and other outliers of Delhi’s refugee cartography. There are streets here that are by no means dark, hedged about by houses that are far from empty.
One such street: a row of stores selling automotive accessories at one end, a dingy park at the other. The modest flats here brood over both store and garden. What windows there are, are barred. Smaller alleys lead off this thoroughfare. The rickshaws come here to roost at night, after the last rude boys in their dark-tinted hatchbacks are gone, stereos blaring. The rickshaws line up one next to the other and the men who ride them curl up either in the meager comfort of the bench seat, or on the open road. There is a small shack by the side of the road which is open late and dispenses tea and biscuits. If you give the man who runs it some eggs, he will make them up for you. The cold glow of sodium vapor lamps is everywhere, rendering the citizens of the night and their environs in an unhealthy yellow.
The smell of confined exhaust is still on the hot air of the Delhi night. There is no or very little breeze and the few clothes the men wear on their thin bodies are glossy with perspiration. A man turns and then turns again and calls out feverishly in his sleep, an intimacy nobody else sharing his open bedroom wants, so the others ignore him and let his ravings crawl up and down the walls and across the street.
One of them wakes then, grumbling, and shambles over to the mean park, a bitterly contested site which is sought by the middle-class denizens of the street to be secured during the day for their children and at night against just such men as he. There is a padlock on the gate, so he does his business against the outside wall. He isn’t the first and a sharp male stench hangs over the whole park. An enormous old neem casts its erratic shadow over him. There are patches of darkness here, more so than out on the street itself, and perhaps he thinks, Why not? Before taking out his kit. Then he hears something, and he turns, and he sees something that goes with what he’s heard, and the combination scares him enough that the old glass syringe in his hand falls from his hand and the dirty needle in it breaks and the precious cargo on its little bit of foil falls upon the heedless ground, scattered into the dirt.
Probably, he screams. Clearly, he runs a few steps.
Then there is a blow and he drops to his knees. There is a second one. An injection is quickly administered, one in which he has no say and from which he derives no pleasure. A finger is removed, a bandage applied, the collector disappears.
The lights are still on, the men still asleep or pretending to be, on their common pavement and on their individual cycle rickshaws, a scant few yards away. Somewhat farther and higher, the middle-class denizens of Lajpat Nagar slumber on, their fans and air conditioners perhaps more of an alibi.
But surely he screams.
He must have screamed, insisted Dayal, as he squatted where the man was found—newly nine-fingered and blubbering—and then squinted up into the rising sun. Daybreak was long past and the cool of that hour, such as it was, was a memory more ephemeral than the dawn itself. But Dayal wasn’t fazed by the heat. He made a fetish out of reconstructing the sequence of events in crimes that he was investigating. This wasn’t just in the interest of fighting crime, either: the DCP enjoyed the physical intimacy of almost being there that a faithful reiteration granted. So he’d walk and think and let his mind wander, and in time, would come to see, almost as if cinematically, what he thought had happened. The broken syringe, the urine stain, the few short steps back in the direction of his comrades: these were an open book to his colleagues too. But Dayal took it further. He caressed, as if with love, the syringe, almost bent to sniff at the ground. He was practically polite to the rickshaw-walas.
His immediate subordinate, a slow-moving Punjabi named Kapoor, heavy of manner and midriff, knew and indulged this, but the rest of the task force from Crime Branch were inclined to treat it as being borderline creepy. But even they had to admit they had precious little else to go on.
They’d all been there since before dawn and now, as the sun approached its zenith, were all slowly wilting. The sullen rickshaw men were desperate to be allowed to ride away, as much to escape the interminable questioning as to earn their daily bread. Their colleague, missing a digit as of the night before, was in the hospital and no use at all to the investigation. The heat, the lack of a lead, the surly faces of the rickshaw-walas: it was all getting a bit much for the more impatient officers, and the possibility of a broken leg or two was being freely aired as an antidote to the torpor and the mulishness of the rickshaw-walas and even, it must be admitted, to the tedium of a dying investigation. It was all talk, of course, because Dayal didn’t work like that. But he was in the zone and they weren’t.
“He must have screamed,” he murmured again. “Did nobody hear anything?”
Kapoor shook his head glumly. Dayal raised his eyebrows, then his eyes to the naked sky. “It was ever thus,” he muttered. “Mir noted it when Nadir Shah sacked Delhi. The refugees were harassed by their own countrymen. Nobody listens, nobody cares.” Presently he asked, “Who is the local dealer?”
Kapoor indicated with a nod the hapless tea-stall owner, perhaps the longest-faced of the entire hangdog crew.
“Anything?” inquired Dayal.
Nothing, admitted the other man. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t know anything. Didn’t seem to be lying. “Do you want me to have the local cops take care of him?”
Dayal thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. Obviously they already knew. “Tell him to confine himself to these rickshaw-walas. If he ever sells his poison to one of the kids from around here, his body will be in the Yamuna before the sun sets.”
Kapoor nodded and ambled over, and then the thin music of a slap judiciously applied to a part-time drug dealer’s face was lambent upon the air of Lajpat Nagar. The heavy tread of his subordinate approached again. “I have family here,” said Kapoor virtuously.
Dayal nodded at him, then frowned again. “Where does he come from?” he wondered aloud. “From the trees? What is he, a vampire?”
“Like those kids?” asked Kapoor. “The ones fighting in the metro?”
Dayal looked at him and smiled. Just like them, he nodded.
Then, finally, he got to his feet. One of the rickshaw-walas approached him. “Can we go now, sir? We have to make at least our daily rents for our rickshaws. Otherwise it comes out of our pockets.”
“Do you have their mobile numbers?” asked Dayal.
“Where’ll they go?”
Dayal turned away. “Set them loose.”
In an over air-conditioned room in police HQ sits the cyber-crime unit. When the DCP and Kapoor walked in that afternoon, a few young police officers were on duty, sitting at the big screens of their powerful new machines. A young female officer met them at the door and escorted them in.
She knew who the DCP was and was glad of the opportunity to meet him and was flattered when he smiled in turn. The DCP was a good-looking man and he knew it. The darkly handsome cast of his features was led by an aquiline nose, which also rescued his somewhat beetling brow. Inquisitive eyes, by turns gentle and probing, gave the final touch to a visage that was intelligently lupine. His tailored clothes sat well on his trim figure, while his well-tended mustache
