Читать книгу Necropolis - Avtar Singh - Страница 6

Summer games

The papers of that time were full of the somewhat anticlimactic resolution to the story that had consumed them through the summer. A young man’s dead body was recovered from a wooded area next to an old village of Delhi, the main road not so very far away. He was no older than twenty, reportedly well dressed, affluent enough to afford both extraordinarily detailed tattoos and a vast amount of metallic piercings. While the mainstream press stayed away from describing either, there were murmurs in the parties and bazaars of Delhi of fetishistic inserts in his genital area and some apparently self-inflicted injuries, including bits of metal embedded under his skin. His face was clear, according to sources in the police. There was a mark around his neck, presumably from a rope or similar restraint: it was unclear whether it had been placed there with or without his consent. He was declared to have died of a heart attack.

Around his throat was a necklace of fingers.

These fingers had been collected from a number of unwilling donors. The perpetrator of this digital crime wave had followed a simple and startlingly effective method. He followed his victims late at night. They were drawn from the ranks of the peripherally urban—rickshaw-walas, casual laborers, and the like—whose coming home late would have passed unremarked. They were incapacitated with a blow to the head, delivered from behind. An injection was administered to make sure the mark didn’t awake. The absence of the digit would be noted, along with a deft bandage to minimize the blood loss, when the drug wore off. Not one man had died, though the absence of mortality, if anything, added to the morbidity of the crimes in the city’s eyes.

As the collector grew in confidence, he took to even chasing his targets. Only one, famous in his village for being fleet of foot, eluded him. The rest were run down through a city that stopped its ears to their screams and were divested of the tax the collector felt they owed.

He took only one finger from each mark, and never took a thumb. There seemed to be no pattern to his culling either: his collection had just as many pinkies as ring or index fingers.

He had started in high summer, had persisted and indeed sped up through the monsoon, and by the time a hysterical city was nearing spontaneous combustion, had collected almost twenty fingers. There had been some speculation whether he would stop then, or whether the good weather would see him make the big jump across the class divide and actually start defingering the middle classes. There was a palpable feeling of relief around the city that neither hypothesis was put to the test.

The news outlets had noted that the policeman on the spot was Deputy Commissioner of Police Dayal of the Crime Branch, noted for his perspicacity in matters criminal. As the head of the task force set up to deal with the matter, he had become, over the summer and the rains, the most visible investigator into these particular outrages. His phlegmatic encounters with the press had achieved almost cult status and were relayed from citizen to like-minded voyeur via mobile phones and social networking sites.

“We had established who he was,” said the DCP to the cameras and the digital data recorders in the early-morning light. “I was pursuing him. He was running away when he collapsed. Obviously, he wasn’t very well.” With which understatement, the policeman turned away from the press and retreated behind the sanctity of the yellow tape, and no amount of media coercion could tempt him out again. People watching at home over their cornflakes and breakfast parathas remarked, as the inevitable frenzy played out over the course of the next few days, at the resignation on the DCP’s face as he said his piece. Triumph and closure were conspicuous by their absence. Various commentators would impute tiredness as a reason for this lack of emotion, as well as the deflation that would naturally ensue from the conclusion of a long and harrowing case. The thing to remember, it was pointed out, was that the abomination itself was over.

A cursory glance at the city pages of the newspapers would have served to acquaint the reader with the other irritant to Delhi’s solid citizenry that interminable summer. The battles, sometimes pitched and at other times running, between gangs of self-styled vampires and werewolves, had captivated the youth and horrified the elderly and left everyone in between completely bemused. What was to be made of young adults of both sexes wearing makeup and hurling objects and insults at each other, in bus stations and on trains, in markets and parking lots? Who were their role models and what were they trying to prove and where were their parents?

The lighter pages in the city supplements of those same papers also noted the disappearance of the Colonel. She was so called because of the vaguely military outfits she wore when out on the town, which was every night. Her tight leggings and fitted epauletted jackets defined both her anatomy and her style and were further distinguished by being copied by nobody else. The fashion victims of the city had long since concluded that only the Colonel herself could carry off such ensembles. She disappeared, it would seem, on the very night marked by the discovery of the body of Delhi’s own Angulimala.

A gaggle of her feminine hangers-on, bereft of her leadership, were interrogated inside their nocturnal habitats by a few reporters on the nightlife beat and a TV channel or two. How long had she been around? “Forever,” declared one twenty-something. “Since before this bar was opened,” affirmed another. “And that was at least two years ago.” She had no family that anybody could remember. Nobody could state that they had ever been invited to her home. She came to a different bar every night and her court moved with her, and her smile and her conversation and her benevolent hold on their lives would be missed forever.

In a few days, she too disappeared from the papers and the minds and hearts of her erstwhile acolytes.

A few months earlier:

Two a.m. in Lajpat Nagar. A bastion of the Punjabi middle class in reasonably central Delhi. Its posher parts house the minor officials of the more déclassé embassies, while the seedier bits are populated by Afghans and Kashmiris and other outliers of Delhi’s refugee cartography. There are streets here that are by no means dark, hedged about by houses that are far from empty.

One such street: a row of stores selling automotive accessories at one end, a dingy park at the other. The modest flats here brood over both store and garden. What windows there are, are barred. Smaller alleys lead off this thoroughfare. The rickshaws come here to roost at night, after the last rude boys in their dark-tinted hatchbacks are gone, stereos blaring. The rickshaws line up one next to the other and the men who ride them curl up either in the meager comfort of the bench seat, or on the open road. There is a small shack by the side of the road which is open late and dispenses tea and biscuits. If you give the man who runs it some eggs, he will make them up for you. The cold glow of sodium vapor lamps is everywhere, rendering the citizens of the night and their environs in an unhealthy yellow.

The smell of confined exhaust is still on the hot air of the Delhi night. There is no or very little breeze and the few clothes the men wear on their thin bodies are glossy with perspiration. A man turns and then turns again and calls out feverishly in his sleep, an intimacy nobody else sharing his open bedroom wants, so the others ignore him and let his ravings crawl up and down the walls and across the street.

One of them wakes then, grumbling, and shambles over to the mean park, a bitterly contested site which is sought by the middle-class denizens of the street to be secured during the day for their children and at night against just such men as he. There is a padlock on the gate, so he does his business against the outside wall. He isn’t the first and a sharp male stench hangs over the whole park. An enormous old neem casts its erratic shadow over him. There are patches of darkness here, more so than out on the street itself, and perhaps he thinks, Why not? Before taking out his kit. Then he hears something, and he turns, and he sees something that goes with what he’s heard, and the combination scares him enough that the old glass syringe in his hand falls from his hand and the dirty needle in it breaks and the precious cargo on its little bit of foil falls upon the heedless ground, scattered into the dirt.

Probably, he screams. Clearly, he runs a few steps.

Then there is a blow and he drops to his knees. There is a second one. An injection is quickly administered, one in which he has no say and from which he derives no pleasure. A finger is removed, a bandage applied, the collector disappears.

The lights are still on, the men still asleep or pretending to be, on their common pavement and on their individual cycle rickshaws, a scant few yards away. Somewhat farther and higher, the middle-class denizens of Lajpat Nagar slumber on, their fans and air conditioners perhaps more of an alibi.

But surely he screams.

He must have screamed, insisted Dayal, as he squatted where the man was found—newly nine-fingered and blubbering—and then squinted up into the rising sun. Daybreak was long past and the cool of that hour, such as it was, was a memory more ephemeral than the dawn itself. But Dayal wasn’t fazed by the heat. He made a fetish out of reconstructing the sequence of events in crimes that he was investigating. This wasn’t just in the interest of fighting crime, either: the DCP enjoyed the physical intimacy of almost being there that a faithful reiteration granted. So he’d walk and think and let his mind wander, and in time, would come to see, almost as if cinematically, what he thought had happened. The broken syringe, the urine stain, the few short steps back in the direction of his comrades: these were an open book to his colleagues too. But Dayal took it further. He caressed, as if with love, the syringe, almost bent to sniff at the ground. He was practically polite to the rickshaw-walas.

His immediate subordinate, a slow-moving Punjabi named Kapoor, heavy of manner and midriff, knew and indulged this, but the rest of the task force from Crime Branch were inclined to treat it as being borderline creepy. But even they had to admit they had precious little else to go on.

They’d all been there since before dawn and now, as the sun approached its zenith, were all slowly wilting. The sullen rickshaw men were desperate to be allowed to ride away, as much to escape the interminable questioning as to earn their daily bread. Their colleague, missing a digit as of the night before, was in the hospital and no use at all to the investigation. The heat, the lack of a lead, the surly faces of the rickshaw-walas: it was all getting a bit much for the more impatient officers, and the possibility of a broken leg or two was being freely aired as an antidote to the torpor and the mulishness of the rickshaw-walas and even, it must be admitted, to the tedium of a dying investigation. It was all talk, of course, because Dayal didn’t work like that. But he was in the zone and they weren’t.

“He must have screamed,” he murmured again. “Did nobody hear anything?”

Kapoor shook his head glumly. Dayal raised his eyebrows, then his eyes to the naked sky. “It was ever thus,” he muttered. “Mir noted it when Nadir Shah sacked Delhi. The refugees were harassed by their own countrymen. Nobody listens, nobody cares.” Presently he asked, “Who is the local dealer?”

Kapoor indicated with a nod the hapless tea-stall owner, perhaps the longest-faced of the entire hangdog crew.

“Anything?” inquired Dayal.

Nothing, admitted the other man. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t know anything. Didn’t seem to be lying. “Do you want me to have the local cops take care of him?”

Dayal thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. Obviously they already knew. “Tell him to confine himself to these rickshaw-walas. If he ever sells his poison to one of the kids from around here, his body will be in the Yamuna before the sun sets.”

Kapoor nodded and ambled over, and then the thin music of a slap judiciously applied to a part-time drug dealer’s face was lambent upon the air of Lajpat Nagar. The heavy tread of his subordinate approached again. “I have family here,” said Kapoor virtuously.

Dayal nodded at him, then frowned again. “Where does he come from?” he wondered aloud. “From the trees? What is he, a vampire?”

“Like those kids?” asked Kapoor. “The ones fighting in the metro?”

Dayal looked at him and smiled. Just like them, he nodded.

Then, finally, he got to his feet. One of the rickshaw-walas approached him. “Can we go now, sir? We have to make at least our daily rents for our rickshaws. Otherwise it comes out of our pockets.”

“Do you have their mobile numbers?” asked Dayal.

“Where’ll they go?”

Dayal turned away. “Set them loose.”

In an over air-conditioned room in police HQ sits the cyber-crime unit. When the DCP and Kapoor walked in that afternoon, a few young police officers were on duty, sitting at the big screens of their powerful new machines. A young female officer met them at the door and escorted them in.

She knew who the DCP was and was glad of the opportunity to meet him and was flattered when he smiled in turn. The DCP was a good-looking man and he knew it. The darkly handsome cast of his features was led by an aquiline nose, which also rescued his somewhat beetling brow. Inquisitive eyes, by turns gentle and probing, gave the final touch to a visage that was intelligently lupine. His tailored clothes sat well on his trim figure, while his well-tended mustache and full head of hair were being allowed to acquire a soft sprinkle of gray that sat well, he thought and Kapoor concurred, with his position and responsibilities. He was used to being smiled at and didn’t mind smiling back, so he said, “It’s a pleasure, Miss Dhingra.”

“Please,” she replied. “Call me Smita. Everyone does.

“What exactly are you looking for?” she asked, now briskly professional, her young male colleagues watching attentively.

“Well, what I said over the phone. These gangs, the vampires and the werewolves. What do we know about them?”

“What do they have to do with the finger-stealer?” asked one of the young policemen curiously. Kapoor froze him with a look. The DCP didn’t even turn around, his attention on Smita, who was tapping away at her keyboard.

“Quite a lot, or not a lot, depending on what you want to know.”

“Well, for starters, where can I find them?”

“That’s easy. They’re all over the Internet.”

“Facebook,” stated Kapoor.

“Among other places,” agreed the young woman, her face still to the screen.

The DCP looked at Kapoor, who blushed and mouthed, “My son.”

“Do you know where they’re going to be at any time?” asked the DCP.

“It isn’t hard,” said one of Smita’s colleagues. The two older cops turned to him expectantly. “Well, it isn’t,” he repeated. “We actually circulate e-mails to the local stations when we believe a fight is going to take place. They don’t happen spontaneously: they’re actually rather well-planned.”

“Why?” wondered Kapoor, leaving aside for the moment the question of why the local officers weren’t paying any heed to the intelligence this office was providing.

“These are kids, for the most part. The eldest are just about twenty, the younger ones barely in their teens. They live with their parents. If they have to get somewhere, they have to plan it,” said Smita.

The DCP nodded. “How do you track them?”

“That’s the easy part. They’re clever, but not clever enough to want to clear their tracks. We look for words and phrases, things like vampires, lycans, rumble, a random place: you know, like Karol Bagh. Then we put them together and run searches, monitor certain forums, new sites, groups, things like that.”

“Lycan?”

“Werewolves, sir,” supplied Kapoor. “My son,” again, to his superior’s wordless question.

“Most of them are just innocent kids. Like your son, sir,” said Smita deferentially to Kapoor. “They read these books, Twilight and the like, they see the movies and play the games, and they fashion a world for themselves they think they recognize as actually being real, or more worthy of being real, at any rate, than the one they’re in. The ones doing the fighting are a harder core.

“I’d be interested in speaking to them,” she murmured as an afterthought.

“Really? Why?” asked the DCP.

“Well, I like the books and movies too,” she grinned, as did her colleagues. The two older cops couldn’t help but join in.

“Do you know where they’ll be tonight?”

“We do, as a matter of fact. The metro station in Model Town.”

“Model Town,” said the DCP thoughtfully, turning to Kapoor, who nodded in turn.

“I have family there.”

Night was well-established in the city by the time the two of them drove by the police lines in the shadow of the newly constructed elevated metro track. Dayal had considered and then rejected the idea of asking the local police for help. His need to be inconspicuous was paramount. Anyway, he pointed out to Kapoor, if the local cops felt that bunches of kids fighting each other in public at night was beneath their notice, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it either.

Kapoor had wondered why they were coming here. “Call it a hunch,” the DCP had replied. They were both content to leave it at that. The bright lights of the Mall Road receded behind them and the shadows lengthened under the elevated track. The citizens of the night were setting up their homes under its spans and Dayal thought, as he had before, of how a bridge’s ability to raise you above the water is only one of the ways it shelters you from that particular element. He thought of how a bridge is simultaneously a soaring premonition of a city’s future and a weighty anchor tied to the ground it has sprung from. He would no doubt have wordlessly amplified this theme, metaphysical speculation being, as befitted his detective status, one of his primary, albeit solitary joys, but then the car stopped and Kapoor climbed out.

“Up there,” he said. Dayal looked up at the expanse of lit-up concrete that loomed above their heads, connecting the elevated track to either side of the busy road below. The way lay up a flight of stairs Kapoor pointedly ignored, heading instead to the lift that was conspicuously marked as being for the benefit of those with special needs. The security man there let them in without demur and they ascended to the level of the ticket counter, where they quietly walked through the electronic turnstiles that another security man beeped open for them, deferentially touching his peaked cap with the other hand.

“So much for being inconspicuous,” muttered Dayal.

“Biharis,” replied Kapoor nonchalantly, next to him on the escalator up to the track level. “Not the soft kids we’re after. Where will they ever have seen a cop before?”

The heavier man stalked onto the platform, looking this way and that. It was empty. Dayal and he walked over to a bench and sat down to wait.

Pretty soon, the kids began to arrive. They came in couples and groups, the boys wearing shades, all of them plugged into their iPods and phones, trailing snatches of death metal and electronica and clouds of pheromones. They strung out along the platform affecting boredom and jangling with nerves, and the two cops felt as if it was palpable, the tension of a juvenile riot being birthed. Kapoor was busy on his phone and the DCP was immersed in thought and the noise and strobes of passing traffic on the road below was strong enough to disorient anyone. When the train arrived, its service infrequent at this hour, it seemed as if the kids breathed, inhaling when the doors opened, exhaling when they sighed shut, in time with its rhythm. The two cops stayed put on the platform. The kids finally noticed and one of them, a large almost-man with a turban but not yet a beard, ambled over. “Why didn’t you get on that train?” he asked, not very gently.

The DCP looked up at him politely. “Why don’t you tell me about vampires and lycans?” he replied.

The boy studied the two of them, the fluorescent light of the platform cold upon his skin, their visages reflected in the mirrored surfaces of his sunglasses. “Dogs,” he said softly, then turned and was gone down the stairs. The word was relayed swiftly down the platform and the kids were gone as quickly as they’d come, the ones closer to the escalator descending that way, the ones at the other end of the platform escaping nimbly across the tracks, clambering up the other side and streaming down the stairs. Only one, a young girl, came to hand. Kapoor held her, her shirt clenched in one meaty fist.

“I do hope you’re a vampire, sweetie,” he smiled. “I want to see how well you fly with my foot up your ass.”

She wept and flailed and the few kids left on the opposite platform gestured and shouted abuse. As the DCP looked at them, studying the situation for leverage and clues, one of them, a young man with his face covered with a kaffiyeh even in the hot weather, showed him a finger. Then, quite clearly and still silently, he held up his other hand, showing him two fingers scissoring at each other, which he then brought to the first one, pretending to cut it off. A train headed in the opposite direction hissed to a stop on the other line, wondering faces lining the windows, then the train was gone and the young man with the kaffiyeh and all the other kids as well, and the DCP was left with the thought that his hunch had been right but Angulimala himself had escaped.

So he turned to the girl who was writhing and sweating and crying in Kapoor’s grip.

“It’s my first time, I swear. I’ve never come here before. I’ll tell you who brought me. I can’t go to jail,” she moaned. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Of course you will, honey,” said Kapoor. “Just do me one favor. Promise me you’ll take your time.”

The girl looked at him first, speechless with fear, then at the DCP, who merely smiled and lit a cigarette. Then they too were gone down the escalator, ignoring the other riders who averted their eyes from the sight of the two men escorting the weeping girl, past the downcast guards, out to their waiting car, parked on the bank of the river of traffic that surged under the fluorescent sterile station above.

The girl, it transpired, was telling the truth. She knew only two of the others, both young women. They’d only come along because they’d been following the conversation across sites and groups of like-minded young people on the Internet. She didn’t know the young man in the kaffiyeh, didn’t know the moving forces behind the vampire-versus-lycan war, barely recognized her father when he walked into the station to collect her. He was a man of consequence, arrived in an SUV, possessed rings on all his fingers, and didn’t bother calling any of the ministers whose numbers were clearly stored in his phone. He thanked the DCP and Kapoor for rescuing his daughter, slapped her once in front of them, then embraced her and cried as well. The DCP was informed by the immigration authorities at Indira Gandhi International Airport that she left for Singapore the next night for an indefinite stay with her maternal uncle. Apparently, she was flying business class.

Records revealed that a few of the young antagonists had been unwise enough to use their metro cards to gain access to the platform. They were all roused from their scattered sleep before the night was out. Unsurprisingly, they all proved to be models of cooperation, though they added very little to the meager fund of the DCP’s knowledge. None of them knew the man in the kaffiyeh. He was known to be solitary, was a vampire, a brutal fighter among a collection of kids who were mostly dilettantes of delinquency, and barely spoke to anyone. He didn’t have a name, never corresponded over e-mail, and didn’t possess a mobile phone. He followed the conversation and came to the rumbles and that was all they knew.

Tracking an e-mail ID or even an IP address was pointless, Smita told them. “The kids these days change them like you change your clothes.”

The two detectives were in her office, their feet comfortably on chairs in front of them. There had been a surge of chatter on the Internet, she told them, and then it had all gone dead. The kids were lying low for the moment.

“You didn’t get a good look at him?”

The DCP shook his head. Nothing had set him apart from the other kids on the far platform. Only the kaffiyeh, and plenty of other kids were wearing them that year.

She turned back to her computer. “Okay. I don’t know who he is, but I have a fair idea I’ve read his posts, under various names.” One of her colleagues, who’d been monitoring their conversation, nodded too.

“I thought these kids never heard from him,” stated Kapoor.

“Most of these kids are hobbyists,” said Smita dismissively. “They’re told where to go and they show up to see what’s happening. A few of them, however, are worth keeping an eye on. This one, in particular, is a dark one. If he’s the same guy.”

“What do you know about him?”

“We know that he’s boastful. He does it under different names, but we can recognize his style,” said Smita’s colleague. “That he considers himself a vampire is pretty much spot on. He’s one of the hard core, a believer. He’s not doing it for kicks, or to fit into a crew, or because he likes the hair and the makeup. I’ve tried tracing him, following him around on the Internet. We’ve found his signature on underground vampire sites, groups that feed on each other’s blood at private parties, things like that. But he doesn’t keep the same online persona long enough for us to actually track him down.”

The DCP raised an eyebrow. “And?”

Smita picked up the thread. “We know he’s convinced there have been vampires in Delhi for hundreds of years.”

This time the DCP raised both eyebrows.

Smita and her colleague chuckled in tandem. “That’s one of the ways we recognize him. Even in that crowd, this stands out.”

“You’re an aficionado of Delhi’s history, aren’t you, sir?” said the young male officer. “What do you think?”

“I think you should tell me what else you know,” said his superior officer. “Any noise at all on the finger-snatcher?”

The two cyber-crime officers shook their heads regretfully. They’d been monitoring the chatter, which had of late become a cacophony, but there was nothing to link the vampire to the collector of fingers.

“There is one thing,” said Smita. “He’s obsessed with the Colonel.”

The DCP and Kapoor looked at each other, then at the young woman. “Who?”

“You know, that woman who parties every night. Everyone knows her and talks about her. She’s in the silly papers all the time.”

“What does he want with her?”

“Photos, for the most part. Information. Posts keep popping up on various forums, asking for either. Her address, where she’ll be that night. We’re convinced it’s him.”

The DCP still looked fogged. “If she’s always in the papers, surely he can just run a search for her images?”

“That’s the point,” said Smita with a cagey smile. “She seems to know all the photographers. The writers go on about her, describe her clothes and what she’s drinking, but there’s never a photo. Practically everyone who goes out at night has seen her. I’ve seen her. But if you only knew her through the papers, she could almost be a figment of the collective imagination of Delhi’s gossip writers.”

“A ghost,” supplied her colleague helpfully. “Or a vampire. Apparently, some of the stories say vampires can’t be photographed. He’s offered to pay for her photo. He trawls through the Facebook pages of Delhi’s nightbirds looking for camera-phone shots of the night before. He haunts the Flickr accounts of the press photographers. We think he’s even hacked the image archives of the dailies. But clearly whatever he’s found isn’t enough.”

“The Colonel,” mused the DCP. “Is that really her name?”

“That’s what the papers call her,” said Smita.

“Alright then,” said the DCP. “Where do we find her?”

“That’s easy,” said Smita’s colleague eagerly. “It’s Wednesday. She’ll be at the nightclub at the Babar Hotel.”

Smita nodded sagely.

The DCP looked at Kapoor, who nodded as well and said, “My nephew works there.”

“Would you,” the DCP formally asked Smita, “be interested in helping me with the investigation into the finger-snatcher case?”

“A table for two,” said Kapoor over the phone.

The night saw them heading toward the Babar Hotel in the DCP’s personal car. He thought that the young policewoman had hit just the right pitch with her choice of clothes, with the trousers a no-nonsense nod toward what was in effect a working dinner, while the straps on the otherwise discreetly chic blouse were meager enough to suggest that she wasn’t entirely unaware of the potential of a night out at Delhi’s current hotspot.

She asked him about Delhi’s vampires, when she felt the silence beginning to weigh. What about them? he asked back. Did the DCP believe there were such things? she replied.

He told her he’d thought about it all that day and had realized that he didn’t really know, one way or another, which surprised him.

Djinns are still invoked in Ferozeshah Kotla and in other places, he said as if to himself. There are shops in Dariba that have been empty for generations because the jewelers believe they’re cursed. There are madwomen on the Ridge and tree spirits in Mehrauli, and during the Uprising, armies dressed in green silk with their swords naked to the air were seen and then disappeared. In daylight.

“This city,” he said, gesturing out through the windows of his car at the agglomerations of squat ugly houses racing by in the land south of Safdarjung’s tomb. “It’s a giant necropolis. Entire developments raised on what used to be graveyards. Old villages gone, fields buried, their soil used for cement.”

The bare bones of householders and thieves, the spirits of lost cremation grounds, the stories of wanderers and village heads and warriors and all their women. Disinterred and then dispersed back into the dust. But at what cost? wondered the DCP.

“Would it surprise me that some revenant actually came knocking? Probably not,” he smiled. “Zauq couldn’t leave the streets and alleys of this city. Why should a ghost or a vampire or whatever be different?”

Smita digested this for a moment. “So what they say about you is correct? That you’re into Delhi’s history?”

“It’s where I’m from, Smita. Aren’t you?”

“I’m from here,” she replied, waving outside her window. “From this city that’s sprung from your necropolis. My grandparents were refugees after Partition. These new colonies are my home. I don’t even know who Zauq is. And I’d be surprised if the streets he’s talking about are the ones we’re driving on.”

The DCP looked at her in surprise, then inclined his head. “You’re right. Let me begin again. I am interested in Delhi’s history. Very interested. And my connection to Delhi predates Partition, as you’ve probably gathered. Are we . . . cool?”

Smita looked at him and smiled. “We’re cool. But who is Zauq?”

“An Urdu poet. Rather famous. He was writing around the time of the Uprising of 1857.”

“Really? A contemporary of Ghalib’s?”

An eyebrow, raised. “Quite right. But you’ve heard of him?”

“Who hasn’t?” she grinned.

They were pulling into the overly grand entrance of a hotel already famous for its lofty cuisine and tiny rooms and beautiful views of urban sprawl. The way ahead lay off to the side, where the entrance to the nightclub was.

The DCP, while not antisocial, didn’t make a habit of going out on the town. His famed incorruptibility militated against a regular enjoyment of Delhi’s luxury nightspots, the cost of which was equally legendary. But there was nothing self-consciously austere about his demeanor when he did get out and about, and he looked around, following in Smita’s self-possessed and evidently right-at-home wake, with real appreciation. He enjoyed the clubby little bar that also functioned as the entrance, the quite charming way the management had of dismissing those whom it felt were unsuitable, and was impressed with the uniform sullenness of the tight-shirted males who were waiting to get in and the equally invariable smiles of the women who had all, it seemed to his aging eyes, been allowed to escape their homes in their lingerie. It fit together. His innate sense of symmetry was pleased with the way the aspects of this ritual, arcane as it seemed, were being so closely observed.

A beautifully dressed young man detached himself from the bar and hurried toward him, his hand outstretched, just as the DCP was reaching into his pocket for his ID and cards.

“DCP Dayal,” he said with a smile, “what an honor. And this lovely lady is your date? It’s good to have you both here,” he said, leading the way into the temple, past the waiting line of the supplicants, the bouncers one step away from bowing and scraping. Then the older officer didn’t have any time to think at all, because the music, hitherto muted by the door, hit him in the chest.

He was glad in those first few moments of Smita’s company, of her comforting presence at his shoulder as the lights and the sound and the dense crush of people on the fringes of the dance floor threatened to overwhelm him. Kapoor’s beauteous nephew cut an apparently seamless path through the multitudes to the bar, where he set them up with cocktails which, at the DCP’s almost imperceptible nod, Smita accepted.

There, over the music, he told them the lay of the land. The first table over there, he gestured, behind the intricately wrought steel and wood screen, was the Colonel’s court. “It’s the quietest private booth we have. It has an unobstructed view of both the entrance and the dance floor. Would you like me to introduce you?”

The DCP shook his head and took a sip of his drink, raising it in appreciation to the younger man.

“And yours?” he asked Smita. “Is it to your satisfaction?”

“Entirely, sir,” she replied.

The DCP nodded and thanked Kapoor’s nephew and walked toward the Colonel’s table with Smita in tow.

She was ensconced on a purple banquette, a stemmed glass in front of her and laughing female acolytes to either side. A lone gent patrolled the outskirts of their party, there apparently to replenish drinks at his own expense. The DCP and Smita walked up to the table where, without preamble, the older officer sat down, inviting Smita to have a seat next to him. By a trick of the acoustic designer’s art, the table was a quiet haven, while still close enough to the floor that the officers could glimpse the sweat in the cleavage of the feverish dancers who threw themselves about a few feet away, beyond the almost diaphanous screen.

The Colonel looked inquiringly at the DCP as he made himself comfortable.

He then leaned across and said, loud enough that the young women to either side of her could hear, “I don’t know whether to shake your hand or salute you.”

The woman looked at him with her eyebrows raised, then smiled. “You can greet me the way you like, Commissioner. I am yours to command.”

The DCP would remember that first smile, her perfect even teeth, the warmth in her eyes.

“You know who I am,” he said without surprise.

“Who doesn’t?” she replied.

“I know who you are, but not what to call you. Colonel sounds awfully formal.”

“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”

“It fits. Delhi’s own sultana. Regal, powerful.”

“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”

“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”

“Perhaps, Commissioner, but she’s still a bit before my time. But if the name pleases you, it is yours to use.” She waved her hangers-on away. The young women obediently went off with their solitary male attendant, and the DCP and Smita moved closer to her.

“And you, my dear?” she smiled at Smita. “What’s your name?”

“Smita Dhingra.”

“A policewoman, perhaps?”

“I am.”

“And how,” said Razia, “can I be of service to the law?”

“Doubtless you’ve heard,” replied the DCP, “of the finger-snatcher?”

Razia inclined her head.

“Perhaps you’ve also heard of these gangs of pretend vampires and werewolves who’re fighting each other all over Delhi?”

An eyebrow acknowledged that she was indeed in receipt of this information.

Why, wondered the DCP, would a young man who thought himself a vampire be looking for pictures of her? Why, indeed, would a woman such as Razia, an habitué of nightspots far removed from the louche battlegrounds of the angsty undead, have come to the attention of one such as he?

Razia pursed her lips thoughtfully and registered contemplation, and the DCP remarked, as he would again, at how the theatricality of her every movement was rendered with such poise as to make it seem natural. Was it, she said as if to herself, because of the paucity of such material? Perhaps, acknowledged the policeman. Is there a reason for this shortage? he asked in turn. Privacy is a commodity, replied the woman. Like any other, it becomes more precious when the supply begins to dwindle.

“You don’t have to come out, you know,” said Smita. “If you like your privacy so much.”

The woman’s soft laugh defused both the acerbity of Smita’s response and the rebuke in the older officer’s eyes. “In response to your questions, Commissioner. I don’t know. But clearly the young man has an unhealthy fascination with creatures of the night. No doubt he classifies me as one.”

“Does he search for you because he wants a kindred spirit?”

“Perhaps he wants a candle to light his way out.”

“A sign of the dawn, perhaps?”

“Quite right, Commissioner,” she replied. “But if he’s right, then he’s destined to be disappointed, because this candle may be dead as well.”

They smiled at each other while Smita narrowed her eyes.

“Ghalib,” murmured the DCP. “But surely even he is before your time?”

“Not necessarily,” replied Razia evenly. “If poetry can survive the Revolt and the fall of the Mughals, why can’t it thrive in a place such as this?”

The lights of the club strobed around them and kept pace with the deejay’s efforts on the tables, and the convulsions of the dancers were bright upon the DCP’s retinas as he considered what Razia was saying. He thought about her desire for anonymity and how perhaps it wasn’t as disingenuous as Smita believed, and whether a club such as the one they were in, with its overt uniformities and hidden alcoves and blandly overpowering sensory assault, wasn’t indeed the perfect prescription for such a need. He remembered legends of poetic confrontations in courtyards of homes long abandoned and demolished, the disputants waiting for the candle to be placed in front of them so they could start their recitations, their allies and adversaries cloaked and turbaned in the uniforms of the time and dispersed through the seated crowd, the women watching from behind their screens and curtains in the upper stories, waiting for a new king to be crowned, a new flame to be lit, a new name to be added to the roster to which gifts were to be sent, poems dispatched for comments, love to be made. He brought himself back to the present and found two sets of female eyes on him, one bewildered, the other amused.

“Has this man,” he asked formally, “not tried to make contact with you?”

“I don’t know, Commissioner,” Razia replied. “I’m not on the Internet. I don’t normally answer my phone and I certainly don’t give my number to just anyone.”

The DCP pondered this quietly.

“Would you like my number, Commissioner?” asked Razia.

The DCP nodded his head slowly, fished out his phone, and fed in the number she gave him.

“Bring yourself to my poor house, Commissioner. I’m sure we can find a candle to take turns with.”

He nodded again, though he doubted whether his poetic impulse would be up to that or any test.

There was one more thing, pointed out Razia gently. She still didn’t know the commissioner’s first name.

Sajan.

A fitting name for a man of Delhi, said Razia, inclining her head. “I feel as if I’ve known many men like you in years past, Sajan. But I fear there are fewer and fewer left.”

The DCP and Smita left then, past the screen that shielded Razia’s table, past the dance floor and the bar, through the door and up the stairs and out to the hotel’s vestibule where, in deference to his position, his car was waiting off to one side. They were in the car and on their way to Smita’s home before she opened her mouth.

“She was flirting with you,” she said almost accusingly.

“I noticed,” he replied drily.

Smita gave him a sidelong look, then laughed, a robustly merry sound that brightened the older man’s hitherto-in-free-fall mood.

“So. Do you think she’s a vampire?” he asked jocularly.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” replied Smita. “I was looking at her very closely, and I have no idea how old she is. I hate women like that.”

The rains broke with a vengeance that year. The month of Saawan didn’t herald the monsoon: it rode in on it. The level of the Yamuna waxed and waned and then rose again and there were dark murmurings in the streets about floods. The watery apocalypse to come was all over the vernacular press and the regional language channels and those Dilliwalas with family in distant places were besieged with phone calls urging a retreat to higher ground. The news that a city as dry as Delhi was to be flooded was greeted with hoots of laughter from Dilliwalas themselves, or at least those that didn’t live in close contiguity with the river. Urchins swam in the new streams, infants were beguiled with the unheard sound of the patter of raindrops, vendors of tea and fried snacks did a brisk business everywhere. A city used to associating gray with smog, undrinkable water, and the residue left behind by the dusty air grew to love again the silver light of cloudy skies and falling rain. The monsoon winds swept through the city and cooled homes from the top down and everywhere was vigor and rebirth and brilliant resurgent green.

But Dayal drew little sustenance from the cool and the moistness and the burgeoning trees. He and Kapoor ploughed a lonely furrow through the wet city, on the track of a young man wearing a kaffiyeh who believed he was a vampire. They spent wet afternoons and evenings in the gleaming forecourts of malls in Saket and Rajouri Garden, waiting for young people to grow fangs and beards and engage each other again. Once, as night came to Nehru Place, they ran behind a pack of young boys who exhibited no little athletic skill in climbing up what seemed to be blank walls and who jumped from broken rail to seedy step to dangling grating with an abandonment of physical limitation and fear that seemed otherworldly. The rain fell around them in the dankly dirty plaza and the dark towers loomed around them as they discovered that these young boys were innocent devotees of a new urban sport called parkour and no, they were neither vampires nor werewolves, sorry to disappoint you, but did the two uncles know where they could be found? The last office workers of the evening trudged wearily past in the steadily falling rain as Dayal and his junior worked their way stolidly through the fare provided by the least greasy-looking of Nehru Place’s canteens, their faces illumined by the flame under the big metal plate, the dirty tubes above, and the reflected light off the puddles in the broken plaza beyond.

Look at this place, gestured Dayal to Kapoor. “This was once going to be the shining beacon of New Delhi. Its buildings full of the urban elite, its plazas places for its forward thinkers to congregate. Less than forty years ago. A moment in Delhi’s history. And look at it now. This is all the time it takes for a dream to disintegrate in New Delhi.”

Though he left it unsaid, Kapoor knew that his superior and friend meant it as an exculpation for his own attachment to the cities that had preceded this misbegotten one. Even though he himself was a product of the new city, Kapoor sympathized, as he looked glumly at his plate of forlorn samosas and considered, along with Dayal, how long it would take for the new malls to fall. That he picked up three new Playstation games for free from a street vendor who was closing up for the night was little consolation. My son, he told Dayal, who nodded dolefully as he gazed about himself at the wretched prospect of a business district drowning in the rain.

The weeks came and went, the rain stayed. There were reports of fights all over the city and men continued to lose their fingers to Angulimala and the clouds pulled in closer over Dayal. One evening, after a frantic phone call from Smita, Dayal made his way across the river in the evening traffic. The commuter rush was worsened by citizens who stopped their cars to show their children the unaccustomed sight of the Yamuna actually flowing free and alarmingly close to the roadway. The siren on Dayal’s car and the imprecations his driver shouted at their fellow travelers seemed to have little effect. The commissioner settled himself further back in his seat and allowed his mind to wander. The setbacks of the last few weeks, the growing numbers of men missing their fingers on the streets and the city’s maddened reaction, the fear of a copycat and the threat that one of these unfortunate men would actually die: all these things and more pressed about him just as the traffic did around his car, and so he, as he always had, sought refuge in abstract speculation.

But today, the expected release failed to materialize. The rain drummed upon the roof of his car and skated off the slick windshield. Through the manic whirring of the wipers he saw raincoated children on the pavement and similarly covered riders on their two-wheelers and impotently honking cars everywhere. He thought of Smita and her laughter and her constant presence over the phone these past few weeks, as he checked in with her for leads and clues. He thought of a woman’s beguiling invitation and how he had nothing to offer her, so he hadn’t taken her up on it and what did that make him? He thought of the fact that he had nothing to go on, that Angulimala had been the width of a metro platform away and was now gone, his collection growing every week in the wet night watches while Dayal and his minions foundered in the selfsame dark. The cold wet grip of failure clutched at him so he told his driver to mount the pavement and scatter the children, because he had a riot to disrupt.

They sped along the pavement, their siren and lights blaring, a posse of civilian two-wheelers following in their wake, as will happen in Delhi. The driver sought his superior’s eyes in the mirror for confirmation, his foot poised over the brake, expecting the instruction to leave the first motorcyclist to hit his bumper lying in the wet dirt of the pavement as a warning to the others. But Dayal didn’t look up so they drove on, the turgid river surging below, the supposedly fleet motorized stream constrained above. Dayal’s phone beeped. Smita was on the line and sounding flustered, not something he associated with her.

“They’re broadcasting,” she said peremptorily. “Those little bastards are shooting their fight and showing it live.”

Dayal nodded. It was only as he expected. “How many of them? You’re recording it, I hope?”

“Of course. No more than three on each side, now. Perhaps less. Certainly no more. The hobbyists are gone. Scared off by you. These are the hard-cores.”

“Okay. Anything of interest?”

“Your boy in the kaffiyeh is there. He’s currently beating the hell out of one of the lycans.”

“Is there any sound?”

“None. It’s all silent. Whoever is filming is close to the action. It’s pretty tight. Can’t tell where they are, but I’m assuming it’s still in that new bus depot they’re building. There’s a lot of open concrete, and there seem to be patches of floodlit ground.”

“Where’s it being hosted?”

“An open-access web-streaming server. Mainstream, legal. The transmitting address is a ghost. We’re working on it. My guess is the source is a smartphone working on a 3G-enabled account. We’re working on that too.”

“Good,” said Dayal. “Very good. Anything else?”

“I suggest you get there quickly, sir. The clip’s going to be on YouTube in about two minutes.”

The car swept through the intersection that marked the end of the bridge and flew along the raised road that cut through the townships on the other side of the river. Dayal glimpsed towers off to one side and fields interspersed with squat concrete blocks on the other and once he thought he saw a statue of Hanuman, painted and glowering and large beyond belief, but the rain was strong and it might have been an illusion, and before he was really ready, they were there and pulling into the almost-finished bus depot, the security men sheltering forlornly in their little shack to the side. The car sped along the slick surface, its lights off now, the big floods of the bus bays’ illumination enough through the steadily falling rain. Off at the far end of the enormous depot, Dayal saw a tight knot of young people dissolving into the darkness. His car raced toward the wraiths, the rhythm of the raindrops and the thwacking of the wiper blades a backbeat to their swift, silent progress.

“Put on your lights,” said Dayal quietly. “I don’t want you to hit any kids lying on the road.” The lights came on and the car swept to a halt. Dayal and his driver barrelled out into the rain—a body lay still on the ground in the lee of one wall, a floodlight tower almost perpendicularly overhead. Dayal motioned his driver to look along the wall, knelt to check the body itself. He turned it over and saw a young man, perhaps in his late teens, with a beaten face that was already turning blue in the watery light. He was alive and breathing but in a bad way. He winced as Dayal moved him.

“Take it easy, son,” said the DCP gently. “Help will be here soon.” As he said it he heard the wail of sirens and in a moment saw the wash of watery headlights. By and by they were joined by Kapoor and a detachment from the local station, headed by the duty officer. The beaten adolescent lay quietly in Dayal’s arms as the men clustered around them. Kapoor knelt as well and felt for the boy’s hands. His eyes met Dayal’s as he counted ten fingers, then his eyebrows rose as he followed Dayal’s gaze to the puncture wounds in the boy’s neck. The driver arrived and reported the little gate in the wall a short distance away, and the road on the other side where the vehicles of the fighters must have been parked. Naturally, they were gone. Nevertheless, at a word from the duty officer, the men of the local station took off at a run to have a look around.

Kapoor peered at the local inspector, who picked wearily at the dripping collar of his uniform. “Didn’t you know?” he asked, without any apparent heat.

The inspector looked up, then away. “We’d heard.”

And so? wondered Kapoor.

“We’re a long way from HQ, uncle,” responded the inspector. “This rain has caused four accidents already tonight, including one less than a kilometer away on the highway. There’s been one building collapse and three evacuations. Up to eleven people might have died in the collapse. And over there, next to that new stadium, the local farmers are up in arms about the acquisition of their land for the parking lot.”

And your point is? inquired Kapoor’s eyebrows.

“Those fucking villagers are camped out with their sticks and their guns, uncle. If they start heating up, they won’t stop at biting each other. Frankly, these kids are a nuisance but they haven’t really hurt anybody.”

“Till now,” said the DCP.

The inspector nodded unhappily.

The DCP’s phone beeped. It was Smita. “It’s up on all the websites, sir.”

“Hmm. How did it end?”

“It came down to the boy in the kaffiyeh, the person holding the camera, and the boy I’m assuming you’re hovering over.”

The DCP grunted.

“They were obviously in a hurry. The boy in the kaffiyeh pummeled that poor child. Then he knelt over him, with his back to the camera, and appeared to bite his neck. The boy being bitten definitely seemed to be feeling it. Is he still alive?”

“He’ll live. Then?”

“The boy in the kaffiyeh let the victim collapse to the ground. Then he turned back to the camera and saluted. Very deliberately. He held up a finger, shook it at the camera, knelt down and drew it across the beaten boy’s throat, then stood up and saluted again. Then they seemed to hear something. Probably you. They took off running. The camera was killed seconds later.”

“Any progress on the account?”

“We’re working on it.”

The DCP hung up. At his feet, the boy stirred in the wet slush.

“Sacrifice,” he said faintly.

“What?” asked Kapoor.

“Sacrifice. He said I was a sacrifice.”

“Who did?” asked Kapoor roughly.

“The boy in the scarf. Our leader.”

“I thought you were a lycan?” said the DCP gently.

“No. No lycans. We’re all vampires. It was supposed to be my initiation.”

Kapoor and Dayal looked at each other.

“I suppose you don’t really know these guys?” asked Kapoor with disgust.

“No. They said I was a sacrifice. They said the Colonel would know and understand.”

“And that’s why they kicked the shit out of you,” said the inspector glumly.

“They said it was for my initiation.”

“They lied, son,” said Kapoor wearily. “They beat you up because they can. I suggest, when you’re out of hospital, you find new friends.”

The boy was put away in the back of the inspector’s duty jeep.

“May I ask you something, sir?” the inspector said to the DCP. The older officer nodded. “Why is Crime Branch interested in these freaks? More to the point, what do they have to do with your task force?”

“That’s two questions, inspector. But if you come across anything that might be of interest to me on either front, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

The inspector looked at him, the bill of his uniform hat shaping the flow of the rainwater off his face. Then he nodded in turn, touched his hat, and drove away.

Kapoor and Dayal stood there, next to the latter’s car, in the relentless rain.

“That was staged for our benefit,” noted Kapoor.

Dayal nodded wordlessly.

“Kids these days. Seriously.”

Dayal had to agree.

“I think it’s time you called the Colonel.”

The path to Razia lay through a narrow alley that led off a busy road in south Delhi. There was a bank to one side with a line outside the ATM and a shop selling bodybuilding supplements in the basement. An outlet for Adidas guarded the other flank. The commerce of the main road ebbed and flowed around the parked cars. The pushcarts, cycle-rickshaws, and pedestrians, bent on their own business in the moist night, eddied around Dayal’s own car. He stepped out and lit a cigarette, looked one way then another, and moved into the alley.

This was one of Delhi’s urban villages and the alley was a tight one, along which ran close-packed houses. They were high enough and dense enough to cut off the sun at noon: at night, every person in these alleys was a ghost. Power lines snaked overhead, the myriad noises of soap operas and cricket matches came and went, and the smoke from the DCP’s cigarette floated up into the ephemerally electric night. The air was neon and then fluorescent, and once there was the silver illumination of a lightning flash, the blues and pinks of the streaming homes off to either side starkly vivid. Seconds later Dayal heard its attendant roar. But by then the alley, now meandering through the village, was dark again. A corner store that stocked cigarettes and paan masala and eggs and bread provided a beacon of light where Dayal stopped to ask for directions. The man looked at him, then away, and then looked again, and saw Dayal for what he was. So he pointed, reluctantly, in a particular direction. Dayal bought a cigarette and sauntered through the sodden lane.

The newer houses were built above little parking bays, where Dayal saw scooters and occasionally small cars. Once a cat walked along a boundary wall and sometimes a dog, surprised in his slumber, barked at the policeman. Dayal took no notice. A Northeastern woman hurried past in the opposite direction, her mobile phone at her lips, urgently telling a driver at the mouth of the lane to wait for her, that she couldn’t take the next ride because her shift was starting in Gurgaon in less than forty-five minutes. He reached the end of the lane and was faced with a choice, whether to turn right or left. He stubbed out his smoke and glanced around and was pleased to discover that, as with all such places, he was far from alone.

There were eyes on him from balconies and from windows, even from a little set of young men taking it easy on the street. He felt how anonymity and communality can coexist in the same place and time, and knew what it is to be both naked and secure. So fortified, he walked up to the wall in front of him and knocked on the door that he knew was there. It opened quietly. He stepped into the forecourt of a pleasingly large haveli and turned to acknowledge Razia’s spare, elegant adaab.

“Welcome,” she said simply, leading him through the little gatehouse into the haveli proper. There was a colonnaded courtyard, empty save for the remnant of a fountain. There was a sprinkling of furniture in the verandas off to the sides. She led him to one such alcove, where the mattresses and bolsters were already set up and the makings of both paan and cocktails awaited. Candles illumined their meeting and their shadows played along the whitewashed walls. Rain began to fall again, the quiet courtyard coming alive with the sound of fresh water on ancient flagstone.

“Nice place,” said Sajan. “Must be expensive to maintain.”

“You’ve no idea,” smiled Razia. “Do you know how hard it is to keep a place like this when everybody else is tearing them down?”

Sajan shrugged and asked her how she found it. She merely said she’d had it for a while. Her neighbors: did she like them? They’re good people, she replied. Old families of the area, young people from outside. The way Delhi’s always been.

“They look out for you, I imagine?”

“Always.”

Dayal nodded and sipped at the cocktail he knew would be excellent before he even tasted it. He closed his eyes and sighed, leaned back against a bolster.

“Long day?” asked Razia with sympathy.

“Long few months,” answered Sajan.

“May I prepare a paan for you?”

“In a moment, perhaps.”

Then they were both quiet, enjoying the night and the smell and the sound of the rain in the courtyard. But the moment didn’t last, for even though the idea of a companionable silence with Razia was a tempting one, and Sajan was glad for the respite, he had work to do.

“You know why I’m here?” he asked.

She inclined her head.

“Can you help?”

“What would you have me do?”

“He’ll come to you if you tell him where and when.”

“This is true,” she acknowledged.

“I’d like you to call him to you. Here.”

She indicated her acquiescence.

“I think I’ll have that paan now, please.”

Later, his head was both on the bolster and perilously close to her knee. She could have been inches away from stroking his hair and he could have been moments away from ecstasy. He thought that this indeed is the reward warriors should expect. The thought crossed his mind that the devious bitch had probably spiked his paan, but he brushed it aside as being of no consequence, for what, in this world or the next, did brave Sajan have to fear from beautiful Razia?

So he asked, in the delirium that follows in the footsteps of a quest fulfilled, why she hadn’t yet taken care of this pestilential finger-reliever.

“A number of reasons,” she answered as she finally began to stroke his hair, the long slim fingers with their polished nails parting and then bestrewing the strands, now black and further gray. “He hadn’t found me. You hadn’t approached me. And finally, you hadn’t asked. Until now.”

Sajan opened his eyes in agreement. “You can’t be seen to be involved, I imagine.”

“Exactly,” smiled Razia, and he noticed the warmth and the candlelight in her dark eyes.

He held her gaze and asked, “Would it have helped if I’d come sooner?”

Perhaps, she replied. But the point to remember was that her Sajan had come. The victims, the young vampire, the consternation of the city: what did it matter?

“Who are you?”

“I think you already know.”

“Surely you’re not a vampire?”

She laughed, a rich quiet burble both ladylike and real. “What do you think?”

“He certainly seems to think so.”

“He doesn’t matter. His head isn’t in my lap.”

“If I thought you were a vampire, my head wouldn’t be either.”

She smiled at him again and continued to play with his hair.

“I remember,” he said, “my father speaking of a home such as this. His own father, my grandfather, must have been about ten when the family left the old city for the new home in Civil Lines. But he told my father stories about it, stories my father passed on to me.”

She nodded, waiting.

“What was Skinner like?” he asked.

“Not as Indian as you might think,” she replied.

“And Rangila?”

“Not as interesting as you might imagine.”

“Ghalib?”

“Exactly as you’ve ever thought he was.”

He smiled at that and so she asked, “My beautiful Sajan has come to my house of his own accord. Is talk all he requires?”

He looked at her, his face inches away from hers, a question in his eyes.

“When you get to my age,” replied Razia, “you get choosy. Besides, how many men are going to kiss a woman they think is a vampire?”

He nodded quietly, still looking into her eyes.

“Tell me, Sajan. What are you going to put in my mouth tonight?”

Behind them was the silent light of the moon, unencumbered now by the lowering clouds. The candles guttered and then went out. The rain returned and then retreated. Everywhere was silence, broken only by the distant sound of thunder and the occasional dreaming dog. The night slipped away in the blink of an eye. The first pale flush of dawn was just beginning to crease the cheek of the attendant sky as he left.

Just once, as he exited the door and heard it being shut behind him, did he feel a moment of disquiet. He felt a pair of eyes on him that didn’t belong in that setting, so he peered up at the new homes on either side of the alley that faced him. He looked this way and that and shook his head and then looked straight up, but there was nothing there either. He lit another cigarette and was gone down the alley, a drift of smoke the only marker of his passage before he too was swallowed by the almost-night.

“And now?” inquired Kapoor, later that day. They were back in the cyber-crime section, Smita and her colleagues taking them through what they’d found. The matrix of time, location, 3G accounts, and account holder’s age had offered up a list of hits which they were currently working their way through.

It’s just a matter of time, the two detectives were being assured. That one of the hard-cores used his or her cell phone was the first mistake Angulimala had made.

“He won’t get away this time,” said Smita confidently.

Kapoor digested this in silence, then repeated his question to his superior officer, whose abstraction had been noted by everyone in the room.

“Sir,” said Smita, and the DCP finally looked up.

“No, no,” he said. “It all sounds very good. You’ve all been working very hard indeed.”

“We have,” affirmed Smita. “None of us went home last night.”

Kapoor raised his eyebrows in her direction, and she blushed. “I don’t think a roomful of Indian Police Service officers need a chaperone, sir.”

“I agree,” said Kapoor drily. “I was just thinking how clean you look, after a night spent here.”

She shrugged. “A loaded handbag and a lavatory mirror can work wonders, sir.”

Her colleagues laughed and Kapoor smiled, while the DCP stared off into space.

“Sir,” prompted Kapoor gently.

With an effort, the DCP roused himself. “I’m sorry. I was busy too. Last night.”

The others waited.

“I think, with the data you’re collecting, we’ll have an arrest very soon. Perhaps as soon as tonight.”

The younger cops waited for more information to be volunteered, but none was forthcoming. Smita looked at Kapoor for help because nobody had mentioned a time frame for resolution, but the DCP had retreated behind a wall again. Kapoor sighed and waited and indicated, by leaning back and closing his eyes, that the others should curb their impatience and do the same.

Presently, the DCP looked around, felt for his cigarettes, motioned to Kapoor to follow him. They shared a meditative smoke on a balcony overlooking the city. Traffic bristled under them. Off in the near distance, the huge stacks of a thermal power plant lurked over the burgeoning river. Humayun’s Tomb, massively red in the cloudy day, lay off to one side. Kapoor watched his smoke disappear and felt the city flow below and heard the dark kites whirl screeching against the sky.

Tonight? inquired Kapoor.

Tonight, nodded Dayal.

“What exactly is going to happen?”

Dayal looked at him, then away. “I’m not entirely sure.”

“Does the Colonel indeed have a role to play?”

“It would seem so.”

“Has this been a setup from the start?”

“Possibly.”

“To what end?”

Dayal looked at his old friend and colleague, the city’s gray mass behind him. “I don’t know,” he said.

“And the Colonel? Who is she?”

“I don’t know,” repeated Dayal.

Kapoor digested this as he turned to the city, leaning his elbows on a rail almost blackened by soot from the power plant’s chimneys and the slow-moving traffic below. And so, to spare his friend the embarrassment of three straight nonanswers, he asked: “Can she end this finger-fucker’s roll? Tonight? Really?”

The DCP nodded, a gesture the other man couldn’t see. “I think she can. I think she will.”

“And you? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going over there to see her. Hopefully he’ll be there. Ready and waiting.”

“Do you need me?”

“I don’t think that’s part of the plan.”

Kapoor thought about that, then repeated: “And you, boss? What are you going to do?”

The DCP looked at his friend’s back, still turned to him as the other man studied the darkening city.

“My father told me,” continued Kapoor, “when I was still ambitious and young in the force, that I should know my own limits and choose my friends with care. That the friendship of powerful people carries a price. They don’t do favors for free. Not for people like us.”

The DCP listened disconsolately.

“He was a small man. Small dreams. Five years of village school. A refugee. My being a policeman was the height of his ambition.”

The DCP closed his eyes and rubbed them with one hand.

“I was going to tell you that I hope you know what you’re doing. For all of us.”

“But?”

“I don’t need to. I’ve been lucky with my friends.”

The DCP considered the weight of what had just been laid on him as Smita walked out onto the balcony. Kapoor finally turned to face them both. She stood quietly with her back to the door till Kapoor offered her a cigarette, which she thought about before shaking her head.

“You don’t smoke?” asked the DCP.

“I do,” admitted the younger officer. “But that isn’t my brand. And I don’t think I know you two well enough to have a smoke with you.” The three of them grinned in unison.

“So tell me, sir,” said Smita quietly. “What’s going on?”

The two elder policemen looked at her in surprise, then at each other. Kapoor shrugged once, elaborately, then went back to leaning on the railing. The DCP sighed.

“I’ll be needing a match from you people by tonight.”

Smita nodded slowly. She knew it wasn’t a request.

“Will this match be for an arrest, sir, or for confirmation?”

The DCP studied his junior’s face for a moment, then nodded without saying anything.

“I see,” said Smita. And then, recklessly: “Does that woman have anything to do with this?”

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

Smita nodded again, a hot flush at her cheeks. She turned to leave.

“Smita,” said Dayal. She waited by the door. “You’ve done well. Very well indeed. You and your colleagues, but especially you. I’d like you to know that my task force couldn’t have done this without you.”

“Done what exactly, sir?”

The DCP smiled. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. “We could use someone like you. Couldn’t we, Kapoor? Unless of course you’re happier here, running a terminal.”

Smita looked at the two of them, swallowed once, and quietly left.

“The girl’s got balls,” observed Kapoor.

“I’ve noticed,” concurred Dayal.

“You’re having a tough time with one, boss,” said Kapoor. “You really think you can handle both?”

The DCP laughed long and hard with his colleague and friend. Lightning was beginning to play on the horizon when they went in, still chuckling.

The first watch of the next day:

He arrives in the early hours, to give Smita’s unit time to do what they’ve been asked. His quiet knock on the door is immediately answered by Razia. They embrace inside the door, in the forecourt, before she thinks to peek behind him.

“Is Sajan really alone?” she wonders.

“Of course I am,” he responds.

“No pet gorillas,” she smiles.

“Nary a one,” he replies.

“No strong men?”

“Am I not enough?”

“And that rather lovely Punjabi girl?”

“She isn’t here either.”

She thinks that over for a moment, shrugs, and puts an arm through his, leads him into her home. “I’m glad the men of Delhi have made their peace with the people of Punjab.”

“Did we ever have a choice?”

“Perhaps not,” agrees Razia, as they walk across the courtyard to their nook in the colonnade off to the side. The lightning, a mere premonition a few hours earlier, now lays siege to the sky.

“Is he here?” Sajan remembers to ask.

She nods, says, “Can we please let him be for a few minutes? He isn’t going anywhere.”

Sajan is happy to agree and lies back against a bolster, her head on his shoulder and an arm across his chest. The moment is light with happiness and heavy with dread, and he thinks that all life is just this, outcomes irreconcilable with each other masquerading as choices. He knows he isn’t here of his free will, but he is happy, happy as long as this head lies on his shoulder and this arm across his chest, and he feels he can hear, with every drumbeat of thunder and in every flash of lightning, the susurration of finite sand running out of its glass.

Happiness and grief, thinks Sajan. They’re only to be hoarded and feared so long as we preserve the myth of our own agency. An agency he surrenders willingly as he turns to his Razia in a paroxysm of present happiness and impending grief. He turns to her and kisses her as the lightning plays around the courtyard and throws giant shadows against the walls. He sheds the necessary zips and buttons without losing her mouth, her own hands willing partners in the dance. He forgets the vampire in her house, the shadows across her walls. All he knows is her and the shelter of her arms around him and presently they are done, but still her arms encircle him and they murmur into each other’s ears.

“You’re going away, aren’t you?” asks Sajan.

“Haven’t I been here long enough?” she replies. He chuckles quietly and she squirms, the noise loud in her ear.

“Has this always been your home?” he asks.

“In one way or another, it’s been very dear to me for a very long time.”

“I’m surprised you still have it. How did the builders spare it?”

“They came by. They asked around. My neighbors scared them away.”

“Do your neighbors know about you?”

“They suspect, but without suspicion. They’ve known me, in one way or another, for a very long time.”

“How long have you been alone?”

“How do you measure forever?”

“Were you always alone?”

“There were others. They’ve moved on, one by one. Nobody believed this city would last as long as it has.”

“Are you the last one?”

“Not anymore,” she replies. Then they’re both quiet.

A chik, loose even at night, shifts in the soft breeze, its brass pulls clanking against an arch. The rain falls melodiously against the flagstones in the courtyard and distantly, Sajan hears a man scream.

“Shall we see about your problem?” she asks. Sajan nods dutifully.

They enter the house, dark save for candles here and there, and Sajan, looking about him, is surprised to see how spartan it all is. She takes him through a succession of rooms till they arrive at a staircase leading down to a cellar. The walls are damp and the light is dim and it is entirely appropriate, thinks Sajan, that a creature as crepuscular as Angulimala the vampire should end up in a hole like this. He is attached, loosely, by a rope around his neck to a ring in the wall. He writhes naked in the light of the tapers in the wall, his eyes closed, lost in his delirium. But their coming rouses him. He sees both Sajan and Razia and he spits on the ground in front of the DCP. Razia goes up to him and pats him on the head and he almost purrs with pleasure.

“Here he is,” she says.

The DCP nods. He notes the necklace around the vampire’s throat and the inserts and tattoos that will, in the days to come, be the talk of Delhi. He goes up to him, risking saliva in the eye, touches the gruesome constituents of his collection.

“Like them?” leers the vampire.

The DCP shrugs. Razia looks on impassively.

“Why,” murmurs the DCP to the vampire, “do you want her so badly?”

“I did this for you!” screams the vampire.

“Of course you did,” says Razia consolingly. “You’ve done very well indeed.

“This city,” she continues meditatively, the light flickering away from her face, “it has survived so much. Plague, invasions, the vagaries of water. Empire after empire. And all the pretenders. The Gujjars, the Jats, the Marathas and the Persians, the Sikhs in their time, the Rohillas. Taimur and Nadir and Ahmed Shah.”

“So much,” she repeats. “Eternity’s a long time,” she says to her Sajan. “I suggest you prepare for it carefully.”

Then she puts her hands over the eyes of the vampire and says, “Sleep, sweetheart.” So he does.

She looks at her putative pupil, perhaps even tenderly, hanging by his neck from a rope attached to the wall. “He’s just a symptom. He isn’t the disease, per se.”

Sajan can’t help but agree so he asks her whether it bothers her that she has so ill-used this twisted young man. And what of the twenty men of this city with only nine fingers on their hands and all the resources of Delhi wasted on this search that could have been utilized elsewhere.

“I’ve done worse,” she says quietly. “I’ve been around for a while, remember?”

The DCP thinks it over, repeats his question of a moment before: “Why did he want you so much?”

She looks at him, shrugs her shoulders fractionally. “Come. Time to wrap things up.”

He follows her up the stairs, and farther, back through the rooms of the old house and up another flight to the roof, where a squat dome sits surrounded by pretend battlements that look both in toward the courtyard and out to the village and the city beyond. The rain is coming down in earnest now, lightning streaks the sky. Razia strips down completely, her clothes lying negligently in a pile at her feet.

They are horribly exposed up on this old dome and Sajan feels naked as well and so he says: “Why me?”

“Who better than you, my beautiful Sajan? Who better to be a bridge? Who better to guard this city now?”

“Is that all I am? A chowkidaar with a taste for history? Is that all this was to you?”

“No,” she replies, as she climbs swiftly to the top of the dome, where an iron spike functions both as decoration and lightning rod. Sajan can see its extension snaking sinuously down the side of the dome and the building below to be lost in the cool damp earth. She grasps it firmly, then turns to him. “Come up here, my brave Sajan. Kiss me.

“Eternity is a long time,” she repeats. “I want something to warm me through it.”

He clambers up as well and embraces her. They cling to each other in the rain, then she tells him softly to step away, because the elements are beyond her control. So he pulls away and climbs down and asks her whether he’ll ever see her again and she smiles and says nothing, so he asks her again. She smiles and smiles and motions him away and he backs away, across the roof, down the stairs, still looking, and she keeps her eyes on his and she smiles and then she is gone and so is he to the street and he hears a sizzle and the crack and feels the earth shake and then she is truly, completely gone.

Moments later, Sajan’s phone rings.

“We’ve found him, sir,” Smita said quickly over the phone. “He’s in that village by the forest. The street address isn’t in any database, but the man who did the verification for the bill said he was called to an old house at the end of the last lane in the village. Less than a week ago.”

“Really?” murmured the DCP. “Is Kapoor there?”

“I just spoke with him. He’s on his way there right now. Say twenty minutes.”

“Good. Get over there as quickly as you can, Smita.”

“Are you coming straight there, sir?”

“I am.”

“He had a rudimentary electronic setup, all done with prepaid cards and the like. Very little paper to link him to this place,” said Kapoor later that day. “I know people here. They don’t remember him. He must have come here quite recently.” He turned to Smita. “Perhaps as recently as a week ago?”

Smita nodded while the DCP averted his eyes. Smita continued: “We found his laptop. His DNA’s all over this place. The fingers are there as well. Case closed, I think.”

The DCP and Kapoor nodded together.

“Funny thing,” said Kapoor. “A few of the villagers swear lightning struck this old house about half an hour before we arrived.” Dayal looked at him impassively. Kapoor studied his old friend, then went on, “They’re also whispering some rubbish about how this place is haunted. Apparently, some old woman’s been living here for hundreds of years. The same woman.”

“Imagine that,” said Dayal. “Villagers with superstitions.”

Kapoor raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and stalked off, knowing he had reports to file. The DCP watched Smita, who seemed to be on the verge of saying something.

“I think you might want these, sir,” she said finally, reaching below her chair to give him a plastic bag. He took it from her and saw, hastily folded inside, clothes of a vaguely military cut. His eyes started to brim over so he looked away.

“Does Kapoor know?” he mumbled.

“He’s the one who found them, sir. On the roof. There was nothing else.”

“Of course he did. Of course there wasn’t. Thank you, Smita. Thank you both.”

“Is there something you’d like to share with us, sir?”

“Perhaps one day,” said the DCP.

“No worries, sir,” said Smita in a businesslike tone. “I’m in no hurry.”

No hurry, thought the DCP. He savored the words and repeated them to himself.

Smita asked him whether he’d considered the question of just how long Angulimala had been associated with the old house in the village. “I’ve been thinking of very little else,” he replied.

In time, he knew, there would be awards and honors and the long rope of official approbation would pull the likes of Smita up from obscurity as well. That, at least, was in his hands, so he smiled at her and offered her a cigarette, which, after a moment’s consideration, she accepted. They stepped outside and watched their city dissolve into the steadily falling rain.