I was just sitting there. Stalking. Contemplating my own existence, and thinking about this godforsaken world. I imagined things, that I believe were unique to me. I was toying with the history of the world, and the history of me. I wanted to matter, and not at the same time. I guess, I was someone in that moment, atleast to myself. I had watched Tarkovsky the night before, and that made me sad. I was not someone who watched Tarkovsky. I was sitting there, in my thoughts, dreaming about a life where I could drive a car when I saw him.
The cop was waving at me. Ferociously. Grinning. I saw him too. I did not like the look of him, of this, the whole situation. I found it absurd, that me of all people, the cops wanted to harass. I did not like cops, a lot of people don’t. I did not respect them even. I looked at this smug guy, and heard Tarkovsky scream at him, in Russian. I did not live in Russia, that much I knew even then. I looked him in the eye, and started reading his mind. All the thoughts that were going through his head, his fears and anxieties, and pleasures and desires. I even felt the power trip that came from his dick and his uniform. The baton he wields, was barely helpful to that. I wished I could name him then and there, that would make me win. But I, as always, was destined to lose.
“ओए मोटे इधर क्या कर रहा है?” he shouted. I wanted to laugh at him, the whole scene was comical. He was so offended by my existence. He was shouting at me in Hindi, in funny words, it seemed like an Instagram reel. I was polite though, atleast then. I hated this guy, the moment I laid eyes on him and he laid eyes on me. I hated his uniform and his dick more than I hated him. He was a weapon of the state, after all, I was trained to hate him. He was also a bully, a bully in a uniform. He had a lot of hate in him, and thus, I hated him. I was not a fighter, otherwise I would have punched him. I was just a regular Indian coward, atleast surfacially.
“क्या हुआ साब? दिक्कत हुई क्या कुछ?” I asked. My instincts had kicked in, otherwise I would have fought him. If not physically, then in a battle of wits. I was good at those, pretty fucking good. Usually, I would’ve expected the people around me to also hate this guy. He was a cop after all. These days, however, the world is making me disappointed time and again, and so are its people. They believe in anything and everything that’s fed to them, there’s no skepticism left anymore. They overwork themselves, and don’t keep any energy left for thought. I sometimes, find myself craving for a conversation that’s reliant on a lot of thought. The people these days, would fall for it when they are told to respect the cops. They believe in state approved violence, as the state takes more and more place where reality used to be. Nowadays, state is morality, state is nature, state is normalcy and state is truth. They live in the state. Whatever is state approved is good, and whatever isn’t is bad. That’s what a legal system would do to a population. I would cite some ancient civilization without a legal system, but that would probably just be worse. That’s what gives me hope, I guess.
“रात के एक बजे रास्ते पे क्यों घूम रहे हो? चोरी चकेरी करने का इरादा तो नहीं कोई?” he asked. I was starting to find this guy more and more funny. He really thought he was threatening. I mean, who wouldn’t, with that uniform and a dick, in the middle of the night, where the public is absent to condemn him with scrutiny. He believed he was the truth, and I was scared. He was right also, to some degree atleast. He knew the population we were dealing with. Nights were banned, in this world of sunlight. Nights were for the outcastes, the morally ambiguous characters, the ones who would harm their pure society. At night, the police was powerful, because the night needed to be policed. The ones who existed in the nights, deserved to be punished. I had started to mislike this distinction of day and night. This strict timetabling of human activity into perfect blocks of breathless planning. The structure of the sleep-cycle, I wanted to break.
“बस बैठा हूँ भैया, नींद नहीं आ रही थी, गर्मी ज़्यादा थी, तो बहार निकला घूमने. खाली रास्ता देखके बैठने का मन करदिया” I was bored, that’s all I can say about this. I was bored and I craved conversation. I wanted to be cordial to this guy. Sometimes, its fun to talk the ones you hate. I was looking at him. Intensely. I was trying to read his mind again. I failed. I realized that police are tricky creatures, you either get them or you die. He could kill me; he could beat me with that baton and I would die. I didn’t want to die at the hands of a police officer, atleast not then. I wasn’t afraid though, just calculating. I try my best to convince myself to believe that the world has a certain logic to it. All of society’s ebbs and flows follow this secret psychoanalytical logic, which can be followed, atleast to a certain extent. History moved by logic, and populations behaved by logic. Problems of the world arose from contradictory logics, because men with spears can kiss each other as likely as they can kill. The logic of the world was not absolute, but dice-based, it was a gamble. The whole world ran on certain gambles succeeding or failing, certain moods aligning and lucks favouring to twist the game that is the world. And I felt that me trying to be cordial to the police man was also a gamble.
He stared back into my eyes. Our souls touched each other, and prepared for a duel. One of them, the souls, made a move, it lunged, and slashed the other soul, and made it bleed. The policeman broke into a laugh, sat beside and pat me on the back “लौड़े साले!” I wanted to laugh again. The world felt like dialogues to me now, and dialogues were supposed to be funny. I watched The Tragedy of Macbeth a few days back, and couldn’t stop laughing in the second half of the film. Conversations, when turned literary, had an inherent comedic value to them. I sometimes wished I could turn my life into literature, and then I could laugh at it as much as I wanted. The literariness of the policeman’s words was hitting hard as it was combined with the euphoria of a potential conversation partner. A stranger conversation partner. A stranger policeman conversation partner.