There is a stretch of forest in the middle of Delhi called the Ridge. For most of the twentieth century it was a piece of the city that the city ignored — scrub and thorn and old rock and nobody else. On the map, a part of that ridge is called Vande Mataram Marg. For years, that is not what Delhi called it. Among themselves, unofficially, people called it Billa-Ranga Road. So who were Ranga and Billa? In the country's highest court, they were shorthand for the worst criminal you could name. At a protest, they were a punchline — a nonsense name you'd scribble on a government form. Two names. Four decades of afterlife. And a whole generation using them without any idea what the men had done, or to whom. This is the story of how those two names got made. And it is the story of the two names that should have outlived them instead — Geeta and Sanjay Chopra.
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