As Superintendent of Police of a district, I was sitting in my office late one day when a young boy sought to see me. I invited him in. He would’ve been about 20 but huge, walked in and talked with impressive confidence and poise.

He said he was fighting against injustice wherever he saw it and had major success. The Police lines in the district had a national flag in front of it. The constables staying in the barracks, on their own, used to enforce an unwritten rule of anyone passing by to get down from bicycles, etc. and walk and pay obeisance to the flag. This boy apparently had filed a case in the Calcutta High Court and managed to stop such (in his opinion, “abominable” and) illegal practice. I was a little intrigued that a young boy of 20 would be spending so much time, energy and money pursuing these matters rather than concentrating on studies and things I felt would be more natural pursuits at that age. However, after a few platitudes, he left.

A few days later, the businessmen’s association in the town visited me in a delegation to complain about extreme extortion by the same young boy. The extortion had been going on for years but that particular year, it had scaled such heights that they were at the end of their tether.

This was a revelation and I enquired closely into what was which. What I found was a devastating, and not a little tragic, tale of what not to do as a parent.

This boy apparently used to arrange for certain public (sarbojonin) Pujas including Durga Puja in his house complex. On this pretext, he used to practically threaten all shopkeepers and businessmen to part with huge sums. There was a sub-text to his meeting me. While the meeting was one-on-one where only platitudes were exchanged, he had gone out claiming how close he was to SP saheb who was content merely to be guided by his advice and counsel for everything that the SP saheb did or didn’t do. And so on and so forth. The general public had seen him going into my office and spending a fairly good amount of time there. They had no way of knowing that it was merely a stray button upon which he had sewn a whole diabolical vest. Some of them had already parted with huge sums.

I was worked up enough to delve into how a young boy had become such a Frankenstein. Nothing had prepared me for the tale of systematic derangement that had gone into its making. His father was a Deputy Magistrate and used to be very indulgent towards the son. Things must have started small but had got to a point where every month, on the first, when the father would return home with the salary (used to be cash salary then), the son would lock him up in his room and not release him until he passed out the bulk of the salary to the son under the door. The utensils he used to eat from were all made of silver. The boy also wore 10 expensive rings, some of them presumably to ward off any evil eye. This state of things had not come to pass overnight.

In the initial days of the boy’s deviant tendencies, the Principal of his school (in another district) had sent a letter to the boy’s father inviting him for a discussion regarding the unruly conduct of his son. When anyone’s kids are in school, the merest hint of any such letter sends parents into a tizzy and preparations for reparations, abject apologies, downloading on the kid/s and so on. Rather than going to meet the Principal with any modicum of apology, what this father did was to move the High Court against that polite letter. I guess, foreseeing unnecessary runs around courts, the school must have dropped the matter. The boy went on to be involved in the rape of a classmate but the father managed to suppress that and got himself transferred to the current district and the boy shifted to a school there.

I asked my officers why this chap’s extortion and other depredations had been allowed to go on with impunity for so long. They all said that every time the Police Station tried to intervene, the father, being a Deputy Magistrate, would move heaven and earth and see that the Police officer, rather than the boy, faced trouble. I also asked them why they were giving permission for the public Pujas. Turned out that the Pujas were all held without permission but no one dared to do anything about it. The reason – the Deputy Magistrate father, again. Plus, in Bengal, there is a lot of sentiment attached to Pujas, Durga Puja in particular. The boy had been detained a few times, only to have been forcibly released within minutes.

At that time, the Durga Puja was a few days away and the boy had put up the pandal. On a Friday, I told the officers to dismantle the pandal structure and arrest him. I talked to the District Magistrate, told him the whole story and requested him not to entertain any extraneous request in this regard. As expected, the father went on an overdrive, but got nowhere. Also, Saturdays and Sundays are public holidays and the Courts function with only skeletal arrangements so he couldn’t arrange instant bail. The boy finally managed bail after a full five days. However, one of the lesser known facts about prisons is that there is a strict hierarchy in the prisons amongst the criminals. Any newcomer is systematically “welcomed” and baptised until he falls in line. Seeing this boy’s rowdy bearing and nature, it must have been baptism by fire.

The long and short of it is that, he came out after those five days a completely different person. The town was rid of a long-standing menace for good.

Love is blind. Paternal love can be blind-er.