I have a festering grouse. I mean,why didn’t some good Samaritan put me wise to the fact that the smart alec cops were up to their necks in tricks and were deploying decoys, cunningly attired in alluring feminine costume, in a bid to catch red-handed eve-teasers and roadside Romeos?

Of course, I don’t belong to either genre; you can judge for yourself as I lay the facts threadbare.
It was a balmy evening and I was on my usual constitutional in Lal Bagh when I spied this comely young woman sitting by herself on a stone bench by the lake with a weighty book in her hands.

Thinking that she might be feeling lonesome for scintillating intellectual company with whom to share a profound chapter from the book— which could have been Spinoza or Sartre— I sat down diffidently at the extreme edge of the bench, my intentions strictly honourable, and coughed.

“Nice weather”, I said and the young woman looked up demurely. I decided to issue a weather bulletin valid for the next 24 to 48 hours. “They say that the unseasonal rains and the wet spell we’re having is due to a well-marked low pressure belt which lay centred at 450 nautical miles nor’ nor' East of Port Blair and moving in a Southerly direction.”

To my infinite relief, the woman didn’t pull herself to her full height and say in a frigid voice, “Sir, you strangely forget yourself!” On the other hand, my weather bulletin was well received for the woman furiously wrote down some notes in a blue note-book.

I looked at the book she was reading and like the lovelorn fool that I was, failed to see the red light going on. It was titled— ‘Karnataka Police Manual. Rule of evidence converging eve-teasers and rowdy sheeters goondas, 14th ed’. I merely thought that she was a final-year law student cramming for her semester exams in criminal jurisprudence.

Now that the weather motif had fizzled out, I decided that my latent Lothario act was worth pushing along and I hit upon some red-hot Lochinvar stuff.

“You remind me of a little Crabbe!” I said tenderly.

The woman went red in the face and reached for what looked suspiciously like a regulation lathi, but poetry came to my rescue. Crossing my arms across my chest and closing my eyes, I recited, “Tender though coy, ease of heart her every look conveyed”.

It was the woman’s turn to pick up the conversation thread. “My second sister-in-law ill-treats me,” she whined.
The latent Walter Raleigh in me came bubbling to the surface and I wanted to hold her hand— my intentions still strictly honourable of course— and pat it and say reassuringly, “You don’t say. Do tell uncle about it.”
Even as I proceeded to give effect to this chivalrous line of action, I heard a deep, gruff masculine voice growl, like a Wodehousian constable, “You’re pinched!”

So ended before the awful majesty of the mobile court in Mayo Hall my maiden essay into romantic courtship.