Pigeons on the Roof

The sun had not yet come out, but the stars had already given way to light, when I felt him fall into step beside me. I didn’t need to turn my head to know who it was. Oh, I said to myself. This is not good news.

Vicky was a local gangster, a habitual criminal, and one of the best-known inmates in Circle 1.

Always on the move, endlessly curious about everyone, and the man to see if you wanted a smoke : grass, a strip of uppers, a strip of downers, whatever the day called for. Slim of build, light-brown, a pencil moustache, and a laugh that came easily and often. When he wasn’t angry he was fun company. A running commentary on the world, delivered with the timing of a man who had spent a lifetime reading rooms.

He also had a temper that once triggered went past anything you’d think his frame could hold. I watched him chase another inmate round the quadrangle for a full twenty minutes, in dead earnest, until the guards waded in and pulled him off. Ready to kill, and over almost nothing : the man, a Brazilian doing time for carrying drugs, spoke neither English nor Hindi, and had simply been doing his job, enforcing the daily lock-in schedule, when he refused to let Vicky linger a few minutes past it. Vicky did not deal well with rules that weren’t his own.

I got to know him properly during quarantine, the seven days the jail imposed on anyone who had stepped outside its walls for a court hearing. Seven days locked in an isolation barrack together, and Vicky filled every one of them with his life.

His father sold sarees out of a shop in Pune, and Vicky spoke of him the way other men speak of gods. No one who walked in ever walked out without buying something, he told me, more than once. Nobody enters a saree shop to sightsee, he said : they’ve already half decided, you just have to find the thing that finishes the decision for them. His father could size up a customer in the time it took them to cross the threshold. Vicky said he’d inherited the same gift himself, called it instinct. Cultivated, I thought, though he wasn’t wrong that it was real.

It is a long way from a lower-middle-class Maharashtrian household to a life of crime, and I was determined to find out how the distance had been covered. What I found, turning the story over across those seven days, was not one wrong turning but an appetite : for speed, for recognition, for the immediate gratification. In a certain kind of person that appetite becomes impossible to feed any other way, and once it finds its supply there is very little chance of pulling the person back off the track.

He left school around the tenth standard, by which time his other career had already made him a minor celebrity in the locality. His parents, from what I could tell, had long since lost whatever grip they’d once had on this hyper-energetic, curious, restless boy. That was the picture I carried of him — until the pigeons.

On the terrace of his father’s house Vicky had built a shelter and raised a whole brood of them : ordinary birds, show varieties, and a set of couriers he’d trained and used routinely. He had photographs of his favourites and went through them slowly, naming each one, and I understood then that I had badly misjudged how much of this man was still, underneath everything, a boy on a roof.

Then came another photograph : a young woman, pretty, from his own locality. He told it as a whirlwind : they fell for each other, married, and she moved in with his parents to live as part of the joint family. A couple of years on she gave him a daughter, who by every account had become the fixed point his whole life now arranged itself around. More photographs. By the end of those seven days I had a fairly good idea of the man.

Vicky had a saree shop waiting for him, and a father he worshipped, and a loft of pigeons, and a wife, and a daughter who was the fixed point his whole life arranged itself around. What holds most of us to the median isn’t virtue so much as guardrail : a family, a shop to run, a daughter to walk to school, a hundred small frictions that keep a life from running too far off course. Vicky had every one of those. They simply hadn’t held.

Back to our walk. Vicky was in his usual high spirits, telling me how much he’d enjoyed our conversations in isolation. In his mind we had become friends, and friendship, to him, came with a licence to say anything. He’d been reading about Chandrasekhar, a scamster housed in Tihar who, through a chain of go-betweens and the particular vulnerability that a long stretch inside breeds even in hard men, had extracted something like two hundred crores from the Ranbaxy brothers on the promise of settling their cases. It had made the front page, national and regional papers both, and Vicky had clearly read every word of it.

Here was his proposal. I was to go to the circle in-charge and complain that Vicky had demanded two hundred and one crores from me as ransom. I know you don’t have it, he said, but that’s not the point. You’re a high-profile target, it’ll hit the papers, my name will be in every one of them, and my standing in the criminal world will go up overnight. Negative publicity, he explained, patiently, as though to a slow student, was the fastest ladder there was. He was already inside for something along the same lines, thirty-five lakhs, a jeweller, a claim of protection owed. This, I understood, was simply the next rung.

My mind went blank. Then, rather tamely, I asked why two hundred and one. That’s easy, he said, delighted, as if the answer were the whole point of the exercise : it has to be one more than Chandrasekhar.

I never went to the Circle in-charge. I told no one. But somehow he found out anyway — these things move through jail faster than any complaint could and within days I was shifted, without a word of explanation, into isolation. The infamous Anda Ward.

I think about that shift more than I think about the proposal itself. He wanted the newspapers to know his name. I never told a soul, and the jail knew anyway. Between the two of us, I am no longer sure which one of us understood the place better.