Sam has kept his voice sweet and full of request, since he now knows that this is how menace is best communicated to all but the extremely dumb. Sam has learned a lot since he and Ajit saw U.P. Singh out of his flat over a month ago. “You don’t kick a man when he’s down,” Ajit had explained after shutting the door. “You put a leash around his neck and tell him which way to crawl.”
After the phone call on the terrace, Fat Cop, Fat-fuck, SI U.P. Singh, the Tia-hassling, tit-staring thulla, had looked like he’d been sitting on a large, slow-growing cactus bush for many years. Ajit, on the other hand, had been ready with a smile and a cold Pepsi poured into a tall glass. Every time the SI tried to raise the subject, to apologize, Ajit stood at the net and volleyed it, turning the subject away to some other topic of general interest. The message was a) Sir, we are now all here in this friendly, postproblem atmosphere, why bring up what is already past? and b) You motherfucking bug on the asshole of a cockroach, you may think your humiliation is complete, but actually it’s just starting.
In the final sum total there had been both spectacular stick and some small carrot. As Delhi Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Shri Satish Wahi sahab’s secretary instructed Singh on the phone, Neb Chand, the wannabe-rapist, was to be transferred to some punishment post. But it was Singh who was to secretly sing out the damning report about Tall Cop’s harassment of innocent young women. It was also going to be part of Singh’s general duties to make sure Mr. Samiran Chakkarvarty, ace web analyst and highly connected press-person, was not hassled by anyone or anything, including nasty neighbors. In return, apropos a discussion on mobile phones, Ajit had gone into Sam’s bedroom, rummaged, and came out with a large manila envelope for Singh. He’d handed this to the cop who was stuttering out his goodbyes. “There are some phones in this magazine, sir, so please take a look. The descriptions are in Russian but model numbers are in Normal, take a look and let me know what you like. I will see what I can do when my cousin returns from Russia — phones are cheaper there than even Singapore or Hong Kong.” With which Subinspector Singh left, carrying a six-month-old Russian Playboy containing three pages of obsolete mobile phones and seven pages of evergreen Playmates of the Year.
Sam had made a small mistake as the cop was about to exit. “Zaroorat padi to mai tum ko phone karunga, thik hai?” (“I’ll call you if and when I need you, all right?”), he had said, but using the familiar “you” with relish. Fat Cop’s eyes had flared. At the same time, Sam received a small kick in the back of the shin from Ajit. It was explained to him later that the “tum” was an off-note in the complex and beautiful symphony of Ajit’s subjugation of U.P. Singh. As Chandran had then underlined, “These kinds of sodomizings are a verre delegate business, mach-aa! Best to leave it to the experts, you understand?”
Hissing cobras
by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya
R.K. Puram
On a drizzly November morning, around 11:00, Inspector Raghav Bakshi parked his Gypsy under a neem tree and looked at the shit-yellow two-story government quarters surrounding a bald patch of land that was meant to be developed as a park. On Sunday mornings one could see the neighborhood kids playing cricket or badminton here, but the park was now deserted except for a couple of stringy goats grazing in a corner where there were still a few clumps of grass leftover from the previous monsoon. R.K. Puram Sector 7 was a colony for the babus who slogged from 9 to 5 in government offices, the Bhawans stretching from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhawan in Lutyens’ Delhi. The wives of these babus, having bundled off their kids to school and their husbands to office along with their lunch boxes, were now enjoying a couple hours of break from the drudgery of running their households on shoestring budgets. Later, after having their frugal lunch of roti, sabzi, and achaar, they would switch on their TVs to enjoy their favorite soaps on Star Plus, Sony, or Zee, mushy serials that glorified the virtues of joint families shepherded by benign and supportive elders.
The inspector was here, in fact, to inquire about the accidental death of one such matriarch, a sixty-five-year-old woman named Kamla Agarwal who’d presided over the measly quarters of her son and daughter-in-law. Five days ago, the old lady was “brought dead” to the emergency room of Safdarjung Hospital with multiple skull fractures. The policeman on duty had registered the case as a “death caused by a fall from the top of Malai Mandir,” an imposing south Indian temple situated on a hillock that overlooks plebeian Sector 7 on one side and swanky Vasant Vihar on the other. The very next day, after the postmortem, a no-objection certificate was issued for the cremation and the paperwork was passed on to the R.K. Puram police station. Inspector Bakshi would have treated the case as a routine one, but then came an anonymous call from a woman alleging foul play. Bakshi decided to give the Agarwals a good sniff, just in case.
The inspector rang the doorbell outside quarter no. 761 and a swarthy woman in a green-and-yellow synthetic sari opened the door. She had a gray shawl draped around her shoulders. As he announced the purpose of his visit, Bakshi noted that the buxom woman, who could have been in her late twenties, adjusted her shawl to cover her bosom. Ushered into a ten-by-ten room painted a dull shade of yellow, Bakshi took a quick inventory of its furnishings: a twenty-inch Onida TV mounted on an aluminum cabinet; a fancy wall clock embellished with a Radha-Krishna icon; a drab government calendar with too many holidays marked in red; a faded print of a nondescript landscape showing sunrise or sunset. This was a babu’s no-frills basic dwelling, he thought, and the message that it conveyed to him was: Don’t expect barfis and cashews with your tea. Amidst this tawdry bric-a-brac, the woman sitting before him on the divan looked quite glamorous.
Bakshi’s roving eyes now paused above the TV cabinet to study a framed picture of an elderly woman smiling under a pine tree on a hilly road. “Is that Kamla Agarwal?” he asked, sitting down on a lumpy sofa with frayed upholstery.
The woman nodded. “My mother-in-law. That one was taken at Katra when she made a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi last summer.”
“Hmm.” Bakshi stroked his well-trimmed mustache like a pet dog. He was pleased to note that the woman was nervously twisting a corner of her shawl. Did she have something to hide? Or was she just feeling uncomfortable in the presence of a beefy policeman when her husband wasn’t around? Bakshi opened his notebook and plucked a pen from his breast pocket. “First things first,” he said. “Your name?”
“Mukta Agarwal.”
The inspector listened to Mukta’s story while consuming a cup of tea and some namkeen. When he stepped out of quarter no. 761 half an hour later, he was inclined to believe that the deceased Kamla Agarwal was indeed just an unlucky woman who had visited Malai Mandir with her daughter-in-law to watch the evening aarti. Built entirely with blue granite stones in the hallowed traditions of Chola architecture, the temple was a south Delhi landmark that attracted thousands of devotees every day. After receiving prasadam from a priest, the two women had proceeded toward the back stairs of the temple for a quick exit. That was when Kamla slipped on a banana peel flung by a careless devotee and hurtled down ten steep steps, crushing her head on a massive boulder that awaited her like Yama, the god of death.
As Mukta narrated the incident, her face turned ashen, her eyes glistened with tears, and she finally broke down, gagging her mouth with her shawl. The woman either possessed the thespian talents of Meena Kumari or was an ordinary lachrymose housewife. Bad luck, Bakshi thought. If he could catch a whiff of foul play in her tale, he could find a way to squeeze her husband for a few thousand.