by Anita Nair
‘Well, let me tell you if you have forgotten that when the Station Muthu gang left me beaten to a pulp outside Byppanahalli railway station, it was a freak of nature who saved my life. So many people walked past me and they walked away without even stopping to check if I was alive or dead. One of those freaks took me home, brought a doctor, nursed me till I could sit up. None of this you see would exist if a bloody chhakka, as you call them, hadn’t…’
Chikka turned, hands folded in penitence. ‘Did I say anything about Akka? But the rest of them … they give you a bad name.’
‘Do I care?’
‘And can you trust them not to blabber about us?’ Chikka asked quietly. He wondered how much King Kong understood. He was a Bihari with only a smattering of Kannada. Chikka and the corporator spoke in Tamil. Nonetheless…
‘They won’t. They fear the wrath of the goddess as much as they fear me. And they know I can summon the goddess if I choose. Enough about this.’
‘The PWD man…’ Chikka reminded him.
But the corporator had closed his eyes. ‘Later, Chikka, later,’ he said.
As if on cue, King Kong put the music on.
MONDAY, 8 AUGUST
He looked around him carefully. It was just as he had expected it to be. The deep leather sofas and the chrome and leather bar stools. Gleaming floors and glass counters displaying cakes that seemed to be made of shaving foam mostly. The smell of coffee, and smart young men and women in smart clothes bustling around, taking orders, serving customers. With complete ease and absolute control.
SI Santosh looked around and bit down on his lip. How did one get to be like that? Was it an urban phenomenon or were you born with the knowledge that the only reason the world existed was to make your life better?
SI Santosh looked at the menu card one of those young gods had left on his table with a smile and a deft flick of his wrist. He blanched. A coffee cost one hundred and fifty-nine rupees. He could buy his whole month’s supply of freshly ground coffee blended with twenty per cent chicory for that money. What kind of people came to coffee shops like this?
His eyes darted around the premises. A hum of voices rose above the music. Music that resonated with a certain tempo to suggest youthful vivaciousness. Music the like of which SI Santosh had never heard before. Music that the girls in their cropped tops and balloon pants, the boys in skinny fitted T-shirts and ears studded with strange devices masquerading as earrings, must understand and even enjoy. If Gowda made him feel foolish, being here swamped him with a sense of inadequacy.
He had walked into the coffee shop on a whim. He had gone to the commissioner’s office on an errand. On his way back, he had decided to take in a few sights. He was unfamiliar with Bangalore still, except for what he had seen in the movies. On M.G. Road, which seemed to have grown a spine on which soon the metro rail would run, he saw a coffee shop and was lured in by its glass and chic.
The parking attendant had instantly recognized that he was a policeman even though he was in mufti. A place had been magically found for his bike. But in here, it was as if he was invisible. He thought of snapping his fingers at one of the young gods and booming, ‘Hey, waiter!’
As he raised his hand, a young man appeared at his elbow. ‘Ready to order, sir?’
SI Santosh’s eyes trawled the menu once again. ‘It’s all so expensive,’ he said, unable to help himself.
‘All our outlets have the same prices,’ the waiter said, trying to hide his smile. ‘If you prefer something cheaper, there’s the India Coffee House in Church Street, it’s just a few minutes from here…’ he added quietly.
SI Santosh didn’t like that. His eyes flicked over the young man, trying to read a veiled insult in those innocuous words. ‘I know where Church Street is. No, that’s fine, give me a hazelnut…’ he said, sticking his finger at the item on the menu. How did one say ‘frappe’?
‘One hazelnut frappe coming up,’ the waiter said.
Santosh grimaced, wondering what would appear before him.
‘Would you like any extra topping? Raspberry? Or chocolate? Or whipped cream?’
‘No, just what I ordered. And a glass of water.’
‘Plain or mineral?’
One more choice. What was it about urban life that demanded you make a choice every minute, every day?
‘Plain,’ he said, and stared down at his fingertips.
‘Hello sir,’ a voice said from nearby. SI Santosh looked up. From an adjacent table, Samuel smiled at him.
As he watched, the photographer rose and came to his table. He drew a chair out and seated himself. SI Santosh wasn’t too sure about the man’s familiarity with him. He was a police officer after all.
‘How is the case coming along?’ the photographer asked.
SI Santosh wondered if he should tell him that both Gowda and he seemed to be walking into one cul-de-sac after another. That, in all probability, it would stay an unsolved case. There was no one out there baying for the blood of Liaquat’s killer. But SI Santosh swallowed his frustration and said with as much gravity as he could muster, ‘The investigation is under way. We should make a breakthrough very soon.’
The photographer smiled as the waiter brought a tall glass with an intricately convoluted plastic straw and a tall spoon.
SI Santosh stared at the straw. Did he drink his hazelnut frappe through the straw? Or did he strip the drink of the straw and use the spoon instead? Oh, why the hell hadn’t he taken the waiter’s advice and gone to India Coffee House?
The photographer reached forward to draw the straw out. ‘May I?’
SI Santosh shrugged.
‘My daughter loves these things. I pick them up whenever I can,’ he said in explanation, wiping the straw clean with a tissue. Then, suddenly struck by a thought, he said, ‘It’s not very often you see a policeman in a place like this!’
‘I am on duty,’ SI Santosh spoke carefully, digging the spoon into what seemed like a glassful of ice. And for this, Rs 159.
‘Yes, I know about it too,’ the photographer murmured.
SI Santosh’s eyes widened.
‘They come here claiming to be students, but they’re ruthless bastards. Each one of them,’ Samuel said.
What on earth was the fool talking about? SI Santosh took a sip of his drink and crunched noisily on a cube of ice.
‘But they won’t come here. This is too conspicuous. I have heard about a couple of places closer to your station. I would go there,’ the photographer added. Then, pulling a pad out of his pocket, he scribbled a few words and pushed it towards SI Santosh.
The policeman gaped at the words. Gamal. Nirvana.
‘Cafés. One’s on A Cross in HRBR Layout and the other’s on Eighty Feet Road. A lot of them gather there,’ Samuel said, rising to leave. Then he paused. ‘That burn victim could have been involved for all you know. Have you thought on those lines?’
SI Santosh threw him a look that he had seen Gowda cast his way every few hours: don’t teach granny to suck eggs, etc. ‘Like I said, the investigation is still on,’ he said, signifying end of discussion. Another trick he had picked up from Gowda.
At the traffic light, SI Santosh watched appalled as a eunuch wove her way through the traffic towards him. Tapping at a car window, clinging to the bar of an autorickshaw, blowing a kiss at a man on a bike, muttering to another, who was driving a little open van packed with trays of eggs. Two other eunuchs were swiftly working the traffic before the lights changed and their captive prey fled.
No, I won’t allow them to terrorize me, no, I won’t let them embarrass me; no, I won’t open my wallet and give them a tenner just so they will go away, a voice screamed in SI Santosh’s head. What was this city, he asked himself for the hundredth time, that spawned such ignominy in the sixty seconds it took a light to change? Young men wearing a tie and rubber chappals selling jigsaw puzzles, ear buds and boxes of tissues with a mindless line of sales chat. Small children with whiskers drawn on their faces, tur
ning somersaults through an iron hoop…
In the little town where he had grown up, there had been life at the street corners. But nothing like this. There too were flower sellers and fruit vendors, beggars with maimed limbs and dead eyes, but this was something else. The desperation of a child turning cartwheels for money rather than for the sheer fun of it; the wretchedness of the salesmen whose ties flapped in the breeze with a certain hopelessness; the rage of the eunuchs who, without a single word spoken, demanded that the city pay for who and what they had become.
The truth was the city was beginning to scare him. The truth was his job was beginning to feel like it was beyond him. The truth was SI Santosh wanted to lay his head in his amma’s lap and howl. In the wake of that desolation, as the lights changed, SI Santosh took a forbidden U-turn amidst the screeching of traffic and the angry voices of people manning them. Somewhere in this locality was Gamal. In there he would discover what Samuel had hinted at. And with that he hoped to find his faith again: the belief that had brought him this far that the world would allow itself to be righted. That all was not lost even in this cold, heartless city.
What SI Santosh did discover at Gamal was the sight of Gowda’s Bullet in the parking lot. Did he know about the goings-on here? Santosh stood by Gowda’s bike, uncertain. Should he go in? Would Gowda be livid that he had walked into the middle of an investigation?
A small ball of rebellion turned in Santosh’s heart. He should have been told if Gowda was doing some undercover work. And this was a bloody café. Anyone could go in. C’mon, SI Santosh, his inner voice, which in these few days had acquired the timbre and countenance of Gowda, murmured with a sneer, where are your balls? Do you have any goolies or do they fill your Y fronts only for show? C’mon, make a move.
SI Santosh adjusted his trousers. The bloody thing had rucked up between his bum again. Get some new trousers, the Gowda voice hissed, ones that fit.
He walked into Gamal through the glass doors that were kept permanently open. The deeply satisfying aroma of coffee and something sweet met him and drew him in. Santosh’s eyes widened. In its shadowed interior, amidst several young couples, Indian and foreign, Gowda sat with a woman.
Gowda stirred the spoon round and round. He felt her eyes on him, taking stock. The coffee sloshed against the rim of the cup. Gowda took a sip. But it may have been hot water for all he could taste. Again the slow stirring, the need to do something as the silence and the years gone by stretched between them. She hadn’t waited for him to text her as he had said he would. Instead, she had called him. He had agreed to meet her at a café that was only twenty minutes away from the station.
‘Fantastic,’ she had said. ‘I need to go to a couple of places in your neighbourhood. So I can combine it with this.’
He had grunted in reply. It was only when the call was over that he realized he had been holding his breath.
He tried to read her expression. What did she see? A middle-aged policeman of no particular significance. The college athlete gone to seed, the slackness of muscles and a burgeoning belly. He wasn’t even a spectacular wreck. An ordinary man with little charm and even sparser conversation. It was this, the image of his very ordinariness in his own head that made him demand, ‘Do you still wipe the leaves of your plants?’
Her eyes widened. Her lips twitched.
‘What?’ he growled. ‘Did I say something funny?’
‘I see you after, what is it, twenty-seven years, and this is what you want to know? Do I still wipe the leaves of my plants? I do, Borei, I do…’ Urmila laughed.
‘You haven’t changed one bit, Borei.’ Urmila shook her head in wry resignation.
‘Would you have preferred it if I had changed? Become another person entirely?’ Gowda asked quietly.
She looked at him carefully. ‘Still so defensive, Borei … why would you think I want you changed? When Michael called me and said he had met you, do you know what I asked him?’
Gowda examined his fingernails. He knew she wanted him to ask ‘what?’ Something stilled his tongue. That damn cussedness of yours is going to slam every door in your face, his father had repeatedly warned him.
‘I asked him if I would recognize you if I saw you now. I asked him if you had changed. Especially given your profession. But somewhere in me I wanted to believe that you would be the same. You would be the Borei I once knew. And fell in love with.’
Gowda felt his heart hammer in his chest. How easily she spoke the L-word. When had he used it last? He felt all of nineteen again. He raised his eyes to hers.
‘I was so young then; so spineless and so wanting everyone’s approval. Do you still hold it against me? The shoddy manner in which I treated you, the carelessness with which I broke up with you … it has haunted me every day. Through my marriage and later, when my husband and I … I thought my sins were catching up with me.’
‘Enough,’ Gowda said. ‘I survived. I am all right. You don’t have to put yourself through any of this guilt thinking you ruined my life. You didn’t.’
I did it on my own: Gowda suppressed that last thought.
‘Are you happy with how your life has turned out?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘I have no complaints.’
‘No regrets either?’
Gowda took a deep breath. ‘What is it you want to know, Urmila?’
He saw her lip tremble. Her fingers tore at the napkin.
‘If you are asking whether I missed you these last many years, I didn’t.’
‘Borei, I…’
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘Let me finish. Suddenly, out of nothing, a pang would seize me. It would clutch at me with iron fingers and I would wonder where you were, how you were, and if our lives would have been different if we were together.’
She continued to tear the napkin to shreds.
‘Are you disappointed?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘A little. I had imagined you nursing this eternal flame of longing for me. But I am relieved too. That your life didn’t pause because of me.’
Gowda smiled. A mirthless smile that didn’t even hint at how often the iron fist squeezed his being. Seeing her had only exacerbated that pang of: If only…
‘Your family?’ she asked.
‘My wife is a doctor. She’s in Hassan. I have a son, Roshan. He is a medical student. And you? Do you have any children?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t. My husband didn’t want any. He was very insistent.’
Gowda saw the lines of defeat that striated her face. He ached to reach forward and smoothen them away.
‘I’m glad I picked up the phone and called you this morning,’ she said candidly. ‘Would you have?’
Gowda spread his hands out. ‘I’m glad you did too. I wouldn’t have. I would have been too afraid to. We are not who we once were. What if you were standoffish … what if you were dismissive?’ His eyes bored into hers.
She reached out and took his hand in hers. ‘Dismissive? I have thought of you every single day after we…’
Suddenly Gowda, SI Santosh saw, pulled his giant paw out of the woman’s clasp and ran out of the room with a speed that belied his size, leaving SI Santosh surprised and Urmila aghast.
His heart, it seemed, had lodged in his mouth, threatening to fall out with every step he took. His breath heaved, pumping his chest out farther and farther. In his head a swarm of bees buzzed, banging against the wall of his eyes, clouding his vision, seeking to escape his ears in a whoosh of heat. But Gowda continued to run, trying to gauge which way his son and the African man had fled.
He hadn’t known where to look when Urmila took his hand in hers. Perhaps that was why his gaze had flitted around the café nervously; was anyone watching them? Two middle-aged fools holding hands in broad daylight while somewhere in the background Dire Straits sang ‘So far away’.
Perhaps it was an occupational hazard. The police eye. A cold clinical eye turning everything in its path and around it for
a hint of suspicious behaviour. An eye of doubt forever.
Perhaps it was just the male gaze. The congenital habit of the male species. Darting this way and that, checking out two in the bush despite having one in hand.
Or perhaps it was that thing called happenstance.
That his eyes should land on what seemed a familiar profile. Roshan. At first, he felt a surge of panic. Had Roshan seen him with Urmila? Then he saw that his son was engrossed in whatever he was doing with the African man. His son appeared to be pleading, while the other man looked unmoved despite the desperation, the fervour, the abject need. The man licked his lips, leaned back and crossed his arms, distancing himself, and as he did so, his eyes locked with Gowda’s. A flicker. A recognition. Criminals and policemen have that. An innate ability to spot each other in a crowd.
He stood up hastily. After a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed Roshan’s arm and almost dragged him away. And the silly fool, Roshan, went without even protesting. And as Urmila continued to speak about god knows what, Gowda had pulled his hand from hers. There was no time for polite niceties and excuse-mes. He went after them. Only to see them breaking into a sprint the moment they were out of the glass doors.
Gowda followed them to the end of the street. But they had had a head start; they were young and racing to get away. They disappeared into a by-lane, leaving Gowda breathless and furious at his own lack of form. And an overwhelming sense of dread: what was Roshan up to?
Gowda stood bent over in the middle of the road, clutching his knees and sucking in large mouthfuls of air. As the blood slowly retreated to his veins and arteries instead of threatening to erupt from the top of his head in a spray, he realized that Santosh was at his side, asking, ‘Sir, sir, what happened? Are you all right? Why were you chasing the boys?’
Gowda straightened slowly. ‘What are you doing here?’
Had the fool seen him with Urmila? Had he recognized Roshan? Panic buttons beeped at the back of Gowda’s still buzzing head. Then from somewhere he dredged up the voice of authority and barked, ‘I’ll tell you in a bit. Wait here.’