The paan shop leads to the opening of a tunnel full of the creatures of the city, and the tears and spit of a fakir.

Sanjay Chaurasia’s paan cart stood less than five hundred yards from my flat; Ratanlal sold chai right next to Sanjay’s. Sanjay had come to Delhi from a small village near Pratapgarh, and Ratanlal from Sasaram. Their makeshift shops were on wheels so they could make a quick getaway in case an official came nosing around. Cops on motorbike patrol came by all the time, but they got their weekly cut. Ratanlal paid five hundred, Sanjay seven. The two men didn’t worry.

‘What’s the big deal? I’ve got no problem. Say I did have a real place. I’d be paying the same money in rent anyway. Or more. Am I right? As long as a man is getting his daily bread, he can fight off the rabid dogs. When I’m right, I’m right,’ Sanjay Chaurasia said, smiling. I wondered whose life was more like the dogs’.

A few steps away was a third enterprise on wheels — the bicycle repair cart belonging to Madan Lal. And across the road from Madan Lal was Devi Deen, the shoe repairman, and just down the road from him was Santosh, a mechanic who fixed scooters, cars, and repaired flat tires. Santosh had come to Delhi four years ago, making his way from a village in Haryana, close to where Madan Lal and Devi Deen were from. All the vendors and hawkers set up camp wherever they could. As night fell, Brajinder joined them, pushing his fancy electric ice cream cart, ‘Kwality Ice Cream’ printed in rainbow letters on the plastic panels. So did Rajvati, who sold hard boiled eggs. Her husband, Gulshan, was there too, with their two kids. Behind her shop, four brick walls enclosed a little vacant lot. As night wore on, people pulled up in cars asking Gulshan for a little whisky or rum. The government liquor shops were long closed by that hour, so Gulshan would cycle off and return with a pint or a fifth he secured from one of his black market connections. Some customers wanted chicken tikka with their hard boiled eggs, which Gulshan would fetch from Sardar Satte Singh’s food stand up at the next set of lights. Sometimes, the customers would give him a little bit of whisky by way of a tip, or a few rupees. Rajvati didn’t make a fuss, since it was a hundred times better for her husband to drink that kind of whisky, and for free, than to spend his own money on little plastic pouches of local moonshine. You could count on that kind of hooch being mixed with stuff that might make you go blind, or kill you outright.

The rickshaw drivers also hung around. Most of them came from Bihar or Orissa, and stood wearily amid the bustle on the lookout for passengers. Tufail Ahmed had come from Nalanda with his sewing machine, which he plonked down right beside the brick enclosure. He did a little business for a short while. But since Tufail Ahmed didn’t have a fixed address, people were wary of leaving their clothes with him. So the only jobs he got were mending schoolchildren’s bookbags, or hemming workers’ uniforms, or patching up rickshaw drivers’ clothes. After a couple of weeks, he stopped showing up. One person said that he was sick, another said he went back to Nalanda, and still others said he’d been hit by a Blue Line bus. His sewing machine was tossed into the scrapheap behind the police station.

It was the same story with Natho and her husband, Mangé Ram, whose cart was right next to Rajvati and her eggs. They sold channa masala at night and chole kulche during the day: no one had seen them for a few months. Someone said that Mangé Ram came down with stomach cancer, and that Natho had drunk away the money for medicine; and, after Mangé Ram died, she took the two kids, crossed over to the other side of the Jamuna, and took up with someone else who had his own kulche cart.

That’s how it was around here, as if there was an unwritten law. Every day, one of these new arrivals would suddenly disappear, never to be seen again. Most of them didn’t have a permanent address where you could go to inquire after they were gone. Rajvati, for example, lived two miles from here, near the bypass, with her husband and two kids, in sixteenth century ruins. If you’ve ever been on the National Highway going toward Karnal or Amritser and happened to glance north, you’ll have seen the round building with a dome right beside the industrial drainage: a crumbling, dark-red brick ruin, with old worn stones. It’s hard to believe that humans could be living there. The famous bus named Goodwill that travels from India to Pakistan — from Delhi to Lahore — passes right by that part of the highway.

But people do live there — families, for the most part, and two single men: Rizwan, whose right leg and hand have wasted away from leprosy, and Snehi Ram, who is so old that he sleeps all day long under the neem tree growing next to the sewage runoff. Snehi Ram knows the entire Ramayana of Tulsidas and the Soor Sagar by heart, and people swoon when they hear his rendition of the Dhola Maru and other epic songs. The two men can count on food handouts from the families living in the ruins. Rizwan gets up first thing in the morning, heads toward the bypass, drinks his chai and eats his bun at Gopal Dhandhar’s, before installing himself at the bus depot until evening, begging. Rizwan’s beard is streaked with grey, his face reminds you of Balraj Sahani from Kabuliwala, and he does quite well for himself.

Others live in the ruins: Rajvati’s sister Phulo; Jagraj’s wife, Somali, who sells peanuts by the gate of the Azadpur veggie market; and Mushtaq, who sells hashish by the Red Fort, and his cousin, Saliman, currently Mushtaq’s wife. The three women turn tricks. Somali works out of her home in the ruins. She takes care of customers brought to her by the smackheads: Tilak, Bhusan, and Azad, who are always hanging around. In the evening, Saliman and Phulo go out in rickshaws looking for customers. Sometimes, Phulo also works at all-night parties.

Phulo occasionally sleeps with Azad, even though Rajvati, her sister, and Gulshan, her brother-in-law, both object. Gulshan always says, ‘Don’t lend money or your warm body to those living under the same roof.’ Gulshan, Rajvati and Phulo have the most money of those living under that particular roof. Since Phulo came from the village and began to turn tricks, their income has increased so much that they’ve been scouting out land in the neighbourhood around Loni Border where they may build a house someday.

Azad says, ‘If you move away, don’t worry, I’ll still manage,’ but over the last few days he’s been shivering and writhing around at night, sick. Gulshan says that he won’t last much longer. All of the smackheads are in the same sorry state. Azad has the innocent face of a child, and is very light skinned. Tilak says Azad is the son of a rich family from Fatehpur. After his parents died, Azad’s brother and sister-in-law took over the whole family estate. Azad’s own brother-in-law was in on the deal, and got Azad hooked on smack — until it got so bad that one day he had to run away. Supposedly, he’d once been a real bookworm.

Azad and I had long talks, and he spoke quite articulately, even elegantly. I was amazed how much he knew about things like European perfumes and colognes, and their Indian counterparts, and horses, too; it seemed that he was fully knowledgeable about every topic, no matter whom he was talking to. His personality was perfect, apart from being a smackhead. But he’d been shivering these last few days, like someone with malaria or Parkinson’s, and I had a strong premonition that one day I’d come visit, and Phulo or Tilak or Bhusan or Saliman would say, What can I tell you, Vinayak? I haven’t seen Azad for four days. He left in the morning, and never came back. You haven’t seen him?

And so the story goes with all of them. Azad wasn’t coming back. What about me? I am Vinayak Dattatreya! Am I any safer than them? I’ve fallen to a new low, with no work, squeezed on all sides, and now I spend all day long sitting at Sanjay’s paan stall: stressed out, useless, numb.

Now I’m just another piece of that world, no different from the rest. I don’t have the courage anymore to come home and face the way my wife and son look at me. I watch my son eat his food at dinnertime, chewing ever so slowly, and I feel as though he’s walking down a long flight of stairs, down into a darkness where I’ll never see his face again. My soul — or whatever it is you want to call it — quietly weeps. Believe me that every time I do a bit of soul searching to try and figure out what’s wrong with me and why I have such bad luck, I come face-to-face with every single rotten thing about this whole system we live in — a system surely created by some underworld gang.

One day I’ll be the one to disappear from this little corner of the neighbourhood: it’s a fact. The poor, the sick, the street corner prophets, the lowly, the unexceptional — all gone! They’ve vanished from this new Delhi of wealth and wizardry, never to return, not here, not anywhere else. Not even memories of them will remain.

They’re like the tears of an ill-fated fakir, leaving only the tiniest trace of moisture on the ground after he’s got up and gone. The damp spot on the ground from his spit and silent tears serves as protest against the injustice of his time. THE RUINED STATUES OF HISTORY AND THE GREAT COMMUTE FROM CORONATION PARK

But it seems we’ve got off track. I was talking about Sanjay’s, the neighbourhood paan shop (right near my flat), and then I got carried away to sixteenth century ruins near the bypass. But that’s what happens. Try it yourself: look closely at anyone from a forgotten corner of any neighbourhood, and you’ll slowly but surely find yourself entering a tunnel inhabited by very different characters. You’ll notice that these city creatures are lodged in unfamiliar sorts of dwellings. But don’t expect to read any news about the bad things that happen to them. Newspapers’ raison d’etre is to hide that news, to edit out everything that they suffer.

If you’re in Delhi, and you’re the kind of person who doesn’t sleep very well at night, and, at three or four in the morning, you’re up, and you leave the house to go wandering around, then you’ve surely seen the road that goes toward Raj Ghat from Kingsway Camp, now called Vijaynagar. If you head toward Nirankari Colony or Mukherjee Nagar from the crossing at Vijaynagar, you’ll find yourself in a desolate place that’s known as Coronation Park. Even though they’ve turned the place into a big, beautiful park, it’s the spot that gave the area the name of Kingsway Camp.

They say that during the time of the British, when George V or Charles came here (I don’t know which one), all the Indian kings and queens of all of the princely states set up camp right there, gathering as one in order to warmly welcome their Imperial King. They say that it was a little like the reception that Bill Clinton got when he visited. The kings and rulers of the princely states performed a crowning ceremony, or the coronation of their English King. The speech that the King of England gave has been stored in the national archives, and the copy of the speech is considered a very important document in the history of India. On top of that, the King of England had a statue of himself installed slap bang in the centre of India Gate, under a lovely canopy. After the British returned to England in 1947, that statue, along with others dating from British rule, were uprooted, collected, and relegated to Coronation Park at Kingsway Camp.

In the years after Independence, the park became a magnet for loonies, beggars, the disabled, lepers, the maimed, druggies, and other wandering, unsettled individuals. They mutilated the statues, turning them into stoves, grindstones, sledgehammers, and using them in all sorts of other creative ways. A king’s head was severed, a hand was taken, a leg removed. The torsos of the other statues lie scattered on the ground in a frightening, limbless state, surrounded by tall grass and shrubs. As soon as the sun sets, the special inhabitants of this park converge from each and every corner of Delhi, and pass the night among the felled, ruined figures.

So, as I was saying, if you’re in Delhi, and things are such that an endless nightmare loops in your head all night long, and, in a fit of restlessness and depression, you go out wandering in the middle of the night, or right before daybreak, then you’ve seen them: the mass of human beings skulking out of Coronation Park, Kingsway Camp, loping toward Raj Ghat on Mall Road. The dark of the night hasn’t fully dissipated, and dawn is still a hazy mystery, while you watch a great mass of broken, maimed, crippled, halfway-human beings, like characters from a Fellini or Antionioni film, as they quietly pass into the capital.

They’re like a group of survivors of a devastating bombing campaign from a twentieth-century war, who pick themselves out of the rubble in the city that was the scene of the carnage, and carry their wounded bodies to a place of refuge, in search of a final protector.

After the sun comes out, you see them everywhere in the capital: at the train station, at bus stands, in temples, at holy sites, at intersections, on sidewalks. These are not the slum dwellers: they form their own constituency — one that’s only got bigger since Independence.

In the corner of the neighbourhood where Sanjay’s is, sometimes you’ll also see one-eyed Rupna Mandal whose face is dotted with white spots from vitiligo selling colourful paper flowers and pinwheels. She, too, journeys from Coronation Park. Sometimes Sohna, a nine-year-old with no arms, another of the dispossessed, also comes along.

You see how this tunnel that starts from the little corner of the street that’s home to Sanjay’s paan stall leads to the Bypass ruins, from there to Kingsway Camp, and from there extends to each and every corner of the capital. Enter the tunnel, quietly make your way deeper and deeper, and you’ll soon discover that the tunnel traverses the entire length of the country; then, it continues below the ocean floor, until, finally, it circumnavigates the entire subterranean earth. This is a different kind of globalisation, one so stealthy and so secret that not a single sociologist in the whole wide world knows a thing about it. Those who do know keep quiet, stay put, and wait until tomorrow. But the important thing to remember is this: the tunnel originates mere steps from my home.

Walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart — and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out. MEETING RAMNIVAS, AND THE START OF THE SECRET

It was at this little corner of the street I first met Ramnivas. He’d moved to Delhi twenty years earlier from Shahipur, a small village in Handiya district near Allahabad, along with his father, Babulla Pasiya. In the beginning, Babulla washed pots and pans in a roadside dhaba food shack on Rohatak Road, and was later promoted after learning how to cook in a tandoori oven. Five years ago, he built a makeshift house in Samaypur Badli village in northwest Delhi, itself a settlement of tin shacks and huts — and just like that, his family became Delhites. Even though the settlement was illegal — city bulldozers could come and demolish everything at any time — he’d procured an official ration card after last year’s election, and increasingly entertained the hope they wouldn’t get displaced.

Ramnivas Pasiya was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, max. Ramlal Sharma, the local council man, put in a good word and got him part-time work as a city sanitation worker. His area was in south Delhi, in Saket. At eight in the morning, he’d put his plastic lunch tiffin, full of roti, into his bag, and catch a DTC bus toward Daula Kuan, and then transfer to another bus that took him to Saket. Ramnivas would punch in, grab his broom and other cleaning equipment and head toward the neighbourhood he was responsible for. When he got hungry in the afternoon, he’d buy a couple of rupee’s worth of kulche, and then eat his fill along with the roti he’d brought from home. His wife, Babiya, had made the roti; they’d been married when she was seventeen. Now he was the father of two — a boy and a girl — and would have had two sons if one hadn’t died.

I first met Ramnivas by Sanjay’s. He had a good reason for frequenting the neighbourhood: he was chasing after a girl named Sushma. She was a part-time servant who washed dishes and did chores for a few neighbourhood households, commuting every day from Samaypur Badli, where Ramnivas also lived. Ramnivas had accompanied her several times, smoking cigarettes or bidis at Sanjay’s or drinking chai at Ratanlal’s while she worked. Sushma was seventeen or eighteen, a full ten years younger than Ramnivas. He was dark-skinned and lean — if the actor Jitendra were a little poorer, a little darker, and a little skinnier, you’d have Ramnivas. Sushma had a thing for him; you could tell just by watching them walk side by side.

The secret that I’ve been wanting to tell you is connected with the tale of Ramnivas. But please, promise me this: don’t tell anyone who told you. You already know that I’m in way over my head, and if anyone found out, I’d be drowning in danger.

I saw Sushma just yesterday, and even today she came to clean a few houses in the neighbourhood. Every day, she still comes. Just like always.

But Ramnivas?

No one’s seen him around for a few months, and no one’s likely to see him anywhere for the foreseeable future. Even Sushma doesn’t have a clue where he is. I’ve already told you about this kind of life: a man who you see every day can suddenly disappear, and never be seen again, not a scrap to remember him by. Even if you went looking for him, all you’d find — at most — would be a little damp spot on a square of earth where Ramnivas had once existed; and the only thing this would prove is that on that spot some man once did exist, but no more, and never again.

I’d like to tell you, briefly, about Ramnivas: a simple account of his inexistence that will reveal the first hint of the secret — the secret that these days it’s vital we all know.

Two years ago, on Tuesday, 25 May, at half past seven, Ramnivas, as usual, was getting ready to go to work in Saket, forty-two kilometres from where he lives. His wife Babiya not only packed his plastic tiffin full of roti, but also placed a small metal lunchbox in his bag. In it was his favourite: spicy chole with vegetables, and aloo, too. Sushma was already waiting for him by the time Ramnivas got to the bus stop. Today, she was wearing her red polka dotted salwar, had used special face cream, and was looking lovely.

The previous Saturday, she accompanied Ramnivas for the first time on an outing to a movie at the Alpana. During intermission, they’d gone outside and snacked on some chaat-papri. In the theatre and afterwards, and on the bus going home, Ramnivas inched closer and closer to Sushma, pleading with her to say yes, while Sushma continually deflected his advances. After they’d got off the bus and were walking home, Ramnivas announced this before parting: if she wasn’t at the bus stop waiting for him next Tuesday, it meant she wasn’t interested, and they were through.

Now it was Tuesday. Every morning after washing up, he’d ask Babiya for last night’s leftover roti, eating it before he left. This morning, he wasn’t hungry, but weirdly nervous, and tried to hide it from his wife. His heart sank as he left the house, thinking, as he often did, that Sushma was having serious doubts. So when he saw her at the bus stop waiting for him, Ramnivas was so overjoyed that he declared they should ride in an auto rickshaw instead of taking the bus. He insisted and insisted, but Sushma wasn’t persuaded. ‘Why throw away hard-earned money? Let’s just take the bus like we always do.’ Ramnivas had fixed on the idea of sitting very close to her in the little back seat of the rickshaw, and maybe even getting a feel — and so he was crushed at her refusal. But Sushma’s coming to the bus stop was a ‘yes’ signal to Ramnivas, and the man was beside himself. Now really and truly happy, he sensed that his life was about to turn a corner.

He was always picking fights with his wife, Babiya. Doing the housework and looking after the kids left her with no time, and one of the kids was always getting sick. Ramnivas could only remember one time (and he wasn’t even sure of that) when he saw Rohan, his son, horsing around and having fun. Moreover, Ramnivas’ pay cheque wasn’t enough for Babiya to cover household expenses. Even though it wasn’t her fault — she bought only what they needed — Ramnivas would let loose. ‘It’s like your hands have holes in them! Look at Gopal! Four kids, parents, grandparents, and god knows who else living with him, makes less than I do, and still gets by! And you? Night and day, bitch and moan.’ She’d remain silent, but glare at him with a stare whose flames licked at the inside of his head all day long. That stare made sure he watched every penny. When he got hungry, he let his stomach cry out in pain. If he felt like chai, he did what he could to get someone to shout him a cup. He rode the buses all the time without a ticket. Babiya’s burning stare, the one etched in his head, saw to it he never had fun.

That Tuesday, Ramnivas told Sushma he’d leave work early and be at Sanjay’s by two, since that’s where she’d be waiting; then they’d go home together. Sushma had said that she didn’t like waiting for him at Sanjay’s (Santosh, the scooter mechanic, was always trying to flirt with her, and Sanjay, too, was always cracking dirty jokes), but in the end, she agreed.

And then, for the very first time, Sushma, very slowly and very deliberately, instructed Ramnivas to bring her some of those chili pakoras, the ones he’d been going on and on about that they sell by the Anupam Cinema. When Sushma made her request, Ramnivas could swear he heard a note of intimacy in her voice, even a hint of possessiveness, and it made him feel very good indeed. He said casually, ‘I’ll see what I can do, let’s see how things go,’ but had a very hard time concealing the fact that he was jumping for joy. THE BROOM, THE GYM, AND MARS STARES AT JUPITER

Ramnivas went on his way, happy, while singing that song from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. After punching in, he told his boss, Chopri sahib, that he needed to leave work early to go home because his wife was so sick she needed to be taken to the hospital. Even though he usually gave employees a hard time about leaving early and would insist that vacation forms be filled out, for some reason he readily agreed. ‘Today’s a lucky day,’ Ramnivas thought.

That day, Ramnivas was sweeping the floor of a fitness club in a building that housed various businesses. Cleaning the gym technically wasn’t his responsibility since it wasn’t a government building, but Chopri sahib had instructed him to clean it, explaining to Ramnivas that rich people and their kids went there every day to lose weight.

The gym had every exercise machine imaginable: one for the waistline, another for the stomach muscles, and another for the whole body. The prosperous residents of Saket and their families went there in the mornings and evenings, spending hour after hour busy on the machines. A beauty salon and massage parlour occupied the first floor. Middle-aged men of means would go for a massage and, occasionally, take some of the massage girls back to their car and drive away. Ramnivas had seen policemen and politicians frequent the place.

Govind’s chai stall was right outside, and he told Ramnivas that a girl named Sunila earned five thousand for accompanying gentlemen outside the massage parlour. ‘Who knows what these fucking big shots do with themselves in there,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them throw after-hours parties, boys and girls right from this neighbourhood.’ Govind did well during the late-night parties since the drinkers and partyers sent out for Pepsi and soda all night long. Indeed, while cleaning the bathrooms, Ramnivas sometimes stumbled on the kind of nasty stuff that suggested that someone had had a good time, and it wasn’t much fun to clean up.

What a life these high-flyers have, Ramnivas thought to himself. They eat so much they can’t lose weight. And look at me! One kid dies from eating fish caught from the sewer, and the other is just hanging on, thanks to the medicine. Then he remembered Sushma, that she’d be waiting for him at two at Sanjay’s, and he set his mind to finishing up work.

As he was sweeping the floor of the big gym, the rope on the handle of the whisk broom that fastened the bristles together began to unravel, and he couldn’t sweep properly. Annoyed, Ramnivas banged the head of the broom against the wall to try and right the bristles. What was that? Sensing something strange, he again banged it against the wall. This time, he was sure. Instead of the hard thud of a thick wall, he heard something like an echo. It was hollow, a quick layer of plaster had been applied, but what could be behind it? Ramnivas wondered. A table and chairs, and a couple of burlap sacks stood between him and the wall. Ramnivas moved them to make space. Then he hammered the head of the broom into the wall, hard.

It was just as he suspected. A few cracks began to show in the plaster, which soon crumbled away, exposing the inside. The strong smell of phenyl or DDT escaped. Ramnivas peeked in through the hole he’d opened, and his breath stopped short. He went numb. Holy cow! The wall was filled with cash, stacks and stacks of five-hundreds and hundreds.

He drew his face flush with the hole, and took a good look. The hollow was pretty big, like a long tunnel carved out on the inside of the wall. Nothing but stacks of cash, as far as he could see, all the way on either side until the light failed and the money was lost in the dark. Ramnivas’ heart raced. His fear began to rise and he kept glancing around to see if anyone was there.

There was no one, only him, completely alone. Before him stood the wall in the big gym, at A-11/DX 33, Saket, against which he’d banged his broom and opened up a hollow, hidden space filled with a cache of bills.

‘Dirty money… dirty money… dirty, dirty, dirty!’ came the words, like a voice whispering into his ear. His hair stood on end. Here he was, face-to-face, an arm’s length away from the kind of fantasy he’d only heard about from others. But this was no dream, no fairy tale, but the real deal. He’d stumbled on it, and here it was, right before his very eyes.

Ramnivas didn’t move for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he grabbed his bag from the table in the corner and, peering around to make sure there wasn’t anyone watching, took two stacks of five-hundred rupee bills and stuffed them in his bag. Then he took one of the burlap sacks and placed it in front of the wall to cover up the hole along with the table and chairs. He hoped no one would suspect anything. Then he gave the floor a good sweep, cleaning up the dust and mess and plaster, and strode confidently outside where he plopped down at Govind’s. He ordered a cup of Govind’s strongest chai, and a couple of salty cakes.

‘Yesterday was fine, but today — too hot!’ Ramnivas declared. But Govind wasn’t in the mood to chat: a government jeep had pulled up, and an order for five cups of chai and salty cakes came from inside.

‘It’ll get hotter,’ was all Govind added, pouring the water into the pot. It was only half past eleven, and Ramnivas still had the better part of his cleaning rounds to finish. Instead, he went right to the office, hung up his broom, and said that he got a phone call alerting him that his wife had taken a turn for the worse. He needed to go home right away.

Each stack of cash contained ten thousand rupees, meaning that Ramnivas had twenty thousand. He’d never seen this much cash in his life, and was so scared that he rolled up his little bag and shoved it down his pants for the bus trip from Saket to Rohini. If any of his busy fellow passengers had had a moment to spare and had taken a good look at Ramnivas’ face, they would have instantly realised this was a man in a state of high anxiety.

Ramnivas took a rickshaw from the bus stop to Sanjay’s. He found Sushma joking around with the scooter mechanic, Santosh. This upset Ramnivas, but what unnerved him was when Sushma said, ‘Enjoying a trip in a rickshaw today, are we? Did you knock over a bank or something?’ But then she added, ‘You said you were coming at two, and it’s not even one. How did you get out so early?’

Ramnivas laughed. Maybe it was seeing Sushma, or just making it to Sanjay’s — Ramnivas relaxed, his worries slipping away. A DREAM OF AN AUTO RICKSHAW, AND A SPECIAL TREE OF PLEASURE

‘I ran as fast as I could!’ Ramnivas said, looking at Sushma with a big smile. She returned his smile, but what Ramnivas said next caught the attention of Sajay and Santosh, who suddenly looked at him, causing Ramnivas to revert to his previous state.

‘Can I buy you guys a cup of chai?’ Ramnivas asked to a startled Santosh and Sanjay.

‘What’s the special occasion? Did you get overtime?’ Santosh asked.

Sushma was also startled, since Ramnivas was known for being such a penny pincher. She never liked the way he’d come around Sanjay’s and try every trick in the book to convince someone to buy him a cup of chai, or a bidi. This day, however, Ramnivas didn’t just include Sanjay and Santosh in the round of chai, but also Devi Deen, the cobbler, and Madan, the bicycle repairman. And not just plain old chai, but the deluxe brew — strong, with cardamom.

Sushma protested, ‘why throw money down the drain like that?’ but Ramnivas didn’t listen. He hired an auto rickshaw for the rest of the day and took Sushma on a whirlwind tour of Karol Bagh, Kamla Nagar, and Deep Market. He fed her chaat-papri, splurged on bottles of Pepsi, bought her a handbag in Karol Bagh, and a five-hundred rupee salwar outfit with matching chunni from Kolharpur Road in Kamla Nagar. Sushma, as if in a dream, felt indescribable bursts of happiness each time she touched, or even looked at, Ramnivas. The sad and worried little Ramnivas of yesterday (on many occasions Sushma had thought, enough is enough) had suddenly blossomed into an uncannily happy, technicolour lover. Though his hair was unkempt, his stubble getting scraggly, and his bidi breath hard to take, whenever Ramnivas kissed Sushma in the little back seat of the rickshaw, for some unexplainable reason, she felt as if she were rolling around on a flowerbed of the prettiest blossoms in the world.

There’s no way Sushma could have known what accounted for Ramnivas’ surprising turnaround. She knew this much: She’d done well by showing up at the bus stand that Tuesday morning, after having spent the whole night thinking, Do I show up? Do I not show up? It turned out she’d made the right decision. There is someone out there in the world who loves me! Sushma thought, overflowing with joy. And she was with him at that very moment. To Sushma, Ramnivas seemed wide-eyed and innocent, like a little kid. Even a few days later after she began to sleep with Ramnivas, and even after he got her pregnant and then got her an abortion at the Mittal Clinic in Naharpur, she’d remember the whirlwind trip that day in the auto rickshaw. Two years ago, on Tuesday, 23 May, Sushma and Ramnivas had entered a fantasy land — the day Ramnivas found the cash hidden in the hollow wall of the building located at A-11/DX 33, Saket.

The roots of happiness lie hidden away in money. From there, the tree of pleasure can grow, and flourish, and bear the fruit of joy. Maybe the best qualities of men, too, lie locked inside a bundle of cash — this is how Ramnivas began to think. He was a new man: everything had changed. Gone was the poor, broken, sorrowful Jitendra. Now he was the gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile. Life at home had also improved substantially. First, his wife, Babiya, seemed happy all the time, and cooked the most delicious food. They could afford to eat meat at least twice a week, and eggs every day. If he wanted to eat an egg, he’d go and eat an egg. The kids asked for ice cream, and the kids got ice cream. If a guest came knocking, Babiya would bring out the good stuff: Haldiram’s namkeen snacks, and Britannia biscuits. ‘Please, don’t be shy! Why don’t you take some more?’ she said, offering the snacks on a fine little plate. Ramnivas bought a sofa, a TV, a VCR, a double bed, a fridge, a foreign-made CD player from Palika Baazar, and announced that it was only a matter of time before he bought a computer for the kids. He said everyone knew that in today’s world, there was no getting ahead without one. He started looking into computer courses for his children, Rohan and Urmila. He planned to send them both to the States, where they’d work for a company and make six-figure salaries every month.

Ramnivas’ relatives, who’d always steered clear of him, suddenly started showing up at his place with whole families in tow. Ramnivas, once decrepit and spiteful, now personified all the virtue and beauty the world had to offer, and Babiya wasn’t afraid to sing his praise, all the time, and right to his face. His stock within his own caste community was on the rise, and he was often approached for advice about matrimonial alliances between families. He got all sorts of letters and wedding invitations. If he felt like it, he’d go. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t. But when he did — what a welcome he got!

‘Take it — it’s all yours. Don’t worry about paying it back,’ he’d be heard saying as he helped someone out. To paraphrase a popular saying, even a Ramnivas can get lucky.

Meanwhile, Ramnivas had begun drinking every day, and his liaisons with Sushma also became a daily occurrence. By then, Babiya knew all about the affair, but had decided to keep her mouth shut. She knew enough about the kind of man Ramnivas was to feel confident he’d never leave her or the kids. And so she didn’t worry.

Sometimes Ramnivas wouldn’t come home until well after midnight. Sometimes he’d disappear for a few days — sometimes with Sushma. But it didn’t make any difference to Babiya: the neighbourhood now held Ramnivas in high esteem. He’d go straight to Sushma’s house and had no qualms about talking to Sushma about going out to see a movie. Right in front of her mother, Bilaribai, who also washed other people’s dishes and cleaned other people’s houses.

Sushma now owned several salwar outfits, complete with matching sandals and jewellery sets. She used to go head-to-head with Ramnivas no matter how small the squabble, but now, fearing he might get angry, Sushma silently put up with more and more. On several occasions her mother cautioned, ‘How long will this last? You have to stand up for yourself and tell him what’s yours is yours. And he is yours, honey. People are beginning to talk.’ But Sushma would reply, ‘I’m no homewrecker, Amma. He has kids don’t forget. Let it go for as long as it goes.’ Deep inside she was sure it would go on forever, for the rest of their lives.

If people asked Ramnivas where he’d suddenly got so much money, he’d say that he’d got in on a half-million rupee pyramid scheme in Saket, or that he was playing the numbers and he kept hitting. Or that he’d won the lottery. Or — and this he reserved for only a few — that he’d met a great holy man near the mosque who whispered a very special mantra in his ear that caused future stock-market figures to flash before his eyes. In turn, Ramnivas whispered the same mantra into the ears of several people, all of whom failed to see the numbers flash before their eyes. Ramnivas explained that in order to see the numbers, one’s heart must be pure. First you must bear no ill-will, prey on no one, cause no harm, and then you’d see: the market and lottery numbers would dance in your mind’s eye!

Whenever Ramnivas felt like it, he’d go and fill up his bag with a few stacks of cash from the wall in Saket. It was amazing that no one had stopped him or arrested him, and no one had moved the stacks of rupees around. Spending the money as he pleased for so long with no one stopping him had turned Ramnivas into a carefree man, and so his daring grew. And yet he was still beset with worry that one day the rightful owner of the money might show up and take it away. So with wisdom and foresight, Ramnivas did two things to lessen the impact in case the money ever disappeared. First, he bought a ten acre plot of land in Loni Border, and put it in his wife’s name. Second, he took three-hundred thousand and deposited it into various savings accounts in several banks, all under different names. One of them was a deposit of fifty thousand in Sushma’s name, who had by then decided she wanted to go on forever with Ramnivas, just the way things were. LOVE AT THE TAJ MAHAL, AN AIR-CON ROOM, EAGLE EYE, AND THE POLICE

It happened about eight months ago.

Ramnivas made big plans to take Sushma on a trip to Jaipur and Agra, where, of course, they’d have their photo taken in front of the Taj Mahal. It would be a fun getaway for a few days. Sushma instantly agreed. They travelled to Agra by train.

They found a taxi driver the moment they stepped out of the train station. Ramnivas instructed him to take them to a hotel. ‘What’s your price range?’ the taxi driver asked, sizing him up.

Ramnivas could tell that the driver thought he was just an average joe, or worse, some schmuck. ‘It doesn’t matter so long as the hotel’s top-notch,’ Ramnivas said firmly. ‘Don’t take me to some fleabag, cut-rate flophouse.’

The driver appeared to be around forty-five; he had a cunning look on his face and dark eyes as alert as a bird of prey. He smiled, asking sardonically, ‘Well, there’s a nice three-star hotel right nearby. Whaddya think?’ The man must have been expecting Ramnivas to lose his cool at the mere mention of a three-star hotel, but Ramnivas was unfazed.

‘Three-star, five-star, six-star — it’s all the same to me. Just step on it. I really need a shower, a hot shower, and a big double plate of butter chicken.’

The taxi driver gave him a long look, which he followed with a piercing, hawklike glance at Sushma. Pleased with himself, and now mixing in mockery, he added, ‘Yes sir! On our way! And do you think I’m going to let you settle for a plain old hot shower? I’ll see to it you have a whole big full tub of hot water! And butter chicken? Did you say butter chicken? I am going to take you somewhere they will serve you not just any old butter chicken, but whatever your heart can dream up!’

Ramnivas laughed at this and said, ‘That’s more like it! Now step on it.’

The taxi driver then asked, ‘So where are you from, sir?’

‘Me? I’m a Delhite. What, did you think I was from U.P. or M.P. or Pee Pee or someplace like that?’ Ramnivas quipped, smiling at Sushma as if he’d just won the war. ‘I come to Agra all the time. With the company car, every couple of weeks,’ Ramnivas added, hoping that this shrewd driver wouldn’t ask him about his big job. What would he say? Grade Four sanitation worker? Broom pusher? Janitor? But the driver didn’t follow up.

When they got to the hotel, Ramnivas took the luggage out of the trunk. The driver told him, ‘Go and see if they have any rooms. If not, we’ll try someplace else.’

Ramnivas left Sushma in the taxi and went inside. When he got to the reception desk and heard the rate, he wondered if they should find a cheaper place to stay. But he soon signed on the dotted line for an AC room with a deluxe double bed for fifteen hundred a night. The man sitting at the reception desk sent Ramnivas upstairs to take a look at the room, and sent a bellboy on his way to fetch the luggage.

When Sushma arrived along with the luggage, she looked a little worried. ‘Wow!’ she exclaimed. ‘What kind of a place is this, anyway? Everything’s so shiny and polished, like glass. I feel like I shouldn’t touch anything. What if it gets dirty? There’s something about all this stuff, and the bellboy, too, that gives me a weird feeling,’ Sushma added hesitantly.

After the bellboy had finished with their luggage, showed them that the pitcher of drinking water was filled up, and left, Ramnivas said to Sushma, ‘Just enjoy yourself, and don’t worry.

We’ve still got some stashed away, so why fret?’ Then, lovingly, he added, ‘Come over here and give me a big smooch. And crack open that bottle in my bag while you’re at it.’

The knock on the door came at half past ten that night. It had already been a long day of sightseeing at the Taj, with all sorts of poses for the camera, then buying trinkets on the road, on top of which Sushma bought a set of Firozabadi bangles that had made her ever so happy.

Ramnivas wondered who it could be so late. He opened the door to find two policemen. One was an inspector, and the other, the inspector’s sidekick.

‘You’ve got a girl in there?’ the inspector asked in a scolding voice.

‘Yes,’ Ramnivas replied. The inspector and his sidekick came in. The name V.N. Bharadwaj was engraved on a little brass tag pinned to his uniform. The way he was looking at Sushma! A fury began to build in Ramnivas, but he was too scared to say anything. Sushma was wearing her pink nightie, and you could see right through to the black bra he’d bought for her at Kamla Nagar. And beneath that was her fine, fair skin.

‘Something tells me she’s not your wife,’ the inspector declared. ‘So where’d you pick her up?’ The inspector’s square face housed cunning little eyes that kept on blinking. His hair had been turned jet black with unspeakable quantities of dye, and at first glance he appeared to be a sleazy, shrewd, thick-skinned man who liked to play by his own rules, and never ruled anything out.

‘She lives next door. She’s my sister-in-law,’ Ramnivas said. He was a terrible liar. Between his fear and putting on airs, everything came out sounding feeble and wrong.

‘So, you’ve been having a little party!’ the inspector continued, glancing at the fifth of Diplomat on the table. Then he gave Sushma the hard once-over. ‘She ran away. You helped her. You brought her here. My guess is she’s under-age.’ He turned to Sushma, ‘How old are you?’

She was scared. ‘Seventeen,’ she said. For some odd reason she felt like something impossible was happening, and that she and Ramnivas would both perish because of it.

‘I’m taking you down to the station — both of you. We’ll find out from the medical reports exactly how much fun you’ve been having. That’s a three-seven-five, three-seven-six, easy.’ He pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘So where’d the money come from? A three-star hotel? AC? My guess is this isn’t your usual style. Did you steal the money? Or knock someone off?’

Ramnivas had a good buzz going, and should have been able to pluck up his courage; but Sushma telling the truth about her age had unwittingly thrown him to the wolves. He felt as if he was walking right into their trap. He thought quickly, and a smile took shape on his face. ‘C’mon, inspector, just give the word. Another bottle?’

‘That I can order from the hotel. As for you two — I’m taking you down to the station. Go on, get dressed. Is she coming like this? With her see-through everything?’ the Inspector said plainly.

‘What’s the rush? The station goes wherever you go, inspector. The inspector’s here, and so is the station. Why hurry? We can work things out right here,’ Ramnivas suggested with a little laugh.

He was surprised at himself. Where had this been hiding, and hiding for so long? He took a quick look at the sidekick, who was standing by the bed, to see if he could get him to go along. It looked like yes, Ramnivas thought: The sidekick was busy staring at Sushma, but seemed to give a little nod when his eyes met Ramnivas’s. ‘Aw, they’re just kids, Bharadwaj sahib,’ he said. ‘They come to see the Taj. Let ‘em have their little party. You and me can have some fun with her too. Whaddya say, pal?’

Ramnivas didn’t like what the sidekick was hinting at. On top of this debacle, Ramnivas was now becoming angry. ‘Wait just a minute,’ he said. ‘Look, Bharadwaj sahib, as far as some food and drink go, just say the word, and I’ll have it sent up in no time. But you’ve got to believe me that she’s really my sister-in-law. I swear!’

The inspector began to laugh. ‘Uh-huh. You need an AC hotel room in order to polish off a fifth of single malt with your underage sister-in-law? And then let me guess: The two of you were singing holy bhajans and clapping your hands? I can just see it. But now that you mention it, go get a bottle of Royal Challenge and order a big plate of chicken and some stuff to go with it. Actually, don’t move.’ The inspector sat down on the bed and said, ‘I’ll order from here.’ He pressed the intercom button at the head of the bed that got him to the reception desk, placed the order, and then stretched out on the mattress. He loosened his belt buckle and regarded Sushma, who was sitting at the foot of the bed looking as if she wanted to crawl under a rock. ‘And you — go sit in the chair in the corner and face the wall. Don’t make me crazy. I lose it a little when I drink, and then the two of you’ll go crying to your mothers about big bad Bharadwaj. I just can’t help it, like when I see those pretty Western girls that come here on vacation.’ He had a big laugh.

They killed the bottle in just over an hour. First, Ramnivas finished off his own fifth, and then joined the police in a few more shots from theirs — by the end, he was completely drunk. The inspector and his sidekick left the hotel room sometime after midnight. They settled on five hundred to let the matter slide; later, the sidekick shook him down for an extra hundred. By the time they’d gone, Ramnivas was utterly spent, and so drunk he was queasy and started getting the spins. Sushma helped him into the bathroom and poured cold water over his head, but Ramnivas lay down right there on the bathroom floor and began to retch. Out came all the butter chicken, the naan, and the pulao. After the vomiting subsided, he clung to Sushma, but everything was a blur, so he went straight to bed. He crashed face first, and in an instant a sound issued from his nose that seemed to come from the snout of a horse that had galloped from half-a-world away.

In the morning, Sushma told Ramnivas that after he got drunk he’d told the police about cash hidden behind a wall somewhere in Saket. Ramnivas instantly sobered up. He’d been so careful about keeping his secret! So much so that he hadn’t even hinted about it to Sushma or his wife. In the end, a little booze had turned the sweet smell of success into a putrid pile of shit.

He made a few excuses to Sushma about something coming up back home, not feeling so well, and then canceled their trip to Jaipur. Ramnivas decided to take the next train back to Delhi. BUDDHA JAYANTI PARK, A SUZUKI ESTEEM WITH NO LICENCE PLATES, AND THE FINAL BIDI

Just as he’d feared, a police Gypsy idled in front of his house, waiting for him the next morning. ‘The assistant superintendent wants to talk to you,’ an inspector said from the jeep. He was identified by the name embroidered above his breast pocket as D. K. Tyagi. Ramnivas got into the Gypsy. As they left Samaypur Badli, he saw the bus stop where he used to catch the bus toward Dhaula Kuan, and where Sushma was waiting for him today.

Some eight months earlier — I think it was a Tuesday — there was a light cloud cover, and it seemed it might start to drizzle at any time. That day, I saw Ramnivas at Sanjay’s; he was waiting for Sushma.

When the sky got overcast like that, and there was a trace of drizzle in the heavy air, Ramnivas used to say, ‘It seems like the weather’s whistling.’ And when the weather was like that, he’d take Sushma out for an excursion in an auto rickshaw and feed her all the snacks and junk food in the world. But that day something was on his mind, eating him from the inside. In half an hour he’d done nothing but smoke one cigarette after the other, and was biting his nails, clearly nervous.

I ordered two cups of deluxe chai from Ratan Lal, and got my first inkling of how desperate Ramnivas was when I saw him down the piping hot tea in one gulp, burning his mouth and everything else.

It was early afternoon, and Ramnivas, eyes full of pleading, looked at me and said, ‘Vinayakji, I’ve got into a big mess. Way in over my head. Help me find a way out — please! I won’t forget it for the rest of my life.’

I asked him to tell me all about it, and he did; and now I’ve told you everything he told me. When he finished, just as I was about to see if I could find some way to help — Sushma showed up.

‘Meet me here tomorrow morning. I’ve got to go,’ Ramnivas said, and the two of them jumped in a rickshaw. I watched them ride away until I couldn’t see them any longer. That was the last time I saw Ramnivas.

He won’t come back to this little corner of the street. He’ll never come back. If you ask anyone about him, no one will say a word: not Sanjay, not Ratan Lal, not Devi Deen, not Santosh, and not Madan.

And if you keep going from this corner to the sixteenth century ruins at the bypass, and ask Saliman, Somali, Bhusan, Tilak, or Rizvan about Ramnivas, you’ll get the same blank stare. Ask Rupna Mandal, the one-eyed girl who sells paper flowers and pinwheels, whose face is blanketed with white spots from vitiligo, or Rajvati and her husband Gulshan, who sell hard-boiled eggs at night — they’ll all give you the brush-off.

Even the fair and graceful Sushma, who comes every day from Samaypur Badli to clean people’s homes, will walk right past you at a brisk pace without so much as a word. That’s how bad it is. Nowadays, she’s been seen taking excursions in auto rickshaws with Santosh, the motor scooter mechanic. I saw the two of them munching on chat and papri in front of the Sheela Cinema last week.

That’s how life goes on.

And if you happen to travel to that little settlement by the sewage runoff in Samaypur Badli and manage to ask for the address of the tiny hut that Ramnivas had converted into a real house, and, once there, ask his wife, Babiya, or his sickly son, Rohan, or his daughter, Urmila, Where is Ramnivas? you’ll face a stare as blank and cold as stone. They’ll say, He’s not home. He’s out of town. If you ask when he’ll be back, Babiya will reply, ‘How should I know?’ and walk back inside.

In the New Delhi Municipal Office in Saket, where Ramnivas used to work, go and ask Chopri sahib or some other worker about a man by the name of Ramnivas, and they’ll tell you, ‘How are we supposed to remember the names of the hundreds of daily wage workers who come through here every day?’

No one in all of Delhi has any idea about Ramnivas — that much is clear. He simply doesn’t exist anywhere — no trace is left. But hold on a minute. I’m about to give you the final facts about him. That’s why I’ve used this story as a cover, so you can find the secret behind.

If you read any of the Hindi or English newspapers that come out in Delhi — say, Indian News Express, Times of Metro India, or Shatabdi Sanchar Times — and opened the June 27 2001 edition to page three, where they stick the local news, you’d see a tiny photograph two columns wide on the right side of the page. Below the photo, in twenty point boldface, the headline of the capsule news item reads: Robbers Killed In Encounter, and below that, in sixteen point font, the subheader: Police Recover Big Money From Car.

The three-line capsule was written by the local crime reporter, according to whom, the night before, near Buddha Jayanti Park, the police stopped a Suzuki Esteem that bore no licence plates, and was travelling on Ridge Road from Dhaula Kuan to Rajendra Nagar and Karol Bagh. Instead of stopping, the people inside the car opened fire. The police returned fire, and two of the criminals were killed on the spot, while three others successfully fled in the dark of night. One of the dead was Kuldip aka Kulla, a notorious criminal from Jalandhar. The other dead man could not be identified. Police Assistant Superintendent Sabarwal said that two point three million rupees were recovered from the trunk of the car, most of which were counterfeit five-hundred-rupee bills. It was the biggest police haul in many years. The Assistant Superintendent stressed the importance of information provided by the Agra police in netting the loot.

If you were to examine the photo printed above this news item, you’d notice that the car is parked right in front of Buddha Jayanti Park. The front and back doors are open. One of the men is lying face down next to the front tire, and he’s wearing a Sikh pagri on his head. And the dead man lying right beside the back door seems to be staring up at the sky. Look closer — use a magnifying glass if you have one, or, better yet, enlarge the photo.

The dead man lying face up in the street next to the back door of the car, mouth open, pants coming undone and shirt unbuttoned, chest riddled with bullet holes from the police, is none other than Ramnivas — the criminal who, to this day, remains unidentified. And he will never be identified, since no one would recognise him any longer. THE REVEALING OF THE SECRET, A CROWBAR, A TROWEL, AND AULIYA’S SHRINE

Now, listen to what happened that day, a few hours before the encounter.

According to Govind, who sells chai on the street corner in front of A-11/DX33, Saket, that night at ten, a police Gypsy came with three plain-clothes cops and two regular ones. They went into the gym, kicked out all the girls and boys who were exercising, and then, later, themselves left. About an hour later, as Govind was closing his stall, the Esteem pulled up. It didn’t have any licence plates, and a Sikh, not too tall, not too short, got out.

Ramnivas stepped out of the backseat right after him. They went inside and stayed for about an hour and a half. They kept carrying things from the building and loading them into the back seat and boot of the vehicle. An undercover Ambassador car with concealed sirens pulled up right around the corner, where Khanna Travels and Couriers shop is, and followed the Esteem when it began to pull away.

Govind’s shop was closed — he was getting ready to go home — when the greenish Esteem without licence plates pulled up right next to him. Ramnivas rolled down the window and asked for a bidi. Govind had an open, half-smoked pack of Ganesh brand bidis in his shirt pocket, and gave him what he had.

Govind said Ramnivas looked incredibly stressed, his eyes glazed over like those of a corpse. He’d tried to say something to him, but the Esteem was gone in a flash — the Sikh was driving.

If you’re at Dhaula Kuan crossing and instead of taking Ring Road, take the next left, Ridge Road, you’ll run into Buddha Jayanti Park. It’s right off Ridge Road, and that’s where the photo was taken.

According to what Ramnivas told me about the hollow wall in the gym at Saket, it must have been pretty large. Conservatively, I figured, it had to have enclosed an area of about twelve by four feet. Ramnivas had said the space was crammed full of one hundred and five-hundred-rupee bills. Based on that, I did the maths. What I came up with was that there was easily anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty million rupees in there.

Do you remember the case where the Central Bureau raided a cabinet minister’s house, along with a few of his other properties? The investigation was launched by the government that had just come into power, and the cabinet minister under investigation had been part of the previous government. The minister was charged with taking something like a billion rupees in kickbacks from some foreign company that supplied sophisticated high-tech equipment. The man did a little time, and was later released. He then joined the very same government that had earlier begun the investigation. It’s clear that Ramnivas, guided by auspicious astrological alignments, or just dumb luck, had discovered a problem with his broom, and, in order to solve it, he began banging the broom head against the wall. He figured out the wall was hollow, put his hands inside, and was suddenly face-to-face with money hidden from the eyes of the Central Bureau and from the tax man. It was unaccounted money, untraceable money — dirty money.

Astrologer Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay set up shop to the right of Sanjay’s, and just a few steps away from Madan’s. He spread out his square of cloth on the sidewalk. I approached him and told him the whole story, changing what needed to be changed to remain discreet. The astrologer-ji told me this: If Jupiter, in the third house, aligns with Mars, while in the sixth house, Mars first aligns with Venus, then Jupiter, and then, by luck, it’s the fourth or ninth lunar day of the waning moon, and a moonless night, and Delphinus is visible, then Kuvera, the god of wealth, will stir the senses of a man, and what this all adds up to is that there’s a great likelihood of stumbling on some buried treasure, or major wealth.

Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, originally from Baliya but now living next to the Naharpur sewage runoff in a rented tin shack, warned me. All planets and constellations were conspiring against me in the most dreaded alignment; Saturn was rising and casting a dark seven-and-a-half year shadow over my life, and I would soon face the full wrath of the government.

I think that Kuvera must have been in the right position last year, on Tuesday, 23 May, that made the change in Ramnivas’ luck possible. Think about it: a simple whisk broom sweeps up the trash. The twine holding the bristles together gets loose, and the bristles need to be righted, so he beats the broom against what looks like a normal wall. And he finds a huge cache of cash. How? Think about it: for a few months he entered a fantasy land, getting everything his heart desired. He was able to give his wife, Babiya, and two kids, Rohan and Urmila whatever they wanted to eat and whatever clothes they wanted to wear. And he was able to take his teenage mistress to the other side of a shimmering, technicolour rainbow, where they got to see the Taj Mahal and have their pictures taken in several different poses.

That may be the case. But the astrologer-ji was quick to add that if the manna was, in fact, dark and dirty from the stain of sin, the result would be disastrous. What do I believe? I believe that somewhere around midnight on 26 June 2001, the sin, or vice, or bad karma attached to that money caught up with Ramnivas once and for all, bringing him and his dreams to a violent end.

And you ask me: so what’s the big secret you want to tell me? Why use this story as a cover, and hide the secret behind it?

You already know that only a few lakhs of rupees were recovered from the trunk after Kuldip aka Kulla and Ramnivas were killed on Ridge Road that night — and a large part of that cash was counterfeit too. And yet, we know that there was at some point three billion rupees taken out of that wall.

The police officer who supervised ‘Operation Ramnivas’ is a respected and powerful cop who owns a few homes and has one of those farm houses outside Delhi perfect for all-night parties. And when he throws one, he invites politicians, high-ranking cops, journalists, top intellectuals, and a few senior literary figures. They drink until they fall down on the floor. I’m sure you’ve seen their photos in all the local Delhi papers. These people are no longer like you or me — they’ve helped turn each other into name brands. If you read any poetry or stories coming out these days, you know what I mean when I say that you can smell the stench of liquor coming from the words they write. And underneath their sentences lies a pile of chicken and goat bones, and the skeletons of the innocent ones. If you poke the head of your broom into contemporary literature, you’ll find a hollow wall stuffed full of money — impure, dirty money.

I’ve been in Delhi for some twenty-five years, and I’m scared. I suspect that Ramnivas told the cops that he’d told me the secret about the hollow wall in Saket, and you know how much danger that puts me in.

It doesn’t matter how many days I’ve got left in this sorry life before I also disappear — but I, too, would also like to enter into a world of my dreams, just like Ramnivas did.

So that’s why every night at midnight, when all of Delhi is asleep, I put on some black clothes, sneak out of the house with a pick in one hand, trowel in the other, and spend the rest of the night scraping out the walls of Delhi. Treasures beyond anyone’s wildest dreams are hidden in the countless hollows in Delhi’s countless walls. I’m sure it’s there, and I’m sure all of it is unmarked. My only regret is that I’ve wasted the last twenty-five years of my life. Even if I’d only taken twenty-five days to see what’s inside the walls of Delhi, I’d be a billionaire by now, and I’d be able to live my life with a little respect.

So if you read this story, go and pick up a little pickaxe and trowel and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s the only way left to make it big. If you would rather live by hard work, the straight-and-narrow, following your dreams, using your talent, believing in yourself, keeping faith — if that’s how you want to lead your life, you’ll die of hunger, and the cops will never leave you alone. You probably don’t know about that judge in Maharashtra who declared that the Indian police and the criminals and goons of the land are one big lawful family.

In the meantime, I’ll settle down with the beggars, the lepers, the smackheads, the transients, and the other forgotten ones, I’ll stretch out, and sleep among the dismembered statues of the old English rulers that lie scattered in Coronation Park. I’m broken in the same places, with my bad back and bone tuberculosis. Whenever I have free time, I go to the shrine of Hazarat Nizzamuddin, just past the Delhi Zoo, and sit for hours on the marble floor of the dargah, repeating the words that the sufi saint, Auliya — Hazarat Nizzumaddin — once spoke to the then ruler of Delhi, Ghayasuddin Tughluq. Delhi is still far away. Tughluq summoned Auliya to explain why the sufi saint was visited by more people than was Tughluq’s court. Delhi is still far away. Auliya declined the summons, just as he had with all the other kings he’d seen come and go. Delhi is still far away. Tughluq left on a military campaign in the south to let Auliya think it over. Delhi is still far away. Auliya’s followers warned him to leave Delhi; Tughluq had threatened to behead Auliya if he disobeyed the summons. Delhi is still far away. The night before returning to Delhi, Tughluq and his men set up camp just outside the city. Delhi is still far away. That’s the night Auliya uttered the sentence I keep on repeating. After he spoke it, Tughluq, drinking and carousing, died right at the Delhi border when the tent he was in collapsed. That place is now known as Tughluqabad.

Amir Khusaro’s tomb is also at Auliya’s shrine — the man who wrote the first lines of poetry in what we now call Hindi — and who, in his own lifetime saw eleven kings, their courts, and their hangers-on, all come and go. If you go and look at the guest book that Sayid Nizami keeps at the shrine, you’ll see my name.

Believe me when I say that I am praying not only for me, but for the well-being of all of you, and for that of my dear country. Have faith that my prayers will reach all the way to Auliya’s ears.

So long as the police or other powers-that-be in this city don’t frame me for something, I’ll use my pickaxe and trowel to find the wealth hidden in Delhi’s countless walled hollows.

And if you want to get lucky, come to Delhi right away — it’s not far at all. Forget about being a millionaire; coming to Delhi is the only way left to scrape by.

The other ways you read about in the papers, and see on TV, are rumours and lies, nothing more.

What is the colour of fear? Is it the colour of dirt, or of stone? Is it yellow, charcoal? Or the colour of ash left over from a burning coal — ash that coats the coal still glowing red-hot, that still has its heat! Or a colour that masks a terrifying silence behind it? A small tear that exposes a frightful scream suspended behind.

Have you ever seen the bloodshot, dying eyes of a fish thrown from an ocean or a river, onto a sandy bank or shore? That’s the colour.

The most talented actor, no matter how hard he tries, can’t quite make the whites of his eyes or his pupils imitate the colour you see in the face of a living, breathing man who is scared clear out of his wits. Like a man going home after a hard day’s work, exhausted, satchel in hand, penny candy and cheap toys for his kids in the bag, along with a few pills for his wife’s cough. The man turns the corner into a deserted alley to find himself caught in the middle of a riot — and, unfortunately for him, he’s the wrong religion or race as far as the gang or mob that’s surrounding him is concerned.

The look in the doomed man’s eyes, on his face, the posture of his body right at that moment, just a second or two before his murder — that’s the colour I’m talking about, and that was the colour of Mohandas’ face that day.

I’m sure you’ve seen films like Schindler’s List or others that show German trains being sent somewhere far away. You remember the faces of the Jewish women, children, and the old men, pressed up against the insides of the railway cars, peering out. Or, more recently, the faces of those looking out from windows and rooftops in the cities and towns of Gujarat.

That’s the colour.

‘Is there any way you can get me out of this, uncle, please!’ Mohandas stood in front of me pleading in a weak, wavering voice. ‘I’m begging you, think of my kids, my father’s dying of TB, just give the word and I’m ready to go to court right away and sign a sworn statement that I am not Mohandas. I don’t know anyone by that name. Just help get me out of this!’

The first thing you’ll feel when you look at Mohandas is pity, but soon you’ll also feel fear. It’s a frightening time, and people are getting more and more fearful every day.

I’ve known Mohandas for a long time, along with several generations of his family. That’s how it is in little villages like ours. You wouldn’t guess by looking at him that he was a graduate of our government M.G. Degree College, located right here in the Anuppur district, or that he graduated at the very top of his class; ten years ago, his name was number two on the list of the University’s ‘toppers’. The way he looked now gave no indication whatsoever of his past. He wore a torn, patched-up, washed-out pair of denim pants that had once been blue, and a cheap poly blend shirt with a frayed right sleeve. The faintest trace of a checked pattern remained on the shirt, but the lines had long since vanished. His cheap rubber shoes had been so ravaged by mud, dirt, misery, time, water, and sun that they sometimes looked as if they were made from clay, other times from skin.

Mohandas is probably around forty-five, but he looks as if he’s at least my age or older.

I found him discombobulated, in the grip of terror. I had never seen him idling in the village, shooting the breeze, playing cards, or sitting around watching TV. He was driven by a kind of harrowing restlessness that wouldn’t let him sit still for a second. People said he always found something to keep him busy, some job or chore. He needed to dig a new well every day for his water, and plant a new crop of wheat every day for his bread. And it wasn’t just one member of his family he had to provide food for — there were five, five mouths and five stomachs. Mohandas’s father was Kabadas, who’d been suffering from TB for eight years. His mother Putlibai had gone blind after a cataract operation she’d had at a free eye clinic, and now saw nothing but darkness. His wife Kasturibai was a mirror image of her husband: she helped Mohandas with his work, and kept the stove warm at home. The people in the village claimed the two had never been seen fighting or quarrelling. It seemed there had been nothing but trials and tribulations for husband and wife — things that either strengthen or weaken a union between a man and a woman.

Devdas is one of the two remaining people, and Sharda the other. Mohandas and Kasturi had two offspring. One was eight, the other six. Devdas went to primary school in the village; after school he worked as a helper at Durga Auto Works on the town bypass road, where he put air in tires, fixed flat ones, and did minor repair work on scooters and motorcycles. For this he earned a hundred rupees a month. In other words, Mohandas’s son Devdas, through his own hard work, took care of feeding himself while he was at school; he was self-sufficient. The teachers at his school said he was one of the brightest kids in fourth grade.

But something caught Mohandas’s eye when he was told this, and his gaze wandered. Maybe he noticed something far off in the sky. The wrinkles tensed on his face and the sparkle vanished from his eyes. A gruff voice emerged as if out of some deep cavern: ‘I finished my BA, with honours. Studied day and night. Look where it got me.’

And then the twinkle would return, and his cracked lips broke into a smile. ‘I’m learning computers now. I go to the Star Computer Centre near the bus stand. Shakil owns the computer centre, he’s the son of Mohammad Imran who runs the building supply and hardware store, and he told me, “If you can learn how to type well, do layout and printing, I’ll pay you more than six hundred a month.”’ Mohandas continued, ‘This month I’m up to thirty words per minute. I’m working a few small typing jobs, but the thing is that it takes a lot of time to correct the mistakes, and I make a lot of them.’

But this was old news. A serious calamity had now befallen Mohandas, who kept repeating:

‘My name isn’t Mohandas. I’m ready to go to court and sign an affidavit. Whoever wants to be Mohandas, let him be Mohandas. Please, do whatever you can to help! I beg all of you!’

What sort of dire straits was Mohandas in?

But before getting into that, I’d first like to finish describing the fifth member of Mohandas’s family, his six-year-old daughter, Sharda. Six-year-old Sharda goes to school in the government primary school in the village, and is a student in the second grade. After school, she sets off for Bichhiya Tola, another village that’s two-and-a-half kilometres away, crossing two ponds on the way. She doesn’t get back home before half past nine or ten at night. In Bichhiya Tola she looks after the one-year-old son of Bisnath Prasad, and does household chores like sweeping and cleaning. In exchange for her services, she’s fed supper and given thirty rupees a month.

Nagendranath was one of the major farmers of Bichhiya village. He was also a manager in the life insurance company; his connections reached everyone from the district collector to the local MP. He’d been head of the local panchayat twice and the district director once. Bisnath Prasad, whose one-year-old was looked after by Sharada, was one of the sons of Nagendranath, one of the village elders. Even though his real name was Vishwanath Prasad, everyone in the village called him Bisnath, and said behind his back, ‘He’s a real viper, a first-rate poison pusher. One squirt from his mouth and the show’s over! The father’s Cobranath and the son’s Vipernath. If he spies you and starts to smile, words dripping with honey — better watch out! That means he’s ready to strike.’ Of all the things Bisnath possessed, honour was not among them. Sometimes he’d get drunk and say, ‘Pull the wool over someone’s eyes? That’s fun, but what’s more fun is pulling down the skirt of your wife and finding her wool, ha!’ No gentle words were ever spoken about the people he consorted with, either from within the village, or without.

Bisnath was from a high caste, Mohandas a low Kabirpanthi weaver. Many of Mohandas’s brethren still wove mats and rugs and blankets. Mohandas wasn’t merely the first member of his community from the village to get a college degree, but the first in the entire region. And he not only finished his degree, but also graduated second in his class.

(Please stop for a moment and tell the truth: did you begin to get the feeling that I’d gone and started telling you some kind of encoded, symbol-laden tale? The main character of the story is called Mohandas, the wife is Kasturibai, the mother is Putlibai and the son’s name is Devdas…?

Kasturibai reminds you of Kasturba — and, well, Mohandas couldn’t be more clear. If you read Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, also known as The Story of My Experiments with Truth, you’ll discover that his father, Karamchand, was also called Kaba. And His mother was Putlibai… and who doesn’t know the tale of his son, Devdas? Look at Mohandas, his build, and the state he’s in: he shares the same history as the Mahatma. The difference is that Mohandas looks the way he does not because of Porbandar — the place where Gandhi was born — or Kathiawar, Rajkot, England, South Africa, or Birla House, but as a result of the hunger and heat, sweat and sickness, insult and injustice in the fields and pastures, caverns and caves, jungles and marshes, of Chhattisgarh and Vindhya Pradesh. Otherwise, all the rest is the same.

I’d also like to stop the story right here and now to solemnly affirm that the similarity of names is honestly and truly just a coincidence. When I sat down to write this, I had no idea these sorts of echoes could possibly be hidden in the story of Mohandas and his family from the village.

You’ll have to take my word, and don’t read too much into it. It isn’t some symbolic story or allegory or coded fable. It’s totally on the level. Though, truth be told, it’s not really a story. As I’m wont to do, I wind up detailing the real life of a real person — someone alive now, living among us in our society — concealing it behind the veil of a story. Mohandas is a living, breathing human being, and his life is at this moment in grave danger. Though you can count on my having played a little fast and loose with the truth, as I always do.

My game, however, is like the game of trying to hide an elephant with a washcloth.

Assume that the elephant is a truth. If a poet or writer tries to hide the animal behind a meagre washcloth, he risks burning his bridges and sinking the boats that ferry him through the journey of life.

Mohandas is real. If you’d like to verify this, you can do so by asking any inhabitant of our village, or any other village in this country.)

Mohandas’s mother and father had high hopes that when he got his BA he would soon find a good job. He’d been married by the age of fifteen to Kasturi, the daughter of Biranju, from Katkona village. She was a hard worker. After arriving at her in-laws’ after the wedding, she immediately began looking after the entire household, even taking on small chores for the neighbours; the money she earned allowed Mohandas to pay his college fees. Everyone was watching Mohandas, the first young man from his caste to get a college degree, and at the top of the class. When the exam results were announced, his photo was published in the local papers. Test prep companies even used his photo in their publicity materials.

Mohandas duly registered with the job office, and sent off application after application for openings he’d found in the classifieds. Time and again he received postcards from the job office. He then studied for the public service exam, working much harder than he’d ever worked as a student.

Mohandas travelled anywhere and everywhere looking for work. Though he’d aced his exams at college, he was never invited back after the job interviews. And then he’d discover the people getting hired were those with barely a high school education, if that, or the ones who had graduated in the middle or bottom of their classes. All of them had some kind of connection: either they were the son-in-law, or son, or nephew, or brown noser, or assistant, to a government officer, politician, or big shot. Mohandas came home after every interview with the feeling his luck was running out, but he didn’t give up hope. He knew full well how corrupt India was — but what about the ten or twenty per cent who found work on the basis on merit and hard work?

He realised after a while that some of the positions were auctioned off to the highest bidder. If his father had had fifty or a hundred thousand rupees, Mohandas could have used that as a bribe to get two or three jobs that had otherwise slipped away.

Time went on. He was now past the age limit for a government position. His family began to lose hope. Still, Kasturi kept up her encouragement: No government work, no problem, you’ll get something in the private sector. Or else pick up a trade. The government has plenty of opportunities nowadays for the out-of-work educated. We’ll raise chickens. We’ll start a brisk business selling eggs. We’ll open a shop to make candles or incense, or a little flourmill. Government banks are giving out loans. One time a literacy job came up; he could have found temporary work as a teacher. But in the end it turned out the government official who was in charge of the program was only hiring people from his own caste or political party; Mohandas was of a different caste, and didn’t belong to any political party.

He was totally straightforward; a bit reserved, and had plenty of self-respect. And, sadly, it simply wasn’t in his power to do as much running around as he would have been required to, kissing the arses of government officers or hakims, bribing them with food and drink. And like the jobs themselves, looking for a job was a bloodsport, full of rivalry. It’s not as if Mohandas was afraid of competition — if he had been, how would he have graduated with honours? But he soon discovered the real world was one massive sports stadium, and the ones who scored goal after goal were those who had the power to cripple the other players. And this power came from criminal, illegal connections and back-door deals, nepotism and nefariousness, bribes and rewards — none of which Mohandas had access to.

It wasn’t just Mohandas, but his whole family that began to let go of the dream of his becoming a government officer or hakim, and with great difficulty began to hope that he would just find some job, any job that would free him from joblessness and emptiness, and at least bring home some money to feed the family. This is when his father, Kaba, was diagnosed with TB. He began wheezing, and coughing up blood. And just a little while later Putlibai’s eyes were ruined by the free eye clinic. On top of all of the housework and small jobs she did to earn money, now Kasturi had become the caretaker for her in-laws. This was also when she was in most need of rest, since she was pregnant — Devdas had arrived in her womb.

Looking at Mohandas, you’d think he’d been sick for a long time. He didn’t visit many people from the village. It also became more and more difficult for him to face his fellow villagers or caste brethren, so he avoided them all. The same question was on everyone’s lips: ‘What’s he up to, and has he sorted out a job yet?

The Kathina river flowed nearby. Like most people from the village, Mohandas planted various melons, cucumbers, and gourds in the summer months on its banks. His wife and parents joined him — they dug irrigation ditches to bring water to the seedlings. They worked in shifts, afternoons and evenings, watching over everything to make sure the digging went smoothly; the crops brought them an extra nine or ten thousand rupees per year. Though a few times the monsoon came at the wrong time, causing the river level to rise; whatever crops had been ready for harvest were washed away by the swelling current. Twice this happened to Mohandas. A dark pessimism began to grow inside.

Mohandas hadn’t come home the night Kasturi gave birth to Devdas. He’d been lying on the wide sandy bank of the Kathina, keeping an eye on the quiet sky above. It happened to be a new moon the night Devdas was born. Kasturi almost didn’t live through the delivery; the umbilical cord got twisted around the infant’s neck, with little Devdas stuck halfway out. Bilspurhin, who’d come to help with the delivery, announced that Kasturi, who’d passed out from fear, was in mortal danger.

Mohandas’s blind mother and coughing father looked everywhere to find their son, but he was nowhere to be found. He was lying on the sandy bank of the Kathina, staring up at the moonless sky like a corpse, searching for some sign of life inside him. The dark black of the new moon night, not blood, flowed through his veins. His gloomy mind couldn’t find sleep, it swarmed with visions of terror that had incubated in the womb of a system thoroughly rotten and corrupt.

Mohandas had probably passed out on the banks of the river that night — otherwise, he would have heard his mother and father calling him, or his wife shrieking, or his newborn son Devdas crying when he was born at four in the morning.

The sun had already risen well into the sky by the time its rays awakened Mohandas, who was lying on the banks of the Kathina one kilometre outside the village, out of his sleep, or swoon.

Mohandas lay still in the sand for a long time as he warmed up. His body was spent, his thoughts scattered. It began to dawn on him that he wasn’t on his balcony or in his courtyard; he was sprawled on the sandy riverbank, where he’d planted cucumbers and melons and loki and tomatoes just a few days ago. But the rains had come too soon, and the river had first swelled, then overflowed, until its ravenous crest had swallowed everything whole.

Mohandas returned home to find quite a crowd from the village assembled; women, too. It seemed they were all talking about him, and the crowd hushed and people scattered as soon as he arrived.

‘It was by the grace of god she pulled through, son. The villagers had already come with the tulsi leaf and said she was nearly dead,’ his mother said, wiping the tears away with a corner of her sari. ‘I swear that baby’s some kind of angel.’

He went into his wife’s little chamber. Kasturi was lying on the cot, sleeping with her baby; moments earlier, she’d been on the brink of death. Smoke from the cow dung cake burning in the borsi pot filled the room, along with the smell of the neem water and musty ajwain. Her eyes barely registered Mohandas’s presence; his heart sank when he saw how exhausted she was, how vulnerable. One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning. Arrangements for half a litre of cow’s milk would have to be made daily for nine months. Kasturi would need a diet of turmeric rice, ginger, ghee, and sweet gur for a month. And then he’d have to spend all kinds of money feeding relatives for the birth ceremony, the naming ceremony, the annaprashan milk-and-rice newborn feeding ceremony. And then… his gaze fell on the newborn sleeping against his mother’s side, a hale and hearty, pudgy little fellow, beautiful and innocent, snuggled against her, looking like the offspring of some divine being. Mohandas felt fatherly feelings well up inside for the first time, and he simply couldn’t take his eyes off of the boy.

‘The postman Sitaram’s here and he’s got something for you,’ Kaba called from the balcony.

Mohandas read the letter, from the biggest coal mine in the district, inviting Mohandas for an interview. It’d been more than a few months since he’d received this kind of invitation. Was it possible that while he lay in the sand on the banks of the Kathina his thoughts had produced some kind of sound that reached high up in the sky, finally reaching a celestial body? That a heavenly being perceived his sorrow, his calamitous state? Was the baby Kasturi gave birth to in the wee hours of the morning an angel who would unlock the door to a whole new life for his entire family?

The interview letter sent to by Oriental Coal Mines via the employment agency glowed with the promise of a new beginning. After a long drought, a tender sprout of hope grew once again in Mohandas’s heart. He couldn’t sleep the next night; though he had accepted the fact that his tree of life had been reduced to a dead stump, now it exploded with new shoots.

On the day of his interview, Mohandas arrived one hour early. Invoking the names of his family goddess, Malihamai, and his spiritual guru, Kabirdas, he experienced an unprecedented feeling of self-confidence, hungry for the job no matter what. A one hour written exam would be followed by an hour’s break, followed by the physical test. He dived into the tasks with all his mind and soul. He finished the hour-long exam in less than thirty minutes. The questions were easy, and multiple-choice; he had only to write a check mark next to the correct answer. For the two-hour physical exam they made him run a 1500metre dash, then a sprint, then lift some weights, then crawl on all fours over rough terrain, and finally run five laps around the field. He took an eye exam; they had him identify various colours. He didn’t come in second in any of these performances.

At four in the afternoon, the door opened to the office where the hundred and fifty other job applicants were sitting. The names of the five candidates that had been selected were called out, and Mohandas’s was number one.

His heart beat wildly — the impossible was happening. A quick end to all his life’s uncertainties. Every month, a pay cheque. Every day, a fire in the stove at home, and a hot, steaming curry. Medical treatment for his mother and father. No more need for Kasturi to work like a dog in the homes of others.

The clerk had assembled all of Mohandas’s diplomas and transcripts. Looking over his BA transcript he said, ‘Huh? You haven’t found a job yet? With just a little shoulder to the grindstone and you should’ve been able to find something decent.’

‘How soon can I start?’ Mohandas asked.

‘Consider yourself started. We’ll have all your papers processed by the end of the week at the latest, and then the contract will be sent to your house. At most the whole process will take two weeks.’

It was the dawn of a new era at the home of Mohandas. He had two thousand rupees sitting at the post office, and with it he bought a new mosquito net, a kilo of ghee, sweet gur, dried ginger, a few good pots and pans, new clothes for Kasturi and Devdas. For himself he bought a pair of jeans, a poly blend shirt with a checked pattern, a thirty-rupee wallet, a couple of five-rupee handkerchiefs. He made arrangements with Parasu for a half litre of milk to be delivered each morning. Word spread in the village that, at long last, Mohandas had found an honest-to-goodness job. Villagers who had utterly shunned Mohandas began to be civil, even solicitous. People who’d made fun of his degree and hard work began to sing a different tune.

‘It was just a matter of time. Mohandas couldn’t have sat around empty-handed for very long with his kind of degree.’

And then there were others who made comments like this: ‘You know that bamboo-weaver-whatever caste Mohandas belongs to? They’ve got job quotas for them now too. And he’s the one who got the quota job for his caste since he was the only one of the lot there with a degree.’

And kheer, too, was served for dessert at Mohandas’s home that week, and a delicious potato-tomato curry — and spicy! His mother forgot about her blindness as her fingers felt and groped around the little winnowing basket to pick out the pebbles from the rice and dhal. She even used mustard oil to make a chicken dish with red chili and dried mango powder. Kaba bought a full pack of Mangalore Ganesh bidis and a box of Nai Jahaz-brand matches — a gentle strike, and they lit up like a torch. He sat out on the balcony for many nights, taking long, satisfying puffs on his bidi, singing bhajans in praise of Kabirdas at the top of his lungs. And he didn’t cough once, and there wasn’t any blood in his phlegm.

One morning at the crack of dawn blind Putlibai was nearly pirouetting in the courtyard, singing with all the joy in her heart:

My boy, his wife, they’ve come to settle down

Life was getting better for Uday Prakash when I first met him face-to-face in August, 2005. His ‘Mohandas’ had just been published by the leading Hindi literary magazine Hans, and it was clear that the novella, to steal a phrase from Bollywood, was a superhit. The mobile numbers and postal addresses of Hindi writers are a standard part of back-flap bios in India, just in case readers would like to call and compliment the author on a job well done. And so in the car on the way back from New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport to his home in nearby Ghaziabad, Prakash received call after call and SMS after SMS from happy fans who wanted to tell him how much they’d enjoyed reading the story. He continually pulled the car over to receive felicitations from a local colleague, or a stranger from elsewhere. Things were changing quickly in India, as Prakash often points out in his stories — and one advantage of mass mobile-phone ownership, if nothing else, has been that lonely poets and writers are able to receive at least a little boost now and again from their readers.

When he and I had first emailed a couple of years earlier about my translating his novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008), I had little idea about the ‘dark days,’ as Prakash puts it, he was passing through — a period in his life he alludes to at least once in all three stories of this volume. Prakash has always been a popular writer with a huge base of readers: before mobiles, and even in 2005, he received stacks of one-rupee postcards every day from admirers spread across the most forgotten corners of India. (After the publication of ‘Mohandas,’ many postcards simply read, ‘I am Mohandas.’)

Despite his huge, grass-roots fan base, Prakash has always had an uneasy relationship with the Hindi establishment, or any other (in a phrase he likes to use) ‘power centre.’ For most of his professional life, he has worked as a freelance writer, journalist, poet, critic, film maker and producer: anything to provide for his family, at the mercy of the kindness of assignments, rarely able to enjoy the stability that an academic job or government post would have provided. Accused of stirring up caste unrest, called a ‘rabid dog,’ Prakash sustained many attacks from both left and right after the publication of The Girl with the Golden Parasol in 2001 (the novel tells the story of a non-Brahmin boy who falls in love with a Brahmin girl). The plug was pulled overnight on nearly all his freelance jobs. The dark days had begun — and only began to lift years later after the publication of ‘Mohandas’ and the winning of a PEN American Center Translation Fund Award for The Girl with the Golden Parasol in translation.

Uday Prakash was born on New Year’s Day, 1951, in Sitapur, a village on the Son river in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Hindi is his second language: he grew up speaking Chhattisgarhi, a regional language of north India now with its own state, Chhattisgarh. His family were thakurs, or landlords of the village, in a system that was, and is, quite feudal. I have seen Prakash regale a wide-eyed five-year-old in San Francisco with the true tale of the pet elephant he called his companion as a child — and how the elephant used to assist in bathing the young writer with its trunk. Prakash’s own childhood is filled with astonishingly detailed memories of close friends from the village, and the surrounding forest he used to explore — much of which has been decimated after years of deforestation, development, and the forcing off the land of indigenous inhabitants.

Prakash’s mother, Ganga Devi, had come from a Bhojpuri-speaking area near Mirzapur, and had brought with her not only many Bhojpuri songs she often sang at home, but also a facility and abiding love for traditional drawings and illustrations from her region. She painted on the walls and sketched in a notebook she’d kept since she was a teenager. She was skillful, and her art made a deep impression on Prakash, the youngest of her four children, to whom she was very close. After suffering from tracheal cancer, she died two days before Prakash’s thirteenth birthday.

Prakash’s father was an avid reader, had a good education for the time, subscribed to many Hindi magazines, and wrote poetry — all of which spurred Prakash’s own reading and writing habits. After the death of Prakash’s mother, his father began drinking heavily, and it soon became difficult for Prakash to stay at home. Prakash was taken in by a teacher at a nearby town, Shahdol, sixty kilometres away: a tiny hamlet by Indian standards, but as big and strange as a foreign country to Prakash. In an age with bad roads and few bridges, it was quite far from home. He considers the teacher who looked after him a second father, and credits him for helping to guide his studies.

Prakash’s father later developed carcinomas on his cheek and mouth, and Prakash travelled and stayed with him in the city of Indore as he underwent treatment. Before slipping into a coma, his father wrote a letter to a relative, kept by Prakash’s youngest sister, about his fears of what would happen to Prakash. His father was worried that his son lacked sensibility in the ways of the world, and would face terrible problems in the future.

When Prakash’s father died in September 1969, he left to study at the university in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, and later, in 1975, just after the Emergency period began, moved to New Delhi where he soon began teaching comparative literature and Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the next thirty years, he rarely travelled back home. Only recently has Prakash begun returning to Sitapur for longer periods in order spend time with his relatives and childhood friends.

‘The Walls of Delhi’ and ‘Mangosil’ — the two ‘city stories’ in this collection — are clearly the work of a writer who has trod extensively through the bylanes of India’s sprawling capital. Still, Prakash shines greatly in his village stories. His poem Tibet, which earned him a prestigious poetry prize at a young age, was inspired by the chanting of Tibetan monks resettled near his village after fleeing the Chinese invasion. ‘Heeralal’s Ghost,’ expertly translated by Robert Hueckstedt, is a fable of a low-caste servant of the village landowner who dies from overwork, then returns as a ghost to terrorise his former employer’s family in episodes both hysterical and tragic. And here, in ‘Mohandas,’ Prakash provides a harrowing portrayal of the caste dynamics and corruption that are still a powerful force in India.

After Prakash picked me up from the airport on that sticky monsoon night in 2005, we spent a week in New Delhi discussing the translation of The Girl with the Golden Parasol. We also spent half a day with his longtime Hindi publisher drinking some twenty cups of tea while in tense negotiations over a decade’s worth of unpaid book royalties. Prakash and I then packed up the car for the three-day trip to Sitapur. From there, we had been invited to the inauguration of a museum in the capital of Chhattisgarh, Rajnandgaon, to be dedicated in part to one of the most important twentieth-century Hindi poets, Muktibodh — a favourite of Prakash’s, and a fellow struggler. At first, Prakash was reluctant to accept the invitation, since the museum and ceremony and publicity all fell under the auspices of the right-wing BJP state government of Chhattisgarh; the Chief Minister of the state — by coincidence, a distant relation of Prakash’s — would be cutting the ribbon. In the end, Prakash decided that it was more important to support recognition of Muktibodh, a man marginalised in his own time, than to keep away from politics he disagreed with.

Muktibodh is the name of the independent-minded judge in ‘Mohandas,’ and we were joined on the trip to Rajnandgaon by Virendra Soni, to whom the story is dedicated. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that as we were leaving town, Prakash, seeing a man on the road walking toward us, said, ‘Oh, there’s Mohandas.’ And so it was: the man who he had based his character on, looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story. We stopped, spoke at length, took some photos and went on.

Our host for the festivities was the district collector of Rajnandgaon, who put us up in VIP accommodations at a local chicken magnate’s bungalow. The next day Prakash and other guests read from their work. I will never forget the hundreds of Prakash’s young fans who, hearing he would be in attendance, had travelled long distances and made huge sacrifices to see him in person. In particular, I remember one young man who was unable to walk being carried by four of his friends into the hall. ‘These are my readers,’ Prakash told me.

Though we had assumed that we would attend the museum dedication as spectators, an assistant the next day informed us we would share a dais with the Chief Minister, and that we would be flower-garlanded on stage. In one of the more terrifying moments of my life, once on stage I was instructed to give a speech in Hindi to the thousands assembled. The Chief Minister, speaking last, wasted no time in transforming the oddity of a Hindi-speaking American into political gain: ‘The Congress party may have Sonia Gandhi,’ he told the crowd. ‘But we have Jason! And his Hindi is better than hers.’ ‘We’re here for Muktibodh,’ Prakash whispered to me by way of reassurance after the ribbon-cutting.

In many of his stories, Uday Prakash shows how those who dare to dissent against a suffocating system are punished. But with his biting satire and delightful narrative detours he also demonstrates how humor and compassion ultimately provide the best means to fight back and escape. These two elements combine in stories that are like a mix of Milan Kundera blended with Tristram Shandy — and told by one of the most naturally gifted storytellers writing in any language. Among Hindi writers, Prakash has broken from a strict model of social realism that dominated Hindi fiction for much of the twentieth-century, though he maintains many satirical elements of writers like Manohar Shyam Joshi, while inventing a humor that is all his own. As one prominent Hindi literary critic recently told me, ‘Uday Prakash is knocking on the canon.’ As he continues to knock, he has already spawned a cottage industry of young imitators.

After the publication of ‘Mohandas’ and The Girl with the Golden Parasol, and later, when the Indian national literary body, the Sahitya Akademi, awarded Uday Prakash its highest honour in Hindi for ‘Mohandas,’ and Kindle magazine named him a top South Asian youth icon, the dark days began to recede. Life for Uday Prakash as an independent Hindi writer continues to be difficult and uncertain, but less so. It is his hope to spend much of his time writing in relative peace possibly in Berlin, where his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson live. He is currently at work on several projects, among them a novel entitled Cheena Baba about a Chinese soldier who deserts during the 1962 Indo-China war and makes his home in a tree near the Indian border with Nepal.

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