India, Feb. 14 -- There isn't a lot of whimsy on the police force. But look hard enough, and the tinsel sparkle of dreams will glimmer through.

One such man in khaki with technicolour dreams is Shivaraju BS, 46. This is his story.

It all started, he says, with his mother Gowramma (who goes by only one name), in the village of Bannikuppe in Karnataka's Ramanagara district, about 50 km south of Bengaluru.

Gowramma wrapped his childhood in lore; there was little else to decorate it with.

On their meagre farm, with a largely absent father and money scarce, they would escape into reimagined worlds, enacting tales from the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

The isolation and poverty still left their mark. "Whenever I visited other people's homes as...