Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  I was to meet the councilor at 5 at his showroom. I was back at the house by 3. I didn’t have any desire to hang out at the office. The story was beginning to get to me, and I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. On a hunch I decided to stop by the councilor’s house on the way to his showroom. Even though I wasn’t sure what I’d do at the house, I decided to give it a try.

  The councilor’s wife answered the doorbell. It took her a while to get there. Gray-haired, dressed in a salwar kameez, she could easily have been a relative of mine from Punjab. She apologized for having kept me waiting. She said she had difficulty walking because of her knees, and the servant was away on an errand. I spoke to her in Punjabi with the deference due to an elder, told her I was a journalist and that I lived not far from her house.

  “Yes, I know. When you all moved in, people in the colony were very worried. Five bachelors living on their own, we thought there would be loud parties, people dropping in all the time. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was used to here. But you boys keep to yourself.” I wasn’t going to tell her that it was not for lack of trying. She asked me to sit down and hobbled to get me some water.

  I found it very difficult to broach the subject. Sitting there, it felt more appropriate to ask how her children were doing, whether her arthritis was troubling her. When I did put the question to her, it seemed a betrayal of the setting, but she seemed to be expecting it.

  “Kaka,’’ she began, and I was being addressed as a boy for the second time in two days, but this time it was not meant to be patronizing. “He was a thief. Some of his relatives work here, but you know how these tribals are. He was an alcoholic, everyone says so, and I think he was probably looking for some loose cash or jewelry that he could sell later. The poor man panicked when he heard us and jumped off the roof.”

  Did she go out and see where he had fallen? I asked.

  “Haan, he didn’t seem too badly injured to me. I even made him a cup of tea while we waited for the police to arrive.

  I think there must have been some internal injuries, but he wasn’t complaining of any severe pain.”

  Was she sure, was she really sure? I repeated slowly in Punjabi.

  “Haan kaka, he was sitting in front of me like you are sitting now. God knows what the policemen did to him.”

  I told her I was going to see her husband and asked the way to the showroom; I shouldn’t have. When I got to the showroom, Trehan was waiting for me, already aware of my conversation with his wife. “I didn’t realize you lived in Gyan Kunj, we could easily have met there later in the evening.”

  All I could do was make some vague noises about being unsure of my way. It should have been no big deal, but such interactions are decided by small things. Being in control of the situation is everything; I wasn’t.

  He was sitting behind his desk in a cabin at the rear of the showroom. Plywood had been used to partition it off from the open floor displaying electronic goods. On one of the walls there was a photograph of him dressed in saffron, staff in hand, on a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine.

  Snow-clad mountains in the background seemed to suggest it was Vaishno Devi. He must have made the journey a decade earlier—his younger version didn’t carry so much flab around the abdomen.

  When he spoke there was no warmth in his tone, he was curt, eager to be rid of me. “So ask what you want to ask, I don’t see why anyone should be wasting so much time on an open-and-shut case.” Even as he spoke, his fingers played nervously on the table; each bore a thick gold ring encrusted with a gemstone.

  For the first time I felt a little more sure of myself. “Mr.

  Trehan, I don’t think there’s anything open-and-shut about the case. I’ve just been to your house and spoken to your wife. I know the SHO wanted this conversation off the record, but I must tell you that everything you say will be on the record.”

  I had overestimated his nervousness. Today I would have been able to gauge him far better. “I have no desire to say anything off the record. I don’t know why you wasted your time speaking to my wife. She wasn’t even present, she only repeated what she was told.’’

  “That’s not what she said.”

  “She’s been worried ever since that stupid fool died. She thinks the police will come around troubling me and so when a reporter lands up she tries to clear the family of any blame. She slept through much of the incident, and in any case she would have never made it to the back, her arthritis barely allows her to walk. She never even saw the man, and I came and told her he was fine just to keep her from worrying. If you want, you can ask the servant who was there, or the SI and the constable who arrived later.”

  “But that’s not what the SHO told me. He said you’d tell me what really happened.’’

  “That Puri is a fool. I thought you wanted to speak on the record. There you have it—what I have told you, what my servant will confirm, what is in the FIR, what the SI and the constable say they saw, what the postmortem says. What does that leave out, Mr. Singh?’’

  “Mr. Trehan, you feel you have everything sewn up, but there are things that don’t make sense. Isn’t it true that Ekka campaigned against you during the elections?’’

  “Perhaps, but everyone in that jhuggi either worked for or against me during the elections. Does that explain why the others make an honest living and this one steals?’’

  I sat there noting down everything he was saying. I think I still have the notes stashed away somewhere. Really, though, I was writing things down only because I didn’t know what else to do.

  I went back to the metro editor. He took me out to the press club later that night. He was far more indulgent of me than he needed to be; at the time I thought much less of him than I should have. I think he sympathized with how I felt about the organization, but he’d also lived long enough to know we all need to get by. It was up to each of us, he told me, to see whether we were eventually left with anything other than money in the pocket.

  “Drop the case,’’ he advised, sipping his rum. “You’re wasting your time.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to him, but I did. I’ve never really forgotten that evening though. So it was no surprise that the details came flooding back when a friend asked me to write about a Delhi I had known. The first words I wrote were the beginnings of this story. Somewhere in the writing I realized I needed to find out where Dr. Mohanty was now working.

  Perhaps a sense of failure and the feeling that there was more I could have done spurred me on. Perhaps I wanted to see if it was possible to give a damn after all these years. But then, a lifetime of deciphering the intentions of others had left me no wiser about myself, I just knew it was something I had to do.

  I was senior enough now for the young reporter on the beat to treat my words as more than simply a request. It didn’t take long—Mohanty, he told me, was the head of the forensics department at the same hospital where he had done that postmortem a decade earlier.

  I headed to meet Mohanty the next afternoon, driving through those same streets, past the bridge I used to stroll across. I rarely came to east Delhi any longer. I had fled further and further south in the city, away from this grime. The river, black as ever with sludge, a vast sewer, flowed placidly below. The traffic was far more ferocious. Across the bridge the market was in transition, the old shops I remembered were giving way to even fancier showrooms. As I turned past Radhu Palace, the old structure was barely visible behind the new malls that were being constructed. It was only a matter of time before it would all be torn down for a multiplex. For a moment I even thought of driving into Gyan Kunj, but I was already late for the appointment.

  I followed the directions the crime reporter had given me. A final left turn took me to the edge of the vast flood plains of the Yamuna. An old building, looking much like any large office or hospital built by the government anywhere in the country, was in the process of being dwarfed by a new steel-and-glass structure coming up to one side. It would be home to the new C
entral Institute of Forensic Sciences.

  All this I learned from Dr. Mohanty. He still sat in the old building on the top floor. It took me awhile to find the office, walking through interminable lengths of corridors with mosaic-tiled floors. No one seemed to be around, and I had to look into each lab along the corridors, the stench of chloroform and phenyl taking me back to the dissections at the biology lab in school. Finally, a peon directed me to his room.

  His secretary asked me to wait in the adjacent library while Dr. Mohanty finished with an appointment. The shelves were lined with books. I glanced at a few of the titles—Law of Dying Declaration by S.K. Shanglo, two volumes of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Embalming by T. Jayavelu.

  My gaze shifted from the shelves to the two posters on the wall in front of me, on either side of a large window overlooking the river. One was titled Basic Measurements in Hanging: One ofthe Factors in Deciding the Mode of Death. The diagrams below had different perspectives of the same drawing that showed a figure hanging from a roof. The measurements that mattered were from hook to knot, knot to toe, hook to ground, loop circumference, toe to ground, and hook to head. For those who could process such information, the other poster dealt with Types of Manual Strangulation.

  Mohanty was a curiously upbeat character in these surroundings. Bald and bespectacled, he sat in a room crowded by the usual ensemble of mementos and awards. Everything else, however, was dwarfed by a larger-than-life poster of him receiving one such prize. I sat facing him and from the wall to my right, his visage beamed down on him. His mobile rang as soon as I sat.

  “No, I don’t want a credit card, what would I do with it?

  A sari for my wife? What sort of chutiya do you think I am?

  She’ll get a sari when I can afford to buy it. You are wasting your time on me, I belong to a generation that believes taking a loan is a sign of failure. Okay, enough, bhanchod, this is my office time, find someone else to trouble.’’ He turned to me. “What can a man do, Singh sahib? These guys never leave you alone. Anyway, tell me what brings you here. Your reporter said it was something personal.’’

  I told him the entire story on the hunch he would react sympathetically to the odd request.

  “Not a problem, not a problem, just the kind of case to show you how useful our work here can be. I have records of every postmortem conducted in this hospital for the past thirty years. If you can get me the name and the year, I’ll just pull the report out. From what you say, it is a postmortem I conducted. I am sure that looking at the report will bring something back to mind.’’ He sent for his PA, who noted down the name and the date. “It will take them a bit of time, come let me show you around this place.’’

  The crime reporter had warned me about his rose garden—it was always part of the deal when anyone went to meet Mo-hanty. We walked through the corridor leading to the terrace. It had shelves at eye-level lined with jars of biological curios that Mohanty seemed to delight in. Snakes, the larger ones coiled tight in the jars, fetuses, and severed limbs were followed by a row with deadly poisons on display. It was an eclectic list ranging from ferric sulfate to hydrogen peroxide.

  The corridor opened out to an enormous terrace overlooking the floodplains of the river. Along its length ran four rows of roses—yellow, red, white, and orange—neatly arrayed in earthen pots, each labeled with the name of the variety. “I come out here to water them every day. It’s therapeutic.’’

  We sat quietly for a while among the roses, overlooking the river that seemed unsoiled from this distance. Then he led me to a wire coop at the far corner of the terrace.

  “This is where I rear pigeons. I have collected every conceivable variety from various parts of the country. Of course, I never say this to the doctors, but after they have spent much of their day performing postmortem after postmortem, it’s a relief to come out here. They walk past the roses to this corner and then ask the man who looks after the pigeons whether a new brood has hatched, whether an ailing bird is now doing better. After dirtying their hands with death, they come back to life here.’’

  We walked back to his room. The postmortem report was lying on his table. He flipped through it, reviewing it twice. It didn’t take him long, then he pushed it aside and looked at me.

  “I remember this case rather well. The SHO called in to cash a favor, and there was something I didn’t mention in the report.”

  He paused; the memory must have been vivid for him to recall the case so many years later.

  “Ekka died of massive internal bleeding. His lower intestines were torn apart by a blunt object thrust up his anus.’’

  Past where he was sitting, through the window behind him, I could see the city spread out before me. My eyes slowly retraced the path I used to follow, from the new malls coming up at Radhu Palace, the new metro line leading back to the bridge, the glitzy newspaper office that had risen with the circulation. I had tried running away from the tedium on the trail of a man’s death. As the years had passed, I had gone further afield, chasing stories with greater skill, some of them taking me far from the streets of this city. But in the end it seemed this is what I had come back to, what I could not escape. What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler—either the police or the councilor and his men were capable of such brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t seem to matter. No one in this city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to realize neither did I.

  PART III

  WALLED CITY, WORLD CITY

  GAUTAM UNDER A TREE

  BY HIRSH SAWHNEY

  Green Park

  It 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.

&nb
sp; 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.