‘Fuck!’ he cried aloud.
He ran his eyes over the buttons. A button was blinking red. He pressed it instinctively, the blinking stopped. And slowly the door opened. He jumped out of the elevator. He sighed heavily, looked up, and gestured with his eyes. ‘Oh God! Hell! I will never take an elevator again!’ He told himself. For the first time in years, had he mentioned God in his phrase. Long ago had he aligned to with the atheistic way and had never looked back since then. However, he did not note that. It came out accidentally. Instinctively.
He went past the first five rooms. He walked past rushing nurses and patients on wheeled stretchers. The smell of antiseptic fathomed into his nostrils, nullifying his senses. He hated that kind of smell. He started feeling vaguely dizzy now.
A woman was standing outside room no. 336. She was not a nurse, she was an old woman dressed in a checkered cotton saree and carried tender wrinkles on her tense face.
THIS MUST BE IYER’S MOTHER! Jai thought.
He was reluctant to ask her if she was indeed Iyer’s mother. However, he did not want to peep into the room where Iyer’s dying father was resting either. Going near a dying person would always freak out Jai. He was a weakling as his father had predicted earlier. Asking an old woman’s identity was much simpler than knocking and entering the room of a dying man. Therefore, he called her, ‘Excuse me mam!’
‘Aa?’ The woman responded gravely.
‘Are you… hmmm…’ He pondered over what to ask, ‘Is Mr. Raamasamy Iyer in this room?’
The woman adjusted her thick spectacles and closed in on the boy, ‘who are you, son?’
‘Uhh…I am…Well, Krishnaprasad Iyer sent me.’
An expression of shock and surprise clouded on her face, the wrinkles seemed to dance together in commotion.
‘Krishna?’ her eyes filled up quickly with tears, ‘Krishna is my son, where is he?’
‘He… he sent me this,’ He held out the envelope of money in front of the sobbing old woman, ‘The money you needed. He wants you to pay it off right away.’ Jai was not able to stand there anymore. His knee began to shiver. He had never faced a crying old woman in his life before. In fact, he had never faced a crying person before, just his girlfriend Tania who had sobbed two nights ago when he had dumped her. He didn’t have to face her either.
He did not know what to do, if he had to put an arm around her bent shoulders and console with sweet words. He had never done anything like that; he did not how to do that!
‘Krishna… I want to see Krishna! Where is he? Is he all right?’ She continued sobbing.
‘Look, mam! He is all right, okay?’ Jai held the woman by the shoulder and looked straight into her eyes, piercing it with a laser of solace, ‘He wants you to pay off all the required money and he will be here as soon as Mr. Iyer is safe. He will be here, trust me!’
She nodded as she sulked in some more tears that were oozing out of her nasal passage.
‘Now, please go and do what is required. Everything will be all right!’
‘Yes, yes. Thank you, son. God bless you! Oh, would you please take this inside and keep it on his table?’ She said forced a thatched basket into Jay’s hand.
‘Oh!’ Jai did not want to sneak into the patient’s room. His hands had received the basket involuntarily and the woman was already walking away towards the elevator with the envelope.
‘Shit!’ He swore to himself.
Forty One
Despairingly he waved his head as he turned the door’s knob and opened it. He entered the room. It was a spacious white room with occasional presence of green. On the right-hand side of the room, there stood a bed adjacent to the window. There was a table next to the bed. As he walked towards it, the face of an old man revealed among disarrayed folds of a woolen blanket. Jai closed his eyes so that he does not have to see the dying man. On the way to the table, he hit the side of the bed and it made a thudding sound and shook the bed hard.
‘Shit, holy shit!’ He cursed himself.
He doubted if he had disconnected any wires that connected to the old man’s body. He feared if he had killed the old man accidentally. He held his breath and opened his left eye and carefully placed the basket on the table and prepared to leave. Slowly he opened his eyes and started breathing again as he turned his back to the patient. He was heading towards the door.
‘Kkk…’ There was an utterance from behind.
Jai was shocked! His eye sockets opened to reveal huge circular eyeballs.
‘Kkrrris…Krisshhnn….hmphh….’ The voice was grimly lit by terrible anxiety and a binding feeling of attachment. It tried hard to speak, ‘Krishnaaaa’ it cried finally.
Jay’s jaw dropped down his chin. He had seen everything that he had not imagined today. He was being forced by his fate to face his fears. First running away, then elevator getting jammed, surviving the smell of the hospital, walking into a dying man’s room and now being summoned by a dying man as his son in a subconscious state of mind.
He gulped his saliva and turned around.
‘Krishna, you have come? I knew you would.’ The grim voice creaked.
Jai did not know what to say, he moved closer to the man. He saw his face for the first time. It was not the face of a cruel dictator like Iyer had said. There was no thick moustache guarding a diabolic face. He was clean, the hair white on his head were accountably few and the face had the pale of anemia. Thick dark circles gunged below the closed eyes. The man was speaking in his subconscious state of mind.
‘Krishna, come closer to me. Krishna…’ the voice pleaded.
Jai sat beside the patient.
‘All these years I waited for you! I thought you will come but you did not! It was entirely my fault, I…I never tried to understand you.’ He said slowly between displeasing sets of cough, ‘but you did not understand me either.’ the voice kept on getting weaker with every word it uttered.
Jay’s heart was getting heavier with every word that his ears heard. It was ready to sink beyond the deafening depths of the deepest ocean of emotions.
‘You wanted to be an actor; I wanted you to become a mathematician!’ Iyer’s father continued in the state of unconsciousness.
Jai looked at the face again; suddenly it was replaced with that of Jay’s father. He was shocked. He saw his own father confessing to him on that bed in room no 336. Now it was the turn of his eyes to sink.
The creaky voice continued, ‘But I never wanted you to be a person who considered me as his enemy. I prayed that you would come back, but you did not. I would have let you do whatever you wanted to, but you never came back.’
The voice paused for a moment and then out of the silence it gleefully croaked, ‘See? You are here and Appa did not die. Those words were powerless!’ it paused again, ‘I love you my son! Now do not go anywhere. Stay with me forever! Forgive this foolish old Appa! Enne Mannichidu Krishna….’
Jai stood up from the bed. He ran out of the room, tears from his eyes dripping on the way. All those words said by Iyer’s father squeezed Jay’s heart from all sides. He wept intemperately as he ran towards the elevator. He pressed the button outside and in a minute the doors opened, he stepped inside. He quickly pressed another button and the doors closed, the elevator descended. As soon as it stopped moving, he pressed another button that opened the door. He rushed out of the lift and towards the exit as he tried hard to hide his outgoing tears. The sudden emotional exchange had made him forget the fact that he was claustrophobic. He used the elevator without getting tense and breathless.
He was out of the glass building. He shouted ‘Bastard! Fucking bastard! What the fuck was that fat bastard thinking when he left home! He left his fucking father to die!’
People started looking at him as he was shouting loudly.
He did not bother about those who were staring at him. He walked briskly towards the big gate from which he had got in earlier. He expected Krishnaprasad Iyer waiting with that huge tummy of his, outside the ga
te, waiting to know about his father and Jai was prepared to give a hard-hitting lecture to the fat man.
Forty Two
Prakash Bhawan, Gurgaon
10:30 AM
Mrs. Sharma could not take it anymore. She had waited for a long time since morning. Finally, upon receiving a reluctant nod from her husband, she called the local police station and reported her son missing. She held the receiver close to her chest as if it contained the remnants of her lost son and she was not going to let it go again.
‘Madam, could you please give your son’s description?’ The voice from the phone enquired.
Mrs. Sharma ejected at once, ‘Tall, stout figure, with shady dark eyes. He liked to keep his hair long. Yes, it was uncut. He would wear T-Shirts over jeans. Always roamed with earphones plugged in tightly, could never leave behind his music. His complexion was fair, rather on the lighter side of fair. He was…’ She was lost in his thoughts.
Silence.
‘Excuse me, madam? Hello?’ The voice worried upon not hearing her voice for a minute.
‘I am sorry, yes. He always carried his music with himself.’
‘Did you contact all his friends? And their parents, his school?’
‘Yes, I did. Of course, I did! His friends said that they did not know anything regarding his plans to run away. His best friend was clueless too! Otherwise, he is the one who would know everything!’
‘Well, we…’ there was a blinking sound in the background and then the voice continued, ‘Oh! Very well, our network has shot back in. I am sorry to have kept you waiting. Kindly email your son’s photo to us. We will send our men to look out for him.’
‘Thank you, officer!’ She sulked.
‘We request you not to worry and keep trying from your side too. Your son will be tracked down soon. We will release his pictures on every security network spanning over the city so we will make sure we do not miss out on him at any places that are using CCTVs and centralized security networks like metro stations and certain malls and traffic signals within the city.’
‘Thank you very much!’
‘You are welcome madam.’ The voice said and then the line went dead.
Forty-five minutes later, the phone at Prakash Bhawan rang again. A frantic Mrs. Sharma ran towards the console and picked up the receiver, she spoke in, ‘Hello?’ Her tone chiseled with anxiety.
‘Mrs. Sharma?’ the voice enquired. She had heard the same voice some minutes ago over the same phone line.
Forty Three
Bakhtawar Singh Road, Sector 38, Gurgaon
10:50 am
Jai looked around; the road was as empty as the sound inside his heart. He paneled his vision towards left and then scanned the periphery towards his right. He took a step forward, as he brought his neck back to normal position.
‘Where is he?’ Jai asked himself. A dozen vehicles appeared on the far left side. They were heading towards Mayfield Gardens. Still far away from where Jai was standing.
Jai had expected a tense faced person waiting outside for him, but there was no one around except for the guards who were standing on the other side of the gate. The cars came closer and all but one of them took a right turn. The gates of the huge hospital complex opened and made way for the lush blue BMW to enter. Jai walked back to the gate, he gestured one of the guards to come. The security guard raised his eyebrow in inquisitive enquiry, ‘Haan bhai?’ He asked in a native Haryanvi tone.
Jai knew the stubborn guard would not come to him. Therefore, Jai went to him instead and queried curiously, ‘Jo mere saath bhai saab aaye thei, kya aapne dekha ke vo kaha gaye?’
The dark skinned man looked at Jai, produced a very irritated face at him. He was chewing ghutka within his roughly withered pair of lips, the ones that resembled the bark of a dead Oakwood. He spit out the chewed mixture on the tiled ground and answered sparingly, ‘Tu to ekla tha… Apne aap te hi bolne laag ra tha!’
‘What? No! No! I came here with a big fat man! Almost six feet tall, huge tummy with dark skin. His name was Iyer. Where is he? He was waiting outside for me. Here!’ he pointed at a spot just outside the gate.
‘Dekh bhai! I too knows the Englis. You cames with the nobody! We bere objerving you at the gate, you came, you turned and you talking to yourself.’ The guard cleared in his thick Haryanvi accent and broken English.
‘No! I was not talking to myself, you illiterate moron! I was talking to Iyer.’ He blurted in frustration.
The guard closed in on Jai. He was four inches taller than Jai and could easily feel the might of the guard superseded by a sudden gush of anger driven by his ego. ‘Ke chaahve hain? Samajh na aave ke? Baawlo hai ke? You comes here to tighten loose screws? Hain?’ he threatened.
‘I am not loose!’ Jai was getting aggressive.
Two more guards stepped in and covered Jai from behind. Jai knew he could not wipe them off him if they pounced at him. He was weaker than the weakest of the three guards. Jai retreated; he took few steps back and turned around. He shot away as fast as he could towards the Junction where Iyer and he had landed off the auto rickshaw. He ran harder as if someone had set a werewolf behind him. Nobody was following Jai, but he kept running until he reached the junction circle. Some workers were resting under a huge peepal tree. There was no sign of Iyer.
He saw an auto rickshaw coming his way that was going towards the Metro Station. He gestured it to halt. The three-wheeler stopped in front of him, he jumped in and they were soon moving. Jai breathed in through thick fumes of diesel that the rusty auto rickshaw emitted into the inner compartment of the three-wheeler. Jai tucked his nostrils by pulling the neck of his T-Shirt, covering his nose and entire lower facial region below it.
WHERE DID HE GO? THAT FAT BASTARD!
I KNEW HE WAS THERE, WE CAME TOGETHER.
THOSE FUCKING GUARDS MUST BE DRINKING ON DUTY.
Such thoughts kept circumbulating around his over-stressed mind. The disappearance of Iyer was more startling than most of the events that had taken place that day including Iyer’s appearance and the striking similarity between Iyer’s story and his own life.
The auto rickshaw had stopped and all the passengers had got off. Jai was the last one to get off from the half-cracked metal container of a vehicle. He tipped the driver with a twenty-rupee note and ran towards the metro station. The driver called Jai to take back his change, but Jai was nowhere around to hear. He was already inside the station building.
Forty Four
Prakash Bhawan
11:15 AM
Mrs. Sharma dug into the receiver, ‘Yes, did you find my son?’
‘No, but we have tracked down his cellular device.’ The voice replied.
‘Oh Really?’ She gasped in excitement.
‘The device had been stationery till 12:28 am this morning. The location matches your house’s address, which means that he had not left home until 12:28. His sim card was well placed inside his cellular phone. There was movement until about two in the morning and then it was stationery till 5:30. He must have chosen to rest during this time.’
‘Where?’ She demanded.
‘The location is somewhere near Iffco Chowk. At about six, there was movement till Iffco Chowk metro station. However, within a span of twenty minutes the location changed swiftly. Finally, the phone was last recorded with the sim card intact at a place outside Ghittorni Metro Station. This is the time when he missed a call from a local number. After which we could not find neither the cell phone’s status nor the sim card’s. Apparently your son did not want to be tracked down by anyone by any means, so he must have either disconnected the sim from the phone or destroyed the handset completely.’
‘But why Ghittorni?’
‘Well, he must have planned on using the metro till Delhi and then escape hitherto, but to his misfortunes, the metro services were temporarily closed down and they were operational only until Ghittorni owing to an accident on the yellow line.’
‘Is my son safe?’
/>
‘We all hope he is, besides, we have already sent his photo over to all the metro stations as I had mentioned earlier. We will be able to capture him soon. Keep your courage and spirits high madam!’
‘I am… I am’ she chanted.
‘I will inform you as soon as I receive any update on your son’s whereabouts.’
‘Thank you, Officer!’
‘Goodbye!’
Mrs. Sharma placed the receiver slowly over the console. She had tears in her eyes, many beady drops of salty water. She prayed to all the Gods she had heard while growing up. She prayed hard.
Forty Five
Huda City Center Metro Station, Gurgaon
11:18 AM
Jay’s eyes scanned all corners of the station. There were more people now. The locals preferred to refer to it as the starting point for the Yellow line and indeed, it was! It docked half a million people home every day. Bulk of them did not know that the line was temporarily cut down for the time being. On the other hand, had it been restarted? Jai bulged in through the swarm of people who were on their way out of the station. All of them carried dumpy looks on their faces, they had hopes pinned on the metro rail for journeys to their destined destinations but alas! Theirs was not to be today.
Jay’s destination was a man who had stormed his mind with a disillusioned story that was strikingly whelming. He scanned everything and everyone around him to get the slightest glimpse of the man who had disappeared mysteriously. Some of the words from Iyer’s story kept playing in Jay’s mind. Jai was not even half the brat he was a night ago when he had decided to run away from home.
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