Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  Or maybe one of them had remembered and lost them, and they had been caught with their bloodlust high, like rapists rendered suddenly impotent.

  “And then I arrived in the alleyway, and even before my eyes had registered what was there, I lit the match and brought it to my cigarette, to the profanity that was to save me that day.

  “Maybe it saved me from something, maybe it didn’t.

  “The cigarette fell from my open mouth, but the matchbox was still in my hand. The leader of the gang held out one commanding palm.”

  Arjun Singh paused and summoned the will to continue. Despite the care he had taken at maintaining the youthful façade, he looked old, very old. She could now see the signs of the artificial stiffness caused by botox injections.

  In a soft voice Arjun Singh continued: “It has been almost twenty-four years now, but I saw God that day, in the eyes of the man I betrayed. I heard him plead, ‘Bhagwaan ke naam mein …’ (‘In the name of God …’)

  “But I was carrying profanity that day, hiding behind it, using it to keep myself safe. And when that one hand stretched out to demand the matches, I gave them.”

  Arjun Singh stopped again, taking a long, shuddering breath.

  “Twelve years went by until I could find the courage to make my way back to that alleyway. It was blackened and sorrowful still, and something spoke to me. And for another twelve years I retraced my steps, day by day, week by week, year by year. I’ve made myself back into the man I was at that time. I have even watched all the films backwards from then to the present.

  “Look,” he pointed at a large framed photograph on a wall. “Isn’t that me?” And Suhasini had to agree. From a distance, Arjun Singh had walked backwards in time and looked like the man he had been twenty-four years ago. In a soft voice, he concluded, “Only two days are left, and I need to walk back that way. I need to go back there and say ‘No’ to the man who had asked me for the matches that day, to Rajan Pandey.”

  For a few long minutes Suhasini just sat there. As the story had unfolded she had found herself leaning back in the chair, leaving way for the tragedy to spill out. She could find no words to respond. It was all mad, fucking mad. She had heard her own mother talking about being forced to flee the area of British India that had become East Pakistan. This part of the world was full of tragedies and full of mad people. Arjun Singh’s insanity was just of a different flavor. Triloki must have thought it was manageable and worth it if he had taken on the job. Nevertheless, she couldn’t figure out how to react. It was Arjun Singh who broke the long silence.

  “I thought I was going to have my chance to face him. Triloki found him, identified him. But now Triloki has disappeared.”

  It was then that she asked, “What about the diary?”

  And suddenly she saw the shrewdness flash in his eyes. The man might be insane, but he hadn’t earned this money or his reputation as an antique collector by being stupid.

  “What do you know about the diary?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Triloki left me a note,” she offered, and it only made him more suspicious.

  “You’re all in this together!” he suddenly shouted. “Get out! Get the fuck out! I told him I wouldn’t give up the diary. I told him. Get out!”

  She rose slowly. There was no idea what he was going to do. “All right, Mr. Singh, I’m leaving. But you called me, not I, you.”

  Arjun Singh just glared at her. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Triloki,” he muttered.

  And that was just one step too far. “You trusted him? I don’t know what the diary is, but one thing I know for sure is that you didn’t trust him with it.” Furious, she pulled out Triloki’s letter from her back pocket and threw it at him. “Read it, you mad bastard. Triloki thought he was doing something for nothing. He risked his life for you, and he lost. I’ve been calling him on his cell phone, and some person pretending to be him picks up the phone. In all likelihood he’s dead. All for you and your fucking weird crusade. Keep your motherfucking diary, and rot!”

  She turned and stormed out of the house, too angry to think. As she made it out of the gate, she felt a thrust of regret. She shouldn’t have thrown the letter at Arjun Singh. It was probably the last thing Triloki wrote, and now that crazy antique collector, that Sikh-in-denial, would have it.

  Jumping into her car, she revved the engine and left the streets of the area, of Jalebi Central, in a burst of exhaust smoke.

  It was late evening and she was back at her office when Arjun Singh called. She didn’t pick up. He tried three more times until she finally answered. “Mr. Singh,” she said, “I’m not interested in working for you. Get somebody else.”

  “Ms. Das, please.” There was terrible strain in his voice. “I apologize. I have worked all my life toward this day. I’m sorry I overreacted.”

  “Mr. Singh, you are a rich man, no doubt you can hire many private detectives. Please do so, and stop bothering me.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t understand about the diary. It’s the private diary of one of Rajiv Gandhi’s personal secretaries. It’s a record of everything that happened during those riots, seen from the prime minister’s office. After I rescued myself, after I confronted Rajan Pandey, I planned on helping all of those who died in those days to find some measure of justice, and this is my only tool.”

  And now it all became clear to Suhasini. “And it would be the perfect bait for a person like Pandey,” she said.

  “But I can’t sacrifice the justice of thousands for my own deliverance.” She could hear the anguish in his voice, but her mind was already running ahead of her. She could see how Triloki must have planned things, how he had failed without the diary.

  “You don’t have to sacrifice anything,” she said. “You can offer to sell it to him, and he’ll come to you. He has to. The diary is political dynamite, and all he knows about you is that you are an antique collector, somebody who can be paid off with money. Triloki set things up with an inspector at Niza-muddin. I’ll make sure he’s there. You can lure Pandey with the promise of selling him the diary and then confront him. We get Pandey, and you don’t lose the diary.”

  When Arjun Singh didn’t answer right away, she said, “Mr. Singh, this is the only way,” and was surprised at the pleading in her own voice. It seemed very important to her now to complete this thing, to make sure that Triloki’s last assignment was finished properly, his penance completed.

  Maybe it seemed that way to Arjun Singh as well, because he said, “I should have trusted Triloki. I’ll trust you instead.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Singh.”

  “Please,” he replied, “please, just make this work,” and hung up.

  She looked at her phone and didn’t know what to do next. The name Rajan Pandey niggled at her, and she realized that she didn’t know how to contact him. If he was the fixer he was supposed to be, then there would be no real way to access him, not for somebody like her. On an impulse she dialed Triloki’s number on her second cell phone.

  This time it was the smooth voice that picked up. “Hello?”

  “Rajan Pandey?” she asked.

  If she hadn’t been concentrating she would have missed the hesitation, and the slight rise in the pitch of his voice, as he replied, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.”

  “No, I don’t, Mr. Pandey,” she said. “It’s you that has the wrong number. In fact, you have the wrong phone, Triloki’s.”

  “Suhasini Das,” the voice said.

  “Very good, Mr. Pandey,” she answered.

  “You aren’t inviting me to an inauguration again, are you?”

  The voice was so cool, so controlled, it made her ears burn. “No, Pandey.” And now she spoke in anger: “I’m inviting you to look at a diary.”

  “You have it?” Now he was dead serious, no jokes at all.

  “You haven’t even asked which diary,” she said.

  Laughter erupted from him, hard, cold, bitter laughter. “I k
now which diary,” he said. “Triloki was most … cooperative.”

  Bastard, she thought, I’ll enjoy taking you down. “Day after tomorrow. Morning, at 10 o’clock, near Hotel Rajdoot. You know where that is?”

  “Yes, I know where that is,” he said. “Where exactly?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said, and hung up. And then she called Arjun Singh. He was both elated and panicky, but she managed to draw from him the address where he wanted to confront Pandey and the promise that he wouldn’t step out of his house until she arrived.

  She made one final call.

  “Hello, Inspector Ramdev?”

  “Who is it?”

  “This is Suhasini Das, Jaidev Triloki told me to call you.”

  “Yes, yes, he said you’d call.” Ramdev sounded far too hearty. “What’s the matter?”

  “I need your help. There’s a meeting where there will be a person turning up. He’s well connected, Triloki probably told you about him,” she said.

  “You want security?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and gave him the details. He reassured her that he would be there, and he sounded happy. Ramdev probably had no idea of how badly things had turned out for his friend Triloki, and this was no time for her to tell him.

  She spent the next day with Arjun Singh, walking the streets of Jalebi Central. She checked the place where the killing had happened so many years ago, and all the approaches to it. She wanted to make sure that there was nowhere that Pandey could run, and no direction from which he could catch them unawares. She met Ramdev, who, despite the hint of delight on his face, seemed like a reliable man in a tight spot, competent and tough.

  She spent the night at Arjun Singh’s house, traveling backwards in time at every moment, full of oldness and oddity, and could hear the man pacing upstairs as she slipped into sleep.

  She woke up in the middle of the night, groggy and ill at ease, to the sound of something smashing. She rose from the bed and quietly made her way to the door. Opening it softly, she looked around until she spotted Arjun Singh. He was walking purposefully with hammer in his hand, and she saw him stop before a clock and take a mighty swing. Then smash it again. He was done with time marching backwards.

  She crept back to bed, but her sleep was filled with bad dreams, and she rose in the morning feeling more tired than when she went to bed. When Arjun Singh appeared he was wearing clothes that were precisely twenty-four years old and had a small brown diary in hand. They walked to the alleyway, and from there she called Pandey.

  “I’ll be right over,” was all he said.

  As they waited, she saw the policemen slowly arrive, filtering in one by one as if they were there by chance. Ramdev parked his jeep ten feet away and gave her a grin, tipping her anxiety to fear. There were too many of them, and they were far too close. Pandey would see them and escape. She was getting ready to signal them away when the sleek Mercedes arrived, precisely at 10. She recognized the numbers on the license plate, and suddenly she remembered where she had seen Rajan Pandey’s name before. It had been on a file on Triloki’s desk, a case he had been investigating.

  And then the car door opened and a man stepped out. She recognized him from the photographs in that file on Triloki’s desk. Rajan Pandey, the man that Suparna, the builder’s wife, was having an affair with. Rajan Pandey, whose pictures had been used by Triloki to blackmail Suparna. Rajan Pandey, the seed that had destroyed Suhasini and Triloki’s partnership.

  Pandey looked past her and waved to Ramdev, and Suha-sini knew she had been tricked, badly beaten. She turned to Arjun Singh, wanting to warn him, but he was already rushing ahead toward the culmination of his long dream. “See!” he shouted, waving the diary. “See! This is the truth, the truth that you can’t burn. I won’t give you any matches today!”

  And then the driver also stepped out of the Mercedes. It was Triloki. “You can always find matches,” he said, “if you know where to look.” And he tipped his hat at Suhasini.

  HOW I LOST MY CLOTHES

  BY RADHIKA JHA

  Lodhi Gardens

  Until I lost my clothes I was a regular sort of guy: lots of clothes, lots of problems, a little luck—mainly with women. I had a family that was insisting I get married again, a dog with a chronic skin disorder, a flat with a mortgage, and a growing infatuation with heroin, better known as brown sugar or “sister” on the streets. On the plus side, I was the educated, intelligent CEO and sole employee of a global consultancy company. My three ex-bosses back from when I was still a salary slave were all women who believed in me and continued to give me enough work to keep me dancing with sister all night long.

  The night before I lost my clothes was a night like any other. I had a report to finish, a feasibility study of a new iron ore extraction process the Koreans wanted to sell to an Indian company. The report had been due the previous week. I’d done all the work and only had the conclusion left to write, so I’d gone to the bar at the Habitat Center at 7:00 to celebrate. By 11:45 p.m. I was home, well lubricated, a little horny, and ready to earn my next few hits of sister.

  I opened the computer and went to My Documents. But the file wasn’t there! Believe me, I looked for the file everywhere—in every single directory, folder, and subfolder, even the hidden ones. I searched for it by keyword, by date, by name, by subject. But it was nowhere to be found. I stared at the computer and suddenly felt certain that my ex-wife, the custodian of our only child, had somehow gotten to it and erased it. So certain was I that I sent e-mails to my lawyers and hers, to her parents and to mine, to her bosses and to mine, to the police, the supreme and high courts, the prime minister, and a few friends of the family who happened to be ministers at the time. Then I sat back and waited for news of her arrest to arrive.

  My mobile phone rang after fifteen minutes.

  It was one of the she-bosses, Sheena, the one for whom I was doing the feasibility study.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s true,” I insisted, raising my voice. “I was going to print it out and mail it to you tomorrow, but the bitch got to it first. She must be spying on me.”

  “And how is she doing that?” Sheena asked sweetly.

  “I don’t know.” I looked suspiciously at the walls. “Maybe she bribed the maid again.”

  Silence on the line. I could see Sheena shaking her head, her shoulder-length iron-gray hair brushing her cheeks.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she asked for the second time.

  I looked at my watch. 1:29. “Time? What has time got to do with anything? This is an emergency, we need to find her and put her in prison,” I said impatiently.

  “It’s 1:30 a.m.” she continued in the same deadpan voice. “I have to work tomorrow morning, you know. I can’t sleep till 11 like you do.”

  I sensed a lecture coming and groaned. “But you’ve got plenty of time to sleep. Stop talking and go to sleep now. I’ll find her and the file and get them to you tomorrow. Promise.” The moment the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake.

  “You won’t,” she sighed. “You won’t because you haven’t done it. You’ve just been boozing and womanizing instead. How can you be so irresponsible? Think of Akshay, for God’s sake.” She went on for another five minutes, telling me how I had mucked up my life, finishing with, “Do you have a death wish? If so, just tell us and we’ll leave you alone. But remember, you have a son to think about.”

  “I know, I know,” I said when she’d finished. “Just go to sleep. I’ll find the report and get it to you tomorrow. Promise.”

  The phone went dead. I got up and threw it off the balcony. Then it struck me that if the police called I wouldn’t know, and if they couldn’t find me they would let her go. So I decided to go to the police station myself. I left the house and began walking. I had no choice. My car was gone, not stolen or sold as normally happens in this city, but simply misplaced. It would tu
rn up eventually. It always did—for the car was so filthy no one wanted it in front of their house.

  I walked along National Highway 3 toward Delhi, past the NOIDA golf course, the shopping malls, and the beehive colonies with their peeling façades. People in cars honked as they drove by. Truckers flashed their lights and motorcyclists cursed. But I hardly noticed. I was a man on a mission, filled with a superhuman strength. I walked over the sewage drain that was the Yamuna by way of the Japanese Bridge. As I entered the city, Humayun’s onion-shaped dome glowing palely in the moonlight, my objectives changed and I headed up Mathura Road to the roundabout with the little Lodhi tomb and then turned left toward the Oberoi flyover. I was going to score some sister.

  There was a party going on under the flyover. Four men had just scored some sister and were huddled over a small scrap of paper. One man, his hands trembling like a fish out of water, was trying to light a match, cursing fluently in a mixture of English, Bengali, and Assamese.

  “Hey, even your language smells like fish,” I told the guy trying to light the fire. “You can’t light a fire like that. Let a real man from the north do it for you.” I grabbed the matchbox from him. Oberoi Hotel, it read. I looked at him again. How had he gotten his hands on it? His clothes were in tatters and his hair was matted. I couldn’t tell when he had last bathed, but it must have been some time ago. He smelled pretty bad. But he still had his shoes. Surprising, for someone in his condition.

  The matches were damp and smelled of urine, which is why they wouldn’t light. So I threw them away and took out my lighter instead. I also took out my stash and added to the stuff on the foil. The others looked at me jealously, or, to be more accurate, they would have been jealous if there had been space for that in their minds. But in the world of sister, once the flame gets going everyone goes really quiet. All shivers, shakes, and itches stop. All feeling melts away. We become the flames, making love jointly to our sister. The world is forgotten along with the itches.