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After two years, a new girl enters the scene.
Neda.
Weeks pass and this becomes the new routine. Sunny’s mood cools and hardens. He shows no emotion, but he begins to entrust Ajay with new tasks, and Ajay must trust no one else. He must take the car out, make sure he’s not being followed, then he must scope out various cheap, grubby, two-star hotels in the city, the names of which Ajay is given on sheets of paper. He must check their security, their privacy, their anonymity, and report back. Each hotel is given a code name, A, B, C, D, E, F. When they talk of them, they are not to use their real names.
For assignations.
One Sunday Sunny receives a phone call that causes him alarm. He pulls Ajay aside and tells him to drive out to the Greater Noida office immediately. Be discreet. Make it seem like you’re going somewhere else. But go right now and keep watch on the office from the road. Watch out for Neda. “Keep her safe,” Sunny says. “I mean it. Keep her safe. Don’t let anything happen to her.”
Something does happen. He waits on the service road a short way from the office building. It’s just off the main expressway, in a desolate part of the satellite city outside Delhi, all farmland and construction. He sits hours, watching for her, then he spots her car, driving back toward Delhi in the dark.
He keeps his distance, driving at a steady pace a few hundred meters behind. Neda’s car crosses into Delhi at the Kalindi Kunj Bridge, heading into Okhla.
See p. 295.
The distance he has kept means he doesn’t see the accident. He only sees the two cars smashed and at rest on different sides of a wide, deserted junction in an industrial area. He only sees two men surrounding Neda’s car, banging on the bonnet and the windows, shouting inside, and another man pulling a cricket bat from the other car. He doesn’t stop to think it through. He accelerates until he’s almost on them, his headlights blinding the two men. Then he runs out and he attacks. Attacks with all the violence that’s been coiled inside him. It’s over in a few seconds. He doesn’t even remember
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Ajay calls Sunny and Sunny directs him to deliver Neda to Hotel D. She is angry, suffering from shock. When Sunny opens the door, she hits him. He drags her inside and sends Ajay away. She spends several hours in there, while Ajay returns to the crash site to take Neda’s car for repairs. After he has dropped the car at a mechanic, he returns to Hotel D and waits. When he’s finally called to take her back home, she is drunk and subdued and terribly sad, but her anger is gone. He keeps watching her in the rearview mirror. After this incident, Ajay begins to ha...
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Her father was awake, sitting in lamplight in the living room in his favorite armchair, patched up many times over the years, watching a DVD. He looked over the top of his reading glasses. “Cinderella . . .”
He said nothing about her clothing, her bare feet.
“What are you watchin...
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“Apur Sa...
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The last film in the "Apu" trilogy.
On-screen, a grieving Apu wandered the coalfields of central India, scattering his novel to the winds.
About fifteen kilometers along she realized there was a vehicle behind her at some distance. It had its full-beam headlights on. Maybe half a kilometer away.
This was Ajay tailing her. See p. 75.
the car was spinning wildly and her head was smashed against the frame of her door.
The "accident".
She did what he asked. She unlocked the door and opened it, and he took her by the arm and eased her out, and she leaned into him as he guided her to the SUV.
End of this narrative.
The narrative was clear: Bunty Wadia was the biggest player in the state of UP.
“These men,” Dean was saying, “are heroes to the people from whom they steal, whose very lives they destroy.”
