Chapter 2: Suryansh

# Chapter 2: Suryansh

## The New Posting

The first thing Suryansh Tomar noticed about the Coonoor police station was the calendar. It was three months out of date — still showing December 2025, with a photograph of Ooty Lake that had been taken in the 1990s, judging by the Ambassador cars in the background — and it hung at a thirteen-degree angle on a nail that was slowly working its way out of the plaster. He knew it was thirteen degrees because he had spent eleven years in the armed forces before transferring to the Tamil Nadu Police K9 unit, and the military had given him many things: a steel rod where his left femur used to be, an inability to sleep past 0445, and an obsessive relationship with angles.

"Welcome, welcome, Inspector Tomar!" Sub-Inspector Dhananjayan rushed forward with a plastic chair and the eagerness of a man who had been running a station alone for six weeks. "Tea? Coffee? We have both. The coffee is better. My wife sends filter coffee powder every Monday. She says the stuff they sell in Coonoor bazaar is mixed with tamarind seed powder, but I think she just likes to send things."

"Coffee. Thank you." Suryansh set his rucksack down — army-issue, faded olive, held together by habit and a single ambitious zip — and surveyed his new domain.

The Coonoor Sub-Divisional Police Station occupied a colonial-era bungalow that the British had built for a tea estate manager in 1898 and the Indian government had converted to law enforcement purposes in 1952 by the simple expedient of adding a lockup in the servants' quarters and painting "POLICE" on the gatepost. The building still had the original teak floorboards, which creaked with a musicality that made stealth operations impossible. The walls were the green of hospital corridors. There was a photograph of the Chief Minister that was two Chief Ministers out of date, and below it, a dusty trophy — "BEST POLICE STATION, NILGIRIS DISTRICT, 2019" — that served primarily as a paperweight for a stack of unsigned FIRs.

Two constables sat at desks that appeared to be from the same era as the building. One was typing something on a computer that ran Windows 7. The other was asleep, his head resting on a ledger, the pen still in his hand, a bubble of saliva expanding and contracting at the corner of his mouth with the rhythm of a man deeply committed to his nap.

Suryansh had transferred from the Jaipur City Armed Reserve. Jaipur had been noise and heat and the constant electric hum of a city of four million people doing four million things simultaneously. His unit had handled riot control, VIP security, and the annual chaos of the Jaipur Literature Festival, where the greatest threat to public order was typically a disagreement between literary critics that escalated into thrown copies of hardback novels.

Coonoor was — not that.

"What's the crime profile here?" Suryansh asked, accepting the steel tumbler of coffee that Dhananjayan handed him. The coffee was, as promised, excellent. Dense, bitter, with a foam that clung to the rim like it had nowhere better to be.

Dhananjayan tilted his head, considering. "Petty theft, sir. Some chain-snatching near the bazaar, but that was six months ago and the fellow turned out to be the nephew of the snatched woman's neighbour, so it resolved itself. Tea estate labour disputes — those can get heated, but usually the union leader and the estate manager shout at each other for two hours and then have tea together. Sometimes literally. One missing person case — Mr. Krishnamurthy from Upper Coonoor — but he does this every monsoon. Goes to Kodaikanal without telling his wife. She files a report, we find him at his cousin's house eating jackfruit, he comes home, they fight, then it's over until next year."

Suryansh took a long sip of coffee. "And the K9 requirement?"

"Ah, yes." Dhananjayan's expression shifted to something more serious. "That is the reason for your posting. The Nilgiris has been seeing increased smuggling activity — sandalwood, primarily. The forest range is vast, the terrain is difficult, and the smugglers know the mountain paths better than we do. The DGP's office authorised a K9 unit for the district. You are, sir, the K9 unit."

"Just me?"

"You and your dog, sir. The department sanctioned one handler and one canine. Budget constraints." He paused. "Also, the previous handler — Inspector Palani — was transferred to Tirunelveli after an incident involving his dog and the District Collector's garden party. I was told not to ask for details."

---

Suryansh found his quarters behind the station — a single room with an attached bathroom, a window that opened onto a eucalyptus grove, and a bed that had clearly been assembled by someone who believed mattresses were optional if you had sufficient spiritual discipline. He dropped his rucksack and opened the window.

The air hit him like a slap of cold silk. He breathed it in — wet earth, eucalyptus oil, the distant green smell of tea processing, and something sweeter underneath, something he couldn't immediately name. The temperature was seventeen degrees. In Jaipur, seventeen degrees meant winter, sweaters, the brief annual reprieve from heat that the city celebrated like a festival. Here, it was apparently Tuesday.

He pulled out his phone and dialled.

"Haan, Maa."

"Pahunch gaya?" His mother's voice carried the frequency of a Rajput woman who had raised three sons, buried a husband, and still managed to run a provisions shop in Jodhpur's old city with the efficiency of a military operation. "How is it?"

"Green."

"Green," she repeated flatly. "Beta, I sent you with two sweaters, three thermals, and enough namkeen to feed a platoon, and all you can tell me is 'green'?"

"It's very green, Maa."

She made a sound that was half laugh, half exasperation — a sound he had been hearing since he was four years old and had answered her question "What did you learn in school today?" with "Nothing." The answer had been technically accurate; he had spent the day building a fort out of tiffin boxes and had been sent to the principal's office.

"The room is fine," he offered. "The station is small. The coffee is good."

"Coffee." She said the word like it was a foreign substance, which, in the Tomar household of Jodhpur, it essentially was. His family ran on chai — thick, sweet, with so much ginger it could clear your sinuses from across the room. "You've become a South Indian already."

"The posting is good, Maa. Quiet. Sandalwood smuggling cases. Nothing dangerous."

A pause. He could hear her adjusting something — probably the dupatta she always draped over her left shoulder, the one she twisted when she was worried. "Nothing dangerous. You said that about Jaipur also."

He hadn't said that about Jaipur. He had said "manageable," which was a different word with a different meaning and had, in the end, been a lie. The Jaipur incident — the one that had landed him in the hospital for three weeks and left him with a steel rod and a mandatory psych evaluation — had been neither quiet nor manageable. But Maa didn't need to know the details. She knew enough. She had sat by his hospital bed and peeled oranges and not asked questions, which was her way of saying I know everything and I am choosing not to scream.

"It's a hill station, Maa. The most dangerous thing here is the hairpin roads."

"Eat properly. Don't just eat that Southern food — rice-rice-rice. I'm sending mathri and ghevar with Bhaiya when he comes to Coimbatore next month."

"Done."

"And call Nandini."

His jaw tightened. "Maa."

"Just call her. She asks about you."

"She asks because her mother tells her to ask. It's not the same thing."

"A mother telling her daughter to ask about a boy is the same as the daughter wanting to ask. This is how it works."

"This is not how it works."

"You are thirty years old. When your Baba was thirty—"

"Maa, I have to report to the SP's office in an hour. I need to settle Bahadur first."

The name worked like a charm. His mother's voice softened immediately. "How is he? Did he handle the train journey?"

"He slept the entire way. Better than I did."

"Because he is a sensible dog. More sensible than his handler. Tell him his Daadi misses him."

Suryansh smiled — the first genuine smile since he had stepped off the Nilgiris Express. "I'll pass the message."

---

Bahadur was a Belgian Malinois — seventy-two kilos of muscle, bone, and an intelligence so focused it occasionally bordered on contempt. He had been trained at the National Training Centre for Dogs in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh, specialising in narcotics and tracking. His official designation was K9-TN-417. His unofficial designation, given by Suryansh during their first week together, was "the only being in my life who has never disappointed me."

Bahadur was currently in the kennel behind the station — a concrete structure with a tin roof that Suryansh had already mentally redesigned. The ventilation was wrong, the drainage was wrong, and the chain-link fencing was the cheap kind that a determined German Shepherd could chew through in forty minutes. A Malinois could do it in twenty. He would fix it this week.

He opened the kennel door. Bahadur was sitting exactly where Suryansh had left him — not lying down, not pacing, just sitting with the erect, alert posture of a dog who was always ready for the next instruction. His ears tracked Suryansh's approach like twin radar dishes.

"Aa, Bahadur."

The dog rose and walked to him — no rushing, no barking, the disciplined approach of a working animal — and then, in the one concession to emotion that Bahadur permitted himself, pressed his head against Suryansh's thigh. The pressure was warm and solid, the weight of trust that dogs give and humans spend their whole lives trying to earn from each other.

Suryansh scratched behind Bahadur's ears — the left one first, always the left one first, because that was their ritual and Bahadur was a creature of ritual. "New place, bhai. New smells. You'll like it here — the forest is thick and the air is clean and there are apparently sandalwood smugglers for you to chase."

Bahadur's tail moved once. A single, controlled wag. Approval noted.

They walked the perimeter of the station compound together — Suryansh scanning the terrain with the automatic assessment of a soldier (entry points, blind spots, cover, lines of sight) while Bahadur catalogued the olfactory landscape with his nose to the ground, processing information at a speed and depth that no human technology could match. A dog's nose could detect one part per trillion. Bahadur's was better than most.

The compound backed onto a hillside thick with eucalyptus and cypress. A narrow path led upward through the trees — a shortcut, Dhananjayan had mentioned, to the main road and the residential area above. Suryansh could see the rooftops of houses through the trees — colonial bungalows and newer constructions side by side, the architectural history of Coonoor layered like a geological record.

He checked his watch. 0730. The SP's office was in Wellington, twenty minutes by road. He had time to shower, change into a fresh uniform, and eat something. Dhananjayan had mentioned a bakery on Bedford Road that made egg puffs that were "worth the cardiac risk."

Suryansh looked down at Bahadur, who looked back up at him with the steady, amber gaze that was the closest thing to unconditional acceptance he had ever received.

"Let's see what this town has for us," he said.

Bahadur's tail moved again. Once.

They walked back to the station in silence, two soldiers in a new country, ready to learn its language.