Eleven Feet
Two strangers saw the car. Both of them reported it.
Delhi, 26 August 1978. At dusk on a Saturday, a brother and sister are taken off the road into a stolen yellow Fiat. Inside fifteen minutes, two strangers see the struggle. One phones the police with the number off the back of the car. One goes after it on a scooter, loses it at a red light, and is told he has come to the wrong police station.
The children are killed that night.
Everybody knows how this ends. The two men who did it were hanged at Tihar Jail on the last morning of January 1982. This is the story of the three years and five months in between, told by one of them. A man who confessed, and a month later took it back.
It is the story of a city that watched, a police force that followed its rules, and two soldiers on a night train who asked a stranger for his identity card. It puts you eleven feet from the other one, and leaves you there.
- FormatsKindle ebook · Paperback · Hardcover
- Length40 chapters · 254 pages
- GenreFiction / Crime
- PublisherPartners Insights
A novel built on the record. The dates, the places, the evidence and the courts are as they were. What is invented is the inside of a man.About the book
Excerpt
TIHAR JAIL, NEW DELHI · 31 JANUARY 1982, 06:00
Since four o'clock there has been a generator running behind D block and it is not running right.
The note drops every fourth or fifth turn. It goes down, and it comes back up, and a little later it goes down again. It is not the load. Nothing is on at this hour except the lights on the wall, and the lights do not change. It is water. It is water got into the fuel.
It is not a hard fault. It is a four-minute fault, if there is a spanner.
Past the generator there is a wall, and eleven feet on the other side of the wall there is Kuljeet Singh Ranga.
He is awake. There is nothing in that cell to sit on, so a man sits against the gate of it, and the gate is iron in an iron frame and it is not tight. When he is asleep it says nothing all night, and when he is awake it says one small thing about every ten minutes. A man cannot keep still longer than that, even if he wants to.
I know him the way you know a lorry that goes past your house at the same time every night. Three years is a long time to listen to a man who will not talk.