Delhi Noir

by Hirsh Sawhney

  Ramnivas Pasiya was twenty-seven—twenty-eight, tops—and lacked any ambition save for a vague desire to see his life circumstances changed. Ramlal Sharma, the local councilman, put in a good word and got him part-time work as a city sanitation worker. His area, Saket, was located in south Delhi. At 8:00 a.m. he’d put his plastic lunch tiffin into his bag, catch a DTC bus toward Daula Kuan, and then transfer to another one that would take him to Saket. Ramnivas would punch in, grab his broom, and head toward the neighborhood he was responsible for. When he got hungry, he’d eat a couple rupee’s worth of chole along with the roti he brought from home. His wife Babiya made his food; they’d been married when she was seventeen. Now he was the father of two—a boy and a girl—though he would have had two sons if one hadn’t died.

  As I’ve mentioned, I first met Ramnivas by Sanjay’s. He had a good reason for frequenting Rohini: He was chasing after a girl named Sushma. She was a part-time servant who did chores for a few neighborhood households, commuting every day from Samaypur Badli, where Ramnivas also lived. He had accompanied her several times, smoking cigarettes or bidis at Sanjay’s or drinking chai at Ratanlal’s while she worked.

  Sushma was seventeen or eighteen, a full ten years younger than Ramnivas. He was dark-skinned and lean. Sushma had a thing for him too; you could tell just by watching them walk side by side.

  I saw Sushma yesterday, and even today she came to clean a few houses in the neighborhood. Every day, she still comes, just like always.

  But Ramnivas?

  No one’s seen him around for a few months, and no one’s likely to see him anywhere for the foreseeable future. Even Sushma doesn’t have a clue where he is. If you went looking for him, all you’d find—at most—would be a little damp spot on a square of earth where Ramnivas had once existed; and the only thing this would prove is that on that spot some man once did exist, but no more, and never again.

  I’d like to tell you, briefly, about Ramnivas—a simple account of his inexistence.

  Two years ago, on Tuesday, May 25, at 7:30 a.m., Ramni-vas, as usual, was getting ready to go to work in Saket, forty-two kilometers from where he lives. Sushma was already waiting for him by the time Ramnivas got to the bus stop. She was wearing her red polka-dotted salwar, had applied some special face cream, and was looking lovely.

  The previous Saturday, she had accompanied Ramnivas for the first time to a movie at the Alpana. During intermission, they’d gone outside and snacked on some chaat-papri. In the theater and afterwards on the bus going home, Ramnivas inched closer and closer to Sushma, while Sushma repeatedly deflected his advances. After they’d gotten off the bus and were walking home, Ramnivas announced this before parting: If she wasn’t at the bus stop waiting for him next Tuesday, it meant she wasn’t interested, and they were through.

  Now it was Tuesday. His heart sank as he left the house, thinking as he often did that Sushma was having serious doubts. When he saw her at the bus stop waiting for him, Ramnivas was so overjoyed that he declared they should ride in an autorickshaw instead of taking the bus. He insisted and insisted, but Sushma wasn’t persuaded. “Why throw away money? Let’s just take the bus like we always do.” Ramnivas had fixed on the idea of sitting very close to her in the little backseat of the rickshaw and maybe even copping a feel—and was therefore dismayed at her refusal. But Sushma’s coming to the bus stop was a yes signal to Ramnivas, and the man was now beside himself. He sensed that his life was about to turn a corner, and soon he would be free from the shackles of home.

  He was always picking fights with his wife Babiya. Even though Ramnivas’s paycheck wasn’t enough for Babiya to cover household expenses, he’d let loose. “It’s like your hands have holes in them! Look at Gopal! Four kids, parents, grandparents, and God knows who else to support, makes less than I do, and still gets by! And you? Night and day, bitch and moan.” She’d remain silent but glare at him with flames that licked at the inside of his head all day long.

  That Tuesday, as they parted ways—Ramnivas to Saket, Sushma getting off the bus in Rohini—he told her he’d leave work early for Rohini and be at Sanjay’s by 2:00, where she should be waiting; then they’d return to Samaypur Badli together. Sushma said that she didn’t like waiting for him at Sanjay’s (Santosh, the scooter mechanic, was always trying to flirt with her; and Sanjay, too, was always cracking dirty jokes), but in the end, she agreed. And then, for the very first time, Sushma, very slowly and very deliberately, instructed Ramnivas to absolutely bring her some of those chili pakoras, the ones he’d been going on and on about that they sell by the Anupam Cinema. When Sushma made her request, Ramnivas could swear he heard a note of intimacy in her voice, even a hint of possessiveness, and it made him feel very good indeed. He said casually, “I’ll see what I can do,” but had a very hard time concealing the fact that he was jumping for joy.

  Ramnivas went on his way, happy, singing that song from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. After punching in, he told his boss, Chopri sahib, that he needed to leave work early to go home because his wife had to be taken to the hospital. Even though Chopri sahib usually gave employees a hard time about leaving early, for some reason he readily agreed.

  That day, Ramnivas was sweeping the floor of a fitness club in a building that housed various businesses. Cleaning the gym wasn’t technically his responsibility since it wasn’t a government building, but Chopri sahib had instructed him to work on it, explaining to Ramnivas that rich people and their kids went there every day to lose weight.

  The gym had every exercise machine imaginable. The prosperous residents of Saket and their families spent hours on them. A beauty salon and massage parlor occupied the first floor. Middle-aged men of means would go for a massage and, occasionally, take some of the massage girls back to their cars and drive away. Ramnivas had seen policemen and politicians frequent the place.

  Govind’s chai stall was right outside, and he told Ramni-vas that a girl named Sunila earned five thousand for accompanying gentlemen outside the massage parlor. “Who knows what these fucking big shots do with themselves in there,” Govind said. “I’ve seen them throw these wild after-hours parties, boys and girls right from this neighborhood.” Indeed, while cleaning the bathrooms, Ramnivas sometimes stumbled on the kind of nasty stuff that suggested that someone had had a good time, and it wasn’t so fun to clean up.

  What a life these high-rollers have, Ramnivas thought to himself. They eat so much they can’t lose weight. And look at me! One kid dies from eating fish caught from the sewer, and the other is just hanging on thanks to the medicine. Then he remembered Sushma. His envy faded away and he set his mind to his work.

  As he was sweeping the floor of the gym, the rope at the handle of the whisk broom that fastened the bristles together began to unravel. He was almost done, working on the cramped corridor between the bathroom and storeroom where hardly anyone went. But now he couldn’t finish his work properly. Annoyed, Ramnivas banged the butt of the broom against the wall to try and right the bristles. What was that? Sensing something strange, he again banged it against the wall. This time he was sure. Instead of the hard thud of a thick wall, he heard something like an echo. It was hollow, a fast layer of plaster had been applied to it. But what could be behind it? Ramnivas wondered. A table and chairs and a couple of burlap sacks stood between him and the wall. Ramnivas moved them to make space. Then he hammered the butt of the broom into the wall, hard.

  It was just as he suspected: A few cracks began to show in the plaster, which soon crumbled away, exposing the inside. Ramnivas peeked in through the hole he’d opened, and his breath stopped short. He went numb. Holy cow! The wall was filled with cash, stacks and stacks of hundreds and five-hundreds.

  He drew his face flush with the hole and took a good look.

  The hollow was pretty big, a long tunnel carved out on the inside of the wall. Nothing but stacks of cash as far as he could see, all the way on either side until the light failed and the money was lost in the dark. Ramnivas’s heart r
aced. He kept glancing around to see if anyone was there.

  There was no one, only him. Before him stood the wall in the big gym, at A-11/DX 33, Saket, against which he’d banged his broom and opened up a hidden cache of bills.

  “Dirty money … dirty money … dirty, dirty, dirty!” came the words, like a voice whispering into his ear. His hair stood on end.

  Ramnivas didn’t move for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he grabbed his bag from the table in the corner and, peering around to make sure there wasn’t anyone watching, took two stacks of five-hundred-rupee bills and stuffed them in his bag. Then he grabbed one of the burlap sacks and placed it in front of the wall to cover up the hole along with the table and chairs. He hoped no one would suspect anything in this forgotten corner of the gym.

  It was only 11:30, and Ramnivas still had the better part of his cleaning rounds to finish. Instead, he went right to the office, hung up his broom, and said that he had received a phone call alerting him that his wife had taken a turn for the worse. He needed to go home right away.

  Each stack of cash contained ten thousand rupees, meaning that Ramnivas had twenty thousand. He’d never seen this much cash in his life and was so scared that he rolled up his little bag and shoved it down his pants for the bus trip. If any of his fellow passengers had taken a good look at him, they would have instantly realized this was a man in a state of high anxiety.

  Ramnivas took a rickshaw from the bus stop to Sanjay’s. He found Sushma joking around with the scooter mechanic, Santosh. This upset Ramnivas, but what really unnerved him was when Sushma said, “Enjoying a rickshaw ride today? Did you knock over a bank or something?” But then she added, “You said you were coming at 2:00, and it’s not even 1:00. How did you get out so early?”

  Ramnivas laughed; maybe it was seeing Sushma. He relaxed, his worries slipping away.

  “I ran as fast as I could!” Ramnivas said, looking at Su-shma and chuckling. She too began to laugh. “Can I buy you guys a cup of chai?” Ramnivas then asked, turning to Sanjay and Santosh.

  “What’s the special occasion? Did you get overtime?” Santosh replied, taken aback.

  Sushma was also startled, since Ramnivas was known for being such a penny pincher. She never liked the way he’d come around Sanjay’s and try every trick in the book to convince someone to buy him a cup of chai. This day, however, Ramnivas didn’t just include Sanjay and Santosh in the round of chai, but also Devi Deen and Madan. And not just plain old chai, but the deluxe stuff—strong, with cardamom.

  Sushma protested—why throw money down the drain like that?—but Ramnivas didn’t listen. He hired an autorick-shaw for the rest of the day and took Sushma on a whirlwind tour of the city. He fed her chaat-papri, splurged on bottles of Pepsi, bought her a handbag in Karol Bagh, and a five-hundred-rupee salwar outfit with matching chunni from Kolhapur Road in Kamala Nagar. Sushma felt indescribable happiness each time she touched, or even looked at, Ramni-vas. The sad and worried little Ramnivas of yesterday (on many occasions Sushma had thought, Enough is enough) had suddenly blossomed into an uncannily happy, Technicolor lover. Though his hair was unkempt, his stubble getting scraggly, and his bidi breath hard to take, whenever Ramnivas kissed Sushma in the little backseat of the rickshaw, for some unexplainable reason, she felt as if she were rolling around on a bed of flowers.

  There’s no way Sushma could have known what accounted for Ramnivas’s surprising turnaround. She knew this much:

  She’d done well by showing up at the bus stand that Tuesday morning, after having spent the whole night thinking, Do I show up? Do I not show up? It turned out she’d made the right decision. There is someone out there in the world who loves me!

  Sushma thought, overflowing with joy. Even after Ramnivas had gotten her pregnant and then paid for her abortion at the Mittal Clinic in Naharpur, she’d remember the whirlwind trip that day two years before in the autorickshaw.

  The roots of happiness lie hidden in money. From there, a tree of pleasure can grow, and flourish, and bear the fruit of joy. Maybe the best qualities of men, too, lie locked inside a bundle of cash—this is how Ramnivas began to think. He was a new man: Everything had changed. Life at home had also improved substantially. First, his wife Babiya seemed content all the time, and now cooked the most delicious food.

  They could afford to eat meat at least twice a week and eggs every day. The kids asked for ice cream, and the kids got ice cream. If a guest came knocking, Babiya would bring out the good stuff: Haldiram’s namkeen snacks and Britannia biscuits.

  Ramnivas bought a sofa, a TV, a VCR, a double bed, a fridge, and a foreign-made CD player from Palika Baazar, and announced that it was only a matter of time before he bought a computer for the kids. He said everyone knew that there was no getting ahead without one. He planned to get them computer courses and then send them both to the States, where they’d make six-figure salaries.

  Ramnivas’s relatives, who’d always steered clear of him, suddenly started showing up at his place with whole families in tow. His stock within his own caste community was on the rise, and he was often approached for advice about matrimonial alliances between families. He got all sorts of letters and wedding invitations. If he felt like it, he’d go. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t. But when he did—what a welcome he got!

  Meanwhile, Ramnivas had begun drinking every day, and his liaisons with Sushma also became a daily occurrence. By then, Babiya knew all about the affair but had decided to keep her mouth shut. She knew enough about the kind of man Ram-nivas was to feel confident he’d never leave her or the kids.

  Sometimes Ramnivas wouldn’t come home until well after midnight. Sometimes he’d disappear for a few days—sometimes with Sushma, who now owned several salwar out-fits, complete with matching sandals and jewelry sets. She used to go toe-to-toe with Ramnivas no matter how small the squabble, but now, fearing he might get angry, Sushma silently put up with more and more. On several occasions her mother cautioned, “How long will this last? You have to stand up for yourself and tell him that what’s yours is yours. And he is yours, honey. People are beginning to talk.” But Sushma would reply, “I’m no homewrecker, Amma. He has kids, don’t forget. Let it go for as long as it goes.” And she was sure it would go on for the rest of their lives.

  If people asked Ramnivas where he’d gotten so much money, he’d say he’d invested in a half-million-rupee pyramid scheme in Saket, or that he was playing the numbers and kept hitting. Or that he’d won the lottery. Or—and this he reserved for only a few—that he’d met a great holy man near the mosque who whispered a very special mantra in his ear that caused future stock-share figures to flash before his eyes.

  In turn, Ramnivas whispered the same mantra into the ears of several people, all of whom failed to see the numbers flash before their eyes.

  Whenever Ramnivas felt like it, he’d go and fill up his bag with a few stacks of cash from the wall in Saket. It was amazing that no one had stopped him or arrested him, and no one had moved the stacks of rupees around. Spending the money as he pleased for so long with no one stopping him had turned Ramnivas into a carefree man, and so his daring grew. And yet he was still beset with worry that one day the rightful owner of the money might show up and take it away. So with foresight, he bought a ten-acre plot of land in Loni Border and put it in his wife’s name. He took three-hundred thousand and deposited it into various savings accounts in several banks—all under different names.

  Things began to crumble about eight months ago.

  Ramnivas made big plans to take Sushma on a trip to Jai-pur and Agra, where, of course, they’d have their photo taken in front of the Taj Mahal.

  They found a taxi driver the moment they stepped out of the train station. Ramnivas instructed him to take them to a hotel. “What’s your price range?” the taxi driver asked, sizing him up.

  Ramnivas could tell that the driver thought he was an average joe, or worse, some schmuck. “It doesn’t matter so long as the ho
tel’s top-notch,” Ramnivas said firmly. “Don’t take me to some cut-rate flophouse.”

  The driver appeared to be around forty-five; he had a cunning look on his face and dark eyes as alert as a bird of prey. He smiled, asking sardonically, “Well, there’s a nice three-star hotel right nearby. Whaddya think?” The man must have been expecting Ramnivas to lose his cool at the mere mention of a three-star hotel, but Ramnivas was unfazed.

  “Three-star, five-star, six-star—it’s all the same to me. Just step on it. I really need a hot shower and a big double plate of butter chicken.”

  The driver gave him a long look, which he followed with a piercing, hawklike glance at Sushma. Pleased with himself, and mixing in mockery, he added, “Yes sir! On our way! And do you think I’m gonna let you settle for a plain old hot shower? I’ll see to it you have a whole big full tub of hot water! And butter chicken? You’ll get triple butter chicken!”

  Ramnivas laughed at this and said, “That’s more like it! Now step on it.”

  The taxi driver then asked, “So where are you from, sir?”

  “Me? I’m a Delhite. What, did you think I was from U.P. or M.P. or Pee Pee or someplace like that?” Ramnivas quipped, smiling at Sushma as if he’d just won the war. “I come to Agra every couple of weeks with the company car,” he added, hoping that this shrewd driver wouldn’t ask him about his big job. What would he say? Grade four sanitation worker? Broom pusher? Fortunately, the driver didn’t follow up.

  When they got to the hotel, the driver told him, “Go and see if they have any rooms. If not, we’ll try someplace else.”

  Ramnivas left Sushma and went inside. When he got to the reception desk and heard the rate, he wondered if they should find a cheaper place to stay. But he soon signed on the dotted line for an air-conditioned room with a deluxe double bed for fifteen hundred a night. The man at the reception desk sent a bellboy to fetch the luggage.