‘Aren’t you tired?’ Amir asked, surprised. ‘Sit. Tell me.’
Without mentioning his friend’s name, Abhishek described what Mayank had shown him at the Pakistan High Commission at the end of their night tour.
‘It’s an excellent story.’ Amir nodded thoughtfully, then proceeded to describe to his attentive new recruit how it should be done.
Long after the reporter left, Amir remained sitting in his cabin.
A
rchana’s mobile rang at midnight. Babloo was, as a rule, punctual.
‘Tell me,’ he said. He did not like small talk on the phone and conversations were rare. He insisted that she use a new SIM card every time he called. She could never call him.
Archana spoke briefly about the evening with Imran, of the boy, and his return to the nightclub on the subsequent two nights. ‘The spotter said that on Saturday he went alone,’ she added.
‘Go next Friday. Not before. All else well?’ Babloo asked.
She wanted to tell him about other developments: the meeting with Salim Khan, the renting of the Mehrauli farmhouse, the progress on infiltrating the security team of the boy’s father and the house staff – and that she missed him. Knowing Babloo, she resisted. ‘All fine,’ she said instead, and the line went dead.
Archana liked interaction and hated the wait. In company, she was sparkling. Alone, she was listless. This, she knew, was to be one of those long-drawn-out games. She took out the previous night’s pizza and a beer from the fridge, and went out to the terrace. The neighbours next door were having a barbecue, and their laughter floated above the noise of traffic. Someone was singing a song, but Archana couldn’t catch the lyrics. She looked at the flower bed. The gardener had promised her a bloom of roses by March. She wouldn’t be here then, she thought. She sat on a chair and wrapped a shawl around her. The years in Singapore had made her susceptible to cold. And yet, once upon a time, a winter evening in Delhi had been among her favourite things.
8
A
t the Pakistan High Commission in Chanakyapuri, a policeman shoved Abhishek. ‘Back, back. Get back!’ Abhishek stepped away compliantly.
A man tried to say something to the cop, who waved his thick wooden stick at him: ‘Sit down. Keep sitting down!’
Abhishek had brought a blanket, which he now laid out on the dewy grass. He sat next to a family of five: three daughters, husband and wife. It was 3 a.m.; two hours more before they would be allowed to queue.
‘Where are you from?’ the father asked Abhishek.
‘Dilli. And you?’
‘We are from Chandigarh. Going to Lahore. My sister-in-law is getting married. Where are you going?’
‘Karachi,’ Abhishek replied. ‘My maternal family is from there. I am going on a short visit.’
‘Have you got a letter from them?’ the man asked, somewhat urgently. ‘I hear that you need a letter signed by the local municipal councillor.’ He rummaged through a large bag and extracted an envelope. ‘Do you know if this will work?’ He held the paper up to Abhishek who tried to read it by the light of his mobile phone. It was a short letter, written in the Urdu script.
‘Oh, I don’t know how to read this,’ he said apologetically.
The man, crestfallen, turned back to his wife and did not speak to Abhishek again.
For lack of anything better to do, the journalist lit his fourth cigarette. The street lights, insufficient against the winter fog, spread an eerie glow which threw indistinct shadows in every direction. People slept or just sat listlessly; some huddled together to keep warm.
He made a rough head count: nearly two hundred now – the crowd had doubled in an hour. Nine policemen ensured that no one stepped off the lawns or approached the counter situated at the back of the high commission.
Kabir Jain was crouching at a distance, his camera bag nowhere in sight. Amir had said that there was no one better at covert work than the chief photographer of the Express. ‘Don’t talk to or approach him,’ he had instructed Abhishek. ‘You are going alone.’ What the new reporter did not know was that Amir had also requested the senior cameraman to keep an eye on his ward.
The auto-rickshaws Abhishek had been told to expect emerged out of the thick fog, just before 5 a.m., like a juddering green and yellow cavalry, rounding the corner en masse, disgorging dozens of young men who immediately formed a queue in front of the counter. After their placid acceptance of the night’s incarceration, the men and women now jostled and fought each other to secure a place in queues that had already conspired to eliminate them. He slowly approached the crowd pleading with the men in uniform.
‘Those applying for a Pakistani visa are required to get coupons first,’ Mayank had explained two nights earlier. ‘They arrive in the middle of the night, hoping to queue early, but the counters open only at seven a.m. Look,’ Mayank had shown Abhishek, ‘they are being held in that field and won’t be let loose until five. By that time, hired men will have already formed a long queue.’ Only a limited number of coupons were issued each day. ‘Most of these people will be disappointed.’
Abhishek now observed a family that was trying to tell two cops that they had to leave for Lahore immediately. ‘Urgent, sir. Her father is dead,’ the man said, gesturing towards his wife.
‘Get in line,’ one policeman responded indifferently.
‘Maybe you will get lucky,’ said the other.
As the policemen turned enquiringly towards him, Abhishek knew that he looked different from most of the men and women gathered there.
‘Sir,’ he said deferentially, ‘I wanted to stand in the line. Up at the front.’
They pointed him to a tout standing next to the counter.
The man seemed to be in his early forties. Despite the cold, he wore no warm clothes, appearing perfectly at ease in his Michael Jackson T-shirt, jeans and fake Nike shoes. He was talking animatedly with his colleagues in front.
‘What?’ He turned to Abhishek, who repeated his request.
‘First eight places, three thousand rupees; next twelve, two thousand. Where do you want?’ he said.
‘And behind that?’ Abhishek asked.
‘There is nothing behind that. You never know how many coupons come. Sometimes they just give ten. You don’t want to come back again, do you?’ Those around him agreed in unison.
‘OK, I will take the one in front,’ Abhishek said, reaching for his wallet.
‘No-no,’ the man said hurriedly. ‘Not here. Come.’
Abhishek followed him away from the crowd.
‘The police, you know … they want all the money.’ The tout smiled. ‘Bhenchods, all of them. We do all the hard work; they take the cream. Nothing remains for us.’ He looked almost apologetic as he counted the money Abhishek gave him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and they shook hands.
‘Do you drive an auto?’ Abhishek asked.
‘No-no.’ The man was offended. ‘I get the boys together.’
Abhishek was quickly pushed into line as one of the hired men ducked out. Third now in the row and having paid his first bribe, he was acutely conscious of the eyes on him.
He spent the next hour productively, speaking to the paid place-keepers; men who found themselves in the same queue every morning. He tried to memorize the details. Gautam and Gaurav, standing in front of him, were brothers who lived in a south Delhi government colony. Their father was a peon in the Central government.
‘Doesn’t matter which one, bhai,’ Gaurav said, when Abhishek pushed gently for details. ‘All same to same, these departments.’
They too were working, had day jobs, the brothers said, but did not say more. They earned 300 rupees each from their queuing duties.
‘Not much,’ Gautam reflected, ‘but it pays for the cigarettes and beer.’
‘And where do you come from, bhai? Dilli?’ Gaurav asked.
Abhishek was beginning his prepared story when both the brothers and another paid queuer, who had been silently and sullenl
y chain-smoking behind him, were moved out. A couple and a single traveller took their places.
Fifty-year-old Hassan was from Amritsar. This was his eighth attempt to go to Pakistan to meet his grandparents, and it would be his final. ‘If not this time, no more. They both are ninety and will not live much longer.’ Every time he came for a visa, he said, the officers at the high commission created different demands. ‘I was even ready to bribe them. I paid agents. Still, nothing. This is the last time, then bas, it’s over.’
How could this happen in the middle of the city? How did the police get away with this? Right here, in one of the most protected parts of Delhi, the police illegally confined nearly two hundred people night after night. And no one knew about it? From the conversations around him, Abhishek figured that many applicants had travelled from outside the capital, and then come directly from railway and bus stations, having no money to spend on hotels or guest houses.
The cops started counting heads, working out their takings for the morning. It was time for Abhishek to leave. He told Hassan he had to pee. ‘I will be back in a minute,’ he said, and moved out before the man could reply.
At the end of the queue, he met the tout. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I have to pee. Can’t hold it any longer,’ Abhishek replied sheepishly.
The tout seemed annoyed. ‘It is not allowed. The police get very angry. Be quick. Just go behind the lane.’
Abhishek walked around the corner. And out of the tout’s line of vision, he broke into a run.
W
hen Amir walked in a little after 8 a.m., earlier than usual, he was surprised to find Abhishek dozing in a chair. ‘Hi. Good morning,’ he said. ‘You are early.’
‘Good morning, sir.’ Abhishek sat up. ‘I came straight from the assignment.’
‘Yes, of course.’ It had slipped Amir’s mind. ‘Went well?’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘Give me two minutes,’ Amir said, and went into his cabin.
When he had finished checking his emails, Amir asked Abhishek if he wanted to join him for breakfast.
‘Yes, sir.’ The boy’s pleasure was evident.
‘OK, let’s go. On the way you can tell me what happened.’ Amir grabbed his jacket and walked out.
‘Let’s go to the India Habitat Centre,’ he suggested as they sat in the car. ‘The American Diner there does a good breakfast. You must be hungry.’
Once past the busy ITO intersection, as the car turned right towards Mandi House, Amir asked, ‘So tell me. How did it go?’
Abhishek was careful not to omit details. He told Amir of the high-handed policemen, the exhausted men and women, the touts, and the auto-rickshaws packed with young men. He also tried, as much as possible, to recreate for his boss the scene of the winter night, the people pleading with the unembarrassed money-snatchers in uniform, and his own moral outrage at the whole atrocity. ‘It is a scandal, sir, that they get away with this. Something should be done.’ Abhishek looked at Amir who hadn’t spoken a word throughout.
‘Indeed something must be done,’ he finally said. ‘To start with, you will get a huge breakfast. Then we will plan the story. And tomorrow those cops will be suspended. Come.’
‘Remember one thing. Exclusives are fine,’ Amir said to Abhishek as they tucked into their scrambled eggs. ‘You get a story, like what you have today. No one else has it; so just by its exclusivity, it becomes noticed. But a good reporter is one who can stand out even with a routine story. Say a murder has taken place. Everyone goes; we all cover it. But only the Statesman reporter finds out that the victim made a final call at eight p.m. to so-and-so. That reporter and the report stand out from the rest. Do you understand?’
Abhishek nodded.
‘Your fire story yesterday. I liked how you described the scene, the television lights blazing down on the burnt bodies. It transported the reader to the place. That’s what you need to do; show them more than the camera can, through your words. Of the who, what, when and why, television has taken away the first three. All that remains is the why. And how,’ Amir said, pouring himself some coffee. ‘So keep asking yourself why. Why corruption, why murder, why theft – why, why, why, why? Make that the mantra.’
This time with Amir was an unexpected treat for Abhishek. The old reporter made up for his earlier aloofness with fabulous tales of his journalistic exploits. ‘If you think I am a monster, you should have met my boss, T.R. Wig.’ Amir smiled. ‘I remember a policeman telling me, “Our deputy inspector generals – the DIGs – are pretty fearsome. Then there are their seniors, the inspector generals – the IGs – who scare the shit out of us. But Wig. No one is more terrifying than the WIG.” Wig sahab knew the police beat extremely well. He was a tough taskmaster, but I learnt much from him. He taught me how to cover crime. The other beat I really liked was education.’
The stories poured forth. Amir had grown up in the north campus of Delhi University where both his parents were lecturers. ‘The police lines were nearby. As a kid, I used to play basketball with the young officers. By the time I became a journalist, several of them occupied senior positions. That was a tremendous advantage. And I also knew the higher-ups in the university because of my parents.’ He sipped his coffee thoughtfully. ‘I was familiar with those beats because I spent years on them. I understood the nuances, the rhythms. I could almost predict the fallout of particular incidents. But today, because of television, the profession has completely changed.’
‘You don’t like television, sir?’ Abhishek asked.
‘It makes us, as some British journalist said, “an Alzheimer nation”. We remember nothing of our past and we have no clue where we are going. Everything is now; you want everything immediately. Expertise is a dirty word today. I see youngsters’ CVs which say they have done ten beats in one year. How is that possible? And at the end of it, a twenty-three-year-old, who has never experienced anything in her life, gets to tell my mother about the world. And you know the silliest thing – my mother believes it.’ Amir shrugged and looked around for the waiter. ‘Need another coffee. I have a long day ahead.’
In his few weeks at the Express, Abhishek had already heard the jokes about Amir’s foray into television.
‘He sounded like a cross between a pompous headmaster and a flailing child,’ Divya Bhonsle, Amir’s deputy, had cruelly remarked during an office lunch. From the way everyone present had joined in the laughter, Abhishek figured that his boss’s misfortune in front of the camera provided an endless reservoir of amusement for the reporting team.
‘Earlier,’ Amir continued, once his mug had been refilled, ‘it took years to become a senior reporter. A special correspondent meant that you had done the hard graft, put years in. The other day a television reporter came to me at the club and gave me his card. It said “Senior Special Correspondent”. Never heard of a designation as fancy as that. And he was all of, thirty maybe? And these are the buggers who tell me about Delhi.’ Amir shook his head, partly in disgust and partly in amusement.
‘Do you like Delhi, sir?’ Abhishek asked, refilling his plate. He was ravenous.
‘I love Delhi. I could never live anywhere else. I love the winters of course, as everyone else does, but I even enjoy the summers. Hot summer afternoons here remind me of exotic places and stories, you know. I think it was your Bengali bard, Rabindranath Tagore, who said summer afternoons reminded him of Damascus and Samarkand. The thousand Arabian nights, he said, must have been conceived of in such baking afternoons. That’s Delhi in the summer – shit hot poetry.’
Abhishek looked up at Amir, astonished.
The older reporter laughed. ‘What, you think only Bengalis read poetry?’
‘No-no, not that, sir. I mean …’
‘You people think Tagore and culture is your exclusive property, no? I have read more Bengali novels than most of you Bongs have. Sunil Ganguly is one of my favourite writers. I’ve read quite a few of the classics too. Saratchandra and Bankim. Any
way, what do you think of Delhi?’
‘Delhi has no soul,’ Abhishek began and immediately realized he had said the wrong thing.
‘That is bullshit. It is only outsiders who say that. People who come to the city, but whose loyalties lie elsewhere,’ Amir glowered.
Abhishek kept quiet. Growing up in Benares, he had become well used to this allegation that he did not belong. He was called gaddar, the traitor, in school because his grandfather, whom he had never met, was an Englishman. In Kolkata, where he was born and first went to school, Abhishek had been called Anglo; not necessarily a term of abuse in a city where the fascination for its colonial past still lingered. The lonely eleven-year-old, attempting to cash in on his novelty in a new town, discovered that Benares and its resurgent Hinduism did not deal kindly with deviations.
There is no place crueller than a children’s playground. The older boys in school devised a torture for him: twenty questions, twenty rapid-fire questions. ‘Who is the president of America? Who is the president of the USSR,’ and then suddenly, ‘Who is the president of your country?’ If he paused, the chants would start: ‘Gaddar, gaddar!’
Seeing Abhishek go quiet, Amir back-pedalled. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘My ancestry is from Punjab. My parents came here as students. What I mean is, if you are a migratory bird, you don’t really care about the place you stay. The Punjabis came here after the Partition, but they were forced to; they are not really migratory. They are not original Dilliwallahs, but they came here to settle. Whereas with, say, the Biharis or the labourers from Uttar Pradesh, their loyalties lie back home. They don’t really care about Delhi like a person who is settled here. It’s just a place to earn money which goes back to their village or town where, sooner or later, they will follow. They teach their children the same. They change Delhi for the worse.’
Amir thought for a while. ‘Let me give you an example. Take your police friends for a moment. The commissioner comes from UP, and Uday is a Bihari. These people started coming in around the 1970s. And that’s when Delhi changed. Before 1980, there were hardly any shoot-outs or police encounters. People like Uday brought what they had seen in their towns – they brought the gun culture here. In the 1990s, when there was a spate of robberies and murders, the police claimed they were committed by first-time criminals with no prior record and therefore harder to catch. The truth is that one lot knew the other. They had gone to the same schools; they were from the same bloody place.’ Amir paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘I know I am being politically incorrect, but I am right. I know this city better than most. And now I need to pee.’
The Price You Pay Page 9