and exit gates. CCTV cameras with their pointy noses snuffle around us. Hi-fi people go past boom barriers in their sleek cars and jeeps. Special Golden Gate stickers are stuck on their windshields so the watchmen can tell easily that they belong inside.
“How could anyone have smuggled Bahadur and Aanchal and Runu-Didi through all this?” Pari asks. “They would have made some noise.”
“If Varun had a car, he could have hidden them inside,” Faiz says. “They aren’t looking at the backseats”—he gestures at the watchmen—“if you live here, they know your face, they let you in. But how can Varun have a car?”
He can’t. He only has a bicycle. Does this mean Runu-Didi isn’t here?
Papa and others are still talking to the watchmen, their voices and hands rising up into the air. One of the watchmen says this tamasha has been going on for too long, we’re calling the police.
“Call them,” Aanchal’s papa says. “You think we care?”
The sound of a siren forces us to turn around. For once, the police are everywhere today.
There’s just enough space between the people in the crowd for me to see a policeman’s shoes clack-clacking on the side road. The shoes are brown, not black like those of the constables, so this policeman is an inspector. A man standing on the balcony of a first-floor flat takes a video of us with his mobile phone.
The police inspector talks to the watchmen, then turns to us and says he has called the owner of the penthouse flat where Varun worked. “The owner isn’t here right now, but we are checking everything, I assure you,” he says. “But please, remember, these are all top people who live here. Let’s keep the noise down to a minimum.”
We wait, again. Pari finds out from someone that a penthouse flat means the topmost flat.
Keep my daughter safe, Ma prays next to me. She repeats the prayer nine times as she has been doing all day.
I look up. I imagine Runu-Didi flinging open a balcony window from the highest flat and jumping, all of us running to catch her before her head hits the ground.
Another police van arrives. Constables stroll around, leisurely, as if they are taking a walk in a park.
“What happened to that Varun fellow? His wife?” Pari stops one of them and asks.
“Lock-up,” the constable answers. “They will never see the sky again.”
“Who wants to see this sky?” his friend says and laughs. “It’s full of poison. They are better off in jail, not breathing this air.”
The crowd at Golden Gate gets bigger. I don’t know where the people are coming from, if it’s from our basti or elsewhere.
The watchmen let in a silver car that’s as big as a jeep, but it stops just inside the gates. Pari, Faiz and I shove and make our way toward the barriers so that we can see what’s happening. Ma, Pari’s ma and Wajid-Bhai come with us.
A woman dressed in a white-and-gold salwar-kameez, silky black hair falling down her shoulders, wearing sandals with heels as long as pencils, steps out. In her left hand she clutches a black bag, and in her right a mobile phone. The inspector is allowed in to talk to her. I can’t see the woman’s face clearly. She waves her hands toward us, the basti-crowd, and keeps making and taking calls on her mobile.
It gets darker. The inspector finishes his conversation with the woman and comes out. Her car-jeep disappears behind the walls. A watchman offers the inspector a plastic chair, and the inspector stands on it as if it’s a podium. Constables hold the chair’s arms and back steady.
“The madam is horrified and saddened to hear of the tragedy that has unfolded in your slum settlement,” the inspector says. “She’s a very important person, a friend of our police commissioner.” The inspector touches the upward-curving edges of his thick mustache with his thumb and index finger spread out. The chair wobbles, the constables grasp it tighter. “Such an upright citizen would have had nothing to do with the disappearances. However, as a courtesy to me, madam will take me to her flat, which she tells me, she bought only recently, for investment purposes. Madam doesn’t stay here often because she has several properties. Madam’s mistake was to hire the criminal who is currently in our custody. Please understand, his family has been working for madam’s family for three generations. They’re from the same native place. When madam was looking for a