Encounter Twenty-Five: Gonzales

The neighborhood of Mahim had an old church and a green mosque and roadside eateries where tied goats stood outside and chomped grass. Inside, large cooking handis were being stirred. Fat was on the boil and aromatic spices in the mix awaited fresh meat. Soon the throats of the goats would be slit. Despite its narrow lanes and its heavy traffic this suburb found space for festivities. The one thing that cast a pall over Mahim was the smell: it was putrid. A car of doctors traversing a road through Mahim would immediately think of an endoscopy camera journeying through an intestine. There is a creek in Mahim that no one has ever seen because most people who drive by roll up their windows. Those who walk through the place know the creek well enough to ignore it like people do in Mumbai—ignore what is clearly inhuman and not to be put up with. How else could the place survive? In a place like this the question of Mumbai or Bombay loses meaning.

* * *

Karan saw the coffin being loaded. He did not accompany it to the cemetery because Gonzales was a don and Karan was the reason he was in it. And he was there against his best judgment because he had followed his wife. He spotted Nandini standing by the side observing the ceremony, and the pall of grief that surrounded her was visible on her face. Tomorrow the welts would appear on him. She held the ends of her sari between her teeth. She turned suddenly in his direction and he had to duck. Her lips were pursed and her eyes held back something akin to guilt. Was she trying to atone for him? The crowd headed toward the cemetery at Bandra and she melted away.

She left behind a question that nagged him: was Nandini the weak link in the family chain, or was it he?

* * *

Two days earlier his boss Ranvir had given him a lecture on social niceties and handed him another folder. Karan had no time to waste on decorum. Deep into the night he sat at his table and read about his next target. Name: Gonzales. Gonzales was a warlord with an army of mercenaries available for hire. He functioned as a recruiting agent for other gangs. His bulky file was slow reading, and it contained many pictures. He seemed friendly, with a smooth face and an amiable smile. It was hard to imagine him as a target. He had killed no one personally but his recruiting skills made him a potent force, so the police were desperate to get rid of him. Gonzales funded many charities and asked for nothing in return. He was a family man with two daughters and three sons, all of whom kept clear of their father’s business. There was a photograph of his wife as well. She was a school teacher.

Karan needed something to motivate himself, but in this case it wasn’t happening.

“Need anything else, Karan?” asked Ranvir.

He needed a date, a place, and a time. Each was important. After forty-eight hours of nosing about, he finally had it. He had a plausible scenario.

He would catch him at a time when he was meant to be alone. Gonzales would look surprised. Life and death would meet in a long second with many fractions. Karan would deliver. His hair stood on end when he visualized it. He felt these people would know him when they saw him. They would recognize the moment.

“This is unreal,” said his handler Desai. He called sounding concerned after reading Karan’s one-page plan.

“It will happen,” Karan insisted. “I guarantee it.”

“What about contingencies?” asked Desai.

“There’s no time for contingencies.”

He had no second thoughts and he did not want to develop a backup plan. All he had to do was wait for the green light. This time they called him at the last moment. Desai rang him from an unregistered number. There was no introduction, only a cryptic order and an urgent tone. He had just five minutes to get ready. He walked quickly to his cupboard in the rear room and opened the drawer. The Ruger was ready for action, fully loaded and heavy. He held it in his right palm, used his left hand to form an armature under his right wrist, and took aim in the mirror. He imagined the Gonzales eye; dark brown it was, with one rogue eyelash and a red fleck in the iris. Outside the rain was pelting down. Karan pulled on his gray raincoat, slipped the hood over his head, and ducked out into the street.

He told himself he was dreaming in fast motion; this was his degree of separation.

Look down and your feet take steps. Your hands stay dry in the raincoat. You walk with no purpose till it is time. On days like this every child on the street bears your name. You can hear their laughter and innocent purpose. You cross the road and voices follow in your wake. Nobody is supposed to know you today. You are anonymous. You are Brahman.

He was wearing a dark shirt, black trousers, a belt without a buckle, and dull suede shoes. He wove a path through some lanes, made sure his tracks were clean, then headed past the Mahim Causeway, taking a left onto Hill Road in Bandra. He crossed the road twice and paused under a lone tree, looking around as if seeking directions. He then walked up to the end of Hill Road and vaulted a fence behind some trees, landing softly, darting his eyes left and right, fearing movement. He crept under the cover of a hedge, keeping his eyes peeled. He had reached the designated spot.

Gonzales was there kneeling before his mother’s grave. Alone. It was four a.m. in this Christian graveyard in Bandra. It was Purnima, a full-moon night. Most of the graves were covered with thick weeds but Mrs. Gonzales’s tombstone shimmered. Her caring offspring, a respected son of Mahim, was down on his knees with tears in his eyes. He was wearing white. His three-man guard remained at the cemetery gate to ward off trouble. Karan rose from behind the gravestone. Was there a breeze? Yes. Gonzales’s wispy hair swayed, his kurta flapped open, and moonlight bounced off the cross he wore.

He loved his mother, this common hoodlum—it was a poignant moment and Karan was hard-pressed to pull the trigger.

Karan must have drifted momentarily because the quarry nodded at him and was about to ask him a question. The marksman gathered himself, his left hand rose, the armature set, the gun took aim and sent a bullet into that brown eye with a rogue eyelash and a flicker of red. His quarry slumped in disbelief. There was a flurry at the gate and Karan should have left in a hurry but couldn’t. What have I done? he asked himself. His feet were curiously leaden, as if held by the soggy ground, and when he moved his gait was confused. He stumbled down a pathway he shouldn’t have taken, one that led him toward the henchmen. Unsurprisingly, there were flashes and the sound of gunshots. He climbed over the fence and stumbled, hurting his knees in the fall; later, he felt his side where a bullet had grazed and drawn blood, six inches from his heart.

* * *

Karan had left his shell behind again. The gangs knew what caliber he used. Ranvir was livid; he banished Karan to Lonavla for a week. It was a dry spell in the ghats and he sat for hours thinking, unable to sleep. He walked to the railway station every morning and sat on the platform, expecting trouble. If the gangs sent somebody for him, Karan wanted to see him first. But nothing happened.

When he returned home he thought he would sneak in quietly. Nandini was waiting for him and she met him at the door. “Done with your Silver Jubilee celebrations?” she asked. “So many days to celebrate your twenty-fifth?”

That was grossly unfair but it was true that each number was significant in the encounter units, and twenty-five was a real milestone. He wanted to explain his absence but he couldn’t reveal where he’d been these last few days.

* * *

“Is this fellow Karan a mental case?”

It was frustrating. Karan was not meant to take chances in his job. He had been repeatedly told that he’d often have just one shot, so there was no margin for error. But he usually needed just one shot.

Whether he was standing, sitting, prostrate on a terrace, or leaning into the wind and fidgeting, when the moment came he was cold, motionless, and—to use a cliché—deadly. Statistically, he had a 0 percent failure rate, but more than once he had taken a leap of faith. How else could you describe shooting into an opaque door? “I could sense my quarry,” Karan had replied when questioned. Remarkably, he had gotten it right. He always faced the target when he took his shot, even if that exposed him somewhat. Was he being polite, fair, or even-handed? Yet of late he seemed to be hesitating when the moment came.

They decided to step inside his mind. People were asked to try to get close to Karan, to try to understand and influence him. They reported a lack. A deficiency. He had a fixed smile and a noncommittal manner and most times he lacked an opinion. But he wasn’t a junkie.

They consulted a psychologist who suggested someone should talk to his wife. A counselor was sent under the pretext of department routine. Her name was Ms. Daftary. She was from Bombay, a little old-school. Aware that she was visiting a chawl (she could not understand why someone would forsake the comfortable police quarters and choose to live in a place like that), she dressed down for the occasion and as she entered—squeezing past a Slimline fridge, a sofa bed, and other space-saving devices—the splendid aesthetic hit her (her own words) and she suddenly felt dowdy sitting across from Nandini, who it seems made a simple salwar kameez come alive and elegantly carried a couple of accessories that could best be described as bling. She offered her guest sweet orange jalebis and crisp salty khakhra from Swati snacks, and a green-colored drink made from khas, if you please. It was not the kind of presentation Ms. Daftary had expected in a chawl.

She filed a quirky first-person report of what had happened in their meeting:

 

“Do you have any idea what he actually does?” I asked Nandini.

“He tells me stories about encounters,” she said. “They sound like bad dreams. I cannot imagine him hurting anyone.”

“Have you seen his weapon?”

She nodded. “I’ve tried to hide it,” she said.

“Why?”

“What do you mean? Shouldn’t I?”

I was stumped and then I saw her smiling. “So what did you do?” I asked her.

“What do you people make him do?”

“Nothing extraordinary.”

She seemed exasperated.“Should I be like him and just pretend everything is normal?”

“Yes, isn’t it?” was my reply.

She walked into an inner room and returned with a pistol. “Have you ever held a gun that has killed people?” she asked.

I could not tell if she was serious. She is a well-grounded person, talkative and candid. Theirs is a marriage of love, she told me. She does not like his job and constantly questions him about his assignments. I am sure they fight because she feels strongly about the police killing criminals without a judicial process. She lectured me on habeas corpus. I have a feeling Karan must be suffering because of a growing rift caused by his job.

She said something in passing that I found significant. It sounded like a marital complaint but I think it is more than that. She said, “Karan has the attention span of a fish and most of our interactions are just that—a minute or two at most. After that he wanders off into something totally unconnected.”

Karan dropped in as I left. He did not look toward me nor did he say hello. I experienced the well-documented diffidence firsthand. He saw the gun, looked at Nandini accusingly, and then picked it up, held it, and put it back in the inner room. It is clear that he has a first-person relationship with his weapon. When I spoke to him he always came back a little late, as if responding from a distance. But he was alert to his surroundings. Walking to the sink, I stumbled on a mat and dropped my teacup. Karan was nearby but looking elsewhere—I hardly saw him move but he somehow caught the cup before it hit the ground. He stared at me as he straightened, expressionless. It was eerie. I realized why he was so good at his job. If he ever killed me I would not know how. I recommend we administer some tests on Karan. Let him go through a physical examination again. We also need to check for stability and a few psychological issues. There is no one who is a natural-born killer, so there will be stress issues.

I sincerely wish they had a child. So often a child changes the narrative for the better in our families.

 

What Ms. Daftary did not tell them was that Karan spoke to her as she was leaving. “Ms. Daftary,” he said, halting her in her tracks. He held her hand lightly, looking away. “Am I in trouble?”

“Of course not,” she had replied.

Karan wasn’t convinced. “I need this job,” he told her. “Please try to understand. This is the only thing I am good at.”

For a day or two she puzzled over his situation. What kind of a person would tell her that what he was good at was being an encounter specialist? And there were related questions that piqued her curiosity: Was it possible for Karan to take pride in a job well done? Was his self-worth linked to being extraordinarily good at killing people?

* * *

Someone followed Karan for a whole weekend on Ms. Daftary’s instructions. Why? There was no good reason. After tailing him for two days all that the officer could report was that off-duty Karan was oblivious to his surroundings and unaware that he was standing in public places and getting in the way of people.

“He lacks something,” said the officer. “He looks like he is posing. He stood outside a clothing store staring at the mannequins in the window for almost an hour.”

“Is he posing because he knows he’s being followed?” asked Ms. Daftary.

“Of course not. We were mostly in Dadar. In Dadar his friend Welkinkar runs a small photography shop that does passport shots. Behind a curtain he has a modest studio with white walls and some lighting equipment. I entered the shop and pretended to look at some cameras. Karan wanted a family portrait. That’s what he told his friend. Where is the family? asked Welkinkar. Karan brought in three random shoppers from the street outside. A mother, a father, and a younger brother; they completed the picture. They posed happily, laughing, and when the camera was ready they said, Cheese, and showed their teeth. Karan liked the photograph. Thank God it isn’t sentimental, he said.”

“You spent the whole weekend in Dadar?”

“Yes. He was window-shopping. You know Dadar—it isn’t posh but then again neither is a policeman. I think he likes the suburb. He looked comfortable standing outside places like the Bedekar Condiment House watching these middle-class Maharashtrian families. He walked into a restaurant that serves coastal gravies. I ate whatever he ate. He really knows his food and he’s a hearty eater. I could hardly get up after all that crab, fish, and prawns in kokum and coconut. After that he stood outside a textile showroom that displayed saris and churidaars and watched women going in and trying things on. Weird. Then he stood outside a jewelry store next to a guard who had an old rifle. Finally the guard chased him away.”

“Let me guess: all Karan did was observe families?”

“Yes. It made a lot of people uncomfortable. He kept staring. I don’t think he means anything by it though.”

“I’m not surprised that you don’t understand,” said Ms. Daftary. “People like you are lucky that parents come to you by birth. You are born and you are part of a family tree. Not so for Karan.”

Within the department Karan was described as a slack jaw—not a slacker or a lazy sort, but someone who promoted that impression by looking as if he had been rescued midway through a stroke. Yet that picture did not fit in with the reality of the police encounters he handled.

Ms. Daftary made a prescient note in his file: While a possible explanation for Karan’s recent setbacks can be the result of him slowing down, another plausible one is that he is increasingly confused and disoriented in life-and-death scenarios. This can come from a need to place himself at the very edge, taking an inordinate risk as a form of atonement.