A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Sudhir and I were standing with the Traffic Inspector (TI) , Howrah , just next to the Howrah Station Tram Depot, ensuring taxis don’t stop at that point on GR Road .It was for all practical purposes our first working day for the on- job training after completing the first phase of Basic Training at National Police Academy , Hyderabad. The previous day, after reporting at Police Training College, Barrackpore, we had been bundled off in pairs to Howrah, North and South 24 Parganas for Puja duty. 

It was getting dark. During the breaks between breaking tail lights of errant taxis, we suffered the TI’s incessant boasts. It was during one such lull when the TI was firing on all cylinders that one teenager came up to him. We will call him Chap A.

“Is one allowed to piddle over there ?” he asked in Bengali, pointing towards a garbage dump towards the river side.

“Shut up , you cannot .“ “ What will happen if one does?” “ He will get a sound thrashing, du danda debo shalaa ke.”

“Ok, I will go and warn my friend, “ and Chap A went away . 

He went about 30 yards where his friend , to be referred henceforth as Chap B , was standing, awaiting clarification, and soon after hearing from his friend, began to ease himself, spreading his legs in a ten past ten angle, much like the hands of a watches in advertisements. The moment he was in the middle of his act, Chap A darted towards us.

“ Uncle, see what that person is doing. Thrash him up as you had promised.” 

The much medalled Inspector , having promised violent retribution just under a minute ago, and apprehensive about derision from us, was left no option but to rush towards the fellow’s friend. Willy-nilly, the Chap B was surprised in processus, and ran with his willy .

On any other day, the young, lanky lad would have made good his escape, but today, with his guard and drawstring dropped, Chap B didn’t stand much chance. The TI soon collared him. After being allowed to tie up his pyjama, the fellow confided that he had started to relieve himself only after being told by Chap A , his friend, that police officer had actually allowed it.

The Inspector realized that he had been taken for a ride, and glared with impotent rage at the young man who was now whistling and showing his thumb with unadulterated glee. 

“Hadeyharaami, rascal to his bones , “the Inspector muttered , his swag gone, his boast deflated , reputation battered, ridicule completed. 

 “Sir, beware. People here are very mischievous and crafty. “ 

We wondered where the hell we had come to. At NPA Hyderabad, people had offered soulful regrets to seven of us at being allotted West Bengal cadre. We had been fed with stories of a population in protest , of labour militancy, police unions, hartaal and gherao. 

Within an hour , we got a call to go to Belilious Road where the then Punjab Governor Siddhartha Shankar Ray was to come and inaugurate a Puja Pandal. It had drizzled by this time, roads had become muddy.  We reached and shortly the convoy of one of the most protected politicians entered the premises. However, the lead cars got stuck trying to reverse . Soon, the small ground in between the pandal and a stage became a theatre of intense cacophonic confusion, the cars revved up to prise out the rubber from the slush. The sound of the cars drowned the welcome salutations of Vande matram and Zindabad by a crowd gathered around and atop the boundary wall. But even as his partyman Priya Das Munshi was extolling the virtues of Sidhharta Shankar Ray, Tiger of Bengal ( ToB), the Governor got up and took away the mic . 

“ Who is in charge of the police bandobast here?” 

“I have seen a thousand but never as bad as this, “ he roared.

We would have been a hundred odd policemen, and a hush fell upon the gathering. The Superintendent of Police was in charge of the arrangements , and he was nowhere to be seen. Sudhir and I wondered what who would go if the SP was not going to come forward .

“Who is in charge of the police arrangement,?” ToB roared for the second time. 

I looked at Sudhir nervously, Sudhir looked at me with a crestfallen anxiety. 

And then the ToB looked at our direction. 

“You,” he shouted, “come here. I will talk to you now, the SP later.” 

I was about to step forward  when , a Deputy Superintendent of Police, tall and in a peak cap, standing next to us,  saluted. But just as he saluted in response to the Governor , the Superintendent stepped forward. 

He was short from head to toe, wide around his belly, his long hair curled out from the rim of his peak cap, and offered a salute which he had customised with his personality. The salute is done by raising the right hand palm open , the spine erect, the neck straight, fingers held together ( including the obstinate little finger which tends to part with the ring finger when so stretched) just above the right eyebrow. Basudeo Singh, my ustaad at NPA would tell us that the point at which the index finger met the middle should be touching the edge of the visor. 

The Howrah Superintendent had a different one. He brought his palm, inclined slightly inwards, till chin level, and then bowed his head down to meet the index finger.

“He does not look look like a Superintendent of Police , look at his belt,” the ToB mocked , beckoning at the multitude who agreed in a gleeful chorus. We also could not disagree much. The Superintendent smiled sheepishly, tugged his belt , saluted , and looked up for approval. The ToB let him go, and handed over the mic to Dasmunshi for more fawnsome praise.

I was shocked , and devastated. Where the hell had we come to. Teenagers making fun of cops, politicians openly upbraiding Superintendents of Police. All the misgivings about being allotted West Bengal cadre were coming to be true. Sudhir, too, was too shocked to offer any comfort. 

During night in my room in the Railway Officers Rooms atop Howrah Station where we had been accommodated, I recalled my first day in another metropolis which had become my home for almost 7 years- Dilli.

I had reached Dilli on a warm August in 1981. Probably Sonbhadra Express. To realize the Bihari dream of civil service success via Dilii, leaving behind a first class history faculty of a top class college, Patna College, founded on 9th of February, 1863 in a Dutch Opium Godown by the huge Ganges. The admissions were over in Delhi University , which traditionally opened on 16th of July ( if not a Sunday) those days. 

So there I was, a leather suitcase in hand, to find out Raju Bhaiya or Rajendra Dayal of Kirori Mal college. I boarded a bus from the Paharganj side ( there was no Ajmeri Gate entrance those days). Was it route 110 ? I can’t recall. It took me some time to attract the conductor’s attention and ask for a forty paise ticket to Maurice Nagar, and in the process gave away my roots.

“Dakhila lene aaye ho? Bihar se ho ?”

I turned around and found one thin middle aged man, with a thick mop of salt and pepper , was dressed in a pair of  white kurta pyjama , a bag was slung across .

“ Ji haan , have come for admission“ I replied, in a not too eager manner the purpose of my visit. There were other people around him, probably his students. Within a minute, he got a seat and so did one of his students. 

 “Uthho, is ladke ko baithne do,” he commanded the boy. 

I sat down, tired and grateful. He inquired about my marks, where I wanted to take admission, and the subject.

 “Do you know anyone?”

 “One Rajendra Dayal of Kirori Mal College. That’s all. “ 

He asked for a pen and paper, and his students promptly obliged. He wrote down, in Urdu, I didn’t understand a word as I chased his pen from right to left. 

“Quersihi saheb ko de dena. Farasi Department ke head haiN. Maybe he can help. He is a good friend. “

I thanked him. Soon it was time for him to leave. As the group was alighting, he stopped and commanded one of them. 

“You stay back and drop him at Maurice Nagar.” 

“Bacche, all the best,” he wished me, smiled and alighted. 

I never saw this kind hearted soul again in my life. 

 Delhi had welcomed me with open arms. 

It remains the city I love to visit. I am simply bowled over by its medieval monuments, and would want to visit them again and again, probably alone, as earlier occasions of visits have been marred by impatience of friends or family members. I would like to visit the lesser known trails as well . A big part of me will always stay in this city, not everywhere, but in that place bound by the Khyber Pass, Kingsway Camp, the Ridge and Kamla nagar or K’nags - yes, Delhi University and within it my college, Kirori Mal or simply KMC. Sometimes when I want to get away from it all, I retreat to the recesses of memories of those days - the hostel corridors, the bun anda and cha at Jaisingh’s , the hours in the library, churning out the tutes, the the college fests and the waft of weeds, the DTC night specials, the close shaves with college and police authorities, the Civil Services grind, and the final exit via Dholpur House on Shahjahan Road. 

But . then  if there is a city I don’t want to work and live in , that again, paradoxically, is Delhi, even though some of my most loved ones are in Delhi. New Delhi is depressingly sarkari. I could never like the narcissistic stonecraft of Raisina Hill structures or the blandness of government housing estates in Moti Bagh, RK Puram, Rabindra Nagar, etc.

The empire was at the beginning of its decline when New Delhi was built, and typically evolved into a cut-off, guarded, almost distrustful - like its Lutyens and Baker, its two architects who fell out- city.  The large spaces which separated the melancholic bunglows in Tughlaq, Moti Lal, Rajendra Prasad and other roads were informed by that mindset. Spaces induce coldness, and that is what gripped New Delhi and its people. The ruler and the ruled remain coldly separated even today. There is a roughness in the air, there is war on its roads , and whispers about fixers abound in its corridors. This was not the Delhi where I had spent some of my best years.

On the other hand, Kolkata, which had disappointed and distressed me at the beginning, grew on me. It is easier to live in , easy on the pocket, far less polluted-more so after significant improvement in its solid waste management. Its traffic is managed by one the best traffic police forces in the world. The City of Joy is safer for women, its cuisine is top of the shelf and it has some of the best clubs in the country.  I opted to stay in Kolkata during both of my central deputation tenures- CBI and CRPF. Calcutta was built, not by a government, but by merchants at a time of buoyant optimism. The social origin of the city informed its evolution.There were no Civil Lines in Kolkata, people mixed everywhere, the buildings also stood next to each other. In short , there was nothing official about it. Over the years, I became a diehard Kalkatiya.

GREEN COCONUT POLICING

“If a probationer will not commit mistakes, then who will”. By this yardstick, constantly reiterated by men who had a big heart , huge patience and great commitment towards their Service fledglings’ training , I was an ideal probationer  in the days when the waist was sub- 30 and weight under 60.

On my first day with the training Superintendent of Police in Burdwan , I had knocked violently on his shoulder --- copiously  sleep-deprived . I had my share of goof ups with the police uniform - once I reported at the Muster Parade without a peak cap. Of course, it was nothing compared to the occasion a few years later when a Head of Police Force arrived at  Combined Police parade wearing his sword on the wrong side - it is not a mean feat, and requires a huge leap of faith in a daft homeguard to kit you up.

The Holi in 1990  at Galsi Police station provided me with an insight into the social habits of the local people. In utter disregard of Sub Inspector Bhagwandas Sur’s advice of serving sweets severally in small plates to guests , I had initially placed about 15 rosogollas in a big plate expecting it to go around. Nothing of that sort happened, one  fellow accepted the whole lot with much reluctance , and proceeded to pop them in, one by one in a cavern beyond his hoopla. I , too, accompanied him - with squirm and shock . The Circle Inspector attachment was used by the the Inspector to regale me with stories of his thana days with a huge array of SsP. But one level of police deployment I had never worked with during my probationary days was the police camp. My only acquaintance was with a camp set up in Guhagram in connection with release of waters by the DVC - having just visited it once.

Police camps are usually set up for a temporary period - to restore normalcy in a locality.They could be placed for as short as a day, and extend to much longer period of months, if not years. There are all kinds of camps- quite a few of the armed police personnel loved it for the perquisites of Halting Allowances or even a steady supply of fish in the bheri camps. Some camps are set deep in very hostile settings - looting of arms and killing of security forces have been reported from Purbasthali during the Naxal movement of 1960s and 1970s and in Silda in 2010.

Very often, once the camp was set up, all kinds of pressure would be brought upon to prevent its withdrawal as it afforded a sense of security in distant areas- when I was Addl SP Nadia, there were 37 camps of a section  strength each in Karimnagar PS, an area ravaged by cattle thieves,dacoits, and women abusers from across the border in those unfenced days. Many a time when a battalion commandant would send vehicle to close a camp, locals would gherao and prevent its closure.

But sometimes, people would be eager to have the police camps removed. I recall an incident in Tamluk which was my first posting in service. Tamluk is now the headquarter of Purbo Midnapore , those days it was a sub divisional town under undivided Midnapore. Famous as Tamralipti in ancient towns as a river port, it has museum which chronicles this antiquity. To the religious minded, the Bargabhima mandir is a top draw. Its revolutionary pedigree is borne by its association with Khudiram Bose, Matangini Hazra, and Sushil Dhara who was a co founder of Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar during Quit India Movement. The place was also famous for cultivation of betel leaf while the Sunday highpoint in those days would be the screening of a movie by the Tamluk Cine Society.

There was a village , I now forget the name, but it was on the road to Mecheda, where two warring Muslim families were locked in dispute over control of some waqf property. Quite often , there  would be violence followed by registration of cases and counter cases . In due course of time, this led to a demand for placing a police camp to prevent further escalation of violence , and a motley of home guards, NVF and a few policemen were under ASI Hiranmoy Sikdar.

It was now over a month that the camp had been set up, and I decided to pay a visit to the village. So one afternoon, with Pannalal Goswami, my OC of Tamluk PS and Gaurango Mitra, the tall and handsome Circle Inspector , I went. The weather was muggy, the path from where we alighted muddy, and very soon , the train of excited people which had been following us , became a huge crowd.It was a medium sized village, with a few ponds, large number of  and coconut trees, with surprisingly few fruits . A few elders took to swooshing and shushing away the loud curiosity of children and livestock , and suddenly out of nowhere a few chairs and a matted cot were offered for us .

Camp- in -charge ASI Hiranmoy Sikdar appeared, a bit off balanced at our  surprise visit, in a uniform which clearly appeared not to have been worn for quite some time.

“Saar,” he saluted and knocked off his spectacles , out of lack of practice and surprise I thought.

But what really bemused me was the camaraderie between some people whom I had seen abusing each other during their thana visits. While some  were making all the show of friendliness, two of them took the OC aside , and were requesting him for something with folded hands. Pannalal Goswami broke into a smile soon came up to me with them.

“Saar,” he said, “ they have promised me  not to fight again, we could withdraw the police camp.”

“Are you sure”, I asked the crowd, “ camp ta tule nebo?”

“ Yes,” they chorused, the ladies, nearly all with children in arms,  seemed firmer in their resolve.

“ Amader jhaagda ta mitey gechhe”, they said. I  looked with wondrous awe at the fumbling and feeble ASI, in admiration of  his skills at salishi or negotiations, at having resolved the disputes when a bunch of cases and a clutch of 107 CrPC prosecutions had failed.

Very soon, after accepting ASI Hiranmoy hospitality  of daab or green coconut water , we left, after leaving orders over wireless for quick dispatch of the thana  1 tonner to come and pick up the camp personnel.

“ Bada Babu”, I remarked through the smoke of a cigarette lit in relief after reaching the thana,” I never knew this Hiranmoy could be so effective.”

“ What exactly did he do, and what were those two telling you?”

“Saar,” Pannalal said, gently placing a cup of tea from a tray before me.

“Please remove the camp otherwise we will will be doomed .“

“Everyday, we get an earful from our women.”

“Why, what happened ? This guy would misbehave with them ? I thought he looked pretty harmless?”

“No sir, “ Pannalal smiled wider, “ they were  saying at the rate Hiranmoy orders their plucking , no daab  stands a chance of becoming a proper coconut. So we decided to resolve our differences !”

“ Sir, ekta o dab narikol hotey paarbe  na,” OC Pannalal Goswami, policeman, cricket umpire, magician and snake catcher, translated for effect.

I drank in the sweet tea, sucked harder at the cigarette, and blew out a ring to garland this wonderful doctrine of Green Coconut Policing of ASI Hiranmoy Sikdar.

“Put up a handsome reward roll tomorrow for him,”  I said and left the thana.

IF A WORD IN THE DICTIONARY IS MISSPELLED , HOW WOULD WE KNOW?

Life is our dictionary-

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

A few months ago, the google doodle popped up the picture of Samuel Johnson on his  308th birth anniversary . Samuel, arguably the pioneer among lexicographers. Lexicographers, the gentlemen who compiled big fat books, called dictionaries.  There are not many uses of a dictionary other than to find meaning, usage, pronunciation  and origin of words -  and sometimes to leave a peepal leaf and wait to see it fossilize into a  neatly patterned veinal skeleton.   

But my first use for dictionary was for something that children of today would find it  unbelievably absurd. It was a thick Chambers Dictionary  my maternal grandfather had gifted to my mother when she resumed her studies after three childbirths. When heat or rain outside held back stepping out for a game, and one was fed up with board  or card games, it was the big fat Chambers Dictionary which would come to our rescue as we opened and closed, at random,  the fat tome  and wrote down scores  from the even numbered pages of Chambers - 2, 4 6. 0 was out while 8 counted as one run.  Not exactly random if you ask me, because it was my job to open the dictionary after every run or wicket , and I had mastered the art of ‘fixing’. Gavaskar never got out without a century, and England never won ! This was called Book Cricket, and when I played it  , you could call it the Art of Book Cricket.

It was such fond memories of  Chambers Book Cricket matches that the  Google Doodle reignited . And now having moved on in years, I reflected at  the immense effort that would have gone behind compiling dictionaries, and that , too, in English, whose present form holds no great vintage , whose evolution was haphazard. A dictionary is not a book which you can write with a plot in mind. Compiling dictionaries was a humongous task. To begin with, it was difficult to know as to how large was the English language. How big is the English language? Samuel Johnson’s dictionary contained 43,000 words.The revised Oxford English Dictionary of 1989 had 615,000 entries. However, if we calculate at the rate of one word one meaning, the numbers could be much more.

One reason is that English is  prodigiously polysemic, that is,  one  word with a multitude of meanings. Shouldn’t mouse be counted as two separate entities? Man,mole, bank, book? What about fine - it has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a  noun and two as adverb? Further, the language has a large number of contronyms- words having opposite meanings- you can sanction funds as well impose sanctions against release of funds; and a horse could bolt through a door bolted just a while ago.

The other challenge to lexicographers of English has been  catachresis or constant change in meanings of words  - like shifting dunes ever since Creation you could say.  What earlier meant a legitimate copy came to be known as counterfeit; brave once implied cowardice. And the task of denoting pronunciation must have been no less arduous - in Loughborough, the first ough sounds as in cuff while the second rhymes with thorough, and that Leveson- Gower could be 'loosen gore'.

But despite these challenges, the English -speaking world has the finest dictionaries.

Samuel’s was actually not the First.  From Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604 ( a compendium of 3,000 words with incorrect alphabetization),  there had been a dozen popular dictionaries, including the fairly distinguished and containing more words , the Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721.  However, Samuel’s  Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in 1755 after nine years of painstaking  research, from an attic room off Fleet Street , containing definitions to 43,000 words, embellished with more than 114,000 quotations is a masterpiece  ( it ranks 86th in English non-fiction) and gave to the language the dignity it deserved- though in the process he must have become fairly bored . The boredom surfaces , for example , when he gives an example of the world dull: “Not exhilarating;not delightful;as, to make dictionaries is dull work.”

But Johnson’s monumental accomplishment was quickly eclipsed by a fussy schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut- Noah Webster after whom the Dictionary Day is celebrated.  His Elementary Spelling Book, 1788, went through 300 editions between 1788 and 1829, and with the possible exception of Bible, it is probably the best selling book in American history- though to many it should come as a surprise that Americans took to being civilized and educated with such fervour!  His dictionary was the most complete of its age, with 70,000 words . Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling , his work was informed by ardent patriotism,  but it is not usually appreciated that his views oscillated more than sometimes a simian would  on a swing.

He insisted on such radical spellings as soop, bred, fugitiv, tuf , yet stood firmly against American tendency to drop the u from colour  and humour  but nevertheless acknowledged the American affection  to transpose the British re in theatre and centre. In terms of pronunciation, he is responsible for American schedule rather than the British shedjulle ,  the American lewtenant against the British lefftenant and even accepted a number of clearly ungrammatical usages like ‘it is me’, ‘we was’ and ‘them horses’.

The next great event in lexicography started in Britain,  a compilation which stretched to 12 volumes - the Oxford English Dictionary -  with a  a stated objective to  record every word used in English since 1150, trace the shifting meanings , spellings and their uses to their  earliest recorded appearance. The mantle fell upon James Augustus Henry Murray ( 1837-1915). Amongst its hundreds of contributors  were Murray’s eleven children, a voracious reader and frequenter of docks and opium dens named James Platt and one Dr WC Minor, an inmate of a hospital for criminally insane.  When completed after 36 years , the OED , with 414,825 entries, supported by 1,827,306 citations ( out of 6 million collected in an age without internet), described in 44 million words, spread over 15,825 pages was quite simply the greatest work of scholarship ever produced. If one knows more about the history of English than any other language, it is largely because of this scholarship. It is all the more remarkable considering it was compiled when no CPR existed- Cut, Paste, Reproduce!

The Chambers Dictionary (TCD) with whose copy I had played Book Cricket was first published in 1872. It  was used by British crossword solvers  and setters,  by Scrabble players ( though it is no longer the official Scrabble dictionary) and was known for its wryly humorous definitions as in” eclair: a  cake , long in shape but short in duration”.

A dictionary which gave me company during the dozen or so years of mofussil posting starting from Tumlook - as I opened envelopes sealed with lac to check my daily dak,  moved from one dakbunglow to the other, handed out bucksheesh and inaums, wore my khakhee, monitored moccadamas, rounded up the budmaash,   learnt sherista work in thanas, performed bundabast duties during hurtauls , led teams of darogas and  bundook- carrying constables, discovered the world of different musallas in Bengali curry was , you probably guessed it right. Yes, it was Hobson- Jobson of Col.Henry Yule ,R.E., C.E and A.C. Burnell, Ph.D., C.I.E.

Later on, I used the official Scrabble Dictionary a lot during my Scrabble games which were one of the few engrossing engagements in the sedate mofussil postings . But Scrabble is much like golf which permits “local rules”, something which my colleague Anuj learnt with much distress. He is being consistently out scrabbled by his sons who insist on inclusion of words from Urban Dictionary , an online crowd-sourced dictionary  and winner of Disruptive Innovations Award in 2013, which spawns with super fecundity a slew of slangs, cultural words and phrases not found in standard dictionaries.

Dictionaries have now gone online and the one to which I look up to most is theFreedictionary.com. The one I find great delight for its compellingly wry humour and satire is the Devil’s Dictionary:”Apologize - to lay the foundation for a future offence ;author(n.): A small plant that requires little nourishment , but lots of trimming”.

A new interest relating to dictionaries  I have is what I call Dictionary News - the quarterly announcement of  words  accepted as legit in Oxford English dictionary. One reason I guess is that speakers of English, despite having a vocabulary of over 2,50,000 words, find themselves  lost for words to describe some situations, say for example the experience of hesitating when you are about to introduce a person whose name you don’t quite remember . So the Scottish word tartle has been included. And they had to fall back on a Danish word kaelling to describe a woman who stands on her doorsteps constantly screaming  obscenities at her children . The first I have a  morbid  fear of as I advance with age while the second is a sight almost anywhere in India. To the alphabetically  curious , this  juggernaut has also pushed back zythum as the last word in OED and given the spit sprayers a field day- the brand new last word is  zyzzyva!

The second reason is that English Language is broadbasing its appeal in the  countries it has travelled to by the processes of  assimilation and co-option of popular languages ( something which  Hinduism would do many centuries ago till it lost the plot to a new surge of inward exclusivism) . A few of East Asian new additions include “yum cha” which means a type of Chinese breakfast, “guanxi” for personal connection  that aid business and “wah”, a Singaporean word which is an expression of delight ( and you that it was actually a Hindi word meaning the same thing). I,too,  find it strange that the OED chaps had to travel to Singapore to pick that word when it was being spoken right here in India for centuries and was recently celebrated in Zakir Hussain’s Wah Taj commercial for a brand of tea!

However, to be fair to the OED, it continues to incorporate Indian words, and not just the language from the cowbelt - abba, anna, jugaad, achcha,dadagiri , timepass, funda, chamcha, natak and chup are just a few examples. This is an admission of distinctiveness of Indian English, an acknowledgement to not just  the “highly specific vocabulary( of Indians)  with no direct equivalents in English”, but also to “to the shared history between Britain and India that has left behind a legacy of loanwords and other lexical innovations”. It is clear then that change is rampant even at the the foundation or base of the English language - and emblematic of this change is the choice of Aadhaar as the most popular Hindi word chosen by Oxford Dictionaries for 2017 !