by Arnab Ray
Arjun dropped to his knees in front of Sudheer and asked, still as calm and collected as before, ‘Why? Why did you sell it?’
‘I won’t tell,’ he said, sniffling, the snot now flowing down in two tiny streams from his nostrils.
Arjun’s hand shot out again and this time the slap was harder, the sound echoing through the house, the impact of the hit making Sudheer’s knees buckle for a second.
‘Why did you sell it? Who did you sell it to? Sudheer, we can make this easy for both of us if you just start talking.’ Arjun had said this to many people over the course of the years, in dark sweaty rooms, but he never thought he would have to say it to his son.
‘Why does it matter to you?’ Sudheer tried to wipe away the snot and the tears with his forearm. ‘You would have sold it anyway. That’s what you do. Sell our stuff. Sell our car. Sell our house. That’s all you do.’
Arjun let Sudheer continue, as he always did those who had started singing.
‘You let the servants go and the driver go. You took us out of boarding and put us in a school where beggars and drivers send their children. I took the watch and played cards with it.’
Arjun put his hand encouragingly on Sudheer’s shoulder. ‘Cards? You mean matka?’
He nodded. ‘I usually win. But that day…my luck was bad.’
‘Who else was with you?’
‘Praveen, Babul and Pappu.’ Arjun made a mental note of the names. He asked Sudheer more questions – where he had gone, how many times he frequented matka dens and who would take him there. Sudheer poured the answers out, reassured by his father’s soothingly calm voice. Once Arjun knew he had got all he could get out of Sudheer, he stood up and let the truth sink in.
His son had given away a watch worth a fortune for a game of roadside matka. He thought of it for a second, and then for a second more, and then he looked into Sudheer’s eyes. There was fear in his son’s eyes, definitely, but that was the fear of a slap. There was no fear of his father, no respect, no feeling of awe, no shame, not even a glint of recognition of what he had done. Just more of feeling sorry and more of complaining.
Something snapped inside Arjun.
Preeti had just opened the main gate when she heard the sounds from downstairs. Dropping the aarti plate with a loud clang, she ran up the stairs, shouting Sudheer’s name. The door was locked. She banged against the door again and again, crying out for Arjun and then for Sudheer, and when Arjun finally opened the door, she rushed to the corner where Sudheer had crawled to, shaking in terror, and took his head in her arms.
‘What have you done to him?’ she screamed at Arjun, running her hands over Sudheer’s cheeks, red and burning from the stings of the slaps that had rained on him. ‘How could you? He is just a baby.’
‘How could I?’ Arjun asked, standing with his hands on his waist. ‘Indeed. How could I? Your laadla is a thief, smart enough to get at your keys,’ he said, pointing to the keys tied around a knot at the end of her anchal, ‘to open the almirah and sell my Rolex. Your baby. Yes. Indeed. Jab main khoon paseena ek kar raha hoon, trying to find every paisa I can from anywhere, your little laadla has just blown away lakhs of my money because he wanted to show his no-good friends what a hero he was in playing matka.’ ‘So what? So he made a little mistake! He is your son.’
‘A little mistake? Is this a little mistake? Your son is growing up to be a thief and a gambler and soon the cops will be doing much worse to him. Likhke deta hoon main…’ Arjun pointed his finger aggressively at Sudheer. ‘If I ever catch you with those boys again, and I mean ever, I will flay the skin off your bones. If you steal from me, I will call the police on you. Believe me.’ He had stormed out of the room downstairs, and as he had walked by, he saw Mohan looking at him, silently, and he turned to him and said, ‘Let that be a lesson to you too. I let you go this time but the next time I see you lying or covering up for your brother, things won’t go as well for you.’ Riti had fortunately slept through all this, for she was sick, and for that Arjun was thankful.
Sudheer had howled for hours, not because he was hurt – for Arjun had been careful to keep the slaps to his fleshy parts, of which he had a lot – but because he was scared out of his wits. At night, Preeti had argued with Arjun, something which she rarely did, and Arjun had tried to impress on her the need for discipline. Though she never did say it directly, Arjun knew what she was trying to say in different ways: ‘But you are a thief and a crook too!’ He had stayed awake that night, wondering if Sudheer had deserved the beating he got or had it been because Arjun was angry that his son did not respect him. He had himself not respected his father because he had always been weak and powerless, and that was exactly what his sons thought of him too.
Less of a man. Less of a father.
And if today on result day the cards fell against him, he would be on the streets. And so would they.
Preeti’s pressure on his arm brought him back to the present. ‘We will go back to the garage, right? Promise me. Please.’
Arjun rose from the bed, shaking off Preeti’s grip. Going back was not something he wanted to even think about. Pulling on his brown, road-worn slippers, he said, ‘I am going to CP. It will be quicker than this blasted radio.’ They had constructed giant election-result boards at Connaught Place and Arjun wanted to be there when the results started going up. When and if defeat came, he did not want to be around his wife and children.
‘What do you mean?’ Preeti said with concern. ‘You can barely walk. What if you fall out there in the middle of so many people? They will walk right over you.’
Arjun reached for the shirt and trousers that lay carelessly thrown on the back of the wooden chair, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t fall.’
‘If you fall today, you won’t be able to get up.’ Preeti refused to let go of his wrist.
‘I know. I know that very well.’
‘We always have the garage.’
But Arjun did not hear her; he was walking quickly down the stairs.
Preeti waited. And waited. Riti went to sleep. Then so did the boys. She sat at the dining table with Arjun’s food, warmed it twice and then put it away. The clock struck twelve. She looked at the telephone on the glass table. But then who could she call at this hour? What would she tell them? At one, she went out, stood at the gate for what seemed to be an eternity but it could not have been more than half an hour and then walked a few minutes out to the main street and stood beneath the streetlight, looking down the empty road, praying. Finally, drained out, she went home and dropped off to sleep on the couch.
When she woke it was to a gentle shaking of her shoulder. Arjun was standing there, his face close to hers. She looked into his eyes for he was so close, and the exhaustion and fear and the anger and the pain she had seen there all these years was gone.
He said, his voice low with excitement, ‘I was right. I was right all along.’
‘W…what happened? Where were you? I was so worried.’ All these years he had been out, she had never felt she had lost him as much as she had these last few hours.
‘It doesn’t matter where I was. What matters is that I am back. And I am never going away again.’
‘Who won?’ Preeti asked, remembering where he had gone and why.
‘I did.’
10
1978
Arjun picked his battles very carefully and this one he was definitely going to sit out. Preeti wanted the new office at Jor Bagh to be straight out of the pages of one of the lifestyle magazines she was so fond of reading and after what the family had gone through over the last few years, he did not have the heart to say no. He would have liked to have stately old wooden furniture and ornate couches like the ones they had had in his father’s office in Lahore but when the professional designer had pointed to various glossy things printed in glossy brochures and used words like ‘decor’ and ‘ambience’ with exaggerated flourishes of the hand, he had nodded his head. He kept nodding when Preeti had asked if he approved
of the design and nodded some more when paying the bills. He was not happy with the number of zeroes on the invoices or the diffused blue lights or the strange-shaped tables or the uncomfortably square chairs or even the designer, who was a woman but dressed like a man or was it the other way round, and, most of all, by the fact that two months after they had moved into his new office they were still working on it, installing a new glass wall one day and fixtures from Italy the next. All of these distractions were getting in the way of his work. There was, after all, a lot of work. Business was great, Bhatia Consultants was signing more clients than he could handle, government tenders were being written and granted in the rooms around, forty people were already working for him – clerks and lawyers and managers
– and it seemed like he had outgrown his office even before the workmen had stopped drilling.
But today he was not thinking of the furniture or the representative of the biggest French arms supplier whom he had met last night or the profusion of money plants that made him feel as if he was sitting in a jungle. He was thinking of RP. For there he was, right in front of him, leaning forward, almost as if he were about to jump across the table and strangle him.
‘Shall we talk straight, man to man?’ RP asked. ‘Or shall we dance around trees?’
‘Let’s talk,’ said Arjun, getting the image of Randhir Kapoor from Jawani Diwani out of his mind. ‘No dancing for me. My knees aren’t what they used to be.’
It was the first time they were in the same room since that first meeting. RP still had that menacing stare and that haughty, superior way of talking and that suit that made him look more impressive than he was, but everything else had changed.
It had started changing the day the election results had been declared. Every politician, big or small, whom Arjun had bankrolled over the last year, each and every one of them, had won in their respective parties and states. The victors had started pouring into Delhi by the afternoon, wearing little white topis and dhotis, quickly starched for the big occasion, with their handlers, and brothers-in-law, to stake their claims and say salaam to the man behind them. The elections had churned the earth and turned up into the light a new breed with new dreams and insatiable greed. New connections had to be made, new alliances to be forged, new territories had to be divvied up and there was only one man in Delhi they knew who could broker it all – the new spider at the centre of the web.
Arjun Bhatia.
With his men installed firmly in Delhi, Arjun had launched his attack. He had waited for RP to import machinery from Germany, and then just before RP was going to begin production, he got the ministry to increase the import duty on every key raw material that the process at the plant needed, some becoming more expensive by as much as five times. RP not only lost everything he had invested in the plant but his partners had, within days, discreetly sent out feelers to Arjun for protection.
That had just been the start.
RP’s family had controlled the liquor business in and around Delhi for decades. So Arjun got his ministers to pass a prohibition law. He then made some calls and within hours, all RP’s registered shops had been shuttered and padlocked. On cue, bootleg liquor started flowing in from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, where Arjun and his politicians had bought out all the suppliers.
All over the country, the assault had continued on RP. Coal inspectors suddenly woke up to the fact that RP’s clients were under-reporting the production of coal to the government. Investigations immediately followed and the results were almost as if Arjun had written them himself. Environmental clearances for the hotels RP had stakes in were withdrawn. Adulteration was discovered in the petrol that was pumped out from his petrol pumps. The railway contractors who owed allegiance to RP lost their contracts. RP’s textile mills were found to be using machinery that had been imported illegally, his bottling plants were locked down after they were found to be dumping dangerous chemicals into the water, and all his real estate projects in Delhi and Bombay and Madras ran into serious roadblocks. RP had tried to fight back, but Arjun had burned every escape route that he could have taken and finally, when Arjun had managed to cancel RP’s membership to the Delhi cricket club, RP had swallowed his pride to seek an audience with Arjun.
Of course he had summoned Arjun, because RP never went below his station in life, but Arjun had made it very clear that if he wanted to talk, it had to be at his place and at his convenience. He had come with two bodyguards, which amused Arjun for that showed RP was shaken, so shaken that he feared that Arjun would kill him. Arjun knew he could not, for RP, even down and out and with blood flowing out everywhere, was still a force. But RP himself was not confident of where he was, which meant the war was almost won.
Now Arjun had to get through this meeting.
‘I know you must have spent a lot already, Bhatia, and only God knows how you got that amount of money, but you and I both know it’s a battle you can’t finish. Not with me.’
Arjun simply smiled.
‘Fortune is a fickle whore,’ RP said slowly in his impeccable accent. ‘Right now she is in your bed and I know you are feeling all warm and cocky but she will come back to me. You can be sure of that. And when she does, I am going to get to work on you.’ He paused, adjusted his Nehru jacket, and continued, ‘You are a sly little fox and I didn’t take you seriously. That was my mistake but I won’t make that mistake again.’
Arjun leaned back casually into his chair, ignoring how uncomfortable it felt against his lower back. ‘But you are making a mistake again. Here you are sitting in my office, your bodyguards are standing outside on the footpath surrounded by my men and you are threatening me here with…with what? With the future? Yeh madarchod-behenchod ka sheher hai, angrezi gaali se kisko darwayenge?
‘What do you want?’ asked RP. ‘What do you really want?’
‘Aah, now we are talking business. You are right. I do want something.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Oh no. Not revenge. If I wanted revenge, I would have made you sit for an hour waiting for me, then if you had not stood up when I came in, I would have made you sit on the ground, or perhaps made you hold your ears and stand on one leg. No, I don’t want revenge. Because it’s bad business.’
‘Then what?’
‘I want your friendship.’
Right then Marie, his secretary, entered with two cups of coffee on a silver tray, and cast a nervous glance at RP and then at her boss. The tension was plain on her face. She knew who he was.
‘So this is your way of making friendship? By trying to run me out of my businesses?’
‘What can I do? Sly fox jo hoon.’
Marie had kept the tray on the table and RP bent forward, letting the steam flow over his face. ‘Aah, good Columbian. I kind of figured you to be the instant coffee type.’
‘I am,’ said Arjun agreeably. ‘This is something I had been saving specially for you. I know you like this particular blend.’ RP glanced sideways at Marie, but did not reach for any of the cups.
Arjun realized that RP was worried there would be poison in his coffee. He was more scared than Arjun had originally thought.
‘So yes, friendship. Why do you think, after all that you have done, that I would consider being friends with you?’
Arjun gave Marie a slight sideways glance. She got the message and left quickly. ‘Because that is your only way out right now.’
RP drawled slowly, ‘As I said, you are taking your good fortune a bit too seriously.’
‘And you are taking your smarts a bit too seriously. I know everything about you, where you keep your money, which apartments are bought in the name of your dog, and which in the name of your Belgian girlfriend and which in the name of your wife’s brother, and yes, I know even the brand of coffee you like. Right now, you may feel you still have something to fall back on, but I have you surrounded.’
‘If you could have finished me off, you would have done so already. No one gives an enemy a breath of air is what my f
ather used to say.’ RP kept looking intently at the wisps of smoke snaking up from the coffee. ‘I call your bluff.’
‘Well, then, you can walk out.’ Arjun took a sip of the coffee. It was too bitter and strong for his liking. He wanted to spit it out but held it in. ‘Trust me, a part of me wants you to walk out because, I swear to God, I am in the mood for blood. You stole from me, and you treated me like a bhikhari and I don’t want to stop until you are begging on the streets yourself. But this would be, as you once told me yourself, bad business. Fighting is always bad business. And I would not underestimate you. You still have power in this city and a big name. I don’t feel it’s worth my time to destroy all that, that is, unless you force me to. It would be better if we join hands, become partners and not allow a third person to come and take away everything, like the British did two hundred years ago. I remember you once saying that the city is big enough for both of us, and why not keep it that way?’
RP did not move but clutched the handle of his chair tightly. Whether it was anger or the hardness of the seat, Arjun could not determine.
Arjun continued, ‘Consider all that has happened as my way of getting your attention. You see, years ago, you thought I was a pushover, a second-rate heartland gunda with guns and a bad dressing sense, and I have hopefully proven to you that I am not.’
RP nodded. ‘No, you are not. You are good. Damn good.’ ‘Thank you, coming from you that means a lot.’
‘It was Dubey, wasn’t it?’ asked RP, finally reaching for the handle of the cup. ‘He sold out to you, didn’t he?’
He had. It had not taken much for Arjun to turn him. While Ismail had been a big help, RP’s destruction would not have happened without Dubey’s knowledge of his master’s dirty little secrets.
‘You should have paid him a bit more. He was always complaining of how stingy you were.’
RP gave a shrug of defeat. ‘Or perhaps not let him know so much. But then, what’s past is past.’
