The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

by Vaseem Khan

  Rangwalla, a thin man with a dark face ravaged by childhood acne–the craters now partially hidden beneath a close-cropped black beard–was a devout Muslim and had proven, over the years, to be a more than able lieutenant. His lack of a formal education was compensated for by his tough upbringing on the streets of Bhendi Bazaar, a Muslim enclave of south Mumbai. It was rare for someone entering the force through the constabulary exams to rise to the rank of Sub-Inspector, but Rangwalla had what Ashok Kalyan would call ‘street-smarts’, a commodity that Chopra felt was fast becoming unfashionable in modern India.

  The auto-rickshaw arrived. Constable Surat loaded Chopra’s box of possessions onto it and Chopra solemnly shook hands with each of the station personnel, many of whom could not hold back their emotions. Each man had brought him a gift, which they now handed over with due solemnity. Constable Surat, who was young, overweight and impressionable, and hero-worshipped Chopra, gave the inspector a small marble statue of Lord Krishna playing his flute, weeping bitterly all the while.

  Chopra, standing by the rick, took one last look at the station, its whitewashed outer wall, the barred windows, the little palm tree in the terracotta-tiled courtyard, the sun-cracked, hand-painted sign above the permanently open saloon-style front doors on which was displayed the station’s name… Twenty years! he thought. Twenty years in a single posting!

  He realised that he knew this place more intimately than he did his own home. The thought brought a lump to his throat.

  THE ELEPHANT ARRIVES

  When he pulled up to the gates of his compound Chopra found himself confronted by yet another crowd. Impromptu crowds, he reflected darkly, were the bane of Mumbai.

  A flatbed truck was parked outside the compound, a driver leaning nonchalantly against the tailgate, chewing on a rod of sugarcane.

  Chopra paid the rick driver, then entered the compound.

  Respectfully, the crowd parted, and Chopra found himself standing between his wife, a small man in a string vest and dhoti, and an elephant.

  A baby elephant, he corrected himself, and a very small one at that.

  The little beast was hunkered down on the dusty ground, apparently oblivious to the fuss going on around it. Its small ears flapped away the occasional fly, while its trunk was curled up under its face. A length of rusted chain was lassoed around its neck, the end of the chain held by the man in the dhoti.

  Chopra was tempted to pinch himself. During the hectic day at the station he had all but dismissed the unwelcome news of the elephant from his mind. It had seemed too incredible, perhaps another of the pranks for which his uncle had been notorious throughout his life.

  But there was no getting around the fact that a living, breathing pachyderm was now parked on Chopra’s doorstep.

  ‘Ah, Chopra, it is good that you are here,’ frowned Mrs Rupa Subramanium, the president of the Air Force Colony’s Managing Committee. ‘I was just explaining to your wife that pets are not allowed in the complex. You will find this clearly noted in part 3, subsection 5, clause 15.5.2 of the building regulations, as I am sure you are aware.’

  ‘It is not a pet,’ said Poppy heatedly. ‘It is a member of the family.’

  Mrs Subramanium, a tall, mantis-like presence in a dark sari and a severe coif, did not deign to reply to this ridiculous assertion.

  Chopra sighed inwardly. Mrs Subramanium was right, of course. But he knew that his wife would never agree to this fact.

  Poppy Chopra had been the first person ever to challenge Mrs Subramanium’s longstanding rule over the Air Force Colony apartment complex. When they had first moved into the compound, five years previously, she had quickly discovered that the other tenants lived in terror of the aging widow. Not one of them had ever questioned Mrs Subramanium’s edicts; in fact, not one of them had ever even asked for a copy of the legendary building regulations from which she quoted on a regular basis and in which were supposedly enshrined the tenets of her iron diktat.

  Poppy, as Chopra had discovered not long after they had been married, was afraid of nothing and no one.

  Soon she was instituting committees of her own, and rallying her neighbours in pursuit of various causes of her own making.

  Only last year she had managed–much to Mrs Subramanium’s chagrin–to persuade the Managing Committee to pass a resolution to open up the rooftop terraces of the three twenty-storey-high towers that made up the complex for celebratory gatherings such as at Diwali or on New Year’s Eve. Many buildings in Mumbai did this as a matter of course, but Mrs Subramanium had long vetoed such gatherings on the basis that they occasioned what she considered ‘improper behaviour’.

  Chopra looked between the two women as they glared at each other. He knew that while his wife was in this mood, there would be no talking to her.

  In the end, it was agreed that the elephant would be tethered to a post beside the guard hut at the rear of the compound, and would stay there until Mrs Subramanium convened the Managing Committee to rule on the matter.

  Chopra and Poppy lived on the fifteenth floor of the first tower in the complex, Poomalai Apartments. The other two were called Meghdoot and Vijay, the towers collectively named in honour of three famous operations undertaken by the Indian Air Force. Mumbai’s lack of space dictated that the bulk of the burgeoning middle class now lived in such high-rise prisons. The city was a hive of construction. If they kept building towers at the current rate, Chopra imagined that Mumbai would soon resemble a giant pincushion. The thought did not please him.

  When he opened the door to his apartment, he was immediately engulfed by a thick miasma of burning incense and scented woodsmoke. His senses reeled.

  From the floor of the spacious main living area, the face of the person he most disliked in the world turned to look at him with its customary glare of disapproval.

  ‘Where were you?’ snapped Poornima Devi, Poppy’s mother. ‘Couldn’t you be on time for this at least?’ The old woman–a grey-bunned, spider-like presence in her white widow’s sari–glared at him, her black eyepatch radiating hostility.

  He and Rao had never gotten along. In part this was literally true, due to the fact that she possessed only one eye, having lost the other in a disagreement with a cockerel many years earlier, but mainly it was because his mother-in-law had never approved of Chopra as a husband for her daughter.

  Back when she was busily vetting suitors for her daughter, Poornima Devi had heard that the local landowner, Mohan Vishwanath Deshmukh, had his eye on Poppy. The fact that he was some thirty years older than Poppy and a widower with a reputation for drinking and womanising did not seem to faze her. He was a landowner, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘You could have been a jagirdar’s wife,’ was a refrain that Chopra often heard falling from the old woman’s lips. Usually she waited for him to be in the vicinity before she told her daughter this, more so since she had moved in with them three years ago when her own husband, Dinkar Bhonsle, had passed away.

  Once again Chopra reflected on how democratic death was, to take away a man as noble, respected and generous-hearted as his father-in-law, and leave behind the bilious wife whom he had never once heard anyone say anything good about.

  On a number of occasions Chopra had tried to convince Poppy that her mother would be better off with her son back in the village. It was, after all, the son’s duty to look after his ailing mother, not the son-in-law’s. But Poppy wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘You know what a wastrel Vikram is,’ she would say. ‘He can barely look after himself, how will he look after Mummiji?’

  Chopra’s brow furrowed in alarm as his mother-in-law advanced upon him. Then he remembered that the old zealot–aided and abetted by his wife–had organised a special religious service to mark the occasion of his retirement.

  By nature Chopra was not a religious man. He had long ago decided that organised religion was the number one cause of divisiveness in his great country. He considered himself a devout secularist; he treated all
religions with equal respect and personal indifference. This noble sentiment was complicated by the fact that Poppy was a great fan of all things that involved them in what Chopra thought of as the pageantry of their faith.

  Take this evening, for instance. A retirement was a matter of fact. What had God to do with it?

  Chopra glanced helplessly at his wife. But Poppy was a willing conspirator in his torture and merely smiled encouragingly at him.

  He stayed long enough for his mother-in-law to smear holy ash on his forehead and force a stale ladoo into his mouth with such bad grace that she almost chipped one of his teeth, and then he excused himself.

  He made his way back downstairs to the courtyard, where he found a gaggle of the building’s children gathered around the elephant, which was now tethered by a padlocked chain to a metal pole beside the guard hut at the rear of the towers. This section of the compound was cemented and curved down sharply before flattening out to the brick wall that circled the entire complex. It formed a depression that always flooded during the monsoon, leaving poor Bahadur and Bheem Singh to wade around knee-deep in the swirling rainwater in order to get to and from their guard hut.

  The elephant calf was hunkered down on the ground, peering up at the children with doleful eyes. It looked terribly dejected, Chopra thought, and somewhat undernourished. Frail was not a word one usually associated with an elephant, but this one certainly looked as if it needed to build up its strength.

  He noted that the children had drawn a series of coloured chalk circles around the calf. As he watched they began circling it and singing, ‘Jai, Bal Ganesha! Jai, Bal Ganesha!’ One of the children suddenly bent down and drew a red bindi on the elephant’s forehead. The calf immediately flattened its ears and closed its eyes. Its trunk curled further under its mouth. It looked, for all the world, as if it wished to burrow into the earth. Chopra could sense the creature’s distress.

  ‘Children, this elephant is not a toy,’ he said sternly. ‘Go on, now. Go and play somewhere else.’

  The children skipped away, casting disappointed looks back at the trembling calf.

  At that moment the guard Bahadur wandered up. Chopra gave him a severe look and said: ‘Bahadur, I am putting you in charge of this elephant. No one is to harass the poor creature. Do you understand?’

  Bahadur pulled himself up to his full unimpressive height, somewhat lost inside his oversized khaki bush shirt and shorts. Bahadur, with his round face and Asian eyes, was descended from the Gurkhas; his real name was something unpronounceable. Bahadur stuck out his pigeon chest. ‘Ji, sahib!’

  ‘Has it eaten anything?’

  ‘No, sahib.’ Bahadur indicated a pile of bananas and mixed vegetation, both fresh and rotting, which lay untouched beside the calf.

  ‘By the way, is it a boy or a girl?’

  Bahadur opened his mouth to speak and then realised that he did not know the answer. ‘One minute, sahib.’ Without further ado, he scrambled onto the ground, lifted the elephant’s tail and attempted to ascertain the creature’s sex. ‘It is a boy, sahib.’

  Chopra crouched down and patted the elephant on the crown of its head. ‘Well, young Ganesha, what am I to do with you?’

  That night Inspector Chopra awoke with a feathery feeling of spiderwebs passing across his face. He sat up in bed and turned to Poppy who was, as usual, dead to the world. When they had been younger he had worried that there was something unnatural, even unhealthy, in the way his wife seemed to enter an enchanted sleep each night.

  In the corner of the bedroom the air-conditioner thrummed away. He wished that for once Poppy might awake so that they could talk.

  Eventually, unable to return to sleep, he got up and went into the living room, tiptoeing past his mother-in-law’s bedroom.

  Chopra went to the windows, pushed aside the curtains and looked out over the city.

  From his fifteenth-floor apartment he had an excellent view of Sahar and the adjoining locality of Marol. In the near distance, he could see the blue neon sign of the legendary Leela Kempinski Hotel, and the great glass-faced buildings of the multinational corporations that now lined the Andheri Kurla Road. A little further north was the shanty slum that ran beside the Marol pipeline.

  His keen gaze followed the night-time traffic as it sped up the Sahar Road and turned onto the Western Express Highway, which extended all the way from the suburbs to the furthest edge of the city. Daredevil beggars slept on the ten-inch parapet of the airport flyover, oblivious to the fatal drop on one side and the hurtling traffic on the other.

  This was what made Mumbaikers the greatest Indians in the land, Chopra felt. This belief in their own invulnerability.

  Chopra loved the city of Mumbai.

  When he had first arrived, some three decades ago, the sheer mass of humanity had terrified him. It had been a great shock, coming from the open landscapes of his village. Now he could not imagine living in a place without the noise and sheer energy that powered Mumbai at all times of the day or night.

  He would often listen to his colleagues complaining about the many problems that plagued the city: the slums, the pollution, the grinding poverty, the high rates of crime. Chopra thought that this was missing the point. As a famous man had once said, a city was like a woman, and like a woman you could not love only the good bits; you had to love the whole or not at all.

  And yet, lately, he would wake up on a bright morning and look out of his window and think that he had awoken in an altogether unknown place. Mumbai’s glorious march on destiny was making her unrecognisable to him: the outsourcing bonanza; the advent of hardline Hindutva politics; the westernisation of Bollywood… these were all symptoms of a frightening transformation which some were foolish enough to call a ‘boom’. And all the time the city grew and grew and grew.

  Chopra knew that his nostalgic vision of India was rose-tinted–after all, the universal problems of corruption, caste prejudice and poverty were historical ones. And yet he couldn’t help but feel that however untenable his idea of India might seem, it was nevertheless the real India, the one that he loved, and the one that was fast disappearing thanks to the mantra of progress.

  Yes, thought Inspector Chopra, everything has changed; but I am still the same.

  Suddenly, a plaintive mooing came up to him. He leaned out of the window and looked down into the courtyard.

  Beside the guard hut he could see the elephant moving around, anxiously circling the pole to which it was chained. The sight of the calf reminded Chopra of the extraordinary fact that he was now the owner of this beast–all thanks to his Uncle Bansi… Of course! The letter! Until now he had completely forgotten about it.

  Chopra crept back into his bedroom, retrieved the letter from the pocket of his uniform and then retreated to his study.

  He switched on his desk lamp, slipped his reading glasses onto his nose, and began to read.

  ‘Dear Krishna,’ began Uncle Bansi. (Chopra smiled. His beloved Uncle Bansi had called him Krishna ever since the incident when, as a precocious ten-year-old, Chopra had been caught spying on the village maidens as they bathed in the river. The young Lord Krishna has been renowned for teasing river-frolicking maidens, often making off with their butter churns and breaking their water pots.) ‘I know that I have not been in touch with you for many years, but I wish now to ask of you a great boon. I do not have much time left, and must make the necessary arrangements. Soon after you receive this letter, there will arrive at your home an elephant. It is my request that you take in and care for this elephant. It is a newborn, not yet a year old. If I were to tell you the circumstances by which this elephant entered the world you would not believe me, at least not yet. Let me say only this to you: this is no ordinary elephant. Remember, what is real and what is maya, illusion, is only a matter of perspective. Your Uncle Bansi.’

  It was a strange letter, thought Chopra, but then Bansi, his father’s elder brother, had always been a strange man.

  Chopra’s father had lo
ved Bansi dearly, that much he knew, and had taken great enjoyment in regaling the young Chopra with stories of his uncle, each improbable tale only adding to Bansi’s legend.

  One thing Chopra had established as fact: as an infant, Bansi had fallen into the basket of a travelling snake-charmer. To the astonishment of all he had emerged from the basket completely unscathed.

  From that day forth it became a matter of local lore that Bansi shared a special affinity with animals. Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as time went by Bansi did indeed prove to have a way with the creatures that shared man’s world. He even claimed to be able to talk to them, although all but the most credulous of village folk found this hard to believe.

  On the morning of his eighteenth birthday Bansi vanished from the village.

  He did not return for ten long years, by which time everyone had decided that he must have long since perished.

  When he returned he was almost unrecognisable. His hair had become prematurely white, he had grown a long knotted beard down to his belly, and his eyes seemed to hold things that ordinary men could not begin to imagine.

  But beneath this alarming transformation, Bansi’s family and friends soon discovered that he was largely the same boy who had left the village all those years ago–a mischievous and intelligent rascal.

  This was the period during which Chopra, then a very young boy, had got to know his itinerant uncle.

  Bansi had taken him under his wing, and would abscond with him on his frequent walks around the village. They often circled out to the neighbouring hamlets where he was already becoming well known as a sadhu, a man whose blessings were to be sought; in return there would always be a treat, a parcel of jaggery or a rod of sugarcane, which Bansi, ever the generous soul, would share with his nephew.

  Chopra recalled now the way his uncle would mutter strange incantations at the behest of some credulous farmer, fluttering his eyelids and hamming it up, much to the awe of his audience. ‘They appreciate the theatre,’ his uncle would tell him afterwards, with a grin on his face. ‘Of course, this doesn’t mean that such things don’t exist. The great mysteries of the cosmos are everywhere around us, seeded into the land, into the sky, into the air we breathe; all we have to do is open our senses to them.’