The Man Hunt

I lived in a rented bungalow in a posh residential locality in Chennai. I shared

the house with two colleagues from the north. Being a south Indian, I
thought I had the edge over them, though the native language was difficult
and different from my own mother tongue. I spoke their language easily and
often mediated with the locals on their behalf.

One of them was bulky with a soft voice and the other was short and tone
deaf. I shared film songs with the former and my reading pleasures with the
latter. We hired a maidservant to keep the house clean and had a dhobi who
came infrequently to collect our clothes for a wash and press.

We worked in an engineering firm on the city’s outskirts. We traveled by a

company-hired bus and often worked in shifts. The days passed serenely;
the burning Madras sun kept us indoor most of the day and the evenings
were spent either in a cinema hall or a shopping mall.

But for the dhobi incident, life in Chennai would have gone on uneventfully.
It was not something that could have altered my life in Chennai, though it
had enough in it to put a slur on my name.

It happened one morning after I returned from a night shift. My colleagues

had left for office and the charwoman had finished her work for the day. I
had nothing to do except rest after a night’s work. I lay down to rest when
the doorbell rang.

It was the dhobi. I did not recognize him; but then I was not good at
remembering faces and so I did not give it a thought. I went inside, pulled a
few clothes from the hangars, my colleagues’ and mine, counted and gave
them to the man waiting outside.

That evening my colleagues returned from work as usual. After a while the
bulky man came out of his room and asked me if I had given clothes to the
dhobi. I nodded and said I gave one of his trousers hanging on the door. His
face darkened: he said he had kept a thousand rupees in one of its pockets.
Bummer!

My face fell. How could I be so careless? If only I had checked its pockets!!
But why would anyone keep money in trouser pockets and leave them behind
when they go out? Don’t they use wallets? Little consolation for me in
deriding the hapless man! Of course, I did not say all this to him; I offered
my apologies and expressed hope that the dhobi might return the money like
an honest man. None of us believed it, and the time passed in grieving
silence.

Mercifully, it was time for me to go for the night shift and I left home, a
troubled man, unhappy over the incident and worried that I might be
suspected of foul play.

All night, while on uneasy duty, I hoped fervently that the dhobi would come
back in the morning and return the money like an honest man. The next day
there was no sign of the man; the colleague duo left for work in despair. I
waited in agony and in vain, but the dhobi did not return.

I resolved, then, to hunt for the man. I quickly dressed and left the house,
feeling a sense of the missionary.

I strained to recollect the face of the dhobi. It was not easy to remember,
for all dhobis looked alike and in Chennai most people wore dhotis folded well
above the knees, their faces often covered in bushy mustache and
sometimes a goatee to top it all.

Looking at dhobis at work in the streets helped a bit to jog my memory, but
I failed to picture him clearly in my mind. However, I approached several
dhobis in the locality with the meager description of the man that I could
muster, and not surprisingly, drew a blank. The problem was compounded by
the fact that my knowledge of the local language was far from sufficient to
conduct a meaningful dialogue.

I despaired of making progress and looked wildly up and down a street. I

saw an old man sitting on a stone bench, his legs pulled up, his dhoti tucked
under them and looking vacantly before him. I approached him and re-told
my story, haltingly, and in broken sentences. He must have found my use of
the local language appalling and offered to speak in my tongue instead. I felt
an immense relief swept over me as we started to converse in the language I
grew up with.
The old man said he knew where the dhobis lived and asked me to follow him.
I followed this man like a puppy would its master.

The burning Madras sun did not bother me, nor the distance covered,
though we had traveled by foot a long way away from our locality. We left
the salubrious surroundings behind and entered into a dingy and stinky
region of shacks and dhobi ghats. The way got narrower as we went farther
and I felt somewhat choked by the place and the people there. We came to a
pond: it was dark and a clutch of weeds stuck out from its bottom. My leader
wanted to cross it to go to the other side; he rolled up his already knee-high
dhoti and was ready to step into the water. A stout dhobi woman, half way
across the pond, her sari held above the waterline and her waistline, looked
back at us in mocking silence.

I gestured to the old main to wait and wanted to know if there was not
another way to get to the other side. There was a long winding road around
the pond but this way we would reach sooner. I preferred the long route, not
wanting to get wet in my business clothes. My word prevailed: my guide and I
skirted the pond and reached a place that housed many families of the
dhobis and the stone benches for the laundry. The place was smelly and
unclean; this is the place where our clothes were laundered; this is the place
where the dishonest man must be found.

There were big burly men milling about, children dashing and jumping all over
the place and women looking at us curiously, wondering no doubt what on
earth could have brought a young highbrow man to their premises.

My guide asked me to wait while he conversed with a couple of men. They

looked at me, then at the old man and once at their living quarters. One of
the men pointed to a hut and said something to my guide. Then they left him
and went towards the hut. They returned with another man in tow – a man
whom I recognized as the one who took the clothes from me for the laundry.
I stepped forward and nodded at my guide that it was indeed the man.

The men shepherded him into his hut and returned almost immediately. They
thrust a sheaf of currency notes into my guide’s hands. The old man waved
to them and placed the money in my hands. He told me that the dhobi had
spent a hundred rupees the night before on his drink. I counted the money
and found it was all there but for the money that went for the drink.
The ordeal ended at last on a pleasant note and I looked forward to a
triumphant return.