"Operation Desert Safari" continues...

Most high-end colonies in the city, therefore, are invariably juxtaposed with such villages which themselves have grown in a most unplanned and haphazard manner. Houses are both pucca and semi-pucca, with poor municipal amenities of sewerage and roads. The village residents have retained their old lifestyle. It it is fascinating to see old men sitting on cots outside their homes, wearing traditional clothes with ‘saafaas’ (head-wrappings), smoking ‘hookahs’
(smoke pipes) while women-folk, veiled in their ‘dupattas’ (stoles) pass by. Cows and buffaloes
vie for space with automobiles and two-wheelers on narrow lanes. Every village has a ‘head’,
usually called a Pradhan, whose writ runs large in the village. The residents retain their earthy
ways, struggling to keep urban modernity at arm’s length. Such rural settings are usually less
than fifty meters away from tony colonies where BMWs and Mercedes with super rich gentry flit
in and out.

Begumpur, one such village, sits between Sarvodaya Enclave and Sarvapriya Vihar,
both posh residential colonies inhabited by the noveau riche. A few beautiful historical
monuments, largely lying uncared for and decaying by the day, dot the area, seemingly amused with the changing times.

Rajbir had thought it prudent to wake up Inspector Rajendra Bakshi of the Delhi Police, who happened to be a resident of Begumpur, the area where the landline phone was reportedly
installed. Inspector Bakshi, an ace investigator in his own right, had in turn contacted the local
Pradhan (village-chief) and sought his help. While carrying out any police operation in Delhi's
urbanized villages it is always advisable to take a local respectable along as a facilitator. It makes
things easy and safe. Inspector Bakshi and the Pradhan were waiting for us when we reached
Begumpur, approaching it from Aurobindo Marg end, across Sarvodaya Enclave, a colony
located to the west overlapping the village.

The village Pradhan informed us he was in the know of the premises located by Rajbir which
belonged to an exporter.

To be continued...