Tiger's Paw

Bangalore a jungle city. A city on the rise to most, but not to Kālā. To Kālā the city was blacker than the burnt hash hanging off the end of his cigarette. He drew in a long drag, that lit his face an ember orange. One...two...three...four; he let out an exhale of smokey haze. Kālā had a scorn chiseled into his face. It was as if he was waiting for an excuse to cause someone pain.

Kālā used to roam the streets as a beggar, hoping to get a rupee or two. He would use the silver coin to fuel his sex addiction with lower class girls looking for a bite to eat. He barely had any meat on his bone back then. That was before the dirty underworld of Bangalore gave him a reason to give a damn.

Kālā’s older brother was the jewel of the family. He choose the path of monasticism to dedicate his life as a sanyāsī, a Hindu monk. Their parents’ pride was cut short, when Kālā was forced to prematurely send his brother’s body down the river. Kālā’s brother had been shot, when he tried to stop a thief from stealing an elderly woman’s anklet.

His brother’s death made Kālā furious at the world. How could they decide to take away such a good man from this Earth, when it could have taken him. Kālā was high on opium in a back alley with a prostitute, the night his brother was killed. Kālā swore to get clean the day after he put his brother to rest. He wasn’t just going to get clean himself, he was going to clean up the streets too.

It wasn’t long after getting clean that Kālā found himself signing up for the Imperial Indian Police service. Kālā would quickly rise through the ranks as he had a reputation for taking no mercy in carrying out the crown’s dirty work. For Kālā, it was about revenge on the dirty low life street thug’s responsible for taking his brother from him.

Kālā was a detective now. He didn’t work well with others, but he was damn good at his job. He was assigned to some of the darkest cases. He was relentless. Kālā didn’t sleep until he solved his cases. He was a dark man, both inside and out. Those that knew him didn’t know which was darker, his skin or his soul. The others in the police service would say that Yama spit Kālā back out from the underworld after he reeked too much havoc beating up the damned down there.

Before Kālā could finish the last couple of draws on his cigarette, a courier boy arrived in the rain to give Kālā his next case. The young boy handed him an envelope with details inside. Kālā pulled the contents out to review them. There were a few photographs of a loading dock with truck’s that had a red symbol on the side. It looked to be a Tiger’s Paw.

The night was late and it wasn’t getting any younger. Kālā had his case and he wasn’t going to get any shut eye tonight. He held the picture up to the light of the tip of his shrinking cigarette butt. The Tiger’s Paw symbol was big. Any crime syndicate willing to brand their underground business out in the open like that meant that they cared more about marking their territory, than they did about avoiding the police. This Tiger Paw gang had to have some of the Imperial Indian Police on their side.

Kālā took one last drag of his cigarette before throwing it to the ground. He crushed it between the heal of his shoe and the puddle of the brick street.

“Time to crack this case or some skulls, whichever comes first.”

It would take two days to track down a rat desperate enough to snitch on the Tiger Paw gang, but Kālā finally found one. Turvi was a wife of one of the drug runners for the Tiger Paw gang. She had found out that her husband was sleeping around with prostitutes and wanted revenge. She spilled the beans on her husband’s coming and goings. All that Kālā would have to do is follow Turvi’s husband back to the Tiger Paw hideout.

As the drug runner was leaving a night market with a bag of rupee’s he got into a delivery truck with a Tiger Paw on the side. The truck made its way into the industrial district. There was an abandoned rubber factory right next to the imperial water reservoir. Kālā pulled off to the side to sneak in the back way.

Once inside the factory, Kālā made his way up to a service platform near the ceiling. There were long industrial pendant lights illuminating the abandoned factory floor below. They had a whole operation down there. Tiger Paw crews had broken through the concrete floor to gain access to the water reservoir next door. The gang was using the water to cook up variants of heroin from the poppy seeds that had stored in sacks and barrels in the docking bay.

Kālā had stumbled into the Tiger’s den, and if he wasn’t careful he would be on their menu. One thing was certain, either the Tiger Paw gang was going down or Kālā would be joining his brother. Both were not going to get out of this match up unscathed.

Maybe the Tiger Paw gang had finally met their match with the vengeful vendetta of Detective Kālā.

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