The Jackal

Those years in the seventies were some of the best I can remember. Delhi in the seventies was not like it is now. It had all the charm of a countryside trying to grow up into a modern city. The roads carried fewer vehicles. Public transportation (DTU, or ‘don’t trust us’ as most people called it), comprised of vehicles of the English Era; sighting a bus was as easy as spotting a UFO.

 A major part of the city was dotted with government colonies and a vast expanse of green forests. The old Mughal architecture was visible in every part of Delhi in the form of tombs or ‘Gummat’ in the local lingo. The air was clean and healthy and people still slept on their terraces or open spaces in and around their homes, on contraptions called ‘Charpoy’.

We used to live in my father’s government quarter in R.K. Puram, then the largest colony in Asia. The colony was divided neatly into sectors; each sector having thousands of two-storied flats in ‘U’ shaped rows. The boy we called jackal (Lomdi) lived in one such flat in my block. We shall interchangeably call him Jackal and Lomdi if only to break the tedium, as this name will feature quite frequently in the story.

Delhi was always very cosmopolitan. Every block had a good smattering of Madrasis, Bengalis, Sikhs, Punjabis and Bhaiyas(from UP and Bihar). Lomdi’s ’s family was Punjabi. His father worked with some government department, his brother did the business of auto spares and the jackal himself did nothing. 

Our block, like all other blocks, was a model of brotherhood and bonhomie. Almost all the families knew each other. Residents of ground floor flats slept outside on the road bordering the colony. Those on the upper floor slept on terraces. Every night, the ritual of dousing the sleeping area with buckets of water to cool down the temperature was a sight I will never forget. Just adjacent to our flat there was the tandoor, a common meeting place for housewives who brought wheat dough every evening to get hot tandoori rotis prepared.

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The Jackal was an enigma to all including his family. He was about five feet by five inches in height, weighing maybe about 20 pounds. Like most Punjabis, he was fair; his hair was like a carpet of American grass, closely covering his head and looking very hard and curly. His eyes were what made him a lomdi; greenish-blue with very bright pupils. The nose jutted from its base between the eyes quite suddenly and landed just above his very tightly pursed lips. There was an unmistakable look of cruel on his face. Add to this his strange behaviour, and you had a perfect puzzle of a man. He never mingled with anyone. I never know of a person in the colony, apart from the jackal’s household, who had ever spoken to him. No one would have even noticed him in the block had it not been for his exceptional deviant behaviour.

Lomdi’s brother was married to a comely lady. It was this lady who triggered off the abnormal in the jackal. It used to happen once in perhaps two or three months. It was always around ten in the night. Before the scene unfolded to the public, it was always Bitto Sardar who brought the news of brewing trouble. Bitto stayed next door to the jackal and he could hear through the walls. The elders in the block would come out only when arguments reached very high decibels, escaping the closed doors and windows of the house. The jackal’s voice, the only time we could hear it, rang like an agitated church bell. 

Mothers and sisters are most respected in virtually every part of the world; more in India; most in the Northern part of India covering Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. Amongst the Punjabis, the words mother and sister are taken reverently, many many times in a day, every day, everywhere. These words, suffixed with an adjective, which symbolizes copulation (to put it as decently as possible), lends itself into the most spoken phrase of the males in the Punjabi dictionary. It is never meant to be abuse but is the most potent expression of disgust and anger. Any person who wants to say it all about anyone without having to waste words can use it. This combination of Mother (Ma) and sister (Behen) get compressed to give birth to a third phrase Ma-Behen kar Diya, meaning a person has been taught a lesson.

Getting back to the scene of action, you could hear the Lomdi addressing his family with the phrases just described above, the crude one involving the F-act. Except for these abuses, the substantive part of the conversations would remain muffled, even though we strained our ears to the maximum. It was too dangerous to go anywhere close to the house. No one would ever intervene or interfere. We would just wait and watch for the door to burst open.

As always, after half an hour of arguments, the door would be thrown open and the brother’s wife could be seen rushing out, barefoot, shrieking for help. Jackal would jump out after her, in hot pursuit, threatening to kill her. She would zigzag around the block, while her husband and father-in-law madly rushed after lomdi, in an attempt to capture and contain him. When she ran out of breath, she rushed into the flat just opposite to theirs. This, let me tell you, always happened. The door of the flat was kept open for her to enter and would be shut immediately thereafter. The enraged jackal would try to break it down, while the father and brother would quickly pounce upon him, pinning his flailing arms, and using their joint strength to push him across and into their flat. 

By about eleven, the block would fall into a relieved quietude. The door of the jackal’s house would open, his mother would come out and wave at the window opposite where the girl had taken refuge. The lady of the house, a fat matronly woman, would escort the girl back to her house and talk for a few moments with the jackal’s mother. The way she touched the mother’s shoulders, and the thankful holding of hands, signalled the end of the drama.

Next day, rest assured you could sight the jackal talking and laughing with his sister in law as if nothing happened.

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These episodes disturbed me deeply. I used to ask my mom for an explanation, but she would shut me up, putting it down as a private affair. But I know she was also interested in the answer and could be seen talking to neighbours. Though the truth perhaps will never be told, we could gather a few hints. The jackal was really a frustrated young man, unable to find any employment. He would not help his brother in business, and, we confidentially gathered, the family exerted considerable pressure on the lad. His Bhabhi, in particular, was reportedly very fond of Lomdi and would pester him endlessly to give up his wasteful ways, stop being with bad company and make efforts to stand on his own feet. It was widely believed that the jackal spent most of his time in the company of speculators (Satta) and kept putting and losing a lot of family money in such ungainful avocations. The jackal himself was believed to be quite close at heart to his sister-in-law rather than any other person in the family. 

Once a while, the males in the family got together for a drink. These were the days when the jackal would let loose his frustrations. Even to our immature minds, it was very clear that the emotional release of this nature is mostly directed at the nearest object or person, however ironical it may seem. We had reliable information that the jackal went off the handle after the second large (Patiala) drink. 

The family was prepared for the inevitable. They had an understanding with the matronly lady opposite to their house, and shelter was arranged for the brother’s wife. 

Apart from these dramatic outbursts, the jackal rarely made the news. The news of his arrest, therefore, came as a shock and surprise to all of us who knew him as a silent, frustrated but harmless soul. We couldn’t believe that the jackal had killed someone. For several days, we could see the police searching the house, talking to people around, and combing the neighbourhood for the weapon. Our own youthful investigations revealed that all this had something to do with the shady business conducted by the jackal. We learnt that the murdered lad was, in fact, one of the jackal’s comrades in the satta business. Certain monetary complications appeared to be at the heart of the murder. Yet it was hard to believe that our own Lomdi could have committed such a dastardly act. 

Our worst fears were confirmed when days after the arrest, the police uncovered a bloodstained knife wrapped in the jackal’s shirt buried behind my house, near the tandoor.

That was the last we saw or heard about Lomdi; and, as is won't with all human beings, the jackal and the episode were fast forgotten. But for a child like me, this was indeed a very close encounter with a murderer. The closest I could ever get.