Encounter Thirty-One

Nobody knew where Kumaran resided. He came and went like a commuter with a day pass. You acknowledged his presence only when something went wrong in the Special Branch building. Since the building was old it required constant repair. Kumaran was the handyman and people often went to him for whatever needed fixing.

The fixer learned from dismantling. Kumaran’s fundamental life principle was “dismantle.” Anything that came his way was broken down to its most essential level. His office desk had four drawers which were full of mechanical and electronic parts. Occasionally some of them would come to life and emit beeps. He would raise an eyebrow, rummage through the drawers, locate the objects, and dismantle them further till they finally died.

Kumaran had a satchel bag that held his possessions. It had become part of his anatomy. In the course of basic training and the years thereafter the team tried to wean him away from it. They couldn’t. The camouflage on the canvas fabric had gradually faded. Kumaran would hang it over his right shoulder, draping the strap across his chest so the bag rode his left hip.

Naturally, Ranvir was compelled to know what was inside. At one briefing session he suddenly decided to conduct a public inventory. Kumaran stood stone-faced as Rana sorted through the bag and recited its contents loudly.

“One Ponds talcum powder that smells of flowers,” he said, turning up his nose. “One green banana.” He held up the slightly crushed fruit. “One cell phone that has been dismantled.” He couldn’t pull out all the pieces. “What is this?”

Kumaran peered inside. “A radio-controlled detonator,” he replied. “One that I defused.”

The inventory continued: “A long single pencil shaving in a plastic box.” It almost looked artistic, if out of place. “One notepad.” Ranvir flipped through the pages. “Drawings of arches, doorways, and windowsills. Where from?”

“VT Station,” replied Kumaran.

The rest was spread out on a table. There was a black-and-white photograph of Ramana Maharshi, a book by Richard Feynman, a Polaroid self-portrait with blurry edges, and a slip of paper that said, Mum’s the word.

The last item puzzled Ranvir the most. Yet despite this public revelation of his most personal possessions, Kumaran remained an enigma. He wasn’t the usual vending machine of death that people expected. (Neither was the rest of the squad.) He certainly didn’t look the part; he was lanky rather than lithe, had poor motor function, and, to add to that, he was clumsy with a weapon. His aim was poor and his hunting skills were not predatory. But Ranvir still felt he had potential.

* * *

We slinked among some parked vehicles on the approach to the chawl. The targets were holed up above us in one of the tenements. Behind us was a concrete wall, a dead end—a term we did not care for. Kumaran looked at it, as if for the first time realizing we were trapped in there. He should have thought this through better.

“Sir, should we not spread out?” I whispered.

Ranvir said nothing.

“Sir, we’re bunched up like goats at an abattoir.” This was Munna trying to be funny.

Ranvir ignored him. We were unhappy that Kumaran was in charge because we didn’t think he was ready to lead an operation. “Are you sure they are there?”

“Yes.” Munna’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke. “Nobody has stopped us thus far. We cleaned up the whole building and nobody fired, nobody shouted.”

Ranvir remained confident. “You have studied the methods of these guys so you should have anticipated this outcome. This is a gentle gang, almost a helpful one.”

Munna, Tapas, and I lurked in the shadows, on our toes, each with a lethal weapon. Our adrenaline was pumping and we wanted to storm that tenement and remove the targets. We were held back by Ranvir’s stern gaze. What’s the point of training so much if someone who can’t handle a weapon has his way in the end?

It had taken us six months to reach this end game, half a year of painstaking detective work that no one likes to hear or read about. For some reason we were losing a number of old folks in a particular locality to seemingly random accidents. Old men and women were falling off staircases, tripping over balconies, and suffering electric shocks from household appliances. Five such incidents happened in the locality in a single week and the Special Branch was called in to investigate. Use your brains for a change, we were told. Other crime branches were busy with more obvious cases.

We started by examining the circumstances in meticulous detail. We questioned all the family members, thought up all possible motives, and harassed the neighbors with enough questions that by the first weekend we had ruffled just enough feathers to stir suspicion in that quiet corner. Suspicion breeds enmity, which in turn breeds informers. Yet there was no breakthrough. The last call we made was to the nearby hospital to check their records. There were no revelations there, and no postmortems had been carried out either.

Ranvir called us in for a meeting.

“I would like to study those who are still alive,” he said. He had to explain that further.

“Study how these old folks live, what they eat, what they drink, what they keep, and what they throw away.”

He saw us looking puzzled. “Just do it,” he ordered.

We marshaled some youngsters from a college to use as “researchers.” We chose five random elderly folk who lived alone. After a few visits that often became extended hand-holding sessions, we developed an inventory of all objects in their houses with descriptions—condition and look and feel. We then compared the lists and drew up a common inventory of items. Godrej almirahs, radios, medicine cabinets, razor blades, discolored mirrors, and old magazines. All of them had stashes of cash, and bundles of notes were stowed in unlikely places. Their jewelry was often kept in packets within jars in the kitchen below the rice and daal.

Three days later I dropped by the station at night to do some catch-up on other cases. I found Ranvir hunched over his desk, poring over our reports.

“What have we found, Karan—isn’t this a treasure trove?”

“Looks to me like trivia, sir.”

“It’s amazing the kind of stuff one learns. What do you think was the most versatile household utility device of the earlier generation?”

I listed a few that I had seen: “A walking stick . . . or reading glasses and pieces of string?”

Ranvir shook his head. “It’s the pin. Every house is full of them, in many shapes and sizes. Pins for cleaning ears, pins in place of fallen buttons, pins to dig into your teeth, and pins to file papers. Have you realized what we have replaced them with?”

“Sir?”

“The earbud, dental floss, and, of course, the new-found Velcro.” Ranvir went back to studying the list. “I think we are ready.”

“Ready to file the cases, sir?”

“No, we are done with the living. Now we’re ready to study the dead.”

We rustled up the case officers from each of the five most recent accidents and ran these lists past them. Remember what you saw when you went in and tell us what’s missing, we said. They went through the lists and ticked most of the items.

“It’s basically the same. Most of these items were there.”

“Any money?”

“Money? You mean cash? No, there was no money around.”

“No bundles anywhere?”

“No.”

“Loose notes, change?”

“None.”

“Are you sure? There must have been some loose change.”

“No sir, there was none.”

“I see. What about the almirahs? Were they rummaged through, untidy?”

“No, they were clean enough. I guess old people have good habits.”

“You’re telling me that in all these instances you only encountered orderly almirahs, and that no cash was lying around in any of these apartments?”

Ranvir let out a long sigh, one that celebrated discovery and promised retribution. “We have a case, gentlemen,” he announced. “Five, in fact—of murder, followed by petty robbery.”

* * *

Kumaran had now blocked all the exits, encircling the chawl completely. But he then sat back and refused to advance. The rest of us were getting bored and restless.

“We are not going in, not now,” he said.

“Then when, when it’s dark?” asked Munna.

“No, let’s just wait this one out.”

“We’ve come here to wait? Why are we even here? You could have called us later,” Tapas piped up.

I was not interested in this debate. It seemed to me that the best we could do was to throw some smoke bombs and shoot our way in.

“Trust me,” said Kumaran. And so the matter ended there.

* * *

We had established the crime and the motive. The mode of killing was painstakingly simple: a nudge or a poke, or a simple but effective domestic accident. We didn’t know where to begin looking for the perpetrator. Ranvir went around humming tunelessly and asking the same question again and again: “Who let them in, who let them out?’”

It was getting on our nerves.

Phase two of our research began: we sat as temporary watchmen in an apartment block in a typical suburb, watching the goings-on for three whole days.

“Getting the vibrations yet?” asked Ranvir.

I was beginning to sympathize with watchmen and their drudgery. Back at the office Ranvir emerged from a hibernation of deep thought and asked for the dates of the incidents. It turned out that all took place in the first week of the month. “Payback time,” said Ranvir, seeing the light. We went after the bill collectors.

We found them quickly. There were three of them, in their late teens, bad eggs given to minor offenses. One was with the gas company, one was with the electricity board, and the third was a newspaper delivery boy. They had teamed up some six months ago—we were looking at a nascent gang, one that might have gone on to bigger things had we not caught up with them.

* * *

Ranvir Pratap invited Parthasarathy for a chai and bun maska. They met in an Irani café over breakfast. Parthasarathy was convinced by the findings. He also agreed with Ranvir when he said that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict these killers through the courts. It was well known in police circles that the burden of proof was a mantle that Ranvir flung with impunity, and he took no chances unless a quick verdict was certain. Parthasarathy did not fight the decision but he made it clear that this should not be a typical encounter, the kind that involved Karan. There should be no shooting.

* * *

There were a couple of new members on the team who had arrived quietly. We watched them suspiciously because they did not fit in. One was a thickset civilian who was fiddling with the electrical panels of the apartment where the gang was holed up. The other was a middle-aged man who was poring over some blueprints. I could glimpse outlines of gas cylinders and pressure pumps.

The chawl was still deserted and its inmates were milling around outside, a murmur gradually rising. We did not have too much time. What was really going on? Kumaran remained stoic and continued fiddling with some kind of detonator. I was growing curious watching him. Ranvir seemed satisfied with the progress.

“Why don’t we smoke them out, sir? We could get them out alive.”

“Cannot,” said Kumaran.

“Cannot or will not?” asked Munna.

Kumaran paused. “The last incident they engineered involved an old woman,” he said.

“So?”

“She lived on the sixth floor of an apartment block.”

“Okay. So what happened?”

“She was blind. They walked her by the hand to the elevator shaft. They had managed to open the sliding doors even though the elevator was on the ground floor below. She fell down into the blackness.”

Ranvir watched us closely. “Feel anything?” he asked. “Sympathy, anger, the urge to do something?”

I felt nothing and looked away. The gun in my holster grew heavy but it remained in place. These boys were multiple murderers and perhaps deserved whatever came their way. But I needed orders to get going.

“At ease, my little sharpshooter,” said Ranvir. “This one is not for you. There’s a better way. We have to do to them what they have done to these old folk. And we have to ensure the public doesn’t find out.” He gave Kumaran a quiet nod.

Kumaran asked us to fall out and scatter. He didn’t want us in the vicinity when he executed his plan.

We were astonished but we followed his orders. Tapas, Munna, and I packed our equipment, turned our backs on the chawl, and started to walk away. At that very moment there was a massive explosion. The two civilians in Kumaran’s team had engineered something—they had used gas cylinders to pump inflammable gas into the chawl, then shorted the power supply. Glass shattered and blew out from the apartment, followed by flames and a blast of black smoke billowing out from the windows. The three of us turned around and gaped. Our guns were instinctively in our hands.

The ensuing scene was unforgettable. Kumaran was crouched behind a car watching the results of his effort. He rose to his feet slowly, then turned to face us. His expression was one of deep satisfaction and vindication. He smiled and his teeth gleamed. I had never seen him smile before; I would never see it again. The first hail of bullets started from left to right. They zinged past us, hit the wall behind, and zipped past again. The line of fire caught Kumaran and drew spurts from below his knees. He buckled, looking surprised. The second hail came from the opposite direction at the same height. By now Kumaran was down on his knees and flailing. He caught that hail with open arms and he never came to again. The spurt of firing died. It was the death rattle of a cornered gang member who was mindlessly letting loose with his weapon. Kumaran lay grotesquely in a crumpled heap. The three of us stood with the best weapons that the force had, cocked and ready, but feeling quite useless. We looked up at the destroyed apartment and then in unison toward our boss. Some part of Ranvir Pratap died that night. We could see it on his face, just a fleeting glimpse.

* * *

The incident made the papers the next day. A chawl had suffered an electrical surge. A fire started and some gas cylinders had exploded. Three youngsters were caught in the blaze and were charred to death. A police team was in the vicinity but could not help them in time.

“A domestic accident,” said Ranvir to the press, as he handed out a list of domestic do’s and don’ts. “We have been experiencing many of them in the past few months, as you must have noticed. We should all be careful.”

Tiwari read the official report and smirked. There was no mention of any gunfire. Kumaran’s fate was recorded as an accident; he was known to be clumsy with a weapon.