Deja Karma

by Vish Dhamija

  ‘Jee Hukum.’

  ‘You can drop me and go back, Bhīma, I’ll get home myself, I’ll call a cab.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you, Hukum.’

  Jay appreciated that Bhīma wouldn’t sleep till his hukum got home. He was there for Jay’s security and he would not budge.

  ‘Okay, why don’t you go home, have dinner and come back after midnight.’

  The compromise was acceptable.

  ***

  Jay Singh was once Jpeg Singh. Jayakumar Prankumar Girjashankar Singh. Jayakumar was the name they gave him at birth. Prankumar was his father’s name, and Girjashankar, his grandfather’s name. In keeping with convention, Singh was his family name. After being ridiculed in school for his unusually protracted name, when he went to college in the early eighties, he introduced himself as JPG. Late-eighties, the Internet and the standardisation of picture format gave him a cool acronym: JPEG. Jpeg Singh. Jpeg Singh became a man of a thousand words when he went to study law at Delhi University. By the time he finished his law degree he had spent his entire inheritance on his education.

  The coolness evaporated after the law degree when he struggled to find employment in any half-decent law firm. For more than a decade his daily regime comprised of cycling to the Tis Hazari Courts where he had a table under the shade of a banyan tree like many other qualified advocates looking for daily work to subsist; qualified advocates trapped in the vocation of notaries who sat verifying worthless documents, writing pointless appeals, certifying power of attorneys. Nobody did this dogsbody work willingly, not the least after being through the grind of legal college but hey, whoever said life was fair should have his degree in writing bumper stickers revoked with immediate effect. Padlocked metal trunks containing important papers were piled along the desk-lined location, come wind, rain or floods. Talk about security and confidentiality. Across from the advocates there were tables set up where rusted typewriters played Mozart all day long; they still used — and reused — the antediluvian carbon papers more than a dozen times till they could transmit nothing on the copy. A little way from these learned advocates someone had set up an illegal stall on wheels to serve tea and refreshments to them on credit. Not on credit card, on credit. Given the financial status of the tea stall’s clients, the owner was paid on a monthly basis by strugglers.

  Though Jpeg Singh religiously sat throughout the day in the humid and sudorific Delhi heat — under a lean-to tent tied to a thick branch of a five hundred year old tree — some days didn’t afford a single paying client, which left him to survive on water. In short, he was living a life he had never imagined, much less aspired to, his dreams vanishing quicker than fizz on a fountain. He despised his failure, but there seemed no way out of the living hell he was in: utterly and completely screwed by life.

  Jpeg had had a traumatic childhood, which had scarred him in his early years. For many years, like a tortoise, he frequently withdrew into his shell, avoided company, and even took treatments. But as money ran out the psychological treatments were dropped halfway. Everything seemed fine when he was on a high, a moment of down and he was really despondent and the depression returned.

  All rookies in all professions have a fallow period, but a decade could break anyone. Jpeg got into alcohol. Every penny he earned went towards buying cheap alcohol, local rotgut on days he couldn’t buy whisky; he bought food only if he had any money left. He had no friends, his peers — fellow advocates sitting under various trees — were not the people he wanted to socialise with, and they weren’t looking to socialise with each other either. And, despite being blessed with no less good looks than any of the current heartthrobs of Bollywood — he even had a striking resemblance to one of the Khans — he had no woman in his life. No woman wanted to date or to walk down the aisle with an indigent lawyer with no future. Arranged marriage, though big in India, needed parents or relatives fixing alliances. Being an orphan and that too with a tainted family background all relatives eschewed meeting him, let alone finding him a wife.

  And Jpeg was getting on the wrong side of thirties. The good looks were fast fading. He hadn’t the time, money or inclination to take care of himself. When chow was difficult to come by, how could anyone upkeep charm?

  Life was tough. God was looking elsewhere. For years, Jpeg Singh thought life would take a turn, some fucking turn, but the bitch didn’t move. It whipsawed him from all sides.

  Then the boat came in.

  Jpeg finally found a ticket. A deplorable ticket, but a ticket nevertheless.

  The case that made Jpeg Singh was the rape of a poor woman by one Dickey Yadav, an affluent VIP’s son — the son’s uncle was a Member of Parliament — who had caused an unwanted pregnancy.

  Apparently, uncontrolled avarice and debauchery had spoilt the young twenty-two-year-old Dickey rotten; he had been having sex with the servant girl, Sheila — a year younger than him — for over five years. A maidservant in the house was another object, merely a toy he could play with. What could she do? Fight him? Fight a powerful family’s only male child? The poor girl endured the chota-sahib as she had illegally emigrated from Bangladesh, and the little money she saved from her meagre earnings doing domestic chores at the Yadav residence she needed to send back to her ailing mother. And the obdurate Dickey carried on with his exploit. However, when she became pregnant the fact was exposed. Clearly, the Yadav family wanted no part in the maidservant or the illegitimate child, and they threw the six-month pregnant Sheila out on the streets. Dickey was asked to prepare for exams to go for further education to the US. Leave this place, leave this country. Get Away.

  The expectant mother — with no food or money or shelter and despite death threats from the Yadav clan — obstinate enough not to let go, came to the assemblage of advocates sitting under the trees at Tis Hazari Courts. Most advocates there had never prosecuted a criminal case and they weren’t going to start now, when the defendant’s family would bring in the best defence money could buy. Besides, none wanted to face the wrath of ‘muscle’.

  Jpeg Singh took the case out of compassion. Pro bono, of course.

  Defence for Yadav unashamedly claimed consensual sex. The girl enticed the rich boy, encouraged him by making advances. She had engaged in sex with Dickey, for years, with a predetermined intention to become pregnant so she could extort money from the respectful family by becoming a part of it. Dickey, in a weak moment, lost control. Plausible. The family were willing to pay for the mother and child to return to Bangladesh and provide for their upkeep. What more could anyone ask for?

  Jpeg Singh attacked on another level. The criminal law in India, under Article 375 of the Indian Penal Code, defined any sexual relations with girls below sixteen years as Statutory Rape. Statutory Rape made sexual intercourse with a girl below a statutorily defined age, a rape, notwithstanding the fact that the girl may have agreed to engage in the sexual activity. As Dickey was a few months older than Sheila, there was a three-month window — the slapdash de-fence advocate had left himself exposed by stating the couple had engaged in sexual intercourse for over five years — where the accused was over sixteen and the plaintiff was a minor. That settled it. The rest was easy. The opulence and influence of the accused was enough to convince the judge of his misdemeanour.

  Winning the case didn’t bring money. It unlocked doors. Jpeg Singh became Perry Mason, and the hero couldn’t turn back when another case, just as challenging, showed up. Winning the second case against another influential family placed him on terra firma, on sure grounds.

  If you win cases that everyone else believes you’ll lose, you get recognised. The politicians and those in power have little interest in punishing the guilty; their prime interest is to be seen as sympathising with the victims and to be perceived as doing the necessary to apprehend the guilty. In other words, earning their brownie points for the next elections. One of the ministers applauded Jpeg Singh on national television. Jpeg, who wasn’t even on the fringe a few months previously, suddenl
y became the torque. Funny how an outcast becomes a king? Everything had coalesced to work for him. The sardine had morphed into a shark and the shark hocked its soul to the devil willingly, which is a usual ramification when winning, and winning alone, became your life’s guiding value.

  The two publicised cases brought fame. Fame started bringing in defence cases. Defence cases meant more money. Money brought its typical indulgences, the idiosyncrasies: Scotch replaced rotgut, Audi replaced the rusted bicycle and the farmhouse replaced the shanty. Good looking he was, but what with the fashion and beauty therapists, vanity too became an overriding quality. He didn’t know what was more elite or acceptable: him or his American Express.

  He’d had to fight for, and stick his neck out for everything that most other advocates took for granted after their degrees. But the days of destitution seemed to be over. Things changed. Those guilty or accused wanted Jpeg defending them. Once a penniless lawyer under a tree, he now operated a law practice with numerous people working for him. When he was an unknown nobody, the name wasn’t important, Jpeg now sounded a bit juvenile; Jay Singh suited better. However, the two cases he had won prosecuting pro bono had left him with legacies.

  Sheila, the Bangladeshi girl, died shortly after giving birth to a boy leaving her son in Jay Singh’s guardianship — after all, in this uncaring, apathetic world he was the only great soul she had ever known in her short life. Jay legally adopted Yuvraj.

  The second case bequeathed him a six-foot-eleven-inch teratoid of a man whose sister’s murder case Jay Singh had represented: Bhīma, an ex-Army guy. With each defence case that Jay Singh won, the prerequisite for Bhīma, by his side, multiplied geometrically. The threats were no longer innocuous; their credibility went up and — after an unsuccessful shot at his car — Jay had unsurprisingly applied for a licensed firearm.

  Bhīma had a past. He wasn’t just another ex-army personnel, he had been hit in the leg at the Kargil war and was hence attached to an army surveillance group that used technology for intelligence gathering. He loved the whole spying business and mastered it. Working for Jay, he had wired more people than Reliance Telecom and Airtel put together in the National Capital Region, or NCR.

  Jay had been in the trenches, he knew the roots, and had been an elite advocate long enough now. Having seen both sides from close quarters, no one could read the terrain like him. With Bhīma by his side and friends on every possible side of the fence, he was arsenic or he was the elixir, depending on which side you were.

  ***

  Jay had met Akbar Ali during those impecunious days when both sat under the same banyan tree practising law. Despite Jay’s success and his insistence that Ali join the flourishing Cooper & Singh to make it Ali, Cooper & Singh, the latter had declined umpteen times citing issues of morality, conflict of interest and all that crap. Ali believed that money earned by defending those accused would bring material comforts at the cost of mental peace, which his ethics didn’t permit. He was in his late-forties, but looked a decade older than that. Being unkempt, malnourished and living on cheap alcohol had taken its toll. He was the only person, besides Cooper, with whom Jay had shared all his past and secrets. Though both Ali and Cooper had known about the existence of the other, neither had made any attempt to meet the other, perhaps because of the cosmic differences in their outlook towards life. The reason of everlasting friendship with Ali was simple: he didn’t judge Jay’s self-destructive lifestyle, didn’t ask questions; just accepted him as he was. Neither man questioned the other’s warped logic of illogical principles, or their lack thereof.

  ‘What a surprise. How nice to see you, Jay. You should have let me know, I’d have got some good Scotch.’

  ‘I already have it here.’ Jay showed the bottle of Chivas.

  ‘You’re always a step ahead, my friend, always a step ahead. Water or ice?’

  ‘Ice, please.’

  Ali lived in a dilapidated one-room kholi, rented out to him by a family who owned the shanty; he had limited material inventory but a refrigerator was one of them. He pulled out the decrepit ice tray and brought two glasses.

  ‘Does this mean you will stop drinking soon?’ he asked, knowing Jay had seen a therapist earlier in the evening.

  Jay didn’t respond. He simply smiled and raised his glass in celebration. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. You look disturbed, Jay. Are you happy?’

  ‘Who is?’ After recounting the past to Anita, the gloom was still fresh in his mind.

  Ali let out an audible chuckle. ‘I am. Contented, at least, if not utterly happy. Happiness isn’t about looking back, Jay; I’ve explained this to you a million times. Bury the past, the more you dwell on it, the more it will hurt, but you don’t ever listen to me do you? Whatever happened is done with, you have no control over it but you constantly allow your mind to wander over hopeless things and hurt yourself in the bargain. What’s the point?’

  ‘I understand what you say, Akbar. It’s just that sometimes I have no control over my own feelings. I keep going back to recreate the moment to see if I can spot something I missed then.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you are going around in circles, and going around in circles never got anyone out of them. So, unless you have a new piece of info or some fresh evidence it is a futile exercise and you, as an advocate, should know that.’

  ‘So where do I get more information?’

  ‘Forget it. They say even a few hours’ delay in starting a murder investigation is late. Twenty plus years late? Not a fucking chance. What new evidence can you find now?’

  Ali’s words resonated in the quiet of the room. He wasn’t wrong one bit.

  ‘What else is news in your world, Jay?’ Akbar could see Jay internalising his statement and supplanted the glum rhetoric with pointless chitchat.

  ‘What if I tell you I met a girl?’

  ‘Wait… hold that for a sec. Let me make another drink before you start.’

  ‘It’s nothing like what—’

  ‘Shhh… shut up.’

  Even in the world where Jay was now a king, some old friends had the right to shut him up. Ali poured the drinks, rummaged in his run-down refrigerator for some shards of ice and brought the tumblers back.

  ‘Now tell me everything from the beginning, my friend.’

  ‘Like I was saying, there’s nothing much to tell.’

  ‘Then why did you say you met this girl, whoever she is. Come on, out with it now.’

  ‘Well, she’s the receptionist of this therapist I saw this evening.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Manavi.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Late-twenties, maybe.’

  ‘Hottie?’

  ‘What is this, some kind of Mossad interrogation?’

  ‘Poverty is a wretched thing, Jay. Not because you can’t buy a new car or a new gadget, no I don’t mean that. I hate poverty because it robs people of the basic human emotions too. You and I lost out on more than the material belongings. We leapfrogged our youths in those struggling years. Even love didn’t happen. It couldn’t. We neither had time nor the money, who would have fallen for us or reciprocated if we had shown interest?’

  ‘So you mean—?’

  ‘Yes, so regardless of my age, I am as curious as I would have been if my friend had told me this twenty years ago. Like teenagers talk about girls.’

  ‘She’s pretty.’

  ‘Pretty or pretty-pretty?’

  ‘The latter.’

  ‘Did you tell her?’

  ‘Did I tell her, what?’

  ‘That she is pretty?’

  ‘What, at the first meeting in the formal setting?’

  ‘So when is the first meeting in an informal setting?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jay figured that he was blushing. Why?

  ‘So, who knows?’

  ‘I am not sure if I am ready for this.’

  ‘Are you a moron?’ Ali l
et out a laugh. ‘If you’re not ready now when will you be ready?’

  ‘I actually meant I’m too old for her—’

  ‘You are not some doddery, senile old man who’s halfway into the grave. You’re still in your early-forties, single, reputable and conspicuously successful. Why should she have any problems if she’s single? What do you mean you’re too old for her?’

  ‘I’ve never been involved with a girl, you know that.’

  ‘There’s always a first time, as they say.’

  ‘I don’t know if she’s single, if she’s even interested in an old dog like me. She might think I am an old fart with mental problems, that’s why I see the therapist. Just because I found her pretty does not mean anything.’

  ‘Now, now, now… if it did not mean anything to you, I don’t think you would have mentioned it to me, Jay.’

  ‘I never said I didn’t find her attractive.’

  ‘Then ask her out. Asking someone out for dinner is no crime. She can decline if she’s involved with someone, and you’d figure out if she’s not interested in you if go for dinner with her.’

  ‘I don’t have the nerves for that.’

  ‘When are you meeting her next?’

  ‘When I see my therapist next, which is on Monday, four days from now, why?’

  ‘Okay.’ Ali kept quiet for a while. Anyone watching him might have thought that he was working on the next foreign strategy for the country. ‘I have an idea. When you go in next, do not book the following appointment… say that you need to consult your diary, and that you’ll call back— ’

  ‘How does that help?’

  ‘Hang on a minute Mr hotshot advocate. Asking Manavi out for dinner would be a lot easier on the phone. Should she decline, you don’t have to face the embarrassment.’

  ‘I’ll still have to face her eventually.’

  ‘Come on now, we’ll figure that out later. And if you can’t find the balls to call, come to me and I’ll call her.’

  ‘Won’t she figure out it’s not me?’

  ‘Won’t she figure out it’s not me?’ Akbar mimicked Jay’s words in a shrill female voice. ‘Don’t be a jerk. Voices can sound different on a phone.’