‘Where is Mehkar on this map?’
Ajith had not heard of the name before and his face had a blank look for an answer.
The Commissioner pointed his finger to a tiny, italicised name between Mumbai and Nagpur.
‘It is a cluster of twenty villages in the middle of the Sahyadri hills right on a straight line between Mumbai and Nagpur.’
Ajith still had a blank look about him.
‘How’s your geometry, Ajith?’
‘Good, Sir. Mathematics was always my strong point in school.’
‘Good. I assume then that you know the importance of straight lines. You know, it takes at least ten hours for a road journey between Mumbai and Nagpur because the road is not a straight line,’ the Commissioner smiled as he signalled Ajith to walk back to the table.
‘And just so that you know, I know that a road will be there within ten years. You may ask me why.’
Ajith was nodding his head by now. He was beginning to grasp the import of the sinuous path this discussion had taken.
The Commissioner continued:
‘The Home Minister and seven other ministers of the government own a total of seven thousand acres of land in and around Mehkar. And I am doubly sure that there should be a road there as I also know that another five thousand acres of land belong to the top six opposition leaders of the state.’
Ajith laughed.
He cocked his head and almost asked the Commissioner, how many acres of land did he own in Mehkar, but thought better of it at the last moment.
The Commissioner laughed aloud as he sensed the question that Ajith had almost asked.
After the laughter died down, the Commissioner went on:
‘As the ministers could not acquire land on their own, they took help and that is where Rashique Bhai came in, facilitating purchases and holdings for the ministers.’
Ajith had dinner at the club before returning home. He then headed straight to his computer, Googled Mehkar, and drew up his plans right away. The day had been very fruitful. He had acquired both knowledge and opportunity and these were the biggest assets to build upon.
Ajith smirked a bit when Inspector Arjun asked him the same question that he had asked the Commissioner.
He shrugged his shoulders and said, chuckling:
‘I don’t know much, but the Commissioner said it had something to do with keeping things in a straight line.’
Arjun nodded earnestly.
The details of Bhai’s murders were at best sketchy. Ten armed guards defended Bhai and yet all of them had been systematically butchered before Bhai was shot as he sat on his toilet seat. The only survivor was a petty actress who was found, semi-conscious and semi-clad, in Bhai’s bedroom.
She remembered hearing a flurry of gunshots before a young boy barged into the room, looked her in the eye, spared her life, and shot Bhai in the bathroom. The boy and Bhai had conversed before he had killed Bhai, but she had not caught any of the words.
‘Young boy, my foot!’ thought Ajith.
She was presently recovering from shock in a hospital and would soon be going through volumes of stock photographs with the Mumbai police to try to identify the ‘young boy’.
The ‘young boy’ was identified the following day.
There was a photo captured, based on a video grab from a shooting at Malhad a year ago. Based on the video evidence, police had arrested three suspected gang-shooters but they were let off due to lack of any corroborative evidence after the court ruled the video evidence as inadmissible as it was too sketchy and grainy. However, the photographs had gone on the police record and the two-bit actress could identify the killer.
The actress had been reluctant initially, but had become very co-operative after the police had threatened her with a case of prostitution and had threatened to expose her activities to the public. She had turned helpful and had readily agreed to identify the culprit and help the police.
Ajith suspected that she had also received instructions to be helpful from both the gang as well as from the higher-ups in political circles. An ambitious pretty young thing could have tremendous reach in the ‘Mumbai muddle’.
The muddle was a milder word to describe the shit there. Yesterday’s mafia members were today’s politicians, and they never stopped being either thereafter. They had a finger in every deal in the city and practically owned or had a stake in everything that churned out money. They were real estate barons, irrigation contractors, hoteliers, developers… the list was endless. You name it and they were there. Their unceasing enterprise for self-aggrandisement was amazing. If only these incredibly smart people actually did what they were supposed to be doing, it would have made his job much easier. Alas, that was not to be and he had to keep on at his duty. His duty was to guard this pot of shit and prevent it from boiling over and scorching the common denizens of the city. Well, not scorch them too much, anyway.
Coming back to the pretty young thing – she was an emerging star in Bollywood without any movie-family connections, and it took a lot of ‘socialising’ amongst the biggies to secure a foothold in the industry. An actress who was intent on making it big would have to know intimately some big guys from the big production houses, some from the political scene, and definitely some from the underworld. That was the troika that ran the Mumbai filmdom and Ajith would not be surprised at the knowledge and intelligence that these industrious females could gather.
The killer identified by the actress turned out to be one Jai, a shooter in the Rashique gang. There was no last name and this Jai had been associated with the Rashique gang for the last couple of years. The bastard was only seventeen years of age and had become a dreaded gangland shooter. There were reports of several shootings attributed to his name: two builders, a film-music record producer, an MLA, and a municipal councillor amongst them. There was no proof to indict him and he would definitely have been on an ‘encounter’ list, had it not been for the patronage of the ruling party for the Rashique gang.
The preliminary investigation on the scene confirmed that the owner of a betel shop opposite the farmhouse had seen Jai, that he had checked in at a rundown hotel close to the farmhouse with a girl the previous night, and that both had slipped out without paying for the room. The hotel owner was furious at having been given the slip, and had co-operated with the police by readily identifying Jai and by providing the police with a sketch of the girl.
The forensics from the farmhouse showed something peculiar. The details seem to tell an incredible tale – there seemed to be a single shooter who came in with a gun, shot a man at the gate, a guard inside, grabbed the guard’s semi-automatic and went on a killing rampage, slaughtering nine guards and Rashique Bhai in the process.
Incredible!
‘Incredibly intriguing, bordering on fucking impossible!’ thought Ajith.
Ajith had asked for a full dossier on Jai, the shooter.
***
Inspectors Tukaram and Arjun took a couple of days before returning a detailed dossier on Jai. There were police records of possible involvement in various crimes, which were preceded by the juvenile home records where Jai had been incarcerated following an unproven charge of murder, and silverfish-eaten records from an orphanage, where the murder had taken place, preceded these.
The oldest account of Jai’s recorded life emerged from the records at the orphanage. Jai’s life started from the depths of a dustbin on the corner of the crossing of St Basweshwar Marg and St Kakkaya Marg in Dharavi.
On a wet, rainy day, a newborn, barely alive, male baby was found and rescued from the dustbin by Anwar Salim, a butcher who lived nearby. Anwar had a small family, consisting of his mother and his wife of five years. He and his wife had been trying desperately to have a child but had been unsuccessful until then. The constant nagging of Anwar’s mother only made life worse for him. He had already made numerous perfunctory rounds of scores of doctors, godmen, and miracle workers, but to no avail. The doctors had not found anything wrong with either of th
em and yet they had not had a baby even five whole years after marriage.
Anwar took the baby boy as a signal from Allah and took him home where, after some reservation and some consternation, he was accepted as a Godsend – manna from heaven.
There was only the matter of a narrow, beaded saffron thread around his neck. Although it meant that the boy could be a Hindu, Anwar chose to ignore the thread. The boy was purified, christened Yousuf and was then duly circumcised.
Yousuf struggled through a sickly childhood and was soon joined by a beautiful sister, Yasmeen, born to Anwar’s wife a couple of years later. Yousuf and Yasmeen had a happy childhood filled with the love of their doting parents and the meagre means of his butcher father feeding five mouths.
Things could have gone on like that forever and Yousuf could have had a normal life butchering animals for meat, but things panned out a little differently for him.
Yousuf’s father had a beef with another butcher in the area and things slowly reached a head on a wet, humid Friday. On that fateful day, after the evening prayers were over, Yousuf and Yasmeen went away with their aunt to spend the weekend at her house. A bloodbath ensued in their house and Anwar Salim, his wife, and his mother were hacked down in the dead of the night.
The murderers were caught by the police after three days and thrown into jail. Close relatives and neighbours recovered the bodies from the mortuary after autopsy and arranged for their burial. Everyone sympathised with the two lovely kids but felt that they would be too much of a burden on their already strained resources. The aunt wanted to have them but her husband shook his head. So they very humanely decided that they be given up to an orphanage.
The formalities were completed and Yousuf and Yasmeen were given up to an orphanage run by an NGO in Kalyan, Mumbai. The NGO, Bharat Kalyan, was based in Mumbai and had offices all over the country. They dealt with old-age homes, widows’ homes, orphanages, and hospices for the terminally sick. They had made headlines for their work during the deadly tsunami down south. One of their patrons being related to a media house did help their cause and helped to keep them in constant media glare. The NGO business is a tightrope walk of finances and sometimes even big NGOs are stretched thin over finances. The orphanage in Kalyan had a similar problem.
It had the wrong kind of people appointed as its supervisors. And the lack of resources made supervision of the supervisors difficult.
Yousuf learned about the world rapidly in the orphanage. He was a scrawny, sickly child who was bullied constantly by the other inmates. He generally kept to himself and the happiest moments were the moments that he shared with Yasmeen. He took as much care of her as he could. The boys and the girls slept in separate buildings at night and Yousuf eagerly waited for morning to meet up with his sister again. The night brought his private terror back to him as he battled the demons in his ‘Somali nightmares’ that had started about the time he joined the orphanage. He was subjected on a regular basis to a hundred different deaths of Abdi in his nightmares, and every time he had a nightmare, he woke up with a shriek, drenched in cold sweat.
The orphanage housed children until the age of fifteen and fifteen is an old enough age in the school of life in certain circumstances. The child-men and -women growing up in the orphanage had a ringside view of all that was dirty in the world. Yousuf had seen a vanload of girls being led out of the orphanage at odd hours of the night. Most of them returned in the morning, barely able to walk on their feet. Some returned a couple of days later and worst of all, a few did not come back at all.
Yasmeen was nine when she was whisked away in the night and did not return for three days. When she came back, she was running a high fever and was barely able to talk. Yousuf rallied around her for days but to no avail. She barely looked at him and never spoke a single word after coming back. She succumbed to her fever a few days later in the orphanage, before the authorities could decide on shifting her to a hospital. Yousuf cried his heart out and his stifled sobs kept his dorm-mates awake for a full week.
Yousuf was now truly an orphan with no one to call his own.
Then one day, not very long after, he snapped.
That day a girl, barely older than Yasmeen, returned after a similar nocturnal sojourn and fell very sick. She had bruises all over her body and succumbed to a deadly infection a day later. The children watched in horror as the orphanage supervisor and two of his assistants returned after burying that girl’s body. The cause of death was fever of unknown cause and a medical certificate was obtained to that effect.
That night Yousuf sneaked out of his room after lights-out and before lock-in time and waited in the dark of the verandah…
***
The next morning Yousuf, and not the supervisors, unlocked the doors of the children’s dorms.
‘Those of you who want to leave can leave now,’ he murmured under his breath, his hand covered in dried blood. One of the children found the bodies of the supervisor and his two assistants in a massive pool of congealed blood, all of them stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife. There was chaos in the orphanage as the news spread and the orphanage was empty in less than half an hour as the children ran out, to be engulfed in the vast underbelly of Mumbai.
Yousuf had nowhere to go and therefore he waited until the laundry man came a couple of hours later and found out about the carnage. Yousuf was then carted off to the police station and branded the devil incarnate. He was the toast of the local media for a couple of weeks.
The how and why of the entire affair was never solved but Yousuf found himself in Adarsh Juvenile Home in Vikhroli two weeks later.
The warden of the place, Shankar Waghle, was a devout Hindu and he came across the tidbit about a saffron thread around Yousuf’s neck when he was found by his father in the dustbin, long ago. He took it upon himself to correct that gross wrong inflicted on the boy, and re-christened him Jaidev and ‘converted’ him back to Hinduism, his rightful and birth religion.
It did not really matter to Yousuf but everyone called him Jai thereafter.
It was in this Mumbai Borstal that Jai met Ali a couple of years later. Ali helped Jai escape, mentored him, and let him loose on the Mumbai underworld scene at the age of thirteen.
Superintendent of Police Ajith Swaminathan was aware of what had followed after that. Now he had a dangerous criminal on the run who probably had nothing to be in fear of, save the safety of a gangster’s moll, whom the criminal was probably blindly in love with.
His enquiries at the moll’s house had turned up the bizarre story of a shoot-out in the dead of the night that had left three dreaded local goons dead. Initially the moll’s mother had kept mum but on further prodding, she had confessed to her daughter having been there on the fateful night of the shooting with a boy matching the description of Jai. It had been Jai who had taken down the three goons and both he and the moll had left soon thereafter. That had happened two days before the shooting of Rashique Bhai.
That meant that Jai had headed straight to Mumbai and killed Bhai in his farmhouse while he was surrounded by a sizeable number of his cronies.
Many things did not make sense. It was most bizarre, even for an excellent marksman, to be able to take down so many armed men, and in fact, to come seeking them and killing them. It was incredibly brave and incredibly foolish at the same time, and to live to get away from all that was incredibly lucky too.
There was a lot of heat coming through now, from within the police department and indirectly from the political bosses who had been close to the erstwhile Rashique gang. Rashique’s gang had since regrouped under Munna Bashir and things had transitioned smoothly. Munna Bhai had promised Baba that he would bring Jai to his death.
‘Where are you, Jai? It’s going to be a bloody good game of cops and robbers now,’ Ajith thought pensively as he leaned back in his reclining chair.
Chapter 16
Tomorrow’s News
Mumbai, India
17 May, 2012
; Ajith had dispatched his constables with posters of two blown-up pictures of Jai and Juliet, offering a reward of fifty thousand rupees for any leads about them. He had asked them to put up the pictures in all the bus stops and railway stations in and around Mumbai and Pune. The fugitives could have left by taxi but there was no way to cover the millions of taxis running around in Mumbai.
Later that evening Ajith went round to brief the Commissioner about what had happened in the case. The Commissioner was his usual self and did not miss the chance for pontificating:
‘One of the reasons the Mumbai janta takes notice of surroundings around it is the constant and looming threat of terror in Mumbai. It has been targeted numerous times, and despite all the tales of Mumbai’s vibrancy, there is a deep-seated fear of the all-too-familiar terror attacks. People are constantly wary, notice everything around them furtively and are always in a constant hurry, scurrying away from the bomb that is going to rip the pavement twenty paces behind them the next instant.’
Ajith nodded as the Commissioner droned on about the psyche of the city. The Commissioner continued:
‘It’s like they are walking on egg-shells. Everyone is afraid to lose something. They are scared of being dead, being handicapped, losing their loved ones, losing their livelihood. Everyone is scared of something or other all the time.’
Ajith nodded his head. He had intentionally kept the reward amount at only fifty thousand and had insisted on putting up a photograph of the girl along with that of Jai.
The low cash reward made the duo appear petty and harmless for the public. The girl’s picture added to the effect. It was unlikely anyone would risk snitching on a menacing big don worth a ten-lakh reward and much more likely that many would come forward to rat on two innocent-looking kids worth some fast bucks.
Things panned out as Ajith had hoped.
The first call had come the same evening. There were many more. But thirty-four of the forty-five callers reported sightings from platform eleven of the Victoria Terminus railway station. The police searched for outbound trains at the purported time of the sightings and found an intercity to Pune, an express to Ahmedabad, and a long-distance superfast to Chennai.
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