Instant Karma

[This was my entry for the Sunday Herald short story competition 2014. A big thank you goes out to Pallavi Prasad for staying up the night before the deadline to help with editing the piece.]

TARIKA SHUFFLED IN her seat at the breakfast table to hide the newspaper from her father as he walked in. His drooping visage made him look under the weather and he had not shaved or showered for the day. He was not wearing his usual black coat over a crisp white shirt with the cuffs out, but took his place next to Tarika in his vest and lungi from last night. His hands did not join palms before they picked up the knife and fork to cut his omelette with, nor did his moustache bristle to ask Tarika to pass him the pepper shaker. Justice Kumar did not notice that his ten-year-old daughter was still in her pyjamas at seven in the morning and not in her pinafore, ready for school. Maybe today, thought Tarika, he would not ask for the paper either.

This was one of those days she felt a little mischievous and felt like she could do whatever she pleased in the world, for Mama had a minute ago declared an unexpected off from school. Reading the newspaper now, she couldn’t contain her excitement on seeing her Papa’s name in big, bold letters on the front page. Her Papa was famous! She wanted to be the one to announce it to him when he came in for breakfast. But she wanted to know what the words meant before she read them out. She spread her thighs to peek at the headline as he entered. It screamed:

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.

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[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.]