Encounter Thirty

When Nandini got pregnant her home became silent at night. The chawl members welcomed the silence but were unaware of the reason. Soon Nandini was visibly pregnant and then the neighbors congregated, played some games, and suggested names. The child would be a girl, they decided. She would have her parents around her little finger.

Karan stood tall when all this happened and tried to imagine what life would be like. He was anxious. All he wanted was a normal child, a healthy baby who would dribble, spit, wail, and still be cute. When there wasn’t much time to go—perhaps a month—he was relieved by a lull at work. Every assignment was now a cause for argument in which Nandini played prosecution. But she was glowing, became a happy grumbler, and her appetite was hearty. Karan learned how vegetables were cut, sliced, and diced. Most mornings he made Spanish omelets and some nights he tossed a Chinese noodle.

And then, out of the blue, as it always happened, a call came and an encounter took place. That day Nandini was yearning for a Gujarati meal and he was to meet her for lunch near Bombay Hospital. He managed both, barely making it to the restaurant. They had lunch together, enjoying the meal, but that night she discovered Number Twenty-Nine because Karan had been careless—he’d left his gun and a spent cartridge on display.

She sat on a lounge chair with her legs up on a stool, the light from a lamp casting shadows on a wall. He could tell from her stare that she knew. “Why now?” she asked him, her hands on her belly, tapping, responding to the movement inside. Was there ever a good time? He had no answer.

The next morning there were complications. There had been complications before with autoimmune rejection, and she was taking medication for it, and for a while they had prayed and things had settled down. This time seemed more urgent and, as he rushed her to hospital, they looked at each other for reassurance but ended up fearful. His car did not let him down and it drove smoothly and quickly. They held hands till she went into surgery. The doctors did their best but could not save the baby.

For days after this Nandini went into a shell. She sat at home in that same dark place, looking at Karan expectantly when he walked by. He wasn’t very good at discerning feelings and it was easy for him to be oblivious. But the sheer physicality of her stare raised a singular question: was he guilty? In their nuclear household this mishap was Number Thirty.

When she emerged from her depression she was still a little distant and there needed to be a confrontation to clear the air. He abhorred confrontation but now he wished he could instigate it. He said sorry many times in his head and finally out loud.

Was he sorry? Yes, now and then, and he felt sorry for her sometimes. He was also sorry for the perversion of what was good and the deification of what was considered bad, and he had stood in the land in between, where his job made him feel guilty and his boss told him that his misgivings were groundless.

Nandini listened to a TED Talk that evening. Again. She was an evangelist for such material. She found them uplifting, these stories of the valorous who could stalk a stage with a mic pinned to their collar, who used their hands cleverly to articulate stories, and before them the acolytes gathered, a junta hooked to phoenix-like narratives attempting to prove that life rewards those who believe in redemption.

She wanted an encounter specialist on a TED Talk. If only Pradeep Sharma would stand up in the dark under a spotlight, keeping his hands in view, and speak about gunning down baddies. What would this achieve? She felt people should know how cold and clinical it all was, and how desperate.

Karan himself would not be able to deliver a TED Talk, according to her. He disagreed, privately. Something told him that his halting manner, his pauses, his uncertainty, and his doubt would be less polished but more riveting. He would tell those gathered there about the unreal feeling that came his way before he pulled the trigger. He wasn’t thinking, just like the manual said. There was no doubt, only unease.

“What are you, Karan? What kind of person are you?” she asked him. “You go to a barbershop and shoot someone who is seated and helpless. You go to a grieving son on his mother’s death anniversary and shoot him dead as he kneels at her grave.”

She was holding her scrapbook in which she recorded his actions, culled from newspaper reports. Some days she wanted to destroy it, as if it was a part of him that could hence be excised and diminished. He could sense that.

“Do you know these people?” he asked her. “Have you read their stories?”

She wouldn’t listen.

“These people have done nothing to you. They haven’t threatened or even heard of you, and yet you walk up to them and kill them in cold blood.”

She needed help. Maybe he did too. The next day the two of them were in the midst of a Sunday breakfast and it was obvious she hadn’t slept well. She had her head in her hands and her hair obscured her face as she flipped the newspaper pages. She was still in her faded cotton nightgown that she had bought at an art exhibition and refused to let go of. He waited for her next salvo and it came.

“Who can do the things you do and then walk away to a restaurant to eat a leisurely lunch?”

He had done that, admittedly. What could he tell her in his defense? They had gone to that Gujarati restaurant because she wanted to go. Of course he was hungry, and he had done justice to the unlimited thali. The restaurant staff had gathered around him and beamed because they hadn’t seen his kind of relish in a while. And now, after realizing he had come straight there after a bloody assignment, Number Twenty-Nine, she was playing that scene over and over in her mind. He hadn’t even gone to his office to file his customary report. Assignments made him hungry. It was a physical thing that he thought needed no explanation.

“Nobody is a shell,” he finally said. He was done with her staring.

“What did you say?” she replied, leaning in closer.

“Everything is questionable.” This wasn’t his best. He could express it better in local parlance in front of men but he couldn’t tell her that he was a dumb madarchod or a grade-A bhosadi because he stuck to a job that wasn’t plain and simple and whose reward was just a damn statistic.

He felt alone now. He always felt alone when people came at him saying he was heartless. But there was a way out. All he had to do was to show signs that he was affected. Perhaps by skipping a meal, getting migraines, developing an ulcer, shouting Gaand maraa bhosadeke aulad, suffering sleepless nights tossing and turning and mumbling incoherently, visiting temples after something untoward like a hit, or by confessing to her now and then that inside he was eroding and he was gutted—this would have made him part of the human sea.

“You told me your department is scared, and that you will become like the Class of ’83. True?”

He nodded. But unlike the Class of ’83 he had committed no crime, and looking around at his modest possessions anyone could tell he had made very little extra money.

“They are idiots,” said Nandini. “I am scared that you will remain who you are.”

“Who I am?”

“What are you, Karan?”

He had to think through this question. “I am a person.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” She was shouting now.

He wasn’t being funny. He meant every word. “I am a person, not a puzzle.”

Later she went to the wall in his den. Below Aham Brahmasmi, she wrote: A MAN WHO OBEYS.

* * *

You walk to the nearest station and catch a train. You follow yourself, observing from a distance. You are a man with a hood holding a camera behind you, panning the compartment from your six-foot height. The most useless way of spending an hour in Mumbai is taking the train from Borivali to Churchgate. The slow train takes prisoners. You are jammed amid paan chewers, people with bleeding gums whose breath smells of halitosis and plaque. There are lice nesting around you, quiet lice that are hard at work making colonies in unwashed hair. You cannot prevent people feeling you up. You stopped being sensitive a long time ago. At Andheri Station there is commotion and at Dadar Terminus where people switch lines it will turn to mayhem. People will crush past in both directions. The mindless train moves on. At Bandra Station there is a Hail Mary—at least you thought you heard one. Phones ring, some vibrate against your knee, and one man’s headphones shudder as the bass kicks in.

You exit at the Marine Lines Station seemingly on a whim. That was Desai telling you to go off and do the unexpected. Walk to Metro Cinema, he said, step inside, and watch a film. Doesn’t matter what is running, stay with it. Leave the theater and it will be dark outside. Adjust quickly to the city’s rhythm that has changed to red. Scan your surroundings. One of our men will be in some nook observing you. We wish to determine if you are being tailed. We have been told you are under watch. Be yourself, whatever that is. Desai snickered here despite himself, proving for once he was human.

Pick up your trail at Charni Road Station. As you stand on the platform, facing the Taraporewala Aquarium outside, do not look behind you. If someone comes up to you he will do so quietly. Ignore the buzz in your ear, the hair that stands on the nape of your neck, and your instinct to reach for your metal, because it will be too late. Someone does come up but nothing happens. A train comes and goes. Then another one. You think hard and now you want to do something slowly. You want to turn around and see who is beside you. The rest will be up to him. “Do what you feel you need to,” you say.

It happens just the way Desai said it would. You control your unruly mind that is screaming at your silent hands. Your eyes blur with effort as you wheel around. You are hurting but you remain steady as everything leaks out of the picture frame, and only one face comes into focus: Evam Bhaskar. He belongs to your childhood. You belong to a place he created.

“Where have you been hiding?” he asks you.

You spend a couple of hours with him, unburdening, and nothing gets resolved. “There are no answers to the question, Why me?” he says.

So you ask him differently: “Do things happen for a reason?”