A teaser for my next story

We were all sitting in my living room. I was playing with my son, Gaurav. My wife Anjali and daughter Gauri were glancing through a book on birds. Abruptly, my daughter asked us a question, as children of her age are prone to doing almost every minute, “Why does an ostrich have wings? They do not fly, do they?”


My wife and I looked at each other and smiled at the innocent but smart question and suddenly looked serious.

It took us back a few years…


It all started 5 years ago, when I was doing duty as the sub-inspector of police at the Dadar police station in Mumbai. We always seemed to be in the eye of the storm. The threat of terrorism was at its peak and the mafia was not making our life any easier. Between them and corrupt officials, we had our hands more than full. I often longed for the cool life of a software professional, work in AC comfort and get to travel to various parts of the world, just as most of my close college friends had gone on to do. But then, maybe the grass is always greener on the other side. But then again, here I was, all 6 feet of me, Sub-Inspector Tendulkar, in my faded brown khaki uniform, 5 years of rigorous back breaking training later, sitting in a dimly lit room, at the head of a makeshift wooden board of a desk, in sweltering Mumbai heat, with a cutting chai in my hand at 2am in the night. In the company of the smell of countless ageless register book records, even older furniture and above all, recently chewed paan (betel leaf).

And what had brought me here at such an unearthly hour, was a shrill call from my colleague Sub-Inspector Kale. They had found the first body (if it could be called that) at Bandstand. It was the beginning of what was going to be a long night..