Perundevi and I set out to watch Chanakya, in the hopes that it would be a pleasurable pursuit. Devika had sent an official jeep to pick us up. She said she would join our party midway. En route, Perundevi exclaimed, “Look, there’s Madan’s cycle!” When he saw the police vehicle, the chap on the cycle froze. The peabrain hadn’t bothered to sandpaper Madan’s name that was painted on the cycle. After all, who would expect a bicycle stolen in Chinmaya Nagar to be spotted a good five kilometers away in Ramavaram? We parceled the custodian of the cycle and offered him a joyride with us.
“This I bought from stranger man standing Ashok Pillar – six hundred only,” said the boy who looked to be about twenty, but he yielded even before the police had begun to grill him. Perundevi was thrilled to have got the cycle back.
The play was a disaster from start to finish. It was past ten when that eyesore of a spectacle ended. We took our supper at a ‘military’ hotel that served curried blood and head of goat. Perundevi and Devika did not object despite the fact that they were vegetarians. Perundevi had actually learned to cook animal meat just for me, but offal is out of her culinary orbit, which is why I am at the mercy of restaurants like this one to sate my occasional craving for that good stuff.
It was past midnight when we reached home. No sooner did we enter our house than we heard the screams of the young man from upstairs at our window. “Aunty! Aunty!”
“Don’t open the door,” I said nonchalantly.
“Why not? It sounds like the poor chap is in distress,” she said, and off she went.
I dropped onto the bed as she went to open the gate. The boy was not a stranger, so I didn’t care to accompany her. The next thing I heard was Perundevi’s terrified scream. “Oh God! Udhaya!”
Three burly men and women were brutally beating her up. One of them was even trying to strangle her. Madan too got roughed up in the pell-mell. If not for man’s instinctive fear of dogs, if not for Baba zapping to her rescue and lunging at the attackers and sending them running helter-skelter, Perundevi would have been dead.
“I’ll kill you, bastard!” yelled one of the scooting thugs who was bleeding from the eye. He was the head of the family that lived on the floor above. He had come with his son and his son-in-law.
We dialed the cops who arrived after five minutes. Devika turned up a quarter of an hour later. The assailants were long gone.
Perundevi had to be carried to the police station to register her complaint. She was a woman with the strength of a spring chicken. She would come close to fainting when I played Black Sabbath and Cradle of Filth. Her body began to convulse, foam dribbled from her mouth. She soon lost consciousness and we rushed her to the hospital on a stretcher.
Not a single head from our apartment popped out to check what the fracas was all about. After ringing the police, I rang Gangadharan, the owner of the complex, as he was responsible for this whole sorry affair. He had rented out the flat to these roughnecks because his tongue was hanging for money. He was also present during the Residents’ Association meeting earlier that day during which Perundevi had spoken in his favor, much to the fury of the tenants upstairs. Gangadharan’s wife answered the phone. Trembling with rage, I demanded to speak to her husband that very moment.
“He is sleeping,” came her calm reply.
Agitatedly, I described to her what had transpired.
“Why did you have to fight with the other tenants? Can’t you live amicably with them?”
“Just give the phone to your husband,” I said.
But the woman hung up.
The x-ray revealed that Perundevi had suffered a hairline cervical fracture. She had to spend a week in a government hospital. Since hers was a police case, we couldn’t treat her in a private hospital. The general ward was like a refugee camp; due to the shortage of beds, a number of patients lay on rags spread on the floor. We paid some extra money and had her shifted to a private room on the fourth floor. It turned out that there was no water supply up there. In order to use the toilet, water had to be fetched from the third floor for which an attendant had to be bribed. With no water to bathe, Perundevi decided to make a trip home. Her attackers, whose plea for bail was being heard, received this intelligence.
“She’s checked herself into a hospital despite the fact that she’s in a sound physical condition,” said the defense attorney. “She even goes home occasionally.” He thus managed to successfully argue them out of jail. I gathered that the hooligans had hired a mole to keep an eye on us at all times.
How much more abuse would Perundevi’s sinewy body endure? It started with her father. How many more fists? How many more blows? Her desperate scream from the other night was still ringing in my ears.
Attending to Perundevi in the hospital made me realize why people in India hesitate to approach the law. What passed for medical care in the hospital was only marginally removed from being manhandled.
There were several temples, mosques and churches around the hospital. Beginning at four in the morning, all these religious places battled it out to dominate the airwaves. The Mariamman devotees were the loudest. Even at eleven in the night, L.R. Easwari’s devotional medleys would be on full blast.
So much happened in the hospital that I do not know what is or isn’t worthy of being written. To use the lift to get from the third floor to the fourth, five rupees had to be slipped to the operator. On her third day of her stay in hospital, the head nurse came to Perundevi and unashamedly said, “Keep us in mind, madam. We slog day and night.” She was a heavyset woman of fifty. Bewildered, Perundevi took out a hundred from her purse and handed it to her, but the head nurse was not happy. “What is this, madam? There are four of us, and we all work from morning to night. Please don’t insult us like this.” When Perundevi handed her a five-hundred rupee note, the woman was all smiles. It left me dumbfounded that she could be so brazen as to demand such a hefty bribe despite seeing the woman with the cop-badge making frequent appearances.
It was around six one evening when I was about to make a trip home from the hospital when an auto screeched to a halt at the entrance. A man in a lungi, one hand chopped off at the wrist, stumbled out. He was with a woman who was carrying his severed hand in a bloodstained plastic bag. Had he been operated immediately, there was a fat chance that his hand could have been saved, but the nurses on duty dismissed him, saying, “The doctor is not here.”
The nurse saw me looking at her, baffled. She explained, “If we admit such cases, we will be in a stew with the law. These chaps chop off hands, legs and heads in a drunken rage. We can save ourselves the trouble of shuttling between the hospital and the court this way.”
“I see,” I said, removing myself swiftly from the scene.
As I was going back and forth from the hospital, Perundevi’s parents asked me, “Where does Madan eat?”
“Motherfuckers,” I muttered to myself. Then I replied. “I have no time to think of where he eats, drinks, bathes or shits. My brains are addled.”
I heard later that Madan had been taking his meals in their house.
Their enquiry was probably their jab at me for being an irresponsible father. And would you look at who it came from? But I refrained from getting into words with them for the sake of Madan’s stomach.
None of Perundevi’s relatives – not even her parents – paid her a visit or made a courtesy-call to enquire after her. Her parents took on Madan to excuse themselves.
Once we returned home, we were given police protection for eight days. Two constables took it in turns to guard our house. The men in the apartment above us had already had another run-in with them the previous week. Janakaraj, one of the constables, recounted the incident to me.
“The fellow who misbehaved with me is as rotten as rotten can be. I did not catch him in a headlock or punch his teeth down his throat because I’m a softie. I avoid trouble as much as I possibly can. But
I assure you that I have them on my radar.”
I felt bad for the constables who had to stay up and out in the cold of night. I invited them in, but they refused, saying that they would be unable to nab any troublemakers if they were not on the alert. With the swarms of mosquitoes with vampire’s cravings that were active during the night, it was a wonder they still had blood in their bodies. Even mosquito-repellent coils proved ineffective. Janakaraj subjected me to a daily hour-long sermon on mosquitoes. Even after the eight-day police protection ceased, he would pay us a visit during his morning rounds to talk at length about his favorite subject. “I don’t understand the world. We have sent one of our women into space but we still haven’t got rid of mosquitoes.”
“Pathetic,” I gravely nodded in agreement.
“Have you noticed something, sir? The mosquitoes used to be tiny little chaps before. Now, they’re bigger than flies and their stings itch like the pox.”
Sometimes, I wondered if the man had been born and raised with pesky mosquitoes.
To avoid the trap of such pointless conversations, I desist from making conversation. Another reason for my lack of sociability is my hatred for these harassing know-it-alls who talk like they’ve swallowed the ocean of knowledge and churned it for days to extract the nectar of everlasting wisdom they are determined to dispense to anyone and everyone within arm’s length.
Before my second visit to Paris in 2001, Kannappan, a senior officer in the postal department came to me with his queries.
“Why are you going to Paris?”
“I was invited to lecture at a literary conference.”
“A lecture on what?”
“Literature.”
“That’s a little too obvious. What’s your concentration?”
“Postmodernism and contemporary Tamil literature.”
“Take my advice and read Ramanichandran before you leave,” Kannappan said gratuitously. Ramanichandran is the most famous purveyor of pulp in Tamil. Her connection to postmodernism is as strong as mine to the sport of lacrosse.
Thereafter, whenever I ran into him, he would ask if I’d managed to read the masterpieces of his recommendation. I always replied in the negative, fearing that a “yes” would effectuate a long-drawn conversation on the writer’s œuvre. He happened to be my superior and I couldn’t risk a haggle with him over a subject we were bound to vary on, a subject he considered himself an expert in.
While Perundevi was still in hospital, I had a meeting with Harish, a friend who lived in California. He brought me a tin of tuna. I put it in the fridge and forgot all about it. A couple of days later, I noticed it sitting there, untouched, and began looking all over the place for a knife to open the can. We had two knives, of which one was sharp enough to cleanly cut a goat. Neither could be found.
When Perundevi returned home, I asked her about the knives and she confessed that she had hidden them. I had gone out with friends for drinks a couple of days after our incident. Perundevi explained that she had hidden the knives because she didn’t want them lying around when I came home drunk. I was alarmed. “I wouldn’t even kill an ant! Do you think I would kill you? I love you more than my life. Don’t you know that? Do you really fear me?” I protested.
“I know you love me, Udhaya, but sometimes, all I feel is terror.”
It filled me with anxiety to think about how long she would subject herself to living in fear. She also told me that her coworkers were afraid to accompany her anywhere, so, wherever she had to go, she went alone.
“What bullshit! Why are they afraid of you? It should be the other way round.”
“They see me as a trouble magnet. They fear that if the thugs come, they might get roughed up too.”
In spite of the police protection and the close friendship of Devika, we were convinced that no one and nothing could keep harm from befalling us.
It was crazy. Whenever I saw – or even imagined – the person who had sworn to kill me, I trembled in fear. Who was this fellow, and what did I ever do to him for him to want so desperately to kill me? Whenever these thoughts harassed me, I felt anger against Perundevi. The owner of the apartment was going about his life without a hitch as were the other tenants. Why did she, of all people, have to get so deeply involved in things? Because of her, both of us had to live in constant fear, all because she had meddled in something that had naught to do with her. For how long would we continue to look over our shoulders?
As I masticated on these thoughts, a police officer told me that the guy upstairs has close ties with the leader of some political party. Coincidentally, the leader was also a friend of my friend Basheer. I explained our predicament to Basheer and asked him to talk to the leader. He was to convince him that no loyalties tied us to Gangadharan, and that there was no reason for the goons upstairs to target us.
Basheer arranged a meeting with the leader during Pongal. We had to wait for hours to see the man, and I was again moved to anger for being put in this spot all on Perundevi’s account. When the leader finally arrived, I had to reiterate that miserable account and he listened to me with rapt attention. When I finished, a thickset fellow who had been standing near the leader said, “Anney, we’d planned to finish off this fellow if our people hadn’t been released on Monday.” The leader raised his hand, signaling him to shut up. He turned back to me and said, “You can leave now. Leave everything to me. You won’t have any problems.” Once we were outside, Basheer told me, “The leader will lay off those thugs. No one dares to flout his word. Don’t sweat it anymore.”
Begging that leader to save our lives was the most mortifying things I had to do.
Sometime later, misfortune after misfortune befell our attackers. As it was a case of attempted murder, they had to cough up a lot of cash and consequently, their business crashed and burned. Their daughter had a stillborn baby, and even in that fragile physical and emotional condition, she had to answer summons from the court and the police station. The respect these folks enjoyed among the locals diminished sharply, and within a few days, they were reduced to such a miserable state that they folded their hands in greeting whenever they encountered me.
Perundevi began to pray for their welfare. The police had done everything they could to ensure that they would be moved to court on charges of assault with intent to murder. When they had gone into hiding, the police nabbed them in Andhra Pradesh. But finally, when we were asked to testify against our assailants, we refused.
“There is no point punishing them any further,” I told the baffled policemen. “Fate has punished them enough.”
The people who had subjected us to one of the worst ordeals of our lives eventually packed their backs and left the neighborhood and settled elsewhere.
12 – The Art of Buying Fish
I love the fish market. It is a microcosm in itself. I’d recommend a visit even if you’re a vegetarian, just for the sake of the experience. Nadukuppam on Lloyds Road is my favorite. There, a person can buy anything from a lobster worth a thousand bucks to a mackerel worth twenty. Its democracy only serves to boost its appeal. I visit once in five days and buy shark and Asian sea bass from a very dignified fifty-year-old woman. If the fish is kept in the freezer after being marinated in salt and turmeric, it will not rot. During the DMK regime between 2006 and 2011, blackouts in the state could last for as many as twenty hours a day, but Chennai, being the state capital, had to endure the heat and the darkness for only a couple of hours.
Perundevi grumbled that I was being gypped by the fishmongers. This is something married men have to live with because women all over the world think their husbands are gullible fools. Before I left for Thailand, I’d told her to go to Nadukuppam if she needed fish. On my return, she told me she’d found a woman who sold for less. “What you buy for eight-hundred, I bought for six,” she announced smugly. The next time Perundevi went to the market, I went with her, wanting to se
e the seller she was talking about. When we got there, I realized that we’d both been buying from the same woman. There was something about her that lured buyers. Perundevi told me, “From now on, I’m buying the fish. You stay away.”
Like barring a man from buying fish was not enough, Perundevi would bug me, saying that Ismail, the neighbor, brought home a bag full of fish for a mere hundred rupees. So, she sent me with him one day to learn the art of negotiation.
I suggested we take an auto because, left to Ismail, he would have preferred to go the distance on foot. Ismail, on reaching the Lighthouse, asked the driver to turn right towards Nochikuppam. If we drove straight till Queen Mary’s College and turned left we would have reached Nadukuppam, but Ismail said, “They ask for astronomical sums there.” I smiled noncommittally. Ismail was already several paces ahead of me by the time I’d alighted from the auto. “Let’s take a look first,” he said. There must have been at least a hundred shops and he stopped at each one of them, enquiring about prices. The women selling the fish were adorned with chunky gold neckpieces. Unlike the middle-class folks, these people seemed to prefer squandering their money on tasteless jewelry rather than investing it for their children’s education.
Most of Mylapore’s children receive a twelve-year education at P. S. Senior Secondary, Rosary Matriculation, S. S. K., Vidya Mandir or St. Raphael’s and move on to college, get a degree and get settled. But Nochikuppam’s children rarely get that chance. These women could very well use their money and their gold to provide for their children’s immediate and future needs, but why on earth don’t they? I followed Ismail who evinced no interest in such social and cultural issues and instead kept raving about the art of buying fish.
“Listen to me carefully. If a fishmonger asks you for six hundred, you must quote two hundred.”
“What? Two hundred?”
“Watch this,” he said, pointing to a couple of large barracuda fish. He asked the vendor the price.
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