Plague, invasions, the vagaries of water. Empire after empire. And all the pretenders. The Gujjars, the Jats, the Marathas and the Persians, the Sikhs in their time, the Rohillas. Taimur and Nadir and Ahmed Shah.”
“So much,” she repeats. “Eternity’s a long time,” she says to her Sajan. “I suggest you prepare for it carefully.”
Then she puts her hands over the eyes of the vampire and says, “Sleep, sweetheart.” So he does.
She looks at her putative pupil, perhaps even tenderly, hanging by his neck from a rope attached to the wall. “He’s just a symptom. He isn’t the disease, per se.”
Sajan can’t help but agree so he asks her whether it bothers her that she has so ill-used this twisted young man. And what of the twenty men of this city with only nine fingers on their hands and all the resources of Delhi wasted on this search that could have been utilized elsewhere.
“I’ve done worse,” she says quietly. “I’ve been around for a while, remember?”
The DCP thinks it over, repeats his question of a moment before: “Why did he want you so much?”
She looks at him, shrugs her shoulders fractionally. “Come. Time to wrap things up.”
He follows her up the stairs, and farther, back through the rooms of the old house and up another flight to the roof, where a squat dome sits surrounded by pretend battlements that look both in toward the courtyard and out to the village and the city beyond. The rain is coming down in earnest now, lightning streaks the sky. Razia strips down completely, her clothes lying negligently in a pile at her feet.
They are horribly exposed up on this old dome and Sajan feels naked as well and so he says: “Why me?”
“Who better than you, my beautiful Sajan? Who better to be a bridge? Who better to guard this city now?”
“Is that all I am? A chowkidaar with a taste for history? Is that all this was to you?”
“No,” she replies, as she climbs swiftly to the top of the dome, where an iron spike functions both as decoration and lightning rod. Sajan can see its extension snaking sinuously down the side of the dome and the building below to be lost in the cool damp earth. She grasps it firmly, then turns to him. “Come up here, my brave Sajan. Kiss me.
“Eternity is a long time,” she repeats. “I want something to warm me through it.”
He clambers up as well and embraces her. They cling to each other in the rain, then she tells him softly to step away, because the elements are beyond her control. So he pulls away and climbs down and asks her whether he’ll ever see her again and she smiles and says nothing, so he asks her again. She smiles and smiles and motions him away and he backs away, across the roof, down the stairs, still looking, and she keeps her eyes on his and she smiles and then she is gone and so is he to the street and he hears a sizzle and the crack and feels the earth shake and then she is truly, completely gone.
Moments later, Sajan’s phone rings.
“We’ve found him, sir,” Smita said quickly over the phone. “He’s in that village by the forest. The street address isn’t in any database, but the man who did the verification for the bill said he was called to an old house at the end of the last lane in the village. Less than a week ago.”
“Really?” murmured the DCP. “Is Kapoor there?”
“I just spoke with him. He’s on his way there right now. Say twenty minutes.”
“Good. Get over there as quickly as you can, Smita.”
“Are you coming straight there, sir?”
“I am.”
“He had a rudimentary electronic setup, all done with prepaid cards and the like. Very little paper to link him to this place,” said Kapoor later that day. “I know people here. They don’t remember him. He must have come here quite recently.” He turned to Smita. “Perhaps as recently as a week ago?”
Smita nodded while the DCP averted his eyes. Smita continued: “We found his laptop. His DNA’s all over this place. The fingers are there as well. Case closed, I think.”
The DCP and Kapoor nodded together.
“Funny thing,” said Kapoor. “A few of the villagers swear lightning struck this old house about half an hour before we arrived.” Dayal looked at him impassively. Kapoor studied his old friend, then went on, “They’re also whispering some rubbish about how this place is haunted. Apparently, some old woman’s been living here for hundreds of years. The same woman.”
“Imagine that,” said Dayal. “Villagers with superstitions.”
Kapoor raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and stalked off, knowing he had reports to file. The DCP watched Smita, who seemed to be on the verge of saying something.
“I think you might want these, sir,” she said finally, reaching below her chair to give him a plastic bag. He took it from her and saw, hastily folded inside, clothes of a vaguely military cut. His eyes started to brim over so he looked away.
“Does Kapoor know?” he mumbled.
“He’s the one who found them, sir. On the roof. There was nothing else.”
“Of course he did. Of course there wasn’t. Thank you, Smita. Thank you both.”
“Is there something you’d like to share with us, sir?”
“Perhaps one day,” said the DCP.
“No worries, sir,” said Smita in a businesslike tone. “I’m in no hurry.”
No hurry, thought the DCP. He savored the words and repeated them to himself.
Smita asked him whether he’d considered the question of just how long Angulimala had been associated with the old house in the village. “I’ve been thinking of very little else,” he replied.
In time, he knew, there would be awards and honors and the long rope of official approbation would pull the likes of Smita up from obscurity as well. That, at least, was in his hands, so he smiled at her and offered her a cigarette, which, after a moment’s consideration, she accepted. They stepped outside and watched their city dissolve into the steadily falling rain.
Girl stories
Delhi isn’t famous for treating its daughters well.
Yet even its well-developed carapace of insensitivity was pierced by the horrors of that year’s early winter. A young schoolgirl, raped and sodomized and then abandoned in a ditch to die, was the ember that grew into a full-grown flame when the latest in a line of women from the Northeast
