They waited an hour, until it got dark, and the taxi driver insisted on going back, with or without them.
They came back the next day. They spoke to the local police, who denied that there was any land dispute or that any murder had taken place. What woman and son, the thana inspector asked. Sinha’s press card turned the police obliging and polite. The inspector took the three outsiders to the nameless village, fetid with garbage next to mud huts with holes in their thatched roofs, and shouted for some old man to come out. Come out, hey you, Dhanarwa! When the man, stubbled, limping, coughing, came out of the low hut, the inspector said to Sinha, Sir, describe the woman and her son to the man. He is the headman here. He knows everyone.
Sinha did as he was asked to do, Preeti adding a word or two of detail.
Description done, the inspector addressed the old man in a gruff tone. So, he said, do you know this woman and the boy?
The old man shook his head silently. A crow cawed and perched on the sagging roof of a hut behind them. With its daggerlike beak, it started to dismember a small rodent held in its talons.
Speak up. Has someone cut your tongue off? Speak up.
Not to me, you dolt. Tell sir and the madams here, the inspector barked.
No, huzoor, said the old man.
You do not know the woman? repeated the inspector.
No, huzoor.
Or the boy?
No, huzoor.
The inspector turned to Arvind, Preeti, and Tine, all three now sweating profusely in the hardening sunlight of the late morning. See, sir, he said, see, madam, what did I tell you? 420. The woman was a 420. A chaalu fraud. You should lodge a complaint with us. We will catch them for you.
On the way back the next day, as the train shuddered on the old tracks, Sinha had his doubts. He was familiar with such interrogations by police officers. The way they asked questions often determined the answers. And though he laughed away Tine’s offer to buy him dinner in Chor Bizarre on their return to Delhi — I lost the bet, she said — Sinha still could not settle the matter in his mind.
However, Preeti and, especially, Tine had been converted: they spent much of their waking hours on the train trip back to Delhi calculating the money they had paid out to the woman and her boy, the Turd, on the way. By the time the train reached Aligarh, they had agreed on the exact sum of 5,941 rupees.
But doubt nibbled at Sinha. All the way to Delhi. And that is why now, even weeks later, when Preeti and Tine have already turned the experience into slightly different anecdotes for friends, Repoder Arvind Sinha walks past the Jantar Mantar area, on the lookout for that little Turd. Under the tall gleaming buildings he walks, on the broad sidewalks with protest banners, past this useless observatory, always darting glances to the left and right, on he walks in this place that changes and is always the same, looking, looking, looking.
The walls of delhi
by Uday Prakash
Rohini
Translated from Hindi by Jason Grunebaum
I met Ramnivas at Sanjay Chaurasia’s paan cart that stood five hundred yards from my flat in Rohini; Ratanlal sold chai right next to Sanjay’s. Sanjay had come to Delhi from a village near Pratapgarh, and Ratanlal from Sasaram.
They built their shops on wheels so they could make a quick getaway in case someone from the city came nosing around.
Cops on motorbike patrol came by all the time, but they got their weekly cut: Ratanlal paid five hundred, Sanjay seven.
The two men didn’t worry.
All the vendors and hawkers set up camp wherever they could in Rohini’s evening market. As night fell, Brajinder joined them, pushing his fancy electric cart, Kwality Ice Cream printed in rainbow letters on the plastic panels. So did Rajvati, who sold hard-boiled eggs. Her husband Gulshan was there too, with their two kids. Behind her shop, four brick walls enclosed a little vacant lot. As night wore on, people pulled up in cars asking Gulshan for some whiskey or rum.
The government liquor shops were long closed by that hour, so Gulshan would cycle off and return with a pint or a fifth he got from one of his black market connections. Some customers wanted chicken tikka with their hard-boiled eggs, which
Gulshan would fetch from Sardar Satte Singh’s food stand up at the next light. Sometimes the customers would give him a little whiskey by way of a tip, or a few rupees. Rajvati didn’t make a fuss since it was a hundred times better for him to drink that kind of whiskey, and for free, than to spend his own money on little plastic pouches of local moonshine. You could count on that kind of hooch being mixed with stuff that might make you go blind, or kill you outright.
Tufail Ahmed had come from Nalanda along with his sewing machine, which he plunked down right beside the brick enclosure. He did a little business for a short while. But since Tufail Ahmed didn’t have a fixed address, people were wary of leaving their clothes with him. So the only jobs he got were mending schoolchildren’s bookbags, or hemming workers’ uniforms, or patching up rickshaw drivers’ clothes. After a couple of weeks, he stopped showing up. Someone said that he was sick, another said he went back to Nalanda, and still others said he’d been hit by a Blue Line bus. His sewing machine got tossed into the junkyard behind the police station.
That’s how it was around here, like an unwritten law. Every day, one of these new arrivals would suddenly disappear, never to be seen again. Most of them didn’t have a permanent address where, after they were gone, you could go and inquire. Rajvati, for example, lived two miles from here, near the bypass, with her husband and two kids in sixteenth-century ruins. If you’ve ever been on the National Highway heading toward Karnal or Amritsar and happened to glance north, you’ve seen the round building with a dome right beside the industrial drainage: a crumbling, dark-red brick ruin. It’s hard to believe that humans could be living there. The famous bus named Goodwill that travels from India to Pakistan — from Delhi to Lahore — passes right by that part of the highway.
But people do live there — families, for the most part, and a few others: Rajvati’s sister Phulo; Jagraj’s wife Somali, who sells peanuts by the gate of the Azadpur veggie market; and Mushtaq, who sells hashish by the Red Fort, and his cousin Saliman, currently Mushtaq’s wife. The three women turn tricks. Somali works out of her home in the ruins. She takes care of customers brought to her by the smackheads, Tilak, Bhusan, and Azad, who always hang around. In the evening, Saliman and Phulo go out in rickshaws looking for customers.
Sometimes Phulo also works at all-night parties.
Phulo ocassionally sleeps with Azad, even though Rajvati, her sister, and Gulshan, her brother-in-law, both object. Gulshan always says, “Don’t lend money or your warm body to anyone living under this roof.” Gulshan, Rajvati, and Phulo have the most money of those living under that roof; since Phulo arrived from the village and began to turn tricks, their income has increased so much that they’ve been scouting land in the neighborhood around Loni Border, where they might build a house someday.
Azad says, “If you move away, don’t worry, I’ll still manage,” but over the last few days he’s been shivering and writhing around at night, sick. I had a strong premonition that one day I’d come visit, and Phulo or Tilak or Bhusan or Saliman would say, What can I tell you, Vinayak? I haven’t seen Azad for four days. He left in the morning and never came back. You haven’t seen him?