by Arnab Ray
‘That man is not walking free.’ Mohan had stood up after taping Riti’s mouth. ‘He owes us, and not just for screwing our sister.’
Chuha shook his head. ‘I am going to regret this tomorrow but I suppose it’s the least entertainment I can provide, given how much you paid me. And I am sorry my man didn’t notice the woman inside, yes, that was a mistake.’
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ said Sudheer, ‘and as you yourself so kindly said, you have fucked up enough for today. So just give me the gun and let me finish this.’
‘Ranjha ko Heer ke saamne maar doge to your father may let you live, being as you are his son, but he sure won’t spare me.’
‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Mohan.
‘Ten minutes. Tops. We have been pushing our luck. Aur kismat kunwaari ki choot ki tarah hoti hai, zyada ghusaya toh phaad jayenge.’
Mohan asked once again, ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Rishi ji, hold Rajkumar up, will you, but before that, let me see what’s around.’ He looked around the room – his man had been right, there was nothing there except big fat books and loads of electronics. ‘Not a bat or a hockey stick,’ grumbled Chuha.’ Which man does not keep a bat and a hockey stick in his house. Saala, teri behen hijre ko chod rahi hai.’
Rishi yanked Arijit to his feet, and though he struggled with his hands tied, he was no match for Rishi’s gym-made rippling muscles. Everyone saw now, Arijit’s eyes glowing with rage, almost leaping out of their sockets, while he strained against his restraints.
‘Look Mohan, look at his eyes. He is going all Sunny Deol– Balwant Rai ke kutte on us.’ Sudheer laughed. ‘Which movie was that?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t watch that crap,’ Mohan mumbled.
‘Abey yeh sab chutiyapa baad mein karna,’ Chuha said. ‘And that dialogue is from Ghayal. Every Jat ka puttar knows this by heart.’ Chuha laughed for a few seconds. Then he gestured towards Sudheer. ‘Now that Rajkumar is standing up, punch him in the face. Punch him hard.’
Sudheer did not need to be told twice. He rushed forward and started throwing punches. Left, right, left, till after five, he was panting and doubling over, holding on to his knees.
‘ Yeh kya hai, mar rahe ho ya chumma de rahe ho?’ asked Chuha. ‘This kind of punching can throw down your sister, but on a man that’s just foreplay. The problem with you, motay, is your entire body is jiggling, like a Punjaaban’s flabby boobs, and the force is going everywhere. Let me show you how it’s done. Isko Patiala punch kehte hain.
‘See, you don’t need to move your body while punching. Just stay steady, move hand back, and boom.’ Chuha’s fist cracked forward, straight on to the bridge of Arijit’s nose, and you could almost see it move as it broke, and blood came streaming out. ‘We do it like this, and this, and this. See, my body stays still.’ Chuha was pummelling Arijit’s face as Rishi struggled to hold him aloft with the impact of the punches, backing up against the wall for support.
‘See,’ Sudheer screamed at Riti, his eyes gleaming with hate. ‘See what we do to your little friend. This is what happens when you fuck with our honour.’
Riti tried to get to her feet, her hands and mouth restrained, but Mohan caught hold of her from the back. She bawled through her restraints, begging them to let him go, and Sudheer just smiled. ‘Just see what we do, just see.’
Blood was streaming down in little rivulets from Arijit’s broken face. He was barely conscious, as he mumbled slowly into the tape covering his mouth.
Chuha stepped aside and looked towards Mohan. ‘You want to take your turn, little brother?’
Mohan shook his head. Sudheer walked up, shoved Chuha to the side and brought out his Berretta. ‘I will take his place.’
‘Saale, aankh dikahata hai,’ Sudheer grunted, ‘Aankh.’
He started hitting Arijit’s eyes with rapid, overhand strikes using sometimes the barrel, and sometimes the handle. Arijit’s eyes were already swollen and shut, a mangled mess of purple-red, and yet Sudheer did not stop.
‘Take that madarchod, and that, and that. Aaj se tu Romeo nahin rahega. Likh ke deta hoon.’
‘That’s enough. I think we have all made our point. Let’s go,’ Mohan said, nervously looking out through the window slats.
Sudheer looked at his watch. ‘The rat said ten minutes, choot. I still got four.’
It was two in the morning, and the house was dark in its silence. Arjun sat quietly outside Riti’s bedroom, his face buried in his hands, rocking back and forth.
‘Fortunately, Riti did not get a concussion,’ the doctor had said, ‘a cut on the head and a twisted ankle. Nothing to worry about Mr Bhatia, just get in touch with me if she feels dizzy or loses her balance.’ There were two ayahs sleeping in the antechamber, in case she needed to get up, yet Arjun sat outside the room, not wanting to go anywhere far.
How had she come back? What were the men in New York doing? They were supposed to keep watch, to prevent exactly this from happening.
Arijit must have been involved somehow. If he could have gotten into the telephone system, he could have fooled those men in New York.
The poor bastard, Arjun thought, he had paid for all this.
Riti had wept, more than he had ever thought she would have to, when they had brought her in.
‘They beat him without mercy,’ she had said between sobs. ‘They had his hands tied and mouth gagged and Sudheer punched his face again and again. Then they beat him with their guns and rolled him on the ground, and kicked him in the ribs and groin. Then one of them twisted and broke his leg, I could hear the sound, oh the sound, I can still hear it.’ Arjun had sat impassively at her side, running his fingers through her hair. ‘I cried so much, I told them to stop, I told them it was all my fault, but they had tied my hands and covered my mouth…’
Arjun had sat similarly impassive when Sudheer and Mohan had come to his room, after the doctor had left. They had told him everything. How they had traced the Vantor leak to Arijit and how they had gone to teach him a lesson and how once inside he had found their sister with him. Through it all, Arjun said not a word.
‘I lost my temper, I am sorry,’ Sudheer said, ‘but it was an accident. I had no intention of hurting her. I got angry, and don’t tell me I had no right to, this was about our family’s honour.’
Arjun had remained silent, just looking straight at Sudheer.
‘I know you are mad at me, papa, but I am not going to bend over asking for your forgiveness. I did what I felt was right. Hell, if it was someone else, they would have killed their sister. For good reason too, because without honour, a woman’s life means nothing. That is our culture, and you should know that.’
Preeti was standing there, right next to her sons, and she backed him up. ‘We should never have sent her to America. See what she has become. A pervert.’
Arjun looked at Preeti and then back at Sudheer.
‘Papa, I know your silent treatment. You want to make me shiver in fear,’ said Sudheer. ‘I am sorry if this offends you, but I have decided not to be scared of you. So if you take off your belt and beat me, as you had done once for selling your watch, I am ready to take it.’
Preeti moved over to Sudheer, touching his head affectionately. ‘No, no…nothing like that…’
‘I was out there taking care of business,’ Sudheer continued. ‘I found out who the enemy was, all by myself. Do I hear a thank you for that? No, I do not.’
Preeti said, ‘I am sure your father understands how hard you have worked.’
‘No, he does not, he never does.’ Sudheer sniffled back his tears of anger. ‘He will tell me to take responsibility and when I do something, and I do it right too, he clams up as if it were me who shamed the family.’
Mohan stood quietly in the background, looking at his feet. ‘This is a big conspiracy, papa – Riti and Vantor, the link with Arijit cannot just be accidental.’
‘Forget it, Mohan,’ Sudheer said. ‘He thinks we are too stup
id to make the connection, because only he can. I know why he is angry – he is angry because we figured it out, and he could not. I mean, who will he look at tomorrow, and pity and shake his head? The only one of us that has ever mattered to him is Riti, anyway, forget it…’ Sudheer threw his arms up in disgust. ‘I refuse to be your ugly, fat mistake any more, I refuse to stand like a dog outside your door, begging for you to pat my head, to consider me worthy of being your son. So as I said, go ahead, and beat me with a belt or a bat, but I won’t apologize, I won’t fall at your feet, I won’t be scared.’
Finally, Arjun broke his silence.
‘Beating you that one time, the way I did, that was wrong of me. I was angry for some other reason and I took it out on you. You were a small child and I should have known better. But my intention was honest. I wanted to teach you a lesson, that you should not steal and talk back to your elders, but maybe I ended up teaching you the wrong thing. That it was all right to hit someone you love, someone who cannot respond to your violence. I accept the responsibility for teaching you that.’
Preeti started to protest but Arjun silenced her with a raised finger.
‘Now, about your responsible handling of this situation. Riti had told me about Arijit a few months ago, I knew about their relationship, I just hadn’t told any of you yet. Because I had misgivings about the boy, about his real intent, and I was trying to find out. I knew he had been behind Vantor, and I was trying to get to his boss, something I don’t think I will after the stunt you two pulled today. Because now everyone knows we know. And the ones behind him will cut those strings and go underground. So I hate to tell you this, but you screwed up. Again. As I expected you to.’
It took a few seconds for Preeti to process what Arjun had said. ‘You knew your daughter was living in sin?’
‘I didn’t know she had come back from the US without telling me, and that somehow her calls were being forwarded from the US to here, so every time I was calling her in the US…never mind… but yes, I knew the rest.’
‘You didn’t feel it fit to tell me, her mother?’ She was sobbing now.
‘That’s papa,’ Sudheer said. ‘He loves his family so much that he likes to keep them in the dark. Because you, me, Mohan, all of us are leeching off papa’s money. Do as you want, but as I said, I am not scared of you.’
‘As to you not being afraid of me, Sudheer,’ Arjun said, ‘I am happy that you are not. But, to be honest, I really was not giving what you just called the “silent treatment”. I was just thinking to myself, what I will do to you should anything, and I mean anything, happen to Riti.’ Arjun gently adjusted the collar of Sudheer’s dishevelled shirt. ‘What I will do then won’t be for your improvement because I have given up on it. I will do what I want to because I will be angry and I will be out for revenge. Since you are all grown up, you can ask around. You can find out what’s happened to those who have gotten on my wrong side, the ones who are still alive to tell you, that is. Now you may think I am too old, and too past my prime for you to care, and that may well be true but then you don’t know that for sure. Now here is the question I want you to go home and think over. Do you want to find out?’
They had left soon after, and Arjun was sure that Sudheer was scared, in the way a father knows how his son feels, no matter how distant they may have become.
There was one more thing left to do. He put in a call to Dr Raheja, the director of the All India Institute of Medical Science, who he knew would be on duty at the hospital. He had gotten Arijit transferred to AIIMS from the hospital to which he had first been admitted, and Dr Raheja had assured Arjun he would personally look after Arijit. ‘The son of a very old friend,’ is what Arjun had said, ‘Got into some bad company.’
Dr Raheja’s voice was grim at the other end.
‘His right eye has severe internal bleeding, and there are some lacerations on his skull. One of his ribs is broken and he has a compound fracture on his thigh. The face, I cannot even…’
‘Will he live?’
‘I think he will.’
‘Any permanent damage?’he asked, dreading the answer.
‘We don’t know that yet. The swelling needs to go down for us to make a better evaluation. But I am afraid for the eye. And his right leg. I will come back tomorrow, and hopefully will have better news.’
He had gotten one of his men to call Nayantara earlier in the night, pretending to be from the hospital, telling her that Arijit had met with an accident. He wondered when she would be in the city, and how she would take the news. Would she come here, to his house, he wondered. Did she even know where he stayed? No, she would not come to him, he knew her well enough, and after today, she definitely never would. It was funny, Arjun thought, all these years they had been apart and he had never ever once thought that what they had between them would ever end. They might never meet each other again or share a cutlet in Mitra Cabin, but that didn’t mean it was over.
Today he knew it was.
He dozed off on the chair and dreamt of sun-kissed gardens in Lahore, his mother’s voice, and his brothers, in the distance, calling out to him from the wall. There he was, running towards them, when suddenly everything changed. There were now dark clouds like mountains in the sky, and all he could hear was the chug-chug of a hundred trains. He looked to the right, and saw lying on the lawn the old gentleman in the white suit he had seen on the platform, bloodied and battered. Arjun reached down to help, and the old man’s face became Bangali’s and he said, ‘Live a little, behenchod,’ before breaking into a hideous smile, and it was a corpse, its body buried in the ground, the skull sticking out, worms coming out of the eyes. Arjun kept running away from the corpse, but his brothers were gone, and the wall seemed to have moved further to the horizon, but now to his left was a funeral pyre, the wood crackling and hissing, columns of smoke rising to the sky. There were people standing round the pyre, familiar faces, some he could recognize, some he could not, and then he saw there was another pyre a distance away, and then further beyond, yet another, each with a crowd of silent mourners, all in white, gathered around. He looked at his shirt, there was blood on it, and yet he ran past the pyres, not daring to look too close for fear of discovering who lay on them, till in front of him stood Dr Raheja. He had in his hand a big brown cardboard box and a clipboard, and on seeing Arjun running towards him, struck the package out and said, ‘Delivery for Arjun Bhatia.’ Arjun tried to dodge him and run past, knowing what was in the package but not wanting to find out, but then everyone, from every pyre, turned around to look at him, and they all started laughing, till it echoed everywhere, the laughter, and he woke up in a cold sweat, his heart galloping, his hands cold, and Arjun felt fear, of the kind he had felt that night in Lahore, stacked up against sweaty bodies, waiting for death. He got up and paced up and down his palatial bungalow the whole night, deep in thought, and only when the sun’s rays had broken through the darkness did he finally go to bed and sink into a dreamless sleep.
13
‘Babuji, every time I see you, you seem to have grown thinner. Are you getting enough sleep?’ Arjun liked Nimmi, Sudheer’s wife, because even though she had been brought up in London and Geneva, she was still aware of the social graces of a Punjabi family in that she wore a sari at her in-laws’ place, kept her eyes appropriately cast downwards, and spoke in a syrupy voice, soaked in concern, that Arjun could not but admire for its modulated correctness.
‘What can I say? He doesn’t listen to me any more. Stays awake all night, talks to people on the phone, and then all day talks even more,’ Preeti said, shaking the golden bangles of her hand with vigour as she put paneer on her plate. ‘See if you can talk some sense into him.’
Four months had passed since they had brought Riti home unconscious. Four months it had been since he had spoken to either of his sons. They would call and he would avoid the phone, and when they came, he would leave the house or lock himself in one of the rooms. But today was his birthday and that had alway
s been celebrated with a big party on the lawn and VVIPs and musicians flown in from Pakistan or England, and even though he had begged off the celebrations this year citing poor health, Preeti insisted on having the brothers over for a family dinner.
‘How long are you going to be angry at them?’ she would keep saying in the weeks leading up to the birthday.
‘They beat their sister up like she was an animal. What do you mean how long am I going to be angry with them?’
‘They made a mistake,’ she would say dramatically, ‘they have been trying to say that and you won’t even talk to them. What do you want them to do? Fall at your feet? Rub their noses in the ground?’
Preeti had gone at it, morning, afternoon and evening, wearing him down as the day came closer, till finally he had relented. And so they were all in the same room once again, the two brothers, sitting next to each other, big smiles pasted on their faces, everyone around trying their best to pretend that the last few months had not happened.
Riti was not at home that evening. She had been staying with Arjun ever since that day. Today she had gone out with a school friend of hers, and even Preeti, who had not stopped letting Riti know exactly how she had felt about her ‘living in sin’ these last few months, did not stop her from going. It would be best, both the parents realized, if she was not at home when the two brothers came, for even though they say time heals, it does not do so that quickly.
Sudheer said, his mouth full, a bit of curry dribbling down the side, ‘She is right, papa. You look miserable. Have you got a check-up done? I mean a full physical, with what-they-call-it…’ He looked towards Mohan, hoping for help.
‘Yes, I have,’ Arjun said dryly, ‘the doctor told me I have a condition. It’s called growing old.’
