by Gauri Mittal
After this incident came another, and this time I was injured. Early in the morning, before breakfast, one of the guards who was our close ally informed me that I had to accompany him to the admin office urgently to discuss the postponement of the day’s campaign with the PMC due to a major problem. Since I knew the guard quite well, I did not bother to confirm the news with Vishwaroopum.
I went along with him while Aarav was out in the bathroom getting ready, only informing the lady from the family that lived next to us where I was going.
On reaching the admin building, I noticed the reception desk was unmanned. But the guard told me all the others were waiting for me in the PMC room.
Walking towards the PMC office, I felt trepidation, but I dismissed it as nerves because I was to face the general in the more private setting of the PMC office instead of the usual big announcement hall. Vishwaroopum would be there, along with the others, I reasoned. But when I reached outside the office, I decided to turn back. What if the guard had been lying? How could I have trusted him so easily?
I started to back away from the door when it opened from inside, and I was pushed into the darkness of the room. The door closed behind me, and before I could react, I was hit on the head by something hard, and I fainted.
Upon awakening, I felt my shoulder throb in pain and a big bump on the back of my head. There was a penetrating white light hanging above that forced me to keep my eyes shut.
“Mom,” I whispered, my head dizzy. I closed and opened my eyes several times, slowly realizing I was not home in Rajgar. I tried to bring both my hands to my face, my right shoulder hurting with the movement.
Multiple silhouettes of people stood still around me. Someone was bending by my side.
“Aarav,” I said. He was here. It meant I was safe.
“How are you feeling?” he said, tenderly holding my hand.
“What happened?” I asked. The light was in my eyes, and I could not see the faces of the other people standing around me.
Slowly, it came back to me. I had been following the guard to the PMC office. Someone had pushed and then hit me. The rally! Had I missed it?
“We have to go,” I said, starting to sit up.
Someone very tall came out of the way of the light towards me. “I am sorry, Miss Madhavi,” Vishwaroopum was saying. “I trusted the wrong man. The guard was a double agent for the general.”
“Yes. I did too,” I replied.
“Luckily Pranav was in the lounge beside the PMC. He had spent the night there working. He barged in and fought the guard and the other man who had hit you, disarming him before he could take out the knife. They had to flee, and he brought you here,” Vishwaroopum said.
The other two people moved away, and Pranav came forward.
“Are you okay now?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “Thank you.”
He was looking at me with hidden expressions. “Have you missed the rally because of me?” I asked.
“It has been postponed. Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking around at everyone. “I have been careless. I shouldn’t have followed that guard alone, believing his words.”
“Just rest,” Aarav said. “Don’t talk too much.”
The next day, my arm was in a sling, and there was a bandage around my head. Thankfully my right shoulder had taken the brunt of most of the damage from the wooden chair I had been hit with, leaving my head with only a slight concussion and superficial injury.
The guard who had been responsible for my predicament was identified hours later, hiding in one of the cabins. Some citizens found him before he could inform the general, and a furious Aarav and Vishwaroopum went to arrest the accomplice who had hit me with the chair.
The postponed rally was held early the very next day. The general made an appearance, giving his speech as if nothing was amiss. And though he knew he had been unsuccessful in killing me, he only knew the facts we asked the hospital to leak to anyone who asked. Thus, Varishth thought I had been fatally wounded. My absence at the rally only strengthened his ignorance of the facts. He was confident I held no proof of his involvement, being unaware of the fact that his men had been captured.
After his rally ended, the general went to sit on his chair at the back of the stage, and Pranav was called on to make his speech. Vishwaroopum and his friends from the village surrounded the exits, preventing anyone from leaving.
I entered the announcement room still bandaged, and a murmur spread throughout the audience. I ascended the stage and took a place across from the general. His eyes became wide for a moment but quickly turned impassive.
Pranav started speaking. “Miss Madhavi, as all of you can see, is severely injured, and that is the reason she is late. I wish to enlighten everyone about the cause of her injury since I was a witness to it.”
The general got visibly uncomfortable and started to get up from his chair.
Pranav continued speaking. “I have with me two other people, one of whom will tell you exactly what happened the day before.” At that, the guard and the other accomplice were led to the stage by Aarav.
The general had descended the stage and was trying to nonchalantly pass through the audience.
“Who asked you to attack Miss Madhavi?” Pranav was asking the man who had hit me with the chair.
“It was the general’s orders,” the man said, stuttering. The crowd gasped. “I just did what he told me to. He said he would throw me out of the city if I did not obey him.”
The guard gave his testimony, and as Pranav narrated his side of the tale, a hush fell on the audience. When he finished, murmurs arose again, of an angry nature.
“Throw out the general!” someone cried.
“He’s a murderer!” someone else shouted.
“No, Pranav is a liar!” someone from the general’s smaller side of the audience shouted.
The general was at the exit, surrounded by Vishwaroopum and others. In comparison to the angry public, the general found Vishwaroopum’s company to be safer.
“Take me away, or they’ll kill me,” he said to Vishwaroopum. He obliged.
The general was imprisoned in a room in the military headquarters. After Pranav spoke and the general was arrested, I took the mike and requested the PMC take justifiable action against the general at their earliest convenience.
The majority of the public cried for vengeance with me.
Five days later, the PMC had come to a ubiquitous decision to banish the general from the city, along with the Kalkani men identified in the pictures and anyone possessing illegal arms and drugs. The army was now under PMC rule and was ordered to inspect every room in the building for the contraband items.
Two months were left before the election. It was between me and Pranav. The month before had seen the most civil discourses of any political rally that anyone could remember. On both sides of the stage, only the future of Shunya and Iddis was talked about. None of the two opponents said a word against the other. It was a strange kind of rally.
A month was left before election day. Only two rallies remained.
I sat in the cafeteria, having dinner with Aarav. Just as I finished my meal, Pranav entered from the other hall. He did not completely ignore Aarav as he usually did and said to me, “I have something to talk about, if you could spare me some time. We can talk here, when the crowd isn’t so thick.”
I looked at Aarav for his permission, since by now I had told him all about Pranav’s marriage proposal to me and more. “I’ll meet you at home later,” he said to me, getting up from his seat beside me.
I nodded and smiled at him.
Pranav sat down across from me, where he used to almost six months back.
“Why do you want to become the president?” he asked, cutting right to the chase.
“My reasons have undergone vast changes in the past six months,” I replied. “Initially, I considered the fight to be an escape from the sorrow I
held in my heart, of losing my world, but as I fought, my reasons became more about what I could do. About giving my all. About emptying myself out completely. Now I have structure. A plan to follow and a society to help rebuild.”
“Have you ever, even for a tiny fraction, felt anything for me?” he asked, his eyes holding none of their fire but also none of their torment.
I was quiet for a while. “You were my saviour, Pranav,” I said finally. “Then and now again. When you came to sit by me in the truck from Rajgar to here, I felt like there was a constant blanket of protection around me.”
He gave a slight nod. “I’ll see you at the next rally,” he said, getting up. And he left.
Fifteen days later, called to speak before right before me, he announced his withdrawal from the race.
Fifteen days before election day, I was made the president of Shunya.
Chapter 18
“I
n the end, we will meet at that place where only you and I shall exist, and there, within each other, we will find our purpose to live.”
Aarav sang.
I looked at him, raising my head, which leaned on his chest. “Shall we start the process of going back?”
He smiled. “I volunteer to go on the first exploration,” he said.
My smile turned sad. “Why did you say that?”
“Because you would never volunteer my name to go, and would feel guilty afterwards when agreeing to the volunteering by other people’s husbands and sons.”
Three years had passed since Pranav had relinquished his nomination. I was president, and the PMC was now my cabinet. It was comprised of seven elected members from within the citizenship. Pranav, Vishwaroopum, and Lakshmi were in it.
Ashima had passed away, with Aarav at her side in her last moments. Geetika had married Vishwaroopum. We still ate cabbages and lentil and longed, wretchedly, for the sun, the moon, the sky, and the trees.
The first group of volunteers left the city on foot, through the entrance to the cave at the end of 3rd Street, Aarav with them, leaving me with my heart in my throat.
They returned two weeks later with samples of soil and water and plants from the forest at the edge of the cave, plants that the villagers identified as medicinal. All the volunteers were first taken to the hospital, where they were tested for the amount of radiation their bodies had absorbed.
The results were hopeful. The radiation levels on the atmosphere had decreased. The Earth had started self-healing. A report was filed from the information provided by the volunteers. The haze that had enveloped the planet had begun clearing. The Earth had grown warmer again. But there was still the soil. Only when the soil was fit for farming could we truly re-establish our society on the surface.
The volunteers had found no other survivors or contact with any other people. They had seen birds and bees and some disfigured fish in the water. They were good signs.
The next expedition would be to establish communication. Aarav went out again, against my wishes. But he had seen the sky, and now he could not wait to see it again. They had identified some towers in the mountains on maps that they thought would work.
This time they returned after a month, and I was almost eaten alive by anxiety in that time. When he returned, I promised him I would accompany him wherever he went the next time.
But they were safe, and a sense of joy pervaded the whole city. Everyone knew the time was nearing when we would return home.
The team had managed to find a tower and connect to a communication satellite through multiple small portable antennas towers and large suitcase like devices they had been working on all these years. The different portable towers were tuned to catch signals from different satellites through different frequencies and relay them through the primitive output machines.
Three signals were caught. One from Jashar, another from Aarkans, and the last from a small unknown country called Deeja.
The information collected was filed in a report.
20th June, 2041:
Environmental radiational: Below 4 millisievert per year
Soil quality: Not fit
Satellite Communication: Established
Jashar: One underground facility with 10,000 survivors
Aarkans: One underground facility with 3,400 survivors
Deeja: One underground facility with 6,000 survivors
Iddis: One underground facility with 3500 survivors
By the end of the eighth year, the test results on the soil had come positive. It was time to go home.
The exit to the path that led to the cave from 3rd Street was opened by Vishwaroopum. He led the way as the first hundred made their way out.
We had to be patient. We couldn’t leave the city immediately, but slowly we started leaving, transporting supplies, our belongings.
The first rays of the sun fell on my face on 21st June, 2042. I walked through the narrow path, anticipation bubbling in my heart. The air started changing. It began to feel lighter. The light of the sun started appearing in the distance.
The path ended, and I was standing in the middle of a giant cave. Clear water rested in a huge lake in one corner. Small trees and bushes grew around it. I crossed the cave, moving towards the light. And then, all at once, I beheld the sky. Blue, majestic, and infinite. The first rays of the sun fell full on my face, warming my soul. I closed my eyes, my head tilted to the sky. I was overwhelmed. My eyes watered with tears of joy, and I fell to my knees, weeping, to be back in the lap of the mother.
I stood up, drinking in the forest and mountains that surrounded me, and I walked on into the future.
About the author:
Gauri Mittal is a doctor with a keen interest in writing. She has written poems, short stories and another novel, titled “Love, Arranged By Mother Nature.”
She can be contacted at her email id: [email protected]