Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  Gautam waited for Kumar in a dimly lit room with hardwood floors and ceilings, a sign of great wealth in a country whose forests have all but been eradicated. One of Husain’s Mother Teresa paintings hung on the wall, and a fire crackled in the corner. Its flames flickered so perfectly that Gautam wondered if it was real until a uniformed servant poked at its logs.

  “Thank you for coming,” said the raspy-voiced man when he entered the room twenty minutes later. Gautam described Ashok as short and handsome. He was wearing a casual suit without a tie and had grown a light black beard during his week-long convalescence. This was the man who’d made me.

  During business trips to Calcutta, Ashok always managed to spend a few hours in bed with me. He started to linger longer and longer after our sessions and eventually decided he could use a woman like me in Delhi. I left behind my life of servicing Communist officials and Marwaris in Sonagachi all too willingly and became his pet project, living proof that social mobility actually exists in this country. You must be thinking, How can a girl from such simple origins evolve into such a creature? That’s impossible.

  Well, first of all, I didn’t start out life poor; before my seventh birthday I’d worn frocks, taken piano lessons, and learned to sing Rabindrasangeet. Besides, it’s not that difficult to hold a wine glass by the stem, use toilet paper, or shout styupid idyot at servants. There are many insurmountable challenges in this world, but learning how to mourn the country’s rural-urban divide at champagne dinners isn’t one of them. All you need is money and the backing of powerful people. Ashok Kumar gave me both.

  Seating himself across from Gautam, Kumar started off by trying to charm him. He praised the article Gautam had written about his father the poet. But Gautam wasn’t up for chit chat. This was, after all, the monster responsible for the death of his friend.

  “Mr. Kumar, you know why I’m here,” he said. “I know you’re directly connected to the murder of Khem Thakur, and I know about your financial links with the Canadians. Would you like to make a formal response to these allegations?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Why did you call me here then?”

  “Because I’d like to ask you not to write these half-truths about me.”

  “You can’t intimidate me, Mr. Kumar.”

  Breaking from the conversation, Kumar picked up a phone. He ordered some fresh-squeezed orange juice and cappuccinos. Then he said, “You’ve learned quite a bit about me, Gautam. Don’t you know I never start off a relationship with threats? I first offer incentives.”

  “Mr. Kumar, I can’t be bought.”

  “Gautam, I’ve learned a lot about you as well.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “I know about Lauri,” Ashok declared, his eyes surely beady now.

  “What does she have to do with any of this?”

  “I’ve found out about your daughter, Gautam. I know Lauri gave birth to a child.” These words must have made Gautam sweaty and speechless. He’d never spoken out loud about the daughter he’d never met. “They live in America, which I know is a problem. But I can bring you to your daughter, Gautam.”

  “How’s that?” His question was barely audible, a whisper.

  “Just forget about all this nonsense. I’m asking you to forget about Khem Thakur, bauxite mining, and Ashok Kumar.”

  “And then what?”

  “It’s very simple. Do that and you’ll have a green card.”

  After his trip to Kumar’s palace, Gautam avoided me and started smoking charas with a vengeance again. He stopped sleeping and began taking walks at odd hours, mulling over what would have been an easy decision for most. Children, they say, are the only things that give life meaning. But as he detailed in his journals, choosing to be united with his daughter meant Ashok getting away with it. And Gautam wasn’t sure if fatherhood was a responsibility he even wanted. He wasn’t sure if he could face Lauri Zeller or forgive her.

  We hadn’t seen each other for three days when I showed up at his barsaati one evening just before sunset. It had been a particularly biting afternoon, so I’d wrapped myself in a beige shawl. This one I didn’t have to acquire for the assignment. My father had gifted it to my mother, and it was the only thing of value she’d managed not to sell. Suraj was pumping water into the tanks and greeted me at the gate. “It’s good that you’ve come,” he said. “I’m worried about Gautam bhaiyya.”

  When I walked into the barsaati, Gautam was taking a hit from his chillum. His eyes were closed and he was relishing this action, as if the pipe were his lover. He’d never smoked in front of me before and looked like a real junkie.

  Upon hearing me enter, he opened his eyes but didn’t stop sucking until he’d had his fill. Then he said, “I wasn’t expecting you,” in a soft, airy voice. It was completely devoid of the poise it’d been filled with since we’d gotten close.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. A small plastic bag with the words Kunal Medicos printed on it lay on the card table. Gau-tam must have picked up some opiates in Yusuf Sarai, where nobody needs a prescription for pills.

  “I like your shawl,” was all he said back.

  He took another hit from his chillum and tried to pass it to me. When I pushed his hand way, he attempted to force the thing to my lips. I’d never seen him like this before.

  “Have you gone crazy?” I snapped.

  “Just have a hit, try a little,” he kept on going.

  When I slapped his face, the demons that had been inhabiting his eyes suddenly fled, and a look of panic replaced them.

  Then, looking away from me, he drew his hand behind his ear and hurled his pipe at a spot on the wall beside the poster.

  The chillum smashed into half-a-dozen pieces, and the puppy started whimpering. Gautam began crying too, and he buried his head in my bosom. I held him tightly. It was upon my urging that he slid himself into me that night.

  In the morning, we remained naked under the covers despite the cold, and it was then he confessed that Lauri had given birth to his child. He also told me about Kumar’s proposition.

  Gautam didn’t speak about his fear of fatherhood, he just said he was uncomfortable sacrificing the truth for his own selfish ends. “Picking Ashok Kumar over Lakshman and Satya is like picking evil over good. It should be that simple.”

  My response to his dilemma should have come quickly to my lips. But I said nothing. We moved out to the terrace and stared at some local children playing hopscotch and chattering in Hindi on the street below. In front of a neighboring house some laborers were assembling a shamiana for a wedding. “Imagine if that were for us,” Gautam said, a faint, wistful smile on his face.

  “Nothing could make me happier,” I told him.

  When he was alone that night, Gautam called Lakshman and told him the article was off. “It’s going nowhere, and I’m tired,” he said. There was some back and forth, during which Laksh-man tried to appeal to his sense of justice and democracy. But Gautam was firm in his resolve to abandon the project.

  I was volunteering at the school the next morning when a student stormed through the courtyard and screamed at the principal: “Gautam sir is lying dead in the park, Gautam sir is lying dead in the park!” I ran there as fast as I could.

  A crowd was staring from a safe distance: servants walking sweater-clad dogs; prickly old men holding sticks to beat away strays and poor people. I pushed through them and his body came into view. Damaged but not dead, he was sprawled beside an earth-colored Lodhi tomb he often loafed around. An enormous gulmohar tree hung over him. It wasn’t Laksh-man himself who’d sent the goons with cricket bats to Gau-tam’s flat before dawn. His C Party colleagues had taken care of that.

  The sight of his bloodied, maimed face sent a wave of anguish through me.

  Two security guards, uniformed UP-wallahs, were attending to his body. A wiry one was dragging Gautam by an arm and his curly locks, and a paunchy one was using a rifle to prod him. The butt of the gun met my leg with a c
onsiderable amount of force, and I let out a howl that snapped them out of their sadistic fever.

  Once I had their attention, I shouted a series of reprimands in English peppered with words like “idyot.” Had Gau-tam been more alert, it would have unnerved him to hear how naturally such bilious Angrezi spilled from my tongue. But in the nation’s capital, the Queen’s language is still a deadlier weapon than a Mauser.

  After eyeing me up and down, the head guard decided I wasn’t a force to reckon with. “Didi,” he said, his gaze now inflected with leering. My dress code for this assignment had meant my demotion from “madam” to “sister.” “We’re going to take him to the police thana. Just listen to me and you’ll remain unharmed.”

  When I dropped the name of some fictitious high-level official, my mamaji the High Court justice, the guards became uneasy. But what really got them was the sight of the Black-Berry I pulled from my pocket. They couldn’t have known what exactly it was or how much it cost, but even they knew it was far more expensive than the toys of the casually rich. I’d kept it concealed from Gautam all these weeks.

  The guards helped him up, and I walked out of Deer Park supporting the weight of his semiconscious six-foot frame. After bringing him home, I stayed by his bedside for the next twenty hours. I only left when Ashok called me in for a meeting.

  Kumar received me in his mahogany study. He was in a bathrobe and had a stoic look on his face. It was meant to communicate his disappointment in me. “Things have gotten very complicated,” was all he said. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but it’s best to just finish this now. And obviously destroy all his papers.” Those were my orders, and they weren’t unreasonable ones.

  I got up to leave, but Kumar motioned for me to stay. He picked up one of the three phones before him and said, “Ba-hadur, I’m not to be disturbed for twenty minutes.” Then he got up and walked over to the expensive leather chair I was sitting on and untied his robe. There was nothing underneath it, just his hairy body, a gold chain, and the limp organ I was to make hard with my tongue. This was my medicine. I had to win back my place in his good books.

  I took the length of him into my mouth. No matter how far I moved away from Sonagachi, this man would never let me forget about the whore I once was.

  I returned to Green Park early the next morning, and as I climbed the stairs to the barsaati one final time, the dog began making noise, a series of shrill yelps, the sound of a puppy in distress. When I walked in, the thing pissed on the flats I was wearing, ethnic ones I would’ve gotten rid of anyway.

  Gautam’s eyes were closed and his mustache was caked in vomit, but he was still breathing. On the floor was an empty strip of oxycodone, and next to it a brown envelope. Lakshman’s people had sent it to him during my brief absence. I thumbed through its contents, five black-and-white photographs.

  In one of the pictures I was getting out of a car at the Kumar farmhouse. In another I was wearing a bikini on the beaches of Goa. But strangely, these pictures of me seemed in pristine condition, as if he’d barely glanced at them. Only one had been soiled by tears and fingerprints; it had clearly been too much for him. For me the photo confirmed how tired I’d grown of this life I was supposed to be grateful for.

  The photo showed the mother of Gautam’s child. She was sitting on a bench having a conversation with my boss. I didn’t know it then, but Ashok Kumar and Lauri Zeller had known each other. He’d paid her for knowledge of Khem’s movement, and she’d used the money to help finish off her movie. I never confirmed that they’d been intimate, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Staring at the photographs, I contemplated sparing Gau-tam. Images of us starting a new life together passed through my mind. That’s what would have happened in a film. But I knew he’d be more useful dead than alive.

  I took out a syringe from my bag and filled it with potassium chloride. Then I jabbed him between the toes. This was the only way I’d ever killed somebody, it was painless and civilized. With all the opiates and benzodiazepines in his system, the coroner would pronounce Gautam dead from an overdose. Nobody would lament the passing of this confused orphan. After shoving Gautam’s notebooks and computer into the jute bag he’d used for sabzis, I leashed the puppy and left the barsaati with it.

  When I contacted Lakshman, he was surprised to hear from me. It took some arranging, but eventually he was more than happy to print Gautam’s exposé on Kumar, which implicated my boss, the B Party, and the Canadian Aluminum Corporation in the murder of Khem Thakur.

  Months after the article was published, the C Party won key state elections and handed over Orissa’s bauxite mines to more favorable industrialists. The party rewarded Lakshman for his services by securing him a position as an MD in an international media conglomerate.

  Three weeks after Gautam’s article came out—in London and in Delhi—a Criminal Bureau of Investigation probe was launched. My name came up during the investigation, but I’d long since made it abroad with my Indian pie dog. Ashok Kumar was arrested and caged in Tihar for a few months, where he was allowed to bathe in milk on Sundays. He was of course freed.

  In the days immediately after the article’s publication, newspapers printed gushing obituaries about its author, referring to Gautam as “one of India’s finest young minds.” Delhi’s intelligentsia lamented his tragic death over kebabs and moji-tos for a few months. Then they forgot he’d ever existed.

  THE SCAM

  BY TABISH KHAIR

  Jantar Mantar

  A little Turd sits outside the metro exit closest to Jan-tar Mantar and offers to polish your shoes when you leave the cool, clean interior of the underground for the smog and heat of the pucca-baked roads. You say no, having little time for Turds of that sort and because your boy-servant has already polished your shoes twice this morning, once of his own volition and once because you were not satisfied. So yes, you say no, and plunk, the little Turd has deposited a real piece of turd on your shoes. Oh, you do not see him do it, but where else does real turd come from if not from little Turds like him? See, see, saar, says the Turd, speaking Ingliss to you because he can see that you are the type, not phoren but polished. See, see, saar, he says. Ssuu durrty.

  The little Turd has made a mistake. Just because you are polished does not mean that you only speak Ingliss. You slap him on the head, twice. It is a language he understands. You thrust your shoe out to him, and say in Hindi-Ingliss-Punjabi: Saaf karo, abhi saaf karo shoes, harami, and you add a few choice gaalis in Punjabi which need not be put down on paper. If you had not added those gaalis, the little Turd might have raised a racket. But he is convinced he has made a mistake. He was fooled by your patina, like those Spanish adventurers were once fooled by the shine of the copper on the Indians in America: What glittered on you was not gold. The little Turd realizes his mistake. He is a quick learner. You have convinced him in two expressive local languages: Punjabi and Slapperi.

  He wipes your shoe with a rueful pout. Then as you turn to leave, he cannot resist the question. He is still intrigued. He needs to place you. Perhaps he maintains a record of his mistakes. He is a professional, just as much as you or anyone else in Delhi these days. So he asks you with a comic salaam, still in Ingliss, Vaat you do, saab, vaat job-vob, saar?

  You have won this battle. You are in an expansive, forgiving mood. You decide to answer him, and mention your profession.

  Repoder? Jurnaalis? he says.

  Then he shakes his head, as if that word explains his mistake. Jurnaalis, he repeats. Jurnaalis. Repoder.

  The street outside Jantar Mantar is a favorite haunt of journalists. Next to the nineteenth-century observatory, there are broad sidewalks, and these broad sidewalks often host impromptu protest groups. Sometimes for months. There is one occupied by victims of the Bhopal gas leak. They have been sitting there, on and off, for at least a few years, down to five or six people now, mostly ignored by journalists. A much larger group, bathed in camera flashes, belongs to the Nar-mada Bachao Andolan
. They are an intermittent fixture on this road, and because their champions include celebrities like Arundhati Roy, they attract media flashlights once in a while.

  Actually, they are the reason why that little Turd doing his su-paalis-and-turd-on-shoe scam made such an error of judgment when staff reporter Arvind Sinha of the Times of India exited from the metro. Reporter Sinha has long harbored a crush on Arundhati Roy. Hence, he had dressed up with extra care this summer morning and left his Bullet motorcycle behind to avoid the blackening traffic fumes, before doing his round of the Narmada Bachao Andolan protest. Not that it is going to be noticed. The famous Roy is there, but too uninterested in her fame to give interviews, let alone be whisked away for a fawning chat in one of those three-, four-, five, and probably-more-star hotels around the corner.

  So, after jotting down the day’s press declaration in his spiral notebook, and pocketing the day’s press release, Re-poder Sinha heads for one of the four-star restaurants on his own. The Sangharsh Morcha had announced a press meet there, and now that Sinha is here he might as well look in, collect the releases, and, hopefully, guzzle down a cold beer or two. On the way, he notices that a new tent has come up at the corner of Jantar Mantar: It bears the obligatory banner stating, Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied, in English. There is no one under the tent—a rickety affair, broad enough to hold four or five people at most—so Repoder Sinha cannot inquire about the nature of the justice that has been delayed or denied, though it is doubtful that he would have stopped to do so anyway.

  Past the revolving glass doors of the restaurant, in the air-conditioned, potted interior, Sinha spots the table reserved for the press meet by the Sangharsh Morcha. Not much of the press has met. Apart from Sinha, there are only two other reporters, one of whom is actually the editor of his own newspaper and, it is rumored, subsists on the beer and snacks offered at such meets. Handouts are handed out, appropriate noises are made over soda and lemonade—it appears that the Sangharsh Morcha has a Gandhian aversion to alcohol, which might also explain the low turnout of reporters. Just when Sinha is about to sneak away from the rather drab press meet, the room is visibly brightened by the entry of two women.