Delhi Noir (30 page)
And if you happen to travel to that little settlement by the sewage runoff and manage to ask for the address of the tiny hut that Ramnivas had converted into a real house, and, once there, ask his wife Babiya or his sickly son Rohan or his daughter Urmila,
Where is Ramnivas?
you’ll face a stare as blank and cold as stone. They’ll say,
He’s out of town
. If you ask when he’ll be back, Babiya will reply, “How should I know?”
No one in all of Delhi has any idea about Ramnivas—that much is clear. He simply doesn’t exist anywhere—no trace is left. But I’m about to give you the final facts about him.
If you read any of the Hindi or English newspapers that come out in Delhi—say,
Indian News Express, Times of Metro India,
or
Shatabdi Sanchar Times—
and open the June 27, 2001 edition to page three, you’ll see a tiny photograph on the right side of the page. Below the photo, the headline of the capsule news item read,
Robbers Killed in Encounter,
and below that, the subheader:
Police Recover Big Money from Car
.
The three-line capsule was written by the local crime reporter, according to whom, the night before, near Buddha Jay-anti Park, the police tried to stop a Suzuki Esteem that bore no license plate and was traveling on Ridge Road from Dhaula Kuan. Instead of stopping, the people inside the car opened fire. The police returned fire. Two of the criminals were killed on the spot, while three others fled. One of the dead was Kul-dip, a.k.a. Kulla, a notorious criminal from Jalandhar. The other body could not be identified. Police Assistant Superintendent Sabarwal said that 2.3 million rupees were recovered from the trunk of the car, most of which were counterfeit five-hundred-rupee bills. He stressed the importance of information provided by the Agra police in netting the loot.
If you were to examine the photo printed above this news item, you’d notice that the car is parked right in front of Buddha Jayanti Park. The dead man lying faceup in the street next to its back door, mouth open, pants coming undone and shirt unbuttoned, chest riddled with bullet holes, is none other than Ramnivas—the “criminal” who, to this day, remains un-identified.
Now, listen to what happened that day, a few hours before the encounter.
According to Govind, who sells chai in front of A-11/DX33, Saket, that night at 10, a police Gypsy came with three plainclothes cops. They went into the gym, kicked everyone out, and then themselves left. An hour later, as Govind was closing his stall, the Esteem pulled up. It didn’t have any license plates, and a Sikh, not too tall, not too short, got out.
Ramnivas stepped out of the backseat right after him.
They went inside and stayed for about an hour and a half.
They kept carrying stuff from the building and loading it into the trunk of the vehicle. An undercover Ambassador car pulled up right around the corner, and followed the Esteem when it began to pull away.
Govind said Ramnivas looked incredibly stressed, his eyes glazed over like a corpse’s. He’d tried to say something to Ramnivas, but the Esteem was gone in a flash—the Sikh was driving.
According to what Ramnivas told me about the space behind the wall in the gym at Saket, it must have been pretty large. Conservatively, I figured it had to have been an area of about twelve by four feet. Ramnivas said the space was crammed full of hundred-and five-hundred-rupee bills. Based on that, I did the math. What I came up was that there was easily anywhere from a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty million rupees in there.
Do you remember the case where the Central Bureau raided a cabinet minister’s house, along with a few of his other properties? The investigation was launched by the government that had just come into power, and the cabinet minister under investigation had been part of the previous government. The minister was charged with taking something like a billion rupees in kickbacks from a foreign company that supplied high-tech equipment. The man did a little time, and was later released. He then joined the very same government that had earlier begun the investigation. It’s clear that Ram-nivas, guided by auspicious astrological alignments, or just dumb luck, had discovered a problem with his broom; and in order to solve it, he began banging the butt against the wall.
He figured out the wall was hollow, got his hands inside, and was suddenly face-to-face with money hidden from the eyes of the Central Bureau and the tax man. It was unaccounted money, untraceable money—dirty money.
You already know that only a few lakhs of rupees were recovered from the trunk after Kuldip, a.k.a. Kulla, and Ramni-vas were killed on Ridge Road that night—and a large part of that cash was counterfeit too. This, when we know that there was some one hundred-and-fifty million rupees taken out of that wall. What happened?
Kulla, a career criminal, had so many cases pending in court that the police could use him as they pleased. He worked as an informant, reporting to the police station each and every day. He spied for them, pimped for them, and provided false testimony as needed. But they say that a few days before that fatal episode, he got into a fight with the station superintendent, who accused Kulla of playing both sides and being on the take from another party.
He’s become more trouble than he’s worth. Let’s make the problem disappear.
So the police killed two birds with one stone, disposing of Kulla in a manufactured encounter and getting their hands on the cash. A police captain plotted the whole thing with a couple of trusted underlings: low risk, high payoff. The cops split the spoils among themselves, and they didn’t forget their friends in Agra. And the officer behind the plot received a medal and promotion for his good deed that day.
It doesn’t matter how many weeks or months or years I’ve got left in this sorry life before I also disappear—but I, too, would like to enter into a world of my dreams, just as Ramni-vas did.
So that’s why every night at midnight, when all of Delhi is asleep, I put on some black clothes, sneak out of the house, and spend the rest of the night scraping out the walls of Delhi. Treasures beyond anyone’s wildest dreams are hidden in the countless hollows in Delhi’s countless walls. I’m sure it’s there.
My only regret is that I’ve wasted the last decades of my life before starting out with my pick and trowel.
So if you read this story, go and buy a little pickax and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s not far at all, and it’s the only way left to make it big. The other ways you read about in the papers and see on TV are rumors and lies, nothing more.
T
he slender black police transport sprang into the sky above headquarters, then shuddered to a halt in midair. Dome, mission-commander of the two-man team inside the vehicle, frowned as he punched the com-link on his helmet. A vacant hiss greeted him.
“Transmission failure?” he wondered out loud. “I’m raising clean air.”
Mission coordinates from the dispatchers were normally fed simultaneously into the commander’s helmet and to the transport vehicle’s self-guiding system.
But today, silence.
Dome stabbed at the com-link button repeatedly.
Blank.
“Oh, come on, come on,” muttered Hem, copilot. “We’re losing time …”
In Dome’s three years of airborne service he had never yet been dispatched without directions. Finally—a couple of squawks in his earphone and—
“What?”
Dome swung around to face Hem. “Can you believe this? They’re asking for a
visual
search!”
Hem groaned, though he took the precaution of covering his mouthpiece with his hand. Profanity, even to the extent of rude noises, was strictly forbidden amongst uniformed of-ficers. “We’ll never find the sucker.”
“Apparently the call came over some sort of outdated radio device—” Dome listened to the dispatcher’s voice squeaking in his ears, trying to make sense of what he heard “—reception garbled … just the name: Golden Acres.” He glanced toward Hem. “Ever heard of it?”
The copilot shook his head, scowling. “Nah,” he grunted.
Directly beneath them was the gigantic administrative complex known as the Hub. It served as the absolute nerve center of Dilli Continuum, glittering capital city of the economic behemoth of Greater India that sprawled across the whole of South Asia. The six-lane avenue called Rajpath that had once stretched from the presidential palace in the west to the national stadium in the east had been replaced by a long straight block of buildings four stories high. It was crossed by a matching block at its midpoint. From the air, the combined blocks of the Hub looked like a colossal plus-sign.
Nothing now remained of the old white-walled bungalows of the past, the hexagonal roundabouts, the graceful tree-lined avenues. The presidential palace along with all historical monuments, including ancient forts and tombs, had been dismantled and rebuilt in vast underground museums.
The Hub bristled with dish antennae and the long whiplike lances of directional audio-scopes. Flat green lawns provided a boundary between the structure and its parking vaults. A battalion of employees moved in and out of the place in four daily shifts, ensuring that it remained awake and operational twenty-four hours a day, year in, year out. The strictly linear grid of streets that contained and defined the city originated from this central location.
“It’ll take
forever,
” snarled Hem. “Do we even know what to look for?” Pilots were encouraged to compete for the fastest response times. Weekly and monthly bonuses were awarded on the basis of nanosecond differences in their scores.
“An area of desolation is what we need to find,” said Dome, repeating what he’d heard over his earphones. Now he pulled down his helmet visor, reading information off its glow-screen. “No solid structures. No roads. No landmarks … Wait … incoming images … hmmm. Dense smoke haze. Can’t see much through
that
. Okay, they’re saying to head north and east—the caller will send up a flare five minutes from now.”
Precious minutes spilled from Hem’s time-cache as the transport hummed high above the taut regularity of the city’s streets below. In every direction beneath them the rigid graph that originated at the Hub had wholly replaced the tangled web of the old city’s narrow streets. Avenues met at precise right angles and at every intersection artificial cherry trees in permanent full bloom had taken the place of dusty neems and soaring silk cottons of the past. Surface vehicles were regulated by magnetic strips embedded in the road surface. From the air the neat rows of residential buildings looked like identical wooden blocks, color-coded by locality.
“It’s some kind of dump,” said Dome, listening to the dispatcher. “The world’s largest—two thousand acres—occupied by squatters …”
It was difficult to make sense of the information. How come he’d never heard of it? How could such a vast area have gone unregulated and unreported to the extent that its coordinates weren’t available to dispatchers? What was the meaning of such obscurity?
Four minutes passed before the transport was hovering above a cloud of pollution that blanketed the area like a thick gray lid. The machinelike regularity of the city’s streets had ended abruptly at what looked like a wall or a moat, zigzagging at sharp angles. Beyond it was the fog.
“It’s been used as a dump since the mid–twentieth century,” said Dome. “Used to be on the northern-most boundary of the city … along some kind of ancient highway—G.T. Road, they used to call it, stands for Grand Trunk—and a bog or a lake called Bhalswa …”
While the modern Continuum had developed southwards, the northern dump had become a lawless, cancerous wasteland. Its residents were declared illegal squatters but were too numerous to be moved out by force. Rather than risk the disapproval of their international business partners, the government had chosen the alternative of maintaining the dump as a ZZ: a Zero Zone. They suppressed all information going in or coming out of the area while leaving the inhabitants severely isloated. In an operational sense, the sector did not exist.
“That’s the flare,” said Hem, pointing toward a flash of pink light that fountained up above the murk.
“Yes,” said Dome, “set me down there.”
He, like Hem, wore full-body protective armor. It was designed to protect the wearer against all foreseeable threats, mechanical or chemical. Hem positioned the transport above the locator flare as the mission commander descended from the transport on a steel cable attached to his suit.
The air had the consistency of thin gruel, stirred by the gale from the transport’s whirring rotor. Dome wondered, as the murk enfolded him, if his helmet’s air filter would be overwhelmed. It was equipped to process and neutralize gas attacks but not such dense concentrations of airborne particulate. He was trained to suppress all emotions and reactions, yet his nerves were twitching and a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. He hated to acknowledge these signs of weakness, minor though they were.
Then his feet touched down and he went into a defensive crouch, automatically scanning and processing information.
On the ground, a taser.
Beside it, a body.
The taser’s handgrip glowed cherry-red in the heat scanner Dome wore as a monocle clipped to his visor, over his left eye. The red glow meant that the weapon had been handled very recently. Yet its muzzle appeared blue and cold in the heat scanner: Whatever the cause of death, it hadn’t come from this small weapon.
Visibility was low. Air unbreathable. Operational area flat, open, a circular clearing forty feet in diameter and—Ah.
There was someone else present. A man.
Dome straightened up, his movements slow and deliberate. Civilians were known to be nervous in the presence of the tall crisis-response officers in their gleaming body suits.
From the man’s string-vest, loose khaki shorts, and bare feet, Dome guessed that he was a resident of the Acres. Dress codes elsewhere in the city were as strict and formal as the building regulations, with low tolerance for bare skin. The man was short, wide, and wiry, his black hair close-cropped and his eyes set deep beneath a jutting brow. He was clearly unarmed and did not appear to be offering any threat.