You don’t react, that is your problem, wrote the pencil.
“People kept asking me what I was thinking. They wanted to know what I was feeling.”
And the answer is nothing, wrote the worn-out pencil.
“Nothing. I wasn’t feeling anything, I wasn’t thinking.”
“What subjects were you good at?” asked Nandini to change the topic.
That brightened him up. “I was good at math. I felt I never got tested in math. It was too easy. But I wasn’t good at explaining it to my friends when they would come to me for help.”
“How about sports?”
“I was good at chess. It was one game I could get obsessed with. I remember a grandmaster—a former student—who once played speed chess with ten of us kids. We all sat in a row and he walked to each table making moves at lightning speed. After a few moves he started spending a lot of time at my table. I noticed because people began to gather around us. In the end, the game was a draw. He beat everyone else and I let him draw. You are shaking your head but I’m telling the truth. I did let him draw, and he even acknowledged this afterward. He saw me hesitate over one move and he knew immediately. He asked me why I did it and I said nothing. You see, I didn’t want the attention. Everybody would have stared at me and would have asked me more questions. I hate questions.”
Next our genius will say he can bend a spoon, wrote Nataraj HB.
“What about early childhood?” Nandini tried instead.
He scratched his head. “I have very few memories of early childhood. I remember places and things, but not people.”
“Are you violent?” Nandini slipped in that question; something had compelled her to ask.
“Violent?” He sounded surprised. “You mean, have I gotten into fights? Aside from police training, where we had exercises in combat, no. But I was good in hand-to-hand only—I would often miss, but when I hit it was extremely hard. I could break bones, even when wearing a glove.”
“Did you ever apologize?”
Here he paused. Sorry? Should he have apologized? “No,” he said.
“So you hurt someone and you felt nothing?” She glanced down at his rough, hardened knuckles.
“Well, it hurt, of course,” he replied.
Big, lovable baboon, wrote Nataraj HB.
“But you didn’t feel anything inside?” asked Nandini, only half jokingly.
He nodded and said, “A teacher also once asked me this question. I remember that and I will never forget. She made me stay after school and write on the blackboard hundred times, I have feelings. It was very difficult for me. I took two hours. The teacher saw me struggle and asked me if I’d ever cried. I don’t remember ever crying. But when children would die at the home I’d feel ill sometimes, like I had a fever. Once I even vomited. I think it was because of the food.”
“The vomiting?” asked Nandini.
“No, the deaths,” replied Karan.
“You need to learn how to feel,” she told him sharply. She had broken the point of her pencil and so the interview was over.
He smiled to himself at the end. He wasn’t naive, nor was he dumb. He had analyzed his childhood and understood his hesitancy: the fact was that he had no ethnic identity, and in a country like India where your caste, creed, and religion define you, he had no way of introducing himself.
* * *
Their wedding happened at the Defence Club in Pune. Karan invited Welkinkar, who doubled as photographer. He did not invite Evam. The absence of guests from the groom’s side was noticeable, as just three tall and quiet young men stood in a corner and did not mingle with the rest. Most people thought they were undercover agents, but they were acquaintances from Evam’s Ward who like Karan had managed to outgrow the place.
Karan and Nandini made a striking couple. “You are a handsome bastard,” she had told him. “And you are killing it,” he replied, and they kissed while the guests looked on. Her mother handled the proceedings jovially but shed some tears whenever she remembered her husband. The Defence community had turned up in all their finery, the men with some gray at the temples, the women fully dyed, and they held their glasses tight and traded regiment stories, and when the deed was done they raised a hurrah for the dead father and someone clinked a glass and paid a glowing tribute and then they all retired to the lawns. The army veterans closely scrutinized this young police officer in the making and some raised their eyebrows while others just shrugged their shoulders.
“Does he drink?” asked the mother-in-law, a good Christian. “I could offer him some wine.” She had tried to break the ice with her son-in-law for a week after they first met and almost gave up.
Karan had no idea how to handle a mother-in-law. He was extra polite and the idea of loosening him up with alcohol seemed to work. One evening they had a few glasses of red, treacly wine and Karan, perhaps under the influence, walked up to her abruptly and hugged her, holding her close. He wouldn’t let go. She tried to step back but he held on. She was affected; she found this strange man of good heart.
“Hello, stranger,” she said. It was a phrase she would keep using.
“Hello, Mother,” said Karan. Strange words he thought he would never use.
Wasting no time after their marriage, Nandini soon announced, “I want a house with sloping roofs. Go find one.”
In Mumbai this was a tall order. Karan could find sloping roofs only in chawls. These two-story structures had tiled roofs and a rough disposition. They were intimate dwellings where you walked out of your room into a common corridor and right into your neighbor’s clothes that were hanging to dry. Chawl people borrowed sugar, salt, and each other’s thoughts. You listened to your neighbors’ radio and watched their lives play out like they did yours. Occasionally you fought and then pretended to make up. Everybody finally adjusted, burying their differences beneath a veneer of civility.
They bought three adjoining single-room units. They were in poor shape with cracked floors and exposed brick walls. No matter, said she. She had plans and all these plans worked well till the first rains came and then the flooding left the place in tatters.
“I should have married a damberwala,” she wailed. “I would have had a dry home. If his damber worked we would have made love. If it didn’t he would have held out a bucket.”
Karan held a bucket. And then an open pressure cooker, and finally an oil drum. When the rains paused, the damberwala came and poured black tar on their roof. And after he left they clambered up there and poured buckets of water to test the repairs. Nandini stood below with an umbrella just in case. There was no leak.
When the next rains came Karan and Nandini made love through the monsoons. They were a noisy couple and the neighbors learned to live with the rhythm of their nights.
“What’s happening?” asked someone that first time. They could hear whispers, immodest laughter, and then creaking furniture.
When they discovered that Karan was with the police force the chawl members got wary. All their transgressions stood out like beacons but he seemed to notice nothing. Soon life went back to the messy Indian way. Word of Karan’s exploits in the force began to percolate and a legend would eventually form. The fellow had a third eye. He was incarnate of someone called Karna, didn’t you know? The children wondered where he kept his gun. One boy who claimed to have seen it said it was black as a krait and had two barrels that resembled the exhaust of a car. Karan left for work every day with a trail of curious eyes following his jeep.
Every time he used the weapon in an assignment, Karan would ceremoniously clean it afterward. In the dead of night in the corridor outside his door, he would lay a white cloth on the floor, get down on his knees, and clean it. He was empty of feeling as he examined barrel, chamber, and snout.
* * *
“Can you break a sentence?” asked Nandini, startling Karan. She shook her newspaper and said, “This murderer wants a leave of absence from his jail term. No joke. Can you even do that? Can you break a sen
tence?”
Karan was back at school. His English teacher, Mrs. Rosario, was waving his test in front of the entire class.
“Broken English,” she admonished. She seemed distraught. Karan tried not to look at her and also ignored his classmates who were staring at him.
Mrs. Rosario started to read from his exam: “I met a man. He asked, ‘Do you remember me?’ I tried to say, ‘I do not forget.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked again. He held my hands. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Try to remember me.’ He had forgotten. Karan,” said the teacher, “what is this? You have broken your sentences.”
Nandini offered Karan some tea and biscuits.
“Parole,” he said. That was the word that broke prison sentences.
She folded the newspaper twice and buttonholed the crossword. She licked a pencil and filled in parole. “What would the victim’s family think?” she asked.
Karan felt he was a victim at school. He could never finish a story.
His teacher was still waving his sheet. “What has he forgotten?” she asked. “What has the man forgotten?”
“His name,” replied Karan.
The class laughed and the teacher tried not to smile.
“Why do you break your sentences?” she asked.
Nandini’s eyes had strayed from the crossword. As Karan feared, she came across the news item. “Where did you go yesterday?” she asked him.
“I was at the Aarey Milk Colony.” There was no point in lying.
“Did you . . . ?” she began. “Were you responsible . . . ?”
“No,” he replied sharply. “No.”
“Did he have a family?” she asked.
“How should I know?”
“What was his name?”
“Panduranga. Vithaldas Panduranga.”
Encounter Twenty-Eight: Panduranga
Vithaldas Panduranga was a God-fearing foot soldier of Mumbai. He floated through life with the firm belief that someone up there in the heavens would take care of him. Bhagavan, the god above, put him to the test. Vithal ended up at age thirty in the Aarey Milk Colony in Goregaon squeezing teats. His hands smelled of foamed milk and his feet of auspicious dung.
Rectangles described his life. Home was a ten-by-twelve-foot room with a five-by-four shared bath. The building was a squat structure with two floors. Each floor had a long corridor that was flanked by twenty rooms, ten on each side. All the rooms were connected so even the slightest sound carried. In the dead of night you could hear your neighbor breathe. The residents shared their most private moments but the close proximity bred no friends. They shied away from each other.
“I know what you did last night, you horny Mastram.”
“Yes, I know. I heard you listening.”
The building was called Suryodaya. Vithal had chosen this place because the chawl faced east. Surya Devta, the Sun god, came in through his two-by-three window, bright and early, every morning. God was also a rectangle that traversed his floor, climbed his wall, and dried his clothes.
Vithal’s dilemmas came in circles. His every action was predicated on the movement of those around him: If someone crossed the road, he would too. If a bus overtook that car, he would wait. The aggressive traffic on the Western Express Highway was a nightmare. Three lanes of speeding maniacs to negotiate, then a low fence, and on the other side even more lunatics. In the ten minutes it took him to get across he would consider his peculiar assignment of the last year and his spine would tingle.
“I am Vithaldas Panduranga.”
In truth he was a two-faced lowlife, a bahurupi.
“Blacken my face if you will.”
Yes, if he was actually found to be an informer, that would be his fate.
“I rat on the criminal class even if they are my friends.”
The police force thanked him for this.
“Tiwari-sir gives me money. You are doing punya, he tells me. In his presence I feel closer to God.”
He was closer to God than he could have imagined.
The police will protect me, so this should be a safe job, thought Vithal. Safer than crossing this road.
Vithal ratted on his kin for more than a year and nobody knew other than the cops. Till one day he crossed a line. Some information that he passed on was leaked to the press and it came out that an encounter Ranvir had organized had been staged. It was an embarrassment that Ranvir could not stomach. He had someone send Vithal’s phone records to Govardhan Bhai, the local don described as the baap of all bhaiyas in the western suburbs of Mumbai. Govardhan Bhai ruled Goregaon, Jogeshwari, and the community of migrants from the heartland states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who lived there. Bhai was by turns benevolent and violent. He grew livid when the details of Vithal’s calls to Tiwari surfaced.
“Brothers, kindly take care of Vithal,” he instructed his informal army. “He is a bahurupi. I want you to show me what’s under his skin.”
They took good care of him. They brought him to the goshala and gathered around him like hungry crows. They mashed his face black and blue, strung him from a clothesline, then slit his tongue. He rocked back and forth in pain but he couldn’t scream. That was just the beginning. Did they really need to ask Mastan, the butcher from Sultanpur, to skin his hide?
Bhai saw Vithal before he died. He almost felt sorry—so much pink, so much blood mixed with milk. There was an uneasy silence among the group. A few of them gagged at the sight and most looked on in disbelief at what was left of Vithaldas.
“Where is his protector now?” asked Bhai. He circled the body with a sickle in hand.
Nobody responded to this question.
“Where are his loved ones?” shouted Bhai. He searched their faces and they all glanced away.
They stood in silence. It was a learning experience for those migrant workers who lived far from the villages they came from. Each had moved here alone, and out here they had only one other—and Bhai.
Who is this Tiwari? wondered Bhai. He grabbed Panduranga’s cell phone and tried Tiwari’s number. He needed to deliver the news and send a message, and do so in front of his army. The number was busy but Bhai needn’t have bothered—word had already spread like wildfire. The khabari network was intricate and incestuous and bad news moved quickly. It started with the status Khabari in trouble and evolved quickly into Khabari down. The informer network waited for Tiwari’s reaction. Tiwari had to do something. He calmly considered how Vithal’s phone records might have been accessed. Perhaps the telephone company had released them to the police under pressure. And there was one person with possible motive. Tiwari decided to call a fixer who thrived on dirty work.
“Where is Atmaram Bhosle?”
“Somewhere in Andheri.”
“I have an assignment for him if he can reach Aarey Colony in half an hour with his bazooka.”
He could. Bhosle was an alleged cop-killer in hiding. He was an expert shot with a scope rifle, and had the mentality of a seasoned sniper. He was promised immunity and a hefty sum from Tiwari’s slush fund.
While this was happening, Ranvir and Karan were also en route to the site per their orders. And Ranvir was on the phone with Tiwari.
* * *
“Everybody here looks like a bhaiya from Uttar Pradesh,” said Ranvir. “But I don’t feel at home.”
I was there, two steps behind him, trailing him like a heartland wife with her bowed head covered by the end of her sari. We were traipsing alongside fields of long green grass that would feed black buffaloes and yield creamy, foamy, and slightly warm white milk.
“Are you speaking to me, sir?” I asked.
He shook his head. A white earpiece buzzed loud enough for me to hear.
“Well, if not UP then from Bihar,” he continued. “There are only two types of bhaiyas in India.”
We waited as a herd of buffalo crossed our path, leaving behind a variety of black mounds. Their droppings resembled coiled snakes.
“What do you bhaiyas do in Mumb
ai? Either you drive a taxi or you milk a cow. You are an exception, sir-ji. You even have a title.” Ranvir paused to swat at a horsefly bothering his exposed neck. We had finally reached the Aarey Milk Colony in Goregaon. “How do I know so much? Bhaiyas give themselves away when they speak. They are sher-mukhs with big mouths and small brains.”
Ranvir chuckled and spotted a buffalo wading through the grass. Despite rushing here it seemed my boss was in no hurry to get to the scene. More squawks came from his earpiece. He turned around and looked at me.
“Karan? You’ll never guess where he is. But why do you want to know? Am I in trouble?”
We spotted a crowd ahead of us.
“Do you have an informer in Aarey Colony? You can tell me in confidence.”
Ranvir was bluffing; we both knew this offer was meaningless. As we approached the crowd, there was a quiet murmur that dissipated as we were let through. I hurried ahead of him, pushing my way to the center of the crime scene. We were too late; a red tableau unfolded before us. The distant electricity of raw violence remained suspended in the air. Some idiot offered us fresh foaming milk in a steel tumbler. Ranvir accepted it, downed his drink in a massive gulp, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve while I held my mug and wandered among the blood and grist.
“Look around,” said Ranvir softly. “Let’s be on our way. There is no work for us here.”
I am not a detective but something didn’t add up.
“The sad bastard was an informer,” he told me. “This is a show killing. It is a gruesome message that says, Do not rat on us. You understand?”
Was this one of Tiwari’s informers on the ground? And why were all these people sticking around if they had done this?
“The gang is here because they did it,” said my boss, as if reading my thoughts. “And they are telling us that they’re in it together, so don’t even bother. And they’re telling each other that if anyone else rats he will meet the same fate.”
“So why did they assign the case to us, sir? And why is the riot squad here?” I asked, gesturing to some new arrivals.
Ranvir whispered, “I believe the victim has a Maharashtrian name. And if bhaiyas killed him there will be riots all over the city very soon.”
The Third Squad Page 8