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