Delhi Noir (9 page)
I stood by the grave and felt my shirttail begin to lift and billow. His spirit clad me, sliding over my skin like a lover’s hand. The air grew red and I was racked with pain and filled with heretical notions. Blood is our element, I remember thinking, not water. We swim in it from one life to the next, passing like a wet flame from wick to wick. So little to the body, I was thinking the other day while I bathed, the soaping is so quickly done, so little to do.
Go! I heard my Baba say. Fight, with love in your heart.
I went to a hardware store and bought a quarter-inch brush, a small tin of enamel blue, a cheap screwdriver, and a key ring with a red disc; on the sidewalk I bought a secondhand padlock. Then I went home and parked the Bee and kissed my wife. Not now, I said, detaching myself when she sent the boys out to play. I opened the paint can and outlined eggplants and marigolds on the nose of the Bee and rose water urns and caged bulbuls on her tail. The paint was still wet as I rode over the hill again and padlocked the iron door in the curly-wurly ruin.
Next day I tailed the pair again. They did a repeat of the hill walk and parted at the gate on the 212 route, Sidey looking more depressed than ever. I tailed him home to a Maurice Nagar flat and made some inquiries with neighbors.
The morning after I was at the DU metro station early. This time I braved the sweet potato but asked for an extra squeeze of lime.
Mongoose turned up in his floral jacket and ordered the same. We exchanged a wink when a Bips lookalike passed by on gel-pen refill heels. I chucked my leaf plate and ordered another.
“And one for my friend here!” I said.
“No, no,” he protested, but only formally. He was already chucking his leaf.
“Something else, these babes, no?” I said, strolling him gently away. He was walking before he knew it.
We drifted up University Road toward the gates. He seemed happy to get away from the metro, but kept looking back all the same.
“So, Mr. Raju,” I began.
Mongoose stopped dead in his tracks. “How do you know me?”
“Oh,” I brushed away an airy cobweb, “we have our ways.” At the
we
I drew myself up to my full height, laid a long finger on my shoulder, and tapped twice where some silver might adorn my epaulettes. He remained standing so I prodded him along with little shocks of home address and house history, even a little detail about a tiny nephew who might need a polio shot. (I picked that up from two door-to-door health workers.)
“And how is the, um,” I gestured up the Ridge, “shikar these days? Happy hunting?”
His eyes bulged. Sideys break down more or less right away so I was at pains to let him know I knew he was just the accessory. “And your friend, the big gun?”
He was dumb and dry-mouthed. I walked him up the slope past the tower to the curly-wurly lodge in the forest.
“We’ve had to change the lock on your door, I’m afraid.” I produced the key ring that my older boy had painted in police blue-and-red; he had added off his own bat the sinister Delhi Police motto:
With you, for You, Always.
“Go on, open it.”
He undid the padlock but lacked the strength to climb the stair.
“Don’t you want to go and see?”
“I believe you.”
“All right. What can you tell us about your friend?”
Right then the cell phone rang in his cargo pants. Mongoose jumped where he stood. It was Cobra, I could tell. The timing shook me too; the sidey simply came unhinged.
“If it’s our friend,” I said, “tell him you’ll meet him tomorrow.”
He obeyed. But Cobra had other plans and after hearing him out, Mongoose hung up in an ecstasy of fear.
“What’s up?”
He looked unseeingly at me, his finger and thumb worrying a burr on the cotton jacket.
“Hey.” I frowned and slapped him.
He began to whimper, edging away from me and then back as if pushed from the other side by an unnamed force. The phone slid into his pocket and he gripped the barred door like a prisoner who doesn’t realize he’s on the outside. “He’s crazy,” he wailed. “He’s mad!”
“What’s this drama-shama?” I growled.
He slid down the door like a bad actor and squatted there with his forehead lodged between two bars.
“Hoy!” I booted him in the bum to no effect. I was aiming a harder kick when he began to speak.
“He’s going to kill somebody. And he wants me to help.”
“Kill who?”
“Somebody. Anybody. He says no more fooling around. He says next time we use the knife. He says finish off the bastards. He says they need to be taught a lesson. They keep coming here and polluting the morals of the nation. But then he himself …”
“He himself what?”
He hung his head.
“He himself what?”
“Brings me here.”
“When are you seeing him?”
“He says we’ll have a drink this evening. He says we’ll want a bit of warming up. He wants me to bring a bottle of Walker. Where am I supposed to get the money?”
I thought for a bit. “Okay, you get a bottle of Patiala whiskey and go to the rebottlers behind Kashmiri Gate. They don’t charge much. Your job is to get him drunk, okay? You don’t drink in here? … Good. Get him drunk and then walk him to Flagstaff House. I’ll be waiting there at 10 o’clock. In an autorick-shaw. We’ll take him for a ride. Just get him drunk. And keep yourself sober. Do you think you can manage that?”
He seemed to come to life and we parted at the 212 bus stop.
“Ten o’clock!” I called as he climbed on his bus.
At half past 9 I was parked and waiting. I moved a couple of lovers on in a gruff policemanly voice and, as I watched them go, wondered where the knife would have gone in. Then there was nobody. I sat in the Bee and twiddled my thumbs and watched the night. The tower looked bleak and aloof, the Ridge close and unfriendly. Another feather of gray would have tipped the night sky into blackness. Brooding on my ancestor I realized that at this hour before the battle he would be drawing his mystic box in the dust and beginning his slow dance of death and transference. I simply sat and nibbled at a sugar stick. Before I knew it I had emptied the box.
At 10:10 I heard voices. They were singing but they were not houris. It was my quarry, drunk, both of them. Cobra was spitting threats at the world in between lines from an old song.
There’s a boy across the river
With a bottom like a peach
“Get in, you idiot!” I whispered to Sidey, who was busy playing the Lucknow game of After You. He obeyed and snuggled up to King Khan.
But alas I cannot swim!
Cobra needed help and I brought myself to touch him. His balloon jacket felt dry and scaly, so I pinned him by the neck, bent him in two, and simply sprung him in. He turned to Deepika and began to slobber all over that sheer black negligee. I got in at once, started up, and took off, veering clockwise around the tower. My passengers were thrown left in a crazy centrifuge, Cobra leaning precariously out of the Bee.
“Hang on!” I yelled, and we plunged downhill, racing the way the boy had run the night of the tube light. Down below I jinked around the traffic barrier and left onto University Road. It was a repeat of the hospital ride, only this time I had the villains.
The Bee buzzed like the beauty she once was. I felt I was playing an instrument whose dark sweet drone underlaid the pair’s drunken bawling. In days past I could tell the engine’s semitones up and down the scale. I swooned to certain piston tremolos and awoke in time to pump a sweet glissando on the brake. Bee and I were partners in a dance whose music was in our blood. We moved in unison: I could trust her with any step, and she responded with an enabling precision; I could jiggle the schoolkids into giggling hysteria, sway a pouting beauty, or hit a bump at speed and bounce a snark straight up into the iron beam.
What to do? I was thinking as I sped through the dark. I had no plan. I watched the two men in my rearview mirror, but really I was looking a lot further back. Rape is a tricky business to judge. Unless you’ve felt the hot blunt thorn of it in your own flesh, your opinion isn’t worth a lot. For a moment the mirror showed me just one face in the backseat, then as the bastard split in two I knew what I would do.
At the corner where the road goes over the hill, a northbound 212 was about to take the curve onto University Road. There’s no median strip there and downhill buses always cut that corner. There’s a moment when their headlights are shining clear up the Hindu College Road when in fact the bus is heading down toward the university gates. I switched off my light and spun the Bee around in a tight U-turn. Cobra flew out into the bus’s path. Last in, first out.
I watched him go in the mirror and thought he flew a little further than I intended. Well, that’s destiny, I thought: He’s meant to lose a little less. I turned the U into an O and sped off into the night, but not before I saw the bus drive over his feet.
Enough to put him out of action, up on the Ridge anyway. Then I dropped the Mongoose home. As in
dropped
.
Well, that’s that, I thought. You don’t see folks again in the big city. It’s getting bigger all the time. That’s progress: fluorescent lamps replacing tube lights, four-wheelers replacing three.
But maybe a month later I did see Sidey again. I had a passenger so I couldn’t stop, but he was looking fresh and expansive on the sidewalk and he gave me a long cool wink as I went by.
It wasn’t till I arrived home that I got to thinking about it. The wife had made baba ganoush after scorching the eggplant skin on a naked flame in her painstaking way. It’s the family favorite, picked up from an aunt in the Gulf, and it usually goes down in a great hurry, no chewing, but I was about to swallow when I saw that wink again and then all I remember is the wife and boys looking strangely at me because I just kept chewing on that mouthful.
I haven’t seen Mongoose lately but I often see that shrewd little pair of eyes fixed on me. Then one of them closes in the blackest wink, and I’m left wondering: Which of us was the sidey?
T
he cop van, slowing down on the street below, he doesn’t like, even though he doesn’t really notice at first. He’s not planning to spend long on his terrace, just enough to catch one more shot of her walking away with that young ass of hers, maybe exchange a wave as she gets into daddy car and drives off. There’s music playing behind him, on his comp, and the just-opened bottle of vodka waiting. It’s what you do after a good love session, except she’s young and doesn’t drink what he does, doesn’t listen to what he does, and on top of that, the Aunty is waiting at home, dinner ready, while the owner of daddycar is away, businessing out-of-country.
There’s all kinds in this neighborhood, the semi-rich retired, the Government Service Detritus, the bourgeois Mosey refugees who’ve been forced out from other parts of Saarey Jahan ka Kachha, the old ’47 rehvaasis refusing to die, the solid slum-class that’s accrued around the Dargah, the Sufis and qawwalis who’ve dittoed, and now the new hippies, do-gooding goras with their blond and barefoot children kicking up dust as they trail along behind their crazy rent-paying momdads.
This afternoon they’ve decided this is also where Osama’s hiding—totally best place for him, actually—and they’ve been fucking for him, doing it for O Bloody Laden, hoping he can hear them in his lonely hole, maybe even see them from one of the high mosque turrets near the tomb. It’s been good, great even, and funny too, especially when she’s shouted, “Oh, Sam, let’s do it for Osama!” and then when they’ve collapsed in a postcoital heap of sweat, laughter, and sheets. He hasn’t wanted it to end just yet, but she’s pulled the plug, both on the Most Wanted Man on Earth, and on him, suddenly the Least Wanted Man.
“Babe!” He hates that “babe,” coming from her, which is not the same as coming from the Yankietta who had a right to use it—same as we, us, have a right to use “bhenchod” and goras, like, don’t.
“Babe, you know, na, if I make it back in time for dinner then we peacefully get another whole day before Dad returns, right?”
“Right…didn’t know you were still in Class Ten, but yeah, okay, go.”
“Fuck you, uncle, I might as well be in Class Eight, okay? For you I’ll always be in Class Eight, a horny Class Eight thirteen-year-old, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’ll take what you get, na?”
“Yeah. Now go.”
“And dude, I’ve been here from 1:30 to now, 7:30, which is six hours, so you’re not seriously complaining about what you get and take, ya?”
“No. Now go.” He hates the “dude” even more than the “babe.”
“I’m not complaining about this either, na? So, like no complaints and see you day after?”
“Ya, ya, ya, now GO!”
She places a goodbye tongue in his mouth, like she’s depositing cash at a government bank—rightful, superior, slightly disdainful of the clerk on the other side of the counter—and goes. Bolt door behind, turn around, and, like, beautiful choice: Go to kitchen, pour second drink vs. Go to computer and carry on hitting the downloads and get the rest of the Joy Div stuff before the broadband does its late-night slowdown.
He goes out to the terrace to get one last visual taste of her, catches her as she walks into sight under the lamppost, fixing her spaghettis, pulling uselessly on her low-low sal-war bottoms, sees her turn right into the little gali across the way where he’s told her to avoid parking, and then he sees a bloody thana Qualis, blue-light mundu spinning as it casually, absentmindedly crawls up and blocks the gali where she’s parked. The blue light goes off but neither of the two thullas sitting inside makes any move to get out.
It’s not that she can’t drive, problem is she tries to drive like she’s Schumacher’s little sister, bloody Ferrari sitting in an Indica. That’s also fine, it’s just that her slow-driving is pretty bad: the parking, the backing, the maneuvering in narrow situations—it’s the opposite of watching her on a dance floor, where she mongooses through a maze of groping hands with nothing really managing to touch her. Here she’s liable to touch everything, including the cops’ Qualis. If she had any sense she would drive the way her car’s pointing, straight into the service lane on the other side of the gali, and nose her way out from there, but she’s a headbanger and he knows she’ll reverse toward the main street and hit her horn.
