My friend in Delhi was not his usual ebullient self on the phone the other morning. When I asked why the day had begun poorly for him, he said the reason was not he but the fellow who washed his car. Such people not turning up once in a while was par for the course, I said. No, he has turned up but he almost didn’t make it, replied my friend.
The fellow had gone to New Delhi railway station to see off a relative the previous night. It was at the peak of the Jat agitation and all trains in north India were getting delayed. After what seemed like ages, the train finally left and our man walked out hoping to catch a late-night bus. But that was not to be. A couple of men in dreaded wardi stopped him, quizzed him and demanded to see his ticket. He was in luck, he thought, and fished out the platform ticket. But this is valid for two hours and you’ve been loitering here for four hours now, they said.
What to do saab, the train was delayed. Nothing doing, pay up or else we will put you in the lock-up, they threatened. His protestation that he was gareeb fell on deaf ears, his pockets were searched and he was relieved of all the 20-odd rupees he had. Result? Sans bus fare, he had to trudge on foot all the way back to Punjabi Bagh. Thoroughly shaken by his ill luck, he decided not to tempt fate further by dozing off and being absent from work. So there he was washing the car as on any other morning.
My cell phone kept ringing and it was a while before I realised that I was not dreaming that it was and picked it up in the wee hours of the morning. Baba, said my agitated daughter from the other end, please tell these policemen that I am not eloping with Aaftab and his friend but we are all going to Mussoorie for a long weekend. My blood froze, as would of any parent whose young daughter lives alone in Delhi, eagerly pursuing her career.
But why at this hour, I asked in suppressed worry and anger. Naturally, she said, in the tone reserved by grown-up children for their parents, and added, office got over at six, we took a while getting started and we are now just outside Dehradun. As she spoke, my fear that she was in some kind of trouble subsided and anger rose over the policemen detaining them.
In the curtest tone that I could employ, I asked the policeman what the matter was and his reply only raised my blood pressure further. You know what is happening saab, he said. That was a period when the papers were full of stories about eloping couples chased by enraged relatives and militant panchayat leaders dead against a union that broke some social code.
I raised my voice a little and asked if they looked like scared youngsters fleeing outraged relatives. They were working grown-ups on a holiday. The insincerity in the policeman’s voice was palpable as he explained that he was only doing his duty in ensuring that eloping couples were safe. My aggressive tone and the mixture of tact and firmness on the part of my daughter enabled her and her friends to escape the grasp of the policemen without paying anything.
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The experience of our son late one night in a working-class area of Mumbai was of an altogether different order. His auto-rickshaw was stopped, he was asked to alight and after a few perfunctory queries one of the policemen asked him whether he was a mussalman. He said no and the cop asked in a tone of admonishment why he wore that dirty-looking beard. Their interest dwindling, one of them saw his laptop and asked where he was returning from. Work, he told his sceptical interlocutors and added, I write scripts for films.
The atmosphere was transformed. The cop called the other policemen in the party, introduced our son and the group immediately launched into a pattern-less discourse on scenes and aspects of recent films. One of them had a nephew who was an assistant film editor and our son, a decent actor in his own right, showed he was impressed. He then promised to incorporate some of their ideas in his next script and left.
But none of these experiences can equal mine when I was stopped just outside the Ashok hotel in Bangalore a few years ago at what must have been close to midnight. The round table with bankers had gone off well and a few of us seniors had relaxed a bit too long over too many drinks. I didn’t need a policeman to tell me I was drunk and ought not to be driving in that condition. As he got ready to book me I did the usual — identified myself as a journalist who was returning from “work”.
His expression changed. He started protesting that journalists got away with murder. It was clear that he was there not to actually chalaan lawbreakers but to fleece those coming out of the hotel at that hour. He was also clear that come what may, there would be no personal gain for him from me. As I slowly drove off, I thought this was the one time when I could have been booked nice and proper and not had a leg to stand on, or two wobbly ones to be precise.