Sodden Impact

The policeman at the checkpoint picked his nose with his left hand, scratched himself and spat wetly onto the road. His right hand held a Thums Up bottle and a lighted bidi between gnarled and calloused fingers. A bamboo lathi dangled from his right wrist by its leather loop. His jaws worked rhythmically around a quid of paan.

A young constable regarded this revolting sight with nervous affection. His grizzled superior looked exactly like a hard-working Havildar should look. So many social engagements, so little time.

The Havildar mournfully contemplated the colossal cabriole curve of his enormous pot belly. The starched khaki of his uniform blouse was strained to bursting point by his protruding paunch and softened in placed by dark patches of perspiration. He philosophically took a swig of his cola and a puff of his bidi. Gather ye roses while ye may. A policeman’s lot is a hard one; what with sundry speeding motorists, eve-teasers, auto-lifters, terrorists – and not to mention the Ungrateful Indian Public.

An unnatural silence pervaded the streets, so much so that scattered bursts of birdsong could be heard. The scooter rickshaw stand was deserted and the tea stall owner had shut up shop for the day after presenting his “complementary”  bottle of cola in exchange for keeping an eye on his closed-down concession during the bandh. The Havildar sighed heavily. The Gol-Guppa man could have had the decency to bring his pushcart around at least once, bandh or no bandh. He spat again, leaving betel-nut bloodstains on the dingy grey surface of the potholed road.

The Havildar ceased his melancholy meditations. His facial expression relaxed into its normal state of sour suspicion. Havildar Horrible always anticipated the worst, and in this humble expectation, he was seldom disappointed.

The sylvan calm was abruptly shattered by the blatting, vibrating approach of an ancient scooter with a defective silencer. The corpulent charioteer of the advancing ramshackle juggernaut appeared to be engaged in a monologue in demotic Punjabi with an invisible pillion rider.

Convinced that he was dealing with a mobile maniac, the hoary guardian of the law hastily transferred the Thums Up bottle to his left hand and raised the lathi with his right in an unequivocal gesture to halt. Unfortunately, in his haste, the bidi somehow slipped right inside his blouse where it promptly burnt a hole in his singlet. With a stentorian roar of agony, the Havildar reflexively hurled part of the bottle’s contents right into the eyes of the startled scooterist who braked sharply, skidded, and then precipitately abandoned his mortally stricken mount.

Ignoring the prone figure adding its contribution to the stains on the road, the Havildar doused the bidi with the remnants of the soft drink. Turning to survey the damage, he found the flimsy traffic barrier neatly folded in two by impact with the riderless scooter which was now making noises very like a bandsaw thwarted in love.

The Havildar’s face assumed  an interesting heliotrope (i.e. purple) hue. He began to verbally belabour the somnolent scooterist, prodding the prone figure with his lathi.

These tender ministrations were interrupted by the arrival of a rather hefty woman in a towering rage. She bore the marks of someone rudely ejected from the pillion seat of a moving scooter. Her outlook was not markedly improved by the arresting sight of the Havildar harassing her comatose companion. Drawing a rolling pin and a pair of tongs from a nylon shopping bag, she advanced menacingly.

The Havildar found his carbuncled nose gripped in an iron vise and then the rolling pin descended smartly on to the dome of his beret, impacting with an audible thump. Probably for the first time in his unlovely existence, the Havildar’s face cracked into a bleary, lopsided smile of great benevolence. He closed his eyes and began to emit deep bass snores as he slowly toppled backwards onto the road.

Meanwhile, the junior constable was curled helplessly on the floor of his concrete revetment, hugging his Sterling L2A3 police carbine closely. He was giggling foolishly, but hard, until the 9mm sub-machine carbine accidentally discharged and blew off the top of his head.