Free Mumbai Noir by Altaf Tyrewala

once again.
    Doglekar
    The Borivli blast had left Rahim terrified. At the crossing of Seven Bungalows, the images of blown-up bodies tumbling through his mind, he had jumped a signal. So distracted was he that he didn’t even notice when a pandu on a bike started to trail him. It was only when the bike angled its nose sharply across his path that he hit the brakes, and he felt his heart freeze with fear.
    In seconds his license was gone. In minutes he found himself before Doglekar once more. The name on the challan popped up in the system as a suspect in the blasts. And the RTO had spun him around and sent him to the same chowki Rahman and he had already visited five times that year.
    Standing before the raisin-faced SI once more, Rahim didn’t know why but he thought of Ramdulari, and how this time when he returned to the streets with Langdi, she would never turn to look at him ever again. His mind wandering, once again he lost track of where he was. By now he had missed answering two questions shot at him by the SI. And even as he collected his wits, a heavy palm slammed into the side of his face. Bouncing back off the floor, burning with indignation, Rahim didn’t know why, but he slapped Doglekar right back!
    The next thing he knew he was being beaten by a rifle butt, a different bone cracking under the weight of each blow. Growing dizzy with what must have been the loss of blood, he did what any normal person would do. Any normal person who had broken the law. He confessed.
    At first he gesticulated feverishly, trying to tell Doglekar that there were—not one—but two of them, yet Doglekar understood nothing. So Rahim, his mind a blur of red rage and yellow fear, desperately lunged for a notepad and pen on Doglekar’s desk. At which point the SI slammed the blunt edge of the rifle into Rahim’s ribs. Rahim hung by the precipice of the desk’s edge, numb to the hammering, choosing his words one by painful one, pinning them down on the paper, trying to tell Doglekar in the only way he could that he … and his identical twin … drove one rickshaw … by day and by night … only for some extra income … and that they were not terrorists … and that he was sorry … very, very sorry … for breaking the law … they would pay for it … swear to God … but please stop beating him now … or he might die. At that Rahim had slipped off the edge and crumpled to the floor, the pen’s nib puncturing the page.
    The last thing he remembered was Doglekar kicking him in the mouth as he lay smashed and bleeding on the floor. Doglekar had simply said, “Liar.”
    And then Rahim’s broken heart had stopped ticking.
    For a good minute, heaving from the exertion of his workout, Doglekar didn’t realize what had just happened. Then he bent over and checked Rahim’s breathing. There was none. “Bhenchod!” he had muttered, his blood going cold. And then he had lunged for the sheet of “rubbish” the “pimp” had scribbled on, and as he frantically made sense of it his back slowly straightened and a sigh of relief nudged out from between his raspy breaths.
    By Two
    Rahman answered the door. Two policemen stood outside, grimacing at the stench. “Rahim?” they asked. Rahman felt the strong urge to shake his head. He nodded. “Is that your auto?” they asked, pointing at Langdi, half-hanging from the hook of a tow truck. Rahman nodded. “We found a dead body inside,” one of the cops said. To which Rahman nodded again and muttered, “That was Rahman,” and held his hands out to be led away.

CHACHU AT DUSK
    BY A BBAS T YREWALA
Lamington Road
    E very night, as the last train leaves a station that used to be called Victoria Terminus, and the last club closes its cop-smeared doors, nothing melts out into the night. No secret city slowly takes over the darkness, lit by naked bulbs that cast more shadows than light. No creatures of the night, whose silent nods to each other hold more coded information about weight,