Hero
"Eight feet road and I am in the middle, how dare anyone touch me", the turbulent voice of the drunken man broke the silence of the night. Summer colds are always a little trying, and the entire village had retired to bed after a hard day’s labor. I could still hear his voice for the most part of the night. The next morning as I strolled out for my daily jog, I found him lying besides the drains, near the corner of the street, half awake and still shaky from his previous night’s chore. His face looked like “stool-for-sample” and he smelled rats. There was nothing in the world he required more than a shower. He quickly recognized me with, "Hello, Two-by-Four!” I was 13 then and it was his accustomed greeting. He was still in his uniform, which meant he was on Patrol- Duty, not to forget "the Petrol" in which he had plunged himself the previous night. It was very early in the morning and the stillness still there in the streets. I offered a hand to him and helped him to his room, the Police Staff Quarters. While the Police Outpost was on the second floor of this rented building, the ground floor were occupied by shops and most importantly, a major portion by a Restaurant cum Bar. Someone said it very true; “One who sits by the well will never go thirsty.” This was mostly where he quenched his thirst.
The walls in his room were so close to one another, like we can call it a Lilliputian Emporium. If he wished, he could light the gas with one hand and close the door with the other without taking the eyes off the reflection of his tonsure in the mirror. Except for a pair of uniform dangling recklessly on a rusty nail, a small table only to hold a gas burner (the rust screaming how it missed to see a spark from a light for ages), and a charpoy which never embraced his body for more than a minute at a time. The only window in his room never opened, his colleagues had hammered nails into it (his screams at regular intervals in his inebriated condition had been enough to the neighbors). No one ever visited his room, quite literally not even himself.
He had a “Bahadur” as his middle name but he looked senile. He had a ruddy complexion and potato nose, enviable black whiskers and a fine sonorous voice. When he was sober, he was a man of few words, I considered him to be a sort of cross between an old Country Singer and a Lion Tamer from a circus. The two most prominent features in him were his great sense of humor and the knowledge that he had stuffed inside his fragile skull. Knowledge he had kidnapped from his various sojourns and interactions with humble men, he could tell the proportion of water and muscle required to bake a thousand cookies, the count of nails required to scale the balance to a kilogram, the shortest verse in the holy “Gita”, the last king of Burma, the salary of the railway post-officer in the village and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat. He had a laugh like a medium-sized dog. He adored kids, used to be seen throwing packets of candies on the streets for them, blubbering and cracking jokes. I still have a friend back home he nicknamed “hairy” (pronounced “HARRY”). He used to say,” Though we can hardly see him under his thick body hair, still he can have a western name”. Except for his drinking habits, everyone focused on his plusses. And that he had plenty.
He was on the verge of his retirement after serving the police force for almost his entire life. He used to say he lost his virginity before the” Tricolor” fluttered at the Red Fort for the first time. With only a handful of teeth left, he could hardly chew a gum; liquid went easily down his pharynx. The last few years of his professional life thus went by whipping his steps in and out of the bar; the latter one hardly required his limb. But he was earning few thousands per month, which he needed to support his feet whether his feet would support him or not. And every night he went around with the same chores, high on methanol, hooting like some “Yankee “fan. If someone managed to catch him in broad daylight, he would be found grinning at almost anything and everything that crossed his path, with only two teeth prominent behind his dark parched lips, far apart from each other like some couple on the verge of divorce. And his punch lines were simply intoxicating. A cat was always a “pussy” for him; the village dhobi was always at his receiving end; his wife for him was but an “old -farting-lady”. And his grin always buttered his sarcasms.
One evening I met him at the market, which always felt strangely deserted at late hours. The sun had just slid down the horizon, leaving behind magnificent arrays of red and blue over the mountain top. The day itself was reminiscent of what was left in the lonely evenings of this small village town, where men seem to have gone out like the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of smoke as a witness. I almost didn’t recognize him that day. Since I was still yards away from teenage-hood, it felt like, “if it’s not him, then I never saw him.”For some inexplicable reason, he was not wearing his uniform, had kept unusually long beard, his hair ever seemed longer to me and his eyes as red as ruby. He took a gander at me, like the last soul he had seen, grinned the same old “toothless-baddie” type with the accustomed “Hello, Two-by-four!” Shaking me warmly by my hand, he added; “How come you got up so early in the morning today?” I believe I stared at him for too long that he had to repeat it again. I moved my eyes far towards the horizon and mumbled. “Or is it late evening?” he answered himself and drowned himself into a breeze of laughter. His laugh always followed with a brief dancing, the “Cameroonian” dance in the soccer field types, like he might have just stumbled on the elixir of youth. He realized he had gone to bed but in the morning and missed most part of the afternoon. Even as I left in haste, I could still see his twin tooth from a distance. That is the last memory I have of seeing him in person.
I was constantly tipped off about his stints in the town by someone or the other even while I was away. My friends found him one early morning bemoaning about a rather funny incident. A huge crowd, concoction of young and old had gathered around him. His anecdotes were almost always jocular, no one dared missed it. The topic of the day was his daughters. And since he had three, all of them eloped in successive months, the last one still a juvenile- the youngest of them all. As a father, he surely missed the opportunity of marrying them in great grandiose. But his concerns were relatively adverse. He was behind the “rednecks”; he (informally) called them opportunists. And the victims here were his “roses”. “Are my daughters’ rose? That just when they started blooming, someone just plucks it and vroom! Off they go.” The whole crowd burst into peals of laughter. His was the loudest. Even if he was liquored up, sober, blissful or in doldrums, he still could revive a smile in his face and in many others, a skill that takes years to develop and hone.
It was quite late in life that I heard him retire. He came back to his village (which I shared with him), but it was only some time recently that I met him.
The day was relatively hot. The sun had stopped in the middle of the sky, refusing to move, firing missiles of heat down lying there unbroken and unnaturally still. My younger brother walked ahead of me as we crossed the dense orange orchard and reached our farmhouse. It was deserted, but obviously. Village life is strenuous, everyone busy as a beaver. It was my first visit to my village in years, and I yearned to make the most out of it, visit as many of my relatives, neighbors and my childhood “snot-licking” friends.
My uncle was out in the field and the farmhouse was deserted for the day. So we had to hop-in to our neighbor’s kitchen for a cup of midday tea. This was where I met our old-time baddie; couldn’t be for the last time. Since seeing him after a long hiatus, let me give you a modified description of him at present. Weight, 60; complexion, hair and brain, dark; height, five feet five; age, about seventy-three; dressed in a Rs 1200 suit of greenish-blue serge; containing a bunch of keys and a packet of cigarette protruding from the only front pocket. He was balancing a stick on his one hand as he sauntered by in the lawn before making his way towards us in the kitchen. He carried a “ninety- nine- dollar” grin on his face, as if silently mocking us and sat down in a wooden chair beside me. A fancy Chinese goggles loosely dangled down his rabbity nose. That "Hello, Two-by-Four!” was missing. The change silently irked me. I smiled back and carefully studied every wrinkle on his face which looked so familiar. “I observe that you are of a studious disposition” he said. A strange smile ran across the kitchen, off the window and all over the place. I could sense that he still carried his charm with profound glorification and his best was yet to come.
I offered him a smoke and that broke the ice. For the next three hours and over several cups of tea, I was still to be found gaping at his idea of bliss, which was different. When I told him that he looked younger, he went ahead comparing his age with every “fifty plus” in the village, and in the end, convinced us in positive assertion that he at seventy and three- was indeed the stripling. He closed it with; “And I intended to retain it, come hell or high water”. It seemed his every comment was finely measured, crafted and calculated. When I inquired about his drinking habits, my neighbor jumped into the conversation, mocking that he ceased as soon as he retired- with “peanuts”. Ignoring the flippancy, he gave us a competent figure that he was drawing as “pension-money”, and his motive of abstaining from booze was rather complicated. He was hardly frugal, his voice became softer when we spoke to us, and his jests were lighter; making him all the more alluring.
To bring the best out of him, I chose to start our tete-a-tete in rather satirical phrases. So when I noticed his teeth multiplying as he added numbers to his age astronomically, prompt came his reply; “Money buys everything these days. If only I could sell, my wife would surely fetch me a few extra bucks.” His recriminatory remarks was so manifest here, yet he grinned, putting an effort to make evident that he had bought the whole set of 32. He initially had the first two incisors replaced with the fake ones. The only problem he had was while brushing them in the mornings. Since he had to manually remove them for the exercise, he could'nt hold water inside to rinse his mouth fully. You should have heard him say how the little water to rinse used to make its way out of his closed mouth through the gap, irritating him for the entire morning for years. That is when he plucked out the remaining few and bought the whole set of 32. “I only feel younger, so much so that they gleam at the slightest sight of our village cougars.”
His transition from an alcoholic to his sober-self seemed too good to be true. He had no specific reasons as to how, when and what made that happen. Money he had enough, leisure was all his own, fetching a bottle would be at a stone’s throw from his house, yet he chose to opt out off the league. Spirituality? “Nah! Came his reply. I am yet to see a God in flesh and blood.” I tried another ploy,wanted to know more about his Police-ing days. " We were herdsmen in the begining,not policeman", is what he told me. And even before I could ask, he came up with his explanations of the same. He was posted in the extreme borders of the state towards China , where Yaks were plenty and humans few. And since Yaks had unblemished records, the very few humans had nothing to do to outrage the policeman. " There were herds of Yaks that travelled from the Tibetian Plateau towards our side, and since these lost-herds were mostly unattended, it was our task, rather "job" of the police to round them up and guard them for days, sometimes even months until the owners turned up. Many a times they never did. And what do you do when you see hungry yaks in the morning around the camp? Take them out to graze right? That is what we ended up doing most of the time of the year in the Himalayas. Now you tell me, were we policemen or herdsmen?" So he was a herdsman in uniform for almost a decade when he was called off towards more civilized parts of the state. In the himalayas, they had yak butter, yak meat and plenty of yak milk to drink. The city had nothing better to offer him, and that milk was sold in bottles here: Brandy,Whisky and Rum.
He almost jumped like a kid with his stories, talked a lot about his recent tour and pilgrimage, pressing hard on the fact that the most voyageous part of his life was only accomplished after he shed the uniform. He could barely read when he joined the force but he reads alongside his grandchild today, that he is now accustomed to see his wife in bed every night beside him (without getting scared in the morning), simply loves the way his fellow villagers treats him with profound respect, and not the least, he still finds humour, somewhere between everything he speaks and hears of. I mysely lost the count on the number of times I got an eye-full of his false teeth.
The tea cup was still on my hand, dangling between my thumb and the index finger, the sun outside was but faint and ready to hide beneath the giant mountains as if they were scared to shine any longer, the room was already dimly lit with a 40W and the entire village gleamed in orange. He got up from the bench with a little support he got holding my knees and straight headed towards the exit door. He was still all smiles and I didn't need to know the reason why; maybe he was born that way. I took a look around, everyone had their eyes transfixed on him, as if we all were waiting for something more, something to seal the day with. Upon realizing that my mouth was half opened, I quitely closed them. I swear it didn't miss his eyes, for, upon seeing me gape at him relatively close, he dislodged the goggles, wiped it over the shirt near his bosom, put it back to his eyes and grinning the grin of a hyena said;
"And I am the "Dev Anand" of this village."
