The route to R Dhanalakshmi’s house seemed to be never-ending. “Off the main road here, second right, then another left, follow it through till the nearby temple,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner as I spoke to her on the phone. “There, you’ll see a small pushcart advertising fish fry. The next left after that.”
I noticed that the driver of the cab I was in was listening in on our conversation, and growing irritable at the confusing directions. He and I took turns asking Dhanalakshmi questions to try and understand what she was saying, but had little luck. We stopped and asked people on the road, but nobody knew the location we were describing.
When we finally arrived at the old house in Coimbatore’s Saravanampatti neighbourhood, the driver asked suspiciously if I was sure this was the house I was trying to locate. When I nodded, he asked why I was so keen on finding Dhanalakshmi and her family.
I explained to him that the family had allegedly had a direct experience of violence while in police custody. This answer seemed to pique his curiosity, and he offered to stay until I’d finished my interview to take me back into the city. It was a kind offer, but I declined because I was unsure of how long the conversation would take. I paid him and stepped out of the car, eager to hear Dhanalakshmi’s story.
Inside, I sat with Dhanalakshmi and her husband Rajarathinam as they described in meticulous detail the ordeal that they and their son Jayakumar had allegedly faced at the hands of the Coimbatore police. The conversation started in the afternoon, and stretched well into the evening, the light falling into the room fading as the hours passed.
Towards the end of our conversation, Dhanalakshmi stepped out of the house for a few minutes and came back inside, looking puzzled. She told us that somebody was waiting for us outside.
We stepped outside to see that the driver of the cab was waiting outside. In an enthusiastic tone, he said, “How much longer will it take?” He explained that he had clocked out of other work for the day, so that he could wait to take ne back into the city, for no extra charge.
A short while later, I stepped out and saw that the driver was still around, standing quite close to the door and looking at the house, almost as if he was interested in our conversation. Dhanalakshmi and Rajarathinam, who sell fried fish for a living, followed us to the car before running back in and returning with various kinds of fish masalas.
After giving me clear instructions on how to use them, and insisting on telling them when I ran out so they could send me more, they bid me goodbye.
In the car, the driver was full of questions. He wanted to know what the couple had said, what had happened to their son and why I was covering the story. He grew even more intrigued when I mentioned that Dhanalakshmi’s son had been a cab driver as well, and had been taken into custody by the police and allegedly been tortured for days. He eventually needed to have surgery and dialysis because his kidneys had been severely damaged.
Though the driver listened intently, he was at first unsympathetic to Jayakumar’s fate. The police “had to do their jobs”, he said, even if it meant torturing people to “get to the truth”.
Gradually, however, as I spoke to him about the illegalities of police detention and violence against those in custody, he recounted an experience he had once had with the police.
A few years ago, he said, he had had a long night, and when he returned home, he realised he was locked out of his house because he had forgotten his keys at a friend’s house. Too exhausted to drive back, he decided to sleep in the car that night, and collect the keys in the morning. But a few hours later, he said, the police knocked at his window.
“They asked me why I was asleep,” he said. “I told them that my house was just there and that I couldn’t get in. But they wouldn’t listen to me. They dragged me out of the car.”
He was taken to the police station. “They beat me and harassed me even though I had done nothing wrong,” he said. “They just wanted to find someone to torture.”
Though he had faced this brutality, he was surprised that I would choose to write a story about custodial violence. “Isn’t this normal?” he said. “It’s normal for the police to beat up people. It is an everyday affair.”
He was shocked to learn that the police do not, in fact, have the right to physically abuse anybody, that it was illegal for them to do so and that one could choose to file a complaint against them. For the rest of the drive, he pondered over this, occasionally asking other questions about custodial violence and the story I was going to write.
When he dropped me in the city, he gave me his phone number, and urged me to call him the next time I was reporting in Coimbatore. He insisted that he would not charge a rental free for the vehcile, only for petrol and the driver’s allowance. “Please tell me one day in advance so I can clear my schedule to take you around,” he said.
