by Mainak Dhar
Now Sai was on his own.
Sai tried to bring his gun into play again. This time I stabbed the back of his right hand, blood spurted out as he dropped the gun to put pressure on the wound. I picked up the gun, a small .22 pistol, and put it in my pocket. He took another step back. I could see that the fight was gone from him. He held up his bloodied hand in front of him.
'Look, Major, it doesn't have to end this way. I am just doing someone else’s dirty work. Killing me will not stop the drugs trade. It won't get justice for all those who were killed. You should really consider which side you’d rather be on. My employers would pay very well for someone with your talents.'
I slapped him, raking his face with the sharp edge of the key. He fell back, blood trickling down the left side of his face.
'Join them and you could live in luxury forever. You can't imagine how powerful they are. You're a fool to imagine you can win against them. You are just a single, bloody foot soldier. What can you do? Face that reality.'
I took the blood-covered key from my fist and put it back in my pocket. I turned to see that Zoya was okay. I saw that she was walking towards me, tears streaming down her face, shaking like a leaf. I motioned for Sai to sit down. As Zoya came to me, she clung to me, burying her face in my chest. I held her tight.
'Sweetheart, everything is going to be fine now. Please go outside and wait for me. I'll be out in a few minutes. I need to talk business with Mr Sai.'
She kept her face buried in my shoulder. When I raised her chin, I saw the fire in her eyes. That was the Zoya I loved. Despite all that she had gone through, despite all that she had just seen and heard, she was not crying. The weakness and tears had been replaced by fury.
She leaned closer and hissed, 'Kill him, Aadi. Do it for all the lives he has ruined.'
As she walked towards the door, Ravi rushed in and scurried away, holding Zoya. I hoped Phadke had come through on the other front – to temporarily redeploy police patrols away from this area, so that we got the time to get away before the cops arrived. Assuming, of course, that all went according to plan.
Sai was watching me, a bemused look on his face. 'So, you have seen the light. Good, we can forget all this and I can introduce you to my employers. They pay well. They can make all kinds of things happen. It was foolhardy of you to think that you could wage a war on an operation like ours.'
'Another drink, Sai?'
He smiled. I walked to the bar and got fresh glasses and a plastic bottle of soda. I poured two drinks, topping up the Scotch till the soda bottle was empty. Sai drank his greedily, his hands shaking, blood all over his glass, but he didn't care. He finished his drink in a couple of swigs and looked at me, clearing his throat and relaxing visibly.
Sai was right. There was no way I could wage this war on my own. There was no hope of my winning, even if I tried. He was also right on another count. I was a foot soldier, a Para at that. We are not trained to think of broader strategies and power plays, which bureaucrats like Sai and his political masters excelled at. We are good at one thing, and that is killing the bastard in front of us. We might not cook up all the strategies for waging a war, but we are the ones who win the battles.
And, I could settle for that.
I thought of the man dying in his wife's arms in R-City. An honest officer who had tried to do the right thing. I thought of all those others who had died, either for the mistakes they had made in joining Sai or, even worse, as 'collateral damage'. I thought of Sinha, dying so I could live. I thought of Karzai, driven to become a hired killer due to the lie behind his mother's death. I thought of Tony, slaughtered simply because he had been associated with me. I thought of Zoya, the pain and terror she had gone through. So many lives lost, ruined or scarred. All so that some men could make more money and safeguard themselves. Men who thought ordinary people were powerless before them, that we couldn't possibly stop them, let alone think of taking them on.
I took the pistol out of my pocket and put the neck of the empty plastic bottle against its barrel so that it would do a fair job of suppressing the sound of the gunshot. Sai sat up, wondering what I was doing.
Then, I shot him in the head.
'Ready for dinner?'
Three innocuous words, said perhaps hundreds of times each year in ordinary households across India. But those three innocuous words still brought a lump to my throat. They made me realise just how grateful I should be for how things had turned out. I closed the book I had been reading and walked over to the kitchen to help heat up the food in the microwave.
Zoya greeted me with a kiss. When I tried to steal another, she playfully slapped my hand away. 'You've got to earn that. Or, have you forgotten?'
As I took the plates to set the table, I paused again. I could feel a tear forming in my eye. The family, the normalcy, the everyday routine, the hopes and dreams so many millions take for granted but which I had never imagined I could have were now a part of my life.
'Boy, are you going all maudlin on me? Losing your edge, are you?'
It was Ravi, walking towards the table, carrying a bottle of wine. Rekha had joined Zoya in the kitchen. I could hear them talking excitedly. That was why we had invited Ravi and Rekha over. We had just shared with them the news that we were going to be parents.
Imagine that – I, the man who had imagined his life was at a dead end, now had it all. Well, to be honest, I didn't have much by way of career prospects, not as far as I could see. I didn't have a huge amount of money, either. What I did have however was something every man should be so lucky to have – hope. I had something to look forward to. A life with Zoya, our child, our family.
A day after we recovered Zoya from the bungalow at Worli, I had asked her to marry me. To my delight, she had agreed. That was six months ago. We had spent those six months in a haze. The marriage, Zoya's parents' disapproval of her marrying an unemployed ex-soldier with limited prospects, applying for a dozen jobs and being turned down repeatedly. Then, help had come out of the blue. Someone had called me offering me the job of a security consultant with a public sector oil company. It didn't pay a lot, but at least I got to spend a lot of time at home. I began teaching self-defence to people in the neighbourhood. And, I got to spend a lot of time with Zoya.
When I met the manager, who was hiring me, I couldn’t help but ask who had referred me. He didn’t tell me who it was, but spoke about an old friend of his who had worked with him in the government and later became an author. I wondered if this was one of the surprising connections old men were supposed to have, as MK Dhar had reminded me.
There was the not-so-fun stuff as well. I had a hard time explaining to the cops what had happened to me. Luckily for me, Phadke came through. He ensured that I got off lightly during the interrogation. The official story now was that I woke up in a house with my hands and feet tied, with no knowledge of what had happened after my abduction, that I managed to free myself and call Ravi, who came and fetched me the morning after he got Zoya home from the hospital.
'Turn off the TV. It's the same old drama about the same old politicians.'
As Rekha scowled at the news breaking about another former minister being charged with corruption and huge amounts of stashed funds and assets being unearthed in raids on his properties across India, I stifled a smile. I had not told her, Ravi and Zoya everything I had done after the confrontation with Sai. As it is, they were burdened with knowing some terrible secrets. I didn't want to increase that burden. Also, never knowing what turn things might take, I figured the less they knew, the safer they would be.
When I had been in the bungalow with Sai, I had dialled Phadke’s number and asked him to record whatever he heard when I called him. When I met him afterwards, he had been in a state of shock that Sai had been the architect of the chaos that had destroyed so many lives. He had been itching to go public. I had cautioned him against doing so. There was no telling what Sai’s friends might do. I asked him to do what M.K. Dhar had advised me. Phadke a
nonymously passed the recording onto Dhar.
As the old spy had said, old men did have all sorts of interesting connections. I’d never heard back from him. There was no news for a month or so, but then all kinds of things started to happen.
Varsha Singh went on air one night talking about how the former director of the IB, who had been presumed killed in a domestic accident in a friend's bungalow, had been working on a secret investigation into how some former ministers and politicians had links with the international drug mafia and terrorists. Sai was made a martyr and hailed as a hero. That hurt, but I realised that someone like him could not be openly exposed for what he was without seriously embarrassing the government and weakening the country’s intelligence apparatus. That's just how it is. In the real world, justice isn’t neatly delivered in a happy ending.
At least. I had the satisfaction of having shot the bastard in the head.
Others, however, were starting to be brought to justice. One minister in the former regime after another was being investigated for links to this ring. Two were already in jail. The cynic in me wondered how many ministers in the current regime were involved and if the government would have acted with such alacrity unless the whole incident allowed it to paint the opposition in a bad light.
As for Aman Karzai, I hadn't heard from him since. He had killed Sai's men, helped rescue Zoya and then melted away. What was he doing now? How was he dealing with the fact that his mother and so many innocents had been killed by the very men who had sent him on this phony mission? I had a future to look forward to, people whom I cared about. Aman had nobody. Unlike me, there would be no going back to any sort of normalcy for him. The Americans and Afghans would still hunt him, perhaps the Pakistanis too. All he had to look forward to was a life on the run, a lonely life where he only had his regrets for company. It was tempting to think of Aman as a cold-blooded killer, but then I thought of the intelligent, thoughtful man I had spent some time with, of what I had learned about what had made him what he was. Where was he? Was he even alive?
'Where are you lost?'
Zoya snapped me back to reality. I tried to focus on enjoying the company of those I loved. We wrapped up dinner. Zoya and Rekha went inside to talk about the baby, the long list of names Zoya had already prepared – one for a boy and another for a girl. She wanted Rekha's opinion to break the tie between two names we could not choose between.
Ravi handed me a glass of wine as I stood by the window, watching the distant lights of the Mumbai skyline.
'Don't think so much about what should or could have been. Focus on the amazing wife you have and the child you will soon have.'
I took a sip of my wine and looked at my old friend and mentor. 'Ravi, I think about all those who died and whose families will never really know why their loved ones died, or indeed those who were guilty and won't face justice.'
'You did what you could, my boy. You couldn't have done any more.'
I had no answer to that. Yes, I couldn't have done any more, that was the harsh reality I would have to live with. The fact that there were people like Karimi and others behind Sai whom I could do nothing about. They would prosper, become richer and more powerful. Somebody like me had no real way of threatening them. The government would go after those whom it found politically convenient to crucify. I thought of how simplistic our assumptions about friends and enemies could be. Karzai had been the enemy, someone who would have gladly killed me and vice versa. But we were both victims of those who manipulated us.
I drained my glass and walked over to the TV. Varsha Singh was staring at the camera, appearing disbelieving of what she was hearing. She whispered something off camera and then faced it again.
'News just breaking in from Islamabad. Pakistan President Asghar Karimi has been assassinated en route to the airport. Karimi was to fly to Delhi for his proposed peace summit with Indian leaders.
‘He did it, didn’t he?’ Ravi said disbelieving.
The screen turned black. Then Varsha was back. ‘President Karimi was assassinated in Islamabad. While the details coming in from Islamabad are still sketchy, police sources say Karimi was shot in the head, long range. They are looking for the shooter, but have no leads yet. Let me remind our audience that Mumbai was rocked by a similar terror attack six months ago, with the killing of a former police officer with a 7.62 mm bullet. Is this a beginning of similar attacks in Pakistan?’
My phone buzzed and I picked it up to see a message from an unfamiliar number.
‘I cannot make up for all my sins, but this is a start. For the rest, I will have to seek forgiveness from the Almighty and try to help more people than I have hurt. Take care, Major. Perhaps, in different circumstances, we would have been friends.’
I called the number back but got a message that the phone was turned off. Likely a disposable phone that had been destroyed.
I turned off the TV and walked inside where Zoya and Rekha were sitting on the bed. I sat down next to Zoya and wrapped my hands around her, resting my head on her shoulders.
‘You okay, Aadi?’
‘Yes, fine. I have a request for the baby’s name. If you are okay with it, that is.’
‘Of course. What’s the name?’
I sat up straight, looked at Zoya and smiled.
‘If it’s a boy, can we call him Aman?’
The adventure of the 7even series continues…
Coming Soon…
Book II
You know your vacation to Paris won’t end well when your plane gets hijacked.
A year has passed since the bloody events in Mumbai forced me to tap into a violent past, which I had left behind. With a wife and young son in tow, I have no desire to embark on any more adventures. All that changes when the hijackers take over. They claim to be jihadis, but my training tells me that something is off. Why are they speaking to each other in English? Why are they killing hostages when it means their demands will never be met?
When all seems lost, an old frenemy comes to my rescue. A sniper, who had once sworn to kill me.
Now, we must strike at the heart of the enemy, not just to save my family and hundreds of hostages, but also to unmask a sinister plan that could wreak untold havoc. In a world where the most dangerous terrorists are often not the ones carrying the guns, but their hidden masters, we will show them that we are the predators, and not just their prey.
This is our story…
* * *
[KG1]Consider word ‘ordinarily’