ONE

There was still some light of dusk leaving the last few remaining patches of red on the western sky. Just like the street dogs that sleep lazily off the walkway until the meat shop has just been opened and half raise their heads when the first gamy smell of dried blood and skinned raw meat enters their nostrils, to see if the meat store has actually opened, constable Shiva half rose from a coloured plastic stool of a roadside fast food eatery when the mixed smell of smoking cookies, brewing chocolates and freshly cut fruits together entered his olfactory organ. He bent his torso to see if the adjacent ice cream store had opened. It had. He rose, straightened himself and walked up to the steps of the store.

Two heaped scoops of soft dull thistle dotted with a darker purple. He tried hard to peep in through the clear areas around the rounded brand sticker pasted on its transparent cap. His attention was fixed on the consistency of the blueberry ice cream. It must not melt. He kept continuously tossing the cup from one hand to the other lest it melts from the heat of his palm. It must not melt.

The crimson was entirely gone from the western sky and dusk had set in by the time Shiva reached the police station. It looked nothing different from ordinary.
As he entered through the doors, he felt all the eyes of the few handcuffed and other not handcuffed men turn on him, rather on his hand-held blueberry ice cream cup. He grew a bit self-conscious. Even the two great men of India, hanging from the wall—one with a bald head and the other with an upside-down paper boat-shaped cap on, one celebrated on every Indian currency note and the other not as much, but both wearing round glassed specs—seemed to watch him through their very similar-looking eyeglasses and shaking their heads in despair and futility. But his dedication never faltered. His eyes were still fixed on the ice cream. He went straight to the inspector’s table, a half bald, dusk complexioned man in his mid-forties sitting with a pile of files stacked and strewn across his desk. The inspector took the ice cream from him and opened the cap with a crackling sound.

Constable Shiva looked across the table. A man sat on the edge of the bench kept on the other side of the desk. He couldn’t tell from the looks of the man if he was a criminal or the victim; he was obnoxiously covered in muck, one could not tell if those were the striped pattern of his shirt or stains of intractable filth, large dark circles made his cavernous eye sockets noticeably pronounced, his manes were in a rough dirt-filled entangled mesh. But then Shiva remembered that not all the police reports and FIRs involve a crime, victim or criminal. In India, the range and hand of crime are indeed far reached. Every day, hundreds and thousands of cases of theft, murders, rapes, domestic violence and innumerable kidnappings take place. Human and animal trafficking is mentionable in that. Poaching and illegal trading and what not… the list continues. Apart from these actual crimes, there are less harmful domestic clashes and quarrels and who knows what uncountable numbers of people go missing each day. The police department is one of those that never sleeps, one where every day multiple new complaints are lodged.

Shiva was looking at the man, lost in his own thoughts. There was pin-drop silence except for a constable sleeping near the back door with his occasional snoring. He kept watching the man, his clothes, his face, his hair, the drops of sweat that were hanging heavy from their tips, ready to fall to the ground any moment. And it did… and to Shiva perhaps it had its own sound, a sound loud enough to break his trance.

The inspector was engrossed in putting the fourth spoonful in the gaping hollow of his mouth when suddenly he froze for a moment. He looked at it and then smelled it a couple of times. There was surely something wrong. Then he smelled into the cup and looked back at the spoonful. Then he doubtfully placed it inside his mouth. But the next moment, he realized everything was alright in it and then he looked around and realized something else. He looked at the dirty man sitting next to him on the bench. The man started smiling at the inspector when his eyes fell upon him.

“Aye Shiva, get this garbage bin out of here. The whole police station is stinking,” the inspector ordered the constable while eyeing the man from the corner of his eyes as if he was some despicable pest.

“Sir, he is Ramchand. He has come to file a report,” Shiva replied.

The inspector again looked at Ramchand, wincing in hatred, and then waved his hand at Shiva, asking him to leave. His ice cream was not finished and whenever he put a spoonful into his mouth, Ramchand giggled. And every time he did, his eyes filled with dangerously hopeless despair that could bring both sympathy and fear in anyone’s mind. The inspector’s attention was fixed on the ice cream. He finished it, put it aside, cupped both his hands over his face and took a deep breath. He then waved at Ramchand, calling him to his desk. Ram came, folding his hands in a reverent gesture.

“Tell me… What were you laughing at? Me?” the inspector asked lightly.

“No, sir,” he held his ear lobes between his fingers, “I was laughing at the ice cream.”

The inspector suddenly flinched at the sudden whiff of stink emanating from Ramchand as he now stood close to him and spoke for the first time. He covered his nose with his hand and asked in a voice that came out from under his hands, garbled, “What’s your complaint? Tell me.” He wiped his hands on a seemingly FIR lodged at his desk and looked up reluctantly at Ramchand.

Ramchand felt inner gratitude for his wife. He had a tiff with her a couple of weeks ago after his family’s dreadful experience at the langar house in the city. His wife had been pestering him for a long time to let go of his labourer’s bidding jobs and settle for a more secure and stable source of earning… the hundred days work of the municipality. Though he could feel the futility behind his bidding jobs which he and his ancestors have been doing for years now, his ego did not allow him to surrender to a woman’s plan right away in front of her, however wise she might be. He had managed to get in a hundred days job a week ago, but he could not swallow his pride to confess to his wife about it, that he had ultimately taken refuge in her ideas.

He hit his fortune when he had gone below the rail bridge built over a putrid water stream. From where the black waters originated, he never knew. Scales, skins, feathers, guts and entrails always flowed in with it; they flowed out of some commercial food processing unit in the close vicinity belonging to a worldwide restaurant chain franchise (of course he learnt that from some neighbourhood youths who worked somewhere in the supply chain for the company). The perpetually black waters flowed down through the gutter in front of his hut, right below his window, and after crossing everyone else’s in the row of shanties, it plunged down a few metres into a wider body of putrefying water many such streams drained into and flowed below the rail bridge. Often, carcasses of pigs, dogs and cats would rot for days on the shores grazed by the waters. These foolish animals never understood, or during the summer months, when surface waters dried up all over the state, some of them would have no choice.

He never had any issue handling and clearing those decomposing carcasses, for he had been desensitized to some extent to the smell and sights of them from the moment of his birth in those dingy shacks and had seen the rotten river flow below his windows as far back in his memory as he could remember. And so, he managed to grab a hundred days clean up the environment drive initiated by the municipal corporation.