Delhi Noir

The railway aunty by Mohan Sikka

Paharganj

I lay in my dark little veranda, the space I occupied in my bua’s Delhi flat. The windows were open to the nonstop honking from Panchkuian Road. There was no breeze. The cool weather hadn’t arrived and the sulfurous smell of popping fireworks made breathing difficult. I remembered how, in our old house in Jalandhar, my sisters hid behind each other as I lit bottle rockets on Diwali. Ma gave us sweaters and woolen socks she’d knitted herself. This coming winter, my sisters would even be lucky if their old sweaters were darned. The middle one was in a boarding school for orphans, the youngest with my frail grandfather.

I woke up late the next morning with a sensation of suffocation. I left the flat without breakfast and walked to Paharganj. I bought a cup of tea and sought out the quiet of the large Christian cemetery by Nehru Bazaar. Putting down my satchel under my favorite neem, I took out my chess set and my bitten paperback of the champion Kasparov’s classic matches. I drank tea and practiced the grandmaster’s moves. Worn concrete graves surrounded me on three sides.

I didn’t see Johnny, the caretaker with the salt-and-pepper hair, until he was standing next to me, his stocky arms folded. With a grin on his long, craggy face he said, “Didn’t you know an open chessboard attracts spirits with scores to settle?” I packed up my things, thinking he was going to escort me out. But instead he took me to the workshop by the main gate. Workers inside were sawing and hammering wooden planks for coffins. Johnny ushered me into the cemetery office at one end of the shop. He fumbled in a drawer and took out a book, as beat-up as mine, about grandmaster Karpov, my hero Kasparov’s archrival. “Kasparov played like a bull,” he said, making a meaty fist in the air, “but Karpov was the wily fox.” When he asked me to take out my chessboard, I knew I’d made a friend.

When I got home from college that night, my bua said: “Sarika called to remind you. Go pick up the apples.” The next afternoon, fearful but of course intrigued, I made my way to Sarika Aunty’s flat. It was in another building in Bua’s colony. Growing up, any boy who teased my sisters in school knew he had a bloody nose coming. My mother would scold me but was secretly proud. Deflecting an aunty’s advances was a lesson I hadn’t learnt though.

Sarika’s door was opened by a wrinkled woman in a gray sari and, despite the weather, a thick sweater-blouse. Her eyes were opaque with cataracts. She stood there like a sentry, and I could barely catch a word of her rustic Punjabi. “Mataji, I am Mrs. Verma’s nephew,” I kept saying in response to her soft, toothless mumbles. “I came for the case of apples.” Finally, she cracked the door wider, and I bent forward to better understand what she was saying.

“Demon’s daughter...” she muttered, “a snake in human form. Keeps me locked up.” She grabbed my arm so tightly it hurt. “Poison. Careful of her poison.”

I was about to leave when Sarika Aunty appeared. She was dressed in a loose, translucent salwar kameez which suggested that no special company was expected. The outline of her taut, shapely figure was noticeable even though she wasn’t in the form-fitting clothes she wore to my bua’s house. Her hair, black with streaks of brown, was tied in two thick braids. This gave her fair, oval face a pleasant expression. Around her neck were rudraksha prayer beads. Her feet were bare. She looked relaxed, glowing. Perhaps my unease was misplaced.

“You’re not to open the door, Bibiji,” she said sharply to the old woman. “What if some Nepali slashes our throats?”

I remained standing in the living room while she escorted the babbling Bibiji inside. The flat’s layout was like Bua’s, but the furniture was grander than Bua’s practical, well-worn things. A carved-wood sofa with silver cushions sat on a plush carpet, flanked by wide lounge chairs. In the center was a marble-topped table. Ornate brass lamps stood in the corners. I thought: Sarika’s husband must be the type of railway officer my father resented when he was alive — the kind who demanded “sweets” for his children from contractors. My inheritance had been gnawed away by such officers.

But there were no pictures of children here. The only item suggesting a child’s presence was a tall glass cabinet. Inside were displayed rows of dolls — circus dolls in costumes, dolls with fancy hats wearing party dresses, dolls with startling green eyes. They were so well made, they didn’t seem like toys. The large ones had realistic facial expressions; one had a sly, sinister look that followed you around.

Sarika returned. She saw my gaze. “My father was in the foreign service,” she said proudly. “This is my collection. We traveled everywhere when I was a girl.” She pointed to the sofa. “Sit.”

I had picked out my best shirt and ironed it myself. But now I felt like a peon offered a seat in an officer’s house. “Aunty, my bua said you called,” I ventured.

“I don’t like this Aunty-vanty stuff,” she broke out, sitting down barely two feet from me. “Call me by my name.”

“If my mother were to hear me—” I stumbled like a fool.

“From heaven?” she snapped, and then caught herself.

We both fell silent. Her fingertips, I noticed, were trembling slightly. Her nails were painted a dark maroon. As we sat close, my eyes downcast, I felt her assess me from head to foot. A prickly sensation arose on the back of my neck, just like when she teased me at my bua’s lunch parties. “Working so hard, Mukesh?” Or, “I need help around the house too. When can I expect you?” She spoke loudly while I served lemonade and pakoras, knowing all the ladies thought she was amusing, just incorrigible. The space between us began to stretch like an elastic band, until I was sure it could snap at any second. I shifted awkwardly and crossed my legs. Her forward manner disconcerted but aroused me. Barely lifting my eyes, I could see the shadow of her bra beneath her thin shirt, the way it lifted and fell with her breath.

She said impatiently: “Why are you always at your bua’s? Don’t you have college friends?”

I stayed silent. Those with cash to burn went to the movies with college yaars. I played chess in an old Paharganj cemetery.

She moved closer. “What’s the matter? Are you scared of me?” She picked up my hand and casually placed it just above her knee. “A burly boy like you.”

I was torn between giving in to the softness of her leg and the grave presumption of doing just that. I pulled my hand away. “Sarikaji, someone may think I am being impertinent.”

“Who is there to think that?”

I heard a scuffling noise from inside the flat. “Bibiji,” I said, my cheeks hot.

“Bibiji is resting. She can sleep through a bomb blast.”

“May I have the apples?” I pleaded. “Bua will be waiting.”

“You took your time coming. I gave away the last case this morning. More will come soon from my brother’s orchard.” She passed her slender fingers through my hair. Every sinew and tendon in my body tensed. “So thick, like a girl’s. Comb it properly or get it cut,” she added cruelly.

She took my face in her hands and turned it toward her. Then she kissed me. Her tongue reached inside my mouth and elicited reactions in faraway places — my toes, my stomach, my quivering thighs. My heart was beating so fast I didn’t know how it would slow down. I didn’t want it to.

She stood up and removed her prayer necklace. Then she pulled her kameez up and over her head. It billowed like a banner before falling in a heap on the carpet. Her salwar had a drawstring like a man’s pajamas, but the shape at the hips and ankles was different. She loosened the string and the salwar dropped like a curtain. I remembered my middle sister Sonu’s shapeless drawers hanging on the clothesline. Sarika’s panties were small and dark and lacy, fitting snugly against her light skin. Other than the flare of her hips, her frame was slighter, more boyish than I’d imagined.

She turned her back to me. “Get up,” she ordered, breaking the brief illusion that she was something frail. She reached her arms behind her. “Unclasp this.” I fumbled with her bra hook as best I could. Even from her backward glance I could feel the derision from her face.

She commanded me to lie down, knelt over me, and began to undo my buttons and buckles. When my underpants were off, she said: “It seems you aren’t too scared. For a minute I thought you weren’t a real man. Now I see you are like most — overeager.”

She guided my hands to parts I had only imagined with eyes closed on a woman. My trembling fingers outlined the orbs of her breasts. They were shiny with perspiration, and the way they rose and peaked made my jaw ache with craving. Her nipples weren’t much bigger than mine, but darker and harder. In my mouth they tasted like stiff, salty rubber. A line of fine hair traversed down the center of her stomach to a different kind of darkness between her legs.

She was nice enough to let me make amends for my first, clumsy effort, but before that she called my bua. We were both naked. “Hope you don’t mind, Pammi. I sent Mukesh to Paharganj for some groceries.” She put the receiver to my ear as Bua was saying: “Any time. I’ve trained him into quite an expert shopper. Make sure he gives you a full accounting.”

“Now,” Sarika said, “I am going to show you how to curb your enthusiasm.” I shyly followed her into the bedroom, but I must have shown potential because she left me a prize I kept for several days — her nail indentations on my back and buttocks.

As the weather turned cooler, I found some release playing chess with Johnny in his caretaker’s office. I often wanted our matches to move faster, but I learned a lot by watching his methodical openings, his surprisingly lethal middlegame.

Sarika, I discovered, preferred a combination of fixed and variable routines. Before we began, she would ask me to brush my teeth and take a bath, even if I had already done so. I would come out in my towel to find her lying undressed smoking her pipe packed with ganja she procured from a discrete Israeli dealer in Paharganj. She insisted on initiating any kissing, which she liked deep and rough. If I tried to just hold her, she would whinny and thrash like a trapped mare. My chest became bruised from her teeth marks. As soon as one set of scratches healed on my back, she covered me with another. This is what I remember from those days: her kneeling against the side of the bed, goading me on as I crouched over her from behind, my legs open and half-bent and trembling, her neck craning back and her pretty mouth distended, her spine coiling and convulsing like it was a reptile trapped beneath her skin.

She wanted me to be just as rough with her. I struggled to comply. “Bite me. Harder. Didn’t I say harder?” she would cry mid-frenzy. Once, approaching climax, she halted abruptly and changed positions. “Choke me. Do it. I’ll tell you when to stop.” I hesitated, but she pummeled me until I actually wanted to hurt her. Dark and angry urges rose inside me as I pressed my fingers around her supple neck. Fortunately, I soon lost control. Sputtering and coughing, she examined her neck in the mirror. Even from a distance I could see the bruises I’d left. The salty bile of shame rose up in my throat. “Now we’re making progress,” she said, eyes gleaming with strange pleasure.

I played chess with Johnny after that session. He frowned and stopped the game. “What’s the matter, Mukesh? You’re sacrificing pawns early and without a plan.”

“I have one,” I insisted, but my lie was soon exposed.

After I’d lost the next three games, he looked at me and said kindly: “I enjoy our matches, Mukesh. But it’s not right that you come to this place so much. Go spend time with other young people.”

With a curt goodbye I left his office. If he didn’t want to play, I had other preoccupations: I could sit under the neem and read my notes from college.

In the bright, early winter light I walked up the cemetery’s central path. The bustle of Nehru Bazaar was just beyond the high walls but here the only sounds were the cackling of crows and the dull whack of workmen breaking the hard ground with pickaxes. I stood beside the workers for a moment, nursing the thick sensation I carried in my chest these days, a sensation like hard-boiled phlegm. The hole the workers were digging appeared too small for an adult. Perhaps it was for a missing person’s funeral. Only room to bury personal items was needed.

I began to dress in my bua’s bathroom to avoid scrutiny of my wounds. She did remark on my new jeans and jacket. I told her I’d bought them cheap in Main Bazaar. Bua felt the jacket’s lining and said: “Main Bazaar or Bandits’ Bazaar?” In truth, Sarika had given me money for them, saying she didn’t care for my dreadful clothes. She also paid for me to get my hair styled, causing my bua to say: “Delhi air is something. Look how city wiles have sprouted.”

In addition to Bua’s chores, I was now also on call for Sarika’s household errands. Picking up her dry cleaning one Sunday, I saw her tank of a husband lounging on the sofa in a loose bathrobe. Bibiji sat on the floor shucking peas into a steel tray. Locked away during my other visits, the old lady had become a rare sight. She rose and creakily approached, shouting: “She puts chains on my feet, but I am not a fool, you hear?”

The hair on my arms stood up. What was she reporting to Mr. Khanna? But he only yawned and stretched where he sat. His wide, bushy midsection peaked out from underneath his banyan. “Bibiji,” he barked without putting down his newspaper, “brake lagao, or you’ll be sent to bed.” The old lady shuffled back to her peas.

Sarika came out with the dry cleaning. Right under her husband’s nose she said: “Come back later. Mr. Khanna is going to the club by 1, and the peon is out today.”

Bibiji’s face twisted with loathing. Mr. Khanna raised his thick eyebrows, but the rest of his face stayed hidden behind the paper. As I shut the door I heard him ask Sarika something in a gruff tone.

She said: “No one. Mrs. Verma’s nephew. A helpful boy.”

My grandfather’s heart stopped in his sleep in December. I could not see Sarika for some weeks and found that I missed her rough attentions. A council of uncles and aunts was held at Bua’s flat, just like after my parents’ accident. The agenda was my youngest sister Chhoti’s guardianship. “Already we are barely making ends meet,” Bua said grimly. Another aunt added: “Mukesh, finish your BA quickly, beta. Everyone is counting on you.” I responded to such demands with a blank face, and silently cursed my parents for their ill-timed pilgrimage, which, like a bad investment, was bearing expense without end. The decision was made to send Chhoti to the boarding school for orphans that Sonu, our middle sister, attended. People thanked my bua for the sacrifice of keeping me. The indignity of being a charity case sat like curdled milk in my stomach.

In the New Year my liaisons with Sarika resumed. If she knew what was happening in my family, she never asked about it. After our third meeting in January, however, she handed me a slip of paper with a lady’s first name and number. I looked at her, confused, and she said: “You want to make some money, right?”

I heard out her proposition. The aunty on the paper would pay for small but important errands. If I was reliable, there would be more jobs.

The aunty sounded pleasant when I called her from Sarika’s phone. She gave me an appointment for the next day. Her bungalow was on Doctor’s Lane near Gol Market.

Sarika smiled broadly. “Come by soon and tell me what happened.” Then she took out some money and said severely: “Buy a new undershirt before you go. Are you using deodorant regularly?”

I laughed. This was how she spoke to me after we’d made hard, sweaty love for an hour. I tried to kiss her, but she cringed at my eagerness and pushed me back.

I was the opposite of eager when I returned with my report from Doctor’s Lane. “Sarikaji,” I said, lips trembling, “forgive me for misunderstanding. I’m not that kind of boy.”

“Oh?” she said, lifting her brows. “What kind are you then?”

I’d come in with the intention of confronting her, but her haughty self-assurance washed away my resolve. “The aunty... she gave me the money first. It seemed like too much. When she told me what she wanted, I tried to give it back.”

“She didn’t report any problems to me.”

“I was forced to stay,” I said, shuddering at the memory. “She told me she would raise a noise if I tried to leave, have me beaten as an intruder.” I held all the money before Sarika. “Take this. I don’t want it.”

She peeled out a few notes from the bundle. “That’s my share, Mukesh. Think of this work as social service you get paid for.”

“No,” I cried.

“Then don’t come back here,” she said flatly. “I can’t tolerate undependable boys. I give you a chance and you come back wheedling and whining.”

“Don’t say that,” I said, almost hacking. My throat was dry, constricted.

“Imagine what you can do with the money,” she said, and pulled me by the arm to the bedroom. Afterwards, she looked at the bites on her breasts. “I’ve taught you well,” she said. “Luckily, Mr. Khanna doesn’t like the lights on.”

With my first earnings I bought a mobile and a diary to keep track of my appointments. If the person I called didn’t recognize the name I asked for, the rule was to pretend I had the wrong number. Sarika sent me to railway wives, lady doctors, businesswomen, young managers in offices. Now I understood why she usually began texting the moment we finished in bed. I saw the insides of flats and bungalows from Gol Market to Bengali Market, and as far south as Sundar Nagar. Some aunties only wanted to meet in a seedy tourist lodge in Tooti Chowk after shopping at Connaught Place. Sarika’s instructions were to accommodate every request.

I serviced aunties who were beautiful and bored, homely but adventurous, unabashed about their needs, or shy and self-conscious. One fed me afterwards; another threw money in my face as though I’d offended her dignity. Both asked for me again. I remember the aunty who liked to watch her favorite serial in bed. While I pleased her she delightedly gave me a rundown of the episodes I’d missed. One roundly cursed her husband while we made love; it drove her to heights of frenzy. Most never mentioned their husbands at all. They all appreciated that I readily agreed to their commands or requests. They all enjoyed the tricks with tongue and finger that Sarika had taught me.

I’d wake up on my hard cot in Bua’s veranda, remember the day’s appointments, and think my mind was playing tricks. Then I’d feel the soreness in my lower back and thighs. A few times I caught Bua watching me with narrowed eyes. I became convinced she could smell it on me — the disrepute, I mean.

Winter was almost over when I sent a package of clothes to my sisters’ hostel. Sweaters, woolen socks, new shoes. Sarika gave me grudging advice on size and colors, calling me a simpleton. On an impulse I bought silver anklets and left them by Sarika’s bedside with my weekly payment. She said: “Money is enough. No presents.” She never wore the anklets.

For Johnny, the caretaker, I bought a chess set from a Jan-path curio store, with pieces carved from dark and light wood. He was happy to see me once again. “I am in your debt for this,” he said. To remove some of his obligation, I played our next match with great focus and beat him in a fierce king and pawn endgame. Any awkwardness from our last exchange was gone.

I wasn’t surprised when Bua commented on my new shoes. I told her Sarika Aunty had given me some tuition referrals. “I see you’ve both kept me in the dark,” she said. “Be cautious, beta, that woman is very clever.”

As the days warmed, the wad of cash in my satchel grew in size. Its heft made me both excited and uneasy. I began to dream of renting a room in Paharganj. I’d bring my sisters to live with me. It would be tight at first. Bua would pretend to be upset, but secretly she’d be relieved.

I tried to open a bank account, but they wanted to know my source of income and see my guardian’s ID card. Instead, I went to Sarika and asked her to hold on to most of my earnings.

“Don’t trust me so much,” she said, very seriously.

“I have nowhere else to keep it.”

She was amused. “I will charge interest.”

“I know,” I said, defending myself with my arms as she tried to clutch and bruise my chest. “This is that kind of bank.”

She’d tied me to the bedposts one hot afternoon when we heard footsteps followed by banging on the bedroom door. At first I thought Bibiji had escaped. Then the door crashed open, and Mr. Khanna stood before us in a brown safari suit. We had carelessly left the back door unlocked. I wrenched myself free of my restraints, chafing my wrists badly.

Panic flowered on Sarika’s face, but only for a moment. With exaggerated slowness, she reached for her bra and bathrobe, while I stumbled into my discarded jeans and T-shirt.

“If you can’t knock like a civilized person, at least have the courtesy to look away,” she said to her husband. But I could see that her hands were shaking.

Mr. Khanna’s wide, brutish face appeared paralyzed on one side. “All these years I thought the hag was half-mad,” he said hoarsely. “Then one day I asked myself: Ashok, how long since Sarika nagged you for anything? She seems content. What has changed?” He licked his lips as if they were parched. “You were certainly clever, Sarika. It took my man quite a while to discover your tricks.” He produced an envelope and threw it at her. Photos spilled to the floor.

“Get out,” Sarika said, eyes looking down. It took me a second to realize she meant me. I was flustered, but worried for her safety. “Now,” she hissed. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Sorry, Uncleji,” I mumbled stupidly as I passed Mr. Khanna. The thick, stubby fingers of his right hand were clenched as though around an invisible club.

“Beta,” he said, “ask your bua to arrange your funeral party.”

I grabbed my satchel from the dining table and fled. Bibiji, let free, was shucking peas on the floor. She rocked back and forth and chanted noisily.

Later that night, I climbed up to my bua’s flat, my heart flap-ping like a wild bird in a cage. Everyone was watching TV with blank expressions. Nothing has happened, I thought. Sarika has managed it. Then Bua rose and asked me to follow her to the veranda. I saw the smirks on my cousins’ faces and my legs turned to leaden weights.

Mr. Khanna had been over. He claimed I’d dropped in on Sarika asking for more cash. I’d complained that my bua withheld food and money. Sarika had listened because I’d been so respectful in the past. Then, in full view of Bibiji, I’d tried to give Sarika a hug. She had smelled cheap liquor on my breath and gently pushed me away. I was a boy, and boys can get stupid ideas when they have a woman’s attention. But I had been insistent. I’d demanded a kiss. I had pulled so hard on Sarika’s arm that I had badly bruised her.

I flinched. I knew who had caused that injury. Then I saw how red Bua’s eyes were.

“You have one hour to pack your things,” she said.

“Where will I go?” I said, becoming angry. My college exams were a week away.

“I don’t know. Stay with a friend. Get a hotel with all the money you are making. Go indulge your new habits — fancy clothes and, now, drinking.”

“What Mr. Khanna told you wasn’t the truth,” I said quietly.

“Sarika has a known reputation, beta. But this is a public shaming. Whatever his reasons, Khanna will make trouble if he sees you here.”

As I was leaving, she stuffed some hundred-rupee notes into my hand. I didn’t refuse, but once outside I dropped the notes in the mail slot.

I camped outside the graveyard gates with my bags. There were any number of cheap hotels in Paharganj, but I was in the mood to see what destitution felt like. The air was dusty and full of exhaust fumes. Till midnight, traffic was brisk on Ramdwara Road, with people buying vegetables by the hiss of gas lanterns and groups of raggedy foreigners stumbling to their hovels, high on hashish. Soon, the market began closing down. A number of vendors put out their bedding right on their stands and carts. The smell of rotting vegetables hung like an unwelcome blanket in the night heat, the quiet broken by snatches of disco music blaring from hotel rooftops.

I was jostled awake during the night, I thought, by someone brushing against my luggage with evil intentions. But it was just stray dogs chasing enormous rats.

In the morning, Johnny took me to his bachelor abode. It was what I’d imagined for my sisters and me — one room in an alley not far from the lodge where I met some of my aunties. It overlooked a shared courtyard with a peepal tree. Johnny owned a kerosene stove, some aluminum pots and utensils, one wooden cot, and a trunk. There were no family photos. The solitary bright spot was a postcard taped on the wall showing blue skies over a white sand beach.

“My cousin in Mauritius,” he explained. “He says I should emigrate, but I’m too old.”

“Thank you, Johnny,” I said. “As soon as my exams are over I’ll find another place.”

“Play chess with me every night, and you can stay forever.”

That evening the power went out while I was studying, and, with a hand on my thigh, he made a very different request of me. It was put gently, but with a clear expectation. Initially I was anxious, even fearful. But unlike my last lover, Johnny was tender in his attentions before he was forceful. Later I realized I enjoyed being held in the safety of his short, burly arms.

I knew Sarika would be waiting for a message so we could settle accounts and discuss the future. If she was aware how close I was, we could find a way to meet. I was sure even she was feeling badly about turning me in.

Meanwhile, I had to resume business on my own. I phoned an aunty by the alias of Devika. This lady, whose voice I knew well, said, “Wrong number.” I wasn’t concerned; it only meant I’d called at an inconvenient time. But two days later, the number was cut off. In this way, one by one, the numbers in my diary disappeared from service, snuffed out by an invisible hand.

I went to see the aunty on Doctor’s Lane, and another bungalow I’d visited many times near Bengali Market. I rang and knocked in both places, but no one answered.

“Friend,” I told Johnny one morning during these harrowing days, “one more favor from you. Please take a message to a lady in Basant Lane. Tell her I need to settle my tuition account.” I’d told Johnny I’d fought with my bua and it was awkward going back to the railway colony. For his trouble, I put money into the pocket of his shirt hanging on a nail.

“I am a bachelor,” he protested. “What use do I have for that?” But I didn’t listen; I needed as little charity as possible. As he dressed to leave, I wrapped what was left of my earnings inside my underwear and locked them in my suitcase.

All day I paced in his room. As the sun got stronger, the walls heated up, until I felt I was being slowly cooked. In the late afternoon I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, my half-shirt drenched in sweat, Johnny was priming the kerosene stove in the dark, the blue flame lighting up his creased face. The way he crouched on his haunches, his compact upper body folded over as he worked, made me feel a pang of affection for him, my one loyal friend.

“I met your lady friend in the railway flats,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me in. She said no one needs a tutor now.”

“What about settling what she owes me? For her nephew’s tuition?”

“She got angry. She said: ‘We’ve paid our dues. Tell the tutor to keep what he has. But there is no more work.’ Then she shut the door in my face.”

It was as though someone had shot me point-blank through the heart. In bed that night, I turned away when Johnny reached for me. He was silent for a while. Then he said, in his somber way: “I don’t know all your troubles, Mukesh. But if you’ve been treated unjustly, you must stand up for yourself.”

Over several mornings I wandered down Basant Lane with a dark umbrella over my head, looking over the boundary wall at the buildings rising in staggered rows. Days of punishing sunlight had unevenly bleached the pink distemper on the outside of the buildings; to my eyes they had a mottled, diseased appearance.

I was sure Sarika was padlocking her doors now. I noticed that adjoining flats on each floor shared the narrow servants’ balcony, with just a wall dividing it into two parts. A plan took shape in my head.

I knew Sarika headed to her gym and beauty salon on Monday mornings. I waited with my umbrella outside the colony gate to see if this ritual had changed, and, indeed, it had not. I followed her as she walked to the taxi stand on the main road. Her slender profile from the back, the sight of her pert shoulders in a T-shirt, made me melt through the center of my body.

By the following Monday my preparations were complete. I bought a length of strong rope, a crowbar, and a switchblade, and I put them inside a backpack. I got my hair cut with a quarter-inch clipper. Johnny said I looked different, tougher.

I shaved closely and wore dark glasses and clean pants, shirt, and shoes. “Soon I’ll stop being a burden on you,” I told my friend. He shook his head at me indulgently, but I knew what I had to do.

I walked one last time toward Basant Lane. I entered the colony compound with confidence, my backpack over my shoulder. The guard at the gate saluted smartly. I climbed up the stairs in Sarika’s building two at a time.

As I had expected, the front door of her flat had a large lock on the outside. The servant’s door appeared bolted and locked from the inside — Bibiji was trapped. But the neighbor’s service entrance was open; they illegally sublet their quarters and people always went in and out. I stepped through and walked along the servants’ balcony toward Sarika’s side. It was quiet. If anyone saw me, I would say I was Mrs. Khanna’s nephew, locked out by my aunt.

I straddled the dividing wall between the two flats, hanging precariously off the parapet as I crossed over. A vein in my temple throbbed. I found the door to Sarika’s kitchen latched from inside, but I was a contractor’s son and knew railway construction. I cracked open the foot latch with a few kicks, then leaned against the lower part of the door. It strained open a few inches. I reached into the gap with my crowbar and pried down the top latch.

I found Bibiji cowering on the living room floor. She hiccupped and gurgled as I tied up her hands and wrapped a strip of cloth around her mouth. Her eyes widened when I used my knife to cut the rope. She fell down as if dead. I picked her up and took her to her room.

For an hour I examined every item in the household: refrigerator magnets, ashtrays, the doll case, confidential files in Mr. Khanna’s desk. I lay on Sarika’s bed, but it felt strange and unfamiliar somehow. I searched through open cupboards for money, though all I found were bedsheets and pillowcases.

I heard the front door open and close, and then the squeak of the inner deadbolt being drawn. If only we had taken such precautions before. I waited in Bibiji’s room, where the old woman lay facedown, groaning occasionally.

Sarika screamed once, seeing Bibiji trussed up like a goat, but I had my knife out and Sarika was a smart woman. I made her sit down in a chair and tied her hands and ankles. She was wearing a polo shirt, light jeans, sneakers. She had cropped her hair below her ears. It made her look even more like a boy. Her hands smelled of fresh nail polish. Her left eye twitched and she cringed at my touch, but she stayed quiet.

“I came to settle our business,” I said, keeping my voice steady even though my temples were pounding hard.

“The network is gone,” she replied, leaning forward. “I told your friend with the long face.”

“Mr. Khanna shut it down?” I said, trying to sound reasonable.

“I did,” she shot back. “Ashok knew about the boys, but not yet all the ladies.”

“There were other boys?” I burst out without thinking.

Contempt flashed across her face. “Poor Mukesh,” she said, despite her position. “You were only the cheapest.”

I winced and shut my eyes. I clenched my aching head between my fists, the knife in my hand. When I opened my eyes, she was attempting to rise.

“Don’t move!” I shouted. I was finished with her indignities. “I’m only asking once: Where is the money?” I held up the knife.

“There is two thousand in the almirah. Untie Bibiji and I’ll get it. But if you ever return, my husband will be waiting.” Was it fear or amusement in the curl of her lips?

“I’m not a thief who needs to hide. I came for my due, not charity.”

She looked at me as though I were an exasperating child. “Then why threaten me with this bandit act? Ask the one who has it.”

“Mr. Khanna?”

“My husband doesn’t need your money,” she said scornfully. “Your sad-faced friend. I wondered why you sent him. I could tell he was unreliable with just a glance.”

I felt punched in the gut. My legs became unsteady. “Why would you lie?” I cried hoarsely.

“What kind of company are you keeping? You’ve forgotten everything I taught you.” She’d risen to her feet despite my admonition. She held out her hands in a wordless demand to be untied. She was commanding me, just as she always had, from the day we met in her flat to the last time she farmed me out as her bull.

I stood staring at her open-mouthed. I should have known she’d efficiently neutralize my threats. Cornered and defeated, I raised my knife to slash her ropes, but just then, a sharp knock on the front door startled us both.

“Sarika,” a gruff, familiar voice called out. “Open the door. Are you alone?”

For a moment I thought time itself had unwound — a strange, sick sensation.

“Good work, Mukesh,” Sarika said. “Did you alert him before coming?” But there was a false note in her bravado now.

“What is he doing here?” I hissed, as the knocking changed into banging. The room was beginning to spin.

“He must have posted his man outside. Did you think of that when you made your plan?”

The pounding grew insistent. Bibiji groaned. Mr. Khanna was making loud threats that he’d break the front door down, that no barrier could keep Sarika from him. The bolt on the door, though strong, couldn’t hold him out indefinitely.

“What should I do?” I asked, my gut in my throat. I was completely in her hands once again.

We heard the cracking of wood and metal. But instead of panicking, Sarika grew thoughtful. Slowly, her face took on an expression of perverse satisfaction, like those moments when she would examine her love bruises. “Stab me,” she whispered, like an endearment.

I looked at her in fear and disbelief.

“You have to,” she said calmly. “Remember, the ropes won’t convince him.”

“I couldn’t,” I said, trembling like a man with convulsions.

“Do it,” she ordered. “Now! Quick.” And she smiled the most chilling smile I have ever seen. “Bring it here, I’ll help you.”

I ran back to Paharganj. I kept waiting for shouts from behind me, a crowd chasing me down. Instead, people backed away when they saw the blood on my shirt. A foreigner with matted hair, wearing a torn shirt and lungi, said, “Man, are you okay?” but I brushed past him. When I got to Johnny’s, my luggage was lying outside his door. My clothes were there but the money was gone from my suitcase. The lock on the door had been changed. I peered inside through a crack in the courtyard-side window. The room was empty. I pulled out a fresh shirt. My fingers were so rigid, my hands shook so hard, unfastening and fastening buttons took an eternity.

I abandoned my luggage and went to the cemetery. The workers grinned and told me Johnny Sahib had already left on a holiday. I came out in the bright, hot street and wanted to find a place to lay my head. There was so much time till nightfall. I stopped by an open gutter and heaved. Sarika didn’t have to help me in the end; the knife had slipped into her side with effortless satisfaction. “It feels like heaven,” she’d said, her fair face twisted in pain. She had fallen in an awful corkscrew motion, on her knees then her hands. “First-class first,” she’d said, before she closed her eyes. Did she know it felt good to me too? Hell was the look on Mr. Khanna’s face as we passed each other in the living room, my bloody knife in my hand.

I wandered through the alleys and byways of Paharganj for hours. I ventured by New Delhi Station but there were too many police cars. Eventually, it was dark. I knew I had to run but first I needed to rest. I scoped the cemetery perimeter until I found a place I could clamber over. With difficulty I scaled the wall and jumped inside. I found a freshly dug grave and crawled in. The earth was cool as I lay on my back. I stared at the inky sky and waited for dawn’s unforgiving light.

Hostel by Siddharth Chowdhury

Delhi University, North Campus

The first time I saw Zorawar Singh Shokeen was through the small gap between the doors connecting my room in Shokeen Niwas to the adjoining one. He sat astride a large, naked Punjabi woman in her late thirties who had buttocks that even film star Asha Parekh would be proud of. She was on her knees, at the edge of Jishnu Sharma’s cot. Jishnu da (MA, Previous, English, Ramjas), meanwhile, was in my room looking as usual philosophical and tragic. His left hand was buried in his loose, discolored Tweety Pie Bermuda shorts which he never washed. In fact the shorts were so stiff with profligacy that the story went that once during an argument in the hostel over who was supposed to pay for the Old Monk khamba that Friday night, Jishnu da in anger had taken off his shorts and thrown them in Farid Ashraf’s face. Though Farid managed to turn his head in time, he cut his fingers on the razor-sharp edges of Jishnu da’s shorts. The next day Farid (third-year History Honors, KMC) had to get a tetanus shot.

So right now, with his left hand Jishnu da was “making baingan bharta,” in his own immortal words. Eight or ten boys from the neighboring rooms were clustered in mine, their faces shining with barely repressed lust, the air dank with sweat and Navy Cut smoke. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a hot July day in 1992 and I had just returned to my room after my first day at Zakir Husain College. A week earlier I and my friend Pranjal Sinha had arrived in Delhi from Patna and landed up at Shokeen Niwas. Pranjal had taken admission in Hindu College reading Economics while I got English at Zakir.

“He has taken her once in the chut, then in her mouth, now he is doing her ass,” Pranjal informed me in a cool matter-of-fact way, after taking a long drag from his cigarette. He added as an afterthought, “Jishnu da too is on his third shot.” Then he bowed and beckoned me to the slightly ajar door.

Zorawar Singh was holding onto both of “Madam’s” breasts with their large purplish nipples for balance, and was anally fucking her with much gusto. Her real name was Mrs. Midha and she was a section officer at Delhi University but everybody called her “Madam” because a few weeks back, Jishnu da, along with Farid Ashraf and Ramanuj Ghosh (second-year BA, Pass, Ramjas), was standing outside Shokeen Niwas when Zorawar Singh drove up with Mrs. Midha in his white Gypsy.

Zorawar had stopped the car and asked Jishnu da whether he had gotten admission for one of his candidates in Ramjas College, which he had asked him to follow up on.

“Uncle, you don’t worry. The boy will be taken in through the sports quota after the third list. I have spoken to the teacher in charge. He was being uncooperative at first but I ‘convinced’ him in the end.”

“Very good. Keep following it up though. These Ramjas people are bastards. Remember, this is for the Kaana.”

“Uncle, it looks like it will rain tonight. We are all feeling a bit chilly.” Jishnu smiled ingratiatingly and pointed to Farid and Ramanuj.

“Toh, madam ki le le.” (“Here, screw the madam.”) Zorawar Singh had pointed toward Mrs. Midha, who was looking stonily out of the other window through her white plastic — framed sunglasses. To emphasize his point, Uncle gestured with his fist, moving it back and forth rapidly. Jishnu and the boys didn’t know where to look. Then Zorawar Singh, laughing at their discomfort, had taken out two hundred-rupee notes from his shirt pocket and given them to Jishnu da. “Buy a bottle of Old Monk rum. You know what rum is, don’t you? Regular Use Medicine. It will take care of the chill.”

So from then on, Mrs. Midha was universally known as “Madam” in Shokeen Niwas.

Zorawar Singh looked as if he was concentrating hard on some faraway problem. His eyes were closed. From time to time Madam would turn her face away from the pillow and look back and call “Oye” as if she was hailing someone from the balcony. She too was concentrating hard it seemed. After five minutes of this, Zorawar Singh suddenly opened his eyes and shouted, “Jai mata di!” From the bed Jishnu da commented, “Game over.” Now his eyes were closed. With a loud plop, Zorawar withdrew his dark, rapidly shrinking cock that a donkey would be proud of, and Madam slumped to the bed with a last feeble “Oye.” A thin watery stream of semen trickled out of her anus.

Zorawar Singh Shokeen, mid-level political broker and property dealer, was our landlord. A strapping six-foot-two half-Jat half-Gujjar from Chandrawal, full-bearded with a dandy’s taste in clothes. He usually wore deep pink or lemon-yellow silk shirts with gold cufflinks that brought out his peaches-and-cream complexion. His eyes were light brown and matched his beard. He was forty years old and for the last ten years had been the terror of Chandrawal, Shakti Nagar, Roop Nagar, Kamala Nagar, Vijay Nagar, Mukherjee Nagar, and other areas adjoining Delhi University. He was rumored to be close to H.K.L Bhagat, still then the undisputed New Delhi Congress boss and whom Zorawar called “Kaana” with the proud contempt that only close familiarity breeds, an obvious reference to the vain Bhagat’s damaged eye.

Sometimes Zorawar would be picked up from Shokeen Niwas in a white Ambassador car with a red flashing light on the top, tinted windows, and a Black Cat commando in the front seat. Zorawar would quickly slide in back beside a small gnomelike silhouette and then the Ambassador would reverse at full speed and turn toward Bungalow Road.

Jishnu da was the de facto caretaker of Shokeen Niwas. In his first year he had endeared himself to Zorawar Singh, showing great presence of mind one evening when an enraged Sikh husband of a woman Zorawar was screwing arrived at the doorstep of the hostel with a Matador van full of sword-wielding Sardars. Zorawar was at the time doing his thing to the lady, who was on her knees at the edge of the bed with a mouthful of pillow. In Jishnu da’s room, of course. Hearing the commotion, Jishnu da peeked out from the balcony and, gauging the situation correctly, promptly locked his room from the outside. He then gathered a couple of boys from the other rooms and headed downstairs to meet the Sardars who were trying to break open the front gates.

After instructing the boys, young kids from Chapra who had arrived only a week earlier, to just stand behind him coolly and not say a word, Jishnu da draped his cotton check-towel over his shoulders like a warrior’s mail. With enormous pluck, he then opened the front gate, yawned, rubbed his eyes, and demanded quietly, “Madarchod, what the fuck do you want?” or something to that effect, to the Sardar who was banging on the door with the steel hilt of his sword. Taken aback at the sight of this emaciated five-foot-five rangbaz in a sandow ganji of indiscriminate color and Tweety Pie Bermudas, not to mention the towel over his back, the Sardar replied, “Where is Zorawar Singh Shokeen? He has kidnapped my wife.”

“Is that the problem?” Jishnu da replied indifferently. “Rest assured he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him here for weeks. Actually, no, come to think of it, he did come here with a Sardarni a couple of weeks back but she was very friendly with him. Couldn’t have kidnapped her. Probably some other Sardarni, not your wife.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned.

Unable to contain his rage, the Sardar slapped Jishnu da, who in turn latched onto the Sardar’s luxuriant beard with all his strength. Farid Ashraf and Ramanuj Ghosh, who had been standing behind Jishnu da, joined the fray along with the other Sardars. There was a lot of wild shouting and murderous threats but very little actual violence.

“I’m telling you,” Jishnu da shouted, still hanging onto the Sardar, “Uncle is not here screwing your wife! If you don’t go away, all twenty-five boys I have upstairs will come down and break your asses.” He then called to the only boy upstairs, looking down from a balcony, “Tell Panday and Mumtaz to get the kattas.”

The Sardars, confused by all the bluster, slowly retreated. After the van had backed out of the lane, Farid and Ramanuj almost collapsed with relief at the doorway. Jishnu da wiped sweat from his armpits with his towel and then dramatically tied it around his head like a peasant and lit a Navy Cut.

“Boss, what were you trying to do, get us killed?” Farid Ashraf inquired after a while.

“Never under any circumstance back down in a fight or have a dialogue or compromise. No fight lasts more than five minutes. Remember that always. Never try to have a rational conversation with anyone who is trying to fuck you. He will then fuck you. But if you call him a motherfucker and offer to cut his throat, he will respect you. When you say those words you must mean them from the bottom of your heart. Just like in the song.”

Farid and Ramanuj looked at Jishnu da with profound incomprehension but nodded their heads in agreement.

“Both of you did good.” Jishnu da passed the Navy Cut to Ramanuj. He then went upstairs and opened his locked room. Just as he triumphantly pushed open the door, a deafening roar erupted from inside the room. Zorawar Singh had opened fire from the Mauser 80 that he always carried in his trouser pocket. Though the bullet just grazed his hair, Jishnu da fainted and collapsed to the floor.

A close bond was forged that day between Zorawar Singh and Jishnu da, which continues unabated to the present times. From that day onwards, Jishnu da had lived rent-free at Shokeen Niwas and was given carte blanche as to the running of the place, the vetting of tenants, the collection of rents. He was the hostel president for life, so to say.

“Uncle has just one condition. The boys should be primarily Biharis. He seems to think that we are just like Gujjars. Tough and callous. No need to contradict him. So never under any circumstance prove yourself to be otherwise. Be tough, stupid, and callous always. Once in a while a Matador will come and you two will have to accompany the rest of us to some colony somewhere in Delhi where you just stand outside the van for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes or whatever. Usually a property dispute somewhere. Nothing major. It’s just a show of strength, then you can go home.”

This was one of many things that Jishnu da had told Pranjal and me during our first week at Shokeen Niwas, and I had solemnly promised him that we would do him proud.

After he finished his story about the Sardars and their swords, Jishnu da took us out to the balcony, where a hideous framed painting was hanging on the wall that showed Hanumanji on one knee baring his heart with both hands to reveal embedded images of Lord Ram and Sita. Pranjal and I both thought that Jishnu da was going to ask us to seek Hanumanji’s blessing as another rite of initiation into the rarefied world of Shokeen Niwas. But no.

Jisnhu da simply removed the painting from the wall and showed us the round smooth hole made by that Mauser bullet. The bullet itself could be touched by wriggling in one’s little finger.

“It is just like a chut, it gets bigger as you go deeper,” Jishnu da said philosophically as he filled ganja into an empty Navy Cut cylinder.

It was whispered among the boys of Shokeen Niwas, usually the senior ones like Jishnu da, that at the age of twenty-five Zorawar had committed his first murder. He was then a student of Satyawati College in Ashok Vihar and in the evenings he would visit Kamala Nagar from Chandrawal, where he lived with his widowed mother.

One day while having tea near Hans Raj College, he saw a very pretty girl come out of the mandir across the street. (It was the same mandir where every Tuesday Jishnu da and Ramanuj Ghosh would go to offer their prayers. Ramanuj always carried a large cotton check-towel draped around his neck and the joke was that after offering prayers at the mandir, he would come outside, wrap the towel like a shroud around himself, and sit with the beggars lining the boundary walls. Come to think of it, he always did pay for his share of the Old Monk khamba with twenty-five and fifty-paise coins.) Zorawar, totally smitten, left his friends and followed the girl home. I like to imagine that Zorawar was perhaps intrigued by her bare feet, the delicate arch of her ankle partly uncovered at the bottom of her petticoat. He did this every day for fifteen days. The girl had noticed him and once or twice while coming out of the mandir had smiled at him. On the sixteenth day, just as she unlocked the latch of the front gate, Zorawar caught hold of her from behind and, slowly tilting her head, kissed her full on the lips.

“I am married,” she is said to have whispered to him. “I know,” Zorawar replied before parting her lips with his tongue again. The girl’s name was Sunita Khandelwal and her husband worked as a lower division clerk in the Shakti Nagar branch of the Punjab National Bank.

I visualize Sunita as short and delicately built, in American georgette and leheriya-print sarees, with straight hair and the pallu wrapped tight around both shoulders, like many bania girls before the fat finally catches up with them.

Each afternoon after lunch, when Suresh Khandelwal returned to his bank, Zorawar would join Sunita in her marital bed. After a couple of months of this, Suresh comes home early one evening and his fourteen-year-old saali, Lado, lets him in and leads him straight to the bedroom, where he catches his wife sucking Zorawar’s cock. Such is their passion that they continue with their lovemaking even though poor Suresh is right there, one foot on the wooden choukhat, poised to enter his own bedroom, watching his young wife’s mouth fill with semen. Zorawar takes a hand towel and wipes the edges of Sunita’s mouth, all the time smiling at Suresh Khandelwal. A mild-mannered man, Suresh then turns, retraces his steps to the front door, and carrying his rexine-lined briefcase walks off into the sunset. The next afternoon his body, cut in half by a freight train, is found near the Sarai Rohilla station. Suresh’s father and younger brother arrive from Sikar to arrange his funeral. Within a month Zorawar moves in with Sunita. A couple of neighbors who object have their faces rearranged and their windows broken. No one complains to the police. Zorawar Singh Shokeen settles in. He loves the house. Sure beats his narrow two-room heat-trap of a hovel in Chandrawal. He enjoys the old-style expansiveness of the courtyard and the high-ceilinged rooms on three floors that surround it. He especially loves the dark-red flooring from which intricate patterns made with bits of broken china float up.

A true bhumihar if ever there was one, Jishnu da described Zorawar’s love for his new acquisition, his joy at being finally a man of property, with great detail. From the top of the terrace Zorawar can see all of North Campus and the areas adjoining it. Kirori Mal and Hans Raj College at a stone’s throw; beyond looms the dense kikar-encrusted Delhi Ridge, Bara Hindu Rao, Hindu College, St. Stephen’s, and the back gate of Miranda House. The teeming Bungalow Road is just outside the lane, with its bookshops, cafés, juice corners, and glittering shops catering to all the needs of students who come to the university from faraway places and bring to it their own tribal customs and rituals. If Zorawar turns his head he can see Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, Amba Cinema Hall, and, finally, Malka Ganj, where Mrs. Midha, his future paramour, lives with her homeopath husband and thirteen-year-old daughter who bears a striking resemblance to the Bollywood starlet Divya Bharti, complete with round apple-fed cheeks and rounder tits. If he strains his eyes he can also see the vast spread of Chandrawal. But try as he might, he can’t locate his own house where his mother still lives. It is too small. Too insignificant.

Six months pass. For Sunita it is a blissful time. A period of full sexual awakening. She never realized the amount of pleasure that can be had from the male body, to say nothing of her own. She constantly surprises herself. She forever wants to keep looking at Zorawar, keep touching him, have him three or four times a day, anywhere, anytime, if he is willing. “Uncle is a heavy choder,” Jishnu da explained. Sunita can’t have enough of her Zorawar. She doesn’t care for household chores anymore, nor for the views of her neighbors. She realizes that Zorawar is a criminal of some kind but she can’t care less. She would gladly give up a hundred Suresh Khandelwals for one Zorawar Singh Shokeen, every time. Meanwhile, it is Lado who cooks and takes up housekeeping. She stops going to school and Sunita and Zorawar do not force her to. Lado has always hated school and for her, too, this is a time of liberation. Sunita and Lado have money of their own, provided by their father, who was a prosperous Kamala Nagar cloth merchant before his death. Their mother had died during Lado’s birth. It is Sunita who has brought Lado up like a daughter, and now Lado at fourteen has finally come of age.

One night around 3 a.m. Sunita wakes up languorously, wants to curl up into her gorgeous Zorawar, but there is no Zorawar anywhere. Her bed is empty. Mildly alarmed, she pulls on her black kaftan and leaves her bedroom to look for him.

“Black kaftan? How do you know it was black?” I interrupted Jishnu da’s narrative flow but he didn’t mind.

“Would you rather it was pink, Hriday?” Jishnu da lit a Navy Cut spiked with prime Bhagalpuri ganja and carried on. Stepping outside her room in her black kaftan, Sunita finds the door to Lado’s room ajar. Even before she enters the room she knows in her heart what she will find there. Her fate is sealed. She can turn back, return to her room, pull off her black kaftan, and wait for Zorawar to slip back beside her and all will be fine. But she does not do that. Mesmerized by fear and loathing, Sunita walks into her sister’s bedroom and is assailed by the very scene that led Suresh Khandelwal to kill himself. With a slight role reversal: This time, Zorawar is between the girl’s legs.

Sunita screams, rants, and tells Zorawar to clear out of her house. Right then, in the middle of the night. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she runs to her bedroom and bolts the door.

Her charred-to-the-bone body, to which flesh still clings in spots like sludge, is recovered by the police the next morning. The entire room reeks of kerosene for years afterwards.

“If you inhale deeply, you can still smell Sunita off the walls,” Jishnu da said, and took a deep breath.

It is true, the room had a funny smell that no amount of distemper and room freshener could do away with. The room which was once the pride and joy of Sunita Khandelwal was now mine and Pranjal’s for the rent of 900 rupees a month.

Within a month of Sunita’s death, Zorawar married the fourteen-year-old Lado and the house was finally his. He named it quite expectedly Shokeen Niwas. He was finally a man of property. Full and proper.

About seven years back, Zorawar moved out of Shokeen Niwas with Lado and his two daughters, Goldy and Shiny, to a plusher house in West Patel Nagar that he had captured from a Sikh major in the aftermath of the 1984 riots. He then converted Shokeen Niwas into a student lodge. There were twelve rooms, four on each floor. Usually two or three boys in each room. On weekends more, as friends would join in for drunken revelries from Ramjas, Stephen’s, Hindu, Hans Raj, SRCC, and KMC hostels. Across the street there was a small grocery store run by a man called Mehendiratta who also lived there with his family. Mehendiratta catered to all our needs.

Even though Zorawar had left Shokeen Niwas, he still liked it for his romantic trysts, about once every fortnight. He often used Jishnu da’s room, as it had been Lado’s bedroom in the early days.

“You and Hriday do not have to worry at all. He usually walks right by your room. He would never barge into it with a randi,” Jishnu da reassured Pranjal, who had deep misgivings about living in Shokeen Niwas and was thinking of moving out. But I, Hriday Thakur, had no such misgivings. I loved the wanton amorality of the place. Its chanciness, its far remove from respectability. I wanted to be a writer. It would be here, I knew, that I would start to truly become one. I had finally found my material, if not my voice. Even though Pranjal would later be proven right (as always), I was deeply grateful to Jishnu da for introducing me to the magical world of Shokeen Niwas and the kerosene-suffused bedroom of the late, lamented Sunita Khandelwal.

Small fry by Meera Nair

Inter State Bus Terminal

There was this girl. The first time I laid eyes on her she was standing in front of the closed Himachal Roadways ticket counter, clutching a valise as if it contained her life savings. From behind she looked like a schoolgirl — her hair fell down her back in two long braids. But then she swung the valise down and turned around and that’s when I saw her chest — straining to escape the tightest T-shirt this side of Bollywood. She was a real cheez, a top-class no. 1 item. Even in the sickly light of the fluorescent bulb that flickered above the counter, her skin looked like she bathed in milk.

I never learned her name, but I owe her my life. Sort of.

She was with a guy and they were arguing. He wanted to get the hell out of there and she wanted him to go to hell — only she said it in words I never imagined could come out of a movie-star mouth like hers.

I was lying under a cart parked in a safe corner of Delhi’s Inter State Bus Terminal. I was fifteen going on hundred that year. A street kid who had seen everything. Still, I had never seen anyone like her. Smooth, rich, glossy from head to carefully painted toe.

I had taught myself to size up people, to spot the suckers and the desperate. In my line of work it was a survival skill. I quickly figured out that she was putting on an act. There was something a little too eager about the way she looked around, as if expecting someone to rush forward any minute and do her bidding. Three in the morning, not even a decent dog awake, and here she was, carrying on loud enough to excite every insomniac crook in the place. Obviously these two weren’t from Delhi. No Dilli-wallah would venture into the bus terminal and yell at this time of night. The last bus had left hours ago and the earliest one was hours away.

After watching a few minutes longer I decided they were boyfriend and girlfriend, even though the chokra looked a good five years younger than Miss India there. The two of them must be off to someplace high in the hills for a week or two of fucking, I figured. Probably staying in some hushed hotel where no one would recognize them and report back to unsuspecting mamas-papas back home.

The boyfriend tried to put a hand on her shoulder and she shook it off. Now, he was a different breed altogether. Hrithik Roshan — style star stubble. Nike shoes. Leather jacket. Everything he had on was foreign, imported, no Palika Bazaar fakery for this one. I just knew she had bought his outfit. He looked like a kept boy, the lucky bastard. I hated him instantly.

Although just then he wasn’t exactly feeling fortunate, judging by his swiveling eyes. Scared shitless more like it. The thought cheered me up a little as I sidled out from under the cart and went in search of Hoshiyaar.

Scalper, tout, scam artist, mentor, mai-baap, fathermother — Hoshiyaar Singh was the closest thing to family I had in that place. He, better than anyone else, would know how to take care of the loving couple.

Hoshiyaar was asleep on his blanket against the wall of the so-called waiting room of the bus terminal, his hands crossed neatly on his chest. Business hadn’t been great tonight, and he’d stuck around in case I managed to reel in an extra customer or two. Fast asleep like this, his gray beard resting on his chest, Hoshiyaar looked like someone’s kindly grandfather, a devout old man who made daily trips to the gurdwara to pray for his soul.

The streetlights outside shone dimly through the high windows of the room. Around me, strewn beside the broken plastic chairs, other men lay huddled on their sheets, hands clutched between their knees. The suffocating stink of urine pressed down on us all. A chilly little breeze had sprung up and it came in through the open doorway and twirled up the trash, yesterday’s newspaper pages and plastic bags, toward the hapless sleepers.

These poor bastards hadn’t managed to snag an official ticket in time for a bus to Karnal or Kullu or any one of the small towns the government buses jolted past. The men had probably stood in endless lines all yesterday. By the time they got their precious ticket the last buses would’ve been full. That’s why they were still here, sleeping open-mouthed on the filthy floor — because they couldn’t afford anything but a cheap ticket on a government bus.

But for the rich or desperate there were easier options: buses that parked with their lights and engines switched off in the dusty lanes behind Ritz Theatre or Mori Gate, or in front of the Tibetan refugee colony. Most of these vehicles were illegal, run by black-market operators without government permits. The bus mafia bribed local politicos, State Travel Association clerks, travel agents, the police — threw money all the way down the food chain to scalpers like Hoshiyaar. Who, in turn, sold tickets for whatever the going rate was that day.

The ticket counters wouldn’t open for a few hours yet and the shouting, fist-waving crowds wouldn’t be here until later, but I was dead certain Hoshiyaar had tickets to sell. I was also pretty sure that Miss India had cash enough in that bag of hers to buy a Volvo bus, never mind a ticket on one.

Now, standing next to Hoshiyaar, I shivered. His face, shadowed and cratered in the half-light that came in through the window, looked bloodless. Someone nearby sighed deeply in his sleep and I was suddenly frantic for Hoshiyaar to wake up, scared like a child alone in the dark.

“Chacha.” I crouched down close to him, then remembered.

I’d better make sure the couple was still there before I woke Hoshiyaar — otherwise he’d twist my ear like a bottle cap.

The couple was headed toward us looking around for someone to make them an offer. They knew the rules of the ticket game after all.

“Chacha,” I hissed once again in Hoshiyaar’s ear. The old man snapped awake and stared at my face fiercely without missing a beat, as if he had just closed his eyes a second ago.

“Kya bey, Ramu? What is it?” Even after all these years, his instant alertness unnerved me and I took a shaky breath before I stuck a thumb in the direction of the duo.

“Two bakras for you,” I said. Sheep for the shearing.

He took a look then turned to face the wall. “You woke me up for that?” he said. “Go away, fucker, I’m asleep.”

I couldn’t believe it. Ever since I was a kid, washing used plates and glasses in a basin under the table at Sethi’s food stall, it had been my job to spot the potentials, to alert Hoshi-yaar or keep the suckers talking until he arrived and took over.

This was the second time this month he’d chosen sleep over the solid dhanda I was reeling in.

“Acha, theek hai, I’ll go tell Jaggu then,” I said, naming a rival ticket tout. “He needs the business and that chick is dripping with cash.” The old man sat up at that, hands smoothing down his beard, and I swear I could hear his mind click on instantly, I am talking tchak, like a pistol’s trigger cocking. He flicked two fingers at my skull but I ducked.

“You do that and I’ll break your legs.” He wasn’t kidding so I grinned to convince him that I was. He stood up, straightened his white kurta, still crisp after a full day’s work, and waited until the couple came closer. Behind them, Jaggu and another ticket tout emerged, snouts quivering, but slunk back into their corners when Hoshiyaar sauntered toward them. No one who did any business in the terminal messed with Hoshi-yaar. The few who did either left to find other turf fast or had nasty accidents. Once I saw him slowly bend a man’s arm the wrong way until it jerked out of the shoulder socket with a soft pop. The sound kept me from sleeping some nights — nights I lay awake and thought of leaving Hoshiyaar.

The girl faltered when she saw Hoshiyaar, then continued walking toward us. He must have looked terrifying looming out of the dark like that — a tall Sikh made taller by his turban. A blanket was slung around his shoulders and underneath it was a belt strapped across his chest. It ended in a holster for his kirpan. The dagger was his most precious possession, and he checked now to see if it was resting against his thigh where everyone would notice. He’d said I could keep it when he passed away.

He liked to say I was the son he’d never have, especially after he gave me a pasting for something I had failed to do properly. A year ago, after he broke my nose and had to take me to the hospital, Hoshiyaar had started letting me distribute the hafta money to his network. Now I was in charge of weekly payments to the hotel receptionists, autorickshaw and taxi drivers, and eager little clerks in their ticket cages who funneled travelers to him.

I knew he also wanted me to slip secret packets to rich young men idling their motorbikes in a bylane near Kashmiri Gate, far away from the cops — it was a new sideline he’d started and he needed a runner. He’d asked me once or twice, pretending he was joking, but so far I’d found some excuse to sidestep him. Every once in a while some kid turned up dead or cut up by the drug dealers and I wasn’t looking to lose any bits of myself just yet. But Hoshiyaar was a dangerous man to cross and soon his patience would run out. Then I didn’t know what I’d do.

In return for my help with his ticket business, he gave me a small percentage of the profits and a corner of his room to sleep in and watch Zee TV. Plus he made sure I was safe from gangsters, homosexuals, and Sethi’s rages, or the odd policeman looking to make an easy arrest. I was grateful for the protection.

Back then I was scrawny, with arms like sticks, no different than the other chokras who harassed passengers streaming through the bus adda, urging peanuts or shoe shines on them.

As long as I had my tea caddy, no one paid me any attention a second longer than it took to buy a glass of chai. Since I was invisible to most people, I was able to hear conversations and pick up tips that were useful to Hoshiyaar. Sometimes I’d stand with my mouth slightly open, stupid expression firmly in place. Or hunker down and pretend to be heavily asleep, head lolling on my chest. I made up roles in my own little drama.

Together we were a double-action pair. Hoshiyaar stood out, I did not. I bagged the customers, Hoshiyaar finished them off.

That night I must have done a good job of acting because Miss India didn’t spare me a glance for the longest time, even though I was standing close to the three of them. She was busy frowning up at Hoshiyaar’s face. He was playing Leather

Jacket like a ringmaster in the Apollo circus. Here’s the hoop, now jump, doggy!

The two of them wanted tickets to Shimla.

“So I am getting tickets to you the moment it is morning,” Hoshiyaar said, speaking English — the boyfriend didn’t know Hindi. Perhaps he was from the South, a Madrasi. “You not pay single paisa now — only on delivery. Yes, I am doing under-table business, but bahoot clean dealings only, sir. I have to feed wife, four children, old mother. But I giving good customer service. You tell other people about Hoshi-yaar, okay?”

His eyes twinkled when he raised his palms in front of his chest as if he was blessing the boyfriend. Or surrendering, like the gangsters did in the movies when the police arrived with guns drawn, I thought, suppressing a grin. Tonight Hoshiyaar was a harmless, jolly old fellow trying to make a living, getting by in his own fashion. The honest broker — Hoshiyaar, too, was good at his act.

“How much?” Miss India demanded. It was clear she was the boss. Hoshiyaar acted as if he hadn’t heard and continued talking.

“We have to leave tonight,” the boyfriend said, sealing their fate.

I stepped up from where I was making like a shadow behind Hoshiyaar and named a sum four times the official rate before the old man could hazard a price. Leather Jacket’s mouth fell open a little. He was a got-to, must-have type — let him pay through the nose. I could feel Hoshiyaar staring at me but I ignored him.

“That’s bullshit, yaar!” Leather Jacket finally bleated, his eyes skittering over Miss India’s face. She made an impatient sound then raised her perfect eyebrows in my direction, noticing me for the first time. I forced myself to hold her glance.

“Can’t you lower it a little? It’s too much, bhayya—” Her voice went all breathy and pleading. Brother, she had called me. If only she knew. The things I wanted to do to her were far from brotherly.

“Not too much.” I shook my head. “You want to go today night — that is rate. Tomorrow night different rate. You ask anyone, he and me are not like others, only less profit we are taking.” I could feel Hoshiyaar beside me stiffening but I didn’t look at him to see how he felt about my promoting myself to partner.

“Private superdeluxe bus — AC, semisleeper, free water bottle, free cinema,” I continued, and I swear she was amused by my persistence. Not that she deigned to smile or anything but there was something softer in her look, something almost admiring, I thought.

I tore my eyes off her mouth and turned to the boyfriend.

“Bus parked very close to here — you board without problem.

Where you and madam are staying?” I asked casually.

“Anand—” Leather Jacket blurted out like the fool he was — and Miss India clutched at his arm in warning.

“We’re checking out in the morning,” she said quickly.

I glanced at Hoshiyaar. If he was as surprised as I was, he didn’t show it.

One would have thought anyone who looked and dressed like these two would choose a better hotel. Anand Vikas was a low-class, dirt-cheap, zero-star cowshed on Chuna Mandi managed by a tobacco-chewing degenerate who sometimes let me go up to an empty room and watch a whore performing on her customer next door through a secret hole drilled into the wall. The manager charged by the hour — same as the whore.

Hoshiyaar jumped in: “We’re giving good service. No standing in line for you — we bring tickets to your hotel,” he said. I’d asked where they were staying as a bluff. I was horny and curious and had some vague idea of stalking Miss India in the morning. But what was Hoshiyaar up to?

“There’s no need — we’ll come back. Just tell us where,” Miss India said quickly. She sounded nervous all of a sudden.

“No tension, no tension — I bringing to hotel in Paharganj,” Hoshiyaar insisted. Leather Jacket was shifting from foot to foot. “Ticket delivery only in hotel,” Hoshiyaar repeated, his voice still silky-smooth.

She looked down at her high heels and my stomach clenched. Hoshiyaar had botched it — she was going to walk away from the deal and I wouldn’t see her again.

“Don’t worry, be happy,” I chimed in, and her head shot up at that. A lopsided little smile came and went.

“When you come to the hotel, ask the manager to call the room and we’ll come downstairs to collect. Understood?” she said finally, addressing Hoshiyaar, ignoring me once more. It dawned on me that whatever was waiting in Shimla for these two must be life-and-death. They were a little too desperate, too willing to pay the price. Miss India was mixed up in some shady number-two dhanda, the kind of rich-people’s business that wasn’t exactly legal but never got anyone marched off in handcuffs.

Hoshiyaar nodded with obsequious vigor and she turned, heading for the exit. Her boyfriend stared after her, perhaps surprised at her abrupt capitulation, threw an awkward smile at Hoshiyaar, and trotted off after her. She stalked past me behind my pillar and I got a whiff of her perfume, a scent of jasmine. A memory teased at the edges of my mind then drifted away, leaving only a feeling of warmth and softness. My throat began to ache.

“Tomorrow morning,” Hoshiyaar called after her, winking at me. He jerked his head approvingly at her backside. I swear I would have laid my life down for a piece of that world-class ass.

Walking back, Hoshiyaar thumped my shoulder. “At that price I’m willing to arrange delivery on the moon!” he laughed.

“You’re getting balls, chotey!” I grinned back. Until tonight I’d never interfered in the bargaining.

“Give me a little extra cut then—” I said, getting the words out before I lost my nerve.

“We’ll see,” was all Hoshiyaar replied. Still, it had been a good night.

When we got back to the waiting room, Hoshiyaar lay down again. “Get lost! I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Chacha, why are you delivering at the hotel?”

Hoshiyaar shrugged. “That bitch was talking a bit too much. I just want to scare her a little — have some fun.”

Don’t ask me how but I knew he was lying. I stayed put, staring down at him.

He turned his back. “Okay, okay. This place is crawling with sisterfucking cops — that Inspector Balwant is always sniffing around so it’s safer to go to the hotel,” he proffered.

But I wasn’t convinced. He was definitely up to something.

“Chacha, I’m coming to the hotel with you,” I said. He pulled the blanket over his head and didn’t respond.

The sky was lightening all around me as I walked away from Hoshiyaar. The terminal was slowly stirring to life. I could hear the deep roar of cars on Mahatma Gandhi Road, all those people rushing to beat the early-morning traffic. Passengers were streaming in through the main gate, many of whom would want tea.

I went into a PCO booth and made a local call. Outside the sweepers began their futile cleaning, scraping their stiff brooms through the trash. Farther away, the earliest buses started up with a rumble.

Sethi’s food stall was already busy when I wandered over to pick up my tea caddy, my stomach gurgling at the hot smell of chole baturas frying.

A few hours later, at 8:30 a.m., Inspector Balwant turned up and parked his ample backside on the bench in front of Sethi’s. I had come back for a refill and was waiting for the cook to pour the boiling tea into my metal caddy.

The inspector was an extra-large man with a hairy paunch that flashed through the buttons on his khaki uniform. He was the seniormost of the policemen that swarmed all over ISBT. He liked to make surprise visits to the terminal and, although he never bothered me, it was obvious he didn’t like Hoshiyaar.

“A holy warrior meditating on money,” he had characterized Hoshiyaar last week. “Who knows if he is even really a Sikh or just pretending to be one? Though his look is a smart move, sant aur shaitan — saint and devil at the same time. Must be good for business, eh?”

I had never seen Hoshiyaar enter a gurdwara in the years I’d known him, but I didn’t give a damn. Anyway, I knew that the inspector was telling me that he knew what Hoshiyaar and I were up to — the cop wasn’t looking for answers. So I’d said nothing, just made myself scarce.

Still, Hoshiyaar and every other tout at ISBT knew Inspector Balwant was after bigger fish and couldn’t be bothered with our petty scrounging.

There was someone new with the cop today, a clean-shaven young man with glasses.

“Chole batura for my journalist friend here!” shouted the inspector. As if there was any other food choice. The cook rushed to comply, fishing the fried bread out of the huge kadai and artistically arranging raw onion rings and lemon slices on the plates.

“No, no, how can I? I already ate, sir...” the journalist demurred, but he wolfed the food down anyway, nodding with his mouth full, while the inspector held forth.

“As you can see, sir, this is the shithole of the world.” He waved his hand in a circle. A family passed the stall — a man and wife with bundles on their heads, two ragged children dragging after them. The man touched his hand to his head in a salaam as they moved past the inspector. “Ten thousand people rushing about every day — and my bosses expect me to find one or two criminals.” He shifted on the seat and his stomach jiggled on his thighs like an oversized baby.

“But sir, you caught Abdul Kadeer just recently. Then what about those fellows from the Tyagi gang your team stopped on the Chirag Delhi flyover?” A few months ago the inspector had walked up to a bearded man climbing into a bus near Jahanpanah forest and had drawn his gun on him. That’s where men go to fuck other men, and who knows what that guy was really up to, but the next day it was all over TV that Balwant had caught some most-wanted terrorist type.

“Aah! Yes — you remember that? Very good memory. Yes, sometimes God is with me.” The inspector looked pleased at the journalist’s chamchagiri. Recently the government had designated Balwant to some big-shot post in the antiterrorism task force. The papers had immediately dubbed him the Don of Delhi. Maybe the journalist was here because he was hoping the inspector would fall over a terrorist or two right then and there in front of his camera.

“Get going, fucker,” Sethi, who had appeared from nowhere, snarled at me. The inspector looked up from his plate.

As I picked up my full caddy and left I could feel his eyes following me.

The ISBT was roaring around me when I plunged back into the crowds. Dust rose in thick clouds and diesel fumes were everywhere. The place smelled of fried food — and nervousness. Everyone here was anxious to be gone, to be somewhere else. At least the ones who had somewhere else to go. As I passed, a flower seller I knew brandished her jasmine garlands in my face, teasing. Around me vendors shouted, babies cried, autorickshaws honked.

My mother had been a flower seller, Hoshiyaar said. I couldn’t recall her face, though sometimes if I concentrated her smell came back to me. She’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident near our slum. I was five years old and would have been doomed to begging in the streets if Hoshiyaar hadn’t taken me home, found me work at the stall, given me a life. He reminded me of his magnanimity often. On most days I believed him.

When my caddy was empty I went back to the stall. Inspector Balwant was still there declaiming to the journalist.

I had been out among the crowds five times already and I was tired. All I had eaten since last night was a slightly brown banana one of the vendors had given me. I slid to the ground and sat on my haunches.

The cook plunked another full caddy in front of me and I picked it up. Sethi would leave to check on his other business in an hour. I could go to Miss India’s hotel then. Without waiting for Hoshiyaar.

“Oy, chotey! Naam kya hai tera? Come here,” the inspector called out, waving his hand at me.

“Ji! Abhi aaya.” I went around to the bench, stood in front of him. “I’m Ramu,” I said. He knew my name. He’d asked me twice before. The inspector heaved himself to his feet. The journalist stood up too, and then at a word from the inspector walked off in the direction of the white Maruti Gypsy parked a short distance away.

“There’s something I want to ask you, Ramu — so don’t go anywhere,” he said. I wondered what he wanted with me — I was small fry, insignificant.

I felt a cold little tickle start up in my stomach. These cops were always sniffing around for trouble until someone paid them to go sniff somewhere else. Hoshiyaar had said the inspector wasn’t interested in our little sideline, but now I wasn’t so sure.

Inspector Balwant’s lips drooped. He sighed, his face comically sad. I shifted from one leg to the other. “Give me your hand,” he said.

I hesitated, set the caddy down, and put my hand out. The cop took it in his huge paw and held it loosely, then covered it with his other palm, so my fingers were sandwiched in between.

“Where are those two going?”

“Who?” I said.

“The couple who wanted tickets from your Hoshiyaar last night,” the inspector said, and pushed my fingers backwards so hard that the pain made me rise up on my toes.

“Shimla, sir,” I said when I could speak.

“Are they coming back here to collect the tickets?” The inspector’s hand moved up casually until his fingers circled my wrist, gave it a little experimental twist. I felt slightly lightheaded — this man was going to snap my wrist in broad daylight. Past Inspector Balwant’s bulk I could see the journalist smiling at the sight of the two of us, from the window of the jeep. He took out his camera and snapped a picture of the celebrated inspector shaking hands with the lowly tea-boy.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. My voice came out cracked and whispery like an old man’s. The inspector’s hand squeezed my wrist. Hard. “They arranged delivery with Hoshiyaar. They’re leaving tonight — that’s all I know. By private bus.”

“Where’s Hoshiyaar now?” He glanced toward the ticket booths, searching.

I didn’t look up. “I don’t know, sir.” I could taste the sweat dripping off my upper lip.

“Tell him I am looking for him, okay?” The inspector released my hand and it flopped down to my side. “If they come back here I want you to call me,” he added, then wrote a number on his notepad and pushed the torn page roughly into my shirt pocket before walking off.

Gaandusaalachutiyabenchodmaderchodbastardwhore-spawnmotherfuckingsisterfucker. My fingers hurt as if they were broken. Watch out for the ones who aren’t on the take — they’re the worst, Hoshiyaar always said.

I waited until the Gypsy, with the inspector squeezed safely inside, had driven off. Then I shoved my tea caddy back into the stall with my good hand and left for the hotel. I could hear Sethi behind me yelling for me to come back “right-now-this-minute or I’ll skin you alive,” but at that moment I didn’t care. Miss India and her loverboy were up to something that was bad enough to get the police all excited. Perhaps I could do her a favor, warn her somehow.

“I transferred them to room 5-B this morning. You owe me,” the manager said in answer to my panted question, pointing a finger to the ceiling. The room number was familiar. I had called him this morning, made him change Miss India’s room. No harm in a little look-see, I’d thought. Coming here, the bus had gotten stuck in traffic a mile away and I had cut in front of Imperial Cinema to get to the hotel. As usual there was a big crowd of people chowing down in front of Sitaram Diwan Chand. These suited-booted types were crazy to come to the stall from faraway places to eat chole baturas of all things. As if there weren’t a million other places in Delhi selling the same greasy shit.

Behind the reception desk was a glass mirror with the outline of the Red Fort etched in gold on it and I got a glimpse of my sweaty face. I pushed my hair off my forehead.

“You missed some top action, yaar. She was licking him like an ice-cream cone. Early in the morning they were at it — without even brushing their teeth,” the manager said. He made an obscene sucking noise. I turned and bounded up the stairs two at a time. He called something after me but I didn’t stop to listen.

When I put my eye to the hole in the wall, my view of the bed was partly blocked by Hoshiyaar. He had come without telling me and the manager must have let him up. He was standing quite still, his back to me. Beyond him was Miss India’s smooth naked leg sticking out to one side.

I knocked on the closed door of 5-B and said his name twice before Hoshiyaar replied.

“Go home and wait for me,” he growled.

“No. Inspector Balwant came after me — there’s something going on with those two.” Hoshiyaar opened the door and yanked me inside.

“And what did you tell him?” He grabbed my arm and shook it.

“Nothing. I didn’t know where you were.” I glanced at the bed and the words jammed in my throat.

Miss India lay on top of the blood-soaked sheet, arms flung wide apart, a stab wound to her throat. Her valise lay open on its side next to her. Spilled out of it were three handguns and bundles upon bundles of rupees wrapped in transparent plastic. The guns looked so much smaller than in the movies.

She mumbled something indistinct and weakly moved her fingers. My legs gave way under me and I stumbled to a chair, held onto its arms. Her eyes were open and they locked into mine as if she was trying to tell me something. My stomach heaved and I swallowed hard, forcing myself to look away.

“We fought, struggled. Bitch pulled a gun on me — I lost my head,” Hoshiyaar said. “Her friend ran into the bathroom — I locked him in. He was crying and carrying on — I couldn’t think.” His eyes bounced around the room. “I need to think.” His turban had fallen off his head and his bald pate, barely covered by his wispy topknot, shone with sweat.

Leather Jacket thumped on the bathroom door, yelled something I couldn’t quite understand.

It seemed important at that moment to find Hoshiyaar’s turban. I looked around until I spotted it fallen down behind the chair. I picked it up carefully, dusted it off, and handed it to him. “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

I heard sirens in the distance. They were coming closer.

“The bastard cops must have had you followed.” Hoshi-yaar looked toward the door. “Will the manager lie to them? Go down and tell him I’ll kill him if he opens his mouth.”

“No — it’s no good,” I said. “He’ll sell his own sister — and then watch while they fuck her.” I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I felt unhinged by the blood, the dying girl.

Hoshiyaar slapped me so hard that my head snapped back. I put a hand to my cheek, then drew a deep breath. The shock steadied my head. Below us the terrifying wow-wow of the sirens drew even closer, then passed. Just some fat-cat politician going about his dirty business. I looked at the money. Miss India was quiet now, her eyes closed.

“Did you bring their tickets?” The old man nodded. I walked to the bed. I couldn’t make myself touch the valise, so I tore off a pillowcase and started shoving the money into it.

“Don’t touch the money!” Hoshiyaar said. So that’s why he had come here without me. He must have sensed that these two would have hard cash hidden in the room. If I hadn’t barged in, if his plan had gone smoothly, would he have shared any of it with me, his so-called son?

I doubted it.

“We’ll take the money and get out of here,” I said, then resumed picking up brick after brick of cash and stacking each inside the pillowcase. It was all becoming clear to me. Our life here was over. “I’ll go to Shimla — wait for you.”

“Shut up! Put the money down and get out of here. I’ll say she pulled a gun — I stuck her with the kirpan in self-defense.

Lots of these cops owe me favors — I’ll take care of everything.

But you shouldn’t be found here.” Hoshiyaar was talking fast, almost babbling.

“But what about the manager?” I asked. The pillowcase was full and I put it down where he could see it. “He saw us, and you’re going to have to take care of him.”

Hoshiyaar turned away and picked up a jug and glass from the little table beside the bed. It took him a few tries but in the end he managed to pour himself some water without spilling it. He drank noisily. “Go down and get the manager,” he said after a while.

I went down to the manager. There was no one else around. There never was — this hotel was probably a front for some other operation.

“You have to come and see this,” I said, acting excited. “You can’t believe what she’s doing.” I took him back to the empty room next door to 5-B. He was bending over to look through the hole when Hoshiyaar came in. I thought he was going to offer him money to keep quiet but instead he simply snapped his neck. “It was either him or us,” Hoshiyaar said. I couldn’t talk — what was left to say now? Hoshiyaar was taking me somewhere I hadn’t been before, a place I didn’t want to inhabit. “Help me here,” he ordered, and I got hold of the manager’s arm and together we dragged him back to Miss India’s room.

That’s when I had my idea. “Shoot him with her gun,” I suggested. “When the cops come they’ll think they had a fight and he killed her.” I pulled cash out of the pillowcase, tore the plastic off, and scattered some bundles on the bed. The manager tried to rob her and she shot him — that was the story here. It would save the old man, I thought. Hoshiyaar put a pillow over the gun to muffle the shot but it still sounded like an explosion. I could feel myself beginning to shake. Deep inside, not anyplace where it showed.

When Hoshiyaar went to wash his hands in the bathroom, I took three bricks of cash and dropped them down the front of my pants. My shirt was many sizes too big and I figured he had been too rattled to count the money.

When he came back, Hoshiyaar reached into the pocket of his kurta, fished out a bus ticket, and gave it to me. He talked fast, panting a little. “Get out of the city. Wait for me in Shimla, check in at the Satyam Chaat stall once in a while — I’ll find you. I’ll get out of here in a few days — I’ll work as usual at the ISBT so no one gets suspicious.”

“Give me the money,” I said, pointing to the pillowcase. “You can’t be found with it.” He looked at me for a long time, his eyes hooded. I waited, testing him.

“Don’t worry about it — I’ll hide it somewhere and bring it with me to Shimla,” he replied finally.

I nodded, then swallowed. My throat felt tight, squeezed shut.

“What about him?” I asked, to change the subject, indicating the bathroom door. Poor Leather Jacket.

“I’ll take care of him,” he said.

Then he grabbed me by the arm and marched me toward a door at the other end of the room. It led to a tiny balcony.

“Leave from here so no one sees you exiting the building.”

At the door he hesitated, then went back to the bed and returned with some cash and handed it to me. It must’ve been a couple of thousand rupees.

“That should be enough till I get there.” He put out a hand and patted me on my cheek. His fingers were cold. “Don’t be afraid, son, I’ll be all right. We’ll leave Dilli — disappear forever. You and I — we can do business anywhere. I’ll phone Satyam — he’ll be waiting for you.” He pushed me through the doorway onto the balcony, then closed the thick wooden door behind me and latched it with a loud click.

Five stories below me was a gali filled with garbage. On the left side of the balcony, fat water pipes ran all the way to the ground. My heart jumped inside my chest as if it was trying to break free.

I took a deep breath and threw my flip-flops down before swinging my leg over the balcony ledge. My palms were wet and slipped on the pipe once or twice but I made it down okay.

When my feet touched the ground I collapsed and sat legs splayed out in the dirt of the alleyway for a few minutes, crying and shaking. I thought of us in Shimla, me doing what I always did, living the life Hoshiyaar planned, stepping on the stones he laid down. I stumbled to my feet and started running.

At the ISBT there were no busloads of policemen, just the usual chaos. I grabbed two plastic bags off a cart selling oranges. At another stall I wheedled a bar of soap from the owner, a Bihari guy I treated to free tea once in a while. Inside the bathroom of the waiting room I washed my face, hands, and neck, combed my hair in the mirror. I took Inspector Balwant’s note out of my pocket. On it he had printed his name and ANTITERRORISM TASK FORCE in spindly capitals. Hoshiyaar had taught me to read from the garish children’s books the vendors sold. I put the money and Inspector Balwant’s note in the bags, then walked into one of the stores near the terminal and bought some jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, cheap dark glasses, and a pair of fake Nikes. After I put them on I looked like a new person — even Hoshiyaar would have trouble recognizing me. I threw away my shirt and shorts. Afterwards, I went into the Ritz Theatre and bought tickets for all the films and watched them one after the other, staring blankly at the screen until it was time for the bus to leave.

I looked out of the window at the busy street as the vehicle turned away from Kashmiri Gate. The monument itself was now behind grating, locked away by the government. There were a few foreigners around it, mouths and guidebooks open as they squinted up at its massive curved brick doorways. I had lived my whole life in the city yet had never gotten on a bus, never ventured beyond this little world. Now Delhi was spitting me out. As we raced over the quiet highways I couldn’t sleep. Miss India would have sat in the seat I was in, rested her cheek against the cool glass of my window. I imagined Hoshi-yaar a week from now leaving for Shimla. I would go to the Satyam Chaat stall and there he’d be waiting, smiling faintly, ready to kick-start our life together again.

Sometime in the middle of that night, the bus driver stopped on the outskirts of a small town to let passengers use the bathroom. I got off the bus, plastic bag in hand, and walked toward the blazing storefronts. There was a phone booth there and I told the operator I had never made a long-distance call and so he dialed the number on the paper in my hand. The inspector answered and I told him about the hotel and Hoshiyaar and the money he had taken and hung up before the cop could ask me a thing.

Next to the booth was a dhaba with a corrugated tin roof.

A man in an undershirt was rolling rotis and pressing them onto the walls of a tandoor. I asked him to wrap up an order of dal-roti and stood there beside the glowing drum, breathing in the scent of toasted flour.

(Years after I had made myself into another Ramu, I went into a library in a big city far from Delhi and dug through old newspapers until I found the one I wanted. There was a picture of Inspector Balwant, another of Hotel Anand Vihar.

It had been big news at the time because there was a woman involved. The couple had posed as tourists but the police had credible information that they were aiding and abetting terrorists from the northeast, one of the many separatist groups fighting for their piece of the homeland. The woman killed in the hotel room was beautiful, the writer noted. I searched hard but there was no mention of Hoshiyaar. Yet on the inside pages there was a fawning profile of Balwant as the “people’s cop” accompanied by a picture of him shaking hands with a tea boy — me. It set me trembling and I tell you I quit that library fast.)

When the man handed me my food, I asked and he told me — but I have forgotten — how many miles we were from Shimla.

The bathroom was a shed in the back of the building, set at the edge of sugarcane fields that stretched out into the distance. The moon was large and round in the sky and the little crooked trails that ran between the fields were full of light and shadow. I waited till the rest of the men had zipped up their flies and left. Then I stepped down into the dirt of the pathway in front of me and started walking without glancing back. Someone did come search for me and shouted my seat number a few times. I could see a glimmer of his shirt as he stood at the edge of the fields searching the darkness. But the cane was tall on both sides of the path and I stayed still. Finally he left and a few minutes later the bus started and drove off. After that it was just me. As for Hoshiyaar, I couldn’t give a fuck. Really.

Fit of rage by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Defence Colony

I sit on a blue plastic stool outside the Mother Dairy booth in Def Col Market and do nothing. It’s the end of another gray and cloudy August day. The monsoon has yielded little rain. Even though it’s evening, I’m sweating. The humidity makes me feel like a squeezed sponge.

I should be at home. I really don’t know what makes me leave my room. These days I am pushed along by forces not in my control. One day slips into another. Every night is a silent dark space that swallows me whole. I squat inside her belly until she spits me out at dawn, covered in phlegm and bile.

Something happened a year ago. Arpita and I were living in Bombay then. We were locked in the missionary position when, suddenly, she pushed me off. She said, “Manik, I feel hemmed in. Every day it is the same damn thing. We’ve been together for five whole years and every night it’s the same old shit. No new positions. No nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I feel my youth slipping away from me, Manik.” She sat on the floor and glared at her toes. I smoked a cigarette. I felt deeply humiliated.

Then I did something terrible.

It’s not very clear to me what exactly happened. I did what I did in a fit of rage. I remember a kitchen knife, I remember being seized by an uncontrollable urge and doing what had to be done. I recall a pair of dangling headphones playing tinny music.

Defence Colony isn’t a completely new place for me. I lived here many years ago, when I was a techie with a dot-com. It was my first job.

In Bombay, I thought to myself: It’s all over now, let me return to where I started my adult life. From twenty to thirty has been one long journey. I suppose you could say my life never really took off. Many strange things happened in those ten years. I try not to remember them but very often memories force themselves on my consciousness; they are like stubborn relatives who invite themselves over even when you’ve made it clear that they are unwelcome.

I have a room on the first floor, directly above the garage. The house faces a school. In the mornings I can hear the bell go off every forty minutes, signalling the end of one period and the start of another. Midmorning, at around 11, a drum starts its heavy pounding, probably a P.T. class. From my window I can see only a small part of the playground. The lot is dusty and shorn of grass. During the break the girls play a game where they run around holding each other’s hands, forming a chain. When the girls stray into the corner of the field visible from my window, I back away or hide behind the curtain. I wouldn’t want them to see me.

Defence Colony is a posh Delhi neighborhood, but in the afternoons it has the air of a small, well-planned town. The roads are narrow and quiet. Guards nap in their plastic chairs, their bottoms squeezed in at odd angles. Mongrel dogs give chase to each other, or join the guards in their siesta. A dirty open drain divides the neighborhood in two halves. Cows graze peacefully on the grass on both sides of the nullah. Abandoned bulls forage in overflowing garbage dumps.

And cycle-rickshaws weave in and out of the lanes, obediently slowing down and pulling to the side in order to give way to passing SUVs.

When I arrived here four months ago in May, it was very hot. I would stay in my room all day long. When the landlady, Mrs. Bindra, asked what I did, I told her I was an online journalist. Delhi is a big city. People do all kinds of things. My landlady didn’t ask me any more questions.

In the evenings I would go to the C-block market and walk around in circles. Sometimes I would hire a cycle-rickshaw and ask to be peddled around the various blocks of the neighborhood. That’s how I met Sadiq. It didn’t take me long to befriend him. He was a Bihari migrant to Delhi. He rented his rickshaw from a rich man who owned an entire fleet. He was also a smackhead.

Every other day he’d take a bus to Connaught Place and come back with small, innocuous-looking paper pellets. The pudiyas contained the deadly brown powder. He would do it all the time, in all sorts of places. Sadiq had a friend who lived in the Jungpura slums, near the railway tracks. He’d head over there often. I’d go along, not for the smack but for the ganja which his smack buddy also dealt.

When no one was looking, I’d get Sadiq to come up to my room. He always expressed amazement at the fact I lived on my own. “Don’t you get lonely all by yourself? I just wouldn’t be able to handle it...” Sadiq lived in a one-room tenement in Kotla, a poor neighborhood just around the corner from Def Col. His four children, wife, and younger brother all slept in the same room. And he alone wouldn’t have been able to afford even that. His younger brother had been lucky to get a job in an electrical repair shop. When he rented the room he had felt obligated to ask his older brother if he and his family wanted to move in.

I am sitting in my room with Sadiq and Chotu. Chotu is the newest member of our two-person gang. Now we are a trio.

Chotu works at Mrs. Bindra’s. He lives in a room on the terrace, surrounded by black Sintex water tanks. His room has a tin roof which heats up during the daytime. He has few possessions, all of which he keeps locked in his gray tin trunk. For furniture he has a bed, a mattress, a surahi, a small rectangular mirror, a noisy table fan. To liven up the walls he’s cut out glamorous pictures from Delhi Times. Seminaked Bollywood actresses and foreign models smile and pout at Chotu. At night they go a step further. Some pop out of their frames and climb into bed with him. He says he has felt them touching him in all the right places.

Chotu is from Garhwal. He is fair-skinned, has shiny black eyes and big hands. He is moody and irritable when with us. In front of Mrs. Bindra he is subservient and self-effacing, always ready to please. He misses the rain and the mountains, the company of his friends. He’s fond of his drink. We do a lot of that sitting in the park opposite the main market or in Sadiq’s rickshaw while he peddles us around. Chotu stares at all the fancy women with their oversized sunglasses and opulent cars. He finds it strange that I remain indifferent to the sensual world around us.

We have another hangout — the first floor. The golf-playing Mrs. Bindra, wife of the dead Rear Admiral Bindra, owns C-47, Defence Colony. She lives on the ground floor. Between Mrs. Bindra’s plush, dark home and the terrace lies a vacant first-floor apartment. A young woman committed suicide here several weeks before I moved in. No one has been bold enough to rent the place after that incident. Chotu feels her ghost is still around. He describes her as being very sexy, very aloof.

She worked for a bank and lived on her own. At night she had boyfriends over. Chotu used to clean her apartment on Sundays. He had a key to the flat. He was the one who found her dead body dangling from an Orient ceiling fan.

The three of us go there sometimes, either in the mornings when Mrs. Bindra is playing golf or when she’s out-of-station, visiting her only daughter in Bombay.

It’s one of those weekends. Mrs. Bindra is in Worli, visiting her daughter who works for Hewlett-Packard. We have taken over the first floor. The curtains are drawn. The rooms are empty so our voices echo, bounce off the walls. In the vacant space our low voices acquire a rumbling, basslike quality.

Chotu and I are sitting on folding chairs. Sadiq is on the floor surrounded by the tools of his drug habit: silver kitchen foil, a new one-rupee coin which he uses as a filter, a mutilated Bisleri bottle serving as a spittoon. I use wax matches to light the foil from underneath while he chases the dragon.

Afterwards, he lies down. Every once in a while he gets up and goes to the toilet to puke.

Chotu is drinking. He has finished half a bottle of country liquor and is ranting about his boss. There’s too much work.

He was initially hired to cook but now does a host of other jobs at the same salary: dusting, cleaning, driving, shopping for groceries, walking the dog, ironing the clothes, driving Mrs.

Bindra around. She hasn’t given him a raise in two years. He says he could kill her. I say I would if I were him. He tells me to watch out; he just might one of these days.

I am smoking thin joints of Stadium ganja. I’m only half-listening to Chotu. The more I smoke, the more I think of Arpita. I’m fighting my memories but it’s a losing battle.

We are like hikers, heading toward a common summit but from different directions. At the moment we are all trekking along on our solitary paths; very soon we’ll be united at the summit. We will exchange high-fives, shake our fists, plant flags.

At around 3 in the afternoon I feel like eating. The ganja has made me hungry. Chotu is drunk but steady on his feet. He’s willing to join me. Sadiq is lying on the bare floor with his eyes shut. When I poke him he doesn’t budge. His clothes are so dirty I can’t make out what he’s wearing. His body is wrapped in rags. I realize I haven’t looked at him much all these months we have been together.

Chotu and I decide to go to Sagar Restaurant in the C-block market. I’m wearing a green polo T-shirt and faded blue jeans. Chotu’s wearing a plain red shirt and dark-brown trousers. The doorman at the restaurant hesitates for a moment, then decides to let us in. He bows and says, “Please,” pointing toward the windowless ground-floor section. He knows me by face: I eat here almost every other day. Chotu doesn’t cast his eyes around the other tables; he stares at the floor and follows me. We sidestep a couple of barefoot attendants on their knees in the narrow aisle between the tables. They have brushes and dustpans and are cleaning the floor. Not a single crumb will escape their deft hands and keen eyesight.

We make our way to the first floor where a group of Punjabi ladies are playing bingo: “Two-saven, twanty-saven, one-zero Downing Street.” Their restless children sit at another table and order ice-cream shakes and kulfis. Some of the women cast suspicious glances at us when we enter.

We sit down at a corner table and place orders for Mysore masala dosas. Chotu leans back and looks around in disgust as if we are sitting amongst mounds of smelly garbage.

After the late lunch, Chotu and I stroll around for a while: Chotu checking out women’s feet, I staring vacantly at passersby. Fortunately, everyone comes to Def Col with their maids in tow so the two of us together don’t attract much attention.

We find a cycle-rickshaw near Kent’s Fast Food. We take him to the Flyover Market. We need more booze and cigarettes. Chotu is grumpy and disgruntled. He says he can see this life of slavery is not going to go anywhere. He wants money. His present job is not going to earn him that. “Seven days of nonstop work,” he complains, “and at the end of the month a fuck-all salary. She gives me food and shelter. That’s supposed to be enough. Whatever little I have left I send home. I never had any money I could spend on myself. I’ll never have that.” He wanted a motor scooter but Mrs. Bindra refused. Chotu claims it would make the shopping quicker and easier. “But no. She insists I do everything on my bicycle.

This is no place for bicycles, brother. I am tired of cars honking me out of their way.”

At the Flyover Market I take him to Nirula’s for a drink of water. His lips are chapped and dry. He looks dehydrated. He is on his third glass when I notice one of the red-uniformed employees walking toward us. I asked Chotu to hurry. We leave before he can reach us.

We buy whiskey from the off-license under the dingy Flyover Market. The sound of the traffic is loud. Invisible trucks and buses roll past above our heads. We are the small fish covering the ocean floor while the big fish hunt closer to the surface. I buy cigarettes from a man sitting opposite Central Bank. We walk home in silence. Chotu has stopped complaining for the time being. While walking over the small bridge across the nullah, I see cows grazing in the grass down below. They look sluggish and bored.

When we get back, Sadiq is awake. He is doing a line. He seems happy to see us. He tries convincing us to join him but neither of us is interested. Then, turning to Chotu, he says, “So, are we doing it tomorrow or not?”

Chotu seems irritated. “For that you’ll have to stay off the brown for a bit, you know. Finishing someone off requires brains and energy. You have neither in the state you’re in right now.”

Sadiq tells Chotu not to be deceived by appearances. He says he is ready, that he is an able and strong man — as a boy he fought a cobra with his bare hands; as a young man he fathered no less than four children.

Chotu says, “Okay, I trust you. We’ll need some of that old vigor tomorrow. Not that Mrs. Bindra’s a cobra, but still...”

By evening I had been taken into confidence. Initially I was a little apprehensive, even paranoid. Why were they sharing this with me? Had they stumbled upon something related to my own past? But that was impossible. As far as I knew they had no friends or acquaintances in Bombay. Had the police come snooping around then?

But as they talked amongst themselves I realized it had nothing to do with me: It was all about them and their plans for freedom. They just trusted me. We had been hanging out together for the last few months. They knew our backgrounds were different. Still, I didn’t behave like other men of my class; I didn’t even seem to know any. Chotu and Sadiq were fully aware that they were the only friends I had. No one came to visit me and I hardly left my room. I suppose a strange kind of desperation bound us together, gave us the illusion of belonging to each other’s worlds.

The plan was simple. Mrs. Bindra was supposed to return from Bombay the next afternoon. Chotu would go to Palam and pick her up. He would serve her lunch, after which Mrs. B would lie down to rest. Sadiq was supposed to arrive around this time and park his rickshaw further down the road. When Mrs. B was fast asleep, Chotu would give the all-clear sign to Sadiq. He would then slip in through the open front door; together they would overpower and kill the old lady. They would break open the almirah in her bedroom — that, according to Chotu, was where Mrs. B kept all her cash and valuables. They would stuff the booty in two empty bags, get on Sadiq’s rickshaw, and head up to the main road to catch a bus to New Delhi Railway Station.

They wanted my opinion. I said the plan sounded okay. They didn’t tell me where they were going to go afterwards. I didn’t particularly want to know.

Servants murdered their masters all the time in Delhi. Every other week the newspapers carried stories of elderly couples being drugged and clobbered to death. I often wondered: If the motive was robbery, why kill? Why not steal and scoot? Anyway, this seemed to be how they did it in Delhi.

Later that evening we went to the Vaishno Dhaba in the A-block market. On the way back we stopped by a construction site. An old house had been pulled down recently and a new one was coming up in its place. The front stood in darkness.

The roof had already been laid. A laborer’s family was living inside. One could see a faint light in a back room. A transistor radio played film music.

Chotu seemed to know exactly what to do. He took us toward the boundary wall to the left of the house. The ground was uneven and embedded with pieces of broken tiles and shards of glass. Some iron rods were lying next to the wall. Chotu picked up three. We walked back to the rickshaw, constantly looking over our shoulders, hoping no one had seen us.

Sadiq and I piled into the rickshaw, laying the rods flat on the footrest. Chotu wheeled us to C-47. They asked me if they could store the rods in my room for the night. I had no problem. Still, I was curious, so I asked Chotu why he didn’t keep them in his room. He said he would but he didn’t want to take any chances. The ironing lady across the road was a bitch. She was always trying to get him into some kind of trouble with Mrs. Bindra. She poisoned the old lady’s ears with tales. Once she’d told her that each time she was away, Chotu had whores in his room. This had gotten Mrs. Bindra very exercised.

She had promptly marched up to his room for an inspection. He had been embarrassed by the pictures on the wall: Mallika Sherawat, kneeling on the ground in a red satin dress; Kareena Kapoor in white bra and denim micro shorts, a basque cap on her head. Not finding anyone, she had asked him to take the pictures down: “Give these people a roof to live under and they turn it into a brothel.” He’d taken them down only to put some of them back up as soon as she left. But the damage was done: Mrs. B’s ears had been poisoned. Despite her age — she was seventy-six — Mrs. B was given to climbing the stairs all the way to the top of the house, especially when she returned from a trip.

Chotu slipped the rods under my bed. He had also procured a kitchen knife which he had sharpened at the Kotla market. He went and got it from its hiding place in his quarter. I kept it in a drawer in my wardrobe.

After this we said goodbye. Sadiq had to go home. This was probably the last time he was going to see his family.

Chotu returned to his quarter and slipped into bed with one of his sexy, pixelated women.

The next day, Chotu returned from the airport with a very vexed Mrs. Bindra. I could hear her complaining about something. I could hear Chotu saying “Ji Madam” repeatedly, to appease her.

Gradually the sounds died down. Silence returned to C-47. The guards, mongrels, and lanes of Def Col returned to their customary afternoon stupor. At around 3, exactly three hours after Mrs. Bindra’s return, Chotu knocked on my door.

He seemed calm and distant. We didn’t greet each other. He brushed past me and gathered the knife and the rods. We didn’t exchange many words. He asked me to take care of myself and I asked him to do the same.

I went out on my cramped balcony. Sadiq was standing a little distance from the house, under a neem tree. I saw Chotu step out of the front gate. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Even the ironing lady had closed shop, it being time for her siesta. A cuckoo bird sang doggedly and insistently. A parrot shrieked somewhere.

Chotu signalled to Sadiq. He threw away the bidi he was smoking and began walking toward C-47. I heard them shuffle in quietly. Silence followed. After a minute or two I heard Mrs. Bindra’s raised voice. She sounded more angry than scared, but then again, I could have been imagining things.

Her voice vanished as abruptly as it had started up. The sound of loud hammering followed: the sound of Chotu and Sadiq forcing a lock open.

I stepped back into my room and bolted the door from the inside. Arpita was sitting on my bed painting her toenails. I had a knife in my hand. I shut my eyes for what seemed like a very long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I missed her terribly. I desperately wanted to hold her and press my nose into her breasts. I wanted to fall at her feet and suck her freshly polished toes.

I stand by the window overlooking the school playground. It is empty at this hour. Babblers hop about on the ground. They look as busy as ants, pecking at random, immersed in their ceaseless chatter.

After about twenty minutes I catch a glimpse of Chotu and Sadiq walking down the part of the road that curves around the edge of the playground. They are on foot and carrying one bag each. They could be going shopping, getting Madam’s mixie fixed. Within seconds they have turned the corner and are out of my field of vision.

I know I am never going to see them again. They are going to start anew. I wish I could do the same. Murder has liberated them but trapped me in this horrible prison. They have a plan; I don’t.

Yet plan or no plan, things will take their own course. Mrs. Bindra’s corpse will rot. There will be a smell. The ironing lady will raise an alarm. The police will knock on my door one of these days. I will tell them whatever I know about Chotu. I will give them directions to Sadiq’s house in Kotla. Maybe I’ll tell them what I did to Arpita.

Just another death by Hartosh Singh Bal

Gyan Kunj

It wasn’t even supposed to be my first assignment. I was at the desk, working one shift after another at the Hindustan Express. A few years earlier, heralding the changes now underway, the hot metal setting of headlines had given way to the bromides printed out by the new machine installed two floors below. There in the basement, sweaty old men in banyans, their hairy arms retrained to the art of cut-and-paste, would follow our instructions while speaking of the girls on the floors above.

The editor, employed only because he had some shares in a publication the group wanted to take over, was no different.

Rarely venturing out of his new glass-paned office perched above the open newsroom, he never managed to make the aphrodisiac of power work for him. Suspended between the desperation above and the lust below were men like me, somewhat more at ease with the women because of the English we spoke, the youth that we then took so much for granted.

The day I ran into my first story I was on the morning shift.

I had loitered around to chat with friends who had come in for the later shift. By the time I started walking back the sun was already low on the horizon, barely visible through the exhaust from the half-digested kerosene-diesel mixture belched out by autorickshaws.

I was living across the bridge from ITO, unable to afford the better-off localities in south Delhi. The walk back home led past the crowded narrow lanes of Laxmi Nagar. Even here change was in the air; cheap plastic digital Casio watches had started flooding the shops and Sukh Ram’s PCOs were taking root everywhere.

At the very edge of Laxmi Nagar, just a few hundred yards short of the Radhu Palace cinema, was an enclave of upwardly mobile middle-class respectability — Gyan Kunj, the repository of knowledge. Decades earlier, retired college teachers had gotten together to form a society that had been allotted land at concessional rates by the government. Some of the old single-story houses that still survived on the large plots spoke of the difficulties of fulfilling the ambition of a home of one’s own on an honest college teacher’s salary. Their decades of labor had now liberated the next generation from the usual step-by-step pursuit of salaried respectability.

There were five of us staying in two rooms on the first floor of a house now managed by an architect. He and his wife lived with his aging parents, both retired college teachers. A side entrance led to our rooms, a large one with three beds lined up in a row and a smaller one that I shared with a Bengali. His excessive attachment to his mother and poetry would soon take him back to Calcutta. We had all been trainees together at journalism school — the Bihari thakur who had not made it through umpteen UPSC attempts and the two Lucknow Brahmans who were far more focused in their ambitions.

They had all gladly taken up offers from the financial newspaper in the Hindustan group. The economy was just beginning to open up and the salaries were higher. I thought I’d be better off editing copy from remote parts of the country, straightening out stilted language while I dwelt amidst books and the fond hope of writing one of my own someday.

The reality of the job turned out to be somewhat different.

The first day at work I walked up to the horseshoe table at the heart of the newsroom and sat there for six hours with nothing to do. Over the next week the chief sub on duty would throw the most inane articles my way. Often enough he would crumple my subbed copy and drop it into the wastebasket at his feet without even a look. It took ten days before a brief I’d touched made it to the paper.

In the end it didn’t take much to get more work. On a dull summer day with nothing other than a picture of a bitch wallowing in water for the front page, the chief sub warmed up to my suggestion of “Dog Day Afternoons.” I was suddenly seen as a sub with promise. But it didn’t dispel the tedium of the job, a tedium that would grip me each day as I walked back from ITO.

The day the tedium finally broke, I’d been thinking of a new girl on the desk, a welcome change from the tattered magazines lying under my mattress.

Barely a few hundred yards from the house, near the ramshackle jhuggis huddled together in a hollow by the sewer line, the traffic had come to a standstill. Long before I managed to make my way to the group of mourners blocking the road, I could hear them. They were gathered around a body that lay at the center of the street, covered with a sheet. As always, it was the women who were the loudest, each trying to outdo the other. Threading my way past them I was halted by a voice I recognized. It was the maid who worked at the house.

“Bhaiyya, Ekka ko mar diya.” (“They’ve killed Ekka.”)

Ekka was her brother-in-law and would clean and cook for us whenever she took time off. A tribal from what was then south Bihar, Ekka was true to every stereotype, working only when he felt like. He would always turn up at our place thanks to the dregs of liquor he could find in the bottles we had tossed away under the beds. If he worked a few days in a row, he knew we’d hand him a bottle of Old Monk.

In a moment of weakness, late one evening as he fried some fish for us with our rum, I had even given him my business card. Thankfully, no such thing as a mobile existed then, but at times, as I struggled against a deadline on the night shift, I would get a call from Ekka. “Bhaiyya, yeh log mujhe maar rahein hain. Main bhag ke PCO me ghus aiya hun, kuch kariye nahin to meri jaan le lenge.” (“Some guys are beating me up. I had to run inside this phone booth. Do something or they’ll kill me.”)

The first few times, I requested the reporter on duty to help him out. In turn I would insert a brief item to favor some official the reporter needed to placate. Once, as Ekka was putting the receiver down, I heard him tell someone, “Ab dikhata hun saalon, dekhna kaise police aati hai.” (“Now I’ll show you bastards, see how the police turn up.”) I soon started hearing him out only to quickly return to the headlines awaiting me, the urgent need to get the pica count right for a three-column heading on the calming of Punjab or further strife in Kashmir. It seemed the night before his death Ekka didn’t even have time to make that call.

Standing there amidst the mourners it was difficult to connect the man alive in my mind with the body that lay before me. The maid’s voice, as she began telling me what had happened, was the only thing that brought the two together.

Today, as I quote her, there is a double deception involved, the first because I am recreating these events from an uncertain memory that cannot recall her name, and the second because she actually spoke in a dialect of Hindi that I cannot even begin to capture.

“We were given the body this afternoon at the police station. He had left home yesterday and we didn’t worry about him till early this morning. It was when I woke up to his absence that we started looking for him. We thought we’d ask you whether he had called. Then, in the afternoon, a policeman came looking for us.” I didn’t interrupt her as she spoke.

She was oblivious to the blocked traffic, the gathering crowd.

I was hoping to get away as fast as possible.

“He took us to the police station. There we were made to put our thumbprints on several forms. No one told us anything. We were asked to pick up his body from the mortuary after the postmortem. That was when we realized Ekka was dead. Now they are telling us that he was a thief who died while trying to escape. You know the house behind the general store, the one where the Punjabi councilor lives? They said Ekka broke in, and when the people in the house raised an alarm, he ran up to the roof and jumped off the second floor onto a pile of wood lying at the back. But we saw his body, you look at him yourself.”

And before I could say a word, she had thrown the sheet off his torso. His body was badly bruised but his face was untouched. He lay there in repose, his eyelids shut, no different from how he would have looked in his sleep.

“They beat him to death, bhaiyya. Look at him, look at him. He worked for the councilor’s opponent during the election and all the basti votes went against the Punjabi.”

She kept repeating — They beat him to death, they beat him to death — and the mourners picked up the chant, the uncovered body adding to their frenzy.

I called up the crime reporter who just said he had too much on his plate for the evening. In the morning I ran the story past the metro editor — he was a veteran who had made his peace with the new setup. He just told me to look around and see if anyone in the office gave a damn about a dead Bihari from a jhuggi.

He was right. The old man who had run the paper for decades was dead. His son was an MBA from Wharton, he wanted the paper to make money. This was no unreasonable demand but it required drastic changes in a newspaper so far shaped by his father’s whims. There was little space left for dead Biharis from a jhuggi.

I just couldn’t easily stomach the thought that a man could die such a death. It helped that for the time being the morning shift was sheltered from the cuts underway, and in the first few days after Ekka’s death my afternoons were free. Outside the office, people had little sense of journalistic designations and the Hindustan Express logo on my business card allowed me to go around asking questions.

I learned on the job, there was no one around to tell me what to do. The first thing I did was contact the police. I was to learn later this was best left to the end. The SHO in charge of the local police station was also a Punjabi, fair and light-eyed, his tall frame now putting on bulk, his face sagging with the weight of two decades of free alcohol.

He made me wait a few minutes in the large hall where the FIRs were registered. Three other policemen sat around sipping the tea that had been sent for on my arrival. A suspect was seated in a corner, manacled to the bench. On the walls were the crime figures for the area. Rapes were down, pick-pocketing and sexual harassment were on the rise.

When I walked into the SHO’s room, the subinspector investigating the case was already seated there. “Aayye aayye, Singh sahib, I’ve called the case officer so that we don’t have to keep asking other people for the information you want.”

He rang a bell placed at the side of his desk and sent for some more of the syrupy tea I had just finished drinking. “So, Singh sahib, what makes you interested in this? Such things happen all the time.”

I told him my editor felt it might be a case of custodial death. He smiled, leaning back on his metal-framed chair.

“Aap log to hamesha sensational angle dhundte hain. Bahut seeddha case hai, batao jara Ram Lal ke kiya details hain.”

(“You people always look for something sensational. It’s a straightforward case. Ram Lal, just give him the details.”)

Ram Lal didn’t waste words. At 3 a.m. the thana had received a call from the councilor’s house. When Ram Lal arrived with a constable, Ekka was already lying motionless besides a pile of wood, perhaps already dead. They sent for an ambulance and Ekka was taken to a nearby hospital where he became another entry on the dead-on-arrival list.

Ram Lal was told that an hour earlier the councilor Rakesh Trehan had been woken up by a noise outside his bedroom. He set off the alarm and heard someone running up to the roof. He waited for the servants to arrive before following the intruder. They got there just in time to catch a glimpse of a man running to the edge of the roof. It was only the clatter that followed that made them look behind the house. Ekka, they had told Ram Lal, lay there moaning quietly on a pile of wood, and they sent for the police.

“That’s it. It’s a simple case. We have checked, the man was a troublemaker, a drunkard. He probably needed money and when he was caught inside the house, he panicked and ran up to the roof,” the SHO told me. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.” I duly jotted down his words; all the questions occurred to me far too late.

I did obtain the postmortem report from Ekka’s sister-in-law and asked the crime reporter to help me make sense of the document. It wasn’t all that difficult. On the printed outline of the back and front views of a generic male figure, the specific injuries to Ekka’s body had been marked and listed.

The crime reporter was somewhat bemused by my interest in the case. He called up Dr. Mohanty, the physician who had performed the postmortem. The injuries, it turned out, were “not incompatible” with the description of the incident. Mohanty had said, and the crime reporter finally showed some interest in the case as he told me, that perhaps the man may have been beaten by a lathi.

I went back to SHO Puri, who was expecting me. “You seem the stubborn type. You shouldn’t take your work so personally, it makes life difficult.” I let him have his say before I asked him about the blows from the lathi. Puri didn’t even bother to ask me how I knew. “Officially, if you want something from me, I can only say there is nothing to your question, everything is clearly spelled out in the postmortem. But I can tell you something off the record, if you agree.”

Today, I know the bastard was uncomfortable at that moment. I should have gone after him, but then you live and learn.

“Things are never the way we write them down in the FIR, certain norms are forced by our legal procedures. We would never get a conviction if we started noting things down exactly as people tell us. Ekka didn’t just run up to the roof when he was caught. The councilor got up in the middle of the night — you know how it happens when you drink too much in the evening. He was headed to the bathroom at one end of the corridor when he saw a shadowy figure slipping into his daughter’s room. She is a young woman, in college. The councilor switched on the lights and raised the alarm. The servants rushed in from the back. By then, the councilor had already caught hold of Ekka.

“Now, I know what you are thinking. You journalists are not very different from police officers, there is very little about human beings that surprises either of us. She is a rich, spoiled kid, maybe she already knew Ekka, maybe she was the one who called him home. But then again, maybe she didn’t. We didn’t ask. He is a councilor, a powerful man. Regardless, his rage was understandable. After all, he is a Punjabi. Aren’t you one as well?

“Yes, just as I thought, so you should understand. The shame of a man trying to slip into his daughter’s bedroom, you would have done the same. Yes, they beat him, beat him badly. Apparently, he managed to slip free as the blows were raining on him and ran up the stairs. They chased him and that is when he jumped off the roof. You already know the rest of the story.”

There were several things I should have asked, but as I said, they just didn’t occur to me at the time.

He could sense I was out of my depth. “Why don’t you check for yourself? Here, let me fix an appointment with the councilor for you.” I sat and watched him call the councilor.

He broke into Punjabi. “Haanji, haanji, kal shammi aaa jaoga, khul ke gall kar lo, chappan lai nahin hai, samjhada hai, sadde passé da munda hai.” (“Yes, yes, he’ll come and see you tomorrow evening, talk openly, it will be off the record, he understands, he is a boy from our part of the world.”) I didn’t need to be told I was being patronized.

I was to meet the councilor at 5 at his showroom. I was back at the house by 3. I didn’t have any desire to hang out at the office. The story was beginning to get to me, and I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. On a hunch I decided to stop by the councilor’s house on the way to his showroom. Even though I wasn’t sure what I’d do at the house, I decided to give it a try.

The councilor’s wife answered the doorbell. It took her a while to get there. Gray-haired, dressed in a salwar kameez, she could easily have been a relative of mine from Punjab. She apologized for having kept me waiting. She said she had difficulty walking because of her knees, and the servant was away on an errand. I spoke to her in Punjabi with the deference due to an elder, told her I was a journalist and that I lived not far from her house.

“Yes, I know. When you all moved in, people in the colony were very worried. Five bachelors living on their own, we thought there would be loud parties, people dropping in all the time. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was used to here. But you boys keep to yourself.” I wasn’t going to tell her that it was not for lack of trying. She asked me to sit down and hobbled to get me some water.

I found it very difficult to broach the subject. Sitting there, it felt more appropriate to ask how her children were doing, whether her arthritis was troubling her. When I did put the question to her, it seemed a betrayal of the setting, but she seemed to be expecting it.

“Kaka,” she began, and I was being addressed as a boy for the second time in two days, but this time it was not meant to be patronizing. “He was a thief. Some of his relatives work here, but you know how these tribals are. He was an alcoholic, everyone says so, and I think he was probably looking for some loose cash or jewelry that he could sell later. The poor man panicked when he heard us and jumped off the roof.”

Did she go out and see where he had fallen? I asked.

“Haan, he didn’t seem too badly injured to me. I even made him a cup of tea while we waited for the police to arrive.

I think there must have been some internal injuries, but he wasn’t complaining of any severe pain.”

Was she sure, was she really sure? I repeated slowly in Punjabi.

“Haan kaka, he was sitting in front of me like you are sitting now. God knows what the policemen did to him.”

I told her I was going to see her husband and asked the way to the showroom; I shouldn’t have. When I got to the showroom, Trehan was waiting for me, already aware of my conversation with his wife. “I didn’t realize you lived in Gyan Kunj, we could easily have met there later in the evening.”

All I could do was make some vague noises about being unsure of my way. It should have been no big deal, but such interactions are decided by small things. Being in control of the situation is everything; I wasn’t.

He was sitting behind his desk in a cabin at the rear of the showroom. Plywood had been used to partition it off from the open floor displaying electronic goods. On one of the walls there was a photograph of him dressed in saffron, staff in hand, on a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine.

Snow-clad mountains in the background seemed to suggest it was Vaishno Devi. He must have made the journey a decade earlier — his younger version didn’t carry so much flab around the abdomen.

When he spoke there was no warmth in his tone, he was curt, eager to be rid of me. “So ask what you want to ask, I don’t see why anyone should be wasting so much time on an open-and-shut case.” Even as he spoke, his fingers played nervously on the table; each bore a thick gold ring encrusted with a gemstone.

For the first time I felt a little more sure of myself. “Mr. Trehan, I don’t think there’s anything open-and-shut about the case. I’ve just been to your house and spoken to your wife. I know the SHO wanted this conversation off the record, but I must tell you that everything you say will be on the record.”

I had overestimated his nervousness. Today I would have been able to gauge him far better. “I have no desire to say anything off the record. I don’t know why you wasted your time speaking to my wife. She wasn’t even present, she only repeated what she was told.”

“That’s not what she said.”

“She’s been worried ever since that stupid fool died. She thinks the police will come around troubling me and so when a reporter lands up she tries to clear the family of any blame. She slept through much of the incident, and in any case she would have never made it to the back, her arthritis barely allows her to walk. She never even saw the man, and I came and told her he was fine just to keep her from worrying. If you want, you can ask the servant who was there, or the SI and the constable who arrived later.”

“But that’s not what the SHO told me. He said you’d tell me what really happened.”

“That Puri is a fool. I thought you wanted to speak on the record. There you have it — what I have told you, what my servant will confirm, what is in the FIR, what the SI and the constable say they saw, what the postmortem says. What does that leave out, Mr. Singh?”

“Mr. Trehan, you feel you have everything sewn up, but there are things that don’t make sense. Isn’t it true that Ekka campaigned against you during the elections?”

“Perhaps, but everyone in that jhuggi either worked for or against me during the elections. Does that explain why the others make an honest living and this one steals?”

I sat there noting down everything he was saying. I think I still have the notes stashed away somewhere. Really, though, I was writing things down only because I didn’t know what else to do.

I went back to the metro editor. He took me out to the press club later that night. He was far more indulgent of me than he needed to be; at the time I thought much less of him than I should have. I think he sympathized with how I felt about the organization, but he’d also lived long enough to know we all need to get by. It was up to each of us, he told me, to see whether we were eventually left with anything other than money in the pocket.

“Drop the case,” he advised, sipping his rum. “You’re wasting your time.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to him, but I did. I’ve never really forgotten that evening though. So it was no surprise that the details came flooding back when a friend asked me to write about a Delhi I had known. The first words I wrote were the beginnings of this story. Somewhere in the writing I realized I needed to find out where Dr. Mohanty was now working.

Perhaps a sense of failure and the feeling that there was more I could have done spurred me on. Perhaps I wanted to see if it was possible to give a damn after all these years. But then, a lifetime of deciphering the intentions of others had left me no wiser about myself, I just knew it was something I had to do.

I was senior enough now for the young reporter on the beat to treat my words as more than simply a request. It didn’t take long — Mohanty, he told me, was the head of the forensics department at the same hospital where he had done that postmortem a decade earlier.

I headed to meet Mohanty the next afternoon, driving through those same streets, past the bridge I used to stroll across. I rarely came to east Delhi any longer. I had fled further and further south in the city, away from this grime. The river, black as ever with sludge, a vast sewer, flowed placidly below. The traffic was far more ferocious. Across the bridge the market was in transition, the old shops I remembered were giving way to even fancier showrooms. As I turned past Radhu Palace, the old structure was barely visible behind the new malls that were being constructed. It was only a matter of time before it would all be torn down for a multiplex. For a moment I even thought of driving into Gyan Kunj, but I was already late for the appointment.

I followed the directions the crime reporter had given me. A final left turn took me to the edge of the vast flood plains of the Yamuna. An old building, looking much like any large office or hospital built by the government anywhere in the country, was in the process of being dwarfed by a new steel-and-glass structure coming up to one side. It would be home to the new Central Institute of Forensic Sciences.

All this I learned from Dr. Mohanty. He still sat in the old building on the top floor. It took me awhile to find the office, walking through interminable lengths of corridors with mosaic-tiled floors. No one seemed to be around, and I had to look into each lab along the corridors, the stench of chloroform and phenyl taking me back to the dissections at the biology lab in school. Finally, a peon directed me to his room.

His secretary asked me to wait in the adjacent library while Dr. Mohanty finished with an appointment. The shelves were lined with books. I glanced at a few of the titles — Law of Dying Declaration by S.K. Shanglo, two volumes of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Embalming by T. Jayavelu.

My gaze shifted from the shelves to the two posters on the wall in front of me, on either side of a large window overlooking the river. One was titled Basic Measurements in Hanging: One of the Factors in Deciding the Mode of Death. The diagrams below had different perspectives of the same drawing that showed a figure hanging from a roof. The measurements that mattered were from hook to knot, knot to toe, hook to ground, loop circumference, toe to ground, and hook to head. For those who could process such information, the other poster dealt with Types of Manual Strangulation.

Mohanty was a curiously upbeat character in these surroundings. Bald and bespectacled, he sat in a room crowded by the usual ensemble of mementos and awards. Everything else, however, was dwarfed by a larger-than-life poster of him receiving one such prize. I sat facing him and from the wall to my right, his visage beamed down on him. His mobile rang as soon as I sat.

“No, I don’t want a credit card, what would I do with it?

A sari for my wife? What sort of chutiya do you think I am?

She’ll get a sari when I can afford to buy it. You are wasting your time on me, I belong to a generation that believes taking a loan is a sign of failure. Okay, enough, bhanchod, this is my office time, find someone else to trouble.” He turned to me. “What can a man do, Singh sahib? These guys never leave you alone. Anyway, tell me what brings you here. Your reporter said it was something personal.”

I told him the entire story on the hunch he would react sympathetically to the odd request.

“Not a problem, not a problem, just the kind of case to show you how useful our work here can be. I have records of every postmortem conducted in this hospital for the past thirty years. If you can get me the name and the year, I’ll just pull the report out. From what you say, it is a postmortem I conducted. I am sure that looking at the report will bring something back to mind.” He sent for his PA, who noted down the name and the date. “It will take them a bit of time, come let me show you around this place.”

The crime reporter had warned me about his rose garden — it was always part of the deal when anyone went to meet Mohanty. We walked through the corridor leading to the terrace. It had shelves at eye-level lined with jars of biological curios that Mohanty seemed to delight in. Snakes, the larger ones coiled tight in the jars, fetuses, and severed limbs were followed by a row with deadly poisons on display. It was an eclectic list ranging from ferric sulfate to hydrogen peroxide.

The corridor opened out to an enormous terrace overlooking the floodplains of the river. Along its length ran four rows of roses — yellow, red, white, and orange — neatly arrayed in earthen pots, each labeled with the name of the variety. “I come out here to water them every day. It’s therapeutic.”

We sat quietly for a while among the roses, overlooking the river that seemed unsoiled from this distance. Then he led me to a wire coop at the far corner of the terrace.

“This is where I rear pigeons. I have collected every conceivable variety from various parts of the country. Of course, I never say this to the doctors, but after they have spent much of their day performing postmortem after postmortem, it’s a relief to come out here. They walk past the roses to this corner and then ask the man who looks after the pigeons whether a new brood has hatched, whether an ailing bird is now doing better. After dirtying their hands with death, they come back to life here.”

We walked back to his room. The postmortem report was lying on his table. He flipped through it, reviewing it twice. It didn’t take him long, then he pushed it aside and looked at me.

“I remember this case rather well. The SHO called in to cash a favor, and there was something I didn’t mention in the report.”

He paused; the memory must have been vivid for him to recall the case so many years later.

“Ekka died of massive internal bleeding. His lower intestines were torn apart by a blunt object thrust up his anus.”

Past where he was sitting, through the window behind him, I could see the city spread out before me. My eyes slowly retraced the path I used to follow, from the new malls coming up at Radhu Palace, the new metro line leading back to the bridge, the glitzy newspaper office that had risen with the circulation. I had tried running away from the tedium on the trail of a man’s death. As the years had passed, I had gone further afield, chasing stories with greater skill, some of them taking me far from the streets of this city. But in the end it seemed this is what I had come back to, what I could not escape. What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler — either the police or the councilor and his men were capable of such brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t seem to matter. No one in this city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to realize neither did I.