Ranvir Pratap

People expect to glimpse the stately city of Lucknow in Ranvir. This capital city of Uttar Pradesh leaves an imprint that the poetic language Urdu describes as mijaz. Besides his style, demeanor, and diction, Ranvir has what is known as andaz. Off-duty he wears long white kurtas made of fine cotton or muslin. He chooses custom buttons made of silver. Crisp white pajamas complement his kurta. Ranvir’s favored drink is tea and it is a finicky brew, otherwise he won’t touch it. The water he drinks comes from his house in a flask, every day, as does his glass. He does not trust other people’s hands. In a police station he would rather salute than shake them.

Ranvir is a private person and a well-read one. He has seen an India of small towns and villages where women fetch water from an open well and men till the soil with their bones. Where the farmers worship the sun that burns their backs and the land that breaks it. Where their meager surplus goes to the market, where money hides behind merchants. Most people would rather reside in cities than lead this simple life. The next generation migrates out of this modest existence to places like Mumbai because the city has a strong pull and offers newcomers a different trajectory. Some of these migrants give Ranvir reason to hold a gun. Mumbai’s soil is fertile; moneymen flourish but crime has taken root as well. Crime is an industry in Mumbai whose recruits come from all communities and castes. There are hard-working gangsters here and hard-working cops. The work is alluring but sometimes deadly.

Ranvir has a leathery face with a few creases. A broad forehead greets you. His lips are pursed and above them a mustache dips at the ends. He has been known to smile at family functions. A smile makes him a different person. Or so it is rumored.

He is not actually from the city of Lucknow though he is fluent in Urdu. He quotes poetry and occasionally waxes eloquent about the fragrant preparation of dum biryani. And people cannot reconcile this with what he does. It would seem that the head of a unit that dispenses summary justice through a gun should in some sense be visibly a lesser mortal, perhaps from a place like Azamgarh, a district in Eastern UP where khadi bhasha was spoken and lohars, the local blacksmiths, made kattas, the local pistol. Azamgarh is an interesting place that has produced poets like Kaifi Azmi alongside dons like Abu Salem. This is a juxtaposition that makes perfect sense in Uttar Pradesh, a state where crude reality has been given a sort of poetic license.

Ranvir’s narrative began in a place called Allahabad. In its time this was a town with raunaq, tehzeeb, and other nice-sounding epithets that describe its soul. He grew up in the neighborhood of Civil Lines. In its quarters Urdu was spoken and pure Hindi grew on its trees. Thoughts can make a city; sometimes words can save it. Allahabad had a fragrance despite its open drains.

He was the fifth of seven children. He lost two siblings when he was in his teens. They were a close-knit family and these partings were gut-wrenching. The family astrologer, Gopal Shastri, had made an interesting prediction for Ranvir. “He will choose a career where he risks his life, again and again,” said Shastri-ji. “He will take lives as well.”

Ranvir’s father, a feared freedom fighter, laughed when he heard this. This fever-ridden, skinny fourteen-year-old son of his was not exactly the biggest threat he had ever seen.

Ranvir had an idyllic childhood in Civil Lines. The family bungalow had a mulberry tree in front that yielded delicious berries resembling centipedes. The branches of the neighbors’ mango tree spread over their veranda. The neighbors were famous lawyers and some members of that family would become chief justices. Behind the house was a renowned poet whose son would become an iconic actor. Across the lane were freedom fighters and civil servants. The air was charged and Ranvir’s father firmly believed that since his children breathed it, they would do well in life.

Yet a fertile land that nourished freedom fighters and threw up poets like Nirala, Mahadevi Varma, and Jaishankar Prasad is likely to mess with one’s head. In this land of metaphor there was plenty of room for ambiguity. Ranvir left Allahabad with a confused sense of what was right and what was wrong. How was he to know?

The train journey to Mumbai prepares you for the worst. All along the railway tracks you see the backs of shanties and the backsides of people. The accumulation of dirt and detritus paints a bleak picture. It also smells. At the Bombay Central Station you encounter crowds in motion. That is the first thing you learn in the city—how to move in a moving crowd. The next thing you learn is how to speak as you walk past. Nobody pauses; they carry on and try to help you as they pass by. Directions come to you from the corners of mouths and half-turned faces. The taxi is a rattling death trap driven by someone from your home town. If you start him off he has a story to tell, just like everyone else.

Ranvir’s first residence looked like it had been put in a compactor, and resembled an aged face with a hat for a roof.

“In Mumbai there is water, electricity, and a get-ahead sensibility that thrusts and competes with naked ambition. You realize very quickly that you have left your native place behind. Where you came from is a story nobody wants to hear.”

So said his first landlord, Girdharilal, who pocketed the advance and gave him a piece of advice, something that Ranvir took to heart.

“Don’t look for help in Mumbai,” Girdharilal told him. “This is a self-service city. Everybody here is a swayam sevak.”

“I just need a little luck,” said Ranvir.

His landlord snorted. “Luck will not pay your rent.”

They stood together briefly, sharing tea and a ragda pattice. They did not meet again for a year.

The street where Ranvir lived was a mirror image of every other street in Mumbai. This is a city of convenience in aesthetic but it is ambitious in its needs. Luckily, unlike the landscape, the people are nuanced.

There are no famous Ranvir-isms. His approach is simple and borrows from the animal kingdom: stay low during pursuit, keep beneath the radar, live in a nondescript building, wear plainclothes all the time. Second: lock horns, engage from the very start, deal with people directly. And third: go for the jugular. Follow the animal instinct that says, No thought in action.

The principle of natural selection works because someone pursues and someone else runs. That becomes instinct over centuries. The deer always run, the cats pursue. But there is no hand-me-down DNA for this among men, so the training has to be one-sided. Here is the drill: you are a cop, you are the hunter.

His team’s groundwork was always thorough and the quarry was researched exhaustively. Ranvir never got personally involved. And he never pulled the trigger—except that first time. An incident at an interrogation set the tone. The quarry was a known killer and the questioning was hard—hard on everybody. The guy admitted to a spree of crimes, showed no remorse, and he was grinning when he died. He didn’t see it coming. The other people in the room said it was a clean break, it was a bare-hand execution: Ranvir held his hair and broke his neck.

After Ranvir left they strung the guy up in his cell with his bedsheet. Another prison “suicide.”

This incident saw him get a mild reprimand. They posted him out to a remote corner of UP for a couple of years, ostensibly to cool his heels. But incidents have a habit of following people like Ranvir. He was watched closely to see if he might measure up to be the head of the next encounter unit.

He was assigned to the town of Baraut in the Baghpat District, where he ran the station during this stretch. This small UP town had a polytechnic college, and students would come from all the nearby areas to enroll in the numerous vocational courses it offered. Being a small town in an unruly state, there was considerable political influence over the college. Policies and rules were subject to various external pressures. A year into his assignment Ranvir learned of a new principal who had joined the college. Chaubey came to Baraut from one of the city colleges. This was his first assignment in a politically charged atmosphere. It didn’t take long for the sparks to fly and within a month of his arrival, word was out that the local community was already plotting his transfer.

Ranvir met him for the first time at a college function where they shared the podium. He liked the man’s simple, crisp style and engaging manner. He could also see that this was one fish that would soon be out of water. They stood for a couple of minutes chatting after the event.

“So, officer, how has your posting been? Have you settled down well in these parts?”

Settling down was the last thing on Ranvir’s mind. Baraut was a dull place and a punishment posting. The contrast to Mumbai was striking. “No, Mr. Chaubey,” he replied. “In my line of work, if you settle down they transfer you out immediately. Honestly, I place no premium on being appreciated by the locals.”

“So, what do you like about this place?” asked Chaubey.

It was a question Ranvir had asked of himself. He counted with his fingers as he spoke: “Let me see: community toilets on the terrace, sparrows getting killed by my bedroom fan, monkeys parading around in my underwear.”

Chaubey laughed. “This is Uttar Pradesh, after all. And what do you dislike?”

Ranvir thought for a moment. “I guess the kathor bhasha. The language is rough and immediate, like the people.”

Chaubey reflected on the nature of curse words commonly used in Baraut. Naali ka keeda was the genteel opener. “I agree,” he replied. “Words bristle on people’s tongues out here. Even verbs sound coarse in Baghpat District.”

To Ranvir, silences were a measure of a place. In Allahabad he treasured the silence. He could hear poets at work in those long hours when time stood still, usually in the afternoon. In Baraut he could sense an unruly quiet; he could feel lonely men hatching predictable plots. There was nothing commendable about the silence in Baraut.

The local police station was a crude outpost. They had a simple approach to dealing with suspects: bring them in, work them over; if that fails, do them in. The cops also relied heavily on local hoods to do most of their work and only bothered to show up when absolutely necessary. As a result, there was a parallel system of enforcement that had sprung up with the active connivance of the constabulary. Ranvir had to work hard to break this mold. The first thing he noticed was a complete absence of records. Many cases were not even filed, and those that were had hardly any paperwork. He made an honest attempt but after a few months he realized the futility of trying to change something that was ingrained in the very fabric of the place. Rather than Ranvir changing Baraut, the place changed him. When he returned to Mumbai he looked the same but he was amenable now to getting things done the way they did in small towns. In other words, he had the right disposition to head an encounter unit.

He arrived back in Mumbai unheralded. Nobody had noticed his absence in the first place, other than counterintelligence, which had been following him closely. Ranvir rose rapidly up the ranks.

His seniors called him Rana, which he liked. After a few years he was asked to study the Class of ’83 and do better in assembling an encounter team of his own. Do better than them? They had an enviable track record at eliminating targets and were publicly acknowledged as heroes. In sum, this group of police officers had eliminated more than six hundred underworld gang members. One unfortunate side effect of this new dynamic had been lawlessness within the force itself; the spirit of the Wild West seemed to have emboldened most of these officers into making extracurricular money and exercising their power for private gain. The city was “cleansed” and extortion cases decreased, but while gangs felt the heat and their activities were severely curtailed, most of these specialists were soon involved in some misdemeanor or another. As they say, success is a perch that breeds entitlement.

It was eerie. One by one the batch had taken pieces of the law and broken them. It was almost as if they’d been told to pick their crimes from a catalog of vice.

But the department was unwilling to accept these misdemeanors as the necessary price of ridding the city of six hundred hoods. They wanted a different approach and a team that could be controlled better, a quiet team with a low profile. The deputy general of the Maharashtra police publicly said, “Socks. And corrupt officers. The Mumbai police needs to pull up both if they want to win back the respect they once commanded.”

Ranvir’s boss was part of the old guard, a tenured officer who asked him strange questions like, “Do philosophers make good omelets?”

Ranvir thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His boss was a guilty man; at least he behaved like one. He was forever trying to justify the encounter approach to himself. He began quoting extensively from the Bhagwad Geetha, a text in which killing brothers in a war was arguably acceptable and philosophically tenable.

Thought has its place in the police hierarchy, but at lower levels it is preceded by action. That is how Ranvir trained his men. If someone were to ask Pradeep Sharma, How do you get around to killing somebody? he would describe in great detail exactly how he would do it. It wasn’t complicated and it certainly wasn’t a philosophical issue.

The targets were violent people who had taken lives. They could not be reined in or brought to custody easily, and many were beyond the pale of the justice system. The judicial process was multitiered; it was often infiltrated, witnesses were vulnerable, and they were either bought or they paid with their lives. The accused had the backing of gangs and they had the recklessness of cornered animals. The gangs employed lawyers who were trained in subverting the judicial process. On the one good day when the prosecution actually got a conviction, the system of appeals was endless and stretched beyond people’s career timelines. The Swamy case was a prime example and it exhausted Ranvir. Moreover, when Swamy was gunned down, Ranvir got a stern lecture from the judge, a dressing down that he found hard to stomach.

The encounter teams were given the choicest bits, those that were truly beyond the purview of the best sociological minds. Their subjects’ files were fat and juicy reading. Bring out the meat carver; this was blood that needed spilling.

“Ours will be a cool, collected operation and the odds will be stacked in our favor. We depend on good information, which is why we will tolerate Tiwari.”

But when the moment came someone still had to pull the trigger. It was tricky. There was no animosity or personal connection, but they still had to do it. Ranvir needed the right people to complete the task.

“I do not belong to this world. I don’t think anybody does. What we do feels artificial, even if it isn’t always staged.”

And that posed a challenge.

“You lost your hold on reality after a while. I needed to be careful with my team and look for people who would be less affected. Sympathy and empathy were unwanted. I wished for a while that I had a genetically modified team to manage, one that spoke less, operated alone, was less social, did not feel for the targets or imagine what would happen to their families.”

Mulling these qualities over in his head, Ranvir wrote out a job description for the team.

* * *

Ranvir and his wife settled into the comfortable police quarters behind Worli Seaface. It was on a private road and housed a large community, so she was happy. In the evenings, they would walk along the seafront and peer out over the water. Life felt precious in those days, to say nothing of the two gun-toting guards who walked behind them wearing black combat uniforms.

A lot was happening in his personal life back then.

His wife, a Brahmin from the south, was inbred, which was the norm in her community and by itself wasn’t a bad thing. Except for the fact that cousins marrying each other, aunts wedding their nephews, and uncles getting hitched to their nieces sounded strange. But these were real people and the ages were right, with the men older than the women by a few years, as Brahmin society had so wished. The issue was that the human species hated this sameness and sought diversity; if it felt cloistered by blood that grew thicker, then its innate need for freedom tripped the neural wiring.

Their child (a son) was born with disabilities. The one bright moment was when the nurse came out of the delivery room. (“You have a son.”) The rest they gradually delved into. The child turned out to be severely autistic, and all Ranvir could do was be courageous and support the mother. They did not weep. There were no tears at all. What followed was brief and intense.

They went to a young man named Evam Bhaskar, a “doctor” who they met by accident at a social function. He ran an obscure outfit in Gamdevi which they could not find at first. The entrance to the place was through a small gap between shops selling electrical wire and spare parts. The narrow entrance opened into a small courtyard graced by a lone tree. Three rooms surrounded the courtyard.

The first time Ranvir met Evam Bhaskar he was unimpressed. Intuition told him this was a person who was as strange as he looked.

“Dr. Evam, you are trained in which discipline?” He held Evam’s business card by a corner and brought it close to his eyes. He flipped the card over and was disappointed to see the reverse was blank.

“Non-Freudian medicine,” said Evam, watching Ranvir closely, aware of his disregard. “Psychology.”

“You mean psychoanalysis?’”

“No sir,” replied Evam. “We actually believe in chemo.” He tried a laugh. It was a solitary sound that slinked away through the window.

“This place is your clinic?” asked Ranvir.

“Yes. I also have a consulting room near Dharavi. It is where I . . . keep my records.”

He handed the card back to Evam, who looked surprised. Ranvir smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I have always wondered how you deliver your cures. It must be a difficult practice. There is no eureka moment when your patient is suddenly cured and can simply walk away.”

“There is no cure, sir,” Evam said. “There is no disease either.”

“And yet people come to you and they pay good money?” he asked, his dislike for Evam immediately apparent. Ranvir would soon gather that his patients never walked away either.

He would later reflect: “Evam ran a strange operation, and I for one was not convinced he was properly qualified. He didn’t look like a psychologist or a psychoanalyst, but nevertheless he spoke to us about autism. He said boys are more likely to be autistic (so don’t blame yourself), that more than one in a hundred children are statistically affected (I am not sure I’m stating it right), that we should be prepared for our child to not speak at all (some words might materialize but they go away), that a host of illnesses like allergies, bowel diseases, persistent viruses, and sensory-perception problems will follow him—and he stated all this in a calm, everyday manner, because this, it seems, was his everyday. I had to hand it to him. He lived with a bunch of these kids and their parents, day in and day out. I would have questioned the need long ago. I only had one child, my own; Evam bore many. He had a homily up his sleeve at all times. (If science fails then homilies are the cure.) He told me, When a normal child is born your windows open out. You breathe fresh air, hear new sounds, and you see a brave new world. When an autistic child is born you go knocking on doors.”

Moments of love and affection were few but they were breathtaking. Half the time Ranvir looked at his son in wonder.

“He couldn’t speak our language, so we invented words or expressions as a convenient shorthand. And then I kicked myself back into the present. When my son died of a severe infection we were barely there. To try to describe the feeling would be hollow. But it seemed then that someone had sent us this child as a sign. It was fleeting. It was a flare.”