I think he may have spotted me. Damn. I duck and take cover behind an Ambassador. A minute passes. What now? Is he looking at me still? I begin counting the minutes, trying to work out the appropriate lag before I can straighten up again, but I’m distracted by a thought that has strangely never occurred to me even once in all my previous visits: what is this godforsaken Amby doing here, parked right opposite the elegant Western Court, a one-time accommodation for Members of Parliament?

Only now do I notice the protruding axle and the missing tyres, the broken windshield and the smooth yet rusted Morris curves. Is this some kind of prank Mr Modi has played, given his dislike for anything Lutyens? It has been six months since his crowning; surely his advisors would’ve informed him of this atrocity overlooking the new Media Centre? “Sir, wo Ambassador ke baare mein…”

Broad shallow steps and their unhurried charm, colonnades redolent of limewash – and then, in the middle of the velvety lawn, this: a hollowed-out Ambassador. But if one thinks about it a little longer – and I’m doing so, crouched and uncomfortable – one would perhaps realise why. You see, all these journalists that I notice milling around here, all these journalists and writers and anchors and panellists and historians who arrive every day to occupy the Western Court steps – like daily wage labourers waiting for their munshi – well, I’ll be honest: they look not much different from this Ambassador. Besides, the familiar Janpath din – with its many tourists being chased by chess and miniature hookah-carrying urchins – is mysteriously absent, held at bay by the check-post boom barrier as it were. Wind whistles eerily in an out of the Amby. The whole scene is a relic. It is a message.

Someone taps my shoulder and I turn around.

“Why are you following me?”

It is the same man, tall and gangly, expansive nose, ruffled hair, two buttons missing from his kurta. I evade my eyes and look down, and notice he is barefoot.

“You find it amusing? Perhaps it tickles you to find me in such a state?”

“N-no”, I stammer.

“It could all have been so different but for you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. No one recalls hurtful sentences separated by tens of articles, spread over months and years – no one – least of all bureaucrats. But your anthology, your ode to me that brought hundreds of such rebukes together – in one piece – well, that – that – is impossible to forget, even by a lowly babu. And this is what has become of me. You, you are-”

His monologue is cut short by a VW Beetle that screeches to a halt a few yards to our right. The tell-tale aroma of Esoterica Penzance wafts towards us making the man scolding me close his eyes and tilt his head. He opens his eyes a second later and runs towards the Beetle. I discover he has a limp.

“Dada!”

“You again?” says Dada, pulling at his pipe. “What is it, this time?”

“A poem”, the man says. “Here”, he rummages through his kurta pocket and brings out a crumpled sheet of paper. “Here, Dada, listen – you’ll love it.” His hands are trembling.

“Not now”, says Dada, “I’m running late. WSJ  folks are here and-”

“Please, Dada. Please. No newspaper wants to publish my writings. I haven’t eaten in days. I need the money. This is perfect for Organiser, perfect! Here: Like a lotus in bloom, through conquered lands of doom, Narendra Modi shines, but the poet forgets his lines, and-”

“Enough”, says Dada.

“I have more”, the man pleads. He searches his other pocket. “Here’s a 500-word piece on why Modi’s development model can work even for Taiwan. Listen to this: It wasn’t easy for a man to pick India up from the ruins of the UPA rule and-”

“Alright”, says Dada, “Give me the poem. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Dada, thank you!” says the man. “You don’t know how-”

“I know”, says Dada steely eyed.

Dada knows. He knows that this country is a land of extremes, a land where opposites cannot co-exist. For 10 years, hundreds of anti-Left writers and opinion-makers were ignored by the mainstream press, they were ridiculed, their voices stifled, their journeys scuttled before they could reach the gates of literature festivals or television studios or op-ed centrespreads. For 10 years they gawked forlornly at the awards and medals they’d been showered with during the last NDA regime, the many books they had published to critical acclaim. For ten years they sat huddled up in an attic rotting while their pro-Left counterparts helped India understand Naxalism, Maoism, Fascism, and Secularism and in the process appropriate fellowships and TV debates and column yards and committee memberships and Davos dinners.

Now the wheel has come full circle. A licked finger knows which way the wind is blowing. The newspapers knew what they had to do if they wanted government advertisements and tender notices. The magazine proprietors knew how they should behave if their next building project was to be allowed scrape the sky. The news channels knew which anchor to keep if they wanted to avoid a CBI and FERA investigation. Those who left their newspapers and their magazines in a fit of bravado and rage, bemoaning totalitarianism through signature campaigns, threatening to write for the British and American newspapers, vowing to leave India never to return, were now the ones who sat on the shallow steps of the Western Court awaiting Dada’s Beetle. The foreign press had dealt them a cruel blow – it had no choice if it wanted access to the lucrative Indian market, a carrot the NDA had dangled recently. A share of the FDI print-pie wasn’t something to be traded away for a handful of pro-Left columnists.

No one went to Siberia; they just went to work, refreshed, renewed. But what of the millions of impressionable minds who knew Tipu only as a fearless warrior not as a tyrant, who thought Aurangzeb was worthy of roads being named after him, who saw Idea-of-India Indologists as the next best thing since sliced bread? Well, just as in 2004 when the UPA had talked of the urgent need for “detoxification” of school textbooks, the NDA now whistled the same tune, except that this time round it was Leftist thinking that had to be detoxified and gotten rid of – from music, cinema, plays, novels, textbooks, from a 10-year old way of life.

The attic doors were kicked open and out popped the hibernating writers, cradling tomes and omnibuses they had dolefully self-published, and to welcome them with open arms stood in line all the major Indian publishers. There were book launches and book launch clashes every other day. A leading French historian, ten years the wiser, was ready with his take on how a leading British historian had revised Indian history right from the time of Mahabharata. An NRI academic, pitied and lampooned by flute glass-clinking theologians during their 10-year monopoly, was now the toast of literature festivals and lecture circuits. He was no longer bitter on Twitter.

Congress-loving commentators, too, moved out. Some became tenants of cyber space. The return from Google AdSense wasn’t much, but at least it put bread on the table. Many others took to writing on food and beverages and mobile phones. It was business as usual, business as standard.

“Dada!”

This time it is a bearded man. “Dada”, he shouts as he strides towards the Beetle. “Here, the finest pipe tobacco. Just for you.”

“What do you want?” asks Dada. “Is life in our Reich not good enough?”

The bearded man lowers his head. “Please Dada, let bygones be bygones. You know I didn’t mean a word – all that Reich and Führer stuff.”

“What do you want?”

“I would want to be a panellist again. It’s small money – 1400 per appearance – but it’s better than nothing. I have a family to feed. Where will I go? Please, Dada, a channel of your choice.”

“My choice? Who’s stopping you?”

“All of them have refused point-blank.”

“So?”

“You know Arnab, Dada. Please, will you put in a word for me? I only have bad things to say about the Congress. Look – I have a whole dossier on them. Here…”

“Where was this dossier until now?”

“Sorry, Dada, I-”

“I’ll talk to Arnab. But I can’t promise anything. He’s his own man.”

“Thank you, Dada, thank-”

But Dada has walked on, up the shallow steps and through the glorious colonnade and into the high ceilinged room where the fate of the nation is discussed and decided on a daily basis. Left to wait another day are the same journalists and anchors who had decided the nation’s fate before Dada.

In this country, people with differing opinions don’t coexist. They wait for their turn to exist. A farmer waits for his monsoon, a patient waits for his doctor, a journalist waits for his government. They don’t mind the wait. Their turn will come, they know. Ten years from now, UPA will once again come to power and Indian children will once again get to think that Tipu was a fearless warrior, that Macaulay was a good, kind-hearted man.

Knowledge – not Karma – is a chameleon here.

I replace my notepad in my shirt pocket and look around. Among those waiting is a man who carries 37 pen-drives on him at all times. These are sting operations carried out on Congress ministers that had never seen the light of day during the UPA rule. “Explosive”, he shouts after Dada every day as he chases the Beetle. “Explosive, Dada, I promise you! Just get the damn CBI off my back. Explosive!”

Dada makes him wait.

He waits.