In Neeraj self-preservation as an instinct was elevated to the level of an art. He saw that the mob was advancing towards him in a trance-like state and would trample him or carry him along with it if he did not clear out now. The next moment, the first person passed him and even though they were close enough for Neeraj to feel the villager’s shirtsleeve brushing against his arm, the villager did not even spare Neeraj a glance.
“Drugged or hypnotized,” Neeraj thought, as the mob began walking past him. He was standing where the footpath was at its narrowest, and soon he was being pushed from all directions, elbows hitting his stomach, bare feet crushing his toes. Neeraj tried to push them away but they were coming at him from all directions. Not once did anyone of them look at him.
“Hey guys some other time, ok?” Neeraj said, as he tried to work his way back towards the town but it was like swimming against the current in a stormy, angry, river. He was relentlessly pushed backwards, dragged towards the sea along with them. He was horrified to see that now he was about thirty feet nearer to the sea, than where he was, when he first saw them. And they were certainly more than two hundred of them now. To Neeraj’s confused mind there seemed to be literally thousands of them. The whole beach was full of villagers, men, women and children. All bare footed and all completely, terrifyingly, silent. Neeraj would never have guessed that so many people lived in this sleepy little town. And they were taking him along with them. “Making me feel like one of them,” Neeraj barely stopped himself from cackling. No time for hysteria. He looked around himself and saw that now the tree where he originally stood was barely visible through the rain. He turned back and could see the angry sea less than fifty feet away from where he was. In the time it took him to notice this, he was pushed another few steps towards the sea. And now the surge seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. Neeraj knew he was minutes away from sharing whatever fate these drugged or hypnotized villagers had thought up for themselves.
Furiously, Neeraj struggled for a couple of steps forwards before he was pushed backwards again. The old woman who pushed him had a vacant mouth along with a vacant stare. And she was surprisingly strong for such an old age. Neeraj slipped, and fell in the soft mud. In half a minute, half a dozen separate feet trampled his ankles and shins and a small girl, planted a small foot across his cheek and stepped over him lithely. Nobody turned down to see that urban man among them.
Neeraj curled himself in a fetal position, as more legs and feet trampled him. But lying in that position he had an advantage of assessing the situation, since he was less likely to be dragged to the sea in that position. And those extra few seconds were all he needed to come up with a survival plan. Still in the same position, he just turned his face towards the village and opened his eyes. Almost immediately, another foot landed on his face, forcing him to shut his eyes to prevent mud from getting into them. A blink and another second later, he took a peek again and counted the number of legs. Too many to count, but this close to the sea they were walking with a little more space between them. Enough space for Neeraj, it had to be.
Neeraj forced himself to keep calm, thinking about nothing except the physical actions required. He knew if he lost concentration, he would lose his life. He pulled his legs upwards and in, till he was curled like a ball, and while the mob continued to trample upon him, he worked towards drawing his gun out of his waistband. Carefully, using his right hand, he pulled the gun free, and used only his thumb to release the safety. Then opening his eyes he allowed another couple of feet to tread upon him. Then there was a split second when no human limb was within touching distance. Now!
Neeraj made no effort to get up. He knew he would be knocked down in a moment and lose his gun too. He simply used the wet mud around him to slide and turned around, very much like a car fishtailing, till he was facing the town again. Then he opened fire. He was aiming carefully. No ammunition to waste. He was shooting at the dirty, muddy-scabbed kneecaps, directly ahead of him. His gun had twelve rounds. Neeraj busted eleven kneecaps and one shinbone. Not one bullet missed.
It was like a small column collapsed directly ahead of him. The men, women and to Neeraj’s disgust, a pre teen boy, went down with their kneecaps shattered with powerful .45 slugs. The silence of the night was finally broken as the gunshot victims trance was overcome with intense physical pain. But Neeraj did not notice any of it. He was on his knees the moment his sixth victim was down. By the time the last woman to get hit was down, Neeraj had inserted a fresh clip and was crawling on his knees towards the heap of human bodies. The people following them marched on, stepping on their fallen comrades. A few of them got tangled with the fallen and went down. People following them quickly trampled them. But Neeraj sensed a hesitation by the time the heap grew to about twenty people. Now a few of them were actually stepping around the fallen bodies. And then just for a second, he could see the trees in the background instead of only a mass of humanity. Neeraj jumped to his feet, and charged. He did not try to jump over the bodies he carefully stepped on them, his gun was held at waist level, pointing down close to his body. The moment he was roughly on top of the human mountain, he opened fire again. The sound of gunshots was drowned by the sound of thunder. The screams of victims were a little louder. By the time the second clip was empty; Neeraj had busted ten more kneecaps and shot two villagers in the stomach almost point blank. By then the unease of the villagers had turned in to a definite low-key panic. The mob spread itself wide; nobody made an attempt to disarm a single man with a handgun. They simply stepped wider, and walked a little quicker, their eyes glued to the ground beneath their feet. In that crazy moment, they reminded Neeraj of elderly housewives avoiding a tramp flasher. As he inserted his third and final clip into the gun, Neeraj could actually see the town clearly. Again keeping the gun pressed against his body he hunched his shoulders and charged. A small crowd blocked his path, but two shots and two busted knees later they too saw the light and gave him way. Neeraj continued running as fast as his bruised and aching legs would allow and collapsed only when he reached the beginning of the small footpath at the end of the beach. He rolled away from the path into the shrubbery and lay on his back panting. Rain fell on his face in big droplets and his breath was coming in sobs. His heart was thudding wildly in his chest. “Calm down boy, you did not butcher your way through a zillion villagers to die of a heart attack,” he said to himself and then finally gave way to the wave after wave of laughter that threatened to drown him, as surely as the mass of humanity a few moments ago.
Back in the jeep Happy seemed to be lost in his world once again. He whispered to himself, shook his head again and again. Then he suddenly sat very upright and looked around himself as if making sure that his surrounding did not change. After every few minutes, he would smile to himself and begin whispering again.
Shilpa was getting edgy by the minute. This man was freaking her out worse than the violence in the town. The resigned acceptance of his friends about his behavior was just as unnerving. Rani was keeping her hand in his, but apart from that she too seemed to be lost in her own thoughts and Ragini was calmly listening to some rock music with her headphones.
“You remind me of a cop I once met back when we were in Delhi,” Happy told Shilpa. At least he was not muttering to himself for which Shilpa was grateful.
“Is it? What was her name?”
“Rajiv something, a guy actually,” Happy said, and then just as suddenly he was lost once again. Only this time, he was considerably agitated. He had his fingers pressed tightly against his temple, and muttered furiously. Rani put her arm around him and talked soothingly in his ear.
Shilpa felt claustrophobic in the closed jeep and thought of telling Vinit to hurry up. But outside, the rain had grown worse. Vinit must be driving literally blind since visibility was reduced to five feet by then.
“Who is this cop your husband was talking about?” Shilpa asked conversationally to Rani. Rani jumped as if she was goosed. She ignored the question, a
nd continued stroking Happy’s head. His muttering had reduced and now he seemed to be falling asleep.
“What Cop?” Ragini asked Shilpa.
“Your friend said I remind him of a cop he met in Delhi,” Shilpa turned to her.
Ragini seemed to get some perverse pleasure in the reply. She lit a cigarette, and had a puff before replying, “Rajiv Routre. Happy was sentenced to three months of therapy in Delhi, after he attacked that cop in the railway station. They said the cop required some post trauma therapy too. Happy broke both his shinbones.”
Shilpa gasped and reached for her gun almost reflexively. Ragini smiled, and inserted the headphones in her ears again.
Happy times were here again.
Then Happy woke up and began saying something over and over again. This time he was audible. What he said made Vinit turn around in surprise.
“Legend of thousand swords,” he said.
In the 17th century, when King Shivaji ruled the western part of the country, a dashing sailor named Kanohaji Angre, was in charge of the royal navy. Indeed such was the dominance of Shivaji’s navy that all the pirates and robber sailors gave up the west coast and started plying their trade elsewhere. Kumbhpur back then was even smaller a place than now and its shores were considered to be of no use from the naval point of view. However, since it was close to an enemy base, Kanohaji Angre had left a small boat with a gun, and a detail of thirty men watching activity on that coast. Before Shivaji’s death in 1680, and the subsequent turmoil in Maharashtra, there was only one incident on Kumbhpur coast.
Angre’s fighter boats off the Sindhudurg coast spotted a vessel of sea pirates carrying a cache of double-edged swords for the Mogul navy and a chase ensued. With some luck, bad weather and masterful navigating, the pirates dodged the Maratha navy and decided to reach their destination via the present day Kolaba port. To reach there they had to cross the Kumbhpur coast. The pirates felt confident that they could outrun the small boat permanently deputed at that coast.
The pirates luck ran out ten miles inside sea from Kumbhpur. The Maratha navy boat spotted them and the captain of that boat, a reckless and brave young man named Indrajit Deshmukh, decided to go after them. As the boat closed down on them, the pirates finally decided to run for their lives. In order to gain speed they decided to unload the boat. The heavy iron swords, along with some food and fishing equipment, were thrown overboard. But in their haste of unloading the boat, they made the mistake of throwing an entire box full of swords directly overboard. The box hit the hull of the boat underwater, and the boat began leaking. In a matter of minutes, the heavy boat tilted at angle on the left side. By then panic reigned aboard. The pirates jumped into cold water and instantly died of drowning and cold. The ones, who stayed aboard a little longer, were quickly gunned down by the Maratha ship in their pursuit. It was a full moon night and all the Maratha naval men got a good view of the dying pirates.
After the boat sank, an attempt was made to recover the weapons, since the sea there was not known to be deep. However all the underwater missions failed to fetch so much as a single sword up and thus the legend of a thousand swords was born.
On full moon nights, many villagers claimed to see a boat rising from the depths of the sea. The boat always emerged tilted to the left, like the pirate boat was before it sank. And there were always some men running around the deck in white clothes. They would run aimlessly and scream. The screams could be heard even on the shore. Whenever the boat was sighted, the fishermen would not venture out to sea and a prayer to the sea goddess would be offered before crossing the spot where the boat was supposed to have sunk.
Occasionally fishermen’s nets would be sheared under water and there would be blood on the net even though the water itself would be clear blue. Sometimes fishermen brought on shore large fishes with their bellies cut wide open, cleanly as if by a surgeon’s knife. Nobody would eat those fishes. It was rumored that in the eighteenth century, a fishermen who did not believe in the legend made his wife cook one such dissected fish. The next day the fisherman, his wife and their three children were found dead in their beds, their bellies ripped open by a sharp weapon. In those days, such incidents were considered only as a reaffirmation of the old beliefs and the word foul play was not even heard of.
Old and wise men told that story when it complemented their point during any argument, or when they were in a mood to talk about occult. Generations believed that somewhere off the coast of their town at the bottom of the sea, the thousand swords and pieces of the sunken boat still lay. More than four centuries of seawater apparently had no effect on the swords. They were still shiny and razor sharp in their resting place. A wilder version of the legend had it that all the fauna nearby was blind for centuries now, because the sea was shallow enough for sunshine to reach the bottom and the constant reflection of steel glittering blinded them.
The Maratha Empire underwent changes after Shivaji’s death and after his son Sambhaji’s execution by the moguls. Soon the British came as traders and became rulers. Then the whole nation went to war in 1857 and lost. Then in the twentieth century a new breed of freedom fighters emerged and after a century of struggle India became independent again. Throughout the birth of the nation, through the three wars with the neighbors, through the emergency in the seventies, through assassination of a mother and son prime ministers and all the way through the birth of coalition politics, the legend of thousand swords grew. Feeding on numerous claims of sightings, it became stronger as it was retold a hundred thousand times in kitchens by mothers to their children, in farms by fathers to their sons and by wise old men in the village panchayats. The legend is now a living creature in Kumbhpur, for it sustains its charmed fear in the mind of those who hear it for the first time and those who are recounting it for a hundredth time. Each time some villager tells a newcomer that somewhere near the coast of this little town there are a thousand swords that lay buried, the legend buried in the sea, like its swords, assumes a life of its own. The legend for the villagers is as true as the discovery that the earth is round; therefore it should perhaps be no surprise to anyone that a visitor in their town should know about it, without anyone telling him about it.
At the same time as Vinit finished recounting the tale to his fellow travelers, Rajaji was fleeing in the opposite direction. There was no question that the strongman was spooked. The human sea that had so nearly swallowed Neeraj Joshi had earlier claimed Bhosale, Rajaji’s unfortunate aide. Rajaji tried saving him at first but had soon gave up. Bhosale was swept along with the crowd. Rajaji climbed a tree and sat there shaking with fear as Bhosale’s screams of terror were drowned. The crowd never broke their silence. A full thirty minutes after the last man had gone out of sight; Rajaji climbed down and went looking for Bhosale. He found his lieutenant lying near the end of the road. His head was smashed to pulp and his right arm was hanging loosely in the ditch. By then Rajaji’s panic was complete. He turned and ran for his jeep. Inside, he recovered his mobile phone from the passenger seat and tried calling first his office, then his home and finally, Vinit on his mobile. But it was futile, the thunderstorms and rain had rendered mobile connectivity to almost zero. Rajaji headed home in his jeep. He wanted to send his wife and their sons out of town, along with a couple of trusted strongmen, till this situation was resolved. He knew he himself could not leave. Leaving the town in a moment of apparent crisis would be a sign of weakness and with his party out of power in the state assembly; this weakness might prove to be political suicide.
However, in his ancestral house he would feel safer and he could use the phone in his house if the landlines were working. He prepared a mental list of the people to call upon for help and advice while getting off the tar road to take a small by-lane that eventually ended up in front of his house. He noticed that the village was deathly silent. Even considering the weather, he would have expected some sign of life. A lit window of a kitchen, an old man sitting in his verandah spitting tobacco in the rainwater.
Today all doors were closed and there was not as much as a candle to battle darkness. He leaned forward and wiped the fogging windshield with the back of his palm and concentrated on the small pothole filled road ahead. In some deep defeatist corner of his mind, he remembered that terrible moment in his office when he had felt that terrible dread just after having a drink. Now he recognized that vague feeling as premonition. Now, he prayed to the power up above for another premonition to tell him what exactly he was supposed to do.
Eventually he reached the stout wooden gates of his bungalow. In the glare of his headlights he saw something unusual. The door was slightly ajar and there was absolutely nobody at the gate. Since the violent assembly elections last year, he always kept one guard armed with a desi gun at the gate, twenty four hours a day. It was unthinkable that the guard would choose tonight as the night to take off. Not with all the violence around town.
Rajaji got out of his jeep and cocked the hammer of his pistol. Keeping the pistol pointed towards the ground, he cautiously stepped inside his house. The corridor leading to the main house was vacant. Even the dogs his younger son had were nowhere to be seen. And the whole place was as silent as as a grave. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and tried to muster courage; his heart thudding loudly inside his chest.
“Radhika, Ashok where are you?” he called. No reply.
“Radhika, Santosh, Ashok where have you all gone? Radhika?” He was shouting by now. In his entire life he never remembered walking inside his house and finding it empty. He ascended steps that led to the main house. Again the front door was not locked from the inside. He pushed it open and entered extremely cautiously.
Kumbhpur Rising Page 17
