Delhi Noir (7 page)
At first no one bothered me. I wandered amongst the screens and piles of rubble, drinking in the sweet music of many chisels hitting stone. Then I heard a voice behind me. “Hey, what do you want? This is private property,” it barked. I ignored the bark. That’s what you do, ignore dogs that bark. I had a lot of experience with dogs.
The music of the chisels stopped. Everyone was looking at me.
“This is no dharamshala, this is a hotel. You will get no money or food here. Get going!” the guard shouted, banging his stick. I noticed that his uniform was black and red and he looked out of place in that world of sandstone and cool white marble.
“
You
get going,” I said calmly, “
you
don’t belong here.”
The man raised his stick and would have struck me but I was saved by the appearance of a pretty blond creature in a kurta and hippie skirt. “Stop, stop!” she called.
The guard immediately became deferential.
“What does this man want?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know, madam,” he replied dubiously. “But don’t worry, I’ll chase him away. He’s probably a thief.”
“I am no thief.” I said scornfully, “I was just looking.”
She turned to me, and to my surprise she actually looked at my body and my face. And I felt them respond to her.
“Work, I want work,” I said in English.
She seemed taken aback. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. She was no fool. She had seen the junkies in the park by the Nizamuddin Bridge underpass. She looked at my lungi. “But you have no clothes,” she muttered.
“They were stolen,” I replied.
She peered at me sharply, suspicion hardening into conviction. “Then go get some,” she said coldly, “and we’ll consider you.” The wall that all white women had inside them had gone up. It felt harder than stone.
The guard wasn’t following any of this, but he understood, like all good guard dogs did, her change of tone. Grabbing me by the shoulder, he hustled me out. At the gate, maybe because he had a sense of humor or else because he was genuinely sorry for me, he picked up a sheet of pink plastic and handed it to me. “Here, you can make this into a shirt,” he said.
I clutched the plastic to my chest, tears blurring my vision. Once outside, I found I was right by ground zero, the place it had all begun. But this time I decided not to go back into the park. Instead I walked along Lodhi Road, past the church, past HUDCO where Sharmila sat each day on the twelfth floor, giving misguided middle-class couples extremely expensive housing loans, past the gas pump that sold Norwegian smoked salmon and pork chops, past the Islamic cultural center and the Ramakrishna Mission, past Tibet House and the Habitat Center—all the landmarks of Delhi’s cultural life.
I came at last to Lodhi Gardens. The sun was almost gone but inside the gardens the privileged continued their leisurely parade—ayahs with children, bored overweight mothers, joggers, sedate couples, bureaucrats, cell phone–wielding politicians, upwardly mobile businessmen. No one gave me a second glance as I slipped into the garden. They were all too interested in watching each other. The ministers and bureaucrats pretended not to see anyone. The others watched the ministers and bureaucrats. I walked amongst them till I came to a hexagonal tomb encircled by palm trees and slipped inside. There I would wait for darkness to fall, thinking about my old life and what a sad mess I’d made of it. Footsteps interrupted my thoughts. Voices, giggles.
I looked around desperately for somewhere to hide
The only place I could see was between the two tombstones in the middle of the room. I had barely squeezed myself in there when the lovers arrived. She had a terrible shrill sort of giggle which was nasal and unmusical. His voice was okay.
“Ao na,” he was saying.
Giggle, giggle. “Na, na.”
“Ao na.”
“Na, na.”
“What are you scared of? Do you think your mother will jump out from behind a pillar?”
Giggle, giggle again. “Na, na darling. I was just—” She stopped.
“Just what?”
“Thinking.”
“Let me do the thinking for both of us, okay?”
“Okay, darling.”
Naturally, thinking is the last thing a man does when he is with a woman he desires. Women are different. They can think anytime because nothing rears up between their legs to block the forward march of their brains.
Footsteps. Giggle, giggle, silence. I raised my head carefully. Long hair, plastic heels, socks with sandals. A silly pink woolen hat with bunny rabbits and a pom-pom dangling from the top.
Take it off,
I begged the man silently,
she’ll be much
prettier without it
. And sure enough, as I watched, the man lifted his hand and swept the hat off. But that was only the beginning. Before my astonished eyes, the coat came off too, and the shoes. And then the rest. When they were down to their underwear, the clothes in a heap beneath them, the woman made a feeble protest which was just as soon disregarded. Then I was watching the man’s naked butt go up and down, up and down, between her naked knees, and I swear to you they both seemed far more naked with their underwear around their ankles than I had seemed with nothing on.
Afterwards, she cried a little and he held her in his arms looking bored. Then, while she finished dressing, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.
Night fell and the tomb went silent. Just as I was about to get up and go look for food, another couple arrived. They were quicker than the first, more experienced. They didn’t even bother to take off their clothes. After they left another pair entered. This time they were both men. I didn’t look. When they were finished, I dashed to one of the open arches and leapt out. All that copulation was beginning to stress me out.
Now, a different Lodhi Gardens met my eyes. Gone were the self-important bureaucrats, the children, the ayahs, the sedate lovers, the exercise freaks, and the tourists. In their place, under each halogen lamp, there stood a couple in a perfect Khajuraho pose.
Soon I began to feel really cold and a little uneasy. There were only men left, many of them alone, and they seemed to know I was wearing nothing underneath. One approached, expensively dressed.
I had an idea and let him follow me into the Mughal sentry tower beside the rose garden. When he arrived, I told him abruptly to take off his clothes. “How much?” he asked first.
“Free if you take off all your clothes first,” I replied.
“You want to see my jewels then?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he meant, so I nodded.
He began to take off his clothes.
I didn’t move a muscle until they were in a pile on the floor and he was naked before me. Then I took off my dead man’s sheet, threw it over his head, kicked him in the groin a few times, and stole his clothes.
Decently clothed once more, I said goodbye to my days of consulting and ventured into the hospitality industry. Lodhi Gardens’ lovers paid me to ensure an uninterrupted session in a tomb. I provided a bed, water, and talcum powder for after, and I even charged those who were waiting to watch.
After all, they were one big family of lovers, weren’t they? And watching others gave them ideas. So everyone was happy.
As for me, I invested in the stock market, stopped taking drugs, and grew rich. My son and wife eventually moved back in with me and we all lived happily ever after in a brand-new flat on the right side of the Yamuna.
And every once in a while, when I find myself on the Japanese Bridge to NOIDA, I think about the man whose clothes I stole. And I wonder whether he ever realized the gift I’d given him or whether he simply wrapped the dead man’s sheet around him, crawled back into his car, and drove home to his empty life.
A
wise man would have gone home when he heard the tube light smash, but my wife calls me an unwise man and I must be, since I smoke as well as drive an autorickshaw on Delhi roads, and I butted in.
For that matter, a wise man would have finished his BCom and gone into marketing, but I thought: No office for me, no boss for Baba Ganoush. And this looked like the life back then, not that I’m saying it isn’t still, some days, maybe even many days. But autorickshawry has its own traps and it’s always tempting to get that last fare, just one more, and that’s the one that takes you out of your way—when it doesn’t land you in trouble.
God knows there’s trouble enough by day on Delhi roads. And three wheels aren’t the steadiest undercarriage when the going gets rough. Better than two is all you can say, and probably not all the time either. You see some sights on the road that you’d like to forget, and when it comes to the crunch, the guy with the least steel is the loser. I’ve seen some two-wheeler accidents where the helmet didn’t help much more than the severed head. Bastard Blue Line buses! people screech, me too, but might is right in the jungle.
Keep well in, I tell my passengers, and they do. (As if it would make a whole lot of difference when the bus rams you.) But a wraparound shield is better than nothing—even if the dents are starting to join up on my Bhavra. The Bee is what I named her in the good old black-and-yellow days before this greenie shift.
You could say I own the buzzer. I’ve paid back most of the deposit on her to the Punjab National Bank, and I can usually go home by 9, maybe 10. Mornings I start early with schoolkids, twelve monsters packed in with a little removable wooden bench, schoolbags outside. And I don’t always work late. I’ve saved a bit of money in term deposits at the PNB. If I overdraw on the current account, they automatically take it out of the next deposit: last in, first out.
Most days I wear a clean white polyester safari to work. Impractical, I know, and the wife never fails to remind me, though secretly she likes me in it. No pen in my pocket, no comb either. Good Agra sandals, size eleven, and I don’t tuck one foot under me as I drive. It’s hard enough having to double over just to get into the driver’s seat. No holy pictures along the top of the windscreen, just the Shah Rukh poster at the back on the one side and Deepika on the other. I have noticed men sit right up against my life-size Deepika, the shot in the black negligee that got everyone going. Women cozy up to the King.
Anyway, this night I was cruising along the busy Mall Road in Civil Lines looking for a last fare when something about the peace of University Road pulled me in toward the Ridge. I left the rat race behind and sailed along past those sedate college gates in top gear, engine purring. All the walls have gotten higher since I was a student—maybe that’s saying something, if only that I haven’t gotten any shorter. I switched off the stereo.
I was one of the first to install a system back in the twentieth century when the vehicle was new. There was always a Sufifat-boy tape rolling to drown out the noise of the day. Nights nowadays you want to listen to the silence, when you can.
Directly opposite the main gate of Delhi University, where the road goes straight up to Flagstaff House, the hill stretch has been closed to traffic and an autorickshaw stand has sprung up at the barrier. A handful of peanut vendors and ice-cream carts congregate there during the day. At night, of course, it’s deserted, and so it was this night, but sometimes you can pick up a late fare. I did a U-turn and drew up beside the gate. Ten or fifteen minutes under the entrance lights might be well spent, I thought. People don’t like to walk along the Ridge.
The Delhi Ridge is a wilderness of rocks and thorn trees, nature’s last stand in this gray city, the nearest thing we have to a forest. A hundred years ago they planted this barren upland with a Mexican tree that ran amok. Up along the crest are paved paths the municipality has laid in an attempt to tame the manmade jungle. Monkeys use the watershed as a safe base for raids down either side; peacocks honk at first light and then retire, leaving the field to a treepie with a harsh call—half heckle, half jeer. Morning walkers do their laughter therapy up there, and power joggers go by in pairs, tugging at the elastic bands of their tracksuit cuffs to consult expensive watches. But a careless jogger could ruin a pair of Nikes on the broken glass of last night’s rumfest, if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, say he was working late, there’s a higher price he could pay among the syringes and condoms and gutka sachets that lie strewn in the red-brick dust. Even by day you’d jump if someone came up behind you on those paths. You don’t go there after dark unless you have a minder. Or unless you are the minder.
Of course, lovers go there because there’s nowhere else to go. Students mostly, from the DU campus. There are park benches where they can sit and make out by day. I used to go up the Ridge during my spell as a student, before the old man realized I was getting ideas and married me off. In the early days the wife and I took the boys there for a joyride once or twice, before they grew embarrassed about an outing on the workhorse. We’d sit and watch the monkeys by Flagstaff House. In winter they sun themselves and pick one another’s fleas. A big male will turn up and simply roll over in front of a lesser creature, and the chosen one will leave whatever it was he was doing. I tend to believe in the chosen.
The newest tribe are the gardeners who arrived when Nehru Park was created. But joggers and gardeners and ca-noodlers and watchers tend to move on once the sun sets. Everyone does except for the diehards, or those who blithely believe a special dispensation hangs over them like a royal parasol. And who knows, maybe they’re mostly right.
They can be wrong. Every once in a while you read in the paper about a rape on the Ridge. I used to pay special attention to these snippets, partly because of my old association with the university.
That evening, I was parked outside the gates and starting to look at my watch when I heard the tube light smash. Few night sounds are more chilling, none more deliberate. After all, a tube light is something we carry with special care when we must, upright beside us. As if it were the body’s ideal twin, smooth and colorless and fragile. It breaks in a shivering white cascade with the sound of heaven collapsing. If spirit had substance it would shatter like this, something between a gasp and a cry. And that’s how it sounded, scary but somehow, how to put it, binding.
