The Price You Pay

by Somnath Batabyal

  That Sunday afternoon, just before he headed out to meet Abhishek Dutta for coffee, ACP Mayank Sharma was informed that Salim Khan’s man had secured a place in A to Z Security Solutions.

  On the same evening, Monika and Amit watched a movie together. Babloo was yet to meet her. First, he wanted to be absolutely certain his entry into Delhi had gone unnoticed. Monika had arranged the last-minute date with the boy almost in retaliation. Amit did not notice any difference though, and throughout the film their shoulders touched.

  That night, Imran got lucky.

  15

  ‘I

  grew up all over the world. My father was in the foreign services. Spent my childhood in North Africa and the US. Went to school in Europe and then for a bit in Latin America.’ Rajiv Bose’s impeccable accent and modulated diction had made him a star among television anchors. To Abhishek, it made him sound incredibly conceited.

  It was Abhishek’s second day of training and he was shadowing Rajiv on an assignment: ‘a baptism by fire’, Samir Saxena had told him. ‘If you can endure Rajiv,’ he’d said, ‘you’ll be able to tolerate anybody.’

  The two young men were on their way to a judicial hearing that had dragged on for three years. The central Delhi slum clearances of the late 1990s had displaced thousands, giving the government the not disagreeable task of doling out housing contracts to building companies. The government, satisfied with the takings, sat back; so did the contractors. The few buildings that did come up were of substandard quality, uninhabitable by even the dregs they were meant for. But unlike their would-be inhabitants, the buildings refused to go away, standing unfinished at the limits of the city, paint peeling, walls crumbling. A few NGOs picked up the matter. The corruption was so blatant that the government was forced to acknowledge accountability and, to forestall any further consequences, set up a judicial inquiry.

  The very judges who had first authorized the demolition of the slums, now retired, extended their stay in their official residences with their official perks to preside over the inquiry. As far as they were concerned, it could go on for ever.

  ‘What a waste of time,’ Rajiv complained loudly as they emerged from the two-hour hearing. ‘No bloody progress.’

  Minutes later, he gave a live update from the channel’s OB van, the outdoor broadcasting facilities which were stationed close by. Rajiv spoke excitedly to the camera, saying how crucially important the session had been in uncovering the rot of corruption in high places.

  Unclipping his lapel mike, Rajiv suggested lunch. ‘I’m hungry. No point in hurrying back to the office. What do you think?’ he asked Santosh Jain, the cameraman.

  ‘Good idea. If I go back to office now, they’ll put me on another assignment,’ Santosh replied.

  ‘Shall we go to the Press Club? We’re very close …’ Abhishek trailed off, seeing Rajiv’s expression.

  ‘You’re not serious, are you? We’ll go to Pandara Road. Gulatis does good kebabs.’

  In the car, unable to contain himself, Abhishek asked, ‘Rajiv, you said that nothing happened at the inquiry commission today. But you reported it very differently.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he replied dismissively. ‘I had to give it a spin. If I’d said, “Look, nothing happened,” they wouldn’t put me on air, would they? We’ve spent almost four hours on this and I must at least get something out of it and so should the channel. They, after all, pay for this car and our salaries. And they’re about to buy us lunch.’

  Rajiv paused to take a call and then continued, ‘You are new, so you don’t know this yet: It’s all about getting your face on television; no one cares about what you’re saying. Who knows anything anyway about this inquiry? At the end of the day, the more stories you get your mug on, the better for you.’

  The initiation carried on over lunch. ‘In the past two years, the entire fucking place has turned into a bloody ghetto. The earlier journalists who joined News Today were all like me, with parents in the services; quite a few in the foreign and administrative. But things are changing so quickly.’

  Santosh smiled, shaking his head.

  Rajiv looked at him. ‘Ai, bastard, now don’t go and rat to your friends in the fucking Hindi unit,’ he said, and turned back to Abhishek. ‘You missed our golden period. From 2000, when I joined, until 2006, this was the best place to work. We were like a family. All of us came from similar backgrounds, and we produced quality work. We were the best English channel in the country.’

  ‘It still is, no?’

  ‘Yes, but being the best English channel doesn’t matter any more. We started the Hindi broadcast in 2006 and now all the money is spent on those motherfuckers. These Hindi reporters, a few years back, wouldn’t dare talk to us. Today they get higher salaries and bigger studios; the whole focus of the organization has shifted. They rule the fucking place. It’s the same shit everywhere. There’s money in vernacular. And money always wins.’

  Abhishek knew very little about news television and its politics. Along with the hundreds of changes in the universe of his childhood and youth – mobile phones, Internet, MP3s, DVDs – he had taken for granted the transition from state television to private ownership, the sudden appearance of cable television and twenty-four-hour news, and the launch of a hundred regional and local channels. His mother, deprived of her friends and relatives in Benares, took to the nationally available Bengali channels with a passion. His father, grudging of their lowbrow entertainment and politics at first, got used to them and later became addicted.

  ‘Whatever you say, Rajiv, the Hindi reporters work very hard,’ Santosh ventured tentatively.

  ‘And we don’t, motherfucker? That’s the problem; we are seen as privileged and therefore you think we don’t have to work hard. You think my father gets stories and reads the news for me?’

  The manager approached, stemming the flow of Rajiv’s indignation. ‘Mr Bose, is everything all right?’ he asked politely.

  Rajiv quelled his surprise at being recognized. ‘Yes, we ordered quite a while back and have to return to the office. If you could kindly see to our order.’

  The man trudged off to make inquiries.

  ‘Are you a regular here?’ Abhishek asked.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Arre, everyone knows the boss. He’s the next Samir Saxena,’ Santosh said hastily, trying to make up for his earlier gaffe.

  ‘Yes, it does happen,’ Rajiv said, attempting modesty. ‘It will happen to you very soon, Mr Dutta. But at times it can be embarrassing.’

  Abhishek couldn’t imagine his colleague being put off by any sort of attention.

  ‘I was driving one day near India Gate with an ex-girlfriend. We were at the traffic light and this guy tapped on the window. I rolled down the glass thinking, oh another one who wants to get my autograph. I put on my fake smile and extended my hand. The fucker was asking for directions.’

  Santosh and Abhishek burst out laughing.

  ‘I never heard the end of it from the girl I was with.’

  The waiter brought in the starters and Rajiv suggested beer.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ Abhishek replied, though tempted. ‘I have a meeting with the marketing head.’

  ‘Oh, Rajan. He’s a good chap – a dopehead. Don’t worry about him. Santosh?’

  The cameraman nodded between mouthfuls of kebab.

  On their way back to the office, Rajiv rounded up the act. ‘Perhaps I was being too negative,’ he told Abhishek. ‘News Today is still the best place to work and they really look after you well. As an anchor, I get a wardrobe allowance. They have the best canteen that I know of and if you work after eight, dinner is free. And our salaries are better than most.’ He looked at his junior colleague. ‘Did you get a decent deal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Welcome to the big league. You don’t have to go to the Press Club any more.’

  Abhishek smiled.

  ‘Listen,’ Rajiv added. ‘Every Friday we go to this club in Sect
or 21, Airwaves. We are such regulars that we call it the mosque. Why don’t you come along? I’ll tell the gang and you can get introduced properly. Okay?’

  Abhishek nodded, grateful to be accepted while conscious that the cameraman sitting in front was not invited.

  U

  day looked at the traffic in irritation. ‘Put the red light on,’ he told the radio operator.

  Half an hour later, light flashing and siren screaming urgency, the DCP reached the India International Centre.

  ‘Late again,’ Amir remarked as they shook hands.

  ‘Sorry, boss, last-minute meeting. How are you?’

  Amir had taken a table on the lawns, and was drinking coffee. ‘I’m well. But you are the one with the stories. So tell me.’

  ‘Can’t I ask you out for lunch without a reason any more?’ Uday asked, signalling towards a waiter. Amir smiled a meaningful smile and the policeman shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, yes, I am a bit worried and need to talk to you. But let me order a beer first.’

  On this winter afternoon, with the mild, comforting sunshine bathing the green courtyards of this elite Delhi establishment, no one observing the two men would have noticed anything amiss. They were, like the other diners here, powerful citizens who ruled and shaped the city. At wine-laden tables, in corridors and lobbies, outside the library, influential people discussed matters of national and international significance: Chinese goods swamping Indian markets, the US’s tunnel vision on all matters Pakistani, the deplorable corruption and greed of African governments. A conversation about a kidnapper, his links to international terrorists and the consequences of his possible return to Delhi would not be considered extraordinary; if anything, it might seem trivial. Among the crème de la crème of the capital’s elite, Uday Kumar and Amir Akhtar risked being dismissed as men of no real importance.

  The city and the safety of its inhabitants had never been a personal priority for Uday. Rather, it was the need to maintain a certain self-image that motivated him to work. That he loved a good fight was a bonus – he enjoyed what he was doing. That these qualities had led him to knock off a dozen dreaded criminals, track down robbers, terrorists and on occasion even politicians, was to him coincidental, though he was pleased that it usually worked out that way.

  But this afternoon, the decorated police officer was worried that he might have got things wrong.

  Amir heard Uday out without interrupting.

  ‘What do you think? I really have fucked up, haven’t I?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Amir said slowly. ‘Not if what you wanted to achieve in the first place is anything to go by. You,’ he said with a sudden vehemence, pointing a finger, ‘wanted Babloo back. Now that you know he is, you’re scared. Uday Kumar, your balls have shrunk. Are you getting old?’

  ‘Yes, I am and so are you. This time, the consequences of a mess-up are not worth considering. In this media market, I won’t be able to hush it up.’

  ‘Or you might finally become a hero,’ Amir said and then urgently added, ‘Uday, listen, don’t waste any more time. Get the machinery moving. Put the men out. Put the word out. If Babloo is here, the time for silence is over.’

  Driving back to office, Amir allowed the concerns he had hidden from his friend to surface. He asked himself the question that had been bothering him for weeks: Why had he not insisted Uday call in surveillance, ask for help, alert the border agencies? The answer was always the same: Amir too wanted, almost needed, Babloo back in Delhi. He knew that all he had to do was break the story in the newspaper and every police department in the country would be alerted. But what an uninspiring story that would be.

  He went over what he had just heard, not without some admiration for his old ally. Salim Khan’s man had got the job in the security agency, which told him that things would now move quickly, Uday had said. The plan had become too elaborate for remote control. If Babloo had anything to do with all this, he would want to be here, managing movements, giving instructions.

  ‘I reviewed the log entries for every Singapore flight that has landed in the past two weeks,’ Uday had told him. ‘In Kolkata, I discover, a man arrives on a stretcher. Same age as Babloo. Comes with a doctor and a nurse. I get the passport details of all three and ask my contacts in Downtown Core to check them out. Everything is fine except that the owners of these passports are still in Singapore. Next I obtained the video logs from the airport. Although the image is not clear, I am more than certain it’s our man. I am sending it to the labs but, prima facie, I am convinced.’

  From Kolkata, Uday traced the trio’s arrival in Delhi. He checked the Apollo Hospital where the man should have been admitted. He checked every other major and then minor hospital. The three had vanished.

  At the traffic light, Amir rolled up the car window and put on a CD; one of his niece’s compilations of Hindi hits. He was impressed by how Uday, with barely any resources, had managed to zero in on Babloo’s entry into the city. Amir had, over the years, met and known enough policemen, detectives, spies and so-called intelligence officers to acknowledge Uday’s unmatched acumen.

  And loyalty, thought Amir. That was the quality he valued most. Fifteen years ago, in the fiasco with Babloo, Uday hadn’t mentioned Amir’s role to anyone. He had taken the heat, played cover-up and managed, with a politician’s dexterity, to bounce back. ‘I took the call, not you,’ he’d said when Amir had offered to stand up.

  In the last ten years, Amir had seen far less of Uday than he would have liked. Immediately after the incident, the two had clung to each other. They met regularly, went drinking together and, on a few occasions, went away on holiday. Amir was privy to Uday’s marital problems and his fondness for fair, buxom women. Then Uday was posted to the Nicobar Islands for three years. On his return they met enthusiastically, but the need and the necessity, their shared shameful secret, had been dissipated by other distractions.

  At the office car park, Chhote Lal approached Amir. ‘Sir, Abhishek-da has left, I hear.’

  ‘Yes.’ he nodded. ‘Why? What is it to you?’

  Chhote Lal looked a little embarrassed and then said, ‘Sorry sir, small man, big talk maybe, but my younger brother has just finished a diploma in journalism. Maybe you can call him for an interview?’

  A

  bhishek was sitting alone in a large conference room, waiting for his five o’clock briefing with Rajan Chachra, head of the marketing division. It was nearly six now, but given the frenetic activity of the past two days, Abhishek didn’t mind the wait.

  His throat ached and the Strepsils were not helping. Since the lunch with Rajiv, Abhishek had been made to work on his diction with a tall thin girl called Roopleena Bhattacharya. She’d told him that the channel preferred a BBC accent and, though never exactly rude, she smiled condescendingly every time he tripped over his vowels. ‘Bengalis have this problem,’ she said as he faltered over ‘hurt’ and ‘heart’; ‘slip’, ‘sleep’ and ‘slippers’.

  Abhishek’s voice, played back to him, had sounded terribly immature, lacking the conviction and surety his new colleagues could so effortlessly summon. After an hour and a half of modulation exercises and earnest readings of past voice-over scripts – from gong healers in the Himalayas to a prosthetic-limb project in Jaipur – Roopleena had dismissed him with a printout of Bell’s Elocution Manual. ‘Practise your pronunciation at home, especially the vowel sounds.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ The man plonked down an armload of papers. He was short and plump, and his eyes twinkled with merriment. ‘I am Rajan.’

  Abhishek warmed to him immediately.

  ‘So, let me see … what are we doing today? You know, normally these inductions take place in larger groups with all sorts of pie charts and diagrams. Boring shit. Let’s make it quick. If you have questions later, you can always come back to me. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ Abhishek replied.

  ‘Do you have any idea what marketing slash branding is all about?’

&
nbsp; ‘Only the basic facts,’ Abhishek replied, not wanting to appear a total novice.

  ‘Okay. Briefly, television marketing is all about standing out from the clutter of other channels. So that when a viewer reaches for his remote, wanting to know what is going on in the world, he comes to us.’ Rajan paused for a moment and then said, ‘Let me give you an example. Think early ’90s. What did we have? One lone government-run channel, Doordarshan. You thought television, you thought Doordarshan – news, sports, drama; it was all there. Today any cable connection gives you two hundred channels. But just saying you are a news channel doesn’t help; there are over sixty news channels alone. You need to get more specific. Is it Hindi or English? Or Malayalam or Assamese and all the rest? And then finally, and most importantly, what sort of a news channel are you? When you think News Today, what is the first thing that comes to mind?’

  Abhishek waited, but the question was not rhetorical. ‘Well, as you guys say, “For You, 24x7.”’

  ‘Correct. You mentioned our tag line. “For you”,’ Rajan said, using his forefingers as inverted commas, ‘tells you that we come from a viewer-centric position. There are news channels that say, “We are the quickest.” Others say, “We are the most truthful.” Our marketing strategy is, “It’s all about you, the viewer.”’

  ‘Look sharp.’ Rajan grinned at Abhishek. ‘I will now tell you why you journalists need to know all this. Once we’ve decided the positioning of the channel, it needs to be reinforced constantly – hoardings, posters, public-relations exercises. But most of all, if we say we are for the audience, it must jolly well reflect in our programming. And that is where you come in. At News Today, editorial works very closely with marketing. We have joint exercises, drives, we plan promotions together.’

  Abhishek slipped out his notepad.

  ‘For example, last month we did a half-hour special on corruption and the Commonwealth Games scandal. We had viewers call in with their thoughts. It empowers them. We not only hear their concerns, we air them. See what I mean? We were the ones who started citizen journalism in India and now everyone has jumped on the bandwagon.’