But by four, when in an abrupt jolting movement, the sky began to lighten, it became clear that we would see nothing. At five the screen, which I had thought was black and white, filled with
colour – the green of the garden and trees, the pink of the house, the red of the drive. At six the guards, their faces still sodden with sleep, did their first rounds.
‘Can you believe it?’ Robin said. ‘Now they’re starting their rounds!’
The disappointment of what the cameras had not seen caused the net of suspicion to widen. The guards had deliberately not patrolled that night; Amit had been the mastermind;
Kalyan and Santosh were promised a share; the safe had been thrown over the boundary wall to Dinesh, who had possibly buried it on the neighbouring property; since in all likelihood the robbery of
the safe had occurred before the robbery of the laptops, Dheeraj, as Kalyan’s brother-in-law, might also have been involved.
The other element in the equation to turn variable was the actual value of what was stolen. My mother, every few hours, was remembering a new piece of jewellery that had been in the safe. And
with every addition, for instance a set of champagne pearls with an uncut diamond – a present from Amit Sethia – the loss swelled by lakhs.
Her pain at what had been lost became keener when she considered that the great part of her jewellery’s value lay in the people who had made it, jewellers such as Bulgari and Cartier. But
this aspect of their value had no importance in India and would have meant nothing to the people who stole it. In fact it was fair to say that only a handful of jewellers in the entire country were
capable of assessing the jewellery’s value in these terms. And it was not to these places that the thieves would go. Where they would go, the jewellery would be broken up like scrap metal
into gold and precious stones and sold piecemeal. And in this form, now with irony spread evenly among victims and culprits, it was not really worth much. My mother could not manage a smile at the
philosophical implications of this: the special pain of losing the things into which we breathe hidden value; and India, ever prepared to cut down to size anyone clinging to alien refinements. No,
she was pissed off and full of bitter sadness.
That night Kalyan’s family, having made the twelve-hour bus journey from Pauri Garhwal only twenty-four hours before, were sent home. My stepfather felt that if Kalyan
was to be arrested it was better his family were not there. The thought of their arrival, full of expectation at seeing their father and the big city, set now against this tainted departure, was
heartbreaking. I had to stop myself from thinking of their disappointment and fear on that same Uttarakhand Roadways bus, heavy with
the smell of diesel, coiling its way back through unlit mountain roads to the place from where it came. I felt an irrational anger at my stepfather and mother for exposing
me to this image. I knew very well that Kalyan’s guilt would not be enough to erase it. This was not the kind of impression that could be reasoned away. A strange thought, like a lament for
the man I had been in another place, entered my mind. I thought, if India was the sort of country where college essays were written about such things, Kalyan’s son might grow up to write one
about this visit to the capital. A Day in Town. The Night Bus. The Arrest. He would have all the material he needed. And where would I be in such an essay? A small player in the background, a
figure of fun perhaps, denied even the dignity of a villain. A sharper eye, darkly humorous, might want to treat the question of my borrowed literary aspirations and their fraudulence, when seen
against the backdrop on which they operated. One might wonder what fine sensibilities could remain in a man overseeing a week-long thrashing of at least a few innocent men, hardly older than
himself?
Day three. My mother had arrived in Delhi. The gardeners and sweepers had returned to Steeple Hall and the first thrashings had begun. The police wanted to start with Santosh
and work their way to Kalyan, picking up likely accomplices along the way.
On the Thursday evening after the robbery, when the sky had darkened with a dust storm, and British cities were full of police raids, I sat at the desk in my basement study. But for the pool of
protective light from the banker lamp, the room was drowned in silvery obscurity. It brought a hush, making the rest of the house seem far away. Despite the silence, it was some moments before I
became aware of Robin hovering in the doorway. He held a sheet of paper in his hands and his dimly visible face, as though reflecting the mood of the storm, was filled with expectation.
‘Do you have a second, Rehan?’
‘Yes,’ I said, leaning back in my chair. Robin approached; the gloom retreated. He laid the sheet of paper in the pool of light on my desk. It was an Airtel record of calls and text
messages made and received. Some numbers had a tick against them in black.
‘Whose phone is this?’
‘Amit’s,’ Robin replied. The ex-manager. He had been dismissed at the beginning of the month. He was a small fleshy man with unhealthy skin and hooded eyes. I recalled his sly,
deferential manner.
‘And what are these ticked numbers?’
‘Kalyan’s.’
I looked up at Robin, trying to gauge his meaning. Why would it be so strange for Kalyan, the cook, to call Amit, the manager?
‘Look at the date of the calls,’ Robin said after a moment’s pause. ‘June the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth. These calls were made after Amit was dismissed. They
were not friends. What business did Kalyan have calling Amit repeatedly after he was sacked?’
The truth be told, Robin’s suspicions made a weak impression. But he looked so furtive and the room so suggestive that I did not want to disappoint. I tried to appear as grave as I could
and trailed my eye down the list of numbers. One of them, also from mid-June, showed a call of nearly fifteen minutes. 9958661273.
‘What’s this one?’
‘I don’t know.’
The suspense was growing cold when Robin said, ‘Dial it.’
‘What?’
‘Dial it. It might be saved on your phone.’
Kinky, I thought, but why not!
I punched in the number. At first the numerals remained numerals, but just as the call connected, they morphed into a blinking name. Dheeraj! I flashed it past Robin’s eyes and pressed
disconnect. For a moment, Robin’s face, illuminated by the white light of the phone, gleamed with intrigue.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘come with me to the police station.’
To witness the importance of Chawalla’s main road to its village economy was to have an idea of what the river would have meant to earlier settlements. All its single-storey structures with
their dusty shutters and unpainted flanks were ranged along it. The petrol pump. The temple. The chemists, chai shops and mechanics. Beyond this facsimile of every Indian village was the
peach-coloured mansion, ornamented with religious symbols and reflective glass, of Shokeen, the estate agent turned politician. There was the British School, promising Cambridge-affiliated degrees
and English. There was the Reliance mobile-phone shop, a sanctuary of glass and cool amid the choking traffic and diesel fumes. And on both sides, only metres past this hardscrabble stretch,
clinging to the road for sustenance, were dung-filled streets with reposing buffaloes, leading directly into open fields.
On the way to the police station we passed more Shokeen land. Only months before, Robin said, he had attended the estate agent’s daughter’s two-crore wedding. The man, who had become
a millionaire overnight from selling land to people wishing to move out of Delhi, had flown in performers from Bombay. They had arrived in a giant egg, whose shell had opened to reveal a revolving
dance floor.
Just beyond, Chawalla police station was a complex of chalky pink buildings and khaki tents under the shade of a large neem tree. At the entrance there was a small open area crowded with
motorbikes. Narrow mud paths lined with stunted Ashok trees led past rooms marked, ‘Wireless room’, ‘Interrogation room’, ‘Loot Room’ and little sandwich-size
snippets of grass edged with a border of upturned bricks. Surinder Sharma, now out of uniform and in two shades of brown, greeted us at the gate.
‘Welcome to my poor house,’ he said, revealing his capped teeth. He led us toward the SHO’s office past a khaki tent under whose scalloped hem I could make out two bare feet on
the mud floor, stretched widely apart. The legs, bare too, were covered in sparse kinky hair. And though I was no longer the man I had been on Friday, not nearly so squeamish, not indeed afraid to
lay plots of my own, I felt something of the horror of a child soldier, when Surinder Sharma pointed to the tent with his stick, and jumping his eyebrows, said, ‘Santosh.’
‘What are you having him do?’
‘Oh, nothing, just stand with his legs apart. It creates,’ he added, lightly trailing his fingers along the inside of his thighs, ‘a burning sensation in the legs.’
‘How many hours?’
‘Six,’ he replied uncertainly.
‘Any results?’
‘No, Rehan saab, this is nothing for a hardened criminal like him.’ And seeing he had stirred something in me, he added, ‘We still have many methods left. There’s the
chicken-walk, hanging from the wrists, the petrol finger . . .’
‘The petrol finger?’
‘Dip the finger in petrol and up the ass. It burns like hell. But we only use it in extreme cases.’
As he spoke, I suddenly became nervous that Santosh could hear me. And unnerved by the kind of revenge a man, especially a potentially innocent one, might later want to exact for listening in on
men discussing the torments they still had in store for him, even as he endured some mild, late-afternoon torture, I hastened on.
The SHO’s office was a dim room containing a large desk with a surface of brown glass. It was cluttered with softening grey files, coloured glass paperweights, bottles of diluter and
Tipp-Ex and a yellow plastic pen holder. On one tube-lit wall, there hung a white board divided into columns of henious (
sic
) and non-henious (
sic
) crime. Just above kidnepping
(
sic
) was house theft. The police claimed to have solved six of the fourteen crimes reported. Better odds, I must confess, than I had banked on.
‘That six hopefully will become seven,’ Vijay Singh said with a grin, as we sat down before him. He was also in plain clothes. His phone rang constantly; an elderly constable,
standing by his desk, was appealing to him for more leave than he was due, wishing both to attend his father’s memorial and his nephew’s wedding. Vijay Singh was firmly telling him he
couldn’t take that much leave while trying to listen to Surinder Sharma brief him on the plan for investigating our robbery.
‘Systematic, systematic,’ he said, feigning interest in our case, ‘everything should be systematic.’ He gave orders for Santosh’s house to be searched; he approved
Surinder Sharma’s plan to publish descriptions of the stolen goods in all the precinct’s jewellery shops.
‘Perhaps a description of the safe too,’ Sharma suggested.
‘Perhaps,’ Vijay Singh confirmed. ‘Was it a Godrej safe?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘About this big?’ he said, shaping its dimensions exactly with his hands.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He smiled at the impression he made, then closed in on a new phrase: ‘But don’t delay, don’t delay. Must be no delay.’
It was at this point that Robin revealed what he had discovered about Dheeraj.
‘Bring him in for remand immediately,’ Vijay Singh said. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘He’s not here. He’s on holiday.’
‘When is he back?’
‘Sunday,’ I said. And having only just witnessed the departure of Dheeraj’s sister, nephew and nieces twenty-four hours after their arrival in Delhi, I now advised that Dheeraj,
newly married, twenty-two just the other day, and returning to Delhi after that same long journey from the hills, with his new bride in tow, be brought in for remand on arrival.
‘We can do it the next day,’ the policemen said, surprised at my urgency.
‘No,’ I replied coolly, ‘I think we should do it that night itself. It’s important that a surprise element work in our favour.’
Vijay Singh, with his special feeling for this manner of phrase, was impressed. ‘Surprise element,’ he repeated, relishing the sound of the words in his own mouth, ‘surprise
element. Yes, let’s do it!’
A moment later his phone rang again, and becoming engaged in a lengthy conversation, he mouthed goodbye. When we left, the constable was still there, mournfully deciding between life and
death.
Outside the police station a rural dusk was setting in. The small urban life of Chawalla was enveloped by immense and sudden night, carrying in its fall the smell of fields and returning cattle.
The thunder and headlights of trucks down the thin stretch of road deepened the isolation. And once again it was possible to think of the road as river, but dark and solemn now, no longer a link,
leaving Chawalla to its nowhereness.
We waited for a tube-lit chai/food/photostat shop to make a copy of Amit’s Airtel record with its incriminating phone calls to our staff. A steady stream of out-of-uniform policemen went
in and out. Surinder Sharma, feeling perhaps that he ought to treat me to a story from police life, began to tell me of the capture of the chain snatcher of Chawalla, beginning at the end.
‘I’d received information about his whereabouts with great difficulty,’ Sharma said, ‘because he changed his location a lot. We arrived late at night at the building
where he allegedly was. And very quietly we put police ladders against the walls and climbed up to the second-floor window. The first thing I see as I enter through the window is women sleeping. And
I think, ‘Shit, we’re dead. We’ve been given the wrong information. Yet I continued, past the sleeping women, into the next room. And there they were, the men, asleep in chairs,
absolutely talli. There was a table between them full of ashtrays and half-drunk bottles of liquor. On one side of the room was a mattress where the chain snatcher was passed out, a homemade gun
under his pillow. Rehan saab, I’ll say one thing about the man. The minute we nabbed him he confessed everything, and in such detail, that we knew it immediately to be the truth.’