Babu’s pain was better and some colour had come back to his face. “He will have to stay here for the night. Tomorrow, I will see him and decide if he can be sent home. He will need antibiotics for ten days and he should be careful not to let dust or water get into his ear for at least six weeks,” said the doctor to the attendee who waited on the patient. This was two weeks ago. Now here were the two of them again. The boy in good spirits. Suresh did an otoscopy on him again and saw with satisfaction that the drum was healing well and the tear was beginning to close from its ends. “You have to be careful for another three weeks,” he told them. “Why are you looking so worried?” he asked the father. “It’s about the FIR, doctor, they have booked a case against us. I went there so many times to beg them to withdraw it. But they say it has already gone into the files and nothing can be done. I tried to meet the panchayat members, but none of them will help. “Just two days ago, Babu and I were going for work, and along the road came a big lorry with wood. It was going down to the plains. Babu asked me, ‘Appa, what about all that wood? We gathered just an armful and look at what they did to us.’
“‘What to do, Son?’ I told him. ‘That lorry belongs to Shanmugam, a big landlord from a village 10 kilometres away. His men provide every provision for the ranger’s family, in addition to handsome gifts. What have we to offer?’” “Doctor,” he continued mournfully, “I also heard that people like us are implicated in small cases so that they can make up the numbers to meet their target. They have to have booked a certain number of cases to satisfy their superiors. That is the system. I don’t know what to do, Doctor, we don’t have money for a lawyer. It will probably be prison for me, or at best, a fine whose interest I will be paying for the rest of my life. I am finding it difficult to sleep, Doctor. Please can you give me something, just for a few days?”
Suresh wrote out a prescription for them and soon they were gone; but not from his mind, where they lingered for many days. As he trudged home that afternoon, he thought about them, about the system and especially about the target. How can you fix a target for crime? he reasoned with himself. I wish it were not there. True, the big fish get away, which they did anyway. At least the innocent poor won’t have to be sacrificed to meet the target. If he had the power to do away with it, he would have done it that instant. As he neared the house, Suresh took out the inland letter he had received in the mail that morning. He knew it was from his mom, the small neat handwriting with a lot of standalone letters was so unmistakable, and he had seen it from the time he could remember. He tore it open and smiled as he read. She wanted him to come home. Well, this was nothing new. But Suresh realised it was almost six months since he had been to see her. He would go next week, he decided. That evening, he went down to the phone booth and called his friend in Oddanchatram for a bus ticket to Cochin for Thursday. Then he phoned his mom and told her; as expected, she was ecstatic.
Thursday afternoon saw Suresh walking down to the Pachalur village with a backpack on his shoulder. The late afternoon wore a lazy look. The leaves were limp, the air hazy, even a bumble bee that came by seemed lethargic in its flight. The tired sun was waning behind the tops of the tall casuarinas rising on the slopes to the right. Even nature seemed to advocate the idea of the proverbial siesta. Earlier that day, he had helped the others finish the morning’s outpatients and the weekend would usually be light. There were only four buses out of Pachalur, and one was scheduled for 4 pm. This was the one he was planning to catch. It was not an easy task to get sitting space on one of these trips. It called for a good amount of planning and some luck.
This service started at K.C.Patti a few kilometres further up into the hills. By the time it reached Pachalur, it would be more than half full. He reviewed his options as he neared the clearing in front of the temple, which also stood in for the local bus stand. What he saw did not give him much cheer. There were enough people there to fill two buses. Some would have come to say goodbye and maybe some others were just hanging around, thought Suresh hopefully. Whichever way it was, the situation called for some scheming. He could see a few young fellows standing some distance along the road, in the direction from where the bus would come. Clearly, their strategy was to get on the bus while it was still moving. Suresh was not game for this, especially with the rather large pack on his back. There were a few who had crossed the road, and now stood across from where the bus would stop. Suresh had some idea of what their plan was and he decided it would probably be his best bet. So he ambled across to join them. There was a stirring in the crowd, as the rumble of the bus was heard in the distance.
All attention was turned towards the south, from where the bus would turn into the village. Finally, it came into view. While it was still a distance away, the young men started running beside the moving vehicle. The leader of the pack made a lunge for the doorway, his hands found and gripped the rails and his feet found the first step. The others followed close behind him. The old crate was quite a sight. Its dilapidated frame carried a face that bore two square headlights, dull with age. Its radiator grill had vertical lines and the beat-up bumper seemed to curve downwards at the edges. Both the chrome and green paint were worn and chipped all around. It reminded Suresh of a strong, sad, stoic, old man. Suresh had no time to further dwell on the character of the beast as he ran up to the nearest window. He reached up with the Reader’s Digest in his hand and begged the young man with a beard sitting by the window, “Sir, please could you put this book by the empty seat next to yours?” “Okay,” said the man as he took the book. That done, he rushed to join the crowd that clogged the doorway. He was carried along as the throng slowly squeezed and shoved its way into the bus. He had his luggage held aloft over his head as he finally made it up the steps and squeezed his way to the seat that he had booked. The Reader’s Digest was still on it and the young man in the next seat smiled up at him as he sat down.
But the people standing in the aisle next to him scowled down at him resentfully, as though he had cut in on a queue of some kind. But Suresh felt he had only done what he had seen other people do; at the same time, he thought he was lucky that one of them had not brushed the book aside and claimed the seat, for he had seen heated disputes break out over just such a situation. “You people at the front move forwards, there is room enough to lie down there!” The irritated voice of the conductor quipped from the back. Lie down indeed! thought Suresh. There was hardly room enough for a fly in here. Finally, the driver lugged his vehicle into gear and the engine groaned as it struggled to pull away from the curb. If you had seen it from behind, you would have wondered how it could move at all. There was a jumbled mass of legs and hands hanging out of the doorway; so much so that the vehicle was leaning pathetically towards one side. In addition, there were people on the roof and ladder rungs that climbed up to it. You could see the bus as you might see a hive through a mass of bees. Suresh shoved his luggage between his legs and under the seat and settled in. A variety of scents assailed his nostrils; among them, he could make out the smell of sweat and cow dung. But soon, these were displaced by the fresh mountain air that rushed in through the windows as the bus picked up speed. In less than 10 minutes, its murmurs and creaks grew noticeably louder, as it took the first of fourteen hairpin bends that would take them down to the plains. This first leg of the road was steep and soon, his ears popped as the air grew thicker. Then the road ran flat, as it meandered around the shores of the Parapalar Lake.
As usual, he was taken in by the beauty of the water and the hills that made up the scene. Little did he realise that so many of his happy memories would one day be linked to this body of water. As they neared the town, passengers kept climbing on at every stop. Just when Suresh thought that it wouldn’t hold one person more, somehow two more would squeeze in. The old behemoth groaned under the weight. Finally, it reached the Chatram bus stand and disgorged its hoard. You could hear its tired muscles creaking and sighing in relief, as people spilled out. Suresh had a long wait ahead of him, which he spent with some other travellers in a thatched shed outside the travel agent’s office. It was 9 pm by the time the coach pulled in. When Suresh saw it, he could not help comparing it to that other vehicle that had brought him down from Pachalur. This luxury transport was a far cry from its poor old country cousin that faithfully plied the hills. It was long, sleek and lily-white in colour, with more than its share of chrome and glass. On the side was painted in bold stylish dark blue font: Andean Condor. That was its name and come to think of it, it did look like it could take to the sky at a moment’s notice. Suresh climbed in and found his place. The seats were comfortable and could be tilted back, which suited Suresh who was longing to sleep, tired as he was. However, the onboard TV that was playing a Tamil movie kept him awake. He had no wish to see all the violence and gore, but it pervaded his senses even with earplugs and blinds for his eyes. Thankfully, in another 45 minutes, the film ran to its end. The screen phased out, so did the annoying noise and he fell asleep. While he slept, the bus steadily bore him westwards across the vast dry plains of interior Tamil Nadu, through a gap in the mountains and into Kerala with its hilly terrain clothed in green. Had not man domesticated the land, it would have remained a dense rainforest to this day. When he awoke, the bus had stopped and the conductor was shouting out, “Anybody for Angamaly? Anybody for Angamaly?” The few who were to get off were already well on their way down the aisle; no one else stirred, even though the din had awakened everybody. Angamaly was a town about 50 kilometres from his destination—Cochin. Cochin was also the last stop for the bus. Suresh knew that he had another hour’s journey left to him. The engines throbbed as the bus started to move again. It lurched and heaved itself over the kerb and on to the highway. Suresh watched the neon and fluorescent lights whizz by, and then darkness as they crossed a river. On the other side were more lights. It is so different from Tamil Nadu, he thought, where on a night like this, there would be miles and miles of dark uninhabited stretches between the brightly lit towns. Here, semi-urban areas coalesced together to make the difference between town and country more difficult to discern. He must have slept again, for when he woke the bus had turned into MG road. It screeched to a halt a few minutes later. “Last stop, last stop,” yelled the conductor. Suresh got his stuff together and climbed down out of the bus. It was still dark outside. A few autorickshaws were waiting for the slew of buses that came into this stop from distant cities; their weary passengers waiting to get to their destinations.
Suresh took one of these, after settling at a reasonable rate. Suresh had discovered that to get into these contraptions without settling the price was asking for an argument at the end of the ride. Few passengers won such a dispute and it left you with a bad feeling. The three-wheeler puttered its way, twisting artfully through by-lanes and narrow alleys, like a busy black and yellow bug endowed with wheels. Soon, he was on Sudershan Street—his parents’ home. Hardly had he stepped onto the road outside the gate when he heard a stirring from within. Papu, his old dog, had somehow sensed his presence. The creature yelped and then whimpered, rattling the door of his cage. How had this animal found he was there? Was it the smell or his voice? He would never know. Suresh put his hand through the bars and let loose the latch from the inside. The gate creaked on it hinges as it opened to him. He went straight to the door of Papu’s enclosure. He saw that the dog was beside himself with joy, jumping up and down in a frenzy. No sooner had Suresh slid the bolt back, when the big canine bounded out and put both his paws on his abdomen and nuzzled into his chest. Suresh rubbed him behind his ears and the animal whined with approval. Then he heard the front door being opened from within and he knew that behind that door stood another one that loved him. Loved him the way only a mother can. Suresh walked up to the front steps, with Papu trailing behind him, wagging not just his tail, but his whole rear end.
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