Delhi Noir (17 page)
“Is that the problem?” Jishnu da replied indifferently. “Rest assured he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him here for weeks. Actually, no, come to think of it, he did come here with a Sardarni a couple of weeks back but she was very friendly with him. Couldn’t have kidnapped her. Probably some other Sardarni, not your wife.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned.
Unable to contain his rage, the Sardar slapped Jishnu da, who in turn latched onto the Sardar’s luxuriant beard with all his strength. Farid Ashraf and Ramanuj Ghosh, who had been standing behind Jishnu da, joined the fray along with the other Sardars. There was a lot of wild shouting and murderous threats but very little actual violence.
“I’m telling you,” Jishnu da shouted, still hanging onto the Sardar, “Uncle is not here screwing your wife! If you don’t go away, all twenty-five boys I have upstairs will come down and break your asses.” He then called to the only boy upstairs, looking down from a balcony, “Tell Panday and Mumtaz to get the kattas.”
The Sardars, confused by all the bluster, slowly retreated. After the van had backed out of the lane, Farid and Ra-manuj almost collapsed with relief at the doorway. Jishnu da wiped sweat from his armpits with his towel and then dramatically tied it around his head like a peasant and lit a Navy Cut.
“Boss, what were you trying to do, get us killed?” Farid Ashraf inquired after a while.
“Never under any circumstance back down in a fight or have a dialogue or compromise. No fight lasts more than five minutes. Remember that always. Never try to have a rational conversation with anyone who is trying to fuck you. He will then fuck you. But if you call him a motherfucker and offer to cut his throat, he will respect you. When you say those words you must mean them from the bottom of your heart. Just like in the song.”
Farid and Ramanuj looked at Jishnu da with profound incomprehension but nodded their heads in agreement.
“Both of you did good.” Jishnu da passed the Navy Cut to Ramanuj. He then went upstairs and opened his locked room. Just as he triumphantly pushed open the door, a deafening roar erupted from inside the room. Zorawar Singh had opened fire from the Mauser 80 that he always carried in his trouser pocket. Though the bullet just grazed his hair, Jishnu da fainted and collapsed to the floor.
A close bond was forged that day between Zorawar Singh and Jishnu da, which continues unabated to the present times. From that day onwards, Jishnu da had lived rent-free at Sho-keen Niwas and was given carte blanche as to the running of the place, the vetting of tenants, the collection of rents. He was the hostel president for life, so to say.
“Uncle has just one condition. The boys should be primarily Biharis. He seems to think that we are just like Gujjars. Tough and callous. No need to contradict him. So never under any circumstance prove yourself to be otherwise. Be tough, stupid, and callous always. Once in a while a Matador will come and you two will have to accompany the rest of us to some colony somewhere in Delhi where you just stand outside the van for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes or whatever. Usually a property dispute somewhere. Nothing major. It’s just a show of strength, then you can go home.”
This was one of many things that Jishnu da had told Pran-jal and me during our first week at Shokeen Niwas, and I had solemnly promised him that we would do him proud.
After he finished his story about the Sardars and their swords, Jishnu da took us out to the balcony, where a hideous framed painting was hanging on the wall that showed Hanu-manji on one knee baring his heart with both hands to reveal embedded images of Lord Ram and Sita. Pranjal and I both thought that Jishnu da was going to ask us to seek Hanuman-ji’s blessing as another rite of initiation into the rarefied world of Shokeen Niwas. But no.
Jisnhu da simply removed the painting from the wall and showed us the round smooth hole made by that Mauser bullet. The bullet itself could be touched by wriggling in one’s little finger.
“It is just like a chut, it gets bigger as you go deeper,” Jishnu da said philosophically as he filled ganja into an empty Navy Cut cylinder.
It was whispered among the boys of Shokeen Niwas, usually the senior ones like Jishnu da, that at the age of twenty-five Zorawar had committed his first murder. He was then a student of Satyawati College in Ashok Vihar and in the evenings he would visit Kamala Nagar from Chandrawal, where he lived with his widowed mother.
One day while having tea near Hans Raj College, he saw a very pretty girl come out of the mandir across the street. (It was the same mandir where every Tuesday Jishnu da and Ra-manuj Ghosh would go to offer their prayers. Ramanuj always carried a large cotton check-towel draped around his neck and the joke was that after offering prayers at the mandir, he would come outside, wrap the towel like a shroud around himself, and sit with the beggars lining the boundary walls. Come to think of it, he always did pay for his share of the Old Monk khamba with twenty-five and fifty-paise coins.) Zorawar, totally smitten, left his friends and followed the girl home. I like to imagine that Zorawar was perhaps intrigued by her bare feet, the delicate arch of her ankle partly uncovered at the bottom of her petticoat. He did this every day for fifteen days. The girl had noticed him and once or twice while coming out of the mandir had smiled at him. On the sixteenth day, just as she unlocked the latch of the front gate, Zorawar caught hold of her from behind and, slowly tilting her head, kissed her full on the lips.
“I am married,” she is said to have whispered to him. “I know,” Zorawar replied before parting her lips with his tongue again. The girl’s name was Sunita Khandelwal and her husband worked as a lower division clerk in the Shakti Nagar branch of the Punjab National Bank.
I visualize Sunita as short and delicately built, in American georgette and leheriya-print sarees, with straight hair and the pallu wrapped tight around both shoulders, like many bania girls before the fat finally catches up with them.
Each afternoon after lunch, when Suresh Khandelwal returned to his bank, Zorawar would join Sunita in her marital bed. After a couple of months of this, Suresh comes home early one evening and his fourteen-year-old saali, Lado, lets him in and leads him straight to the bedroom, where he catches his wife sucking Zorawar’s cock. Such is their passion that they continue with their lovemaking even though poor Suresh is right there, one foot on the wooden choukhat, poised to enter his own bedroom, watching his young wife’s mouth fill with semen. Zorawar takes a hand towel and wipes the edges of Sunita’s mouth, all the time smiling at Suresh Khandelwal. A mild-mannered man, Suresh then turns, retraces his steps to the front door, and carrying his rexine-lined briefcase walks off into the sunset. The next afternoon his body, cut in half by a freight train, is found near the Sarai Rohilla station. Suresh’s father and younger brother arrive from Sikar to arrange his funeral. Within a month Zorawar moves in with Sunita. A couple of neighbors who object have their faces rearranged and their windows broken. No one complains to the police. Zorawar Singh Shokeen settles in. He loves the house. Sure beats his narrow two-room heat-trap of a hovel in Chandrawal. He enjoys the old-style expansiveness of the courtyard and the high-ceilinged rooms on three floors that surround it. He especially loves the dark-red flooring from which intricate patterns made with bits of broken china float up.
A true bhumihar if ever there was one, Jishnu da described Zorawar’s love for his new acquisition, his joy at being finally a man of property, with great detail. From the top of the terrace Zorawar can see all of North Campus and the areas adjoining it. Kirori Mal and Hans Raj College at a stone’s throw; beyond looms the dense kikar-encrusted Delhi Ridge, Bara Hindu Rao, Hindu College, St. Stephen’s, and the back gate of Miranda House. The teeming Bungalow Road is just outside the lane, with its bookshops, cafés, juice corners, and glittering shops catering to all the needs of students who come to the university from faraway places and bring to it their own tribal customs and rituals. If Zorawar turns his head he can see Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, Amba Cinema Hall, and, finally, Malka Ganj, where Mrs. Midha, his future paramour, lives with her homeopath husband and thirteen-year-old daughter who bears a striking resemblance to the Bollywood starlet Divya Bharti, complete with round apple-fed cheeks and rounder tits. If he strains his eyes he can also see the vast spread of Chandrawal. But try as he might, he can’t locate his own house where his mother still lives. It is too small. Too insignificant.
Six months pass. For Sunita it is a blissful time. A period of full sexual awakening. She never realized the amount of pleasure that can be had from the male body, to say nothing of her own. She constantly surprises herself. She forever wants to keep looking at Zorawar, keep touching him, have him three or four times a day, anywhere, anytime, if he is willing. “Uncle is a heavy choder,” Jishnu da explained. Sunita can’t have enough of her Zorawar. She doesn’t care for household chores anymore, nor for the views of her neighbors. She realizes that Zorawar is a criminal of some kind but she can’t care less. She would gladly give up a hundred Suresh Khandelwals for one Zorawar Singh Shokeen, every time. Meanwhile, it is Lado who cooks and takes up housekeeping. She stops going to school and Sunita and Zorawar do not force her to. Lado has always hated school and for her, too, this is a time of liberation. Sunita and Lado have money of their own, provided by their father, who was a prosperous Kamala Nagar cloth merchant before his death. Their mother had died during Lado’s birth. It is Sunita who has brought Lado up like a daughter, and now Lado at fourteen has finally come of age.
One night around 3 a.m. Sunita wakes up languorously, wants to curl up into her gorgeous Zorawar, but there is no Zorawar anywhere. Her bed is empty. Mildly alarmed, she pulls on her black kaftan and leaves her bedroom to look for him.
“Black kaftan? How do you know it was black?” I interrupted Jishnu da’s narrative flow but he didn’t mind.
“Would you rather it was pink, Hriday?” Jishnu da lit a Navy Cut spiked with prime Bhagalpuri ganja and carried on. Stepping outside her room in her black kaftan, Sunita finds the door to Lado’s room ajar. Even before she enters the room she knows in her heart what she will find there. Her fate is sealed. She can turn back, return to her room, pull off her black kaftan, and wait for Zorawar to slip back beside her and all will be fine. But she does not do that. Mesmerized by fear and loathing, Sunita walks into her sister’s bedroom and is assailed by the very scene that led Suresh Khandelwal to kill himself. With a slight role reversal: This time, Zorawar is between the girl’s legs.
Sunita screams, rants, and tells Zorawar to clear out of her house. Right then, in the middle of the night. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she runs to her bedroom and bolts the door.
Her charred-to-the-bone body, to which flesh still clings in spots like sludge, is recovered by the police the next morning. The entire room reeks of kerosene for years afterwards.
“If you inhale deeply, you can still smell Sunita off the walls,” Jishnu da said, and took a deep breath.
It is true, the room had a funny smell that no amount of distemper and room freshener could do away with. The room which was once the pride and joy of Sunita Khandelwal was now mine and Pranjal’s for the rent of 900 rupees a month.
Within a month of Sunita’s death, Zorawar married the fourteen-year-old Lado and the house was finally his. He named it quite expectedly Shokeen Niwas. He was finally a man of property. Full and proper.
About seven years back, Zorawar moved out of Shokeen Niwas with Lado and his two daughters, Goldy and Shiny, to a plusher house in West Patel Nagar that he had captured from a Sikh major in the aftermath of the 1984 riots. He then converted Shokeen Niwas into a student lodge. There were twelve rooms, four on each floor. Usually two or three boys in each room. On weekends more, as friends would join in for drunken revelries from Ramjas, Stephen’s, Hindu, Hans Raj, SRCC, and KMC hostels. Across the street there was a small grocery store run by a man called Mehendiratta who also lived there with his family. Mehendiratta catered to all our needs.
Even though Zorawar had left Shokeen Niwas, he still liked it for his romantic trysts, about once every fortnight. He often used Jishnu da’s room, as it had been Lado’s bedroom in the early days.
“You and Hriday do not have to worry at all. He usually walks right by your room. He would never barge into it with a randi,” Jishnu da reassured Pranjal, who had deep misgivings about living in Shokeen Niwas and was thinking of moving out. But I, Hriday Thakur, had no such misgivings. I loved the wanton amorality of the place. Its chanciness, its far remove from respectability. I wanted to be a writer. It would be here, I knew, that I would start to truly become one. I had finally found my material, if not my voice. Even though Pranjal would later be proven right (as always), I was deeply grateful to Jishnu da for introducing me to the magical world of Sho-keen Niwas and the kerosene-suffused bedroom of the late, lamented Sunita Khandelwal.
T
here was this girl. The first time I laid eyes on her she was standing in front of the closed Himachal Roadways ticket counter, clutching a valise as if it contained her life savings. From behind she looked like a schoolgirl—her hair fell down her back in two long braids. But then she swung the valise down and turned around and that’s when I saw her chest—straining to escape the tightest T-shirt this side of Bollywood. She was a real cheez, a top-class no. 1 item. Even in the sickly light of the fluorescent bulb that flickered above the counter, her skin looked like she bathed in milk.
I never learned her name, but I owe her my life. Sort of.
She was with a guy and they were arguing. He wanted to get the hell out of there and she wanted him to go to hell—only she said it in words I never imagined could come out of a movie-star mouth like hers.
