Delhi Noir (8 page)

I sat up in my seat and looked at the Ridge, studying the darkness. Curiosity, of course, but partly the witching of that weird sound. In a minute I thought I heard a sort of cry, an earthly pain. I didn’t stop to think. I started up the auto and zipped across the road, made an
S
around the double barrier, and headed uphill in the direction of the noise.

Next thing I heard was running feet, the
stamp-stamp-stamp
of cheap shoe leather. I pulled over and keyed off and waited. It was a young man and he ran straight into me. It wasn’t that my dim headlight was switched off, just that he was running downhill and used the machine as a brake. He slammed into the windshield and stood there bent over and winded. Even by the faint light of my beam I could see he was bleeding. His face was cut up and he looked frightened. So frightened he’d lost his voice and could only point back up the road the way he’d come.

In the background I could see Flagstaff House like a stage set, a black cutout of a tower against the gray of the November sky.

“Get in,” I called, and shoved him into the passenger seat, “and hang on!”

I turned the auto around on a five-rupee coin and was about to get the hell out of there, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and found his voice.

“She’s still there!”

So he wasn’t alone. I armlocked the handlebar till we were facing uphill again and began the slow climb in the old machine. Come on, Bee! Even to me, the journey seemed to last forever.

At the top of the rise the boy jumped from the auto and ran a short way toward the tower calling the girl’s name, but his wild turns of the head said she was not where he’d left her. I looped the tower in the machine, leaning on the horn and shouting words of support and threat into the dark. It must have been the purest gibberish, and a greater silence was the only reply.

“Get back in!” I called, and the boy obeyed but hung out of the auto scanning the side of the road. I’ve made a career of watching people’s faces in the rearview mirror and his was intent, as if unaware of the volume of blood trickling down his forehead. The pain wouldn’t have hit him yet. He seemed to be reading the night, willing it to disclose his harmed lover.

And then she appeared, or a figure appeared that the boy recognized, because he hopped out again and ran toward the brush. She was walking very slowly, smoothing down her kameez over and over again. The dupatta, if she wore one, was gone. The boy took her hand and led her tenderly toward the auto.

I took them straight downhill, jinked back around the traffic barrier, and turned left onto University Road. It was a clear run to the next corner where the road climbs back over the hill to the Hindu Rao Hospital. But a 212 bus coming the opposite way strayed across the white line and broke our momentum. “Blue Line bastards!” I shouted, but we’d lost it and had to toil the rest of the way up to the crest. Then we raced down the other side of the Ridge and into the hospital gates.

Well, that’s it, I thought as I headed home; you don’t see people twice in the big city. But of course you do, maybe just the ones you think you won’t. I told you I read people’s faces in the mirror and it’s true you can tell straight off the talkers, the tippers, the nasties, the hunted, the doomed. I had watched the girl in the mirror whenever a car came the other way and I guessed she wouldn’t report the crime. She still had her silver chain, a necklace of eyelets each with its little silver tear. The pain had finally struck the boy, and last I saw them she was leading.

The next day and the next day and the next I looked in the papers, but there was no report. Ah well, I thought, you lose some, you lose some.

Then there was a story: a savage rape on the Ridge. But the description didn’t match and the date given was for the day before, a whole week after my little adventure. Over the next fortnight there were two more incidents; in both cases the girl’s dupatta was taken and the boy’s face messed up. The police issued descriptions of the assailants, two men in their late thirties. People were warned off the Ridge at night. An of-ficer criticized trends in women’s garments with words I remembered from twenty years before. And the general suggestion was that these things wouldn’t happen but for the foolishness of the couples. Well, I thought, clipping out the stories, maybe all that hot young blood buzzing in the brain does make you a little careless.

Next morning I was tooling along University Road when I saw the boy. He didn’t return my look—maybe after a month he really didn’t recognize me—and ducked in at the main gate. On an impulse I parked the Bee and gave chase. It was him all right and he remembered me, but he didn’t want to be reminded of that night.

“Well,” I said, “you might want to forget it happened, but whoever did it hasn’t stopped.”

He looked genuinely surprised, like he hadn’t read the newspapers. I invited him for a coffee. In my day I used to wonder—a tea man myself—what drew people to the university coffeehouse, although the place had an undeniable glamour. I still don’t know. As we sipped the filthy stuff I took out the news clippings from my pocket and laid them on the table between us. He glanced over them with a troubled expression. The scars were healing nicely on his face; with a bit of luck they would melt into worry lines.

“Look,” he said, when he had read enough, “what’s it to you?”

My heart contracted. I hadn’t imagined he needed winning over. I’d steered clear of asking after the girl, figuring she’d slipped out of his life.

“Just tell me if you could recognize the guy again.”

“You mean the guys,” he said, stressing the plural in a defensive way.

“The guys. Have you ever seen them again?”

He searched my eyes as if looking for a handhold, then gave up. “They hang around the metro station in the mornings. The main guy is built like a bouncer. He wears the same safari suit every day.”

“What color?”

“Sort of a darkish color.”

“Black?”

“Not quite black.”

“You mean like gray?”

“No, no, darker than that.”

“Sort of a blackish gray?”

“More like a grayish black. But darker.”

“Blackish black?”

“Ya. Almost.”

I saw I was getting nowhere fast. I made a last bid. “Listen, I’ll be at the metro station in the morning. Just point him out and I’ll take it from there.”

“Take it where?” he asked despairingly, and I let the question dangle.

I didn’t really expect him to be there the next day but he turned up.

“The safari wala’s not here,” he said, “but the other guy is. By the sweet potato vendor, pink shirt.”

He pointed toward the granite steps where the metro terrace descends to street level. A small sleek mongoose of a man in a red cotton overshirt was stabbing at a leaf plate with a toothpick while sweeping the concourse with his eyes. I dropped my gaze as the little pointed head swiveled toward us. When I looked up it had darted away. His bottle-brown hair was topped by a blue-and-white baseball cap worn the right way so the brim hooded his eyes. Fake Diesel pants with faded chaps were standard, I assumed, but the bulge in the back pocket could have been either a cell phone or a knife. I had never seen a man wear three shirts before, four if you counted the tee. True, it was winter and the outermost, a florist’s dream of canna lilies, was zippered.

I was already moving toward him through the horde of students. I must confess I didn’t stop to thank the boy, nor did he seem keen to stick around. I’m not a big sweet-potato fan myself but the other item on the menu was a salad of yellow star fruit, sour to frizzling insanity, and I stood six inches from the sidey and ate it without turning a hair. Right then a Mal-lika bombshell went by and I groaned and staggered theatrically and caught Sidey’s eye. He winked at me and grinned and I left it at that.

It wasn’t till the next day that I saw the bouncer. I arrived there early and had to wait. I’d dropped off the schoolies and gotten rid of the little bench so I sat in the back of the Bee in the Deepika corner and smoked. Tobacco first, then a sweet cigarette. Back in the ’90s I’d taken to sucking on them whenever I felt tempted and now I had two habits (three if you count stopping by the flat to trouble the wife when a fare brought me within stroking distance). Same red-and-white Phantom pack from childhood, little smooth white sugar sticks with a red dot on the end. Some days if you suck hard enough the red dot actually glows.

A cobra—that was my first thought when the villain ap-peared. I swear I expected all the cool university chicks to go into a frenzy of squawking the way forest birds do when a snake appears. But they stalked on by in their hiphug Pepe jeans with their video cell phones gripped tighter than their textbooks, and the cobra watched them pass with a bland insouciance only Sidey, stationed at the sweet potato stand, could rightly read.

He wasn’t in a safari suit (I felt a little vindicated in mine) but in white drill pants pressed to a knife’s edge, elastic boots, and a black balloon jacket that gave him a slightly unmoored look. Or maybe that was his natural walk, weaving a little, like a wrestler, not a drunk. Sidey fell into step beside him and the two of them walked up University Road without bothering to take in the scenery. I had expected to watch them ogling, but instead I found myself tailing them in the Bee, hanging a good way back. What surprised me more than their disinterest in the girls was Sidey’s face. You expect a planet to light up when the sun appears, but Sidey’s face fell into a total eclipse. His eyes took a haunted half-shadow and even the cap looked crestfallen.

I parked the Bee at the Flagstaff Road barrier, told the ice-cream wala the wife needed a branch of babul leaves, and trailed them uphill. At the top they took Magazine Road and I waited at Flagstaff House pretending to watch the monkeys. The road, once simply a path, follows the crest of the Ridge through the man-made jungle, low dusty thorn trees with twisted gray trunks and a canopy like mustard gas. On either side, beyond the park benches and half hidden by the brush, are power substations and water tanks and gardeners’ tool-sheds like bunkers. Also ruins from Muslim times, tombs and such. Built with a prospect on what would have been a barren ridge, they now huddle blindly in the jungle, peculiarly func-tionless unless to conceal a walker caught short by nature. Turds and worse await the unwary foot.

Cobra and Mongoose sat down on a bench and looked about them. A gardener had set a hose with a ratchet spring to green the grass by the caged bougainvillea and was standing back to inspect the spray as it ticked around in a wide circle. Satisfied, he drifted off to join his fellow workers for a smoke by the garden gate at the far end of the park. Cobra and Mongoose watched him go, then idly observed the itinerant spray. Idly I imagined the eye of the hose coming around to fix them with a stare. Stray walkers came and went along the long park road; a couple sitting on a nearby bench rose and made for the far gate where the 212 goes by.

When the coast was clear Cobra got up and vanished into the forest, Mongoose trailing after. I stayed put. I knew there was no way out of the park except at the far end or back in my direction. They were gone ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I was getting restless when they reappeared and took the road to the far gate, strolling side by side as before.

I went to their bench and sat a moment to see what they saw. Rising out of the bushes opposite was one of those curly-wurly ocher buildings from Mughal days, a hunting lodge maybe. I sauntered into the forest and entered the ruin from behind to find two rooms; the roof of one had fallen in and the floor was grassed over. In the inner room hung a musky odor that told its own tale. A stair led up from the outer room but the way up was barred by an iron door; a heavy padlock hung from the hasp. I picked up the biggest stone I could find, lifted it with both hands, and brought it crashing down on the lock. The lock gave and hung there broken jawed; I unhooked it and threw it into the bushes downhill. (Any crook can remove a government padlock and replace it with his own, a nice rusty old job, and people will walk on by thinking: official.) Upstairs I found an empty chamber with a pillared balcony: nothing but fallen birds’ nests on the floor. On the way back down I noticed a loose slab at the landing and lifted it. Underneath lay a yellow cement sack neatly folded in half. I took it back into the chamber and looked inside. There were four lengths of fabric in there, three colored and one white. They were not new but clean, some printed, one embroidered; together they seemed a strange valueless hoard. It was only when I unfolded one that I realized what it was: a woman’s dupatta.

I went straight back down to the Bee.

“Wife’s going to be angry,” the ice-cream wala forecast.

“What?” As I drove off I realized he meant I’d forgotten the babul leaves.

I headed over the hill past the Hindu Rao Hospital along the 212 route, cursing the Blue Liners as I flew; sharing the same prey, buses and autos are natural enemies. I hung a left at the chaiwala by the cell phone tower, then hard left again, and cut the engine, rolling to a halt right where the silk cotton tree that overhangs our whole neighborhood is anchored. Just short of home.

I hadn’t come to trouble the wife. I was there to call on a man dead five hundred years.

He stood nine feet tall, my ancestor, going by the grave. Called the Grave of the Nine-Foot Saint, always freshly painted green, it sticks out two feet into the main road, the remaining seven closing off the sidewalk. Huge blood-orange flowers flop down on it in summer, followed by a delicate rain of cotton that whitens the precinct like snow. It’s an island of peace for a military man.

He was a military baba, my ancestor, the man whose name I bear. Baba Ganoush. Baba G., my wife calls me for short, or just Baba, though I don’t really qualify. Babas were either plain holy or soldierly holy, and I’m neither. My military baba had no secret weapon:
He
was the weapon. He moved the army. He had a retinue of 786. Baskets of purple eggplants and potted marigolds moved before him in the field; caged songbirds and urns of rose water came behind. The night before a pitched battle, his linked light-boys dressed up as houris and oiled their bodies and did calisthenics for the host. Before the phalanx of warriors he drew a box in the dust with his ring finger and danced a victory dance that spun every watching soldier into heaven.