I never met my “human rights activist” friend again post this incident though we lived in the same town.
I happened to come across an even more distressing occurrence in the newspaper. The goods van of a train coming from the north was opened, and what was found was a terrified Dalmatian dog. The dog had been trapped in pitch darkness for three days, all alone and barking in fear. The two-day journey time must be included too in this ordeal. The frightened animal tried to bite those who approached it. Finally, it was rescued by Blue cross. When I saw the picture in the papers, I could clearly glimpse, in his eyes, the fear the dog had experienced. Maybe the people who had looked after him had been transferred elsewhere. To avoid the expense of taking him with them they had surreptitiously abandoned him in the goods van.
After experimenting with several diets for Baba, we eventually found out only beef suited her. It was around that time we had moved to Mylapore.
Every two days, I made a trip to the beef butcher. The availability of beef is dependent on the time of day and the day of the week. Even beef did not help Baba very long. Cleaning dog puke ranks among the most unsavory activities a man could engage in. The stench was unbearable, but we were left with no choice. To us, the dog was like an ailing child.
As a pup, Baba had a peculiar habit. Hard times relegated us to a barely furnished house with neither washbasin nor wall-mirror. When I needed to shave, I would prop a small mirror against the wall and squat on the floor, like my father used to. This was when Baba would come running and clamber onto my lap. This continued till she was four.
In her tenth year, Baba was no longer able to retain any food. She died a very poignant and poetic death, the sort of death you see in movies. I was out of town, but news of Baba’s condition saw me throwing my plans and appointments out the window and rushing home.
When the frail little creature saw me, she tried to lift her head, but couldn’t. I ran to her side as her head fell back to the floor. I was crying.
I stroked the head of my dying dog gently. Gazing into my eyes, she breathed her last.
5 – A Bite-Sized Story
When Puja was in college, her neighbors had a dog. One day, it had clamped its jaws shut around a human shank. The woman of the house was so angry that she wanted to finish off the mongrel. Her twelve-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son chased the dog with a rod and a rock. Intuition told the frenzied dog that its life was under threat, but despite that knowledge, it did not try and harm its masters. The lady screamed with rage,‘Kill him! Kill him!’ and the boy plunked down the rock on the head of the dog. After watching this gruesome act by the neighbours, Puja’s family moved to another place in few days.
“Udhaya, do we kill one of our children for doing something wrong?” Puja asked tearfully.
6 – The Great Killer who Walked like a Duck
Anjali once told me the story of a 40-year-old Shri Vaishnavite lady who, aided by her two younger brothers, killed an elderly, wealthy Brahmin couple residing in Madippakkam – one of the Brahmin ghettos of Chennai. The couple lived on the first floor and had rented out the ground floor to the Shri Vaishnavites who snuck into the upstairs house one day and bludgeoned the unsuspecting couple to death.
It was a simple open-and-shut case for the Tamil Nadu police and the trio was arrested in two days. But what was to be done with them? If they had murdered the prime minister or some big shot politician, they would have been slapped with the death penalty or life imprisonment. But if you kill someone unimportant like your neighbor, the same rule doesn’t apply. All you’ll have to do is hang around in prison for a couple of years and walk out to a normal life.
This is how justice works in India.
The Brahmin couple that got murdered had two children who had settled off in the U. S. Most middle-class Indians aspire to send their children to the U. S. and I hear such talk during my walks in Nageshwara Rao Park. If it’s not about sending their children there, the talk is about children who are living it up there after settling.
I had a friend called Mohan whose daughter lived in New Jersey. He went to the U. S. for a while to look after his grandchild and he returned to India within a month when he said he’d be there for six. When we asked him about his quick return, he said, “U. S. is such a boring place! It has no life. You have to stay cooped up in the house all day. Even if you go outside, there is nothing to do. I used to visit a park near my daughter’s house; it was beautiful, but how long was I supposed to sit there? I met some elderly people in the park, all of them like me – unpaid babysitters who had come all the way from Mylapore to New Jersey. We would sit in the park and gossip about life back in Mylapore until we returned to our respective children’s places. After a month, I decided I’d had enough.”
“Didn’t you make any American friends?”
“Even if I had any, what would I do with them? What would we talk about?”
He was right. Once you’ve lived in Mylapore, you’ll find it hard to live anywhere else. With a temple on almost every street, Mylapore is Chennai’s temple town. There’s the Sai Baba Temple, Kolavizhi Amman Temple which is the temple of Mylapore’s guardian deity, Adi Kesava Perumal Temple, Madhava Perumal Temple, Kapaleeswarar Temple, Mundakkani Amman Temple and three Hanuman temples. The place is heavily punctuated with cafés and there’s also Nageshwara Rao Park if you feel like you could use a walk.
The people Mohan met in the U. S. spoke dearly of all these places and the murdered Brahmin couple was no different.
A sixty-year-old priest from Tirupati went to Nanganallur, another Brahmin ghetto in Chennai, to call on his daughter and granddaughter. A bunch of goons accosted them during their morning walk and one of the fellows shouted smut at his daughter. When the priest raised his voice in her defense, the goon brandished an arivaal and with it, spilled the old man’s brains.
The locals notified the authorities with bulging pockets about the terrorizing goons. When the chief minister caught wind of the goon situation, he jotted on the police file, “Brahmin area. Do the needful.” The chief minister had been raised in a socio-political tradition that believed that the Brahmin had to be dealt with first if a Brahmin and a snake were encountered at the same time. The authorities, competent in reading between the lines, knew what was wanted of them. The file was left to gather dust. Nanganallur remains an absolute dump.
Call it the randomness of life or destiny where anything can happen to anyone at any time in any place. That murder was not envisaged, blueprinted and committed for reasons of enmity or hatred. It could just as easily have been you or me in that priest’s unfortunate place. And I can’t help wondering what might have been the reaction of the priest’s daughter and three-year-old granddaughter when the rowdies’ arivaal split his skull and his brain spilled out right there on the ground. Would they ever be able to forget that moment for the rest of their lives? How would it have affected their minds? But what I really wanted to say is that those who killed the priest would soon be out of prison and committing other murders. In fact, they would already have been accused of at least three other murder cases at the time of commission of the latest murder.
In my opinion, your lifespan depends on your hood and its inhabitants. Mylapore, my current address, is home to several big names – ministers, judges, actors and the like. During the inundation, when the rest of Chennai looks like a human aquarium in need of cleaning, the residents of Mylapore and the Boat Club area – the fanciest address in town – continue to strut the walkways like runways round the clock in imported rainproof sneakers. There is a slim chance of skull-splitting and gut-spilling here.
Just before I set out for the Himalayas, I met a thirty-year old man called Kumar who had murdered at least six people. Kumar was an acquaintance of my friend Manickam who gave me the rundown of the former’s criminal history. Intrigued by his account, I insisted to meet Kumar, who, despite his notoriety, skillfull
y evaded the grasp of the long hands of the law. In under two hours, Kumar was with us, nattily dressed. He even wore shoes. Over drinks, I asked him about the arivaal, the instrument of death in most murders that happen in Tamil Nadu.
Every town boasts its own distinctive arivaal. The town of Thiruppachethi in Sivagangai is perhaps the most storied where the weapon is concerned. Thirupachethi’s arivaals, however, according to Kumar, were welterweight. Real heavyweight arivaals are forged only in Namakkal. The Namakkal blades weighed anywhere between three and six kilos. A Namakkal arivaal, with one well-aimed swing, could accomplish what the guillotine did. Kumar added that the mandai porul arivaal that came without the beaked-edge was the blade for a clean beheading, while the serrated maan porul arivaal was ideal for a gutting – it took just one stick to spill blood, bone and entrails.
Despite education being government-funded, Kumar quit school after the eighth grade. Corporal punishment, heavily practiced in schools, had embittered him. He was bereft of his mother at a young age. His father found himself another woman and neglected his son. He ended up being raised by his maternal grandmother and his habitat was the street. He was a Dalit. And this meant he got kicked around like a stray dog for sport.
Kumar and his grandmother lived in a tiny asbestos shack. There was a pucca house next to theirs. When Kumar stood near this house to talk to a friend, its owner directed a barrage of abuses at him. “You motherfucker! I don’t want filthy scum standing outside my property! There are young girls in this house! Buzz off before I call the police to beat you to a pulp!”
Incidents such as these filled Kumar with the desire to exact revenge from just about everyone he thought had wronged him. Once, before he had reached adulthood, Kumar and his friends were drinking at a construction site. The watchman who detected their clandestine activity ordered them out of the premises. Every mouth spat filth – son of a bitch, son of this, son of that and son of whatnot.
Kumar took out his mandai porul arivaal and aimed for the watchman’s head. His alcohol-induced stupor caused him to miss his mark and the blade cut through the watchman’s shoulder and all the way down to his chest. His friends cut and ran like scattered sheep. It was hard, even with the finessed arm and wrist movements of a butcher, to extricate an arivaal lodged in human flesh. When it was out, he used it to hack the head off. The arms and legs followed. In one hand he held the head and in the other one of the legs, with the pride of a cricketer holding his man-of-the-match trophy and replica check and walked to the nearest police station. Placing the anatomical remnants of his victim outside the “tesan” (Kumar’s best attempt at pronouncing “station”), he respectfully woke up the drooling constable and recounted the sequence of events that had led up to the murder. “Away with you, you halfwit!” said the groggy-eyed constable. Kumar left and returned in a flash, brandishing the watchman’s scalp.
Since no witnesses came forward and since the murderer had not attained the legal age, he was tossed into a juvenile correctional home where he spent a few years and emerged a free man.
On his return to his neck of the woods, Kumar discovered that he now commanded respect from the same folks who had dared to spit at him earlier. The shopkeeper of the pucca house fervently addressed him as “sir,” for fear that Kumar’s perception of the slightest disrespect might cost him his head.
Kumar’s next murder was planned and executed with an express profit-motive. The plan was to attack a motorist at the traffic signal and bolt with the bike. The first part of the plan went swimmingly. He had mounted the bike, but had cut his thigh while trying to put the arivaal back in his cummerbund. To make bad matters worse, the bike wouldn’t start and a heavily bleeding thigh didn’t help his cause. A traffic cop tried to nab him, but the sight of the arivaal gobbled his gumption. “Dey, dey, I have three children. Please spare me,” he pleaded fearfully. Leaving the bike on the road, Kumar limped to a nearby shop. “Akka, would you mind giving a wounded man a little place to sit?” he said to the woman at the cash-counter. He took a huge swig from the bottle of soda on the table. In the meantime, the traffic cop had arrived with reinforcements of men.
“Did you attack the motorist with intention of stealing his bike?” the officer asked. When Kumar replied in the affirmative, he received a cuffing. Kumar was sentenced to only a few months in prison for this crime. The traffic cop lied under oath in the witness box, claiming he was so busy directing heavy traffic that he hadn’t seen a thing.
As for Kumar’s third murder, I thought it was worthy of being adapted into a stage-play.
An engineer’s wife was having an affair with his assistant. When the husband learned of it, he felt scandalized, and instead of confronting the paramours, contacted Kumar. The engineer introduced Kumar to his assistant as a friend. Kumar’s mandate was to befriend the assistant, lure him to the lakeside on the pretext of a little revelry and finish the job there. Finish he did, with the flourish of a homicide-fetishist. He decapitated the corpse and displayed the limbs. He captured the carnage on his cellphone and sent it to his client. He then packed each limb into a gunny bag filled with rocks and sank each bag at a different place in the lake.
Nearly a month later, the decomposed fragments of the assistant’s limbs were discovered. Yet again, no witnesses and no viable forensic evidence. Kumar the Killer simply couldn’t be nabbed but for human vanity. The cuckolded engineer, keen to acquaint his wife with the cost of her infidelity, showed her the video of the hacking. “You thought you could play me dirty? Look what I did to your Romeo.”
The police were promptly informed. The engineer and Kumar spent some time in prison before being let out into the world again.
As Kumar was readying to leave, I asked him one last question about his modus operandi. “When pistols are so ubiquitous in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and so accessible elsewhere, why do you make do with cumbersome arivaals?”
“If I’d used a pistol, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said. “It’s harder to get bailed out of prison for a firearms offence.” The more I gave his speech thought, the more convinced I became that Kumar was safer inside the prison.
When the time came to depart on a happy high, Manickam offered to see Kumar off at the bus stand. When Manickam returned, he was all complaints. “Did you hear the condescending way the rascal talked? All that talk and no money to even buy a bus ticket or even a cigarette! Wangled a hundred from me!” It turned out that Kumar’s shoes were “borrowed” as well. No wonder the great killer walked like a duck.
7 – Victim: Feline, Perpetrator: Canine
Ismail was the keeper of a large bungalow whose owners were living overseas for an indefinite period of time. Having plenty of time to spare and a quest for some extra income, he offered to run errands for us. He sought a little bit extra not just by way of coin but also by way of sex. A very much married Ismail, unhappy with his wife, was bonking a maidservant of similar marital status in the bungalow he was supposed to be guarding. She was responsible for general upkeep.
Perundevi wasn’t pleased to hear about their affair. She decreed that Ismail would not put one toe on our threshold until after he divorced his current wife and legally married the maidservant. Now that she had barred Ismail, the household chores fell to my lot.
Determined to not let Ismail rot in his sinful state, Perundevi took it upon herself to reform him by telling him moral stories that actually brought about realization and an apparent transformation. “You’re my mother,” he said, prostrating himself before her.
If things had ended there, this story would not have been written. Perundevi gave him an abandoned kitten and exhorted him to take good care of it. She also gave him a daily stipend of fifteen rupees to buy “Chintoo” some milk.
After a few days, Ismail’s promise of fidelity began to fray. “You’ll never change your stripes. Don’t ever come near my house again,” an incensed Perundevi told Ismail.
T
he very next day, I was horror-stricken when I saw Blackie come running to me with Chintoo gripped between his canine jaws. The kitten had somehow escaped from Ismail’s place and found its way to our house. Before my very eyes, I saw one pet murder another. Blackie, like all Great Danes, was as big as a pony. He would obey every command I issued, but on the day of the murder, he simply refused to obey. It deposited the kitten on the floor and there it lay dying before me. Something about that kitten’s death rattled my bones.
“Why did you let the kitten out?” I asked Ismail.
“Well, Madam scolded me rather harshly, so I didn’t have the nerve to ask her for the milk allowance. The cat was starving. It must have sneaked out to search for a bite,” he replied indifferently.
8 – Jalebi Chicken
I know a millionaire in Mylapore. He is a chicken seller. His top-quality produce has made him something of a local celebrity. The industrially processed broiler chicken you usually get in Tamil Nadu is stringy and hard to chew, like a week-old chapatti. Country chicken is not a tad better. While it is not as stringy, it gives the jaws a workout. I had lost faith in chicken and hence stopped eating it. Then, I heard of the millionaire’s Mylapore chicken stall. His chicken slid down my throat with the ease of a syrupy jalebi. No wonder the owner of that shop had become as rich as he had.
After a while, I stopped eating chicken altogether. If you ever hear the desperate clucking of a chicken facing the knife, you would quit chicken too. I sometimes hear chickens clucking in my sleep.
Marginal Man Page 3