Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

But no part of the city was deader than downtown. Here in the heart of St. Louis, in the lee of the whining all-night traffic on four expressways, was a wealth of parking spaces. Here sparrows bickered and pigeons ate. Here City Hall, a hip-roofed copy of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, rose in two-dimensional splendor from a flat, vacant block. The air on Market Street, the central thoroughfare, was wholesome. On either side of it you could hear the birds both singly and in chorus — it was like a meadow. It was like a back yard.

The keeper of this peace had been awake all night on Clark Avenue, just south of City Hall. Chief Jammu, on the fifth floor of police headquarters, was opening the morning paper and spreading it out beneath her desk lamp. It was still dark in her office, and from the neck down, with her hunched, narrow shoulders and her bony knees in knee socks and her restless feet, the Chief looked for all the world like a schoolgirl who’d been cramming.

Her head was older. As she leaned over the newspaper, the lamplight picked out white strands in the silky black hair above her left ear. Like Indira Gandhi, who on this October morning was still alive and the prime minister of India, Jammu showed signs of asymmetric graying. She kept her hair just long enough to pin it up in back. She had a large forehead, a hooked and narrow nose, and wide lips that looked blood-starved, bluish. When she was rested, her dark eyes dominated her face, but this morning they were cloudy and crowded by pouches. Wrinkles cut the smooth skin around her mouth.

Turning a page of the Post-Dispatch she found what she wanted, a picture of her taken on a good day. She was smiling, her eyes engaging. The caption —Jammu: an eye to the personal— brought the same smile back. The accompanying article, by Joseph Feig, had run under the headline A NEW LEASE ON LIFE. She began to read.

Few people remember it now, but the name Jammu first appeared in American newspapers nearly a decade ago. The year was 1975. The Indian subcontinent was in turmoil following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil rights and her crackdown on her political foes.

Amid conflicting, heavily censored reports, a strange story from the city of Bombay began to unfold in the Western press. The reports concerned an operation known as Project Poori, implemented by a police official named Jammu. In Bombay, it seemed, the police department had gone into the wholesale food business.

The operation sounded crazy then; it sounds hardly less crazy today. But now that a twist of fate has brought Jammu to St. Louis in the role of police chief, people here are asking themselves whether Project Poori was really so crazy after all.

In a recent interview in her spacious Clark Avenue office, Jammu spoke of the circumstances that led up to the project.

“Before Mrs. Gandhi dispensed with the constitution the country was like Gertrude’s Denmark — rotten to the core. But with the imposition of President’s Rule, we in law enforcement had our chance to do something about it. In Bombay alone we were locking up 1,500 lawbreakers a week and impounding 30 million rupees in illegal goods and cash. When we evaluated our efforts after two months, we realized we’d hardly made one speck of progress,” Jammu recalled.

President’s Rule devolves from a clause in the Indian constitution giving the central government sweeping powers in times of emergency. For this reason, the 19 months of such rule were referred to as the Emergency.

In 1975 a rupee was worth about ten U.S. cents.

“I was an assistant commissioner at the time,” Jammu said. “I suggested a different approach. Since threats and arrests weren’t working, why not try defeating corruption on its own terms?

“Why not enter a business ourselves and use our resources and influence to achieve a freer market? We chose an essential commodity: food,” she said.

It was thus that Project Poori was conceived. A poori is a deep-fried puff-bread, popular in India. By the end of 1975, Bombay was known to Western journalists as the one city in India where groceries were plentiful and the prices uninflated.

Naturally, attention centered on Jammu. Her handling of the operation, as detailed in the dailies and in Time and Newsweek , caught the imagination of police forces in this country. But certainly no one would have guessed that one day she would be in St. Louis wearing the Chief’s badge on her blouse and a department revolver on her hip.

Colonel Jammu, however, entering her third month in office, would have it seem the most natural thing in the world. “A good chief stresses personal involvement at all levels of the organization,” she said. “Carrying a revolver is one symbol of my commitment.

“Of course, it’s also an instrument of lethal force,” she continued, leaning back in her office chair.

Jammu’s frank, gutsy style of law-enforcement management has earned a reputation that is literally world-wide. When the search for a replacement for former Chief William O’Connell ended in its deadlock of opposing factions, Jammu’s name was among the first mentioned as a compromise candidate. And despite the fact that she had no previous law-enforcement experience in the U.S., the Police Board confirmed her appointment less than a week after she arrived in St. Louis for interviews.

To many here, it came as a surprise that this Indian woman met the citizenship requirements necessary for her job. But Jammu, who was born in Los Angeles and whose father was American, says she went to great lengths to preserve her citizenship. Since she was a child she has dreamed of settling in America.

“I’m terribly patriotic,” she said with a smile. “New residents, like myself, often are. I’m looking forward to spending many years in St. Louis. I’m here to stay.”

Jammu speaks with slightly British intonations and striking clarity of thought. With her fine features and delicate build, she could hardly be less like the stereotype of the gruff, male American police chief. But her record gives an altogether different impression.

Within five years of entering the Indian Police Service in 1969, she became a deputy to the Inspector-General of Police in Maharashtra Province. Five years later, at the astonishing age of 31, she was named Commissioner of the Bombay police. At 35, she is both the youngest police chief in modern St. Louis history and the first woman to hold the post.

Before joining the Indian police she received a B.A. in electrical science from the University of Srinagar in Kashmir. She also did three semesters of postgraduate work in economics at the University of Chicago.

“I’ve worked hard,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of luck, too. I doubt I’d have this job had I not received good press from Project Poori. But of course the real problem was always my sex. It wasn’t easy to buck five millennia of sexual discrimination.

“Until I became a superintendent I routinely dressed as a man,” Jammu reminisced.

Apparently, experiences like this played a key role in the Commissioners’ selection of Jammu. In a city still struggling to overcome its image as a “loser,” the Board’s unorthodox choice makes good public-relations sense. St. Louis is now the largest U.S. city to have a female police chief.

Nelson A. Nelson, president of the Board, believes St. Louis should take credit for its leading role in making city government accessible to women. “It’s affirmative action in the truest sense of the word,” he commented.

Jammu, however, appeared to discount the issue. “Yes, I’m a woman, all right,” she said with a smile.

As one of her primary goals, she names making city streets safer. While not offering to comment on the performances of past chiefs in this area, she did say that she was working closely with City Hall to devise a comprehensive plan for fighting street crime.