THIS DOES QUITE SOUND LIKE ME

In any known association of people, be it a large organisation or even a small office , a school, college or a club, a dak bungalow or even a regular bus or ferry route, tales of "characters " abound. Most of the clubs carry stories about some legends, be it the Oldest Member at the Nineteenth Hole  of Wodehouse's golf stories or Dadi Mazda of Royal Calcutta Golf Club after whom the Club's famous Mazda toasts are named or even Salim Bhai, the head barman of Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (1792)   who was as famous for his  rum toddy as for his geniality in the most trying times when members jostled to beat the bar closing jingle bells. In formal organisations, such characters are elevated as "institutions" and books are written about or by them : JRD, Russi Modi, Lee Iococca, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, et al. 

In uniformed services, such "institutions" are generally more colourful, irascible and temperamental , their memories fermented more with tales of  their idiosyncrasy  than  normality. But usually these people are  extremely cerebral, profoundly well read, professionally sound, fiercely protective and passionately concerned about their subordinates. Probably we tend to speak more about them because we find such people become rarer by the day. In West Bengal  and Calcutta Police, I doubt anyone commanded more stories or merited so many glasses of whiskies to keep the huddles going than the late Ranjit Gupta IP. He was Commissioner of Police , Kolkata and later on became the Inspector General of Police, West Bengal from where he was moved out before the end of his term. He is credited with suppressing the Naxalite movement with a heavy hand and was generally in trouble with the political dispensation of the day. He was also a scholar and an anthropologist. 

Lots of stories about him continued to float for years after his retirement.  But the story no.1 connected to Ranjit Gupta was the L'affaire Teen Kauri which I first  heard from the  then Range DIG Sujoy Chakraborty during the inspection of the office of Addl SP, Asansol over several cups of lebu chai and fried cashew nuts. Readers are requested to remember this anecdote because I shall come to it again.

Well, it runs like this. There were two DIsG in Barrackpore, one in charge of Training and the other of Armed Police,  and Teen Kauri was one of them. Sometimes in early 1970s,  he was reported to have shot at his wife in a fit of anger and true to his dismal record at the range, had missed her completely.  It is said that the feisty lady ran to Barrackpore PS more in agitation than in fright and demanded of the OC, Barrackpore PS that a case of attempt to murder be recorded against her husband. The poor Badababu goldfished  copious quantities of air at such an outrageous and unheard of request . Afraid that his Adam's Apple could pop out of fright, he pleaded with SDPO, Barackpore to come over. The ink of indecisiveness of police in such matters shot up in a capillary action through to the Addl SP, skipped the Superintendent of Police 24 Parganas who was way too dangerous to be woken  up at an unearthly eight in the morning and finally nudged the other DIG at Barrackpore who was requested to come over. 

Naturally the DIG had to show more flair and decisiveness. To be fair to him, he did the best thing in the circumstances . He rang up the IG Ranjit Gupta .

" Sir, Teen Kauri shot at his wife, but luckily the bullet missed her. She is now at the police station demanding an FIR against him," the black phone trembled as he explained the situation with such misery and remorse that for a moment the IG thought it was the informant DIG who was the culprit. 

It is said that the IG who did not like to take a decision which an OC was capable and competent to take,  thought for not more than a second .

"Oh, Teen Kauri was always a poor shot,"  the IG laughed and hung up to work on his pipe, tea and the day's edition of Statesman. 

There were many more but the problem with recounting tales of moth - balled antiquity is that  inaccuracies creep in and events and the dramatis personae get mixed up. Some of the stories could be apocryphal as well.  For a long time I thought that the story of sergeants of Calcutta Police escorting an ex- Commissioner of Police from Lalbazar to Writers' Building in an arrowhead formation on their motorcycles and handing over the Sergeant Security of Writers' Buildings with a "diye gelaam, ei baar maal ta ke bhujhbey" was about Ranjit Gupta only to be corrected that it was about another Commissioner of police who had been elevated as an IG! I will limit myself to my own encounters with him. 

Even after retirement in the first half of 1970s, he never lost his sense of authority. He was used to deference and it was quite common for senior officers much later to see Ranjit Gupta walk into their office and say, " I want you to do  this" lacing his talks with his takiakalaam " now  you listen to me ". He remained the star invitee at important police functions, be it the Combined Police Parades,  or the Sesquicentennial celebration of the Calcutta  Police or the first Mess Night of all retired IPS and IP officers at the IPS Mess. He was a living legend during his service life, famous beyond West Bengal and the sheen never quite wore off . 

It was sheer fate that placed me before Ranjit Gupta, forty six years my service senior. It so happened that he was drawing less pension than he thought was due to him and it rankled him. He wrote to many of his old service colleagues who, too, had retired by this time, asking for assistance/ suggestions in drafting a suitable petition to the government. By this time he had been detected with cancer, had a pacemaker implanted and lost his wife. He had tended to become forgetful and would often harangue an officer for the same thing thrice a day without realising it at times. 

One such victim was SK Singh, an officer 15 years his junior and 31 years my senior who had retired within a couple of years of my joining the service. During his younger days, SK Singh was as outstanding as he was outspoken and after a short run of brilliance, fell foul  of the political dispensation for two thirds of his career. Apart from other things, he was the person to whom all IPS officers turned to whenever they would receive show causes and vigilance inquisitions . It was he  who would draft replies and charter the course of defence. But now he was old, his health was failing, and unable to outrightly refuse his former IG, he did what is now taught in Management schools- he outsourced this problem to me. I was the IPS Association Secretary,  played tennis better than him,  had fitter knees and had probably impressed him by  writing an exceptionally vitriolic letter to the IPS members against the proposed amalgamation of a few areas falling under West Bengal Police with Kolkata Police.

One day I got a call from Mr SK Singh to go and meet Ranjit Gupta and help him get his pension enhanced .

" I am quite sure I will not be bothered again, and let me tell you, he had enquired whether you drink or not, and I have said that you love the spirit" said SK Singh.

I obeyed for three reasons: it gave me a chance to meet the legend, I admired SK Singh a lot and , I had no choice. 

So one fine evening I went to meet Ranjit Gupta at his flat in Ballygunge Circular Road. He was extremely courteous and met me at the door rather than asking me to be ushered to his study which could have been just as fine with me. His was a slight frame, now bent with age, he required a bit of an assistance while walking and as I shook his hands, now gnarled with age, I felt not the the exaggerated grasp typical of swaggering policemen but a warm clasp, just short of limpid but overwhelming in affection.Sunken cheeks, a face lined with creases of age, a pair of  thickset glasses with heavy lenses, tailored clothes hanging loosely on a considerably shrivelled body- yes, he looked every bit of a man who would turn ninety in a few months. But when he spoke, I could get a hang of his legendary authority. The voice had a slight, ailment- inflicted slur but it rasped out firmly, it was not thin but authoritative, and it was not aggressively polite which actually makes me wary.

"Ah Vivek ! you have come. Let's go," he said and he led me, with a shuffling gait, to his study. 

It was a small room, filled with books, a few chairs, a table and a desktop. He informed that he was working on a book, the progress was slow because his ill -health came in way of giving regular dictations. I started to meet him quite often and every time his eldest son Indrajit would remain present. The father and son stuck out quite well but the patriarch still worried about his son even though the latter was definitely well into his fifties. Quite often, the son would correct his father and offer a helping hand whenever  fading memory would play games.  The two would sometimes talk about Peloponnesian War which was quite Greek to me. Ranjit Gupta's strength would drain out after some time and more than once, he would leave after barely nursing a small whiskey which would be poured for him.

"You must excuse an old man like me, you people carry on," he would say and walk away.

We talked about his pension. Forget a DG's pension, I realised he was not even drawing an IG's pension but only an Addl. IG's. I told him as much and said that we have to first get back his IG's pension. On  Day One itself, he shoved a sheaf of papers at me, typed copies of drafts and suggestions by officers who had retired by that time.

" Please go through them, take your time, and come back to me when you can," he said but by the following morning he rang up and enquired about the progress.

Anyway, I worked at it, and he, too, would remind me time and again, sometimes twice within a span of an hour and then apologise for his forgetfulness. The maverick was turning out to be one big delight and I quite liked talking to him. I drafted an RTI petition and within a few months, the government restored his pension to that of an IG, though  I think it was to a large extent due to the Old Man's personal visits to Writers' Building. I am extremely grateful that the then Home Secretary and the West Bengal AG took the correct view and it was done with. But Ranjit Gupta was a hard task master and after a small celebratory drink, he spelt out his next target. 

" Vivek, you see I was IG when an IG was the Head of Police Force. Now a days it is the DG. So I must get the pension of DG. It is not the money, but the acknowledgement of parity of the chair. Now you work on it," he ordered me as I eased myself into a chair in his study. 

Hearing his tweaked version of a kind of OROP, I smiled and commented that  an ex -Kerala IG had already moved the government. But Ranjit Gupta had neither a sense of the value of ordinariness nor an engaging modesty. 

" You forget that chap, and see that mine becomes the precedent," he snapped.

Nothing came off it.  I moved to the Centre and left Ballygunge Circular Road while he also became inactive as his health deteriorated further. 

When I recall the time spent with him, the six seven occasions in his study, a couple in the IPS Mess, a few things remain etched in my mind. One was his longingness for his late wife. He missed her terribly, and in the late autumn of his life, it was very pronounced. It was during my second or third visit that I took my wife to meet him at his invitation. It was just as well. I think he required the comfort and ease of company of a woman to talk about her.

Even as he welcomed us in the living room, the first thing he did on being introduced and after apologising for a kind of disarray his house was in, was to show the framed picture of his late wife- a strikingly beautiful photograph , the fading sepia not diminishing her beauty even one bit. As we moved inside his study, there was more on her. With great fondness, he took out a photograph which had been sent to his house before their marriage for match fixing, showed it to my wife and looked at her for her appreciation and admiration.

 " She handled everything in the house, including my finances, I am absolutely clueless , and quite alone,"  he said looking at no one in particular.

"Those wooden chairs you see," referring to four simple and elegant Burmah teak chairs with cane netting on which we were sitting , "were gifts during my marriage," he added with a sigh. He then proceeded to recount some tales concerning his wife of the years of his mofussil postings- it set my wife at ease and he accessed a rapt womanly attention over stories of his beloved late wife, his eyes shining as the spools of his life played out before him as he spoke.

The second thing was that he had moved on in years, rancour was much less and though agitated at  times, he was not whining and querulous over the fate that met him in the twilight of his professional carer. I had expected him to be bitter about Siddharta Shankar Ray, his college mate at Presidency College who later became the Chief Minister and after some major professional disagreements, showed him the door as IG. He never discussed them. If at all he took a dig at his old friend, it was as a friendly banter. He remembered with glee how Siddharta and Maya had , after their marriage, gone to meet him in Barrackpore. 

" He came as a bit of show- off in his foreign car ( I forget the make ) but ultimately had to return to Calcutta  in my jeep after their car broke down ," he seemed mighty pleased as he said, the smile not being lost to anyone of us. 

On the other hand, he related a few things quite lovingly about his old friend.

"I was from East Bengal, slight in frame, and the city boys would try to bully me. But Siddharta, a big boy, urbane, athletic and hugely popular would shield me. He helped me a lot" he once said.  

I thought he was very conscious of his slight built, and took to polo deliberately as the equestrian sport hid his puniness . About his polo matches with his colleagues he would talk a lot, sometimes detailing events chukker-wise.

His manners were faultless and he could go to great lengths to make his guest feel comfortable and wanted. Once he invited us for dinner at his house. He called over Indryajeet's wife so that my wife had the company of a woman. After a few drinks and some reminiscing about his days in North Bengal, we went over to the Hall for dinner. I love Bengali food and Ranjit Gupta's cook did not disappoint. I thanked him for serving, among other things, kasha mangsho and pabda curry.

" I am glad you liked it," he said and went about slowly with his dinner.

But I saw my wife and Indrajeet exchange a smile. After we returned home, I asked her about that.  She said that a few days ago someone had come from Ranjit Gupta's house enquiring from my house NVF about my favourite food,  and Jogo, the NVF had told him, "Pabda and mangsho".This was Ranjit Gupta- making discreet enquiries about his guest's food choices before their arrival. I was simply amazed , and very touched and then I remembered  SK Singh telling that the Old Man had enquired whether I drank alcohol or not before calling me over the first time.

Finally, what would remain my most abiding memory of the legend was his sense of humour. For this, we must return to that mangsho and pabda dinner. The Old Man was in an expansive mood, being quite chatty about some of his superiors and was absolutely smashing it up. This is when his son, who must have heard the rants many a time, cut him short and humorously prodded. 

 "C'mom Paps, you were no angel. You had been a big devil during your days, and there are so many stories about you," he let go. 

"Well, I was a bit of stickler but I was never unfair," the Polo player defended himself, hooking his son's mallet.

"Besides, there are hardly any stories about me," he counter attacked.

" Sir , but there are indeed many stories about you " I said and proceeded to narrate  L'affaire Teen Kauri and rounded off with my version of mimicking his "Oh, Teen Kauri was always a poor shot" .

He adjusted his hearing aid and listened intently as he sat at the head of the table.  As soon as I finished, he closed his eyes, made a great effort to remember, arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and even grimaced.  The he put down his knife and fork, closed his fists, looked up at the ceiling, then looked at me, threw one glance  at his son, then turned away to look down at his plate. Finally he clasped his hands, brought them close to his heart and looked at everyone. 

"I can't quite remember, but this does quite sound like me," he exclaimed after a moment's silence.

Postscript: The two had so many things in common.  Living into nineties, abrasive during their peaks, both were given a short shrift in their death. When Ranjit Gupta died, even though the Kolkata Police provided the Guard of honour,  I could not see anyone, save for the  DIG HQ and the SP South 24 Parganas, from the West Bengal Police Directorate come over to Keoratala to be present in the legend's last journey  even as a clutch of old, now retired colleagues,  friends and close family members had come over. While Punjab flew its flag at half mast in memory of the man who was its Governor during the peak of militancy, the state, as reported in some newspapers, where he was Chief Minister, offered no such gesture to Sidhharta Shankar Ray.