Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  When Sushma arrived upstairs, she looked a little worried. “Gosh!” she exclaimed. “What kind of a place is this, anyway? Everything’s so shiny and polished, like glass. I feel like I shouldn’t touch anything. What if it gets dirty? There’s something about all this stuff that gives me a weird feeling.”

  “Just enjoy yourself. We’ve still got plenty socked away, so why fret?” Then, lovingly, he added, “Come here and give me a big smooch. And crack open that bottle in my bag while you’re at it.”

  The knock on the door came at half past 10 that night. It had already been a long day of sightseeing at the Taj.

  Ramnivas wondered who it could be so late. He opened the door to find two policemen. One was an inspector, and the other, the inspector’s sidekick.

  “You’ve got a girl in there?” the inspector asked in a scolding voice.

  “Yes,” Ramnivas replied. The inspector and his sidekick came in. The name V.N. Bharadwaj was engraved on a little brass tag pinned to his uniform. The way he was looking at Sushma! A fury began to build in Ramnivas, but he was too scared to say anything. Sushma was wearing her pink nightie, and you could see right through to the black bra he’d bought for her. And beneath that was her fine, fair skin.

  “Something tells me she’s not your wife,” the inspector declared. “So where’d you pick her up?” The man’s square face housed cunning little eyes that kept blinking. His hair had been turned jet-black with unspeakable quantities of dye.

  “She lives next door. She’s my sister-in-law,” Ramnivas said; he was a terrible liar.

  “So, you’ve been having a little party!” the inspector con-tinued, glancing at the fifth of Diplomat on the table. Then he gave Sushma the hard once-over. “She ran away. You helped her. You brought her here. My guess is she’s underage.” He turned to Sushma. “How old are you?”

  She was scared. “Seventeen,” she said.

  “I’m taking you down to the station—both of you. We’ll find out from the medical reports exactly how much fun you’ve been having.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “So where’d the money come from? A three-star hotel? AC? My guess is this isn’t your usual style. Did you steal it? Or knock someone off?”

  Ramnivas had a good buzz going, and he should have been able to pluck up his courage; but Sushma telling the truth about her age had unwittingly thrown him to the wolves. He felt as if he was walking right into their trap. He thought quickly, and a smile took shape on his face. “C’mon, inspector, just give the word. Another bottle?”

  “That I can order from the hotel. As for you two—I’m taking you to the station. Get dressed. Is she coming like this? With her see-through everything?”

  “What’s the rush? The station goes wherever you go, inspector. The inspector’s here, so we can work things out right now,” Ramnivas suggested with a little laugh.

  He was surprised at himself. Where had this been hiding? He took a quick look at the sidekick, who was standing by the bed, to see if he could get him to go along. It looked like a yes, Ramnivas thought: The sidekick was busy staring at Sushma, but seemed to give a little nod when his eyes met Ramnivas’s. “Aw, they’re just kids, Bharadwaj sahib,” he said. “They come to see the Taj. Let ’em have their little party. You and me can have some fun with her too. Whaddya say, pal?”

  Ramnivas didn’t like what the sidekick was hinting at.

  “Wait just a minute,” he said. “Look, Bharadwaj sahib, as far as some food and drink go, just say the word and I’ll have it sent up in no time. But you’ve got to believe me that she’s really my sister-in-law. I swear!”

  The inspector began to laugh. “Uh-huh. You need an AC hotel room in order to polish off a fifth of the good stuff with your underage sister-in-law? And then let me guess: The two of you were singing hymns and clapping your hands? But now that you mention it, go get a bottle of Royal Challenge and order a plate of chicken. Actually, don’t move.” The inspector sat down on the bed. He pressed the intercom button at the head of it that got him to the reception desk, placed the order, and then stretched out on the mattress. He loosened his belt buckle and regarded Sushma, who was sitting at the foot of the bed looking as if she wanted to crawl under a rock. “And you—go sit in the chair in the corner and face the wall. Don’t make me crazy. I lose it a little when I drink, and then the two of you’ll go crying to your mothers about big bad Bharadwaj.

  I just can’t help it, like when I see those pretty Western girls that come here on vacation.” He had a big laugh.

  They killed the bottle in just over an hour. First, Ramni-vas finished off his own fifth, and then he joined the police in a few more shots from theirs—by the end, he was completely drunk. The inspector and his sidekick left the hotel room sometime after midnight. They settled on five hundred to let the matter slide; later, the sidekick shook him down for an extra hundred. By the time they’d gone, Ramnivas was utterly spent, so drunk he was queasy and started getting the spins. Sushma helped him into the bathroom and poured cold water over his head, but Ramnivas lay down right there on the bathroom floor and began to retch. Out came all the butter Schicken, the naan, and the pulao. After the vomiting subsided he clung to Sushma, but everything was a blur, so he went straight to bed.

  In the morning, Sushma told Ramnivas that after he’d gotten drunk he told the police about some cash hidden behind a wall somewhere in Saket. Ramnivas instantly sobered up. He’d been so careful about keeping his secret! He hadn’t even hinted about it to Sushma or his wife. In the end, a little booze had turned the sweet smell of success into a putrid pile of shit.

  He made a few excuses to Sushma about something coming up back home and canceled their trip to Jaipur, then decided to take the next train back to Delhi.

  Just as he’d feared, a police Gypsy idled in front of his house, waiting for him the next morning. “The assistant superintendent wants to talk to you,” a policeman said. Ramnivas got into the Gypsy.

  This was some eight months ago—I think it was a Tuesday, and there was a light cloud cover. It seemed it might start to drizzle at any time. That day, I saw a very nervous Ramnivas at Sanjay’s; he was waiting for Sushma.

  I ordered two cups of deluxe chai from Ratan Lal, and got my first inkling of how desperate Ramnivas was when I saw him down the piping-hot tea in one gulp, burning his mouth and everything else.

  It was early afternoon, and Ramnivas, eyes full of pleading, looked at me and said, “I’ve gotten into a big mess. Way in over my head. Help me find a way out—please! I won’t forget it for the rest of my life.”

  I asked him to tell me all about it, and he did; and now I’ve told you everything he told me. When he finished—just as I was about to see if I could find some way to help—Sushma showed up.

  “Meet me here tomorrow morning. I’ve got to go,” Ramni-vas said, and the two of them jumped in a rickshaw. I watched them ride away until I couldn’t see them any longer. That was the last time I saw Ramnivas.

  He hasn’t come back to this little corner of the street.

  He’ll never come back. If you ask anyone about him, no one will say a word.

  And if you keep going from this corner to the sixteenth-century ruins at the bypass, and ask Saliman, Somali, Bhusan, Tilak, or Rizvan about Ramnivas, you’ll get the same blank stare. Ask Rajvati and her husband Gulshan, who sell hard-boiled eggs at night—they’ll all give you the brush-off.

  Even the fair and graceful Sushma, who comes every day from Samaypur Badli to clean people’s homes, will walk right past you at a brisk pace without so much as a word. That’s how bad it is. Nowadays, she’s been seen with Santosh munching on chat and papri in front of the Sheela Cinema.

  And if you happen to travel to that little settlement by the sewage runoff and manage to ask for the address of the tiny hut that Ramnivas had converted into a real house, and, once there, ask his wife Babiya or his sickly son Rohan or his daughter Urmila, Where is Ramnivas? you’ll face a stare as blank and cold as stone. They’ll say, He
’s out of town. If you ask when he’ll be back, Babiya will reply, “How should I know?”

  No one in all of Delhi has any idea about Ramnivas—that much is clear. He simply doesn’t exist anywhere—no trace is left. But I’m about to give you the final facts about him.

  If you read any of the Hindi or English newspapers that come out in Delhi—say, Indian News Express, Times of Metro India, or Shatabdi Sanchar Times— and open the June 27, 2001 edition to page three, you’ll see a tiny photograph on the right side of the page. Below the photo, the headline of the capsule news item read, Robbers Killed in Encounter, and below that, the subheader: Police Recover Big Money from Car.

  The three-line capsule was written by the local crime reporter, according to whom, the night before, near Buddha Jay-anti Park, the police tried to stop a Suzuki Esteem that bore no license plate and was traveling on Ridge Road from Dhaula Kuan. Instead of stopping, the people inside the car opened fire. The police returned fire. Two of the criminals were killed on the spot, while three others fled. One of the dead was Kul-dip, a.k.a. Kulla, a notorious criminal from Jalandhar. The other body could not be identified. Police Assistant Superintendent Sabarwal said that 2.3 million rupees were recovered from the trunk of the car, most of which were counterfeit five-hundred-rupee bills. He stressed the importance of information provided by the Agra police in netting the loot.

  If you were to examine the photo printed above this news item, you’d notice that the car is parked right in front of Buddha Jayanti Park. The dead man lying faceup in the street next to its back door, mouth open, pants coming undone and shirt unbuttoned, chest riddled with bullet holes, is none other than Ramnivas—the “criminal” who, to this day, remains un-identified.

  Now, listen to what happened that day, a few hours before the encounter.

  According to Govind, who sells chai in front of A-11/DX33, Saket, that night at 10, a police Gypsy came with three plainclothes cops. They went into the gym, kicked everyone out, and then themselves left. An hour later, as Govind was closing his stall, the Esteem pulled up. It didn’t have any license plates, and a Sikh, not too tall, not too short, got out.

  Ramnivas stepped out of the backseat right after him.

  They went inside and stayed for about an hour and a half.

  They kept carrying stuff from the building and loading it into the trunk of the vehicle. An undercover Ambassador car pulled up right around the corner, and followed the Esteem when it began to pull away.

  Govind said Ramnivas looked incredibly stressed, his eyes glazed over like a corpse’s. He’d tried to say something to Ramnivas, but the Esteem was gone in a flash—the Sikh was driving.

  According to what Ramnivas told me about the space behind the wall in the gym at Saket, it must have been pretty large. Conservatively, I figured it had to have been an area of about twelve by four feet. Ramnivas said the space was crammed full of hundred-and five-hundred-rupee bills. Based on that, I did the math. What I came up was that there was easily anywhere from a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty million rupees in there.

  Do you remember the case where the Central Bureau raided a cabinet minister’s house, along with a few of his other properties? The investigation was launched by the government that had just come into power, and the cabinet minister under investigation had been part of the previous government. The minister was charged with taking something like a billion rupees in kickbacks from a foreign company that supplied high-tech equipment. The man did a little time, and was later released. He then joined the very same government that had earlier begun the investigation. It’s clear that Ram-nivas, guided by auspicious astrological alignments, or just dumb luck, had discovered a problem with his broom; and in order to solve it, he began banging the butt against the wall.

  He figured out the wall was hollow, got his hands inside, and was suddenly face-to-face with money hidden from the eyes of the Central Bureau and the tax man. It was unaccounted money, untraceable money—dirty money.

  You already know that only a few lakhs of rupees were recovered from the trunk after Kuldip, a.k.a. Kulla, and Ramni-vas were killed on Ridge Road that night—and a large part of that cash was counterfeit too. This, when we know that there was some one hundred-and-fifty million rupees taken out of that wall. What happened?

  Kulla, a career criminal, had so many cases pending in court that the police could use him as they pleased. He worked as an informant, reporting to the police station each and every day. He spied for them, pimped for them, and provided false testimony as needed. But they say that a few days before that fatal episode, he got into a fight with the station superintendent, who accused Kulla of playing both sides and being on the take from another party. He’s become more trouble than he’s worth. Let’s make the problem disappear. So the police killed two birds with one stone, disposing of Kulla in a manufactured encounter and getting their hands on the cash. A police captain plotted the whole thing with a couple of trusted underlings: low risk, high payoff. The cops split the spoils among themselves, and they didn’t forget their friends in Agra. And the officer behind the plot received a medal and promotion for his good deed that day.

  It doesn’t matter how many weeks or months or years I’ve got left in this sorry life before I also disappear—but I, too, would like to enter into a world of my dreams, just as Ramni-vas did.

  So that’s why every night at midnight, when all of Delhi is asleep, I put on some black clothes, sneak out of the house, and spend the rest of the night scraping out the walls of Delhi. Treasures beyond anyone’s wildest dreams are hidden in the countless hollows in Delhi’s countless walls. I’m sure it’s there.

  My only regret is that I’ve wasted the last decades of my life before starting out with my pick and trowel.

  So if you read this story, go and buy a little pickax and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s not far at all, and it’s the only way left to make it big. The other ways you read about in the papers and see on TV are rumors and lies, nothing more.

  CULL

  BY MANJULA PADMANABHAN

  Bhalswa

  The slender black police transport sprang into the sky above headquarters, then shuddered to a halt in midair. Dome, mission-commander of the two-man team inside the vehicle, frowned as he punched the com-link on his helmet. A vacant hiss greeted him.

  “Transmission failure?” he wondered out loud. “I’m raising clean air.”

  Mission coordinates from the dispatchers were normally fed simultaneously into the commander’s helmet and to the transport vehicle’s self-guiding system.

  But today, silence.

  Dome stabbed at the com-link button repeatedly.

  Blank.

  “Oh, come on, come on,” muttered Hem, copilot. “We’re losing time …”

  In Dome’s three years of airborne service he had never yet been dispatched without directions. Finally—a couple of squawks in his earphone and—“What?” Dome swung around to face Hem. “Can you believe this? They’re asking for a visual search!”

  Hem groaned, though he took the precaution of covering his mouthpiece with his hand. Profanity, even to the extent of rude noises, was strictly forbidden amongst uniformed of-ficers. “We’ll never find the sucker.”

  “Apparently the call came over some sort of outdated radio device—” Dome listened to the dispatcher’s voice squeaking in his ears, trying to make sense of what he heard “—reception garbled … just the name: Golden Acres.” He glanced toward Hem. “Ever heard of it?”

  The copilot shook his head, scowling. “Nah,” he grunted.

  Directly beneath them was the gigantic administrative complex known as the Hub. It served as the absolute nerve center of Dilli Continuum, glittering capital city of the economic behemoth of Greater India that sprawled across the whole of South Asia. The six-lane avenue called Rajpath that had once stretched from the presidential palace in the west to the national stadium in the east had been replaced by a long straight block of buildings four stories high.
It was crossed by a matching block at its midpoint. From the air, the combined blocks of the Hub looked like a colossal plus-sign.

  Nothing now remained of the old white-walled bungalows of the past, the hexagonal roundabouts, the graceful tree-lined avenues. The presidential palace along with all historical monuments, including ancient forts and tombs, had been dismantled and rebuilt in vast underground museums.

  The Hub bristled with dish antennae and the long whiplike lances of directional audio-scopes. Flat green lawns provided a boundary between the structure and its parking vaults. A battalion of employees moved in and out of the place in four daily shifts, ensuring that it remained awake and operational twenty-four hours a day, year in, year out. The strictly linear grid of streets that contained and defined the city originated from this central location.

  “It’ll take forever,” snarled Hem. “Do we even know what to look for?” Pilots were encouraged to compete for the fastest response times. Weekly and monthly bonuses were awarded on the basis of nanosecond differences in their scores.

  “An area of desolation is what we need to find,” said Dome, repeating what he’d heard over his earphones. Now he pulled down his helmet visor, reading information off its glow-screen. “No solid structures. No roads. No landmarks … Wait … incoming images … hmmm. Dense smoke haze. Can’t see much through that. Okay, they’re saying to head north and east—the caller will send up a flare five minutes from now.”

  Precious minutes spilled from Hem’s time-cache as the transport hummed high above the taut regularity of the city’s streets below. In every direction beneath them the rigid graph that originated at the Hub had wholly replaced the tangled web of the old city’s narrow streets. Avenues met at precise right angles and at every intersection artificial cherry trees in permanent full bloom had taken the place of dusty neems and soaring silk cottons of the past. Surface vehicles were regulated by magnetic strips embedded in the road surface. From the air the neat rows of residential buildings looked like identical wooden blocks, color-coded by locality.