with phone calls urging a retreat to higher ground. The news that a city as dry as Delhi was to be flooded was greeted with hoots of laughter from Dilliwalas themselves, or at least those that didn’t live in close contiguity with the river. Urchins swam in the new streams, infants were beguiled with the unheard sound of the patter of raindrops, vendors of tea and fried snacks did a brisk business everywhere. A city used to associating gray with smog, undrinkable water, and the residue left behind by the dusty air grew to love again the silver light of cloudy skies and falling rain. The monsoon winds swept through the city and cooled homes from the top down and everywhere was vigor and rebirth and brilliant resurgent green.
But Dayal drew little sustenance from the cool and the moistness and the burgeoning trees. He and Kapoor ploughed a lonely furrow through the wet city, on the track of a young man wearing a kaffiyeh who believed he was a vampire. They spent wet afternoons and evenings in the gleaming forecourts of malls in Saket and Rajouri Garden, waiting for young people to grow fangs and beards and engage each other again. Once, as night came to Nehru Place, they ran behind a pack of young boys who exhibited no little athletic skill in climbing up what seemed to be blank walls and who jumped from broken rail to seedy step to dangling grating with an abandonment of physical limitation and fear that seemed otherworldly. The rain fell around them in the dankly dirty plaza and the dark towers loomed around them as they discovered that these young boys were innocent devotees of a new urban sport called parkour and no, they were neither vampires nor werewolves, sorry to disappoint you, but did the two uncles know where they could be found? The last office workers of the evening trudged wearily past in the steadily falling rain as Dayal and his junior worked their way stolidly through the fare provided by the least greasy-looking of Nehru Place’s canteens, their faces illumined by the flame under the big metal plate, the dirty tubes above, and the reflected light off the puddles in the broken plaza beyond.
Look at this place, gestured Dayal to Kapoor. “This was once going to be the shining beacon of New Delhi. Its buildings full of the urban elite, its plazas places for its forward thinkers to congregate. Less than forty years ago. A moment in Delhi’s history. And look at it now. This is all the time it takes for a dream to disintegrate in New Delhi.”
Though he left it unsaid, Kapoor knew that his superior and friend meant it as an exculpation for his own attachment to the cities that had preceded this misbegotten one. Even though he himself was a product of the new city, Kapoor sympathized, as he looked glumly at his plate of forlorn samosas and considered, along with Dayal, how long it would take for the new malls to fall. That he picked up three new Playstation games for free from a street vendor who was closing up for the night was little consolation. My son, he told Dayal, who nodded dolefully as he gazed about himself at the wretched prospect of a business district drowning in the rain.
The weeks came and went, the rain stayed. There were reports of fights all over the city and men continued to lose their fingers to Angulimala and the clouds pulled in closer over Dayal. One evening, after a frantic phone call from Smita, Dayal made his way across the river in the evening traffic. The commuter rush was worsened by citizens who stopped their cars to show their children the unaccustomed sight of the Yamuna actually flowing free and alarmingly close to the roadway. The siren on Dayal’s car and the imprecations his driver shouted at their fellow travelers seemed to have little effect. The commissioner settled himself further back in his seat and allowed his mind to wander. The setbacks of the last few weeks, the growing numbers of men missing their fingers on the streets and the city’s maddened reaction, the fear of a copycat and the threat that one of these unfortunate men would actually die: all these things and more pressed about him just as the traffic did around his car, and so he, as he always had, sought refuge in abstract speculation.
But today, the expected release failed to materialize. The rain drummed upon the roof of his car and skated off the slick windshield. Through the manic whirring of the wipers he saw raincoated children on the pavement and similarly covered riders on their two-wheelers and impotently honking cars everywhere. He thought of Smita and her laughter and her constant presence over the phone these past few weeks, as he checked in with her for leads and clues. He thought of a woman’s beguiling invitation and how he had nothing to offer her, so he hadn’t taken her up on it and what did that make him? He thought of the fact that he had nothing to go on, that Angulimala had been the width of a metro platform away and was now gone, his collection growing every week in the wet night watches while Dayal and his minions foundered in the selfsame dark. The cold wet grip of failure clutched at him so he told his driver to mount the pavement and scatter the children, because he had a riot to disrupt.
They sped along the pavement, their siren and lights blaring, a posse of civilian two-wheelers following in their wake, as will happen in Delhi. The driver sought his superior’s eyes in the mirror for confirmation, his foot poised over the brake, expecting the instruction to leave the first motorcyclist to hit his bumper lying in the wet dirt of the pavement as a warning to the others. But Dayal didn’t look up so they drove on, the turgid river surging below, the supposedly fleet motorized stream constrained above. Dayal’s phone beeped. Smita was on the line and sounding flustered, not something he associated with her.
“They’re broadcasting,” she said peremptorily. “Those little bastards are shooting their fight and showing it live.”
Dayal nodded. It was only as he expected. “How many of them? You’re recording it, I hope?”
“Of course. No more than three on each side, now. Perhaps less. Certainly no more. The hobbyists are gone. Scared off by you. These are the hard-cores.”
“Okay. Anything of interest?”
“Your boy in the kaffiyeh is there. He’s currently beating the hell out of one of the lycans.”
“Is there any sound?”
“None. It’s all silent. Whoever is filming is close to the action. It’s pretty tight. Can’t tell where they are, but I’m assuming it’s still in that new bus depot they’re building. There’s a lot of open concrete, and there seem to be patches of floodlit ground.”
“Where’s it being hosted?”
“An open-access web-streaming server. Mainstream, legal. The transmitting address is a ghost. We’re working on it. My guess is the source is a smartphone working on a 3G-enabled account. We’re working on that too.”
“Good,” said Dayal. “Very good. Anything else?”
“I suggest you get there quickly, sir. The clip’s going to be on YouTube in about two minutes.”
The car swept through the intersection that marked the end of the bridge and flew along the raised road that cut through the townships on the other side of the river. Dayal glimpsed towers off to one side and fields interspersed with squat concrete blocks on the other and once he thought he saw a statue of Hanuman, painted and glowering and large beyond belief, but the rain was strong and it might have been an illusion, and before he was really ready, they were there and pulling into the almost-finished bus depot, the security men sheltering forlornly in their little shack to the side. The car sped along the slick surface, its lights off now, the big floods of the bus bays’ illumination enough through the steadily falling rain. Off at the far end of the enormous depot, Dayal saw a tight knot of young people dissolving into the darkness. His car raced toward the wraiths, the rhythm of the raindrops and the thwacking of the wiper blades a backbeat to their swift, silent progress.
“Put on your lights,” said Dayal quietly. “I don’t want you to hit any kids lying on the road.” The lights came on and the car swept to a halt. Dayal and his driver barrelled out into the rain—a body lay still on the ground in the lee of one wall, a floodlight tower almost perpendicularly overhead. Dayal motioned his driver to look along the wall, knelt to check the body itself. He turned it over and saw a young man,
