Cop out!

Has Chennai become better policed? I am convinced it is so. All those creepy silver screen images running at 24 frames per second where an inspector seems pure evil are mostly imaginary, I am sure.

My mind, which did undergo an emotional seesaw, has finally settled in favor of the Khaki Chattai.

To expand on this, I am obliged to go into a long, but (I hope) entertaining story. The house next to ours, which housed the old woman overly concerned about the lack of my reproductive activity, now stands razed to the ground. For at least a year, there will be no ambient sound of daughter shouting at mother. Or that of the mother who shouts at her own, who then carries on a monologue to no one in particular, punctuated by the three whistles of the pressure cooker, a weird metaphor (I imagine) for the mental state of all three women in various stages of their lives.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the house is being razed to the ground, and for that, bulldozers were called in. It turns out that bulldozers are not allowed to ply the roads during the day.
Hiring a bulldozer is quite expensive, and contractors usually try to skimp on costs, no matter how large the project. Solution? Everything has to be done at night.

So the bulldozers were pressed into action, and a “Sleepless in Chennai” night followed. V. made several calls to the police, who promised to rectify the situation, but broke those promises with impunity.

After our numerous complaints, it was agreed upon by the building contractor that it wouldn’t happen again.

But of course, two days later, the bulldozer had made its reappearance. It slowly moved to the now pile of rubble, and was poised to begin work – at 9:30 p.m.

My father-in-law rushed out, as did V. and I. Having recently been accused of sleeping through the hullabaloo two nights earlier (I did), I was out to prove my worth.

I had grand visions of being the woman who saved my frail f-i-l, when the contractors pushed him, while somehow managing to stop the bulldozer by throwing myself in its belly.

I was distracted by the voice of the contractor. “Only two hours saar,” he now said, and seemed to actually grovel. But we were steadfast; we had seen this before (I use the pronoun in a loose sense, of course), just two days earlier, in fact. They had said some pretty nasty things about us earlier (all hearsay), and knew they weren’t all that innocent.

We threatened them once more of inviting the police to discipline them (they actually seemed to snigger at this), and stormed into our house. We called the police, of course, the 100 number.
Convinced it was V.’s educated accent that failed to do the trick earlier, I put on a Chennai accent and reported this violation (or what we thought was a violation anyway).
In the meantime, a mama two houses down had also called the police. He had earlier chided us for being “soft” on these guys, and insisted we should have staged a dharna outside the police station the last time around itself.

Promises that an inspector was on his way were parroted to him as well. By this time, the men in the next plot were, well, plotting their next move. They hung out for a while, during which time two lorries made their way to the (now demolished) gate, sticking their behinds in to collect the rubble.

The bulldozer growled to life (not purred, it was hardly a BMW), and it seems the men were activated. We were, meanwhile, waiting for the police to arrive. Didn’t happen.

V. and I decided that action must be taken somehow, and I used my nagging to get us to the nearest police station. I toyed with the idea of mentioning my background in journalism just for the heck of it, but went into a funk about not actually being a journalist. V.’s advice to not lie to a police officer helped too, of course!

Anyway, we entered the station, and presented ourselves to the policeman nearest the entrance. We were immediately ushered into the inspector’s office. We went in, expecting, of course, someone like Pasupathy of “Dhool” fame. But we’re surprised to see someone really pleasant – almost like the uncle next door.

He bids us to sit, and V. offers me the only seat available, feigning habitual chivalry, which had, in fact, just made its debut. The inspector makes him sit too, on a nearby bench, and asks us what we want. We explain our problem, launching into a tirade about the bulldozer and the noises it makes, and he asks us, as he would a child, “So, what do you want us to do?”

We tell him that we want it to stop, cinema-style. He says, again in that tone that speaks to the kindergartener, “But we don’t allow them to come to the city in the morning. When can they demolish the house?”

V. thinks he’s being the devil’s advocate and (unwisely, I think), tells him why the noise must stop, asap. The inspector gently repeats the question, and we think. Anytime before 11 p.m., and after 5 a.m. is fine, we say. He calls a policewoman, takes down our address and asks her to go and tell the guys they must stop, after a little bit. She does, and leaves.

We go home, and wait. By this time, of course, the demolition men have started their work. We wait and wait and look out for the telltale police van – not that we know how it will look. My mom-in-law calls again, from a different phone (God bless cell phones), as a mami who’s disturbed by the demolition. “Inspector is on his way, mami,” they say.

We wait for nearly half an hour, and by now, it’s not just a matter of the demolition, our egos have entered the equation as well. We are arguing the police, their fidelity, their corruption, and how they would have received bribes from (by now) our arch enemies.

Forty minutes after our meeting with the inspector, almost all of us want to just lie down – we’re disillusioned. In a last gasp for truth (as we saw it), V. and I returned to the police station – this time, it was 11:30 p.m.

The policeman near the entrance was eating his dinner, and said the policewoman was on her way. In fact, he said, she must already be there. We came out, convinced it was one of those “be-there-in-five-minutes” situations. We were talking about whether the police actually expected money for this, all the way home, and were surprised to see a Hyundai police car there.

The policewoman was a pretty sight – she was threatening the workers with stoppage of work if they didn’t stop. Really admirable, the way she asked us to call her if there were any trouble and to them, “Oru call varattum, muttikku mutti thatti ulla pottuduven (I’ll break your legs and throw you guys in).”

The night passed without any incident, or noise. And yeah, we couldn’t sleep that night in all the excitement anyway!

Flat Thoughts

Here’s my attempt at the verse form – for better or worse!

PROMISCUITY

On my red two-wheeler
I inched toward my final destination –
A tiny space high on cloud nine
Where, packed, we workers fine
Create knowledge for the West.

What’s this? I glance to my right,
A grand old lady who has seen better times
Is being violated, beaten, thrashed about.
Ahoy! I want to shout,
She has history in those plastered rooms.

Behind those old teak doors,
Lie secrets, safe with her.
Those days, they preferred a strong base,
Today, she merely looks out of place
In this anaemic, boxed-up world.

The next day I see
She’s wearing a metal skirt
Forced or willingly, I know not.
She seems all bruised, maybe she fought,
But all I can see now is her bent head.

She lies broken, distraught
She knows she must change now,
From chastity through the ages
To promiscuity, inevitably, in stages.
And families are already peeking under her skirt.

I shed a tear for her and ride away
Arriving at my eight-hour cage
Where a gas-filled tube
Controls my life in my cube
As I prepare palatable knowledge.

Down the road is a school
Where kids come for the food
far from palatable, you know.
The knowledge however, is even less so
And what do I do about it?

As my three-month stint is over,
I will start trawling job sites
looking for the next highest bidder.
The best offer I’ll consider
on my way to selling what I’ve got.

When I see the old woman these days
She looks younger, much younger,
She stands tall, not hunched back.
She’s shed her clothes, like she’s back on track.
She seems a maiden metamorphosed.

When she looks at me
With all those eyes
I feel she knows my soul by now
And sensing a kindred spirit somehow,
Sheds that tear running along her side.


I recently realized that I hardly see new houses in the city – they’re invariably flats. As I rode to work one morning, I saw men demolishing this house, one of the very few on that street – I was struck by an inexplicable feeling of loss. This was born out of that.

Hope you enjoy this. Please do leave comments.

Make No Mistake

I know that Poppat Jamal’s sale is not much of a sale. I know where you’ve to go to get paints for a good price. I know which doctors are good in the neighborhood, which ones just stuff you up with antibiotics. I know exactly how much tamarind it takes to make rasam for four people. I know the shortcuts to get to my nephew’s school in peak traffic.
I wish I didn’t, though. Really.
I got to know most of those things through older folks in our families and neighborhood, and while they are, really, advising us so that we don’t get hurt, I sometimes wish we did.
I wish we went to the crappiest restaurant in town and ate the worst dosais, that I bought dresses whose colors ran from the fabric like our maid’s daughter with her suitor, that we made some wrong choices in life.
Happy (or unhappy) accidents, I believe, are what life is made up of. When I botched up a recipe for mushroom sabji, I came up with (our popular, if I may say so myself) mushroom sandwich. As a result of eating of what could arguably qualify as the worst Indian restaurant in Boston, I had to take the following day off work, and finished reading a book that (nearly) changed the way I thought about life.
Several older people in my father's generation had to struggle early on in life, and learned things the hard way. Most of them want their children to have none of that uncertainty, that anxiousness, that feeling of not knowing if they have done well by their children.
But without all that, I often wonder, what is left for one to experience? I want to explore, to find things for myself. Needless to say, doing it anyways while already knowing the best option is sort of like reading an Agatha Christie novel after knowing who did it.
I’m sure tomes have been written about this, but India was traditionally a risk-averse nation, and we like to arrange everything just so in our lives. When my father took up a job in the (God forbid!) private sector, his father was horrified. All his other sons and sons-in-law were in the government sector. How did he produce such a maverick, he often wondered.
I think that the emphasis has, for a long time, been on the “what,” rather than the “how.” This principle might have tricked down to every single aspect of desi life, including getting a ration card, attaining ultimate enlightenment, and even reaching, literally, a destination.
Things are slowly changing now, as young couples, and older ones, realize the value of "life" itself, and not merely what lies beyond it.
Success is, after all, the journey, not a destination.
This may be the American in me talking, but herein might lie the answer to the question we were so often asked: What will you miss most about the United States?
So, this new year, I hope to make many, many mistakes, and learn from (most of) them.