Crime Patrol

From his family home in the old south Bangalore suburb of Jayanagar, with its support system of Suma coffee powder and trusted condiment shops, Gowda has moved to an emerging development in the north. He rides a Bullet and has a tattoo. Stuck in a double cul de sac of age and career, he is posted at a police station on the city outskirts. In summer, the adjoining lake bed dries up, and a constable must burn eucalyptus leaves to drive away the swarms of mosquitoes that descend on the station every evening, even as the head constable mutters darkly about dengue. But after the rains, when the lake fills with water, Gowda sits under a tree to gaze at the lilies and migratory birds.

He needs these moments of quiet — Bangalore is no longer the small placid town in which he grew up. It has grown rapidly, in multiple concentric circles; but unplanned growth has also brought a rise in crime and corruption. If the familiar locations in the novel — Nilgiris, Pecos — bring a smile of recognition, there is also another part of the cityscape that is constantly being torn down and rebuilt. Along the city margins, in restaurants with generic names and dim lighting, middle-aged men get drunk and discuss real estate and women. Much of Gowda’s work takes him into these urban peripheries, often literally.

At the end of the first book, Gowda is back in a relationship with his college girlfriend. But little else has changed in his life, except that he now texts apologetic messages to both lover and wife. It is only work that energises him. Even if most days are spent drifting through “pending files, briefings, bickering, paperwork, phone calls”, he lives for the moments, albeit few, when he can set something right.

In the second novel, Gowda solves a murder case and breaks one link in a long chain of child trafficking. But, as often happens in crime fiction, the murder is not the real story; the real story is how the investigator’s character is constructed. What keeps him going as he stares into the abyss? Is it the wide-eyed children, too afraid to speak or the young trafficker, himself sold by his father at the age of six? Or, is it the unending chain of violence perpetuated by those who were once victims themselves?

As he works on the physically and emotionally exhausting case, Gowda searches for his own sense of personal identity. A middle-class Indian father, he struggles to communicate with his son, just as his father still struggles to communicate with him. Gowda’s brother tells him their father talks to the coconut trees he planted for his children. “Most days he talks to the tree that is supposed to be you. He misses you, Borei.”

Reflecting on his personal failures, Gowda decides to go back to the station: “That was the one place where he knew who he really was.” For, despite everything else in his life, he is something of a legend in the city’s police force: blunt, fearless, and with a sakaath sense of right and wrong.

Nevertheless, it is not easy work. The needs are great, the resources limited, and it is easy to feel defeated. As one member of Gowda’s team remarks: “It feels like we are at the visible end of the garbage dump. The rest of it is cloaked in darkness and deceit.” Chain of Custody is an intelligent, affecting read about crime, punishment and the many challenges of public service.