He figured out the wall was hollow, got his hands inside, and was suddenly face-to-face with money hidden from the eyes of the Central Bureau and the tax man. It was unaccounted money, untraceable money — dirty money.
You already know that only a few lakhs of rupees were recovered from the trunk after Kuldip, a.k.a. Kulla, and Ramnivas were killed on Ridge Road that night — and a large part of that cash was counterfeit too. This, when we know that there was some one hundred-and-fifty million rupees taken out of that wall. What happened?
Kulla, a career criminal, had so many cases pending in court that the police could use him as they pleased. He worked as an informant, reporting to the police station each and every day. He spied for them, pimped for them, and provided false testimony as needed. But they say that a few days before that fatal episode, he got into a fight with the station superintendent, who accused Kulla of playing both sides and being on the take from another party. He’s become more trouble than he’s worth. Let’s make the problem disappear. So the police killed two birds with one stone, disposing of Kulla in a manufactured encounter and getting their hands on the cash. A police captain plotted the whole thing with a couple of trusted underlings: low risk, high payoff. The cops split the spoils among themselves, and they didn’t forget their friends in Agra. And the officer behind the plot received a medal and promotion for his good deed that day.
It doesn’t matter how many weeks or months or years I’ve got left in this sorry life before I also disappear — but I, too, would like to enter into a world of my dreams, just as Ramnivas did.
So that’s why every night at midnight, when all of Delhi is asleep, I put on some black clothes, sneak out of the house, and spend the rest of the night scraping out the walls of Delhi. Treasures beyond anyone’s wildest dreams are hidden in the countless hollows in Delhi’s countless walls. I’m sure it’s there.
My only regret is that I’ve wasted the last decades of my life before starting out with my pick and trowel.
So if you read this story, go and buy a little pickax and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s not far at all, and it’s the only way left to make it big. The other ways you read about in the papers and see on TV are rumors and lies, nothing more.
Cull
by Manjula Padmanabhan
Bhalswa
The slender black police transport sprang into the sky above headquarters, then shuddered to a halt in midair. Dome, mission-commander of the two-man team inside the vehicle, frowned as he punched the com-link on his helmet. A vacant hiss greeted him.
“Transmission failure?” he wondered out loud. “I’m raising clean air.”
Mission coordinates from the dispatchers were normally fed simultaneously into the commander’s helmet and to the transport vehicle’s self-guiding system.
But today, silence.
Dome stabbed at the com-link button repeatedly.
Blank.
“Oh, come on, come on,” muttered Hem, copilot. “We’re losing time...”
In Dome’s three years of airborne service he had never yet been dispatched without directions. Finally — a couple of squawks in his earphone and— “What?” Dome swung around to face Hem. “Can you believe this? They’re asking for a visual search!”
Hem groaned, though he took the precaution of covering his mouthpiece with his hand. Profanity, even to the extent of rude noises, was strictly forbidden amongst uniformed officers. “We’ll never find the sucker.”
“Apparently the call came over some sort of outdated radio device—” Dome listened to the dispatcher’s voice squeaking in his ears, trying to make sense of what he heard “—reception garbled... just the name: Golden Acres.” He glanced toward Hem. “Ever heard of it?”
The copilot shook his head, scowling. “Nah,” he grunted.
Directly beneath them was the gigantic administrative complex known as the Hub. It served as the absolute nerve center of Dilli Continuum, glittering capital city of the economic behemoth of Greater India that sprawled across the whole of South Asia. The six-lane avenue called Rajpath that had once stretched from the presidential palace in the west to the national stadium in the east had been replaced by a long straight block of buildings four stories high. It was crossed by a matching block at its midpoint. From the air, the combined blocks of the Hub looked like a colossal plus-sign.
Nothing now remained of the old white-walled bungalows of the past, the hexagonal roundabouts, the graceful tree-lined avenues. The presidential palace along with all historical monuments, including ancient forts and tombs, had been dismantled and rebuilt in vast underground museums.
The Hub bristled with dish antennae and the long whiplike lances of directional audio-scopes. Flat green lawns provided a boundary between the structure and its parking vaults. A battalion of employees moved in and out of the place in four daily shifts, ensuring that it remained awake and operational twenty-four hours a day, year in, year out. The strictly linear grid of streets that contained and defined the city originated from this central location.
“It’ll take forever,” snarled Hem. “Do we even know what to look for?” Pilots were encouraged to compete for the fastest response times. Weekly and monthly bonuses were awarded on the basis of nanosecond differences in their scores.
“An area of desolation is what we need to find,” said Dome, repeating what he’d heard over his earphones. Now he pulled down his helmet visor, reading information off its glow-screen. “No solid structures. No roads. No landmarks... Wait... incoming images... hmmm. Dense smoke haze. Can’t see much through that. Okay, they’re saying to head north and east — the caller will send up a flare five minutes from now.”
Precious minutes spilled from Hem’s time-cache as the transport hummed high above the taut regularity of the city’s streets below. In every direction beneath them the rigid graph that originated at the Hub had wholly replaced the tangled web of the old city’s narrow streets. Avenues met at precise right angles and at every intersection artificial cherry trees in permanent full bloom had taken the place of dusty neems and soaring silk cottons of the past. Surface vehicles were regulated by magnetic strips embedded in the road surface. From the air the neat rows of residential buildings looked like identical wooden blocks, color-coded by locality.
“It’s some kind of dump,” said Dome, listening to the dispatcher. “The world’s largest — two thousand acres — occupied by squatters...”
It was difficult to make sense of the information. How come he’d never heard of it? How could such a vast area have gone unregulated and unreported to the extent that its coordinates weren’t available to dispatchers? What was the meaning of such obscurity?
Four minutes passed before the transport was hovering above a cloud of pollution that blanketed the area like a thick gray lid. The machinelike regularity of the city’s streets had ended abruptly at what looked like a wall or a moat, zigzagging at sharp angles. Beyond it was the fog.