If all had gone to plan, Rashique Bhai would be dead by now. Maybe the dream was a warning to him not to stick on in the gang and maybe he should make a run for it before anyone found out anything.
But no one would, not too soon, anyway.
There would be lot of trouble once news of Rashique’s death spread. He was sure there would not be anyone seeking revenge anytime soon. There would be a mad scramble for succession within the gang. Munna Bashir, a veteran in the gang, would stake his claim as the new boss. Rashique Bhai’s son Abdul, was only twenty-two – too young to be the leader of the gang. Abdul had lots of other issues too.
Abdul was an impulsive bastard who already had three killings on his count and had a couple of court cases going on against him. The bastard spent most of his time spending his father’s money either on high-society whores or at the gambling den.
He lacked the discipline of Rashique Bhai.
Rashique Bhai had hoped that some sense would be knocked into his son’s head once he became a little older; but an age of twenty-two was old enough and Rashique Bhai was a truly worried man.
If Abdul went after the top job, shit would explode. The gang would split into two, with the saner ones siding with Munna and the ambitious ones with Abdul. A split invariably would lead to a bloodbath, which would invariably end with a compromise across the table, mediated either by another don or by the Mumbai police.
A bloodbath is bad news for both the police and the underground. The police would get a very bad rap and the hullaballoo and mayhem always got them unwanted political attention and wrath. This political wrath in turn led to a witch-hunt by the police, which would hurt the other gangs not involved directly in the bloodbath. That would be bad for the other gangs. So, both had a selfish interest in seeing a quieter succession to Rashique Bhai’s throne. And that issue had to be settled before they came after the perpetrators.
However, there was another side to the story.
In the mayhem, rival gangs would see an opportunity and would move in for the kill. If the Rashique gang did not get its house in order soon, they would be finished off in a systematic cleansing act. This act would be orchestrated by the gangs holding the neighbouring territories, or those with similar or competing interests in the underworld trade. The cleansing would of course be done by the Mumbai police in the name of a renewed effort to cleanse Mumbai of the underworld. Nobody likes turmoil and uncertainty, least of all the police. They would be better off without this nuisance, of a faction-ridden gang led by a weak leader; the shitty nuisance of a beheaded chicken running amok.
The police would draw a fat bonus from the likes of Rashique’s rival, Rajan Bhai, and would happily hunt the kin, brethren and brood of Rashique Bhai. The same police that had, until yesterday, been obeisant on a monthly basis at the doorstep of Bhai. The same police, that drew more from Bhai every month than what they drew from the government.
In an all-out mayhem scenario, it would be a time for huge paycheques for the police who would take over the job of underworld shooters, being heavily bankrolled by a couple or more of the ambitious gang-lords.
It would herald a new order in the scheme of things and the hierarchy would re-establish itself yet again. Nevertheless, this re-working of the order would entail only one thing for Rashique’s gang – they would be hunted down in the gullies of Mumbai like rabid mangy dogs.
Jai knew there were still a few days for the shit to hit the fan.
Jai, though, had only a few hours to get the hell out of there.
If Abdul was saner than he gave him credit for, then things would pan out a bit differently. Munna Bashir was a widower and did not have any children of his own. A little respect and acknowledgement from Abdul for Bashir as the new gang leader would smoothen the transition.
Maybe Hazari Baba would be able to talk sense into Abdul.
Once the succession had been settled, the hunt would then begin for the killers of Rashique Bhai. The gang would go after Rajan’s gang, it being the most likely of suspects. It was necessary to avenge Bhai for the sake of revenge and also to establish the fact that Bhai may be dead but that his gang was not. That scenario again led to a bloodbath on the streets of Mumbai.
The similar culmination of all the various trains of thoughts made Jai shudder in alarm.
‘The future is fucked,’ he thought to himself.
He realised that whichever way this broth boiled, it would ultimately curdle to shit.
He had to make sure that by the time this crap boiled over, he should be far, far away.
‘Rashique, Maader…,’ thought Jai and then stopped midway in his thoughts. Maybe he should not cuss at a dead man.
Jai was in his room at Ghatkopar. He and Billoo Thakre shared the room and paid the rent, split both ways. Jai looked around. Billoo was nowhere to be seen. Billoo, bastard! He must not have come back last night. He must have sodded off at some whore’s.
He gasped and lay down on the bed again, clutching at his hair. There was a crack that ran across the ceiling and Jai had often wondered if the roof would come crashing down on him one night in his sleep. The rest of the room was basic. There was a fourteen-inch Samsung TV in a corner, perched over a humongous metal trunk. A tiny kerosene stove stood perched on a couple of bricks in a corner and the picture of a semi-nude Bollywood starlet hung on one wall, and one of Sachin Tendulkar on his side of the wall. A calendar with a picture of Lord Shiva completed the décor..
‘There could be some news of Bhai’s death on TV,’ thought Jai.
He was about to get up to switch on the TV when Billoo burst into the room in jeans and a half-open shirt.
‘Saale chutiye! Get off your ass right now. Some haraami took a shot at Bhai last night. I just got off the phone with Ali. We need to be at Murtaza’s now.’
Jai suddenly sat bolt upright on the bed. He knew all that already. Still he had to feign outrage and shock. Billoo was turning the bed upside down and thrashing at the pillows.
Billoo was frantically searching for something. Jai knew what that was. He knew that Billoo was looking for his gun. In fact, he had seen him rummage for his gun before. In his nightmare…
‘Looking for your gun?’ Jai murmured, reliving his nightmare once again.
‘Saale! Where’s my friggin’ gun?’ Billoo shouted at Jai. Billoo never cared to hide it safely in the room. Jai had told him that, many times.
Jai knew the gun would be found under the bedside table and that the vase on the table would come crashing down during Billoo’s search for the gun.
Billoo turned to the table, pulled the drawers, rifled through them and shut them. He yanked at the table and the vase came crashing down on the floor.
Jai jerked in his thoughts. The vase had indeed come crashing down. He had just thought about it a moment ago. He had thought about it because he had seen it in his dream last night.
What the fuck was going on? Jai tried to wrap his head around what was happening.
‘Saale haraami! Get up. Didn’t you hear what I just told you now?’ Billoo hollered at Jai. Jai looked at him dumbstruck. Billoo pulled aside the bedside table and found his gun under it. That brought a smile to his face and he tucked the gun in his waistband.
‘Bhai’s dead?’ Jai tried to look aghast and sad at the same time. He did not know if he was producing the right expressions but he was trying hard to pretend.
The cost of being caught would be a shitload; a shitload that he was sure he did not want to try on just then.
He got off the bed and hurried to the bathroom, took a leak, came out and put on jeans and a tee, slipped a lock on the room’s doors and got into the jeep after Billoo.
‘Is Bhai dead?’ Jai repeated to Billoo.
‘Why the fuck should he be dead, saale haraami?’ Billoo retorted as he spun the jeep around in reverse.
Jai almost fell out of the jeep as the words hit him.
‘Hold tight, saale! Nothing happened to Bhai. I don’t know who the shooter
s were, but it seems Bhai was at Juliet’s apartment when the two shooters sneaked into the apartment and pummelled the bed with automatic bullets.’
Jai was still aghast. He opened his mouth to ask something but Billoo continued
‘Only mistake the bastards made was that they never checked if Bhai was in the bed.’
‘Where was Bhai then?’ Jai mumbled
‘Hah! Bhai was shaking his dick in the bathroom when he heard the gunshots in the bedroom. He sneaked out of the window in his underwear, climbed down the pipe, hid in the park nearby and called for Junaid to come get him.’
Jai was aghast. This was what had happened in his dream last night. And it was happening all over again, right down to the last shoddy detail.
‘I never knew that Bhai was agile enough to climb down the drain pipe at this age. No wonder he is still the BHAI.’ Billoo chuckled yet again.
Jai’s face was sickly pale now.
‘What happened to Juliet?’ Jai incoherently shot another question towards Billoo.
‘Now that’s where it bloody gets interesting. The whore has been missing since then. Not only did the shooters not break into the apartment; by the looks of it, they were led into the house and into the bedroom… by JULIET! Saali bhadwi!’
Billoo had by then worked himself into an animated agitation, all visible anger directed at Juliet.
Jai kept mum.
His mind was numb with panic.
In addition, he was worried to the hilt about Juliet. She was on the run and Bhai’s men were looking for her.
As per the original plan, she was supposed to have gone to her friend’s house where she had a packed suitcase ready. She was then supposed to sit tight there and wait for Jai’s call.
Juliet and her friend Nasreen hailed from the same town of Dhanbad in Jharkhand and met up occasionally to share each other’s grief. Nasreen worked as a nurse at the JJ hospital. Jai had met Nasreen many times and had seen both friends pour out sob stories to each other. Most of the time, it would be one of them crying and the other consoling. Jai had teased Juliet on many occasions, that both of them were ‘sob sisters’.
These were the few rare occasions when Jai and Juliet would get to spend some time with each other. These clandestine trysts had gone on for almost a year now. Their meetings were usually brief but emotionally intense affairs. It would usually be him with another of Bhai’s men, escorting her on one of her shopping trips or a trip to catch a new film release, and even then, he would only be waiting outside the shopping mall or the cinema hall for her return. It was always a furtive meeting of eyes and a wary occasional word to each other and nothing more. He was never ever alone with her for more than a few seconds and those few seconds were the eternity of their love. Those seconds would slow down and let them gauge each other; the steely boyish charms of Jai’s face measuring up to the large kohl-lined eyes of Juliet. They would savour these dear moments until opportunity let them be together again.
Jai had never known anyone he could call his own. He had cared for a sister once, but she was long dead now. His memory of her was fading day by day. He did not remember very well the life beyond the walls of an orphanage and a remand home, and had always felt the lonesomeness of his existence.
For Juliet, being in love with Jai was an affirmation that she was indeed in charge of her own destiny. It was also an affirmation of the fact that she was alive and that she existed beyond being a pleasure rag-doll moll for the boss. She felt the need to love Jai and this love made her forget her other life where she had to endure the use and abuse of her body in the hands of an aged mob boss.
Jai had taken an enormous risk in falling in love with Juliet. He had met her the first time when he had been running an errand for Bhai, making a hawala delivery for him. Jai had done that run for two weeks then; delivering wads of cash from Bhai’s den to the dealer’s every day. He would be at her apartment every night at ten sharp, to take a parcel that he would then deliver to the hawala dealer by midnight. Bhai had been there for the first two days and he had dared not look Juliet in her eyes. In fact, he had kept his eyes firmly on the ground in front of him, looking at Bhai and at Juliet’s feet and the ground between them.
The third night had been different. The parcel had been waiting for him but there had been no Bhai. Juliet had opened the door and he had had a fleeting glance of two large kohl-lined eyes set in pale skinny eye-sockets with wet, curly, tousled and very black hair falling over a forlornly angelic face. The kohl made her face exquisitely melancholic. She had extended her hand with the parcel and he had hurriedly averted his gaze away from her face, had accepted the parcel, and literally run out of the building.
Those kohl-lined eyes had haunted him for the entire night and he had slept with his eyes riveted to the ceiling of his room, imagining the grief in her eyes, imagining it to be his to share and to relate to. That was one rare occasion when he had not had the Jihadi nightmare in his sleep. In fact, the days that he did meet her, he had a dreamless sleep, and he loved her even more for that little respite.
The story had repeated itself on the next few days, Jai sinking deeper into the melancholy of those eyes each night. He had asked her for a glass of water one day.
‘Come inside.’
She had asked him to step into her apartment and he had taken two steps within the doorway, waiting for the glass of water to arrive. The apartment was stocked with things that Bhai would use: a big-screen television on the living room wall and a hookah perched on a table in the corner. There were trinkets that decorated the walls, which looked garish and out of place. It reminded Jai of his childhood, where there would be ornately decorated dollhouses in market fairs. Juliet was one of those mute dancing dolls, captive in this ornately done and yet distasteful and disgusting dollhouse. She had handed him the glass of water and her hands had brushed the inner surface of his wrist. His hands had shaken so uncontrollably that he had not even managed to empty that glass of water. His eyes had met hers and there was a glimmer in her eyes. She had looked into his eyes, intent, appealing, and yet restrained by fear.
That night had been especially difficult and his sanity had appealed to him to stop playing with fire. The duel between common sense and a barely tangible love ended in a restless and sleepless draw that night.
The next night had been different. Bhai was back and had handed him the parcel. Juliet had walked into the room with a bottle of Smirnoff and had mixed a drink for Bhai. Bhai had rattled off instructions to Jai in the interim. Jai had managed to steal a couple of glances at Juliet during her presence there. There was an unmistakable black bump of clotted blood above her kohl-lined left eye, which had not been there the night before.
Jai had returned to his room that night and just shut tight the door on common sense. The torture and her vulnerability had won the duel, for barely tangible love.
These meetings had gone on for another ten nights and they had talked a little whenever Bhai had not been there.
After two weeks Jai realised he had fallen in love with her feet, her eyes, her touch, and her voice. The feeling was mutual; he had seen the spark in her eyes, giving him increasing access and permission with his visits.
Then on the last day, she had furtively smiled at Jai and had given him a glass of lemonade instead of water.
It was Cupid at play again, when it fell to Jai and Billoo to escort Juliet for her trips to the shopping mall and to the cinema hall. Jai had dared to slip her a packet of Dairy Milk chocolate during one of these trips, which she had hurriedly accepted. She had cherished that bar of chocolate more than the gold and diamond trinkets that Bhai used to hoist onto her body from time to time.
They had been meeting thus, surreptitiously, for the past year. These meetings had grown emotionally intimate over time although they could not imagine or manage any measure of physical intimacy beyond an occasional ‘accidental’ brush of hands.
There had been a surge of emotion in Jai each time Juliet had borne a n
ew bruise, courtesy Bhai, and he had overcome his helplessness at her beatings by mentally drawing himself closer to her, more and more, each time she was hit. That was his subconscious, rebelling against an unjust authority. He punished Bhai mentally by doing the unthinkable, by usurping his property, by stealing the love of his woman. But that was not to be the end of it.
This frustration of Jai’s worsened precipitously one evening when he saw two cigarette-burn marks on her neck. She had burst into tears on seeing him and Jai had looked on helplessly while seething in rage within.
He was still lost in his thoughts when his cell phone rang above the din of the racing jeep and the ongoing excited monologue of Billoo.
The screen showed that it was from Milas. He knew that he could not take that call there, because ‘Milas’ was ‘Salim’ coded.
He turned to Billoo and said:
‘Billoo, drop me off here. I have some urgent work.’
‘Saale! What can be more urgent than this?’ Billoo retorted.
‘It’s Bhai’s job. Something that I have to deliver to Reddy, and which, if I don’t, Bhai wouldn’t be too happy about. And saale! I don’t want to make Bhai not happy at this time.’
Billoo looked uncertain. Reddy was a conduit for their Middle East operations and they were required to make deliveries to him from time to time.
‘Don’t worry about me. I will get up to Jaggi and reach there by afternoon,’ Jai continued
‘Okay.’
Billoo pulled the jeep to the kerb and Jai jumped out.
‘Saale! Don’t be late. I will make some excuse for you,’ Billoo shouted at Jai as he sped away in the jeep.
Jai grabbed his head with his hands when he was alone. Things had gone sour; in fact, they could not be any worse.
He had to call Salim and see if he had any news for him.
Salim picked up the phone after a single ring.
‘Saale! Where the hell were you? I have been trying to get to you all morning. Have you heard…?’
‘Yes, I heard how you maader-chods couldn’t shoot a drunken sleeping slob, you assholes!’ Jai shouted at his phone. He needed someone to take responsibility for the screw-up.
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