His faltering footsteps could barely be heard running down the street from two
blocks away. His Hawaiian slippers slapped the sidewalk and then his heels,
alternately. There was a stickiness to the slapping sound, which was unmistakable,
ominous and despairing. Like a symphony on melting tar, the velcro-like sound
increased in volume and seemed to build up for a final movement. The afternoon
sun had cleared the streets. A soulless stir wafted through the futile air,
as in a desert. Except that a desert, in its majestic swells, would search for
a reverberation, or hear a voice or grasp at a shimmering mirage for comfort.
But not here. There was nobody else to be seen or heard. Not even the sparrows
that hopped along, very quickly, to avoid prolonged contact with the hot pavement.
Jagged stress cracks, running across the carefully incised cross-lattice pattern
on the sidewalk, were spreading defiantly with the help of the dry mid-afternoon
sun. Only the quickly stencilled profiles of Mao-Tse Tung on the walls, with
his harmlessly sexist and non-malevolent statement on revolutions being unrefined
and unsophisticated happennings unlike a romance or an embroidery or a dinner
party, bore witness to this lonely run. The green shutters on the off-white
house fronts were shut tight, as if the energy of the householders to bear witness
or respond with sympathy to this solitary odyssey had run its due course. Rude,
from his third floor perch, sensed a stirring movement on the red cement balcony
on the ground floor of the house next door, as the runner came closer and closer.
A dog that lay curled up in the shade of one of the pillars was understandably
vexed by the slapping sound of rubber on the heels and sidewalk. As the sound
got closer, the dog raised its head, slowly, to take a lazy look. The breathing
of the runner could be heard from the third floor window where Rude stood. The
summer heat was enough to asphyxiate any Calcutta dog. Rude had taken his shirt
off and wrapped a lungi around his waist. No underwear. His balls dangled free,
taking in the hot air from the rotating table fan, while his fingers ran over
the silky layer of hair on his chest and around his belly-button. The slapping
and sticking sound from the runner's slippers got closer and closer. Rude watched
the dog rise slowly on its haunches and then, as the runner flashed by, it jumped
up and whipped around as if it had been put on alert by a speeding fire-truck
with its air horns on full blast. In that split second, Rude saw Palti's face.
It was contorted in desperation. It looked like there was foam on the side of
his lips. As he disappeared from view, into the entrance of the building, Rude
noticed that patches of red had appeared on the sidewalk, where Palti's slippers
had made contact. A weakness suddenly overtook Rude's entire nervous system.
His hands tensed around his stomach. They had got him.
********************
Palti Karus was born Paul D'Cruz. His grandfather was a Portuguese sailor who fell in love with a Bengali Christian ayah who was employed at Calcutta's Grand Hotel to look after the children of visiting Scottish tea-planters, while they were busy having their meetings at the hotel, on Chowringhee Road. Grandfather D'Cruz never went back to Lisbon. He lowered his chassis down on Serpentine Lane and settled into a happy, meaningful existence with his demure wife Philomena Das and they carefully planned and opened a purportedly Portuguese confectionary and pastry shop in the New Market area. To this day, the shop stands at the same location. A sign on the inside of one of the doors says, "Luso Confectionary, founded 1929 by Albino and Philomena D'Cruz."
The shop is now owned by a bearded man, named Khambatta, who sells burfis and other oil-drenched North Indian sweets that have food colouring added to them with a punishing vengeance. When Albino died in 1959, Philomena became quite listless and chose to sell the business. "If I keep it, there is nobody, who will run it like we did. And slowly, slowly, it will no longer make pastries but switch to Indian sweets. What is the use? It is better to see it go, than see it change. Albino's buns--my God, they were the best in Calcutta!"
For years the shop's name did not change, although it changed ownership a few times. Recently Khambatta had changed the name to Bombay Sweet Hall. A corpulent lady in saris, whose colours closely matched the angry colours on the burfis, sat there all day, swatting flies and looking purposelessly angry as well. The D'Cruzs had one son. A dreadful one. Reginald.
Reginald, Palti's father that is, was a nasty Calcutta policeman, who rode horses, on the expansive Calcutta Maidan. Along with a Sergeant Morehouse, these two personalities effortlessly embodied the confusion caused, on the one hand, by vague notions of racial supremacy stemming from traces of European ancestry in their blood, and on the other hand a certain vengeful neuro-sadism of a semi-colonial variety, caused by the social spurning that they experienced at the hands of the larger Indian society. This sudden incursion of socio-political analysis is necessary, especially where horses are concerned. The steed-to-native relational vector, that is symbolic of a bygone foreign presence, regained some of its confidence on the rider and duly registered itself in the personality of the snorting horses, as well, who trotted around, smartly, with their heads, snapping from side to side. When Morehouse and D'Cruz appeared on the Calcutta Maidan, on such snorting mounts, they imagined incorrectly that they could plod through the wet maidan grass and wade into the soccer throngs with impunity. But the soccer fans were too nimble-footed to be caught under the hooves of these two self-satirizing Burra-sahibs.
On the other hand, there were plenty of betel-nut chewing, dhoti-clad Writer's Building clerks, appropriately armed with black umbrellas, who were ready for this awesome duo, on a soccer afternoon. Whenever Morehouse and D'Cruz found that there were too many soccer zealots congregating in a particular stretch of the ramparts or urinating in the ditches that ran through the Maidan, behind the various stadiums, or bargaining over last minute scalping deals, they would start a slow charge. Of course, the uninitiated would be terrified and run helter-skelter, much to the delight of the duo. However, there was always the veteran umbrella-wielding personality amongst the commoners. Such a person would stand his ground, nonchalantly, till the horses were close enough, so that the dribble from their nostrils almost fell on him, and then he would deftly step aside and jab their hindquarters with the sharp end of the umbrella, in that particularly native style of causing devastating damage, with the alacrity of a field mouse. The horse's rump would quiver, momentarily, and then it would neigh in pain and stand up on its hind-legs.
"Bloody chokra-boy! Mera horse-ko angli kiya! Fucking kutta!" Transliterated, it simply said that the damn soccer urchins had fingered his beautiful horse's arse and what copulating canines they were, in doing so! The crowd would whistle and hoot as the two cops attempted to collect their poise. Meanwhile, the umbrella-wielding culprit would dissolve into the sea of other similarly equipped soccerites. Paul D'Cruz bore no resemblance in personality or looks to his father. In fact, he had left home at the age of fifteen to hang around a posse of small-time car-parts redistributors, who operated in the Entally market area. His father had, of course, completely disowned him. For him Paul did not exist. Reginald was a horse-riding policeman, with a sickening disdain for Bengalis, even though half of him was just that. Paul was one-quarter Bengali and a specialist in hub cap removal. If you were in a traffic jam in broad daylight in the Entally area and Paul was on duty, you could rest assured that he would do all four wheels in six seconds flat. And as a car owner, if you realised in the next hour what had happened, you would return to the Moulali area and buy-back your hub caps, preferably the same day, from authorised second hand car parts dealers. Paul would be moping around on the sidewalk, outside the second-hand shops, with a grin on his face, hands behind his back, looking at the procession of lawyers and doctors with disgusted looks, walking back to their cars with their retrieved hub-caps, only to discover that the headlamps were gone, this time. Because he was the son of a law officer and yet had taken to a life of positive indifference to ordinance and order, Paul's friends very affectionately called him Palti. Somebody who had turned around and crossed the lines. Palti meant he had flipped, switched sides, turned the tables. Evil against good. The rough life against the seamless stretch.
"Yes he is a badmash, a wicked fellow, but he is our guy--notwithstanding. He will never hurt his own people. No sir!" That was the consensus in the neighbourhood.
Palti had no significant ambitions, beyond hub-cap reselling. While his comrades had often attempted to entice him into larger projects, with higher rate of returns, as in the removal of copper wire from slowly moving wagon-trains, Palti was perfectly at peace with this subsistence entrepreneurial activity. Palti's hard pencil moustache undermined a soft personality, that was ready to dole out generous sums of money, to his fellow citizens in distress. His biggest and only weakness was hemp.
Yes sir! "Ganjaman Palti" was his other name. Saturday evenings was hemp night. While the Bihari men, in their slum dwellings, the basti, would sit around in circles and carry on with their frenzied singing of "Rama Ho" in Bhojpuri dialect, Palti would gently drag on a monster chillum and be transported to a translucent sky of wheels and hub-caps rolling through the clouds in perfect harmony with the sound from the drum rolls and rapid rhythmic clanging of the hand-cymbals. The Biharis sang battle songs from the war of 1857, passed on from generation to generation, with very little present-day significance left. The tempo built up slowly, while the story unravelled about heroes and heroines who fought like lions and lionesses for their land and nation. It was the hard-driving, pulsating beat of this folk style, with the frenzied choral attack at the finale, that drove Palti to a red-eyed high and left his cheeks tingling with excitement. While most of the songs eventually ended by paying tedious tribute to Rama and other deities, there were always some spine-chilling descriptions of battles, innovatingly retold every Saturday night, by singers who added on new elements to the never-ending epic of Britain's first war with a nation, that was never at peace with its foreign occupiers. Palti loved the songs and the boho-edge to this madness in his life. Hubcaps, hemp and Bhojpuri poetry were supreme pulse-drivers.
Despite being a card-carrying Anglo-Indian, Palti never got into rock and roll and western music. His anthem was the Rama Ho! scream at the end of the frenzied night. As the singers wiped their brows with their red cloth, which served as towel as well as turban, Palti would become hungry as a python, rush over to the dhaba at the corner, gulp down platefuls of chick pea curry and then come back to the basti and fall asleep on the outside balcony of one of the tin sheds. Some of the Biharis would cover him up with a blanket on cold nights. They brought him tea in the morning with two pieces of cream cracker biscuit that he dunked in it and that would be breakfast. Except on Sundays, when he himself chose to buy a dozen eggs, which he fried with a lot of red onions and served up on rotis made on a clay oven by the side of one of the huts. Everybody in the central courtyard of the slum, knew the Sunday breakfast with the unchanging menu. The Biharis had no problems with him. He even contributed to their collections for various religious festivals. But more than that, Palti had a reputation as a ferocious fighter for local integrity, especially if some alien transgresser, from another territory, harboured ideas about expansion. His little posse of operatives controlled the beat, along the railway lines, at the edge of the slum. The slum itself, lay just east of the city. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday night, or morning if you will, when everybody had definitely retired, exhausted after their singing and smoking, that Rude stepped over his motionless form, lying on such a cement balcony, and Palti instinctively grabbed his feet and brought him down, in a second. As soon as Rude had recovered from this surprise attack, he swung back and had Palti's neck against a pillar with his iron grip. But before he could proceed any further, about fifteen sleeping Bihari forms had woken up and had surrounded Rude and were ready to tear him apart. That is how they met. That is how a year-long association between a Bengali drop-out from an engineering school and a small-time Anglo-Indian thief, with no academic credentials began. It was 1968.
The name Karus. Now how did that come about? The Biharis could not pronounce this D'Cruz stuff. The Indian language does not tolerate names with apostrophes and furthermore, Biharis, living in Calcutta and working as milkmen and tramcar drivers, would not be any kinder to the Portuguese language, for whatever its worth in an independent India. So the name that they pronounced was, Karus. Palti Karus, said with a Bhojpuri lilt, that almost sounded like the name of a Greek god of hubcaps. Some, who knew his police lineage, very mischieviously and to his great vexation, referred to him as "sub-inspector Karus."
*******************
The decision of the Student Coordination Committee at the Engineering School was that Rude had to go. To the slums, that is. The slums around the Entally Market area. It was not a mandate. It was expected of him. He was already skipping classes regularly and spending a lot of time with tramway workers in this neighbourhood. Most of the workers of the Calcutta Tram Company (CTC) from the Park Circus depot, lived in this neighbourhood. And besides, the tea from the kettle that was constantly on the boil, in the corner stall located on the edge of the slum, tasted infinitely more wholesome than any other tea, anywhere in the world, especially in the winter months, when one sat swathed from head to toe in an oversized shawl, protected against mosquitoes and the cold.
According to a journal, published occasionally by some youthful Calcutta journalists and appropriately called Edge, " declassing" was an ideological necessity which could not be achieved by slumming in the day and spending nights at home within the confines of parental middle class sanctuaries. Drawing on the lessons of the May '68 strike at Sorbonne and the appearance of a confused looking Jean-Paul Sartre at the barricades in Paris, the journal went on to say that a sustained stand-off with the state, without an arrangement with factory workers, especially from inner -city slum tenements, would be impossible. A leading Calcutta daily, in an editorial, had also reported that the strike, in sympathy for the students, by almost 10 million workers of the French Central Union was awe-inspiring. Normally, it had always been the other way round. But this time it was the workers, who had put their tools down, in support of student demands. The fifth Republic was almost on its knees, said the editorial. What had prompted such a turn of events? The curriculum (no choices, no alternatives, archaic material) and the teaching style (exams, exams and more exams), of course! The university had taken on the symbolic stature of a class oppressor. Students in Berkeley had brought the state of California to a virtual halt and had managed to lay bare the fangs of personalities with names like Hayakawa and Reagan. On the other hand, the newspapers and All India Radio had popularised names like Danny, Mario, Rudi, Alain, Abbie and Tariq and made them into household words in the student milieu. There was something electric about students, writers, artists and workers walking together with arms locked, towards the helmetted police lines, that resembled a star-trek formation of faceless robots. Large banners spread across city blocks. Flags fluttered atop sacred institutions, to the absolute dismay of bull-dog like chancellors, governors and police chiefs. But more than that, many of these student leaders had already fanned out to Latin America to extend their shoulders to movements there. This was no flash in the pan. They were walking the talk. They meant business. At least this is what Rude felt. The higher-ups in the student committees were not so sure. There was a superior smile on the faces of some of them, that said a different story.
It seemed natural to Rude and a host of his other friends that inequality was not something you complained about. You had to do something about it. And those who did, deserved automatic respect. Therefore, at least once a week, Rude would take his place, at that tea-stall, making or desperately trying to make new acquaintances with members of the working classes. And at night, every few weeks, while the city feigned sleep, scores of squads of young activists, armed with pails of Black Japan paint and stencils, would be climbing parapets, walls, drain pipes and factory gates to plaster the city's walls with their favourite quotations from around the world, calling for the overthrow of the existing order. During all these attempts, Rude's frustration grew as nobody could be contacted who had an identifiable proletarian zeal for change. The city, it seemed was infested with a depressed working class and a large population of lumpen fire-brands, carving out territories from each other. The advent of the college kids into the slums was seen with curiosity, but also kindness. After all, the political parties only came during the elections.The college kids made it a point to live in the slums, despite their smoother complexions and polished words. They did not have street-corner meetings with loud megaphones. They had secret meetings inside the huts with a selected few. Meanwhile outside the hut and on the street corners, stood very obvious looking members, on security detail, with shawls wrapped around them, to conceal their torsoes. Word in the bastis was that they all carried .38s under their shawls. The word for a revolver was "chamber." Anybody with a shawl was thus seen as an "extremist with chamber." The result was that during the coldest months of winter, ordinary citizens in the slum areas, stopped wearing shawls, so as not to be become targets of the Special Branch, who also had started operating in mufti, as spotters for the local police stations.
In a three year period, the journal Edge reported that the cold-blooded killings of students at the hands of the Calcutta police reached such numbing proportions, that the standard story of "heavily armed extremists", ambushing innocent members of the Special Branch had anaesthetised the public conscience. Such was the fantastic creativity of most of the mainstream news reporters in the city, that they had imported Chinese weapons (gifts from Mao) and Army grenades (direct from the CIA) into their stories with increasing impunity. In reality, as Rude knew, there were only a few "chambers" in each locality. There were perhaps five or six sten guns in the entire city, and that even in the hands of well-known wagon-breaking criminal gangs, who worked just as much for the cops, as they did for the big political parties. The deadliest weapons in the hands of the extremists were molotovs, pipe bombs, jute-string bombs called "petos" made from a central core of pottasium chlorate and arsenic di-sulphide and the occassional .38s snatched from the gawky-looking, slum kids employed as "home guards" by the Calcutta police, as the first line of defence against the dangerously armed college kids.
Some Gandhian friend of his father's, had once remarked to Rude that the definition of the good life, was the ability to be a good neighbour. Despite his acute dislike for the politics of Mahatma Gandhi, there was something saintly about such a disposition towards your fellow human beings. Do-gooding was not entirely a characteristic of Christian piety. If the intent of the young human mind could be to be a kind caring neighbour and such an intent could be combined with the militant zeal to overthrow local tyrants, then you had a political programme that was more potent than any complicated manifesto, written at any time in the world. Such was the straighforward sincerety of those, along with Rude, who chose to quit college and plunge themselves into the politics of social change, that the complicated politics of class manipulation and contrived analysis of social ferment, was left to higher ups who smoked Charminars in a twisted-fist grip and released clouds of intellectual smoke in between coughed-out references to names like Browder, Bonaparte, Brecht and Bernstein.
As was duly reported by Edge, in this adventure record numbers of students and youth, despatched themselves to the rural areas of India or stayed in the slum areas adjoining the cities to mobilize for basic fundamental change.
********************
Rude's encounter with the sleeping form of Palti on a cold, foggy Calcutta morning, was eclectic and fundamental. The moon was not in its elements. Desperately seeking to appear in front of the clouds that kept whipping buy its face, the round white eminence in the sky, seemed to want to record this historical encounter between college boy and slum boy. The shadows from the banyan tree had spread over the tin sheds, further complicating the view from the sky. Fifteen Biharis had formed a circle around Rude and were ready to tear him apart. Their long shadows, moved slowly in the moonlight on the floor of the central yard of the slum, like the dance of a hundred warriors and defenders of the realm of truth. The moonlight bounced off Rude's white shirt like a searchlight that had found its prey.
"So why the motherfuck are you here! What's your business?" snapped Palti, still recovering from the neck hold that Rude had him in. A switchblade, in his hands, glistened in the moonlight.
"I was writing on the walls."
"Well, sister, fuck me! There is no election! What are you messing up the walls for?" One of Palti's accomplices came closer to Rude. "Let's take him to the police station. Must be a bank-robber. Does not look like a thief, to me."
"Shut up!" Palti's voice boomed. "No cops here. Show me what you've been writing." Palti's commanding voice made the rest of the shadows, dissolve into each other.
"If you keep me here for five more minutes, you will be attacked from all sides by the kind of bombs you have never seen or heard in your lifetime, and it will be so deadly that you will lose this little kingdom of yours in another five more minutes." Rude's deadly prediction rolled around the slum courtyard, like the dice in a carrom board game, bouncing and sliding away from the various faces and leaving a trail of doubt and suspicion. Nobody wants trouble. There were women and children inside the huts.
"Oh, yeah! We'll see! C'Mon lets take a walk around the walls." As Palti and a few others took Rude to the edge of the narrow lane that led into their slum, they could see fifty yards away, the silhouette of four men wrapped in shawls, standing with their hands folded under them, blocking the entrance to the yard. A fifth one could be seen sitting crouched, under a parapet, overlooking the yard, from an adjoining two storey building. Palti slowed to a halt. Fresh Black Japan paint was dribbling down a white wall. "Revolution is not a dinner party...."
********************
On the fifteenth of May, 1969, Palti Karus, Rude, Allen and thousands of other young men and women walked side by side, on Chowringhee Road, in front of the Grand Hotel. The Americans had defoliated large sections of Vietnam and a demonstration had been called in front of the United States Information Services on S.N. Banerjee Road, by a joint committee of area college student unions. As Palti passed the tired looking facade of the Grand Hotel, his anger at the Americans drifted in and out of his mind. For many years he had not ventured into this part of the city. This is where his Portuguese grandfather had fathered his half-Bengali father, who had become a horse-riding sub-inspector in the Calcutta Police. This is where, for over a hundred years, transient colonials parked themselves and discussed the consequences of abandoning India to the natives. This is where visiting cricket teams from England and Australia, tolerated the heat and dust of this country and waited to leave, even before they had arrived. This is where for two centuries, India's destiny lay manacled to the British and its East India Company. Rude had learnt all this, not in school, not through books, but in gentle conversations with his father. What made Rude such a tower of knowledge on history, was not his academic credentials, but his gentle ways of retelling little incidents from his childhood that politicalised his entire future. This is why Palti liked Rude so much. He was tough, physical and yet gentle. Rude never preached. He just enjoyed provoking Palti's curiosity, by telling him stories that his father had told him.
As the large body of students and youth approached the glass facade of the USIS offices, posses of Calcutta policemen, in their billowing white knickers and mustached primate looks, jumped out of their black marias and immediately started a vicious lathi charge. On that hot May afternoon, as blood poured out of the mouths and heads of the demonstrating students and youth under an unforgiving sun, one group of policemen had cornered an elderly man, in a dhoti, behind one of the pillars, on the corner of Chowringhee and were pounding him into pulp. The man would not give up. As his voice broke and blood streamed down his face, he kept yelling with a hoarse voice that L.B. Johnson would have his day in the people's court, someday. The driven cops kept pommelling him and kicking him. It seemed he had become isolated and there was nobody there to even watch this event. The main body of youth had been pressed to the other side of the street.
Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, Palti broke through the police cordon and dived into the gang of policemen. Before they knew what had happened, Palti threw himself on top of the collapsing man and covered him, while the blows started raining down on him. "Take me, motherfuckers, take your size...why an old man? What is your country mother fuckers?.... Amrika or Bharat?" As the students saw and heard Palti's bullet-like presence, there was immediate reaction. The entire police cordon was torn to shreds by the combined thrust of a thousand rampaging students. The old man and Palti were soon retrieved from that corner behind the pillar and the cops were beating a very very hasty retreat. That evening, there was tear-gas and bullets flying in every direction. But Palti had made his mark on Rude. The fearlessness of a lumpen hubcap recycler was one that revolutionaries could only dream of.
*********************
Keshto-da was a tramway worker. On one of his prolonged stays at the tea-stall on the corner of the railway crossing, behind the slum, Rude had developed a friendship with Krishnapada, aka Keshto, and in reverence for his age Keshto-da, by most folks who frequented the tea-stall. Keshto-da was thin and wiry, with black frame glasses, that he took off frequently, because he had not been to an optician for over 15 years. He wore the glasses more out of habit, than necessity. Naturally, therefore, he would get a headache within a few minutes and he would take it off, only to wear it again after an hour or so. He was an avid reader of all newspapers and some of the Bhojpuri tram conductors, who could not read Hindi, would borrow his abilities to find out news from a Patna daily.
On a March afternoon, as Rude sat in the tea stall, chatting with Keshto-da, he was distracted by the yells of Palti from a distance. Palti was running down the lane and calling out Keshto-da's name. "Keshto-da! Keshto-da! Ghorey cholo! Ghorey cholo! Go home, go home quickly!" Keshto-da's young wife, Malini, had given birth to a boy about eight months ago. The boy was malnourished from day one. They had done everything. Rude had used his contacts amongst the Medical College students, to get special help, which nobody in the slums could ever dream of. Keshto-da , in desperation, had broken all codes and consulted a neighbourhood Muslim pir, and asked for medication from him. The boy seemed to have had some chronic failure in his intestines. His eyes always stared out. His body was always on the verge of dehydration. Keshto-da could not afford the electrolyte solutions the doctors would prescribe. Palti, combining his strong arm tactics with popular appeal, would bring the medicines and fresh milk and even made yogurt himself, so that the child's stomach would be rested and he would get his medication, when necessary.
"This is a democracy. In a democracy, it is the right of a child, belonging to hard-working fathers and mothers to get milk, on demand. I will make these arrangements, as long as I live in this slum." That was Palti's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When Keshto-da and Rude saw Palti running down the lane, so desperately, they knew there was something wrong with the child. Palti made it back before them. Keshto-da's wife sat on the floor of their hut. She was weeping very gently. The child's head was on its side. Palti waited outside. For the first time, since he had known him, Rude saw tears well-up on the corner of Palti's eyes. He said only one sentence, as he walked away sobbing.
"Only the rich motherfuckers can afford the electrolyte--not the worker who runs the trams and the trains for them."
That evening, Keshto-da's son was buried in a Muslim graveyard, near the railway lines, adjacent to the basti. It was less expensive than a Hindu cremation, with full rites at the distant cremation ground. Palti made all the arrangements. It was a warm night. Allan was also there. Palti gripped Keshto-da's shoulders and they both sobbed. Rude's hair had flown across his face. He did not feel like moving it out, to clear his line of sight. A gentle drizzle had started. He pursed his lips and closed his eyes, as the rain water dribbled down his face.
*********************
As he rushed down the stairs, in his lungi, Rude's stomach muscles tensed to a knot. With every step he took, a thousand anxieties lacerated his twenty year old mind. Death had visited him already in many ways. The political climate in Calcutta and the ruthlessness of Calcutta's police force ensured that a steady stream of bodies of young men were being carried to the cremation grounds every night. Many of them were Rude's closest buddies from college and the adjoining neighbourhood. The sense of loss was such, that it was no longer feasible, to be overcome by grief, so frequently. There was only this selfish hope, that it would not get closer and closer every time.
As he rushed down and opened the green wooden door to the outside, he realised Palti had already collapsed on the door frame. The weight of his body swung the door open, and Palti collapsed on the floor. There was blood bubbling out of his stomach, through several bullet holes.
"Plainclothes....from...another station....I did not recogni....." As Rude held him close, there was a look in his eyes, like he was sorry for the mistake he had made. As a fighter, he had been outwitted. His eyes never closed. He stared into Rude's face.
If a man lived a thousand years, everyday in his life he would wake up and see the face that Rude saw for the rest of his life. It was a face of devotion, love, sorrow, commitment, betrayal and above all kindness that was little understood in the world that Rude lived in.
THE END