Delhi Noir (25 page)

“Five tribals were killed, two of whom were children,” he said morosely.

Lauri Zeller, a new arrival to the subcontinent, read Gau-tam’s article and thought the situation was ripe for a documentary. She persuaded him to return to Orissa with her, and the two spent the next year living with the tribals. “We became very, very close,” he explained. He didn’t say so, but alone in the tribal community, they became lovers.

Both forged a close relationship with Khem Thakur, one of the movement’s main organizers. Gautam believed that Lauri’s film should focus on Khem’s struggles against corruption and capitalism. Lauri had different ideas though.

She’d started teaching a group of tribal youths how to paint with watercolors. “She decided to make the film about her ‘attempt to help these children reflect on poverty and globalization through art,’” he told me, mocking the way foreign newspapers had lauded her work.

By the time Lauri had won her BAFTA for
The Color of Water,
she and Gautam were barely speaking. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” he lamented. “She was an egomaniac—she wanted to exploit India like every other foreigner.” He didn’t tell me Lauri’s side of the story, but I know one of the reasons she broke things off with him: he’d gotten back into pharmaceuticals.

Soon after, Khem died in a mysterious car accident. Gau-tam tried contacting Lauri for help, but she refused to take his calls. “Actually,” he said, his eyes moist now, “she never came back to India after becoming famous.” There was more to it than that, I knew, but Gautam wouldn’t talk about such things with me or anybody else.

As he recounted his story, I put a hand on his arm. But he turned away from me and began to stroke the puppy, which was chewing on an old chappal by our feet. “It must have been so difficult,” I said, mustering up my most sympathetic voice.

He proceeded to tell me about G.S. Lakshman and the
Sa-tya
article, and I listened patiently even though I knew more about the situation than he did. “I have an opportunity to do something for the memory of my friend, to do some good for this corrupt country,” he explained. “But I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“It’s fear, you’re right,” he said. A breathy laugh of self-loathing escaped through his teeth. “You’re very wise. I knew you were the best person to speak with about this.” I gave his arm a squeeze. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’ve decided to go through with it.”

“Well, you’re a very brave man.”

He smiled sheepishly. “You smell that?” he asked.

“What?”

“It’s smoke from a chowkidar’s fire.”

“So?”

“Winter has begun.”

He turned to look at me with a smile I knew well, one that doesn’t care about borders of class or religion. Gautam was hungry for sex.

During the month that followed I continued volunteering at the school. In the afternoon we’d spend hours wrapped in shawls on the terrace, the puppy curled up by our feet. A pair of golden-backed woodpeckers was building a home in the amla tree across the street, and Gautam threw stones at the menacing parrots that were trying to chase them away. At night Suraj would bring up sabzi and rotis for us, and I’d tell stories about my invented childhood in Bihar, so many of them that they began to seem real.

Before sleep there was no actual intercourse but lots of touching. In this department, no matter how hard he tried, Gautam could never be the Indian man he wanted to be. He didn’t just stab me with his fingers like some child with a new toy. He used the palm of his hand to rub me between my legs, and I felt things I’d never felt before, not even by myself.

Lakshman told Gautam that he was now representing an important multinational media organization and had to look the part, so Gautam spent a morning in one of Green Park’s many salons. He came out looking like a cross between Hri-tik and George Harrison.

The depression that burdened his eyes began to fade as he flittered around the city investigating Ashok Kumar’s connection to Khem’s death. He did thorough work and met every type of person imaginable: bureaucrats, ladies who lunched, drivers, and businessmen. Lakshman provided him with a generous allowance to convince people to go on the record.

Within a week Gautam was an expert on Ashok’s life story, a story I already knew by heart. Using his father the poet-politician’s connections, Ashok became the official supplier of white goods—air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions—to the central government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia turned to India for these products. India put the Reds in touch with Ashok, who supplied them with all the TVs and washing machines they needed for free, bargaining not for cash but influence. Eventually, he became the exclusive broker of oil between Russia and India.

The brat-turned-billionaire soon had more money than he knew what to do with. He had no use for Indian whores anymore. He could fly blondes in and out of Delhi for weekend sessions. He even formed his own security force and intelligence agency. Before long he became a broker not just of oil, but of nuclear submarine deals and the votes of senior MPs. He became a fixer of memorandums of understanding for bauxite mines in Orissa.

“I’m almost done with the research,” Gautam told Laksh-man on the phone one day. We were sitting on the terrace, and I hummed along to a silly Geeta Dutt song playing on the Enbee. I hadn’t heard it in years.

“There are now two witnesses who can connect Ashok directly to Khem’s death,” he said. He was no longer the disaffected poet I’d met a month earlier. “And there’s this accountant who’s willing to testify that Kumar received three million USD—cash—from the Canadians. I just need a few more days, and the money trail will lead straight to the B Party. I’m thinking about a short trip to Orissa to round off the article, give it some authentic flavor.”

Lakshman firmly cautioned Gautam against this though.

The next morning we were in the middle of pleasing each other when his clunky old Nokia sounded. We were both about to come, and Gautam was irritated by the interruption. So was I.

I picked up the phone from the nightstand, recognized the number at once, and handed it to him. “Hello?” he answered.

Ashok Kumar’s voice sounded sinister due to a recent case of laryngitis. He knew exactly what we were up to all the time, and I wondered if jealousy had driven him to call at that particular moment.

Gautam wrote down Kumar’s address and then phoned G.S. Lakshman to tell him the news. “This is just what we need,” he said. “Some quotes from Kumar will give us more credibility.”

Lakshman’s response was audible from five feet away. “That chutiya bastard doesn’t deserve the right to speak!”

After putting down the phone, Gautam moved to turn on the computer. But I made him come back to bed to finish off what he’d begun.

Around 4 o’clock the same day, he hired an Indica to take him to Sultanpur. It was bitter and gray out, and I stood at the gate waving goodbye like some wife sending her husband off to war.

Gautam’s notes from this occasion are particularly vivid.

To drown out the chaos of Aurobindo Marg, he put in a CD with the words
Old Hindi Songs for Lauri
scribbled on it. The theme song from his favorite Guru Dutt movie played: “
Yehdhuniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai?
” (“
Even if you meet withsuccess in this world, what does it really matter anyway?”

) At a traffic light adorned with advertisements for a telecom company there was a knock at the window. A little girl was selling copies of
Satya
. She was barefoot and dirty and held a malnourished infant in her hands. Despite all that was on his mind—or maybe because of all that was on his mind—he gave the girl a ten-rupee note but said she could keep the paper, just like an NRI or some firang.

At Qutab Minar they veered onto MG Road, passing the mangled skeletons of fashion malls, illegal buildings that the Municipal Corporation had torn down to set an example and make the metro’s construction a smoother process. “Monuments to progress’s war,” Gautam called them. After twenty minutes of furniture shops, they turned right at a sign that read
Manhattan Estates
and then drove another kilometer.

Two rifle-wielding sentries manned the gate that led to the Kumar farmhouse.

I was all too familiar with the sights that greeted Gautam next: the fleet of antique American cars and the guards armed with semiautomatic weapons and sunglasses; the pool and the pagoda-like temple.

Gautam waited for Kumar in a dimly lit room with hardwood floors and ceilings, a sign of great wealth in a country whose forests have all but been eradicated. One of Husain’s Mother Teresa paintings hung on the wall, and a fire crackled in the corner. Its flames flickered so perfectly that Gautam wondered if it was real until a uniformed servant poked at its logs.

“Thank you for coming,” said the raspy-voiced man when he entered the room twenty minutes later. Gautam described Ashok as short and handsome. He was wearing a casual suit without a tie and had grown a light black beard during his week-long convalescence. This was the man who’d made me.

During business trips to Calcutta, Ashok always managed to spend a few hours in bed with me. He started to linger longer and longer after our sessions and eventually decided he could use a woman like me in Delhi. I left behind my life of servicing Communist officials and Marwaris in Sonagachi all too willingly and became his pet project, living proof that social mobility actually exists in this country. You must be thinking,
How can a girl from such simple origins evolve into such a creature? That’s impossible
.

Well, first of all, I didn’t start out life poor; before my seventh birthday I’d worn frocks, taken piano lessons, and learned to sing Rabindrasangeet. Besides, it’s not that difficult to hold a wine glass by the stem, use toilet paper, or shout
styupid idyot
at servants. There are many insurmountable challenges in this world, but learning how to mourn the country’s rural-urban divide at champagne dinners isn’t one of them. All you need is money and the backing of powerful people. Ashok Kumar gave me both.

Seating himself across from Gautam, Kumar started off by trying to charm him. He praised the article Gautam had written about his father the poet. But Gautam wasn’t up for chit chat. This was, after all, the monster responsible for the death of his friend.

“Mr. Kumar, you know why I’m here,” he said. “I know you’re directly connected to the murder of Khem Thakur, and I know about your financial links with the Canadians. Would you like to make a formal response to these allegations?”

“Why would I?”

“Why did you call me here then?”

“Because I’d like to ask you not to write these half-truths about me.”

“You can’t intimidate me, Mr. Kumar.”

Breaking from the conversation, Kumar picked up a phone. He ordered some fresh-squeezed orange juice and cappuccinos. Then he said, “You’ve learned quite a bit about me, Gautam. Don’t you know I never start off a relationship with threats? I first offer incentives.”

“Mr. Kumar, I can’t be bought.”

“Gautam, I’ve learned a lot about you as well.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“I know about Lauri,” Ashok declared, his eyes surely beady now.

“What does she have to do with any of this?”

“I’ve found out about your daughter, Gautam. I know Lauri gave birth to a child.” These words must have made Gautam sweaty and speechless. He’d never spoken out loud about the daughter he’d never met. “They live in America, which I know is a problem. But I can bring you to your daughter, Gautam.”

“How’s that?” His question was barely audible, a whisper.

“Just forget about all this nonsense. I’m asking you to forget about Khem Thakur, bauxite mining, and Ashok Kumar.”

“And then what?”

“It’s very simple. Do that and you’ll have a green card.”

After his trip to Kumar’s palace, Gautam avoided me and started smoking charas with a vengeance again. He stopped sleeping and began taking walks at odd hours, mulling over what would have been an easy decision for most. Children, they say, are the only things that give life meaning. But as he detailed in his journals, choosing to be united with his daughter meant Ashok getting away with it. And Gautam wasn’t sure if fatherhood was a responsibility he even wanted. He wasn’t sure if he could face Lauri Zeller or forgive her.

We hadn’t seen each other for three days when I showed up at his barsaati one evening just before sunset. It had been a particularly biting afternoon, so I’d wrapped myself in a beige shawl. This one I didn’t have to acquire for the assignment. My father had gifted it to my mother, and it was the only thing of value she’d managed not to sell. Suraj was pumping water into the tanks and greeted me at the gate. “It’s good that you’ve come,” he said. “I’m worried about Gautam bhaiyya.”

When I walked into the barsaati, Gautam was taking a hit from his chillum. His eyes were closed and he was relishing this action, as if the pipe were his lover. He’d never smoked in front of me before and looked like a real junkie.

Upon hearing me enter, he opened his eyes but didn’t stop sucking until he’d had his fill. Then he said, “I wasn’t expecting you,” in a soft, airy voice. It was completely devoid of the poise it’d been filled with since we’d gotten close.

“What’s going on?” I asked. A small plastic bag with the words
Kunal Medicos
printed on it lay on the card table. Gau-tam must have picked up some opiates in Yusuf Sarai, where nobody needs a prescription for pills.

“I like your shawl,” was all he said back.

He took another hit from his chillum and tried to pass it to me. When I pushed his hand way, he attempted to force the thing to my lips. I’d never seen him like this before.

“Have you gone crazy?” I snapped.

“Just have a hit, try a little,” he kept on going.

When I slapped his face, the demons that had been inhabiting his eyes suddenly fled, and a look of panic replaced them.

Then, looking away from me, he drew his hand behind his ear and hurled his pipe at a spot on the wall beside the poster.