A Man among Wolves

Chapter 24

The duck-faced caretaker of AKS Wineshop in Neelankarai was bored. He was always bored in this place.

It was located in a tiny street that branched off the East Coast Road or ECR, as everyone called it. There were three major things people always associated with the ECR. First was the sea because you could almost always get a glimpse of it from the road. The second was the existence of resorts where the rich come to cool their heads off from the suffocatingly busy lives they live. The third was loneliness. The farther away from the city you travel, the lonelier the road gets. You only have some tourists and loaded trucks for company. Occasionally, you also find adolescents honing their bike-racing skills on the road (which doesn't end well for some!). Otherwise, there is very little human presence.

Now if the ECR was lonely, the street branching away from it was even more so. One might even wonder why anybody would set up a wine shop in such a melancholic place. But his employer had, for some reason. And he was hired to run it for him. The money that he got was worth all the lazy, gazing around that the duck-faced man did most of the day. So, he ran it. Also, because his wife would pester him till the end of time about losing this job, if he decided to quit. If he failed to buy her a saree she liked, this would become the topic of conversation. If he couldn't take her to a cinema she liked, this would be brought up. It would keep barging into conversations uninvited. Compared to that, this was an easy job. A more peaceful one, if he remembered to turn on the TV and listen to some of the old classic songs.

The duck-faced man scratched his stubble, half opening his mouth absently in the process. He switched on the TV. An old Kannadasan song played, acted onscreen by actor M.G.Ramachandran. It was a song about how you can fight your battles better if you know yourself. The duck-faced man raised the volume and propped his face on his hands on the desk before him. His lips pouted out even more, the resemblance to duck becoming starker.

Playing songs on TV had another advantage. Some of the depressed, poor to lower middle-class men paid visit to the wine shop mostly to listen to these songs, since many of them didn't have the space in their families and homes to do such things. For them, these songs and alcohol were the balm that eased their omnipresent pain. Thus, wineshops like this one became their sanctuary. That meant our business thrived, thought the duck-faced man.

And, the more people come, the more he could search for this man his employer had informed him about. Selvaraj, his name was. Selva. Any sign of him "must be reported". The place must be "sealed", so that the man doesn't escape until someone comes to "take care of him". Those were the orders that were conveyed to him on the phone. If he spotted the guy, a missed call ought to be made to a specific number. And the place ought to be sealed.

The duck-faced man glanced at the entrance to the bar with droopy eyes. No one entered. The bar had just four customers and that was it.

A rat like man with a pot belly was still slurping on his whiskey, looking like he had already lost his sense of self from drinking.

Another man was sitting cross-legged at another table. His head was bald in most places except for the two diverging rows of hair. It gave a peculiar impression of terrace farming done in the Western Ghats. The duck-faced man had seen those when he had to take his noisy son for vacation to Ooty last year.

The other two were young men. One of them had already collapsed onto the table, drunk. He had vomited on the floor nearby before collapsing. His companion was busy licking the pickle and gazing into the distance, possibly thinking about some woman who broke his heart. They had a bag under the table. It was probably full of tools since a cutting plier was poking its head out of the pile, staring out like an enthusiastic reptile. Maybe those two young men were engineers working somewhere...

That was the total list of customers they had had today. Once the rain started, nobody else had come in.

Today's business is not going to be good, the duck-faced man thought. He swung his legs restlessly under the table. No more customers also meant there would be nothing related to this Selvaraj person. Anyway, the man on phone had conveyed that Selva knew many things about everyone involved with his employer. So, wouldn't that mean that this Selva guy would stay away from this wine shop, since it belonged to...

But, no! Nobody can really predict what anyone would do these days. So, he better watch out for this Selvaraj. Maybe he was stupid enough to turn up. But the duck-faced man wished he didn't. He didn't want anything criminal happening in the confines of his shop. That would affect the business ...but if that's what his employer wanted...he would have to...

The young boy Rasool came up to him.

"Na, Scotch is out of stock. Just wanted to inform you."

The man waved the boy off.

The rain began hammering hard outside. A couple of people ran into the shop for shelter and then decided to have a peg. They occupied a table and Rasool immediately jogged to take their order. He asked their names first, just as the duck-faced man had instructed him to. When he heard them say their names warily, the man turned away bored.

The door to the bar opened again.

Rain was louder than before.

A man limped in. He was almost pencil thin and wore a shirt and lungi that were drenched. There was a bandage on his right leg that was discoloured from the rain and mud. In fact, both of his legs seemed muddy. Perhaps he had taken a fall limping on the wet road. The man considered asking him to get out so that his clean floor wouldn't become muddy. But it was a lost cause. There were mud footprints everywhere now. Moreover, that man was a piteous sight. He looked like a wretch. When he moved in, he glanced around in every direction with furtive eyes as if he was navigating a dangerous prison. It was plausible that he would jump and die of shock if anyone tried to admonish him. So, the man decided it would be better to let this poor soul have a drink. If he had money first.

The limp threw a glance at him and hesitated. Then he headed straight to the corner table that was directly opposite the duck-faced man. Now they were looking at each other as if they were opponents in a game at a reality show.

Rasool went up to him and asked his name.

The limp squawked his name loudly. "I'm Selvaraj. Selva!"

The duck-faced man sat up straighter in his chair and frowned.

His hands were already reaching for his mobile.