by Anita Nair
Muni Reddy smiled. ‘Gowda found a small trace of blood on the door jamb of the puja room. It matched Shankar’s blood type. He saw that a pair of rubber slippers had been left under the tap near the back door. Shankar’s slippers. The post-mortem report showed evidence of sexual activity. Shankar had had sex with his wife that night. They found a trace of semen in the lungi he was wearing and a couple of his pubic hair in one of the shreds of the nightie the wife had worn. Gowda had sent that to the forensic lab.
‘The post-mortem report also revealed that Suma had had sleeping pills that night. Shankar had slit her throat when she was asleep, torn her blouse and petticoat to suggest force had been used but there were no bruises of any sort that should have been there.
‘Then he threw the furniture around and hit his head on the door jamb to make it seem like he had been attacked. The doctor’s report showed that it wasn’t a major injury. Shankar had taken three sleeping pills himself so he would be found unconscious. And groggy when consciousness returned, just as someone with a head injury would be. He had thought of everything.
‘It was an open-and-shut case. Shankar confessed and the case went to trial.
‘And Gowda felt he was infallible. He was Huli Gowda. Tiger Gowda. That was his mistake.
‘He heard of a group of underage girls being held in a little house in Shanthi Colony. I was part of the raid and we booked two men under 366/366A/376/349 IPC and Section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act. One of them was a minister’s cousin and the other, the underworld don Kolar Naga’s brother-in-law.
‘Gowda could do nothing but watch helplessly as the case became a no-case. In his haste he had forgotten to get a warrant issued. Suddenly he became the one who had broken the law by trespassing. The underage girls disappeared from the shelter they had been taken to. There were no records to mark their admittance there. The register had been tampered with as well. Gowda was shunted off to traffic and that was the beginning of the end. He got into trouble there as well and eventually, five years later, he was moved to Bowring Hospital station. The huli was reduced to an ili. A hospital rat at that.
‘He has had twelve transfers so far and has been bypassed for promotion. Which is why he is still only inspector. And there is a joke about him. They call him B report Gowda. Gowda, whose cases come to nothing.’
Muni Reddy shrugged. Santosh looked at his desk, unable to meet the older man’s eye. He was being cautioned, he realized.
What was this path he had chosen for himself? Would he too become another B report Gowda? The tiger who became a rat. But Santosh had made up his mind. His brother, who was an author of some repute and the editor of a Kannada weekly, knew whom to call. There was always a cousin or an uncle or the friend of a friend who could be prevailed upon to pull strings.
When Santosh’s transfer orders to Gowda’s station arrived, Muni Reddy said thoughtfully, ‘He is not an easy man to work with. But thank God, you have one thing going for you. You belong to the Gowda caste too, don’t you? He will watch out for you, I am sure.’
Gowda smoked a cigarette and watched while Santosh threw up his breakfast. The young man was retching as if to evacuate every trace of what he’d had to look at. When he straightened, wan and glassy-eyed, Gajendra offered him a bottle of water.
Santosh thrust it away furiously. ‘He knew, didn’t he?’ he snarled.
Gowda frowned. ‘You smell of vomit. Clean yourself up before you get into the jeep with me.’
Santosh grabbed the bottle and splashed water over his face and into his mouth. Somewhere in his chest a sob of outrage gathered. Who the fuck did Gowda think he was? That boli maga!
‘I thought you said you had been in service for three months. How do you expect me to know that you hadn’t seen a corpse yet?’ Gowda offered.
Santosh stared at him. It was the closest to an apology he would ever get, he realized.
‘He has seen corpses, sir, but nothing like this,’ Gajendra said carefully. The young fool would worsen the situation by saying something silly. Especially now that Gowda seemed to be exhibiting a slight trace of remorse. Gowda didn’t like to feel remorseful, Gajendra knew.
‘Third-degree burns can be hard on the eye,’ Gowda said, confirming Gajendra’s reading.
Santosh raised his head, unable to believe what he had heard. Could anyone be so callous? So unmoved by the nature of the horrific death? That was a man once. Hard on the eye! ‘Think of what he must have suffered,’ he whispered, feeling a chill down his spine.
‘Third-degree burns are not painful, you didn’t know, did you? What did they teach you at Mysore? All the nerves would have been damaged so they wouldn’t have been able to relay any pain signals to the brain.’ Gowda lit up yet another cigarette. ‘In fact, he would have lost all sensation in the first thirty seconds or so…’
Santosh felt bile rise up his throat. ‘Stop,’ he screamed. When the jeep ground to a halt, he tumbled out, retching. This time, when Gajendra offered him a bottle, he didn’t say anything.
‘The next time, you won’t be so affected,’ Gowda said when Santosh was back in the Bolero.
‘After a few times, you won’t even blink an eyelid. It’s all part of the learning curve of being an investigating officer.’
PC David shot Santosh a look of pity, but didn’t speak. He was only a driver but he was attuned to the tenets of police dharma: don’t get involved in what doesn’t concern you. He started the vehicle and glanced at Gowda’s face. But Gowda was deep in thought.
The throbbing in his temples increased as the day sped by. All he wanted to do was get into bed and pull the covers over his head. He knew that he should stay on in the station house and tackle the mountain of paperwork that had grown on his table in his absence. But at a little past six, he had PC David drop him home.
He pulled the curtains across the windows so it was dark and quiet. And then, like a wounded animal retreating into its burrow to lick its wounds, he crawled into bed and passed out.
When Gowda woke up, it was almost eight. The headache was gone and had been replaced by a dreadful lassitude. He lay on his bed in the dark room and felt the emptiness of the house and his life gnaw at him. Until, unable to bear the nipping teeth of his own thoughts, he stumbled out of bed into the bathroom.
He turned the shower on, hoping that, in his absence, the God of Blocked Showers may have decided to step in with a miracle. The shower hissed to life, spluttered and stopped. Gowda sighed. Obviously the God of Blocked Showers had bypassed him again. He would have to call a plumber one day very soon.
Gowda filled a bucket with water and splashed sleep and inertia out of himself.
He padded naked into his bedroom and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. He ran his fingers through his greying chest hair and tugged at them absently. He didn’t much like how he looked. The sag in the belly. The hint of grey in his pubic hair. The flaccid penis that seemed content to stay flaccid most of the time, to Mamtha’s immense relief, he thought. Even the texture of his skin seemed to have changed.
In the movies, policemen his age looked distinguished if they were good cops. Or, were fat and feckless if they were the bad ones. His eyes narrowed as he appraised himself in the mirror. The truth was he looked neither. He just looked fucked.
Then he turned and felt the first sight of pleasure at his own body. On his right bicep was his first act of impulse in many years. A three-inch-high, five-inch-wide tattoo. A wheel with wings.
Gowda had never thought that he would get a tattoo done but, some months ago at the Bullet mechanic’s shop, he had seen a young man with a giant tattoo of a bike on his back. The string vest he wore covered most of it, but it was visible enough to trigger Gowda’s interest. Kumar, the mechanic, had seen Gowda’s eyes return to the body art again and again. ‘Sir, there is a tattoo place here in Kammanahalli. Just two streets away. He is the best in Bangalore, I am told. You should get one too … a small one!’
On a whim, Gowda had
walked to the tattoo studio. The tattoo artist had seen the hesitation in Gowda’s gaze and gait; this would be a convert worth having, he decided. Besides, it was a quiet afternoon and he had all the time to pander to this man who was clearly a policeman. He had never had a policeman’s skin to work on before. He opened his album and showed Gowda the various designs he could create. Only one of them excited Gowda. He looked at it for a long time.
‘Great choice, sir,’ the tattoo artist said. ‘It is actually a compound symbol that indicates the kind of speed one needs to be airborne …’
Gowda nodded.
‘Do you like bikes?’
‘Kumar sent me here.’
The tattoo artist smiled. ‘Ah, so you must have seen what I did for Freddie … that took several hours and multiple sittings.’
‘How long will this take?’
‘About three hours max and it will cost about seven thousand five hundred rupees. Though for you, I would do it for five K.’
‘Why?’ Gowda frowned.
‘I am a biker too. I have an old Bullet that Kumar fixed for me … and Kumar doesn’t send me clients ever. So you must be someone special.’
Gowda watched as the stencil was placed on his arm. When it was done, the tattoo artist bound his arm and gave him a whole list of do’s and don’ts. ‘You can take the bandage off after an hour and no wetting or bathing for the next twelve hours,’ he said, walking him to the door.
The tattoo made Gowda feel special. It was not about the symbol of a bike as much as the freedom it suggested. An open road, the song of the wind, the thump of the engine, the dream of a lifetime to keep going without ever pausing.
He traced the wings on the wheel with the tip of his finger. It still filled him with awe that he had actually gone ahead and done it. Mamtha wouldn’t approve, he knew. So he kept it a secret. He had made sure his arms were covered when he was with her, wearing a T-shirt even to bed.
He looked at it one final time. Then he dressed and walked into the kitchen.
He looked around him. The counters were bare except for four bottles of water that stood in a row. One bottle of water stood on his bedside table. In the fridge were four plastic boxes and a bowl. The ceramic bowl held curd that had turned firm without souring. One of the two plastic boxes held potatoes and peas cooked precisely the way he liked them. The other held a small portion of chilli chicken he had brought back from the restaurant the night before. His wife couldn’t have done better, he thought wryly, pulling out the containers of rasam and rice. He poured the rasam into a steel saucepan and put it on the stove. He stood watching the rasam simmer.
Shanthi, the maid, knew his habits and tastes. She knew how he preferred his coffee and where he liked his newspaper kept every morning. She sorted his clothes and sewed on missing buttons. She laid out his handkerchief and socks every day and replenished the toiletries in the bathroom. She told him what groceries were needed every month and shopped for the vegetables and meat herself. She said little and glided through the rooms, an apparition taking care of his needs without reproach or complaint. In fact, other than sleeping with him, Shanthi had slipped into the role of wife with a casual ease that saddened rather than pleased him.
It occurred to him that his marriage couldn’t amount to much if he scarcely missed his wife.
The ping of the microwave.
Rasam and rice, Gowda thought as he toyed with his food, must be the loneliest dinner written in the destiny of any man. A meal you ate because anything else was too much of an effort. A culinary straw you clung to because the familiar taste and aroma, its suggestion of heat and spice evoked memories of a time when your mother stood at your elbow making sure you had everything you wanted. As it slid down your throat, you knew a strange pang: if there was someone else across the table, there would be accompaniments – pickles, vegetables and conversation. Not this silence, broken only by the sound of the metal bracelet of his watch clanging against the rim of the steel plate.
Gowda put the plate into the sink and ran water over it. He stared at the lone plate in the sink and the saucepan in which he had heated the rasam, and the plastic box that had held the rice. He had never felt this alone before. At almost fifty, he had nothing to look back upon. Not even a real memory to clutch at.
From the first floor that was let out to a young couple and their dog, he could hear the dog’s nails as it scratched at a corner of the room.
Gowda paused as he wiped his hands on a towel. He knew what he would do. He would get a dog. Not a silly fluffy yappy dog that his wife may approve of, but a proper dog with a loud bark. He would call Guru at the Dog Squad for his advice. Suddenly Gowda grinned. Maybe they had a retired inspector dog he could bring home. It was a thought. Two police officers past their prime, seeking consolation in each other’s company.
Gowda walked into the living room and rifled through his CDs. He chose a Mukesh CD and slid it into the music system.
He lit a cigarette and sank into a cane chair in the veranda. His house was the only one on that road. On either side and opposite were empty plots. A line of silver oaks demarcated each plot from the other. At first the developer had kept the plots spruced up for customer visits. But when the recession happened and people were laid off, the bottom fell out of the real estate market and the developer stopped bothering about cutting the grass and trimming the casuarina that lined the roads. Weeds took over. Shrubs grew and trees spread their branches, fearing neither the electricity department’s routine lopping off of branches nor the ruthless home builders who sought to fill every square inch of land they had paid for with brick and mortar. Some days it occurred to Gowda that he lived in the middle of a forest. He woke to bird calls, and when it rained, the frog chorus croaked all through the night.
Four years ago, when Gowda broached his plan to build a home in Greenview Residency, Mamtha had been appalled. She had hated the thought of moving from Gowda’s family home in 5th Block Jayanagar. After Shimoga, where Mamtha had grown up, Jayanagar had been everything she had imagined Bangalore to be. You stepped out of your home into a bustling street of shops and people. And yet, it was like what Shimoga had been. There was Suma Coffee Works, where she could buy the coffee-chicory blend she liked. There was Shenoy’s, where she could buy her choice of condiments and short eats; and a sweetshop that sold the best obattus and chirotis. Brahmins Café and MTR were nearby. Mamtha had loved it there. It was also convenient for her as she was posted at the Vanivilas hospital in Chamarajpet, which was only a fifteen-minute drive away.
After living in south Bangalore, the thought of moving across the city into the wastelands of north Bangalore worried her.
‘It’s just the other side of the city. Why are you behaving as if I’m suggesting we move to Outer Mongolia?’ Gowda said.
‘It may well be for me,’ she snapped. ‘What do I know about that part of Bangalore?’
‘The new airport’s coming up there,’ he said, clutching at any straw.
‘And how many times do I go to the airport?’
Gowda had retreated behind his newspaper. He had seen his father do this with great effect when his mother was spoiling for a fight. Behind the newspaper, he held his breath, wondering if she would tear it out of his hands. But Mamtha was not given to such outbursts of emotion. She stared at him and walked away.
She had sulked for the next few weeks but Gowda pretended not to see her distress and went ahead with his plans. The developer had given him a whopping discount on the market rate.
‘This is all I can afford,’ Gowda had tried to placate his wife every now and then as the house took shape. ‘At this price we’d get a hole in a wall somewhere else, but here we have a plot that is five thousand square feet. We can even have a garden!’
Mamtha glared at him. ‘Did I ever ask you for a garden? For that matter, do you know the difference between a mango and a turnip?’ She turned on her side and went to sleep.
Gowda had come to love the quiet and so when the f
irst truck load of stone arrived two years ago for a plot at the end of the road, he felt as if his private space was being intruded upon.
But Mamtha had welcomed the thought of neighbours. ‘About time!’ she had said. ‘It will be nice to have some people and noise instead of the cheep-cheep of birds all day.’
Gowda hadn’t spoken.
Despite Gowda’s daily glowering at the construction workers, the new house had been built and an elaborate housewarming ceremony held. Gowda and Mamtha had attended the puja, one reluctantly and the other compensating with an overdose of effusiveness. But after a few months the owners were transferred to Mumbai. Gowda had watched the movers’ truck arrive with a grin and, when they left, he had walked around with a light step.
Mamtha hadn’t said much, but when Roshan’s medical seat at Hassan came up, she had broached the idea of a move. Gowda had refused to even consider the thought. And then Mamtha played her ace. Someone needed to keep an eye on Roshan, she didn’t trust him to be on his own. She would have the hospital find her a house right in the heart of Hassan.
‘Maybe when you are here on your own, you will be ready to consider moving away from this wilderness,’ she had said as she packed.
Gowda didn’t think he could live anywhere else. He liked it too much here. But he had to buckle in and let the first floor out when Mamtha insisted. ‘We’ve sunk everything we had into this house and Roshan’s medical admission,’ she said. ‘They are a young couple and will be no trouble. And I’ll know that if you need any help, there will be someone around.’
Night had settled in and from the first floor, he could hear sounds of muted conversation. His tenants were back from wherever they had gone to. Had Mamtha and he ever behaved like newlyweds? He had been busy using up all his energy being angry with the system and she had her nose in her medical books. By the time his anger had run its course and she had become a qualified doctor, the baby had arrived. Suddenly they were parents worrying about inoculations and school admissions.