without you.”
“Done what exactly, sir?”
The DCP smiled. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. “We could use someone like you. Couldn’t we, Kapoor? Unless of course you’re happier here, running a terminal.”
Smita looked at the two of them, swallowed once, and quietly left.
“The girl’s got balls,” observed Kapoor.
“I’ve noticed,” concurred Dayal.
“You’re having a tough time with one, boss,” said Kapoor. “You really think you can handle both?”
The DCP laughed long and hard with his colleague and friend. Lightning was beginning to play on the horizon when they went in, still chuckling.
The first watch of the next day:
He arrives in the early hours, to give Smita’s unit time to do what they’ve been asked. His quiet knock on the door is immediately answered by Razia. They embrace inside the door, in the forecourt, before she thinks to peek behind him.
“Is Sajan really alone?” she wonders.
“Of course I am,” he responds.
“No pet gorillas,” she smiles.
“Nary a one,” he replies.
“No strong men?”
“Am I not enough?”
“And that rather lovely Punjabi girl?”
“She isn’t here either.”
She thinks that over for a moment, shrugs, and puts an arm through his, leads him into her home. “I’m glad the men of Delhi have made their peace with the people of Punjab.”
“Did we ever have a choice?”
“Perhaps not,” agrees Razia, as they walk across the courtyard to their nook in the colonnade off to the side. The lightning, a mere premonition a few hours earlier, now lays siege to the sky.
“Is he here?” Sajan remembers to ask.
She nods, says, “Can we please let him be for a few minutes? He isn’t going anywhere.”
Sajan is happy to agree and lies back against a bolster, her head on his shoulder and an arm across his chest. The moment is light with happiness and heavy with dread, and he thinks that all life is just this, outcomes irreconcilable with each other masquerading as choices. He knows he isn’t here of his free will, but he is happy, happy as long as this head lies on his shoulder and this arm across his chest, and he feels he can hear, with every drumbeat of thunder and in every flash of lightning, the susurration of finite sand running out of its glass.
Happiness and grief, thinks Sajan. They’re only to be hoarded and feared so long as we preserve the myth of our own agency. An agency he surrenders willingly as he turns to his Razia in a paroxysm of present happiness and impending grief. He turns to her and kisses her as the lightning plays around the courtyard and throws giant shadows against the walls. He sheds the necessary zips and buttons without losing her mouth, her own hands willing partners in the dance. He forgets the vampire in her house, the shadows across her walls. All he knows is her and the shelter of her arms around him and presently they are done, but still her arms encircle him and they murmur into each other’s ears.
“You’re going away, aren’t you?” asks Sajan.
“Haven’t I been here long enough?” she replies. He chuckles quietly and she squirms, the noise loud in her ear.
“Has this always been your home?” he asks.
“In one way or another, it’s been very dear to me for a very long time.”
“I’m surprised you still have it. How did the builders spare it?”
“They came by. They asked around. My neighbors scared them away.”
“Do your neighbors know about you?”
“They suspect, but without suspicion. They’ve known me, in one way or another, for a very long time.”
“How long have you been alone?”
“How do you measure forever?”
“Were you always alone?”
“There were others. They’ve moved on, one by one. Nobody believed this city would last as long as it has.”
“Are you the last one?”
“Not anymore,” she replies. Then they’re both quiet.
A chik, loose even at night, shifts in the soft breeze, its brass pulls clanking against an arch. The rain falls melodiously against the flagstones in the courtyard and distantly, Sajan hears a man scream.
“Shall we see about your problem?” she asks. Sajan nods dutifully.
They enter the house, dark save for candles here and there, and Sajan, looking about him, is surprised to see how spartan it all is. She takes him through a succession of rooms till they arrive at a staircase leading down to a cellar. The walls are damp and the light is dim and it is entirely appropriate, thinks Sajan, that a creature as crepuscular as Angulimala the vampire should end up in a hole like this. He is attached, loosely, by a rope around his neck to a ring in the wall. He writhes naked in the light of the tapers in the wall, his eyes closed, lost in his delirium. But their coming rouses him. He sees both Sajan and Razia and he spits on the ground in front of the DCP. Razia goes up to him and pats him on the head and he almost purrs with pleasure.
“Here he is,” she says.
The DCP nods. He notes the necklace around the vampire’s throat and the inserts and tattoos that will, in the days to come, be the talk of Delhi. He goes up to him, risking saliva in the eye, touches the gruesome constituents of his collection.
“Like them?” leers the vampire.
The DCP shrugs. Razia looks on impassively.
“Why,” murmurs the DCP to the vampire, “do you want her so badly?”
“I did this for you!” screams the vampire.
“Of course you did,” says Razia consolingly. “You’ve done
