You see this English signature? This is S. Tilottama. She is a lady who comes here and goes. I have seen her for many years. Sometimes she comes in the day. Sometimes she comes in the late night or in the early morning. She is always alone. She has no schedule. She has this very good handwriting. She is also a very good lady.
These are the Latur earthquake victims whose cash compensation has been eaten up by corrupt collectors and tehsildars. Out of three crore rupees only three lakh rupees reached the people, 3 percent. The rest was eaten by cockroach people on the way. They have been sitting here since 1999. Can you read Hindi? You can see what they have written, Bharat mein gadhey, giddh aur sooar raj kartein hain. It means India is ruled by donkeys, vultures and pigs.
This is the second assassination attempt on me. Last year on 8th April, Honda City DL 8C X 4850, drove onto me. That same car you see in the advertisement there on the toilet except that my car was maroon, not silver. Driven by an American agent. On 17th July, Hindustan Times city section, HT City reported it. My right leg was fractured in three places. Even now it’s hard for me to walk. I have to limp. People joke and say that I should marry Phoolbatti so that we have one healthy left leg and one healthy right leg for two of us. I laugh with them even though I don’t find it funny. But it is important to laugh sometimes. I am against the institution of marriage. It was invented to subjugate women. I was married one time. My wife eloped with my brother. They call my son their son now. He calls me Uncle. I never see them. After they eloped I came here.
Sometimes I cross the road and fast on the other side, with the Bhopalis. But it’s much hotter there.
Do you know what this place is, this Jantar Mantar? In the old days it was a sun-dial. It was built by some Maharaja, I have forgotten his name, in the year 1724. Foreigners still come to see it with tour guides. They walk past us but they don’t see us, sitting here on the side of the road, fighting for a better world in this Democracy Zoo. Foreigners only see what they want to see. Earlier it was snake charmers and sadhus, now it is the superpower things, the Bazaar Raj. We sit here like caged animals, and the government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying. They send their journalists to us. We tell our stories. For a while that lightens our burden. This is how they control us. Everywhere else in the city there is Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code.
See this new toilet they have built? For us, they say. Separate for ladies and gents. We have to pay to go inside. When we see ourselves in those big mirrors, we get afraid.
DECLARATION
I do hereby declare that all the information given herein above are true to the best of my knowledge and no material has been concealed therefrom.
FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT on the pavement Dr. Azad Bhartiya had seen that far from being alone, the baby that had disappeared had three mothers on the pavement that night, all three stitched together by threads of light.
The police, who knew that he knew everything that happened at Jantar Mantar, descended on him to question him. They slapped him around a little—not seriously, just from habit. But all he would say was:
Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein
Keh gayee sayyaad se
Apni sunehri gaand mein
Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar
She died in her cage, the little bird,
These words she left for her captor—
Please take the spring harvest
And shove it up your gilded arse
The police kicked him over (as a matter of routine) and confiscated all the copies of his News & Views as well as his Jaycees Sari Palace bag and all the papers in it.
Once they left, Dr. Azad Bhartiya didn’t lose a moment. He immediately set to work, starting the laborious process of documentation from scratch.
Though they didn’t have a suspect (the name and address of S. Tilottama, publisher of Dr. Azad Bhartiya’s News & Views, jumped out at them at a later stage), the police registered a case under Section 361 (Kidnapping from Lawful Guardianship), Section 362 (Abducting, Compelling, Forcing or Deceitfully Inducing a Person from a Place), Section 365 (Wrongful Confinement), Section 366A (a Crime Committed against a Minor Girl Who Has Not Attained Eighteen Years of Age), Section 367 (Kidnapping in Order to Cause Grievous Hurt, Place in Slavery or Subject the Kidnapped Person to Unnatural Lust), Section 369 (Kidnapping a Child under Ten Years of Age in Order to Steal from Them).
The offenses were cognizable, bailable and trialable by Magistrates of the First Class. The punishment was imprisonment for not more than seven years.
They had already registered one thousand one hundred and forty-six similar cases in the city that year. And it was only May.
5
THE SLOW-GOOSE CHASE
A horse’s hooves echoed on an empty street.
Payal the thin day-mare clop-clipped through a part of the city she oughtn’t to be in.
On her back, astride a red cloth saddle edged with gold tassels, two riders: Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful. In a part of the city they oughtn’t to be in. No signs said so, because everything was a sign that any fool could read: the silence, the width of the roads, the height of the trees, the unpeopled pavements, the clipped hedges, the low white bungalows in which the Rulers lived. Even the yellow light that poured from the tall street lights looked encashable—columns of liquid gold.
Saddam Hussain put on his sunglasses. Ishrat said it looked silly to wear goggles at night.
“You call this night?” Saddam asked. He explained that he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses in order to look good. He said the glare from the lights hurt his eyes and that he’d tell her the story of his eyes later.
Payal pinned her ears back and twitched her hide even though there weren’t any flies around. She sensed her transgression. But she liked this part of the city. There was air to breathe. She could have galloped, if they’d let her. But they wouldn’t.
They were on a slow-goose chase, she and her riders. Their mission was to follow an autorickshaw and its passengers.
They kept their distance from it as it sputtered like a lost child around vast roundabouts landscaped with sculptures, fountains and flower beds, and down avenues that spiked off them, each lined with different kinds of trees—Tamarind, Jamun, Neem, Pakad, Arjun.
“Look, they even have gardens for their cars,” Ishrat said as they circled a roundabout.
Saddam laughed, delighted, into the night.
“They have cars for their dogs and gardens for their cars,” he said.
A cavalcade of black Mercedes with tinted, bulletproof windows appeared as if from nowhere and scorched past them like a serpent.
Past the Garden City the chasees and chasers approached a bumpy flyover. (Bumpy for vehicles, that is, not horses.) The row of lights running down the middle looked like mechanical cherubs’ wings mounted on long poles. The rickshaw chugged uphill, then dipped down and disappeared from view. To keep up, Payal broke into a gentle, happy trot. A slim unicorn inspecting the cherub brigade.