here,” the junior constable shouts. “All of you, and I mean all of you, go back to your homes.”
The fathers and mothers and children run inside, but a brown goat, dressed in a spotted sweater that makes it look like it’s part leopard, comes out of a house and butts its head against the junior constable’s legs.
“Motherfucker,” he says, and kicks the goat.
I laugh. It comes out more loudly than I wanted it to.
“What are you looking at?” the junior constable asks. “Taking a video of me on your mobile?”
“No phone,” I shout before he can arrest me. I step away from my barrel-shield, slowly, like a hero in a film with a gun pulled on him, and I turn the pockets of my trousers inside out so that he can see all I have is a striker from the school carrom board that I forgot to return.
“Chokra has to do No. 2,” the senior constable tells the junior. “Let him go.”
I grab my school bag and dart around the corner of the house where I had taken shelter, into an alley that’s so narrow only children and goats and dogs can fit inside. It’s safe here even if the ground is coated with goat pellets.
My shoulders brush against the walls. The filth gets on my uniform. Ma is going to be very upset with me today.
I creep closer to the opening, my ears turned up to full volume to catch any whispers, and look outside. The junior constable waves a stick he must have picked up from the ground. “Everyone, inside,” he shouts at the people who are still standing in the alley. “You two, stay,” he tells Bahadur’s ma and Drunkard Laloo.
The senior constable moves closer to them and says something that I can’t hear. Bahadur’s ma twists the gold chain around her neck and tries to unhook its clasp. Drunkard Laloo reaches to help her but Bahadur’s ma pushes him away. She loves her gold chain.
When word got around the basti a few months back that Bahadur’s ma had a gold chain that was twenty-four-carat gold, not fake like the glittery necklaces sold in Bhoot Bazaar, Papa said Bahadur’s ma must have stolen it from her hi-fi madam. But Bahadur’s ma told everyone that her madam had gifted it to her.
Ma said Bahadur’s ma was unlucky in marriage but was lucky in work, and that everyone had something going right and wrong in their lives—their good or bad children, kind or cruel neighbors, or an ache in the bones that a doctor could cure easily or not at all—and this was how you knew the gods at least tried to be fair. Ma told Papa she would rather have a husband who didn’t beat her than a real gold chain. Papa looked a bit taller after that.
Now Bahadur’s ma unhooks the chain, cups it in her palm and extends it toward the senior constable. He leaps backward as if she has asked him to hold fire. She turns to Drunkard Laloo but he starts shivering again. He’s good for nothing. I bet she wishes her boss-lady was with her instead of her husband.
“How can I take a gift from a woman?” the senior constable says. “I can’t do this, no.” His voice is bright like the apples that vendors polish with wax in the mornings.
Bahadur’s ma sucks in air through her clenched teeth, slaps Drunkard Laloo on the wrist, and hands him her gold chain. The senior constable looks around, maybe to make sure no one else is watching. There’s only the junior who’s drawing lines on the ground with his stick, and Buffalo-Baba, and me, but he doesn’t see me.
“Bahadur ki Ma, are you sure?” Drunkard Laloo finally speaks, shaking his curled-up fist with the chain over her head.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s nothing.”
“You two want to argue, you do that inside your house,” the senior tells them. “I’m not here to solve your miya-biwi problems. But what I can do, what I’ll have to do, is arrest you for creating a public nuisance.”
“Forgive us, saab,” Drunkard Laloo says, and hands over the gold chain to the senior constable, who swiftly deposits it in his pocket.
The policemen on Live Crime never take bribes, not even from men. I feel like a bad detective because I didn’t see the wickedness inside the senior constable.
“Your son,” he says now, “give him a couple of weeks. If he doesn’t return by then, let me know.”
“Saab,” Bahadur’s ma