He was assigned to the town of Baraut in the Baghpat District, where he ran the station during this stretch. This small UP town had a polytechnic college, and students would come from all the nearby areas to enroll in the numerous vocational courses it offered. Being a small town in an unruly state, there was considerable political influence over the college. Policies and rules were subject to various external pressures. A year into his assignment Ranvir learned of a new principal who had joined the college. Chaubey came to Baraut from one of the city colleges. This was his first assignment in a politically charged atmosphere. It didn’t take long for the sparks to fly and within a month of his arrival, word was out that the local community was already plotting his transfer.
Ranvir met him for the first time at a college function where they shared the podium. He liked the man’s simple, crisp style and engaging manner. He could also see that this was one fish that would soon be out of water. They stood for a couple of minutes chatting after the event.
“So, officer, how has your posting been? Have you settled down well in these parts?”
Settling down was the last thing on Ranvir’s mind. Baraut was a dull place and a punishment posting. The contrast to Mumbai was striking. “No, Mr. Chaubey,” he replied. “In my line of work, if you settle down they transfer you out immediately. Honestly, I place no premium on being appreciated by the locals.”
“So, what do you like about this place?” asked Chaubey.
It was a question Ranvir had asked of himself. He counted with his fingers as he spoke: “Let me see: community toilets on the terrace, sparrows getting killed by my bedroom fan, monkeys parading around in my underwear.”
Chaubey laughed. “This is Uttar Pradesh, after all. And what do you dislike?”
Ranvir thought for a moment. “I guess the kathor bhasha. The language is rough and immediate, like the people.”
Chaubey reflected on the nature of curse words commonly used in Baraut. Naali ka keeda was the genteel opener. “I agree,” he replied. “Words bristle on people’s tongues out here. Even verbs sound coarse in Baghpat District.”
To Ranvir, silences were a measure of a place. In Allahabad he treasured the silence. He could hear poets at work in those long hours when time stood still, usually in the afternoon. In Baraut he could sense an unruly quiet; he could feel lonely men hatching predictable plots. There was nothing commendable about the silence in Baraut.
The local police station was a crude outpost. They had a simple approach to dealing with suspects: bring them in, work them over; if that fails, do them in. The cops also relied heavily on local hoods to do most of their work and only bothered to show up when absolutely necessary. As a result, there was a parallel system of enforcement that had sprung up with the active connivance of the constabulary. Ranvir had to work hard to break this mold. The first thing he noticed was a complete absence of records. Many cases were not even filed, and those that were had hardly any paperwork. He made an honest attempt but after a few months he realized the futility of trying to change something that was ingrained in the very fabric of the place. Rather than Ranvir changing Baraut, the place changed him. When he returned to Mumbai he looked the same but he was amenable now to getting things done the way they did in small towns. In other words, he had the right disposition to head an encounter unit.
He arrived back in Mumbai unheralded. Nobody had noticed his absence in the first place, other than counterintelligence, which had been following him closely. Ranvir rose rapidly up the ranks.
His seniors called him Rana, which he liked. After a few years he was asked to study the Class of ’83 and do better in assembling an encounter team of his own. Do better than them? They had an enviable track record at eliminating targets and were publicly acknowledged as heroes. In sum, this group of police officers had eliminated more than six hundred underworld gang members. One unfortunate side effect of this new dynamic had been lawlessness within the force itself; the spirit of the Wild West seemed to have emboldened most of these officers into making extracurricular money and exercising their power for private gain. The city was “cleansed” and extortion cases decreased, but while gangs felt the heat and their activities were severely curtailed, most of these specialists were soon involved in some misdemeanor or another. As they say, success is a perch that breeds entitlement.
It was eerie. One by one the batch had taken pieces of the law and broken them. It was almost as if they’d been told to pick their crimes from a catalog of vice.
But the department was unwilling to accept these misdemeanors as the necessary price of ridding the city of six hundred hoods. They wanted a different approach and a team that could be controlled better, a quiet team with a low profile. The deputy general of the Maharashtra police publicly said, “Socks. And corrupt officers. The Mumbai police needs to pull up both if they want to win back the respect they once commanded.”
Ranvir’s boss was part of the old guard, a tenured officer who asked him strange questions like, “Do philosophers make good omelets?”
Ranvir thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His boss was a guilty man; at least he behaved like one. He was forever trying to justify the encounter approach to himself. He began quoting extensively from the Bhagwad Geetha, a text in which killing brothers in a war was arguably acceptable and philosophically tenable.
Thought has its place in the police hierarchy, but at lower levels it is preceded by action. That is how Ranvir trained his men. If someone were to ask Pradeep Sharma, How do you get around to killing somebody? he would describe in great detail exactly how he would do it. It wasn’t complicated and it certainly wasn’t a philosophical issue.
The targets were violent people who had taken lives. They could not be reined in or brought to custody easily, and many were beyond the pale of the justice system. The judicial process was multitiered; it was often infiltrated, witnesses were vulnerable, and they were either bought or they paid with their lives. The accused had the backing of gangs and they had the recklessness of cornered animals. The gangs employed lawyers who were trained in subverting the judicial process. On the one good day when the prosecution actually got a conviction, the system of appeals was endless and stretched beyond people’s career timelines. The Swamy case was a prime example and it exhausted Ranvir. Moreover, when Swamy was gunned down, Ranvir got a stern lecture from the judge, a dressing down that he found hard to stomach.
The encounter teams were given the choicest bits, those that were truly beyond the purview of the best sociological minds. Their subjects’ files were fat and juicy reading. Bring out the meat carver; this was blood that needed spilling.
“Ours will be a cool, collected operation and the odds will be stacked in our favor. We depend on good information, which is why we will tolerate Tiwari.”
But when the moment came someone still had to pull the trigger. It was tricky. There was no animosity or personal connection, but they still had to do it. Ranvir needed the right people to complete the task.
“I do not belong to this world. I don’t think anybody does. What we do feels artificial, even if it isn’t always staged.”
And that posed a challenge.
“You lost your hold on reality after a while. I needed to be careful with my team and look for people who would be less affected. Sympathy and empathy were unwanted. I wished for a while that I had a genetically modified team to manage, one that spoke less, operated alone, was less social, did not feel for the targets or imagine what would happen to their families.”
Mulling these qualities over in his head, Ranvir wrote out a job description for the team.
* * *
Ranvir and his wife settled into the comfortable police quarters behind Worli Seaface. It was on a private road and housed a large community, so she was happy. In the evenings, they would walk along the seafront and peer out over the water. Life felt precious in those days, to say nothing of the two gun-toting guards who walked behind them wearing black combat uniforms.
A lot was happening in his personal life back then.
His wife, a Brahmin from the south, was inbred, which was the norm in her community and by itself wasn’t a bad thing. Except for the fact that cousins marrying each other, aunts wedding their nephews, and uncles getting hitched to their nieces sounded strange. But these were real people and the ages were right, with the men older than the women by a few years, as Brahmin society had so wished. The issue was that the human species hated this sameness and sought diversity; if it felt cloistered by blood that grew thicker, then its innate need for freedom tripped the neural wiring.
Their child (a son) was born with disabilities. The one bright moment was when the nurse came out of the delivery room. (“You have a son.”) The rest they gradually delved into. The child turned out to be severely autistic, and all Ranvir could do was be courageous and support the mother. They did not weep. There were no tears at all. What followed was brief and intense.
They went to a young man named Evam Bhaskar, a “doctor” who they met by accident at a social function. He ran an obscure outfit in Gamdevi which they could not find at first. The entrance to the place was through a small gap between shops selling electrical wire and spare parts. The narrow entrance opened into a small courtyard graced by a lone tree. Three rooms surrounded the courtyard.
The first time Ranvir met Evam Bhaskar he was unimpressed. Intuition told him this was a person who was as strange as he looked.
“Dr. Evam, you are trained in which discipline?” He held Evam’s business card by a corner and brought it close to his eyes. He flipped the card over and was disappointed to see the reverse was blank.
“Non-Freudian medicine,” said Evam, watching Ranvir closely, aware of his disregard. “Psychology.”
“You mean psychoanalysis?’”
“No sir,” replied Evam. “We actually believe in chemo.” He tried a laugh. It was a solitary sound that slinked away through the window.
“This place is your clinic?” asked Ranvir.
“Yes. I also have a consulting room near Dharavi. It is where I . . . keep my records.”
He handed the card back to Evam, who looked surprised. Ranvir smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I have always wondered how you deliver your cures. It must be a difficult practice. There is no eureka moment when your patient is suddenly cured and can simply walk away.”
“There is no cure, sir,” Evam said. “There is no disease either.”
“And yet people come to you and they pay good money?” he asked, his dislike for Evam immediately apparent. Ranvir would soon gather that his patients never walked away either.
He would later reflect: “Evam ran a strange operation, and I for one was not convinced he was properly qualified. He didn’t look like a psychologist or a psychoanalyst, but nevertheless he spoke to us about autism. He said boys are more likely to be autistic (so don’t blame yourself), that more than one in a hundred children are statistically affected (I am not sure I’m stating it right), that we should be prepared for our child to not speak at all (some words might materialize but they go away), that a host of illnesses like allergies, bowel diseases, persistent viruses, and sensory-perception problems will follow him—and he stated all this in a calm, everyday manner, because this, it seems, was his everyday. I had to hand it to him. He lived with a bunch of these kids and their parents, day in and day out. I would have questioned the need long ago. I only had one child, my own; Evam bore many. He had a homily up his sleeve at all times. (If science fails then homilies are the cure.) He told me, When a normal child is born your windows open out. You breathe fresh air, hear new sounds, and you see a brave new world. When an autistic child is born you go knocking on doors.”
Moments of love and affection were few but they were breathtaking. Half the time Ranvir looked at his son in wonder.
“He couldn’t speak our language, so we invented words or expressions as a convenient shorthand. And then I kicked myself back into the present. When my son died of a severe infection we were barely there. To try to describe the feeling would be hollow. But it seemed then that someone had sent us this child as a sign. It was fleeting. It was a flare.”
Nandini
The very sight of Nandini knocks people over and they compete for her attention, hoping that she’ll notice them. Her gestures, her spirit, and her manner play havoc with common sensibilities. But she has more. She has insouciance and the charge of summer lightning. How could you blame them for falling in love with her?
Karan blamed his peripheral vision. She walked into it one day wearing a floral dress that swirled in the breeze. Things that swirled caught his attention. A faint hint of perfume teased his senses. He saw her and quickly looked away, then had no choice but to return his gaze to her. That was it for a while.
The next time he saw her she was wearing a purple T-shirt and white jeans. The jeans were embroidered with brass studs that glinted in the sun. He stared. Stuff that glinted got his attention. She caught him staring at her legs. That was it for a while.
They finally met. She was smoking a long, thin cigarette in the college canteen. And the smoke made him cough. The cough brought tears. Tears got her attention. She stubbed out the cigarette and walked up to him.
“Speak,” she said.
He coughed again and he glanced around at his friends. They were busy watching him struggle. She sat next to him and wouldn’t go away. He waited for words to form. The canteen emptied.
Karan was tall, good-looking, and a chikna who appeared lost all the time. He didn’t have a bike like the other studs and he didn’t wear brands, not even the cheap rip-offs. He wasn’t part of any of the cliques on A, B, or C Road. The girls were wary but intrigued by his brooding eyes and loner disposition. Here were secrets to be found.
He landed the girl who all the boys chased. She breached his honeycomb. Nandini was the only one to walk up to him and hold his hand. She liked his long fingers, his fair complexion, and the feelings he evoked. When Nandini held his hand his demeanor changed. What was diffident became shy, what was distant became a hesitant proximity. He discovered he liked holding hands and thankfully she led him on; this is why the affair happened. It shocked the class but he wasn’t thinking and she didn’t notice. Their relationship moved rapidly and he had no experience but she knew what she wanted. For the first time in his life heaven was on earth. He shuffled around the city as if in a cocoon that obscured its common nature. Time was elastic and days stretched as weeks flew by.
Nandini was born to a Hindu father and Christian mother. Her father was in the army and his postings flirted with the perimeter of the Indian map. He was a valiant officer who had survived some challenging campaigns. But one morning the neighbors found him slumped over the steering wheel of his jeep, his dead body pushed against the horn.
Nandini took to poetry at a young age to deal with heartache and taking care of her mother after his death. Yes sir, she took control. She had her father’s disposition, his athletic flair, and his ability to kick ass. They lived in a small house on the outskirts of Pune with two bedrooms and a flower bed out front. It had a view of hills till a newly constructed apartment blocked their vista. Clothes fluttered where trees used to sway.
Soon Nandini won a sports scholarship to a college in downtown Mumbai. She packed a bag and took the highway straight there. Life changed when she saw Karan.
“Karan who?” asked Nandini’s mother. “Tell me about him.”
The answer was not forthcoming because Karan was not forthcoming. Nandini had a job at hand. So she decided to learn everything about this fellow she was to marry. Karan who?
One evening she sat him down and tried to get him talking. She chewed a freshly sharpened Nataraj HB pencil and prodded: “Start with school—everybody starts there.”
“I attended an English middle school,” he said, emphasizing the word English, the study of which was an early obsession for him. “Don Bosco School in Matunga. I was sent there for observation.
A father was meant to watch over me, so he did and the children did too.”
“Why? Because you were a strange kid?”
He pretended not to hear that. He had never before known that he was even capable of pretending. “Nobody would come up to me. Nobody would sit next to me,” he said. “But all these nobodies would ask me questions, one after another.”
“Like?”
“Like, Where are you from? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where do you live? Is that close by? Then why do you walk to school? And how come you always eat in the canteen?” He sat in silence for a moment.
“These are normal questions, Karan.”
“Yes, perhaps,” he replied. “But they always found my answers hard to believe.”
“So let me ask them,” she said, sitting up straight. “Where are you from, Karan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t know.” She stared at him sharply and he repeated it. “I don’t know.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“In a home, a place for homeless kids.”
“Was it close to the school?”
“Close? No.”
“Then why did you walk to school?”
“I had to. I had no choice.”
“Why did you eat every meal in the canteen?”
“Because it was free.”
And then Karan spoke some more, all on his own, for the first time in his life. “After this, the more pointed questions and observations would follow: Your clothes are a size too small. Why don’t you get new ones? Your shoes are torn, have you noticed? Who cut your hair? Your stationery is wrinkled and your compass box is broken; have you noticed? Are you poor? Yes, maybe there was poverty. Not just of the money kind. I had very few answers.”
You could have asked questions too, Karan, wrote the pencil in Nandini’s hand.
“But I never felt sorry for myself,” he continued. “Why would anybody feel sorry for what they are?”
The Third Squad Page 7