They had all gladly taken up offers from the financial newspaper in the Hindustan group. The economy was just beginning to open up and the salaries were higher. I thought I’d be better off editing copy from remote parts of the country, straightening out stilted language while I dwelt amidst books and the fond hope of writing one of my own someday.
The reality of the job turned out to be somewhat different.
The first day at work I walked up to the horseshoe table at the heart of the newsroom and sat there for six hours with nothing to do. Over the next week the chief sub on duty would throw the most inane articles my way. Often enough he would crumple my subbed copy and drop it into the wastebasket at his feet without even a look. It took ten days before a brief I’d touched made it to the paper.
In the end it didn’t take much to get more work. On a dull summer day with nothing other than a picture of a bitch wallowing in water for the front page, the chief sub warmed up to my suggestion of “Dog Day Afternoons.” I was suddenly seen as a sub with promise. But it didn’t dispel the tedium of the job, a tedium that would grip me each day as I walked back from ITO.
The day the tedium finally broke, I’d been thinking of a new girl on the desk, a welcome change from the tattered magazines lying under my mattress.
Barely a few hundred yards from the house, near the ramshackle jhuggis huddled together in a hollow by the sewer line, the traffic had come to a standstill. Long before I managed to make my way to the group of mourners blocking the road, I could hear them. They were gathered around a body that lay at the center of the street, covered with a sheet. As always, it was the women who were the loudest, each trying to outdo the other. Threading my way past them I was halted by a voice I recognized. It was the maid who worked at the house.
“Bhaiyya, Ekka ko mar diya.” (“They’ve killed Ekka.”)
Ekka was her brother-in-law and would clean and cook for us whenever she took time off. A tribal from what was then south Bihar, Ekka was true to every stereotype, working only when he felt like. He would always turn up at our place thanks to the dregs of liquor he could find in the bottles we had tossed away under the beds. If he worked a few days in a row, he knew we’d hand him a bottle of Old Monk.
In a moment of weakness, late one evening as he fried some fish for us with our rum, I had even given him my business card. Thankfully, no such thing as a mobile existed then, but at times, as I struggled against a deadline on the night shift, I would get a call from Ekka. “Bhaiyya, yeh log mujhe maar rahein hain. Main bhag ke PCO me ghus aiya hun, kuch kariye nahin to meri jaan le lenge.” (“Some guys are beating me up. I had to run inside this phone booth. Do something or they’ll kill me.”)
The first few times, I requested the reporter on duty to help him out. In turn I would insert a brief item to favor some official the reporter needed to placate. Once, as Ekka was putting the receiver down, I heard him tell someone, “Ab dikhata hun saalon, dekhna kaise police aati hai.” (“Now I’ll show you bastards, see how the police turn up.”) I soon started hearing him out only to quickly return to the headlines awaiting me, the urgent need to get the pica count right for a three-column heading on the calming of Punjab or further strife in Kashmir. It seemed the night before his death Ekka didn’t even have time to make that call.
Standing there amidst the mourners it was difficult to connect the man alive in my mind with the body that lay before me. The maid’s voice, as she began telling me what had happened, was the only thing that brought the two together.
Today, as I quote her, there is a double deception involved, the first because I am recreating these events from an uncertain memory that cannot recall her name, and the second because she actually spoke in a dialect of Hindi that I cannot even begin to capture.
“We were given the body this afternoon at the police station. He had left home yesterday and we didn’t worry about him till early this morning. It was when I woke up to his absence that we started looking for him. We thought we’d ask you whether he had called. Then, in the afternoon, a policeman came looking for us.” I didn’t interrupt her as she spoke.
She was oblivious to the blocked traffic, the gathering crowd.
I was hoping to get away as fast as possible.
“He took us to the police station. There we were made to put our thumbprints on several forms. No one told us anything. We were asked to pick up his body from the mortuary after the postmortem. That was when we realized Ekka was dead. Now they are telling us that he was a thief who died while trying to escape. You know the house behind the general store, the one where the Punjabi councilor lives? They said Ekka broke in, and when the people in the house raised an alarm, he ran up to the roof and jumped off the second floor onto a pile of wood lying at the back. But we saw his body, you look at him yourself.”
And before I could say a word, she had thrown the sheet off his torso. His body was badly bruised but his face was untouched. He lay there in repose, his eyelids shut, no different from how he would have looked in his sleep.
“They beat him to death, bhaiyya. Look at him, look at him. He worked for the councilor’s opponent during the election and all the basti votes went against the Punjabi.”
She kept repeating — They beat him to death, they beat him to death — and the mourners picked up the chant, the uncovered body adding to their frenzy.
I called up the crime reporter who just said he had too much on his plate for the evening. In the morning I ran the story past the metro editor — he was a veteran who had made his peace with the new setup. He just told me to look around and see if anyone in the office gave a damn about a dead Bihari from a jhuggi.
He was right. The old man who had run the paper for decades was dead. His son was an MBA from Wharton, he wanted the paper to make money. This was no unreasonable demand but it required drastic changes in a newspaper so far shaped by his father’s whims. There was little space left for dead Biharis from a jhuggi.
I just couldn’t easily stomach the thought that a man could die such a death. It helped that for the time being the morning shift was sheltered from the cuts underway, and in the first few days after Ekka’s death my afternoons were free. Outside the office, people had little sense of journalistic designations and the Hindustan Express logo on my business card allowed me to go around asking questions.
I learned on the job, there was no one around to tell me what to do. The first thing I did was contact the police. I was to learn later this was best left to the end. The SHO in charge of the local police station was also a Punjabi, fair and light-eyed, his tall frame now putting on bulk, his face sagging with the weight of two decades of free alcohol.
He made me wait a few minutes in the large hall where the FIRs were registered. Three other policemen sat around sipping the tea that had been sent for on my arrival. A suspect was seated in a corner, manacled to the bench. On the walls were the crime figures for the area. Rapes were down, pick-pocketing and sexual harassment were on the rise.
When I walked into the SHO’s room, the subinspector investigating the case was already seated there. “Aayye aayye, Singh sahib, I’ve called the case officer so that we don’t have to keep asking other people for the information you want.”
He rang a bell placed at the side of his desk and sent for some more of the syrupy tea I had just finished drinking. “So, Singh sahib, what makes you interested in this? Such things happen all the time.”
I told him my editor felt it might be a case of custodial death. He smiled, leaning back on his metal-framed chair.