The Brightest Fell

by Nupur Chowdhury

“Well, everything you’ve heard of him, everything we ever thought we knew about him was a lie, wasn’t it?” Ruqaiya snapped, brushing a few stray strands of hair from her face. She was fuming. “Because we sure as hell didn’t know we were nurturing a bloody poisonous snake in our bosom!”

  Abhijat didn’t know why, but Ruqaiya’s reaction gratified him.

  His mother hadn’t said anything outright, but he had years of experience prying information about his father from her reluctant lips. And from what he’d gathered, Fasih’s betrayal had affected Rajat deeply. He was glad to see that Ruqaiya seemed to share Rajat’s feelings.

  “Why do you think he did it, then, if it wasn’t a ploy to get the government under Zanyar control by removing my father?”

  Abhijat had only met Jehan once before at his father’s office, almost a decade ago, when the boy had first joined the QRI. It was back when Rajat had only been a minor minister in his predecessor’s government, years before he’d been elected to the premiership.

  Over the years, he had heard much about Jehan’s unbelievable brilliance and infuriating stubbornness from his father, not to mention all the media reports about the child prodigy who’d taken Qayit’s scientific community by storm. But the only memory Abhijat had of him was that of a tiny, pasty teenager with overgrown hair and no flesh on his bones.

  He’d paid him little attention when they’d first met. At twenty, Abhijat had just joined the army, against his father’s wishes but much to his grandfather’s delight.

  That’d been his last visit to his father’s office before he left the city to start his training. Making friends with some bookish, malnourished boy three or four years younger than him had been the last thing on his mind.

  All he remembered was Jehan looking up from the pages of the huge tome on his lap, to stare at Abhijat like he was an interesting lab specimen.

  But he did know how much Rajat had loved Jehan, how much he’d trusted him. Which was what made this situation so much worse. Skulduggery and corruption in politics was nothing to be surprised about. It was something they were all used to, much as his father liked to pretend otherwise. But to be betrayed by someone he’d loved like a son, someone he’d trusted blindly…

  The thought made Abhijat’s blood boil, and he grit his teeth to keep himself from saying something he’d regret.

  His father had taken a liking to the boy since the very beginning, had sponsored his education and gotten him a position at the QRI that people double his age would have killed for.

  Though Abhijat didn’t for a moment believe that Rajat had not been motivated, at least in part, by the desire to irk Swamiran, Abhijat’s grandfather, by taking on a Zanyar boy as a protégé. His grandfather had had a great many qualities, but even he could accept that tolerance and inclusivity had never been Swamiran’s strong points.

  Still, Rajat had always said that Jehan would play an instrumental role in shaping the future of Naijan.

  Well, if that was true, Abhijat didn’t want any part of that future.

  He was pulled from his thoughts by Ruqaiya’s frustrated sigh. “Damned if I knew!” she said, slamming a hand down on the table and making the glass tumblers teeter precariously close to the edge.

  “If he’s working with the separatists, he’s playing the long game. And he’s playing it alone. Both Badal and Aheli Mehrin were as shocked as we were by what transpired at that meeting. I’ve known them both for years. Their shock was genuine. Badal had not expected to be discarded like so much trash by some egghead twerp barely out of college. The trauma in his eyes…dear God!” she chuckled. “That was probably the only good thing to come out of that godforsaken day.”

  “But you don’t think so,” Abhijat pressed, sensing there was more to this story than Ruqaiya had yet revealed. “You don’t think Fasih is working with the separatists?”

  Ruqaiya shrugged. “It seems like the most likely explanation, doesn’t it? I daresay he expected us to come to that conclusion, and plan our counterattack accordingly. That’s why he was able to blindside Badal and Mehrin so easily, I’ll wager. Like us, they went with the most likely solution. They thought he was on their side.”

  “And you believe he’s not?”

  “I don’t think he’s on anybody’s side, except his own. Listen to me, Abhijat. I don’t think Fasih’s actions are ideologically motivated at all. This isn’t political, at least not for him. It’s personal.”

  Abhijat frowned. “Stop talking in riddles, Qia. The hell is that supposed to mean? What personal reason could Fasih have to betray my father? Did they fight?”

  Ruqaiya waved an impatient hand. “They always fought. That’s immaterial. And I don’t think it’s your father Fasih had a grudge against. At least not directly.”

  Abhijat’s tongue itched with unuttered questions, but he could see that his companion was deep in thought. Despite his curiosity, his self-preservation instinct prevented him from annoying Ruqaiya when she was in such a mood.

  Their food arrived, and for the next few minutes, no one spoke as the delicious-smelling dishes were served one by one. When the waitress left, Ruqaiya took a hearty bite of toast along with a spoonful of piping soup.

  Abhijat followed her example and dug into his own meal. It was delicious. Not that anything would taste particularly bad after the cold airplane lunch he’d had earlier that day.

  At length, Ruqaiya sighed contentedly into her cooling mushroom soup and said, “I’ve been doing some digging into Fasih’s background. As you know, he came to the capital when he was fifteen and managed to get himself enrolled into an undergraduate program at Qayit University without so much as a high-school diploma...so profoundly did he apparently impress the professors.” Ruqaiya’s tone said volumes about what she thought of professors who were so easily awed by bookish pipsqueaks barely out of puberty.

  Abhijat nodded. He’d never gone out of his way to learn about Jehan Fasih or his personal history, but this much was public knowledge. The fact that he had started university at fifteen and joined the QRI at seventeen – the youngest person to ever be hired as junior researcher to the institute – was almost an urban legend at this point.

  “Well, why do you think he came to Qayit in the first place?” Ruqaiya asked.

  Abhijat shrugged. He’d never really thought about it, but it wasn’t hard to guess. “For the same reason anyone does, I suppose. Better education, better opportunities. What else?”

  Ruqaiya’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile. He didn’t know why, but her expression made him vaguely uncomfortable.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She took a sip of her beer and sat back more comfortably into the sofa. The perks of average height, Abhijat thought enviously, but kept his mouth shut. “He was brought to Qayit by his housemaid,” Ruqaiya frowned in an effort of memory. “Or cook, or something of that nature. He came to the capital because he had nowhere else to go. His house had been burned to the ground the day before, and his father had blown his own brains out.”

  Abhijat stared at her. “What?”

  Ruqaiya shrugged and took another bite of her cheesy toast. “Believe me, I agree. I’ve no idea how we missed that stuff for so many years. I don’t think your father knew either, not the whole of it anyway. I’m pretty sure he’d have told me if he did.”

  “But...I mean...why?” Abhijat bit his tongue, annoyed. He wasn’t used to feeling this way, confused and at a loss for words. Still, that was no excuse for stammering like an idiot. He tried again. “I mean, are you sure about this? How did all this happen? And why did Fasih’s father kill himself? I’m assuming he killed himself?”

  Starting in on the main course, Ruqaiya nodded. “That he did. Not very sure why. Didn’t leave a note or anything like that. Apparently, they were some type of rural landlords before the civil war, Fasih’s family I mean.” She paused to swallow a spoonful of fried rice. “Quite wealthy too. They managed to preserve much of their property through the war, mostly because their holdings
were so remote nobody really cared. Very far from any of the major areas of unrest.

  “Well, that was until your grandfather’s land redistribution drive began years after the civil war had ended, exactly when no one was expecting any trouble,” she chuckled. “It was supposed to end the feudal system and help the peasants get their own land, of course. Very noble and all that. And don’t get me wrong, it did do that, but it’s no secret that Zanyar landlords were disproportionately targeted.”

  Abhijat bristled, but said nothing. He had always loved and respected his grandfather. He still did. But even he couldn’t deny that Swamiran had been a tad prejudiced against the Zanyars. Not that that was surprising, considering the times in which he grew up, and his background as a veteran of the civil war.

  “Well?” he said at last, interrupting Ruqaiya’s blissful consumption of the chili chicken.

  “I wouldn’t feel too bad about it if I were you. Not in the Fasihs’ case, anyway. The senior Fasih was no paragon of virtue wrongfully victimized by the ‘system’. From what I could gather from the old records, he was an incompetent pushover at best, and a greedy asshole at worst. He lived extravagantly and mismanaged his holdings. Became too dependent on middlemen and almost drove his tenants to ruin.

  “When the redistribution drive began, he refused to give up his holdings, not unlike many of his peers. Unlike most of them, though, he’d driven his tenants to desperation.

  “Skirmishes were breaking out all over the hinterlands around that time, even places that had remained relatively undisturbed during the war. You’ll remember? It wasn’t long before you joined the army that the redistribution drive ended. The newspapers were rife with reports of rural unrest.”

  Abhijat nodded grimly. “I was in the last couple years of high school. There were about a dozen violent clashes a day. You couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about some landlord who’d been lynched. Papa threatened to leave politics if my grandfather didn’t call the whole thing off. It got so bad Maa wanted to send Rito and me off to some boarding school so we wouldn’t be home for those horrible shouting matches.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Ruqaiya laughed, starting in on the dessert. “Rajat was livid about the whole thing. In Swamiran’s defense, though, I don’t think even he imagined it’d get so out of hand.”

  Abhijat sipped his coffee. “I don’t think he did. But policy-making was never his strong suit anyway. Papa always says he was more of a warrior than a politician.”

  “That he was. And so are you,” she said, pointing a fork at him. “Rajat can say what he wants. I, for one, am glad you didn’t get into politics. It wouldn’t suit you. Anyway, I daresay your grandpa didn’t really think about the logistics of the whole thing.

  “But the upshot of all this was that Jehan’s father had managed to piss off a whole bunch of people who now suddenly felt like they could get some revenge. The village where they lived had a sizeable Birhani population. Apparently, Fasih senior had managed to piss them off something spectacular.

  “I’m not sure of the exact details. But from what I can gather, they’d been demanding for a while that the Fasihs give up some share of their land to those who worked on the farms. A meeting was called, and apparently Jehan’s father refused point blank to give up so much as a millimeter of land without dragging them all to court. You can see how that might’ve rubbed some people the wrong way.”

  “Damned moron! He was inviting disaster.”

  “That he was, and a disaster was precisely what he got. The night after the meeting, the estate was attacked by a mob of farm workers. Personally, I don’t think it was a communal thing, but the media did paint it that way at the time, because many of the peasants working for the Fasihs happened to be Birhani.

  “Anyway, there was some fighting between the security guards working at the estate and the farm hands. Some people were injured, but nobody died. But the mob did set fire to the house. Burned it down to a husk by the time the fire department got wind of it.”

  “With the family inside?”

  “Nah. Everyone escaped. And by everyone, I mean Jehan and the servants. Apparently, Jehan was fast friends with the cook’s daughter. So the cook tried to take him out of the house along with her daughter when the fighting started and the servants began fleeing. Jehan ran to the study to fetch his father, only to find the man holding a hunting rifle to his own head,” she shrugged. “Damn awkward way to die, if you ask me.”

  “So he was alive when Jehan found him?”

  “Yep.”

  “So he–”

  “Blew his own brains out in front of his only son? Yep. Classy guy, wasn’t he?”

  Abhijat looked away. After a few minutes, he said, his voice strained, “And you think Fasih considers my grandfather responsible for...for all this?”

  Ruqaiya swallowed the last of her dessert and nodded. “It’d explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

  “But what happened to his mother?”

  Brushing dessert crumbs from her jacket, Ruqaiya sighed. “Wasn’t in the picture. Apparently, Fasih senior married some Maralanese beauty queen who was more interested in the money than the husband. She hightailed it back to her own country as soon as the trouble began, a few months before her husband’s suicide. Hasn’t been back to Naijan since, far as I know.”

  “And she left Jehan behind?”

  “Seems to be a theme in his life, doesn’t it?”

  Abhijat shook his head, a flurry of thoughts whirring through his mind. “So he’s half Maralanese, huh?”

  “One-fourth. Apparently, one of his mother’s parents was from Naijan. Don’t know which, though.”

  “But she was raised there? In Maralana, I mean.”

  “Yep. She went back to her parents’ house when she left Naijan.”

  “She has to know where her son is, though. I mean, she must’ve read about him in the papers, if nothing else.”

  Ruqaiya frowned, her head cocked to one side. “Probably does. Don’t think she cares, mind. Why? You think there’s a Maralanese connection here? Think Fasih is conniving with Maganti and his lot?”

  “Well, he has been to Maralana quite a few times, if I’m not mistaken. Seems to have made great friends with the president too. Maganti dines with him whenever he’s in the country.”

  “Hmm, you’re not wrong. Your father made him the science envoy to Maralana a few years ago. Maganti was falling over himself to please him. Fasih got more funding from Maralana than all his predecessors combined. You think this has got something to do with that drug he’s been developing? Amven, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Qia. You tell me. Aren’t you the Minister for Science and Technology?”

  “Was,” she smirked, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue. “I’ve had a promotion, didn’t you know?”

  “Damn you.”

  Ruqaiya signaled for the bill and looked at Abhijat through the corners of her eyes. “Your father is the closest thing to an older brother I’ve ever had, Abhijat. Everything I am today, I owe it to him,” she sighed. “I’d do anything for him, I hope you know that.

  “The only reason I accepted Fasih’s offer for the Deputy Premiership is because if I hadn’t, it’d have looked like I was favoring Rajat out of some kind of personal loyalty to him. And true as that is, it’d have hurt his image as much as it’d have hurt mine.”

  “I do trust you, Qia. As does Papa. I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt that. I haven’t spoken to my father yet, but from everything Maa said, I know he’s happy you accepted Jehan’s offer. We need someone to keep an eye on his activities from the inside. As much for this country as for ourselves. With you in the Prime Minister’s inner circle, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without us knowing about it from the get-go. He won’t be able to blindside us again.”

  “And he must know all that,” said Ruqaiya, letting out a frustrated breath. “So why did he do it? Why did he shackle himself to me when he didn’t need to? It doesn’t make any sen
se.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we need to find a way to get him off that chair as soon as possible. He doesn’t belong there. And no good can come of him occupying that seat, wielding that power. Who knows what he plans to do now that he’s Prime Minister? He needs to go, Qia. And you’re one of the only people I know who can make that happen.”

  They stopped talking as the waitress arrived with the bill and Ruqaiya handed her a card. On any other day, Abhijat would have put up a token protest before he allowed her to pay for the meal. Today, he felt too drained to do much more than promising to buy her ice-cream on the way back. It seemed to please her well enough.

  After the waitress left smiling with a generous tip, Ruqaiya looked at him thoughtfully. Then she smirked, sending a chill down Abhijat’s spine. “What?” he snapped testily.

  Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “How’d you like to be the Prime Minister’s head bodyguard?”

  “What?” he said again. His vocabulary this evening left much to be desired.

  “Don’t look so surprised, my boy. I have some strings I can pull. I haven’t been navigating the political landscape of this city for the last two decades for nothing, you know. If you want it, you’ll have it. There are more than enough favors I can call in. Question is, if I make you Jehan Fasih’s shadow, will you be able to keep yourself from wringing his pretty little neck first chance you get?”

  Abhijat swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. “You’re telling me you can give me unfettered access to that bastard?”

  “Unfettered, 24-hour access, yes. You can watch him, follow him around, listen to his conversations, maybe even go through some of his papers, if you’re smart about it. But that’s the key, of course. You’ll never get a better chance to gather evidence against Fasih and clear your father’s name, but you’ll have to be smart about it. Which is to say, no losing your temper at inopportune moments, no flying off the handle at the slightest provocation, and no trying to murder him in public. Or in private. Not for the moment, anyway. Think you can manage it?”

  “He wouldn’t be happy about it. Fasih, I mean.”