by Anil Menon
She may have been. She must have been. Whatever she was, she was here, sweating on a wooden chair under the ineffectual fan, one hand tightly clutching a black Michael Kors handbag, the other over a couple of obese sepia-coloured files she’d placed on my desk.
Her clothes were one size too small, and her skin had acquired the lacquered blotchiness of someone who’d never adjust to the tropical sun. I tried to imagine her growing up in Long Island and all that came to mind were bits and pieces from The Godfather movie.
She had the calm of someone who’d spent all night tossing and turning, but had woken on the other side of exhaustion, body and mind united in a spiritual resolve. On the surface, that is. She was afraid.
I couldn’t understand the fear. Well, I could understand she had reasons to be afraid—she was afraid for her husband and any visit to any Lokshakti office is a fearful experience. But she was safe enough in my office. She was a friend of Tanaz; there were all sorts of obligations placed on me by that relationship. I ordered the peon to bring special chai. The ‘special’ let him know he was to make a fresh batch of chai if necessary, to get the set, not just cups, and to bring cream biscuits as well.
‘Did you have difficulty finding my office?’ I asked, more to set her at ease than to solicit information. I knew finding my office was near-impossible. It is an actual government office, not a showpiece meant to illustrate the idea of government. It’s not a place that encourages visitors, petitioners and the like. If I remember correctly, the only sign the building is anything at all is a number and a zip code. The street we are on changes its name annually, so it is very probable that when the postman who brings our mail dies, no further mail will inconvenience our busy governing.
‘I did get lost,’ she confessed. ‘I went round and round for an hour. I finally had to call Tanaz and ask her.’
But she had been on time. Which meant she’d started out very early, far earlier than she needed to be. I imagined her, corseted in tension, having the frustrated and increasingly rude driver, going round and round the area, asking paanwallahs, office-goers, and ultimately everyone: can you please tell me where is the office I have to go to, to beg for my husband’s life?
‘How do you know Tanaz?’ I asked, determined to set her at ease.
On relocating to India, she had taken a part-time job with Social Weather. Her white skin could get her into circles that would have been difficult for the average desi associate. Social Weather sent her into the Taj, to Marriott, to ethnic art shows, to Alliance Francaise events, to German Book Office affairs; they sent her everywhere foreigners gathered in Delhi. It didn’t pay very well but it gave her something to do while her husband worked on—what else?—another book. She had met Tanaz at an orientation—Tanaz was often asked to speak before new recruits. They’d discovered their Italian connection and had become friends. They would have become friends in any event. ‘Tanaz told me you are also a gifted writer. That you write fiction?’
She was trying to make a connection through flattery and though I understood the effort, I liked her a little less. She’d lied. Tanaz would have said something like: I love getting his letters. I meant every word in my letters. A storyteller, gifted or not, strove only to create an effect. Letter-writing was as removed from fiction as this lady’s worry was from a corporate get-well card.
‘Here I’m nothing more than a servant of the Lokshakti.’
‘Yes of course. Of course I understand that.’
I had been more severe than I’d intended. ‘I occasionally do write stories. We Indian civil servants are required to brood over a magic-realist memoir or two. But I prefer to spend my spare time with Tanaz.’
‘She is so busy! We’ve been trying to meet for lunch forever. When I worked for Social Weather, they kept me on the run too. It was exhausting. That’s why I quit and began to volunteer at the Jawan Sevak shelter—’
The chai arrived at that moment. I poured Margherita—or so I’d begun to think of her—a cup, insisted that she sample one of the cream biscuits. I waited until she had taken a couple of sips then picked up her PFR.
‘Now, what is it that you want me to do?’
‘Please return my husband to me. He’s completely innocent. He’s the sweetest dearest most harmless human being you can imagine. I mean—all he cares about is medieval European poetry. The eighteenth century is about as close as he gets to the modern world. He doesn’t even know how to use a cellphone properly. Yet he is accused of running a spy network, selling secrets to foreign powers and spreading sedition amongst students. Some of them have even been questioned.’
I leafed through her copy of the file. Her husband had been arrested around the time Durga Dhasal had been murdered. The Lokshakti is meticulous in how it incarcerates people. If an ISO-9001 certification had been available, we would have secured it. The accused’s next-of-kin always got a copy of the charges with numbers to call, visiting hours and websites to track the PFR status. The first impression is that everything is very orderly, far from arbitrary and quite considerate.
‘I’m so worried… What must they be doing to him in there? If I could know that at least. It is the not knowing that is killing me.’
There were some two hundred different templates the Lokshakti used to generate the elaborate and largely speculative ‘preliminary findings report’ or PFR. Every PFR had a case number—a monster bristling with dashes and slashes—which became the accused’s virtual representation. The number was a primary key to a variety of database records, with the result that the PFR was a focus, a seed, around which all sorts of incriminating material may be crystallized. That shopping list with milk, floor cleaner and a reminder to fill the car with petrol? Making full use of your B.Sc. (Chem), gold medal, aren’t you? That sexy email you sent your wife quoting Sanskrit erotica? That was slandering Hinduism, wasn’t it? The blog you wrote denouncing the education system and which had ended saying ‘such irresponsible teachers should be fired’? The word ‘fired’, that’s a code word isn’t it, a call to shoot hard-working school teachers? Explain!
Sometimes it was what you wouldn’t say that incriminated you. Why is it so hard for you to praise your country once in a while? Three hundred blog articles on Indian history and not a single one on the noble jawans who died for the flag? Explain!
Sometimes it was the extra effort you took to sound innocuous or casual that to a trained mind screamed: deconstructive subterfuge! Mahatma Gandhi is a great man. Now sir, why state the obvious? We all know he is a man. Why assert the obvious unless you are insinuating the opposite? It is like saying on an airplane: I do not have a bomb. Explain!
Any one thing wouldn’t condemn you; a pattern had to be established. Typically, many officials worked on building the PFR. This was where the magic happened. Even if an official was aware their specific contribution was fantasy, they found it hard to believe the entire bulging file—fatter than War and Peace, heavier than a paperweight—was a work of fantasy. This is an instance of the general faith in human beings we all have. For example, when we examine resumés we may suspect this or that claim sounds a bit overstated, but who goes so far as to doubt that the chap likes to ‘travel for fun’ or isn’t ‘married with two kids’? We are Spinozans, so to speak, rather than Cartesians. That is, we are biased to believe propositions, not doubt them.
The PFR was more than a summary of charges. It was a representation of all the relevant aspects of a human being. Indeed, it made the human being seem almost superfluous. For some officers, the cases acquired a reality greater than that of the actual. I have seen Lokshakti interrogators hammer the accused with verse and chapter from their PFRs, waving the fat files in the air, stabbing and poking pages with their fingers, their voices hoarse with genuine outrage, shocked, genuinely shocked that the ordinary citizens before them could have sunk so low as to forget their duty to God and country. I knew a few case officers who diligently continued to work on PFRs long after their flesh-and-blood originals had departe
d for the Norwegian fjords.
In their display of passion, the officers were only displaying their humanity. Like doctors. Doctors are said to adopt detachment as a survival mechanism. That’s nonsense. The doctor substitute attachment to the sick body with an equally sentimental attachment to measurement. Monitor readings and medical charts, so many cc’s of this and that, protocols to be started and stopped, cultures to be assayed: the dying body is substituted by the corpus of observations to which hope may yet cling. So too with the PFR. Unable to stop the accused from slipping into their self-dug graves, yet unable to accept defeat, unable to accept the prisoner’s faint ‘I prefer not to lie’, the officers opened their own veins, transfused passion, striving to fill what had been emptied, their resolute hands placed on the chest of Text in cardiac arrest: Clear! Live dammit, live! Were they of a less passionate disposition, Lokshakti officers would accept Deleuze’s defeatist claim that the Bartlebys before them, shortly to be bare bodies, animals to be touched only with fables, meant anything at all. But they were men and women of conscience.
‘The PFR seems to be in order—’ I held up a hand to forestall her protest. ‘Seems to be in order. Does your husband have any enemies? People who would like to see him ruined?’
‘Yes! We have this horrible horrible neighbour. We are sure it’s all his doing.’ I let her explain, though I’d already guessed the rest of the story.
A vicious, well-connected neighbour. Small quarrels that had led to this or that Lokshakti contact being called, perhaps some friend of an influential relative. A litany of accusations. The foreigner wife. The trips abroad. The small inexplicable luxuries. The professor’s students would be visited, they could be made to sign various confessions. So on and so forth, till the file had accumulated a sufficient weight to justify an arrest warrant.
‘The crux of the case seems to be this foreign contact,’ I said, poking at the file. ‘His emails make repeated references to buying this and that for one Laura Silvester. There’s a lot of discussion about her being unwell. In our experience, illness is usually code-speak for criticisms about the body politic. You say, so-and-so is ill, has such-and-such problem and in that way discuss what’s wrong with the country.’ Said out loud, the stupidity of the reasoning was even more painfully obvious.
‘But—’ Margherita began scrambling through the black handbag.
‘If she will come forward and establish that she was indeed sick and clarify her relationship with your husband—’
‘Laura is our cat!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Laura Silvester. She’s a stray cat we adopted from an animal shelter. Here, I have the adoption certificate—’ She thrust a paper across the table, her nostrils wide with abject indignation. ‘Petrarch’s cat was called Laura. Silvester was my choice. So we combined the two. Laura is our cat. She had all sorts of ailments; it wrung his heart to see her suffer. It was funny because he had been reluctant for us to have a cat. Growing up he never had a pet, and he didn’t like cats because they seemed so judgmental. But I was really missing my Mussolini—’ She thrust some photos across the table. ‘I’d had to leave him behind in Long Island you see. I wheedled and whined until he agreed to let me keep a pet, not very happily, I must add. I was supposed to take care of Laura, but once we brought her home, forget it, she was his cat. Laura was Petrarch’s great love, so my husband would also joke the cat was his mistress, you never forget your first cat and so on. Yes, some of our emails are naughty but he’s a poet at heart, what do you expect? Can’t you see, it’s all a huge misunderstanding. My husband is accused of plotting with his cat!’
I studied the photos. It was hard to say who was more contented, the man or the cat. I studied the file’s absurd claims. I raised my head, met her gaze.
I burst out laughing. I roared, grasping the arms of my chair for support. I slapped the desktop, raised my feet, shook helplessly. Absurd, it was all so absurd.
Then I stopped, composed myself with a sip of chai. I saw from the frightened smile appearing and disappearing on her tired and swollen face she was wondering how to react.
‘I’m sorry. This does cat a new light on things.’ I felt the laugh rise again and controlled myself. I closed the PFR. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
I was. I would have to exert myself quite a bit; the case had progressed too far for me to get the case thrown out for lack of evidence. The Lokshakti took the phrase ‘lack of evidence’ as a personal insult. I would have to find another way.
‘Please, please. Please help us. You must help us. You are our last hope.’
Was I? I thought about it. She was an American citizen. Sambuka Adams was a dual citizen. Raise enough of a stink and NY Times or Washington Post—probably the latter—would eventually write an emotional piece, win a Pulitzer. #bringbacksambuka. The State Department wouldn’t be a problem; they loved strong business-friendly governments and the relationship between the two countries had never been warmer. In the worst case, we would have to buy something to soothe their hurt feelings. Over-engineered weapons and mutant seeds, probably. Still, the US Government, schizo as always, would have to stage some sort of protest. The Secretary of State might mention Adhamo in some speech, insist that he be released. We would be encouraged to learn from the US about human rights. Margherita could make this an international incident. No, I wasn’t her last recourse, not by a long shot.
‘Let me find out where he is being held,’ I said.
‘The PFR says he is at Section 34.’
I sighed. ‘The Lokshakti occasionally loses track of where its people are. Partly its because there are multiple agencies all overseeing each other. With all that oversight, sometimes people become invisible. He was last at Section 34. Since the report, he may have been moved. I’m told there’s a serious overcrowding problem. There might also be several Section 34s. If you’ve been to Noida, you know how we use numbers. It is mischievous.’
‘Oh god, this is a nightmare.’
‘Then that’s a good thing because nightmares, though scary, aren’t real. Go home madam, resume life. These places aren’t as horrible you might imagine. It won’t help him if you fall apart. Listen to me—’ I waited to make sure I had her full attention. ‘Don’t go to the American consulate and create a fuss about his arrest—’
‘But he’s an American citizen; maybe the State Department can apply pressure?’
I suppressed my irritation. This was no time for romantic fantasies. ‘Pressure is useless without an area to apply it to. You might find it hard to prove he was arrested. The PFR is not proof of arrest; it is merely a dossier of charges. As for the arrest warrant, well, it’s only a piece of paper, isn’t it? Embarrass the Lokshakti, make us look stupid, which we are, and I won’t be able to prevent our immune response from firing up. In fact, you you could be asked to leave the country. My advice? Return to your house, be patient and try not to worry. Don’t call Tanaz or email or talk about this to anyone. Because of the American connection, there’s an excellent chance, near certainty in fact, he’s being treated well. Please be patient. It will take me a while, a few weeks perhaps, to untangle the situation. I will personally look into it. You will have your husband back, madam.’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’ Much to my embarrassment, she grabbed my hand, gripped it. ‘Thank you. I’ll do exactly as you say.’
‘Great!’ I stood up, to indicate the meeting was over. I had only promised to return her husband, not the relationship itself. Prisons could turn butterflies into caterpillars. ‘Let me walk you out.’ She protested it was unnecessary, and I added, ‘It’s a large building; it’s easy to get lost.’
This was true. The building was bit of a maze and old-timers enjoyed making newbies nervous with tales about how the building was actually many buildings. Time travel was as simple as entering through one door and exiting through another. Today, the building was all linoleum floors, wood-panelled rooms and long corridors. It wasn’t spooky however. Indian offices are noisy
, crowded places and noisy, crowded places are simply not spooky. Tanaz’s friend visibly relaxed as we threaded our way through the crowd. I had tuned out the ambience a long time ago but she found small insights. She picked up the rapid-fire click-clacking of typewriters.
‘I hear typewriters!’ she exclaimed.
‘They have their uses.’ History repeated itself through typewriters. At the end of the corridor, a shining rectangle of light. My escort was no longer needed. She met my eyes. I again offered her my reassurances. She managed a smile, even an Indian nod. I watched her walk away.
I had heard of Section 34. It was located near Pokhran in Rajasthan, about hundred or so kilometres from Jodhpur. It was where we stashed our more respectable unfortunates. But it was better not to share that information with the lady. It could give her ideas. I didn’t want her parking anywhere near Pokhran. I had some Swantantrarelated business in Jodhpur anyway. I could fly out, extricate Sam Adhamo, and if all went well, reunite the scholarly felon with his female and feline. A day’s work, max.
Later, after lunch, I prepared for my meeting with media executives at the Oberoi on Lodhi road. I expected to see representatives from all the major channels, the big papers, corporations like Social Weather, and even some ISP providers. Set up at my request, the meeting was a goodwill mission.
No government has ever desired a free media. A free media is microphones and pushy young women who shout questions like sir, sir, so-and-so says you were born because you paid your father to sleep with your mother, what do you say to these allegations, sir, sir?
On the other hand, no member of the media has ever desired a government that works. Who needs a weatherman in good weather?
But I was optimistic that this gap could be bridged. After all, we were both in the business of mediating public perception. It was at this time that I got a call from Bilkis. Her vital Punjabi voice was just the antidote for the morning. She first wanted to know if the line was secure. I told her I had no idea. Now, what was on her mind?