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.
I stood by the grave and felt my shirttail begin to lift and billow. His spirit clad me, sliding over my skin like a lover’s hand. The air grew red and I was racked with pain and filled with heretical notions. Blood is our element, I remember thinking, not water. We swim in it from one life to the next, passing like a wet flame from wick to wick. So little to the body, I was thinking the other day while I bathed, the soaping is so quickly done, so little to do.
Go! I heard my Baba say. Fight, with love in your heart.
I went to a hardware store and bought a quarter-inch brush, a small tin of enamel blue, a cheap screwdriver, and a key ring with a red disc; on the sidewalk I bought a secondhand padlock. Then I went home and parked the Bee and kissed my wife. Not now, I said, detaching myself when she sent the boys out to play. I opened the paint can and outlined eggplants and marigolds on the nose of the Bee and rose water urns and caged bulbuls on her tail. The paint was still wet as I rode over the hill again and padlocked the iron door in the curly-wurly ruin.
Next day I tailed the pair again. They did a repeat of the hill walk and parted at the gate on the 212 route, Sidey looking more depressed than ever. I tailed him home to a Maurice Nagar flat and made some inquiries with neighbors.
The morning after I was at the DU metro station early. This time I braved the sweet potato but asked for an extra squeeze of lime.
Mongoose turned up in his floral jacket and ordered the same. We exchanged a wink when a Bips lookalike passed by on gel-pen refill heels. I chucked my leaf plate and ordered another.
“And one for my friend here!” I said.
“No, no,” he protested, but only formally. He was already chucking his leaf.
“Something else, these babes, no?” I said, strolling him gently away. He was walking before he knew it.
We drifted up University Road toward the gates. He seemed happy to get away from the metro, but kept looking back all the same.
“So, Mr. Raju,” I began.
Mongoose stopped dead in his tracks. “How do you know me?”
“Oh,” I brushed away an airy cobweb, “we have our ways.” At the we I drew myself up to my full height, laid a long finger on my shoulder, and tapped twice where some silver might adorn my epaulettes. He remained standing so I prodded him along with little shocks of home address and house history, even a little detail about a tiny nephew who might need a polio shot. (I picked that up from two door-to-door health workers.)
“And how is the, um,” I gestured up the Ridge, “shikar these days? Happy hunting?”
His eyes bulged. Sideys break down more or less right away so I was at pains to let him know I knew he was just the accessory. “And your friend, the big gun?”
He was dumb and dry-mouthed. I walked him up the slope past the tower to the curly-wurly lodge in the forest.
“We’ve had to change the lock on your door, I’m afraid.” I produced the key ring that my older boy had painted in police blue-and-red; he had added off his own bat the sinister Delhi Police motto: With you, for You, Always. “Go on, open it.”
He undid the padlock but lacked the strength to climb the stair.
“Don’t you want to go and see?”
“I believe you.”
“All right. What can you tell us about your friend?”
Right then the cell phone rang in his cargo pants. Mongoose jumped where he stood. It was Cobra, I could tell. The timing shook me too; the sidey simply came unhinged.
“If it’s our friend,” I said, “tell him you’ll meet him tomorrow.”
He obeyed. But Cobra had other plans and after hearing him out, Mongoose hung up in an ecstasy of fear.
“What’s up?”
He looked unseeingly at me, his finger and thumb worrying a burr on the cotton jacket.
“Hey.” I frowned and slapped him.
He began to whimper, edging away from me and then back as if pushed from the other side by an unnamed force. The phone slid into his pocket and he gripped the barred door like a prisoner who doesn’t realize he’s on the outside. “He’s crazy,” he wailed. “He’s mad!”
“What’s this drama-shama?” I growled.
He slid down the door like a bad actor and squatted there with his forehead lodged between two bars.
“Hoy!” I booted him in the bum to no effect. I was aiming a harder kick when he began to speak.
“He’s going to kill somebody. And he wants me to help.”
“Kill who?”
“Somebody. Anybody. He says no more fooling around. He says next time we use the knife. He says finish off the bastards. He says they need to be taught a lesson. They keep coming here and polluting the morals of the nation. But then he himself...”
“He himself what?”
He hung his head.
“He himself what?”
“Brings me here.”
“When are you seeing him?”
“He says we’ll have a drink this evening. He says we’ll want a bit of warming up. He wants me to bring a bottle of Walker. Where am I supposed to get the money?”
I thought for a bit. “Okay, you get a bottle of Patiala whiskey and go to the rebottlers behind Kashmiri Gate. They don’t charge much. Your job is to get him drunk, okay? You don’t drink in here?... Good. Get him drunk and then walk him to Flagstaff House. I’ll be waiting there at 10 o’clock. In an autorickshaw. We’ll take him for a ride. Just get him drunk. And keep yourself sober. Do you think you can manage that?”