Delhi Noir (24 page)
I
t was around 6 p.m. when he left his barsaati. Aurobindo Marg was more hellish than ever because of metro construction.
At the gurdwara he began his walk through Yusuf Sa-rai. He remembered navigating the neighborhood’s maze of backstreets with Lauri when she’d expressed interest in trying bhang. The memory made him wince, I imagine. Most thoughts of her filled him with a mixture of anger and dread.
Between Lahore Jewelers and some sari shops he noticed a new store dedicated exclusively to the sale of Korean plasma televisions. He’d always considered Yusuf Sarai a place where Delhi’s real middle class came to shop, the families stacked on Vespas and stuffed into second-hand Maruti 800s. That seemed to be changing, he’d lament to me later.
Crossing the road was a death-defying endeavor. According to his notes, a Blue Line bus and a Honda Accord almost ran him over. Then he spotted the beaming orange sign above the Boogie Down Resto-Bar.
No firearms permitted, unloaded or loaded,
read a placard on the first floor of the hastily constructed structure. Standing beside it were some men in cheap black suits, maître d’–bouncers he called them. “May I help you?” the gang’s tallest member asked in English.
“I’d like a table,” Gautam said in Hindi.
“It’s Saturday,” replied the tall man in black. “No stags on Saturday.” Gautam’s worn kurtis and scruffy face often elicited such reactions.
Peering inside the bar, Gautam noticed that in addition to a couple of wives and an Eastern European prostitute, the place was teeming with men. West Delhi teenagers who didn’t have the breeding to hit up the five stars; middle managers from domestic corporate houses who bought their suits at Raymond; small-time bureaucrats who extracted enough chai-pani to afford an Esteem or a Ford Ikon.
Had he been somebody else, somebody practical, at this point Gautam would have launched into his dog-eared American English and gotten a table as well as some respect. But practicality wasn’t one of his strong points. “And what about all them?” he asked, in Hindi of course.
“VIP customers.” English.
“Actually, I have a reservation.” The maître d’ stared back at him. He’d probably never heard anybody use the word “arakashan” to denote a restaurant booking before. “Under G.S. Lakshman,” Gautam continued. Within minutes he was seated at a secluded table sipping a fresh lime soda.
The bar was dark, but lamps he described as “space-age” cast it in “an unsavory shade of orange.” Gautam pulled out his notebook and scribbled half-a-dozen pages about the walk he’d just taken. He mentioned the music that was playing, “Hotel California” followed by a set of film songs. Lakshman showed up thirty minutes later looking as gaudy as ever in his silk burgundy kurta and white churidar. I can’t hide the fact that I don’t care for Lakshman. But we don’t necessarily have to like our benefactors.
As the well-fed editor sauntered toward Gautam’s table, waiters bowed and men with hairy ears broke from their conversations to greet him. Lakshman was, after all, a minor celebrity in the Indian capital. The chief lieutenant at a weekly magazine we’ll call
Satya—Truth—
he was the one who’d engineered the sting that helped bring down the B Party government, a “fascist, hate-mongering government,” as Gautam referred to it.
“Keep sitting, keep sitting,” Lakshman said when he got to Gautam’s table. “It’s great to meet you in person, I’m a big fan of your work.”
“Well, it’s been almost two years since I’ve published anything,” said Gautam, unyielding to Lakshman’s flattery.
“So tell me,” Lakshman said, “when did you move to India?”
“I was born here.”
“But your accent,” Lakshman mused, chuckling his chuckle of self-contentment. “You couldn’t have picked that up in a call center.”
This question-and-answer period was, of course, extraneous. Lakshman already knew—or so he believed—everything there was to know about the mustached young man sitting before him.
When his mother died, Gautam went to the U.S. on a tourist visa and bought a fake Social Security number. He changed his name to Greg, worked at a Kmart, and became more American than the Americans. After enrolling in a picturesque university, he directed plays and acquired a girlfriend, a blonde from California. But this high life unraveled during Gautam-Greg’s senior year. State policemen caught him with enough pharmaceuticals to put down a herd of elephants, and he was indefinitely banned from the country.
“I spent a few years in upstate New York,” was all he told
Lakshman. He never told me about his American years either, nor did he write about them in his journals.
“My sister-in-law lives in Toronto, but I prefer it here too,” responded Lakshman. “Best of both worlds.” His south Delhi Hinglish got under Gautam’s skin.
A waiter came, and Lakshman ordered a Johnnie Walker Red Label, some burra kebabs, and mozzarella sticks. Despite Lakshman’s insistence that he have something hard, Gautam stuck with lime soda.
“Are you still into making movies, man?” Lakshman asked.
He was referring to a documentary Gautam had worked on with the BAFTA-winning American director Lauri Zeller.
Gautam didn’t like to speak about her, and Lakshman must have known this.
“Lakshmanji,” Gautam said, “I’m a teacher now. You told me you had something to say about Khem. That’s the only reason I agreed to meet you.”
“I was just getting to your friend.” Lakshman paused for a gulp of whiskey. “He was a true patriot, wasn’t he?”
“I’m no judge of patriotism, but yes, he did good work.”
Gautam’s Hindi was erudite and awkward as usual.
“You know his death was no accident. Gautam, Khem was murdered.”
“You think that’s news to me?”
“It shouldn’t be. But I do have some knowledge that might interest you.”
“That would surprise me.”
“Gautam, I know who killed him.” After making this bold declaration, Lakshman stopped speaking to suck a mutton bone clean. “You’re a Hindi poetry aficionado,” he resumed.
“You’ve obviously heard of Srirang Kumar, na?”
“Of course.” Gautam was particularly fond of one of Ku-mar’s poems, “The Englishman Is Like a Magpie.” He’d even written a column on it for
Bibliophile
. “But I don’t think you’ve called me here to discuss poetry.”
“Be patient.” Lakshman paused again, this time to wash down the meat with some more whiskey. “You must know about Kumar’s son,” he said, tongue polishing gums and teeth.
Gautam nodded. Who hadn’t heard of Ashok Kumar, industrialist, defense contractor, playboy?
“Well, it’s the younger Kumar who’s responsible for your friend’s death.” The Canadian Aluminum Corporation, explained Lakshman, had paid Kumar a huge quantity to ensure that Khem would stop getting in its way. “We have evidence: taped conversations, witnesses, bank statements. This might be one of biggest cases of political corruption since Gujarat.”
“And?”
“And we want
you
to write the story.”
Gautam silently twirled the ends of his mustache and then began shaking his head. “The tribals have been displaced and my friend’s already dead,” he finally stated. “I fail to see the point of such a story.”
“The point?” echoed Lakshman. Then he launched into an oration on the importance of the “fourth estate” in today’s climate. Things like, “Now, more than ever, as neo-imperialistic capitalism mingles with our corrupt bureaucracy, it’s essential that investigative journalism preserve democracy.”
“I’m sorry. I no longer work for the media, especially Indian media,” Gautam responded. He’d come to the conclusion that Delhi’s spineless editors and their delinquent paychecks weren’t worth the trouble.
“Let me finish, yaar.
Satya
has just signed a deal for a tie-up with the
London Tribune
.” This article, Lakshman clarified, would not only be a cover story in India, it would also be printed in the
Tribune
’s weekend magazine. “A London publication means London payment. One pound sterling per word!”
The sum Gautam had inherited from the last of his mother’s siblings would run out next year. A big paycheck would serve him well. He nevertheless continued on with his protest. “I could never be objective about Khem though.”
“Arré, don’t you see? Your insider connections make you the best man for the job.”
You could consider the day after he met with Lakshman, a Sunday, my third date with Gautam.
Ten days earlier I’d started volunteering at the school where he taught. I told the principal I was an MPhil student doing pedagogical research. Her bureaucratic indifference disappeared when I placed an envelope full of five-hundred-rupee notes on her desk. Despite Gautam’s mental turmoil during that period, I managed to get him to notice me.
We’d scheduled to meet outside of Evergreen, where college students were pushing encyclopedias on sweater-clad families who were gorging on chaat and jalebis. Gautam, standing aloof from all this, was petting an overfed stray when I tapped him on the shoulder.
“You look beautiful,” he said in Hindi.
I couldn’t say the same thing about him. The eyes burdened with purple bags of sleeplessness and ganja, they’d been a constant during our few walks and teas. There was something else though, something new. As I later discovered in his journals, his past twenty-four hours had been particularly tormented ones.
“Green really suits you,” he continued. I was wearing a cheap Sarojni Nagar kameez over a baggy salwar, trying to please him by being the chaste desi girl life had never let me be.
He told me he needed to speak about something important, and even though we were still getting to know each other, this wasn’t surprising. There was no one else in his life besides Suraj, and the elite can only relate to their servants so much.
Conversation proved difficult because a loudspeaker was blaring warnings about terrorist threats. Gautam leaned toward me and shouted over the din, “Maybe we could go back to my place?” He tried to feign casualness, but he badly wanted me to come. I hesitated before saying yes though. Too eagerly acceding to his request might not have sat so well with him.
We held hands as we strolled through the market, just another anonymous couple among the Sunday hordes. At the
Asian Age
offices some shoeshine boys called out to Gautam by name but didn’t beg him for money. He paused to stare as a tipsy policeman yelled at a sabziwallah for spitting paan on the street. “Kya aap janwar hai, ya inasaan? Are you animal or human?”
Gautam’s barsaati was located on top of one of the neighborhood’s original houses, built by a Jain in 1961. Besides a fourteenth-century Lodhi tomb where servants played cricket and young journalists smoked charas, this home was the oldest remaining structure on U-block.
A squat ionic column stood near the house’s front door, and its latticed stucco exterior had a tasteful but chipping coat of yellow on it. Although the boundary walls of neighboring houses were blooming with chrysanthemums that time of year, the one separating this single-story residence from the street was lined with empty discolored flower pots.
I’d never thought post-Partition Delhi houses particularly beautiful compared with the architectural marvels of Calcutta, where I grew up. But as Gautam pointed out, these ones were rather handsome, especially next to the soulless builders’ flats that were spreading across the city like a virus.
When we were about to climb to the barsaati, a scraggly figure came out of nowhere and started mumbling at us. “Hello, bhaiyya, good evening,” the man said, smiling wilily. It was Suraj. “Ah, guest, you have guest tonight,” he said in clunky English. A scarf was tied underneath his chin and over the crown of his head. I pulled my dupatta over my face to shield it from his odor, a mixture of sweat, cheap booze, and soot.
This was poverty’s stench during wintertime, a smell from my adolescence.
He switched back into Hindi. “Achha, sir, kuch … ahhh … chaye. Okhla se?” He wanted to know if another batch of charas was needed. Gautam became uncomfortable and declined.
His barsaati was in want of some modern amenities that I’d come to take for granted over the past two decades: a Western toilet, for example. But it wasn’t lacking what bohemians would call “character,” things like old-fashioned split-paneled doors with a sliding rod and hasp, the kind that have become a faux pas in the capital’s southern parts.
Gautam went to use the bathroom, and I remained in his living quarters, a sparsely furnished room whose sole decoration was a framed poster of depressed Guru Dutt playing a depressed poet in a depressing film. I stroked the orphaned puppy he’d recently rescued from Deer Park until it got overexcited and pissed on the floor.
A dozen books, both in Hindi and English, were piled atop a rickety aluminum card table. Next to these was a photograph that Gautam had clearly been pondering. It was of his dead friend, who was wearing a khadi kurta on top of some green military trousers. A defender of the tribals but not a tribal himself, this activist looked like your average small-scale landowner from the Hindi-speaking heartland: mustached, paunchy, and balding.
“He’s Khem, a dear friend of mine who passed away,” said Gautam. He’d returned from the bathroom and was fiddling with his Enbee. The old stereo was his most prized possession.
“Actually,” Gautam said with the exaggerated earnestness that was typical of him, “I called you over here to talk about Khem.” As an old Hindi record crackled, Gautam told his story.
“It all started six years ago,” he explained. He’d just written an article about Orissa, where the state government, then controlled by the B Party, had decided to hand over some bauxite-rich land to the Canadian Aluminum Corporation. But a tribal community resided on the land, and its members formed a movement to protest the B Party’s actions. Paramilitary forces, heeding B Party orders, opened fire on movement members during a demonstration.
