2: Parchhaiyan

Nikhil had been in Lucknow for eighteen hours, and the city had already made its first impression — which was that it intended to give nothing away easily.

He had been awake at five-thirty, which made him four minutes ahead of them.

He had made notes until midnight the previous night — not new notes, but the practice of rewriting what he already knew in his own hand, on fresh paper, because the physical act of writing forced a different kind of attention than reading. By the time he stopped, he had three pages of handwriting in a narrow spiral notebook and a considered understanding of what the existing file amounted to: seven years of extremely competent investigation producing a negative result so consistent it had begun to look like its own kind of evidence.

He ate breakfast in the quarters — the constable posted to assist him had arranged for a tiffin from somewhere nearby, two rotis and dal, which was adequate — and by eight-fifteen he was dressed in civilian clothes and walking across the compound toward the station.

The Civil Lines station had a separate records room at the back, next to the duty officer's cabin, and it was here that the three officers Nikhil had requested were waiting for him when he arrived. They had been summoned the previous evening with enough notice to produce a mild institutional anxiety — the kind that results not from guilt but from the universal law that no police officer, summoned to explain a past failure to a new senior, feels entirely comfortable doing so.

They sat in a row on the wooden bench against the wall, the way officers sit when they are not sure whether to treat the meeting as a debrief or a dressing-down.

Nikhil sat across from them on a chair, notepad open on his knee, pen in hand. No recorder. He had found, in his years working investigations in MP, that a recorder in the room changed the quality of speech — made men more careful.

"Tiwari ji," he began, keeping his voice level and without preamble, "aap teen saal iss case mein the. Mujhe sab se pehle yeh jaanna hai — aapne kabhi seedha evidence rakha Rao Saheb ke khilaf? Kuch bhi? Ek bhi cheez jo uski taraf directly point kare?"

"Seedha — nahi." He said it without embarrassment, which Nikhil noted as a point in his favour. A man who admits cleanly has usually thought about why. "Jitna bhi mila, woh network ka tha. Route ka tha. Dealers ka tha. Rao Saheb tak pahuunchne ki koshish ki toh aisa laga jaise koi cheez pehle se alert ho jaati thi. Hum pohonchne se pehle jagah khali mil jaati thi."

"Leak tha andar?"

Tiwari made a noncommittal gesture. Not denial — acknowledgment of complexity. "Ho sakta hai. Ya phir Rao Saheb ka intelligence itna strong tha ki unhe leak ki zaroorat hi nahi padti thi. Dono mein se kuch bhi possible hai."

"Chehra?" Nikhil asked. "Kisi ne kabhi dekha?"

"Yahi problem hai." This was Mahesh Pandey, the older inspector, who had the manner of a man who has said this particular thing many times and still finds it remarkable each time he says it. "Kisi ne nahi dekha. Main seriously bol raha hoon, Rathod ji. Hum ne paanchon saalo mein — do investigations mein — ek bhi witness nahi dhundha jisne Rao Saheb ka chehra dekha ho. Har baar ya toh disguise tha, ya koi aur baat kar raha tha unki taraf se, ya woh khud tha hi nahi — bas unka hukum tha."

Nikhil wrote something. Said nothing further about it.

"Figure?" he asked instead. "Height, build — kuch toh hoga."

"Woh bhi mix-up hai." Bipin Yadav, the constable, spoke for the first time — the youngest of the three, he had the nervous precision of someone who has prepared what he wants to say and is delivering it carefully. "Sir, jitne logon se baat hui, utne alag-alag descriptions mile. Koi kehta tha lambi figure. Koi kehta tha medium. Ek dealer jo pakda gaya tha — uske assistant ne bola ki Rao Saheb ki aawaz moti hai. Doosre ne bola patli. Koi taalmel nahi tha. Jaise — jaise har koi alag insaan ke baare mein baat kar raha ho."

"Ya ek insaan ke baare mein jo har jagah alag dikhta ho."

Bipin nodded carefully. "Haan, sir. Woh bhi ho sakta hai."

Nikhil looked at his notes. At the names, at the routes, at the careful absence at the center of everything. Then he looked up at Tiwari again.

"Koi dealer pakda gaya tha — apke time mein? Interrogation mein kuch nikla?"

Devendra Tiwari looked at the floor, then at Nikhil. When he spoke, his voice had lost its official flatness and become something more like the voice of a man describing something he was there for.

"Ek baar. Mere time mein. Ek courier pakda gaya tha Aliganj ke paas. Young ladka tha — bees ke aaspaas. Chota dealer, hum samjhe the ki woh bolega. Woh inka lower chain ka banda tha, shayad directly Rao Saheb se connected nahi tha. Par hum ne socha kuch toh nikalta."

He stopped.

"Kya hua?" Nikhil asked.

"Interrogation room mein le gaye. Woh ekdum shant baitha raha. Bilkul nahi ghabra raha tha. Main sooch raha tha yeh darr ki wajah se chup hain. Par woh —" Tiwari paused again, and this time the pause was the kind that precedes the delivery of something that still, years later, does not sit comfortably in the mind. "Usne kuch chabaya. Seed ki tarah kuch — daat ke beech chhupa ke rakha tha. Cyanide tha. Poora plan tha. Interrogation start hone se pehle hi woh ja chuka tha."

The records room was very quiet.

"Pocket mein ek chit mili." Tiwari's voice was now entirely flat, the flatness of something pressed under weight. "Likha tha uspe —"

"Kya?" Nikhil asked, though he had read about this in the file. He wanted to hear it said aloud. There was something about a spoken thing that a file could not reproduce.

Tiwari recited it from memory, which meant it had stayed with him: "Marna qubool hai lekin Rao Saheb ka sach batana nahi."

He sat with it for a moment. Then: "Ek banda. Itna loyal. Ki jaan de di."

"Woh banda akela nahi tha." Pandey said it quietly. "Iss case mein jo bhi kuch jaanta tha — ya toh bolna nahi chahta tha ya fhir bol hi nahi sakta tha." He meant two different things with the two halves of the sentence, and everyone in the room understood the distinction.

Nikhil closed his notepad. He thanked the three officers, which he did briefly and without ceremony because anything more elaborate would have felt false.

He sat alone in the records room for ten minutes after they left.

He was on the road by ten.

The constable assigned to him for fieldwork was a young man named Shyam Lal, twenty-four, originally from a village near Unnao, who had been in Lucknow three years and had the efficient, quietly alert quality of someone who pays attention without being told to. He drove. Nikhil sat in the passenger seat with the window down, the October sun warm but manageable, watching the city.

He had planned his day as a set of concentric circles. Start with neighborhoods closest to the confirmed supply routes. Talk to shopkeepers, chaiwallas, autorickshaw drivers, anyone who spent their days in public space with their eyes open. Work outward. Take what came. Most of it would be fragments, assumption, noise — he knew this going in. But occasionally something useful swam up from the noise if you listened for long enough without forcing the direction.

At a paan shop near one of the older markets, a man of perhaps fifty said he'd heard Rao Saheb had a house in the city somewhere, lived like a normal person. Didn't know which part of the city. Didn't know anyone who had been there. Had heard it from someone who'd heard it from someone else.

At a tea stall near the old bus stand, a young man said Rao Saheb drove a white SUV. He was certain of this. Another man standing nearby said, no, he'd heard it was always public transport, never a personal vehicle. The two men began disagreeing with each other before Nikhil could finish his chai.

An autorickshaw driver told him Rao Saheb had a thick beard and wore a skull cap. He described this with absolute confidence. Nikhil noted it alongside the other descriptions in his notebook, which now contained a figure of varying height, varying build, a beard, no beard, a scar, no scar, glasses, no glasses — a man who was, compositionally, everyone and therefore no one.

He did not press. He asked, listened, wrote down what was offered, thanked the person, moved on. Shyam Lal waited by the car each time with the patient, watchful manner of someone who understood the rhythm of this kind of work.

"Rao Saheb ne hamare mohalle mein ek aurat ke ghar ka kiraya diya tha jab uska mard chhod ke chala gaya. Koi nahi jaanta kahan se paisa aaya, par aaya."

"Mere bhaanje ko — woh nasha karta tha, bahut bura — kuch logon ne aake samjhaya tha. Kehte the Rao Saheb ka message tha. Ladka theek ho gaya."

Nikhil wrote it all down without expression.

A old woman was sitting outside on a low wooden chowki, sorting dried lentils into a steel bowl with the methodical attention of someone for whom this task requires no thought and therefore leaves the mind entirely free.

"Tum naye ho," she said. Not a question.

"Haan."

"Kahan se?"

"Madhya Pradesh."

She sorted three more lentils. "Rao Saheb ko dhundhne aaye ho."

"Haan."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, still looking at the steel bowl, she said what she said with the absolute unhurried certainty of someone stating a law of nature rather than an opinion:

"Beta, Rao Saheb toh bhagwan hai."

Nikhil waited.

She looked up at him then, directly, with eyes that were still, somehow, sharp.

"Lekin uske darbar mein jaoge toh wapas zinda nahi aaoge."

She went back to her lentils.

Nikhil stood on the lane for a moment. The afternoon sun was overhead, throwing almost no shadow. Somewhere nearby a child was calling out to another child in the particular uninhibited volume of children at play who have no idea anyone is listening.

He walked back to where Shyam Lal was standing with the car.

His jaw was set. He didn't speak for a moment, opening the car door and standing with one hand on the roof, looking at the narrow lane.

Seven officers. A dead dealer with a chit in his pocket. A ghost no one could describe consistently. A city that considered the ghost a divine provision.

He got in the car.

"Aage chalo," he told Shyam Lal.

"Kahan, sir?"

Nikhil looked at the city outside the window.

"Kahin bhi. Bas chalo."

It came from the chai shop's owner, a man in his thirties named Gopal, who had been cautiously forthcoming throughout the conversation and had, Nikhil suspected, a working relationship with at least one of the area's various informal networks.

As Nikhil was setting down his empty chai glass and preparing to leave, Gopal said it, in the offhand manner of a man mentioning something he himself does not quite know what to make of:

"Ek baat aur hai. Likh lena ya mat likhna — aap ka kaam hai."

Nikhil settled back. "Kya?"

"Kuch log kehte hain —" Gopal paused, looking briefly at the street as though checking whether the street had any objections. "Rao Saheb ki aawaz — jo log baar baar suni hai, ya jo dealers ne suni hai, kabhi kabhi poori baat sunte hain kabhi nahi — woh log kehte hain ki —"

He stopped again.

"Kya?" Nikhil repeated, and this time there was something in the patience of the question that invited Gopal to simply say it.

"Rao Saheb ki aawaz aurat jaisi hai."

Nikhil looked at Gopal for a moment.

He almost smiled. Caught it. Composed himself.

"Aawaz aurat jaisi hai." He repeated it back, not as a question, but with the careful neutrality of someone who is being scrupulously professional about not laughing.

"Yahi suna hai," Gopal said, with the mild defensiveness of a man who knows how this sounds. "Main nahi keh raha. Log kehte hain."

"Kaun log?"

"Jo dealer the. Jo pakde nahi gaye. Jo baar baar Rao Saheb se deal karte hain. Kuch ne kaha — clear aawaz, command karne wali, bilkul darne wali nahi. Par —" He shrugged. "Aadmi ki aawaz nahi lagti."

"Toh aap kya sochte ho?"

Gopal made the universal gesture of a man declining to have an opinion. "Main sochta hoon — agar Rao Saheb itna chalak hai, toh aawaz bhi badal sakta hai. Ya phir koi aurat baat karti hai unki taraf se. Ya phir —" Another shrug. "Pata nahi."

Nikhil paid for the chai. He thanked Gopal. He walked out into the lane.

He stood there for a moment in the afternoon crowd, hands in his pockets, the notebook against his side.

He was a trained investigator. He had spent six years doing this work seriously. He had interviewed hundreds of people, followed dozens of leads, built cases from threads so thin they were almost invisible. He knew the taxonomy of bad information — rumour, projection, confusion, deliberate misdirection — and he knew that in an investigation starved of solid evidence, people's minds filled the void with whatever narratives made sense to them, including narratives that made no sense to anyone else.

He thought about the artist's sketches in the file. The mustachioed man. The sharp-faced man. The third sketch that looked like a Bollywood villain. He thought about seven years of investigation, three teams, seventy-three pages of evidence pointing at an absence.

He thought about it for about four seconds.

Then he filed it under the same category as the white SUV, the skull cap, the thick beard, and the varying heights — the vast territory of things people say about what they cannot see — and walked back to the car.

The thought did not return to him for the rest of the afternoon. He would not remember, later, that it had occurred at all.

The day was deepening by the time the work Ananya had arranged with quiet, unhurried efficiency over the previous forty eight hours finally moved.

Three separate routes for the Chinhat consignment. Each with a fallback. Timing staggered so that if one movement drew attention, the others were already clear. She had couriers who did not know each other, who did not know what they were carrying in full, who did not know the name of the person whose instructions they followed.

The drugs had been added to the network three years ago, not because she had sought that expansion but because she had recognized that refusing it entirely would leave a vacuum that would be filled by people with none of her constraints.

The arms were the most recent and the most dangerous — not morally, she had made her peace with the complexity of that a long time ago, but operationally. Weapons drew a different quality of attention than alcohol or even drugs. Weapons made the police and the intelligence services nervous in a way that affected their behaviour, made them less predictable, more willing to act without the usual calculations of cost and benefit.

She sat behind her desk and the desk held the evidence of everything — the papers, the maps marked in her own private notation, the crinkled notes, the ash, the half-drunk glasses — and she moved through it all with the steady attention of someone who has always been the only person in the room she fully trusted to manage everything.

The day moved through transactions the way rivers move through channels — the water does not think about the banks, the banks do not obstruct the water, and the whole thing proceeds with a naturalness that obscures entirely how much engineering went into its construction.

Between transactions she sat alone. Smoked with the window cracked an inch, watching the courtyard below where the late afternoon light fell at an angle across the old brick walls. Drank her tea when it was brought, ate when food appeared, did not particularly notice either.

On the desk beside the papers, her phone accumulated messages — coded, brief, in the language of transactions that meant one thing to anyone else and something precise to her. She answered them with the same economy. A number. A time. A single word. Nothing more than was necessary.

The empire, the bigger it grew, the more it needed her attention. And the more it needed her attention, the less margin she had for error.

She lit another cigarette as the evening came down over the city, turning the sky outside the cracked window the particular shade of orange-grey that Lucknow in October produced with a consistency she had grown up watching, and which she did not think about as beautiful but which was, simply, the colour of evening from this window, the colour of this room at this hour, the colour of the life she had built in the space she had been given and the space she had taken.

The phone buzzed. Another name she knew.

She answered.

"Sab set hai?"

"Rao Saheb — ek naya officer hai. Aaj sehre mein tha. Sawaal kar raha tha."

"Haan." She drew on the cigarette. "Main jaanti hoon."

A pause from the other end, in which the unasked question hung.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***