Delhi Noir (10 page)

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

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

“Yah, coming, what’s up?”

“Cops hassling me.”

“On my way. Be polite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So they took your number?”

“Yeah.”

“Called what time this morning?”

“About 9:30.”

“Fat One or Tall One?”

“Fat One, I think.”

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

“That’s what he said.”

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

“So what do I say when he comes?”

“Nothing. You relax and enjoy.”

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

“Huh?” Sam is slightly confused.

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

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

“Sure, take what you want.”

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

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

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

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

Siddiqui.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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