Narcopolis

On Christmas Day, Dimple had gone back to the church. There was a small crowd, poor people from the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to rest without having to worry about being attacked. They looked exhausted. Dimple wanted to pray, but the only prayer she knew was for Mother Mary, which she repeated though it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. On her way home, past empty rubbled streets, she spotted a loose group of men. For some reason they were all on one side of the road, as if there was a line they would not cross. She stopped only when a man stepped in her way, a drunk with a bandanna worn low on his eyes. He was chewing paan and he had a slight smile on his lips. His eyes were so bloodshot she wondered if he had conjunctivitis. He said one word. ‘Naam?’ It was a signal for the others to gather around her, to examine her the way they would a rare bird, a bird with human hands and a woman’s breasts. ‘Dimple,’ she said, looking the drunk man in the eyes. ‘Christian?’ he said. Without hesitating she said, ‘Yes.’ The man spat a stream of juice at her feet and a few red drops hit her sandals. ‘Nikaal,’ he told her with a jerk of his head, and she hurried on. She thought: If I’d been wearing a burkha they would not have spared me, the dress saved my life. But before she reached the corner of Shuklaji Street she heard a shout and stopped and felt the hair on her arms stiffen. They’ve changed their minds, she thought. But they were shouting at a boy on a bicycle. It was Jamal; she understood then that he’d been following her and had been following her for a long time. One of the men took hold of the bicycle and another grabbed him by his kurta. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she saw the look on the boy’s face and she saw that he was trying to pull himself free. Then she heard herself shouting. She was only a foot or two away from the safety of Shuklaji Street but she might as well have been in another country. She shouted: ‘Stop!’ The men looked in her direction. Jamal pointed at her and said something, something decisive, because they let him go. He ran straight to her. ‘Don’t run,’ she told him, ‘whatever you do, don’t run.’ She took his hand and walked slowly towards home.

What had he said to the men? Jamal wouldn’t tell her. But from then on he always greeted her when they met on the street or the staircase, which to her was a great thing, an achievement, something, finally, to be proud of.

Chapter Ten Confessional

It was around this time, while the city killed itself and the smell of charred flesh hung in the air, that Rumi told her he’d killed someone, or almost killed someone. He had had to drop his uncle to the airport and on the way, in Bandra East, he was stopped for running a red light, he said. It was the first time he’d been stopped in years. The cop asked for his driver’s licence and of course he wasn’t carrying it, that day of all days he’d left it at home. Instead of objecting or arguing, he simply handed over a note and thanked the man in Marathi. It was like paying a fine. His uncle stayed silent through this. But when Rumi started the car, Angre went into a tirade. He said, Paying a bribe is the worst thing an Indian can do. You are perpetuating a system of negativity by condoning a corrupt model that has brought this country to its knees. His uncle was the CEO of the business, a veteran public speaker, who could bullshit for hours into a microphone in front of a roomful of people. He was skilled at this kind of thing. He said, Your generation is reaping the rewards that your elders sweated and sacrificed for. I was a young man during the freedom struggle and I know the sacrifices my parents made, I know how simply and frugally we lived. Above all we believed in truth and I am deeply saddened to see the way you took those notes out of your pocket and gave them to that man, as if you were buying a ticket to the cinema. For the rest of the ride, a good forty minutes, there was silence in the car. At the airport, his uncle took his case and walked away without saying thank you or goodbye. There would be hell to pay. His father, who was the poor relative in the business, would go on about how Rumi had jeopardized the family’s future by bribing a cop in his uncle’s presence. Here Rumi paused for a moment and asked a number of questions that were not addressed solely to Dimple. And what about his own future? He was on the rebound. His marriage was over. Leaving his wife meant leaving her family business. Which meant going back to his father’s company, where he was given plum assignments such as driving his uncle to the fucking airport. Only a question of time before the shit hit. What would happen to him? He’d be fired, of course. And then? Where would he go? What would he do for money?

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