Brutal (14 page)

S
eema felt
as if she was moving. Her eyelids were heavy. Through their narrow slits, she tried to make sense of what was happening.
Am I on a wheelchair?
She tried moving her hands and legs, but they were tied to the chair.
Where are they taking me?
She tried screaming. But to her dismay, she could only scream inside her mind.

The deadly concoction of drugs in her bloodstream was making her feel groggy. She remembered vomiting and then passing out over the cold tiles. Terrible thoughts had been running through her mind like a horror movie reel. In one dream, she saw that Vidisha was being chased by gunmen. She was crying for help. In another dream, she saw herself running a car over her husband, crushing him beneath. She constantly kept shaking her head to end the hallucinations, but they wouldn’t stop.

She heard the ding-dong sound of a lift. Her wheelchair was pushed inside. She felt as if she was being pushed into a well. Something in the water kept pulling her down, while she gasped for breath. She felt suffocated, but her hands were tied. She used all her strength trying to free them up, but her shackles didn’t budge.

She heard a ding-dong again.
Is it a dream?
She shook her head so hard that her neck began to ache. This time she was able to open her eyes. She saw she was in a lift, which had reached the ground floor. Her wheelchair was being pushed across a corridor. She wondered who the person behind her was. The place felt very hot.
Why?
She looked up. There were thick metal overhead pipes running all over the place.
Steam.

A heavy-set man with a massive scar on his right cheek and dressed in army attire walked towards her wheelchair. He and the person standing behind her had a discussion in whispers. Seema understood that the man with the scar was now in-charge of her. He started pushing her wheelchair at a much faster pace. At a dead end, he took a sharp left turn and then stopped. He looked around as if checking for any onlookers. Satisfied that no one was following them, he whispered, “Are you OK?”

Seema tried to study him, but wasn’t able to concentrate on his face. It was a blur.

“Look, I don’t know where they are taking you. But just try to stay alive. We’ll soon get you out.”

Seema shook her hands, indicating him to open her shackles.

“I’m so sorry. I can’t do that,” he said, closing his eyes with regret. “We have spent so much effort in infiltrating this organization. If I set you loose, all will be lost. But I assure you that you’ll be saved. Just stay alive somehow.”

He began pushing the wheelchair again. They turned at another corner and entered the final corridor. A grilled door stood at the far end of it. There was an armed guard sitting at the gate. Some discussion happened between the two men and she was now passed on to her new carrier.

The guard brought her chair out into the open. Even though she was delirious, she felt elated seeing the open sky and the afternoon sun. The place looked like the backyard of a factory. There were huge cylindrical pipes and rusty machinery parts lying all over the ground. A wall with a barbwire concertina on its top stood about twenty meters away. She wondered what lay beyond. The place didn’t look like the jungle where she was captured. Hell, it didn’t even look like Bandhavgarh.
What is this place?

Her mind began to wander again. She shook her head again, but to no effect. A dark dream began to envelop her.

A
muscular man
wearing sunglasses emerged from the building behind Seema and stood in front of her. He was the same guy who had kidnapped her and then killed her driver. The man walked with the swagger of a hardened criminal. He gestured the guard to go away. Taking out a sharp knife from his pocket, he cut the duct tapes tying her limbs to the chair.

Even though he had freed his hostage from bondage, he didn’t see any movement in her body. Seema’s head was down. She kept looking at the ground.

“Wake up sweetie. Papa wants to play with you,” the man said, chewing gum in his mouth.

No response.

The man grabbed Seema’s lower jaw and wrenched it upwards to see her face. He removed his sunglasses and looked into her eyes. They were open, yet looked completely lost. He gave her a mild slap.

Still no response.

He looked at her from top to bottom with lustful eyes.

“So, you’re angry with Papa. Aren’t you? Let me make you happy,” he said, sliding his right hand inside Seema’s kurta. He slipped his hand into her bra and cupped her breast. He pressed his hand tighter and started pinching her.

Still no response.

Biting his lips in anger, he took out his hand out of her kurta and growled, “Bitch! You aren’t going to like what I’m gonna do to you.” He started to yank out her pyjamas with forceful jerks.

The next moment, he felt her hand on his eye. Before he could react, she inserted the sharp finger nails of her thumb and index finger at the corners of his left eye and gouged it out. The eye was now dangling from sinuous nerves and blood vessels. Blood and gooey fluids gushed out of the hollow socket.

The man screamed with horror. With trembling fingers, he touched his wound and writhed in pain. He kept moving backwards till he stumbled and fell. The knife he was carrying dropped on the ground. He tried to pick it up, but couldn’t. His lone eye and the severe pain were not letting him concentrate. The knife wasn’t where it looked to be. His hand kept grazing the soil.

Seema stood up from her chair. Her eyes were bulging, resembling those of a wild tusker on a killing spree. She moved towards him and picked up the knife. Howling like a kid, he started to retreat, dragging his body backwards in the soil, but unable to stand up. She plunged the knife into his stomach and kept on stabbing him till he stopped moving. His body was completely still now.

She walked towards one end of the compound like a zombie, carrying the bloody knife in her hand. With her blurry eyes, she saw someone coming towards her.

It was a man carrying a rifle.

P
rakash stood
at the door of his compartment, trying to get some respite from the heat, with the cool wind blowing into his face. The train had been moving since the last thirty minutes. The hot summer day had ensured that it was filled sparsely. That’s why they had easily got seats in the chair car section.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mrinal.

“Your leg is bleeding,” he said.

Prakash looked down at his legs. His trousers had a crimson coloured blotch near his right knee.
The piece of shrapnel.
He rolled up his pants to check his wound. The chip of metal, which was only slightly protruding a few days ago was jutting out like a small nail today. He tried pulling it out, but it stung like hell.

“You need to see a doctor,” Mrinal sympathised.

Prakash nodded and decided to ignore his wound.

Mrinal hesitated for a moment and then asked, “You got it in the explosion, didn’t you?”

Prakash kept looking out of door with clenched jaws. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“What happened exactly?” his friend pressed on.

“People died!” Prakash spat. “That’s what happens in an explosion. OK?”

A momentary expression of grief crossed Mrinal’s face. He placed his hand on Prakash’s shoulder. “I have seen death,” he said. “It haunts.”

Prakash saw pain in his friend’s eyes.

Mrinal kept talking. “My father committed suicide when I was ten. He was a stock trader. The prick’s suicide note was funny. He said he had lost all his money in the stock market. He was neck deep in debt, which not even ten fucking sons like me could ever repay. So he chose an easy way. He hung himself. Bloody loser.”

Mrinal looked down for a minute, avoiding Prakash’s eyes. When he lifted his head, he had a forced smile on his face. “See, I’m not new to death. You can tell me what happened with you.”

Prakash hesitated, but still began, “I had gone to Banka a month back to cover a story on children being forcefully recruited into the cadres of the Naxalites.”

“Banka? Where is this place?”

“It’s a district in Bihar. A place gifted with a dense forest cover and picturesque landscapes. But no tourist worth his salt would go there. These forests are infested with Naxalites. Banka is a battleground for their bloody war with the police and the administration,” Prakash said.

He continued, “The day this all happened was the most terrible day of my life. We were accompanying the CISF commandos in their night patrol through the dark forests. There were two jeeps. In the first one, I sat with three CISF jawans. The jeep following us comprised of two of my colleagues and three more jawans.”

“Colleagues, meaning?”

“Ojas Patel, who was my cameraman and Ishwar Toppo, a local freelancing journalist,” he said. “While we were passing through a narrow trail cutting across the jungle, I heard a ‘click’ behind our vehicle. That’s the most dangerous sound you can hear in those forests. In a second, an explosion tossed up the jeep coming behind us in the air. The flat ground behind us was now a two feet deep ditch. We had been lucky to miss that landmine. The other jeep wasn’t.”

“Before anyone realized what happened, we heard gunshots coming from the bushes. We had run into an ambush. There was absolutely no chance of survival if the Naxals got to us. The driver of my jeep knew exactly what he had to do. He drove like a mad man for the next half an hour, till we were back in the CISF camp.”

“Did anyone survive that explosion?” Mrinal asked.

“Three people, which included Ojas Patel, survived the explosion. Only to be shot from a point blank range by the Naxals. They left no survivors. Five mutilated bodies were found the next morning and then sent over to a local government hospital,” Prakash said and got lost in his thoughts for a few moments.

When he talked again, his eyes had tears in them. “Ojas Patel was a close friend of mine. His death shook me to the core. What do you do when the devastated wife of a newly married guy looks at you with blaming eyes? I felt something break inside my heart. My anxiety knew no bounds when I had to take her to the hospital to identify her husband’s body. I stood at the morgue door while she walked over to his lifeless body, lying on the floor. Beating her chest and sobbing, she crouched and embraced his body. At that dreadful moment, I heard a ‘click’ again. What followed was a deafening explosion and darkness before my eyes.”

“I opened my eyes three days later in an ICU. The doctors could recover only seventeen pieces of shrapnel from my body. The remaining, they had to leave,” he said. “I came to know that Ojas Patel’s wife was dead. And it was because her body bore the full brunt of the explosion that I was alive. The Naxals had surgically inserted pressure-activated IEDs into all the dead bodies.”

“Bloody bastards!” Mrinal said.

Prakash closed his eyes and sat down on the floor near the door. Mrinal also sat beside him.

After ten minutes of silence, Mrinal said, “Yet another profession which takes its toll on the people involved. My previous profession was also like that. You wanted to know my trade secret, didn’t you?”

Prakash looked at him, puzzled.

“People think that I used to be an equity analyst before I took up this current job. I was much more than that. I was an investment banker and an options trader who used to work for a shady group. This group comprised of hundreds of subsidiary companies with cross holdings amongst them. If you can untangle this web, you’ll come across a startling revelation. Its stakeholders are a group of very senior officials of the RAW and the IB.”

He continued, “Now consider this – every terrorist attack on the country and every international dispute in which India is involved creates a ripple in the financial markets. Look at what happened to the hotel stocks after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. They nosedived. What if you know in advance about these threats and play in the markets accordingly? What if you buy a ‘Put option’ knowing perfectly well that a stock is going to tumble? You will make a hell lot of money.”

“This is insider trading, isn’t it? And it’s illegal.”

“Yes. It’s illegal. But maybe no one was able to catch these people. Or maybe they chose to ignore them. Whatever! I used to churn out bullshit reports speculating whether to buy or sell a stock. There would be all kinds of calculations and research to indicate a trend. It was all financial garbage. In reality, I already knew the macro trends, which would sway the market. I made a small fortune for myself this way, helped by this shady organization.”

“Why did you leave it?”

“Because I was scared. My life was surrounded by terrible news of things yet to happen and I wasn’t able to do anything about it. At times I thought that a few attacks were allowed to happen so that these people could make money.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“It’s true. I left that organization and went dark for a few years. I’m alive only because I’ve never disclosed my story to anyone. Over the duration of my work, I’d built some strong contacts in the RAW and the IB. These were the people who had made money through my firm. So in a way, we were partners in crime.”

“That’s your secret sauce?”

“Yeah. That’s my little secret. These people have access to all the databases of the Government. They can even coerce telecom companies to provide them with information on their subscribers,” Mrinal said. “So now you know how I work.”

Prakash sighed.
How many more mind blowing disclosures?

A
faint sound
brought Prakash back into the present world. His mobile phone was ringing.
Ritesh Pandey.
He answered the call.

“Where have you been Prakash?” Ritesh asked. “No calls. Nothing. I was worried about you.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I’ll tell you. First tell me how’s your investigation going?”

“The going has been a bit tough at times. But I’ve managed to get my hands on some really explosive material.”

“That’s good. We’ll talk more on this when you come here. But I was a bit curious about the death of Mohammed Afroz. His autopsy report surprises me.”

“I haven’t seen it. Can you elaborate?”

“Oh! Then you don’t know that traces of Etorphine were found in his bloodstream?”

“Hell, no! What’s this chemical?”

“Etorphine is a highly potent tranquilizer for veterinary use. Its distribution is extremely regulated. Despite the fact that it has some painkilling properties, its use in humans is almost unheard of.”

“Then it’s obvious. Afroz was murdered. This proves it,” Prakash said. “What about the gun discovered in the pond at Ambala?”

“The police got a match. The M107 found in the pond is exactly the gun, which was used to kill Nitin Tomar at Allahabad. But I’m surprised you aren’t aware of all these developments. Are you alright?”

“Well, I’ve been through some trouble. I am surviving somehow.”

“Be careful then. I don’t want you to vanish like Seema Sharma.”

Prakash stood motionless.
Did he say Seema?
“What happened to … Seema?”

“She disappeared near Bandhavgarh National Park a couple of days back. Was working on the Nitin Tomar story. Just like you.”

Prakash felt as if he was stabbed with a dagger. “What! What do you mean by disappear?”

“It means she’s missing without any trace. Century News has kept the news under wraps. But my sources have confirmed.”

“Was she alone?” Prakash asked. A throbbing pain rose from his heart, choking his throat with sadness.

“I guess so,” Ritesh replied. “Poor girl. I remember meeting her once. She was a good journalist.”

Prakash closed his eyes in grief. “She was my friend.”

“I am sorry… But, I wonder what she was doing in Bandhavgarh? Do you have any idea?”

“No,” he said. But he knew what took Seema to Bandhavgarh.
The search for Kunal Chaubey.

“When are you planning to come back?”

“I’m on my way.”

“OK. Stay safe.” Ritesh hung up.

Prakash squeezed his eyes shut, leaning his head back against the wall of the compartment.
Why did you go alone, Seema?