Authors: R. SREERAM
But it was not a stranger’s voice that addressed him. The greeting was one he had heard hundreds of times, the voice one he thought he would never hear again.
‘Good evening, Chief,’ said the voice, calm, assured, in control, just as he always remembered it. ‘Gyandeep here.’
24th September, 2012. New Delhi.
The hall was loud and raucous even before the session had started. Mrs Pandit surveyed it with satisfaction, pleased by the show of energy. Energy was good. Energy motivated. Reduced reason. It would make it easier for her to push her agenda through without too much opposition, especially from the few who were not as sycophantic as the rest.
Flanking her on the dais were the incumbent and the heir-apparent. Kuldip Razdan, as usual, wore a look of weary boredom, and she wondered how many times she would have to prod him into looking livelier during the session. True, the media would be allowed in only much later, once all the decisions had been ‘discussed and ratified’ by the delegates, and the delegates themselves had been stripped of their mobile phones – with a few actually daring to complain that it reminded them of the incident at the conference centre – but she didn’t want a leak she could not control.
Jojo, on the other hand, was bordering on hyperactivity. She fought the urge to be sterner with him, to chastise him good and proper for forgetting the instructions she had given him before coming to the meeting. It was too bad he was her only child – if only her husband had not had a heart attack on national television . . . but then again, if it hadn’t been for that shot of her husband slumping over in his seat in the Rajya Sabha, her party might not have ridden the sympathy wave as strongly as it had.
She allowed another five minutes of the shouting and cheering before she stood up. The hush that started from the first few rows spread quickly through the hall they had rented; within a few seconds, all the delegates fell silent, their eyes fastened on the lady who would deliver them from this crisis, just as she had in the past.
‘My dear brothers and sisters,’ Mrs Pandit said and the hall erupted into a thunderous applause. Pleased, she waited for the cheer to die down before she continued. ‘Thank you all for coming.’ Another cheer.
‘A grave crisis is staring us in the face.’ A smattering of applause broke out from certain quarters before they were quelled quickly. Mrs Pandit did not bother turning back, despite being quite aware that Jojo had clapped as well. ‘A crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.’
She waited to see if any of the idiots clapped again. Thankfully, there was only pin-drop silence to greet her statement. She counted to three before banging her fist on the table, the amplifier turning it into a gunshot that echoed through the hall. ‘But nothing can defeat us. Nothing!’ For good effect, she banged the table again.
Her secretary, the lady who had actually written the speech for her, nodded to her lackeys within the crowd. It was the pre-arranged signal for them to stand and cheer as loudly as they could, triggering the standing ovation they had planned for. Within seconds, every delegate was standing, whooping, clapping . . .
Watching Jojo spring from his seat, Kuldip Razdan was suddenly overcome by a sense of loathing for everything around him. He was acutely conscious of his place in the hierarchy and every instinct told him that this was the day, the moment, he would finally be relegated to the footnotes of history. He would be praised for his service, commiserated with for his tribulations – and then either Mrs Pandit or Jojo would take the reins from him.
The minutes that followed the standing ovation proved his forecast to be accurate. Unfortunately, uncomfortably.
He should have been flattered by the myths that Mrs Pandit wove around his tenure in office, but the kudos no longer helped him fight his conscience. His genuine achievements had been too few and too far between; the rest were victories of statistics and tweaks in metrics that the government had employed to show that they were performing better than what people gave them credit for. Despite the economic crisis that loomed, Mrs Pandit called him the ‘architect of our vibrant economy’ and assured him that the reforms he had initiated would be carried out by the party faithfully.
What reforms, he felt like asking.
‘But this government – the one we have now – is a savage, fascist force that has no respect for us. For distinguished people like Kuldipji. I have seen the scars from the beating he received at the hands of GK’s goondas; I can see the tears he has shed, not out of personal pain, but for the state of our nation today. And that is why when he came to me yesterday and said he wants to retire, that he is too tired to fight back, I could not refuse him. But I promised him one thing. I promised him on your behalf, my friends, that we will continue to fight this brutal, illegal government. I promised him that we will win freedom for India once again!’
As the audience erupted, something snapped within the former PM. He stood up with as much dignity as he could muster and walked over to Mrs Pandit, who extended her hand for him to shake, assuming that he would raise hers in one final show of unity.
Instead, ignoring her, he reached for the microphone and plucked it from its stand.
24th September, 2012. Columbia, USA.
The four-member team crouched in the twilight, eyeing the house at the end of the driveway. The fifth member of the group, currently fiddling with the electric lines less than a mile away, had already alerted them that the outage at their destination would last for another sixty seconds exactly – after that, the failsafe measure would trigger the alarm unless it was manually switched off.
One of the four stayed back to establish a perimeter. The other three rushed along the hedge that ran along both sides of the driveway, shielded from view, covering the hundred metres to the door in less than twenty seconds. With immaculate precision, they pulled out one of the steps and uncovered the pressure-sensitive switch underneath. As the electronics expert attached a palm-sized console to the exposed leads, the others flanked him, covering his attempt.
Within seconds, the security system was partially compromised – enough to unlock the door without tripping any of the other sensors or indicators and give them another minute to shut the alarm off completely. Silently, their rubber soles making barely over a decibel of noise, they stepped over the threshold and into the house of their target.
The main control panel, as with any house that had the same security system, was placed right beside the main entry, logic dictating that it should be close enough for the owner to shut it within a minute of entry. The electronics expert unscrewed the panel with a motorized screwdriver and had the console connected to the proper terminals as the screen counted down to ten seconds.
He disabled the alarm with less than five seconds to spare.
The three of them moved further inside the house, intimately familiar with its layout thanks to the hours spent poring over its blueprint stolen from the previous owner, and towards the two bedrooms on the first floor. Their silenced pistols were drawn and ready, although they were to be used only as a last resort.
The children’s room was the trickiest part of the operation. Adults knew that it was pointless to argue with a man holding a gun, but children could be unpredictable. Even a moment’s cry could carry far this time of the morning and bring unwanted attention. As one of the most popular residential areas for those working in the White House, the neighbourhood was heavily patrolled. The margin of error was slim to none.
They approached the master bedroom first, where their quarry and his wife were asleep. In a well-choreographed move, two of the intruders made their way towards the head of the bed and pressed the barrel of their weapons to the heads of the sleeping couple almost simultaneously.
The touch of the cold metal woke them up almost instantly. The man of the house was the first to register the intruders – he had a hand on his wife’s mouth before she could make a noise.
The one who had a gun pointed at the owner’s head nodded appreciatively. ‘Good,’ he said, his voice muffled by the ski-mask he was wearing. ‘Sensible. Now if your wife would be so kind as to get your children here without making any fuss, I think we should be able to do this as peacefully as possible. I really abhor violence against children, you know.’
24th September, 2012. Chennai.
Seven hours.
Seven hours, and still nothing to show for it. Discouraged, I switched the television back on and the news channel returned to my living room.
In what many insiders describe as a surprising turn of events, former prime minister Kuldip Razdan has spoken out against his own party for creating the kind of sentiment that has led to the Emergency. He made these allegations at the party summit in the capital earlier today. For more details, here’s our staff correspondent Deepak Gupta, live from Delhi:
‘Deepak, what can you tell us about what happened during the party meeting this afternoon?’
‘Well, Swarup, it seems that the top brass of the party had decided to ease Mr Kuldip Razdan out of the party and nominate either Mrs Pandit or Mr Jojo Pandit to the top job. In fact, party sources claim that this is exactly what Mrs Pandit spelled out in her address to the delegates before Mr Razdan took centre-stage.
‘Mr Razdan apparently started by lambasting the president for dismissing his government. Setting aside every tenet of political decorum he’s been known for, Mr Razdan’s attack was scathing and, at times, personal to the point of being offensive. But he did not reserve his vitriolic wholly for GK – he soon turned his guns on Mrs Pandit, Jojo Pandit and the entire top-level leadership of the alliance, terming them immoral and unethical, and made quite startling revelations about every single scam that has scarred his tenure.’
‘What were these revelations?’
‘Unfortunately, at this point of time, we do not have enough clarity on what exactly was said. But our sources are unanimous in their feeling that Mr Razdan has unleashed his anger at a time when Mrs Pandit and her family have come under attack for being unavailable during a national crisis and that it was a calculated move that will either see him become more powerful within the party, or, the other extreme, expelled from the party altogether. What this means for the National Progressive Alliance as a whole, however, is something we will have to wait to discover.’
I muted the screen. Well, well, well . . . so Kuldip Razdan had finally rediscovered his voice after all. I wondered what the Opposition was up to.
Going online – the internet had been restored three days earlier, after widespread protests across the country – I pulled up a few news websites to catch other reactions from the political spectrum. The United Democratic Alliance, true to its recent trend, was speaking in many tongues. Some of the allies were openly sniping with each other, while even within the main Opposition party, there was neither unity nor democracy to be seen. I read two headlines saying two different things from two different spokespersons – from the
same
press conference. Through it all, like the curious case of the dog that did not bark at night, Karamchand Patil remained silent – perhaps the only one from his camp to do so.
I closed the web browser and returned to Major-General Qureshi’s journal, which Raghav had mailed to me. Lying on top of the cover was the note that had accompanied the parcel.
‘Selvam, I found this in the MG’s desk when we went there. I wanted to check if there were any secrets of national importance in it. I think it is safe. Be warned, though, that it adds little to what we already know. May be a waste of time. When you are through with it, mail it to the address on the back of this note. It’ll be safe. Regs, RM.’
And he was right. There was very little in the journal that I wasn’t already aware of. In fact, it wasn’t even a journal per se, more a glorified notepad. There was a note for an appointment with a Yugi Krishnamachari; there was a small homily to his wife on the day she was buried; there were report cards on his meetings with Raghav Menon and Richa – ‘hopeful’, ‘w.o.t.’ (which I took to mean waste-of-time), ‘concrete’, ‘good’ . . .
I flipped the pages to the entry on the last day of his life. He had written only one word, and I tried, without success, to interpret that one word in such a way as to make sense of his final act. Except for an obvious interpretation, nothing else fit. Yet, in some deep recess in my mind, something nagged. I was not satisfied with the obvious. From everything I had heard of him, any attempt by Powerhouse to tempt him – money, influence, whatever they could afford – would have been rebuffed by Major-General Qureshi.
Or would it? Could he have accepted the offer, only to regret it later and pay with his life as penance? It could have happened that way, but it needn’t have. I wasn’t satisfied. There had to be something else, something more . . . dramatic.
Or was it the author in me that needed to romanticize it? To give his death significance over and beyond what he apparently attributed it to?
Every letter, every curve of every single letter of that word, was etched indelibly inside my head. His last entry threatened to haunt me forever with its possibilities.
Temptation.
24th September, 2012. Hyderabad.
Two minutes later, Qazi was not feeling any easier. The meaningless platitudes the two men had shared as a necessity of polite conversation had done little to erase the suspicion on his visitor’s face or the fears within himself and it took all his courage to continue playing the role of The Pathan.
It was the visitor who opened the line of conversation that he was dreading. ‘I understand that this week was to have been a memorable success in our glorious struggle.’
Qazi appraised the corpulent frame critically before answering. The fat cats that used him and others like him to further their own opaque objectives. Men from whose lips
words like ‘struggle’ and ‘jihad’ fell without the slightest remorse even as they fed on the spoils of war, men who had no idea how to survive on a cup of rice and the generosity of strangers, men who would never feel a part of themselves die as they dealt out death with their own hands.