I met Sameer last night, a driver with an air-conditioned box cab who’s curried enough favor with the hotel’s front staff to get the better fares. I was determined to go on a club crawl and after the hotel-suggested bar turned out to be a wedding banquet, Sareem told me that The Ghetto was the place to be.
“Anything goes,” he promised. The man was already reading my mind. By “anything,” I guess Sameer meant day-glo walls and a large group of women all wearing their company’s t-shirt. It’s okay, though. I had a beer and smoked two cigarettes, as much as I really wanted from the night.
On the way back to the hotel, we agreed he’d take me to Chor Bazaar, or the Thieves Market as it was once known, a place where you can “get anything,” Sameer said.
Right on time, I found Sameer in the same spot we’d met last night. We drove through choked traffic moving about a half a mile in one hour. Sitting at a stand still in the middle of the Muslim part of the city, I watched a tangle of people shouting, small children banging on our windows, and then I watched a squatting man slide a needle into the vein of his friend, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The man took a long time drawing the blood into the chamber, letting it sit in the crook of the man’s elbow until he pushed the plunger slowly forward. The recipient’s head bowed as his friend slid the needle out.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, right out in the open, and prepped my phone to video it. Sameer told me to stop. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s dead.” And the children kept banging on our window.