“Yes,” Ajay replies. “He’s a good man.”
“And you’re gonna work there? Lucky kid. Who cares if anyone robbed you.” He hands the card back. “Let’s get going.” He puts his arm round Ajay. “Just don’t forget your friends.”
It’s turning to dusk when they pull into the narrow road full of shiny cars and piles of construction sand and blocks of inscrutable residential buildings hidden behind huge gates. Ajay is hungry and nervous, with bruises and cuts on his face, but his adrenaline soars when he sees these gates, the grandeur of the buildings they shield.
“This is it,” the auto driver says, pointing toward the gate directly in front, where two armed guards stand outside. The building is a solid, dark, impregnable block, five floors high, its smooth, muscular walls obscured by creepers and vines and mirrored glass holding secrets inside.
As he climbs out, the men eye him distastefully, their hands tightening round their rifles.
“What do you want?” one says. “If you’re begging food you can go to the temple.”
“He’s here for a job,” the auto driver shouts. “Someone needs to pay me too.”
“Get lost,” one of the guards says to the auto driver.
“What do you want?” the other says to Ajay.
“I want to see . . .” Ajay’s voice is so quiet they can barely hear.
“What? Speak up.”
“I’m here to see Tinu,” Ajay says in a clearer voice.
The guards laugh. “Tinu-ji? What do you want with Tinu? What does Tinu want with a dog like you?”
Ajay hesitates. Then he reaches into his top pocket. His fingers caress the card. He withdraws it and steps forward and holds it out nervously, as if it might disintegrate. “See,” he says, praying it will work. “Sunny Wadia sent for me.”
* * *
—
A phone call is made, the gates are opened, and he is led by a guard into a driveway packed with pristine cars, through a small side door into this monumental house. Along the brightly lit passage, like a cave, into another corridor and another, turning in a maze, waiting for a service elevator, going down a level, heading along another corridor. He passes dozens of people, kitchens and rooms with beds and offices, sees men and women in uniform.
He asks the guard, “Is this a hotel?” but the guard doesn’t speak.
After several twisting minutes he is delivered to a small, stuffy room, like a cabin in a ship. A squat man of around fifty with a potbelly and a squashed face only a mother could love is reclining on a bed watching TV, wearing a white undershirt and dark pants. He stirs a little, belches inwardly, frowns as the guard salutes and leaves.
“So,” he turns to look at Ajay, “what’s this about?”
“Sir, are you Tinu-ji?”
The man puts on a shirt, combs his hair. He points to a strip of tablets. “Pass me those.”
Ajay passes the tablets.
“Acidity,” the man says, popping one in his mouth, then, “Yes. I’m Tinu.”
Ajay holds out the card. “Sunny Sir sent for me.”
Tinu reaches for a pair of glasses on his side table—with these perched on the end of his nose he looks like a small-town bureaucrat or a senior clerk, yesteryear’s bruiser turned good. He looks between Ajay’s face and the card. “What happened to you?”
“Sir, some men robbed me.”
“You let them rob you. Never mind.” He looks over the card, back and front, feels it between his fingers, and puts it down beside him. “Where did you get this?”
“Sunny Sir gave it.”
“Yes,” Tinu nods. “Where?”
“Manali. Six weeks before.”
“Right,” Tinu says, sounding unimpressed. “And he offered you a job?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
Ajay is thrown by the question. He looks on helplessly. Tinu raises his eyebrows. “I asked a question.”
“Sir, I helped him.”
“You helped him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re a shack boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You helped buy him drugs . . .”
“No, sir.”
“What did you help him with?”
“Errands, sir.”
“Errands . . .” Tinu checks his watch. “It’s late,” he says. “We’d better put you in a room.” He presses a buzzer and a boy not unlike Ajay arrives. “Give him a bed for the night, take him to the kitchen to eat.” He looks at Ajay. “We’ll deal with you in the morning. Go.”
“Sir?” Ajay says, turning to leave.
“What is it now?”
“The card, sir.”
Tinu rolls his eyes but hands it back and Ajay bows a little and is gone.
He is led along another set of corridors and another, down a flight of stairs to a cramped dorm room in the bowels of the building. He is led into one with four bunks, the bottom two already occupied.
“Take one,” the servant says, pointing to the top. “The cupboard is for your things. Where are your things?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Go to the kitchen at the end,” he points vaguely in the direction they’ve come from, “get some food. Then sleep.”
It doesn’t take him long to sleep. He’s seen submarines in the movies. He imagines he’s in one, that they’re sailing under Delhi now. He listens to the clanking of pipes and the muffled noises of the kitchen down the end of the corridor. Some men come and go in the bunks, which have curtains to draw for privacy, like a sleeper bus.
In the morning the room is empty. He sits in the bed with the curtain drawn back, fully dressed, waiting. Another boy comes for him and takes him to the kitchen to eat breakfast, then takes him to a tailor’s cabin in the basement, where he’s fitted for a uniform, then given three white undershirts, three powder-blue shirts, and two pairs of black trousers in his size, one belt and three pairs of socks and a pair of black shoes also in his size. At a small pharmacy window next to the tailor’s he is given soap and shampoo and a toothbrush and some deodorant and nail clippers. He’s told to shower using soap twice a day, to use deodorant, to wash his hands every few hours or after any activity where dirt might get on them, to always wash them before handling food and after he uses the bathroom, and to always keep his fingernails clipped and clean. He carries the clothes and supplies back to his dorm, showers and changes into the clothes, then he is brought up to the second floor in the building, seeing flashes of the outside world for the first time, to an office where one Mr. Dutta, graying and bookish with sprouting ear hair and a light mustache, sits behind a desk crammed with ledgers, smoking a cigarette.
“Who are you?”
“Ajay, sir.”
Mr. Dutta pauses and inspects him closer, putting out his cigarette.
“You’re the boy Sunny sent for?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lucky you,” he says.
Then comes a long list of questions.
“Do you drink liquor?”
“No, sir.”
“Smoke?”
“No.”
“Take drugs?”
“No, sir.”
“Sell drugs?”
“No.”
“But you know what drugs are, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because you’re a shack boy.”
“I worked in a café, sir.”
“Can you drive?”