“No. Now go.” He hates the “dude” even more than the “babe.”
“I’m not complaining about this either, na? So, like no complaints and see you day after?”
“Ya, ya, ya, now GO!”
She places a goodbye tongue in his mouth, like she’s depositing cash at a government bank — rightful, superior, slightly disdainful of the clerk on the other side of the counter — and goes. Bolt door behind, turn around, and, like, beautiful choice: Go to kitchen, pour second drink vs. Go to computer and carry on hitting the downloads and get the rest of the Joy Div stuff before the broadband does its late-night slowdown.
He goes out to the terrace to get one last visual taste of her, catches her as she walks into sight under the lamppost, fixing her spaghettis, pulling uselessly on her low-low sal-war bottoms, sees her turn right into the little gali across the way where he’s told her to avoid parking, and then he sees a bloody thana Qualis, blue-light mundu spinning as it casually, absentmindedly crawls up and blocks the gali where she’s parked. The blue light goes off but neither of the two thullas sitting inside makes any move to get out.
It’s not that she can’t drive, problem is she tries to drive like she’s Schumacher’s little sister, bloody Ferrari sitting in an Indica. That’s also fine, it’s just that her slow-driving is pretty bad: the parking, the backing, the maneuvering in narrow situations — it’s the opposite of watching her on a dance floor, where she mongooses through a maze of groping hands with nothing really managing to touch her. Here she’s liable to touch everything, including the cops’ Qualis. If she had any sense she would drive the way her car’s pointing, straight into the service lane on the other side of the gali, and nose her way out from there, but she’s a headbanger and he knows she’ll reverse toward the main street and hit her horn.
Unbolt door and pull open, he’s already halfway down the stairs, tucking the hanging drawstrings back inside his shorts, when his mobile starts to sing.
“Sam? Babe, can you please come down here fast?”
“Yah, coming, what’s up?”
“Cops hassling me.”
“On my way. Be polite.”
And that’s how the scene will always play in his head: Cops sitting fat in van, him on stairs, and-but-then by the time he reaches daddycar they are on the road, in the lane, ugly eyes reaching deep into the crack of Tia’s ass as she bends into the open front passenger door, attacking the glove compartment for papers. Then one guy, the tall, tough-looking one, is standing right behind her, his eyes still searching down while the fat one flicks his glance between the papers and Tia’s deep cleavage. In his head, a shout — why are the damn things so big anyway? He’s not a tit man, he didn’t ask for them to be so big, a size or two smaller would have been just fine, caused a whole lot less trouble on these tit-obsessed streets.
Samiran will always remember this as himself being hogtied, witnessing a visual gang rape. The fat cop doesn’t even take his eyes off Tia’s stack when addressing Sam.
“Tu kaun hai? Who’re you? Where do you live?” The “tu” would be insulting if the cop had done it with some thought, but Samiran is suddenly sharply aware that for this thulla he is a default “tu,” nowhere near worthy of the effort of an “aap.” Samiran is now very conscious of his dirty T-shirt and frayed shorts, his unshaven jaw, his Tia-smelling face. There’s no point trying to tell them he does ad research for the net component of a big national weekly mag, but he tries anyway, with the succinct version. “I am from Press, mai Press ka hun.”
The words come out flat and weak, and he will remember the cop’s eyes cranking up to his face, the briefest of curiosities and the quickest of dismissals. Nizamuddin is full of high-powered media, both this side and that side of Mathura Road, and both the thullas have dealt with a few. Sam can tell they are thinking, This dirty chut is no big threat.
“Press card hai?” There’s a fat mole on the left side of the fat cop’s nose which is shining slightly with sweat as the lamp-post catches it. Sam feels like that mole is the central black hole for all the malevolence coming out of the bastard. No, he doesn’t have a press card, he’s not a journalist, and now he is very aware that he doesn’t have a magic number he can call, any contact who can disable these bastards. With fury he realizes exactly where he stands in the Delhi pecking order.
Tia, to her credit, isn’t trying to cover up one inch of her skin. She’s standing there, erect, tits jutting at one cop, butt showing the finger to the other. Before the cop realizes it, she’s taken the papers back from him and gone into attack. She uses her English, not bothering with Hindi and not bothering to modulate her fake American twang. “What’s the problem? I don’nderrstand what the prawblem is!”
The fat cop points at the problem. The problem is the guy Sam knows as “K-5,” and he’s standing there, just outside his gate, the front gate of K-5, in track pants and a long kurta, grinning like a monkey with gonorrhea, the words Got You! almost blazing in neon across his forehead, just under his backpointing baseball cap.
“Parking,” says the fat nose-mole cop, “Suspicious car parking. We have a complaint.”
“Who’s complained?” Samiran feels the blood hit his head.
“We complained!” says K-5, dripping self-righteousness. “We didn’t know who this car was. Never seen it before. Times are bad, could have been a terrorist car, how do we know!?!”
Samiran gets it like a thwack in the face. Tia always parks her car in this lane, right in front of K-5’s side entrance where there’s usually shade. They always tell her not to park there because that’s where they park their third car. And she always tells them they don’t own the lane outside their door. Once she actually told this guy to fuck off. Today is clearly revenge day, with a little help from friends in the local thana. K-5 has obviously called the cops to come and have a look, and everybody’s lucky because this is exactly when the girl’s decided to come down to her car.
Sam turns to Tia. “Listen, why don’t you move the car out to the main road? We’ll just sort this out.”
As Tia gets in and starts backing up, Sam turns to the cop. “Okay, bhaisahab? Now you know who the car belongs to and where people were visiting. Theek hai?”
“Terey kehne sey okay nahi ho jatta hai!” (“It’s not okay because you say it’s okay!”) Tall Cop is now right behind Sam, using the same “tu.”
Sam rearranges the movement on his face, trying to stuff down the anger. He wants Tia out of here and he wants to gun these scum down. On their knees, begging before his.357 Magnum, one close facial, the fat one first, so the tall guy can see what’s coming, Fat One’s brain and face splattering onto the road and into the gutter — no, actually, mostly on the tall guy’s boots, Gazpacho soup kabhi chakhaa hai, bhenchod? (Ever tasted gazpacho, sisterfucker?), and then, as the Champion Rapist of Haryana starts to shake, as he covers his head, babbling “Nahi bhaisahab, nahi huzur...” a bullet straight in the cock, and then as the hands jerk to crotch, then and only then, one slug straight between the eyes. Then, next, a long shot to bring down the cockroach-pimp K-5 as he tries to run, just enough to bring him down but not fully kill. Then, a big smile into the fucker’s face before blowing him away. Two dead cops, one squashed cockroach, somehow nobody else around for miles, and he goes up, carries on with his downloads, finishes half the bottle of vodka around a long shower with proper water pressure... and he wants Tia out of here.
Now, backed out on the main road, Tia has the same idea. Her Indica is finally pointing in the right direction. As he and the cops walk out of the gali, Sam realizes the chick’s bravado has run dry. Her face is now saying, Shit. Daddy. Daddycar. Aunt. Trouble. Big shit.