Immortals (4 page)

Juliet and her friend Nasreen hailed from the same town of Dhanbad in Jharkhand and met up occasionally to share each other’s grief. Nasreen worked as a nurse at the JJ hospital. Jai had met Nasreen many times and had seen both friends pour out sob stories to each other. Most of the time, it would be one of them crying and the other consoling. Jai had teased Juliet on many occasions, that both of them were ‘sob sisters’.

These were the few rare occasions when Jai and Juliet would get to spend some time with each other. These clandestine trysts had gone on for almost a year now. Their meetings were usually brief but emotionally intense affairs. It would usually be him with another of
Bhai’s
men, escorting her on one of her shopping trips or a trip to catch a new film release, and even then, he would only be waiting outside the shopping mall or the cinema hall for her return. It was always a furtive meeting of eyes and a wary occasional word to each other and nothing more. He was never ever alone with her for more than a few seconds and those few seconds were the eternity of their love. Those seconds would slow down and let them gauge each other; the steely boyish charms of Jai’s face measuring up to the large kohl-lined eyes of Juliet. They would savour these dear moments until opportunity let them be together again.

Jai had never known anyone he could call his own. He had cared for a sister once, but she was long dead now. His memory of her was fading day by day. He did not remember very well the life beyond the walls of an orphanage and a remand home, and had always felt the lonesomeness of his existence.

For Juliet, being in love with Jai was an affirmation that she was indeed in charge of her own destiny. It was also an affirmation of the fact that she was alive and that she existed beyond being a pleasure rag-doll moll for the boss. She felt the need to love Jai and this love made her forget her other life where she had to endure the use and abuse of her body in the hands of an aged mob boss.

Jai had taken an enormous risk in falling in love with Juliet. He had met her the first time when he had been running an errand for
Bhai,
making a
hawala
delivery for him. Jai had done that run for two weeks then; delivering wads of cash from
Bhai’s
den to the dealer’s every day. He would be at her apartment every night at ten sharp, to take a parcel that he would then deliver to the
hawala
dealer by midnight.
Bhai
had been there for the first two days and he had dared not look Juliet in her eyes. In fact, he had kept his eyes firmly on the ground in front of him, looking at
Bhai
and at Juliet’s feet and the ground between them.

The third night had been different. The parcel had been waiting for him but there had been no
Bhai
. Juliet had opened the door and he had had a fleeting glance of two large kohl-lined eyes set in pale skinny eye-sockets with wet, curly, tousled and very black hair falling over a forlornly angelic face. The kohl made her face exquisitely melancholic. She had extended her hand with the parcel and he had hurriedly averted his gaze away from her face, had accepted the parcel, and literally run out of the building.

Those kohl-lined eyes had haunted him for the entire night and he had slept with his eyes riveted to the ceiling of his room, imagining the grief in her eyes, imagining it to be his to share and to relate to. That was one rare occasion when he had not had the Jihadi nightmare in his sleep. In fact, the days that he did meet her, he had a dreamless sleep, and he loved her even more for that little respite.

The story had repeated itself on the next few days, Jai sinking deeper into the melancholy of those eyes each night. He had asked her for a glass of water one day.

‘Come inside.’

She had asked him to step into her apartment and he had taken two steps within the doorway, waiting for the glass of water to arrive. The apartment was stocked with things that
Bhai
would use: a big-screen television on the living room wall and a hookah perched on a table in the corner. There were trinkets that decorated the walls, which looked garish and out of place. It reminded Jai of his childhood, where there would be ornately decorated dollhouses in market fairs. Juliet was one of those mute dancing dolls, captive in this ornately done and yet distasteful and disgusting dollhouse. She had handed him the glass of water and her hands had brushed the inner surface of his wrist. His hands had shaken so uncontrollably that he had not even managed to empty that glass of water. His eyes had met hers and there was a glimmer in her eyes. She had looked into his eyes, intent, appealing, and yet restrained by fear.

That night had been especially difficult and his sanity had appealed to him to stop playing with fire. The duel between common sense and a barely tangible love ended in a restless and sleepless draw that night.

The next night had been different.
Bhai
was back and had handed him the parcel. Juliet had walked into the room with a bottle of Smirnoff and had mixed a drink for
Bhai
.
Bhai
had rattled off instructions to Jai in the interim. Jai had managed to steal a couple of glances at Juliet during her presence there. There was an unmistakable black bump of clotted blood above her kohl-lined left eye, which had not been there the night before.

Jai had returned to his room that night and just shut tight the door on common sense. The torture and her vulnerability had won the duel, for barely tangible love.

These meetings had gone on for another ten nights and they had talked a little whenever
Bhai
had not been there.

After two weeks Jai realised he had fallen in love with her feet, her eyes, her touch, and her voice. The feeling was mutual; he had seen the spark in her eyes, giving him increasing access and permission with his visits.

Then on the last day, she had furtively smiled at Jai and had given him a glass of lemonade instead of water.

It was Cupid at play again, when it fell to Jai and Billoo to escort Juliet for her trips to the shopping mall and to the cinema hall. Jai had dared to slip her a packet of Dairy Milk chocolate during one of these trips, which she had hurriedly accepted. She had cherished that bar of chocolate more than the gold and diamond trinkets that
Bhai
used to hoist onto her body from time to time.

They had been meeting thus, surreptitiously, for the past year. These meetings had grown emotionally intimate over time although they could not imagine or manage any measure of physical intimacy beyond an occasional ‘accidental’ brush of hands.

There had been a surge of emotion in Jai each time Juliet had borne a new bruise, courtesy
Bhai
, and he had overcome
his
helplessness at her beatings by mentally drawing himself closer to her, more and more, each time she was hit. That was his subconscious, rebelling against an unjust authority. He punished
Bhai
mentally by doing the unthinkable, by usurping his property, by stealing the love of his woman. But that was not to be the end of it.

This frustration of Jai’s worsened precipitously one evening when he saw two cigarette-burn marks on her neck. She had burst into tears on seeing him and Jai had looked on helplessly while seething in rage within.

He was still lost in his thoughts when his cell phone rang above the din of the racing jeep and the ongoing excited monologue of Billoo.

The screen showed that it was from Milas. He knew that he could not take that call there, because ‘Milas’ was ‘Salim’ coded.

He turned to Billoo and said:

‘Billoo, drop me off here. I have some urgent work.’

‘
Saale
! What can be more urgent than this?’ Billoo retorted.

‘It’s
Bhai’s
job. Something that I have to deliver to Reddy, and which, if I don’t,
Bhai
wouldn’t be too happy about. And s
aale
! I don’t want to make
Bhai
not happy at this time.’

Billoo looked uncertain. Reddy was a conduit for their Middle East operations and they were required to make deliveries to him from time to time.

‘Don’t worry about me. I will get up to Jaggi and reach there by afternoon,’ Jai continued

‘Okay.’

Billoo pulled the jeep to the kerb and Jai jumped out.

‘
Saale
! Don’t be late. I will make some excuse for you,’ Billoo shouted at Jai as he sped away in the jeep.

Jai grabbed his head with his hands when he was alone. Things had gone sour; in fact, they could not be any worse.

He had to call Salim and see if he had any news for him.

Salim picked up the phone after a single ring.

‘
Saale
! Where the hell were you? I have been trying to get to you all morning. Have you heard…?’

‘Yes, I heard how you
maader-chods
couldn’t shoot a drunken sleeping slob, you assholes!’ Jai shouted at his phone. He needed someone to take responsibility for the screw-up.

‘
Saala
Rashique
maader-chod
had to go to the bathroom at that very moment. What is done is done… We will get him another day. I called to tell you that it is not very safe for you there. And get that Juliet bitch away too.’

‘She’s safe where she is.’

‘No, you idiot, she is not. You think
Bhai
does not know about her nursing classes? Even we know about that,
chutiye
.’

Jai kept mum. Things were definitely going into the ground, faster and faster.

‘Listen,
saale,
’ Salim bellowed on the phone, ‘you get to her as soon as you can and ask her to get out of Byculla
now
. And you get your ass to me. I will put you somewhere safe.’

Those words rang through Jai. He had heard that assurance before; in fact yesterday, in his ‘dream’. The dream that had not gone all that well in the end.

‘Shit!’ escaped Jai’s mouth.

‘Yes! You are right. Shit is the word. Get to Capital Godown in Wadala. You will meet my men there. They will take care of you.’

‘Yes, Salim
Bhai,
’ mumbled Jai.

Wadala was the last place he wanted to be. He had a funny sensation in his fingers that had been chopped yesterday in his dream. And the pain in his chest returned, somewhere near the place where the knife had been thrust into him yesterday in his dream after he had been captured from Salim
Bhai’s
Capital Godown in Wadala.

He immediately ran down his contact list and called Juliet. Her phone was switched off.

That probably meant more bad news.

Chapter 4

Death on the Sognefjord

Sogn og Fjordane

Fjord Territory,
Northern
Norway

8 May, 2012

The winds were bone chilling. The temperature was around four degrees Centigrade but the icy winds drove up the chill factor making it feel almost sub-zero. Steep walls of white-streaked rock rose from the banks. Tiny rivulets and waterfalls gushed into the anonymity of the icy-cold fjord. A single twin-sail boat rocked in these icy waters and a man in an ‘Under Armour’ Cold Gear zip-top, and a flimsy, flashy boxer, held the rudder of the sail.

Ludvig Hansen was no ordinary man.

Mere mortals would not be where he was then.

His company, Hantel, had just announced the largest single financial year profits, and it had beaten the next business house by a neat 1.1 billion kroner. There was to be a celebration sometime next week.

And Ludvig felt terribly bored. He needed some time to himself and that was why he was on the Sogn.

He had taken a helicopter ride to Eivindvik, at the mouth of the
Sognefjorden
and had got himself a thirty-foot sailboat and seven days of solitude. His company issue Hantel X-99, the most advanced mobile phone in the world would be switched off for most of the next seven days.

It was just him and the icy, ravenous beauty of the Sogn for the week-long cruise. He soon left the tourists and the villagers behind and was headed for the solitude of a frozen communion with unforgiving nature. Sognefjorden was the longest and the deepest of the fjords in the icy north of Norway. The fjords were a natural formation of deep recesses and ravines that cut deep into the land from the Arctic Ocean. These ravines had dug themselves to levels below the sea level and flowed inland from the Arctic. Steep icy walls rising hundreds of metres on both sides of the ravines surrounded these fjords.

Dry, icy breezes pounded Ludvig’s seventy-year-old body and sapped the warmth out of it. People half his age would not dare be on the adventure that he had taken on.

Sheer madness!

But Ludvig was different.

He did not know the fear of death. And a man who hasn’t that has no other.

It hadn’t always been this way, though. But the last thirty years had been different. And the company in those thirty years had risen from the verge of bankruptcy to being the number one company in all of Europe and Russia, and a close second in the rest of the world. The company had survived its death knell and had staved off no less than five takeover attempts.

The odds that Ludvig had managed to steer his company through were, simply put, humanly insurmountable. But maybe that’s what made Ludvig different, more different than anyone else.

He was looking forward to his seven days in the wild. He did this almost every year. He took on a challenge that was so difficult that no one was insane enough to dare do it, and he completed it to prove another point to himself. There was hardly any publicity for these events. Only close subordinates and some from his immediate family ever came to know of these private exploits; many after these deeds were done.

The wind was blowing across the fjord, sweeping down into the valley from the heights, travelling across the fjord and then battering against its walls. The turbulence created thus, flapped the sails wildly and made it difficult for Ludvig to control his boat.. He pulled in both his sails to the centreline and that brought a little more stability to the boat.

He settled down for a quick bite from the rations that he carried and which were only going to last him for another day. Come tomorrow, he would have to fend for himself from the Sogn, and the wilds flanking it. He would also have to circle round two waterfalls that created deadly vortices where they landed in the Sogn.

‘Could I survive a straight descent down the falls?’ He chuckled to himself as he thought about those waterfalls, and then shook his head.

‘Maybe some other time.’

He had a quiet meal and then looked up at the sky. Light was fading fast and he decided to pull up to the shore where he would set up camp for the night.

***

The week of boating on the Sogn was drawing to a close. It had been a dreadful week. Nevertheless, he had not died.

Not even once.

He had come close a couple of times but had barely managed to survive. He had decided to go for a little hiking trip inland from Storestienneset to the Viagrafossen or the Viagra falls, so named because the waters here were supposed to confer potency and fertility to men. People tended to take the more conventional route from Sogndal, but this was a rawer trail, winding treacherously over snow-capped mountains. While on this trip, he had to tackle a bull reindeer that he had wounded with his shotgun. It had had a fair bit of fight left in it and Ludvig had been surprised. He had ducked in time to miss the charge of its antlers and had avoided certain death that time. Another had been a nasty fall from a slippery boulder that had landed him inches from the sharp edge of an ice-pick, which had slipped out of his gear moments earlier. Narrow escapes, both.

The rest of the trip had been exhilarating. He felt rejuvenated and felt recharged enough to drudge through another year of corporate skulduggery. It was the final day of his sojourn and after the excitement of the last few days, he now steered his boat through the calmer waters of the fjord. It was late afternoon when he could at last see the end of his journey on the bank on Fjaerland. There was a huge rope-net tied across the river to guide his boat to the bank. He sighed when he made out a small gathering of people on the bank of the river. The boat slowly made its way to the bank where he aligned it with a temporary jetty that had been erected for him.

There was going to be a small reception for him. A few trusted aides and his son, Cristoffer, were there to greet him.

To be joining him later for dinner was Dagny, last year’s national beauty pageant winner and a budding actor with a promising career in films. She had recently been hired by Hantel as a brand ambassador at a price exceeding a million kroner per year. She had been bought at twice her market price but then Ludvig was hoping to take that price on to a more intimate level.

Cristoffer was the first to greet his father as he climbed the stairs after anchoring his sailboat.

‘Welcome back, Dad! I don’t know what to say. It’s a relief to see you again.’ There were tears in his eyes. And it was strange to see a thirty-seven-year-old corporate heir with tears in his eyes. But he adored his father and had genuine concern for him in his heart. Ludvig worried about Cristoffer too and often wondered if he would be strong enough to guide the company after him. He was man enough, but when it came to business, Ludvig was not so sure. He dilly-dallied with his decision-making and was unsure of his decisions most of the time.

But making decisions was not easy for Cristoffer. He had tried his best, having trained in the best business schools money could buy. However, despite his efforts, when it came to the real deal, he always found himself a step behind his father. His decisions had been overturned on numerous occasions by Ludvig and generally these seemingly rash and erratic decisions by Ludvig had proven to be a veritable goldmine for the company. This filled Cristoffer with dread and self-doubt, and was slowly killing the entrepreneur in him. He would have felt differently about it, perhaps felt cheated, if he had known Ludvig’s secret but that was not something anyone was privy to, and it left Cristoffer a lot less sure about himself and his business skills. Cristoffer was currently the CEO of the European Hantel operations, the Russian operations being handled by the younger Sonya, Ludvig’s daughter by another marriage, and someone Ludvig thought very highly of. He had always felt that Sonya had inherited the right genes from him and had oftentimes considered making her in charge of the entire affairs of Hantel once he was gone. But that would necessitate some political and familial tight-rope walking and it was a challenge for another day.

Sonya and Cristoffer got along well enough for step-siblings. Sonya liked Cristoffer for being a nice and honest man and she often reassured Cristoffer about their dad’s misadventures.

‘This is what excites him. He could have been an adrenaline junkie, a spy, or a really calculative serial killer. But he became a corporate honcho and we should be thankful for that. The stability of his empire doesn’t excite him enough… anymore. So you should stop worrying and let him be. Just let him be.’

Cristoffer did not understood much of what Sonya wanted to say but still it reassured him to know that someone understood his dad’s ways even if he could not.

The medical team waiting on the banks did not find anything major amiss with Ludvig and gave him a clean chit, advising rest, vitamins and plenty of fluids over the next few days.

An entire alpine hotel had been hired for the welcome-back dinner. Dinner was bountiful although Ludvig’s appetite would take some time to recover after his days on the Sogn surviving only on fish and the half-cooked remains of the reindeer that had nearly killed him with its antlers on the third day of his expedition.

The party lasted late into the night and the festivities were joined in by the folk-dancers from Sogn and the surrounding villages on the coast of the Sogne. Dagny had joined the festivities in the middle after having flown directly from Milan where she had been busy shooting for a Woody Allen movie which was being almost entirely funded by Ludvig.

Ludvig endured the pleasantries of the gathering and then made a small speech

‘Blah blah blah blah…,’ he started, twirling a glass of
akvavit
in his left hand and with a Gurkha Black Dragon cigar in his right.

‘Thanks for coming along. It is nice to see some familiar faces after a week of wilderness. Hope all of you suckers enjoy the free meal and the finest free booze…’ There was laughter all around at Ludvig’s nonchalance.

He continued, ‘And now my tired old bones need to rest. So that’s it; cheers and good-night.’

He got down from the podium to generous applause.

He bade them all goodbye and retired to rest his ‘tired bones’.

A master suite had been decked out for Ludvig’s resting there for the night. He hurried to the rest room to piss deep brown urine, the mark of his exhausting sojourn across the Sogn, the pigment of his tired, broken-down muscles being excreted in the urine. He was not too alarmed by that as he knew from experience that it would subside in a couple of days. After an alternating cold, warm, and cold splash to his face, he put a dab of cologne on himself.

He entered his room and was pleased with what he saw. Dagny lay on the bed, resplendent in two-piece lace lingerie, reading a book on the mysteries of Egyptian Art. She put the book down as soon as he came into the room and flew into his arms. He enjoyed the warm embrace, enjoying the vigour and sensuousness of her young and beautiful body on his ageing and wrinkled skin. He scooped her light body off the ground and hoisted her on to the edge of the bed, dipping his head in her voluptuousness. She let out a sigh and curled up her toes, enjoying and relishing the touch of a master d’amour. She never appreciated the pungency of aged wine but knew the bit about ‘older being better’ to be true of a handful of her old lovers. She turned around, pushed him down on to the bed and hurriedly disrobed him of his party attire. He sensed the blood rush up his body as Dagny went inching kisses down his chest and on to his belly. He felt the rush of pleasure surging within his brain and spreading across like a raging wildfire within him. His pulse raced ahead and he felt his heart pounding against his chest. She reached further down and the warm feeling in him gave way to a hot throb emanating from his heart, a sensation that rapidly morphed into one of constriction and a distinct unease.

His eyes opened. His vision was blurred and his breathing came in gasps. There was a distinct and growing ache within his chest that worsened in seconds. He started to sweat profusely and his breaths turned to loud guttural whoops. Gusts of air were sucked into his laboured chest but he did not feel it invigorating his drowning body. Rather, it felt like a waste of breath as if the air went into his lungs but his body refused to draw from it. He choked and gasped more furiously, but with the same result. By now, he was panicking and Dagny looked up and screamed. Ludvig shot bolt upright on the bed, throwing Dagny to the ground. There was froth at his mouth.

Dagny recovered from the shock of being thrown from the bed, ran across the room, and opened the doors, screaming for help in the corridor.

Ludvig knew it was too late for anyone to do anything. He gave a last sigh.

‘Shit!’

His last word.

His dead body rolled off the bed and he slumped on to the floor of the room, dead from an acute massive myocardial infarction.