Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  It had been big news at the time because there was a woman involved. The couple had posed as tourists but the police had credible information that they were aiding and abetting terrorists from the northeast, one of the many separatist groups fighting for their piece of the homeland. The woman killed in the hotel room was beautiful, the writer noted. I searched hard but there was no mention of Hoshiyaar. Yet on the inside pages there was a fawning profile of Balwant as the “people’s cop” accompanied by a picture of him shaking hands with a tea boy—me. It set me trembling and I tell you I quit that library fast.)

  When the man handed me my food, I asked and he told me—but I have forgotten—how many miles we were from Shimla.

  The bathroom was a shed in the back of the building, set at the edge of sugarcane fields that stretched out into the distance. The moon was large and round in the sky and the little crooked trails that ran between the fields were full of light and shadow. I waited till the rest of the men had zipped up their flies and left. Then I stepped down into the dirt of the pathway in front of me and started walking without glancing back. Someone did come search for me and shouted my seat number a few times. I could see a glimmer of his shirt as he stood at the edge of the fields searching the darkness. But the cane was tall on both sides of the path and I stayed still. Finally he left and a few minutes later the bus started and drove off. After that it was just me. As for Hoshiyaar, I couldn’t give a fuck. Really.

  FIT OF RAGE

  BY PALASH KRISHNA MEHROTRA

  Defence Colony

  I sit on a blue plastic stool outside the Mother Dairy booth in Def Col Market and do nothing. It’s the end of another gray and cloudy August day. The monsoon has yielded little rain. Even though it’s evening, I’m sweating. The humidity makes me feel like a squeezed sponge.

  I should be at home. I really don’t know what makes me leave my room. These days I am pushed along by forces not in my control. One day slips into another. Every night is a silent dark space that swallows me whole. I squat inside her belly until she spits me out at dawn, covered in phlegm and bile.

  Something happened a year ago. Arpita and I were living in Bombay then. We were locked in the missionary position when, suddenly, she pushed me off. She said, “Manik, I feel hemmed in. Every day it is the same damn thing. We’ve been together for five whole years and every night it’s the same old shit. No new positions. No nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I feel my youth slipping away from me, Manik.” She sat on the floor and glared at her toes. I smoked a cigarette. I felt deeply humiliated.

  Then I did something terrible.

  It’s not very clear to me what exactly happened. I did what I did in a fit of rage. I remember a kitchen knife, I remember being seized by an uncontrollable urge and doing what had to be done. I recall a pair of dangling headphones playing tinny music.

  Defence Colony isn’t a completely new place for me. I lived here many years ago, when I was a techie with a dot-com. It was my first job.

  In Bombay, I thought to myself: It’s all over now, let me return to where I started my adult life. From twenty to thirty has been one long journey. I suppose you could say my life never really took off. Many strange things happened in those ten years. I try not to remember them but very often memories force themselves on my consciousness; they are like stubborn relatives who invite themselves over even when you’ve made it clear that they are unwelcome.

  I have a room on the first floor, directly above the garage. The house faces a school. In the mornings I can hear the bell go off every forty minutes, signalling the end of one period and the start of another. Midmorning, at around 11, a drum starts its heavy pounding, probably a P.T. class. From my window I can see only a small part of the playground. The lot is dusty and shorn of grass. During the break the girls play a game where they run around holding each other’s hands, forming a chain. When the girls stray into the corner of the field visible from my window, I back away or hide behind the curtain. I wouldn’t want them to see me.

  Defence Colony is a posh Delhi neighborhood, but in the afternoons it has the air of a small, well-planned town. The roads are narrow and quiet. Guards nap in their plastic chairs, their bottoms squeezed in at odd angles. Mongrel dogs give chase to each other, or join the guards in their siesta. A dirty open drain divides the neighborhood in two halves. Cows graze peacefully on the grass on both sides of the nul-lah. Abandoned bulls forage in overflowing garbage dumps.

  And cycle-rickshaws weave in and out of the lanes, obediently slowing down and pulling to the side in order to give way to passing SUVs.

  When I arrived here four months ago in May, it was very hot. I would stay in my room all day long. When the landlady, Mrs. Bindra, asked what I did, I told her I was an online journalist. Delhi is a big city. People do all kinds of things. My landlady didn’t ask me any more questions.

  In the evenings I would go to the C-block market and walk around in circles. Sometimes I would hire a cycle-rickshaw and ask to be peddled around the various blocks of the neighborhood. That’s how I met Sadiq. It didn’t take me long to befriend him. He was a Bihari migrant to Delhi. He rented his rickshaw from a rich man who owned an entire fleet. He was also a smackhead.

  Every other day he’d take a bus to Connaught Place and come back with small, innocuous-looking paper pellets. The pudiyas contained the deadly brown powder. He would do it all the time, in all sorts of places. Sadiq had a friend who lived in the Jungpura slums, near the railway tracks. He’d head over there often. I’d go along, not for the smack but for the ganja which his smack buddy also dealt.

  When no one was looking, I’d get Sadiq to come up to my room. He always expressed amazement at the fact I lived on my own. “Don’t you get lonely all by yourself? I just wouldn’t be able to handle it …” Sadiq lived in a one-room tenement in Kotla, a poor neighborhood just around the corner from Def Col. His four children, wife, and younger brother all slept in the same room. And he alone wouldn’t have been able to afford even that. His younger brother had been lucky to get a job in an electrical repair shop. When he rented the room he had felt obligated to ask his older brother if he and his family wanted to move in.

  I am sitting in my room with Sadiq and Chotu. Chotu is the newest member of our two-person gang. Now we are a trio.

  Chotu works at Mrs. Bindra’s. He lives in a room on the terrace, surrounded by black Sintex water tanks. His room has a tin roof which heats up during the daytime. He has few possessions, all of which he keeps locked in his gray tin trunk. For furniture he has a bed, a mattress, a surahi, a small rectangular mirror, a noisy table fan. To liven up the walls he’s cut out glamorous pictures from Delhi Times. Seminaked Bol-lywood actresses and foreign models smile and pout at Chotu. At night they go a step further. Some pop out of their frames and climb into bed with him. He says he has felt them touching him in all the right places.

  Chotu is from Garhwal. He is fair-skinned, has shiny black eyes and big hands. He is moody and irritable when with us. In front of Mrs. Bindra he is subservient and self-effacing, always ready to please. He misses the rain and the mountains, the company of his friends. He’s fond of his drink. We do a lot of that sitting in the park opposite the main market or in Sadiq’s rickshaw while he peddles us around. Chotu stares at all the fancy women with their oversized sunglasses and opulent cars. He finds it strange that I remain indifferent to the sensual world around us.

  We have another hangout—the first floor. The golf-playing Mrs. Bindra, wife of the dead Rear Admiral Bindra, owns C-47, Defence Colony. She lives on the ground floor. Between Mrs. Bindra’s plush, dark home and the terrace lies a vacant first-floor apartment. A young woman committed suicide here several weeks before I moved in. No one has been bold enough to rent the place after that incident. Chotu feels her ghost is still around. He describes her as being very sexy, very aloof.

  She worked for a bank and lived on her own. At night she had boyfriends over. Chotu used to clean her apartme
nt on Sundays. He had a key to the flat. He was the one who found her dead body dangling from an Orient ceiling fan.

  The three of us go there sometimes, either in the mornings when Mrs. Bindra is playing golf or when she’s out-of-station, visiting her only daughter in Bombay.

  It’s one of those weekends. Mrs. Bindra is in Worli, visiting her daughter who works for Hewlett-Packard. We have taken over the first floor. The curtains are drawn. The rooms are empty so our voices echo, bounce off the walls. In the vacant space our low voices acquire a rumbling, basslike quality.

  Chotu and I are sitting on folding chairs. Sadiq is on the floor surrounded by the tools of his drug habit: silver kitchen foil, a new one-rupee coin which he uses as a filter, a mutilated Bisleri bottle serving as a spittoon. I use wax matches to light the foil from underneath while he chases the dragon.

  Afterwards, he lies down. Every once in a while he gets up and goes to the toilet to puke.

  Chotu is drinking. He has finished half a bottle of country liquor and is ranting about his boss. There’s too much work.

  He was initially hired to cook but now does a host of other jobs at the same salary: dusting, cleaning, driving, shopping for groceries, walking the dog, ironing the clothes, driving Mrs.

  Bindra around. She hasn’t given him a raise in two years. He says he could kill her. I say I would if I were him. He tells me to watch out; he just might one of these days.

  I am smoking thin joints of Stadium ganja. I’m only half-listening to Chotu. The more I smoke, the more I think of

  Arpita. I’m fighting my memories but it’s a losing battle.

  We are like hikers, heading toward a common summit but from different directions. At the moment we are all trekking along on our solitary paths; very soon we’ll be united at the summit. We will exchange high-fives, shake our fists, plant flags.

  At around 3 in the afternoon I feel like eating. The ganja has made me hungry. Chotu is drunk but steady on his feet. He’s willing to join me. Sadiq is lying on the bare floor with his eyes shut. When I poke him he doesn’t budge. His clothes are so dirty I can’t make out what he’s wearing. His body is wrapped in rags. I realize I haven’t looked at him much all these months we have been together.

  Chotu and I decide to go to Sagar Restaurant in the C-block market. I’m wearing a green polo T-shirt and faded blue jeans. Chotu’s wearing a plain red shirt and dark-brown trousers. The doorman at the restaurant hesitates for a moment, then decides to let us in. He bows and says, “Please,” pointing toward the windowless ground-floor section. He knows me by face: I eat here almost every other day. Chotu doesn’t cast his eyes around the other tables; he stares at the floor and follows me. We sidestep a couple of barefoot attendants on their knees in the narrow aisle between the tables. They have brushes and dustpans and are cleaning the floor. Not a single crumb will escape their deft hands and keen eyesight.

  We make our way to the first floor where a group of Punjabi ladies are playing bingo: “Two-saven, twanty-saven, one-zero Downing Street.” Their restless children sit at another table and order ice-cream shakes and kulfis. Some of the women cast suspicious glances at us when we enter.

  We sit down at a corner table and place orders for Mysore masala dosas. Chotu leans back and looks around in disgust as if we are sitting amongst mounds of smelly garbage.

  After the late lunch, Chotu and I stroll around for a while: Chotu checking out women’s feet, I staring vacantly at passersby. Fortunately, everyone comes to Def Col with their maids in tow so the two of us together don’t attract much attention.

  We find a cycle-rickshaw near Kent’s Fast Food. We take him to the Flyover Market. We need more booze and cigarettes. Chotu is grumpy and disgruntled. He says he can see this life of slavery is not going to go anywhere. He wants money. His present job is not going to earn him that. “Seven days of nonstop work,” he complains, “and at the end of the month a fuck-all salary. She gives me food and shelter. That’s supposed to be enough. Whatever little I have left I send home. I never had any money I could spend on myself. I’ll never have that.” He wanted a motor scooter but Mrs. Bin-dra refused. Chotu claims it would make the shopping quicker and easier. “But no. She insists I do everything on my bicycle.

  This is no place for bicycles, brother. I am tired of cars honking me out of their way.”

  At the Flyover Market I take him to Nirula’s for a drink of water. His lips are chapped and dry. He looks dehydrated. He is on his third glass when I notice one of the red-uniformed employees walking toward us. I asked Chotu to hurry. We leave before he can reach us.

  We buy whiskey from the off-license under the dingy Flyover Market. The sound of the traffic is loud. Invisible trucks and buses roll past above our heads. We are the small fish covering the ocean floor while the big fish hunt closer to the surface. I buy cigarettes from a man sitting opposite Central Bank. We walk home in silence. Chotu has stopped complain-ing for the time being. While walking over the small bridge across the nullah, I see cows grazing in the grass down below. They look sluggish and bored.

  When we get back, Sadiq is awake. He is doing a line. He seems happy to see us. He tries convincing us to join him but neither of us is interested. Then, turning to Chotu, he says, “So, are we doing it tomorrow or not?”

  Chotu seems irritated. “For that you’ll have to stay off the brown for a bit, you know. Finishing someone off requires brains and energy. You have neither in the state you’re in right now.”

  Sadiq tells Chotu not to be deceived by appearances. He says he is ready, that he is an able and strong man—as a boy he fought a cobra with his bare hands; as a young man he fathered no less than four children.

  Chotu says, “Okay, I trust you. We’ll need some of that old vigor tomorrow. Not that Mrs. Bindra’s a cobra, but still …”

  By evening I had been taken into confidence. Initially I was a little apprehensive, even paranoid. Why were they sharing this with me? Had they stumbled upon something related to my own past? But that was impossible. As far as I knew they had no friends or acquaintances in Bombay. Had the police come snooping around then?

  But as they talked amongst themselves I realized it had nothing to do with me: It was all about them and their plans for freedom. They just trusted me. We had been hanging out together for the last few months. They knew our backgrounds were different. Still, I didn’t behave like other men of my class; I didn’t even seem to know any. Chotu and Sadiq were fully aware that they were the only friends I had. No one came to visit me and I hardly left my room. I suppose a strange kind of desperation bound us together, gave us the illusion of belonging to each other’s worlds.

  The plan was simple. Mrs. Bindra was supposed to return from Bombay the next afternoon. Chotu would go to Palam and pick her up. He would serve her lunch, after which Mrs.

  B would lie down to rest. Sadiq was supposed to arrive around this time and park his rickshaw further down the road. When Mrs. B was fast asleep, Chotu would give the all-clear sign to Sadiq. He would then slip in through the open front door; together they would overpower and kill the old lady. They would break open the almirah in her bedroom—that, according to Chotu, was where Mrs. B kept all her cash and valuables. They would stuff the booty in two empty bags, get on Sadiq’s rickshaw, and head up to the main road to catch a bus to New Delhi Railway Station.

  They wanted my opinion. I said the plan sounded okay.

  They didn’t tell me where they were going to go afterwards.

  I didn’t particularly want to know. Servants murdered their masters all the time in Delhi. Every other week the newspapers carried stories of elderly couples being drugged and clobbered to death. I often wondered: If the motive was robbery, why kill? Why not steal and scoot? Anyway, this seemed to be how they did it in Delhi.

  Later that evening we went to the Vaishno Dhaba in the A-block market. On the way back we stopped by a construction site. An old house had been pulled down recently and a new one was coming up in its place. The
front stood in darkness.

  The roof had already been laid. A laborer’s family was living inside. One could see a faint light in a back room. A transistor radio played film music.

  Chotu seemed to know exactly what to do. He took us toward the boundary wall to the left of the house. The ground was uneven and embedded with pieces of broken tiles and shards of glass. Some iron rods were lying next to the wall. Chotu picked up three. We walked back to the rickshaw, constantly looking over our shoulders, hoping no one had seen us.

  Sadiq and I piled into the rickshaw, laying the rods flat on the footrest. Chotu wheeled us to C-47. They asked me if they could store the rods in my room for the night. I had no problem. Still, I was curious, so I asked Chotu why he didn’t keep them in his room. He said he would but he didn’t want to take any chances. The ironing lady across the road was a bitch. She was always trying to get him into some kind of trouble with Mrs. Bindra. She poisoned the old lady’s ears with tales. Once she’d told her that each time she was away, Chotu had whores in his room. This had gotten Mrs. Bindra very exercised.

  She had promptly marched up to his room for an inspection. He had been embarrassed by the pictures on the wall: Mallika Sherawat, kneeling on the ground in a red satin dress; Kareena Kapoor in white bra and denim microshorts, a basque cap on her head. Not finding anyone, she had asked him to take the pictures down: “Give these people a roof to live under and they turn it into a brothel.” He’d taken them down only to put some of them back up as soon as she left. But the damage was done: Mrs. B’s ears had been poisoned. Despite her age—she was seventy-six—Mrs. B was given to climbing the stairs all the way to the top of the house, especially when she returned from a trip.

  Chotu slipped the rods under my bed. He had also procured a kitchen knife which he had sharpened at the Kotla market. He went and got it from its hiding place in his quarter. I kept it in a drawer in my wardrobe.