by Vaseem Khan
They had slept one night under the stars, and Bansi had told him about his travels to exotic places such as Agra, Lucknow and Benares, the holiest city in the land, and later to the top of the world, the high Himalayas, the great mountains where the Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers are born.
Bansi had told him about Punjab and the village of Goli on the border between India and Pakistan, the place where Chopra’s ancestors had lived before they migrated down to Maharashtra, some three generations ago, for a reason that no one could now seem to remember.
Chopra’s great-grandfather, a wizened old man who was more fabulously elderly than the eight-year-old Chopra could possibly comprehend, still remembered the move, and told him, in his croaking bullfrog voice, of the trouble they had had settling into the Marathi culture. But settle in they did, and now the Chopra clan were true Maharashtrians: Chopra, like the rest of his family, spoke fluent Marathi to go alongside his native Punjabi and enjoyed Marathi food. There had even been instances of clan members marrying into Marathi households–indeed Chopra’s own wife, Poppy, was from a prominent Marathi clan.
Reading Bansi’s letter, Chopra found himself struck by mixed emotions. He had had no contact with his uncle for nearly two decades. By now he must be an old man, although, as the years had gone by, Bansi had shown a remarkable resilience to the effects of age. He had continued to live the life of an itinerant, returning from his peripatetic wanderings to his village at ever more infrequent intervals, each time with an ever-more fabulous store of tales.
Chopra hadn’t thought of Bansi for years, and now, out of the blue, here was this letter.
Aside from the strange request, the letter seemed to imply that his uncle believed himself to be not long for this world. The thought stirred up emotions in Chopra that he had not felt for a long time. Suddenly, he was a child again, laughing as he skipped along beside his tall, mischievous uncle, the pair of them clambering over the crumbling stone wall of Jagirdar Deshmukh’s orchards to steal the ripest hapoos mangoes, gobbling fruit after fruit until the sweet mango nectar dribbled over their chins and clouds of flies came to chase them down from the trees, only moments before the irate mali arrived.
BACK AT THE STATION
The next morning Inspector Chopra awoke for the first time in thirty-four years without the knowledge that he was a police officer.
For a while he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. He felt his body urging him to get up, shower, and put on his uniform.
Inertia; wasn’t that what people called it? After all, when one has been running, it takes a while for the body to stop even though the finishing line has been crossed.
When he arrived at the breakfast table, dressed in a plain white shirt and cotton trousers, he felt strangely naked.
Poppy was already bustling around the kitchen with the housemaid, Lata, and flashed him a welcoming smile. ‘How nice to have you home for breakfast,’ she beamed. ‘I’ve made your favourite: masala dosa with sambar.’
Chopra looked down at the steaming dosa on his plate and realised that he had no appetite. He was used to leaving the house precisely at seven. At the station, he would send Constable Surat to fetch him a vada pao from one of the many street vendors that lined the nearby Sahar Road. In the hurly-burly of the station mornings that was all the breakfast he had needed.
After breakfast, he sat in his study and tried to read; books that he had been meaning to get around to for ever. But then, he suddenly remembered, these books–policing manuals of various descriptions–were of no further use to him. He tidied his study, even though it was, as always, meticulous. Then he rearranged the furniture, even though it had been fine as it was. He tried to watch cricket on the little colour television he had set up in front of his favourite rattan armchair. India was playing abroad and Chopra’s favourite player, Sachin Tendulkar, had finished the previous day’s play quietly approaching yet another century. But today, though he was usually passionate about following Sachin’s batting, he found his mind wandering.
After a while, he went to his desk and took out the calabash pipe that he had purchased many years previously.
Although Chopra would never have admitted it, the truth was that he was a closet Anglophile. He had inherited a healthy respect for the British from his father, who, while not blind to their faults, also understood what the arch-colonialists had brought to the subcontinent during their three-hundred-year reign. Chopra enjoyed all things British and as an impressionable young man had been captivated by Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. The pipe was an affectation that Chopra exercised only in the privacy of his study. He was not a smoker, but he liked to sit on his balcony and wield the pipe as an accessory to the process of thinking.
On the wall of the study was a portrait of Chopra’s other great hero, Gandhi. He was aware that in modern India, Gandhi was considered by many to be irrelevant. Chopra did not agree. He always carried with him a well-thumbed pocketbook of Gandhiisms. He knew, from long experience, that Gandhi had a quote for all occasions.
He took out the book now and thumbed through it… What about this one? ‘It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.’
Somehow the words offered him no comfort.
He started to compose a letter to his good friend ACP Ajit Shinde, who had transferred to a posting in the Naxalite-infested jungles of Eastern Maharashtra a few years ago in pursuit of promotion. Chopra himself had been offered the posting before Shinde, but had declined. He had declined a promotion to ACP three times in his career. He hated the politics that came with seniority in the Mumbai police force; he had always preferred the hands-on aspects of policing.
Halfway through the letter he put down his pen and looked at the wall.
He got up and went to the window.
It promised to be another blisteringly hot day. Chopra imagined day after day like this, days stretching out ahead of him for ever… Is this what retirement is? he thought. This feeling that you had entered a waiting room, a place that was neither here nor there?
He recalled the visit to the doctor eight months ago, following the heart attack that had almost cost him his life. Dr Devidikar, an ageing gentleman with tufted ears and a reassuringly wise and indomitable air, had explained to Chopra and a round-eyed Poppy that the inspector was suffering from a condition known as ‘unstable angina’. The very words seemed to conjure up the possibility of an unpredictable and calamitous fate. Poppy had almost swooned, as if Devidikar had pronounced sentence on Chopra there and then.
‘Not to worry, not to worry,’ the doctor had said in his good-humoured voice. ‘We’re not finished with you yet, sir.’ He had told Chopra that the condition was common enough, though not usually for a man in as good a physical shape as Chopra evidently was. ‘But these things can be genetic. Body is a great mystery, sir.’ The doctor had then delivered the blow that Chopra had been dreading. ‘I am afraid that you must desist immediately all activities that may cause anxiety or stress. Next attack may be fatal, sir.’
The doctor had advised that Chopra take early retirement from the police force. This advice had been forwarded to his seniors.
Chopra had resisted, of course, but Poppy had worried him endlessly until in the end he had agreed. The thought of leaving his wife a widow had made him feel selfish and guilty. He could not do that to Poppy. And besides, life was not over just because he was retiring.
‘These days life begins at fifty, sir,’ Dr Devidikar had said, with a twinkle in his eye.
But what about this supreme sense of… of… desolation?
Why hadn’t good old ‘life begins at fifty’ Dr Devidikar warned him about this? This feeling of bewilderment, listlessness and, if he was being honest with himself, overwhelming terror that Chopra was now experiencing? Devidikar had told Chopra that he should avoid activities that might cause him stress. Did he realise how much stress that caused him? To not be able to do the very things that he had spent h
is whole life doing, the things that gave his life shape and purpose?
Chopra was a practical man and had already begun to plan for a future outside the force. Money was not the issue. A full pension had already been awarded to him, and his needs were simple. No. What was terrifying Chopra was the feeling in his gut that whatever he did now would never be enough, would never be true to the man that he was.
There were no pills that Devidikar could prescribe for that.
After lunch Chopra decided to go out for a walk.
Downstairs in the courtyard he first checked on Ganesha. The little elephant had still not eaten a thing, and, if anything, looked even more despondent than the day before.
Chopra felt a flutter of genuine worry. Ganesha’s obvious distress bothered him. The elephant was a child and Chopra had always found the pain of a child the most difficult to bear. It was one of the reasons he had been so tough on those who abused children.
He hoped Ganesha would soon come out of his funk.
Chopra wandered around the Air Force Colony, walking past the flower gardens, which in the prolonged dry spell had been reduced to a display of burnt stalks. He pottered past the deserted badminton courts where he would play the occasional game with his friend and neighbour Captain P.K. Bhadwar, who flew passenger jets and had a devil of a backhand lob.
For a while he sat on the bench beneath the colossal banyan tree that was a focal point of the complex’s grounds. A miniature temple had been built into the trunk of the tree. In the evenings, devout residents would gather to pray and light diyas. One recent disturbing development–it had disturbed Chopra at any rate–was the ‘Laughing Club’ chapter that now met under the tree each day. It was quite a sight to observe the group of elderly men and women–who, until then, he had regarded as generally staid old types–holding their sides and laughing as if they would expire from it.
Today there was no one.
Outside the Colony Chopra meandered up to the fruit market and bought a kilo of sweet plums for Poppy. Streams of people flowed past. Motorbikes with three or sometimes four individuals precariously balanced like a team of acrobats honked their way through the press of bodies. A thick smell arose from the open sewer on both sides of the road.
A cow had sat down in the middle of the street. Chopra knew that it would stay there for as long as it wished. Cows, with their revered status, were the bane of Mumbai’s traffic constables.
As he was buying the fruit, a gaggle of youths from the nearby computing college walked by. They swept past arm in arm, spreading good cheer and laughter as they went. They were the same age, he noted, as the dead boy he had seen at the station.
Chopra recalled the boy’s mother, how distressed she had been, how convinced that there would be no help for someone like her in solving the mystery of her child’s death. The woman’s recriminations had particularly bothered him. Anyone who knew Chopra knew that he prided himself on his integrity. To suggest that he would do less than his duty because the victim was from a poor background, or would somehow do more if the victim had been the son of affluent parents was to suggest that Chopra himself was not an honest man.
Over the years he had maintained a spotless reputation by adhering to the principles his father had taught him as a boy.
‘Son,’ he had said, on the day that Chopra had left his village as an eighteen-year-old hopeful to begin his training at the police academy in Nashik, ‘you must understand that India is a new kind of country. Even though our civilisation stretches back for thousands of years, even though it is all set down there in the Rigveda, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the strange fact is that we are only twenty-three years old and consequently suffer from the afflictions of youth. Since the British cut our country into pieces, we have all felt different. Wouldn’t you, if someone chopped off your arms, right and left? In truth, we are still working out what kind of nation we should be. The only way to avoid falling prey to the perils of confusion is to never be confused about what you are. If you are an honest man, as I hope you will prove to be, never allow the circumstances of a moment to make you act against your nature. That way lies the ruin of everything you stand for.’
Chopra took a rickshaw to the station, where he was immediately mobbed by his former colleagues. There was a round of good-natured jokes about his casual attire, and a few questions about how his first day as a gentleman of leisure was going.
‘It’s going,’ he mumbled. ‘Just don’t ask me where.’
In truth, Chopra was taken aback. By nature he was not a sentimental man, and over the years he had maintained a professional distance between himself and the men under his command. Other senior policemen allowed their juniors to become overly friendly, even to the point of drinking with them. But Chopra was not that sort of policeman.
He knew that some of his colleagues considered him to be a bit prickly, but no one could deny his reputation as an excellent and rigidly honest officer of the law. And in the Mumbai police of today this was something to be proud of indeed.
Leaving the men to their work Chopra wandered up to his old office, and discovered Constable Surat installed outside the door.
‘Hello, Surat, what are you doing here?’
‘Sir! How nice to see you!’ Constable Surat seemed positively relieved. ‘Sir, new sir has asked me to stand outside the door and check before he receives visitors.’
Chopra frowned. He had operated a far less formal policy. Any of his men could simply walk right up and knock on his door; not that many of them ever did. They knew that Chopra was a stickler for the chain of command. But really, what was the need of wasting a man to act as a glorified porter? ‘Well, can you tell the inspector I would like to see him?’
Surat gave a sickly grin. ‘So sorry, sir, but new sir is not seeing anyone until two o’clock.’
‘Ah, he is in a meeting?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then what is the problem? I only wish to have a quick word with him about an important matter.’
‘Sir, new sir has given strict instructions.’
Chopra, who had operated throughout his career on the basis of straightforward common sense, decided that he had had enough. Brushing Surat aside, he entered the office.
To his surprise he found the seat behind his old desk empty. He looked around. There was no one in the office. What in the world—? Then his eyes fell on the pair of very large black shoes protruding from behind the desk.
Chopra walked around the desk and discovered Inspector Suryavansh lying on his back on the floor, apparently fast asleep. Erring on the side of caution he knelt down and checked the inspector’s pulse. Then, operating on a hunch, he bent his head towards Suryavansh’s face; instantly, his nose twitched as the smell of liquor hit him.
Chopra got back to his feet and went out of the office. ‘No one is to enter this office until the inspector says so,’ he said to a relieved Constable Surat. Then he went looking for Sub-Inspector Rangwalla.
He found Rangwalla sitting in the station’s cramped interview room with a very fat man in a grey safari suit who was sweating profusely beneath the wheezing ceiling fan. ‘I demand you arrest the scoundrel this very minute!’ the man was saying. For emphasis he thumped his knees with both hands. ‘Fellow has absconded with my daughter and you sit here and tell me there is nothing you can do! Do you know, he is a Muslim!’
Chopra managed to rescue Rangwalla from the fat man, and they went into one of the back rooms. ‘Tell me, has anyone gone to interview the drowned boy’s father?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ said Rangwalla.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Inspector Suryavansh’s order. He says this is an open-and-shut case. Boy drowned accidentally. End of story.’
‘But what about the autopsy?’
‘Inspector Suryavansh says no need of autopsy. I am afraid he has countermanded your order.’
Chopra fell silent. ‘Where is the body now?’
‘It is at the hospital. They
will issue a death certificate, then the family can take it for cremation.’
‘Show me the panchnama.’
Rangwalla hesitated. ‘Sir, please do not be offended, but you are no longer a police officer. Why do you want to be involved in this?’
Chopra hesitated before replying. He had seen many dead bodies over the course of his career. But this was perhaps the last one he would ever see, certainly in his official capacity. That made it significant in some way, he felt. ‘Rangwalla, we agreed to be involved the day we took our oath. With or without a uniform, we will always be involved. Besides, I am only making a few enquiries. It is not as if I have anything more pressing to attend to.’
When he left the station, a short while later, it was with a copy of the panchnama tucked away in the pocket of his trousers.
Chopra took a rickshaw into Marol Village. As usual, the Village was bustling with life. This was a poor community, but not a slum. The residents were mainly devout Catholics with Goan roots; the Catholic community of Mumbai was small but vociferous and they prided themselves on their sense of civic order. The houses, though small and cramped together, were well tended and gaudily painted.
Chopra alighted near the address of the first individual listed on the panchnama. When he knocked on the door a short, portly man in blue shorts and white vest stepped onto the porch. He was very dark-skinned, with a black moustache and a telltale tattoo of the Cross on the inside of his wrist. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you Merwyn De Souza?’
‘Yes. What do you want?’
