Conman Joe

The news that my good friend Joe, aka Conman Joe, had passed on from the land of the finite to that of the infinite struck me like a bolt from the blue. It was his only living relative, Peter, who had phoned in with the sad news. For a while I wondered whether Peter, who always had an off-on relationship with his cousin, had just wanted to get even by pulling a fast one about his demise.

Like an ox, Joe could knock back a whole bottle of unadulterated military rum and stand ramrod straight like a general in full regalia taking the salute at a passing out parade. The news that he had passed on, and that too in the prime of his life, appeared too incredible to be true. To check it out I gingerly walked up to his house. From the sea of faces 8212; none of which looked sad in the least 8212; I could fathom that the worst had indeed happened. I first met Joe before he turned Conman Joe at a seedy bar in downtown Andheri, a suburb in Mumbai, where I had gone not just to sip the bubbly but to do some research on dance bar girls for a feature that I was working on. Joe had then just started out on a career in crime.

I later lost touch with him but soon learnt that he had made it big in his chosen field, and could be charged under every crime in the IPC. Thanks to his connections with the custodians of the law, most of whom were on his payroll, he never faced the rap. Joe8217;s full name was Joe Numbskull but I never got around to asking him whether the surname was really his father8217;s, for I had never known a man 8212; however dumb his skull might have been 8212; to go around carrying a name like Numbskull.

That Joe had a softer and benevolent side to him I came to know only at his funeral, where a number of young children from a nearby orphanage had turned up to pay homage. It turned out that Joe had channelled the bulk of his earnings towards supporting charitable causes. As the children chanted a prayer while the bier was being lifted, I realised that for them he was their beloved uncle who cared for their welfare and not a fugitive from the law. Would Joe8217;s good deeds qualify him for a place in heaven, or would he rot in hell, I often wonder?