In sum, people of a certain background could come here and feel comfortable.
Tiwari’s assistant Kamte fixes his paan, positions his spittoon, arranges his gaddis, and listens to his every word. Tiwari shifts around constantly, revealing an agility and alacrity that are at odds with his size. Any transactions that are discussed stay mostly in his head. He communicates through handwritten notes in a mix of English and Hindi. Over time he has developed his own peculiar shorthand.
Evam arrives at ten thirty in the morning and Tiwari is on to his second paan. Kamte watches the juice build up in that elastic mouth. He can smell the katha and the choona as they mix inside it. Tiwari’s plump lips pucker and his cheeks swell. It’s time for the spittoon. Kamte!
He wipes his mouth with a small hand towel. And he gets back to chewing.
Pandey watches Evam enter Crime Branch and he is not enthused. Evam Bhaskar doesn’t look like a psychologist. He seems harried and he’s wearing a variety of charms. Around his neck is a black thread with a silver trinket; he wears two strings on his left wrist and three rings with large colored stones on his fingers, all presumably for good luck.
Pandey looks from Evam to Tiwari, then wonders what he is doing spending his time with these two. He is reminded this is a police station by the uniform that has begun to chafe him. Closer up, Evam looks reassuring. He has a pleasant face and sharp eyes that don’t miss a thing. At least he’s not a fool.
Evam spots Tiwari and halts in his tracks. His mind is spinning. He is thinking to himself, This is the sex-starved policeman who batters his keyboard to vent his frustrations. He looks like a village panchayat leader. I wonder what his Giselle looks like. Comely? Yes, certainly comely. Rounded hips and upwardly stacked. Homely? Yes, certainly homely. Clad in a low-cut blouse and a see-through chiffon sari.
They shake hands all around. Tiwari has a plump and sweaty palm. Evam sinks into one of the roomy chairs and wipes his hands on the sides. His deliberate gaze travels the length and breadth of the room. Tiwari is asked to give some background on Ranvir’s team. He relates a tilted version. Little do the others realize that Evam helped Ranvir pull together his team and that he knows each member quite well.
Evam summarizes: “You are telling me that a fellow officer has assembled a private militia: a modern Ranvir Sena. And that he has done this in the police force. He has been given carte blanche by his superiors; for good reason, evidently, because the Third Squad has the most successful record that the Special Branch has ever seen. What I cannot see is a problem.”
“Look deeper,” says Tiwari.
“Let me get this straight,” says Evam. “You are insinuating that there is something wrong with the team that Ranvir heads, and you want me to prove it?”
Tiwari nods. “You are the expert. All I can tell you is I have questioned more people in my career than anyone else in the police force. You have to respect that. My problem is, I am not able to say what I want to say.”
“Try speaking in Hindi,” says Evam with a straight face.
“Okay. In Hindi, the word for crazy is pagal, but the word I use for these four is ajeeb.”
“Meaning strange?”
“Yes. The Third Squad is a ragged outfit with many obvious flaws. You are a psychologist and I am sure if you spent time with them you would discover something. There is something very, very wrong. Have you seen them?”
Tiwari has a scrapbook containing four photographs, passport-size portraits that he has pasted on white sheets. No smiles and no expressions; nothing remotely passes through their eyes as each stares at a point a whisker away from the camera lens.
“Don’t they look like specimens, Mr. Bhaskar?”
When Evam glimpses these photographs he sees the familiar history of Evam’s Ward. He sees social blindness, visual-motor issues, visual-perception issues, and poor prosody. But right now he pretends he sees nothing.
Tiwari scratches himself and examines his fingernail. “I have interrogated hundreds of people, Mr. Bhaskar, but all I can get out of these four are long, strange replies, and those only after an irritating pause. They have no volume control; one moment they speak loudly, the next moment I can barely hear them. Yet they speak in monotone. And they will never look you in the eye. I have tried staring directly at them.” He bites some dead skin from his finger and spits it out. “In interrogation terms these four are guilty. They are hiding something. If I didn’t know they were cops I would have arrested them.”
“The Third Squad is called a crack team, Mr. Tiwari,” says Evam. “They are heroes.”
Tiwari is discomfited. He trusts his instincts in matters like these and he has to get to the bottom of this puzzle, but he can’t clearly enunciate his worries. “Among them I worry most about Karan. Once he cornered me in the bathroom and said, Come with me to the shadow lands.”
Evam tries to reason: “The team probably doesn’t often to speak to outsiders, which is why they might seem false and unconvincing.”
“Sorry, this simply doesn’t add up: these awkward, clumsy men have an unbelievable five-year record against skilled gangsters. Either they are crazy, or you and I are.”
Evam sits up. “That last statement is quite true, Mr. Tiwari. Let’s look at ourselves. I, Evam Bhaskar, am supposed to be a trained psychologist but actually I make a living peddling porn. I run a site called Giselle; she is a girl who moans if you touch her. And you pay me money every time she moans. Am I not mad, truly mad? And you? You look like you just touched a live wire. You might be a police bigwig but you are so horny that the only way you can stay sane is by hammering your keyboard. Where do you fall on the madness charts?”
Tiwari bites his nail again and draws some blood. All pretense is off now and this is a moment when anything can happen. He laughs. “Yes,” he says. “We are a little mad, you and me. Just like this crazy city.”
Evam shudders. He examines his own fingernails. The urge to bite is catching. “I cannot make heads or tails of what I am doing these days.” He walks up to the window and looks out for a while. Policemen were meant to be well-trained, upright officers with the personal habits of gentlemen. Psychologists were not supposed to be quirky businessmen who preyed on a sex-starved nation.
Tiwari watches Evam, whose nervous energy is now visible. “Mr. Bhaskar,” he says, “did you have a chance to review their papers?”
Evam places the papers in front of him and quotes, “I am the best kind of different.” And Evam thinks in his head, It is such a poignant statement. Each of them has realized he is different. Each knows the others on his team are as well. And that is what binds them. They are different from the rest of us—not in any dramatic way, but in the kind of things they are unable to do, their quirks, the things they do not respond to, the things that give them trouble; simple everyday things.
“I am a person, not a puzzle,” says Tiwari, now repeating Karan’s line.
Evam half nods. “That really says it all, Mr. Tiwari. To most people these four remain strangers. But they are not really all that strange.”
Tiwari is still unconvinced. Evam leaves quietly without shaking hands.
That night Evam notes in his diary:
Four grown men on a hit squad; they cannot communicate very well. They have few friends and fewer acquaintances. How can they tell anyone what they are all about? They invent call signs, like pilots do. But these are a different kind of call sign. These are calls for help, the kind that float online looking for buoys in the ether.
“Karan, what are you doing?”
I am sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. I have removed my right shoe and sock. The swelling has started. “Split ends,” I reply.
A girl was crossing the road. She had a hand cupping a ear and she was talking. An auto rickshaw caught her ankle as it swerved. The phone came loose from her hand and tumbled into the street.
“Split ends?”
Nandini looks toward the street. It divides into two up ahead. There is a temple in th
e middle of the road that will not budge. The morning aarti has started and we hear the bells ring.
“Yes,” I reply. I nurse my ankle with one hand and rub it vigorously with the other. Two boys stand next to me. They have handed me the bag of groceries that I was carrying.
“I see what you mean.”
She folds her hands as the bell reaches a crescendo and flames appear in three circles beyond. The boys take an apple each and run. I straighten. The girl with the phone is trying to reassemble it. The auto rickshaw has gone and the driver hasn’t heard her rant. She is young and her hair is loose.
“She needs to brush her hair,” I say. I test my foot and I feel I’m ready.
Nandini looks quizzical and follows my gaze. “Karan,” she says a little loudly, “she is too young for you.”
“Her hair; it has split ends,” I say.
We walk for a while.
“How do you notice these things?” she asks me.
I just look at where I’m looking.
An old man is crossing the road carefully. He has peered left and right, and he clutches his walking stick tight and steps off the sidewalk. There’s a gap in the fast-moving traffic. He has just enough time to make it before the red BEST bus that has stopped gets going again. Nandini follows my gaze, hurries to the gent, and helps him cross. The bus rumbles by and she is back.
“Karan, I asked you something.”
“The old chap was so careful but his fly was down,” I tell her.
She grabs the bag of groceries from my hand. “You are impossible. Why would you notice such a thing?”
I cannot explain what the eye follows. Nobody can. “You are looking nice today, Nandini.”
The wife steps off the sidewalk in a huff.
* * *
Nandini worried about a scene that’s been lodged in her head. She had a 180-degree view of her surroundings, revealing glass-and-concrete towers that sat indiscriminately among slums. The roads that tied them together were battered and the sidewalks were apologies for the lost art of walking.
This vista of urban bondage and posh ruin outside the chawl was truly the age of Kalki. Kalki’s age was not a number, she felt, but a state of being, and Mumbai was concrete evidence that the Indian apocalypse was around the corner.
“Take your pick from these Mumbai ghettos,” she told her audience at a seminar. “These are cheap places, locations for auteurs from Hollywood who wish to shoot an Armageddon or script an apocalypse. Is it too late to conjure up an unlikely hero?”
At home she worried about her husband and his career. Where was Karan headed, and what would happen to his department? It did not take her long to figure out that Karan had one very specific skill set that was useful to the police. But that way of policing that Ranvir and his team represented was increasingly out of sync with the times. Ranvir would soon be isolated in the digital age where information was paramount and social media could protest effectively against the methods he used.
It seemed the era of encounter squads was coming to a close. Times have changed was the easy explanation, but it surely had something to do with the successful record of the encounter teams who, despite the glare of public disapproval, a glare which was harsh and unsparing, managed to eliminate hundreds of gang members. Extortion calls had ceased, kidnapping and murder had declined, and the Bollywood and construction syndicates were breathing easy. The higher-ups in the police force now said they would heed the call of their collective conscience. Do not take the law into your own hands was the new dictum. Soon an item appeared in the newspapers that clearly pointed to a downsizing of two of the hit squads.
Everybody concerned read this report. Tiwari muttered a sentence aloud: “No decisions have been passed on the other two squads.” He looked at his two underlings. “Why not?”
Evam read the report seated in his ward with mixed feelings. Nandini reviewed it and had mixed feelings too, but for different reasons. Ranvir wasted no time and requested a meeting with Parthasarathy.
“Should we even take this seriously?” he asked Partha.
“Yes, I’m afraid so, Rana.”
“If I have no work then that is good for my city,” said Ranvir, ever the diplomat.
“It’s good for Tiwari too,” said Partha. “But you must also realize that he will pull ahead in the succession stakes.”
Ranvir was prepared for this discussion. They both knew there was a mole in Tiwari’s team, a boy who Ranvir thought was a younger version of himself in many ways. It was time to let Partha know what Tiwari was capable of.
“Do you know where Tiwari is right now?” Ranvir asked.
“Should I?”
“He is brothel-hunting, Mr. Parthasarathy. Your potential successor is out to discover his true self. Trust me, it will be ugly.”
* * *
How does male chauvinism happen? wondered Pandey. In what pigsty does it breed? Every time he saw his boss Tiwari in the vicinity of women or heard him speak about them, he understood something more about chauvinism.
“Women are a breed,” said Tiwari for the millionth time. “A breed apart.”
Many of the khabaris who landed up at the station were pimps and Tiwari was friendly with one of them. His name was Ustad. Ustad was summoned to handle Tiwari’s libido. He arrived around three in the morning, a time when watchmen fell asleep. They left in a taxi to a nearby station.
“Where are we going?” asked Ustad. A jovial Tiwari made him nervous. His phone was buzzing because these were the busiest business hours.
“Today you have to blood me,” said Tiwari.
Looks like he wants a freebie, thought Ustad. “There are many ways to do this, janaab,” he told Tiwari. “But none are good.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Tiwari was feeling light-headed.
They boarded a train that headed into the western suburbs, alighting at Goregaon. From there they took an auto rickshaw and Ustad provided directions lane by lane till Tiwari lost his bearings.
“Patli galli,” murmured Ustad as they arrived at a dead end.
Tiwari was brimming with anxiety and the thought of a guaranteed fuck made him restless. He had applied cologne and carefully combed his hair. He sat at the edge of the rickshaw like an eager groom on his wedding night.
The last stretch was a walk through grime. They stepped carefully around a squatting child. Old Hindi music emanated from a small structure with dim lighting. The illuminated sign said, Zabardast Massage Parlor. They climbed broken stairs and a man with stale breath and downcast eyes brushed past them on his descent. Curtains parted and there was a room with a bench; they sat and waited. From the darkness came Giselle. She had shape—just about. She looked like she was wearing props from old films and greasepaint decked her features. And when she spoke Tiwari felt at home. She had a gruff voice, a voice whose timbre was perhaps wrecked by sordid phlegm.
She took Tiwari by the hand and led him to her cave.
This can’t go wrong, thought Ustad as he popped a paan leaf into his mouth. He had chosen someone mature and experienced.
Inside a room that smelled of cheap disinfectant was a bed that had sunk in the middle. The bed groaned deeply as Tiwari sat on it. Giselle had dark eyes; she stood before him with a winsome smile. Tiwari froze. She walked to a corner and undressed, then returned in her underwear and stood before him.
“Come and get it,” she said in Hindi.
Tears formed in Tiwari’s eyes.
She placed his hand on her ample breast. “Squeeze,” she commanded.
He squeezed. “Giselle,” he mumbled, now fully aroused. He grimaced as he removed his belt and pants. A tear dropped onto his bare thigh.
“Where is your pain?” asked his Giselle, a little puzzled.
Tiwari pointed at his head, then smiled through his tears as she went down on her knees.
Her ministrations eased his pain. But he kept crying. All through her kindness he wept.
As they walked down the stairs Ustad looked at
Tiwari nervously and waited for him to say something. He didn’t speak till they reached the station.
“Take me back there tomorrow,” he said.
The spooked Ustad finally let out his breath. “I will take you once more, janaab,” he said. “But next time you will have to pay.”
The next visit would see Tiwari completely let go. He would not be kind.
* * *
Back in his flat Tiwari asked, Who am I? as he let hot water steam his skin. Deep into the night in a place called home, in the room he had been brought up in, he finally found a side of himself that he liked. Things seemed different after the suburban tryst. He stood under the hot shower for a long while till the room steamed up and the mirror disappeared. He worked up some suds and a couple of soap bubbles floated into his face.
“This is what I need,” he said aloud. “I have found what I was missing. She will be my regular. Once a week she will be mine.”
He wore crisp whites and settled into his bed and examined his phones. He usually carried four of them at all times because these were the tools of his trade. The phones had a color code and there was a hierarchy. An official number that was widely available was usually picked up by Kamte. The next couple of numbers were answered by Pandey, and the fourth was his personal line which was divulged only to the best among the rat pack. None of these phones had rung in the last eight hours. He kept checking the signal strength: four bars, full battery. The personal phone was forever in Tiwari’s pants pocket. It nestled in his V front and was on vibrate. He loved that feeling.
* * *
Another day and another train ride and this time Tiwari is humming a tune and drumming his hands on his knees. Ustad watches him and sees the pent-up energy. This man has clearly imagined the next visit and he has a list of things he wants to do. They catch an auto rickshaw at the station and the driver tries to be funny when they tell him the address. All the streetlights are working and the place seems more grimy than usual.
The Third Squad Page 15