The crime reporter had warned me about his rose garden — it was always part of the deal when anyone went to meet Mohanty. We walked through the corridor leading to the terrace. It had shelves at eye-level lined with jars of biological curios that Mohanty seemed to delight in. Snakes, the larger ones coiled tight in the jars, fetuses, and severed limbs were followed by a row with deadly poisons on display. It was an eclectic list ranging from ferric sulfate to hydrogen peroxide.
The corridor opened out to an enormous terrace overlooking the floodplains of the river. Along its length ran four rows of roses — yellow, red, white, and orange — neatly arrayed in earthen pots, each labeled with the name of the variety. “I come out here to water them every day. It’s therapeutic.”
We sat quietly for a while among the roses, overlooking the river that seemed unsoiled from this distance. Then he led me to a wire coop at the far corner of the terrace.
“This is where I rear pigeons. I have collected every conceivable variety from various parts of the country. Of course, I never say this to the doctors, but after they have spent much of their day performing postmortem after postmortem, it’s a relief to come out here. They walk past the roses to this corner and then ask the man who looks after the pigeons whether a new brood has hatched, whether an ailing bird is now doing better. After dirtying their hands with death, they come back to life here.”
We walked back to his room. The postmortem report was lying on his table. He flipped through it, reviewing it twice. It didn’t take him long, then he pushed it aside and looked at me.
“I remember this case rather well. The SHO called in to cash a favor, and there was something I didn’t mention in the report.”
He paused; the memory must have been vivid for him to recall the case so many years later.
“Ekka died of massive internal bleeding. His lower intestines were torn apart by a blunt object thrust up his anus.”
Past where he was sitting, through the window behind him, I could see the city spread out before me. My eyes slowly retraced the path I used to follow, from the new malls coming up at Radhu Palace, the new metro line leading back to the bridge, the glitzy newspaper office that had risen with the circulation. I had tried running away from the tedium on the trail of a man’s death. As the years had passed, I had gone further afield, chasing stories with greater skill, some of them taking me far from the streets of this city. But in the end it seemed this is what I had come back to, what I could not escape. What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler — either the police or the councilor and his men were capable of such brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t seem to matter. No one in this city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to realize neither did I.
Part III
Walled city, world city
Gautam under a tree
by Hirsh Sawhney
Green Park
It was around 6 p.m. when he left his barsaati. Aurobindo Marg was more hellish than ever because of metro construction.
At the gurdwara he began his walk through Yusuf Sarai. He remembered navigating the neighborhood’s maze of backstreets with Lauri when she’d expressed interest in trying bhang. The memory made him wince, I imagine. Most thoughts of her filled him with a mixture of anger and dread.
Between Lahore Jewelers and some sari shops he noticed a new store dedicated exclusively to the sale of Korean plasma televisions. He’d always considered Yusuf Sarai a place where Delhi’s real middle class came to shop, the families stacked on Vespas and stuffed into second-hand Maruti 800s. That seemed to be changing, he’d lament to me later.
Crossing the road was a death-defying endeavor. According to his notes, a Blue Line bus and a Honda Accord almost ran him over. Then he spotted the beaming orange sign above the Boogie Down Resto-Bar.
No firearms permitted, unloaded or loaded, read a placard on the first floor of the hastily constructed structure. Standing beside it were some men in cheap black suits, maître d’—bouncers he called them. “May I help you?” the gang’s tallest member asked in English.
“I’d like a table,” Gautam said in Hindi.
“It’s Saturday,” replied the tall man in black. “No stags on Saturday.” Gautam’s worn kurtis and scruffy face often elicited such reactions.
Peering inside the bar, Gautam noticed that in addition to a couple of wives and an Eastern European prostitute, the place was teeming with men. West Delhi teenagers who didn’t have the breeding to hit up the five stars; middle managers from domestic corporate houses who bought their suits at Raymond; small-time bureaucrats who extracted enough chai-pani to afford an Esteem or a Ford Ikon.
Had he been somebody else, somebody practical, at this point Gautam would have launched into his dog-eared American English and gotten a table as well as some respect. But practicality wasn’t one of his strong points. “And what about all them?” he asked, in Hindi of course.
“VIP customers.” English.
“Actually, I have a reservation.” The maître d’ stared back at him. He’d probably never heard anybody use the word “arakashan” to denote a restaurant booking before. “Under G.S. Lakshman,” Gautam continued. Within minutes he was seated at a secluded table sipping a fresh lime soda.
The bar was dark, but lamps he described as “space-age” cast it in “an unsavory shade of orange.” Gautam pulled out his notebook and scribbled half-a-dozen pages about the walk he’d just taken. He mentioned the music that was playing, “Hotel California” followed by a set of film songs. Lakshman showed up thirty minutes later looking as gaudy as ever in his silk burgundy kurta and white churidar. I can’t hide the fact that I don’t care for Lakshman. But we don’t necessarily have to like our benefactors.
As the well-fed editor sauntered toward Gautam’s table, waiters bowed and men with hairy ears broke from their conversations to greet him. Lakshman was, after all, a minor celebrity in the Indian capital. The chief lieutenant at a weekly magazine we’ll call Satya — Truth — he was the one who’d engineered the sting that helped bring down the B Party government, a “fascist, hate-mongering government,” as Gautam referred to it.
“Keep sitting, keep sitting,” Lakshman said when he got to Gautam’s table. “It’s great to meet you in person, I’m a big fan of your work.”
“Well, it’s been almost two years since I’ve published anything,” said Gautam, unyielding to Lakshman’s flattery.
“So tell me,” Lakshman said, “when did you move to India?”
“I was born here.”
“But your accent,” Lakshman mused, chuckling his chuckle of self-contentment. “You couldn’t have picked that up in a call center.”
This question-and-answer period was, of course, extraneous. Lakshman already knew — or so he believed — everything there was to know about the mustached young man sitting before him.
When his mother died, Gautam went to the U.S. on a tourist visa and bought a fake Social Security number. He changed his name to Greg, worked at a Kmart, and became more American than the Americans. After enrolling in a picturesque university, he directed plays and acquired a girlfriend, a blonde from California. But this high life unraveled during Gautam-Greg’s senior year. State policemen caught him with enough pharmaceuticals to put down a herd of elephants, and he was indefinitely banned from the country.