Delhi Noir (5 page)

“I don’t know.” I looked suspiciously at the walls. “Maybe she bribed the maid again.”

Silence on the line. I could see Sheena shaking her head, her shoulder-length iron-gray hair brushing her cheeks.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked for the second time.

I looked at my watch. 1:29. “Time? What has time got to do with anything? This is an emergency, we need to find her and put her in prison,” I said impatiently.

“It’s 1:30 a.m.” she continued in the same deadpan voice. “I have to work tomorrow morning, you know. I can’t sleep till 11 like you do.”

I sensed a lecture coming and groaned. “But you’ve got plenty of time to sleep. Stop talking and go to sleep now. I’ll find her and the file and get them to you tomorrow. Promise.” The moment the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake.

“You won’t,” she sighed. “You won’t because you haven’t done it. You’ve just been boozing and womanizing instead. How can you be so irresponsible? Think of Akshay, for God’s sake.” She went on for another five minutes, telling me how I had mucked up my life, finishing with, “Do you have a death wish? If so, just tell us and we’ll leave you alone. But remember, you have a son to think about.”

“I know, I know,” I said when she’d finished. “Just go to sleep. I’ll find the report and get it to you tomorrow. Promise.”

The phone went dead. I got up and threw it off the balcony. Then it struck me that if the police called I wouldn’t know, and if they couldn’t find me they would let her go. So I decided to go to the police station myself. I left the house and began walking. I had no choice. My car was gone, not stolen or sold as normally happens in this city, but simply misplaced. It would turn up eventually. It always did—for the car was so filthy no one wanted it in front of their house.

I walked along National Highway 3 toward Delhi, past the NOIDA golf course, the shopping malls, and the beehive colonies with their peeling façades. People in cars honked as they drove by. Truckers flashed their lights and motorcyclists cursed. But I hardly noticed. I was a man on a mission, filled with a superhuman strength. I walked over the sewage drain that was the Yamuna by way of the Japanese Bridge. As I entered the city, Humayun’s onion-shaped dome glowing palely in the moonlight, my objectives changed and I headed up Mathura Road to the roundabout with the little Lodhi tomb and then turned left toward the Oberoi flyover. I was going to score some sister.

There was a party going on under the flyover. Four men had just scored some sister and were huddled over a small scrap of paper. One man, his hands trembling like a fish out of water, was trying to light a match, cursing fluently in a mixture of English, Bengali, and Assamese.

“Hey, even your language smells like fish,” I told the guy trying to light the fire. “You can’t light a fire like that. Let a real man from the north do it for you.” I grabbed the matchbox from him.
Oberoi Hotel,
it read. I looked at him again. How had he gotten his hands on it? His clothes were in tatters and his hair was matted. I couldn’t tell when he had last bathed, but it must have been some time ago. He smelled pretty bad. But he still had his shoes. Surprising, for someone in his condition.

The matches were damp and smelled of urine, which is why they wouldn’t light. So I threw them away and took out my lighter instead. I also took out my stash and added to the stuff on the foil. The others looked at me jealously, or, to be more accurate, they would have been jealous if there had been space for that in their minds. But in the world of sister, once the flame gets going everyone goes really quiet. All shivers, shakes, and itches stop. All feeling melts away. We become the flames, making love jointly to our sister. The world is forgotten along with the itches.

Soon she was warm and ready and we prepared our needles. The fish-eater leaned sideways and pulled out a needle from his shoe. I shuddered, wondering what diseases he had living inside him. He was going down really fast, it was obvious. I wondered if he still had links with his family, or whether he was even educated. As if he’d read my mind, he looked straight at me and asked, “Didn’t you go to Doon School?”

A burst of sunshine warmed the night. Doon School was the place I had loved most in the world. All my nicest memories were associated with it. When I was full of sister I invariably went back to those cedar-paneled rooms where twenty boys slept together, the sweet scent of our slumbering bodies filling the air. I gulped, nodded. “Yes, yes, I did. I am a Dosco,” I said proudly, my eyes becoming misty.

“Which house?”

“Hyderabad,” I replied.

“Kashmir,” he said.

A brother.

Okay, you guessed it. It was the brother who stole my clothes.

When I woke up, I couldn’t recognize the roof over my head. It seemed all broken in places and there were two ugly brown lampshades hanging from it that were closed from the bottom like socks and gave no light. What light there was came from above them. I just couldn’t figure it out. So of course I panicked. Waking up after a night with sister is a serious matter in any circumstance, but when one doesn’t recognize the roof over one’s head, the panic button gets pushed down hard and stays down.

I couldn’t move or breathe. It was as if rigor mortis had already set in. Only my brain refused to stop. If anything, it worked with lightning speed: If my house had miraculously grown mold, it calculated, then it meant that the Yamuna, toxic and polluted, had flooded, and the mold on my ceiling was toxic and polluted and the dappled light above it was actually a phosphorescence even more toxic and polluting. In short, I had to get out. But my legs refused to obey me. I looked down at them—and a stranger’s legs stared back at me.

Then it all fell into place.

He’d taken my clothes and he’d taken my legs too, so I couldn’t go after him. That was my first really clear thought.

But what made me really mad was that he had taken my underwear as well. He should have left it for me, it wasn’t even clean. Yet I couldn’t hate him. For that’s what brothers do, don’t they, wear each others’ dirty underwear?

It took me a little while longer to realize that I wasn’t in my house either and that what I had taken for a roof was a canopy of leaves, and the strange moldy things were in fact beehives. The brother must have woken up before me and seen me lying there in my nice clothes and decided to swap. Dragging me into the junkies’ park next to the Oberoi Hotel, he had stripped me of my clothes and abandoned me.

I lay back on the grass, stared up at the sky, and wiggled my bare toes. Indeed, they were mine. Then I wiggled my shoulders, and the cold tickle of grass told me that I wasn’t dreaming. I looked down, and that’s when I felt the full impact of my nakedness.

For till that moment I had never really looked at my body. I knew what I could do with it and I knew what I couldn’t do with it. But as an object in itself, it was a stranger to me. Women hadn’t seemed to mind it too much and they’d certainly liked what it did to them. But as I looked at my body in the full light of day, I knew that it was really nothing to be proud of. My dick, curving a little to the left, seemed lost, a steam engine trying to hide in a scantily clad hillside.

I got up and looked around for the brother’s clothes. But they were nowhere to be found. Beneath my feet, condoms, bits of old newspaper, plastic wrappings, rags of all sorts, and needle cases crunched and scattered, just the usual garbage. I dropped onto my hands and knees and pretended to search. I knew I wouldn’t find anything though. A junkie sold his underwear long before he sold his outerwear. It was less necessary.

Ten minutes later I gave up. As I suspected, I had found nothing. The brother had either sold his old stuff to someone else or he’d left it under my head and someone even more desperate than him, possibly one of the silent guys he had been with, had taken it. I took a deep breath and the scent of urine and other waste filled my nostrils. The park was empty, most of the junkies having abandoned it for less smelly pastures. I wasn’t a junkie, I thought angrily. I was a victim. I should go and report the theft of my clothes at the police station. So I climbed over the low iron rail separating the park from the road and stood on the pavement.

It was still early and cold. I had goosebumps. I thought about going to the flyover where several hundred people lived, ate, had sex, and slept in tightly wrapped bundles. Someone there was bound to have some extra clothes. Yet I hesitated. What could a naked man offer a poor man in exchange? So I stood on the pavement and stuck my hand out for a lift instead.

No one stopped. That didn’t surprise me. What did, though, was that many didn’t even notice I was naked. I persisted, sticking my hand out and waving it ferociously. How dare they ignore me like that? I was no domesticated chicken, I was a man. I had my pride.

Suddenly, as if God had heard my silent complaint, all the cars froze like they were waiting for me to choose which one I would get into. Then I realized that the traffic light had changed. The drivers had their faces turned forward like robots. Lost in their own private worlds, they never even saw me, not even when the light changed.

I was getting a little desperate when a brand-new Lexus pulled up right beside me and inside it I noticed one of my ex-she-bosses, the nicest one. “Sharmilaa, Sharmeelaa,” I called happily, feeling my luck kick in.

She was listening to Indian classical music, the window rolled down. Her famous Bengali lips were pursed as if she were about to kiss someone. She was frowning slightly, the way she always did when she was worried. Probably her husband, I thought. The man was a serious handicap and I’d told her to ditch him many a time.

“Sharmila,” I called again, approaching the window.

She heard me before she saw me and her head began to turn. I can never forget that moment. Me, rushing to the passenger side of the car full of hope, her face as she got a glimpse of me. She leaned over and quickly locked the door. I grabbed the handle and tried to open it.

“Sharmila, it’s me,” I said urgently, tapping on the window a little harder than I’d meant to, “don’t be scared. I have been robbed. You must take me home.”

She wouldn’t answer, struggling with her window instead. I rushed around the front of the car to her side and bent down so she could see my face. “Sharmila, don’t be a fool. Someone robbed me of my clothes. It’s me. You know me.”

She refused to look at me.

“Sharmila, don’t be stupid now. I don’t have time. You have to take me home. I have a report to hand in,” I said impatiently.

She didn’t budge. Just stared angrily at the car in front of her.

“I don’t know you,” she said at last through tightly pinched lips, “why are you embarrassing me like this? If … if you don’t get away from my car I’ll call the police.” Her face took on the stubborn expression I knew well.

“Sharmila,” I cried, stepping away from the car, “don’t do this, you’ll regret it later. Where’s your heart?”

She looked me full in the face then. And the truth struck me like a bolt of lightning. For that’s when I realized that in fact we were no longer people but animated passport photographs. If our bodies were allowed to assert themselves at all, they could only do so under the cover of night—and their needs were quickly dispensed with. But now that my body had been unveiled in broad daylight, my head had become invisible. I had ceased to be me. I was just a body, not a person with rights or brains.

I saw this clearly then, as I stepped back onto the pavement and watched Sharmila drive away. Strangely, what upset me the most is that she hadn’t been in the least curious about my body. After all, we’d worked together for years. I’d fantasized about making love to her any number of times—even though she had a distinctly pear-shaped behind. And she must have done the same. And yet, when I was there in front of her, she didn’t even sneak a peek. I sat down on the pavement, my knees clamped together. I must be really ugly, I thought sadly.

My pride in tatters and along with it my self-confidence, I wondered what to do. Who could I go to next? I had friends, or at least acquaintances, right there in Nizamuddin, two hundred yards away. At this time they would all be rushing their kids to school or getting ready for work, drinking that last cup of badly made masala tea, shouting at their wives to release a little of their pre-work tension. I bet if I just waited where I was, at least a half-dozen familiar faces would show up. But after Sharmila, this thought made me shudder.

I sat down on the edge of the pavement, making myself as small as I could, and watched the cars go by. It was rush hour. No place for a human on the road, especially a naked one. A traffic cop had arrived, creating more confusion than there had been before. But unlike the drivers of the cars who simply ignored me, he must have felt proprietorial about the crossroads and shouted, “Hey, what are you doing? You can’t sit like that. You’re troubling the traffic.”

Troubling the traffic? How could I have been troubling the traffic? He was the one troubling the traffic. Since his arrival the traffic jam had quadrupled in length. I’d have explained that to him if he’d given me half a chance. Instead he called the other cops, the ones who wore khaki uniforms and sat around in white Maruti Gypsies that had the words
With You,
for You, Always
painted in red on them.