Soon she was warm and ready and we prepared our needles. The fish-eater leaned sideways and pulled out a needle from his shoe. I shuddered, wondering what diseases he had living inside him. He was going down really fast, it was obvious. I wondered if he still had links with his family, or whether he was even educated. As if he’d read my mind, he looked straight at me and asked, “Didn’t you go to Doon School?”
A burst of sunshine warmed the night. Doon School was the place I had loved most in the world. All my nicest memories were associated with it. When I was full of sister I invariably went back to those cedar-paneled rooms where twenty boys slept together, the sweet scent of our slumbering bodies filling the air. I gulped, nodded. “Yes, yes, I did. I am a Dosco,” I said proudly, my eyes becoming misty.
“Which house?”
“Hyderabad,” I replied.
“Kashmir,” he said.
A brother.
Okay, you guessed it. It was the brother who stole my clothes.
When I woke up, I couldn’t recognize the roof over my head. It seemed all broken in places and there were two ugly brown lampshades hanging from it that were closed from the bottom like socks and gave no light. What light there was came from above them. I just couldn’t figure it out. So of course I panicked. Waking up after a night with sister is a serious matter in any circumstance, but when one doesn’t recognize the roof over one’s head, the panic button gets pushed down hard and stays down.
I couldn’t move or breathe. It was as if rigor mortis had already set in. Only my brain refused to stop. If anything, it worked with lightning speed: If my house had miraculously grown mold, it calculated, then it meant that the Yamuna, toxic and polluted, had flooded, and the mold on my ceiling was toxic and polluted and the dappled light above it was actually a phosphorescence even more toxic and polluting. In short, I had to get out. But my legs refused to obey me. I looked down at them—and a stranger’s legs stared back at me.
Then it all fell into place.
He’d taken my clothes and he’d taken my legs too, so I couldn’t go after him. That was my first really clear thought.
But what made me really mad was that he had taken my underwear as well. He should have left it for me, it wasn’t even clean. Yet I couldn’t hate him. For that’s what brothers do, don’t they, wear each others’ dirty underwear?
It took me a little while longer to realize that I wasn’t in my house either and that what I had taken for a roof was a canopy of leaves, and the strange moldy things were in fact beehives. The brother must have woken up before me and seen me lying there in my nice clothes and decided to swap. Dragging me into the junkies’ park next to the Oberoi Hotel, he had stripped me of my clothes and abandoned me.
I lay back on the grass, stared up at the sky, and wiggled my bare toes. Indeed, they were mine. Then I wiggled my shoulders, and the cold tickle of grass told me that I wasn’t dreaming. I looked down, and that’s when I felt the full impact of my nakedness.
For till that moment I had never really looked at my body. I knew what I could do with it and I knew what I couldn’t do with it. But as an object in itself, it was a stranger to me. Women hadn’t seemed to mind it too much and they’d certainly liked what it did to them. But as I looked at my body in the full light of day, I knew that it was really nothing to be proud of. My dick, curving a little to the left, seemed lost, a steam engine trying to hide in a scantily clad hillside.
I got up and looked around for the brother’s clothes. But they were nowhere to be found. Beneath my feet, condoms, bits of old newspaper, plastic wrappings, rags of all sorts, and needle cases crunched and scattered, just the usual garbage. I dropped onto my hands and knees and pretended to search. I knew I wouldn’t find anything though. A junkie sold his underwear long before he sold his outerwear. It was less necessary.
Ten minutes later I gave up. As I suspected, I had found nothing. The brother had either sold his old stuff to someone else or he’d left it under my head and someone even more desperate than him, possibly one of the silent guys he had been with, had taken it. I took a deep breath and the scent of urine and other waste filled my nostrils. The park was empty, most of the junkies having abandoned it for less smelly pastures. I wasn’t a junkie, I thought angrily. I was a victim. I should go and report the theft of my clothes at the police station. So I climbed over the low iron rail separating the park from the road and stood on the pavement.
It was still early and cold. I had goosebumps. I thought about going to the flyover where several hundred people lived, ate, had sex, and slept in tightly wrapped bundles. Someone there was bound to have some extra clothes. Yet I hesitated. What could a naked man offer a poor man in exchange? So I stood on the pavement and stuck my hand out for a lift instead.
No one stopped. That didn’t surprise me. What did, though, was that many didn’t even notice I was naked. I persisted, sticking my hand out and waving it ferociously. How dare they ignore me like that? I was no domesticated chicken, I was a man. I had my pride.
Suddenly, as if God had heard my silent complaint, all the cars froze like they were waiting for me to choose which one I would get into. Then I realized that the traffic light had changed. The drivers had their faces turned forward like robots. Lost in their own private worlds, they never even saw me, not even when the light changed.
I was getting a little desperate when a brand-new Lexus pulled up right beside me and inside it I noticed one of my ex-she-bosses, the nicest one. “Sharmilaa, Sharmeelaa,” I called happily, feeling my luck kick in.
She was listening to Indian classical music, the window rolled down. Her famous Bengali lips were pursed as if she were about to kiss someone. She was frowning slightly, the way she always did when she was worried. Probably her husband, I thought. The man was a serious handicap and I’d told her to ditch him many a time.
“Sharmila,” I called again, approaching the window.
She heard me before she saw me and her head began to turn. I can never forget that moment. Me, rushing to the passenger side of the car full of hope, her face as she got a glimpse of me. She leaned over and quickly locked the door. I grabbed the handle and tried to open it.
“Sharmila, it’s me,” I said urgently, tapping on the window a little harder than I’d meant to, “don’t be scared. I have been robbed. You must take me home.”
She wouldn’t answer, struggling with her window instead. I rushed around the front of the car to her side and bent down so she could see my face. “Sharmila, don’t be a fool. Someone robbed me of my clothes. It’s me. You know me.”
She refused to look at me.
“Sharmila, don’t be stupid now. I don’t have time. You have to take me home. I have a report to hand in,” I said impatiently.
She didn’t budge. Just stared angrily at the car in front of her.
“I don’t know you,” she said at last through tightly pinched lips, “why are you embarrassing me like this? If … if you don’t get away from my car I’ll call the police.” Her face took on the stubborn expression I knew well.
“Sharmila,” I cried, stepping away from the car, “don’t do this, you’ll regret it later. Where’s your heart?”
She looked me full in the face then. And the truth struck me like a bolt of lightning. For that’s when I realized that in fact we were no longer people but animated passport photographs. If our bodies were allowed to assert themselves at all, they could only do so under the cover of night—and their needs were quickly dispensed with. But now that my body had been unveiled in broad daylight, my head had become invisible. I had ceased to be me. I was just a body, not a person with rights or brains.
I saw this clearly then, as I stepped back onto the pavement and watched Sharmila drive away. Strangely, what upset me the most is that she hadn’t been in the least curious about my body. After all, we’d worked together for years. I’d fantasized about making love to her any number of times—even though she had a distinctly pear-shaped behind. And she must have
done the same. And yet, when I was there in front of her, she didn’t even sneak a peek. I sat down on the pavement, my knees clamped together. I must be really ugly, I thought sadly.
My pride in tatters and along with it my self-confidence, I wondered what to do. Who could I go to next? I had friends, or at least acquaintances, right there in Nizamuddin, two hundred yards away. At this time they would all be rushing their kids to school or getting ready for work, drinking that last cup of badly made masala tea, shouting at their wives to release a little of their pre-work tension. I bet if I just waited where I was, at least a half-dozen familiar faces would show up. But after Sharmila, this thought made me shudder.
I sat down on the edge of the pavement, making myself as small as I could, and watched the cars go by. It was rush hour. No place for a human on the road, especially a naked one. A traffic cop had arrived, creating more confusion than there had been before. But unlike the drivers of the cars who simply ignored me, he must have felt proprietorial about the crossroads and shouted, “Hey, what are you doing? You can’t sit like that. You’re troubling the traffic.”
Troubling the traffic? How could I have been troubling the traffic? He was the one troubling the traffic. Since his arrival the traffic jam had quadrupled in length. I’d have explained that to him if he’d given me half a chance. Instead he called the other cops, the ones who wore khaki uniforms and sat around in white Maruti Gypsies that had the words With You, for You, Always painted in red on them.
There were three of them inside, all in khaki, two in front including the driver and one in the back.
“So you are the one troubling the traffic?” the policeman on the passenger side shouted out of the window.
I smiled at him. “No, officer. I am just sitting here thinking about what to do.” I smiled again. It wasn’t worth antagonizing an enforcer of the law—especially when you were naked and had needle pricks dotting your arms.
“He’s thinking of what he’s going to do,” the policeman on the passenger seat said, turning to the others. “What do you think he should do?”
There was a short silence.
The man in the back, who was writing something down in his book, said, “He should come with us.”
The policeman in the passenger seat leaned out of the car and said, “Hey, you’re a lucky guy. My boss likes you. You can come with us. We’ll help you think.”
I didn’t like the look in the man’s eyes. “No. I have to go home,” I said. “I have important things to do, a report to hand in. Thank you for your offer though,” I added.
The policeman didn’t smile. “And how are you planning to get home? Is it nearby?”
“No,” I answered fatally, “I live in NOIDA.”
Suddenly the man in the back who wasn’t wearing a uniform leaned forward. “Get him in,” he ordered.
The passenger door opened and the khaki uniform got out. Did they have extra uniforms in the police station? I wondered.
I was forced to sit between the silent driver and the one in the passenger seat, my knee jammed against the gearshift.
“I have a car too,” I said as the jeep started. “Why don’t you let me go home and I’ll come back to visit you in it? I really have to hand in my report or I’ll lose a lot of money.”
The fat one who seemed to do all the talking shook his head gravely. “We can’t let you do that,” he said. “You’ll catch a cold. And you’ll be a traffic problem. There could be accidents. Let rush hour pass and we’ll take you home.”
I looked out of the front of the jeep. It was nice being so high above the ground. The early November mist still hadn’t cleared. “That’s okay. I’m quite used to the cold, in fact I like it. I went to boarding school in the mountains; in the mornings we exercised in shorts. God, it was cold, but I liked it.”
No one said anything. Behind me, the man was writing away, his pen making a scratch scratch sound. The driver changed gears noisily, jamming the gear shift into my knee even harder.
“You’ll like the station too. We’ll give you food and clothes and take you home later,” the policeman said, laughing. “Isn’t that right, sir?”
The man in the back didn’t reply, but his pen went on scratching.
Food and clothes sounded good to me, so I gave in. We drove to the police station and came to a jerky halt under the porch. There was bougainvillea growing up the side of it and over the top, a riot of purple and white like a fancy lady’s hat. I studied the building critically while the fat guy went around the back and opened the door for his superior. It was a nice piece of colonial architecture. Two women in khaki saris came outside and, seeing me, covered their eyes, giggled, and ran back in. Suddenly I longed for a really stiff drink.
The driver came out with a filthy old blanket which he threw to me. “Cover yourself,” he said roughly.
“I thought you couldn’t speak,” I said, grabbing it. Then I added, “Hey, this is filthy, give me something else. I could get leprosy or something from this.”
“Shut your filthy mouth,” he replied.
I was taken into a reception area where a rather bored policeman fingerprinted me.
“Why are you fingerprinting me? I’m not a criminal. The criminal is out there somewhere, wearing my clothes. I’m a victim,” I protested.
“We fingerprint everyone,” the man across the desk replied laconically.
The fat policeman who’d brought me in said, “He’s dangerous, this one. Got a big mouth. The boss wants him kept carefully. He’s probably a Muslim terrorist.”
I was led down a corridor, my hands handcuffed behind my back, then down some stairs into another dark, featureless corridor that smelled of toilet. We came to a cell and the policeman fished out his keys and threw me in. The blanket slipped off my shoulders and I was naked again. There was no one else in the cell—I was alone.
I don’t how time passed. When someone eventually came, I had lost all track of it. Time and clothes. The two were closely related in this case. The brother who had stolen my clothes had stolen my watch as well, the bastard. It was a Seiko. A final gift from my wife.
The interrogation began. I was tied to a rope, which was tied to a loop in the ceiling that must have once held a fan. They beat me with their belts.
“Who are you?” they asked.
“I already told you! It’s in your register!” I shouted.
“Are you a terrorist?”
“You crazy? I’m a businessman, a CEO. You’re making a big mistake. I came willingly, I’m a victim. You’ll pay for this.” Already I felt less certain. No clothes, no watch, no wallet. Even I didn’t believe myself.
The beating went on for a while. I stopped speaking. They quit when they grew tired. Beating someone is an exhausting job, like manual labor, I guess. And none of them were in good shape.
One peed into a bucket of filthy water and the other threw it over me. They left.
I shivered in the dark and began to sneeze.
Much later I was fed some stale chapattis and a bowl of watery daal. Then I was given a pail and a filthy rag and told to clean the cell. After the cell, they made me clean the toilets.
I’d never cleaned a toilet in my life, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. But they didn’t care. The idea that they’d made me, a Brahman, clean their toilet was what really pleased them. No one really cared if their toilets were dirty, they just wanted to see me, a “sahib,” cleaning them. It proved what I had always believed, that India is a country of ideas, not actions.
As I was working on the last one, there was a commotion outside—sirens, lights, agitated footsteps. “Sonia Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi,” someone called. The place emptied. The man who was supposed to be guarding me ran too. I followed him, not wanting to be alone with the rats, and arrived at the front door just in time to see a convoy of Maruti jeeps racing away from the station. I simply walked out after them. No one stopped me. It wasn’t even dark.
On the street, the cars were still packed lik
e sardines. I dodged between them, not giving them a second glance, until I came to the red light under the flyover where the policemen had picked me up that morning. I saw a bus in front of me and leapt inside.
At first no one reacted. The people in the last seats in back looked at me in surprise when I got in, then quickly turned away, confirming my belief that naked, I was not impressive. But there were too many of them to be scared. I was simply not their problem, I was the ticket collector or conductor’s problem. They stared stonily in front of them just like the drivers of the cars had.
The bus was fairly crowded. Not packed like the Delhi Transport Corporation buses, but profitably full, like the privately owned bus lines always managed to be. The aisles held a decent number of standing passengers, the conductor somewhere in the middle. The moment he saw me he came charging toward me with all the aggression of a raging bull.
“Get out of the bus,” he said without preamble.
I ignored him, staring longingly at his jacket, a cheap Chinese windbreaker with London Fogg written in red.
“I said I want you off the bus,” he repeated, puzzlement creeping into his eyes.
“Why? Can’t you at least let me stand on the step? I’ve been robbed, my clothes have been stolen. I need to get home. ’ll get off soon.” My voice came out all thin and whiny. Not at all like my usual confident foghorn.
“I don’t care. You just get off the bus or I’ll throw you off,” the conductor said loudly. Other passengers turned around to look.
“You should be ashamed of yourself. Letting innocent ladies see you like this,” an older man, a government clerk–type, told me.
Delhi Noir Page 4