Vikas Swarup - Six Suspects

And the Bhusiyas didn't help matters either. They had seemed law-abiding, religious types, who came to the temple every Monday and donated large sums to Lord Shiva. It was only after I started working for them that I discovered they were first-rate crooks and cheats. Uncouth, uncivilized and insensitive, they constantly reprimanded me for some act of omission or commission.

I could have tolerated their boorishness, but what I couldn't stand was the bossiness of the Bhusiya women. They acted as if they owned me. Mr R. P. Bhusiya's wife would send me off to get a DVD from the video parlour and Mr S. P. Bhusiya's wife would demand that I get her dry-cleaning at the same time. Worst of all, Pinky Bhusiya remained completely immune to my charms. I had thought a girl like her would be easy to entice. The way she dressed, she seemed neither too hep nor too staid. Neither too worldly-wise and canny, nor totally timid. I enacted several hero-type roles to attract Pinky's attention, from the sensitive aashiq to the dignified servant with a heart of gold. I tried to impress her with my wide knowledge of mobile phones and my deep understanding of national politics, but nothing seemed to work. She treated me just like a servant, angry one day, amiable another, but never seeing me as a man. All she was interested in were her silly girlfriends and her CD player. Even the bathrooms in the house were so constructed that there was no possibility of peeping in. Within a month I realized that it was a waste of time.

I would have quit my job, given Jaggu the thousand rupees and willingly conceded defeat, when a dramatic new development made me stay on. Asha, better known as Mrs Dinesh Pratap Bhusiya, developed the hots for me. One sticky afternoon, as I walked into her bedroom to deliver some toiletries, she caught me by the shirt, closed the door and began kissing me all over. Thus began our affair.

Servants are the most under-appreciated class of people in the world. They don't demand the affection or compassion of their employers. They only seek respect. Not for what they do, but for what they know. Just attend a gathering of servants in front of the Mother Dairy booth at six in the morning, and you'll hear more hot gossip and insider info than on Breaking News on TV. That is because servants see everything and hear everything, even though they may pretend to be as ignorant as cows. Their own lives are so tedious, they get their kicks from prying into their masters'. When the family is watching soap operas, the servants are watching the family. They catch little gestures and nuances which escape other members of the clan. They are the first to know that the boss is about to become insolvent, or the boss's daughter is going to need an abortion. They have the low-down on what really happens inside a family: who is bitching about whom, who is plotting against whom.

And beware a servant's revenge. There are so many elderly couples in Delhi whose throats have been slit by their Bihari cooks and Nepali guards. Why? Because the servants were driven to the limit by their employers. I, too, have taken my revenge on the Bhusiyas. Mr S. P. Bhusiya, the adulterator, for instance, has no clue that the chicken curry he has been eating at dinner time is also adulterated. I spit in it liberally before laying it on the table. And the elderly Mr Bhusiya, with his diminished sense of taste and smell, happily drank the vegetable soup which I had garnished with bird droppings, and even asked for a second helping!

But I received the biggest thrill of all from thumbing my nose at Mr D. P. Bhusiya. He pretended to be as tough as a bulldog, but his wife confided in me that in bed he was like a mouse, as useless as a camera without film. Bole toh, fully impotent. My affair with his wife lasted two months. The icing on the cake was that she even paid me after every 'performance'. So while Mr D. P. Bhusiya was at his brick kiln in Ghitorni, I would be in his bed with Asha, earning an extra hundred rupees.

I was in his bed this afternoon, when he happened to make an unscheduled visit to the house. It was exactly like they show in films. The husband returning home and opening the bedroom door and his jaw dropping on seeing his wife with another man – worse, his own servant.

'Whore!' he bellowed as I scrambled out of bed and ran into the en-suite bathroom where I had left my clothes. I heard a scuffle and the sound of Asha being slapped. Two minutes later the bathroom door was kicked open and Mr D. P. Bhusiya stepped in with a revolver in one hand and a bottle in the other.

'Now I shall sort you out, you bastard,' he hissed, and ordered me at gunpoint to come out.

He took me to the garage on the ground floor, backed me into a corner and forced me to drink the bottle of Ratkill 30. And that is where I now stand, counting the seconds till my death. A murder which will be presented as a suicide.

I look around the large garage, at the empty space marked by grease stains where Mr R. P. Bhusiya's silver Toyota Corolla will be parked this evening, at the stacks of cartons in the corner containing spices and pulses which Mr S. P. Bhusiya will proceed to adulterate, at the steel ladder, the half-empty plastic bottles of coolant and engine oil lying on the wooden shelf. I try not to think of Mother and Champi.

Mr D. P. Bhusiya is looking at his watch with a worried look. It has been twenty minutes since I polished off the bottle. The poison should have done its work by now. But instead of a creeping paralysis, my stomach is experiencing a bubbling effervescence, like you feel after drinking Coca Cola. Something is rising up in my throat. Seconds later, a jet of vomit shoots from my mouth and lands on Mr D. P. Bhusiya's white shirt.

He gets so flustered, the revolver slips from his hand. That is all the opening I need. I kick the gun away and dash out of the garage.

It is amazing what fear of death can do to the human body. I run like an Olympic champion, glancing back from time to time to see if Mr D. P. Bhusiya is following me.

As I near the temple, I marvel at my extraordinary luck. I had stared Death in the face and Death had blinked. But perhaps this is being too dramatic. By now I have figured out that my death would have been a fake one. As fake as the rat poison Mr D. P. Bhusiya must have obtained from his brother's store!

There is nothing fake about the smile on my face as I burst through the temple gates, see Champi sitting at her usual place on the bench beneath the gulmohar tree in the back garden and crush her in the biggest bear hug of my life.

'Arrey, what's the matter? You are acting as if you have won the lottery,' she laughs.

'You could say that. I have decided two things today, Champi.'

'What?'

'One, that I am never ever going to work as a servant again.'

'And the second?'

'That I am going back to my old profession. Stealing mobile phones. But don't tell Mother.'

There was a time when I actually liked my name. It was a hit with the girls in the locality, who considered it quite cute. And it was a considerable improvement on just plain Munna, which immediately brings to mind some lowly tea-boy or struggling car mechanic. Munna Mobile had a certain ring, a definite charm to it. That was when mobile phones were a high-society item. Now even the bloody washerman has one. What self-respecting youth would like to be called Munna Mobile today? They might as well call me Vodafone or Ericsson.

I acquired the moniker four years ago, after I filched my first mobile phone. I had taken it off a very fat lady who had driven to the temple in a white Opel Astra. She seemed to be in a big rush, the way she wheezed up the steps, as if she had fifty errands to finish that day. It happens. You are very busy. You just want to make a flying visit to God and in your confusion you forget minor details, like locking your car. And leaving your brand-new Sony Ericsson T100 on the driver's seat.