She leaned forward. “So do cardiologists.”
Her mind flicked to the Churi Wallah , the knife-man who had been terrorizing the trans-Yamuna area. But the Churi Wallah took rings. This hand still wore a heavy gold signet ring. So, not a robbery.
The widow’s eyes flickered to a framed photo on the wall: Dr. Mehta shaking hands with a local politician, a man named Rana, whose real estate empire had swallowed half of South Delhi’s green belts.
The bag was a blue Nike duffel, the kind sold on every footpath from Karol Bagh to Lajpat Nagar. Inside, wrapped in a torn Dawn newspaper, was a man’s left hand. The fingers were long, soft. A pianist, maybe. Or a pickpocket.
Anjali visited the widow, a brittle woman in a white sari who offered her chai and said, “He was a good man. He gave free check-ups to the poor.”
“Don’t touch it,” Anjali said to the trembling constable. She crouched. The cut was clean—a surgical saw, not a butcher’s knife. That meant planning. In Delhi, chaos was amateur. Precision was professional.
She closed the diary, hid it under the loose floorboard, and went to sleep to the sound of stray dogs fighting over a bone in the alley.