The First Encounter

Some Months Later

The priests lit a fire in his house and fed it some cow fat. Flames leapt and the smoke licked the ceiling before spreading to the corners of the large hall. The small group of guests coughed and sneezed as the chanting reached a crescendo and tapered with, “Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.” They looked around the hall for Swamy, their host. Swamy was seated on the floor in a hidden chamber, head bowed, his legs folded beneath him. He was breathing deeply. “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti,” chanted the priest corps. Swamy scowled. It wasn’t working. What was the point of having priests on his payroll?

He left quietly, a thief in his own house. Three bodyguards checked for any signs of trouble, ushered him into a black SUV, and then got in behind him. Swamy jockeyed for space to breathe. “All clear,” said the driver. They pulled away. The vehicle weaved its way through lanes and alleys before arriving at a nondescript building. Inside was Swamy’s lifeline. A doctor escorted him up some stairs and they entered a white-tiled room where Swamy rolled up his sleeves, exposed his veins, and submitted himself to the machine. A middle-aged man who was already waiting in the room shuffled over and sat beside him. It was a practiced routine. They spoke occasionally, cracked some jokes over the next three hours before their heads dropped and they dozed. Swamy’s phone rang, breaking his stupor. He peered at the number absently.

“Would you like to live longer, Swamy?” asked the caller.

“What?” Swamy stared at his phone in horror. The SIM card was half a day old and they had traced him already.

“Take a deep breath, Swamy Anna.”

He took one. He wanted to kill the call. The tainted SIM would give away his location very soon.

“You need blood, Swamy Anna, good clean blood. Stand up now, go take a piss.”

He couldn’t and they knew it. “How much longer?” he asked the nurse.

“We are done,” she said. She massaged his wrists and his feet.

He stood up abruptly and his head swam.

“Go see your granddaughter, Swamy. She is traveling soon.”

He rubbed his temples as he grew furious. He slumped on the bed, opened the back cover of the phone, and pulled out the SIM card. His hands shook as he broke it in two.

“They are threatening me.” He pointed at himself. “Me.” The bodyguards who stood near the door snorted in unison.

The middle-aged man spoke softly: “That is their job, Anna. They wouldn’t dare take on someone as important as you.”

Swamy wanted to get up and leave. He half rose before falling back, his head hitting the backrest. This new police encounter team bothered him. It was headed by Ranvir Pratap, a name that brought bile to Swamy’s lips. He coughed and almost retched.

“Get me a damn towel—you, quickly!”

A burly guard brought a white towel. In his hurry he dropped his automatic weapon and it clattered on the floor. The doctor jumped first and the nurse jumped next as the weapon’s snout raked the room and came to rest pointing at their feet. Swamy glanced at the ceiling and then slowly lowered his gaze. His outburst was preempted by a pinging sound. The middle-aged man pulled out his phone and he read the message aloud. “A week from now is an inauspicious date. Message from Mumbai police.”

“That would be the eleventh,” said Swamy, his voice down to a whisper. “They have even declared a bloody date.” He ruefully examined the veins in his hands. What had they done to him?

They left the makeshift dialysis clinic. It was night in this obscure middle-class neighborhood with its crowded streets, where the local population worshipped the Don of Wadala, who now sat in his SUV and allowed himself some filtered coffee. He took a couple of sips and his body relaxed, relieved to be away from the stern gaze of Mrs. Swamy. They headed to a small temple where a bare-chested priest was waiting impatiently, watching the clock reach the appointed hour. The priest lit some camphor as Swamy crossed the threshold, right foot first, head bare, hands folded. He then rang a small bell and made three circles with the flame chanting a Sanskrit shloka. The priest would often offer some fruits and flowers to the deity on Swamy’s behalf. The stone deity was small and black and the sanctum was dimly lit. Roaches and rats scurried in the dark reaches.

* * *

In the first floor of his chawl Karan flung off the covers, brushed his hair, and threw on his uniform. He slammed the door behind him, took the stairs two at a time, and ran across the quadrangle down a narrow lane into a small nook where he parked his dented car with one wobbly wheel. His Fiat had bucket seats and a floor-shift and it rattled as he drove down the western arterial. When he exited at the office blocks near Haji Ali and headed toward the sea, he saw another version of the chawl. The chawls came in various shapes and sizes and this one was built on common land. The roadside here was a public convenience. Power was available on tap and water came in tankers paid for by the brotherhood. Everything (his car, the chawl) seemed makeshift and temporary and rightly so, because in Mumbai poverty was considered a temporary affliction. This was the faith, the one illusion that kept the murky reality at bay.

A single command before the voice on the other end of the line hung up: “Head to the seaface.”

After a while the Worli Seaface turned genteel. Karan parked his car, locked it, and got down to his favorite pastime: watching. A rain-bearing cloud hung over the sea, thinking about landfall. The tide was low and the rocks jutted out of the water near the shore, where two men completed their morning ablutions.

“Don’t get out of your car yet.”

In a holster near his midriff, Karan carried an American pistol, a Ruger, just like his infamous predecessor, Inspector Pradeep Sharma—Karan admired his senior because of how he stood, hands folded across his chest, the matter-of-fact way he spoke, and above all the uncommon reputation he left behind him. Pradeep Sharma was from the Class of 1983, a Mumbai police class that eliminated hundreds of gangsters but subsequently did not age well.

At the stroke of nine, just as the second hand of his watch aligned with the hour, his phone rang again. Karan waited for three rings, flipping the cover open as he took it to his ear. After a small pause someone spoke.

“I hope you are not wearing your uniform.”

“I am,” he replied. He thought the uniform would help.

“Have you lost your mind?” shouted the caller. “Is that how you meet an informer?” There was a murmur in the background. “Well, because of your stupidity we’ll have to change the location. Start the car and drive slowly past the Worli Dairy. There will be a traffic signal up ahead.” The caller spoke again to someone who was with him: “Yes, that light will turn red when you approach. Don’t worry, it will. Someone will come up to your window selling magazines. Keep your window down. You will buy a magazine from him. Inside there will be a message that will tell you when and where to go. Got it?”

“Why all this drama?” asked Karan.

“You do your job, I’ll do mine. I have to keep the informer alive.”

Karan looked to see if there was anybody around. The seaface was deserted. He did as he was told.

That night he reread Swamy’s bulky folder. It was incredible how someone like Swamy had survived for so long despite the attention shown by the police and the judiciary. The court case against him began twelve years ago. Two witnesses were dead, one had gone missing, and fourteen had turned hostile. A decision was due next month and the file said it was likely the prosecution would lose.

* * *

Swamy began his career as a porter in a railway station. Tired of small change, he began to loot goods from trains that passed through it. In all he killed three people as he rose to the top of the heap in the railway yards. Each of the deceased was tied to the tracks and left to the vagaries of the overnight express train. Soon his leadership was undisputed. He granted people favors and in return he adjudicated their lives. His gang collected a daily or weekly fee from most commercial establishments in Wadala. He had the traders by the balls. Even Muruga, the ruling deity, was a lesser entity than Swamy in Wadala, a god with a weaker sovereignty. Swamy’s followers knew that while Muruga might be a superior being above, in this life they’d have to reckon with this bloody goon.

Swamy was a Tamilian from the south of the country and built up his fearsome network between 1975 and 1985. A phone call from Swamy was a dagger to the heart. People who answered his call died twice. Every year Swamy would conduct a show killing and the press built his mythology by going into a feeding frenzy every time, making him out to be the most fearsome don since Haji Mastan and Karim Lala.

Meanwhile, nobody dared search Swamy’s pockets, and for some decades they swelled with ill-gotten gains. Some of it went to cops and some to magistrates. The rest was naturally seen with a blind eye. Who the fuck cared?

“I do,” said Ranvir Pratap.

A couple of years back a reputed astrologer told Swamy he was past his due date. Swamy disappeared and went underground. Nobody had seen him since, though it was rumored he came out at night in an SUV with tinted windows and that he visited temples where he prayed for his own longevity.

He had reason to feel threatened. The Bombay police had taken out a contract on Swamy, after all. That was just how it was done. The local term for this practice among the crime gangs was supari. No one in the police force wanted this particular supari, and so it landed in the lap of a greenhorn, a relative newcomer in a new squad who had a reputation for never missing in target practice. His name was Karan and he was reported to be a little mental. He had agreed on one condition—the encounter would not happen in Wadala. There was no question of challenging Swamy on his own turf.

“Do we have a date?” asked Karan.

“Yes,” said Desai, his controller. “The eleventh. Boss likes the eleventh.”

“Why?”

Because on January 11 Surve died. He died, man. They were waiting for him and they waylaid him. He lay in an ambulance and cursed till the moment he went. Karan saw the body and the grimace in a grainy photograph. Surve was a burly figure with a chestful of hair. They trapped him when he emerged from a taxi near the Ambedkar College junction. The police had been tipped off and two cops got him. Surve was armed; it seems he fired first, but he missed. Raja Tambat and Isaque Bagwan entered history books by firing a clip of bullets into Surve’s chest and shoulder. This was history, the first encounter killing carried out by Mumbai police. And it happened in Wadala on January 11, 1982.

* * *

It was said of Karan that he seemed like a “decent” person when he joined the force. The fact that he would kill people would color his résumé somewhat but that was a departmental thing—a job description—and something he had to do to get a salary and a promotion. His boss Ranvir Pratap had ground to make up. Too many hoods who had practiced mayhem for so long had lived well into their eighties and nineties. It felt unnatural, almost a failure for cops like him that so many of them died from natural causes.

Karan was an unlikely specialist. He was prone to stand for hours on the roadside, an uneaten dish in front of him, speaking in a monotone to either his wife Nandini or to his controller, a disembodied voice named Desai. And this would happen in the midst of an assignment. It was scary that he could still execute successfully.

“What was in the magazine?” asked Desai later that night.

“A list of two things: the temple he will visit tomorrow; and his preferred seat inside his car.”

“Is that enough for you?” asked Desai. He sounded skeptical. “Do you need backup? Should we get you a semiautomatic weapon?”

“No, it will be too obvious. His people will spot me.” There was no point in telling Desai that he had never used an automatic weapon.

“Who was that?” asked Nandini when he returned to the table. They were having dinner.

“No one important,” said Karan. He sat down heavily and stared at his plate.

“Then eat.”

He couldn’t. He poked at the food. “I’m not hungry.”

“Then go to sleep,” his wife said.

The night was too quiet and the chawl was full of furtive sounds. In bed, he couldn’t toss and turn as he wished because Nandini was a light sleeper. He stared at his phone in the dark and watched time pass slowly.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” she asked at one point.

He found an excuse to walk into the outside corridor where he could glimpse the city lights. Beyond the chawl Bombay was shape-shifting. The factory worker and the trade unionist had walked into the sunset, pulling down the curtain on the era of local manufacturing. The militant political party had thrived using jingoism and strong-arm tactics. Spiffy office-goers arrived, and they too thrived thanks to liberalization and the opening up of the economy. A certain licentiousness had seeped into the city, a rowdy good nature exemplified in its cuisine and its festivity. Then, with the arrival of immigrants, Bombay retired, its suburban identity prevailed, and the city called Mumbai found its voice. Mumbai turned its back on Bombay, then dropped its pants and showed its rump. One survivor in this transformation was the chawl. It was a distinctively Bombay creation, and a hardy piece of architecture that was now a curious remnant in Mumbai.

The next morning Karan stood in the shower and let the hot water burn his back and his arms till they reddened. He toweled himself down slowly and deliberately. This would be his first kill. It was a strange assignment and he had been told if he had a clear shot he should take it, even if it was fleeting. He knew that it would happen near his home, too close, but still . . . it would be public and brazen.

“Aren’t you going to the office today? It is raining, Karan, so you better leave early.”

What should he tell her, that he was waiting to find an auspicious time for a kill? She left for work after packing his lunch. He stood by for a call that never came, and finally at noon he sat at his dining table and ate his lunch. And later, he snuck out like a thief.

It was raining hard on his chawl in Parel. The chawl was covered with blue plastic sheets held down by bricks. Beneath them was a tarpaulin cover and the few cracks in the tiled roof were filled with black tar. Karan waited under an awning but water still found a way to drip onto his head. From his vantage it seemed parts of the city were literally going down the drains.

His thoughts traveled back to a time when the city bled. It wasn’t long ago when Bombay was divided on religious lines. The Mumbai riots were terrible and right here in this gully there was arson and looting. Today no signs remained; nothing except the figureheads and their sycophants. The shakhas were still around, and then there were the local mukhyas and prajapatis. These were the true satraps of this city. They sponsored the revelry on the streets. At festival time they would take money from the residents and fund their pandals and processions.

He was meticulous in his preparation. Karan had readied his weapon the night before but keeping it dry in the monsoon was a challenge. The roadside gutters had flooded into streams. A large, ungainly rat looked on as the swirl consumed its hideaway; a child gleefully watched the animal get carried away by the deluge.

Umbrellas formed herds at traffic junctions. The office workers waited impatiently for the traffic lights to change before heading to the new gleaming towers that had sprung up where the mills once stood. When he got tired of taking practice shots Karan joined them, walking with them for a couple of kilometers before returning, a black umbrella hiding his head. Another hour passed and still no news, so he zigzagged across the road, visited some shops, and returned to his spot once more. Occasionally he stood in the open, defying the driving rain.

A few vehicles clattered past the chawl, splashing water and making waves, a street vendor shouted in vain as his wares were sodden, and the gears of a double-decker bus clashed as it rounded a bend. This was getting tedious. The delay continued. He held his umbrella high and negotiated a crossing. When he tired of holding it he folded it, exposing his mop of soaking black hair.

He was just another tall man wearing a gray raincoat and plastic shoes.

The day departed and the rain mercifully eased. Nightlife arrived in a taxi, an old yellow-black Fiat, a braveheart that had seen three engine changes. The cab and the cabbie idled by the roadside, their engines ticking, keeping an eye out for cops. Their passenger was clearly a woman on the make.

“Mangta kya?” she asked passersby, thrusting a hip, parting her lips, and twirling a bag around her right wrist. She posed next to the Fiat, trying to entice. The interior of the taxi glowed and was playing a song from the film Pakeezah. A drunk leered at her. “Chal phut!” she shouted. Get lost.

“Randi,” said the drunk. “Raat ki raani.” In his stupor he was a connoisseur of women.

Across this tableau stood Karan, a silent observer, patient, still, black umbrella by his side, his hair wet and streaming. After four hours of waiting his phone finally rang. It was time.

“Where are you?” Nandini demanded, breaking his concentration. “You forgot your lunch box. Wait, it’s empty.”

He flexed his fingers, rotated his neck and shoulders, and blinked a few times. “Can you get off the line? I’m expecting a call.”

“Are you at work? How long will you be?”

“I don’t know.” He hung up on her, then reached inside his coat, felt his holster, and pulled out his gun in a single smooth motion.

A black SUV came speeding below the overpass, turned, and swerved. Its dark windows were rolled up and its bright lights screamed momentarily into Karan’s eyes. Two traffic lights turned green and the vehicle began to accelerate. Karan took aim at the green lights and fired. Two muffled thumps and then confusion as cars braked and skidded.

“Thamba!” shouted a nearby duty cop, waving his arms.

“Motherfucker!” cursed a driver as he braked, screeching into another car before hitting a pole. Glass shattered and pedestrians jumped out of the way. In the ensuing slowdown the SUV drew alongside Karan, blasting its horn, its tires crunching over the strewn glass. Its custom license plate glinted as Karan’s gun sparked again; the bullet pierced through the windshield glass, spreading a small spiderweb. He waited for the telltale sign as the car swept past. He finally exhaled; there was red splatter on the rear windscreen.

The SUV jumped the red light and made a sharp U-turn, its tires squealing as the driver shifted gears and gunned the engine. Black smoke and diesel fumes spewed behind the SUV as it sped away. The duty cop futilely ran after it, then jumped onto his motorcycle and set off in chase. A couple of street urchins looked toward Karan wide-eyed. They had heard something but they weren’t sure. He was standing erect and seemed to be brooding. Karan’s gun felt warm in its holster. After a brief pause Karan opened his umbrella and moved toward the chawl, entering it without glancing back. Elongated shadows followed him home, stretching around the bends.

Soon, at half past twelve, the traffic lights were turned off and would flash orange till the sun rose again. Dogs settled back down on the pavement and in back alleys. The city dragged its feet for a while, its moral compass awry. Down south the famous Rajabai Tower stood tall between a university and a high court. Its clock chimed desolately into the night.

* * *

The day after the assignment Karan stayed home and counted sparrows. He had heard that sparrows got fried out of existence by electric towers, so seeing some of them buzz in and out of the sloping roof gave him a sense of hope. Nobody called him, which itself was eerie after yesterday. For some reason he remembered the church at the Don Bosco School in Matunga, where he had studied as a young boy, and how he once by chance attended an emotional memorial service there. He had to stare at a stained-glass window to distract himself from the outpouring of grief. An old man next to him kept smiling through the function.

“Are you a relative?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I come here for all the memorials.”

The chawl was customarily quiet at this midmorning hour. Nandini had seemed quizzical since waking up. She was relentless. “What’s the matter?” she asked again as she ironed his uniform. The iron wove around his buttons.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“What are you thinking?” He was midway through brushing his teeth.

“Nothing.”

She sighed and smiled gently. “Don’t worry, I’ll eventually get used to you and your moods.”

When she left he removed his uniform and changed into his pajamas. He slunk on a chair and waited for a call that might not come. At the chawl domestic life proceeded at its own pace; he was the interloper.

“Karan bhai, you are at home?”

He nodded. Wasn’t it obvious?

“Su Karan bhai?” asked a Gujarati neighbor. “Majama?”

“Majama,” he echoed, managing a smile.

“Karan kaka, all well?” asked a maid.

The inquiries were polite, his replies were tart, and the air was pungent with the smell of spices that were seasoning lunch. He sneezed often. He detected the scent of detergent and the slapping sound of clothes being hand-washed. He snoozed for a while and awakened to find the sun in his eyes. He had to retreat further into his small abode and there he rediscovered the small things that made this place home. He puttered about, discovering Nandini in her absence. Her taste showed up in the carefully placed bric-a-brac, her mauve Kashmiri shawl, the two-layered curtains filtering light through the windows, casting shapes on crowded stacks of books that spoke of their shared love of cities. He settled down for a while with a coffee table book called Bombay: The Cities Within, and found that its observations spoke to him. Finally, he sat at the one item that truly belonged to him: his writing desk.

You are not a writer, he said to himself. He really wasn’t, though he had tried. Your attempts are surreptitious and your thoughts are clandestine. He read aloud from passages he liked, taking care to pronounce each word correctly. And he often sat with a thesaurus, sometimes attempting an original composition with esoteric equivalents of commonly used words. He envied his boss Ranvir Pratap, a man with a mordant wit and a quicksilver tongue. What did he look like? He was stocky and unathletic with no six-pack to boast of.

After lunch, time passed slowly in his head as he tired of checking his phone for messages. He lay listlessly on the sofa. He felt like he was seated in a railway waiting room or at a doctor’s clinic. He twirled a blue paperweight and rapped it against a table, admiring its sound. He watched TV, flipping channels and hoping to get lucky. For a while he slept again. And he dreamed of his city, of its various parts that assembled before him like an archive of the quotidian, an everyday life that he could write about lucidly when he slept.

* * *

Words are easy on the tongue but work is hard to find in Mumbai. Old men vie with chokra boys, and sisters vie with mothers. All day they climb up and down the rickety stairs of the chawl doing odd jobs. The city scrimps in its daily life. Chai from a tumbler is shared in groups. Car cleaning pays but only in small change. Elevator attendants, security guards, and peons are proof that vocations trap you for life.

Every chawl is a bunch of kolis, small rooms that house the middle class. During the day they run kiraana shops, tailoring shops, coaching classes, and crèches right out of their homes. There are doctors too who practice where they live.

My Parel chawl has good proportions. It has a family life. You flirt in the landing, get engaged in the corridor, your marriage takes place in the quadrangle outside, and your honeymoon is in the cupboard.

Dust is unhurried in this city. It never settles. Summer brings clichés and the measles, and rain brings the thundering clap. Men wander at this time for nightly visits with painted folk.

“Don’t be fooled by the bright saris, the kohl eyes, and painted lips,” warn our elders. “Before you flirt with streetwalkers take our hands and check the gender.”

Chawl life is intimate. The men lean on railings with feet apart, wearing tight pants. The women sit on the floor with feet apart, wearing nightgowns. The neighbors are second rate and the amenities are third class. The scenery is underwear, displayed like newspapers in a kiosk. Every clothesline speaks.

This is our theater, our darling middle-class Center for Performing Arts. Life is a truthful bore so a little acting helps us all. We know we are God’s rejects but at home we pretend we are Mama’s favored infants. The elders keep telling us that we matter. You are the inner city, they say. This is the soul of the city that resides in chawls everywhere; even in pretentious South Mumbai. Look out for a U-shaped two-storied structure around a quadrangle, with corridors and rooms in a row. Here you will find no entitlement. If we need subsidy we are told to go out and beg.

In the chawl we roll up our sleeves, hang our shirt on a wall, and really examine ourselves. Can you? Good. See here, two arms are all it takes. Both hands now. Submit. Remember, power is hungry.

* * *

Late in the evening Desai called, finally. Karan grabbed at the phone like it was a life raft.

“Yes?” He breathed deeply, shutting his eyes.

“Yes,” replied Desai in his lackluster manner.

“What?”

After what seemed an eternity Desai spoke again: “You are unbelievable. You shot through glass into a dark cave but you got your man.”

“He is dead?”

“Yes. Internal bleeding killed him, luckily. Go to sleep, you are now officially an encounter specialist.”

* * *

There was a big splash in the newspapers the next day but it was the location of the incident that gave him away.

“Karan, where were you the night before last?”

He sat her down and told her that he had been assigned to an encounter squad.

“What did you do? I mean, were you assisting someone?”

He coughed. “I shot him.” He tried telling her it was a prestigious posting, one that any officer would want. “I am lucky. Do you know my predecessors have appeared on national television?” He even had a recording of a field interview which she insisted on seeing, so they sat next to each other and watched. The people who were being interviewed were his seniors. The anchor was stout, bespectacled, and he was behaving like a fanboy. He spoke animatedly (was that a smile?), aware that this Walk the Talk episode on the NDTV channel was the best-rating material he would ever have. Two men with black, well-groomed hair and mustaches walked alongside him. They seemed casual, diffident, and their eyes buttonholed their neighborhood and never wavered. Behind them walked a lithe, uniformed security cover with an automatic weapon. This was a self-aware tableau that expected retaliation.

Inspector Pradeep Sharma and Subinspector Daya Nayak were being questioned by the anchor, an admiring Shekhar Gupta. They remained expressionless through all of it and made no attempt to gloat. Gupta used the cricket analogy of a century score that ended up sounding frivolous and macabre. He spoke glowingly about Pradeep Sharma’s scorecard of ninety-two hits (“nervous nineties,” he called it) and wondered whether at seventy-eight hits Daya Nayak felt the competitive pressure.

The cops conveyed what they felt; nothing deep but a quiet satisfaction. They said they shot only in retaliation. A rooster crowed loudly in the background. They complained about their silly portrayal in Hindi cinema where the cops did nothing and always arrived late. The threesome walked through a slum along a narrow path that had low shanties on both sides, disturbing a boy in shorts and a woman in a doorway. Another rooster flew up to Daya Nayak’s side and flapped its wings at him. Talk of killing continued with what happened on New Year’s Eve 1996, going back to 1992, touching on their feelings before an encounter and after, seeking out how they felt (if they did) doing God’s work and dispensing death.

They passed a tattered signpost that said, Welcome to Seaface. People trailed behind them, curious about the cameras and the gun-toting. A small child sat with one leg crossed over the other, ignoring them. The talk veered to the film actors and producers who were the soft targets for extortionists, who lacked bravery in real life when confronted with the filmic tactics of the underworld.

“Injuries? Did you ever get attacked?”

“Bullet through the thigh,” said Daya Nayak, breaking stride and showing his leg. It still hurt sometimes but no longer in the leg.

The Mumbai Dairy soon appeared on their right and they walked past it discussing calls from known gangsters who tried to threaten them personally. “The crime lords called us and cursed us and we cursed them back in their own language,” he said.

Pradeep Sharma waved his hands in front of him and spoke up, dismissing these gangsters as loudmouths and humble vada pao eaters who now ate chili chicken, a superior cuisine for those wanting to move up the social ladder, as if that gave them the right to talk big. They were local goons without the organization and skill sets to qualify for the tag Mafia, he felt.

* * *

“This is morbid,” she said. “In a few years you will be just like them.”

He wasn’t sure why she was disturbed by that thought. He wasn’t very good at divining what went on in her head.

“I need to get some fresh air.”

“Shall we go for a drive?” It was nine a.m.

They walked to his car, quietly, with pieces of a puzzle in their heads. He squeezed his tall frame in, started the engine, and reversed. A sleeping dog underneath the vehicle yelped and got away just in time. They rolled down the front windows to let in the breeze, then rolled them back up as they passed the shanties, smelling what the city had digested from yesterday’s takeout.

Near Prabhadevi they ran into revelers carrying a huge idol on a cart, loud music blaring from speakers. Some danced in front of them, some knocked on the car’s windows and pressed their faces against the glass, leaving lip marks and spittle behind. Then they moved slowly aside, staring as they let the car through. The sound was deafening and the revelry seemed frenetic. “Is this God in our midst?” Nandini asked as they moved past the idol. No, not this; this was just the bully pulpit.

Back at home it hit Karan with surprising clarity as to how cinematic this city truly was—it was also the uncut version of a civic nightmare.

“So what did you learn from that interview?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he replied. What was there to learn from those who had done it so many times and yet survived? He would rather study those who failed.

“Smart-ass,” she said, clearly irritated.

“I need to remember that targets actually shoot back. Not everything is staged.”

“I see. I feel better suddenly,” she deadpanned.

That night he went to the Jasmine Parlor, really just a small shed. The barber broke a new shaving blade in two, set one piece in a holder, and gave him a close shave. He had his hair oiled and neatly combed and then had his mustache trimmed. He patted some Old Spice onto his cheeks, enjoying the smart stinging sensation. Outside on the sidewalk a man sat on his haunches and spoke softly to him as he cleaned his ears, collecting the wax in his palm. Below the overpass Karan parted with some change to two kids who were playing a game with stones. They thanked him in Tamil. He returned home, fresh and renewed. He headed to his small private den where he took out some creased press clippings, smoothed them out, and read them once again. It was important that he read and reread about those who had faltered. This was the 1983 puzzle, the surprising decline of a hugely successful batch of encounter specialists who had themselves committed crimes. Karan belonged to a different breed, or so he hoped.

* * *

The next day dawned and the chawl stirred with signs of life. An old man in a singlet walked into his view, scratched his balls, and waited for the sun. At first light the man closed his eyes, folded his hands, and murmured a prayer. He then looked around blankly, noticing nothing, not even the black umbrella that Karan left out to dry that had tumbled across the corridor to his door.

Karan yawned and did some stretches. He had walked for an hour in the middle of the night and returned agitated. Half the time the city spat and half the time its pants were around its ankles. After returning he laid on his back and stared at the ceiling, waiting for his wife to awaken. He had things to tell her about Mumbaikars. Nandini’s smooth forehead was furrowed. Her thoughts were writing the worry lines of the city.

Whole sentences felt out of place in Mumbai, Karan thought. Nothing simmered and foreplay was missing. Gone were the days when you could have an uninterrupted view of the setting sun as it dipped into the sea. As the lights went out the men around him changed, they turned predatory or just behaved badly, blurring the line between man and beast. The chawl resembled a pigsty in the morning. There was no room in it for nicety, and barely enough space for intimacy.

Later, after dinner had been ingested and the television serials were winding down, the age-old Chawl Symphony began nearby. He would first hear the rustle and then imagine the quiet moves. Family after family retreated into a common room, a six-by-eight-foot intimate space in which people took turns. The lucky ones had their lovers tonight and a private space, but the lonely ones like Takia Khan the pillow hugger and Chadder Master the restless sheet spoiler were denied; they listened to those who made out and just fucked the bed. It was quick and it was furtive. The tumescent chokras bit their lips and read Savita Bhabhi. She kept her porn columns simple; she knew that syndromes couldn’t hide under the sheets.

Should I wake her up like I used to? wondered Karan. Snuggling up to Nandini was a signal they both knew. Not this time. He felt deflated and the moment passed.

The next day brought strange tidings. A boy who did odd jobs for them had taken to crime and submitted himself to a warlord a few weeks ago. He had now gone missing and his mother showed up at their door pleading for help. “Do something!” Nandini shouted at Karan. “You are a policeman!”

“I’m not that type of cop,” he said, feeling helpless. What could he possibly do? “Wrong department,” he added by way of explanation.

What they needed was a fixer, someone like that Tiwari, the bête noir of his boss Ranvir Pratap.