He seemed to come to life and we parted at the 212 bus stop.
“Ten o’clock!” I called as he climbed on his bus.
At half past 9 I was parked and waiting. I moved a couple of lovers on in a gruff policemanly voice and, as I watched them go, wondered where the knife would have gone in. Then there was nobody. I sat in the Bee and twiddled my thumbs and watched the night. The tower looked bleak and aloof, the Ridge close and unfriendly. Another feather of gray would have tipped the night sky into blackness. Brooding on my ancestor I realized that at this hour before the battle he would be drawing his mystic box in the dust and beginning his slow dance of death and transference. I simply sat and nibbled at a sugar stick. Before I knew it I had emptied the box.
At 10:10 I heard voices. They were singing but they were not houris. It was my quarry, drunk, both of them. Cobra was spitting threats at the world in between lines from an old song.
“Get in, you idiot!” I whispered to Sidey, who was busy playing the Lucknow game of After You. He obeyed and snuggled up to King Khan.
Cobra needed help and I brought myself to touch him. His balloon jacket felt dry and scaly, so I pinned him by the neck, bent him in two, and simply sprung him in. He turned to Deepika and began to slobber all over that sheer black negligee. I got in at once, started up, and took off, veering clockwise around the tower. My passengers were thrown left in a crazy centrifuge, Cobra leaning precariously out of the Bee.
“Hang on!” I yelled, and we plunged downhill, racing the way the boy had run the night of the tube light. Down below I jinked around the traffic barrier and left onto University Road. It was a repeat of the hospital ride, only this time I had the villains.
The Bee buzzed like the beauty she once was. I felt I was playing an instrument whose dark sweet drone underlaid the pair’s drunken bawling. In days past I could tell the engine’s semitones up and down the scale. I swooned to certain piston tremolos and awoke in time to pump a sweet glissando on the brake. Bee and I were partners in a dance whose music was in our blood. We moved in unison: I could trust her with any step, and she responded with an enabling precision; I could jiggle the schoolkids into giggling hysteria, sway a pouting beauty, or hit a bump at speed and bounce a snark straight up into the iron beam.
What to do? I was thinking as I sped through the dark. I had no plan. I watched the two men in my rearview mirror, but really I was looking a lot further back. Rape is a tricky business to judge. Unless you’ve felt the hot blunt thorn of it in your own flesh, your opinion isn’t worth a lot. For a moment the mirror showed me just one face in the backseat, then as the bastard split in two I knew what I would do.
At the corner where the road goes over the hill, a northbound 212 was about to take the curve onto University Road. There’s no median strip there and downhill buses always cut that corner. There’s a moment when their headlights are shining clear up the Hindu College Road when in fact the bus is heading down toward the university gates. I switched off my light and spun the Bee around in a tight U-turn. Cobra flew out into the bus’s path. Last in, first out.
I watched him go in the mirror and thought he flew a little further than I intended. Well, that’s destiny, I thought: He’s meant to lose a little less. I turned the U into an O and sped off into the night, but not before I saw the bus drive over his feet.
Enough to put him out of action, up on the Ridge anyway. Then I dropped the Mongoose home. As in dropped.
Well, that’s that, I thought. You don’t see folks again in the big city. It’s getting bigger all the time. That’s progress: fluorescent lamps replacing tube lights, four-wheelers replacing three.
But maybe a month later I did see Sidey again. I had a passenger so I couldn’t stop, but he was looking fresh and expansive on the sidewalk and he gave me a long cool wink as I went by.
It wasn’t till I arrived home that I got to thinking about it. The wife had made baba ganoush after scorching the eggplant skin on a naked flame in her painstaking way. It’s the family favorite, picked up from an aunt in the Gulf, and it usually goes down in a great hurry, no chewing, but I was about to swallow when I saw that wink again and then all I remember is the wife and boys looking strangely at me because I just kept chewing on that mouthful.
I haven’t seen Mongoose lately but I often see that shrewd little pair of eyes fixed on me. Then one of them closes in the blackest wink, and I’m left wondering: Which of us was the sidey?
Parking
by Ruchir Joshi
Nizamuddin West
The cop van, slowing down on the street below, he doesn’t like, even though he doesn’t really notice at first. He’s not planning to spend long on his terrace, just enough to catch one more shot of her walking away with that young ass of hers, maybe exchange a wave as she gets into daddy car and drives off. There’s music playing behind him, on his comp, and the just-opened bottle of vodka waiting. It’s what you do after a good love session, except she’s young and doesn’t drink what he does, doesn’t listen to what he does, and on top of that, the Aunty is waiting at home, dinner ready, while the owner of daddycar is away, businessing out-of-country.
There’s all kinds in this neighborhood, the semi-rich retired, the Government Service Detritus, the bourgeois Mosey refugees who’ve been forced out from other parts of Saarey Jahan ka Kachha, the old ’47 rehvaasis refusing to die, the solid slum-class that’s accrued around the Dargah, the Sufis and qawwalis who’ve dittoed, and now the new hippies, do-gooding goras with their blond and barefoot children kicking up dust as they trail along behind their crazy rent-paying momdads.
This afternoon they’ve decided this is also where Osama’s hiding — totally best place for him, actually — and they’ve been fucking for him, doing it for O Bloody Laden, hoping he can hear them in his lonely hole, maybe even see them from one of the high mosque turrets near the tomb. It’s been good, great even, and funny too, especially when she’s shouted, “Oh, Sam, let’s do it for Osama!” and then when they’ve collapsed in a postcoital heap of sweat, laughter, and sheets. He hasn’t wanted it to end just yet, but she’s pulled the plug, both on the Most Wanted Man on Earth, and on him, suddenly the Least Wanted Man.
“Babe!” He hates that “babe,” coming from her, which is not the same as coming from the Yankietta who had a right to use it — same as we, us, have a right to use “bhenchod” and goras, like, don’t.
“Babe, you know, na, if I make it back in time for dinner then we peacefully get another whole day before Dad returns, right?”
“Right...didn’t know you were still in Class Ten, but yeah, okay, go.”
“Fuck you, uncle, I might as well be in Class Eight, okay? For you I’ll always be in Class Eight, a horny Class Eight thirteen-year-old, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’ll take what you get, na?”
“Yeah. Now go.”
“And dude, I’ve been here from 1:30 to now, 7:30, which is six hours, so you’re not seriously complaining about what you get and take, ya?”