But Babloo was in no mood for flirtatiousness. ‘You’ll fuck him when and if there is a need. In fact, if required, you will fuck the whole city. But for now keep your mouth shut.’
Babloo was always under-confident and therefore thorough, but Archana had rarely seen him so edgy. More must be riding on this kidnapping than he was letting on, she thought. But she didn’t doubt his loyalty – if she was not being told something, there must be a good reason.
Archana first met Babloo as a nineteen-year-old in Mumbai where she was bedding third-rate directors and a few first-rate ones too, hoping to land a role. Babloo quickly showed her how equations could change. ‘If you had a dick,’ he told her, ‘they would all be sucking on it now.’ Archana had laughed, delirious to be on the other side of power.
Mobster flopped despite all Babloo’s interventions. He had ensured that no other releases took place the week her film hit the cinemas, that every big-billed actor turned up for the launch party, that only friendly reviews made it to print. The only thing Babloo couldn’t guarantee was public appreciation. Archana decided to move on.
When she first came to Babloo, he was living in an apartment near Colaba, not very far from the Mumbai Police headquarters. Archana had been surprised at his willingness to take her on and become her mentor.
On their first night together, Babloo had explained his life and its rules: ‘You think everyone is afraid of me, don’t you? You are wrong. I am afraid of everyone, everything – the man guarding the door, the maid who comes each morning, the newspaper boy … even you. The thing I won’t be afraid of – that will be the thing which will kill me.’ He told her about his fearless brother. ‘He had his eyes gouged out. Hands chopped off. I think of him when I get brave.’
Babloo showed Archana two large suitcases filled with five-hundred-rupee notes. ‘Real ones,’ he affirmed. ‘What do I do with this money? How much can one spend? Can’t keep it in the bank. Can’t do anything.’
Archana was astonished. She could count a hundred ways to spend it.
Over the years, Babloo taught her discretion and fear. In return, she provided companionship and a fiercely loyal friendship that quickly spiralled into love.
Archana came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and checked her phone. There were two missed calls from Amit. No doubt he wanted to know the time and place. For that he would have to wait a little longer.
Archana’s daytime wardrobe was designed not to attract attention. She dressed quickly, without fretting over details. Every weekday she left the house by 9 a.m. and returned just after 6 p.m., establishing a work routine. She was reacquainting herself with Delhi, visiting places she knew during her college years and discovering the recent changes. She went to markets, visited cinemas, checked out restaurants, museums and galleries. Sometimes, like today, she would spend time in one of the larger public parks, but she never went to the same place twice. She tipped reasonably at restaurants and was careful not to draw attention. Babloo had to struggle over this: her proclivity to flirtation had to be almost surgically removed.
Archana went into the kitchen to prepare a light breakfast. Imran would wake up in a while. He left the house an hour after her, once the maid had come and gone. They had insisted she come no earlier, as their separate sleeping arrangements would have invited suspicion. Archana did not mind Imran. He had proven to be unobtrusive. She was not disinclined, she thought smiling, to another fuck.
‘W
here are all the bloody tea stalls?’ Amir muttered, scanning the strip of smart new shops that had replaced his favourite gossip centres. ‘I don’t want fucking Uncle Chipps in the morning.’
The Inter State Bus Terminus was unrecognizable. Like the railway stations and airports, it had been given a facelift. The filth and grime, low-end drugs, cheap food and book stalls that sold paperback porn along with newspapers had been ousted in favour of coffee chains and sandwich outlets.
It was eight o’clock on a December morning and already the place seemed close to bursting. Rows of empty buses stood with their engines running, belching out fumes. People rushed to and from ticket counters and crammed into disorderly queues. Drivers and conductors shouted for passengers to clamber on board. And vehicles rolled in from provincial hinterlands, disgorging bleary-eyed workers ready to begin their day’s mission to keep the capital functioning.
Amir had little patience or curiosity for the human drama that was unfolding around him. It was bitterly cold and foggy, his head hurt, and Mihir Ghosh was quitting. And it was his birthday.
‘Bloody hell,’ Amir shouted, finding the toilet doors locked. He accosted a man who was sweeping the floor. ‘Why are these closed?’
‘New toilets. The people dirty them. So the manager keeps them locked.’
‘Where the fuck do I piss then?’
‘Go around the back,’ the man said nonchalantly. ‘Against the wall there.’
Amir stomped off. He finally found everything he needed: the designated pissing wall and, next to it, a man with a stove burner selling tea.
‘I don’t want a plastic cup,’ he told the chaiwallah.
The man nodded, producing a glass from under his seat and filling it from the bubbling saucepan on the stove.
‘No, no, make a fresh one. Put more leaves and just one spoon of sugar. Very little milk,’ Amir ordered.
The chaiwallah looked up at him, thought of saying something, and then decided against it. He took out a new pot, poured some water from a jerry can, and put it over the flame.
Too much fucking rum last night, Amir groaned inwardly, as he sat on a bench. He had not intended to get drunk; no, it was to be a regular night like any other, and then Shobha had called. She always did this; call the day before his birthday. ‘I want to be the first,’ she used to say in happier times. These days he wished she wouldn’t bother at all.
So, Mihir-da was leaving. Amir had seen it coming. The management had been after him for a while now, and the issue of annual increments had been used to accelerate the showdown. Mihir-da’s recommendations were in most cases rejected, and his journalists would not see any substantial pay hikes. The paper’s declining fortune and the financial crisis were the stated reasons, but the hefty raises for corporate employees over the journalists told Mihir Ghosh that he was being snubbed and his authority undermined.
‘The stand-off is between the management and me. The journalists will suffer if I don’t go,’ he informed Amir during an afternoon chat in his office. ‘Just giving you an early heads-up. You must do what is right for you.’
Amir had nodded dejectedly. Mihir-da was thinking of moving back to his sphere of specialization, economic reporting, and joining a business paper. Senior editors, when changing jobs, usually brought their own core team with them; loyal journalists whom they could trust. But there would not be place for a city reporter in this move. Mihir Ghosh was telling Amir that they were parting ways.
Amir did not expect anything from the annual increment. The money did not bother him. His needs were few. He stayed in his mother’s house, had no dependants and hated travel. The club bills would not break the bank. Publishers sent him the books he wanted and his nieces sent him compilation CDs, which was the only music he listened to.
No, money was not the issue. It was the ignominy that bothered him. The CEO knew that, unlike other journalists, Amir Akhtar had no place left to run. He had worked in almost every mainstream newspaper in the city and while a few might still take him back, there would be no improvement in his salary or position.
Amir rarely indulged in regret or self-pity. There were very few things he would have done differently in his career, except perhaps that disastrous dalliance with television. He had no illusions about his own talent. In fact, as he constantly reminded his colleagues, journalism required little, and most journalists had none. ‘Engineers need expertise, doctors need to know their craft, even plumbers. We just need a fucking social science degree and it’s licence to throw muck at an
yone,’ he used to say.
Amir had defied this lack of talent through doggedness. He did not understand news convergence, could not design a page to save his life, and felt no empathy for youngsters whose CVs boasted an ability to produce a paper from scratch. He was a reporter first and today, he was being told, he was a reporter lost. He could leave; the paper would not care.
The tea came. Amir gratefully took the first sip. ‘Ah, excellent,’ he complimented the chaiwallah. It was almost half past eight now. Where was that idiot Matera? He thought of calling and then decided to give it another few minutes.
Finishing the tea in two long slurps, and getting up to stretch, Amir asked for another. No, this moping would not do, he told himself. There was work to be done. It did not matter how his job was going, who got what increments; he was still the chief reporter of a newspaper. And he had Babloo Shankar to contend with.
Amir thought about Abhishek. The boy had simply vanished yesterday. Repeated phone calls had gone unanswered and apart from that one text, he had heard nothing. Mihir-da had wanted to inform the police but Amir had resisted, though he had asked the night reporter to check for accidents and casualties. Reporters, the good ones, should disappear once in a while.
The sun broke through the fog and Amir could make out the city’s skyline. The three new flyovers, now roaring overhead, had done nothing to ease the traffic. Several buses, each unrelenting, blocked the entrance to the terminus. The conductors jumped out of their vehicles and traded insults as they tried to guide their drivers.
Amir recalled Samuel Pereira, the deputy commissioner for traffic, telling him that every day one thousand new private cars joined the seventy varieties of vehicles choking Delhi. ‘Buses, cars, two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts and push carts. You want to make this city a Shanghai or a Hong Kong? It’s a joke,’ Samuel had ranted. ‘Every bullock cart comes with its own fucking union and a politician to defend it. You need a firing squad, not traffic minders.’
Matera crept up beside Amir, startling him. ‘Sorry sir, my bike had a puncture.’
‘Stop lying.’ Amir laughed, feeling better after the tea. ‘You are behaving like my reporters. Except they come up with better excuses.’
Matera grinned.
‘Listen,’ Amir said, making space on the bench, ‘you have to come with me to meet a few policemen.’ Seeing Matera’s dismayed look, he added reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry. I will be there with you. This might even help you to get to know some of the big bosses, after all those two-bit constables you spend your time with.’
The young man didn’t complain. Amir had kept the police off him on several occasions over the years and if he was needed now, he did not have much choice. ‘Whom will we meet?’ he enquired.
‘Uday Kumar.’
‘Really?’ Matera brightened visibly, imagining the stories he would have for his colleagues.
‘What’s happening with your boss? Any news?’ Amir changed the subject.
‘Not much. I haven’t seen that car or the woman again. Only news is, Salim Bhai has asked Dilshan – he works with me – to join some security agency for a while. Bhai said he is arranging everything.’
‘Do you know which agency?’
‘I can’t remember the name but I can find out.’
‘Do that. It’s very important,’ Amir said, getting up. ‘Now let’s go. We’ll talk more on the way. Come in my car. You can pick up your bike later.’ He could barely contain his excitement.
‘H
ow can you hold this newspaper to your personal embargo? What gives you the right to go for a story and then not write it?’ Mihir Ghosh was livid.
Abhishek, as requested by Uday, had withheld the police-rescue story. The Asian Metro had published it, though with few operational details. Earlier this morning at the meeting, when the editor asked how the story had been missed, Abhishek had proudly announced that he had been part of the police team and the story lacked meat.
‘I can’t believe this,’ Mihir continued, shaking his head. ‘You go for a story, you get it and then because a policeman asks, you don’t do it? Whom do you work for? Delhi Police or the Express?’
Abhishek could sense the silent euphoria of the other reporters in the room. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said as contritely as possible.
‘Sorry doesn’t help, Abhishek. And remember this: You are only as good as your last story.’
Amir said nothing throughout the exchange. Normally he defended his reporters in front of the bosses or took the blame, but today his feelings were ambivalent. Part of him wanted Abhishek to get a dressing-down. But he couldn’t quite dismiss the thought that he would have done exactly the same as the boy had. Protecting sources and respecting confidence were paramount. He knew that Mihir-da as a journalist thought the same, but as an editor, the newspaper was his priority.
He decided that he would have a chat with Abhishek later, but right now, let him face the music. Amir wanted to see if he handled criticism as well as he soaked up appreciation. He noticed the smirks on the faces of his reporters. At least some people were enjoying themselves.
‘Abhishek, can you come into my office for a moment?’ Amir said as they filed out of the morning meeting.
The reporter, looking a bit dazed, said, ‘I have a lunch with the police commissioner, sir.’
‘At the police headquarters? I have a meeting there as well. Give me five minutes and we’ll talk on the way.’
As they descended the stairs of the office building, Amir asked Abhishek, ‘Why did you not tell me where you were?’
‘Uday Kumar told me not to.’
‘You must work out your loyalties, Abhishek. Neither Uday Kumar nor any of your other policemen will give you the time of day if you weren’t a journalist. Your new friends will vanish overnight. They are friends with the correspondent of the Express – not you.’
Abhishek quelled a sense of self-righteous anger. The morning scolding had come as a shock. He had been disappointed to see the story in another newspaper, but he had done his best given the circumstances. He had expected something of a hero’s welcome. After all, a boy’s life had been saved and he had played a major part in it. Instead, he found that no one, not even Maya and Rahul, gave a damn. ‘They are behaving as if they go up Mount Everest to shit each morning,’ he had thought, looking at the almost bored faces of his colleagues as he had related his experiences.
‘So how can we retrieve this story?’ Amir asked as they stepped onto the street.
Abhishek thought for a moment. ‘Today they’ll have the press conference, and most newspapers will focus on the police operation. I have an interview with the victim which we could carry as an exclusive. And I think we should present the story in the context of kidnappings in India. It has become a very lucrative business, and this one was a copycat crime. I did some research last night after getting home. This year there have been three thousand kidnappings in Delhi – more than double last year’s figures. I was planning to ask the commissioner some questions during lunch.’
Amir had to stop himself from slapping Abhishek on the back with delight. Instead, he said, ‘Fine. I’ll ask someone from the business desk to provide inputs on Delhi’s economic growth, and we can link that to the rise in kidnappings. Why didn’t you tell Mihir-da about the exclusive with the boy?’
‘I was wishing I hadn’t opened my mouth at all, sir. Landed me in enough trouble.’
‘You’ll get used to it. Can’t expect to be praised all the time.’
They grinned at each other and walked in silence for a moment until Abhishek spoke again: ‘I’ve got another story, Amir sir.’
He told Amir about the faulty transformers which threatened sites all over the city. He did not reveal his source nor did his boss ask.
‘I think this is front-page. Scandalous,’ Amir shook his head in astonishment. ‘So the kidnap interview can go as the headline on the city page and this story on the front. Fuck me, this is b
ig. I will tell Mihir-da as soon as I get back. What time do you return?’
‘As soon as the press conference finishes, sir, at about five o’clock.’
A few reporters were already present at the PRO office when the two men entered. Vikram jumped out of his chair and rushed across the table to shake Amir’s hand. ‘Good fortune on my office, Amir sahab, you are here.’
Amir, bowed slightly, amused. ‘Singh sahab, how are you? Yes, it has been a while.’
‘Please come, sit, sit.’ The policeman ushered him to the sofa.
Abhishek noted that the other crime reporters stood up to greet his boss. This was only the second time that he had witnessed Amir in a situation outside the office. Vikram was loudly introducing his ‘great friend Amir Akhtar’ to two newcomers.
‘Shakti Bhai!’ Amir grabbed the hand of the journalist who had admonished Abhishek the other day. ‘How are you? I hear you’ve been giving my reporter a hard time about news ethics? You don’t think an interview with a deranged murderer is a scoop?’
Abhishek was shocked at how Amir could have known; he certainly hadn’t mentioned it. Shakti squirmed, his usual bravado gone.
‘Cigarette?’ Vikram plonked himself beside Amir on the sofa.
‘Isn’t smoking banned in government buildings?’ Amir raised an eyebrow at the eager-to-please policeman.
‘Absolutely. But those are new rules. For old-timers, old rules.’
‘I have to reinvent myself to the new times or I’ll become obsolete. Given up smoking.’
‘Amir, okay, I will have to take your boy to the commissioner’s office,’ Vikram said, getting up. ‘Do you want to join him? I’m sure boss will be delighted.’
‘No, no. You go ahead. I have another meeting.’
As they climbed the stairs to the first floor, Vikram probed Abhishek, ‘So, did you get a good story from Rohit Bansal the other day? I don’t think I saw anything …’
‘Yes, it’s probably scheduled for tomorrow,’ Abhishek replied evasively.
A
mir had not been to the Delhi Police press office for a while. Almost three years, he thought to himself, as he settled back in the sofa and listened to the conversations around him. Despite the new faces, the stories remained the same. A young man was relating how an inspector had come to his residence, pleading with him not to do a particular report. ‘I took pity on him when he said he had three daughters to marry off,’ the journalist bragged.
The Price You Pay Page 16