Chapter 2: Vikrant

Seven-fifteen AM. The shop door opened and the man who walked in was not the boy I remembered. The boy I remembered was fifteen and sharp-angled and angry — the kind of angry that small-town boys wore like armour, the kind that came from a father who sold chikki on the highway and who drank what he earned and who left bruises that Vikrant covered with full-sleeved shirts even in May. That boy had stolen Tripathi-sir's Bajaj Chetak scooter and ridden it to the taluka boundary and been brought back by the police and had stood in the school assembly while the headmaster lectured about consequences and had not cried, had not apologised, had looked straight ahead with the specific, defiant stillness of a boy who knew that the worst thing that could happen to him had already happened at home.

This man was different. Taller — six feet, which was unusual for Hogwada, where men tended toward the compact, the economical, the Maharashtrian-average of five-seven. His uniform was pressed. Sub-inspector's stars on the shoulder. The moustache was regulation — not the flamboyant Marathi moustache of the movies but the trimmed, disciplined moustache of a man who understood that authority was a performance and that the moustache was a prop. He walked the way cops walk — deliberate, the weight distributed evenly, the awareness of the room immediate and total.

"Two kadak chai. Extra ginger."

Kamini was already making it. She had been making it since seven-twelve, anticipating the order with the specific, commercial telepathy of a shopkeeper who understood that regularity was revenue and that Vikrant Patil's forty rupees a day, six days a week, was nine hundred and sixty rupees a month, which was the electricity bill.

He noticed me. The noticing was not subtle — his eyes moved from the counter to me and stayed and the staying was three seconds longer than casual and two seconds shorter than staring and the precise duration told me that Kamini was right: he had been thinking about me.

"Tara Kulkarni."

"Vikrant Patil."

"You're back."

"I'm back."

"From Mumbai."

"From Mumbai."

"The commercial — the soap one—"

"Vim. Dishwash liquid. Not soap."

"Right. Your mother showed me."

"My mother shows everyone."

He smiled. The smile changed his face the way weather changes a landscape — the seriousness opened, the jaw softened, the regulation moustache became less regulation and more human. The smile of a man who had been a damaged boy and who had become, through whatever alchemy transforms delinquent sons of chikki-sellers into sub-inspectors, someone who smiled like he meant it.

"I used to steal things," he said. "Now I arrest people who steal things. That's either irony or character development."

"It's Hogwada. Here it's both."

He took his chai. Steel tumbler. The fingers that wrapped around it were large — working hands, hands that had been a boy's hands wrapped around the handlebars of a stolen Chetak and that were now a man's hands wrapped around a tumbler of kadak chai in a dead man's shop, and the distance between those two moments was twelve years and an entire reformation and a moustache and two stars on a shoulder.

"How long are you staying?"

"I don't know."

"Hogwada has a way of making temporary permanent."

"So I've heard."

"It's not the worst thing. The chai is good. The people are nosy but loyal. And the pothole outside Sharma Store has been there since 2014, which means the road department has forgotten we exist, which means nobody's coming to change us."

"That's either comforting or depressing."

"It's Hogwada. Here it's both."

He left at seven-thirty-two. I watched him cross Main Road — the sub-inspector's walk, the deliberate weight, the man who had been a boy who had been hurt and who was now responsible for ensuring that other people were not hurt, which was either the most natural career progression in the world or the most painful.

"Well?" Kamini appeared at my elbow. She had been watching me watch him.

"Well what?"

"Good kurta or bad kurta?"

"I'm wearing yesterday's clothes, Kamini."

"That's not what I asked."

"Good kurta. Definitely good kurta."