Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  She gasps. ‘You mean they engineered a riot to get rid of a cop?’

  The boyfriend shrugs. ‘People were carrying guns. The officer got shot. Nobody saw anyone take aim or anything. But the firing is not just a firing now. The media will give it a new spin. Wait and watch.’

  The story draws her in. It is something out of a movie. A brave, honest cop. An evil, powerful politician. Nepotism. Corruption. People’s lives at stake. Guns. But instead of good prevailing over evil, it was the hero who lay dead at the end.

  He wasn’t supposed to die, she thinks. Heroes must only be allowed to die if their death facilitates something good, such as the union of the heroine with another hero who loves her to death. After all, the heroine has to choose one, even if two men love her equally.

  In her head, that childish world of castles and adventure, heroes and villains, turns on its side. It breathes. After many, many years, she feels the magic of a story. She asks for more details.

  The boyfriend is surprised. She has never taken more than a passing interest in human rights, or caste politics, or local politics, although she is studying to be a political academic. But he is not one to let go of an opportunity to expand on his themes. So he tells her all he knows about the district – feudal dynasties, expanding slums, a history of rioting, new land mafia, murder, police inaction, the position of NGOs like his own, the problem of accessing information, links between the MLA’s brother and the land mafia.

  She brings him more coffee, listens intently. She asks, ‘But this time, things were different? Because of this officer?’

  ‘Yes. This time there was a real chance the police would nail those bastards. MLA saab is into construction benami. His brother did the dirty work – burning shanties, creating dangerous zones around a piece of coveted property so that respectable people would grow afraid, sell out and move somewhere safer. These guys pay squatters to take over the homes of people who run away during riots. They burn property papers. All filthy work, but effective. The MLA’s brother should have been in jail long ago, but . . . well, this is us. This is how the world’s largest democracy functions.’

  She has a faraway look on her face. ‘But that police officer was different. He would have put these bad guys in jail if he had lived long enough, no?’

  The boyfriend is relieved to be talking to her again. Talking instead of fighting. He almost reaches for her to kiss her. But he decides not to push his luck. There are tension lines straddling her forehead and he knows that if he says that he could stay the night after all, her smile will freeze. She has been cold lately, ever since he said he wanted to move in. He bites back his sadness, smiles, and goes off to his office.

  She walks about the house, restless. She picks up the newspapers, wanting to know more. There is a photo of the dead police officer, taken at the bier. He is so heavily garlanded by marigold that his face is barely visible. The grieving family is in sharp focus. The officer was forty-three years old. Not as young as the dying heroes in films. His wife must be around the same age, although she looks older in the photo – hair askew, red bindi still in place, leaning heavily on a relative’s shoulder as if she is about to fall. There are children. A son, twelve, and a daughter, thirteen. They sit behind their mother. Not quite weeping.

  She switches on the television, which has been silent for nearly six weeks. She surfs channels. There’s a news bulletin on one of the local free channels. Local news. She waits until the pudgy newsreader starts saying something about a riot and a dead officer. The funeral is over. At least 300 people had poured out on the streets for a last look. The reporter says, strangers were touching his body, jostling for a turn at lending their shoulders to the bier. A procession winds towards the crematorium. There is a brief video clip but all she can see are a few other cops, grim-faced, watchful, but not pushing away the crowds. Then the camera zooms in to the half-eclipsed face, marigolds, a stack of wood. Cotton stuffed into his nose. Golds rings on his earlobes.

  Funny, she thinks, for a police officer. She hasn’t seen police officers wearing gold earrings. The newsreader is saying laudatory things – how this officer had a reputation for not kowtowing. His medals. His frequent transfers. Upright. A failed ambush by the land mafia. Living alone for the last year. His family lived in the capital because his frequent transfers were affecting the children’s studies.

  The camera focuses on the children’s faces again. The girl is sobbing now, clutching the mother, who is swaying side-toside, eyes glazed, like an opium addict.

  She knows, in a single intuitive flash, that it wasn’t the children’s studies. It wasn’t the frequent transfers that kept them apart. Watching his widow on television, she knows that the couple was through with each other. The widow is mourning the loss of a husband, not the loss of a man who loved her.

  She knows, somehow, that the dead officer died loveless. This thought causes a brief, wrenching shot of pain. She goes up to the television on her hands and knees. She touches the screen as the camera zooms in, lingers on the face of the dead man. She touches the moustache, the shut eyes, the earlobes.

  It was a handsome face, she thinks. Not like those attractive faces that arrest you in the street. No dimples or curls or severe lines. There was a bit of extra weight around the chin. But if he stood upright, she knew she would be drawn to his length, his neat, clipped manner, the shimmer of grey in his hair and the deepening lines under the eyes.

  He was probably tall, one of those naturally well-built men who carry a few extra kilos gracefully, made more imposing by the weight. His nails would be neat. She imagines shaking hands with him – a large, clean hand with ruddy fingertips. She feels the pressure of a firm grip and her hand is released immediately, not held a second too long. An upright officer. He would know what an appropriate handshake feels like. Especially the first time he’s meeting a woman.

  So this is how they meet – a PhD student dilly-dallying with her thesis, and a dead policeman.

  Resistance is futile. The officer is no longer in any position to resist, and she is drawn to him as surely as the sun is drawn to the horizon at the end of a long day. It is inevitable and she does not think of consequences. In love, who does?

  The boyfriend calls, saying he spent the night at the office because the meeting went on too late and he had a long day ahead again. He asks, could he please come by for a cup of coffee. She says, come.

  It is early morning. She is in a good mood. She fixes a breakfast of poha and cheese toast. The boyfriend is pleasantly surprised. Coffee is made graciously. The papers are read together in companionable silence. Breakfast is served in glass plates, with the option of poha or toast or both. A bowl of diced fruit. They linger over it. They lounge in the balcony with their feet up on cane stools. This has never happened before, the boyfriend thinks. He does not understand this woman. But the sun is warm and he is tired and well fed and in no mood to think.

  She asks, ‘You were busy? Still working on that riot mess?’

  ‘The plot thickens,’ the boyfriend says. ‘The MLA’s son has taken off. Gone underground. They are saying he was on holiday, in London, but people here saw him participating in the riot. Witnesses. The main guy, MLA saab’s brother, he is also trying to take off. But MLA saab doesn’t want him to disappear yet. They say he might have to sacrifice the brother to save the son. He wanted to keep his options open. So he leaked info to the cops that this brother of his was fleeing, down south. They arrested him this morning. Now MLA saab will let his brother cool his heels in jail. For a while at least.’

  Her eyes are bright with excitement. ‘What people! But tell me, this brother of the MLA, he will be charged with murder, right?’

  The boyfriend shrugs. ‘Charge-sheeting is a long way off. Maybe rioting. Maybe murder. Nobody saw him pull the trigger. Nobody can prove anything. MLA saab will buy witnesses when the time comes.’

  She hesitates. ‘That police officer? I saw him on TV.’

  The boyfriend clicks his tong
ue. ‘These guys have it pretty rough. Even the corrupt ones. It can’t be easy, meeting people all the time, having to deal with their violence. Doing violence to them. That’s the trouble with our system. Expecting someone else to maintain order for us. Why should we? Is it justified? Paying other men, or women, to kill and die in our names. I think it is problematic.’

  She asks, ‘More coffee?’

  The boyfriend takes a nap after breakfast, and she steps out to buy all the newspapers she can find. One of the papers has a half-page profile of the dead cop. His batch-mates have spoken of him glowingly. A quiet man, principled, did very well at their training. One of his seniors mentions how the officer lived. Frugal. Incorruptible. Rode a bike off-duty, because he couldn’t afford a car. There are three photos with the article. One has the police officer in uniform, sitting astride a bike. Sunglasses. Arms crossed on his chest – a younger, slimmer man than the one cremated yesterday. Another photo has him sitting with his family on a sofa, a brown-black geometric print on it. He is grim, wearing a white kurtapajama, a yellow tilak on his forehead. His wife is in a silk sari. The children wear denims. Probably taken at Diwali.

  The third photo is a close-up of the officer’s face. A passport-sized photo. He looks directly into the camera, not bothering to smile, but not nervous or hostile either. Just looking, as if he was looking into someone’s eyes without the expectation or the assurance of being understood.

  She clips the article out and hides it between the pages of a thick novel kept on her bedside table. Every day, she reaches out, opens the book, looks at the photos, re-reads the piece.

  After the boyfriend goes out of town to research a new chapter of his never-ending thesis, she feels cheerful. She wanders about her house, cooking interesting tidbits for herself. She has stopped going to the library and when she does step outdoors, she heads to the nearest cinema to watch a matinee. She sits alone, but she doesn’t feel alone any more. She feels like her elbow is resting against an arm.

  When she wants to whisper a comment about the movie, she tilts her head, enunciates each word clearly inside her head as if she was saying it to someone sitting beside her. When she gets coffee in the interval, she smiles at the thought of milky foam on her upper lip, forming a cappucino moustache. She never trips on the stairs leading into the dark cinema hall. She can feel a guiding hand gripping her elbow, or resting against her back, ready to catch her if she stumbles.

  The weeks pass, and then she decides to get real. She must research her subject. But instead of finishing her thesis, she goes to the public library to look at old newspapers. She reads about policemen, their salaries, perks, the ratio of police to population. She reads articles by internal security experts on how pitifully armed the force is, how many policemen have died since independence in the line of duty. In one obscure magazine, she discovers an article written by her own police officer.

  The article is two years old. He has written about riot control, argued in favour of opening fire at a mob, even at the risk of innocents getting trapped in the crossfire. Four years ago, he had written an op-ed in Duniya, making an impassioned plea to change the bureaucratic structure so that the police force reported directly to the home minister, not to politicians, or IAS officers who are themselves cowed by the fear of a transfer. He had been transferred twenty-two times already, at the time of writing the article.

  It is an impulse, probably one of the only impulsive things she has done in her adult life. It frightens her to think of what might happen if she is found out, but now she cannot stop. She stands at the entrance to police headquarters, looks around nervously. A passing constable stops, asks who she wants. She says she is looking for information on the police officer, the one who was killed. The constable looks her up and down, leads her straight into the press officer’s cabin.

  The press officer asks her to sit, signals for tea, asks which newspaper she is working for. She looks at herself. How easy stereotypes are – kurta, jeans, flat slippers. It was the university researcher’s uniform, but also the news reporter’s uniform. She shakes her head and almost tells the truth, but when she opens her mouth, different words come out: ‘Not newspaper. Magazine. Foreign magazine.’

  No further questions are asked. The official is eager to help. She walks out with an address in case she wants to meet the bereaved family, the phone number for his retired father, also a former cop. Since she has gone too far already, she goes further.

  She takes a rickshaw to a place that wasn’t really ‘his’, since he never lived there. It was hired for his family, so they could live in the city while he moved around, serving in more remote police stations.

  She repeats the lie about the foreign magazine, gives a fake surname, but uses her own first name. The widow invites her to come in and promptly breaks down.

  She waits as the widow blows into a hanky, repeating over and over: ‘How did this happen? Oh why! Where was I?’

  The widow looks terrible. Hair unbrushed, although it is two in the afternoon, she appears swaddled in a nightgown. After she has wiped her eyes on one short sleeve, the widow nods to indicate a readiness for further questions.

  She draws a notebook out of her cloth bag. Questions aren’t difficult. All the journalists on TV ask the same questions, over and over. She says, ‘Tell me about him. Whatever you can tell me. Your life with him. Anything. Everything.’

  The widow begins. Theirs was an arranged marriage. The police officer had been a quiet man, didn’t have time for romance. He had cracked the IPS entrance when he was twenty-six, having tried twice before and failed. But he persisted, for he had always known what he wanted to be: a police officer. If he couldn’t make the grade, he would have liked to be a forest officer. In later years, he had sometimes wondered aloud if he shouldn’t have opted for the forest service instead of the police. He wanted more and more to spend time in silent, green places. He didn’t mind rural postings, even though it inconvenienced the family, what with the children’s schooling and an old father to look after. That’s why he settled his family in this city house, but lived alone himself.

  She listens to the widow. In her heart, she has guessed what he was like. She has come here only to get a corroboration of her vision. She wants more.

  The widow brings out photo albums and she flips through, not much interested in the endless photos of friends and relatives, but carefully peering at him. It takes an hour to go through the lot. When the widow says, ‘This is all that’s left’ and starts to weep, she asks permission to take a few photos so she can get them scanned at a cyber café.

  The widow sends a servant boy to get the scans and offers to make tea. All the while, she goes on talking about her dead husband. That he liked Kashmiri tea – salty, pink stuff. He liked to wake up early and spend an hour alone. He liked to cook. He had grown more impatient. He took care of his bike. Twice a month, he went to visit his old father, who lived alone in a crumbling house, just four streets away.

  She asks the widow about those gold earrings, the oddity of seeing them on a police officer.

  ‘No, not with his uniform. His ears were pierced as a child. It is a custom in their family. Once he put on the police uniform, he stopped wearing earrings. But he had told his father once that if he died, he wanted to be sent off on his last journey wearing those traditional gold earrings. I would keep scolding him for talking about death. I told him not to even think of bad things. But he never listened to me.’ And with that, the widow bursts into tears again.

  She is impatient. She asks the widow if she can look at some things that belonged to the deceased. Just to get a sense of his personality, she explains. To make him come alive.

  The widow leads her into a room where two suitcases stand in a corner, along with an ancient cardboard case covered with red and black checks. Formal shirts. White, grey and blue. One formal jacket, black. Thick sweaters in muted colours, often with one stripe running across the chest. Two mufflers. Size ten shoes, one black pair issued by
the police, one pair of brown ankle-length boots. Three sets of white muslin kurta pajamas. A shaving kit. Two paintings of the Mithla school. Two framed photos, animals in the wild. A gold ring. One set of silver cuff-links. A file with menus of various local restaurants stapled together. Another file full of certificates of merit and college degrees. Yet another file – electricity bills, telephone bills, newspaper bills. A copper ash-tray. A medal for bravery. Books. A suitcase full of books. She notes down the titles.

  Most of the books are about wildlife or philosophy or political history. One of the books is familiar. It is one she has read – the one that claims that if you want something very badly, it will come to you. If you dream with such intense clarity that your dreams seem real, they will become real. The universe will bow to your will.

  She picks up the book, the ashtray, one of the mufflers. She slips them into her bag. The servant boy returns with the scanned photos stored on a silver disc.

  Back home, she clears a shelf inside her cupboard for a large green tin box that had once held chocolate. Inside the box, she has put a muffler, prints of the photos, cut-outs from newspapers, Xeroxes of articles. She puts a tiny lock on the box, slips the key on the gold chain that she wears around her neck.

  She buys a battered cardboard suitcase from the second-hand bazaar. It was the wrong colour but she bought red and black paint. She paints on the same chequered pattern that she saw on the dead man’s suitcase. She uses it as a side-table for her books, her coffee mug, the stolen ashtray.

  In the past, the boyfriend has offered her cigarettes but she never developed the habit. She wouldn’t even allow him to keep an ashtray in her house. The poor fellow uses an old, cracked coffee mug instead. But now she smokes and she uses the dead man’s ashtray.

  At the university library, she borrows all the titles she saw inside the dead man’s suitcase. She reads incessantly. And not for a moment does she feel alone. She feels as if she is living with someone. Someone who smokes. Someone who is fond of books.