“Motherfucker,” he says, and kicks the goat.
I laugh. It comes out more loudly than I wanted it to.
“What are you looking at?” the junior constable asks. “Taking a video of me on your mobile?”
“No phone,” I shout before he can arrest me. I step away from my barrel-shield, slowly, like a hero in a film with a gun pulled on him, and I turn the pockets of my trousers inside out so that he can see all I have is a striker from the school carrom board that I forgot to return.
“Chokra has to do No. 2,” the senior constable tells the junior. “Let him go.”
I grab my school bag and dart around the corner of the house where I had taken shelter, into an alley that’s so narrow only children and goats and dogs can fit inside. It’s safe here even if the ground is coated with goat pellets.
My shoulders brush against the walls. The filth gets on my uniform. Ma is going to be very upset with me today.
I creep closer to the opening, my ears turned up to full volume to catch any whispers, and look outside. The junior constable waves a stick he must have picked up from the ground. “Everyone, inside,” he shouts at the people who are still standing in the alley. “You two, stay,” he tells Bahadur’s ma and Drunkard Laloo.
The senior constable moves closer to them and says something that I can’t hear. Bahadur’s ma twists the gold chain around her neck and tries to unhook its clasp. Drunkard Laloo reaches to help her but Bahadur’s ma pushes him away. She loves her gold chain.
When word got around the basti a few months back that Bahadur’s ma had a gold chain that was twenty-four-carat gold, not fake like the glittery necklaces sold in Bhoot Bazaar, Papa said Bahadur’s ma must have stolen it from her hi-fi madam. But Bahadur’s ma told everyone that her madam had gifted it to her.
Ma said Bahadur’s ma was unlucky in marriage but was lucky in work, and that everyone had something going right and wrong in their lives—their good or bad children, kind or cruel neighbors, or an ache in the bones that a doctor could cure easily or not at all—and this was how you knew the gods at least tried to be fair. Ma told Papa she would rather have a husband who didn’t beat her than a real gold chain. Papa looked a bit taller after that.
Now Bahadur’s ma unhooks the chain, cups it in her palm and extends it toward the senior constable. He leaps backward as if she has asked him to hold fire. She turns to Drunkard Laloo but he starts shivering again. He’s good for nothing. I bet she wishes her boss-lady was with her instead of her husband.
“How can I take a gift from a woman?” the senior constable says. “I can’t do this, no.” His voice is bright like the apples that vendors polish with wax in the mornings.
Bahadur’s ma sucks in air through her clenched teeth, slaps Drunkard Laloo on the wrist, and hands him her gold chain. The senior constable looks around, maybe to make sure no one else is watching. There’s only the junior who’s drawing lines on the ground with his stick, and Buffalo-Baba, and me, but he doesn’t see me.
“Bahadur ki Ma, are you sure?” Drunkard Laloo finally speaks, shaking his curled-up fist with the chain over her head.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s nothing.”
“You two want to argue, you do that inside your house,” the senior tells them. “I’m not here to solve your miya-biwi problems. But what I can do, what I’ll have to do, is arrest you for creating a public nuisance.”
“Forgive us, saab,” Drunkard Laloo says, and hands over the gold chain to the senior constable, who swiftly deposits it in his pocket.
The policemen on Live Crime never take bribes, not even from men. I feel like a bad detective because I didn’t see the wickedness inside the senior constable.
“Your son,” he says now, “give him a couple of weeks. If he doesn’t return by then, let me know.”
“Saab,” Bahadur’s ma says, “but you said you’ll look for him right away?”
“Everything in its own time,” the senior says. Then he tells the junior, “Those NCs aren’t going to write themselves. Chalo, bhai, hurry up.”
“You’re troublemakers, the whole lot of you,” the junior constable tells Drunkard Laloo, “stealing current from the main lines, making hooch at home, gambling away everything you own. You keep misbehaving like this, the municipality will send JCBs to raze your homes.”
Fatima comes out of her house after the policemen leave, scratches Buffalo-Baba between his horns, and feeds him a handful of spinach.
I don’t want our basti to be bulldozed. When I find Bahadur, I’ll give him a tight slap for making trouble. He won’t even stop me because in his heart he will know, that’s exactly what he deserves.
BAHADUR
From a distance the boy watched three men swathed in blankets huddle by a fire. Ash-tipped flames rose from a large metal bowl once used to carry cement at a construction site. The men let their hands hover above the fire as if performing a solemn ritual. Yellow sparks leaped higher than their faces but their hands didn’t return to the folds of their blankets.
There was a silent companionship between these men that made Bahadur wish he were older, so that he too could have sat with them. But he was only a boy hiding under a pushcart that smelled of guavas, a faint sweet note that trickled down to him through the charred winter air.
The cart’s owner was sleeping on the footpath nearby, his body turned toward a shop’s padlocked shutter, and covered like a corpse from head to toe with a sheet that wasn’t thick enough to muffle his snores. Bahadur had searched, carefully, under the folded tarpaulin sheets and sacks on the cart for guavas and found none. The owner must have walked long and far to sell the fruit.
Bahadur wasn’t sure how long he had been watching the men. It was well past midnight and he knew he should sleep, but it was cold, and he wanted to walk and warm the blood in his veins. He crawled out and turned to look at the men again. They were drinking from the same bottle, each man taking a sip, then wiping its lip against his sweater sleeve before passing it on. In another hour, they would be drowsing by the fire, with bricks for pillows, legs half-covered by blankets splayed out across the lane.
The alleys of Bhoot Bazaar stretched around Bahadur like the gaping mouths of demons. He wasn’t scared. He used to be, when he first started sleeping outside on those nights his mother stayed back at the flat where she worked, to care for madam’s feverish child, or to serve guests at a party that madam was hosting. Until then Bahadur had seen the bazaar only in the day, when it heaved with people and animals and vehicles and the gods invoked in the prayers drifting out of loudspeakers from a temple, a gurudwara, and a mosque. All these scents and sounds so thick they seeped into him as if he were made of gauze.
So, aged seven, when he first snuck away to the bazaar late at night to escape his father, its stillness spooked him. The sky roiled blackish-blue above tangled cables and dusty street lamps. The market was mostly empty but for the crumpled forms of sleeping men. Then his ears grew accustomed to the distant, steady thrum of the highway. His nose learned to catch the weakest of smells from hours before—marigold garlands, sliced papayas served with a pinch of chaat powder on top, puris fried in oil—to guide his steps to the right or left in dark corners. His eyes could tell the stray dogs in the alleys apart by the curves of their tails or the shapes of the white patches on their brown or black coats.
Now he was almost ten, old enough to be on his own though he would never say that to his mother. She didn’t know that he came here. The world had long ago receded from his father’s hooch-stained eyes such that he couldn’t tell flesh from shadow.
On the nights his mother was away, his siblings cajoled the neighborhood aunties into taking them in. They thought a friend’s family did the same for him. But Bahadur didn’t want a corner of anyone’s crowded floor. In every house—even his only friend Omvir’s—there was a chachi who clucked her tongue too often and
asked the gods to lift the curse they had put on him, and children who sneered at the way letters stayed glued to his tongue no matter how much he tried to spit them loose. To them he was always That Idiot or Duffer or Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka or He-He-He-Ro-Ro. They called him Rat-eater and asked him if his mother cleaned the shit crusting the basti’s toilets. There was none of that in the bazaar at night. He didn’t have to talk to anyone. If he wanted, he could even pretend that he was a prince patrolling his kingdom disguised as a street child.
The downed shutters of shops were crinkled like waves. The cold caught up with him, no matter how fast he walked. He stopped near a cycle-rickshaw driver sleeping under a blanket on the passenger seat of his vehicle. Hanging from the handlebar was a white plastic bag that the man had used to pack his lunch or dinner, with something dark and thick pooled at the bottom. Bahadur untied the bag as quietly as he could, then ran ahead and inspected its contents. A ladle’s worth of black dal, which he guzzled with his neck tilted toward the sky.
This was his third night wandering around the bazaar. His best chance for a proper meal would be when his mother returned home on Tuesday, but it was still Saturday and the hours stretched ahead as dark and boundless as the sky. He chucked the bag in his hand into a gutter, then kneeled down and sifted through a pile of trash heaped by the stalls where in the day vendors sold papdi chaat and aloo tikkis glazed with curd and tamarind chutney. But the animals of the bazaar had got to the food before him. He wiped his hands against the bottom of a discarded aluminum foil bowl and stood up.
A heaviness settled in his chest. The air was sharp with smoke and soon the tickle in his nostrils would turn into a cough that would leave him gasping for breath. He knew that it would pass, in a few minutes perhaps. It seemed unfair to him that he struggled with the things that came naturally to everyone else, things like talking and breathing. But he was done with cursing gods, done with trying to get them on his side with prayers.
He walked a little ahead to Hakim’s Electronics and Electrical Repair Shop, which was his favorite place in the bazaar. Hakim-Chacha never expected him to talk and instead taught him about blown capacitors and loose cables and paid him for the work he did around the store though Bahadur would have done it for nothing. Bahadur’s mother had once hired two boys to bring home a clattering refrigerator and a TV that a hi-fi madam had tossed into the rubbish ground near their basti. Bahadur had fixed them in no time, made them as good as new. Chacha said that Bahadur had a gift. That when he grew up he would be an engineer and live in a hi-fi flat.
Bahadur wished a man like chacha had been his father. The past two days, each time he visited the electronics shop, chacha had bought him newspaper cones filled with warm peanuts roasted in salt. He had done so without knowing Bahadur was hungry. Bahadur had stored a few peanuts in the pockets of his jeans for later, though they were all gone now. He checked again, without hope, pushing his hands deep into his pockets. When he brought them out, a few papery skins were stuck to the tips of his fingers. He licked them, tasting the salt, remembering too late that it would make him thirsty.
A smog was beginning to swill against the street lights. He swallowed the air in big gulps and curled up on a raised platform outside the repair shop, his hands around himself, his knees pulled up toward his chest. He was still cold. He got up and found two red crates caked with dirt stacked outside the shop next door, and balanced them on top of his legs, but they were uncomfortable and didn’t lessen the chill. He pushed them aside and lay down again.
The smog looked like the devil’s own breath. It hid the street lights and made the darkness darker. To calm himself Bahadur thought of all the things he liked to do: pulling the orange ears of a blue mother-elephant toy, an elephant baby the size of a gol-gappa nestled in its trunk, bought on a whim from a roadside vendor at Bhoot Bazaar; swinging on rubber tires tied to the branches of toothbrush trees; and holding a warm brick swaddled in rags that his ma gave him on moon-cold nights. He imagined her rubbing his chest with Vicks VapoRub though he had only seen this on TV and they didn’t even have a tub of the ointment in their house. But it soothed him, and he decided to hold on to that picture until he fell asleep.
Then: a movement in the alley that he sensed in the ground. He cocked his ears for footsteps, but there was nothing.
Memories that he didn’t care to remember rustled in his head. On a summer night two years ago, a man who smelled of cigarettes, with a mustache as thick as a squirrel’s tail, had pinioned him against a wall with one hand and, with the other, loosened the knot of his own salwar. Bahadur shook a little, still feeling the pressure of the man’s palm. A group of laborers returning home had seen what was happening and chased the man, giving Bahadur enough time to run away. He had stopped wandering in the bazaar for months afterward until his fears dulled and his father’s temper flared again.
Bahadur wondered if he should pick another spot to sleep. Outside the repair shop the alley was too empty. Any other night it would have been fine, but who knew what beast lurked in this smog, waiting to clamp its teeth on his legs? Where had this smog come from? He had never seen anything like it. Above him, on the roof overhang, pigeons grunted and shuffled. Then, as if nervous, they took off.
He sat up and stared into the darkness, his palms fixed to the floor, small stones stabbing his skin. A cat mewled and a dog barked as if to hush it. He thought of the ghosts after whom Bhoot Bazaar had been named, the friendly spirits of the people who had lived in these parts hundreds of years ago when the Mughals had been kings. “Allah ki kasam,” Hakim-Chacha had told Bahadur once, “they’ll never hurt us.”
If a ghost from the bazaar was in fact approaching Bahadur, maybe it wanted to help him breathe or tell him it was foolish to sleep outside on a night like this. Maybe if he showed the ghost his face, the impress of his father’s hand on his skin, the ghost would let him stay. Hakim-Chacha never said a word about his wounds or the Band-Aids his mother plastered over them. But only the day before, Bahadur had glimpsed his own reflection on the screen of an ancient TV at the repair shop, behind which he had hidden the precious things he couldn’t keep at home, and the bruise around his eye had looked shiny and black like the river that divided his city in two.
Bahadur told himself he was being silly. Ghosts and monsters lived only in the stories people told each other. But the air pulsed with dread, palpable like static. He thought he could see phantom limbs outlined in white, mouths without lips drawn toward him by the clamor of his breathing.
Maybe he should get up and run home. Maybe tonight he should knock on Omvir’s door. But the cold snagged his bones, which felt so brittle that he thought they would snap. He wished the blackness would part, the moon would shine, and the men he had seen by the fire would saunter down this alley. The smog tightened around his neck like a coil of coarse rope.
Now he could hear them: the pitter-patter of bandicoots hunting in packs for crumbs, a horse neighing somewhere, the clang of a metal bucket being overturned by a cat or a dog, and then, the slow footsteps of something or someone he was certain was coming toward him. He opened his mouth to scream but couldn’t. The sound of it stayed pinned to the back of his throat like all the words he had never been able to say.
TONIGHT IS OUR LAST NIGHT—
—in the basti, Ma says. No need for this drama-baazi, Papa says. What if we lose everything, Runu-Didi says.
I sit cross-legged on the bed and watch Ma make a clearing on the floor. She stacks against the wall our books, plastic footstools, and the pots she and Didi use to bring water from the tap. In the new empty space, she spreads out a pink bedsheet with black flowers, the colors wrung out to almost-grey by too many washings. Then she picks up the things we can’t do without and heaps them on the sheet: our best clothes, including my plastic-wrapped uniform, her roti rolling pin and board, and a small statue of Lord Ganesh that Dada gave Papa years ago. The TV stays on the shelf. It’s too heavy for
us to carry around.
“When did our house become a set for a Hindi picture, haan, Jai?” Papa asks, sitting next to me with the TV remote in his hand. I straighten his crooked shirt collar. It’s tattered where Runu-Didi or Ma scrubbed it too hard to get rid of dirt and paint stains.
Didi tries to help Ma but keeps getting in her way. Ma doesn’t scold her. Instead she keeps muttering Bahadur’s ma was wrong to go to the police.
“Her brain isn’t working,” Ma says. “All this running around hospitals, I suppose it can make anyone go mad. Arrey, she even asked Baba Bengali to tell her where her boy is. Paid him a fortune too. Everyone was talking about it when Runu and I went to the tap to get water in the evening.”
Baba Bengali looks like he has just stepped out of a cave in the Himalayas, with his ropey hair and muddy feet, but he uses computers. Once I saw him outside Dev Cyber Print House in Bhoot Bazaar, holding a sheaf of posters that he then pasted around the bazaar. The posters claimed he had answers to grave problems such as cheating wives, cheating husbands, angry mothers-in-law, hungry ghosts, black magic, bad debt and bad health.
Ma walks around the room, deciding what else needs to go into her bedsheet. She picks up her alarm clock that never runs on time but puts it back on the shelf.
“What did Baba Bengali say?” I ask.
“He said Bahadur will never come back,” Runu-Didi says.
“That baba is a fraud,” Papa says. “He makes money out of people’s misery.”
“Ji, you don’t believe in him, that’s fine,” Ma says. “But don’t badmouth him like this. We don’t want him cursing us.”
Then she stands on a footstool and removes an old, blue plastic tub of Parachute 100% Pure Coconut Oil from the topmost shelf. The oil inside it is all gone. Instead, there are a few hundred-rupee notes that Ma stores in case “Something Happens,” though she has never said what the Something is that might Happen. She puts the tub on top of her mango-powder tin, from where it’s easier to grab if we have to run out of the house in the dark. The tub is like Ma’s purse except I have never seen her open it.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 5
