The roof had already been laid. A laborer’s family was living inside. One could see a faint light in a back room. A transistor radio played film music.
Chotu seemed to know exactly what to do. He took us toward the boundary wall to the left of the house. The ground was uneven and embedded with pieces of broken tiles and shards of glass. Some iron rods were lying next to the wall. Chotu picked up three. We walked back to the rickshaw, constantly looking over our shoulders, hoping no one had seen us.
Sadiq and I piled into the rickshaw, laying the rods flat on the footrest. Chotu wheeled us to C-47. They asked me if they could store the rods in my room for the night. I had no problem. Still, I was curious, so I asked Chotu why he didn’t keep them in his room. He said he would but he didn’t want to take any chances. The ironing lady across the road was a bitch. She was always trying to get him into some kind of trouble with Mrs. Bindra. She poisoned the old lady’s ears with tales. Once she’d told her that each time she was away, Chotu had whores in his room. This had gotten Mrs. Bindra very exercised.
She had promptly marched up to his room for an inspection. He had been embarrassed by the pictures on the walclass="underline" Mallika Sherawat, kneeling on the ground in a red satin dress; Kareena Kapoor in white bra and denim micro shorts, a basque cap on her head. Not finding anyone, she had asked him to take the pictures down: “Give these people a roof to live under and they turn it into a brothel.” He’d taken them down only to put some of them back up as soon as she left. But the damage was done: Mrs. B’s ears had been poisoned. Despite her age — she was seventy-six — Mrs. B was given to climbing the stairs all the way to the top of the house, especially when she returned from a trip.
Chotu slipped the rods under my bed. He had also procured a kitchen knife which he had sharpened at the Kotla market. He went and got it from its hiding place in his quarter. I kept it in a drawer in my wardrobe.
After this we said goodbye. Sadiq had to go home. This was probably the last time he was going to see his family.
Chotu returned to his quarter and slipped into bed with one of his sexy, pixelated women.
The next day, Chotu returned from the airport with a very vexed Mrs. Bindra. I could hear her complaining about something. I could hear Chotu saying “Ji Madam” repeatedly, to appease her.
Gradually the sounds died down. Silence returned to C-47. The guards, mongrels, and lanes of Def Col returned to their customary afternoon stupor. At around 3, exactly three hours after Mrs. Bindra’s return, Chotu knocked on my door.
He seemed calm and distant. We didn’t greet each other. He brushed past me and gathered the knife and the rods. We didn’t exchange many words. He asked me to take care of myself and I asked him to do the same.
I went out on my cramped balcony. Sadiq was standing a little distance from the house, under a neem tree. I saw Chotu step out of the front gate. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Even the ironing lady had closed shop, it being time for her siesta. A cuckoo bird sang doggedly and insistently. A parrot shrieked somewhere.
Chotu signalled to Sadiq. He threw away the bidi he was smoking and began walking toward C-47. I heard them shuffle in quietly. Silence followed. After a minute or two I heard Mrs. Bindra’s raised voice. She sounded more angry than scared, but then again, I could have been imagining things.
Her voice vanished as abruptly as it had started up. The sound of loud hammering followed: the sound of Chotu and Sadiq forcing a lock open.
I stepped back into my room and bolted the door from the inside. Arpita was sitting on my bed painting her toenails. I had a knife in my hand. I shut my eyes for what seemed like a very long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I missed her terribly. I desperately wanted to hold her and press my nose into her breasts. I wanted to fall at her feet and suck her freshly polished toes.
I stand by the window overlooking the school playground. It is empty at this hour. Babblers hop about on the ground. They look as busy as ants, pecking at random, immersed in their ceaseless chatter.
After about twenty minutes I catch a glimpse of Chotu and Sadiq walking down the part of the road that curves around the edge of the playground. They are on foot and carrying one bag each. They could be going shopping, getting Madam’s mixie fixed. Within seconds they have turned the corner and are out of my field of vision.
I know I am never going to see them again. They are going to start anew. I wish I could do the same. Murder has liberated them but trapped me in this horrible prison. They have a plan; I don’t.
Yet plan or no plan, things will take their own course. Mrs. Bindra’s corpse will rot. There will be a smell. The ironing lady will raise an alarm. The police will knock on my door one of these days. I will tell them whatever I know about Chotu. I will give them directions to Sadiq’s house in Kotla. Maybe I’ll tell them what I did to Arpita.
Just another death
by Hartosh Singh Bal
Gyan Kunj
It wasn’t even supposed to be my first assignment. I was at the desk, working one shift after another at the Hindustan Express. A few years earlier, heralding the changes now underway, the hot metal setting of headlines had given way to the bromides printed out by the new machine installed two floors below. There in the basement, sweaty old men in banyans, their hairy arms retrained to the art of cut-and-paste, would follow our instructions while speaking of the girls on the floors above.
The editor, employed only because he had some shares in a publication the group wanted to take over, was no different.
Rarely venturing out of his new glass-paned office perched above the open newsroom, he never managed to make the aphrodisiac of power work for him. Suspended between the desperation above and the lust below were men like me, somewhat more at ease with the women because of the English we spoke, the youth that we then took so much for granted.
The day I ran into my first story I was on the morning shift.
I had loitered around to chat with friends who had come in for the later shift. By the time I started walking back the sun was already low on the horizon, barely visible through the exhaust from the half-digested kerosene-diesel mixture belched out by autorickshaws.
I was living across the bridge from ITO, unable to afford the better-off localities in south Delhi. The walk back home led past the crowded narrow lanes of Laxmi Nagar. Even here change was in the air; cheap plastic digital Casio watches had started flooding the shops and Sukh Ram’s PCOs were taking root everywhere.
At the very edge of Laxmi Nagar, just a few hundred yards short of the Radhu Palace cinema, was an enclave of upwardly mobile middle-class respectability — Gyan Kunj, the repository of knowledge. Decades earlier, retired college teachers had gotten together to form a society that had been allotted land at concessional rates by the government. Some of the old single-story houses that still survived on the large plots spoke of the difficulties of fulfilling the ambition of a home of one’s own on an honest college teacher’s salary. Their decades of labor had now liberated the next generation from the usual step-by-step pursuit of salaried respectability.
There were five of us staying in two rooms on the first floor of a house now managed by an architect. He and his wife lived with his aging parents, both retired college teachers. A side entrance led to our rooms, a large one with three beds lined up in a row and a smaller one that I shared with a Bengali. His excessive attachment to his mother and poetry would soon take him back to Calcutta. We had all been trainees together at journalism school — the Bihari thakur who had not made it through umpteen UPSC attempts and the two Lucknow Brahmans who were far more focused in their ambitions.