into the service lane on the other side of the gali, and nose her way out from there, but she’s a headbanger and he knows she’ll reverse toward the main street and hit her horn.

Unbolt door and pull open, he’s already halfway down the stairs, tucking the hanging drawstrings back inside his shorts, when his mobile starts to sing.

“Sam? Babe, can you please come down here fast?”

“Yah, coming, what’s up?”

“Cops hassling me.”

“On my way. Be polite.”

And that’s how the scene will always play in his head: Cops sitting fat in van, him on stairs, and-but-then by the time he reaches daddycar they are on the road, in the lane, ugly eyes reaching deep into the crack of Tia’s ass as she bends into the open front passenger door, attacking the glove compartment for papers. Then one guy, the tall, tough-looking one, is standing right behind her, his eyes still searching down while the fat one flicks his glance between the papers and Tia’s deep cleavage. In his head, a shout — why are the damn things so big anyway? He’s not a tit man, he didn’t ask for them to be so big, a size or two smaller would have been just fine, caused a whole lot less trouble on these tit-obsessed streets.

Samiran will always remember this as himself being hogtied, witnessing a visual gang rape. The fat cop doesn’t even take his eyes off Tia’s stack when addressing Sam.

“Tu kaun hai? Who’re you? Where do you live?” The “tu” would be insulting if the cop had done it with some thought, but Samiran is suddenly sharply aware that for this thulla he is a default “tu,” nowhere near worthy of the effort of an “aap.” Samiran is now very conscious of his dirty T-shirt and frayed shorts, his unshaven jaw, his Tia-smelling face. There’s no point trying to tell them he does ad research for the net component of a big national weekly mag, but he tries anyway, with the succinct version. “I am from Press, mai Press ka hun.”

The words come out flat and weak, and he will remember the cop’s eyes cranking up to his face, the briefest of curiosities and the quickest of dismissals. Nizamuddin is full of high-powered media, both this side and that side of Mathura Road, and both the thullas have dealt with a few. Sam can tell they are thinking, This dirty chut is no big threat.

“Press card hai?” There’s a fat mole on the left side of the fat cop’s nose which is shining slightly with sweat as the lamp-post catches it. Sam feels like that mole is the central black hole for all the malevolence coming out of the bastard. No, he doesn’t have a press card, he’s not a journalist, and now he is very aware that he doesn’t have a magic number he can call, any contact who can disable these bastards. With fury he realizes exactly where he stands in the Delhi pecking order.

Tia, to her credit, isn’t trying to cover up one inch of her skin. She’s standing there, erect, tits jutting at one cop, butt showing the finger to the other. Before the cop realizes it, she’s taken the papers back from him and gone into attack. She uses her English, not bothering with Hindi and not bothering to modulate her fake American twang. “What’s the problem? I don’nderrstand what the prawblem is!”

The fat cop points at the problem. The problem is the guy Sam knows as “K-5,” and he’s standing there, just outside his gate, the front gate of K-5, in track pants and a long kurta, grinning like a monkey with gonorrhea, the words Got You! almost blazing in neon across his forehead, just under his backpointing baseball cap.

“Parking,” says the fat nose-mole cop, “Suspicious car parking. We have a complaint.”

“Who’s complained?” Samiran feels the blood hit his head.

“We complained!” says K-5, dripping self-righteousness. “We didn’t know who this car was. Never seen it before. Times are bad, could have been a terrorist car, how do we know!?!”

Samiran gets it like a thwack in the face. Tia always parks her car in this lane, right in front of K-5’s side entrance where there’s usually shade. They always tell her not to park there because that’s where they park their third car. And she always tells them they don’t own the lane outside their door. Once she actually told this guy to fuck off. Today is clearly revenge day, with a little help from friends in the local thana. K-5 has obviously called the cops to come and have a look, and everybody’s lucky because this is exactly when the girl’s decided to come down to her car.

Sam turns to Tia. “Listen, why don’t you move the car out to the main road? We’ll just sort this out.”

As Tia gets in and starts backing up, Sam turns to the cop. “Okay, bhaisahab? Now you know who the car belongs to and where people were visiting. Theek hai?”

“Terey kehne sey okay nahi ho jatta hai!” (“It’s not okay because you say it’s okay!”) Tall Cop is now right behind Sam, using the same “tu.”

Sam rearranges the movement on his face, trying to stuff down the anger. He wants Tia out of here and he wants to gun these scum down. On their knees, begging before his.357 Magnum, one close facial, the fat one first, so the tall guy can see what’s coming, Fat One’s brain and face splattering onto the road and into the gutter — no, actually, mostly on the tall guy’s boots, Gazpacho soup kabhi chakhaa hai, bhenchod? (Ever tasted gazpacho, sisterfucker?), and then, as the Champion Rapist of Haryana starts to shake, as he covers his head, babbling “Nahi bhaisahab, nahi huzur...” a bullet straight in the cock, and then as the hands jerk to crotch, then and only then, one slug straight between the eyes. Then, next, a long shot to bring down the cockroach-pimp K-5 as he tries to run, just enough to bring him down but not fully kill. Then, a big smile into the fucker’s face before blowing him away. Two dead cops, one squashed cockroach, somehow nobody else around for miles, and he goes up, carries on with his downloads, finishes half the bottle of vodka around a long shower with proper water pressure... and he wants Tia out of here.

Now, backed out on the main road, Tia has the same idea. Her Indica is finally pointing in the right direction. As he and the cops walk out of the gali, Sam realizes the chick’s bravado has run dry. Her face is now saying, Shit. Daddy. Daddycar. Aunt. Trouble. Big shit.

As they get close, he waves at her. “Achha, now you go!” He calls out, “I’ll take care of it.”

Him saying this overlaps exactly with her saying, “Dude! I gotta go!” and she takes off, smoothly enough, like her normal fast takeoff, no extra engine-gunning in panic, but no quarter given to the speed-breaker that sits a few yards down, and none to the two stray dogs dawdling in the middle of the road who yelp away right and left as she zips straight through them.

Telling Ajit three days later, Samiran still feels a throb of fear. “That’s when the cops got heavy. She zips off and the fat one says, ‘Who said she could go?’ Tall One says, ‘Why did you tell her to go? That’s very suspisuss!’ Fatso says, ‘You know we can take you into custody right now?’ Tough Guy says, ‘Shall we take you to the thana? Shall we check your house? Which one is your house?’... And I could see the fat bugger was, like, looking at me as a Revenue Area, but the tall one was acting like I was going to be a Recreational Area. Then, suddenly, this K-5 bastard pipes up and points up here and says, ‘That one! That’s his barsaati!’ and that was it, man. I just lost it.”

“Lost it, how? You didn’t abuse, I hope?” Ajit looks slightly worried.

“Nothing like that, I just got tough myself. Told them to stop calling me ‘tu’ and try ‘aap.’ Told them they could come and check me out anytime, said to them, police harassment big in the news so they should be careful not to be used by some malicious neighbors. Finally said you can never tell who is who in this town, and tried to look like I fucking meant it.”

“So they took your number?”

“Yeah.”

“Called what time this morning?”

“About 9:30.”

“Fat One or Tall One?”

“Fat One, I think.”

“So he’s going to drop in around 1 o’clock?”

“That’s what he said.”

“So,” Ajit looks at his watch and smiles, “lunchtime may mean he’s looking for some lunch money. Revenue Area. You said you are Press, but his SHO’s phone is still intact, two days, no call from anybody high, so he’s going to try his luck again.”

“So what do I say when he comes?”

“Nothing. You relax and enjoy.”

Chandran looks up from Sam’s computer. “Yes, man, you just relax. Let Ajit convey some pnownage.”

“Huh?” Sam is slightly confused.

“Ignore him,” Ajit says. “These bloody Southies speak in another language.”

“Some nice stuff you have here.” Chandran is completely engrossed in Sam’s iTunes library. “Can I rip this sometime?”

“Sure, take what you want.”

“Great, thanks. In fact, I have my drive with me so I’ll do it right now.” Chandran gets up and stretches. “Which was the complaint guy’s house again?”

Sam points at K-5 through the thin curtains. “The corner one. That’s the main gate, on the main road, and that’s the lane, with the side entrance, which they think they own.”

“And this... You got their right name, anh? The family’s name?”

“Yeah, think so, it’s what it says in the colony directory. Siddiqui.”

“Right, right... And next to them is who? In this one, just across the gali?”

“Flats, three different families.” Sam leafs through the directory. “Ghufran, Abbas, Khan.”

“And then this one, to our right?” Chandran is now pointing at a wall of Sam’s front room, gesturing beyond the view provided by the window.

“Kashmiris. Renting, so name not in this owners’ directory. Some big carpet business.”

“You’re in this corner house, so everyone has a nice view of your barsaati, huh?” Ajit is grinning again. “Nice, clear view of all your activities too!”

“Well,” Chandran stays serious, “nice view works both ways sometimes. Sam has a nice view of these guys too. In fact, we are higher here than most of them.”

“A bit,” agrees Sam, “but there’s nothing to see, usually.”

“Whereas you, my boy, are a one-man, live-action, neighborhood porn channel!”

“I wish. Anyway, I close my curtains.”

“But isn’t this Tia the one who makes a lot of noise? What will curtains do? That little neighbor of yours can probably hear her all the way across the road. Every time she moans he probably sizzles. You need sound padding, like they have in those posh fuckotels abroad.”

Samiran doesn’t say anything. Ajit is a friend but Chandran he’s meeting for the first time. Ajit sees this and fields.

“It’s okay, these Southies are sexless. They get their kicks from world domination.”

World domination or not, Chandran stays focused on his immediate plan. He pulls out a small external drive and plugs it into Samiran’s computer. Then he puts on the headphones. By the time the doorbell rings, he’s got all of Sam’s jazz, most of his early punk, and nearly all of his Velvet Underground bootleg tracks. As Sam goes to open the door, he can hear Chandran singing in a low voice, “Now you know you shouldn’t DO that, don’t you know you’ll stain the CARPET...”

Fat Cop and the mole on his nose are even uglier in daylight; it’s as if two malevolent creatures have come visiting, one attached to the other. The thulla doesn’t wait for Samiran to move aside, he shoulders past him as if it’s his own house and Samiran is some kind of minion who just happens to be there. Once inside, the cop looks around with interest, taking his time, checking out the narrow corridor that leads from the door to the main living area, peering at the Che Guevara poster and the small framed stills from the Apu trilogy. In the small no-man’s-land that joins the rooms, the kitchen, and the door to the terrace, the man discovers Janis Joplin, with her hands crossed over her privates but otherwise naked. The cop tries to decipher the flower-power calligraphy announcing the ancient concert but goes back to staring at Janis’s smallish tits. And then interrogating her crossed hands, trying to get her to part them.

“Mishter Chakkarvarty, you are very fond of naked women, hain?”

Samiran stays silent, wondering where Ajit’s gone. Chandran’s singing has stopped too. For all the cop can tell, the two of them are alone.

“Mishter Chakkarvarty, you have a servant-woman who comes to work for you, no? What she is thinking of this picture?”

Good point. Sam remembers the momentary awkwardness when Farida and Janis first met, the day after he put up the poster. And then Farida’s curtain of dour indifference dropping back in place; the complete absence of any emotion as she dusted over JJ’s naked hippy-waif body, the silent adding of the poster to the other bad things Farida encountered when she came in every morning, the other things she ignored, the booze bottles, the unmade bed, the girls who would sometimes be filling the bed or wandering around the barsaati, clothed, mostly, but their very presence conveying the opposite.

The thulla lets go of Janis and pushes open the terrace door with the very tips of his fingers, like not wanting to tamper too much with the scene of a crime; but his ownership air is fully in place as he walks out onto the terrace — Chakkarvarty, you have come as summoned. Now let’s talk.

“So where is that madam who was driving the car that night?” The cop’s voice is hard without any warning, even the word “madam” is like a slap. “We can either talk to her or we can talk to her father...” The cop looks down at a piece of paper in his hand. “We can talk to Mr.... Avinash Prabhu, C-343 Defence Colony.”

Samiran folds his arms, mouth still shut, wondering what Ajit is playing at. Samiran’s silence seems to send the cop into greater fury. He drops the “aap” he’s been using so far and reverts to the “tu.” “What makes you think you people can turn a decent family neighborhood into a whorehouse muhalla? Hunh?”

Samiran clenches his fists under his armpits, fighting to keep his face impassive. A pigeon comes and settles on the parapet behind the fat cop. After examining the situation, it starts a slow sentry march up and down the parapet, pecking every now and then at live goodies in the lime paint, being a total sidekick to the cop.

The policeman pulls up a cane chair and sits himself down. He takes out a little notebook and a battered rollerball from his tunic pocket. “What is the girl’s mobile number?” His voice is quiet, final, pronouncing death. “We need to talk to her.”

Samiran opens his mouth, wondering what to put through it. Ajit’s voice is suddenly very audible, speaking in oozingly respectful, clear, official Hindi.

“No sir, no, no, no need for that, not yet. No sir, please, Saikia sahab is usually very tough in these cases, sir, overtough sometimes, so why disturb him? Why bother DCP Corruption, sir, for such a small thing? It would become a policeman’s whole career at stake, sir, because of a small mistake. No, no sir, no, no, there is no demand for a bribe, just a case of... how to say it, overzealous imposition of a certain morality... and, you know, malicious neighbors with nothing better... Exactly, ji, exactly!”

Ajit has walked out onto the terrace as if there’s no one else around, his phone trapped between ear and shoulder. He ignores Samiran and the cop and goes to the parapet, making the pigeon flap away. “DCP Saikia, you know, will immediately suspect the other motive... Sir, yes sir... His new anticorruption campaign, yes sir... Well, he has just been posted from the northeast, no, sir? I don’t know if they harass girls there for wearing small-small clothes, no... Oh yes! Hahahaha! Yes, yes sir, army-paramilitary may rape women, but local police will not arrest a boy-girl for kissing! Hahaha, quite right, sir!”

Samiran sees that Ajit is using his hands to carry two glasses and a bottle of beer, all of which he gingerly manages onto the parapet. He listens intently to the other party as he pours the beer, making sure the head of foam is just right in both glasses.

“Ji, sir, Nizamuddin thana, I think... Yes sir, Wahi sahab, the officer is right here. Should I just ask him and call you back?... No?... Okay, okay, I’ll just ask him right now.”

Ajit hands a glass to Samiran and turns to the cop. His tone is politely conversational, equally for the cop and the benefit of his phonee. “Sir-ji, please, can you tell me your name?” Before the cop can answer, Ajit bends to take a look at the name tag on the cop’s left tit. He speaks into the phone: “Subinspector U.P. Singh, sir... Yes, I will just ask.” He turns back to the cop and smiles kindly. “Sir, thoda, please, aapka full name? DCP South wants to know your name.”

The fat cop is sliced into two zig-zagging parts, two halves that fit perfectly but which are barely able to cling to each other. One part of him clearly wants to snatch the phone from this new stranger and slap him unconscious; the other part seems to want to vault over the terrace wall and parachute away. Samiran imagines he can see thin seepings of blood where the blade has cleaved the man. When the voice comes out, it’s barely audible, so squeezed is it by the juice-press of rage.

Ajit straightens up and announces into the phone: “Sir, he says his name is Ujjwal Prakash Singh. Nizamuddin thana, na?” The thulla jerks out the smallest of nods. Ajit listens a beat longer, allowing the bloodlines to well up further, and then, “Okay, sir, yes sir, I will tell him.” He snaps his mobile shut and takes a deep pull on his beer.

“Nice, no? This one is much better than the usual bird-piss we get, no? Genuine German wheat beer. Deepti says her friend will be importing it now regularly.” Samiran forces himself to gulp from his own glass. Ajit turns to the cop. “Sir-ji, your mobile is on and working?”

“Yes.”

“The thana will have your number I take it?”

“It is naat so eejhhi to threaten me, my friend.” Fat Cop is now pushing out his English, trying to jump start it. “You and your friend will get into the deeper trouble.”

“Threaten, sir-ji? Threaten who? Who is threatening anybody? What are you talking about? I am just trying to bring about a friendly solution to the little problem we seem to be having.” Ajit sticks to his smoothly purring government Hindi. “Oh, sorry, we haven’t met. Ajit Karlekar, Delhi Government.” He puts his card down on the low table between them.

Fat-fuck’s phone has a ring-tone that Sam can’t quite place. His voice is cautious as he answers it; Sam can see that the guy’s hoping the whole thing’s a crazy bluff, in which case he’ll be able to tear into Ajit and him, but he can also see that the guy has a sinking feeling about the whole situation; after the first few moments on the phone, Sam can see anxiety cloud the small eyes; he can almost feel the mobile phone winch the man up from his chair, almost hear the voice that makes the man spin around and move away from them. Even from behind, Samiran is sure he can see the sweat spots enlarge, turning the khaki a darker brown under the man’s armpits; and if, maybe, he’s imagining that, he’s certainly not imagining Fat Cop’s smell, which is now sharp and impossible to escape.

Sam can’t take his eyes off the thulla but Ajit is engrossed with his mobile, sipping beer and text messaging intently. All Sam can hear from around the cop’s back and spreading ass is a binary progression of Sir-sir-sir-ji-ji-sir-ji-ji-huzoor-huzoor-ji-sir-huz... a word or syllable getting chopped off here and there as the other side cuts in. At one point, Fat Cop says a name which Sam assumes is that name of the Haryanvi rapist Tall Cop: “Sir, ASI Neb Chand, sir, yes, Neb Chand, he a good—” and then Neb Chand’s goodness is also abruptly cut off. Sam notices the sidekick pigeon is back, waddling and cooing sympathetically as the man nods into his Nokia.

The phone conversation twists Fat Cop around again, and he’s back to facing Sam and Ajit. Still listening and nodding, the man starts to give in to the September heat. His non-phone hand goes first to middle of stomach, through his shirt, right into the belly button, one scratch, two, three, then to the side of his paunch, as if drawing a median around the earth, the fingers fiddling between the liver area and the right kidney, and then, as someone on the other side ups the ante, the hand goes down to the crotch. But there Fat-fuck stops, suddenly aware that he’s being watched.

The next time Samiran sees Fat Cop, however, the man completes the gesture. He begins by fiddling with his balls and then giving them a good, full-turbo mauling. It’s late afternoon a month later and Samiran is looking down from his bedroom window, watching Fat Cop standing outside his entrance, three floors below. Fat Cop is standing there because he has been summoned by Samiran to counter a new policeman, Third Cop, who has entered the frame from outside, entered all the way from Mandawali thana across the river.

Third Cop has also come into Samiran’s life courtesy K-5. Though the pimp-rat hasn’t connected Sam to the sharp misfortunes that have befallen him and his family over the last four weeks, he has figured out that the local cops from Nizamuddin are no longer able to help; somehow or other they’ve been disabled, turned even, so that any complaint seems to almost backfire. K-pimp has therefore called upon the thulla talent from around his factory, obviously bribed them, and sent them, sent this Third Cop, after Sam. Chandran, in the meantime, has picked this up on his magical radar and given Sam an early warning, advising him to call Subinspector Singh, which Sam has promptly done.

“Sir, you know I don’t have a problem with any police, but it would be good if your colleague didn’t waste his time or mine.”

Sam has kept his voice sweet and full of request, since he now knows that this is how menace is best communicated to all but the extremely dumb. Sam has learned a lot since he and Ajit saw U.P. Singh out of his flat over a month ago. “You don’t kick a man when he’s down,” Ajit had explained after shutting the door. “You put a leash around his neck and tell him which way to crawl.”

After the phone call on the terrace, Fat Cop, Fat-fuck, SI U.P. Singh, the Tia-hassling, tit-staring thulla, had looked like he’d been sitting on a large, slow-growing cactus bush for many years. Ajit, on the other hand, had been ready with a smile and a cold Pepsi poured into a tall glass. Every time the SI tried to raise the subject, to apologize, Ajit stood at the net and volleyed it, turning the subject away to some other topic of general interest. The message was a) Sir, we are now all here in this friendly, postproblem atmosphere, why bring up what is already past? and b) You motherfucking bug on the asshole of a cockroach, you may think your humiliation is complete, but actually it’s just starting.

In the final sum total there had been both spectacular stick and some small carrot. As Delhi Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Shri Satish Wahi sahab’s secretary instructed Singh on the phone, Neb Chand, the wannabe-rapist, was to be transferred to some punishment post. But it was Singh who was to secretly sing out the damning report about Tall Cop’s harassment of innocent young women. It was also going to be part of Singh’s general duties to make sure Mr. Samiran Chakkarvarty, ace web analyst and highly connected press-person, was not hassled by anyone or anything, including nasty neighbors. In return, apropos a discussion on mobile phones, Ajit had gone into Sam’s bedroom, rummaged, and came out with a large manila envelope for Singh. He’d handed this to the cop who was stuttering out his goodbyes. “There are some phones in this magazine, sir, so please take a look. The descriptions are in Russian but model numbers are in Normal, take a look and let me know what you like. I will see what I can do when my cousin returns from Russia — phones are cheaper there than even Singapore or Hong Kong.” With which Subinspector Singh left, carrying a six-month-old Russian Playboy containing three pages of obsolete mobile phones and seven pages of evergreen Playmates of the Year.

Sam had made a small mistake as the cop was about to exit. “Zaroorat padi to mai tum ko phone karunga, thik hai?” (“I’ll call you if and when I need you, all right?”), he had said, but using the familiar “you” with relish. Fat Cop’s eyes had flared. At the same time, Sam received a small kick in the back of the shin from Ajit. It was explained to him later that the “tum” was an off-note in the complex and beautiful symphony of Ajit’s subjugation of U.P. Singh. As Chandran had then underlined, “These kinds of sodomizings are a verre delegate business, mach-aa! Best to leave it to the experts, you understand?”

Hissing cobras by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya

R.K. Puram

On a drizzly November morning, around 11:00, Inspector Raghav Bakshi parked his Gypsy under a neem tree and looked at the shit-yellow two-story government quarters surrounding a bald patch of land that was meant to be developed as a park. On Sunday mornings one could see the neighborhood kids playing cricket or badminton here, but the park was now deserted except for a couple of stringy goats grazing in a corner where there were still a few clumps of grass leftover from the previous monsoon. R.K. Puram Sector 7 was a colony for the babus who slogged from 9 to 5 in government offices, the Bhawans stretching from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhawan in Lutyens’ Delhi. The wives of these babus, having bundled off their kids to school and their husbands to office along with their lunch boxes, were now enjoying a couple hours of break from the drudgery of running their households on shoestring budgets. Later, after having their frugal lunch of roti, sabzi, and achaar, they would switch on their TVs to enjoy their favorite soaps on Star Plus, Sony, or Zee, mushy serials that glorified the virtues of joint families shepherded by benign and supportive elders.

The inspector was here, in fact, to inquire about the accidental death of one such matriarch, a sixty-five-year-old woman named Kamla Agarwal who’d presided over the measly quarters of her son and daughter-in-law. Five days ago, the old lady was “brought dead” to the emergency room of Safdarjung Hospital with multiple skull fractures. The policeman on duty had registered the case as a “death caused by a fall from the top of Malai Mandir,” an imposing south Indian temple situated on a hillock that overlooks plebeian Sector 7 on one side and swanky Vasant Vihar on the other. The very next day, after the postmortem, a no-objection certificate was issued for the cremation and the paperwork was passed on to the R.K. Puram police station. Inspector Bakshi would have treated the case as a routine one, but then came an anonymous call from a woman alleging foul play. Bakshi decided to give the Agarwals a good sniff, just in case.

The inspector rang the doorbell outside quarter no. 761 and a swarthy woman in a green-and-yellow synthetic sari opened the door. She had a gray shawl draped around her shoulders. As he announced the purpose of his visit, Bakshi noted that the buxom woman, who could have been in her late twenties, adjusted her shawl to cover her bosom. Ushered into a ten-by-ten room painted a dull shade of yellow, Bakshi took a quick inventory of its furnishings: a twenty-inch Onida TV mounted on an aluminum cabinet; a fancy wall clock embellished with a Radha-Krishna icon; a drab government calendar with too many holidays marked in red; a faded print of a nondescript landscape showing sunrise or sunset. This was a babu’s no-frills basic dwelling, he thought, and the message that it conveyed to him was: Don’t expect barfis and cashews with your tea. Amidst this tawdry bric-a-brac, the woman sitting before him on the divan looked quite glamorous.

Bakshi’s roving eyes now paused above the TV cabinet to study a framed picture of an elderly woman smiling under a pine tree on a hilly road. “Is that Kamla Agarwal?” he asked, sitting down on a lumpy sofa with frayed upholstery.

The woman nodded. “My mother-in-law. That one was taken at Katra when she made a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi last summer.”

“Hmm.” Bakshi stroked his well-trimmed mustache like a pet dog. He was pleased to note that the woman was nervously twisting a corner of her shawl. Did she have something to hide? Or was she just feeling uncomfortable in the presence of a beefy policeman when her husband wasn’t around? Bakshi opened his notebook and plucked a pen from his breast pocket. “First things first,” he said. “Your name?”

“Mukta Agarwal.”

The inspector listened to Mukta’s story while consuming a cup of tea and some namkeen. When he stepped out of quarter no. 761 half an hour later, he was inclined to believe that the deceased Kamla Agarwal was indeed just an unlucky woman who had visited Malai Mandir with her daughter-in-law to watch the evening aarti. Built entirely with blue granite stones in the hallowed traditions of Chola architecture, the temple was a south Delhi landmark that attracted thousands of devotees every day. After receiving prasadam from a priest, the two women had proceeded toward the back stairs of the temple for a quick exit. That was when Kamla slipped on a banana peel flung by a careless devotee and hurtled down ten steep steps, crushing her head on a massive boulder that awaited her like Yama, the god of death.

As Mukta narrated the incident, her face turned ashen, her eyes glistened with tears, and she finally broke down, gagging her mouth with her shawl. The woman either possessed the thespian talents of Meena Kumari or was an ordinary lachrymose housewife. Bad luck, Bakshi thought. If he could catch a whiff of foul play in her tale, he could find a way to squeeze her husband for a few thousand.

That evening, Mukta told her husband about the policeman’s visit.

“And what did he ask?” said Ashok, masticating a matthi and sipping his tea with some relish. After his back-breaking eight-hour grind as a typist in the Ministry of Rural Industry, he didn’t really want to be bothered with a detailed report of the policeman’s visit. He had been a dutiful son and had already done enough for his domineering mother, who always treated him like a child. He had bribed the morgue assistant to jump the line for a quick postmortem, lit her pyre, consigned her ashes in the holy Yamuna, and, on the chautha, the fourth day of mourning, fed seven brahmins to ensure that his mother’s soul speedily reached its heavenly abode without any interruptions from the dark creatures of the netherworld. Let his robust wife now handle this police inquiry, which, he believed, was just a routine exercise. She wasn’t a weakling, after all. Didn’t she once tell him that she had played on her school’s kaabadi team?

Still, he nodded perfunctorily when Mukta detailed the day’s proceedings. “He asked me how it happened and who saw it,” she said. “I rattled off the same story I’ve told the whole world a hundred times. He also asked for a recent picture of Mataji and one of me too.” Mukta sighed. “I’m tired of all this.”

“So am I. I wish you hadn’t taken her to that temple.”

Why blame me when it was your mother who wanted to see the evening prayer?”

“I’m not blaming you, dear,” Ashok said, trying to mollify his wife. “Look, I don’t think they’ll bother us about this again.” Like his late father Ramlal, Ashok was a quiet, peace-loving clerk who avoided trouble of any kind, so much that he wouldn’t take a crowded bus if he found the conductor badmouthing a passenger traveling on the footboard.

Less than forty-eight hours had passed since he’d met Mukta Agarwal when Raghav Bakshi received a second anonymous call from the same woman. “Have you visited quarter no. 761?” she asked, sotto voce.

“Yes, but I found nothing suspicious there.”

“So you too have been taken in by her cock-and-bull story? Slipping on the banana peel and all that bakwas.”

“Look, if you want us to dig deeper, you have to come out in the open and give us a written statement.”

“I can’t do that. But do you know about her affair with one of the neighborhood boys — a jawan?”

“I think you’re digressing,” Bakshi said, feigning disinterest. But he had already pressed a button on his telephone that would record the conversation. Mukesh the techie might even be able to trace this elusive caller.

“Tell me your name,” he said.

“Anamika.”

Bakshi was about to needle her with more questions, but Anamika — or whoever she was — had hung up. As he sat there twirling the ends of his mustache, his lips slowly spread into a smile. The information he’d just acquired could be valuable. He briefed Mukesh and then summoned Ram Bhaj, a freelance informer who was his man Friday. A three-day watch on Mukta Agarwal would be good enough to ferret out her little secrets.

Mukta knew she was under watch, but she ignored her stalker since she had other things on her mind. She felt sick one morning, vomiting twice in ten minutes. Having missed two consecutive periods, Mukta knew those passionate afternoon sessions with Rakesh had given her something more tangible than orgasmic delight. The young soldier and the distraught housewife had consummated their relationship, built clandestinely over a period of six months, during one opportune week in October. Rakesh was on leave and Kamla was away at her daughter’s place in NOIDA. What Ashok couldn’t achieve in three years, even with the help of those exotic medicines prescribed by a renowned “sexologist” of Daryaganj, Rakesh did in seven days flat. Impressed by his performance in bed and assured by his declarations of unending love, Mukta had told her new lover she wanted to divorce her husband. Rakesh promised to marry her once he was posted away from the killing fields of Kashmir.

Bakshi hadn’t been very happy with Ram Bhaj’s initial report, which contained nothing more than Mukta’s haggling with the greengrocers at Indira market and buying muffins and cheap noodles from Supreme Bakeries in Sector 8. Mukesh the techie wasn’t very helpful either. All his efforts revealed was that Anamika, literally “Lady Anonymous,” had called from a PCO in Sector 18 NOIDA.

“Dig deeper,” Bakshi hectored his minion, “or you’ll get a mighty kick on your gaand.”

The threat of an immediate sack worked wonders on Ram Bhaj. He quizzed, cajoled, and threatened the Sector 7 women into revealing Mukta’s secrets, which, he knew, would put his demanding boss in good spirits.

“Mukta has a lover called Rakesh who is a fauji,” Ram Bhaj reported to his boss.

“Good,” said Bakshi, reaching into his drawer for a sachet of paan masala. He had just returned to his seat after beating a confession out of a suspect. Punching and whipping suspects gave Inspector Bakshi the same thrill he felt when fucking a woman who wasn’t his wife.

“The lover’s parents live in quarter no. 353, directly opposite the CPWD Enquiry office,” Ram Bhaj continued. “They’d been meeting on the sly since May this year but it wasn’t until October that they actually shacked up. Rakesh had come home from Kashmir on a week’s leave and Kamla Agarwal was away at her daughter’s.”

“Great,” Bakshi grinned. This was what he called Class A material. “Who served up this chaat-masala?” he asked, just to make sure he wasn’t being fed bazaar gossip.

“Two elderly women who knew Kamla Agarwal.”

“And what did the young women say about Mukta?”

“A lotus in a dungheap.”

“Really? How fascinating! And what did they say about Kamla?”

“She was a tyrant. She treated her bahu like dirt, even worse because Mukta didn’t bring any dowry and couldn’t conceive after six months of marriage. They said Kamla made three attempts on Mukta’s life within the past year: The first time it was poison, dhatura seeds, then she tried pushing her daughter-in-law over the terrace. The last time she sprinkled kerosene on Mukta’s clothes and tried torching her.”

“Lucky woman, she’s still alive and kicking after all that! Why didn’t she run away to her parents?” asked Bakshi.

She went to her parents after the poison, Ram Bhaj explained, but they sent her back saying they already had too many mouths to feed.

“What about her husband?”

Ram Bhaj curled his thin lower lip in disdain. “He’s a weakling, a coward who slunk away to the terrace when his mother turned the heat on his wife.”

“You haven’t told me the whole story, Ram Bhaj.” Bakshi was stroking his mustache again. “Am I right?”

The lackey grinned. “Your brain works like a computer, sir. I am sure you will get the ACP’s post very soon.”

“Stop oiling my butt and spit out the gem you’re holding in your gullet.”

“He is impotent, sir,” the informer whispered.

“Who told you this?”

“Neela, Mukta’s close confidante.”

“Hmm.” Bakshi wanted to whistle, but he straightened himself up in his chair and assumed an official air to indicate that their meeting was over. “Good work, Ram Bhaj. Keep it up.”

Bakshi pondered the case before him. If Kamla’s friends knew about Mukta’s affair with the virile fauji, Kamla herself must have known what her bahu was up to while she was away. Bakshi needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that upon discovering Mukta’s adultery, Kamla must have taken her tyranny to new heights by the first week of November, around the time when she had her great fall from the temple top. Perhaps the tortured bahu had pushed the tyrannical saas down the stairs after all.

The next day, Bakshi received yet another phone call regarding the Kamla Agarwal case, but this time it was from a man. “My wife has been making some wild allegations against Mukta Agarwal on telephone,” said a phlegmy voice. “Please ignore them.”

“Identify yourself first.” The cop pressed the record button on his telephone and then looked at the crime chart on the wall. It showed that two suicides, one murder, and three burglaries had occurred that week. Not enough work for a proactive police officer like Bakshi.

“My name is Anand Bansal, I’m Ashok Agarwal’s brother-in-law.”

“Your profession?”

“I run a courier service from Atta Market, NOIDA.”

After he had collected the address and telephone number of Anand Bansal, Bakshi threatened that he’d file a case against the man’s wife for making unsubstantiated allegations against Mukta Agarwal and interfering with a police investigation. When Anand seemed sufficiently brow-beaten, Bakshi suggested they could settle the matter at 6:30 that evening — not at the police station, but in the Sector 9 park, near Sangam Cinema.

That evening, Bakshi not only collected ten thousand rupees from Anand Bansal to exonerate his wife from a police case — enough money to splurge on drinks and kebabs for a week — he also gathered a few nuggets on Mukta Agarwal that Ram Bhaj, his dogsbody, had failed to unearth. Nugget no. 1: Anand, who hailed from Meerut, was Mukta’s former lover, and it was he who had persuaded Kamla to get Ashok married to his old flame. He’d wanted to see the poor shopkeeper’s daughter happy and well-settled, but he had no idea that Ashok was a “nonfunctional male” or that his mother would be so hard on the poor girl. Nugget no. 2: Even though she’d denounced Mukta as barren, Kamla had let Anand know in a roundabout way that for the noble cause of perpetuating the Agarwal clan, she wouldn’t mind if her virile son-in-law, who had already fathered three healthy children, inseminated Mukta, as long as it remained a family secret. While Anand was willing to oblige his mother-in-law, Mukta rejected her former lover’s advances. Nugget no. 3: Savitri, Anand’s wife, hated Mukta because she knew about her husband’s premarital affair with the woman. Anand had no idea why his wife would allege foul play in her mother’s death, other than a perverse wish to see her enemy incarcerated in a dark Tihar cell.

As Bakshi’s visits to Safdarjung Hospital and Malai Mandir hadn’t unearthed any substantial evidence, he was inclined to believe that Mukta had no hand in Kamla’s death. Nonetheless, he couldn’t get his mind off the woman, particularly after the new masala that Anand had provided about her. Ah, those lucky bastards, Rakesh and Anand, he thought wistfully.

On a chilly December afternoon, Bakshi pressed the bell of quarter no. 761 for the second time. He was clutching a slim gray police file. Mukta saw him through the peephole and rearranged her shawl to cover her bosom before opening the door.

“How are you, Mrs. Agarwal?” asked Bakshi. He stepped in without waiting for an invitation.

“I am fine, inspector saab,” Mukta said, edging away from the path of the hulking policeman to avoid any accidental contact.

“You haven’t told us the truth, Mrs. Agarwal,” Bakshi said, settling down on a sofa.

“What truth are you talking about?”

“You had a very strained relationship with your mother-in-law.”

“That’s not true. We had a few saas-bahu spats in the past, but in the end we got along fine.”

Bakshi guffawed and shook a few grains of paan masala into his mouth. The tang of lime and tobacco often fired his imagination. “A mongoose waltzing with a snake, huh?” he said with a sly wink. The inspector then tensed his facial muscles to look serious and slightly intimidating. “You haven’t told me the true story, Mukta Agarwal.”

“I told you everything I saw,” Mukta maintained.

Bakshi held up his file, frowning. “Here I’ve got statements from three witnesses who saw you from the circular path that goes around the base of the temple. They identified you and your mother-in-law from the photographs.” Bakshi studied his suspect’s face to assess the effect of his words before opening his file. “Here we have Mrs. Natarajan of Saket telling us that she saw you arguing with the old lady.”

“That’s not true... We didn’t have any arguments that evening.”

“And here’s Mr. Nair, our second witness from Moti Bagh, who saw you smiling while Kamla was still tumbling down the stairs and shrieking.”

“That’s totally absurd! I’m not mad, inspector.”

“Of course you aren’t; you just couldn’t help rejoicing the death of a person you hated. You are a clever woman, Mukta Agarwal: You foiled three attempts on your life.”

Mukta gave a start at this sudden disclosure which she had thought was known only to Neela, her best friend in the neighborhood.

“I can see that slimy spy of yours has filled your ears with rumors,” she said, recovering quickly. “We have neighbors with old scores to settle with the Agarwals. Why don’t you talk with my husband about this?”

“Let’s forget the poor babu for the time being.” Bakshi flipped through his papers and then looked up as he located the next piece of incriminating evidence against Mukta. “The temple management claims they keep the stairs clean by hiring a dozen sweepers. The banana peel that Kamla slipped on has to be a figment of your imagination.”

“I haven’t invented the banana peel, inspector saab,” Mukta said. “How could the management expect to keep the staircases clean with a few sweepers when thousands of visitors are going up and down the stairs throughout the day? Many of them are from the villages and don’t even know where to throw their garbage.”

Bakshi ignored the rebuttal and looked sharply at Mukta. She no doubt had a point, but he wasn’t going to allow her to debate her innocence. “You have a motive, Mukta Agarwal. You planned to eliminate your mother-in-law because she would not tolerate her bahu having an affair with a neighborhood boy and bringing shame to the family. Well, you got your chance when you accompanied Kamla to Malai Mandir, and you acted fast, like a pro. It just took one good push of your strong arms to get rid of your enemy.” Having proclaimed his verdict, the inspector now indulged in his hobby of the month, ogling Mukta Agarwal’s bosom.

“May I have a look at those statements?” Mukta said.

Bakshi shook his head. “Your lawyer can see them when we produce them as evidence before a judge.”

“So you’re dragging me to court?” Dodging a murderous mother-in-law was certainly easier than coping with a vindictive policeman, Mukta thought.

Bakshi nodded. “The Patiala House criminal courts. In the meantime, we’ll have to arrest you, Mukta Agarwal. Here’s the warrant.” The inspector brandished a smudgy printed form made impressive with several signatures and rubber stamps. So, the inspector had come well-prepared for a real showdown. This must be the handiwork of Savitri, she mused. The inspector now took out a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them before her eyes. Mukta visualized the shocked women of Sector 7, even her best friend Neela, watching her from their verandas and balconies as the inspector frog-marched her to his jeep, her head bowed in shame.

“I have to inform my husband,” she said, flicking away a teardrop from the corner of her eye.

“Of course. But before you do that, I can offer you an option to postpone your arrest.”

The inspector’s eyes were contemplating her thirty-eight-inch bust. Mukta got his drift. She was not surprised since she remembered that even on his first visit he had ogled her with his piggy eyes. He could in fact be blackmailing her with a few incriminating documents collected from dubious sources. But she knew she was powerless against him. Neither Ashok, her husband, nor Anand, her ex-lover, would come forward to get her off the hook. If only Rakesh, the bold, sinewy jawan, were by her side. He alone had the guts to call the inspector’s bluff.

“I am a married woman, inspector,” she said. “My husband—”

“You needn’t worry about him,” Bakshi cut in. “He is impotent, after all, and you have taken lovers from time to time to fulfill your needs. Haven’t you, Mukta Agarwal?”

Mukta winced. That snooping bastard had dug out all her secrets. She stared hard at Kamla Agarwal’s beaming likeness, which seemed to be jeering at her from the wall.

“I know about Rakesh, and Anand too,” Bakshi continued. “I can produce a couple more names from your past, your glorious Meerut years, if you’d like. Why not add one more name to your list of lovers, eh?”

“I am not a veshya, you loocha-lafanga shaitan!” Mukta hissed. “Go and mount your sister if you’re so horny.”

Bakshi smiled at Mukta’s outburst. This was the right moment to plunge the knife deeper and twist it a little for greater effect. “I like spirited women,” he said airily. “Look, I have twenty-one incriminating documents in this file. Each one of them is a hissing cobra that can raise its hood and strike you dead when you are on trial. Unless, of course, I kill them.

The question is, do you want me to destroy these hissing cobras?”

In spite of herself, Mukta began to nod.

“Good. You are a sensible woman, Mukta. Shall we start our first session right now? This divan looks pretty good for a roll.”

“When are you going to destroy those papers?” Mukta asked, realizing she was stepping into a dark tunnel without a torch.

“I will kill one cobra after each session.”

“Impossible!” The very idea of being ravaged by this gorilla for three weeks nauseated her. “I’d rather go to jail.”

Bakshi didn’t like negotiating terms with victims, be it over money or sex. But he also understood that what was most important in this delicate situation was a good beginning. More hissing cobras could eventually slither out of their holes and crevices, ensuring the continuance of his pet project until he discovered a new and more appetizing female suspect within his fiefdom. “Well, if you are so fastidious, dear, I will destroy three cobras after each session. Right?”

Mukta wanted to shout, Wrong! But she knew she couldn’t stop this randy bastard from molesting her.

It was when the inspector had gone to the bathroom after his third rape session that Mukta managed to take a peek at the nest of hissing cobras. The papers the inspector had been blackmailing her with and destroying so scrupulously at the end of each encounter, she discovered, were actually pages from a recent police report on cybercrime. Mukta covered her face with her palms to hide her pain and fury when Bakshi returned, whistling “Crazy Kiya Re” from Dhoom 2, last summer’s chartbuster. He’d presumed that with her big bindi, voluminous sari, and other signs of backwardness, Mukta was a perfect specimen of “behenji,” a woman from one of the Hindi-speaking states where English wasn’t a compulsory subject. But Mukta had studied up to class eight, and in addition to showing her prowess in the school’s kaabadi team, she had also learned just enough English to read the newspaper headlines and understand what they were all about.

“Don’t worry, sweetie, we just have a dozen cobras to destroy,” Bakshi said, squeezing one of her ample breasts.

“I’m not worried,” Mukta said, removing her palms from her face. “I was just wondering how many women suspects you’re helping out these days.”

The inspector tweaked her nipple and winked. “Jealous, huh? Well, at the moment there’s just one, but she’s not as young and sweet as you.” He kissed her and then looked at his watch. “Got to rush back to the office for an important meeting with my subinspectors. See you next Monday.”

Mukta didn’t tell Ashok about the inspector’s biweekly visits because he’d just throw a tantrum without actually offering to protect her. If — and it was a big if — the inspector kept his word, her suffering would come to an end in another two weeks. She couldn’t, however, withhold her other secret from Ashok. Her vomiting had stopped but her small bump would soon be visible.

“Do you really love me, Ashok?” It was a Saturday night, they were in bed, and he hadn’t started snoring yet.

“Of course, Mukta. Haven’t I snapped my ties with my sister Savitri for you?”

“I am sorry for that,” she said, and pecked him on the cheek. After all, until Rakesh rescued her from her dud marriage, Ashok was definitely her best bet. He had never joined his mother or sister in humiliating her. And since Kamla was no longer around to complicate matters, Mukta could now afford to be brutally honest with her husband. If he insisted on a divorce, so be it. “I’m going to be a mother, Ashok.”

Her husband sat up bolt upright on the bed. “You aren’t joking?”

“Are you blind or what? Haven’t you seen me puking almost every morning?”

“Yes, but I never thought...” He broke off and looked searchingly at his wife’s face. But Mukta couldn’t meet his gaze.

She lowered her eyes and whispered: “You aren’t the father of my child.”

“Oh!” Ashok clutched his throat as if he wanted to strangle himself. His jaws hardened, his eyes became flinty. “Who’s this lucky guy, may I know?”

“Rakesh, the fauji from quarter no. 353. We met—”

“Bas!” He snatched a pillow from the bed and dashed out of the room to spend a troubled night on the divan.

But Mukta knew Ashok would eventually cool down. He wanted to be a parent as much as she did. He would soon realize that what happened between his unsatisfied wife and the hot-blooded jawan was inevitable, if not providential.

And she was right. Ashok returned to his wife in the wee hours and quietly lay beside her. She turned and drew him to her bosom as if he were a child.

“Kamla is haunting my dreams,” Mukta said when Bakshi visited her on Monday afternoon. “She looks so horrible, with blood dripping all over her face. And she stares at me as if I were responsible for her death. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep.” Mukta started crying. Sex with a crying woman could be disastrous, so Bakshi stroked her head and made some soothing noises. Ah, these chicken-hearted middle-class housewives. Whether they lived in R.K. Puram, Sarojini Nagar, or Lodhi Colony, they were all the same. Even before the police had filed a First Information Report, they rushed to the nearest thana to spill their story. How boring! A woman from Vasant Vihar or Greater Kailash would strangle her husband in the morning and dance the night away with her boyfriend at Athena or Climax, one of those thousand-rupee-a-drink nightclubs. And if the law finally came knocking at her door, she’d just throw wads of five-hundred-rupee notes at everyone concerned, even the lowly chowkidar. Bakshi wanted to work among these smart, filthy-rich people, who drove BMWs and Benzes, carried BlackBerrys, and attended glitzy parties at the Hyatt or Maurya Sheraton. But till that prize posting came his way, he’d have to make do with the whimpering Mukta Agarwals of the babu colonies.

“I want to visit Malai Mandir and pray for Kamla’s unhappy soul,” Mukta declared, sniffing.

Bakshi grimaced. This woman was really going too far. She needed a little roughening up to clamp her mouth shut and spread her legs wide open. Harita, his reedy wife, also needed a mild thrashing now and then, especially when she complained too much about his philandering. The whining bitch had run away to her parents with their two daughters after he’d given her an egg-sized bump on the forehead and a few welts and bruises on her back. He normally would have kept her home with just a hard slap, but then Harita threw a vase at him and accused him of fucking their fifteen-year-old daughter on the sly, buying her silence with a sumptuous allowance.

“You’ve already performed Kamla’s shradh ceremony, honey, so you needn’t worry about her soul. Now peel off your sari and...”

But Mukta was adamant. She threatened to scream and alert her neighbors if she wasn’t allowed to do her penance at the temple.

This woman was a pain in the ass, Bakshi thought, but she was good in bed. She had ample flesh in the right places, and he loved kneading her dough. And, like a good whore, she also knew how to fake an orgasm. In fact, she was better than his skinny wife and the other women he’d molested, threatening them too with his hissing cobras. One has to suffer the kicks of a cow if it yields milk, he thought. If a brief visit to the temple would stop her sniffing and make her bedworthy, so be it.

The evening aarti had just begun when they entered the temple. A bare-bodied priest was rhythmically waving a flickering brass lamp, revealing the immaculate stone idol of Lord Swaminatha carrying his mace. Like the other devotees, Mukta joined her palms and chanted paeans to the Lord. Earlier, as they had climbed the stairs, she had explained to her companion that in the north Lord Swaminatha was worshipped as Kartikeya, the handsome warrior god who was the son of goddess Durga, the destroyer of Mahishasur, the demon. Bakshi was not a religious person, so after Mukta had bowed before the idol for the umpteenth time, he whispered in her ear that she had done enough penance for the day and now they should return to her house and eliminate three more hissing cobras. Mukta sighed and allowed him to gently push her through the crowd of devotees toward the exit.

But when they were outside the temple, Mukta stopped short as if she remembered something.

“Now, don’t tell me you have to complete your thousandth bow before the idol to complete your penance,” Bakshi said.

“I won’t tell you that,” Mukta assured, looking very solemn and contented. “I only want to stand and pray for my mother-in-law on the spot where she spoke to me for the last time.”

“I don’t give a fuck about that evil woman.”

“Mind your language, inspector,” Mukta frowned, even though she was amused by his unexpected surge of hatred for Kamla. “I wonder, have you really fallen in love with me?”

Bakshi squeezed her shoulders and whispered: “I have, darling. You are so special to me.”

“Then come with me for just one minute. Once I have offered my prayers for Kamla’s soul we can go back to my house and have some fun.”

Bakshi felt elated. So, she had finally accepted him as a lover. Wow! He had fortified his virility with a Penagra tablet before mounting her each time, and his performance must have favorably compared with her previous lovers. Whistling “Crazy Kiya Re,” he followed his ladylove to the back of the temple and then skirted a huge PVC water tank mounted on a stone platform. Away from the traffic of devotees, this was a desolate area used only by the temple staff and the priests. A faint light from a distant lamppost illuminated the staircase.

“So this is the spot where you stood that evening with your beloved mother-in-law?” Bakshi said.

Mukta nodded. Then she told him how, after finding out about her affair with Rakesh, Kamla had tortured her. Hadn’t he noticed those scars on her body, the branding mark on her pubes?

Of course he had, but... well, married women were prone to getting a few bruises due to their obstinacy and unwarranted intrusion into the male zone. He’d actually found Mukta’s bruises cute, even aphrodisiacal. “You should have filed an FIR against her,” Bakshi said, squeezing her arm just to show that he was a sympathetic male.

“But the police don’t take notice of domestic violence unless it’s a murder or there’s some pressure from someone powerful.” Mukta looked up at the inspector and whispered: “So I decided to take things into my own hands.”

Bakshi grinned. A confession at last! It was a nice jolt, like the one he often got from a big shot of whiskey. The oppressed had finally turned the tables on the oppressor. How fascinating! How filmic! The very idea of fornicating with a murderess gave him an instant hard-on.

“So you bumped Kamla Agarwal?” Bakshi said. “Wonderful!”

“Are you surprised?”

Bakshi nodded. Indeed, in his twenty-odd years in the profession, he was yet to come across a single case of a tortured wife liquidating her mother-in-law. “I guess you gave her a mighty push with your hands?”

“No, actually, I used my leg.” She smiled and hitched up her sari.

His hard-on still intact, Bakshi was staring at Mukta’s thunder thighs and imagined having a quickie right there behind the water tank. But a sudden shooting pain ended this fantasy. With all her might, Mukta had rammed the heel of her right foot into his crotch. Bakshi screamed as he keeled over clutching his balls. In the semidarkness, the inspector’s left hand desperately groped for the iron railing. But Mukta, the veteran kaabadi player, was quick enough to land another kick on his flank. Bakshi fell like a ton of bricks and hurtled down the steep stairs. Then there was that stomach-churning sound again — a cranium cracking on a big boulder. She took a peek at the bloody mess sprawled on the massive stone on which someone had chalked Om Shanti Om and then returned to the temple. She bowed deeply before Lord Swaminatha, whose aarti had just reached its crescendo, and then weaved through the crowd of devotees to make a quick exit by the main door of the temple.