She looked at the big digital clock on the wall. It was nearly ten o’clock, way past the time her shift finished. She killed her screen, said goodbye to Varma, and left the building.
The orange glow-tubes of the street-vendors illuminated the rain-slicked street. A constant procession of traffic surged back and forth, horns blaring in a mindless concerto of futility. Rana walked briskly through the humid night. She was still energised from concentrating on the case, and she knew that sleep would be a long time coming.
She hadn’t seen the kids down at the Howrah bridge for over a month—what better way to empty her mind of the day’s events than to chat with Vandita and her friends over a chai?
She took a cab to the Ganges, paid the driver and crossed the pavement to the railings overlooking the broad sweep of the water. The tide was out, revealing a slick expanse of mud-flats. Stick-thin figures in dhotis and vests waded up to their knees in the estuarine silt, poking about with long poles for who knew what. From beneath the arching span of the Howrah bridge, Rana heard the echo of children’s voices and laughter, and she was reminded of the spirit of community and camaraderie she had missed for so long.
Of all the children she had worked with over the years, in every part of the city, she had an affinity with the Howrah bridge kids most of all. There were many reasons for this: the self-help and co-operative scheme she had set up here a couple of years ago was still running successfully; the twelve-year-old Brahmin girl who organised the children, Vandita, reminded her so much of herself; and once she too had made her home between the steel pillars on the bridge’s northern bank. Now the kids would be gathering there after a hard day’s work, pooling their money, sending out for daal bhat and chai, gathering around the fire for a few hours of chatter before one by one they fell asleep.
Rana moved to the bridge and peered into the shadows. A flickering fire illuminated a circle of brown faces and bright eyes.
Vandita saw her and leapt to her feet. “Rana-ji!” she cried. “Where have you been?”
Rana felt a stab of guilt. “I’ve been promoted, Vandita. I didn’t want the job, but I couldn’t refuse.”
Soon they were milling around her. They touched her uniform and the polished butt of her pistol protruding from beneath her jacket, as if it were some kind of talisman or good luck charm. Vandita took her hand and dragged her into the makeshift home beneath the bridge. They had laid boards on stones clear of the mud, covered the wooden slats with scraps of carpet and cloth, and had even found mattresses and old charpoys to sleep on. The three enclosing sides, two steel pillars and the brick wall, were hung with garish pix of Hindu gods, Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh, alongside holodrama stars and skyball players. They even had a big, battered tea pot bubbling on a brazier.
Rana removed her boots and sat down on a mattress, her back against a pillar.
“Chai, Rana?” Vandita asked.
A chipped mug was pressed into her hand, full of sickly sweet, spiced chai. She looked around the beaming faces. “I’m sorry I haven’t called for such a long time,” she said in Hindi. “Any problems?”
“The people who clean the bridge want us to move,” Vandita reported. “We said we’d move out until the bridge is cleaned, and then move back in. But they’re not happy with this. They want us to go for good. They say we dirty the bridge, but this isn’t true.”
“Have you told Private Khosla?” Rana asked. “He’ll talk to the authorities and come to some arrangement.”
Vandita avoided her gaze. The other children looked unhappy.
“What? You have seen Khosla, haven’t you?”
“He came once only,” Vandita said, jogging her head from side to side. “He told us that the money for our cleaning equipment—the subsidy you gave us—is to be cut. Now we get twenty rupees per month only, instead of fifty.”
“But he can’t do that!” Rana looked around the staring faces, feeling guilty herself for Khosla’s duplicity. “I’ll talk to him immediately, Vandita.”
A young boy in soiled shorts and a small vest said, “When the officer came down, he had his nose in the air. We invited him in for chai’—he put his thumb to his lips in the gesture for drinking—‘but he wouldn’t join us. The look on his face said that we smelled. He’s like all the other cops.” He looked away from Rana’s gaze.
She pulled a fifty-rupee note from her pocket and passed it to Vandita. “For food,” she said. “I’ll talk to Khosla and get your money restored, ah-cha?”
Khosla was doing what officers had done for years before him: appropriating funds meant for elsewhere. If he was taking over fifty per cent of all the money spent on schemes meant to help the street-kids across the city, then he would be earning more than his actual wages. Khosla had probably assumed that she would cease her association with the kids as soon as she was promoted; no doubt he could not conceive of why anyone might seek their company. She would quietly tell him that she knew what he was doing, and that if it didn’t stop she would inform his superiors.
“But you, Rana!” a young girl called Priti asked. “Tell us about all your adventures!”
“How many murderers have you caught? Tell us!”
So she made up stories of car chases and shoot-outs, evil gang-lords and robbers, rather than disillusion them with the truth, that ninety-nine per cent of police work was boring administration.
She sipped her third cup of chai and listened to their stories. Each child had a tale to tell, exaggerated epics of how they had been chased, robbed, beaten—but she knew that most of these adventures were imaginary. She had told the same tall tales years ago to while away the hours before sleep.
One small boy said, “A holostar outside the Tata studios gave me twenty rupees! But then a drunken yar came and snatched it from me! I yelled and screamed, but where are the cops when you need them?”
The children laughed. They were forever complaining about the police, with justification, and smiling at Rana as they did so. She took as a compliment the fact that they no longer saw her as an officer of the law.
Midnight came and went and the brazier burned low. The children slipped quietly to sleep, the younger ones first, curling up where they lay on scraps of carpet or, if they were lucky, on old mattresses. The older children fought to keep awake, but long hours working on the streets, and the prospect of early starts at dawn, soon had them snoring.
Rana shifted her position on the mattress. She was warm and comfortable, and enjoyed the strange feeling of being safe among people she knew and trusted.
Carefully, so as not to wake the sleeping children, Vandita moved to her side and leaned against her. Rana stroked the matted tangle of the girl’s rosewater-scented hair.
“Are you happy, Vandita?” she whispered.
The girl nodded beneath Rana’s hand. “I have friends, now, Rana. Life is hard, but I have friends.”
“At first it is hard,” Rana said. “Everything is new, and you are never trusted because of what you left behind. They say, ‘How can you want to live like us? How can you turn your back on what you had?’ But they don’t understand that sometimes wealth and privilege can be terrible for the heart. In time things get better—you win their trust and they see you are just like them.”
She looked down at the girl curled by her side, but Vandita was asleep.
Rana stretched comfortably on the mattress and stared out from under the bridge at the silvered expanse of the Ganges, the ripples from the wakes of passing boats slicing the reflection of the full moon into shimmering ribbons.
It seemed such a long time ago now, a lifetime away, but at the age of ten she had been so unhappy. She had attended an expensive school with pupils from all over the world, and in a class of fifteen girls she had not one friend. She supposed it was her fault. She was small and quiet and cripplingly shy; in company she would have to screw her courage up to speak, and then it would come out too quickly, or the timing would be wrong, so that by the time she had thought of something to say the topic of conversation had moved on. She was never bullied, but sometimes she wished she had been, because then someone might have stood up to protect her, and she would have had a friend.
But if school was bad, then her life at home was even worse. She lived in a big house to the west of the city, with a big garden, and she had her own rooms and all the latest toys. She was looked after by an unsmiling nanny, a big woman with rough hands who hurt her when washing her hair or scrubbing her back, and showed her not the slightest sign of affection, or even friendship. She had heard other girls at school talk about how their nannies took them to holodramas and restaurants, but her nanny performed the bare minimum of duties for her weekly wage,
