Bheem

by Jyotin Goel

  She moved to intercept, hurriedly rounding the screening bushes—and froze. She had never seen anyone quite so huge.

  Run! she thought. Run!

  But she couldn’t move. Paralysed, like a bird caught in a snake’s yellow glare. Putrefying stench stifling her like marsh gas, choking her. A giant hand wrapped around her neck and lifted her off her feet. The man looked at her lazily, and shook her. A soft crunch was the only sound the neck bone made as it snapped.

  The Clarion Building

  1.46 a.m.

  The phone trilled. Bannerjee grabbed it.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘We’ve got her. Found her in Lodhi Gardens.’ Sinha sounded worried.

  ‘And? Is she all right? Willing to cooperate?’

  ‘She’s unconscious. Nishi could tell us what’s wrong.’

  Ten minutes later, a van drove into the Clarion Building’s underground parking lot. The basement’s lights had been switched off on instructions from above. No one questioned the orders, no one saw the van’s three occupants alight. Swiftly, they walked through the darkened hallway and entered an elevator that exclusively serviced the eighteenth floor. A security guard turned a corner—and stopped short. The elevator’s lights briefly illuminated an unlikely trio: a Clarion reporter accompanied by an enormous, tattooed being carrying an inert woman. Then the elevator’s doors hissed shut and they were gone. The guard blinked, swallowed and decided not to make a fuss. The tobacco-laden paan he had just chewed on—it was making him see things, of course. He decided to ditch the habit right away. Or maybe he could just change his paanwala?

  ‘Drug-induced,’ Nishi said, examining the woman lying on Bannerjee’s couch. ‘Dilated pupils . . . and there are puncture marks on her arms.’

  ‘Will she be okay?’ Vineet asked.

  ‘Blood pressure’s all right. She’s a regular user obviously, so her body’s developed resistance. She’ll probably just sleep it off. I’ll need to take a blood sample, as soon as possible—start examining it for genetic anomalies.’ She turned to Bannerjee. ‘Could I have access to a pathology lab?’

  The editor was in the northwest corner of the room, as far from Nishi as he could get without making his fear of contagion obvious. Vineet grinned sardonically.

  ‘No point backing away, Chief,’ he said. ‘You’re dead, already. We all are.’

  Bannerjee looked at Vineet with a sickly mix of terror and resentment. He punched out a number on his phone and mumbled into it, ‘Shaumit, call Preeti. Get her to . . .’ He paused—and listened attentively, his face suddenly blank. ‘Something’s come up,’ he muttered, clicking on the phone’s speaker.

  A voice crackled out in mid-sentence, ‘. . . in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, Chief. The cops have identified the body, just now. Seems she was a sex worker, name of Aarthi Kutty. Regularly worked the park around Bibi Ka Maqbara, the tomb of Aurangzeb’s queen. Looks like an Aneeta Nair-type copycat killing: blood completely drained from the body, every drop! And toothmarks! Just one set, this time. On the neck.’

  Bannerjee looked grim. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Her neck’s broken, otherwise unmarked. Just like Afghanistan . . .’

  ‘Okay. Keep me informed.’ The editor cut the call.

  Vineet looked at Bheem. ‘Copycat? A madman imitating the first killing?’

  ‘No. This is not, as you term it, a “copycat”. This is Ashvatthama.’ The warrior’s eyes were bleak, turned inward. ‘The broken neck, the unmarked body—Ashvatthama has deliberately marked the killing with his spoor. This is a message to me. He will not be deflected from his goal. Once he kills all four, that is when he will take up my challenge.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know about Aradhana, yet! We could save her!’ Aviva spoke urgently, moving towards Nishi and the unconscious woman on the couch. ‘The fire wiped out all blood samples when they killed Valsamma. But couldn’t we scatter Aradhana’s blood samples? That would stop them trying to kill her!’ She turned to Bheem. ‘Don’t you see? They’d have nothing to gain! We would have won!’

  ‘They will not attack this one.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘She is not one of the saviours. We have been chasing shadows.’

  ‘How—?’

  ‘The arrow ladder in the cave . . . you have its image on your device. Look at it.’

  Aviva’s phone lay on a shelf, its drained battery being recharged. Hurriedly, she picked it up and switched it on.

  Delhi Police Headquarters

  Indraprastha Estate, New Delhi

  2.23 a.m.

  The two over-burdened havaldars assigned to the mind-numbing task of monitoring a pair of inoperative mobile numbers were ‘away from station’, dawdling over tepid cups of masala chai. And so they missed the blinking screen that indicated that one of those ‘dead’ numbers had suddenly come alive.

  The Clarion Building

  2.24 a.m.

  ‘Let me.’ Bannerjee took Aviva’s phone and paired it with the television on the wall. The miniature image expanded, the shot of the scarred cave wall filling the five-foot-wide screen.

  Bheem pointed at the image. ‘Do you see?’

  ‘I . . . ‘Aviva looked uncertain. Then her eyes widened. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I do.’

  ‘What?’ asked Vineet, baffled. ‘I don’t get it!’

  Aviva stepped to the screen. ‘In all likelihood, this ladder represents successive generations of the four sisters.’ The archaeologist’s finger moved down the rungs of the genealogical chart, tracing the path of the arrows. ‘The writing is illegible but wherever the arrow shapes can be seen, the pattern is consistent. In every generation descending from each of the four sisters, even where there are siblings, there is just one inheritor of what Nishi calls the immunity gene—four in each generation. And after a hundred and twenty generations, from four sisters to four first cousins to their descendants, they would have dispersed—the inheritors can no longer be closely related.’ She looked at the warrior. ‘You’re right. Aneeta Nair’s first cousin couldn’t be one of the four.’

  Vineet looked unconvinced. ‘But then . . . but how can you be sure that the woman in Aurangabad—the one killed tonight—was a saviour? Couldn’t the enemy be mistaken too?’

  Bheem shook his head. ‘Aneeta-Nair . . . we uncovered her name. Ashvatthama had no need for it.’ He turned to Nishi. ‘You found Valsamma-Nambiar . . . because she did not die. Ashvatthama did not know this. And yet he was there.’ The warrior looked grim. ‘Ashvatthama knows who the saviours are. He knows the name of the fourth and last saviour; I do not. This ladder is the only way that I can track the descendants from that yug to this one. But it is marred beyond recovery—it can tell us nothing more.’

  Bannerjee felt fear grip him like a vice. ‘What—what is he—?’ He stumbled to a halt, the question unfinished.

  No one answered. The import of Bheem’s statement sank in. It was over; they had lost. A few short seasons and humankind would be wiped out. Pralay was upon them, the Armageddon foretold by the ancients.

  ‘There could be a way . . .’

  Aviva looked up sharply. Bheem stood facing the floor-to-ceiling windows, the glittering lights of New Delhi reflected in his eyes.

  ‘Indraprastha,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This was my city. We Pandavs built it. Indraprastha.’ Bheem turned. ‘You call it “Delhi”.’

  Aviva wondered where this was going. ‘A corruption of the Persian word dehleez, yes,’ she said.

  The warrior shook his head. ‘A corruption, yes, but of the Sanskrit word dehali—“threshold”. This city is the great entrance—a threshold to Antaragata and much else. Indraprastha holds the key to every door, if one has but the courage to demand it.’

  3

  Safe House

  Mehrauli, New Delhi

  3.17 a.m.

  ‘Wake up!’

  Alex’s face scrunched up, staving off the sudden glare.

  Talwar strode forw
ard, holding out a buzzing cell phone. ‘It’s the Israeli! Answer!’

  Aviva!

  He had repeatedly called her number and the one she had used to message him, tried texting her over and over. There had been no reply, nothing. And now, suddenly . . . Alex flung off the bed covers and the remnants of sleep, scrambled up and grabbed the phone. The buzzing stopped.

  Outside the National Zoological Park

  New Delhi

  3.18 a.m.

  She disconnected. He was asleep, obviously.

  So much, I had so much to tell him, Aviva thought. Would he think me mad? And the positive test . . . He doesn’t even know about the baby.

  Disappointed, Aviva switched her phone back to airplane mode. It couldn’t be allowed to buzz or ping, not when they were about to scale a wall penning in lions.

  Vineet eased the Clarion van off the road, crunching over the unpaved walkway to the opposite edge of the grassy verge. Tricky, he thought, manoeuvring the vehicle with his only good hand. He stopped with the van’s side parallel to the twenty-foot-high wall, just four inches from the stonework, and looked around. Night blanketed the street, traffic practically non-existent.

  Bheem slid open the glass panel between the driver’s cabin and the rear compartment. ‘Well done, Vineet-Sinha. You know what you have to do now.’

  Vineet nodded. ‘I wait here for Aviva. Until daybreak.’

  ‘Good.’ Bheem shouldered the rear doors open and alighted.

  Aviva, in the passenger seat next to Vineet, turned to face him. ‘It would be stupid to say “Don’t worry”.’ A quick smile flitted across her lips, one that Vineet didn’t return. Aviva shook her head. ‘You know, of course, if I’m not back by then, something would have gone wrong. Let Alex know. You have his cell number.’

  Vineet said nothing, then nodded.

  ‘Nishi and you,’ Aviva said, ‘it would be up to you, then. I know that you . . .’

  She stopped. Patted his hand. It was cold, dead. She looked confused for a moment, then smiled again, opened the door and stepped out. A minute later, she stood seven feet above the road, the warrior having lifted her effortlessly on to the roof of the van. The wall of the lion enclosure loomed over her, its top bristling with jagged, glassy teeth.

  Six metres high, at least, Aviva thought, eyeing the barrier apprehensively. And there was a three-metre-deep moat on the other side, she remembered, lined with thorn bushes, keeping the lions in. And very effectively keeping everyone else out. How does he—?

  ‘Don’t move, Aviva-Fein,’ Bheem said.

  He sprinted away, across the road. Accelerating smoothly, he wheeled around, hurtled back, leapt. The van rocked wildly; its windows exploded, showering Vineet with fragments of toughened glass as the roof buckled under the impact of the massive foot that slammed on to it. A flying arm scooped Aviva off the roof and then they were airborne, rising, hurdling the wall, soaring cleanly over the brambled moat, descending towards its far side, finding earth with a dozen decelerating steps, still upright, still balanced, astonishing.

  It was a moment before Aviva remembered the need to breathe. She shook her head, cleared away replays of the heart-stopping leap, turned to look at Bheem. The warrior’s eyes were raised, gazing at the gently rising hill that faced them.

  ‘Dehali.’ Bheem gestured towards the ramparts of the ancient fort that crowned the hill, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. ‘The entrance to the Antaragata. It lies within the fort’s walls, below the structure you call “Sher Mandal”. An easy climb—and no one will see us entering from here.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

  Bheem raised a curious eyebrow.

  ‘The lions,’ Aviva said, glancing around nervously. ‘They don’t cage them in this zoo, you know.’

  The warrior looked amused. ‘They are probably snoring. Like all kings, they are lazy—sleep up to twenty hours a day.’

  Safe House

  3.27 a.m.

  ‘Inside?’

  The technician at Delhi Police HQ winced, aware that, to the CIG man, he sounded hopelessly unprofessional. ‘We’ve double-checked, sir. The mobile phone is definitely inside the lion enclosure.’

  Lions. This is getting crazy!

  Talwar dragged moodily on his cigarette. Just when the Israeli’s phone had come alive, when he was about to crack the case wide open . . .

  ‘Get a car there!’ he barked into the phone. ‘And no one goes into the zoo! No one does anything until I get there! Shouldn’t take me more than twenty minutes at this time.’

  The National Zoological Park

  3.47 a.m.

  Bheem sharply gestured for quiet and turned towards a particularly dense stand of bushes in the undergrowth halfway up the hill. One of the lions wasn’t asleep. The bushes shivered and it stepped out, full-maned, moonlit-gold, magnificent. Bheem raised a steely right arm towards it, fist clenched, index and fourth fingers extended. The predator froze; a low rumble sounded and then the big cat backed away, eyes locked on the huge, threatening being whose face promised terrible retribution for any aggression. The bushes parted, and the creature was gone.

  Aviva let go of a rigidly held breath. ‘How . . . how did you . . . ?’

  The warrior smiled. ‘He understood me. Smart animal.’

  With no warning, he heaved the Israeli on to his shoulder and swarmed over the steel-link fence that marked the zoo’s boundary. And now they stood within the walls of the fort, in the shadow of the tall, arched south gate. A hundred metres away, the bright night glinted on Sher Mandal’s red sandstone. Bheem sniffed the air; his eyes swept the open, starlight-dappled ground and the dark spaces under the walls; his heightened hearing picked up sounds of small creatures stirring, registering the intrusion of humans. Nothing unusual, nothing against which to guard.

  ‘We move,’ Bheem said, and raced away, Aviva struggling to keep pace with him.

  Mathura Road, New Delhi

  3.56 a.m.

  ‘He’s still there?’ Despite the fact that Talwar was speeding down a road notorious for dropped calls, the reception on his mobile phone was surprisingly clear.

  ‘We’ve passed the place three times, sir. The van hasn’t moved—just sitting there outside the zoo wall. Looks like it’s been in a crash. Driver seems okay, but when he stepped outside, his arm looked wrong. Could be hurt.’

  ‘Right. Don’t approach. Got that? Don’t approach.’ Talwar switched to an incoming call from headquarters. ‘I’m almost at the zoo. How many units have we got there?’

  ‘That’s just it, sir,’ HQ replied. ‘The phone under surveillance—it’s no longer in the zoo.’

  ‘What? Where—?’

  ‘Inside the fort, sir. The Purana Qila.’

  ~

  Sher Mandal, Purana Qila

  Delhi

  3.57 a.m.

  Sher Mandal had been closed to visitors for years, but Bheem had dealt peremptorily with its lock and grills. They stood inside its wide hall now, starlight filtering through its filigreed windows.

  Classic Mughal architecture, thought Aviva, her trained eye running along the inner walls, registering remnants of ornate plasterwork and multiple stone shelves, which, in all likelihood, had been repositories for the emperor’s books. The squat tower had been a royal library and observatory, after all. Her eyes were drawn to a narrow opening that led to a steep stairway to the upper regions of the tower.

  ‘That’s where he fell,’ she said.

  Bheem looked at her, delved into her memories. ‘Humayun,’ he said. ‘Mughal emperor.’

  ‘Yes.’ She felt unsettled, even a little violated. ‘You looked into my mind, right? Then you know that Humayun slipped while rushing down those steps to answer the muezzin’s call. You can still see that the floor’s pattern there is slightly mismatched—probably redone to remove signs of the emperor’s blood.’

  ‘I know that you think this. But the mismatch is not because of the bloodstains.’

  ‘No?
What then?’

  The warrior didn’t answer. He motioned her to be silent and shut his eyes. Unseeing, he moved forward, stepping on a series of flagstones in what appeared to be a completely random sequence. But his choice of stones was unhesitant, his steps smooth with the precision of vision. He brought his feet together on the last one but he did not step off; instead, he opened his eyes and effortlessly leapt fifteen feet to the archaeologist’s side. Aviva stumbled back, startled. All at once, the floor under Aviva’s feet rumbled, juddered. She swayed and would have fallen had Bheem not grabbed hold of her shoulder, steadied her.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The true reason, Aviva-Fein, for the mismatched stonework.’

  ‘Wha—what do you—?’

  The rumbling stopped. Bheem stepped to the spot where the emperor had been found, but the misaligned flooring was gone, a gaping, six-foot-square hole where it had been.

  ‘The Antaragata,’ Bheem said, stepping into the pit. ‘Come.’

  Aviva stood rooted to the floor, dazed. The warrior descended rapidly, dropping out of sight. Snapping out of her trance, Aviva hurried forward, pulse quickening. The pit yawned before her, a stairway spiralling down from its lip, still unwinding, moving stones repositioning themselves even as she stared down in disbelief. There was light within the stairwell, a lambent glow that allowed her to see the warrior speeding down its twisting path.

  A hidden chamber! A catacomb! Excitement shot through Aviva. Archaeologist’s rush, she thought, grinning wildly.

  Bheem looked up and gestured for her to follow.

  Aviva didn’t need any urging. She tested the first step of the stairway, muttered, ‘Cora-Pamela,’ and strode into the pit.