Lathi

/ˈlɑːtɪ/ n. A long, heavy wooden stick used as a weapon in India, especially by the police.
Etymology: Hindi

The little boy saw it purely by chance.

It lay half-submerged in a puddle on the cement stage where he played every day. His ball had bounced oddly off it. Curious, he dug into the water and pulled it out.

It was about a foot and a half long. One end was broken off, splintered like sugarcane snapped under force. The exposed wood was frayed at the edges, spiky and fibrous. The other end was rounded, dark with polish, smooth from long use. At the center, the wood looked chewed – scarred, but intact.

He drew back at first. There was something in it. A presence.

Years later, he would remember that feeling in another place – deep in the forests of central India, when he came upon a lone gaur at dusk. Old, hulking, black as a shadow. Its one horn gleamed. Just one. Which meant the other had taken something with it – maybe a tiger’s ribs, cracked open in the undergrowth. That kind of silence. That kind of danger. He had felt it before, in that puddle.

And now it sat in his hands.

*

‘A lathi,’ his father said.

He didn’t need to look at it.

The boy turned to him. ‘To catch thieves?’

There was a pause. Then, he said, ‘Once, in Delhi, someone stole my watch. The police did nothing until someone in the Home Ministry made a call. That evening, I was asked to come to the station. They had the cobbler – face down, arms spread. The inspector had a stick like this one. He placed it over the man’s ankles, then stood on the ends, slowly rolling it over his legs. He screamed. Later, they used a second stick. Across his back. Over and over.’

The father said no more.

*

As a college student, the boy would encounter another lathi. One night, sometime in its wee hours, he found himself outside a tired police outpost in a small town, alone, under the weak flicker of a dying vapour lamp.

The station was locked.

Eventually, a constable emerged, roused by the student’s pounding, rubbing sleep from his eyes. As he yanked shabby trousers over loose pajamas, his paunch spilled over a belt that strained against indifference. Even bugs seemed to keep their distance from the dirty, torn vest protruding through his open fly.

He wore his uniform shirt like a lab coat. ‘The Sub-Inspector is on his way,’ he mumbled, yawning.

Across the pavement lay a family, a labourer, his wife, and their baby. The constable prodded them with his toe. The woman stirred, spat a curse, and the man backed off, muttering.

The street fell silent again, save for the dogs fighting somewhere far off. A jeep arrived. The engine died. Out stumbled the Sub-Inspector, drunk. He kicked a stone, then staggered forward, his foot landing squarely on the sleeping woman. She bolted upright, cursing loudly, with venom.

The SI barked at the constable to remove them. The havildar hesitated, then stepped forward again, only to be driven back by the woman’s acerbic abuse. The inspector paused. Blinked. Then grabbed the lathi from the constable’s hands. He walked up to her. Prodded her.

She sat up again, still half-asleep, still hurling insults.

He raised the lathi and struck.

Ssssaaaat!
Ssssaaaat!

The sound sliced through the night like a mortar shell, violent, echoing. Even the dogs froze.

The reaction was instantaneous. The woman shot up and fled, barefoot, disrobed, not looking back to check on her husband or child, clutching her back, breath rasping with pain.

All that remained was a single cry trailing into the night.

*

The stick ended up by the cupboard, part of the household now.

His father used it for wrist curls. Every morning, the boy watched the thick rope wind around the lathi as the weight rose. The teak never cracked, never warped. Over the years, the ropes wore down and were replaced, but the lathi stayed the same.

*

One day, a pigeon entered the boy’s room. It fluttered madly, unable to escape, knocking into walls, its wings loud and confused. The boy screamed. He didn’t know yet that pigeons don’t harm boys. His father appeared in the doorway.

The boy’s eyes flicked to the stick. Half-hidden beneath the cupboard. He pulled it free.

Swung.

The first strike was blind. By chance, it hit. The bird collapsed, twitching.

Something in him shifted.

Heat surged through his arms. The lathi felt heavier now. Or maybe he was stronger.

He hit it again.

And again.

His father didn’t intervene. He only watched.

And in that stillness, in that silence, the boy felt, perhaps for the first time, that his actions had found a quiet, invisible place in his father’s gaze. Not approval exactly, but something close.

He pushed the bird into a bucket.

And beat it.

And beat it.

And beat it.

*

What remained with him long after was not just the lathi, or the rope, or even the silence.
It was the memory of the bird, mute, wings splayed at the bottom of the bucket, crushed beneath a darkness, that was now his own.