Free Noon by Aatish Taseer

places where a breach might have occurred.
    ‘Crossing could have happened here, Rehan saab,’ he said, ‘and, here.’ He grabbed hold of the rusted supports that propped up rolls of razor-wire on the boundary wall,
and defying the whiteness of his stubble, swung himself easily onto one corner. There, standing among cement dust and embedded shards of glass, he said, ‘And, here, too, a crossing could have
been made.’
    His uniform was of a coarse greenish-brown material with a single star on the epaulettes. He had a hard prominent jaw and a changeable manner, now grim, now crude and mocking. It was as if, by
the sheer robustness of his personality, whether playful or violent, he would ferret out the thief.
    But he wanted first to let me know the challenges of his job. He made a charge through the house sizing up the men he passed; he occasionally fell into a sofa, and from that sprawling posture,
screwing up his eyes like a comic book detective, took in the room. When passing my bedroom, I asked him how a fifty kilogram safe could have gone missing from the adjoining room without my hearing
a sound. ‘The thieves, Rehan saab,’ Jat replied, ‘are very clever; they sometimes pump ammonia into the room. You would have slept the sleep of the dead.’
    We sat down at last in the foyer to wait for the forensics team. The security from the night before, Group Four men, one of Delhi’s best security agencies, stood around. Jat asked them
where they were from. They were heavyset men with local Haryana accents like Jat’s. And when he recognized the village from which they came, his suspicions lifted. ‘They’re family
men,’ he said to me, ‘they wouldn’t have done it.’
    But they were all family men. And the man on whom the security had first laid their suspicion was not just any family man, he was our family man, of almost eight years. At that
stage we had known only of the two missing laptops. And because the security had seen him leave, according to their register, at 9.12 the night before, with a large bag slung over his shoulder, he
became our first suspect.
    ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not Sati,’ my mother had said on the phone, ‘it would be such a shame. I think it must be Kalyan. He’s forever in trouble with money, taking
loans here and there. I think he realized after I told him his family couldn’t stay that he was in danger of losing his job. He has to go.’ She paused and said, ‘Have you checked
to see if anything else is missing, the silver, the safe . . .’
    That was when Kalyan had entered the room, having less than an hour before discovered the missing laptops.
    The tone of the morning had been set by a strange text message from an American friend in Spain. It read: ‘Hope you’re safely back in India now. I think of you
often and I hope that all is well where you are. Beware of complacency, my friend, and work hard. Did you get the recipe for gazpacho?’
    Zack. A friend from college studying abroad. I had been with him in Seville only weeks before, on my way back to India for the summer. It would have been late at night in Spain; I imagined he
would have drunk too much, even though the message was not uncharacteristic. A few minutes later Kalyan had come in with the tea tray and the two almonds, two walnuts and dozen raisins a
nutritionist had advised I eat first thing in the morning. I drank the tea in bed, then went in for a shower. It was not yet six when I rang Kalyan to ask him for a cup of coffee downstairs in my
study.
    The study was new. Till just the other day it had been the Sethia wine cellar. But now for the past month or so, besides two glass-fronted wine refrigerators, the basement room contained a
coffee table, two rattan chairs and a Gustavian writing desk with blue painted legs. On its polished surface lay a brass ashtray, a silver Mac and a desk lamp with a green glass shade.
    The new study was a bad room to work in. The buzz from the wine fridges and