Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  Two very different women. Sinha knows one of them: Pre-eti, who works for one, or probably more, of those internationally visible NGOs. The other is a sturdy blonde wearing a kurta and jeans. Preeti is wearing a kurta and jeans too, but while the blonde looks tired and sweaty, Preeti, like all women of her refined class (at least to Sinha’s working-class eyes), never looks ruffled or unkempt. Sinha has seen women like Preeti step out of forty-five-degree heat in July without a bead of sweat on their foreheads, no sign of a damp spot under their armpits. He suspects that their air-conditioned cars offer part of the answer to the riddle of their unruffled coolness, but there are moments when he feels that they are another breed, a superior subspecies that has evolved beyond bodily fluids and signs of discomfort.

  Preeti spots Sinha and, ignoring the others, launches into the kind of direct speech that, Sinha suspects, is also part of the evolutionary progress of her subspecies. For God’s sake, Arvind, she says, what are you reporter-veporters doing here in this fake palace? There are two dharnas just outside, near Jantar Mantar.

  Been there, Preeti, replies Sinha …

  Not the Narmada one—Preeti is too radical to espouse specific causes—there is another one. From near some Tikri village in Bihar, where there has been a caste atrocity which has not been reported by you guys.

  If it has not been reported, it has not happened.

  Oh yeah? Ask the woman sitting there and her cute little son. They have experienced it. Father killed, uncles chased away …

  Just two? A woman and a child?

  Both Preeti and her foreign friend nod in affirmation.

  A scam then, pronounces Sinha. Look, Preeti, these days you cannot have a caste atrocity without a couple of politicians turning up to squeeze the last drop of political mileage out of it. If it’s just a couple of people, it is a scam. Another way of begging …

  Oh, you are so cynical, says the foreign woman, in a vaguely European accent.

  Not cynical—reporter, staff reporter, contributes Preeti, and introduces the two. The foreign woman is a visiting journalist from Denmark called Tina. But it is spelled with an “e,” she explains: Tine.

  Why don’t you check it out?

  Check what out?

  Your scam.

  Waste of time.

  Or afraid to be proved wrong?

  I am not wrong.

  Check it out then. They are just outside anyway.

  What if I am right?

  I will buy you a dinner.

  Where?

  In Chor Bizarre.

  Deal?

  Deal.

  Good. Preeti, you are the witness. Let’s go.

  The Press Club on Raisina Road, not that far from Jan-tar Mantar, has sometimes been nicknamed the Depressed Club. Its whitewashed colonial façade has worn thin, its floor stained by tired feet, bleak notices and cuttings on the bulletin boards in the drafty corridor, lawn outside showing only a hint of grass, tables piled with dirty plates, broken chairs, a slight smell of urine from the toilet next to the main entrance.

  There, that evening, seated at a corner table, wreathed in miasma, which consists largely but not only of cigarette smoke, we can find Repoder Sinha, Preeti, and Tine. Plates of kebab and beer have been ordered—gin and lime for Preeti—and conversation is going strong. It is still hovering around the scam protest, which—on inspection—had turned out to be that rickety tent with the banner in English: Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied.

  I told you it was a scam, said Sinha.

  How do you know?

  I recognized the boy with the woman. He runs a shoe polish scam there. Tosses rubbish on your shoes, so that you have to pay him to polish them up.

  So?

  So!

  So, it proves that he does something for a living. They said they have been here for months, petitioning every person they possibly could. They showed you the petitions and letters that they have actually paid people to write for them.

  Another way to beg.

  Oh, Preeti, are your journalists always so cynical?

  Only the men, Tine. Only the men.

  Oh, c’mon, Preeti. Tine doesn’t know the place, but you and I know how these things happen.

  I am not sure I do, Arvind.

  What do you mean?

  Look, that woman had a plausible story. Small village in Bihar. Land dispute. Husband killed, murdered one night on the way back from work. Police not interested in clearing the matter. Dismissing it as the kind of thing that happens to people who belong to the so-called denotified tribes. Uncles frightened into moving away. Land forcibly occupied. The woman tries to get justice, finally takes whatever she has and comes to Delhi with all her papers. Sounds plausible to me, given a plucky tribal woman, which is what she seems to be.

  She is not a village woman from Bihar, and that boy is too slick. He has grown up here on the streets.

  You would be surprised how quickly kids pick up habits and words.

  Still, I bet you my bottom dollar—a scam.

  Why don’t you go to Bihar and check it out? asks Tine suddenly.

  Check it out? The woman’s village doesn’t even have a name. Near Tikri village, she says. Even if I could locate Tikri village …

  Take them with you, says Preeti. We’ll come along. I’ll raise the money for it.

  I’ll have to take leave, Preeti.

  Take leave, Arvind.

  Take leave, Arvind, will you please? Tine adds, looking soulfully at him with her speckled greenish-blue eyes.

  What a waste. Okay, if you ladies insist. Let me see …

  Time does not fly around Jantar Mantar. That is the magic of such places. The buildings change their billboards; the streets change their beggars, protesters, pedestrians, cars. But all change is for the same. Time simply repeats itself, again and again.

  Jantar-mantar, say children: abracadabra. Whoosh! Something happens. Plastic flowers turn into a dove; a rabbit is pulled out of the hat. Jantar-mantar, murmur old women in villages, and they talk in whispers because they are talking of devious doings, black magic, sorcery. Jantar-mantar, say foreign-educated doctors in the cities, and they are referring to the hocus-pocus of quacks, the vaids and hakims who still cater to the rural poor and either heal them or kill them.

  But Jantar Mantar in Delhi is a sprawling observatory built in the nineteenth century. It is used to observe nothing.

  It is useless. Around it rise useful buildings: offices, hotels.

  Buildings that change and are always the same. About it walk useful people: reporters, politicians, businessmen, doctors, bureaucrats. People who change and are always the same.

  So what surprise is there if, a month from the time we last saw him agreeing to go to Bihar, we see Repoder Sinha walking out of the same metro exit where he had encountered the Turd, the boy whom—along with his mother—Sinha and Pre-eti and Tine had escorted back to Bihar just a few weeks ago?

  Repoder Sinha has changed and perhaps he is still the same.

  In any case, he is looking around. He has been doing this almost every day since all three returned from Bihar: He looks around for the Turd, the little boy, for he knows that the Turd must have returned to Delhi. After all, scams have their fixed scenarios; tricksters their territory.

  Repoder Sinha walks slowly, darting quick glances to the left and the right, thinking of that lightning trip to Bihar. He is not sure what happened there, but he will not concede this uncertainty to himself.

  The woman and the boy had refused to go back to Bihar; Preeti and Tine had to convince them with assurances of safety and gifts of money. And it had been like that all the way to Gaya, by train, and then to the village of Tikri by taxi: The woman and the boy had wheedled a minor fortune out of the two women. Sinha had expected that; it confirmed his suspicions. But he had not anticipated the certainty with which the woman led them to Tikri and then two kilometres out to a small village and a plot of land which she claimed was the disputed property. That is when it all happ
ened, and Sinha is not very certain even now about what it was.

  It was late, the summer evening still steamy, the wind having dropped. Tine was pink, a few beads of sweat had appeared on Preeti’s neck. Both were conservatively clad—a reflection of their notions of rural Bihar—in cotton salwar kameezes.

  The plot they stood on was rocky; it did not look worth fighting over to Sinha. The woman and her son, the Turd, were pointing out things like the palm trees that demarcated one end of the field, the huts—thatched, hunched—of their village in a far corner, and the small hillock which marked the other end of the field. A fly kept buzzing around Preeti, evading her attempts to fend it away with her anchal, which she wore draped loosely around her shoulders. Tine had discarded her anchal, displaying a rather low-cut kameez that, Sinha felt, was less conservative than most shirts and T-shirts.

  As the woman rambled on—the usual lament, how the land was taken away from her, how her husband was murdered, how the police did not listen to her—suddenly, on the hillock, there stood a group of men. They appeared as if by magic—jantar-mantar, Sinha almost thought—burly, impassive men, against the reddening sky, leaning on their staffs. They could have been any group of villagers on their way back from work, attracted by the sight of a taxi and three obviously urban types, one of them a firang.

  But that is not what the woman and her son, the Turd, thought. Or pretended. Sinha is not sure. For then there was a cry of fear from the boy and the woman started cursing and weeping. The boy said, Run, ma, run, they said they would kill us if we came back, run. Then both were running—in the opposite direction, toward the palm trees and the brambles and jungle behind the bleak, tall palms. Sinha shouted, but they did not stop. Preeti and Tine had not even had the time to react. When Sinha looked up at the hillock, the men who had been standing there were gone too.

  They waited an hour, until it got dark, and the taxi driver insisted on going back, with or without them.

  They came back the next day. They spoke to the local police, who denied that there was any land dispute or that any murder had taken place. What woman and son, the thana inspector asked. Sinha’s press card turned the police obliging and polite. The inspector took the three outsiders to the nameless village, fetid with garbage next to mud huts with holes in their thatched roofs, and shouted for some old man to come out. Come out, hey you, Dhanarwa! When the man, stubbled, limping, coughing, came out of the low hut, the inspector said to Sinha, Sir, describe the woman and her son to the man. He is the headman here. He knows everyone.

  Sinha did as he was asked to do, Preeti adding a word or two of detail.

  Description done, the inspector addressed the old man in a gruff tone. So, he said, do you know this woman and the boy?

  The old man shook his head silently. A crow cawed and perched on the sagging roof of a hut behind them. With its daggerlike beak, it started to dismember a small rodent held in its talons.

  Speak up. Has someone cut your tongue off? Speak up.

  Not to me, you dolt. Tell sir and the madams here, the inspector barked.

  No, huzoor, said the old man.

  You do not know the woman? repeated the inspector.

  No, huzoor.

  Or the boy?

  No, huzoor.

  The inspector turned to Arvind, Preeti, and Tine, all three now sweating profusely in the hardening sunlight of the late morning. See, sir, he said, see, madam, what did I tell you? 420. The woman was a 420. A chaalu fraud. You should lodge a complaint with us. We will catch them for you.

  On the way back the next day, as the train shuddered on the old tracks, Sinha had his doubts. He was familiar with such interrogations by police officers. The way they asked questions often determined the answers. And though he laughed away Tine’s offer to buy him dinner in Chor Bizarre on their return to Delhi—I lost the bet, she said—Sinha still could not settle the matter in his mind.

  However, Preeti and, especially, Tine had been converted: they spent much of their waking hours on the train trip back to Delhi calculating the money they had paid out to the woman and her boy, the Turd, on the way. By the time the train reached Aligarh, they had agreed on the exact sum of 5,941 rupees.

  But doubt nibbled at Sinha. All the way to Delhi. And that is why now, even weeks later, when Preeti and Tine have already turned the experience into slightly different anecdotes for friends, Repoder Arvind Sinha walks past the Jantar Mantar area, on the lookout for that little Turd. Under the tall gleaming buildings he walks, on the broad sidewalks with protest banners, past this useless observatory, always darting glances to the left and right, on he walks in this place that changes and is always the same, looking, looking, looking.

  THE WALLS OF DELHI

  BY UDAY PRAKASH

  Rohini

  Translated from Hindi by Jason Grunebaum

  I met Ramnivas at Sanjay Chaurasia’s paan cart that stood five hundred yards from my flat in Rohini; Ratanlal sold chai right next to Sanjay’s. Sanjay had come to Delhi from a village near Pratapgarh, and Ratanlal from Sasaram.

  They built their shops on wheels so they could make a quick getaway in case someone from the city came nosing around.

  Cops on motorbike patrol came by all the time, but they got their weekly cut: Ratanlal paid five hundred, Sanjay seven.

  The two men didn’t worry.

  All the vendors and hawkers set up camp wherever they could in Rohini’s evening market. As night fell, Brajinder joined them, pushing his fancy electric cart, Kwality Ice Cream printed in rainbow letters on the plastic panels. So did Raj-vati, who sold hard-boiled eggs. Her husband Gulshan was there too, with their two kids. Behind her shop, four brick walls enclosed a little vacant lot. As night wore on, people pulled up in cars asking Gulshan for some whiskey or rum.

  The government liquor shops were long closed by that hour, so Gulshan would cycle off and return with a pint or a fifth he got from one of his black market connections. Some customers wanted chicken tikka with their hard-boiled eggs, which

  Gulshan would fetch from Sardar Satte Singh’s food stand up at the next light. Sometimes the customers would give him a little whiskey by way of a tip, or a few rupees. Rajvati didn’t make a fuss since it was a hundred times better for him to drink that kind of whiskey, and for free, than to spend his own money on little plastic pouches of local moonshine. You could count on that kind of hooch being mixed with stuff that might make you go blind, or kill you outright.

  Tufail Ahmed had come from Nalanda along with his sewing machine, which he plunked down right beside the brick enclosure. He did a little business for a short while. But since Tufail Ahmed didn’t have a fixed address, people were wary of leaving their clothes with him. So the only jobs he got were mending schoolchildren’s bookbags, or hemming workers’ uniforms, or patching up rickshaw drivers’ clothes. After a couple of weeks, he stopped showing up. Someone said that he was sick, another said he went back to Nalanda, and still others said he’d been hit by a Blue Line bus. His sewing machine got tossed into the junkyard behind the police station.

  That’s how it was around here, like an unwritten law. Every day, one of these new arrivals would suddenly disappear, never to be seen again. Most of them didn’t have a permanent address where, after they were gone, you could go and inquire. Rajvati, for example, lived two miles from here, near the bypass, with her husband and two kids in sixteenth-century ruins. If you’ve ever been on the National Highway heading toward Karnal or Amritsar and happened to glance north, you’ve seen the round building with a dome right beside the industrial drainage: a crumbling, dark-red brick ruin. It’s hard to believe that humans could be living there. The famous bus named Goodwill that travels from India to Pakistan—from Delhi to Lahore—passes right by that part of the highway.

  But people do live there—families, for the most part, and a few others: Rajvati’s sister Phulo; Jagraj’s wife Somali, who sells peanuts by the gate of the Azadpur veggie market; and Mushtaq, who sells hashish by the Red Fort,
and his cousin Saliman, currently Mushtaq’s wife. The three women turn tricks. Somali works out of her home in the ruins. She takes care of customers brought to her by the smackheads, Tilak, Bhusan, and Azad, who always hang around. In the evening, Saliman and Phulo go out in rickshaws looking for customers.

  Sometimes Phulo also works at all-night parties.

  Phulo ocassionally sleeps with Azad, even though Rajvati, her sister, and Gulshan, her brother-in-law, both object. Gulshan always says, “Don’t lend money or your warm body to anyone living under this roof.” Gulshan, Rajvati, and Phulo have the most money of those living under that roof; since Phulo arrived from the village and began to turn tricks, their income has increased so much that they’ve been scouting land in the neighborhood around Loni Border, where they might build a house someday.

  Azad says, “If you move away, don’t worry, I’ll still manage,” but over the last few days he’s been shivering and writhing around at night, sick. I had a strong premonition that one day I’d come visit, and Phulo or Tilak or Bhusan or Saliman would say, What can I tell you, Vinayak? I haven’t seen Azad for four days. He left in the morning and never came back. You haven’tseen him?

  And Azad wouldn’t come back. What about me? Am I any safer than them? I’ve certainly fallen to a new low, with no work, squeezed on all sides, and now I spend all day long sitting at Sanjay’s paan stall, stressed out, useless, numb.

  It seems we’ve gotten off track. I was talking about Sanjay’s, the neighborhood paan shop (right near my flat), and then got carried away to sixteenth-century ruins near the bypass. But Ramnivas? I first met him at this little corner paan shop. He’d moved to Delhi twenty years ago from Shahipur, a small village near Allahabad, along with his father, Babulla Pasiya. In the beginning, Babulla washed pots and pans in a roadside dhaba, and was later promoted after learning how to cook with the tandoori oven. Five years ago, he built a makeshift house in Samaypur Badli village, itself a settlement of tin shacks and huts—and just like that, his family became Delhites. Even though the settlement was illegal—city bulldozers could come and demolish everything at any time—he’d procured an offi-cial ration card and increasingly had hope they wouldn’t get displaced.