Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  “I spent a few years in upstate New York,” was all he told

  Lakshman. He never told me about his American years either, nor did he write about them in his journals.

  “My sister-in-law lives in Toronto, but I prefer it here too,” responded Lakshman. “Best of both worlds.” His south Delhi Hinglish got under Gautam’s skin.

  A waiter came, and Lakshman ordered a Johnnie Walker Red Label, some burra kebabs, and mozzarella sticks. Despite Lakshman’s insistence that he have something hard, Gautam stuck with lime soda.

  “Are you still into making movies, man?” Lakshman asked.

  He was referring to a documentary Gautam had worked on with the BAFTA-winning American director Lauri Zeller.

  Gautam didn’t like to speak about her, and Lakshman must have known this.

  “Lakshmanji,” Gautam said, “I’m a teacher now. You told me you had something to say about Khem. That’s the only reason I agreed to meet you.”

  “I was just getting to your friend.” Lakshman paused for a gulp of whiskey. “He was a true patriot, wasn’t he?”

  “I’m no judge of patriotism, but yes, he did good work.”

  Gautam’s Hindi was erudite and awkward as usual.

  “You know his death was no accident. Gautam, Khem was murdered.”

  “You think that’s news to me?”

  “It shouldn’t be. But I do have some knowledge that might interest you.”

  “That would surprise me.”

  “Gautam, I know who killed him.” After making this bold declaration, Lakshman stopped speaking to suck a mutton bone clean. “You’re a Hindi poetry aficionado,” he resumed.

  “You’ve obviously heard of Srirang Kumar, na?”

  “Of course.” Gautam was particularly fond of one of Ku-mar’s poems, “The Englishman Is Like a Magpie.” He’d even written a column on it for Bibliophile. “But I don’t think you’ve called me here to discuss poetry.”

  “Be patient.” Lakshman paused again, this time to wash down the meat with some more whiskey. “You must know about Kumar’s son,” he said, tongue polishing gums and teeth.

  Gautam nodded. Who hadn’t heard of Ashok Kumar, industrialist, defense contractor, playboy?

  “Well, it’s the younger Kumar who’s responsible for your friend’s death.” The Canadian Aluminum Corporation, explained Lakshman, had paid Kumar a huge quantity to ensure that Khem would stop getting in its way. “We have evidence: taped conversations, witnesses, bank statements. This might be one of biggest cases of political corruption since Gujarat.”

  “And?”

  “And we want you to write the story.”

  Gautam silently twirled the ends of his mustache and then began shaking his head. “The tribals have been displaced and my friend’s already dead,” he finally stated. “I fail to see the point of such a story.”

  “The point?” echoed Lakshman. Then he launched into an oration on the importance of the “fourth estate” in today’s climate. Things like, “Now, more than ever, as neo-imperialistic capitalism mingles with our corrupt bureaucracy, it’s essential that investigative journalism preserve democracy.”

  “I’m sorry. I no longer work for the media, especially Indian media,” Gautam responded. He’d come to the conclusion that Delhi’s spineless editors and their delinquent paychecks weren’t worth the trouble.

  “Let me finish, yaar. Satya has just signed a deal for a tie-up with the London Tribune.” This article, Lakshman clarified, would not only be a cover story in India, it would also be printed in the Tribune’s weekend magazine. “A London publication means London payment. One pound sterling per word!”

  The sum Gautam had inherited from the last of his mother’s siblings would run out next year. A big paycheck would serve him well. He nevertheless continued on with his protest. “I could never be objective about Khem though.”

  “Arré, don’t you see? Your insider connections make you the best man for the job.”

  You could consider the day after he met with Lakshman, a Sunday, my third date with Gautam.

  Ten days earlier I’d started volunteering at the school where he taught. I told the principal I was an MPhil student doing pedagogical research. Her bureaucratic indifference disappeared when I placed an envelope full of five-hundred-rupee notes on her desk. Despite Gautam’s mental turmoil during that period, I managed to get him to notice me.

  We’d scheduled to meet outside of Evergreen, where college students were pushing encyclopedias on sweater-clad families who were gorging on chaat and jalebis. Gautam, standing aloof from all this, was petting an overfed stray when I tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You look beautiful,” he said in Hindi.

  I couldn’t say the same thing about him. The eyes burdened with purple bags of sleeplessness and ganja, they’d been a constant during our few walks and teas. There was something else though, something new. As I later discovered in his journals, his past twenty-four hours had been particularly tormented ones.

  “Green really suits you,” he continued. I was wearing a cheap Sarojni Nagar kameez over a baggy salwar, trying to please him by being the chaste desi girl life had never let me be.

  He told me he needed to speak about something important, and even though we were still getting to know each other, this wasn’t surprising. There was no one else in his life besides Suraj, and the elite can only relate to their servants so much.

  Conversation proved difficult because a loudspeaker was blaring warnings about terrorist threats. Gautam leaned toward me and shouted over the din, “Maybe we could go back to my place?” He tried to feign casualness, but he badly wanted me to come. I hesitated before saying yes though. Too eagerly acceding to his request might not have sat so well with him.

  We held hands as we strolled through the market, just another anonymous couple among the Sunday hordes. At the Asian Age offices some shoeshine boys called out to Gautam by name but didn’t beg him for money. He paused to stare as a tipsy policeman yelled at a sabziwallah for spitting paan on the street. “Kya aap janwar hai, ya inasaan? Are you animal or human?”

  Gautam’s barsaati was located on top of one of the neighborhood’s original houses, built by a Jain in 1961. Besides a fourteenth-century Lodhi tomb where servants played cricket and young journalists smoked charas, this home was the oldest remaining structure on U-block.

  A squat ionic column stood near the house’s front door, and its latticed stucco exterior had a tasteful but chipping coat of yellow on it. Although the boundary walls of neighboring houses were blooming with chrysanthemums that time of year, the one separating this single-story residence from the street was lined with empty discolored flower pots.

  I’d never thought post-Partition Delhi houses particularly beautiful compared with the architectural marvels of Calcutta, where I grew up. But as Gautam pointed out, these ones were rather handsome, especially next to the soulless builders’ flats that were spreading across the city like a virus.

  When we were about to climb to the barsaati, a scraggly figure came out of nowhere and started mumbling at us. “Hello, bhaiyya, good evening,” the man said, smiling wilily. It was Suraj. “Ah, guest, you have guest tonight,” he said in clunky English. A scarf was tied underneath his chin and over the crown of his head. I pulled my dupatta over my face to shield it from his odor, a mixture of sweat, cheap booze, and soot.

  This was poverty’s stench during wintertime, a smell from my adolescence.

  He switched back into Hindi. “Achha, sir, kuch … ahhh … chaye. Okhla se?” He wanted to know if another batch of charas was needed. Gautam became uncomfortable and declined.

  His barsaati was in want of some modern amenities that I’d come to take for granted over the past two decades: a Western toilet, for example. But it wasn’t lacking what bohemians would call “character,” things like old-fashioned split-paneled doors with a sliding rod and hasp, the kind that have become a faux pas in the capital’s southern parts.

 
; Gautam went to use the bathroom, and I remained in his living quarters, a sparsely furnished room whose sole decoration was a framed poster of depressed Guru Dutt playing a depressed poet in a depressing film. I stroked the orphaned puppy he’d recently rescued from Deer Park until it got overexcited and pissed on the floor.

  A dozen books, both in Hindi and English, were piled atop a rickety aluminum card table. Next to these was a photograph that Gautam had clearly been pondering. It was of his dead friend, who was wearing a khadi kurta on top of some green military trousers. A defender of the tribals but not a tribal himself, this activist looked like your average small-scale landowner from the Hindi-speaking heartland: mustached, paunchy, and balding.

  “He’s Khem, a dear friend of mine who passed away,” said Gautam. He’d returned from the bathroom and was fiddling with his Enbee. The old stereo was his most prized possession.

  “Actually,” Gautam said with the exaggerated earnestness that was typical of him, “I called you over here to talk about Khem.” As an old Hindi record crackled, Gautam told his story.

  “It all started six years ago,” he explained. He’d just written an article about Orissa, where the state government, then controlled by the B Party, had decided to hand over some bauxite-rich land to the Canadian Aluminum Corporation. But a tribal community resided on the land, and its members formed a movement to protest the B Party’s actions. Paramilitary forces, heeding B Party orders, opened fire on movement members during a demonstration.

  “Five tribals were killed, two of whom were children,” he said morosely.

  Lauri Zeller, a new arrival to the subcontinent, read Gau-tam’s article and thought the situation was ripe for a documentary. She persuaded him to return to Orissa with her, and the two spent the next year living with the tribals. “We became very, very close,” he explained. He didn’t say so, but alone in the tribal community, they became lovers.

  Both forged a close relationship with Khem Thakur, one of the movement’s main organizers. Gautam believed that Lauri’s film should focus on Khem’s struggles against corruption and capitalism. Lauri had different ideas though.

  She’d started teaching a group of tribal youths how to paint with watercolors. “She decided to make the film about her ‘attempt to help these children reflect on poverty and globalization through art,’” he told me, mocking the way foreign newspapers had lauded her work.

  By the time Lauri had won her BAFTA for The Color of Water, she and Gautam were barely speaking. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” he lamented. “She was an egomaniac—she wanted to exploit India like every other foreigner.” He didn’t tell me Lauri’s side of the story, but I know one of the reasons she broke things off with him: he’d gotten back into pharmaceuticals.

  Soon after, Khem died in a mysterious car accident. Gau-tam tried contacting Lauri for help, but she refused to take his calls. “Actually,” he said, his eyes moist now, “she never came back to India after becoming famous.” There was more to it than that, I knew, but Gautam wouldn’t talk about such things with me or anybody else.

  As he recounted his story, I put a hand on his arm. But he turned away from me and began to stroke the puppy, which was chewing on an old chappal by our feet. “It must have been so difficult,” I said, mustering up my most sympathetic voice.

  He proceeded to tell me about G.S. Lakshman and the Sa-tya article, and I listened patiently even though I knew more about the situation than he did. “I have an opportunity to do something for the memory of my friend, to do some good for this corrupt country,” he explained. “But I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “It’s fear, you’re right,” he said. A breathy laugh of self-loathing escaped through his teeth. “You’re very wise. I knew you were the best person to speak with about this.” I gave his arm a squeeze. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’ve decided to go through with it.”

  “Well, you’re a very brave man.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “You smell that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s smoke from a chowkidar’s fire.”

  “So?”

  “Winter has begun.”

  He turned to look at me with a smile I knew well, one that doesn’t care about borders of class or religion. Gautam was hungry for sex.

  During the month that followed I continued volunteering at the school. In the afternoon we’d spend hours wrapped in shawls on the terrace, the puppy curled up by our feet. A pair of golden-backed woodpeckers was building a home in the amla tree across the street, and Gautam threw stones at the menacing parrots that were trying to chase them away. At night Suraj would bring up sabzi and rotis for us, and I’d tell stories about my invented childhood in Bihar, so many of them that they began to seem real.

  Before sleep there was no actual intercourse but lots of touching. In this department, no matter how hard he tried, Gautam could never be the Indian man he wanted to be. He didn’t just stab me with his fingers like some child with a new toy. He used the palm of his hand to rub me between my legs, and I felt things I’d never felt before, not even by myself.

  Lakshman told Gautam that he was now representing an important multinational media organization and had to look the part, so Gautam spent a morning in one of Green Park’s many salons. He came out looking like a cross between Hri-tik and George Harrison.

  The depression that burdened his eyes began to fade as he flittered around the city investigating Ashok Kumar’s connection to Khem’s death. He did thorough work and met every type of person imaginable: bureaucrats, ladies who lunched, drivers, and businessmen. Lakshman provided him with a generous allowance to convince people to go on the record.

  Within a week Gautam was an expert on Ashok’s life story, a story I already knew by heart. Using his father the poet-politician’s connections, Ashok became the official supplier of white goods—air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions—to the central government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia turned to India for these products. India put the Reds in touch with Ashok, who supplied them with all the TVs and washing machines they needed for free, bargaining not for cash but influence. Eventually, he became the exclusive broker of oil between Russia and India.

  The brat-turned-billionaire soon had more money than he knew what to do with. He had no use for Indian whores anymore. He could fly blondes in and out of Delhi for weekend sessions. He even formed his own security force and intelligence agency. Before long he became a broker not just of oil, but of nuclear submarine deals and the votes of senior MPs. He became a fixer of memorandums of understanding for bauxite mines in Orissa.

  “I’m almost done with the research,” Gautam told Laksh-man on the phone one day. We were sitting on the terrace, and I hummed along to a silly Geeta Dutt song playing on the Enbee. I hadn’t heard it in years.

  “There are now two witnesses who can connect Ashok directly to Khem’s death,” he said. He was no longer the disaffected poet I’d met a month earlier. “And there’s this accountant who’s willing to testify that Kumar received three million USD—cash—from the Canadians. I just need a few more days, and the money trail will lead straight to the B Party. I’m thinking about a short trip to Orissa to round off the article, give it some authentic flavor.”

  Lakshman firmly cautioned Gautam against this though.

  The next morning we were in the middle of pleasing each other when his clunky old Nokia sounded. We were both about to come, and Gautam was irritated by the interruption. So was I.

  I picked up the phone from the nightstand, recognized the number at once, and handed it to him. “Hello?” he answered.

  Ashok Kumar’s voice sounded sinister due to a recent case of laryngitis. He knew exactly what we were up to all the time, and I wondered if jealousy had driven him to call at that particular moment.

  Gautam wrote down Kumar’s address and then phoned G.S. Lakshman to tell him the news. “This is just what we need,”
he said. “Some quotes from Kumar will give us more credibility.”

  Lakshman’s response was audible from five feet away. “That chutiya bastard doesn’t deserve the right to speak!”

  After putting down the phone, Gautam moved to turn on the computer. But I made him come back to bed to finish off what he’d begun.

  Around 4 o’clock the same day, he hired an Indica to take him to Sultanpur. It was bitter and gray out, and I stood at the gate waving goodbye like some wife sending her husband off to war.

  Gautam’s notes from this occasion are particularly vivid.

  To drown out the chaos of Aurobindo Marg, he put in a CD with the words Old Hindi Songs for Lauri scribbled on it. The theme song from his favorite Guru Dutt movie played: “Yehdhuniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai?” (“Even if you meet withsuccess in this world, what does it really matter anyway?”

  ) At a traffic light adorned with advertisements for a telecom company there was a knock at the window. A little girl was selling copies of Satya. She was barefoot and dirty and held a malnourished infant in her hands. Despite all that was on his mind—or maybe because of all that was on his mind—he gave the girl a ten-rupee note but said she could keep the paper, just like an NRI or some firang.

  At Qutab Minar they veered onto MG Road, passing the mangled skeletons of fashion malls, illegal buildings that the Municipal Corporation had torn down to set an example and make the metro’s construction a smoother process. “Monuments to progress’s war,” Gautam called them. After twenty minutes of furniture shops, they turned right at a sign that read Manhattan Estates and then drove another kilometer.

  Two rifle-wielding sentries manned the gate that led to the Kumar farmhouse.

  I was all too familiar with the sights that greeted Gautam next: the fleet of antique American cars and the guards armed with semiautomatic weapons and sunglasses; the pool and the pagoda-like temple.