Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  And that if the PM insisted on pushing him down a path that would lead to his demise, well then, it was the PM who must die.

  Once that decision was made, everything else followed. Madan Mohan had called a meeting of the two arms dealers closest to him: Deepak Sethi and Gopi Goyal. Their fortunes too depended on Madan Mohan maintaining his silence. So, it was incumbent on them to come up with a plan to get rid of the Prime Minister.

  It was Deepak Sethi who had come up with the poison pen solution. He had recently returned from a trip to South Korea, where all the newspaper headlines were about how Kim Jong Un had had a prominent critic of the North Korean regime assassinated in Seoul with a poison pen. The target died instantly and by the time anyone realized what had happened, the assassin was long gone.

  What a neat way of doing away with a political opponent! No fuss, no muss, no messy bullets, no loud bombs. Just a tiny prick of a pen, a quick injection of poison, and it would all be over.

  But where would they get such a pen, asked Madan Mohan. Neither of them dealt with North Korea or had contacts in that country.

  Leave that to us, Sethi and Goyal assured him. We know just the man. We will sort that out. And sure enough, they had done just that.

  So, Birendra Pratap was dead and gone while Madan Mohan Prajapati lived to fight another day. And, as it turned out, another Prime Minister.

  FIFTEEN

  A red mist of rage had descended on Karan Pratap after his meeting with Suresh Shastri. It didn’t matter to him that there was no direct evidence linking Madan Mohan Prajapati to the murder of his father. Or that the IB chief had insisted that there may be an innocent explanation for the calls between Akshay Trivedi and the mobile number traced back to PP Consulting. He had insisted that the CBI pick up both Goyal and Trivedi and place them in custody. He didn’t want the two men out and about, tampering with evidence.

  But whatever the outcome of the investigation that ensued, Karan knew in his heart that it was Madan Mohan who had ordered the hit on Birendra Pratap. It may be almost impossible to prove in a court of law, going by current evidence, but that did not make it any less true.

  As he sat in his office in South Block, having cancelled all his appointments for the rest of the day, Karan’s mind kept flashing back to the last few months of his father’s life. What could have gone so wrong between Birendra Pratap and Madan Mohan? The two men had been close for more than three decades. Madan Mohan had been one of Birendra Pratap’s most loyal lieutenants. The two families had known each other for years—his own childhood memories had Madan Mohan floating in and out of them.

  So, what had gone so spectacularly wrong? Karan ran his mind over the events of the last few months of his father’s life. But no matter how hard he thought, he couldn’t recall any incident that may have set off the chain of events that led to Baba’s assassination.

  Was he wrong about this? Had he got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Was he just grasping at straws? Or was there really something to his instinctive, almost visceral, certainty that Madan Mohan was behind his father’s death?

  There was only one person who could put his doubts to rest. And that was his late father’s private secretary, Nitesh Dholakia. He was the only person who was fully in Birendra Pratap’s confidence, the one man from whom Baba had no secrets. If anything had gone wrong between Birendra Pratap and his Defence Minister, Dholakia was the one man who would know all the details.

  The only problem was that Dholakia had taken an indefinite leave of absence from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) a couple of months before Birendra Pratap’s death. His wife had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cervical cancer, and been given only a few months to live. And Nitesh had given up his job so that he could spend as much time as possible with her in her final days.

  Karan realized, with a sudden sense of shame, that he didn’t know if Neelam Dholakia was still alive. He had some faint recollections of seeing Dholakia file past his father’s body as it lay in state at Teen Murti Bhavan. And he was sure that the bureaucrat would have been present at the cremation as well. But that whole time period had passed by in such a blur that Karan wasn’t sure whether he had spoken to Dholakia or not.

  Since then, he had been so preoccupied with the investigation into his father’s assassination, the election campaign, the task of governing, that he hadn’t even bothered to find out how the Dholakias was doing. But surely, he thought, someone in the office would have told him if Neelam had passed away? If they hadn’t, that must mean that she was still clinging on to life.

  Karan picked up the phone and dialed Dholakia’s number. He picked up on the third ring. ‘Hello,’ he said cautiously.

  Of course, thought Karan, this was a new and secure mobile number assigned to him after he became Prime Minister. Nitesh wouldn’t have it saved on his phone.

  ‘Hello Niteshji, I hope I am not disturbing you. This is Karan Pratap speaking.’

  ‘Oh, hello sir!’ Nitesh’s voice promptly took on the deferential tone that all bureaucrats employ when speaking to their political masters. ‘No, no, you are not disturbing me at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really should have called earlier to check how Neelamji was doing,’ said Karan contritely. ‘But it’s just been such rollercoaster ride ever since Baba died…’

  ‘Thanks for asking, sir. She’s stable for the moment, though the pain is still hard to manage. We are just taking it one day at a time,’ said Dholakia.

  Then, after a moment’s pause, he added, ‘And please don’t apologise, sir. I know exactly how it goes. It must have been such a difficult time for you. I’m just sorry that I couldn’t be around to see you through the transition.’

  ‘Yes, it has been tough,’ said Karan, his voice trailing off.

  ‘Well, if there is any way in which I can help,’ said Nitesh, rapidly trying to work out the real reason the PM was calling (he hadn’t bought the ‘checking on Neelamji’ excuse for a second), ‘please do let me know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Karan, ‘there is a small matter that I wanted to consult you on. But I don’t want to do it over the phone. Do you think you could come meet me and Arjun later tonight at Race Course Road? Or is that too short notice?’

  Karan knew perfectly well that there is never such a thing as ‘short notice’ when it comes to being summoned to RCR. And Dholakia, a veteran of the civil service, was well aware of that too.

  ‘Not at all, sir,’ he responded quickly. ‘I’ll be there. What time would suit you?’

  ▪

  Emerging from an Ambien-fuelled nap in the early evening, Asha decided that it was time she took a shower and washed her hair. As she lathered up the shampoo, she tried and failed to remember the last time she had washed her own hair. Her maintenance routine always included getting her hair professionally washed and blow-dried thrice a week. But given the events of the past few days, she wasn’t up to calling her hairdresser in. Teresa was the soul of discretion, but she couldn’t bear the thought of having someone else see the state she was in.

  Asha slipped into a bathrobe and plugged the hairdryer in to begin blow-drying her hair in front of the full-length mirror. Having half-dried it roughly, she paused to pick up a round brush from her vanity, and switched the hairdryer off for a minute. That’s when she heard that familiar voice wafting in through the open bathroom door. Sunny Mahtani. There was no mistaking that baritone, with its undertones of brash confidence and overtones of slick privilege, leavened with just a smidgen of a British accent.

  Her heartbeat accelerated automatically. What fresh hell was this? Was Sunny giving interviews about their affair? Did he intend to feed the media machine more salacious details about their relationship? Did he mean to give new legs to this story, which seemed to be finally moving off prime-time?

  Asha dropped the hairdryer where she stood and ran to the bedroom. But by the time she got there, Sunny had finished speaking from a makeshift podium set up in front of the Belgravia mansion of his parents,
and was walking back inside through the black front door.

  Oh God! What had he said? And what had possessed her to go for a bath? She should have stayed in bed and monitored the TV like she had been doing for the past three days.

  Asha did a frantic search of all the news channels. But every single one of them had cut back to the studio, where a panel of talking heads was holding forth on how ‘dignified’ Sunny Mahtani had been. And how he had tackled such a ‘difficult situation’ with ‘grace and restraint’.

  What on earth had he said? Asha began scrolling through Twitter to see if any of the news feeds was carrying a recording of his remarks. And suddenly, up it popped, at the top of her timeline: NTN’s ‘exclusive’ video clip of Sunny Mahtani’s brief press interaction. Except, of course, it wasn’t an interaction at all.

  Sunny had walked out on a sunny London day, wearing a brilliant-white shirt paired with dark-blue jeans accessorized with his trademark Hermes belt. He had raised the microphone, placed a sheet of paper on the podium, and proceeded to read from it in a low monotone, neglecting to make eye contact with any member of the assembled press party.

  ‘The events of the past few days have left me shocked and saddened. My privacy, and that of my former fiancée, Asha Devi, has been violated in the most terrible of ways. I am horrified to see that our personal pictures, taken in the context of a loving relationship which we believed would end in marriage, have been stolen from us and distributed to the world. This violation of our privacy is one of the most shameful moments in Indian politics.

  ‘I am not a politician and nor was Asha when these photos were taken. But even those in public life have a right to a private life. And I find it simply appalling that our privacy had been invaded, that our intimate moments have been made public and are being used to shame and humiliate us. Politics has always been a dirty business but this is a new low even by the standards set by Indian politicians.

  ‘The last few days have been the very worst of my life. And though I haven’t spoken to Asha, they must have been even more challenging for her. I wish I could support her through this—but circumstances prevent me from doing that. But I will fight for her in my own way.’

  Sunny turned the page and continued. He had filed an official complaint with the Metropolitan Police about the theft of his personal pictures. He had also instructed his legal department to pursue this matter. He did not intend to take this lying down. All those involved in this conspiracy to defame him and Asha would be hunted down and made to pay the price.

  At this difficult time, his thoughts and prayers were with Asha and her family, who were going through the worst days of their lives, grieving for Birendra Pratap.

  Sunny’s voice seemed to quaver at this point. ‘I know how they feel. Birendra Uncle was like a father to me too. And he would have been my father-in-law if things had worked out differently. But now he has gone, and his family is broken and shattered. I just want to say to them, please stay strong, please make him proud.’

  At this point, Sunny set aside the papers he was reading from and looked straight into camera. ‘And to Asha, I will say just one thing. Be brave. None of this is your fault or mine. And I promise you, I will find out who is responsible and they will pay. That is my promise to you.’

  With that, Sunny had turned around—ignoring the reporters shouting questions at him—and walked back into the sanctuary of the Mahatani residence.

  Asha had watched the clip with mounting indignation. Having been with Sunny for so long, she knew perfectly well how seriously he took cybersecurity. His phone was protected with the best firewalls, as was his email account, and his computer was encrypted by the best experts in the business.

  There was no way some hackers had stolen those personal pictures off Sunny Mahtani’s iCloud account. There was no way anyone could have hacked into his email to steal those images. And even if some mysterious entity had managed to breach all those firewalls, the Mahtani conglomerate would have been alerted immediately by its cyber security unit about the leak.

  If those photos were now in the public domain, it was because Sunny wanted them to be. There was a reason why all the naked pictures were of Asha, while Sunny was only featured from waist-up. All the images—and God knows there had been many—that featured his full-frontal and naked butt were not among those leaked.

  So, Asha wasn’t taken in by his little performance—all that contrived sadness, the fake humility, the ersatz concern—at the podium. She knew in her bones that Sunny was behind the leak, he was the man responsible for her humiliation, the reason why her carefully-reconstructed world was now in shambles.

  She also knew that she would never be able to prove that. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t make him pay.

  ▪

  Karan Pratap drove straight to Number 7 when he entered the RCR complex. He needed to spend half an hour briefing Arjun on what had transpired during his meeting with Shastri before Nitesh Dholakia turned up.

  He walked into Arjun’s den after a perfunctory knock and found him idly flicking through Netflix, with a large bottle of Pellegrino by his side. Arjun followed his brother’s gaze and grinned sheepishly. ‘Detox time,’ he said defensively.

  Truth be told, Arjun had been rather rattled by the whole Asha scandal. As someone who had spent many evenings on some combination of drugs and drinks, he shuddered to think what pictures he must have posed for in the course of all his carousing. And if those pictures ever saw the light of day… No, no, perish the thought!

  But there was no answering smile on Karan’s face. He shut the door firmly behind him and sat down beside his brother.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Arjun, ever sensitive to his brother’s moods.

  ‘Just about everything,’ replied Karan wearily as he poured out a glass of sparkling water for himself and prepared to give his brother a blow-by-blow account of his meeting with the IB chief.

  The moment the words ‘PP Consulting’ made it to the narrative, Arjun who had been pacing up and down, came to a sudden halt. ‘That’s that Prajapati fellow’s Dubai company.’

  Karan nodded in confirmation.

  ‘What does this mean, Karan?’ asked an ashen-faced Arjun. ‘That the Prajapatis were involved in Baba’s assassination?’

  Karan advised caution. His gut told him that Madan Mohan was involved. But there was no evidence to produce in a court of law as yet. So, he had asked Shastri to keep the findings within a small tight group in IB while he investigated further. The Prime Minister would decide what to do with the information after the election was over.

  But Arjun Pratap was having none of that. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked his brother, his face turning red with anger. ‘Are you fucking serious? We finally find out who is behind Baba’s death and you want to wait until the bloody election is over?’

  ‘Calm down, Arjun,’ said Karan. ‘I can understand your anger. Hell, I was furious myself when I found out. But I have had time to think since then. And Shastri is right. We need more information before we proceed further.’

  ‘What information? The only way you’ll get information is if you arrest that bastard and his entire family and slap them around till they tell you everything they know.’

  ‘You know full well that I can’t arrest a former minister on the basis of a few phone calls that we can’t even trace back to him. We need more evidence. We need motive. We need to know what happened between him and Baba. Which is why I have invited Nitesh Dholakia here today. He’s the only person who can tell us what went wrong, assuming that anything went wrong.’

  Almost as if he had been waiting in the wings for a cue to appear, the intercom rang. Nitesh Dholakia was here. Should they send him in?

  A minute later, Nitesh was seated on the couch facing them. Both brothers were shocked to see the deterioration in his appearance, though they tried hard to hide their surprise. Dholakia’s shock of black hair had turned completely white, almost as if some switch had been turned off. And judgi
ng by the fit of his suit, the man had lost at least 15 kilos.

  Dholakia began by offering his condolences yet again. Karan brushed them aside and asked about his wife. Then, the preliminary social niceties over, he got down to business.

  Did Dholakia know if there had been any problems between their father and Madan Mohan in the last months of his life? Had there been any bad blood between the late PM and his Defence Minister?

  Dholakia was too seasoned a bureaucrat to ask why they were peppering him with all these questions. And he knew full well that there were some things that it was better not to know. So, he stifled his natural curiosity and began recounting the tale of Madan Mohan and his dodgy bank accounts.

  The initial information, he recalled, had come from the Americans. The CIA had run a penetration operation against a bank in Cayman Islands, which was supposed to be a money-laundering hub patronized by the Colombian drug mafia. Among the trove of information they had gathered in a blanket sweep through the bank’s records, they had found an account that showed a suspicious pattern of payments and transfers. They had investigated further and found that it did not belong to the drug dealers they were after. But money from that account had been wired to Dubai on more than a few occasions so they wanted to rule out a terrorism link.

  Imagine their surprise when they discovered that the ultimate beneficiary of the account was the Defence Minister of India, Madan Mohan Prajapati.

  The Americans had sent all the information in a diplomatic bag directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. Birendra Pratap had been sceptical at first and had asked the Americans for further proof.

  ‘So, what did Baba finally do with all that information?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I couldn’t say. You see, my wife fell ill around this time. And as her condition deteriorated, I decided to take a leave of absence. That’s how matters were when I left. I really don’t know what happened next.’

  ‘Niteshji, you didn’t think about briefing me on such an important issue? If the Defence Minister of India had an illegal bank account in the Cayman Islands, don’t you think you should have told the new Prime Minister?’