The Lesson Read online




  For my parents

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  One

  The rapist sighed and leaned back on his chair. There were far too many applications today.

  Everyone was asking for it, even babies. The courts had recently declared that if a rapist was staying away from his family (which he was), the victim, however young, could ask for it. This had widened the application pool greatly and he knew it was going to be a long day at the office.

  To make life simpler for himself, the rapist sorted out the applications according to the length of the statement of purpose. The shorter ones (mostly written by grandmothers who just told him that they were women too) he put away to read later. They did not express as much interest as the other, longer ones, carefully drafted and proofread several times. Some thought they were being clever by telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. They wore short clothes. They went to pubs. They smoked. They were not virgins. They had several boyfriends. They wanted him to teach them a lesson. In fact, they were begging him to teach them a lesson. The rapist sighed again. Where was the originality in this? Originality was everything. It was sad that people seldom gave it the value it so deserved. In earlier days, when such applicants were rare, the rapist had given them the attention they so desired. But now, he was bored of reading essay after essay that said the same thing. The rapist believed in meritocracy, people getting exactly what they deserved.

  As he dumped these essays into a file to be read later, a familiar handwriting caught his eye. It was his wife. She had written to him stating that she was appealing to him on the grounds of marriage. She was well within her rights to ask for it. The rapist considered this and smiled. His wife lived in his hometown, far from the capital city, and her plea would have to be deferred. Besides, he did not want to be accused of favouring someone he was related to. Some good samaritan was bound to file an RTI and catch him with his pants down.

  For now, he ought to look beyond. The clock ticked on as the rapist worked at his desk. He was meticulous in his filing system. When at last he had finished sorting out the essays, his table was full of immaculate files with neat labels and cross-references. There was one for babies and minors. Another for minorities. There was one for clothing. Another for lifestyle. He had even created an especially professional-looking file for his colleagues in the building. He had drawn a large red heart for the file which contained applications from his friends and family. Though he always tried to remain disinterested in his choice, the rapist was also human.

  In spite of the number of files, there was no confusion. The rapist’s system of classification was flawless. Why, he said to himself, admiring his work, anybody could mention a name and he would find a way to fit them in.

  Two

  The building that the rapist worked in was full of government offices like his own. But his was the only one with a single employee. The others were teeming with men and women who clattered past his corridor noisily in their suits and with their BlackBerrys. There were seven floors in all. The rapist sat in the fourth floor. To the right was the Adjustment Bureau and to the left, the Moral Police.

  Now, at last, the building was quiet. The street was a heady mix of car lights and long shadows and the moon was barely visible beneath the heavy cloud cover. The rapist’s office was the only one that remained open twenty-four hours a day. He was expected to be available always, at least over the phone, though most people errantly assumed that he worked only night shifts. As if he were an owl, the rapist snorted.

  He closed his eyes, thinking of all the work he had to do in the next few days. His hand ran over his penis absently.

  ‘May I come in?’

  The rapist opened his eyes with a jolt. Who was it at this time of the day?

  ‘Mr President?’ he said, surprised. He did not need a confirmation. The stodgy figure before him was unmistakable. The president of the Adjustment Bureau was rarely seen or heard. And yet, he was one of the most powerful men in the capital city.

  The president said nothing. He seated himself opposite the rapist and looked at him appraisingly. The rapist did not know how he was supposed to react. This was the first time he was meeting the president face to face; in the past, he had only caught fleeting glimpses of the man as he zoomed in and out of the building in his black Ambassador. He had seen his photographs in the newspapers though.

  After what seemed to be an interminable pause, the president cleared his throat and said, ‘I need your help.’

  The rapist was taken aback. The president of the Adjustment Bureau was a man of connections. Politicians, actors, cricketers, musicians, scientists, journalists, corporate bigwigs – he knew them all. The president always got complimentary tickets for the best entertainment shows – music concerts to World Cup matches – from his posh clientele, but he rarely blessed them with a visit. The president had only one addiction: his job.

  ‘Why me?’ said the rapist cautiously.

  ‘I’m asking you for help,’ the president said, ‘because I know you are the only one who can render it. There is a woman.’

  The rapist leaned forward, listening.

  ‘She came to the bureau today,’ the president said, and continued with some difficulty. ‘She would not be persuaded. She’s determined to go through with it.’ The president spat at the floor with distaste.

  The rapist stared at the glob of spit with fascination. It was white as an angel. If he stared hard enough, he could almost see the wings.

  ‘Even after the PoI?’ he asked, forcing himself to look away from the glob and at the president instead.

  ‘Yes,’ said the president. ‘Yes. She walked out of the Prison of Illusion screaming that her current life was worse.’

  The rapist started to say something but stopped. He knew this was a sensitive subject. The president was very proud of the prison. It was something that gave his irate clients an experience of the world that awaited them if they flouted the authority of the bureau – absolutely state-of-the-art. The wide range of monsters, from unwilling landlords to molesting bosses, who lived in its dark corners were enough to make them yield.

  But not this woman. ‘She emerged out of the prison, complaining that they made her wear saris every day,’ said the president, irritation crowding his brow. ‘In a nation where most people cannot afford clothes, I would think that’s a blessing!’

  The rapist grinned. A ribald joke involving Draupadi came to his head but he dared not say a word. He did not know if the president would encourage such familiarity. Instead, he nodded at him seriously.

  ‘Apparently, that fool of a husband hit her,’ the president grumbled. ‘And she comes running to me like a kindergartner running to her principal. What am I to do? Cane the husband? I showed her the flyer. The national adjustment policy. You’ve seen it?’

  Of course the rapist had seen the pink flyers with the legendary words ‘Please Adjust’. He would have to be blind not to have. They were everywhere. He said so to the president.

  The president smiled at him, pleased. ‘Yes, our new marketing team does a good job. Young recruits fr
om top business schools. I chucked the old fogeys out. They’d clearly lost their bling. Just because it’s a government job, they thought they’d never get fired.’

  ‘And what did the woman say?’ said the rapist.

  ‘She—’ The president swallowed hard and said, ‘spat at me.’

  The rapist’s jaw fell to his chest.

  ‘And then she threw my paperweight at the clock,’ the president went on, his mouth tightening. ‘Even then, I did not lose my calm. She threatened to take her clothes off to show me her bruises!’

  A sly smile crossed the rapist’s face.

  ‘Well, obviously, I told her I’d have her arrested for indecency if she did that,’ said the president, not moving a muscle.

  ‘Did you give her the box?’ asked the rapist softly.

  ‘You know about the box?’ said the president, surprised. The box was the ultimate weapon in the bureau’s armoury but it had been used very rarely in its long history. It involved very expensive technology and the bureau couldn’t use it as often as it would have liked to. In the president’s twenty-year reign, since the PoI had been introduced, it had never been used. The president had seen to that.

  ‘I have my friends,’ the rapist said.

  ‘Yes, I gave the bitch the box,’ said the president, forgetting himself for a moment. ‘And do you know what she did with it?’

  The rapist shrugged.

  ‘She dropped it on the floor and left. Now I ask you, what normal woman would drop a baby? And it was crying too! I told her it would save her marriage but she just walked over the box, baby and all, and simply left!’ the president said, working himself up.

  ‘So why are you here?’ asked the rapist. He knew the answer already but he wanted to hear it from the president.

  ‘Teach her a lesson,’ said the president. ‘I can’t have this happening in my tenure. Not now.’

  Three

  The marriageable age notifier was out of order. The bulky machine was placed right next to the elevators on the ground floor where it churned out thousands of memos by the hour. The memos were collected by the moral policeman on duty. Though the Moral Police office was on the fourth floor, the notifier was placed on the ground floor because it was simply too large to fit into the overcrowded office space. The capital city’s Moral Police Force was the largest in the country (a fact they were very proud of) and the notifier was moved when the chief added an entirely new division for cyber crimes. The notifier was one of the vital functions of the Moral Police Force and they took good care of it. Usually.

  But today, as the moral policeman on duty pressed the large green button that said ‘START’, the machine stared back at him, unmoved. Nonplussed, the moral policeman gave it a few thumps and tried shaking it for good measure (he’d seen his son doing the same to his computer when it gave him trouble). Nothing. Frustrated, he shoved his hand into the paper feeder to check if there was a jam. But there was nothing obstructing the path of the pink sheets.

  That was when he found the note. It was taped to the side of the table.

  ‘To hell with you,’ he read out slowly. The moral policeman’s face turned purple. This was clearly the work of hooligans, the very sort that the force tried to reform. What was more, the hooligans had had the cheek to write the note on the back of a department memo sheet! The daring of it galled him.

  He tore out the note carefully, stuck it inside his handkerchief and put it inside his pocket. He looked at the notifier regretfully. This breakdown would mean days, even months, of delay. God knows how many wanton young people would use this excuse to play truant from entering the Holy Institution of Marriage. Parents these days were pretty stupid. They seemed to live in oblivion, not even realizing that their wards had reached marriageable age till the notifier sent them a memo. And after that, they would act like headless chickens, running helter-skelter to meet the deadline set by the office.

  Just the previous day, he had caught a couple messing around and called their parents to inform them about their wards’ nefarious activities. This was not a requirement but only a guideline in the guidebook for the Moral Police Force, but the moral policeman liked to follow it. The disbelief in the parents’ voices always amused him. They seemed to be completely ignorant of just how astray their children had gone. The girl had been a whore, there was no doubt about that. Her dupatta was slung around her neck, barely touching her breasts (how the moral policeman would have loved to strangle her with it!).

  He was not a hard-hearted man. He had signed up for this job believing it to be a noble one. The pay was not out of the world but it was enough. There was the security of a pension after retirement too. But sometimes, the waiting got to him. He had never been a patient man (in school, he had always performed poorly because he could not sit for three hours straight in the examination hall). Some couples seemed to take forever to kiss, but not this whore. She had planted one on the boy as soon as she got into his car. The moral policeman could have intervened immediately but he wanted to see how far they would go.

  Emerging from the long shadows supplied so generously by the trees, he walked slowly towards the car, careful not to use his flashlight even though the street was dark and there was barely any moonlight. If it was what he suspected, he wanted to catch them red-handed. When he reached the car, he suddenly switched on his flashlight and swung it inside the window. A smile of triumph lit up his face. His hunch had been right!

  When he dragged the couple out from the vehicle, the boy hastily trying to button up his shirt and the girl trying to wrap her dupatta around her shoulders, as though she were the very symbol of modesty, the moral policeman made the boy switch on his headlights to get a good look at them. They were rich kids, he knew, looking at the size of the car and the girl’s toe-nails that were polished and painted immaculately. They probably lived in mansions with bathrooms the size of his government quarters.

  The boy was trying to call someone urgently. The moral policeman snatched his phone and flung it to the ground. It was an expensive model, one that his son had been coveting for months now. With satisfaction, the moral policeman stepped on its screen and jumped once. There was a delicious crunch as the heel of his shoe met the glass of the phone.

  The girl wept. She told him that they were from good families. But though she was supplicating and begging him, the look in her eyes was so full of loathing, so full of hate. He knew that she thought him to be something disgusting, a paan stain on a white wall. It was then that he told her to get into the car. He kissed her hard on the mouth while his hands squeezed her breasts. She pushed him away but he’d been ready to go anyway. The moral policeman never crossed the line. He knew just what was enough. She would remember this forever. It was far more effective a deterrent than letting the two off with a measly fine that would have been paid from their

  family wealth.

  When he got out of the car, he saw to his disgust that the boy was shaking and that he’d wet himself. Gingerly stepping past the pool of urine, he walked casually back to his bike to call their parents, happy that the day had ended so productively. Sometimes, strong measures were necessary to put an end to evil.

  Now, immersed in his thoughts, the moral policeman bumped into the rapist who was talking to his wife over the phone.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the moral policeman, looking up.

  The rapist disconnected the call and smiled at him pleasantly. He knew the moral policeman well. In fact, he had been recruited by him into service when he was seventeen. The rapist had been working from a dingy hole in the wall, his operations limited to few cases. He was new to the capital city and had no friends.

  But one day the moral policeman, who had read about his talent in a three-inch column in a local newspaper, had knocked at his door and changed everything. He’d encouraged him to write the entrance exam to gain admission into government service, assuring him that he would crack it without a problem. The rapist had gone on to do just that, making the moral policeman very
proud of his protégé.

  The moral policeman had become his mentor in every sense of the word. He’d shown him where to buy his vegetables, directed him to a quilt shop that made the softest and cheapest quilts in the city and even lent him a few pots and pans to get the kitchen in his modest government quarters started. In the building, he introduced him to the people who mattered and ran him through the basics of his job, pointing out the mistakes that the rapist who’d occupied the office before him had made.

  ‘The key,’ the moral policeman had said, ‘is to never forget why you are doing what you are doing. The importance of it. Be passionate about your work and you will shine.’

  His words had made a huge impression on the rapist who’d been a starry-eyed youth back then. But over the years, their relationship had changed from mentor-mentee to friendship. And at times, the rapist, who had been in awe of the moral policeman’s seemingly infinite powers in the past, even thought him to be stupid.

  ‘What’s up?’ the rapist said to the moral policeman now.

  ‘Some hooligans have broken the notifier machine,’ the moral policeman fretted. ‘Look at this note!’

  The rapist took the note from him and studied it carefully.

  ‘Could I see the machine?’ he asked. The moral policeman nodded and the two of them walked to the notifier.

  ‘Look!’ said the moral policeman unnecessarily. The rapist lowered his head and peered into the machine. Someone had viciously pulled the wiring apart.

  The rapist whistled. ‘I don’t think this is the work of hooligans,’ he said, reading the note again. ‘This has been done by somebody who was angry. Really angry. Hooligans do such things for pleasure.’

  The moral policeman rubbed his paunch thoughtfully. ‘But who could’ve done this?’ he wondered aloud. He knew the chief was going to be mad when he heard. Someone would have to take the blame and the moral policeman didn’t want to be the fall guy, not when he was hoping for a pay hike in the coming financial year.

  The rapist stuck his head into the machine again and watched. He was very good at watching. His eyes darted from one end to another. It was dark inside the machine and the smell of ink hit him. But the rapist remained calm and collected. If needed, he could stay in the same position for hours, just watching. Unlike the moral policeman, he was good at waiting.