Kumar and the Cops

My friend, I’ll call him Kumar, his real name since he won’t deny it, has experience with both Indian and American cops. While reading this, remember that Kumar is one of the quietest geekiest Indians you’ll ever meet. Even among the quiet and geeky high-tech Indian set he stands out, or should I say, is unnoticed.

This is too bad, he often could warn me of trouble months in advance, but because he was a geek, nobody else listened. But I did, I always listened to Kumar.

One day at work he came into my office to discuss something, for some reason we got on the subject of police and he related this story.

Kumar’s friend Srini was moving from the East coast to the West coast back in the mid-nineties and asked Kumar to come with him. He’d rented a truck and was hauling his car on a car dolly behind the truck. They didn’t want to stop at a hotel so they were driving all night through Tennessee when Srini stopped at an all night gas station in the middle of nowhere. Not thinking clearly he pulled into a parking space, how was he going to back out with the dolly behind him?

They went inside and the service station lady was a bit taken aback. White and black men she was familiar with, but being all alone with brown men made her nervous at 2 A.M.

“Do you boys need any help?” she asked.

“Yes”, they replied. They didn’t know how they were going to get the truck out.

So she called the police. Seems like a reasonable response to two lost Indians in Tennessee.

A standard issue good ‘ol boy cop comes out and instead of saying, “Um, no crime has been committed here, perhaps I should be on my way”, decides he’s going to instruct these foreigners on how to handle trucks and cars. He has them back out a little bit, but of course that didn’t work. I think somehow the car was backed up a bit off the car dolly as well. But the point is that they unhooked the trailer as much as possible, but the car dolly was still caught on the ball of the trailer hitch because of the way they’d backed out earlier.

The cop stepped up to the junction of the T-bar and trailer hitch and tells Srini to move the truck forward. Kumar and Srini start talking in Tamil now.

“I don’t think you should do that with him there”, Kumar says.

“What can I do? He’s a police officer”, Srini answers.

Indians are terrible about questioning authority. That’s why it took them one hundred years to get their independence, they kept asking the British to leave nicely. If a cop or manager tells you to do the impossible, an Indian will keep trying, or pretending to try, but will never say, ‘You idiot, can’t you see this will never work?’

Sure enough Srini moves forward a bit, the tension is released, the hitch comes lose with a pop, and the T-bar flies up and hits the cop square under the jaw and sends him flying 20 feet.

“What did you do?” I asked Kumar in horror.

Kumar answered, “I thought the cop was dead. I looked at Srini in the side view mirror and his eyes were as wide as saucers.”

A brown man had just killed a white cop in Tennessee. He would be lucky if they read him his rights before the execution.

Then the cop moaned a little. Kumar went over to him and knelt down. The cop motioned for Kumar to hand him the electronic number pad strapped to his shoulder. Kumar did so and the cop slowly punched in a few numbers.

“And then within one minute all I could hear, from all directions, were sirens” Kumar said amazedly. The ‘Officer Down’ code gets other cops attention.

The police arrived to find a brown man kneeling over a wounded cop. They didn’t exactly draw their guns but they did have their hands on the holsters and were quite edgy in asking Kumar to back away.

They took the cop to the hospital, got their story, and held Kumar and Srini at the gas station for twelve hours until the cop was conscious enough to give a statement and verify their story. The cop must have been pretty embarrassed.

Then Kumar starts telling me another story, about how back in India he was riding a motorcycle without a license or registration. He entered an intersection where a cop was directing traffic and the cop sees him and knows he’s got Kumar dead to rights. He puts his hand out for Kumar to stop.

Kumar is torn between stopping and running away, so he chooses a middle ground and lays the bike down while skimming along on the ground with his jeans absorbing what could have been a nasty road rash.

The bike spins around and around and bowls the cop down. Before the cop can recover, Kumar gets up, hops on the motorcycle and rides away.

I looked at him severely holding up two fingers to make my point, “Wait a minute!”, my voice was raised, “Am I to understand you took down two cops in your life?!”

Geeky little Kumar’s smile said it all.