by Vaseem Khan
“Ultimately, Ayesha fell pregnant. She begged Jignesh to marry her as he had promised. But there was a problem. Jignesh had begun work on a picture featuring another young actress, one who was setting the industry alight. Her name was Nandita Goyal—soon to be Bijli Verma.
“Jignesh was obsessed. He pursued Bijli with single-minded determination. He forgot that he had made promises to another woman, one who was carrying his child. Ayesha was distraught. She was a Muslim woman, pregnant, disowned by the father of her child. But she refused to let Jignesh ignore his responsibility, and so she pursued him; she confronted him on the set of his film; she even found her way to his home. Here she met Bijli. She felt that another woman might understand her plight. She was wrong.
“Bijli warned her to stay away. Then she gave Jignesh an ultimatum—she forced him to make a choice.
“In the end Jignesh told Ayesha that she was finished. He told her that if she ever approached him again he would use his contacts to have her imprisoned. I was the go-between he employed to carry this message.
“Ayesha, broken and afraid, contemplated suicide. But in the end she could not do it. She retreated back to her family, but they refused to help. They had never approved of her acting ambitions. In their eyes she had been punished by God for her arrogance.
“Fate is cruel to those it marks out. Ayesha took the only option available. She married.
“The man she married was the only one who would have her—a fallen woman, shunned by her family—a poor man, a habitual drunk with a violent temper.
“The child was born, a girl. And that is all I know. Shortly afterwards Ayesha vanished. Took the infant and just disappeared into the night with her no-good husband.” Lal’s features gathered into a storm of angst. “But this is ancient history. What has it to do with the kidnapping?”
“Don’t you understand yet?” said Chopra. “This kidnapping is Ayesha’s revenge on Bijli Verma.”
“My God! You think she’s behind this?”
“No. Not directly, at any rate. Ayesha recently passed away. But her daughter is very much alive. Her name is Aaliya, and I suspect she knows that she is the illegitimate child of Jignesh Verma, the man responsible for her mother’s ruin. I believe that is why Vicky has been targeted.”
Lal seemed aghast. “But—but how could she have pulled off something like this?”
“She had help,” admitted Chopra, thinking of Aaliya’s cousin, Ali.
Finally, the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. He knew the real motive behind the kidnapping: consumed by rage following her mother’s death, Aaliya Ghazi had exacted revenge on the family of the man who had betrayed Ayesha all those years ago. She had punished Bijli Verma, just as her mother had been made to suffer.
Was Vicky still alive?
That would depend on just how much rage was fuelling Aaliya’s actions. In truth, Chopra feared for the actor’s chances. Hacking off Vicky’s earlobe hinted at a latent aggression, a genuine desire to punish. He couldn’t see a scenario in which Aaliya and Ali returned Vicky willingly and unharmed.
As for Lal… Chopra had his answer now.
Lal had played no part in the kidnapping of Vicky Verma. It had merely presented a long-awaited opportunity to perform a heroic act for the woman he had silently adored his whole life, to finally win some acknowledgement for his devotion. Lal had staked his heart out in the desert of Bijli’s affections, hoping that one day she would find her way to the succour he yearned to offer.
That day had never come, and never would.
It was curious, Chopra thought as he left the apartment, that in spite of everything Lal had done to him, he could not hate the man. Rather, he felt an enormous and undiluted pity. And he thought, as he so often had, how strange and unfathomable were the hearts of men.
CONFRONTING THE KIDNAPPERS
Chopra parked the van a short distance from the home of Aaliya Ghazi and let Ganesha out. The elephant sniffed the air with his trunk, then shuffled back into the lee of the van, peering around the front fender as Chopra jogged into the gloom.
Chopra knew that he was dealing with an adversary who was acting not through rational self-interest, but on emotions that were of greater importance than any monetary payoff. The fact that Aaliya and Ali had not released Vicky after collecting the ransom was telling. There was every chance that Vicky was now in a shallow grave somewhere.
Chopra sincerely hoped that this was not the case.
If Aaliya and Ali had any sense they would realise that murdering a man as famous as Vicky would stir up a hornets’ nest. Bijli Verma would not rest until her son’s killer—or killers—were found. Their best bet was to release Vicky, and vanish with the ransom.
He cautiously approached the dilapidated home.
He stepped onto the porch and peered through the flyscreen covering the windows. He held himself still, straining his ears, but could hear no movement from within.
He pushed open the sun-cracked plywood door and entered the tiny dwelling.
Instantly, he was confronted by a sense of déjà vu.
Everything appeared exactly as he had left it on his previous visit. The peeling walls, the cheap furniture, the tiny television set. And on the sofa, once again, the recumbent form of an overweight man, stretched out in the ragged slumber of the habitual drunkard.
Chopra wasted no time.
Not knowing when, or if, Aaliya would return, he took the opportunity to search the house.
It did not take long.
There were only three rooms: the living space with its tiny corner kitchen, a shower room with rusted showerhead and squat toilet, and a single bedroom.
He quickly riffled through the kitchen cupboards and the broken chest of drawers in the living room.
Nothing.
The bathroom cabinet contained only toothpaste, a single toothbrush, shampoo and soap. In the bedroom he found a steel cupboard. Inside were women’s clothes, toiletries, and a number of burkas. But nothing else.
Chopra stepped back, his brow creased in thought.
Then he turned and knelt down beside the bed. Bending low, he looked underneath.
And immediately saw the flight bags.
He reached beneath the bed and pulled them out. Opening the flaps, he looked inside—the bundles of five-hundred-rupee notes were intact.
Chopra hesitated, considering his next move.
If he took the ransom with him now he would alert the kidnappers and perhaps lose the best chance he had of finding Vicky Verma, if indeed he was still alive.
He shut the bags, and pushed them back under the bed. Then he returned to the living room, where the slumbering drunk had now rolled onto his front, his face buried in the crook of the sofa, muffled snores echoing around the room. He paused, once more, in front of the poster of Ayesha Azmi. There was something about her face, about her eyes, something that arrested him, yet swam, tantalisingly, just out of reach… Shaking his head, he jogged back out to the van.
Aaliya arrived in a rickshaw an hour later. She left the rickshaw waiting outside, and entered the house, a slim figure in a black burka. Minutes later she returned, clutching the ransom bags.
Chopra switched on the van’s ignition and followed the rick as it sped away.
The sweltering night air blew in as they moved southwards.
Even this late the roads were congested. Truly, Chopra thought, of all the contenders for the title of “city that never sleeps” Mumbai had the most frantic claim. He supposed that the upcoming festival of Holi had something to do with it. The thought brought to him memories of Holis past, an event that Poppy celebrated with a gusto that always irritated him. But now he found himself yearning for her mischievous grin as she doused him in jets of coloured water even after he had asked her a dozen times not to.
An hour later, to Chopra’s considerable surprise, the rickshaw puttered to a stop outside Sahar Hospital.
The public hospital was one of just a handful in the suburbs,
the largest and most well known, a sprawling whitewashed facility that catered to the masses. Chopra was familiar with the place as this was where corpses from his own locality ended up, often for post-mortem. Indeed, his good friend Homi Contractor ran the autopsy suite… Why in the world had Aaliya come here?
He parked the van, left the windows down for Ganesha, then followed the young woman into the bustling hospital.
Aaliya slipped through the clattering corridors like a black-shrouded ghost, the bags swinging by her side. Eventually, she entered a crowded waiting room. Here she fell into a seat before excavating a mobile phone from beneath her burka. She made a quick, furtive call, then sat back.
Chopra squeezed into a seat in the row behind her. Beside him a droopy-eyed, middle-aged man with a makeshift bandage wound around his skull was being berated by a woman who was presumably his wife. On the seat opposite, an elderly woman squinted at him suspiciously as if, perhaps, Chopra had designs on her virtue.
Ten minutes passed and then, just as he was beginning to wonder if he should confront Aaliya… there he was!
Ali.
Chopra watched as the tall man spotted Aaliya, and walked over. He wore a blue hospital porter’s uniform and a white skullcap.
So Ali was an employee of the hospital.
Chopra considered this.
There seemed something incongruous in a kidnapper and possible murderer working in an environment designed to save and preserve life. But during his long career Chopra had often found himself marvelling at the way the criminal mind operated. He had met many men like Ali who held completely contradictory philosophies in their heads, who could be one thing to some and a different, darker thing to others. In Chopra’s experience very few people were career criminals. Many who ended up in the country’s prisons had simply fallen into crime when a particular opportunity arose, when greed or lust or foolishness overtook them at a moment of weakness.
He wondered briefly why Ali had gone along with Aaliya’s plan for vengeance. Was it purely for the money? Two crores, after all, was a lot of money, worth taking inordinate risks for. Or had Aaliya informed her cousin of the injustices Jignesh Verma had inflicted upon her mother, and thus inflamed in him an equal passion for vengeance?
Chopra considered this scenario, then flipped things back to front.
What if he had this all wrong? What if Ali was the real mastermind here? Perhaps Aaliya, with no one else to confide in, reeling after the death of her mother, had revealed the terrible events of the past to her cousin. Had Ali sensed an opportunity and twisted Aaliya’s outrage to his own ends?
Chopra strained his ears as Ali and Aaliya Ghazi talked in terse whispers. He could sense that they were arguing, but the details eluded him.
Suddenly, Ali stood.
With a final angry shake of his head he stalked from the waiting room.
The girl sat there momentarily, her shoulders sunk in frustration. And then she stood and swept out of the room with the bags.
Chopra hesitated. Why had Ali left the ransom behind? What had the pair been arguing about?
He realised that he was forced into making a choice. Stay with the girl and the money, or follow Ali?
In the end it was no choice at all.
He strode through the swinging double doors and barrelled after Ali.
Ali moved quickly along the greenwashed corridor, then down two flights of steps to the lower basement. Here he turned right past Haematology, then left past Renal, and eventually ended up outside the mortuary.
Chopra, peering from around a corner, saw him settle into a chair in the porters’ station where a fellow porter was thumbing a well-worn paperback.
The graveyard shift.
Chopra waited for fifteen minutes, during which little happened.
Ali pulled a newspaper from a rucksack and sat back to read. Occasionally, he would glance at his watch—what was he waiting for?
Chopra took out his phone and called Homi Contractor.
“Chopra?” Homi’s voice snapped from the phone. He sounded tired and irritable. Homi was a gregarious and highly intelligent man, but one with a short fuse that seemed to be perpetually lit. “It’s been a long day. What can I do for you?”
“I need some information, old friend.”
Quickly, he described his mission.
“Ali?” Homi scratched his jowly chin. “Yes, I think I know the one you mean. New man. Started a month ago. Seems competent enough. I’ve seen porters whose knees turn to jelly at the sight of a corpse. Of course, Rohit usually deals with the help.”
Rohit was Homi’s greatly put-upon assistant in the autopsy suite.
“What’s this about? Is there something I should know about him?”
Chopra hesitated. “I think he may be mixed up in criminal activity.”
“What sort of criminal activity?”
“A kidnapping.”
“That’s quite an accusation. How does a hospital porter get mixed up in a kidnapping?”
“I don’t know. I just know that he’s involved.”
“And who is it that he is supposed to have kidnapped?”
“Vicky Verma. The actor.” Chopra had decided that at this point it made no difference telling Homi the truth. He knew he could count on his friend’s discretion.
“That oaf?” Chopra could imagine Homi’s cheek twitching. Vicky Verma exemplified everything that was wrong with the modern generation in Homi’s opinion. “Are we sure we want him back?… Oh, very well. What can I do?”
“I need access to Ali’s personnel records.”
“I don’t suppose it’s ethical, but then again I’ve never had much time for ethics when common sense was the need of the hour.”
Ten minutes later a night clerk found Chopra with the personnel file for one Sikandar Ali.
The paperwork made sparse reading.
Sikandar Ali appeared to be forty-two years old, born in the state of Maharashtra, educated to a rudimentary level, but no higher. His sketchy work history claimed that he had spent many years out of the state in Uttar Pradesh, performing a number of roles as security guard and porter. His current address, the key thing Chopra was interested in, was in Juhu. This came as a surprise. Juhu was a premier district, an expensive place to live. How could Ali afford a residence there, on a porter’s salary? And the address itself seemed vaguely familiar…
The real mystery was what Ali was still doing here. He and Aaliya had the ransom. Why hadn’t they fled? Why hadn’t they released Vicky? Was Vicky already dead? Was Ali lying low to avoid attracting attention? Or was there something else Aaliya and Ali wished to achieve? Some other way in which they wished to hurt Vicky and Bijli Verma?
Try as he might, he could not get his head around Ali’s mystifying actions.
Another thirty minutes passed as he lurked around the corner, watching Ali read the paper and exchange pleasantries with passing colleagues.
And then, suddenly, Ali grabbed his rucksack, and headed down the corridor.
Chopra, whose eyelids had begun to droop, ducked back just in time, pretending to examine a bulletin board swarming with leaflets.
Then he turned and plunged after him.
Outside the hospital Ali flagged down a taxi. He hurled his rucksack into the rear seats, and ducked in behind it.
Chopra raced to his van and gunned the engine.
CHASE ON THE SEA LINK
Ten minutes into the tail, Ali clearly realised that he was being followed.
The taxi suddenly stopped.
Ali leapt out, yanked the protesting driver from his seat, and bundled behind the wheel. With a screech of tyres he veered back out into traffic and hit the accelerator.
It had been a long time since Chopra’s last car chase.
Many years ago he had been with Inspector Jai Kotwal from the Marol station when a white Honda had pulled up beside Kotwal’s police jeep. A burly man behind the wheel had spat betel nut into the road.
Kotwal looked at t
he man. The man looked at Kotwal.
Time ground to a halt.
And then Kotwal yelled, “You!”
The driver’s face collapsed into panic. He roared off.
“That’s Natwarlal Sen!” Kotwal had bellowed as he set off in pursuit. “His face has been staring at me from a Wanted poster for the past four years.”
Within seconds Chopra came to a terrifying realisation.
Kotwal was a maniac.
Hunched over the wheel like a crazed bear, eyes boring into the road, Kotwal drove like a man possessed. Blasting his horn, he hurled the jeep along the congested Sahar roads, men and animals leaping out of his way, Chopra clinging grimly on for dear life.
The chase finally ended when the villain lost control of his vehicle and careened into a concrete barrier on the Western Express Highway; the resultant fireball had lit up the night sky. A week later Kotwal had been posted to the salt-desert wasteland that was the Rann of Kutch.
Chopra had never heard from him again.
Ali was an experienced driver and tore the taxi around tight corners and narrow alleyways. Chopra was thankful that it was late; he was certain that if the chase had occurred earlier, the reckless Ali might have caused serious injury to the pedestrians that usually thronged the roads.
It soon became clear that he was moving towards the lush Mumbai suburb of Bandra, home to movie stars and moguls. Once there, he weaved through the wide, tree-lined roads, bearing west.
As they moved along Swami Vivekanand Road, a sign flashed by on Chopra’s right.