The Third Squad

by V. Sanjay Kumar

  Partha consulted some papers he had brought and then continued: “The world is divided into the neurotypicals and Aspies. While Karan seems to be on the cusp between the two groups, the other men on the team clearly showed up as Aspies.”

  “What should we do with them?” asked the chief softly.

  “Sir, if you met these guys you would know that they are not very different, and without orders they are not dangerous.”

  After a while the chief shook his head. “It seems like more than that to me. It seems like Ranvir is rearing his own private species.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, that sounds a little extreme,” replied Partha.

  The chief shrugged. He wasn’t here to discuss anthropology. “What about the Fourth Squad? Soon you will tell me they are all engineered mutants and that’s what an encounter team needs.”

  Partha smiled weakly. “So what do we do now? I only have a month left to run this operation.”

  Mishra fiddled with another cigarette for a moment. “Let’s say we put Karan to a test. Is there someone who can give him instructions?”

  Partha nodded. “The mole Desai normally deals with Karan.”

  “So let’s given him a series of assignments and see how it goes. Leave the usual instructions for him. Observe him closely and report to me. I know there is some risk but we need this capability till we can build it up all over again.”

  Partha was reluctant. “It’s unpredictable without Ranvir supervising.”

  The chief drummed his fingers on the table and then pulled out his pipe and a packet of fragrant tobacco. He spent a few moments cleaning his pipe, tapping it, eyeing it closely, and then filling it.

  “Shall we go ahead then?” asked Partha.

  The chief was busy lighting his pipe but he seemed to nod almost imperceptibly.

  * * *

  “Women are always right about these things,” said Nandini. She pressed the iron down on his uniform, the steam hissing out. “What are these white patches below the arms, and here in the collar? They never go away.”

  “Sweat,” said Karan.

  She splashed some water on them and ran the iron again. “I told you the gas cylinder was leaking and I knew it the moment I entered the kitchen in the morning. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “If I hadn’t insisted you would never have replaced that cylinder—and what did the gas company tell you?”

  “It would have burst in your face, they said.”

  She picked up the shirt and bit a loose thread with her teeth. “I didn’t tell you but I had a feeling about that boy Sudhir next door. I told him to wear a helmet and I even spoke to his mother. Finally he bought one, and guess what?”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Of course you know—he had an accident a few days later.” She looked up at him to see if he was still listening. He had almost nodded off to sleep. It was eleven p.m. and he’d had a long day. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” she added.

  “I know,” he said again.

  “Karan, I have a premonition, a bad one.” He was alert now. “I keep waking up in a cold sweat. I shouldn’t be saying this but I think you should take a leave—a long one. We could take time off and travel.”

  “I can’t. You know I couldn’t just leave work like that.”

  She slammed the iron down. “You don’t get it, Karan. I am not being frivolous. I know this may sound foolish, but I’m really worried about you. It just feels like something’s going to happen, and everyone else realizes it too, but they’re all standing around like spectators.”

  “Nandini, why do you have to—”

  “Fine, forget it. At least take care of the rat.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the kitchen, inside the trap. Just dump it in a bucket of water and be done with it. And please shut the door when you come back.”

  “Sorry,” he said, after returning from the kitchen a few minutes later. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can’t kill a rat?”

  “It’s just so small,” he said. “I tried, I lifted the trap and there were squeaky sounds, I dipped it into the bucket but it started splashing around and I could see really small bubbles come up. I couldn’t leave the trap inside.”

  “Aaaargh.”

  They didn’t speak for a while and the ironing continued.

  “Can I just set it free outside the chawl?” he asked.

  Encounter Thirty-Two

  A smog-ridden city gets a hazy dawn. Sunrise arrives an hour late on the western seaboard of Mumbai. The orange orb rises slowly, reluctantly, as if the municipality has to winch it up from the Arabian Sea. The city develops a weak and watery gaze.

  I hold my breath and let it go and it floats away like the thought I slept with, a thought that I do not wish to remember. I stray to my window. Potted plants struggle in windowsills while a seedling which has taken root inside a water pipe thrives. A woman spots me from a balcony as she hangs up clothes. She drops her arms and adjusts her sari, covering her breasts. I turn away slowly, pretending I haven’t seen her generous curves.

  The household is asleep and I have to leave early. On the refrigerator is a scribbled message that says, Movie this evening? I want to reply, but how can you say no?

  “There are many ways of saying no, Karan,” Nandini once told me. “One way is to just say it.”

  I had returned to the office building the night before. Police buildings have poor security because we are smug and we do not expect thieves. So it was all very easy. I wanted to find out what these people thought of me. As I walked the corridors I snuck into the records room and to my surprise I quickly found what I was looking for: notes from Parthasarathy and even Evam.

  Partha writes in longhand with a fountain pen using lots of loops and flourishes. He has a theory for me and people like me, and a category too: the category is called Asperger’s syndrome. Evam uses a typewriter. That machine is worn out and some letters look faded. This is what he said:

  Your question is: is he capable of violence outside of instruction? I am not sure that can be predicted. There was a case of an encounter specialist who turned rogue and was conveniently called a deviant. That fellow was violent, genetically violent. On the surface there was nothing wrong. He was clean. But this cold, ruthless man began to act without instruction. They tried telling him to stop and he couldn’t. Bloody mystery. It seems he was trying to clean up all of Mumbai. Finally he killed himself. And he left a suicide note that had one word. “Atonement.”

  Atonement. I like the sound of that word. I can relate to it. I like Christian themes like redemption and resurrection. I also like the thought of reincarnation. What I don’t like are descriptions like “slow-witted,” “socially awkward,” and “unable to sympathize or empathize”: that, according to them, was me.

  Partha has made a notation in Evam’s file:

  But what explains Karan’s ability to shoot? Even in the glare of lights he can pick off targets. It is unreal. Find out how. If you feel we do not have time, tell me so.

  There was also a memo from counterintelligence that contained my name. I was a mystery and they don’t like those. But I could explain myself to them if they bothered asking because I have spent many months doggedly reading about how the eye sees, how the brain senses and analyzes, and then how the muscles act. I am a “neurotic reader,” after all.

  Mind-reading, empathy, imitation learning, and the evolution of language come from neurons in the brain that we call “mirror neurons.” Autistic people have very few. People like me with so-called minor forms have a few more mirror neurons than the truly autistic, but not quite enough. We cannot look at you and feel for you. Your feelings and gestures do not fire mirror neurons in our brains. So we do not empathize, and hence our communication and interaction seems off-key.

  But I have one mirror neuron that fires beautifully every time I have a gun in my hand. That’s because I have seen Ranvir with
a gun and he is the best. We practiced day and night. I watched and I have learned. People dare not blink in our presence.

  * * *

  The morning sounds of the chawl: the bhaiya on his Enfield with the milk cans, the newspaper vendors dropping and sorting bundles on the pavement, and the cleaning chokras chattering in different tongues. A few bikes start up and one car refuses to. I sip my morning cup and slip out of the door sideways and shut it quietly. Outside is clear, or so I thought. I bump into my comely neighbor, inappropriately, and ruffle the front of her nightgown. She frowns and untangles her hair from my shirt button, seeming irritated. I should say something but I can’t find the right words.

  I tiptoe past a door where an old woman lives. She has this habit of calling out to me.

  “Manu? Is it you?” she says, every time.

  I don’t get it. Her hearing is so good yet her eyesight is so awful. Should I tell her she’s making a mistake?

  “Manu beta, could you raise me up?”

  That makes me stop. I enter her room for the first time and help her sit up, get her glasses, and pour her some water. And I leave before she can say anything else. When I reach my jeep, the sun hits my eyes and suddenly all my unspoken thoughts and words come out in a rush as if someone pressed a button in my head.

  I was thinking last night that I should stop sleeping in the den. It’s not a place of rest.

  I wanted to reply to that note on the fridge, saying, in a nice way, that I might not make it to the film. And I wanted to tell my comely neighbor, who thought I was a pig, that people who do not speak are not as rude as those who do.

  As I start my jeep I check my pockets, my holster, and my briefcase. I drive slowly, take three right turns, and arrive right back where I began. Nobody has followed me today, and the chawl is as I left it. I fiddle with my phone. Should I make a call? Who should I call?

  I call Ranvir Pratap. He likely will not answer since he’s on medical leave, but going through the motions is still comforting. I hope it’s nothing serious. I cut the engine of the idling jeep and wait, then hang up. My thoughts drift to whether I should have left home the way I did: like a thief.

  Nandini told me, “Sometimes you should wake me up before you go, even if I don’t like it.”

  “Wouldn’t that inconvenience you? Wouldn’t that cause another—”

  “Argument? Karan, without conflict things will die.”

  The phone rings. On assignment day it always sounds different.

  “You are in play,” says Desai. “Are you set?”

  “Yes, I’m already on the road.”

  “Good. Fill up your tank and head for Flora Fountain.”

  There’s a line of cars at the gas station because of an imminent price hike. I am stuck between cars and have to wait. I try to remember what today is all about. I have already visualized how it will happen.

  * * *

  My eye is a fitted lens that pans the scene inside the office building. I slow time and movement breaks down into frames. The target, a gifted assassin, will emerge from an elevator, in one motion, to take in the tableau and pull his weapon. That is the moment I will shoot, even as he progresses into my vision. It will be close, heart-thuddingly close. It is heady to imagine this happening. The rush comes; it comes to me in one smooth wave and that is the only recoil I allow.

  The man I have pursued for two days is a lowlife. The more I get to know of him the less I like what I’m doing. This one’s not worth my time. He looks like a regular guy, of medium height, light-brown complexion, dark hair, normal features, and a forgettable profile. But he’s a gifted assassin and I’ve been chosen to kill him.

  There are a few things that are different about this assignment.

  “Don’t look like yourself when you go,” Desai had told me, his voice cracking.

  “How do I do that?” I asked.

  He said nothing.

  “Why?” I tried.

  “It’s nothing personal,” he said. That meant it was. This was Desai at his obtuse best.

  At home Nandini walked up to me, put her mouth to my shirt, and bit off yet another loose thread. She always had something to say on days like this.

  “You’re on assignment, aren’t you? I know it, I can feel it.”

  As I let myself out I bumped into the child from next door. He looked startled. “Sugar,” he said, pulling a cup out from his pocket. He smiled. I carried that smile with me. I needed it.

  * * *

  I’m standing at the head of the stairs facing the elevator shaft. It’s an old Mumbai building in a district whose best days were captured in glossy coffee-table books. The staircase is wooden and the lift is an old open-door Schindler that clicks and rattles. The lift doors are made of metal grating in a criss-cross pattern and they have to be manually operated. There are two doors on this sliding lift, on opposite sides, and my information is that this weasel will emerge in front of where I stand.

  The elevator arrives and the attendant pulls the sliding iron mesh aside. And he emerges foot-first. In my frame I see one hand holding an attaché. The other moves like Napoleon. He is half out when he meets my gaze and his other foot has dragged by the time he meets my bullet. The frame shifts. One hand is still under an armpit where his gun has begun to glint. The other has spilled the attaché. The frame moves. The attaché splits wide open as it falls. It slides to my feet.

  The man keeps walking toward me with a look of frozen surprise. He was fractionally slow. My disguise had worked. I think it was the way I stood. I wasn’t facing him as he would have expected. I had half turned and I pulled off the shot with my back facing him.

  He is close enough to whisper to me as he begins to fall. He comes to rest with his head on these photographs that have spilled from his attaché. He still looks surprised and, peering down, I am too. The photographs are of me. Me at home, me in the jeep, and me with Nandini eating at roadside stands. He had blown my cover and I was his target. He had tracked me and shot these photos and I did not know.

  I lay my police badge down on the floor to keep people calm. A team arrives breathlessly from the nearby building. I collect the photographs and head home.

  “What have you brought?” asks Nandini.

  “Something personal,” I reply.

  “Wash your feet,” she reminds me.

  This is how you leave death at the door. That night I clean my gun in the chawl veranda under a moonlit sky and stay on my knees long after. I ignore the curious eyes of children with imagination. I am not a hero today. For the first time what I have done is personal. It feels different. All along I had practiced to be a hunter but today I am the hunted as well.

  The next day Desai calls and I cannot speak. Something has changed inside me.

  “I knew you would get him,” he says. “He was very good. Were you wearing a disguise?”

  * * *

  Partha called the CI chief and he was kept on hold for five minutes. Finally he came on the line and his tone was impatient.

  “What happened?”

  “Karan got him. The target had been following him and had all his details it seems. God knows who tipped him off.”

  “What do you mean, God knows, banchod?” screamed Mishra. “Find out the fucking leak, take some bamboo, and plug it. We cannot have our sharpshooters getting compromised.”

  After a while Mishra calmed down.

  “I have to say, Karan is as good as he ever was,” said Partha. “I admire his skill level. He is the only one who could have pulled this off.”

  “You should admire his resolve more than his skill,” replied Mishra. “Give him the difficult cases. He is your best man. And please keep an eye on Tiwari. I don’t want any more leaks.”

  “Sir, in light of your vast experience, do you see any holes in Karan?’

  Mishra took his time before replying. “Of course he has weaknesses. I have studied his cases and I can see them.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re once aga
in asking me to do your work for you.”

  “Sir, please,” pleaded Partha. “Do you see an end game?”

  Mishra finally relented. “Karan’s file is interesting. There is no consistent genealogy in his thirty encounters. But there has been an impact on him. What has and will continue to diminish him are encounters that pose questions.”

  BOOK III

  Encounter ThiRty-Three

  “Imight take a long walk,” joked Nandini when her contract came up for renewal. “Frankly, I’m getting tired,” she added.

  The rest of the Heritage Walk team sat in silence till she couldn’t handle it.

  “We all do this for a reason, right?” she said. They nodded. It wasn’t for the money, they all liked to say. “Fine, three more months,” she finally relented.

  Nandini was a popular guide and her tours were usually sold out. She had a different take on the familiar, so even locals would come by to visit places they already knew. A walk with Nandini became a reason to visit old haunts. People swapped stories from their previous visits and it was fun. The society that organized these walks could not afford to let her go. The money they raised was useful for their charities. Nandini knew she couldn’t leave, so why not force them to let you go? She decided to get wacky. She thought she could put people off by announcing a Dharavi Walk, one that squeezed you through the heart of the big slum. They ended up with a waitlist. Her follow-up to this was the Grant Road by Night Walk that covered the red-light district. This had an even longer waitlist.

  She bought new shoes, unique ones for each of the walks. She dressed differently and she spoke in a local dialect in some of the places they went to. It bordered on the theatrical. Things happened on these walks because they involved living spaces and people, not monuments, relics, or history.

  She bought a map of the city, an old one. She bought many old maps. And the walks became Tracing the Map, returning to a moment in time where the landscape and topography was revealed in its absence.