Omair Ahmad - Delhi Noir

The voice was so cool, so controlled, it made her ears burn. “No, Pandey.” And now she spoke in anger: “I’m inviting you to look at a diary.”

“You have it?” Now he was dead serious, no jokes at all.

“You haven’t even asked which diary,” she said.

Laughter erupted from him, hard, cold, bitter laughter. “I know which diary,” he said. “Triloki was most... cooperative.”

Bastard, she thought, I’ll enjoy taking you down . “Day after tomorrow. Morning, at 10 o’clock, near Hotel Rajdoot. You know where that is?”

“Yes, I know where that is,” he said. “Where exactly?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said, and hung up. And then she called Arjun Singh. He was both elated and panicky, but she managed to draw from him the address where he wanted to confront Pandey and the promise that he wouldn’t step out of his house until she arrived.

She made one final call.

“Hello, Inspector Ramdev?”

“Who is it?”

“This is Suhasini Das, Jaidev Triloki told me to call you.”

“Yes, yes, he said you’d call.” Ramdev sounded far too hearty. “What’s the matter?”

“I need your help. There’s a meeting where there will be a person turning up. He’s well connected, Triloki probably told you about him,” she said.

“You want security?”

“Yes,” she answered, and gave him the details. He reassured her that he would be there, and he sounded happy. Ramdev probably had no idea of how badly things had turned out for his friend Triloki, and this was no time for her to tell him.

She spent the next day with Arjun Singh, walking the streets of Jalebi Central. She checked the place where the killing had happened so many years ago, and all the approaches to it. She wanted to make sure that there was nowhere that Pandey could run, and no direction from which he could catch them unawares. She met Ramdev, who, despite the hint of delight on his face, seemed like a reliable man in a tight spot, competent and tough.

She spent the night at Arjun Singh’s house, traveling backwards in time at every moment, full of oldness and oddity, and could hear the man pacing upstairs as she slipped into sleep.

She woke up in the middle of the night, groggy and ill at ease, to the sound of something smashing. She rose from the bed and quietly made her way to the door. Opening it softly, she looked around until she spotted Arjun Singh. He was walking purposefully with hammer in his hand, and she saw him stop before a clock and take a mighty swing. Then smash it again. He was done with time marching backwards.

She crept back to bed, but her sleep was filled with bad dreams, and she rose in the morning feeling more tired than when she went to bed. When Arjun Singh appeared he was wearing clothes that were precisely twenty-four years old and had a small brown diary in hand. They walked to the alleyway, and from there she called Pandey.

“I’ll be right over,” was all he said.

As they waited, she saw the policemen slowly arrive, filtering in one by one as if they were there by chance. Ramdev parked his jeep ten feet away and gave her a grin, tipping her anxiety to fear. There were too many of them, and they were far too close. Pandey would see them and escape. She was getting ready to signal them away when the sleek Mercedes arrived, precisely at 10. She recognized the numbers on the license plate, and suddenly she remembered where she had seen Rajan Pandey’s name before. It had been on a file on Triloki’s desk, a case he had been investigating.

And then the car door opened and a man stepped out. She recognized him from the photographs in that file on Triloki’s desk. Rajan Pandey, the man that Suparna, the builder’s wife, was having an affair with. Rajan Pandey, whose pictures had been used by Triloki to blackmail Suparna. Rajan Pandey, the seed that had destroyed Suhasini and Triloki’s partnership.

Pandey looked past her and waved to Ramdev, and Suhasini knew she had been tricked, badly beaten. She turned to Arjun Singh, wanting to warn him, but he was already rushing ahead toward the culmination of his long dream. “See!” he shouted, waving the diary. “See! This is the truth, the truth that you can’t burn. I won’t give you any matches today!”

And then the driver also stepped out of the Mercedes. It was Triloki. “You can always find matches,” he said, “if you know where to look.” And he tipped his hat at Suhasini.

Lodhi Gardens

Until I lost my clothes I was a regular sort of guy: lots of clothes, lots of problems, a little luck — mainly with women. I had a family that was insisting I get married again, a dog with a chronic skin disorder, a flat with a mortgage, and a growing infatuation with heroin, better known as brown sugar or “sister” on the streets. On the plus side, I was the educated, intelligent CEO and sole employee of a global consultancy company. My three ex-bosses back from when I was still a salary slave were all women who believed in me and continued to give me enough work to keep me dancing with sister all night long.

The night before I lost my clothes was a night like any other. I had a report to finish, a feasibility study of a new iron ore extraction process the Koreans wanted to sell to an Indian company. The report had been due the previous week. I’d done all the work and only had the conclusion left to write, so I’d gone to the bar at the Habitat Center at 7:00 to celebrate. By 11:45 p.m. I was home, well lubricated, a little horny, and ready to earn my next few hits of sister.

I opened the computer and went to My Documents . But the file wasn’t there! Believe me, I looked for the file everywhere — in every single directory, folder, and subfolder, even the hidden ones. I searched for it by keyword, by date, by name, by subject. But it was nowhere to be found. I stared at the computer and suddenly felt certain that my ex-wife, the custodian of our only child, had somehow gotten to it and erased it. So certain was I that I sent e-mails to my lawyers and hers, to her parents and to mine, to her bosses and to mine, to the police, the supreme and high courts, the prime minister, and a few friends of the family who happened to be ministers at the time. Then I sat back and waited for news of her arrest to arrive.

My mobile phone rang after fifteen minutes.

It was one of the she-bosses, Sheena, the one for whom I was doing the feasibility study.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m telling you, it’s true,” I insisted, raising my voice. “I was going to print it out and mail it to you tomorrow, but the bitch got to it first. She must be spying on me.”

“And how is she doing that?” Sheena asked sweetly.

“I don’t know.” I looked suspiciously at the walls. “Maybe she bribed the maid again.”

Silence on the line. I could see Sheena shaking her head, her shoulder-length iron-gray hair brushing her cheeks.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked for the second time.

I looked at my watch. 1:29. “Time? What has time got to do with anything? This is an emergency, we need to find her and put her in prison,” I said impatiently.

“It’s 1:30 a.m.” she continued in the same deadpan voice. “I have to work tomorrow morning, you know. I can’t sleep till 11 like you do.”

I sensed a lecture coming and groaned. “But you’ve got plenty of time to sleep. Stop talking and go to sleep now. I’ll find her and the file and get them to you tomorrow. Promise.” The moment the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake.

“You won’t,” she sighed. “You won’t because you haven’t done it. You’ve just been boozing and womanizing instead. How can you be so irresponsible? Think of Akshay, for God’s sake.” She went on for another five minutes, telling me how I had mucked up my life, finishing with, “Do you have a death wish? If so, just tell us and we’ll leave you alone. But remember, you have a son to think about.”