03:02

by Mainak Dhar

  I collapsed more than sat down on the sofa next to him and took the glass he was offering. I took a long swallow; the warmth spread through my body and I felt myself relaxing.

  ‘Marie and I had always wanted to see India. We went to the Taj Mahal, visited Rajasthan and were to fly back home via Mumbai. I just retired a few weeks ago and thought we’d take a break. Who would have thought something like this could happen?’

  He gripped his glass tighter and took another sip. There was nothing really to be said that would help him deal with what he had seen, so we just sat there for a while in silence before he asked me what I did.

  ‘I work with a venture capital firm here. I’m the vice preside—’ I stopped myself. Did any of that matter any longer? What use were those titles and office politics when life was stripped down to the basics of survival as we had seen in the last couple of days?

  ‘Forget it. I’m just a guy trying to keep myself sane and alive till the lights come on,’ I said.

  He raised his glass and clinked it against mine.

  ‘No, young man. You’re doing much more than that. I’ve heard about how you saw off those thugs last night, and I saw how you helped us. You’re doing much more than just staying alive.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I was a surgeon in Zurich.’

  He had barely said that when a bulb went off in my head. The hospital. If the gang was after soft targets, they may have concluded that societies would now be alerted and, at the very least, be ready to put up some resistance. The hospital would have cash and drugs, and very little by way of security. When I had passed it on the way to the hotel, I had seen none of the policemen or security guards that had been there earlier. Also, none of the waiting relatives were there. I could not let what had happened to the hotel happen there. I downed the last of my drink and rushed out.

  ‘What exactly are we doing? And what do we propose to do if we do run into the gang again?’

  Pandey’s question was a valid one, and I had to appreciate his coming along without asking much more in front of the others at the society. I knew if others had asked the question, they may not have approved of our going to the hospital and seeking out trouble. At least, that’s how a lot of them would have seen it.

  ‘Pandeyji, I just don’t want anyone else to suffer because I didn’t help or warn them when I could have. As for the gang, we’ll take it as it comes.’

  Actually I was counting on the fact that they would not be brazen enough to launch a raid while it was still light outside. It was a quarter to six and I assumed that they would wait for darkness before striking. That was why I was pedalling as fast as I could, Pandey and Nitish right behind me. Nitish was nervous about heading out, but I had asked him to come along to help out in case the hospital needed any help with their generators.

  I had no intention of seeking out a confrontation with the gang, but I was hoping to at least warn the doctors on duty. They must have heard the screams of the previous night, but there was no telling if they actually knew how much danger lurked in the darkness. I’d ask them to lock the doors, maybe keep all lights off to not attract attention, and to put some of their staff on guard duty at all times during the night. Importantly, I needed to pass on the information that the gang was wearing police uniforms.

  I had asked Nitish to get along a couple of torches to fashion into makeshift searchlights. That tactic had worked for us, and I was hoping that if the gang went to the hospital, the mere fact that the folks inside were ready for them would dissuade them, as it had in our case. When we reached the hospital, I was surprised to find the main door wide open. I motioned for Pandey and Nitish to be quiet as we crept in. A man in a hospital uniform was lying dead behind the counter. I could hear someone moving in a room to the right and as we got closer, the voices became audible. A female voice was pleading. ‘Take the money. You already have all the money we have, but I will not let you hurt my patients.’

  The response was barked out in a hoarse male voice. ‘Shut up, bitch. I’ve got the money and I want something more. My brother will be coming soon with the others and I don’t want them to get you before I have my way. I should get some reward for coming out here alone to check on the hospital for them. Let them have the patients, but I want you. Be quiet and you may even enjoy it.’

  I heard the sound of shattering glass and then a cry of pain from the man—she must have thrown something at him.

  ‘Stupid fucking bitch!’ the man yelled. ‘I’ll not just rape you, but I’ll make you scream as I do it.’

  I slipped into the room and saw the doctor I had met the first day when I had come to the hospital. She had her back to a wall and bearing down on her was a large man wearing a police uniform. I recognized him as the drunk I had seen sitting outside the police station. He still reeked of alcohol and he was carrying a knife in his right hand. He was bleeding from a small cut on the side of his forehead and I could see the shattered remains of a bottle at his feet. Pandey and Nitish were right behind me, and I could see them both frozen in place. I took a step forward.

  ‘Hey.’

  The man spun around and when he saw us, his fleeting look of concern was replaced by a sneer.

  ‘Get lost or I’ll cut you before I do her. The last time some fucker tried to be a hero at the hotel, I ripped him to pieces.’

  The mention of the hotel, remembering what I’d seen there, remembering the shock and horror on the kids’ faces, and remembering my own impotent rage—it all brought me to a boiling point. My mind was a red mist of rage as I strode towards him. My sensei would never have approved of a black belt heading into a confrontation in anger. Anger makes you sloppy, anger makes you undisciplined. That was what he had taught me when I received my black belt. All that was fine in the dojo, but here I relished the rage I felt course through me.

  The man raised his knife to bring it down towards my chest. I stepped into the blow, parried his hand with the outside edge of my left hand, then turned my left wrist to grab his hand and pull him off balance. His momentum and weight did the rest as he nearly fell towards me. That was when I brought up my right elbow and sent it crashing into his temple. I stepped back as the man fell to the ground, the knife falling from his grasp. He got up, bellowing in rage, and came at me in a half crouch, hoping to grab me and bring me down into a grappling fight where his weight and strength would work in his favour. I sidestepped him, grabbing his left wrist and twisting it behind him.

  I could hear my sensei’s voice from the classes of all those years ago. ‘Aadi, control. You’re not here to break bones.’

  But this time, there was nobody or nothing to control me, and breaking bones was precisely what I had in mind. I heard the bones snap in the man’s wrist as he screamed in agony. I brought my elbow hard down on the back of his neck and he collapsed, his face smashing into the hard concrete floor, blood gushing as his nose broke. As he tried to get up, I punched the same spot again with all my strength—all my rage coming out in that one blow. The man fell again and did not get up.

  As I stood, it was as if someone had woken me up from a trance. Pandey and Nitish were staring at me with wide eyes, and the doctor was still backed up against the wall.

  I turned to her. ‘Doctor, you heard him. His friends are coming here. You cannot stay for much longer. Come with us and you can at least be safe for the night.’

  She lifted her chin in defiance and shook her head. The name tag on her chest said ‘Dr Megha’.

  ‘I’m not leaving my patients. No matter what, I will not leave them alone.’

  I had not bargained on taking people back to our society, but then I had certainly not bargained on a confrontation with one of the gang either. I had to take a snap decision, and it was pretty simple. There was no way I could leave the doctor and her patients here.

  It turned out there were two female patients left in the hospital who were not so unwell that they could not sit on our bicycles and be taken back with us. The ot
hers had been taken away by their families when it became clear that the lights were not coming back and, as the doctor informed me with her eyes misting over, four more had died when the generator stopped working earlier that day. The thug had come in pretending to be a policeman and got information from the solitary attendant left in the hospital before killing him.

  Nitish and Pandey got the two women on their bicycles and began pushing them back to the society. The doctor had mentioned that there was one more patient who had come in just a couple of hours ago.

  ‘He’s in bad shape and definitely cannot sit up, so we’ll need to find a way to get him to your society. He has been shot and has lost a lot of blood. Maybe we can wheel him there on a stretcher, but we have to save him. He’s special.’

  ‘Of course we won’t leave him, but what makes him so special?’

  ‘He’s an Air Force officer and he says he knows what happened to make the lights go off.’

  FIVE

  It seemed as if every single resident from both societies had gathered outside our meeting room. Dr Guenther had asked everyone to give him some space, that the pilot was weak and had lost a lot of blood, but once news had spread of his arrival, there was really no holding anyone back. Not that the pilot discouraged them. He lay there on the folding bed we had carried down from one of the apartments, looking pale and weak. Guenther told the pilot to be still and quiet while he worked on extracting the bullet, but once he was told the bullet had been removed, he whispered that he wanted to tell us what had happened.

  Megha was there, looking distraught. The other two patients had been admitted to the hospital with car accident injuries, one with a broken ankle and another with a broken hand. They were now fast asleep in Mrs Khatri’s apartment, but it was the state of the pilot that had hit her hard.

  ‘I should have done more for him. I’m not a surgeon but a GP. There was no way I could have removed the bullet.’

  Guenther lay a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Doctor, he’s still alive because of you. The morphine you gave him took the edge off the pain, and the IV drip at least helped him last this long. If he doesn’t make it, it will be because he’s already suffered too much internal damage from the bullet.’

  Then he turned to me.

  ‘He’s asking for people to come closer.’

  I walked towards the pilot; Mrs Khatri and Anu were there by my side, along with General Lamba and the two doctors. Everyone else stood some distance back, eagerly waiting to hear what the pilot had to say. We had seen his papers when Guenther was operating on him, and it turned out that he was not Air Force after all, but a Navy fighter pilot based out of Goa. Squadron Leader Sajid Iqbal. He grabbed my hand, and despite his condition, his grip was strong.

  ‘For two days we had intel warnings of an imminent terror attack. Nothing more specific than that. But that changed on the second day. The Americans were warning all their allies that there was a WMD attack imminent on North America, India and Europe.’

  He stopped, coughing. Megha gently placed a glass of water to his lips and raised his head as he drank greedily before lying down again. General Lamba explained the acronym to the others.

  ‘WMD means weapons of mass destruction. Nukes, usually.’

  I could hear shock ripple through the crowd around me, but all my attention was focused on the pilot as he continued.

  ‘On Sunday, at around 2:30 in the morning, we were given a scramble order to intercept some sort of seaborne threat. Our recon planes were out but had spotted nothing other than the usual freighters and fishing boats. We were circling around when my wingman called out that he saw a launch of some sort. A rocket, maybe. Then there was a bright flash and my plane died. It shook like hell and all the systems just stopped and it went into a dive. I ejected and landed near the Western Express Highway.

  ‘We had orders to go to the domestic airport in case of an emergency and I started to make my way there…’

  He coughed again, his body wracked with pain, but he continued. ‘It was an EMP blast as near as I can tell. Bastards nuked us all right, but did it in a way we didn’t expect.’

  He began coughing again, doubling over with pain with each spasm and he was wheezing as he breathed. Dr Guenther pulled me aside.

  ‘His lungs may have caught some shrapnel. I’m not sure I can do much for him here. I’d need a full team and the hospital to be sure of saving him.’

  ‘Let’s take him there then.’

  No sooner had I said the words than I realized that saving the officer and getting him to the hospital meant a lot of things. Nitish would need time to fix the generator there. We’d need to roll the pilot there on a stretcher, the way we had brought him to the society. And none of that was even remotely possible with the gang out there, probably at the hospital right then. As Guenther tended to the pilot, he asked Megha to take a break and I also walked away for a breather. All around me people were talking about what little the pilot had said.

  ‘How the hell are we still here if they exploded a nuclear bomb?’

  ‘What the hell is an EMP anyway?’

  Nitish said something about it being an electromagnetic pulse, an intense burst of energy and radiation, emitted by a nuclear bomb going off in the atmosphere.

  As I walked into their midst, they parted and stopped talking. Word had gotten out about the confrontation at the hospital.

  I went up to Pandey and told him we needed to get the pilot to the hospital but we needed to think about how to handle the gang out there.

  In a soft voice that was practically a whisper, Pandey said, ‘Things are more complicated than that. Before we left, I checked on the man you fought at the hospital. He was dead.’

  I stood there, shocked, as I took in the words. I had killed a man. Sure, it was for a good cause, and sure, I had been angry, but I had never thought myself capable of murder. Was it murder at all? I could see Pandey looking at me with sympathy in his eyes and, as I looked around, I was shocked to find a large number of people look at me with a mixture of awe and fear. I had just killed a man. Had our world changed so much in a couple of days that it took brute force and murder for a man to earn respect and power?

  I rushed to the lift and up to my apartment. I went straight to the bathroom, and while we all knew water supplies were running low, I turned on the tap and held my head under the cold water for several long seconds. Afterwards, I sat down on the bed, looking at my hands. I heard someone come into the room.

  It was Megha.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  My hands were shaking as I answered. ‘I killed a man.’

  She sat down next to me.

  ‘Yes, and if you hadn’t, I would have been raped and killed, and the two patients as well.’

  ‘It still makes me a murderer.’

  She held my hands and I turned to look at her. I had never really noticed it before, but she was younger than I was and, if we hadn’t been so exhausted and if we had met under different circumstances, I would have found her very attractive. Just sitting there, looking at her, helped calm me down a bit.

  She said, ‘No, you aren’t a murderer. Whatever else anyone calls you, you are a hero to me and to those other women at the hospital.’

  I closed my eyes. When this whole thing had begun, the only title that had mattered to me was to be called vice president of a firm that probably didn’t even exist anymore in our new reality. In the short time since then, I was a murderer and a hero. What other titles would I accumulate before this was over? Would it ever be over?

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Megha still looking at me. Her eyes were tired but kind. I knew she had been through hell, but she still managed a smile, one that did not tell me everything was okay, because perhaps things would never really be okay in the sense we had taken for granted, but at least that I wasn’t alone.

  ‘I don’t feel like much of a hero, Megha.’

  I heard a soft knock on the door. It was Pandey.

/>   ‘That is what makes you a hero, sir. The fact that you are upset about killing a man shows you still have humanity left. I would be more worried if it hadn’t disturbed you, sir.’

  What was with him calling me ‘sir’ all of a sudden?

  As I got up, Pandey straightened, as if standing to attention. ‘The doctor downstairs is trying to stabilize the pilot,’ he said, ‘but if you remember what the thug said back there, their leader is his brother. If he finds out you killed his brother, he will be back for revenge.’

  ‘Do you think they will have guns from the police station?’

  Mrs Khatri had asked the question that was probably on many people’s minds, and I thought back to R City. Had those figures in uniform I had seen been policemen or this gang?

  ‘I’d say it’s safe to assume they will be armed. They may be goons but they’re not stupid. They were smart enough to take the uniforms and use them, and I suppose they will be knocking on nearby societies pretending to be cops to get the info on where people from the hospital went.’

  General Lamba had made the observation without much emotion in his voice but I could hear the audible gasps around the room. Suri stood up, staring at me.

  ‘We are not vigilantes and we are not soldiers. We are respectable people with normal jobs and lives. Why did you kill the man and risk bringing the gang upon us?’

  I tried hard to control my temper and waited a few seconds before I spoke. I remember Ma telling me to count till ten whenever I was going to lose my temper before doing or saying anything, and while I didn’t quite count till ten, the pause helped me soften my response a bit.

  ‘Mr Suri, we all had so-called respectable lives and jobs, but that respectability meant that we ignored what happened outside our comfortable homes and cushy offices. Women were raped, crimes committed, corruption thrived, and we were happy to pretend it was someone else’s problem as long as they didn’t intrude on our air-conditioned rooms. Now, those barriers are gone, and those problems are ours. You know what happened at the Meluha and what was going to happen at the hospital. If we sit back and pretend it is someone else’s problem, who will help us when that problem comes knocking at our door?’