MANGALA RAPE ACCUSED ACQUITTED BY JUSTICE KUMAR
“Papa, what does acquit mean?” Tarika asked, worried if she
had pronounced it correct. Justice Kumar looked up from his plate at once and
trained his eyes on his daughter.
“Where did you learn that word, beta?”
“I think I heard it on the news yesterday. I saw you
on the TV, Papa! Mama also saw!” she exclaimed in glee, hoping she would not
have to reveal the real source of her newfound vocabulary so soon. Justice
Kumar gave no reaction to his TV appearance but resumed eating. Someone must
have told him already that he was famous, Tarika figured.
Justice Kumar ate his omelette in silence and drew in
a long breath as he drank his milk. He had known the day would come for Tarika’s
mother and him to talk to the girl about good
touch and bad touch. They had discussed
when to broach the topic with her and how to approach the questions she might
have. But for a day
he couldn’t convict rapists for a lack of evidence, much less explain to his
ten year old why he had acquitted a
bunch of men who had touched another
person in the worst way imaginable, he certainly wasn’t prepared. He wasn’t equipped for the day he would fail to
achieve a conviction in spite of the eyes of the accused bearing irrefutable
testimony to their crime. Was this failure his, of Metropolitan Magistrate
Kumar’s? Or a failure of the public prosecutor who did not present his case
well enough, or a failure of the police who bungled up the investigation from
the very beginning? Or the failure of an entire system that hopelessly,
repeatedly faltered in its duty to sift truth from lies and bad from good? Was
this a failure at all, and not karma’s
way of freeing criminals for a fate worse than prison?
“What does acquit mean, Papa?” Tarika punctured his rumination.
“Tell me, Tarika: what does your teacher do when she
catches girls talking in class?”
“She makes them kneel in one corner of the classroom.”
“And what does your teacher do when she can’t catch
them talking?”
“Nothing,” Tarika said, matter-of-factly.
“That means your teacher acquits them. She can’t punish them because
she can’t be sure that they are bad girls who have done something wrong.”
Justice Kumar hoped the logic in his simplistic analogy wasn’t too bad. Had he
lost his sense of good and bad last evening?
“If the girls talked but Teacher didn’t catch them,”
said Tarika, “They are still bad girls.”
“Yes, Tarika. You’re right,” he chuckled. “Bad people
who are not punished for their wrong actions are still bad people. But even if
the good people responsible for punishing them can’t punish them, karma will
catch up with them in the end. Nobody can escape their karma.”
“What’s karma?”
asked Tarika, hearing another word she could add to her vocabulary, completely
forgetting about the headline she was sitting on.
“Karma,” Justice Kumar said wistfully, “is what you
deserve for what you do. If you do good deeds, you get good karma, and only good
things will happen to you.” Justice Kumar paused; Tarika nodded to indicate
that she was following him. “If you do bad deeds, you will have bad karma, and bad things will
happen to you, sometime later in life or in your next life.”
Tarika opened her eyes wide and rolled them up as if
trying to fully absorb the philosophy of this new concept called karma. She
twirled her father’s words around in her head for a while and then said, “Good
people should get good things immediately and bad things should happen to bad
people instantly. Karma should be instant!” Justice Kumar laughed heartily at
this idea, so innocently wished for by his daughter, when he heard multiple
voices drawing towards the door. The next second, there were harsh knocks on
the timber. He hurried to bolt all the latches as Mrs. Kumar came running out
to the dining area. Justice Kumar motioned her to take Tarika away into the
bedroom and stay put there.
Through the peephole, he could see two burly
moustachioed men banging and rasping at the door with hockey sticks in their
hands. The spark that had set off at the Sessions Court after yesterday’s
verdict spread as wild fire across the city, fuelled through the night by the
media and ended up a conflagration at his door. He rushed to the window across
the hall and saw dozens of frenzied people on the street, calling him a villain
and summoning him outside. As he quickly drew his windows shut, he heard a
scream and a simultaneous sound of his car’s windshield shattering on the
porch.
BEAT CONSTABLE JADHAV was on his early morning round
of the area. He stopped his motorcycle beside a dump truck and thrust his hand
at the driver’s window, collecting his daily toll of fifty rupees. This was a
convenient sum agreed upon by the constable and the truck driver for
overlooking the disposal of garbage on this street corner, instead of having to
drive to the landfill site thirty kilometres from the city each day.
The driver
spat out his paan as he pressed the
dumping lever and offloaded the day’s garbage over the months’ mounting heap.
Some of the paan spittle splashed on
Jadhav’s khaki trousers, but he did not mind and readied to resume his round.
He had to hurry before it turned seven, to the water and milk tankers and
collect his tolls for overlooking the pilfering of water and adulteration of
milk. These would contribute the majority of his morning’s earnings before the
actionable fruit and vegetable vendors set up their carts. His was a thankless
job if not for these morning customs and duties.
He turned away as he spotted a man peeing on the
garbage pile and revved his engine, when his walkie-talkie crackled to
life: 'All units proceed to Thanapur Jail immediately.' A call
to the Jail at this early an hour? What could it possibly be? thought Jadhav,
starting for Thanapur. He caught up with a Police jeep shortly on the way and
asked the officers what it was about.
“Don’t you know?” one of the officers in the jeep
said, “There’s been some ruckus in the Jail. Bloody prisoners must have fought
at the prayer assembly. The two death row inmates in there have died and many
others have been injured. They need more manpower at the Jail to keep the
situation from blowing up. Hey, what’s that?” The jeep and Jadhav slowed down
as the officer pointed to a congregation near the judicial colony. A large
crowd appeared to be bellowing war cries against the Metropolitan Magistrate in
relation to the Mangala rape verdict. “Go see what is happening there,” the
officer instructed Jadhav, “We’ll continue to Thanapur.”
There were close to a hundred men and women trampling
Justice Kumar’s lawns. Some of them brandished hockey sticks; others held
stones and were hurling choice expletives. A few stray dogs had come bounding
from their alleys and were barking hysterically around the mob. The crowd tried
to drive them away and presently, a couple of men began to flay them with their
hockey sticks. Suddenly, out of the throng, a man broke loose followed by a
woman on his heel. They came sprinting, one after another, till they halted by
the uniformed Jadhav.
“He stole my mangalsutra off my neck!” yelled the
woman pointing at the man’s hand. Jadhav looked at the man: he was visibly in
agonising pain. Sure enough he was caught red-handed, for the necklace had tied
itself tight as a tourniquet on his right wrist, which had been severely cut by
it and was oozing blood from the gash. Jadhav couldn’t help but gape at the
man, confounded as to why he had done this to himself. He would bleed to death
in minutes.
“Help me! Please. This woman wants to kill me!” bawled
the man. But before Jadhav knew it, the woman was flogging the man silly while
the man flailed his arms at the woman. A few feet away, the mongrels now held
the hockey sticks in their jaws and were mauling their assailants who lay on
the ground helplessly covering their heads. The outer circles of the crowd had
turned their attention to the bizarre battles in progress behind them when the
sound of glass shattering issued from near the house. The crowd on the porch
parted to let the man who had broken Justice Kumar’s windshield fly up into the
air. There the man floated five feet above the ground with the hockey stick
still in his hand when the shards of the smashed screen rose up collectively,
swarming around him like angry bees whose honeycomb had been destroyed, and
attacked him - stinging and cutting him in midair. Jadhav could not believe
what he saw.
The other protesters viewing this, dropped their jaws
and the stones they had held, not out of fear or disbelief, but out of an
involuntary compulsion that also made the abuse hurlers cough and gag on their
words and break into convulsions. Meanwhile, the garbage on the street corner
had taken flight as if on the wing of a giant wind and was quickly joined in the
air by the copious amounts of pee and paan spittle that had trickled down the
rubbish over the years. The packets of adulterated milk sealed just this
morning tore themselves open and the pilfered water, separating itself from the
milk, traversed its way back into the water tanker.
The garbage gale had now
collected tickets, cigarette butts, wrappers, a variety of plastics and was
whirling in a hurricane that grew faster, bigger, denser as it picked up more
and more man-made waste. Several similar trash tornadoes had started in
different parts of the city and merged with bigger typhoons they met on their
paths. Within the hour, all the unattended debris, garbage and sewage in the
city had converged into a single black, menacing mass. The people still on Justice
Kumar’s lawns could smell the foul stench as it advanced toward the judicial
colony.
Constable Jadhav felt his pockets wriggle and then the bribes he had
collected during his dawn patrol tumbled out of his pants, circled his face
jeeringly for a while and flew up and away to join the Great Badness that
turned darker and more ferocious with the addition of illicit funds to its
campaign and assumed the shape of a mushroom cloud looming over the city’s sky.
JUSTICE KUMAR HAD locked himself in his bedroom with
his wife and Tarika, and shuttered down all his windows. He rued the thought of
his car being battered beyond repair on the porch for no fault of his own, but
was relieved to have kept his family and himself sheltered from the wrath of
the masses outside. He was blissfully unaware of the fantastic goings-on beyond
the threshold of his house. He hoped that by now, the police had arrived to
clear the crowds and knew also that the press would have arrived before the
police, to cover the fracas.
He switched on the television to watch the news, half
expecting to be treated to the scenes outside of his house. Instead, he heard
accounts of unusual happenings in various parts of the country. Correspondents
from Mumbai reported on the weird theft at the Reserve Bank wherein the cash
from the State’s coffers had miraculously flown out of Headquarters and had
rained on the city’s population. But when people tried to grab these notes,
they flew off again. Journalists in Delhi claimed that in an unprecedented attack
on Parliament, several MPs had suffered sudden seizures and a couple of
ministers had succumbed to death in the midst of a session. It was not yet
clear what had leaked into the Lower House to trigger this mysterious
occurrence and if this was a deliberate attack on the legislators.
Justice
Kumar changed channels and saw that the bytes in from Bihar were even more
incredible. Eye witnesses swore they’d beheld known offenders becoming victims
of the self-same crimes that they had escaped being convicted for. Rapists had
been raped, kidnappers had been duct-taped, and killers had had their necks
sliced open. Mrs. Kumar grabbed the remote and switched to a local news
channel. It was carrying a story of how butchers’ knives and farmers’ sickles
had somehow turned against their erstwhile employers, sparing the lives of
poultry, crops and most food sources.
Tarika snatched the remote from her mother’s hand and
flicked to TV India, her favourite
channel that always featured the most uncommon news incidents. It was talking
about a widespread phenomenon called ‘Instant Karma’. Bad actions and sins were
being punished instantly, whereas good actions and favours were being rewarded
immediately. It was all an extremely bizarre business, but people were happy:
the crime and filth in the country were being washed away, while humankind had
finally found reason to be kind to each other. Supermarkets had extended a
take-all-you-can open sale, since they discerned that if customers didn’t pay
for what they took away, their inventories were magically replenished.
Small-time grocers followed suit to stay in competition and offered all their
wares for free; they too observed their storerooms overflowing with goods more
than those that they had given away.
Vehicle owners had taken to coercing pedestrians into
allowing themselves to be dropped to their destinations, for the motorists had
noticed their fuel tanks to be fortuitously full after each such favour. Nobody
felt the need to visit petrol pumps any more, and so oil companies started
giving discounts for people to get their vehicles filled from their stations,
to the very point of bankruptcy. But financial solvency had no meaning in a
world where money had lost its value. In fact, by late afternoon, when everyone
had realised how Instant Karma worked, money was no longer recognised as
tradable currency. Karma had replaced it as the mode of exchange. Faced with a
shortage of food, neighbours force fed people with whatever edibles they had
left, hoping the good karma they won through this goodwill gesture would stock
up their larders. Human beings went to doing good to others with the ulterior
motive of benefitting themselves.
Darkness descended early that day because of the Great
Badness that hung over the sky. Human activity however, had intensified as
people scrambled to perform good deeds upon others in a selfish bid to earn
some commodified karma. The government had been quick to pass a law classifying
good karma and bad karma, and economists had devised a method to quantify it.
With such models, one could calculate precisely how much karma one would gain
or lose with every action. Armed with these studies, humans converted their
salaries and shares into karma terms and started trading it on a newly
established Karma Stock Exchange.
AT ELEVEN PM of what had been the single weirdest day
of his life, Justice Kumar turned off the television and went to tuck Tarika in
her bed.
“This Instant Karma doesn’t bode well,” he said to
Tarika. “I may lose my job tomorrow. They won’t need a Judge to tell right from
wrong or good from bad when karma takes care of everything! Anyway, this whole
system of karma is flawed. Because the truth is, Tarika, nothing is absolutely good or bad. Evil exists in this world
because good does, and without absolute evil, even good karma turns rotten...” With
this, Tarika’s holiday ended as she drifted off to sleep.
She woke up at dawn and read in the papers what her
wishful thinking had set off in the world the previous day. But when she set
out for school at seven, the world was back to normal. Humans had been restored
to being punished with instantaneous guilt for bad actions and to getting
rewarded with immediate happiness for unconditional favours. The Instant Karma
of yesterday seemed like a distant dream today as Tarika was led by her father
to the corner of the street, where she would board her bus to school. Beat
Constable Jadhav turned around the corner at the same moment her school bus
arrived. She saw Constable Jadhav, the bad goodman smile at Justice Kumar, the
good badman as the bus sped away.
■
[27 Jul - The results for the competition were announced in the Sunday Herald today. I read the winning entry and was not particularly impressed. Perhaps I should choose the competitions I enter into more wisely. In any case, deadlines get me to put pen to paper. So it's all good.]
