On my way to town, I saw a motley crowd gathered on the pavement outside Kannada superstar Rajakumar's house. The two big police vans that used to line the pavement for those three months when he was in Veerappan's custody were long gone. But there were two pleasant-faced constables, smiling goofily as they herded some 25 shuffling men into a queue. I looked curiously at the big black gates of the house that have featured on television screens all over the world. And suddenly saw a dark, puffy but strangely familiar smiling face folding his hands in greeting to the waiting men. It was the superstar himself, dressed in a simple white dhoti and shirt, greeting his fans. Nothing strange about that. Except that Rajakumar can seldom be seen outside his house. He tends to be a rather private person who does not walk out of his house or greet neighbours. I remembered what his doctor Ramana Rao had told me a week after Rajakumar was released: "After his enforced silence for so many weeks, Annavru [as Rajakumar is known] now wants to talk non-stop to anyone who is willing to listen. He wants to reach out and touch his family, his fans, luxuriate in their proximity..." After weeks of seeing foreign television crews jostling their Indian counterparts outside the bungalow, and busloads of fans dancing on the streets and being beaten back by the police, it is still odd to see the site so empty. "Where are all those barricades and policemen posing in front of cameras?" asked my five-year-old daughter Amala, as we drove past. Two days later, we were driving home, past the scenic Sankey Tank, when we saw cameras, vans carrying generator sets and crowds. "There must be some film shooting on there," said Amala. "Stop the car at once, and take me to see who it is!" "Not me!" I groaned, having just finished a huge round of grocery shopping and feeling in the least like socialising with a film star whom I would most likely know, given the nature of my work as a journalist. "You take Bhavani and go." My teenage maidservant Bhavani was more than happy to take my place, and tore across the road, nimbly skipping between cars and motorcycles, holding Amala's hand. "Its Shivu Uncle!" Amala yelled embarrassingly loudly, from her vantage near the cameras. "He's talking into a small cell phone, that's a quarter the size of your huge handset. Why don't you get a neat instrument like his?" "Come back!" I mouthed silently, not exactly feeling like getting into a conversation with Rajakumar's eldest son Shivaraj Kumar, one of the Kannada screen's leading heroes of the moment. Not looking the way I did, anyway, with my hair coming undone and my hands smelling of potatoes and onion. Amala came back with an annoyed pout and jumped into the back seat, a disappointed Bhavani , who had obviously hoped for an introduction to the star, trailing behind. That evening, we rushed into my gymnasium exactly four minutes late, as usual. I was invariably just late enough to miss the warm ups for my aerobics workout, and pant through the rest of the gruelling session rather miserably. Amala and Bhavani ran around the back of the room -- again, as usual. Suddenly, I heard a loud screech. "Look, its Appu Anna! And he's shaved his head and became quite fat!" I groaned unhappily, looking back through the huge mirror that lined the entire wall in front of us. Sure enough, it was the brat Amala, jumping up and down and pointing excitedly to a sweating but grinning Puneet, Rajakumar's youngest son, who had been exercising quietly in his usual corner in the room. Perhaps Appu, as he is known, had hoped to make a quiet comeback to our gymnasium, after being away since his father was abducted. "Look, he's smiling at me in the mirror and waving!" continued Amala in her resonantly high-pitched child's voice. "No, that's not Appu Saar!" I could hear Bhavani say in response. "He's much thinner and had grown a beard and long hair: I saw him and his brothers on television last month, so I know!" I was sure poor Appu must have been ruing the day he made friends with the brat in the gym all those months ago. Halfway through a particularly strenuous routine, he broke off and jogged quickly to the back, perhaps to swig some cold water or breathe some fresh air. But it was not to be. In the mirror, I saw Amala planting herself squarely in his path, batting her small eyelashes at him, a gooey smile on her face. Was this generation learning how to bat their eyelashes at young men so early, I wondered idly, remembering from my own distant childhood that I learnt all those little feminine wiles much later... A bemused Appu leaned down, tweaked Amala's cheek until her grin spread right across her face, and jogged out of the room tiredly. It was almost as if the three months of madness, when Rajakumar was in Veerappan's custody -- the traffic jams, sporadic violence all over the city and the grim faces of superstar's family haunting everyone's living rooms through their television sets -- had never been. Nobody even notices Appu in the crowd in the gym any longer, except for Amala, who never fails to greet him in embarrassingly loud tones. And we are back to exercising without the smells of the mutton stew being brewed for the police battalions wafting up from below. Or having randy cops swat our backsides as we rushed in. Bangalore-based M D Riti had a hectic time covering the Rajakumar kidnapping. Illustration: Uttam Ghosh Tell us what you think of this diary
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