by Vikas Swarup
I would have quit my job, given Jaggu the thousand rupees and willingly conceded defeat, when a dramatic new development made me stay on. Asha, better known as Mrs Dinesh Pratap Bhusiya, developed the hots for me. One sticky afternoon, as I walked into her bedroom to deliver some toiletries, she caught me by the shirt, closed the door and began kissing me all over. Thus began our affair.
*
Servants are the most under-appreciated class of people in the world. They don't demand the affection or compassion of their employers. They only seek respect. Not for what they do, but for what they know. Just attend a gathering of servants in front of the Mother Dairy booth at six in the morning, and you'll hear more hot gossip and insider info than on Breaking News on TV. That is because servants see everything and hear everything, even though they may pretend to be as ignorant as cows. Their own lives are so tedious, they get their kicks from prying into their masters'. When the family is watching soap operas, the servants are watching the family. They catch little gestures and nuances which escape other members of the clan. They are the first to know that the boss is about to become insolvent, or the boss's daughter is going to need an abortion. They have the low-down on what really happens inside a family: who is bitching about whom, who is plotting against whom.
And beware a servant's revenge. There are so many elderly couples in Delhi whose throats have been slit by their Bihari cooks and Nepali guards. Why? Because the servants were driven to the limit by their employers. I, too, have taken my revenge on the Bhusiyas. Mr S. P. Bhusiya, the adulterator, for instance, has no clue that the chicken curry he has been eating at dinner time is also adulterated. I spit in it liberally before laying it on the table. And the elderly Mr Bhusiya, with his diminished sense of taste and smell, happily drank the vegetable soup which I had garnished with bird droppings, and even asked for a second helping!
But I received the biggest thrill of all from thumbing my nose at Mr D. P. Bhusiya. He pretended to be as tough as a bulldog, but his wife confided in me that in bed he was like a mouse, as useless as a camera without film. Bole toh, fully impotent. My affair with his wife lasted two months. The icing on the cake was that she even paid me after every 'performance'. So while Mr D. P. Bhusiya was at his brick kiln in Ghitorni, I would be in his bed with Asha, earning an extra hundred rupees.
I was in his bed this afternoon, when he happened to make an unscheduled visit to the house. It was exactly like they show in films. The husband returning home and opening the bedroom door and his jaw dropping on seeing his wife with another man – worse, his own servant.
'Whore!' he bellowed as I scrambled out of bed and ran into the en-suite bathroom where I had left my clothes. I heard a scuffle and the sound of Asha being slapped. Two minutes later the bathroom door was kicked open and Mr D. P. Bhusiya stepped in with a revolver in one hand and a bottle in the other.
'Now I shall sort you out, you bastard,' he hissed, and ordered me at gunpoint to come out.
He took me to the garage on the ground floor, backed me into a corner and forced me to drink the bottle of Ratkill 30. And that is where I now stand, counting the seconds till my death. A murder which will be presented as a suicide.
I look around the large garage, at the empty space marked by grease stains where Mr R. P. Bhusiya's silver Toyota Corolla will be parked this evening, at the stacks of cartons in the corner containing spices and pulses which Mr S. P. Bhusiya will proceed to adulterate, at the steel ladder, the half-empty plastic bottles of coolant and engine oil lying on the wooden shelf. I try not to think of Mother and Champi.
Mr D. P. Bhusiya is looking at his watch with a worried look. It has been twenty minutes since I polished off the bottle. The poison should have done its work by now. But instead of a creeping paralysis, my stomach is experiencing a bubbling effervescence, like you feel after drinking Coca Cola. Something is rising up in my throat. Seconds later, a jet of vomit shoots from my mouth and lands on Mr D. P. Bhusiya's white shirt.
He gets so flustered, the revolver slips from his hand. That is all the opening I need. I kick the gun away and dash out of the garage.
It is amazing what fear of death can do to the human body. I run like an Olympic champion, glancing back from time to time to see if Mr D. P. Bhusiya is following me.
As I near the temple, I marvel at my extraordinary luck. I had stared Death in the face and Death had blinked. But perhaps this is being too dramatic. By now I have figured out that my death would have been a fake one. As fake as the rat poison Mr D. P. Bhusiya must have obtained from his brother's store!
There is nothing fake about the smile on my face as I burst through the temple gates, see Champi sitting at her usual place on the bench beneath the gulmohar tree in the back garden and crush her in the biggest bear hug of my life.
'Arrey, what's the matter? You are acting as if you have won the lottery,' she laughs.
'You could say that. I have decided two things today, Champi.'
'What?'
'One, that I am never ever going to work as a servant again.'
'And the second?'
'That I am going back to my old profession. Stealing mobile phones. But don't tell Mother.'
There was a time when I actually liked my name. It was a hit with the girls in the locality, who considered it quite cute. And it was a considerable improvement on just plain Munna, which immediately brings to mind some lowly tea-boy or struggling car mechanic. Munna Mobile had a certain ring, a definite charm to it. That was when mobile phones were a high-society item. Now even the bloody washerman has one. What self-respecting youth would like to be called Munna Mobile today? They might as well call me Vodafone or Ericsson.
I acquired the moniker four years ago, after I filched my first mobile phone. I had taken it off a very fat lady who had driven to the temple in a white Opel Astra. She seemed to be in a big rush, the way she wheezed up the steps, as if she had fifty errands to finish that day. It happens. You are very busy. You just want to make a flying visit to God and in your confusion you forget minor details, like locking your car. And leaving your brand-new Sony Ericsson T100 on the driver's seat.
That was the first mobile I had ever touched. Before that I used to steal the shoes and slippers of devotees who were foolish enough to leave them at the bottom of the steps rather than give them for safekeeping to the old lady who charges a mere 50 paise per pair.
If truth be told, my exploits as a slipper thief were nothing to write home about. The pickings were slim, though I did manage a couple of pairs of almost brand-new Reeboks and Nikes. Had they not been in sizes nine and ten, I would have kept them for myself instead of selling them to the cobbler at one tenth of their price.
I took the fat lady's mobile to Delite Mobile Mart, the mobilephone shop just outside the temple. Madan, the owner, gave me two hundred rupees for it, ten times what I received for a used pair of slippers. That first mobile introduced me to a whole new world of SIM cards and PIN numbers. Bata shoes and Action sandals soon gave way to Nokias and Motorolas. That was when I formed a partnership with my best friend Lallan, realizing that stealing mobiles required much greater coordination and planning than stealing shoes. Our favourite targets were cars stopped at red lights with rolled-down windows and mobiles glinting on the dashboards. While Lallan would divert the driver's attention, I would creep up on the other side, snatch the phone from the dashboard and then run like mad through the meandering alleys and side roads that we knew like the back of our hands.
I have kept a record of each and every mobile phone we stole over a three-year period. The total came to ninety-nine. It was good while it lasted. It gave me enough to live a modest life, buy a few decent clothes, have flings with a couple of girls from the locality. The funny thing is, I didn't have to sell the girls any fake story about my being a medical rep or some shit like that. They got their thrills from hearing about my exploits as a mobile-phone thief. And a handset makes a much-sought-after present. A girl will let you touch her breasts for
a Motorola C650. She might even open her legs for a Nokia N93.
Not that I am too much into that sort of thing. The mohalla girls who work as maids and babysitters are just cheap lays. Dark and coarse, they are good only for fulfilling a physical need. What I really crave are the rich chicks, the memsahibs with their English accents and low-slung jeans. I admire their flawless complexions and fair skin. I gape in amazement at the sleek curve of their waists and the delicate bones of their made-up faces. I inhale the expensive perfume on their bodies, watch the seductive roll of their hips and feel dizzy. But I know they are good only for my dreams. For someone like me, they are almost as unattainable as Shabnam Saxena. Still, I was hopeful of at least ensnaring the middle-class daughter of a chief engineer who was a regular visitor to the temple, when my fledgling career as a mobile-phone thief was abruptly cut short by tragedy.
We had nicked a Samsung from a Mercedes stopped near Qutub Minar. I had managed my getaway with the mobile quite smoothly, but Lallan couldn't disappear fast enough. He was chased by the driver, nabbed and hauled up to the police station, where he was personally interrogated by Sub-Inspector Vijay Singh Yadav, known throughout the area as the Butcher of Mehrauli.
Lallan and I had grown up together. I lived with Mother in the temple premises; he stayed with his family in the sprawling Sanjay Gandhi slum just outside. We played football and cricket on the roadside, went to the same municipal school, which Lallan dropped out of in Class Six while I continued right through to Intermediate. He was my partner in everything, from hustling shoes from the temple to teasing the neighbourhood girls. I called him my best friend, but in reality he was closer than a brother to me. A lesser person would have blurted out the truth when confronted by the Butcher of Mehrauli, but Lallan stuck to his code of loyalty, adamantly refusing to confess.
What happened subsequently in the police lock-up is a dark memory which still gives me nightmares. Lallan was stripped, strung up by a rope, and then kicked, caned and flogged for three consecutive nights while his aged father pleaded and begged and cried and grovelled in front of the police station. But Lallan still refused to squeal on me.
On the fourth day, he disappeared. The police claimed they had released him. We searched for him everywhere, even as far afield as AIIMS and Saket, but found no clue to his whereabouts.
We discovered his bloated, mangled body three days later, lying in a shallow ditch near Andheria Bagh. Flies were buzzing over the sores on his chest and maggots were crawling out of his pus-filled eyes as though he was a common slum dog.
Lallan's death was my wake-up call. It brought home to me the stark fact that I couldn't even take life for granted. So I gave up stealing mobile phones and resolved to make something of myself. But what you make of your life is a function of who you are. If I had a family pedigree and political connections, my university degree would have landed me a cushy job in some air-conditioned office, or at least made me a peon in a government department. But when your mother is a lowly sweeper earning 1,200 rupees per month and you are an ex-thief, your career options are limited. For a brief while I worked as a book-keeper at a grocery store, then as fleet supervisor at a transport company, and finally as a servant for the Bhusiyas. I was a failure in all three. The easy life as a mobilephone thief had spoiled me. I couldn't see myself counting cartons, sniffing diesel or serving tea for a living.
So I have decided to go back to the only job I do well – stealing mobiles.
Stealing a mobile phone is not as easy as it seems. It really is a fine art. Just as a pickpocket takes your wallet from right under your nose, the mobile thief makes away with your phone. Far from a crude snatch-and-grab operation, it is more like a disappearance trick, a sleight of hand. One moment you have the mobile in front of you and the next moment it is gone. Like magic.
It is also an art which you never lose. A cricketer can be off form, but not a thief. I know it is only a question of time before I nick another mobile and score a century.
Today is 26 January, Republic Day. And I am hiding behind the HP petrol pump on the Mehrauli–Badarpur Road and breathing heavily. I have just stolen my first mobile phone in a year.
I had gone to visit a friend who lives in the tenements behind the Star Multiplex and was walking back to the bus stop. It was late evening and the neon lights of the street lamps were shrouded in the hazy glow of winter. While I was waiting at a red light, rubbing my hands to keep them warm, a red Maruti Esteem pulled up in front of me. The driver was a wiry man with curly hair and a square jaw. What struck me about him was the way he gripped the steering wheel, as if it would come unstuck any minute. In the peak of winter he was sweating like a pig. The man radiated tension like a blower radiates heat. There was a mobile phone on the dashboard and the window was open halfway. Pure habit took over from there. Just as the light changed to green, my hand darted inside with the speed of a bullet. The driver stared ahead unblinkingly, his knuckles turning white. He engaged the gear and the car surged forward, leaving me standing on the pavement with a very stylish mobile phone in my hands. It was a brand-new Nokia E61, so new that the cellophane had not even been removed from the display window. I knew it would fetch me a lot of money on the black market.
I think a woman in a Ford Ikon immediately behind the Esteem saw me take the mobile. She glared at me as she drove past. Before she could raise the alarm, I decamped from the scene, criss-crossing streets for almost two kilometres till I reached the safety of the petrol pump.
As I stand under the grey awning, panting from exertion, the stolen mobile rings. The caller ID says 'Private number'.
I am not sure what to do. Mechanically I press the green 'talk' button.
'Hello, Brijesh? I am going to give you the pick-up location. Are you listening?'
It is a harsh, guttural voice. A voice with authority. A voice which cannot be ignored. Which has to be answered.
'Yes,' I say in an equally guttural voice. A monosyllabic answer which reveals nothing about the person answering.
'Go to the alley next to Goenka Public School on Ramoji Road. The maal has been left in a black briefcase inside the municipal dustbin. Collect it within the next half-hour. OK?'
'Haan,' I say again.
'Good. We shall talk again after your pick-up. Bye.'
Maal. The word keeps ringing inside my brain like an alarm clock. Maal can mean any number of things. Literally, it means 'goods'. In old Hindi films, gangsters used to refer to contraband consignments of drugs and bullion as maal which would be offloaded from ships on Mumbai's Versova Beach. A beautiful girl is also maal, but unlikely to be packed inside a briefcase. For that matter, even groceries from a provision store can be maal. There is only one thing to do. I have to find out what the maal is.
I try and get my bearings. Ramoji Road is just a five-minute drive from the petrol pump, twenty minutes on foot. I walk.
The Goenka Public School is one of the premier private schools in Mehrauli. In the morning when the children begin their classes and in the afternoon when they leave, there is a mini traffic jam in the area, caused by all the cars of the rich businessmen whose children study here. However, at eight p.m. it is completely deserted. Only a couple of guards stand in front of its imposing gates, warming their hands over a fire. I pass the school and enter the narrow alley. It is deserted. I find the dustbin almost immediately. It stands unobtrusively at the back of the alley, illuminated by the yellow glare of a lamppost. There is a dog sleeping next to it. 'Shoo!' I say and the dog pricks up his ears and slinks off into the shadows. I push open the lid of the bin to find it brimming with rubbish. I feel around with my hand but my fingers scrape only bulging plastic bags, glass bottles and metal cans. So I begin emptying the bin, removing the plastic bags and stacking them up against the side. The stench of rotting food makes me gag. The dank recesses of the dustbin yield various kinds of rubbish, even a few soiled nappies and a broken transistor. And at the very bottom is a briefcase, wrapped in a white plastic sheet. I h
ave to lean right in to pull it out. It is an expensive black VIP attaché case with a hard top. I rip off the plastic sheet, and press the two side latches. The briefcase clicks open and my eyes are dazzled by stacks of thousand-rupee notes lining the inside. It looks like a lottery advertisement. How could I forget that cash is the ultimate maal! I hastily close the briefcase. I do not need to count the wads of notes to know that it contains more money than I have seen in my life.
I take a good look around. Not a soul appears to be in the vicinity. I put all the plastic bags back into the bin. As I am about to leave, the stolen mobile trills again. Its incessant ringing almost paralyses me. With trembling fingers I switch it off and push it deep inside the dustbin. Then, with my heart thumping madly, I pick up the briefcase and hasten towards the main road.
6
The Politician
'Hello. Is this the Spiritual Meditation Centre in Mathura?'
'Yes.'
'Is Swami Haridas there? Bhaiyyaji wants to speak to him.'
'Bhaiyyaji? Who is Bhaiyyaji?'
'Are you new there? Don't you know that there is only one leader in Uttar Pradesh who is addressed as Bhaiyyaji and that is Home Minister Jagannath Rai.'
'Oh! Home Minister Sahib? But Guruji is in the middle of his discourse. We cannot disturb him.'
'Tell him it is urgent. He never refuses Bhaiyyaji's call.'
'OK. Please hold on. I am going to the lecture hall.' (Pause.)
'I am passing the line to Guruji. Please put Home Minister Sahib on the line.' Beep. Beep. Beep.
'Namaskar Guruji. This is Jagannath.'
'Jai Shambhu! What is the big emergency, Jagannath, that you forced me to interrupt my discourse?'
'Guruji, there has been a disturbing development. I need to consult you urgently.'
'Is it about Vicky? His case is coming up for a verdict, isn't it?'
'No, Guruji. I have managed Vicky's case. I am more worried about the case against me.'