Kindergarten Cops...

For crime reporters, it is a normal routine procedure to visit police stations on a regular basis to stay in touch with their sources. Many a times, such visits do not yield anything worth writing home about and the reporter ends up spending an hour or so passing the time with his cop source over a cup of tea and risqué jokes. It was exactly such an afternoon when I found myself at one such police station in the city. On getting to know that the cop I was supposed to meet was expected in an hour or so, I decided to spend the time sitting in the almost deserted station premises and read a book to kill time.

An excited squeal from a corner of the police station brought me back from the pages of my book and turning around in my seat to see what was happening, I saw this woman constable in her late fifties rush in the police station with something cradled in her hands. The rest of the cops who were dealing with their own paper-work suddenly perked up at the sight of the matronly cop with the mysterious package grinning widely at the world around her. The next minute, all the cops had surrounded her and were murmuring something between themselves in a remote corner of the police station.

Being the incorrigibly curious cat, I got up from my comfortable perch and ambled over to the crowd to investigate what had caused the entire police staff to mill around the uniformed lady. It turned out that the old woman, who stayed in the police housing colony right behind the police station had been blessed with a grand-daughter recently and had brought the little one to the police station to show her off to her colleagues. What I saw then is probably something so rare a sight that it deserves to be shared with everyone…

This group of big, burly uniformed cops with handlebar moustaches and short cropped hair, who look supremely menacing at most times and perfectly capable of instilling the fear of God in any human being had surrounded the woman and were cooing and making baby noises at the infant, which would have seemed silly to me in different circumstances. Moreover, the infant was responding to it and was happily gurgling back, which encouraged the cops to intensify their efforts at cooing. Fascinated, I kept watching the grinning group behave like a bunch of excited kids at a birthday party. After some time, one of the cops spotted me spying on them and nudging the others, tried to arrange in face in a trademark scowl which he must have reserved for people during his normal duty hours.

Realizing that they probably got embarrassed at an ‘outsider’ seeing this side of their behaviour where they ceased being cops for that moment and turned into fathers who behave exactly the same when with their children in the privacy of their homes, I turned and walked away, smiling at the rare sight which would be in my memory for a long, long time.