BOOK REVIEW- THE LINE OF MERCY

   

                                 MERCY  HAS  TO  BE  EVOKED,  NOT  DEMANDED 

                              

THE LINE OF MERCY

AUTHOR- TARUN TEJPAL

PUBLISHER- HARPER COLLINS, INDIA

MARCH 2022

   Tarun Tejpal is the Devil's Advocate for the underdog, the counsellor for the damned. His forte is the underbelly- of the government, society, passions, beliefs, long held shibboleths, blind traditions, religious dogmas, the legal fictions that make life comfortable for the elite and the privileged and hell for the others. It takes skill to describe the beautiful, but it requires exceptional talent and artistry to describe the ugly, and Tejpal has that in abundance. THE LINE OF MERCY is a monumental work, crafted by a scalpel not a pen, in which all the ugliness and hypocrisy of our society is laid open with a surgical skill that is both brutal and poetic in its breadth and depth. It does not always make for pleasant reading but then anything that makes one question our comfort zones  rarely does.

   The essence of this book is captured in one line from it, one of the many aphorisms embedded in its formidable 700- odd pages: " Mercy is the line across which live the weak and the defeated." Tejpal focuses his penetrating powers of observation on finding out precisely where this line is drawn and who are the people on either side of it. Is it drawn inside the interrogation room of the police station? In the illusory safety and privacy of the bedroom? On the boundary between the fields of the warring families of two lovers? In the competing predatory instincts of the hardened inmates of a jail? In a courtroom in the space between an amoral lawyer and an indifferent judge? Between a promised "masjid" and a fait accompli "mandir"? Between a brutal truth and a comforting lie? Between a crime and a criminal? Between a god and his worshipper ?

  Tejpal poses this question repeatedly ( he is wise enough not to answer it, that is the reader's burden) and enlarges on it, in Canterbury Tales fashion, by creating a medley of characters residing in the underbelly of India like lice , invisible to most of us privileged in real life,  noticed only when they sting or bite us. The stage for this panoply of actors is a district jail, the default universe for a significant part of our population, the updated version of Dante's Inferno: Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

   This book is our own version of Crime And Punishment, but on a much wider canvas and with the difference that there can be no redemption for the protagonists here. If only to continue the analogy, it could perhaps be more appropriately  titled Alleged Crime And Certain Punishment, for in India it is not necessary for guilt to be proven before inflicting punishment. Tejpal imparts an entirely new meaning to the phrase Justice Is Blind and suggests that perhaps society could be served better if justice was not totally blind but had one eye cocked open. As he puts it: " The angel of justice should be principally blind but should keep peering intermittently from under closed eyelids."

   The cast of characters in the book is simply overwhelming, and Tejpal narrates, with superb insights into the working of human emotions, the route followed by each one of them to the penitentiary. Not unlike the road to hell these roads too are paved, but with the bitumen of social injustice, poverty, illiteracy, rejection, patriarchy, ambition, misdirected passion, lust and plain bad luck. Notwithstanding what their Aadhaar cards may say, the dramatis personae are all rechristened in the cages of their new world, in recognition of their essential characteristics. And so we have Asambhav and Aranya, the eternal lovers whose Wagnerian passion for each other is an epic by itself ; Bichhhoo the triple murderer; Dr. Hagg, whose medications had killed two children. His real name was Damodar Desai but he was renamed because he had a propensity to lose control of his sphincters every time he was beaten up; Peter the Fist, the overlord of the prison wards in recognition of hands the size of watermelons; Godwin, the framed innocent and unloved son of a paranoid father and a mother who sets herself on fire to escape the daily forensic examination of her intimate parts by her husband; Barretto the pimp; Papa the baker; Aslam the sodomiser who also doubles up as the jail barber; Jogen Jabda and Atoum Bumb the dwarf, who began life as runaway kids in a circus; Andha Kanoon, the plumber who beat his wife and her sister to death and was so named because he was turning blind in his cell, Babu the Hindutva fanatic. There are also Google Baba, the inevitable Hitler, Bobo, Singham the cop, Sparkplug who marries his internet love via Skype from the jail. Each one of them is framed in tragi-comic terms in order to  render the underlying pathos more acceptable.

   It is a fascinating cast of characters, which more or less covers the mofussil world of India. Between them they encompass all the essential passions of mankind: love, jealousy, greed, paranoia, hate, family feuds, anger, power. They are cleverly chosen and constructed by Tejpal because they also reflect the social maladies and fissures that underpin our much vaunted civilisation and culture. As the author explains: "The social contract between humans everywhere is based on the commonwealth of lies. The lies of justice and equality. The lies of nationalism and common purchase." The lies that ensure our jails will always be over populated with the guilty and the presumed guilty, the weak and the defenceless, the illiterate and the barely literate, the weirdo and the addict - fodder for policemen, wardens, lawyers and judges.

   But where this book stands out in solitary splendour is in its practical contribution to Indian penology- the study of crime and punishment and of prison management. What Tejpal focuses on, however, is not  the hardware but the software: not the administrative nitty gritty of prison management but the psychology and pathology that drives all those who live within its fetid walls. For the prison is a world alien to most of us, hidden away from our refined sensibilities. Tejpal lays it bare for us, from the inside out, like no Law Commission or Parliamentary Committee has ever done. It is a singular achievement which, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in Indian writing, English or any other language. Through the phenomenal cast of characters we learn of the caste system in prisons, hierarchies based not on the Vedas but on the heinousness of the crime, seniority of incarceration, propensity for violence, complicity with the jailors. We learn of the code of omerta and the protocols of violence. We learn how, even in this pit of despondence, there can be a rekindling of hope, love, religion. We see how the stoicism of Hindu philosophy can be relevant here when all other beliefs are shattered. The rules which govern the world outside also apply here, with the added sanction of permitted violence. There are fixers here, smuggling, pornography, bribery, beatings, despair, the paradoxical abandonment of hope along with the constant search for it in every arriving letter, Whatsapp message, a delayed bail hearing. You can demand justice here, says the author, but you cannot demand mercy. You have to learn to evoke it. You have to find out for yourself where the line of mercy is drawn, and then hope that you are on the right side of it.

   The book is strung together with individual stories but these stories are not important in themselves. What is important is the world they construct, their raw material transmuted, with consummate skill, into a universe of the damned. The prison is the "chakravyuh" which one can enter with ease but can exit only as a corpse or a broken being or a serial criminal. Equally important are the uncomfortable questions the author poses- to the government, to society, to lawyers and judges, to the "thekedars" of religion, to us as individuals. But it is dangerous to answer them, for we shall stand exposed if we do. 

  Tejpal's insights are as incisive as they are eclectic, for he delves into the pathology of justice, religions, communalism, marriage, political posturing and the many other legal fictions we live by. Where he has few equals, however, is in his clinical ability to put the idea and practice of love under a microscope and to dissect its various constituents. He is the taxidermist of passion. He can identify the parts that elevate and those that corrupt love. He casts away the latter like so much dross and leaves you with the pure essence of love, a noble trophy, as the ultimate prize. Sadly, however, as this book shows, this trophy is beyond the reach of most of us. But it is a worthy if romantic goal to aspire to for, as Browning writes: One's reach must exceed one's grasp, or what's a heaven for? This is what makes a hopeless romantic, and the author for all his scathing cynicism and brutal exposition, is one such romantic at heart.                                                       Tejpal is as much of an unrecognized philosopher as he is a novelist, his insights into the labyrinthine corridors of human character, individual and collective, are deep and illuminating. But they do not engender hope. If this book had a sub-title it would have to be: Homo homini lupis est- Man is wolf to man. 

NEW FILES, SAME OLD GUILES.

   When was the last time you heard our revered Prime Minister recommend a film to his MPs and colleagues ? In fact, I am a bit astonished that he even has the time to see a movie in his packed 18 hours working day, but obviously he made the time to view The Kashmir Files (TKF) (even if he missed Rana Ayub's The Gujarat Files: this last bit is an assumption, of course, since he has not made any similar recommendation for it).

  So what's so special about TKF, apart from the fact that its Director, stars and financiers are known BJP acolytes? We can leave the merits of the film, its historical fidelity, intentions and box office collections to be debated by the Whats App university (where, I learn, they are soon going to offer a quick course on "Pundits and Whodunits ?") My own view is that the importance of TKF is that it provides the missing link between the 2022 state elections and the 2024 general elections. Let me explain.

  The Kashmir Files has provided the BJP a much needed opportunity to upgrade its Hindutva model. The just concluded UP hustings have demonstrated that the old model- based on Aurangzeb, hijab, beef, conversions, love jihad, Mandirs- has become jaded, over-used, and did not produce the same torque and horse power as earlier. A new hybrid engine was needed to produce the RPMs and charge up the faithfuls. If Mahindra could do it with the Thar, why not the country's biggest assembly line of the external combustion engine? TKF does this very well- half fact, half innuendo, history blended with historicide, liberals with leftists and the JNU types. At the centre of this narration, of course, is the archetypal villain, the slouching beasts numbering 200 million who pose the greatest danger to our civilisation and culture. Which is why this film is now the new vehicle which will replace the Ram Rath and the Yogi's bulldozer and drive the BJP to power in 2024.

  This is clearly evident not only from the PM's gushing praise for the film, but also from the rising crescendo of tweets and WhatsApp forwards, the social media pressure on Bollywood notables to do likewise and to jump onto the bhaktwagon. And it certainly cannot be a happy coincidence that as many as 7 BJP state govts (at last count) have exempted the movie from Entertainment tax. Mr Vivek Agnihotri has even received the ultimate accolade- Kangana Runout has announced that she is willing to work with him! Even the Oscar would pale in comparison with this encomium.

  A deliberate, calculated, nation-wide hysteria is being built up to reinforce the "Hinduism is in danger" trope, to underline the  "UP will become like Kashmir and Bengal" threat. Parliament and state Assemblies are arranging free screenings of the movie for its overworked members, business houses are giving discounts to those who have seen it, in Kanpur (I was there this week) RWAs Resident Welfare Associations) are offering free tickets to its residents (no prizes for guessing where the money for this is coming from). Voices which plead for restraint and sanity are mercilessly trolled. The intention clearly is to exhume the ghosts of 30 years ago, re-open wounds which were healing, to keep alive, not the patient, but the maggots of hate and fear.

  It is certainly not my intention to decry or belittle the unspeakable sufferings of the Kashmiri pundits. What happened to them should not happen in any country, far less in a nation with a rich legacy of pluralism and tolerance. My objection is to the insane tumult and furore being manufactured to paint all Muslims with the Kashmiri terrorist brush, the selective brutalisation of a community. Let us not forget that the oppression of the Kashmiri pundits is not unique, it is just one such incident in our sometimes blood soaked history: there were others- the 1984 killing of Sikhs in even larger numbers than the pundits, the Nellie massacre in Assam, the Chattisinghpora killings in Kashmir, the NE Delhi riots of 2020, the Muzzafarnagar riots of 2013. And of course, the Gujarat carnage of 2002. Indeed, it is ironical that our Prime Minister, praising TKF, castigates those who "do not want the truth (about Kashmiri pundits) to be told." I say so because how many of us even remember a film called PARZANIA , made in 2007? It was about the massacre of residents (mainly Muslims, of course) of the Gulbarg Housing Society in the 2002 Gujarat riots. This film was not allowed to be screened in Gujarat and, to the best of my knowledge, that position prevails till today. More than one can hide the truth. Maybe the Gujarat Assembly will screen it for its members, now that the age of Truth has dawned?

  What needs to be unequivocally condemned, therefore, is the selective double standards, the exploitation of the Kashmiri pundits for political purposes, the heartless use of their genuine sufferings to demonise one community, to fan the embers which were dying out in the merciful embers of history. And what is even more unacceptable to me is that this cynical propaganda is being engineered by a party under whose joint watch in Delhi this exodus happened, a party whose eminent leader was the Governor of the state of Kashmir at the time and exercised absolute powers, this same political party has subsequently ruled that state in partnership with a Kashmiri party it now holds partly responsible for the incidents. And the same political party has since been in power at the center for more than 12 years. Time enough, one would think, for it to have ensured the safe return of the Kashmiri pundits to Kashmir, to enable the restoration of their lost properties, to compensate them for their losses, to bring to book the perpetrators of the violence. But it has not moved one inch on these matters, because its objective is, not to heal the wound, but to keep it festering till the last maggot in it has been extracted and shoved into the ballot box.

  And then, of course, I would much rather this government and party talked, and showed the same concern and outrage, about some of the other files in the nation's sealed cupboards: the Rafale files, for instance, or the Panama and Pandora files, the Pegasus files, the Electoral Bonds files, the Judge Loya files, the Gogoi files (which probably need a separate cupboard by themselves). I'm not a great movie buff but I would love to watch movies on these files and would hope that they too are given tax breaks. In fact, I foresee happy days for all those Netflix addicts: one producer has already announced that he will make a film titled the GUJARAT FILES, Akhilesh Yadav has expressed the hope that someone would produce the LAKHIMPUR FILES. Ashok Khemka (he of the repeated transfers fame) could launch his political career with a film called THE ESCAPEGOAT FILES. It's showtime, folks, so get ready for your next lesson in history ! 

HOME IS THE HUNTER, HOME FROM THE HILL

 

                                            

                                                  ANIL  PRADHAN,  IPS [ 1977 ]

   It was April of 1971, a pleasant day in Delhi. I was standing in a line at a counter in Hindu college, waiting to hand in my form for admission to the MA (English) course. Everyone in the queue was relaxed, for this was long before the insanity of cut-offs robbed kids of the pleasure of college admissions. Suddenly, a voice behind me said: "Excuse me, do you have a light?" I turned around, to see a sturdily built chap with clean but rugged visage, a Roman nose and soft eyes that belied the otherwise strong features. "Sure," I replied, "but I'm out of cigarettes." He smiled and took out a packet of Wills Flakes : "Be my guest; I'm Anil Pradhan, from Shillong," he said.

  That was the start of a friendship which lasted almost 52 years, till Prads decided he'd had enough of me and walked off into the sunset behind his beloved mountains on the 6th of this month, after a struggle that lasted a month. He fought well, but I have a feeling he knew that the battle was not going to be easy.

  Real friendship requires that you must share experiences together, the good and the bad. And we did it for five years running, and thereafter. Both of us outsiders to Delhi, we did the same course and serenaded the same girls (and a couple of our teachers too, I don't mind admitting at this safe age!) We were roommates in Hindu college hostel and thereafter, as Lecturers, room mates in the barsatis and servant quarters of Timarpur and B.D. Estate. We ate at the same dhaba and paid each other's bills when the NPAs mounted up. Each of us took turns sitting outside on the stairs of our barsati, smoking innumerable cigarettes, when the other had a tryst with the accredited girl friend of the moment (though I must admit that Prads' north-face-of-Kanchenjunga looks were more marketable than mine, and it was usually I who did most of the smoking!) We took the civil services exams together, I made it to the IAS in 1975, Prads to the IPS two years later . I was fortunate enough not to get my home state, he was fortunate to get his home state of Meghalaya, from where he ultimately retired as Director General of Police. Prads did make one major mistake though- he named his only son after me. No kid should start off life with a handicap like that!

  Prads was the nearest I've come to a complete gentleman- frustratingly correct in everything he did, immaculately groomed and dressed, impeccable in his language and manners, chivalry itself with ladies. These traits played a vital role in my marriage to Neerja. Sometime in 1976 it was arranged between the parents that I would meet Neerja at her friend's place in Golf Links and explore the tinkling of the wedding bells. I was terrified, and lacked the strength to even kick start my Jawa mobike. Prads volunteered to take me on his scooter (he disapproved of mobikes as being too loud) and to chaperone me. Neerja was accompanied by five of her LSR (Lady Shri Ram) friends, but I need not have worried. They were all so taken up with Prads'  deportment that they decided that anyone who had a friend like him couldn't be all that bad. We've been married now for 45 years but I suspect that Neerja is convinced to this day that it was a perfectly executed con job. 

   Prads loved his home town of Shillong, and the lovely cottage his father had built in Laitumkrah. He insisted that I should come there with him, and in 1973 or thereabouts we went up. On the way there, in a sultry 3-Tier coach, he got into an argument with some Bihari boys and beat them up. Thereafter, till we crossed Bihar, gangs of local youngsters scoured the train for him. I shoved him into a toilet and locked the door from inside- it was the longest toilet break either of us have ever taken. (He repaid me back in Timarpur by letting me have the first use of our tiny toilet in the mornings ever after.)

  We reached Prads' Laitumkrah cottage at midnight; it was dark and empty as his parents (Prads' dad was a Colonel in the army) were in some other state. To our horror we discovered that for once Prads had faltered- he had forgotten the front door keys in Delhi. After a hurried confabulation it was decided that Prads would get in through a partly open skylight and open the door from inside. He clambered up, by which time the alarmed neighbours had called in the police. We spent the next hour trying to establish our identities. Fortunately, the neighbours recognized Prads as the son of his father, though they did mutter that there was a glitch in the transmission of the Pradhan DNA to this particular offspring.

  One of my abiding regrets is that Prads and Shanky (Shanta, his wife) could not come up to our place in Mashobra: he would have loved it, with its forests, large skies, the fireplace meant for relaxed evenings of conversation and single malts. While in service our jobs took us to various places and kept us fully occupied. For a few years in the 90s we were together in Delhi (he was in the IB, I think) and met regularly for a drink and dinner. But then our paths diverged, till they came together again after our respective retirements. And now, of course, Prads has decided to plough his own furrow, without waiting for us.

 Life, I have found, is like a honeycomb, with a finite number of cells. Each cell belongs to a friend or loved one and contains the experiences and memories associated with him or her. Taken together, they make up the honeycomb and are the summum bonum of our existence. But the laws of nature demand that, sooner or later, the cells will die, one by one, and when they do a part of our life is extinguished for ever.  And when enough of the cells die, the honeycomb itself will no longer live. The process, I fear, has begun for my generation.

  Prads is back again in his beloved Meghalaya, his ashes immersed by Shanky in the mighty Brahmaputra. He would have wanted it that way, for as the poet said:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill. 

We'll have that single malt yet, someday, old friend.                              

CORPORATE HOSPITALS AND THE TRICK OR TREAT BUSINESS MODEL

    It is generally assumed that the term "bureaucracy" pertains exclusively to the government. This is a misconception, the creation of a lazy media and ignorant public. It has been my experience that any organisation, if it becomes big enough in size and business, becomes a bureaucracy with all its attendant ills and lack of accountability. Take the corporate hospital in India, the very mention of which drives me to spread my prayer mat and check how much money I still have in the bank.

   Homo sapiens, in his rapid journey to self-extinction, has created or invented a lot of terrible things: toilet paper, the jacuzzi, reality shows, aerosols, mothers-in-law, Pegasus, hyper sonic missiles, boxer shorts, air conditioned class rooms, to name just a few of the stuff we need like we need a bullet in the head, for all the good it does either to us or to the planet. The corporate hospital, by my reckoning, falls in this category.

   There are 69000 hospitals in India, of which 43000 are private (2019 figures); 70% of them are in urban areas. When you consider that the Union budget for the current financial year allocates less than 2% for health care, it is but natural that the massive demand-supply gap makes hospitals a good business to be in for the private sector. Which is why the hospital industry is worth US$ 61.79 billion (2017 figures), is growing at an ACGR of 22%, and is expected to reach US$ 132 billion by the end of this year. Which is also why the stand- alone private hospitals of my younger days are now giving way to corporate hospitals and hospital chains, especially in urban areas.

   Fair enough, I have no beef with that: a good business opportunity should be exploited. My grouse is with the exploitation of the hapless patient: the gouging bills, the utterly insensitive and uncaring doctors and staff, the worse than bureaucratic paperwork, the endless waiting at a dozen counters, the unnecessary procedures. Except for the Italian marble on the floor and the vacuous but pretty girl at the front desk you might as well be in a government hospital. But hey! the latter is free while here I'm paying Rs. 100,000 a night for the ICU bed, where the only free thingy is the ICU superbug. Would you not expect a Florence Nightingale attitude, if not touch, for that kind of money? Think again.

   Forget for a moment the murderous prices for the room, the ICU bed, the surgical procedure, a cup of coffee, for that is all upfront and you know what you are getting into. What is reprehensible is the dubious strategems to make even more money from a virtually captive patient- the redundant "consultations", the unending "investigations", the dietician who pops her head into you room for thirty seconds to tell you that your lunch will consist of spinach, dal and roti and charges you one thousand rupees for the visit. And at every stage one has to deal with a bureaucracy that would have put our own steel frame to shame.

   My bitter half , Neerja, breaks a bone every ten years, with the regularity of the arrival of Hailey's comet. She did so again a few months back and I took her to the Emergency section of a leading corporate hospital in my area. It took me an hour to register her for admission, after I had produced every document known to man. It took another hour and a half before someone swung by to put a plaster. Two and a half hours to attend to a person with a broken arm imparts an entirely new meaning to the word Emergency. But this was only our first step in this journey of discovery.

   The last time Neerja had fractured her arm (it's always the same one) was in 2010, when I was in Shimla, and she had been treated in a government hospital. It took one X-ray, one plaster, two visits to the doctor and four weeks for her to regain her Maria Sharapova back-hand. This time it needed seven consultations with the orthopedist, seven X-rays, about twenty tests, four plasters, fifteen physio sessions, twelve weeks- and she still can't raise the hand and give the RSS salute convincingly.

   The problem, as I see it, is that the very term "corporate hospital" is an oxymoron. A corporate exists to make profits, a hospital to cure people. You can't do both without cutting back on one or the other. But even this does not fully explain why these hospitals have become impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracies. It takes hours to get an admission, and even longer to get a discharge. These hospitals are as reluctant to discharge a patient as a father is to give his daughter away in "kanyadan." It took me six hours, after lining up at four different counters to get various NOCs- that's about the same time it takes at AIIMS, Delhi, even when Mr. Modi is getting his vax shot there. So why does one have to pay ten times more for this privilege?

   Neerja runs an NGO for children with severe mental disabilities. But even she is far more forthcoming with her kids than these hospitals are with their patients. They rarely bother to explain anything and their doctors feel offended if you ask questions. Once, at another such hospital, the doctor prescribed an expensive procedure for my son which had been performed just a month ago. I politely asked him why it was necessary to do it again. He haughtily informed me that I would need an MBBS degree to understand that, and he didn't have the time to explain it to me anyway. I politely informed him that I had paid Rs. 800 for his time and he could refund that to me. He quickly backtracked. We didn't do that test, it's been eight years since that incident, and my son is none the worse. I did complain to the management but, as in the case of the government, they can't be bothered.

   But, frankly, I don't blame the doctors: they are as good as any in the world. The problem is that hospitals are no longer run by doctors but by MBAs, CAs and lawyers. The bottom line is just as important as the squiggle on the patient's ECG chart. It is common knowledge that doctors are given revenue targets, to achieve which they are encouraged to prescribe unnecessary tests, medicines, investigations, referrals- all at highly inflated costs. The average patient has no recourse to redressal of his grievances, there is no Regulator to instill any discipline on these hospitals (not that the other Regulators have proved worthy of the trust that Parliament and the citizen has reposed in them). 

   The genesis of the creation of these hybrid monsters, I feel, has been the disappearance of the G.P.  (General Practitioner), the family doctor, and the stand- alone private hospitals. Today it's almost impossible to find a good G.P or clinic and one has no option but to go to a consultant in a corporate hospital. Once there one is in the coils of an anaconda and can exit only when one is squeezed dry. The main culprits, however, are the governments over the last twenty years who have failed to either establish enough medical colleges or hospitals in the public sector.                                                                                                          The country has a shortage of 600,000 doctors and 2 million nurses; against a WHO norm of 1:1000 population we have 0.5 doctors per thousand population. U.P boasts of only 0.4. 60000 Indian doctors are working abroad. But the government is not bothered: it has washed its hands of the problematic public health issue and has handed it over to the private sector. Even the Ayushman Bharat programme is an opportunity for the latter (and their partners in crime, the insurance companies) to make even more money. The Union govt. has budgeted Rs. 6400 crore for it (2021-22), all of which will go to the private sector hospitals. This money could have established at least five AIIMS or 35 medical colleges, or double these numbers if the states are asked to put up a matching share. A worthwhile investment for the future, you would think, except that for politicians the future ends in 2024.

   Some day I shall write about that other pea in this corporate pod, the CGHS (Central Government Health Scheme), one of the eternal founts of revenue for the corporate hospitals. Can you imagine what happens when two bureaucracies work in tandem?