Necropolis. Avtar Singh

      Summer games

      The papers of that time were full of the somewhat anticlimactic resolution to the story that had consumed them through the summer. A young man’s dead body was recovered from a wooded area next to an old village of Delhi, the main road not so very far away. He was no older than twenty, reportedly well dressed, affluent enough to afford both extraordinarily detailed tattoos and a vast amount of metallic piercings. While the mainstream press stayed away from describing either, there were murmurs in the parties and bazaars of Delhi of fetishistic inserts in his genital area and some apparently self-inflicted injuries, including bits of metal embedded under his skin. His face was clear, according to sources in the police. There was a mark around his neck, presumably from a rope or similar restraint: it was unclear whether it had been placed there with or without his consent. He was declared to have died of a heart attack.

      Around his throat was a necklace of fingers.

      These fingers had been collected from a number of unwilling donors. The perpetrator of this digital crime wave had followed a simple and startlingly effective method. He followed his victims late at night. They were drawn from the ranks of the peripherally urban—rickshaw-walas, casual laborers, and the like—whose coming home late would have passed unremarked. They were incapacitated with a blow to the head, delivered from behind. An injection was administered to make sure the mark didn’t awake. The absence of the digit would be noted, along with a deft bandage to minimize the blood loss, when the drug wore off. Not one man had died, though the absence of mortality, if anything, added to the morbidity of the crimes in the city’s eyes.

      As the collector grew in confidence, he took to even chasing his targets. Only one, famous in his village for being fleet of foot, eluded him. The rest were run down through a city that stopped its ears to their screams and were divested of the tax the collector felt they owed.

      He took only one finger from each mark, and never took a thumb. There seemed to be no pattern to his culling either: his collection had just as many pinkies as ring or index fingers.

      He had started in high summer, had persisted and indeed sped up through the monsoon, and by the time a hysterical city was nearing spontaneous combustion, had collected almost twenty fingers. There had been some speculation whether he would stop then, or whether the good weather would see him make the big jump across the class divide and actually start defingering the middle classes. There was a palpable feeling of relief around the city that neither hypothesis was put to the test.

      The news outlets had noted that the policeman on the spot was Deputy Commissioner of Police Dayal of the Crime Branch, noted for his perspicacity in matters criminal. As the head of the task force set up to deal with the matter, he had become, over the summer and the rains, the most visible investigator into these particular outrages. His phlegmatic encounters with the press had achieved almost cult status and were relayed from citizen to like-minded voyeur via mobile phones and social networking sites.

      “We had established who he was,” said the DCP to the cameras and the digital data recorders in the early-morning light. “I was pursuing him. He was running away when he collapsed. Obviously, he wasn’t very well.” With which understatement, the policeman turned away from the press and retreated behind the sanctity of the yellow tape, and no amount of media coercion could tempt him out again. People watching at home over their cornflakes and breakfast parathas remarked, as the inevitable frenzy played out over the course of the next few days, at the resignation on the DCP’s face as he said his piece. Triumph and closure were conspicuous by their absence. Various commentators would impute tiredness as a reason for this lack of emotion, as well as the deflation that would naturally ensue from the conclusion of a long and harrowing case. The thing to remember, it was pointed out, was that the abomination itself was over.

      A cursory glance at the city pages of the newspapers would have served to acquaint the reader with the other irritant to Delhi’s solid citizenry that interminable summer. The battles, sometimes pitched and at other times running, between gangs of self-styled vampires and werewolves, had captivated the youth and horrified the elderly and left everyone in between completely bemused. What was to be made of young adults of both sexes wearing makeup and hurling objects and insults at each other, in bus stations and on trains, in markets and parking lots? Who were their role models and what were they trying to prove and where were their parents?

      The lighter pages in the city supplements of those same papers also noted the disappearance of the Colonel. She was so called because of the vaguely military outfits she wore when out on the town, which was every night. Her tight leggings and fitted epauletted jackets defined both her anatomy and her style and were further distinguished by being copied by nobody else. The fashion victims of the city had long since concluded that only the Colonel herself could carry off such ensembles. She disappeared, it would seem, on the very night marked by the discovery of the body of Delhi’s own Angulimala.

      A gaggle of her feminine hangers-on, bereft of her leadership, were interrogated inside their nocturnal habitats by a few reporters on the nightlife beat and a TV channel or two. How long had she been around? “Forever,” declared one twenty-something. “Since before this bar was opened,” affirmed another. “And that was at least two years ago.” She had no family that anybody could remember. Nobody could state that they had ever been invited to her home. She came to a different bar every night and her court moved with her, and her smile and her conversation and her benevolent hold on their lives would be missed forever.

      In a few days, she too disappeared from the papers and the minds and hearts of her erstwhile acolytes.