In my other life, as an obedient government servant, I’d seen crooks of all shades. I knew of small ones, who forged big cheques for politicians, big ones that gave construction contracts to relatives and ate up public funds, bigger ones that bribed their way to acquiring fake bills running up to crores of rupees, teeny tiny ones that made up illnesses for the small change that came as medical aid or made bills disappear ahead of a probe for a tiny wad of cash, peons who moonlighted as loan sharks and lent to daily wagers.
But the first crooks I ever laid my eyes on, before I had set foot in the real world, were these two that had come to my home. I was never the same again. I was twelve then. My grandparents had gone to Bombay by train. A couple of days after they left, an old man and his wife showed up at our door. My parents seemed clueless. I caught them asking each other with their eyes if the other knew who these people were.
We offered them water first to buy some time. Then we found out that these people knew everything there was to know: our names, what each of us did, what my grandparents were like, what each of us liked to eat. They even knew that my grandparents were in Bombay just then. So we couldn’t stop at the water. To make up for the embarrassment of not recognising them, we began to ply them with food.
The couple ate well, giving and withholding praise by turns, completely confusing my parents, who even opened up their bedroom out of guilt. The two napped for two solid hours there that afternoon and woke up to hot pakodas and coffee.
Before leaving, the man said to my father in this imperious, old-patriarch manner: “As you know, we have been running an orphanage for two decades now.”
“Of course,” my father lied.
“What great service,” my mother added sugar to his lie.
“If you have important birthdays or anniversaries coming, we will be glad to serve meals for the fifty
children in our hostel in your honour.”
I jumped to my feet squealing, It’s my birthday next month, made it to my piggy bank, broke it open and handed him everything inside. My mother glared at me, pinching the back of my upper arm very hard.
My poor father asked him, “How much to sponsor lunch for her birthday? It is on the fifteenth of June.”
“Two hundred rupees, yes, that would be ideal,” the man said.
Stunned silence.
Then the sound of notes being counted.
Notes changing hands.
And then a quiet goodbye.
Two hundred rupees is nothing today, cheap change. Back then, it was half my father’s salary. I got an earful from him for a couple of days, then we moved on. A month later, when my grandparents came back, we sat down to talk about that lunch. We cut each other off and corrected each other, my parents and I, narrating to them our version of the day, until we finally agreed on the events. I tried to draw them from memory. No use. My grandparents looked increasingly concerned. My grandmother even managed a nervous laugh.
“We have no such relatives,” she said, and then, almost to herself, “Such nonsense.”
“Who in our family,” my grandfather asked, “has the moral or financial authority to run a home for orphans?” They were obviously wrong. We described the couple in detail. What they looked like: rotund, elderly, respectable, minimalist. What they wore: handloom. What they said: so much about us; so little about themselves. How they acted: authoritative, like elders did.
“But why did they do all this?” My grandmother was confused. “For a meal and a nap? Are you sure they didn’t steal any valuables?”
“No but …”
“What?”
“We donated two hundred rupees to their orphanage.”
“…”
“But they knew everything about us. It’s impossible for someone to know that much. They even knew that you were on that train to Bombay!”
And then, my grandmother’s face froze, like shocked women in illustrations that accompanied men’s stories in Tamil magazines. Eyes wide, mouth an O. My grandfather looked at her, confused at first and then he too seemed to have heard thunder and seen blinding lightning. He slapped his forehead.
“It’s our fault,” he said.
“We did this,” she agreed.
The couple had been in the same coupe as my grandparents on the train to Bombay. They befriended us, my grandparents said, with humility and kindness, learned everything about our family, even our home address, thanks to two days of eating and sleeping in that small space. They’d given my grandparents a whole other story: for those two days, they were pious Catholics on their way to their children’s home in South Bombay.
That’s how they knew to swindle us that well. They had studied my grandparents, dressed like them and acted just like them. They had scarred us all for good, and none of us ever again gave money to anyone after that.
Excerpted with permission from Burns Boy, Krupa Ge, Context/Westland.
