Free Delhi Noir by Hirsh Sawhney Page A

the long park road; a couple sitting on a nearby bench rose and made for the far gate where the 212 goes by.
    When the coast was clear Cobra got up and vanished into the forest, Mongoose trailing after. I stayed put. I knew there was no way out of the park except at the far end or back in my direction. They were gone ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I was getting restless when they reappeared and took the road to the far gate, strolling side by side as before.
    I went to their bench and sat a moment to see what they saw. Rising out of the bushes opposite was one of those curly-wurly ocher buildings from Mughal days, a hunting lodge maybe. I sauntered into the forest and entered the ruin from behind to find two rooms; the roof of one had fallen in and the floor was grassed over. In the inner room hung a musky odor that told its own tale. A stair led up from the outer room but the way up was barred by an iron door; a heavy padlock hung from the hasp. I picked up the biggest stone I could find, lifted it with both hands, and brought it crashing down on the lock. The lock gave and hung there broken jawed; I unhooked it and threw it into the bushes downhill. (Any crook can remove a government padlock and replace it with his own, a nice rusty old job, and people will walk on by thinking: official.) Upstairs I found an empty chamber with a pillared balcony: nothing but fallen birds’ nests on the floor. On the way back down I noticed a loose slab at the landing and lifted it. Underneath lay a yellow cement sack neatly folded in half. I took it back into the chamber and looked inside. There were four lengths of fabric in there, three colored and one white. They were not new but clean, some printed, one embroidered; together they seemed a strange valueless hoard. It was only when I unfolded one that I realized what it was: a woman’s dupatta.
    I went straight back down to the Bee.
    “Wife’s going to be angry,” the ice-cream wala forecast.
    “What?” As I drove off I realized he meant I’d forgotten the babul leaves.
    I headed over the hill past the Hindu Rao Hospital along the 212 route, cursing the Blue Liners as I flew; sharing the same prey, buses and autos are natural enemies. I hung a left at the chaiwala by the cell phone tower, then hard left again, and cut the engine, rolling to a halt right where the silk cotton tree that overhangs our whole neighborhood is anchored. Just short of home.
    I hadn’t come to trouble the wife. I was there to call on a man dead five hundred years.
    He stood nine feet tall, my ancestor, going by the grave. Called the Grave of the Nine-Foot Saint, always freshly painted green, it sticks out two feet into the main road, the remaining seven closing off the sidewalk. Huge blood-orange flowers flop down on it in summer, followed by a delicate rain of cotton that whitens the precinct like snow. It’s an island of peace for a military man.
    He was a military baba, my ancestor, the man whose name I bear. Baba Ganoush. Baba G., my wife calls me for short, or just Baba, though I don’t really qualify. Babas were either plain holy or soldierly holy, and I’m neither. My military baba had no secret weapon: He was the weapon. He moved the army. He had a retinue of 786. Baskets of purple eggplants and potted marigolds moved before him in the field; caged songbirds and urns of rose water came behind. The night before a pitched battle, his linked light-boys dressed up as houris and oiled their bodies and did calisthenics for the host. Before the phalanx of warriors he drew a box in the dust with his ring finger and danced a victory dance that spun every watching soldier into heaven.
    I stood by the grave and felt my shirttail begin to lift and billow. His spirit clad me, sliding over my skin like a lover’s hand. The air grew red and I was racked with pain and filled with heretical notions. Blood is our element, I remember thinking, not water. We swim in it from one life to the next, passing like a wet