An Acquaintance between Misfits

edited by Anjasi

In a dark room, a tired face peered into a lime green laptop. Night time had cast its spell on the cityscape. The rise and fall of lines in Akriti’s design had teleported her into a mood of intrigue. She was focused. Until a sudden notification from messenger distracted her. She threw her arms around and stretched out her toes. She loved the weekends because her job only ever gave her a headache. All those years she spent in university had landed her a decent job but lately all she enjoyed was messing around on her laptop making intricate graphic designs.

 

She would be twenty-eight next month. She didn’t have any friends to celebrate it with. She had given up on hard work and often wondered if she hated her job. The night hours were when she worked and the daytime when she slept. She didn’t really depend on people. People saw very little of her…

 

It is a message from someone she met on an online dating app. It’s three a.m. ‘What could he want?’ She’s ashamed to admit it but she likes him, she thinks. He’s lonely too, and at thirty, she understands why he would have a profile which leaks desperation in every sentence. She relates with things he says. But she ignores the notification and gets out of her pashmina shawl to roam about in this fortress she has built for herself. ‘Ouch!’ she cries hitting her head on a cupboard. Pressing and rubbing the bump she reaches for the switchboard with a shaky index finger and flicks it on. A warm light comes on in the chandelier. Resting against the counter in the suffocating kitchen, she takes gulps of water as though she has been thirsty for ages. Her laptop makes another sound, she knows it’s him again. Still messaging. Her gaze helps her connect thoughts and she decides she won’t talk to him anymore. He’s quite boring now that she thinks about it.

 

Of late, she has found herself in an observant mood. Patterns have been revealing themselves to her ever since she has started designing graphics on her laptop. Everything big and small, round and flat, is now an object to her of someone’s imaginative design. A window isn’t a window, it’s a rectangle; a bottle isn’t a bottle, it’s a cylinder. Every line and curve has a unique measurement and everything else looks on the surface the way it does because somebody imagined it that way. ‘There must be some universals in all this variety,’ she wonders lost in her gaze. She was onto something new though. She took appearances as warning signs instead of inspiration. When patterns showed themselves to her she knew she could see them only because something was not right. The night had come to a halt. It seemed dead and reborn at the same time out of nothing. ‘Something’s gone bad, I just don’t know what it is yet.’

 

Akriti felt like he was physically inside her room — the man inside the app — looking at her designs trying to figure out what would make her talk. She stood so still for a minute that dust began to gather in her mind. It was hard for her to shake it off. She ran her fingers through her boy-cut hair and remembered that time she had wanted to color it brown. How good it was to be young and happy. She always found it tough to let go of the past.

 

She doesn’t know why it hurts to be so alone. She stood there holding her face when she should have moved. That night Akriti had a recurring dream.

 

The day was a Sunday. Something loud woke her up. She looked at her phone. The screen was too bright and it hurt her eyes. She was annoyed at the sun for entering her room. She pulled the comforter over her face. There it was again! A loud bang-bang rang in the floor outside her house. Jumping out her feet landed straight into the slippers and she went outside to see. When she opened the door a lady the age of her own mother was screaming, short of breath, ‘Stop them… stop them… thieves… thieves…’ Akriti was shocked and scared that a robbery had taken place in her building. Others on the floor had come out to the call for help long before her. Not everyone was in bed at 1 p.m. like her. When she saw these people, the first thing that occurred to her was that she should, by now, know at least one of them and they should at least know her name since they were neighbors. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ she told herself and kept clinging on to the door to her house. The lady who had screamed for help was surrounded in no time. Apparently four minors had entered her house, shoved her into a corner and robbed her of some cash at gun point. Akriti soon understood that she was a speculative woman. She kept saying she knew exactly who these minors were and called them the scum of the earth. Akriti had to concentrate a lot to gather all this from where she stood. She thought she would step outside her door and go near the crowd but she shut the door and sat behind it fearing the possibility of four minors entering her house one day.

 

She stayed in the whole day, and the day after that, doodling spiders until it was time for her to leave for office. She must have checked the door over twenty times to see if it was, in fact, properly locked.

 

Outside, as she neared the apartment where the incident had taken place, she slowed to a pause and listened keenly. She could hear the sound of cable news on the TV. The anchor was yelling out his bigoted views during a debate. It was so bad, that Akriti froze for a second. At that exact moment the door opened. It was a police inspector. The woman must have lodged a complaint at the police station. ‘It’s an odd time for an inspector to be questioning the victim,’ thought Akriti. She couldn’t get out of her head in time and stood there watching. The inspector walked past her and reached the elevator. She avoided eye contact with the lady and followed after the policeman. Now the two waited for the elevator.

 

For a person consumed by the general intrigue caused by patterns, it took her long to question if the robbery had taken place in the house of the policeman. He could have been this woman’s son. The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. She’d been unfolding the possible design behind the robbery all day long and so far found it to be invisible to her eyes. The man standing at an arm’s distance from her was surely a vital link in the chain of events. She was interested in finding out how four minors could go past security and rob a house in this building where “respectable persons” lived. She was unconsciously smacking her lips in nervousness. The inspector could see that she was either yawning or was gathering courage to speak. When he turned towards her he could see that she was shaking. He raised an eye brow at her questioningly and removed his cap. ‘Were you here to question her about the robbery?’ she finally broke out.

 

‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘You are the neighbor,’ he stated. He did not say anything to her after that and did not look. He did seem agitated. Something had unsettled his mind. He kept looking at the number of the floor every now and then as if he’d pressed the wrong button.

 

‘What has she said?’ Akriti asked. ‘I don’t get time to interact with anyone in the building,’ she added quickly.

 

He understood she was worried about her own safety. ‘Miss Methi is convinced that some boys who loiter near her departmental store have done this to her. They are seeking revenge she thinks, seeking revenge for always being told by her to quit begging and go back to their incapable parents.’ He stopped abruptly, then continued just so that he could let these words out, ‘She called their mothers prostitutes and their fathers drunken addicts. Strange lady.’

 

The elevator was at the ground floor. ‘Well, sorry for disturbing you,’ said Akriti and turned to walk to her car.

 

The inspector’s voice stopped her on her way out of the building ‘What did you hear at the time of the robbery?’

 

In life she had learnt that no two parts of a design can measure the same.  He obviously saw the case from a different point of view. She was considerate of his intentions in asking that question. She thought about it deeply and said, ‘I heard nothing’ and continued heading across the pavement to her car. She had lived many lies in her life and looking back, she had never regretted them. But she regretted this one.

 

‘Did you see any of them?’

 

He sensed her discomfort because of the way he had approached her and backed off immediately. ‘She has demanded that I find those minors in Harijan Basti but I think she is speaking out of prejudice. I wouldn’t want to waste the time of my department because everything goes on record.’ He showed her pictures of four young men and said, ‘These four boys have recently broken into at least seventeen homes. I suspect it might be them and not the boys she thinks did this to her.’

 

‘I’m sorry officer, by the time I came out of my house I think they were already gone. Although I’d like to say they were in possession of at least one gun because I heard two shots fired.’

 

He sighed. ‘Exactly why I don’t want to waste time on the profile she gave… I have questioned a gun store owner nearby who has confessed to selling a revolver to these minors for four thousand rupees.’ He showed her the pictures again. ‘I believe her explanation does not support the pattern.’

 

Akriti was impressed the inspector would say something like that.  He thanked her and walked away. He had left her with a smile. She was feeling almost entirely okay after talking to him. She had secretly read the name on his tag. “Devendra Sinha” it had said. He went about life trapped in patterns too. It was peculiar she thought. She was having second thoughts about her theory about patterns being warning signs and not inspiration. She thought he was doing inspiring work. For now she wasn’t as convinced about her own life because she had to go back to the weakest link in the design of her life, her dead end job.

 

Akriti saw Inspector Sinha again after two days. Her neighbor Rati Methi was scolding him for ignoring her statement. He looked disappointed. He hadn’t yet gotten hold of the culprits. Miss Methi did not appreciate it seeing those four poor innocent children still loitering around her shop. She said she had wanted to beat them when she saw them. She couldn’t of course. She called them all kinds of names. At that time she had nothing but hate to back up her claims. She did admit the faces of the robbers who had entered her house were concealed by masks and she hadn’t actually seen even one of them.

 

The people of the city often did not have time for sentiments. Untraditional lives weren’t uncommon. Rati Methi was also a lonely woman, she had no one in that house to live with and she was a real TV magnet. She was addicted to cable TV and news in particular. She didn’t turn down the TV even when she was talking to Inspector Sinha. It was blasting out of her house with some anti-human argument as usual. In fact, she was so upset with the inspector that she didn’t even let him enter her house this time. She simply caused this scene in the corridor. Akriti honestly felt bad for Dev. That’s what she called him in her mind. She asked him out for a cup of coffee after Rati Methi banged the door shut on his face.

 

They started meeting fairly regularly after that. It was good. Devendra was thirty just like Akriti’s last affair but he wasn’t half as desperate in living life, or so it seemed. He spent the evening with her on her birthday. She had wanted him to stay a while longer but he had to go back to his mother and his father. She respected it. It did leave her lonely at night but she was okay. He lived with his parents and was the only one they depended on. They were conservatives. They would often interfere with his work by encouraging him to ally with political clutter. They did not see the world as he saw it when he was out in the field. He saw people starving and living in extreme poverty. At times he’d lose respect for humanity but he would have to find a way out of that sinking misanthropic feeling. His parents did not understand whenever he would tell them that every crime had roots, that crime can be understood when we look closely enough. They would always blame the criminal whenever the media coverage for a case was on TV. Hardly any of the cases he’d work on went unnoticed by a local news network. He felt burdened with the weight of their expectations but he loved them. After five years in the department he had understood how cases differed, he knew when the criminal was to blame for the crime and when the criminal’s circumstances. And this was the first thing Akriti learnt about Devendra.

One night after a late show of the new Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster Akriti was dropping Devendra home, Devendra read her eyes and asked her if she was feeling scared.

 

‘What if it was my house they had broken into instead of my neighbors that day?’ she sighed deeply into the dark shadows inside her car and shut her eyes. Her hands were still placed at the steering wheel, it was not like she wasn’t ready for the drive home. Devendra realized he hadn’t thought about the case all evening. The department was now pressuring him to bring in the poor boys Miss Methi had profiled as suspects in the case and declare the mystery solved. He fell silent at the thought of it. ‘I didn’t mean to ruin your mood,’ she shook her head in disappointment ‘I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.’ He could not help the way she felt. He couldn’t deny it was a heavy feeling resting on his conscience.

 

‘I’m going to bring them in soon. I can feel it’ he said to her reassuringly. ‘They will serve the sentence and maybe they will have a change of heart just like the others do… The punishment is real for some of them. I’ve always felt, that what you are feeling right now, this fear because of living in a society pained by crime is a reality. I cannot say that your fear is unreasonable. All I can say is that the change I’ve seen in criminals once they are convicted is also a reality. The criminal will one day feel they were doing something horrible; they just don’t see it coming.’

 

Devendra did not know if that made Akriti feel better or not but when she drove home that night she went with a smile. He wanted to feel good about the evening but it was hard for him out of habit. He couldn’t let himself be moved by joy or passion. He could only let life happen to him. He slept with the mental image of a reflection of trees falling on the windshield of Akriti’s car. He remembered her fondly. They’d only recently met and he did not know whether to let romance guide his life or choose to hide beneath files of unsolved crimes. Because if he chose love, his life would take a turn towards longing, he’d always feel incomplete, and his work would just be something he did as a job. If he chose police duty, love would remain an oddly shaped part in an incomplete puzzle in the life of a policeman. 

 

Several months passed. Akriti and Devendra kept meeting, mostly to watch old SRK movies and one day Akriti got to meet his parents at a small party he had arranged for all his friends. She was afraid that day and it meant a great deal of anxiety for her to let go of her own feelings and go out to be in the company of other people. Three days after the party Devendra cracked the case and turned in the fourth and final culprit.

 

First, he had caught two out of the four, they confessed and led him to the third who had been underground, and the fourth one had been a long time coming. He felt relieved. The department would let him take the back seat for a while. But sometimes life is caught in a pattern that does not offer any rest. It’s like being caught in a spider web spun by a spider ten times the size of you.

 

On his way back home he noticed a period spanning forty to fifty minutes from his day was missing from his memory. He forgot all about it. He thought he must surely be tired but then it started happening to him more frequently. Sometimes it would happen to him when he was with Akriti, later he’d fail to remember they were together. Entire days began disappearing from his life. He noticed he hadn’t been sleeping. He had lost memories enough to pen a book.

 

He went to the doctor’s and didn’t tell anyone. Akriti was so tied up in her own life that she did not see his situation.  They told him at the hospital that he might be suffering from chronic insomnia. He didn’t know how he would tell her. It was even more troubling that his parents were expecting Akriti to marry their son. How would his parents feel when they found out that their son was unwell at such a young age? He was devastated. He had his whole life ahead of him. Maybe he was just overreacting. He knew if he told Akriti she would try to show him hope. She would say that there was a solution, a way out — that insomnia could be managed. Out of the two of them, she was the sensible one. But he wasn’t even sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, so he buried his feelings within him. Life in the metropolis deserves no hope. He thought the doctor didn’t know what was wrong with him and had misdiagnosed him, he didn’t even take the medicines he had been prescribed. He hid his disease and it got worse. Of course it started to show in a few days. He often didn’t show up for work.  He began to detest himself for what he had become, more than that he hated the world and everybody in it. He was tired of living up to his parents’ expectations, sick of doing what the department wanted him to do. He saw a reflection of corruption everywhere his work sent him. He saw through the faces of the people he had served all his life, he thought that they hated him too. Akriti started noticing these changes in him and tried to confront him several times but he denied it in every conversation. Work took the heaviest toll on him. The politics that was so intricately mixed with his profession seeped into the open cracks of his mind. It was all control of power after all. Maybe he just wasn’t meant to do this with his life.

 

They were at the park and the flowers were in bloom. She had asked him to stay the night with him and he went. Over at Akriti’s apartment something strange happened that night. He stepped out of bed without waking Akriti up and walked out of the building. He stood over a patch of grass on the side of the pavement. He felt that a violent mob was headed towards him. He was scared. It was a mob just like the one he had seen on TV. They were setting people’s homes on fire and ripping up their children with their swords. He could feel the fire on his skin burning him. He felt like they were coming to get him. Out of that clutter of bad memories Devendra suddenly woke up. He had no idea how he had gotten there. The night was a quiet one. He was sweating and shivering and there was not a soul in sight.