A new story, after ages

[There is a story behind this story. I wrote a number of short stories in the nineties, just to see whether I had lost the creative faculty since the days when I wrote If winter comes. Some of them were much appreciated by those I read them out to. Then the source seemed to dry up. For close to twenty years I haven't written another story. I started on this one in early 2020, and then lost track and stopped halfway. I don't know what gears and relays clicked inside my subconscious, but shortly after watching Jai Bhim I sat down at the keyboard and finished the story at one sitting last night.

I shall be glad to have thoughtful and observant comments. But don't bother to write in if all you can say is 'Good one Sir'!]

A thief’s story

‘Some of the strangest people are drawn into the detective dragnet from time to time’, remarked Dr. Mitra, almost sotto voce, staring into the dregs of his drink.

Priyanghsu’s ears pricked up at once, though. ‘I thought that that net was full of holes?’ he asked with mock innocence. He rarely lost a chance to needle the old man.

‘Don’t get fresh with me, young feller,’ growled the ex policeman, who had retired ten years ago as an Inspector General with the state police. ‘The vast majority of felons get arrested through routine, methodical, laborious police work, not through the smart tricks of the private sleuths that you read about in pulp fiction. And we’re cleverer than you think. If a lot of criminals get away, it’s because we’re not given a free hand…’ his voice trailed away, as if he was recalling bitter memories.

Some of us had smelled a story. Anish hushed Priyanghsu up, and said, ‘You were talking about strange people, Sir?’

That ‘Sir’ was unusual, and it made Dr. Mitra swivel a suspicious eye at him. But he didn’t seem peeved. ‘Care to get me another drink?’

We were a motley group of friends, some going back to high school, who gathered at one of our houses once every weekend, or at least tried to, for the traditional sort of Bengali adda. On an average evening nine or ten attended. There were doctors and lawyers, bankers and engineers and journalists among us, and we were all in our thirties or early forties, except for a well-heeled restaurant chain operator in his mid-fifties, and of course ex-IG Mitra, who was the senior most member. We told one another stories, cooked group dinners and had a few drinks, helped one another out in times of trouble. Mostly we told stories.

Crossing his dhoti clad legs (he had always dressed in uniform or jeans and blazer in his professional days, he had told us, but lately he had become fond of dhoti and kurta), Dr. Mitra pulled his favourite bolster close and nursed his second drink meditatively. ‘Oh, yes, a strange lot indeed,’ he murmured. ‘There was a bank officer like you once, Priyangshu, who had taken up tantra on the sly, and we nabbed him before he could put his plans for making a human sacrifice into effect’. Priyangshu looked startled, and vaguely guilty. He was going to mumble some sort of protest, but Dr. Mitra ignored him and carried on. ‘Then there was a transporter who had started blackmailing a movie starlet in the hope that she would get him a role in one of her forthcoming films, convinced that he needed just one break to become a hit. There was an airport manager who was helping sleeper terrorists to get in and out of the country because he was convinced they could make it a better place to live in. And then there was the rich man who hated rich men…’

‘That’s odd,’ I ventured. ‘Why should he?’

‘How much do we understand about the workings of the human mind, dear boy?’ shot back Dr. Mitra. ‘Do you want a philosophical argument or a story?’

‘Story, story,’ we cried in unison, and he seemed to be mollified.

*****

‘There was a spate of rather odd robberies from the houses of affluent and well-connected people in the city about thirty years ago. At first they were too minor to be reported, and if reported, we didn’t seriously bother to investigate… we often let things slide that way, you know; we always have too many things on our plate not to have to prioritize of necessity.

‘I was DC crime branch in the metropolitan police in those days. Eventually too many reports of the same sort began to pile up on my assistant’s desk, until he was forced to draw my attention to them. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern, except that the thieves never stole cash, and usually not even jewellery, only things that were of great intrinsic worth to the owners themselves – small family heirlooms, art objects, presents or awards given on very special occasions, that sort of thing, things whose loss would hurt badly, because they couldn’t be replaced. Usually they couldn’t even be sold off, because it would be too easy to trace the source. So what could be the motivation? And the cases were scattered all around the city, some even in the well-appointed suburbs, or so the reports from many different thanas indicated. Nor could the aggrieved parties recall anyone in particular who had a serious enough grudge against them to do this sort of thing just to spite them. In every case the domestics were picked up, interrogated, the usual threats and blandishments wielded, to no avail. They were obviously not just innocent but plainly bewildered. The crooks were skilled professionals, that much was for sure: they virtually left no trace, no clues that help your Sherlocks so much…

Eventually one or two of the robbers slipped up, so they were arrested on suspicion. They were too clever to be caught red-handed, though, and the stolen goods were never found. We did all we could short of giving them the third degree (which you can’t do in the case of such relatively petty crimes anyway) but they were tight like clams; not a loose word slipped from their lips that could give us a lead. We could only surmise by and by that they were in someone’s employ, someone who paid them very well and had somehow even otherwise earned their complete loyalty, so that they would never squeal on him. Someone who had money and cunning and a very strange reason to keep doing what he was doing.

It occurred to me that the only way we could eventually find some sort of trail was to keep inquiring about someone, any one person in particular, whom all the victims knew, who had at some time or other visited them at home and come to know them well. Think about how slow and arduous that kind of investigation can be, how annoying to both sides. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Eventually the needle did begin to waver in one particular direction, but it was all too uncertain to merit a search warrant, let alone an arrest. It would have probably come to nothing, and we would have given up in despair and turned our attention to more pressing things, if the mastermind didn’t eventually show his hand himself. Some of his recruits, if we may so call them, were ill in custody, or their families were suffering, and he was careless in sending them help, careless enough for us to be able to set a tail on him.

This tail was a cat burglar who had turned informant in exchange for a greatly reduced sentence. He came to us one day with the tip that someone who seemed to fit our speculative description – rich, unsocial, secretive, and had sometimes been a guest at the houses of several of the victims – was looking for a man like him to carry out a robbery. It was a framed doctoral certificate in the name of a steel tycoon, scion of a fifth generation business family with high political connections, a man who liked to be seen hobnobbing in intellectual circles and was ashamed of his little secret, namely that he had dropped out of college. The detective in charge wired the informant when he went to receive instructions, but it was only from an intermediary who named no names and only specified a drop location. Even the drop was collected by a slum boy who was barely out of school, and when we nabbed this kid with the stolen article on him, his mother went berserk, and that brought the big fish into our net at last, because, silly and large-hearted as he was, he couldn’t bear the thought of a poor little boy being beaten up in police custody for his sake. In exchange for an immediate release of the boy with no charges, he volunteered over the phone, made from a pay booth, to come clean, but far away from police precincts. So the detective met him and took him home, though it was highly irregular, because the man did not seem to fit the regular image of any kind of criminal at all. And that is where he told his strange story.

*****

This Mr. Sarkhel (the name is obviously fictitious) was a most unprepossessing man, pushing fifty, thickset, his skin rather dark, his hair gray and balding, walking with a slow stoop, and talking with a slight stutter. There was a thick black mole on his right cheek. When he arrived in the detective’s house, he was dressed simply in dhoti and kurta … rather as I am now, but made of rougher material, and old fashioned, polished black pumps. He was visibly ill at ease, and yet there was a strange air of quiet pride and self-possession about him. It took the police officer some time to make him relax, and then he gradually grew voluble. It was an autumn evening, growing dark, and as he spoke from his shadowed corner, his voice seemed to become disembodied.

‘How can we be sure you are not covering up for someone else?’ he was asked.

‘Come on, detective babu, why should I?’, he smiled,  ‘I’m sure you have noticed a pattern in the thefts – the pattern of no pattern at all if you like – and who else could possibly stand to benefit from my confession?’

‘Well, then, what persuaded you to give yourself up?’

‘I told you, the most important thing was that I couldn’t bear to live with the knowledge that someone else, and a child at that, was going to suffer for my sins. Besides, it was a long drawn out folly anyway, and I had begun to grow tired of it. I would have stopped by myself soon enough, I think. There are other, better games to play…’

‘What made you start on this so-called game?’

‘Oh, I was angry, and I wanted to cause a little pain to some people whom I had come to despise deeply.’

‘That won’t do, you know. I need details. Start from the very beginning.’

‘What details do you want to know? It’s tied up with my whole life’s story, and that would be too long and boring for a busy man like you.’

‘No no, I have time enough, go on. Tea?’

He hesitated a little before launching on his tale, as if marshalling his thoughts. ‘Sir, my father was a primary schoolteacher in East Pakistan. He revered education, and instilled a passionate love of books in me. But our family was uprooted during the furious upheaval shortly before the war of liberation for Bangladesh. We had to cross over the border in a panic stricken hurry, my parents, little sister and I – I was 17 then – and arrived in Kolkata almost in the clothes we stood in, with no money to survive on for more than a couple of months. We found shelter in what was then called a refugee colony in the suburbs. My father had to start life anew in middle age, vending fish from door to door, while my mother became a cook in rich men’s houses.

Within a couple of years my father became too ill to keep on earning a halfway decent living. That is when I decided to quit school and step into his shoes to keep the home fires burning. I was determined that my mother shouldn’t have to work as a domestic help for long, and that my sister at least should get a proper education. – she’s a senior nurse in a government hospital now Sir, married to a drugstore owner who is a keen amateur actor on the side, with two lovely children; I hope you won’t drag them into this mess I have made. Please Sir.’

‘We shall see about that. You should have thought of such things before you put yourself into this mess, as you call it. But go on…’

‘Well, Sir, I sold fish from door to door like my father, but I kept my eyes and ears open. I gradually got to know the ins and outs of the bheri – fish culture – business, and the kind of profits one could make in it. If only I had a bit of capital to start off, I used to daydream.

Fortune smiled on us when I was 22. I won a big lottery. Out of the blue I had nearly ten lakh rupees in cash, and that was a lot of money in those days. I put it all into the wholesale fish trade, found a patron who was getting too old to do the dog’s work, and slogged at it night and day, put my heart and soul into it, all the while living as frugally as I could. Business is a great deal about luck too, and I was lucky. I won’t bother you with the details, Sir, but in fifteen years’ time I owned two of the largest bheris in Bengal, and have now branched off into the trawling business, exporting shrimp from Vishakhapatnam. I also invested well into the nascent housing boom in this city, and that paid off handsomely. I have multiplied my initial investment several hundredfold.

By that time my father was gone, and I had married off my sister and got married myself, and moved in with my mother into a large, well-appointed villa in one of the posh new outskirts of the city. That is when I began to develop an urge to be accepted by the élite of Bengal. And that is when I had a series of very nasty shocks.

I did all the things people do: getting a good address, liveried servants and several nice cars, club memberships, rubbing shoulders with prominent politicians in exchange for hefty donations to party funds, attending thousand-rupees-a-plate celebrity parties (this was the early nineties, remember, said Dr. Mitra in an aside), the works. I was naïve enough to think that that would give me an entrée into high society. But it wasn’t too long before it was brought home to me that all I was getting was cold disdain from the high and mighty – and even more so, by their spoilt, useless, snooty wives and children! My wife was a plain housewife, rustic in their eyes; we had not gone to famous schools, we spoke broken English haltingly, we had no family history to boast of, our money was new money, still smelling of sweat I suppose, we hadn’t seen Paris and Rome, London and New York, so we just hadn’t managed to arrive. Our receptions were poorly attended, and our invitations rarely returned by anybody who didn’t owe me a favour in the line of business. There came a point when I began to thank God we did not have any children, who might have suffered even worse at the hands of these snobs.

What made it all the more galling was that I began to notice how ignorant most of these so called ‘high-class’ people were, how poorly read (I have read a lot, Sir, believe me, even if mostly in Bengali, and I know something about art and music too), how ill-mannered, how contemptuous of the weak and the poor, how uncharitable unless there were photo ops – in a word, uncivilized, by the standards of civilization my father had drilled into me. Their conversation was mostly banal and superficial, no better than what you get to overhear in roadside tea stalls. Yet they despised me for my caste, for the colour of my skin, for my indifference to overvalued branded products, you name it. At the same time, they were not at all ashamed, indeed they boasted in their own circles, of how they kept adding to their piles by cheating and bribing all and sundry – tax authorities, employees, customers, the media, low level government functionaries, their own in laws. Worst of ironies, these extremes of social prejudice and discrimination were not only tolerated but actually considered normal and eternal in a state that was ruled by a party that called itself communist, that preached equality and brotherhood!

These people who barely noticed me and scoffed at me behind my back gradually drove the iron into my soul. Little by little this mad desire to hurt them where it would hurt badly took possession of me. What could I do to get some of my own back?

Call it childish if you please, or mean or stupid or whatever, it doesn’t matter now. It occurred to me that the only thing that would hurt them was to lose the trinkets they so dearly prized, so loved to show off – a trophy here, a medal there, a degree, a citation, an heirloom with a story, things of that sort. I didn’t care for them, they had no value in my eyes any more than they did in the marketplace, but I figured it would give me a kick to hear of them mourning their petty little losses. So I began to list people I had visited at home, things I had seen, things I would like to remove from their owners. And then I got in touch with people who could get them for me. That part was easy; in your so called underworld, I have a lot of people in my debt for one thing or another. You know the rest of the story.

What are you thinking, Sir? Do you intend to turn me in? Do I deserve to have my name, my business, my family ruined, and spend much of the rest of my life in jail?’

There was a long pause. The detective sahib was thinking. ‘You know it’s not as easy as that. You asked for a private interview, without a recording of the conversation, and I have kept my word. So now I have no confession, and even if I did, it would be my word against yours, with no corroborating evidence unless you lead us to your hoard, which you have probably long disposed of anyway – I’d credit a man of your intelligence with that much. No one will come forward to bear witness against you in court, you can hire the best lawyers, and they would claim ‘framing’, I know that and you know. At best it would be a long drawn legal battle, and the police might end up with egg on their faces. I am sure you calculated those eventualities before you decided to see us, didn’t you?’

He smiled a slow smile, his eyes hooded. ‘Why did you bend rules to see me and hear me out, Sir, may I ask?’

It was the detective’s turn to be uncomfortable. ‘I had personal reasons to be interested. Let’s leave it at that. Talk turkey – are you willing to stop pursuing this hobby of yours once and for all? Do you give me your word?’

‘Does my word count for so much with you?’ his voice was solemn, with a slight tremor in it. ‘I swear by my dead father then.’

‘Let us leave it at that. I shall write up this interview as a meeting with an obviously harmless crank whose story didn’t hang together, and that will be it. Case closed, unresolved.’

The detective stood up, and so did the ‘thief’. They shook hands solemnly before the visitor was shown out. He said ‘You don’t have to drop me anywhere Sir. I’ll take a bus to where my car is waiting for me. You didn’t ask for my name, address or phone number; you didn’t take my photograph, so please do me one last favour: don’t have me tailed home.’

The host nodded. He thought he heard a muttered ‘Thank you’ before the visitor vanished, out of his life forever.

‘No similar case of theft was reported to the city police for all the rest of the years I was in the service,’ concluded Dr. Mitra.

*****

A long silence, while we finished our drinks, and Mitra’s glass was refilled. Then Priyanghsu, idiot as he is, had to blurt out: ‘That detective was uncommonly sympathetic to this weirdo of a thief, wasn’t he? Could it be that he was none other than…?

‘Ask no questions and you will be told no lies,’ cut in Dr. Mitra. ‘Need to know, son, need to know. But yes, my father was a poet who died ill and hungry, because he was an ardent lifelong socialist, the idealistic sort the politicians rejected and forgot once they tasted the loaves and fishes of office. Now I must bid you good night.’