Delhi Noir (6 page)

There were three of them inside, all in khaki, two in front including the driver and one in the back.

“So you are the one troubling the traffic?” the policeman on the passenger side shouted out of the window.

I smiled at him. “No, officer. I am just sitting here thinking about what to do.” I smiled again. It wasn’t worth antagonizing an enforcer of the law—especially when you were naked and had needle pricks dotting your arms.

“He’s thinking of what he’s going to do,” the policeman on the passenger seat said, turning to the others. “What do you think he should do?”

There was a short silence.

The man in the back, who was writing something down in his book, said, “He should come with us.”

The policeman in the passenger seat leaned out of the car and said, “Hey, you’re a lucky guy. My boss likes you. You can come with us. We’ll help you think.”

I didn’t like the look in the man’s eyes. “No. I have to go home,” I said. “I have important things to do, a report to hand in. Thank you for your offer though,” I added.

The policeman didn’t smile. “And how are you planning to get home? Is it nearby?”

“No,” I answered fatally, “I live in NOIDA.”

Suddenly the man in the back who wasn’t wearing a uniform leaned forward. “Get him in,” he ordered.

The passenger door opened and the khaki uniform got out. Did they have extra uniforms in the police station? I wondered.

I was forced to sit between the silent driver and the one in the passenger seat, my knee jammed against the gearshift.

“I have a car too,” I said as the jeep started. “Why don’t you let me go home and I’ll come back to visit you in it? I really have to hand in my report or I’ll lose a lot of money.”

The fat one who seemed to do all the talking shook his head gravely. “We can’t let you do that,” he said. “You’ll catch a cold. And you’ll be a traffic problem. There could be accidents. Let rush hour pass and we’ll take you home.”

I looked out of the front of the jeep. It was nice being so high above the ground. The early November mist still hadn’t cleared. “That’s okay. I’m quite used to the cold, in fact I like it. I went to boarding school in the mountains; in the mornings we exercised in shorts. God, it was cold, but I liked it.”

No one said anything. Behind me, the man was writing away, his pen making a
scratch scratch
sound. The driver changed gears noisily, jamming the gear shift into my knee even harder.

“You’ll like the station too. We’ll give you food and clothes and take you home later,” the policeman said, laughing. “Isn’t that right, sir?”

The man in the back didn’t reply, but his pen went on scratching.

Food and clothes sounded good to me, so I gave in. We drove to the police station and came to a jerky halt under the porch. There was bougainvillea growing up the side of it and over the top, a riot of purple and white like a fancy lady’s hat. I studied the building critically while the fat guy went around the back and opened the door for his superior. It was a nice piece of colonial architecture. Two women in khaki saris came outside and, seeing me, covered their eyes, giggled, and ran back in. Suddenly I longed for a really stiff drink.

The driver came out with a filthy old blanket which he threw to me. “Cover yourself,” he said roughly.

“I thought you couldn’t speak,” I said, grabbing it. Then I added, “Hey, this is filthy, give me something else. I could get leprosy or something from this.”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” he replied.

I was taken into a reception area where a rather bored policeman fingerprinted me.

“Why are you fingerprinting me? I’m not a criminal. The criminal is out there somewhere, wearing my clothes. I’m a victim,” I protested.

“We fingerprint everyone,” the man across the desk replied laconically.

The fat policeman who’d brought me in said, “He’s dangerous, this one. Got a big mouth. The boss wants him kept carefully. He’s probably a Muslim terrorist.”

I was led down a corridor, my hands handcuffed behind my back, then down some stairs into another dark, featureless corridor that smelled of toilet. We came to a cell and the policeman fished out his keys and threw me in. The blanket slipped off my shoulders and I was naked again. There was no one else in the cell—I was alone.

I don’t how time passed. When someone eventually came, I had lost all track of it. Time and clothes. The two were closely related in this case. The brother who had stolen my clothes had stolen my watch as well, the bastard. It was a Seiko. A final gift from my wife.

The interrogation began. I was tied to a rope, which was tied to a loop in the ceiling that must have once held a fan. They beat me with their belts.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“I already told you! It’s in your register!” I shouted.

“Are you a terrorist?”

“You crazy? I’m a businessman, a CEO. You’re making a big mistake. I came willingly, I’m a victim. You’ll pay for this.” Already I felt less certain. No clothes, no watch, no wallet. Even I didn’t believe myself.

The beating went on for a while. I stopped speaking. They quit when they grew tired. Beating someone is an exhausting job, like manual labor, I guess. And none of them were in good shape.

One peed into a bucket of filthy water and the other threw it over me. They left.

I shivered in the dark and began to sneeze.

Much later I was fed some stale chapattis and a bowl of watery daal. Then I was given a pail and a filthy rag and told to clean the cell. After the cell, they made me clean the toilets.

I’d never cleaned a toilet in my life, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. But they didn’t care. The idea that they’d made me, a Brahman, clean their toilet was what really pleased them. No one really cared if their toilets were dirty, they just wanted to see me, a “sahib,” cleaning them. It proved what I had always believed, that India is a country of ideas, not actions.

As I was working on the last one, there was a commotion outside—sirens, lights, agitated footsteps. “Sonia Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi,” someone called. The place emptied. The man who was supposed to be guarding me ran too. I followed him, not wanting to be alone with the rats, and arrived at the front door just in time to see a convoy of Maruti jeeps racing away from the station. I simply walked out after them. No one stopped me. It wasn’t even dark.

On the street, the cars were still packed like sardines. I dodged between them, not giving them a second glance, until I came to the red light under the flyover where the policemen had picked me up that morning. I saw a bus in front of me and leapt inside.

At first no one reacted. The people in the last seats in back looked at me in surprise when I got in, then quickly turned away, confirming my belief that naked, I was not impressive. But there were too many of them to be scared. I was simply not their problem, I was the ticket collector or conductor’s problem. They stared stonily in front of them just like the drivers of the cars had.

The bus was fairly crowded. Not packed like the Delhi Transport Corporation buses, but profitably full, like the privately owned bus lines always managed to be. The aisles held a decent number of standing passengers, the conductor somewhere in the middle. The moment he saw me he came charging toward me with all the aggression of a raging bull.

“Get out of the bus,” he said without preamble.

I ignored him, staring longingly at his jacket, a cheap Chinese windbreaker with
London Fogg
written in red.

“I said I want you off the bus,” he repeated, puzzlement creeping into his eyes.

“Why? Can’t you at least let me stand on the step? I’ve been robbed, my clothes have been stolen. I need to get home. ’ll get off soon.” My voice came out all thin and whiny. Not at all like my usual confident foghorn.

“I don’t care. You just get off the bus or I’ll throw you off,” the conductor said loudly. Other passengers turned around to look.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Letting innocent ladies see you like this,” an older man, a government clerk–type, told me.

“I am, I am. Give me your clothes then, I’m sure you have more,” I replied.

A murmur of disapproval passed through the crowd.

“Hey, hey. Just joking. I’m getting off at the next stop, promise,” I said placatingly.

Hearing this, the conductor leaned out a window and banged hard on the side of the bus. But the driver didn’t react. He’d just built up a head of speed which he wasn’t going to lose till the next scheduled stop.

Now it was my turn to smile and the bus conductor’s to feel stupid.

“Have you no shame? Get off this bus now,” he ordered.

“But how can I? The bus is moving. Have you no pity?”

“Pity-shitty chodo, that’s not my problem. You cannot be in this bus without a ticket, that is all.”

We’d just passed the Lodhi Road Crematorium at this point, and I was hanging onto the railing on the top step when the bus came to a crashing halt, squealing brakes and all. We peered out of the windows to see what had happened, expecting to see a dead man.

And that is exactly what we saw—but not quite as freshly dead as we expected.

A dead man was crossing the street along with an enormous cortege of the living, that’s why the driver had been forced to stop. Inside the bus, everyone’s lips began to move in prayer and fingers clutched at lucky charms hidden under shirts and sari blouses.

I had an idea. The dead were generous people. They didn’t need their clothes.

The bus began to move slowly. I didn’t wait. I leapt off it and joined the marchers. They pretended not to notice me, or perhaps they were so lost in their grief that they really didn’t care about the naked man in their midst. Or perhaps death made them look at such things in a more tolerant, philosophical light.

As soon as I was through the gates, I was quite literally pushed aside by an even larger mass of mourners who had obviously been waiting for the deceased. Must have been an important man, I thought. But he was dead now. Luckily for me, he wasn’t getting an electric cremation, for then I would have lost the clothes. Instead he was being given the full treatment, with priests and incense and oil and wood. I climbed a nearby tree and watched.

Beneath me, the cremation ground was a sea of white. The man’s family, who’d been standing at the entrance greeting everyone, arrived—two sons in their forties, and a sister or wife who took one look at the body on its bed of wood and fainted.

The sea of white parted as the woman was carried away. The pundits began to mumble and the sons, their flabby bodies pale in the smoggy light, began to throw ghee on the pyre. The smell made me hungry and sick at the same time and I wished they’d hurry up. I watched the cloth anxiously. If my calculations were right, while the top cloth would be a goner, the sheet on which the body lay would be all right.

The flames rose high. It struck me suddenly that the dead man and I were similar. We had both been robbed of our clothes while we were defenseless and dreaming. I wondered what would happen if the man came alive after the crowds had left and found his body half-burnt and naked. Would he lie back down and ask for more wood and oil, or would he demand some clothes? I knew what I would do. I would demand clothes and go a.s.a.p. to find my son.

But the man didn’t move a muscle. The smoke thickened and grew bitter and people began to drift away. The pundits finished their work and the family moved to the entrance to say goodbye to the guests. Soon there was only an attendant left, a grizzled old man with coal-black skin who was no doubt paid by the family to make sure the body burnt till the end. Bones, I vaguely remembered, took a long time and a lot of oil and wood. The body would take four or five hours, and then the family would return for a box of ashes that they’d carry to the polluted Yamuna, where they would pay more money for more prayers.

Up in the tree, I shifted uncomfortably, the bark rough against my skin, the mango leaves filled with dust and diesel exhaust, praying that the old watchman would leave to take a pee or have a smoke. But to my surprise, he didn’t. He remained where he was, morosely watching the pyre, the white hairs on his beard and head getting picked out by the flames.

The fire burnt well. The ghee, it seemed, had not been adulterated. I heard the bones crack and a new, truly awful smell filled the air. I began to cough and the old man looked up in surprise. But the leaves of the tree must have been dense and plentiful or his eyes were weak, because he didn’t spot me. I decided to abandon my post and rescue my sheet straight away. What if there were secret caches of oil in the wood that were even now destroying it?

I got down on the ground and armed myself with a piece of wood from the pyre. Then I crept around the old man and hit him on the back of his head. He turned just as I swung, perhaps his hearing was especially sharp or else it was pure coincidence, and the branch smashed into his face, breaking his nose. He let out a cry and then fell slowly, like in a movie. I dropped the branch and dashed around to the other side of the pyre, scrambling up the unburnt logs even though the heat was something terrible.

Through the smoke and my tears I saw the edge of a sheet gleaming whitely just above my left hand. One more foothold, and I had the sheet grasped firmly and pulled.

I hadn’t thought it out at all though. I could have saved myself the trouble by simply stealing the clothes of the unconscious guard. Instead I burnt my hands and feet and almost got myself killed. When I used a burning branch to free the sheet, the body came along with it. We both tumbled to the ground, the body’s half-burnt face on top of me. I don’t know how but his eyes were open and staring into mine expressionlessly.

I threw the body off me—it was unbelievably heavy—and grabbed the sheet on which it had lain. The sheet still smelled sweet like rose water, and I wrapped it around my waist like a lungi, taking care to conceal the burnt bits. Then I ran, I ran as fast as I could out of that place of death.

I made it to the Lodhi Hotel compound on the other side of the road. Of course, there was no Lodhi Hotel left. It had been bought and torn down, Russian kitsch to be replaced by modern kitsch. Back in the old days the hotel had belonged to the government and was filled with pretty Russian hookers. I had liked it then—the idea of a government building filled with hookers always managed to stir my desire. Now it was a construction site.