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 Mallika 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 appeared. 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 functionless 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.