The Brightest Fell

by Nupur Chowdhury

  Oh well, no point in breaking character now. In his experience, it always paid to play to your strengths. Inhaling deeply – and making sure that the microphone caught the shakiness of his breath – Jehan began. “Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank you all for joining us here today.

  “Me and my colleagues at the Qayit Research Institute have, after long deliberation, decided to call this meeting because we feel that some things are happening at the Institute, as well as in the country at large, that should be shared with the people of the nation…”

  He let his voice trail off, allowing his nervousness and discomfort to shine through. He wasn’t a public speaker, he was a scientist. Nobody expected him to be good at this. Too much confidence right now would do more harm than good. The best lies, after all, had a basis in truth.

  “As you all know, we have been working on a high priority project for the central government for quite a few years now. The development of the Amven drug has been underway for almost a decade at this point, although details about the project have been kept from the public…for security reasons.”

  He let that hang in the air for a few seconds, letting them wonder whether or not he was telling the truth. Then he continued. “After the heinous terror attacks at the metro last month, the government has been putting tremendous pressure on me and my colleagues to get the Amven drug ready for clinical trials. From what I understand, the first batch of the drug is to be used on the terror suspects who have been apprehended so far. Of course, we have done everything in our power to cooperate.

  “However, despite our best efforts, the fact of the matter is that Amven is not ready for testing yet. At its present stage of development, the drug is quite volatile and its effects are unpredictable. As the lead scientist working on the project, I can say that testing the Amven drug, in its current state, on human subjects can be incredibly dangerous, and not just for the subjects themselves.

  “Based on our research so far, we have reason to believe that the drug could bring about psychological and uh…physiological changes in the subject that might prove dangerous to those around them. As my colleagues will tell you,” he paused to glance at Ehsana and Saket, both of whom were sitting stiffly to his right. “We have tried time and again to explain our concerns to the relevant authorities. However, our attempts at a discussion have been repeatedly thwarted, blocked, and ignored at the highest levels of the administration.

  “And with the leaked financial reports and bank records, the corruption that has come to light recently, implicating some of the highest ranked ministers in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet…” Jehan sighed, carefully emphasizing the last few words. “We feel that we must inform the public about our concerns, not only regarding the use of the Amven drug, but also about the fact that there might be individuals in the government who have a…vested interest, shall we say, in having this volatile drug used on suspects who might have vital information about those who planned and funded these attacks on our soil…”

  Jehan stopped talking, and all hell broke loose. Reporters jumped forward with their questions, talking over each other in their bid to be heard. Cameras flashed and clicked from various corners of the room. On either side of him, Ehsana, Saket, Navis, and Rayani were bombarded with questions, even as many of their answers were drowned out by the questions that followed.

  Jehan answered some of the questions directed at him, while ignoring others with a smile. Did he think there was an international conspiracy against Naijan? Was the Prime Minister in on the conspiracy? Were there traitors in the Cabinet? Would there be an impeachment? What role would the Institute play in it all?

  He answered some of their questions, but his task for the day was already over. The board had been set. All that was left now was for the players to assemble.

  All that was left was for him to face Rajat and see the betrayal in his eyes.

  Jehan walked through the labyrinthine hallways of the Parliament House in a daze. Some of his colleagues at the Institute had offered to accompany him to the meeting, albeit halfheartedly, but he’d refused. He hadn’t asked their permission before he put this thing in motion; it wouldn’t be fair to drag them into it now that it was time to face the music.

  Besides, he might need their help yet. No point in burning bridges he might soon need to cross. He’d incinerated enough of them already.

  Jehan shook his head, trying to pull his mind out of the funk it seemed to be sinking into with every passing day. He hoped he looked presentable. Too much caffeine and too little sleep had taken their toll on his appearance; not that he had ever looked particularly healthy to begin with.

  He could count on his fingers the number of hours he had slept in the past week, and Dileep kept telling him he was losing weight he couldn’t afford to lose. He was probably right. His favorite cardigan hung off him like the rags off a scarecrow, and he’d had to punch an extra hole in his belt so his trousers wouldn’t fall off.

  Jehan clutched at his sleeves and pulled them down over his fingers. He needed to buy a pair of gloves. Was it colder than usual this year, or was he coming down with something? God, please let it be global warming wrecking the planet’s weather cycle. He couldn’t afford to be sick right now.

  And then his feet froze mid-step and refused to move any further. Across the corridor, he could see Rajat step into the elevator hall and press the call button for one of the lifts.

  For a few seconds, Jehan couldn’t make himself move. He stood there, biting his lip, feeling like a boy who had been summoned to the principal’s office for hiding in the library during sports-class. Every instinct told him to turn away and make a run for it.

  Or to run to Rajat and apologize. Explain everything, and ask his mentor for the help and guidance he had always so generously provided. Jehan didn’t think he had ever needed Rajat more than he did now.

  The elevator pinged, a tinny voice announcing the floor. Jehan forced himself into a brisk walk, stepping into the lift just as the doors were about to close. He was panting, and he realized a moment later that his hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists and shoved them into his pockets.

  When he finally looked up, Rajat was staring at him like he had seen a ghost.

  Seconds passed and neither of them said a word. Jehan parted his lips, tried to make his tongue form a greeting. But there was a stone lodged in his throat and nothing came out but a broken gasp. Fuck. What was he doing? Why on earth had he thought it would be a good idea to get on this lift with Rajat?

  At length, Rajat raised an eyebrow. Jehan thought he must practice that look in a mirror. It wasn’t possible to convey that much contempt and disgust with a single expression without considerable practice.

  He forced himself to hold the other man’s gaze, waiting for him to speak. Whatever he said, Jehan was sure he would have deserved it.

  “Why?”

  Jehan looked away. God, how he wished there’d been some curses and expletives attached to that question. Anything to distract from that sense of naked betrayal.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Rajat hit the little red emergency stop button so hard Jehan was vaguely surprised it didn’t break. “You’re right, I probably wouldn’t. Even I’m not stupid enough to believe the same lies over and over again. Or maybe I am. You’ve certainly proved to me that I’m far more gullible than I ever suspected.”

  “Rajat–”

  “Why are you here, Jehan?” The rage seemed to go out of Rajat almost as quickly as it had arrived, leaving behind a tired old man who looked like he had aged ten years in the few weeks since Jehan had seen him last. “Why did you board this lift? You could easily have gotten another one. What, you want to gloat about how clever you’ve been? Well, I’ll give you that. You were clever. And helpful, wittingly or otherwise. You exposed people in my own Cabinet that I myself would never have suspected of being corrupt. I suppose I should thank you for that. But the game isn’t over
yet, my boy,” he spat the words like they’d burned his tongue. “And the final scores might not be what you imagined.”

  “I…” Jehan glanced down at his feet, trying to keep himself from fidgeting. “I just wanted to talk to you before…” he gave a half-shrug, glancing in the general direction of the east wing, where the meeting was to convene. “Before it all begins.”

  Rajat laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “It began when you called that press conference, Jehan. This is where it ends.” He pressed the red button again, restarting the lift. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, or who put you up to it. But you should know that I will find out, and I’ll never forget what you’ve done.”

  The elevator grunted to a halt at their floor and the doors pinged open. Jehan stepped out, turned around, and forced himself to meet Rajat’s eyes one last time. “Then I hope with all my heart that a day will come when you’ll be able to exact your revenge, sir.”

  The room was well-lit to the point of being painfully bright. Jehan counted twelve lamps and five wall-mounted tube lights, and those were just the ones he could see without turning his head.

  Turning his head, of course, was not an option.

  Seven quibbling Zanyar and Birhani ministers sat on either side of him, all around the long, rectangular table at the center of the room, snapping and jeering at each other. The meeting had descended into chaos more than thirty minutes ago, and it had been almost a quarter of an hour since Jehan’s vision had begun to swim.

  Boredom and sleep deprivation, he was beginning to realize, could be a lethal combination.

  The wood-paneled room had the kind of understated opulence that old, important government buildings usually possessed. There was an exquisite marble statue mounted on a platform near the back, presumably of some civil-war hero whom Jehan didn’t immediately recognize.

  Which wasn’t surprising, because Jehan had never really cared about the civil war or its heroes. And it wasn’t just because his father kept screaming and wailing about how the civil war had brought ruin to their family. The war had been over for more than ten years by the time Jehan was born, and the only ruin he had ever seen had been brought about by his father himself. Jehan just didn’t think much of wars in general, including the people who fought them.

  At the center of the room was a huge twelve-seater oak table. Rajat sat directly opposite him at the head of the table. To his right sat Badal, the Zanyar representative and the current Deputy Prime Minister. And to Rajat’s left sat Ruqaiya Dehran, the Prime Minister’s protégé and the Minister for Science and Technology. Last year she’d been the Minister for Agriculture.

  Jehan was reasonably sure that Ruqaiya knew nothing of science or agriculture, and had no particular interest in either. But she did know a hell of a lot about politics, and had connections with almost every power-player in the capital. She was also one of Rajat’s most loyal supporters, and the would-be successor to his post as the Birhani representative. If Rajat were to resign, it would hurt her prospects terribly.

  Jehan closed his eyes and tried to focus, which was easier said than done amidst all the quibbling.

  One of the good things about the civil war was that it had made everything so much simpler and more streamlined. The Birhanis and the Zanyars had been fighting to go their separate ways and form their own countries. You would think that wouldn’t require much fighting, since both parties agreed on the basic premise of the idea.

  Problem was, nobody could figure out where to put the damn border. It wasn’t as if all the Zanyars lived on one side of the island and all the Birhanis on the other. Both the groups had been spread out throughout the island, living in small communities at the time the war broke out. And while both parties wanted their own country, nobody could agree on which parts of the island were to be the Zanyar nation and which were to be the Birhani state.

  And so they decided to try and kill each other to reach a consensus. The side with the highest body count to their credit would get to decide. Or at least Jehan guessed that must have been the plan. Nothing else could explain why two million people needed to die to draw borders on a map.

  In the end, some of the most prominent Zanyar and Birhani leaders had gotten together and come to the conclusion that a country inhabited by corpses wasn’t much use to anybody, and maybe living together was better than not living at all.

  So the predominantly Zanyar territories of Zanya and Ishfana had come together with Birhan, Sien, and Eraon, all of which were populated largely by Birhanis. And the five states together had formed the nation of Naijan, with its capital in Qayit.

  And to ensure that neither of the communities would wield undue power over the other and spark another civil war, the founders had decided that at any given time the country would be ruled by one representative from each community.

  Thus, every ten years, an election was held to elect a chief representative for the Birhanis and one for the Zanyars. For the first five years after the election, the Birhani representative held the post of Prime Minister while the Zanyar representative acted as his deputy. This was reversed during the last five years of their term, with the Zanyar representative taking up the mantle of the PM and his Birhani counterpart serving as his deputy.

  This system worked well, or at least it had, so far. Not just because it ensured equality of power between the two communities, but also because it forced them to work together in order to survive.

  And it wasn’t just that the Prime Minister and his Deputy had to work together to run the country, which of course they did. But the entire nation voted to elect both the Birhani and Zanyar representatives they wanted to send to Qayit Hall, the official residence of the Prime Minister.

  So every politician aspiring to the premiership had to ensure that he or she was popular with both the communities. Divisive rhetoric might get you the votes of your own community, but nobody could be elected to the position of chief representative without a substantial support base amongst both the Zanyars and the Birhanis.

  If nothing else, this system ensured that no warmongering demagogues got themselves elected to the highest position in the government. In Jehan’s opinion, whichever political scientist had come up with this system was the only true hero of the civil war.

  “My point is,” Jehan began, interrupting the quarreling factions. “That even without the recent leaks of sensitive documents and financial records to the media, which are incriminating enough in and of themselves, this government will have a hard time justifying the extent of the negligence and oversight that allowed not one, but three major metro stations in the capital city to be attacked on the same day. A security breach that significant couldn’t have been planned and orchestrated in a day, or even a week. This attack had been in the works for a few months at the very least. That the Intelligence Bureau had no inkling of it could be attributed to one of two things – gross negligence or intentional blindness.”

  “Are you suggesting that there was collusion with the terrorists, Dr. Fasih?” Ruqaiya asked, her voice so cold the temperature in the room dropped by a few degrees. “That somebody ‘on the inside’ colluded with separatist outfits to ensure the…success of the terror attacks?”

  Jehan shrugged, sitting back and projecting nonchalance he did not feel. “You tell me, Madam. Because it was either that, or sheer – frankly ridiculous – incompetence on the part of our intelligence office.”

  Diwakar Saini, the textile minister, interjected mildly. “Even if you believed that to the case, doctor, you could have brought the matter to the Cabinet before going to the media.” A popular Birhani leader who’d fought in the civil war, Saini had been one of Rajat’s principle opponents during the last parliamentary elections. The man was over seventy years old and that had been his last chance at the premiership. He had held the position of Transport Minister under Rajat’s predecessor, but had since been siphoned off to the textile ministry to live out the rest of his political career.

  If Je
han played his hand carefully, Saini would not be hard to win over.

  “I’m by no means the first person to have raised these issues, sir, although so far I have perhaps been the most successful in garnering the attention that the matter deserves. Perhaps that is because of the timing, or maybe because of my position as the lead scientist for the Amven project.

  “But many NGOs and other institutions had previously tried to bring the matter to the government’s attention, only to be thwarted time and again. The transfer of funds from various institutions in Maralana to politicians and bureaucrats in the Naijani government has been documented by many individuals and organizations for more than a year now. And so far, no action has been taken.

  “That wouldn’t have been the case if someone – or perhaps multiple individuals – at the highest levels of the administration hadn’t had a vested interest in brushing this whole thing under the rug. Going to the media, as you can see, seemed like the only way to get through to those in power.”

  “And I’m sure your ongoing quibble with the government over the Amven issue had nothing to do with it,” Ruqaiya all but sneered.

  Crossing his legs, Jehan set his elbows on the table and favored the Science and Technology Minister with his sweetest smile. “Why, of course it’s got everything to do with that, Madam Dehran. My colleagues and I are being pressured to expedite the testing of a potentially dangerous drug despite our misgivings about the possible consequences of these clinical trials.

  “I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to you that testing this drug on the arrested terror suspects could hurt the investigation. We’re being told that it will help with the interrogation, and maybe it will. But as the original creator of the Amven formula, and one of the chief researchers responsible for its development in subsequent years, I can tell you that I’m far from being sure about how it’ll affect a human subject.