The transport scam was fiendish in its simplicity. The state government systematically downgraded and shut down viable and profitable government bus routes only to grant licenses to private operators who ran those very same routes at considerably higher cost to the commuter. At first these private operators appeared to be competitors, but on inspection, eight out of ten were Wadia proxies, while the other two were run by extended family members of Ram Singh.
She skipped through, put it down. Picked it up again. Skipped through. There was a section of history, how Bunty Wadia had risen from a lowly grain merchant in Meerut. How he’d given Ram Singh his first boost in politics. How he’d shifted into daru production with the help of his elder brother, Vikram. How Vikram “Vicky” Wadia had become an enforcer in Maharajganj, Eastern UP, then an MLA. Her eye caught something familiar.
“The Kushinagar incident?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “that one took a lot of figuring out. In the end I got it from the horse’s mouth.”
“The horse?”
“Vicky Wadia. He filled in a lot of the gaps.”
“He spoke to you?”
“Where he comes from, this article is just good PR.”
She read the paragraph slowly.
“Did he really do this?”
“I think so. The only ones who really know are the ones who were there. I asked the ex-DM of the district if it was true. I told him what Vicky told me. He said, ‘If Vicky says it, then it’s true.’ In the end it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s whether people believe it. And they believe it. They believe that he’s a kind of God-man out there, that he does a powerful black magic.”
“He burned someone alive in the vegetable market?”
A young man was caught stealing a housewife’s gold chain, running through the market with it to escape. Vicky had been wandering through with his entourage. He saw the thief coming. Plucked him right into the air, so it was said. Flung him senseless to the ground. Took the gold chain back. Poured kerosene over him. Lit a match. The whole market watched it happen, the man screaming, running into the tomato stand.
“Go ahead, read his quote.”
She read Vicky’s words from the page. “?‘He was a thief, and thieves were plaguing the district at this time, and someone had to stand up for the people, someone had to make thieves understand there are consequences to their crime.’ End quote. Jesus.”
“He got voted into office later that year. They have another name for him, out there. Himmatgiri.”
She threw it down, she wanted to change the subject. “I’m exhausted just reading it.”
“Imagine how I feel.”
Imagine how Sunny feels.
* * *
—
The weight of these men, the violence of their lives. It had been on top of her for days, weeks, months. For as long as she could remember, for what now seemed like years, years and years, hundreds of kilometers of black road. The money she had consumed, the wine, the whisky, the blacked-out cars, the black sole of Bunty Wadia’s shoe, pushing Sunny deeper into the pool.
“These men,” Dean was saying, “are heroes to the people from whom they steal, whose very lives they destroy.”
She felt the foot.
She saw his face.
* * *
—
“Is there anything,” she asked, “about Delhi?”
Dean laughed. His laugh was the laughter of the defeated, the man at the end of his rope, with nothing to lose, the man with whom the gods have done their business.
“Sure there is. Turn to the second-to-last page.”
She watched him closely as she felt for the pages. Did he know?
She braced herself.
But there was nothing about demolitions and resettlement colonies or land grabs.
It was about Sunny.
“Read it out loud,” he said.
She cleared her throat: “Bunty Wadia invests in none of the typical signifiers of brand building. There are no sponsorship deals, no billboards, no interviews, no public events; no public profile at all. He is not so much building a brand as a silent, invisible web. Yet like so many so-called great men, his weakness appears to be his son. The yearning for dynasty blindsides such men to the clear and obvious flaws that come with nature’s imperfect replication.” She looked up at him. She carried on reading, but this time in her head. On he went, speechifying, writing on the neoliberal global order, the deafening clamor to transform Delhi. Then he came to the point. He had in his possession a copy of a proposal prepared by Sunny Wadia and an MIT graduate he had hired for the transformation of the Yamuna Riverfront from derelict, slum-ridden wasteland to “World-Class Business and Leisure Destination.” It painted that same Utopian picture she had seen and of which she’d heard, of promenades, marinas, biodiversity parks, cultural centers, boating lakes, and boardwalks. It boasted computer-generated images of clean and happy families, their skin lightly toned, enjoying the blue skies and clean waters of a Yamuna “denuded of its very essence, it’s very nature.” Dean tore it apart. “The plans, according to those in the know, have been ridiculed. They are seen as both politically unfeasible and environmentally unsound. As one unnamed official commented, ‘the Yamuna is an unchannelized Himalayan river, sitting on a floodplain, subject to monsoon pressures and at the mercy of nature’s whims. To imagine otherwise is fantasy and folly of a gross nature.’?”
Enough. She’d had enough. She flipped the stack of pages over, shook her head, gripped her beer.
“See,” he said. “I told you Sunny Wadia was a joker.”
5.
On Valentine’s Day of all days, an unknown number called her phone.
She recognized Sunny’s voice right away.
“Neda,” he said.
It sounded so distant, so pained.
She waited for him to speak, but he only breathed heavily on the line. Not the heaviness of threat, but of oblivion, self-destruction. She was at home in the kitchen making chai. She took the call out in the front yard. The parakeets were flitting, there was a chill in the air. It caught you hard if you stood in the shadows; she moved to the sun.
“What?”
“I need help.”
She shook her head. Tears gathered in her eyes. “I can’t help you.”
“I can’t do it anymore.”
He sounded desperate.
“You can’t do what?”
“You know what.”
She blinked and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I thought you were going to fix this?”
“I can’t.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Where are you?”
“Goa.”
“Why?”
“I can’t do it anymore. I need help.”
“OK. Calm down.”
“Fly down.”
“Sunny . . .”
“Fly down today. I need to see you. I need to speak to you. Face-to-face.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone. Just come. Just come and I swear I’ll never ask you anything again.”
“Sunny.”
“What?”
“Honestly? This sounds like a trap.”
“It’s not.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“Book a ticket. Send the details to this phone. Ajay will meet you at the airport. Please, just come. Come now and I’ll never bother you again.”
* * *
—