The Case Of The Missing Toothpick Man

Well, if you dig deep enough you can chase it down all to Division of Labour and moving away from the hunting gathering that happened 10,000 years ago. There is no point digging so deep and hence let us go little superficial and make this case little more interesting. Generally speaking the events that have mass impacts can be categorized into two –one with immediate impacts like a flash flood, police firing or the girl next door streaking across the main road and then there are the slow ones like say the change in the composition of the central government thousands of kilometers away. The event that we are going to look at many feel fall into first category – CAT 1 if you like it that way.

The way the guy who ironed clothes was known as just the “Ironing Man” the milk delivery man as the “Milk Man”, his real name was unknown to his customers, neither did they care nor did they feel they will get a discount or better service if they used his name in their encounters (as is the case in some restaurants, I am made to understand). So he went by the tag of “Tooth Picker Man” / “Tooth Picking Man” or “Tooth Pick Man” because that is what he did. He went around probing into the crevasses, gaps and black holes that dominated the dental structure of the affluent Sun City apartment residents with his tools on a daily basis. Business was brisk and booming on weekdays and come weekends their was frenzy , so much so that he was contemplating getting an assistant to help out on Sundays. But this was a niche skill, cleaning somebody else’s teeth, a small scrape on the gum and before you know the whole world (read Resident Association represented by an array of hefty office bearers) will come crashing on you physically and electronically. You will be stripped naked to four generations before in the most uncouth at the same time most sophisticated manner – thanks to yahoo groups.

Name was Raju ( Mutturaj obviously) , age mid twenties and appearance – clean shaven face , medium height, stocky build, mild manners and most importantly clean steady hands. Raju setup his business soon after Sun City started filling in with software professionals, business folks, doctors and what not from all over. Parents, grand parents and grand children added themselves to the list of occupants in no time and soon there was a strong captive customer base and in simpler less attractive terms lot of holes and gaps. Raju visited his regulars daily and his irregulars whenever he got calls on his mobile seeking his services. The job was a dignified one as it gave easy access to people’s apartments, living rooms, bed rooms or wherever else they chose to get their tooth picked. His clientele varied from the pan chewing 80+ Marwari grandma on the 9^th floor of Dazzle block to the pious middle aged Tamil guy from whom a strong tobacco stench of burning tobacco issued though he never smoked. Had he been little more intelligent Raju would have realized that people mouths was opening to understand their lives , but luckily he wasn’t all that intelligent and hence was saved of all the embarrassment that human lives can be.

For all good things the trouble starts only when the trouble starts and same was the case with Raju – he disappeared one morning from Sun City, he was not to be seen at his usual seat in the basement car park, his cell phone was not being answered and the security guys had no clue where he was. He had disappeared as only a tooth picker man could, with all his equipment and intimate knowledge of the contours of the inside of numerous mouths at Sun City. There were rumors that he had made a fortune cleaning teeth over the last 4 years at Sun City and he had gone to his native (wherever that was) with his hard earned cash. None of the residents knew where he lived (which is expected , given nobody knew his name) and people started discussing the idea of having a centralized database of names and addresses of all the people who came into Sun City to provide valuable services such as cleaning one’s toilet bowl and needless to say the mouths. It was also mooted that a fee be charged from the residents to setup and maintain this database – (after all , who doesn’t want to have enough info to chase your tooth pick man down if he decides to disappear one fine day ?)There were also rumors that he doubled up as a local politician’s goon after his working hours at Sun City and now that his party was in power had no reason to look at people’s faces no less their mouths. Some rued that he was under paid and should have been paid more or at least should have been smiled at so that he had enough relationships to not just walk away the way he ended up doing .Whatever the truth of the matter was there was panic and distress all around. People called their friends and then their friends elsewhere in the city looking for alternatives. Dentists were sought out but the costs pulled back the richest, the not so rich and well to do in that order. Few of the older residents decided to go back to their old ways, clean their teeth themselves which they had done up until before they moved into their children’s place at Sun City and had given up the habit as part of the elevation in status. Most had travelled too far down the path of change and had no going back , they lodged a formal complaint at the local police station notifying them that an important citizen whose name and whereabouts nobody knew had gone missing ( Incidentally the complaint was filed when the policemen where en-masse engaged in picking their teeth after their own sumptuous lunches) The complaint was written down and summarily sent into the black hole of files just behind the Sub-Inspector’s seat at the police station. The situation got worse as the first weekend without Raju dawned on the residents of the revered apartments. There was pandemonium and panic, so many calls were made and so many emails sent that Saturday alone that the local ISP providers and telephone service providers had to temporarily disable connections to Sun City to avoid disruption of services across Bangalore.

Like all good things that need to end, most bad things need to as well. So on the 7^th day of his disappearance Raju returned back and resumed his duties as before much to the joy of the esteemed tooth aching residents. Questions were asked and turned out that he was taken on a pilgrimage by his family to a far off temple to pay his reverences to a toothless deity whose name and location unfortunately he did not have an opportunity to find out.