Pandu

Pandu is a former childhood friend of Ayyan Mani whose life narrows from sporting promise and private artistic freedom into silence, exhausting work, and nightly drinking. His death after being taken into police custody is reported as suicide, but the account is met with an unmistakable understanding of custodial violence. In the brief story of Pandu, the novel sets an unrecognized individual loss against the routines that make such a death easy to explain away and quickly forget.

Identity and Early Life

Pandu is remembered as an exceptionally fast underarm bowler, perhaps the fastest Lower Parel had ever seen. That distinction belongs to a much earlier version of him: a boy who was unreasonably happy and who drew erotic pictures. The recollection presents him not only as an athlete but as an artist, someone who had found a private outlet for invention before adult responsibilities closed in.

His talent survives in the words of the drunk acquaintance who brings news of his death. Even while describing Pandu as someone no one knew, the man calls him a great painter. The difference between those judgments matters: Pandu’s ability is vivid to the people who knew him, yet it never becomes public recognition or a means of escape. His artistic life remains a lost possibility, carried in memory rather than acknowledged by the world around him.

Work and Decline

Adulthood changes the boy remembered for happiness and drawing. Pandu works as a driver for Balaji Car Hire, a job the narration presents as enslaving. As work and unhappiness accumulate, he grows silent and no longer finds time to sketch. He drinks heavily every night. These changes are described as a gradual constriction of his life: art does not disappear because the story declares it worthless, but because the conditions of his adult existence leave it no room.

The contrast between the quick bowler, the boy who drew, and the silent driver makes Pandu’s decline more than a catalogue of personal misfortunes. The abilities that once gave his life movement and expression are displaced by work and drinking. His former happiness is recalled sharply precisely because the present offers no renewal of it. The narrative gives no account of a recovery, an audience for his pictures, or a later chance to return to drawing.

Custody and Death

Ayyan learns of Pandu’s death while walking home. A drunk acquaintance emerges from the shadows and calls him by name, drawing on a closeness from their boyhood that makes Ayyan stop rather than pass with his usual nods and murmurs. The news comes in stages: Pandu’s employer accused him of stealing money; police picked him up; the next morning, they told his wife he had hanged himself in the lockup.

The official explanation does not settle what happened. Ayyan’s temples move in silent rage because, in this setting, he understands what it means when police say that a man has hanged himself in custody. The acquaintance states that Pandu was beaten to death. The narration thus places the claim of suicide beside the community’s reading of the circumstances, while showing how the police account is delivered to Pandu’s wife as something she is expected to accept. The discrepancy is central: the death is not merely private bereavement but a story about whose explanation carries authority.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The account of Pandu’s death lingers on the gap between a real loss and the public forms of grief available to represent it. Ayyan imagines the tears of prime-time television spreading through homes across the nation, attaching those imagined mourners to the memory of the boy who had found freedom in art. Yet the serial’s mourning is interrupted by an advertisement for Red Label Tea, which replaces grief with the family’s ecstatic response to a drink. The transition makes televised emotion seem both abundant and disposable: a fictional sorrow commands attention for a moment, then yields to a cheerful commercial, while Pandu’s death remains largely unseen.

The imagined image of Pandu’s wife confronting the official account of his death intensifies that contrast without turning him into a public cause or a recognized artist. His story returns instead through the recollections of an old friend and the anger of Ayyan, who receives the news in silence. Even the description of Pandu as a great painter whom no one knew preserves the double truth of his life: he possessed a gift, and the social world around him did not make that gift visible. His death interrupts the domestic television scene, but it cannot interrupt the larger routine that allows a custodial death to be recast as suicide and a little-known life to pass without national notice.