Encounters with Officialdom - 1

A pleasant Saturday evening. After weeks of running around and ‘follow-up’, I finally seem to have a permanent solution to the recurring problem with my car’s power windows! I roll down my window as I drive back home, partly to enjoy the pleasant breeze, and largely to relish the joy of a window that rolls down when I want it to :- )

As I navigate the steep bump in front of Figurine Fitness while speculating upon how I should celebrate my car’s fitness, I hear a rude honk from behind. A black Safari, with dark tinted glasses to match, evidently in a hurry to save the world (as usual!). The road is narrow with houses on both sides, and is speckled with numerous cars and side lanes a – I cannot risk accelerating beyond the 45kmph that I am currently at! But my friend in the Safari is more daring, and resumes his incessant honking. I raise my hand in the rear view mirror as a signal to him to take it easy. Suddenly, he swerves from the left, overtakes my car and then deliberately swerves to the right to ram into the passenger door, and then speeds away. For a moment, I can’t believe this has happened – I had heard of, and expected, such irrational behavior in Delhi, but not in peaceful Bangalore. My next thought is to give chase to express my indignation, but the pragmatic part of my brain is already telling me this won’t work – the guy is driving like a maniac, and I have no idea how many men are inside the car. I quickly note down the car’s registration number, and still in shock, drive to my home a km away to inspect the damage.

What I see breaks my heart! There is a huge dent on the left side of the bonnet, and an ugly scar running all along the passenger door! I am furious by now at the completely uncivilized and barbaric behavior of the guy – this can happen only in India! I decide I will not let him get away. Immediately, I call 101 to give them the car’s registration number, but they tell me I will need to go to a police station to file a case.

By this time, I am seething. I decide I will go to the station, but I also realize I need to mobilize some resources – a lone woman who cannot speak the local language (except – Kannada gottilla) is unlikely to meet with blazing success with the notorious Indian police. P is out of town; I call D –she’s out with friends; C doesn’t pick up his phone. My mind’s numb by now – all I want is to DO something! Heck, I’ll go it alone, I tell myself. 101 had directed me to the Ulsoor police station. I ignore the openly curious looks of all the men squatting in the station, and march up to the duty officer and pour out my tale. Our man, however, is unimpressed, and continues to pick his teeth as he gleefully informs me this is not under his jurisdiction. But 101 directed me to Ulsoor, I splutter. He shrugs. So what do I now, I demand. Go to Jeevan Bhima Nagar station, he states dismissively.

Thanks, I mutter, I didn’t expect any better from you, so why be surprised. By now the angry indignation is wavering – going by this experience, I am unlikely to get anywhere even at JBN. So do I bow in and keep silent, like most of us do, ineffectual against the notoriously corrupt SYSTEM, I wonder. Not quite yet, I decide. If we ‘evolved’ people also start giving in without a fight, then the future of our country is indeed bleak.

As I drive to JBN, I again try to mobilize some resources – H, my landlord’s son is out with friends, but he suggests I contact Uncle whose clinic is very close to the station. Unfortunately, Uncle has just stepped out, so I take a deep breath and decide to face this alone.

Unlike the sprawling campus of Ulsoor, JBN station is a small corner house converted into a station – two or three small dinghy rooms in a straight line, one room leading to another, all crowded with harassed fellow sufferers. As you move from one room to the next, you get the feeling of being sucked into the vortex of a deep well – or maybe it is just my imagination working overtime! However, I am pleasantly surprised when the first officer I meet with offers me a seat before I can spill out my tale. I am escorted into the innermost chamber (the bottom of the well?), where two or three officers are frenziedly manning the phones. One of the officers remarks they got the car details from 101, and have traced the car’s owner. A driver was driving the car, he says – we know the owner, he is a nice man. If he’s such a nice man he should be more careful about the people he chooses to drive a car, I rage. The officer shrugs and says the owner lost his son a few days ago, thanks to the manic driving of one of his drivers.

I am so angry by now that I have no sympathy for the owner, even when I hear about his son’s death. What about my case, I demand? We can give you the phone number of the owner and you can negotiate a settlement, the officer says. But I don’t want settlement, I fume – I want to meet the driver and I want to see him face the consequences (probably slap him, Hindi movie style? But I don’t say that!). The other alternative is that you file a case with us, the matter will go to court, your car will need to be left with us for the examination, and well, you let the law take its course, he suggests with a deadpan expression.

I can see where he is leading to by now. In my beloved country, the law literally takes its own course, and a very long and tortured course spread over decades at that! Letting the law takes its own course would mean constant haranguing (and bribe paying) by police officers, countless visits to the courts, endless dealings with petty officers...for in the Indian judicial system, the powerless (or less powerful) is guilty and the influential innocent, no proof needed.

My mind baulks, the resolve weakens. I had marched into the station demanding to “see justice done”, but in my outrage, I had momentarily forgotten what that means in India. And despite the odds, if I still decide to pursue the long path of justice, would I really be fighting against the ‘right’ accused? The owner claimed the accused was a driver, but because of the dark windows, I had no means of verifying the claim. For all I know, a family member was driving the car, and a poor man at the bottom of the food chain would pay the price (I have grown up on a staple of Hindi movies with such incidents you see). Or even if it was the driver who was at fault, maybe he was exhorted to drive faster by someone, or under pressure of an unrealistic deadline. Who could tell the real story?

Plagued by moral doubts, uncertainties and unease at the thought of dealing with the complex system, I decide to give in. I write out a letter, but I do not file it – instead, I meekly tell the officer I am open to negotiation, and head back home to retrieve what remains of my weekend.

In the end, I was left with a vague sense of disappointment . I was pleasantly surprised by the civility and responsiveness of the officers at JBN, and was glad that I did something (contrary to my middle class upbringing of deferentially giving in to the notorious system). Yet, I could not get over the nagging thought that a civilized society would never allow such incidents to take place at such alarming regularity, and that I, as a part of this so-called civilized society, was in a way as much to blame as the ‘system’.

The Music of Words

I had a manic-Monday-types Friday – chock a block with difficult conference calls, meetings and interviews. I was so exhausted by the time I was done by 8 that I discarded all thoughts of gymming and headed straight home. Dined on some soup and dinner rolls. I was alone at home, and somehow, time appears to inflate when you are alone – unless you are drunk or asleep. There wasn’t anything interesting on TV (I get bored of TV very quickly anyway), I didn’t have the energy for a full fledged movie (not the kinds that I had at home anyway) or a book – but it was Friday for chrissakes, and I detest turning in early on a Friday night. Somehow, the more I stretch my sleeping hour on a Friday night, the more I tend to savor the seemingly endless possibilities of the weekend – so what if most of these possibilities remain just that, limited to the realm of my imagination.

Unexpectedly, it started to rain. Not the gentle pitter patter of a Bangalore evening shower, but more like the gentle drilling of a crane, coarse but blunted as if a piece of cloth covered its mouth. I could almost imagine the raindrops falling straight down - not slanting - but vertical. Slow, incessant, seemingly endless - just the kind of rain that depresses me. Give me a tumultuous downpour any day – one that knows that a quick departure is always better than a long drawn farewell.

So it was probably the combination of my solitary-yet-content state and the slow, unending rain that made me drift towards reading poetry after a long time. Surprisingly, I did not drift towards Vikram Seth. Instead, I dwelled upon the lyricism of Eliot’s Burnt Norton & The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, the latter a poem that I can read and re-read a thousand times and one; the wonderfully constructed Patterns that compassionately but unsentimentally chronicles a young Flanders woman who has just learnt that her beloved fiancé who she was to marry a day later has been killed in war; Under One Star by Wislawa Szymborska, a delightful peep into all the delightful little pieces of life; Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise – oh, what a powerful writer she is!; Wilfred Owen’s cry against war, Dulce Et Decorum Est; the wonderfully ironic A Strange Problem by Kanwar Narain on ‘the power to hate with all my heart Is ebbing by the day’; Harivanshrai Bachchan’s melancholy reflections on life in Kya Bhoolon Kya Yaad Karoon; and finally; Books, by Gulzar, an interesting eulogy to the decline of the physical reading of books.

A bit of caustic wit and irony was called for after all this sentimentality, and who better than Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson to supply it! I shared Parker’s disappointments in being forced to live with one perfect rose, and shared Dickenson’s Presentiments on “Faith” (a fine invention), “Hope” (the thing with feathers), formal feelings after a great pain, not being able to stop for Death, and a certain slant of light in winter.

I ended with Vikram Seth of course – a seven course Michelin meal should be polished off with a fitting dessert. I suppose if I was given the chance to take just one book on a marooned island, I’d take his Collected Poems. That, or Neruda, is all the nourishment one needs!