Official Business

The discrepancy in style between public institutions and modern, private enterprises in India is quite something.

In Bangalore next to the metro overpass towering Tamarind trees, which were old even in the time of the British, shade an army of uniformed lawyers who congregate in the yard of the civil law courts, drinking cola and tea and gossiping about the day’s traffic violation cases.

Inside the striking crimson Victorian building a Dickensian to-and-fro: endless scribes and court clerks hurry along corridors with wreaths of documents, paralegals crammed elbow to elbow churn out letters for patient civilians. There are nine little typewriters set up in the small atrium alone. An army of Bob Cratchits busying away.

In a waiting room sharp-nosed lawyers explain procedures to country folk who look awed by it all. One man wears a pince-nez. I sit and watch for a while until I realise every eye is on me – it is difficult to observe when it is so obviously the other way around.

My neighbourhood police station is a musty little building with a few bulky computers.  The obligatory sputtering ceiling wafts hot air onto the languid cops below, who browse their phones in varying attitudes of boredom. An inescapable sense that things get done here slowly.

You never see a cop in India in baggy uniform. It appears to be a matter of pride, no matter the weather and paunch of the man in question, to fit the clothes as skin-tight as humanly possible. I shudder to think how they get into them in the morning.

A group of women talk quietly but intensely to a plain-clothes policeman at a desk in the corner – the corner being the closest thing to a private space in the cluttered room. Amidst the local dialect I hear only the words ‘domestic violence’. Shiva and Rama shine golden in their frames in a room the colour of dust.

The actual holding cell for prisoners is in the same room as the desk-bound officials and reception area, so one is ‘treated’ to the view of miserable looking youths peering through the bars and pacing like animals. Every now and then they retreat into the shadows at the shrill bark-like command of a cop. It was so much like a jail from the Wild West that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t a movie set.

The crimes too come from a different era. Arrayed in a disorganised jumble in shelves across an entire wall of the station are three years worth of crime statistics: cattle, servant and sandalwood theft prominently displayed, and the dramatic murder for gain promises much. An entire upper-shelf reserved for rowdiness.

The bars and coffee shops of Bangalore could be anywhere in the world, but the courts and jailhouses come straight from VS Naipaul. This is how he saw India in the seventies – dusty, archaic and deliciously unmodern.