Eleven Feet: A Novel of the Ranga Billa Case, the Crime That Taught Delhi to Be Afraid

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 in India knows how this ends. The two men who did it, Ranga and Billa, were hanged at Tihar Jail on the last morning of January 1982, and for a generation of Delhi parents the case is the reason the children were called in before dark. Eleven Feet is the story of the three years and five months in between, told by one of the two men, from a cell eleven feet from the other.


It is the story of a city that watched, a police force that followed its rules, two soldiers on a night train who asked a stranger for his identity card, and a court that had to decide what a confession was worth after the man who made it took it back.


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: a family, a father, a city, and a reason for the way he speaks. The book never puts what was done to a sixteen-year-old girl on the page, and it never argues that the man telling the story was owed anything.


Written in plain English for readers in India and everywhere the case is still remembered.