Delhi Noir (20 page)
“Shut up! Put the money down and get out of here. I’ll say she pulled a gun—I stuck her with the kirpan in self-defense.
Lots of these cops owe me favors—I’ll take care of everything.
But you shouldn’t be found here.” Hoshiyaar was talking fast, almost babbling.
“But what about the manager?” I asked. The pillowcase was full and I put it down where he could see it. “He saw us, and you’re going to have to take care of him.”
Hoshiyaar turned away and picked up a jug and glass from the little table beside the bed. It took him a few tries but in the end he managed to pour himself some water without spilling it. He drank noisily. “Go down and get the manager,” he said after a while.
I went down to the manager. There was no one else around. There never was—this hotel was probably a front for some other operation.
“You have to come and see this,” I said, acting excited. “You can’t believe what she’s doing.” I took him back to the empty room next door to 5-B. He was bending over to look through the hole when Hoshiyaar came in. I thought he was going to offer him money to keep quiet but instead he simply snapped his neck. “It was either him or us,” Hoshiyaar said. I couldn’t talk—what was left to say now? Hoshiyaar was taking me somewhere I hadn’t been before, a place I didn’t want to inhabit. “Help me here,” he ordered, and I got hold of the manager’s arm and together we dragged him back to Miss India’s room.
That’s when I had my idea. “Shoot him with her gun,” I suggested. “When the cops come they’ll think they had a fight and he killed her.” I pulled cash out of the pillowcase, tore the plastic off, and scattered some bundles on the bed. The manager tried to rob her and she shot him—that was the story here. It would save the old man, I thought. Hoshiyaar put a pillow over the gun to muffle the shot but it still sounded like an explosion. I could feel myself beginning to shake. Deep inside, not anyplace where it showed.
When Hoshiyaar went to wash his hands in the bathroom, I took three bricks of cash and dropped them down the front of my pants. My shirt was many sizes too big and I figured he had been too rattled to count the money.
When he came back, Hoshiyaar reached into the pocket of his kurta, fished out a bus ticket, and gave it to me. He talked fast, panting a little. “Get out of the city. Wait for me in Shimla, check in at the Satyam Chaat stall once in a while—I’ll find you. I’ll get out of here in a few days—I’ll work as usual at the ISBT so no one gets suspicious.”
“Give me the money,” I said, pointing to the pillowcase. “You can’t be found with it.” He looked at me for a long time, his eyes hooded. I waited, testing him.
“Don’t worry about it—I’ll hide it somewhere and bring it with me to Shimla,” he replied finally.
I nodded, then swallowed. My throat felt tight, squeezed shut.
“What about him?” I asked, to change the subject, indicating the bathroom door. Poor Leather Jacket.
“I’ll take care of him,” he said.
Then he grabbed me by the arm and marched me toward a door at the other end of the room. It led to a tiny balcony.
“Leave from here so no one sees you exiting the building.”
At the door he hesitated, then went back to the bed and returned with some cash and handed it to me. It must’ve been a couple of thousand rupees.
“That should be enough till I get there.” He put out a hand and patted me on my cheek. His fingers were cold. “Don’t be afraid, son, I’ll be all right. We’ll leave Dilli—disappear forever. You and I—we can do business anywhere. I’ll phone Satyam—he’ll be waiting for you.” He pushed me through the doorway onto the balcony, then closed the thick wooden door behind me and latched it with a loud click.
Five stories below me was a gali filled with garbage. On the left side of the balcony, fat water pipes ran all the way to the ground. My heart jumped inside my chest as if it was trying to break free.
I took a deep breath and threw my flip-flops down before swinging my leg over the balcony ledge. My palms were wet and slipped on the pipe once or twice but I made it down okay.
When my feet touched the ground I collapsed and sat legs splayed out in the dirt of the alleyway for a few minutes, crying and shaking. I thought of us in Shimla, me doing what I always did, living the life Hoshiyaar planned, stepping on the stones he laid down. I stumbled to my feet and started running.
At the ISBT there were no busloads of policemen, just the usual chaos. I grabbed two plastic bags off a cart selling oranges. At another stall I wheedled a bar of soap from the owner, a Bihari guy I treated to free tea once in a while. Inside the bathroom of the waiting room I washed my face, hands, and neck, combed my hair in the mirror. I took Inspector Bal-want’s note out of my pocket. On it he had printed his name and
ANTITERRORISM TASK FORCE
in spindly capitals. Hoshiyaar had taught me to read from the garish children’s books the vendors sold. I put the money and Inspector Balwant’s note in the bags, then walked into one of the stores near the terminal and bought some jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, cheap dark glasses, and a pair of fake Nikes. After I put them on I looked like a new person—even Hoshiyaar would have trouble recognizing me. I threw away my shirt and shorts. Afterwards, I went into the Ritz Theatre and bought tickets for all the films and watched them one after the other, staring blankly at the screen until it was time for the bus to leave.
I looked out of the window at the busy street as the vehicle turned away from Kashmiri Gate. The monument itself was now behind grating, locked away by the government. There were a few foreigners around it, mouths and guidebooks open as they squinted up at its massive curved brick doorways. I had lived my whole life in the city yet had never gotten on a bus, never ventured beyond this little world. Now Delhi was spitting me out. As we raced over the quiet highways I couldn’t sleep. Miss India would have sat in the seat I was in, rested her cheek against the cool glass of my window. I imagined Hoshi-yaar a week from now leaving for Shimla. I would go to the Satyam Chaat stall and there he’d be waiting, smiling faintly, ready to kick-start our life together again.
Sometime in the middle of that night, the bus driver stopped on the outskirts of a small town to let passengers use the bathroom. I got off the bus, plastic bag in hand, and walked toward the blazing storefronts. There was a phone booth there and I told the operator I had never made a long-distance call and so he dialed the number on the paper in my hand. The inspector answered and I told him about the hotel and Hoshiyaar and the money he had taken and hung up before the cop could ask me a thing.
Next to the booth was a dhaba with a corrugated tin roof.
A man in an undershirt was rolling rotis and pressing them onto the walls of a tandoor. I asked him to wrap up an order of dal-roti and stood there beside the glowing drum, breathing in the scent of toasted flour.
(Years after I had made myself into another Ramu, I went into a library in a big city far from Delhi and dug through old newspapers until I found the one I wanted. There was a picture of Inspector Balwant, another of Hotel Anand Vihar.
It had been big news at the time because there was a woman involved. The couple had posed as tourists but the police had credible information that they were aiding and abetting terrorists from the northeast, one of the many separatist groups fighting for their piece of the homeland. The woman killed in the hotel room was beautiful, the writer noted. I searched hard but there was no mention of Hoshiyaar. Yet on the inside pages there was a fawning profile of Balwant as the “people’s cop” accompanied by a picture of him shaking hands with a tea boy—me. It set me trembling and I tell you I quit that library fast.)
When the man handed me my food, I asked and he told me—but I have forgotten—how many miles we were from Shimla.
The bathroom was a shed in the back of the building, set at the edge of sugarcane fields that stretched out into the distance. The moon was large and round in the sky and the little crooked trails that ran between the fields were full of light and shadow. I waited till the rest of the men had zipped up their flies and left. Then I stepped down into the dirt of the pathway in front of me and started walking without glancing back. Someone did come search for me and shouted my seat number a few times. I could see a glimmer of his shirt as he stood at the edge of the fields searching the darkness. But the cane was tall on both sides of the path and I stayed still. Finally he left and a few minutes later the bus started and drove off. After that it was just me. As for Hoshiyaar, I couldn’t give a fuck. Really.
I
sit on a blue plastic stool outside the Mother Dairy booth in Def Col Market and do nothing. It’s the end of another gray and cloudy August day. The monsoon has yielded little rain. Even though it’s evening, I’m sweating. The humidity makes me feel like a squeezed sponge.
I should be at home. I really don’t know what makes me leave my room. These days I am pushed along by forces not in my control. One day slips into another. Every night is a silent dark space that swallows me whole. I squat inside her belly until she spits me out at dawn, covered in phlegm and bile.
Something happened a year ago. Arpita and I were living in Bombay then. We were locked in the missionary position when, suddenly, she pushed me off. She said, “Manik, I feel hemmed in. Every day it is the same damn thing. We’ve been together for five whole years and every night it’s the same old shit. No new positions. No nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I feel my youth slipping away from me, Manik.” She sat on the floor and glared at her toes. I smoked a cigarette. I felt deeply humiliated.
Then I did something terrible.
It’s not very clear to me what exactly happened. I did what I did in a fit of rage. I remember a kitchen knife, I remember being seized by an uncontrollable urge and doing what had to be done. I recall a pair of dangling headphones playing tinny music.
Defence Colony isn’t a completely new place for me. I lived here many years ago, when I was a techie with a dot-com. It was my first job.
In Bombay, I thought to myself: It’s all over now, let me return to where I started my adult life. From twenty to thirty has been one long journey. I suppose you could say my life never really took off. Many strange things happened in those ten years. I try not to remember them but very often memories force themselves on my consciousness; they are like stubborn relatives who invite themselves over even when you’ve made it clear that they are unwelcome.
I have a room on the first floor, directly above the garage. The house faces a school. In the mornings I can hear the bell go off every forty minutes, signalling the end of one period and the start of another. Midmorning, at around 11, a drum starts its heavy pounding, probably a P.T. class. From my window I can see only a small part of the playground. The lot is dusty and shorn of grass. During the break the girls play a game where they run around holding each other’s hands, forming a chain. When the girls stray into the corner of the field visible from my window, I back away or hide behind the curtain. I wouldn’t want them to see me.
Defence Colony is a posh Delhi neighborhood, but in the afternoons it has the air of a small, well-planned town. The roads are narrow and quiet. Guards nap in their plastic chairs, their bottoms squeezed in at odd angles. Mongrel dogs give chase to each other, or join the guards in their siesta. A dirty open drain divides the neighborhood in two halves. Cows graze peacefully on the grass on both sides of the nul-lah. Abandoned bulls forage in overflowing garbage dumps.
And cycle-rickshaws weave in and out of the lanes, obediently slowing down and pulling to the side in order to give way to passing SUVs.
When I arrived here four months ago in May, it was very hot. I would stay in my room all day long. When the landlady, Mrs. Bindra, asked what I did, I told her I was an online journalist. Delhi is a big city. People do all kinds of things. My landlady didn’t ask me any more questions.
In the evenings I would go to the C-block market and walk around in circles. Sometimes I would hire a cycle-rickshaw and ask to be peddled around the various blocks of the neighborhood. That’s how I met Sadiq. It didn’t take me long to befriend him. He was a Bihari migrant to Delhi. He rented his rickshaw from a rich man who owned an entire fleet. He was also a smackhead.
Every other day he’d take a bus to Connaught Place and come back with small, innocuous-looking paper pellets. The pudiyas contained the deadly brown powder. He would do it all the time, in all sorts of places. Sadiq had a friend who lived in the Jungpura slums, near the railway tracks. He’d head over there often. I’d go along, not for the smack but for the ganja which his smack buddy also dealt.
When no one was looking, I’d get Sadiq to come up to my room. He always expressed amazement at the fact I lived on my own. “Don’t you get lonely all by yourself? I just wouldn’t be able to handle it …” Sadiq lived in a one-room tenement in Kotla, a poor neighborhood just around the corner from Def Col. His four children, wife, and younger brother all slept in the same room. And he alone wouldn’t have been able to afford even that. His younger brother had been lucky to get a job in an electrical repair shop. When he rented the room he had felt obligated to ask his older brother if he and his family wanted to move in.
I am sitting in my room with Sadiq and Chotu. Chotu is the newest member of our two-person gang. Now we are a trio.
Chotu works at Mrs. Bindra’s. He lives in a room on the terrace, surrounded by black Sintex water tanks. His room has a tin roof which heats up during the daytime. He has few possessions, all of which he keeps locked in his gray tin trunk. For furniture he has a bed, a mattress, a surahi, a small rectangular mirror, a noisy table fan. To liven up the walls he’s cut out glamorous pictures from
Delhi Times
. Seminaked Bol-lywood actresses and foreign models smile and pout at Chotu. At night they go a step further. Some pop out of their frames and climb into bed with him. He says he has felt them touching him in all the right places.
