Free Delhi Noir by Hirsh Sawhney

were standard, I assumed, but the bulge in the back pocket could have been either a cell phone or a knife. I had never seen a man wear three shirts before, four if you counted the tee. True, it was winter and the outermost, a florist’s dream of canna lilies, was zippered.
    I was already moving toward him through the horde of students. I must confess I didn’t stop to thank the boy, nor did he seem keen to stick around. I’m not a big sweet-potato fan myself but the other item on the menu was a salad of yellow star fruit, sour to frizzling insanity, and I stood six inches from the sidey and ate it without turning a hair. Right then a Mal-lika bombshell went by and I groaned and staggered theatrically and caught Sidey’s eye. He winked at me and grinned and I left it at that.
    It wasn’t till the next day that I saw the bouncer. I arrived there early and had to wait. I’d dropped off the schoolies and gotten rid of the little bench so I sat in the back of the Bee in the Deepika corner and smoked. Tobacco first, then a sweet cigarette. Back in the ’90s I’d taken to sucking on them whenever I felt tempted and now I had two habits (three if you count stopping by the flat to trouble the wife when a fare brought me within stroking distance). Same red-and-white Phantom pack from childhood, little smooth white sugar sticks with a red dot on the end. Some days if you suck hard enough the red dot actually glows.
    A cobra—that was my first thought when the villain ap-peared. I swear I expected all the cool university chicks to go into a frenzy of squawking the way forest birds do when a snake appears. But they stalked on by in their hiphug Pepe jeans with their video cell phones gripped tighter than their textbooks, and the cobra watched them pass with a bland insouciance only Sidey, stationed at the sweet potato stand, could rightly read.
    He wasn’t in a safari suit (I felt a little vindicated in mine) but in white drill pants pressed to a knife’s edge, elastic boots, and a black balloon jacket that gave him a slightly unmoored look. Or maybe that was his natural walk, weaving a little, like a wrestler, not a drunk. Sidey fell into step beside him and the two of them walked up University Road without bothering to take in the scenery. I had expected to watch them ogling, but instead I found myself tailing them in the Bee, hanging a good way back. What surprised me more than their disinterest in the girls was Sidey’s face. You expect a planet to light up when the sun appears, but Sidey’s face fell into a total eclipse. His eyes took a haunted half-shadow and even the cap looked crestfallen.
    I parked the Bee at the Flagstaff Road barrier, told the ice-cream wala the wife needed a branch of babul leaves, and trailed them uphill. At the top they took Magazine Road and I waited at Flagstaff House pretending to watch the monkeys. The road, once simply a path, follows the crest of the Ridge through the man-made jungle, low dusty thorn trees with twisted gray trunks and a canopy like mustard gas. On either side, beyond the park benches and half hidden by the brush, are power substations and water tanks and gardeners’ tool-sheds like bunkers. Also ruins from Muslim times, tombs and such. Built with a prospect on what would have been a barren ridge, they now huddle blindly in the jungle, peculiarly func-tionless unless to conceal a walker caught short by nature. Turds and worse await the unwary foot.
    Cobra and Mongoose sat down on a bench and looked about them. A gardener had set a hose with a ratchet spring to green the grass by the caged bougainvillea and was standing back to inspect the spray as it ticked around in a wide circle. Satisfied, he drifted off to join his fellow workers for a smoke by the garden gate at the far end of the park. Cobra and Mongoose watched him go, then idly observed the itinerant spray. Idly I imagined the eye of the hose coming around to fix them with a stare. Stray walkers came and went along