Immortals (6 page)

Chapter 8

The Home Run

Mumbai, India

8
and
9 May, 2012

Jai got up.

He was back on the bed in his room in the
chawl
. He was sure that it was the morning of the day before, yet again. He shifted his eyes around the room and waited.

He was waiting for Billoo to bust through the door and into the room any second.

And there he was

‘
Saale chutiye
! Get off your ass right now. Some
haraami
took a shot at
Bhai
last night. I just got off the phone with Ali. We need to be at Murtaza’s now.’

Jai got up from the bed. He put on a shirt, still dazed by what was happening.

He knew there wasn’t much time in his hands. He locked himself in the bathroom while Billoo was rummaging for his gun. There was a small three by two foot window in the bathroom that opened onto the ledge of the adjoining building. A sewage pipe ran down from the bathroom to the sewer below. The vase came crashing down inside the room and Jai knew that he had to make his run now.

Jai found his footing on the window sill, climbed out of the window, down the pipe, and ran. There was no looking back now.

He had to get to Byculla as soon as he could.

He took a taxi and reached Nasreen’s in twenty minutes. Billoo had called him twice in the interim and Jai had ignored his calls. Salim had made his call and he ignored that too.

He bounded up the stairs to the door of the apartment. He paused just for a second, checked the door knob. No, there wasn’t any blood on the knob. He turned the knob. It was locked.

He rang the bell once.

No answer.

He rang again and whispered

‘Juliet, open up – it’s me.’

Still there was no answer.

Jai could sense her eyes through the lens on the door. He stood back and spread his arms in an embrace, forcing a smile on his face.

The door cracked open and Jai entered the apartment. Juliet ran into his arms and started sobbing furiously.

‘Juliet! Hey dear,
Bhai
survived. And we don’t really have any time. We need to leave now. Do you understand?’

Juliet looked up at him. There was shock mixed with fear in her wide eyes.

‘Do you understand?’ Jai held her by the arms and repeated.

Juliet nodded her head; tears still flowing down her cheeks.

‘Where’s Nasreen?’

‘Hospital… duty,’ Juliet muttered.

Jai knew there was nothing he could do about Nasreen.
Bhai’s
boys would be here anytime now and they could not wait here for Nasreen.

‘We have to go now.’

Juliet nodded and disappeared into the bathroom, to emerge a couple of minutes later, clad in a full-length
burqa.

She then turned to the corner of the room to pick up an already packed air-bag. There was dread in her eyes, mixed with hopelessness. She had hoped that with
Bhai’s
death, her ordeal would come to an end. That not happening meant that both of them were in for a world of hurt.

Anyway, they were now resigned to this fate. They had to run.

They took a taxi to the Dadar railway station, which was some distance away from Byculla. Jai avoided the Victoria as that would be the first place anyone would trail them from Nasreen’s flat, being the nearest train station.

Jai was afraid that people would soon be searching for them at all the bus stands and the railway stations. He was hoping that he would be early enough to give the search party a miss.

The Dehradun train was due at night and they could not wait that long.

They sat at the station awaiting the Dadar-Kolkata express that was scheduled in half an hour’s time. The two of them did not utter a single word between them. Jai was expecting a bullet to hit him any second from almost any quarter. He was sitting out there in the open on a station platform and it was impossible to track activity on all  quarters on the busy platform. Every man on the station looked like a hit-man and every movement seemed like the drawing of a gun.

Possibly the biggest manhunt in the Mumbai underworld would soon be underway to hunt them down. He had to get away, far away from here.

The train came, and left with them, without any further excitement. They sat in the cramped general compartment clinging to each other. She held his arm with both her hands and rested her head on his shoulder. Despite the circumstances, Jai realised that this was the closest that they had ever been to each other. Jai finally belonged to someone and he loved feeling responsible for someone other than himself. She had a scarf draped around her head and her hair wafted a pleasant perfume of shampoo.

‘Do you know my name, Jai?’

‘I know you by the name of Juliet.’

‘No, that is not my real name. That was the name I was given when they brought me here.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘Henna.’

Henna was such a beautiful name. Jai held her hand and gave it a squeeze. She smiled and drifted off into a tired sleep, her head on Jai’s shoulder in the crowded compartment.

Jai kept thinking about her name. He too had been given other names – Yousuf was one of them. It seemed like ages before, when he was known by that name. He had heard himself being addressed as Abdi in his earlier nightmares. Now, he had yet another face – without a name – in his recent interludes in the white room.

Faces and names could not alter what he was, where he was, and with whom he was now. And he cherished that moment of togetherness, names and times be damned.

The train rumbled into the crowded Asansol railway station at six in the evening the next day. The platform was very crowded and Jai and Henna got down into the hot and humid hustle-bustle of the railway station.

There was still a long journey ahead for them.

They decided that they would reach Henna’s house and then decide what to do next. Jai did not think that it was a great plan but Henna had insisted. To reach her house, they needed to get to Dhanbad and then on to Jharia, where amongst one of the many colliery villages, Henna had a home and a family that she had left behind a long time ago. There were no phone calls and no letters exchanged other than a money order that Henna sent her family every other month. She had been dutifully doing that because the extended family of her parents and her three siblings needed that money.

Also, she hoped that the money would help avoid her siblings ending up like she did.

Henna had a family that she loved. The family had fallen on hard times when her dad lost his job to disease and to the closure of many of the mines. The mines were a mess, an unregulated haphazard maze with scant regard for planning and safety. They were a testament to the greed and corruption, first of the British colonial rulers and then of the bigoted plutocracy that ruled over the treasure now. The perfidious and callous handling by the government of the mine district had ultimately resulted in a large-scale collapse of the mines. Now, the entire swathe of coal was burning underground and the city of Jharia was sinking, soon to be swallowed up in the red-hot abyss of burning coal embers.

Henna had loved going to school. She had attended school until the eighth standard and she had loved to read. However, between her dad’s unemployment and cirrhosis, and her siblings’ needs, her schooling was terminated when she was fifteen. From being the darling of her house, she became a liability for her parents. They started searching for a groom to marry her off. But fate had other plans. She caught the roving eye of a lecher, a trafficker who used to recruit girls from villages to be thrown into the thriving flesh trade of Mumbai. He offered a deal to Henna’s parents that was too good to refuse.

She was ordained the saviour of her family. There was a plum job for her in Mumbai: a job as a house cleaner that paid very well and which would be the only lifeline for five souls who would otherwise have succumbed to penury sooner rather than later. There had been an inkling that the job entailed duties more than housekeeping, but they were not in a position to probe any deeper. Bad finances are a great motivation to moral turpitude. They needed the money and the less they probed, the less would be their guilt. Henna was thus packed off to Mumbai, sold into the hands of thinly guised traffickers to save her family from ruin, impecuniousness, and death.

Henna was bitter at first, when she realised the betrayal of her family. But with time, she learnt to forgive them. She understood the pressures of being hapless and hopeless. Her years with
Bhai
reduced her to a soulless rag but she understood and found succour in bringing herself to forgive her family for what they had done to her. It was ironic, but it brought relief to her to be able to do that in her darkest hours. Forgiveness also allowed her to go back further down memory lane, further from her parent’s betrayal of her, and thus allow her to access the happy space of her carefree and loved childhood.

It was ten, by the time they reached her home. It was a little village by any standards, and lay thirteen kilometres into the countryside from the majestic Grand Trunk Road, and proper roads ceased after about five of those thirteen kilometres. The rest was a patchwork of cart-track and no track at some places. The only evidences of an Incredible India that had percolated to Henna’s village were the Pepsi and Wills hoardings above the shanty tea-shops. The roads were unlit as were the majority of houses. There were only a handful of houses that had brick walls.

Henna’s house had brick walls. There was also a hint of a lit electric bulb inside the house.

The doors were opened by an elderly lady who had the finely chiselled features of Henna’s face and was old enough to be her mother. She gasped on seeing her daughter and it took a moment for it to register on her. Tears were already flowing from Henna’s eyes even before the door opened and she fell, sobbing, into her mother’s arms.

Jai picked up the bag and followed mother and daughter into the courtyard of the house. The courtyard was large, and a scooter stood in one corner beneath a giant
neem
tree. Three goats were tied to the tree on a single trifurcating leash. There was an enclosure for hens and a couple of emaciated roosters stood in silence looking dumbly at Jai and Henna as they were brought into the courtyard by Henna’s mother.

Jai sat on the creaking wooden cot in the verandah and Henna was ushered inside the house by her mother.

It took an hour for the emotional meeting of a long-lost daughter and her family to settle down. Henna’s father was away for the week. She had two younger sisters, and a younger brother who was twelve years old now. After many tears had been shed, Henna’s mother came looking for Jai. Jai took a much-needed bath and had a change of clothes. The clothes belonged to Henna’s father and were two sizes too big for Jai.

Henna saw Jai in them and started laughing.             

Jai smiled too. He was happy to see Henna smile for the first time in a long while. Jai had been introduced as a friend of Henna’s from Mumbai, and no more questions were asked.

Henna’s brother, Ashfaque, was sent scurrying to the village sweetshop to get
littis
and
rasgullas
. Jai had a couple of each and it was followed by a dinner of hot
parathas
and a spicy chickpea curry.

Henna’s mother promised Jai chicken curry for lunch the next day.

Jai retired to the room assigned to him. He desperately needed to sleep. However, the lingering excitement of the events of the preceding day, coupled with the hot and humid room, denied Jai any sleep. He picked up his bedding and headed for the cot in the courtyard.

He passed another room on the way where Henna and her mother sat talking to each other. Henna was sitting on the bed and her mother sat on the ground, crying.

Henna sat resolute on the bed, listening stoically to her mother cry.

It was very difficult on the conscience of a family to barter away a daughter for a few square meals. This guilt had led them away from their daughter and there had been practically no contact between the family and their daughter, save for the money order that they duly received from their daughter every month or two.

And all that simmering and suppressed guilt was venting itself tonight.

Jai let that be. He knew this catharsis between mother and daughter would probably help Henna overcome the trauma of her ordeal in Mumbai.

Jai had a lot to ponder about himself. He realised that he had cheated death twice. In fact, not cheated, but been dead twice, and had come back from the grave each time. The thoughts and the possibilities swirled in his brain but he had no answers to them. As there were no answers, the thoughts soon meandered into nothingness. The cool of the clean village breeze, and the spectacle of a peaceful, nearly full moon overhead, quickly lulled Jai to sleep and before he knew it, he was deep in tired slumber.

Chapter 9

The Ambush

Henna’s Village, Jharia

Jharkhand, India

10 May, 2012

A dull thud awoke Jai.

Years of living on the wrong side of law had made Jai very sensitive to noises.

Another thud followed.

Jai was wide-awake now. There was a faint but audible rustle of leaves being trampled upon, under tiptoeing steps.

Jai had tucked away his gun under the mattress, on the bed in the room inside. He could feel the presence of men within the courtyard. He still had his eyes closed but he could sense about three or four persons in the courtyard. They could be armed and there was nothing that Jai could do against them, without his gun.

Jai knew there was no way other than to make a run for the room and his gun. He just hoped that his bolt and run would surprise them and give him enough time to make it to the room. He would dive right into the room and under the bed, grab his gun, turn around, and start shooting.

This planned, Jai jumped from his bed and ran towards the room, ducking and weaving along the way. Multiple shots rang out simultaneously. He did not feel anything hitting him. He was running towards a pillar that shielded the room from the courtyard.

He was almost near the pillar when he felt it. A hot searing round entered his back somewhere at his waist. He fell flat on his face spread-eagled on his stomach. He tried flexing his legs but could not get up. The bullet had gone through the spine and had severed his spinal cord into two. He had lost control of his legs in an instant. He was running on them an instant before, and now his legs were just dead weight under him.

All he could do now was to turn his head around to catch a glimpse of his assailants. There were four of them who had been shooting at him. The guns had gone silent now. Henna had come running out of the house. A bullet had rung out and had narrowly missed her. Henna ducked instinctively and fell on the floor. Her mother and sisters came running and crowded around her. The assailants rushed closer to them, waving their guns at the family. Henna’s brother stumbled out of the door and one of the assailants fired his gun. The bullet caught him in the head and he dropped dead. There was a wail of anguish from his mother, who immediately knew that her son was dead.

One of the assailants moved closer to them and asked:

‘Who amongst you is Juliet?’

There was a stunned silence and no one spoke.

‘I just need Juliet. No further harm will come to anyone else.’

There was a moment’s silence and then the assailant raised his gun at Henna’s mother.

Henna shrieked in horror and raised her arm.

The assailant raised his arm and with precision, pumped a bullet each into Henna’s mother and her two sisters. They all dropped like rag dolls.

There was absolute terror on Henna’s face. Jai saw her face contorted with shock, fear and anguish writ large on her face.

The assailant lowered his gun on to her head and said:

‘This is from Rashique
Bhai
.’

The shot rang out and the bullet was buried deep inside Henna’s brain even before the line was complete.

Henna just slumped there, the blood trickling down from her face onto her lips. Jai saw Henna’s beautiful face sink into the abyss of the night and he howled.

The assailants who had given him up for dead turned their attention towards him. Two of them ran to him, put a barrage of bullets into his back, and the one that finished him caught him in the back of his head right between his ears.