smiling back, so he said, “It’s a pleasure, Miss Dhingra.”
“Please,” she replied. “Call me Smita. Everyone does.
“What exactly are you looking for?” she asked, now briskly professional, her young male colleagues watching attentively.
“Well, what I said over the phone. These gangs, the vampires and the werewolves. What do we know about them?”
“What do they have to do with the finger-stealer?” asked one of the young policemen curiously. Kapoor froze him with a look. The DCP didn’t even turn around, his attention on Smita, who was tapping away at her keyboard.
“Quite a lot, or not a lot, depending on what you want to know.”
“Well, for starters, where can I find them?”
“That’s easy. They’re all over the Internet.”
“Facebook,” stated Kapoor.
“Among other places,” agreed the young woman, her face still to the screen.
The DCP looked at Kapoor, who blushed and mouthed, “My son.”
“Do you know where they’re going to be at any time?” asked the DCP.
“It isn’t hard,” said one of Smita’s colleagues. The two older cops turned to him expectantly. “Well, it isn’t,” he repeated. “We actually circulate e-mails to the local stations when we believe a fight is going to take place. They don’t happen spontaneously: they’re actually rather well-planned.”
“Why?” wondered Kapoor, leaving aside for the moment the question of why the local officers weren’t paying any heed to the intelligence this office was providing.
“These are kids, for the most part. The eldest are just about twenty, the younger ones barely in their teens. They live with their parents. If they have to get somewhere, they have to plan it,” said Smita.
The DCP nodded. “How do you track them?”
“That’s the easy part. They’re clever, but not clever enough to want to clear their tracks. We look for words and phrases, things like vampires, lycans, rumble, a random place: you know, like Karol Bagh. Then we put them together and run searches, monitor certain forums, new sites, groups, things like that.”
“Lycan?”
“Werewolves, sir,” supplied Kapoor. “My son,” again, to his superior’s wordless question.
“Most of them are just innocent kids. Like your son, sir,” said Smita deferentially to Kapoor. “They read these books, Twilight and the like, they see the movies and play the games, and they fashion a world for themselves they think they recognize as actually being real, or more worthy of being real, at any rate, than the one they’re in. The ones doing the fighting are a harder core.
“I’d be interested in speaking to them,” she murmured as an afterthought.
“Really? Why?” asked the DCP.
“Well, I like the books and movies too,” she grinned, as did her colleagues. The two older cops couldn’t help but join in.
“Do you know where they’ll be tonight?”
“We do, as a matter of fact. The metro station in Model Town.”
“Model Town,” said the DCP thoughtfully, turning to Kapoor, who nodded in turn.
“I have family there.”
Night was well-established in the city by the time the two of them drove by the police lines in the shadow of the newly constructed elevated metro track. Dayal had considered and then rejected the idea of asking the local police for help. His need to be inconspicuous was paramount. Anyway, he pointed out to Kapoor, if the local cops felt that bunches of kids fighting each other in public at night was beneath their notice, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it either.
Kapoor had wondered why they were coming here. “Call it a hunch,” the DCP had replied. They were both content to leave it at that. The bright lights of the Mall Road receded behind them and the shadows lengthened under the elevated track. The citizens of the night were setting up their homes under its spans and Dayal thought, as he had before, of how a bridge’s ability to raise you above the water is only one of the ways it shelters you from that particular element. He thought of how a bridge is simultaneously a soaring premonition of a city’s future and a weighty anchor tied to the ground it has sprung from. He would no doubt have wordlessly amplified this theme, metaphysical speculation being, as befitted his detective status, one of his primary, albeit solitary joys, but then the car stopped and Kapoor climbed out.
“Up there,” he said. Dayal looked up at the expanse of lit-up concrete that loomed above their heads, connecting the elevated track to either side of the busy road below. The way lay up a flight of stairs Kapoor pointedly ignored, heading instead to the lift that was conspicuously marked as being for the benefit of those with special needs. The security man there let them in without demur and they ascended to the level of the ticket counter, where they quietly walked through the electronic turnstiles that another security man beeped open for them, deferentially touching his peaked cap with the other hand.
“So much for being inconspicuous,” muttered Dayal.
“Biharis,” replied Kapoor nonchalantly, next to him on the escalator up to the track level. “Not the soft kids we’re after. Where will they ever have seen a cop before?”
The heavier man stalked onto the platform, looking this way and that. It was empty. Dayal and he walked over to a bench and sat down to wait.
Pretty soon, the kids began to arrive. They came in couples and groups, the boys wearing shades, all of them plugged into their iPods and phones, trailing snatches of death metal and electronica and clouds of pheromones. They strung out along the platform affecting boredom and jangling with nerves, and the two cops felt as if it was palpable, the tension of a juvenile riot being birthed. Kapoor was busy on his phone and the DCP was immersed in thought and the noise and strobes of passing traffic on the road below was strong enough to disorient anyone. When the train arrived, its service infrequent at this hour, it seemed as if the kids breathed, inhaling when the doors opened, exhaling when they sighed shut, in time with its rhythm. The two cops stayed put on the platform. The kids finally noticed and one of them, a large almost-man with a turban but not yet a beard, ambled over. “Why didn’t you get on that train?” he asked, not very gently.
The DCP looked up at him politely. “Why don’t you tell me about vampires and lycans?” he replied.
The boy studied the two of them, the fluorescent light of the platform cold upon his skin, their visages reflected in the mirrored surfaces of his sunglasses. “Dogs,” he said softly, then turned and was gone down the stairs. The word was relayed swiftly down the platform and the kids were gone as quickly as they’d come, the ones closer to the escalator descending that way, the ones at the other end of the platform escaping nimbly across the tracks, clambering up the other side and streaming down the stairs. Only one, a young girl, came to hand. Kapoor held her, her
