The Rat Eater

by Anand Ranganathan

  Ajay put his foot down, and not just to crush the three-four maxim. ‘No, Kharbanda, dammit. I said tomorrow, and I want them, by tomorrow. At the most, you can have till tomorrow afternoon. This is big, too big. Even a day’s delay means you can say goodbye to all your dreams. So, now that you have understood me, may I ask if you have a number—off the top of your head?’

  SP Kharbanda glanced around. ‘Er, sir, please. This is just between you and me. Officially, there are no unsolved murders—my job is gone if this gets out. I hope you understand, sir.’

  ‘Stop making me understand. Just answer the bloody question.’

  ‘Sir, don’t mind, in the last ten years, at least 170.’

  Ajay opened his mouth and then found he couldn’t close it. ‘170. 170. Man, you guys, you are gods. No one can touch you…170 ?’

  SP Kharbanda didn’t know whether he was being praised or ridiculed.

  ‘But that’s too many for me, Kharbanda. I want a small list, only high profile. Like—yes, exactly like—Saane’s. Now you know and I know that this Saane thing is unsolved. But the public will know only of Dev and Kitla, right? So now, how many, like Saane? And I dare you to say three-four. I dare you.’

  ‘Sir, off the top of my head, not more than ten.’

  Ajay rubbed his hands. ‘Great. We can handle that. Great. Now listen carefully, Kharbanda. I am giving you a free pass to becoming a DIG—by next year, I promise. Now you listen…’

  ‘I am straining my ears, sir. I can even hear the goor-goor in your stomach.’

  ‘Good. Collect as much information about those ten—leave everything else. Ask Sharma to do the Saane paperwork—it’s “solved” anyway. This is big, Kharbanda—too big. If my hunch is right…Now listen—most important–’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You need to get all of Agatha Christie’s novels—and I mean all, and…’

  SP Kharbanda sounded worried. ‘All, sir? There must be hundreds—er, my daughter’s read a few…’

  ‘I don’t care if there are thousands. Add them to the HQ library afterwards for all I care.’

  ‘Er, yes, sir.’

  ‘Maybe you guys would benefit a little from the wisdom of Hercule Poirot.’

  ‘Err…’

  ‘Anyway, where was I? Haan, get all of her novels and take down whatever is written on the back flap—you need not read the whole damn novel.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir, that’s a big relief.’

  ‘I thought as much. Anyway, take it down and make a neat table of two columns. You know what is to be filled in those columns?’

  ‘I think so, sir. In the left column the name of the novel and in the right column, er, whatever is written on the back flap.’

  ‘Good. You surprise me at times.’

  Phitay-moo, ban-cho. Now was this praise or ridicule? wondered SP Kharbanda.

  ‘Er…thank you, sir.’

  ‘And let’s meet by twelve noon tomorrow—your office at the HQ.’

  ‘Yes, sir, everything will be ready.’

  ‘And listen. Cancel our plane tickets. I cannot go back for at least a week, ten days.’

  ‘Sure, sir.’

  ‘I have to find a way to tell Aparajita this.’

  SP Kharbanda nodded his head cheerfully. ‘No problem, sir. I am sure madam will understand.’

  ‘Arey, you don’t understand women, Kharbanda. I’ll go to the gallows for this.’

  ‘Hah, yes, sir.’

  ‘And, Kharbanda, you will do the digging—not a whisper to anyone. You got that?’

  ‘Clearly, sir—only me and you.’

  ‘Fantastic, Kharbanda, fantastic.’

  I’d ban-cho bet my striped kachha this was praise, thought SP Kharbanda, clearing the way for Ajay.

  Have you ever seen a horse with Pampers? Or a goat with Huggies? Same principle—they don’t seem too keen to lug their droppings along with them. Humans, the so-called superior species, are the only species in the animal kingdom that carry their dung on their backs for hours. All the others ease themselves, here, there, everywhere. Like, 80 per cent of India. Which divide is more difficult to accept and understand? Open defecation is an issue because of the absence of facilities to perform them in appropriate places. Otherwise, we leave our droppings everywhere, hoping no one will find them. Like a lot else. Getting found out is worse than doing it—than doing anything. And we do everything khul ke. Deification, defecation—same-same.

  Even animals don’t behave like this. They don’t write on walls. Engrave their names on national monuments. Muthu loves Sharda, or Bitto loves Gunnu, with a heart cleaved in two with an arrow. Such recognisable signs of longing.

  There is no street named after a chimpanzee. In the animal kingdom, of which human beings are supposedly the bosses, animals share. Do we? After the tiger has chased the antelope and devoured the royal share, other animals partake of the meal. Right down to the last insect, the kill is shared till there is no trace of it left. The scene of the slaughter is clean, with no space for any diseases to take root. If animals are greedy, they don’t show it. Animals don’t kill for pleasure or torture each other and later watch it on closed circuit television. They kill when threatened from the outside. Their scores are settled with claws, not guns and cannons. And they don’t take selfies with the other monkeys.

  In the evolutionary process, we have been animals and monkeys for too long. The human has many more eons to go. Ask anyone who has seen war of the populations decimated, of moving from spot to spot in search of security. The old, the infirm, the baby, they are left behind—human beings don’t move in herds. See how quickly we break rules to get ahead, not as a collective but as an individual? Annihilation crosses our mind the moment we are confronted with differences, with other odours and food, rituals and prayers. Massacres are something we are used to. Torture, extortion, defecation, defamation are all activities that attract us.

  Hoarding—do animals hoard? They store food for long winter months. We are civilised—that’s why we rush to capture, to deprive, to degrade and then to discuss in endless seminars about who is the better killer and who is depleting the world’s resources faster than others. We even discuss which form of torture is acceptable and which is not; entire tomes are devoted to what the world’s elders deem right. Then comes a new type of war—cyber war, chemical war, another Kurukshetra, another dharmakshetra that changes all the rules. All hell breaks loose as the aggressor is a known entity—one of us who has real ambitions as opposed to something ordinary. We are thrown. We are thrown at the slightest push.

  Simple things like, standing patiently in a queue is beyond us. So we criticise others who are orderly, quiet and respectful. That’s foreign to us. But the moment we cross the immigration counter in a foreign airport, we become foreign to ourselves. We are polite, courteous; the bathrooms are cleaner. We even go to the extent of saying please and thank you. A crow in India is no different from a crow in Italy. Pigeons shit all over the place, wherever they are.

  And we talk.

  Oh, that little girl putting herself through impossible hoops at the traffic light should be sent to the Olympics. She could beat Nadia Comaneci any day, hands down. And the children of our fisherfolk, we should pack them off, too—so many Mark Spitzes and Michael Phelpses in the country. Rope trick, hat trick, snake trick, water trick, air trick, trick trick, we can do it all. It just needs the right attitude. But who has the time? So many problems, so many people. So many people and so few Olympic medals. So many uncles and aunties in selection committees and so many foreign lands to visit.

  And we talk.

  We talk of humility all the time because we are not humble as a people. Service is not servility. We struggle with that difference. Humility to find talent and nurture it, wherever it exists, and whichever strata of society it comes from, escapes us. If it was truly survival of the fittest, the beggars outside luxurious hotels would have long joined the elite for a meal. We have managed to bend, break, upt
urn and distort every law of nature to ensure that a few in a country of a billion survive as the fittest while the rest can wallow in hunger, disease and death.

  And we talk.

  The only time they meet us is at the crossroads. Streets named after one family and their friends. Avenues, museums, airports, sports stadia, savings deposits—all fit into three names. Even Switzerland, a country of a few million, has more names than an India of a billion, where history has been written by the vacant and the vanquished, where lies are plagiarised, where freedom is denied, where food is allowed to rot, and from where we call for peace, justice and harmony in Albania. We do this when we cannot walk across the street and share a meal or a song or a game with others.

  And we talk.

  We prefer the comfort of our gated communities, our answer to the karmic divide. No water, get a tanker; no electricity, get a generator. Food, medicines, healthcare—bring everything in and lock the gates. Let those who serve us stay outside and break all the rules as long as we can continue to live in our illegal constructions and irrelevant conversations that last for entire generations. On this side, even animals know they cannot pee against the wall. It is from here that we judge the rest of the world for being cold and uncaring—a world where old people are sent to old-age homes instead of living in the warmth of an extended family. Indians never leave their parents and relatives alone. How many times have you heard it said that it is better to be old in India because everybody takes care of each other? Do we? That body lying on the street, those beggars outside religious places are also parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. Their mangled figures are also bodies, as innocent as ours. Their dreams are also real, as real as ours. But their anger can never be the same as ours. That’s where we have fixed the survival step. Naturally. That’s what makes our nation a nation of fixers.

  And we talk.

  We have nervous conversations about a nervous people in a nervous nation. What are we but a handful of dust? We don’t have to be, but we are and that’s what kills.

  13

  1987—A Room with a View

  Friday, 16 October 1987

  Room N3A. Pembroke College, Cambridge

  Miss Aparajita Balasubramanian

  c/o Mr Krishnan Balasubramanian IAS

  S-23 Lord Cornwallis Road, New Delhi

  My dearest Api,

  I miss you so much I cannot put it in words. I think of nothing else but you. I feel like I am on a sanyas, so far away from you, and thoughts of leaving it all and coming straight back home come to me time and time again. And so I cannot describe to you my mad joy when the porter informed me there was a parcel from India waiting for me. It had arrived in the last week of September (when I was in Delhi, with you). And when I recognised your handwriting, I almost cried. You must have mailed it as early as August. I cannot possibly love you more, you know.

  And it had everything that I needed or was hoping I wouldn’t have to shell out precious pounds for. I may have to wait a little longer to be in a position to use some of the things. Like the Eveready batteries. I am thinking of buying a radio; the silence here is killing me. Or the 100 gram Nescafé pouches—a kettle is a must now. Coffee is forty pence, tea, thirty, and if you convert all these Ps into rupees, well, you can imagine.

  But that sweater! I have not been seen without it ever since I pulled it out of the holdall. It is beautiful. And so are the A.S.-inscribed hankerchiefs. Thanks also for putting in a pack of Reynolds ballpoints and Bittoo exercise notebooks, although at first I was worried at the prospect of being spotted carrying around dear Bittoo. Thankfully, Bittoo is now concealed in brown paper—also so thoughtful of you to have shoved in. The shoes seem a size small but I am wearing them nonetheless. And the zippable quilt: fantastic—most handy. The room has no fan and it gets stuffy at night. Once I tried sleeping with the window open—nearly froze to death. I now sleep all zipped up. There is that annoying feeling of not being able to stretch your legs but this is way better than waking up to find icicles on my eyelashes.

  I love you.

  And I love you even more for trying (unsuccessfully) to hide the identity of the sender—no letter, no note. Silly of you to think I wouldn’t recognise your handwriting, howsoever impossible to read it normally is. Next time, try writing with your wrong hand.

  I miss you so much, my Aparajita. You must be angry, I know— nearly two weeks since I landed and this being my first letter. But this is deliberate. As you can see, I am using up one of the Bittoos. It is my intention to write to you every fortnight, so that I can describe all my experiences when I have had a chance to pack them densely—jump up and down them, just as how AB shut my VIP for me the day I was to leave for England. And I am determined that I use up at least half of each Bittoo every fortnight. Happy now?

  Yes, to begin. Did you get my postcard from Heathrow? I know—the last thing you expected was a postcard from London with a photo of the Taj Mahal. Blame it on AB. Just before I disappeared into the immigration section at Delhi, he thrust a bunch of postcards in my hand. I can’t imagine where he got all those British postage stamps from (his dad’s connections, perhaps?), but each postcard was adorned with the bust of a young-looking queen. That’s typical of AB—that he can think of getting British stamps for me but not British postcards. As a result, you got the Taj Mahal while he, the Lal Qila. Dr Rajendran must now be staring at a decked-up lady in a Kathakali pose in front of Madurai temple—that one I posted from right outside Trinity. And principal sir must be wondering, ‘How the devil did this fellow land up on a sunny beach in Goa after all that talk of Cambridge?’ There are still a few left: Fatehpur Sikri, Golconda Fort, Howrah Bridge. But for you, my loveliest, a Bittoo.

  The very first moments. There are eighteen of us, ten of whom are here for their PhDs. They seem a world away from those who have come for a BA tripos (eight in number. including me). I couldn’t possibly identify myself with the BA bunch. I mean, one girl had brought along a tanpura—said she can’t have ‘supper’ before she does her daily riyaaz. She invited everyone on the plane, even one Kenyan couple, to come to Cambridge and be an audience. Then there’s this girl who kept saying ‘O good heavens,’ ‘deary me,’ ‘upsy-daisy,’ ‘now isn’t that lovely’ at the end or the beginning of every sentence—and this was before we had even landed in London. Oh, and one guy, can you believe it, he was lugging around an acoustic guitar and a cricket bat. Most of the PhD types are from mid-sized to small towns and six of them got married as late as a month before their journey. When will it be our turn? When?

  Anyway, we landed, and were promptly told to assemble at the medical approval cabin. My turn came twenty minutes later and I went in. The doctor’s assistant was a blonde woman, who said, ‘’Ave ya lough coom-in todaai, ’en?’ I could gather only ‘ya’ from that. She added, ‘Yar x-raaai ’n r’poa ’en, luv.’ I behaved as though she had said ‘Stachoo’ to me—even my lips stayed parted. The lady could have been speaking Malayalam for all it mattered. I mean, before her, my familiarity with the English accent was limited to James Bond and Lawrence of Arabia. And here she was—‘Todaai,’ ‘X-raai,’ ‘Dijya’. The doctor kept moving his head up and down, right and left, like he was a boxer flexing his neck muscles before entering the ring. After a while, he said, thankfully in a Lawrence of Arabia accent, ‘Have you got the lung X-ray and the reports?’ ‘Yes sir, of course—the reports…Here,’ I answered. ‘Hmm…and the X-ray. Can I see it?’ ‘But it must be there, sir,’ I said, sounding a little worried. ‘Well, I don’t see it. Can you see it, Amanda?’ asked the doctor. ‘Nouuuu,’ muttered Amanda. ‘Oh, dear,’ said the doctor. ‘Tsk tsk,’ said Amanda. ‘Sunk,’ I thought. They will now pin me down and shove me inside the luggage X-ray machine (I couldn’t see a proper X-ray anywhere). This was a disaster. My lips remained parted. The doctor must have felt pity for me, because at long last, he said, raising his voice, ‘Never mind, never mind. Both lung fields are clear. Both domes of diaphragm, CP angles, and bo
th hila appear normal. Heart is within normal limits of size and shape. Bony thorax appears normal. Good. Next.’

  He had read my report out loud. I could see the tanpura girl sniggering at the back. I said my thank yous and bolted.

  After another hour-long agonising wait, we formed a huddle at the immigration counter. And here we found this old Sardarji, an airport employee who kept barking at us: ‘Aiththon, Aiththon’, while to the whites: ‘From there, sir’, ‘No, madam, that way, you see?’ He waved me on so dramatically that I broke into a haphazard run, coming to rest at the end of a long and impatient line of fellow third worlders. My turn came. At the kiosk, the officer gave me such a stare, Api, that I was certain his third eye would burst out any moment and turn me to a nice little heap of ash. He said, more like growled: ‘And what can possibly make us think that you wouldn’t go back finally to your country, given the fact there’s nothing that you haven’t already learnt in your Indian bachelor degree—or have you?’ It took me a minute to understand his phrasing. You remember that Beatles song that AB and you have had hajaar fights over? ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done’? Well, something like that it was. Luckily, some nice Indian woman on the plane had forewarned me of such an interrogation. I was prepared. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I am thankful for this wonderful opportunity that your country has given me and it is my solemn wish, indeed duty, to learn and then go back to my country and apply that knowledge to the welfare of my fellow countrymen.’ I sensed immediately that he knew that I knew that such a question will be asked, and I was sure he knew that my answer was a prepared one. He looked left and right and then burst into a hearty laugh. Then he smiled—and I smiled back. He flicked open my passport and brought down the stamp like he was hacking a kathal with a machete, and said: ‘Thank you, sir…Next.’

  In the arrival area, we were greeted by the previous year’s batch of Indian scholars. Each one of us was assigned a ‘parent’—someone who would take care of us in the first few days—show us around the town, get a bank account opened, take us to the supermarket, that sort of thing. My parent (father) was a guy called Bhishma Patel, from second year PhD chemistry and originally from a village in Orissa. Nice guy. He can lift a bicycle with his teeth. Once all our baggage was collected (including the tanpura, the guitar and the cricket bat) we were shepherded to a bus stop outside. It was drizzling and overcast and the wind was fierce, howling, like in the movies. The bus was so silent as if it were gliding on butter. It took us about thirty minutes to leave the city, during which time I never once heard a car or a bus honk. Very, very unsettling.