Episode 11: Five to Eleven

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

The shops on Civil Lines Road started pulling their shutters down by nine-thirty. The loudspeaker had said nothing about shops, but there was no point staying open when the whole town was heading to the curb. Even the cobbler near the bus stand, who had nothing to do with Modi Tiles and told everyone so twice a week, folded up his stool and carried it to a doorstep with a better view.

By ten the road looked like a fair that hadn’t quite started. Three deep on both sides, four near the sweet shop. Children on fathers’ shoulders. The tea stall at the corner doing its best business of the month. Two constables stood near the crossing with their hands behind their backs, men given a location and no further instruction.

Mama-ji had his spot. Front row, just past the warehouse wall, one foot on the curb and both elbows on the railing someone had dragged from the temple courtyard. He waved Gopina over with the pride of a man holding ringside seats at a wrestling match.

“Come, come. I have been here since eight. Baba Ramji came at nine and I told him first come, first come.”

“Baba Ramji is eighty,” Gopina said.

“Eighty and fast. You don’t know that man.”

Sushma arrived at ten-forty in the pressed sari and positioned herself beside Gopina with the care of someone choosing their angle for a photograph nobody was going to take.

“Twenty minutes,” she said, checking her phone.

“Twenty minutes in this sun,” Rashika said. “We could have come at ten-fifty.”

“And stood behind Deepika Khosla? I don’t think so.”

Mama-ji leaned over to Gopina. “Baba Ramji wanted this exact railing. His face when he saw I was already standing here.” He kissed his fingers.

“That man wrestled one match in 1987,” Sushma said. “He has been dining out on it for thirty-nine years.”

“Thirty-eight,” mama-ji said.

“My point stands.”

The sun climbed. The shadows under the shuttered shops shrank toward the walls. A boy sold water pouches from a bucket, calling his price at a volume that suggested the convoy was competing with him.

An old man near mama-ji, thin shirt, hands behind his back, muttered something Gopina caught only in pieces.

“—not two weeks that boy is dead and they hand out water coolers to schoolchildren—”

The woman beside him touched his arm. “That’s enough.”

He went quiet. The water-pouch boy kept calling. Nobody turned. One sentence, come and gone like a scrap of newspaper blown across the road and stepped on.

“My feet are done,” Rashika said.

“Your feet are fine,” Sushma said. “Think about Deepika’s ankles.”

The minutes stretched. A dog wandered into the middle of the road, sat down, and was chased off by a constable who had finally found something to do.

Sushma checked her phone again.

“Five to.”

“Five minutes,” Gopina said.

Sushma adjusted her sari. Gopina raised the camera.