Heroes R Us

by Mainak Dhar

  Mishti did get married later that year, and is now pregnant with her first child. If it's a boy, she plans to name him Arnab. Jayantada did hire a new Assistant Librarian, but would never tire of speaking about the fine young man who had worked for him, and who had been one of the heroes who had jumped into the Cricket field that fateful evening to help the Guardian Angel. On his repeated pleading, the Principal agreed to rename the library as the Arnab Bannerjee Memorial Library.

  Chintu never tires of telling his mother about the super powers Arnab had possessed. Mrs Duggal gently discourages this hero worship, and hopes her son grows out of this phase.

  As for Khan, he cried his heart out for a long time after seeing what had happened to Arnab, but that grief was tempered by a fierce sense of pride, much like a father would feel towards a son. A couple of days after the attack, he finally opened the suitcase Arnab had left for him. The contents shocked him, but then an idea came to him, and the old man began plotting.

  ***

  A year after the attack, something peculiar started happening. Young men, operating in groups of two or three, began materializing in Delhi's streets by night. They were all dressed in hooded sweatshirts, and initially people thought they were just fans of the Guardian Angel, trying to imitate their fallen hero. That changed when these men began to intervene in law and order situations. It began on a small scale, with these men chasing away robbers or petty thieves. But soon, larger groups of these men began to appear in the city's streets, patrolling neighbourhoods, and not shying away from open confrontation with criminals. A gang of carjackers was set upon by them and left beaten to a pulp. A sexual assault on a group of women was thwarted and the five would be rapists were thrashed by the four young men in hooded sweatshirts to the point where they spent more than a week in hospital before they were sent to jail.

  The men were unarmed but seemed to demonstrate high levels of expertise in martial arts and wild rumours began spreading about how invincible they were, especially when one of them walked away after being shot by a bank robber. After the first few incidents, the word was out on the street-it was foolish for any criminal to try and take them on. The government publicly denounced them for taking the law into their own hands, but when Delhi experienced its lowest ever crime rates that year, the new Prime Minister, Balwant Singh, announced that the young men were well-intentioned but could do with some guidance from the government. As the months went by, the numbers of these young vigilantes seemed to multiply, and soon they were a regular, and welcome sight on Delhi streets at night, a visible symbol that someone was finally doing something to fight back against the lawlessness that had once threatened to engulf the capital. They were well organized and disciplined, and seemed to operate with some clear central direction.

  Despite intense media interest, not much was really known about the identity of these hooded vigilantes or who was training and funding them. It was rumoured that they were being trained at a secret training center outside Delhi and were outfitted with state of the art equipment including bulletproof vests and night-vision equipment. Nobody could explain how anyone could afford that kind of money, but there were persistent rumours that the driving force behind this was an old retired soldier who was funding this with his own money.

  By the time the year was over, ordinary civilians-men and women alike-in other cities had begun forming their own neighbourhood watch groups in emulation of the Delhi vigilantes. What they lacked in the martial skills of these hooded vigilantes, they made up in numbers and enthusiasm. The first to feel the brunt were criminals but then corrupt officials, policemen and bureaucrats started to find themselves at the receiving end. Shocked that ordinary citizens were no longer willing to meekly accept their demands for bribes and favours, many were thrashed black and blue by groups of irate citizens. The Government really didn't know how to react. On the one hand, Balwant Singh and his ministers would keep saying that people should not take the law unto their own hands, but soon they realized that they were up against a tidal wave of public anger that they should best leave alone.

  Crime rates began to plummet across cities, and the media began reporting about how the greatest legacy of the Guardian Angel may have been to shake people out of their apathy, to prove that an ordinary man could sometimes make a big difference, even in a society as messed up and corrupt as ours.

  A leading weekly carried the following piece as its editorial.

  'Nobody knows how long this will last. How many days before these men and women go back to their ordinary lives? How many days before we one again succumb to a mute acceptance of what happens around us? How many days before we go back to the apathy we had learnt to take for granted, where we were content to watch the rot around us, and unwilling to do anything until that rot began to bring our own walls down? How many days before we return to a system where unquestioning tolerance of the status quo is encouraged and any attempt to stand up against it dismissed as unnecessary bravado? While one hopes that doesn't happen, one fears that this wave of popular consciousness and action will subside, and become little more than a short-lived ripple in the sea of selfishness and cynicism that we had come to take for granted in our society. But while it lasts, it is a glorious thing to be applauded and celebrated. It serves to remind us, that no matter how dark things sometimes seem in today's India, there is still hope. That hope for a better tomorrow springs not from the actions, no matter how heroic, of one superhero, but from the awakening his deeds have created in the hearts of millions of ordinary people, spurring them to perform their own small, individual acts of heroism, which when taken together, promise to change things much more than one man could ever have hoped to have done by himself. The events of the last few weeks and months serve to remind us true change requires not one superhero, but for every one of us to discover a little bit of a hero in ourselves. The Guardian Angel's greatest legacy will not be his incredible saga of heroism and sacrifice alone, but the fact that he has awakened millions to the notion that we need not look for heroes, super or otherwise, to materialize and solve our problems for us, or indeed believe that true heroes exist only in the make-believe world of comic books. We need only look within-for those heroes are us.'

  BONUS CONTENT: THE MAKING OF HEROES R US

  The origin of this novel, in the author's own words

  My weakness for bread pudding proved to be the catalyst that led to this novel. I was on an overnight flight from Singapore to Sydney and faced with the insipid fare laid out in front of me for dinner, had to choose between sleeping and waiting for dessert. When I saw the magic words 'bread pudding' on the menu, hunger or perhaps greed won out over sleep and I decided to wile away time watching a movie while I waited for dessert. In flicking through the channels, I came across Superman Returns and I began to think about this whole superhero business. Before I knew it, I was scribbling away on the back of my boarding pass.

  Superheroes are always a reflection of the times in which they are created. More specifically they reflect the fears that dominate people's imaginations at that time. So a whole slew of all-American superheroes like Superman, Captain America and others came to the fore during the Second World War, when the big villains in popular imagination were seemingly alien regimes bent on world domination and destroying the American way of life. Heroes like Batman and Daredevil emerged in response to rising urban crime. I found myself asking-what would an appropriate superhero for today's India be like? The villains the ordinary Indian dreads are not aliens out to destroy our planet or megalomaniacs trying to take over the world. Their villains are of the ilk we encounter every day-the louts on a Delhi street molesting women, the thugs who get away with it because of their 'connections', the apathetic policemen who stand by and watch or demand bribes for performing their duties, the leaders who bother more about garnering power and money and less about the people they supposedly lead. That was what led to the uniquely Indian superhero I set out to create for Herogiri, which was the name for this novel
when it was first published in India by Random House.

  As a result, the superhero in this novel is not the product of an alien race like Superman. Nor is he a reclusive billionaire like Batman. He is Arnab Bannerjee, a shy Assistant Librarian in a Delhi college, whose primary excitement in life comes from chasing down missing books and whose big ambition is to secure a government job. He does not fly down from the sky like Superman or arrive on missions in a high-tech Batmobile. Our superhero rides into battle in a public bus. While he has some powers, his skills are not honed through a crystal library hidden in the North Pole or a secret lab funded by his billions-he hones them with the help of Khan Chacha, a retired soldier who runs the neighbourhood video parlour. He does have a uniform-but it isn't something exotic or extravagantly expensive like the suit of a recent Bollywood superhero film in the making. It's an old faded sweatshirt with a hood. And no, he does not wear his underwear on the outside. When love does come his way, he does not exactly sweep his lady love off her feet. Coming from a small suburb of Kolkata, he has never even been on a date before. As he embarks on his most critical mission, the biggest danger comes not from alien rocks like Kryptonite or super-villains but the fact that he finds himself being forced to join hands with the very men he fought against-the Minister who wants to use his powers to rig elections, the policeman who tried to kill him in an `encounter' and the business tycoon who wants to cash in on his popularity by signing him on as a brand ambassador.

  Most importantly, the catalyst for him discovering his powers is the simple fact that for once he decides not to look the other way when he sees a stranger in distress. He decides to go against what has been drummed into him since childhood-the fact that `decent middle class' people do not get involved when there may be trouble. He shrugs off the same apathy that has made `being a hero' almost a derogatory term in modern India-a term for unwarranted bravado. Perhaps what we really need is not a Superman but an `everyman'- for people like Arnab, for people like you and me to stand up against the villains, large and small, that we see around us every day. For when apathy ends, heroism begins.

  And oh yes, the bread pudding was well worth the wait.

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