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The city is shrouded in fog. Days of winter gray, grounding flights at the airport and leaving trains stranded on tracks hashtagged over burned, stubbled fields. Nighttime traffic in the city becomes a jittery crawl, yellow headlamps and blinking hazard lights creeping in slow motion along empty avenues. After days have passed, maybe even years, Bibi thinks, the fog lifts. The queues begin.
Men, women, the elderly proceed in zombie shuffle along separate lines to get new currency in return for the old, discontinued banknotes. Handwritten signs flap in front of ATM machines. “Out of Order,” some of them say. Others, simply: “NO CASH.” Bibi, who has not stood in line to turn in her expired money and who does not possess the new magenta banknotes, the ones with images of the piloted Mars Mission on the back, uses her credit card to buy groceries and milk from the DLF Promenade mall. Then, because she doesn’t have cash for an auto-rickshaw, she walks back to her flat in Munirka Village, past the endless walls of the university, her backpack heavy with supplies.
The queuing ends, the surgical strikes begin. Special forces make raids across the border, targeting jihadi camps deep inside Pakistan. On the primetime television show, The National Interest, the glossy-haired news anchor asks experts whether beheading enemy soldiers is a suitable riposte to the martyred torso found along the Line of Control. The anchor is wearing a western suit, and his face takes up half the screen. A couple of Pakistani politicians—stereotypical, bearded maulvi faces—are among the seven guests squeezed into the other half, men and women sitting in remote studios who look utterly bored until they start shouting. As #BrahmAstra crawls in fluorescent orange across the bottom of the screen, the anchor’s voice rises in pitch. “We are going to finish you off. You are done,” he screams at the Pakistani guests. They try to respond, but the microphone cuts them off. The volume is turned up on the voice of the anchor as he rants, the ticker now flashing in glorious, multicolored fury—#SuperWeapon #NuclearOption #FinalSolution—as India unites behind him against jihadis, against foreigners, against anti-nationals.
Eventually, for reasons as mysterious and opaque as those that started off the chain of events, the surgical strikes end. The killings by the cow vigilantes begin. Muslims suspected of transporting cattle to slaughterhouses are pulled out of trucks. They are beaten to death with iron rods and metal pipes while the cows look on, bony haunches caked in their own shit, bovine eyes glazed with horror.
A Muslim migrant worker is set on fire by a local man while his cousin films the death and uploads it on to social media. An eight-year-old girl is raped and murdered, a teenager is raped and murdered, women are raped and murdered. They are raped and murdered inside police stations, on buses, on trains, in taxis, in temples, in forests, in fields, in huts, in hotels, in ashrams and in offices.
An anonymous number shows up on Bibi’s WhatsApp and sends her a series of messages. “I want . . .” “I will . . .” “You are . . .” She blocks the number. The profile picture is a mask, made up of the trimmed white beard, gold-rimmed Gucci glasses and holes for eyes popularized in an election campaign many years ago. It could be anybody.
Throughout these turbulent months, Bibi sleeps. The end of the year comes and goes, the new year begins, and still she sleeps. She sleeps like a fairytale princess with a spell upon her. She sleeps like everything—the fog, the money queues, the killings—has happened many times before and will happen many times again, an unending cycle of the present, a loop to be broken only by some apocalyptic rupture.
An elongated figure standing upright at the tiller of a boat surfaces in her dreams. Without a face, without eyes, it somehow still observes her. Around the boat, the tops of buildings raise their heads above rushing water, trees sprouting from their faded cladding, creepers tangled around wires and satellite dishes.
Bibi cannot understand what the boatman wants. She is as useless in these dreams of hers as she is during her waking hours, unable to respond to the demands that shadow her, helpless in the face of an unending stasis. She ignores the deadlines piling up at work. She has done nothing about the task urged upon her by the farmhouse people. She is unresponsive to her mother’s needs and pays no attention to her flatmate, Moi, who is caught up in her own fantasies of a perfect husband and emigration to the west.
All Bibi does is sleep and dream, especially enjoying the ones where strange, unknown lovers propose to her, even if the relationships always end before she can luxuriate in a single one’s embrace. Sometimes, there are children in her dreams, as if she has jumped all the possible queues of partner, pregnancy, or adoption and has abruptly become a mother. When she wakes up, she can recall two children a few years apart, a boy and a girl, their cheeks chubby with baby fat, clinging to their tiny cricket bats with desperate intensity as they wait for Bibi in the dreary corridor of a government office.
In these encounters, Bibi is never in Delhi, city of demonetization and brume. Sometimes, she moves through places she does not know, does not recognize, where a balcony opens out to a glittering sea. There are dreams where she walks down tunnels and the tunnels lead into corridors and she is forever opening doors to small rooms heavy with grief. In others, she is saying heart-rending goodbyes to her shadowy beloved in what looks like her lost hometown, Shillong. The streets are lush with pines and firs, the stone walls thick with moss, the air heavy with the smell of tea and pungent kwai, kerosene and regret. Lightning flashes above the hills, and the umbrellas and raincoats make it impossible to kiss the beloved properly one last time. Bibi can never finish bundling the children up, is still adjusting the mufflers around their necks when she wakes up and knows that she is not in Shillong and that she has never had that other life.
In the streets and the parks of her lost hometown, she is always late for a rendezvous with her beloved and it is always raining.
1
Not that long ago, on the Monday after Diwali, Bibi finds herself running late for work. It is November. Winter fog, troubling situations, and disorienting dreams are yet to come as she skips breakfast, rushing helter-skelter along the alleyways of Munirka. Buildings jostle around her like men at a queue, leering at the tiny courtyards edged with refuse. Dark, intestinally tangled electrical lines loom overhead. The stores that are open are small, mean, and dimly lit, the eyes of a young Jat shopkeeper blank as they follow the clothes spinning endlessly in the washing machines set up in his tiny laundry.
The magenta line of the Delhi Metro is down for undisclosed reasons, and so she must take an auto-rickshaw to the Hauz Khas station and then the yellow line to Rajiv Chowk. Already, there is a text from S.S., her boss, sitting on her phone. Where u at? Need to talk ASAP. Bibi keeps going, tall even without heels on, tall even though she has a tendency to stoop. A half-built wall materializes where there was a short cut just the day before. Hastily, she backtracks. A test subject in a labyrinth, a rat in a maze.
When she emerges from the village into the messy sprawl of businesses that is Rama Market, it is hard to spot an auto-rickshaw. The air around her is yellow, an uncanny haze dense and heavy with the smoke of Diwali firecrackers, brick kilns, steel furnaces, power plants, carbon-fueled automobiles, and distant fields that have been burned to clear land for a winter crop that will still not save the farmers from destitution. She finds an auto, its dashboard festooned with plastic Hanuman stickers, sitting exactly in the middle to avoid the cold drafts attacking down both flanks.
“Hauz Khas?” she asks.
The driver shakes his head. “Too much traffic.”
His face projects indifference and exhaustion in equal measure as he bargains, asking her if she’s willing to take the auto farther, up to the Dilli Haat stop on the yellow line. She has no choice but to agree.
The names of the roads around her evoke the twentieth-century ruins of nonalignment, of Third Worldism, of Bandung, as the auto adds its emissions to the yellow haze. Behind her sprawls Jawaharlal Nehru University or JNU, a dying bastion of leftism wrapped in the embrace of Nelson Mandela Marg and Aruna Asaf Ali Marg. In front of her stretches Olof Palme Marg and then, as they turn left, Africa Avenue. Children with bloodshot eyes cluster around her auto as it stops at the traffic signal near Bhikaji Cama Place, an agglomeration of hideous concrete buildings named after the woman who, at the Second Communist International, raised a new flag, designed for a future nation called India.
The auto takes forever, crawling past endless, unpainted, unnamed flyovers that add to the claustrophobia, bullied by hulking SUVs with tinted windows and yellow license plates all the way to the metro station. There are more traffic lights, more emaciated, glue-sniffing children holding up glossy magazines encased in transparent plastic sleeves. On their covers, Bibi sees faces replicating themselves like viruses. Men in suits and men in saffron robes. The occasional woman, light-skinned, power dressing, leaning in. Men with Gucci glasses and men with knotted ties. Men with rudraksha beads and men with dead eyes. It is only when Bibi is underground, waiting for the northbound train on the yellow line, that she finally feels that she has some air.
