Unlike flying , walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or candle making . I saw it first at an outdoor shooting in Barrackpore at a farm house. A fellow of the crew walked through a brick wall right there in the farm. I said, “Say, I want to try that.” Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and trousers in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.
Muffled Voice at Urbana
On the first floor of 4/2 D Rajendra Lala Street, near Manicktala, Indra Pal used to live. He was aged 42 years when he discovered his remarkable gift of being able to pass through walls with perfect ease. He wore a Gandhi styled glasses with a small black French cut beard and he worked as an upper division clerk in the Department of MSME at Dalhousie. He would religiously leave his home at 9 am, walk to the Manicktala crossing and take the 9:15 am Minibus from Dunlop to Dalhousie to reach his desk by 9:50 am. In the mild winter of Kolkata for 2 months, he used to walk back at 5:30 pm from his office to his home. He was unhappily married to his wife, Anamika Pal, who was a bombshell at 35 years. She came from a similar middles class family and they were married a good twelve years ago.
She was a woman who wanted the classy lifestyle and lived in the world of the serials and films on TV. Indra was a very ordinary man with an ordinary libido. Since Anamika was not very educated to get a job, she got herself reconciled to a life of compromises and used her ire on Indra at the slightest pretext. They did not have a child.
One evening, the electricity went out briefly while he was standing in the entrance of the staircase to his 1st floor flat. The building had two stories and his elder brother lived with his family on the 2nd floor. He groped around for a moment in the dark, and when the power came back , he found himself standing on the 2nd floor landing.
He knew that his elder brother’s wife had gone with her kids for a one month break during summer holidays to her home town at Bankura. Without knocking, he decided to pass through the wall alongside the front door and heard moaning sounds from his brother’s bedroom. He peeked in and saw his wife sitting naked on the bare body of his elder brother. He was not aghast at this, as he had a premonition of a clandestine affair between the two. He had once seen them, couple of years back, holding hands and kissing each other on the balcony in late evening , when he had suddenly entered his flat as the front door was open.
Momentarily lost in the display of sex, he thought of doing a queer act. He passed through the wall of his brother’s bedroom, crouched under the bed and flicked off his wife’s bra which was lying on the floor. With the prize possession dangling in his hand, he returned to his flat in the same way —by passing through the wall. This strange ability seemed to have energised him and set his aspirations soaring, so much so that the mundane stuff of life did not affect him. He laughed silently when he saw his wife’s shocked expression on seeing him in the flat watching a comedy show on TV. He watched through the corner of his eyes, her saree wrapped round her blouse and her eyes hovering around before she suddenly spotted her bra on the bed in the adjoining bedroom . She looked at her bra in thunderstruck silence as if she had seen an apparition. For the rest of the evening, she was quite vexed in doing her usual chores of preparing dinner and her exasperation was noticed when Indra tasted the dal and mentioned, “ You have forgotten to put salt.”
That night he silently got up and re-entered his brother’s flat through the wall and mixed a colourless purgative in the water by his bedside, while his brother was snoring to announce his sexual satisfaction of the release of prolactin. Having done this, he came out of the house and went in to some nearby houses through their walls to watch more sexual scenes of copulating couples. In the process he flicked off some jewellery and cash lying on their dressing tables. His brother had to take leave the next day and the sound of flush formed the background music till late in the morning.
On Sunday, he went and met a doctor friend, who used to be the class topper in his school, and presented his case to him. The doctor satisfied himself that Indra was telling the truth, and upon examining him he discovered that the problem was caused by a helicoidal hardening of a membrane of the thyroid gland. He explained in detail a complex process called quantum tunnelling, and occurs when a particle passes through a barrier that it seemingly shouldn’t be able to. This would be like a child jumping into the air, and somehow clearing a whole house. Quantum tunnelling is possible because of the wave-nature of matter. Confounding as it sounds, in the quantum world, particles often act likes waves of water rather than billiard balls. This means that an electron doesn’t exist in a single place at a single time and with a single energy, but rather as a wave of probabilities. The low iodine secretion of the thyroid may have led to this phenomenon, he conjectured as a hypothesis. The doctor was enthused by his case and promised to take it as a case-study to do further research.
He prescribed intensive overwork and told him to take two daily doses of a tablet made from of Liothyronine, which is essentially dried thyroid glands of pigs and seaweed with some capsules of Levothyroxine. He told him to meet him after a week.
Indra took one dose, then put the medicine in the back of his bedside drawer and forgot about it. As for intensive overwork, his activity as a clerk followed fixed practices which did not lend themselves to any excess. He spent his free time reading the newspaper and working on his coin collection; these activities did not require him to expend an unreasonable amount of energy either.
He still retained the ability to pass through walls, and used it sparingly. He used it for his nocturnal visits to several houses nearby his home and in a month had enough cash and jewellery to buy a car. He sold the jewellery in small pieces across a broad spectrum of scattered shops in the city. However a lowly placed clerk buying a car may raise eyebrows and he just stashed away the cash in his cupboard which was not touched by anyone, wrapped in old forgotten clothes. Beyond this; he had little interest in adventures and he stubbornly resisted the impulses of his imagination. The idea never even occurred to him to enter his apartment any other way than by the door, and that after having duly opened it using the lock.
He might have lived out his life in his peaceable habits and never been tempted to put his gifts to the test if an extraordinary event had not suddenly disrupted his existence. Rajeev Mehta, the Secretary of MSME, left to take another position in the Government and was replaced by one Atri Bannerjee, another IAS, who spoke in short, clipped sentences and wore a toothbrush moustache. From the very first day, the Secretary was highly displeased to see that Indra had a French-cut beard, and he made a great show of treating him as an obsolete nuisance. Once in a departmental meeting he openly snubbed Indra for not being active enough to push a scheme that had been launched by the department. Indra’s vain protests that his boss did not give him the proper directions on the scheme, fell to deaf years. He soon became a persona-non-grata in office and was avoided even by other clerks with whom he has worked for more than a decade. His boss told him that he will get transferred to Siliguri where MSME has another office.
Far more serious however, was Atri’s plan to introduce far-reaching reforms in the office; they seemed specially designed to disturb the peace of his subordinates. These included changing the way of drafting memos, writing emails, time frame for movement of files for approvals, limit to tea breaks and lunch breaks. He even introduced a visiting hour for ordinary citizens and members of MSME to meet the officials to take advantage of various schemes. Above all, Atri had a brusque attitude and did not even acknowledge the greetings of his subordinates.
Indra began to find the atmosphere at the MSME Department oppressive. He felt apprehensive on his way to work in the morning, and at night in his bed he often lay awake turning things over in his mind for a full fifteen minutes before he could fall asleep.
Atri Bannerjee was disgusted by the wilful backwardness of his staff which was threatening the success of his reforms, and in particular he took out his rage on Indra, so he had Indra’s desk moved to a small damp termite infested room with a small window, next to his office. It was only accessible by a low narrow door which opened onto the corridor and still bore the inscription “STORE ROOM” in capital letters. Indra accepted this unprecedented humiliation with resignation, but at home, whenever he would read in the newspaper about some grisly murder incident, he found himself daydreaming, imagining Atri Bannerjee as the victim.
One day, the Secretary called him to his room and while holding up a letter bellowed, “Rewrite this stinking letter! You will rewrite this awful piece of letter which is dishonouring my department!”
Indra tried to protest, but the Secretary, in a thunderous voice, called him a cockroach and as he left, he took the letter he had in his hand, crumpled it up into a ball, and threw it in his face. Indra was modest but proud. He sat alone in his rickety chair, steaming, when suddenly he had an inspiration. He rose from his chair and entered the wall which separated his office from that of the Secretary. He was careful to move only partway through the wall, so that just his head emerged on the other side. Atri Bannerjee was seated at his work table, his ever-twitching pen shifting a comma in the text in a file, an employee had submitted to him for approval. Hearing a quiet cough in his office, he looked up, and discovered to his unspeakable alarm the head (just the head) of Indra stuck to the wall like a hunting trophy. What’s more, the head was alive. It looked over its Gandhi glasses at him with deepest hatred. And then it began to speak:
“ Sir,” it said, “you are a terrorist, a maniac, and a spoiled brat.”
Gaping with horror, Atri Bannerjee couldn’t take his eyes off this apparition. At last, tearing himself out of his chair, he leapt into the corridor and raced to Indra’s room. Indra sat in his usual place, pen in hand, looking perfectly peaceful and industrious. The Secretary stared at him for a long moment, mumbled a few words, and went back to his office. No sooner had he sat down, the head reappeared on the wall.
“Sir, you are a terrorist, a maniac, and a spoiled brat.”
In the course of a single day, the dreaded head reappeared on the wall eighteen times. Indra became rather good at this game, and he no longer contented himself with shouting silent abuse at the Secretary. He uttered veiled threats; for example, he would cackle demoniacally and wail in a sombre voice:
“The Tiger on the prowl! Beware! (laughter) No one’s safe—he’s everywhere! (laughter)”
In a rare occurrence, the Secretary left before him that day, his hair standing straight on his head and a cold sweat of terror trickled down his back. He was looking pale and distraught. Indra continued his act on sticking out his head on the wall several times that week. As the week wore on, you could practically see Atri Bannerjee melting away. He avoided calling Indra to his room and had stopped yelling at his staff. Murmurs of his failing health filled the gossip of the department. In a meeting with the Honourable Chief Minister, he mumbled when he was presenting the Department causing the irritable Chief Minister admonish him in front of others. The news spread like wildfire in the corridors of power. At the beginning of the second week, an ambulance came to his residence and took him away to a sanitorium. He was soon replaced by another mild mannered Tamilian Secretary at MSME.
Having accomplished this feat, Indra Pal’s unmet demand grew inside him, a new, urgent need, which was none other than the need to walk through walls.
He could certainly indulge this need easily, at home for example, and he didn’t waste the opportunity. But a man possessed of brilliant gifts cannot satisfy himself for long by exercising them on a mediocre subject. Walking through walls cannot really serve as an end in itself. Rather, it is the first step in an adventure, which calls for continuation, development, and, in short, a payoff. Indra understood this fully. He felt within him a need for expansion, a growing desire to fulfil and surpass himself. and a certain bittersweet pull which was something like the call of the other side of the wall. Unfortunately, what he lacked was a goal. He sought inspiration by reading the newspaper.
Indra’s first burglary took place in an important bank on Metcalfe Street, a short walk from his office. He passed through a dozen walls and partitions and let himself into various vaults, where he filled his pockets with currency and gold coins. As he left, he signed his work in red chalk, using the alias “The Tiger”, underlined with a distinctive flourish which made it onto the front page of all the newspapers the following morning. Within a week, the name ‘ The Tiger’ had gained extraordinary celebrity. Public sympathy was unreservedly behind this prestigious burglar who so thoroughly flouted the police and electronic surveillance. Every night he distinguished himself with some new exploit; sometimes his target was a bank, other times a jewellery store or some wealthy apartment in New Alipore or Ballygunge. Very soon his exploits spread from TV channels in Bangla to National News. He was compared to heroes and soon became a folklore. Songs were made and lyricists and comedy scriptwriters worked overtime to catch the wave.
There wasn’t an urban woman who, in her daydreams, didn’t nourish a fervent desire to belong to the fearsome Tiger, body and soul. Bengal at last got a living icon. After the theft of the famous Copper Coin of Tipu Sultan ( 1782 CE) from the Indian Museum, this enthusiasm reached a fever pitch. The Home Minister of Bengal was forced to resign, and he brought the Police Commissioner down with him. Special budget was given to Lalbazar to buy stealth gadgets from Israel to track the Tiger. Nonetheless, Indra Pal, now one of the richest men in Kolkata, remained perfectly punctual at work. Every morning at the Department of MSME, he took great pleasure in listening to his colleagues discuss his exploits of the night before. He saw with satisfaction his wife devouring with gaping eyes, the news channels where his heists were being aired. “The Tiger” they would say, “a great man, Superman, a genius!” Indra blushed with embarrassment to hear such praise, and he beamed with friendship and gratitude from behind his round-rimmed glasses.
He had rented a small flat in Rajarhat, where he bought four Godrej Steel Almirahs to keep his booty. The flat was locked, windows barred and a surveillance camera was present in the two rooms with a 24*7 connection to his mobile. Thursdays and Fridays were his favourite days when he would go on an adventure after finishing work. His wife expressed a minor surprise at his coming back late , which he briskly dismissed with the excuse of extra work. He bought a new TV for the house and some modern styled furniture which the wife enjoyed and stayed mum.
One day this sympathetic atmosphere boosted his confidence so much that he thought he would not be able to keep his secret any longer. As his colleagues stood together around a newspaper reading about the burglary at HDFC Bank on Strand Road, he studied them shyly, then announced in a modest voice, “As it so happens, I’m the Tiger.” Indra’s confession was greeted with loud and long laughter, and it earned him the derisive nickname “The small Tiger”. In evening, when it was time to leave work, he was the butt of endless jokes from his colleagues
.A few days later, the Tiger got picked up by the night patrol police in a diamond jewellery shop at Bowbazar. He had affixed his signature to the sales counter and was singing the Rabindrasangeet ‘ Aaj Jyostna rate sobai geche bone..’ .It would have been easy for him to slip into a wall and escape the night patrol, but in all likelihood he wanted to be arrested, probably with the sole intent of getting even with his colleagues and proving a point to his relations and family.
Indeed, they were most surprised the next day when the newspapers published Indra Pal’s photograph on the front page. They bitterly regretted underestimating their brilliant comrade and they all saluted him by growing little French-cuts.
Indra believed that by giving up his freedom, he was giving in to a prideful desire for revenge. In reality, though, he was simply sliding down the slope of his destiny. When a man is able to walk through walls, one can’t really speak of a career until he’s tried prison at least once. He was put in a cell at Lalbazar and the outside was thronged by media.
When he was taken to the court the next morning for a remand, flash lights flared non-stop and microphones were thrust at him. The judge looked at him quizzically before announcing a seven days judicial custody. He could see his wife, elder brother and his elder brother’s wife in the courtroom. There was a police picket outside 4/2 D Rajendra Lal Street and the downtown middle class area became a tourist spot with vendors setting up makeshift stalls after bribing the local thana. He was promptly suspended by the Department of MSME.
When Indra was taken inside the cell again, he felt as though fate had smiled upon him. The thickness of the walls was a veritable treat for him. The very first morning after he was imprisoned, the astonished guards discovered that the prisoner had driven a nail into his cell wall, and from it he had hung a Rolex watch belonging to a high ranking officer. He could not or would not reveal how this object had come into his possession. Moreover, the guards complained of receiving mysterious kicks in the behind which seemed to come from nowhere; it seemed that the walls didn’t just have ears anymore, but feet as well. The Tiger had been in jail for one week when the Police Commissioner found the following letter on his desk upon entering his office in the morning:
“Dear Chief of Police,
Hope you are doing well. Since I have finished the works of Vivekananda given to me from the library, I want to escape tonight between 11:25 and 11:35 p.m.
Sincerely yours,
Tiger.”
Despite being under close surveillance that night, Tiger escaped at 11:30 pm . He walked down to the office of Ananda Bazar on Prafulla Sarkar street and had his smiling face clicked by the journalist who was having a smoke outside at midnight, before running off to catch a cab to sneak off to his Rajarhat flat. The journalist lost no time in leaking the news, When the news hit, it was greeted everywhere with great enthusiasm. Indra slept for two days, taking home delivery of food and using the spare mobile , which he had dutifully kept there as a fall back during emergency times. Three days after his escape he went to office at 9 am and his shocked colleagues called the police to get him arrested again.
Indra was taken now to the Alipore Central Jail and triple locked in a dingy solitary cell; he escaped from it that same evening and spent the night at the jailor’s apartment, in the guest room. He took a fancy to the voluptuous body of the jailor’s wife and saw her naked by sticking his eyes through the bathroom wall. Around nine o’clock, he rang for the jail canteen to bring him his breakfast. The guards were summoned, and they seized him where he sat in bed, putting up no resistance. The jailor was outraged; he posted a guard at the door of Indra’s cell and placed him on bread and water. Around noon, the prisoner went off to have lunch at a restaurant near the prison, and when he finished his coffee, he phoned the jailor from the restaurant to come and pay the bill.
The jailor showed up in person immediately and lost his temper, shouting threats and insults at Indra. Indra’s pride was wounded; he escaped the following night, never to return. The jailor was promptly suspended.
This time he took a few precautions. He shaved off his French cut beard and traded his Gandhi spectacles for a flashy red coloured Armani. He dyed his hair a shade of deep brown. Next he went to the showrooms at Quest Mall for a pair of Gucci shoes, Lacoste golf trousers and a blue checked Tommy Tee to complete his transformation. He then went to the showroom of Audi at Park Street to come out with a brand new Q3 to drive to his home. At last he could put his driving skills to use and ticked off one more item from his bucket list. The policeman guard in front of his house saluted him as he entered his own house. His wife was busy watching a serial when he entered, and he put a finger on his lips to show her not to shout by seeing a stranger. Then he had a good meal and slept. His brother came with his family in late evening and all of them looked at him with a new-found admiration. He simply smiled at them, told them to keep mum and did not speak much. He called another close schoolmate of his, Ringo Dutta, who is still a struggling director in Tollywood and made an appointment for next day.
Next day he drove in his Audi before the sun rose and the police guard was snoring . He packed all the designer jewellery, diamonds and the coin of Tipu into a sack in his Rajarhat flat and went to the nearest police station. He dumped the bag on the nearest table with a handwritten letter addressed to the Police Commissioner, of which he took a photo and sent by whatsapp to the journalist at Ananda Bazar for another fodder of ‘Breaking News’. Before he was noticed by the police guys at the thana, he walked off and drove to the residence of the film director at Salt Lake. Ringo Dutta, who is a Page 3 guy, even though he is a failed director was over-zealous at Indra’s company and started to tell him the story line. But Indra had a vested motive. He asked for details of a heroine he had always fancied, but was no longer in news and asked him to set -up an appointment with her. He gave his friend, cash of twenty lakhs to start work on the movie on his newfound fame.
Unfortunately, he learned from Ringo that this beauty was married to a violently jealous man; moreover, her husband was a rouge and dealt in the darker side of politics and even ran a racket of drugs. Every night he would abandon his wife from eight in evening to four in the morning, but before he would leave, he always made sure to double lock her in her room and padlock the shutters. He had literally cut her career. Even during the day, one of his henchman will follow her to the sets. As a result, producers and directors have stopped casting this talented and beautiful actress.
On the very same afternoon Indra fell in love with the actress whom he met at Marriott on EM Bypass. He immediately forgot about his cash, coin collection and jewellery. As for the heroine, she looked at him with great interest, though she was briefed beforehand by Ringo and told to keep this a secret. Nothing captures the imagination of young beauties like a pair of golf pants with Gucci shoes . That movie producer look sets them dreaming about cocktail parties and Bollywood nights. He told her that he loved her respectfully and that he knew about everything—the cruel husband, the locked door and the shutters—but that he would be in her bedroom that very night and she would be the heroine in Ringo’s movie. The actress blushed; the Martini glass trembled in her hand and her eyes grew moist with tenderness. She gave a muffled sigh. “ Indra, that is impossible. I hope you know that I stay in Urbana and there is a guy of my husband sitting right now in this hotel’s lobby, watching my every move. ”
The evening Indra entered Urbana, located her 4 bedroom apartment and hid in the wall of the lift to watch her door. At last a man stepped out, carefully locked the door behind him and walked towards the lift, causing Indra to blend himself with the outside wall. Indra waited until the lift went down and then he rushed forward and strode like an athlete into the wall, running straight through the obstacles until he penetrated the bedroom of the lovely recluse. She greeted him ecstatically and they made love late into the night. Indra found back his lost libido and was full of gratitude to the actress. Indra came back to his home in the early hours and parked his Audi outside. The Police picket was nowhere to be seen. The earlier night a political leader has been assassinated and that had become the news of the evening.
Unfortunately, the next day Indra had a terrible headache. He was certainly not going to let something so trivial make him miss his rendezvous for today. Nonetheless, since he discovered some tablets scattered at the bottom of his bed-side drawer, he took one in the morning and one in the afternoon. By evening his headache was tolerable, and in his intense excitement he forgot about it altogether. The young woman was waiting for him, full of impatience aroused by her memories of the previous night; that night they made love until three o’clock in the morning. When he left, Indra passed through the walls of the house and felt an unusual rubbing sensation against his hips and shoulders. He didn’t think it merited much attention, though. In fact, it was only when he entered the living room wall to go outside that he felt a definite resistance. He felt as though he were moving through some gel like substance that was still fluid but was growing thicker; it became firmer the more he struggled. Once he was entirely embedded in the thickness of the wall he realized that he was no longer moving forward. Terrified, he remembered the two tablets that he had taken that day. He had thought they were Dispirin tablets, but in fact they contained the pigs’ thyroid gland powder and the other capsule that the doctor had prescribed the year before. The effect of the medication combined with intensive exertion produced quite a sudden reaction.
Indra Pal was immobilized inside the wall. He is there to this very day, imprisoned in the living room wall of the heroine. Her husband heard muffled voices in the living room a number of times and in spite of his boorish nature he felt a shiver going down his spine. He got some masons to come over to figure out whether there is a vacuum in the wall by knocking every inch with small hammers. They went back with no findings. But the muffled voice continued. In desperation the husband moved out of the flat with his beautiful wife. The flat got a disrepute of being haunted and to this day it is lying unoccupied. The lift doesn’t stop at that floor in Urbana anymore. Indra’s Audi was later identified by the security and confiscated by the Police.
( acknowledgement : Marcel Ayme)
Alekhya Talapatra 