Delhi Noir (22 page)
I
t wasn’t even supposed to be my first assignment. I was at the desk, working one shift after another at the
Hindustan Express
. A few years earlier, heralding the changes now underway, the hot metal setting of headlines had given way to the bromides printed out by the new machine installed two floors below. There in the basement, sweaty old men in banyans, their hairy arms retrained to the art of cut-and-paste, would follow our instructions while speaking of the girls on the floors above.
The editor, employed only because he had some shares in a publication the group wanted to take over, was no different.
Rarely venturing out of his new glass-paned office perched above the open newsroom, he never managed to make the aphrodisiac of power work for him. Suspended between the desperation above and the lust below were men like me, somewhat more at ease with the women because of the English we spoke, the youth that we then took so much for granted.
The day I ran into my first story I was on the morning shift.
I had loitered around to chat with friends who had come in for the later shift. By the time I started walking back the sun was already low on the horizon, barely visible through the exhaust from the half-digested kerosene-diesel mixture belched out by autorickshaws.
I was living across the bridge from ITO, unable to afford the better-off localities in south Delhi. The walk back home led past the crowded narrow lanes of Laxmi Nagar. Even here change was in the air; cheap plastic digital Casio watches had started flooding the shops and Sukh Ram’s PCOs were taking root everywhere.
At the very edge of Laxmi Nagar, just a few hundred yards short of the Radhu Palace cinema, was an enclave of upwardly mobile middle-class respectability—Gyan Kunj, the repository of knowledge. Decades earlier, retired college teachers had gotten together to form a society that had been allotted land at concessional rates by the government. Some of the old single-story houses that still survived on the large plots spoke of the difficulties of fulfilling the ambition of a home of one’s own on an honest college teacher’s salary. Their decades of labor had now liberated the next generation from the usual step-by-step pursuit of salaried respectability.
There were five of us staying in two rooms on the first floor of a house now managed by an architect. He and his wife lived with his aging parents, both retired college teachers. A side entrance led to our rooms, a large one with three beds lined up in a row and a smaller one that I shared with a Bengali. His excessive attachment to his mother and poetry would soon take him back to Calcutta. We had all been trainees together at journalism school—the Bihari thakur who had not made it through umpteen UPSC attempts and the two Lucknow Brahmans who were far more focused in their ambitions.
They had all gladly taken up offers from the financial newspaper in the Hindustan group. The economy was just beginning to open up and the salaries were higher. I thought I’d be better off editing copy from remote parts of the country, straightening out stilted language while I dwelt amidst books and the fond hope of writing one of my own someday.
The reality of the job turned out to be somewhat different.
The first day at work I walked up to the horseshoe table at the heart of the newsroom and sat there for six hours with nothing to do. Over the next week the chief sub on duty would throw the most inane articles my way. Often enough he would crumple my subbed copy and drop it into the wastebasket at his feet without even a look. It took ten days before a brief I’d touched made it to the paper.
In the end it didn’t take much to get more work. On a dull summer day with nothing other than a picture of a bitch wallowing in water for the front page, the chief sub warmed up to my suggestion of “Dog Day Afternoons.” I was suddenly seen as a sub with promise. But it didn’t dispel the tedium of the job, a tedium that would grip me each day as I walked back from ITO.
The day the tedium finally broke, I’d been thinking of a new girl on the desk, a welcome change from the tattered magazines lying under my mattress.
Barely a few hundred yards from the house, near the ramshackle jhuggis huddled together in a hollow by the sewer line, the traffic had come to a standstill. Long before I managed to make my way to the group of mourners blocking the road, I could hear them. They were gathered around a body that lay at the center of the street, covered with a sheet. As always, it was the women who were the loudest, each trying to outdo the other. Threading my way past them I was halted by a voice I recognized. It was the maid who worked at the house.
“Bhaiyya, Ekka ko mar diya.” (“They’ve killed Ekka.”)
Ekka was her brother-in-law and would clean and cook for us whenever she took time off. A tribal from what was then south Bihar, Ekka was true to every stereotype, working only when he felt like. He would always turn up at our place thanks to the dregs of liquor he could find in the bottles we had tossed away under the beds. If he worked a few days in a row, he knew we’d hand him a bottle of Old Monk.
In a moment of weakness, late one evening as he fried some fish for us with our rum, I had even given him my business card. Thankfully, no such thing as a mobile existed then, but at times, as I struggled against a deadline on the night shift, I would get a call from Ekka. “Bhaiyya, yeh log mujhe maar rahein hain. Main bhag ke PCO me ghus aiya hun, kuch kariye nahin to meri jaan le lenge.” (“Some guys are beating me up. I had to run inside this phone booth. Do something or they’ll kill me.”)
The first few times, I requested the reporter on duty to help him out. In turn I would insert a brief item to favor some official the reporter needed to placate. Once, as Ekka was putting the receiver down, I heard him tell someone, “Ab dikhata hun saalon, dekhna kaise police aati hai.” (“Now I’ll show you bastards, see how the police turn up.”) I soon started hearing him out only to quickly return to the headlines awaiting me, the urgent need to get the pica count right for a three-column heading on the calming of Punjab or further strife in Kashmir. It seemed the night before his death Ekka didn’t even have time to make that call.
Standing there amidst the mourners it was difficult to connect the man alive in my mind with the body that lay before me. The maid’s voice, as she began telling me what had happened, was the only thing that brought the two together.
Today, as I quote her, there is a double deception involved, the first because I am recreating these events from an uncertain memory that cannot recall her name, and the second because she actually spoke in a dialect of Hindi that I cannot even begin to capture.
“We were given the body this afternoon at the police station. He had left home yesterday and we didn’t worry about him till early this morning. It was when I woke up to his absence that we started looking for him. We thought we’d ask you whether he had called. Then, in the afternoon, a policeman came looking for us.’’ I didn’t interrupt her as she spoke.
She was oblivious to the blocked traffic, the gathering crowd.
I was hoping to get away as fast as possible.
“He took us to the police station. There we were made to put our thumbprints on several forms. No one told us anything. We were asked to pick up his body from the mortuary after the postmortem. That was when we realized Ekka was dead. Now they are telling us that he was a thief who died while trying to escape. You know the house behind the general store, the one where the Punjabi councilor lives? They said Ekka broke in, and when the people in the house raised an alarm, he ran up to the roof and jumped off the second floor onto a pile of wood lying at the back. But we saw his body, you look at him yourself.’’
And before I could say a word, she had thrown the sheet off his torso. His body was badly bruised but his face was untouched. He lay there in repose, his eyelids shut, no different from how he would have looked in his sleep.
“They beat him to death, bhaiyya. Look at him, look at him. He worked for the councilor’s opponent during the election and all the basti votes went against the Punjabi.”
She kept repeating—
They beat him to death, they beat himto death
—and the mourners picked up the chant, the uncovered body adding to their frenzy.
I called up the crime reporter who just said he had too much on his plate for the evening. In the morning I ran the story past the metro editor—he was a veteran who had made his peace with the new setup. He just told me to look around and see if anyone in the office gave a damn about a dead Bi-hari from a jhuggi.
He was right. The old man who had run the paper for decades was dead. His son was an MBA from Wharton, he wanted the paper to make money. This was no unreasonable demand but it required drastic changes in a newspaper so far shaped by his father’s whims. There was little space left for dead Biharis from a jhuggi.
I just couldn’t easily stomach the thought that a man could die such a death. It helped that for the time being the morning shift was sheltered from the cuts underway, and in the first few days after Ekka’s death my afternoons were free. Outside the office, people had little sense of journalistic designations and the
Hindustan Express
logo on my business card allowed me to go around asking questions.
I learned on the job, there was no one around to tell me what to do. The first thing I did was contact the police. I was to learn later this was best left to the end. The SHO in charge of the local police station was also a Punjabi, fair and light-eyed, his tall frame now putting on bulk, his face sagging with the weight of two decades of free alcohol.
He made me wait a few minutes in the large hall where the FIRs were registered. Three other policemen sat around sipping the tea that had been sent for on my arrival. A suspect was seated in a corner, manacled to the bench. On the walls were the crime figures for the area. Rapes were down, pick-pocketing and sexual harassment were on the rise.
When I walked into the SHO’s room, the subinspector investigating the case was already seated there. “Aayye aayye, Singh sahib, I’ve called the case officer so that we don’t have to keep asking other people for the information you want.”
He rang a bell placed at the side of his desk and sent for some more of the syrupy tea I had just finished drinking. “So, Singh sahib, what makes you interested in this? Such things happen all the time.”
I told him my editor felt it might be a case of custodial death. He smiled, leaning back on his metal-framed chair.
“Aap log to hamesha sensational angle dhundte hain. Bahut seeddha case hai, batao jara Ram Lal ke kiya details hain.”
(“You people always look for something sensational. It’s a straightforward case. Ram Lal, just give him the details.”)
Ram Lal didn’t waste words. At 3 a.m. the thana had received a call from the councilor’s house. When Ram Lal arrived with a constable, Ekka was already lying motionless besides a pile of wood, perhaps already dead. They sent for an ambulance and Ekka was taken to a nearby hospital where he became another entry on the dead-on-arrival list.
Ram Lal was told that an hour earlier the councilor Rakesh Trehan had been woken up by a noise outside his bedroom. He set off the alarm and heard someone running up to the roof. He waited for the servants to arrive before following the intruder. They got there just in time to catch a glimpse of a man running to the edge of the roof. It was only the clatter that followed that made them look behind the house. Ekka, they had told Ram Lal, lay there moaning quietly on a pile of wood, and they sent for the police.
“That’s it. It’s a simple case. We have checked, the man was a troublemaker, a drunkard. He probably needed money and when he was caught inside the house, he panicked and ran up to the roof,” the SHO told me. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.” I duly jotted down his words; all the questions occurred to me far too late.
I did obtain the postmortem report from Ekka’s sister-in-law and asked the crime reporter to help me make sense of the document. It wasn’t all that difficult. On the printed outline of the back and front views of a generic male figure, the spe-cific injuries to Ekka’s body had been marked and listed.
The crime reporter was somewhat bemused by my interest in the case. He called up Dr. Mohanty, the physician who had performed the postmortem. The injuries, it turned out, were “not incompatible’’ with the description of the incident. Mo-hanty had said, and the crime reporter finally showed some interest in the case as he told me, that perhaps the man may have been beaten by a lathi.
I went back to SHO Puri, who was expecting me. “You seem the stubborn type. You shouldn’t take your work so personally, it makes life difficult.” I let him have his say before I asked him about the blows from the lathi. Puri didn’t even bother to ask me how I knew. “Officially, if you want something from me, I can only say there is nothing to your question, everything is clearly spelled out in the postmortem. But I can tell you something off the record, if you agree.”
Today, I know the bastard was uncomfortable at that moment. I should have gone after him, but then you live and learn.
“Things are never the way we write them down in the FIR, certain norms are forced by our legal procedures. We would never get a conviction if we started noting things down exactly as people tell us. Ekka didn’t just run up to the roof when he was caught. The councilor got up in the middle of the night—you know how it happens when you drink too much in the evening. He was headed to the bathroom at one end of the corridor when he saw a shadowy figure slipping into his daughter’s room. She is a young woman, in college. The councilor switched on the lights and raised the alarm. The servants rushed in from the back. By then, the councilor had already caught hold of Ekka.
“Now, I know what you are thinking. You journalists are not very different from police officers, there is very little about human beings that surprises either of us. She is a rich, spoiled kid, maybe she already knew Ekka, maybe she was the one who called him home. But then again, maybe she didn’t. We didn’t ask. He is a councilor, a powerful man. Regardless, his rage was understandable. After all, he is a Punjabi. Aren’t you one as well?
