Delhi Noir (11 page)
Samiran opens his mouth, wondering what to put through it. Ajit’s voice is suddenly very audible, speaking in oozingly respectful, clear, official Hindi.
“No sir, no, no, no need for that, not yet. No sir, please, Saikia sahab is usually very tough in these cases, sir, overtough sometimes, so why disturb him? Why bother DCP Corruption, sir, for such a small thing? It would become a policeman’s whole career at stake, sir, because of a small mistake. No, no sir, no, no, there is no demand for a bribe, just a case of … how to say it, overzealous imposition of a certain morality … and, you know, malicious neighbors with nothing better … Exactly, ji, exactly!”
Ajit has walked out onto the terrace as if there’s no one else around, his phone trapped between ear and shoulder. He ignores Samiran and the cop and goes to the parapet, making the pigeon flap away. “DCP Saikia, you know, will immediately suspect the other motive … Sir, yes sir … His new anticorruption campaign, yes sir … Well, he has just been posted from the northeast, no, sir? I don’t know if they harass girls there for wearing small-small clothes, no … Oh yes! Hahahaha! Yes, yes sir, army-paramilitary may rape women, but local police will not arrest a boy-girl for kissing! Hahaha, quite right, sir!”
Samiran sees that Ajit is using his hands to carry two glasses and a bottle of beer, all of which he gingerly manages onto the parapet. He listens intently to the other party as he pours the beer, making sure the head of foam is just right in both glasses.
“Ji, sir, Nizamuddin thana, I think … Yes sir, Wahi sahab, the officer is right here. Should I just ask him and call you back? … No? … Okay, okay, I’ll just ask him right now.”
Ajit hands a glass to Samiran and turns to the cop. His tone is politely conversational, equally for the cop and the benefit of his phonee. “Sir-ji, please, can you tell me your name?” Before the cop can answer, Ajit bends to take a look at the name tag on the cop’s left tit. He speaks into the phone: “Subinspector U.P. Singh, sir … Yes, I will just ask.” He turns back to the cop and smiles kindly. “Sir, thoda, please, aapka full name? DCP South wants to know your name.”
The fat cop is sliced into two zig-zagging parts, two halves that fit perfectly but which are barely able to cling to each other. One part of him clearly wants to snatch the phone from this new stranger and slap him unconscious; the other part seems to want to vault over the terrace wall and parachute away. Samiran imagines he can see thin seepings of blood where the blade has cleaved the man. When the voice comes out, it’s barely audible, so squeezed is it by the juice-press of rage.
Ajit straightens up and announces into the phone: “Sir, he says his name is Ujjwal Prakash Singh. Nizamuddin thana, na?” The thulla jerks out the smallest of nods. Ajit listens a beat longer, allowing the bloodlines to well up further, and then, “Okay, sir, yes sir, I will tell him.” He snaps his mobile shut and takes a deep pull on his beer.
“Nice, no? This one is much better than the usual bird-piss we get, no? Genuine German wheat beer. Deepti says her friend will be importing it now regularly.” Samiran forces himself to gulp from his own glass. Ajit turns to the cop. “Sir-ji, your mobile is on and working?”
“Yes.”
“The thana will have your number I take it?”
“It is naat so eejhhi to threaten me, my friend.” Fat Cop is now pushing out his English, trying to jump start it. “You and your friend will get into the deeper trouble.”
“
Threaten,
sir-ji? Threaten who? Who is threatening anybody? What are you talking about? I am just trying to bring about a friendly solution to the little problem we seem to be having.” Ajit sticks to his smoothly purring government Hindi. “Oh, sorry, we haven’t met. Ajit Karlekar, Delhi Government.” He puts his card down on the low table between them.
Fat-fuck’s phone has a ring-tone that Sam can’t quite place. His voice is cautious as he answers it; Sam can see that the guy’s hoping the whole thing’s a crazy bluff, in which case he’ll be able to tear into Ajit and him, but he can also see that the guy has a sinking feeling about the whole situation; after the first few moments on the phone, Sam can see anxiety cloud the small eyes; he can almost feel the mobile phone winch the man up from his chair, almost hear the voice that makes the man spin around and move away from them. Even from behind, Samiran is sure he can see the sweat spots enlarge, turning the khaki a darker brown under the man’s armpits; and if, maybe, he’s imagining that, he’s certainly not imagining Fat Cop’s smell, which is now sharp and impossible to escape.
Sam can’t take his eyes off the thulla but Ajit is engrossed with his mobile, sipping beer and text messaging intently. All Sam can hear from around the cop’s back and spreading ass is a binary progression of
Sir-sir-sir-ji-ji-sir-ji-ji-huzoor-huzoor-ji-sir-huz …
a word or syllable getting chopped off here and there as the other side cuts in. At one point, Fat Cop says a name which Sam assumes is that name of the Haryanvi rapist Tall Cop: “Sir, ASI Neb Chand, sir, yes, Neb Chand, he a good—” and then Neb Chand’s goodness is also abruptly cut off. Sam notices the sidekick pigeon is back, waddling and cooing sympathetically as the man nods into his Nokia.
The phone conversation twists Fat Cop around again, and he’s back to facing Sam and Ajit. Still listening and nodding, the man starts to give in to the September heat. His non-phone hand goes first to middle of stomach, through his shirt, right into the belly button, one scratch, two, three, then to the side of his paunch, as if drawing a median around the earth, the fingers fiddling between the liver area and the right kidney, and then, as someone on the other side ups the ante, the hand goes down to the crotch. But there Fat-fuck stops, suddenly aware that he’s being watched.
The next time Samiran sees Fat Cop, however, the man completes the gesture. He begins by fiddling with his balls and then giving them a good, full-turbo mauling. It’s late afternoon a month later and Samiran is looking down from his bedroom window, watching Fat Cop standing outside his entrance, three floors below. Fat Cop is standing there because he has been summoned by Samiran to counter a new policeman, Third Cop, who has entered the frame from outside, entered all the way from Mandawali thana across the river.
Third Cop has also come into Samiran’s life courtesy K-5. Though the pimp-rat hasn’t connected Sam to the sharp misfortunes that have befallen him and his family over the last four weeks, he has figured out that the local cops from Niza-muddin are no longer able to help; somehow or other they’ve been disabled, turned even, so that any complaint seems to almost backfire. K-pimp has therefore called upon the thulla talent from around his factory, obviously bribed them, and sent them, sent this Third Cop, after Sam. Chandran, in the meantime, has picked this up on his magical radar and given Sam an early warning, advising him to call Subinspector Singh, which Sam has promptly done.
“Sir, you know I don’t have a problem with any police, but it would be good if your colleague didn’t waste his time or mine.”
Sam has kept his voice sweet and full of request, since he now knows that this is how menace is best communicated to all but the extremely dumb. Sam has learned a lot since he and Ajit saw U.P. Singh out of his flat over a month ago. “You don’t kick a man when he’s down,” Ajit had explained after shutting the door. “You put a leash around his neck and tell him which way to crawl.”
After the phone call on the terrace, Fat Cop, Fat-fuck, SI U.P. Singh, the Tia-hassling, tit-staring thulla, had looked like he’d been sitting on a large, slow-growing cactus bush for many years. Ajit, on the other hand, had been ready with a smile and a cold Pepsi poured into a tall glass. Every time the SI tried to raise the subject, to apologize, Ajit stood at the net and volleyed it, turning the subject away to some other topic of general interest. The message was a)
Sir, we are now all
here in this friendly, postproblem atmosphere, why bring up what
is already past?
and b)
You motherfucking bug on the asshole of a
cockroach, you may think your humiliation is complete, but actually
it’s just starting.
In the final sum total there had been both spectacular stick and some small carrot. As Delhi Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Shri Satish Wahi sahab’s secretary instructed Singh on the phone, Neb Chand, the wannabe-rapist, was to be transferred to some punishment post. But it was Singh who was to secretly sing out the damning report about Tall Cop’s harassment of innocent young women. It was also going to be part of Singh’s general duties to make sure Mr. Samiran Chak-karvarty, ace web analyst and highly connected press-person, was not hassled by anyone or anything, including nasty neighbors. In return, apropos a discussion on mobile phones, Ajit had gone into Sam’s bedroom, rummaged, and came out with a large manila envelope for Singh. He’d handed this to the cop who was stuttering out his goodbyes. “There are some phones in this magazine, sir, so please take a look. The descriptions are in Russian but model numbers are in Normal, take a look and let me know what you like. I will see what I can do when my cousin returns from Russia—phones are cheaper there than even Singapore or Hong Kong.” With which Subinspec-tor Singh left, carrying a six-month-old Russian
Playboy
containing three pages of obsolete mobile phones and seven pages of evergreen Playmates of the Year.
Sam had made a small mistake as the cop was about to exit. “Zaroorat padi to mai tum ko phone karunga, thik hai?” (“I’ll call you if and when I need you, all right?”), he had said, but using the familiar “you” with relish. Fat Cop’s eyes had flared. At the same time, Sam received a small kick in the back of the shin from Ajit. It was explained to him later that the “tum” was an off-note in the complex and beautiful symphony of Ajit’s subjugation of U.P. Singh. As Chandran had then underlined, “These kinds of sodomizings are a
verre delegate business,
mach-aa! Best to leave it to the experts, you understand?”
O
n a drizzly November morning, around 11:00, Inspector Raghav Bakshi parked his Gypsy under a neem tree and looked at the shit-yellow two-story government quarters surrounding a bald patch of land that was meant to be developed as a park. On Sunday mornings one could see the neighborhood kids playing cricket or badminton here, but the park was now deserted except for a couple of stringy goats grazing in a corner where there were still a few clumps of grass leftover from the previous monsoon. R.K. Puram Sector 7 was a colony for the babus who slogged from 9 to 5 in government offices, the Bhawans stretching from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhawan in Lutyens’ Delhi. The wives of these babus, having bundled off their kids to school and their husbands to office along with their lunch boxes, were now enjoying a couple hours of break from the drudgery of running their households on shoestring budgets. Later, after having their frugal lunch of roti, sabzi, and achaar, they would switch on their TVs to enjoy their favorite soaps on Star Plus, Sony, or Zee, mushy serials that glorified the virtues of joint families shepherded by benign and supportive elders.
The inspector was here, in fact, to inquire about the accidental death of one such matriarch, a sixty-five-year-old woman named Kamla Agarwal who’d presided over the measly quarters of her son and daughter-in-law. Five days ago, the old lady was “brought dead” to the emergency room of Safdarjung Hospital with multiple skull fractures. The policeman on duty had registered the case as a “death caused by a fall from the top of Malai Mandir,” an imposing south Indian temple situated on a hillock that overlooks plebeian Sector 7 on one side and swanky Vasant Vihar on the other. The very next day, after the postmortem, a no-objection certificate was issued for the cremation and the paperwork was passed on to the R.K. Puram police station. Inspector Bakshi would have treated the case as a routine one, but then came an anonymous call from a woman alleging foul play. Bakshi decided to give the Agarwals a good sniff, just in case.
The inspector rang the doorbell outside quarter no. 761 and a swarthy woman in a green-and-yellow synthetic sari opened the door. She had a gray shawl draped around her shoulders. As he announced the purpose of his visit, Bakshi noted that the buxom woman, who could have been in her late twenties, adjusted her shawl to cover her bosom. Ushered into a ten-by-ten room painted a dull shade of yellow, Bakshi took a quick inventory of its furnishings: a twenty-inch Onida TV mounted on an aluminum cabinet; a fancy wall clock embellished with a Radha-Krishna icon; a drab government calendar with too many holidays marked in red; a faded print of a nondescript landscape showing sunrise or sunset. This was a babu’s no-frills basic dwelling, he thought, and the message that it conveyed to him was: Don’t expect barfis and cashews with your tea. Amidst this tawdry bric-a-brac, the woman sitting before him on the divan looked quite glamorous.
Bakshi’s roving eyes now paused above the TV cabinet to study a framed picture of an elderly woman smiling under a pine tree on a hilly road. “Is that Kamla Agarwal?” he asked, sitting down on a lumpy sofa with frayed upholstery.
The woman nodded. “My mother-in-law. That one was taken at Katra when she made a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi last summer.”
“Hmm.” Bakshi stroked his well-trimmed mustache like a pet dog. He was pleased to note that the woman was nervously twisting a corner of her shawl. Did she have something to hide? Or was she just feeling uncomfortable in the presence of a beefy policeman when her husband wasn’t around? Bak-shi opened his notebook and plucked a pen from his breast pocket. “First things first,” he said. “Your name?”
“Mukta Agarwal.”
The inspector listened to Mukta’s story while consuming a cup of tea and some namkeen. When he stepped out of quarter no. 761 half an hour later, he was inclined to believe that the deceased Kamla Agarwal was indeed just an unlucky woman who had visited Malai Mandir with her daughter-in-law to watch the evening aarti. Built entirely with blue granite stones in the hallowed traditions of Chola architecture, the temple was a south Delhi landmark that attracted thousands of devotees every day. After receiving prasadam from a priest, the two women had proceeded toward the back stairs of the temple for a quick exit. That was when Kamla slipped on a banana peel flung by a careless devotee and hurtled down ten steep steps, crushing her head on a massive boulder that awaited her like Yama, the god of death.
