14. Inside a Police Station

As days passed, the city shrank in size. Adampura and Jaitpura, particularly, had seemed quite outside the bounds of possibility the first six months, lying as they did at some unspecified distance in the north of the city. By January, with the advent of near-perfect weather, I told myself, “Why not?” and swung onto a rickshaw with the instruction, “Adampura thana!”

The journey that followed almost made me change my mind. We covered the greater part of the city, including the uphill and downhill of Chauk, the main crossings of Godaulia and Maidagin, and the grain market of Visheshwarganj. More than an hour after starting we stopped at a large, heavy, orange-red brick building, and the rickshawalla announced, “Pilikothi!” meaning “the yellow mansion.” This was, I discovered, the police station for Adampura ward, after whose hue the whole area was known as Pilikothi. Only outsiders like me called it Adampura; as with most places in Banaras, the area had an alias that its residents preferred, and every little neighborhood in the ward had several names that could be thrown out at you, but not “Adampura.”

Having resolved the dilemma of how much to pay a man for a ride that seemed too long for a rickshaw at all, I gingerly stepped into the police station. Not into the inspector’s room as was my habit, since he wasn’t in and I was prevented from entering by the guard, but into the more public, completely male record room, with railed-in counters at which sat the clerks and record keepers who registered complaints and filed the infamous “first information reports,” better known as FIRs. At every door was an armed policeman, and everywhere there were only men. Because policemen both work and live at police stations, they can be glimpsed in various postures of relaxation and various stages of undress, at any time of the day, since they work, as we all know, odd hours. All this is very awkward for a woman, and, as far as I know, no woman enters the record room of a police station. If she urgently needs to file an FIR, she can surely locate a brother, neighbor, or well-wisher to do so for her. There are women constables and sub-inspectors, of course, but so few that they are almost never seen. Nor, I think, does every thana have one. Less tangibly than all this, there is an ambience of maleness that pervades the average thana. The men develop an old-boy, clubbish mentality that leads them to use language, gestures, greetings, and so on not readily seen in the world of the family. They also leave possessions around such as packets of biri, pouches of tobacco, or, in Banaras, a langot (the Indian male version of the g-string), which reinforces the effect. Not only are the men none too careful about the finer points of dress, but also most of them are big and solid, a requirement for joining the police force. The inspector is likely to be the biggest and hulkiest of all, the most aggressively male, the most immune to female sensibilities, a regular old-boy club leader. After glimpsing such places, I was quite intrigued. I would have sat for the sub-inspector’s exam if I could have, joined the force, and then done research with the full freedom to poke around that my uniform gave me.

At Adampura thana I almost had a taste of that freedom. When I explained to the crowd of questioning policemen that I was interested in the station’s festival registers, they were too startled by the unusualness of my request to have a ready-made reply. They huddled among themselves but ultimately could only respond that the officer in charge was out and that I should sit down and wait. I was put on a chair in the best sunny spot on the verandah. After some time and persuasion, I was given a table and the festival register “just to look at” until the station officer returned.

This eminent personage breezed in one hour later. Remember that I was on a verandah inside, facing the courtyard that lay at the heart of the building, as in every old Indian structure. The inspector stood in the middle of the courtyard and roared for his lathi (bamboo pole). I then noticed a thin, ordinary man cringing in the shadows, being pulled out by policemen. The inspector started whacking him with the pole. The man would try to back off from the blows but would be pushed back into the middle of the courtyard to be targeted once again by the lathi. As he suffered more and more, he grew progressively desperate and had to be held as he was struck. I noticed then that although the inspector himself was a fat and terrible figure, none of the other policemen were. Most of them were of average size, even small and weak, and some were almost emaciated. They were grinning and enjoying the spectacle as if it were prime entertainment. The inspector made sense, as overblown and suggestive of inhumanity as his personage and position were, but these ordinary, starving policemen—starving, I mean, for good, clean fun, grinning as they were at a fellow man’s inflicted suffering—seemed totally pathetic and strange.

I watched the whole drama from my vantage point in the sun, my eyes growing bigger and bigger, my heart thumping harder and harder. No question but that I had reached the inner circles. I had wanted to know what goes on inside the privileged domains where the ordinary female does not peer, and here I was. This was what the menu had to offer! To say I was shocked is not quite sufficient. My eyes were wrenched open by the cruelty, the matter-of-fact brutality, and the mismatched show of physical strength that existed on a day-to-day basis. This was no exceptional day or exceptional situation, but rather as average a day as I, by simply breezing into the police station, could have picked. And the sheer drama of it was something that my timid, humdrum, middle-class background had not prepared me for. It made my nerves tingle and my stomach palpitate.

When Mr. Tripathi, the inspector, was quite done, the prisoner cowering in a corner in near collapse, he brushed the incident off his hands and noticed me for the first time. He walked past me into his office, signaling for me to follow him, saying expressionlessly over his shoulder, “This fellow has set fire to someone’s property! I got so angry…” In his office was another person who rather resembled the one beaten up and who looked rather scared at what he, like me, had witnessed. This, presumably, was the man whose property had been set afire. He sat in a corner of the room while the inspector dealt with me.

“What do you want?”

I gave the bare essentials of my purpose with a controlled face and voice.

“Do you know that these records are not public property?” thundered the officer.

I cited what is known as the Thirty Years’ Rule, by which all official records are open to the scrutiny of researchers after a thirty-year period. The inspector humphed and went away without a word, perhaps to think it over or perhaps to wash the blood off his hands. On his return, he was cooler and stared at me. “So what is the topic that you have been given?” This, I had discovered, was the form of verb always applied in Banaras to my research, not the topic that I had “chosen” or “picked” or “decided upon,” but the topic that I “had got” or “had been given.” It told me much about Ph.D. research in India.

“Oh, festivals and things,” I said hastily, aware that this was the point at which I sometimes went wrong. “Celebrations, processions, the things that people like to do for entertainment.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place—everything happens in Adampura. In fact you may as well do your research only on Adampura. This place has been around, do you know, from Baba Adam’s time.” My spirits leaped at his words; it was one of the only two responses possible to the statement of my research topic: either “Nope, there’s no material at all to be had here” or “All the material is here, and only here.” But with the close of his sentence, my flight of joy rudely ended. “Now,” he stared hard at me again, “our I.G.’s daughter is doing some research here, too.”

“Yes,” I said miserably. “That’s me.”

Mr. Tripathi then did an extraordinary thing. He jumped straight out of his chair, joined his palms in reverential greeting, and, bowing and smiling excessively, repeated, “Namastee! Namastee!!”

I brought his attention back to the festival registers, which of course were set before me, as, gradually, were platefuls of sweets and snacks. Now Tripathi had good taste in snacks, being basically a villager attuned to corn, orange juice, peas, peanuts, sugar cane, and chhena sweets, and he was simple enough to offer this rustic fare even to his most distinguished guest. He was also a large man, and to sustain his size he snacked often. That day, and in the many days to follow, our relationship was partly constructed on our mutual search for something to eat—I, with the miles I covered daily in the city and the mental exercises that accompanied them, and he, with his erratic duties, habits, and sheer appetite. He knew places and had ideas about food that were irresistible to me. So, whenever he was with me, as escort or guide, we spent a necessary part of our time taking breaks for snacks. Of course I justified these breaks on the grounds that they not only satisfied my hunger but also contributed in an essential way to my research, in that I was “discovering the eating places of Banaras.”

Mr. Tripathi was a Banarasi also, a different kind from my artisans Tara Prasad and Mohan Lal or the suave poets and writers of Kashipura and Madanpura, but no less typical for all that. His face resembled depictions of the wrestlers and weight lifters of old, as did his body, save for a growing paunch. That is, his face was broad, with a tiny stooping moustache forced up at the ends, his hair was on the long side, and a darkness and languor about it all that suggested nothing to me but I think aroused in traditional Indian (or just eastern U.P.?) minds the idea of beauty. Everything about him—face, girth, movements, laughter—was big, making him as typical a police inspector as a Banarasi.

That first day in his office, I was starving as usual, and after politely declining offers of refreshment at first, savored everything put before me. That gesture of acceptance was the end of any strict speeches I may have been planning on the subject of torture and physical abuse in police stations. I did raise the subject, but he was so unembarrassed about the incident that I decided to wait for a more effective moment, maybe, planned I with some satisfaction, after I had checked up with his I.G. as to the appropriate punishment for him. The punishment, let me tell the readers, never materialized. Not only did my father look bemused at the mention of the incident, but also he as much told me that such things were more the rule than the exception. As with liquor, drugs, prostitution, and violence in general, I had no desire to follow up the matter in any way, and it was slowly pushed to the back of my mind.

Once I had rearranged my perceptions to minimize the impact of this beating scene on me, I had progressively less difficulty in capitalizing on Tripathi’s help in discovering Adampura. He had been there long enough to know the place well, and in his own country bumpkinish way, got along well with all levels of people—though not, of course, the ones he beat up. I needed a guide to people and activities, say to the Shobe-raat festivities, an all-night event celebrated variously at tombs and shrines, impossible for me to reach on my own. But with Tripathi in his jeep and Abdul Jabbar guiding us, we covered shrine after shrine; and having spent only half the night, we felt we were doing so well that we ranged outside Adampura and attended shrines in other parts of the city as well. Tripathi’s protectiveness, his affectionate respect, indeed reverence, made me feel exceptionally secure by bringing back, I suppose, memories of my childhood.

One must remember that I had been brought up by policemen. Because of the way an officer’s household is constituted, it was policemen who had cooked for me, served me, taught me to ride a bicycle, accompanied me everywhere, played with me, and communicated to me my first lessons in gentleness, kindness, sweetness. I had never encountered violence or harshness anywhere. The closest I had come was the experience, as a child, of driving through our gates, where the armed guard would point his rifle at the entering car and shout, “Tham! Kaun ata hai?” (“Halt! Who comes there?”). I would undergo a few seconds of trepidation; what if the driver forgot the magic word of reply, “Dost!” (“Friend!”)? So over the years I retained a soft spot in my heart for policemen, and they remained—in spite of later wisdom—people I instinctively turned to for help, people I always spotted in a crowd. Even the knock-kneed raw recruits or junior constables in their half-pants aroused my affection and interest, certainly not my mockery or, as I was amused to note Rashdie write in Satanic Verses, a desire to escape “India’s clutches.”

I spent a long time at Adampura thana that day and on subsequent days, poring over the festival registers, which were unusually descriptive. I was even supplied a translator, who deciphered the older entries in scrawled Urdu. In one sense the ward did have “everything”—all the usual Hindu celebrations and Muslim ones, and some innovations besides, such as “the marriage of Lat Bhairav” and, thanks to the predominance of weavers, some “deviations” that seemed to belong only to them. I was rather overwhelmed and simply copied down the data; there was no question of anything making much sense at that early stage. No researcher should expect patterns to emerge and meanings to divulge themselves before the first year at least.

The police station also had Registers No. 8, the so-called Village Crime Notebooks, the nomenclature continuing even after areas had been squarely categorized as urban. In these, one register to a mohalla, there were actual statistics on the number of houses in each mohalla and the caste and occupational structure of the neighborhood, as well as comments on the “nature” of the residents: rowdy, cunning, docile, hardworking, and all those other British stereotypes inherited by the Indian administration. Unfortunately, there were too many mohallas in any ward, some fifty to a hundred, for me to make the most of such information, except very selectively.

I sometimes wondered if I should circumscribe my topic in some way, restrict it to a group of mohallas, or a ward, or in the same vein, to a community, occupation, whatever. But I could not persuade myself to part with all the rest of whatever I would have excluded. With the things I was discovering, expanding my subject in length and breadth gave me in fact greater depth—so I reasoned. But primarily it was greed, possessiveness of the city, and growing pride at a certain mastery over it that made me reluctant to part with any section of it. Whereas in music I liked solos and small ensembles, in my research, I preferred the symphony that the total city produced.