Oh, you are so cynical, says the foreign woman, in a vaguely European accent.
Not cynical — reporter, staff reporter, contributes Preeti, and introduces the two. The foreign woman is a visiting journalist from Denmark called Tina. But it is spelled with an “e,” she explains: Tine.
Why don’t you check it out?
Check what out?
Your scam.
Waste of time.
Or afraid to be proved wrong?
I am not wrong.
Check it out then. They are just outside anyway.
What if I am right?
I will buy you a dinner.
Where?
In Chor Bizarre.
Deal?
Deal.
Good. Preeti, you are the witness. Let’s go.
The Press Club on Raisina Road, not that far from Jan-tar Mantar, has sometimes been nicknamed the Depressed Club. Its whitewashed colonial façade has worn thin, its floor stained by tired feet, bleak notices and cuttings on the bulletin boards in the drafty corridor, lawn outside showing only a hint of grass, tables piled with dirty plates, broken chairs, a slight smell of urine from the toilet next to the main entrance.
There, that evening, seated at a corner table, wreathed in miasma, which consists largely but not only of cigarette smoke, we can find Repoder Sinha, Preeti, and Tine. Plates of kebab and beer have been ordered — gin and lime for Preeti — and conversation is going strong. It is still hovering around the scam protest, which — on inspection — had turned out to be that rickety tent with the banner in English: Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied.
I told you it was a scam, said Sinha.
How do you know?
I recognized the boy with the woman. He runs a shoe polish scam there. Tosses rubbish on your shoes, so that you have to pay him to polish them up.
So?
So!
So, it proves that he does something for a living. They said they have been here for months, petitioning every person they possibly could. They showed you the petitions and letters that they have actually paid people to write for them.
Another way to beg.
Oh, Preeti, are your journalists always so cynical?
Only the men, Tine. Only the men.
Oh, c’mon, Preeti. Tine doesn’t know the place, but you and I know how these things happen.
I am not sure I do, Arvind.
What do you mean?
Look, that woman had a plausible story. Small village in Bihar. Land dispute. Husband killed, murdered one night on the way back from work. Police not interested in clearing the matter. Dismissing it as the kind of thing that happens to people who belong to the so-called denotified tribes. Uncles frightened into moving away. Land forcibly occupied. The woman tries to get justice, finally takes whatever she has and comes to Delhi with all her papers. Sounds plausible to me, given a plucky tribal woman, which is what she seems to be.
She is not a village woman from Bihar, and that boy is too slick. He has grown up here on the streets.
You would be surprised how quickly kids pick up habits and words.
Still, I bet you my bottom dollar — a scam.
Why don’t you go to Bihar and check it out? asks Tine suddenly.
Check it out? The woman’s village doesn’t even have a name. Near Tikri village, she says. Even if I could locate Tikri village...
Take them with you, says Preeti. We’ll come along. I’ll raise the money for it.
I’ll have to take leave, Preeti.
Take leave, Arvind.
Take leave, Arvind, will you please? Tine adds, looking soulfully at him with her speckled greenish-blue eyes.
What a waste. Okay, if you ladies insist. Let me see...
Time does not fly around Jantar Mantar. That is the magic of such places. The buildings change their billboards; the streets change their beggars, protesters, pedestrians, cars. But all change is for the same. Time simply repeats itself, again and again.
Jantar-mantar, say children: abracadabra. Whoosh! Something happens. Plastic flowers turn into a dove; a rabbit is pulled out of the hat. Jantar-mantar, murmur old women in villages, and they talk in whispers because they are talking of devious doings, black magic, sorcery. Jantar-mantar, say foreign-educated doctors in the cities, and they are referring to the hocus-pocus of quacks, the vaids and hakims who still cater to the rural poor and either heal them or kill them.
But Jantar Mantar in Delhi is a sprawling observatory built in the nineteenth century. It is used to observe nothing.
It is useless. Around it rise useful buildings: offices, hotels.
Buildings that change and are always the same. About it walk useful people: reporters, politicians, businessmen, doctors, bureaucrats. People who change and are always the same.
So what surprise is there if, a month from the time we last saw him agreeing to go to Bihar, we see Repoder Sinha walking out of the same metro exit where he had encountered the Turd, the boy whom — along with his mother — Sinha and Preeti and Tine had escorted back to Bihar just a few weeks ago?
Repoder Sinha has changed and perhaps he is still the same.
In any case, he is looking around. He has been doing this almost every day since all three returned from Bihar: He looks around for the Turd, the little boy, for he knows that the Turd must have returned to Delhi. After all, scams have their fixed scenarios; tricksters their territory.
Repoder Sinha walks slowly, darting quick glances to the left and the right, thinking of that lightning trip to Bihar. He is not sure what happened there, but he will not concede this uncertainty to himself.
The woman and the boy had refused to go back to Bihar; Preeti and Tine had to convince them with assurances of safety and gifts of money. And it had been like that all the way to Gaya, by train, and then to the village of Tikri by taxi: The woman and the boy had wheedled a minor fortune out of the two women. Sinha had expected that; it confirmed his suspicions. But he had not anticipated the certainty with which the woman led them to Tikri and then two kilometres out to a small village and a plot of land which she claimed was the disputed property. That is when it all happened, and Sinha is not very certain even now about what it was.
It was late, the summer evening still steamy, the wind having dropped. Tine was pink, a few beads of sweat had appeared on Preeti’s neck. Both were conservatively clad — a reflection of their notions of rural Bihar — in cotton salwar kameezes.
The plot they stood on was rocky; it did not look worth fighting over to Sinha. The woman and her son, the Turd, were pointing out things like the palm trees that demarcated one end of the field, the huts — thatched, hunched — of their village in a far corner, and the small hillock which marked the other end of the field. A fly kept buzzing around Preeti, evading her attempts to fend it away with her anchal, which she wore draped loosely around her shoulders. Tine had discarded her anchal, displaying a rather low-cut kameez that, Sinha felt, was less conservative than most shirts and T-shirts.
As the woman rambled on — the usual lament, how the land was taken away from her, how her husband was murdered, how the police did not listen to her — suddenly, on the hillock, there stood a group of men. They appeared as if by magic — jantar-mantar, Sinha almost thought — burly, impassive men, against the reddening sky, leaning on their staffs. They could have been any group of villagers on their way back from work, attracted by the sight of a taxi and three obviously urban types, one of them a firang.
But that is not what the woman and her son, the Turd, thought. Or pretended. Sinha is not sure. For then there was a cry of fear from the boy and the woman started cursing and weeping. The boy said, Run, ma, run, they said they would kill us if we came back, run. Then both were running — in the opposite direction, toward the palm trees and the brambles and jungle behind the bleak, tall palms. Sinha shouted, but they did not stop. Preeti and Tine had not even had the time to react. When Sinha looked up at the hillock, the men who had been standing there were gone too.