like, Commissioner. I am yours to command.”
The DCP would remember that first smile, her perfect even teeth, the warmth in her eyes.
“You know who I am,” he said without surprise.
“Who doesn’t?” she replied.
“I know who you are, but not what to call you. Colonel sounds awfully formal.”
“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”
“It fits. Delhi’s own sultana. Regal, powerful.”
“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”
“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”
“Perhaps, Commissioner, but she’s still a bit before my time. But if the name pleases you, it is yours to use.” She waved her hangers-on away. The young women obediently went off with their solitary male attendant, and the DCP and Smita moved closer to her.
“And you, my dear?” she smiled at Smita. “What’s your name?”
“Smita Dhingra.”
“A policewoman, perhaps?”
“I am.”
“And how,” said Razia, “can I be of service to the law?”
“Doubtless you’ve heard,” replied the DCP, “of the finger-snatcher?”
Razia inclined her head.
“Perhaps you’ve also heard of these gangs of pretend vampires and werewolves who’re fighting each other all over Delhi?”
An eyebrow acknowledged that she was indeed in receipt of this information.
Why, wondered the DCP, would a young man who thought himself a vampire be looking for pictures of her? Why, indeed, would a woman such as Razia, an habitué of nightspots far removed from the louche battlegrounds of the angsty undead, have come to the attention of one such as he?
Razia pursed her lips thoughtfully and registered contemplation, and the DCP remarked, as he would again, at how the theatricality of her every movement was rendered with such poise as to make it seem natural. Was it, she said as if to herself, because of the paucity of such material? Perhaps, acknowledged the policeman. Is there a reason for this shortage? he asked in turn. Privacy is a commodity, replied the woman. Like any other, it becomes more precious when the supply begins to dwindle.
“You don’t have to come out, you know,” said Smita. “If you like your privacy so much.”
The woman’s soft laugh defused both the acerbity of Smita’s response and the rebuke in the older officer’s eyes. “In response to your questions, Commissioner. I don’t know. But clearly the young man has an unhealthy fascination with creatures of the night. No doubt he classifies me as one.”
“Does he search for you because he wants a kindred spirit?”
“Perhaps he wants a candle to light his way out.”
“A sign of the dawn, perhaps?”
“Quite right, Commissioner,” she replied. “But if he’s right, then he’s destined to be disappointed, because this candle may be dead as well.”
They smiled at each other while Smita narrowed her eyes.
“Ghalib,” murmured the DCP. “But surely even he is before your time?”
“Not necessarily,” replied Razia evenly. “If poetry can survive the Revolt and the fall of the Mughals, why can’t it thrive in a place such as this?”
The lights of the club strobed around them and kept pace with the deejay’s efforts on the tables, and the convulsions of the dancers were bright upon the DCP’s retinas as he considered what Razia was saying. He thought about her desire for anonymity and how perhaps it wasn’t as disingenuous as Smita believed, and whether a club such as the one they were in, with its overt uniformities and hidden alcoves and blandly overpowering sensory assault, wasn’t indeed the perfect prescription for such a need. He remembered legends of poetic confrontations in courtyards of homes long abandoned and demolished, the disputants waiting for the candle to be placed in front of them so they could start their recitations, their allies and adversaries cloaked and turbaned in the uniforms of the time and dispersed through the seated crowd, the women watching from behind their screens and curtains in the upper stories, waiting for a new king to be crowned, a new flame to be lit, a new name to be added to the roster to which gifts were to be sent, poems dispatched for comments, love to be made. He brought himself back to the present and found two sets of female eyes on him, one bewildered, the other amused.
“Has this man,” he asked formally, “not tried to make contact with you?”
“I don’t know, Commissioner,” Razia replied. “I’m not on the Internet. I don’t normally answer my phone and I certainly don’t give my number to just anyone.”
The DCP pondered this quietly.
“Would you like my number, Commissioner?” asked Razia.
The DCP nodded his head slowly, fished out his phone, and fed in the number she gave him.
“Bring yourself to my poor house, Commissioner. I’m sure we can find a candle to take turns with.”
He nodded again, though he doubted whether his poetic impulse would be up to that or any test.
There was one more thing, pointed out Razia gently. She still didn’t know the commissioner’s first name.
Sajan.
A fitting name for a man of Delhi, said Razia, inclining her head. “I feel as if I’ve known many men like you in years past, Sajan. But I fear there are fewer and fewer left.”
The DCP and Smita left then, past the screen that shielded Razia’s table, past the dance floor and the bar, through the door and up the stairs and out to the hotel’s vestibule where, in deference to his position, his car was waiting off to one side. They were in the car and on their way to Smita’s home before she opened her mouth.
“She was flirting with you,” she said almost accusingly.
“I noticed,” he replied drily.
Smita gave him a sidelong look, then laughed, a robustly merry sound that brightened the older man’s hitherto-in-free-fall mood.
“So. Do you think she’s a vampire?” he asked jocularly.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” replied Smita. “I was looking at her very closely, and I have no idea how old she is. I hate women like that.”
The rains broke with a vengeance that year. The month of Saawan didn’t herald the monsoon: it rode in on it. The level of the Yamuna waxed and waned and then rose again and there were dark murmurings in the streets about floods. The watery apocalypse to come was all over
