I was one of the first to install a system back in the twentieth century when the vehicle was new. There was always a Sufifat-boy tape rolling to drown out the noise of the day. Nights nowadays you want to listen to the silence, when you can.
Directly opposite the main gate of Delhi University, where the road goes straight up to Flagstaff House, the hill stretch has been closed to traffic and an autorickshaw stand has sprung up at the barrier. A handful of peanut vendors and ice-cream carts congregate there during the day. At night, of course, it’s deserted, and so it was this night, but sometimes you can pick up a late fare. I did a U-turn and drew up beside the gate. Ten or fifteen minutes under the entrance lights might be well spent, I thought. People don’t like to walk along the Ridge.
The Delhi Ridge is a wilderness of rocks and thorn trees, nature’s last stand in this gray city, the nearest thing we have to a forest. A hundred years ago they planted this barren upland with a Mexican tree that ran amok. Up along the crest are paved paths the municipality has laid in an attempt to tame the manmade jungle. Monkeys use the watershed as a safe base for raids down either side; peacocks honk at first light and then retire, leaving the field to a treepie with a harsh call — half heckle, half jeer. Morning walkers do their laughter therapy up there, and power joggers go by in pairs, tugging at the elastic bands of their tracksuit cuffs to consult expensive watches. But a careless jogger could ruin a pair of Nikes on the broken glass of last night’s rumfest, if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, say he was working late, there’s a higher price he could pay among the syringes and condoms and gutka sachets that lie strewn in the red-brick dust. Even by day you’d jump if someone came up behind you on those paths. You don’t go there after dark unless you have a minder. Or unless you are the minder.
Of course, lovers go there because there’s nowhere else to go. Students mostly, from the DU campus. There are park benches where they can sit and make out by day. I used to go up the Ridge during my spell as a student, before the old man realized I was getting ideas and married me off. In the early days the wife and I took the boys there for a joyride once or twice, before they grew embarrassed about an outing on the workhorse. We’d sit and watch the monkeys by Flagstaff House. In winter they sun themselves and pick one another’s fleas. A big male will turn up and simply roll over in front of a lesser creature, and the chosen one will leave whatever it was he was doing. I tend to believe in the chosen.
The newest tribe are the gardeners who arrived when Nehru Park was created. But joggers and gardeners and canoodlers and watchers tend to move on once the sun sets. Everyone does except for the diehards, or those who blithely believe a special dispensation hangs over them like a royal parasol. And who knows, maybe they’re mostly right.
They can be wrong. Every once in a while you read in the paper about a rape on the Ridge. I used to pay special attention to these snippets, partly because of my old association with the university.
That evening, I was parked outside the gates and starting to look at my watch when I heard the tube light smash. Few night sounds are more chilling, none more deliberate. After all, a tube light is something we carry with special care when we must, upright beside us. As if it were the body’s ideal twin, smooth and colorless and fragile. It breaks in a shivering white cascade with the sound of heaven collapsing. If spirit had substance it would shatter like this, something between a gasp and a cry. And that’s how it sounded, scary but somehow, how to put it, binding.
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 officer 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.