Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  “Alok let’s leave this place, it is creeping me out.”

  Again, there seemed to be no reassurance from Happy. He acknowledged her sentiment with a nod of his thin head and continued humming.

  “Alok I said let’s leave.”

  “In case you have not noticed we are inside a police station dear so probably leaving just like that might make us fugitives.”

  “What for? We have done nothing wrong.”

  “This is short term memory talking Rani; do you really think you have done nothing wrong? That you never stepped on a toe that had been stepped over all its life? That you have been fair to everyone all your life? If you believe that, then may be you are the one who needed medication and this vacation baby.”

  “What has this got to do with anything Alok? I am saying right now we are not accused of anything, so let’s leave. Let the police take care of the whole mess.”

  “What a beautiful term “right now”. I think when our generation gets wiped out our eulogy will begin with “this generation lived in the right now,” Happy said and resumed singing. Rani knew the song. He was singing the last part of the Eagle’s Last Resort.

  There are no more new frontiers, we gotta make it here

  Satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds

  In the name of destiny in the name of God……

  While listening to the off key singing of her demented husband, Rani suddenly realized why Happy seemed so calm about it.

  He had seen what was coming…..

  And he had led his beloved wife and his faithful friends right into it.

  The word redemption has a different meaning for all of us. In Indian predominantly Hindu communities, the ideas of sin and salvation are probably not as strong as in the Christian religion, but Alok had an education that was wide and deep. And he had learnt well. He understood the concept of redemption on an intellectual level. The idea of salvation had been his companion all his life.

  At the beginning of his troubles in Delhi, Alok had reported audio visual hallucinations. Some of the weirder ones he told the doctor in order to convince him to put Alok on medication. The simpler ones, the ones that disturbed him the most, he kept to himself.

  He would often walk to his office in uptown Delhi and suddenly turning around the corner, the man standing on the footpath, waiting for the ‘walk’ light to come on, would turn and he would be the same guy Rani was dating but dumped when Alok came into her life. The guy would smile and probably say hello, but Alok could see him the way he would have been the night Rani told him she couldn’t go out with him anymore. He would see a hurt, angry, sad kid trying to come to terms with the simple fact of competition in his life. Or he would be having a burger at a stand next to his office building and would see a teenager sitting and sipping on her soda. He would see Ragini in her place, the way she was on the night, when Nishant had got drunk and called his MD a cocksucker. He would see the helplessness in her eyes and her body. He would know, that in exchange of allowing Nishant to keep his severance package, the woman would go right down on her knees and suck the man who had the power of forgiving her husband.

  The evening when he assaulted the cop, had been no different. All along he had been seeing those small people who had been crushed by the meaningless tragedies of everyday life. Walking to the metro station from his office, he remembered Ragini, the feisty, spunky, but hardworking girl, turned into a prostitute. He remembered Rakesh’s mail saying how he was beaten up by the collection team of his credit card company. He remembered Jeet calling him and telling him that he was now going to live the life of a woman, since it was obvious he could not take care of himself. Alok remembered Jeet particularly well, a shy, slightly sullen kid, who could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. Jeet lost his job with everyone and then the economic instability made him come out of his closet. He had done the same thing that Ragini had done, but for that he had to change the very core of his being. He began dressing in girl’s clothes and started putting up his snaps on the net in the hope of finding a boyfriend who could provide for him. The quest was now over with him staying with the same man for over two years. But it had not been without its own baggage of setbacks. Alok remembered Rajat telling him how Jeet had gone on a blind date and how he was beaten within an inch of his life by a man who at the last moment discovered he was not gay and was disgusted by Jeet’s feminine appearance. Alok was feeling crushed by what his therapist used to call “excessive irrational empathy”. He could feel the helplessness that had driven all his friends who trusted him, to the kind of lives they were leading. Rajat and Rakesh living the lonely lives of borderline alcoholics, Ragini and Jeet living the shadowy lives of commercial sex workers. None of them had thought they would turn out that way and even when it turned out so, they always thought it would end. But it would not; real life was not full of comeback stories like ‘Seabiscuit’ it was full of ordinary tragedies like ‘Death of a Salesman.’

  All his life, Alok was always the establishment man. Barring his problem with his parents on the issue of his marriage, he was always the one for order, always playing by the rules and good at it. One reason his team always revered him was they saw in him some promise, that in life, the order ruled. They were in their own ways outcasts, and Alok had shown them how to be part of the system, and how to beat it at its own game. But it had extracted its own price, and everyone around him had paid. Alok knew if there was ever a census taken of people who ruled, and people who were ruled, he would always be the part of the ones who ruled, while his friends would primarily were the ones who were ruled. And Alok knew it was not a just rule, he had exploited them as much as anyone around them, and the fact that they did not know it, only made it worse. When the thought of the attack came to him for the first time, it scared him not because it went against the order that he liked, but because he knew if there was such an attack, then he would be the one under fire, and the justly so. That knowledge, and not excessive irrational empathy, was the source of his psychosis.

  In his final four months in Delhi, Alok was only thinking about the attack and nothing else. He had finally realized that he could avert the attack no more than he could stop the rain from coming, so the decision was whether he stuck with the establishment, and helped them crush the attack the way he had all his life, or for once he should stand for something that went against the grain of his upbringing, but felt right.

  When he kicked the cop in the nuts, he had made his decision.

  Now here he was, once again a disillusioned revolutionary. Two full years after attacking the cop in Delhi, Alok aka Happy knew there was always order. The battle was not between the good and the evil, there were no heroes in this version of God’s play, it was only a question of which particular brand of order was going to come out winner.

  Alok was afraid, whoever won, his friends had lost.

  ***

  Chapter 13

  By the time Vinit walked back to the main police station, the rain had worsened. The noise of the rain falling on the thatched roof of the police station was loud enough to make conversations difficult. Vinit walked in with Neeraj a step behind him. He had a gun rammed into the small of Vinit’s back.

  Shilpa and Rajwade had their guns out and trained on Neeraj before the other people realized that he was there. Neeraj said softly “Easy folks, my gun is on his back, so just calm down. Hello Ragini.”

  The only free sex I had in last two years is with a serial killer; how’s that? Ragini thought and smiled at Neeraj.

  “Let him go and put the gun down, you are under arrest,” Shilpa said in a shaky voice. She could not, for the life of her, imagine the nerve of the man wanted for multiple murders, walk into a police station.

  “As the saying goes, it is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” Alok contributed dryly. Promptly Ragini, Rakesh and Rajat yakked up.

  “Shut up,” Shilpa said, and took a step forward.

  “Please stay where you are madam, he
really has a gun to my back,” Vinit said. Everyone in the room admired his calm. For a man on the twenty-fourth straight hour on the job of witnessing man at his worst and now with a gun in his back, Vinit was remarkably under control.

  “Would you just listen to me Shilpa for once?” Neeraj said and raised his gun so that everyone could see it. He leveled it at Vinit’s left ear, and took a step forward.

  “You listen to me, keep the gun down and surrender; I am not going to tell you twice.”

  “Can someone please talk some sense in this woman?” Neeraj said with exasperation “I am not the one you want to watch out for officer, if by end of tomorrow morning both of us are alive and out of this place, I guarantee you will have my signed confession for all the murders you want, hell I will even confess for a few unsolved ones if that will help you in a promotion. But right now, you got to listen to me and listen well because there is not a whole of lot of time to waste here.”

  “We are not talking till you have that gun in your hand” Shilpa said “ Raje on the count of three you take this man down if he does not drop the gun,” Raje, not entirely convinced, moved away from her and leveled his gun at Neeraj’s head.

  “Aren’t, you kinda forgetting him?” Happy asked, pointing at Vinit.

  “He is as they call small change, Mr. Shukla” Neeraj said. “This woman will probably get a bravery medal for catching me. Life of a country cop doesn’t mean a whole lot to her. Anyway, I don’t think this is gonna work out, so a piece of advice, leave this place as soon as you can. These cops can’t protect you,” with this advice Neeraj pushed Vinit away from him, and before the city cops could react, he raised his gun and fired two quick shots at the ceiling lamps, taking them out. Ragini was hit with a flying piece of glass and she could hear Rakesh too howling with pain.

  Things were happening too fast for everyone. Vinit collapsed to his knees and started shaking as Shilpa and Rajwade ran out looking for Neeraj. Shilpa had instinctively fired two shots in the dark, but she knew they had hit nothing. Now out in the rain, she could see nothing but darkness.

  “Where did he go?” Shilpa asked Raje, but the senior cop was no longer interested in pursuing the serial killer. He was watching gape mouthed, towards the direction they had come from an hour back. Shilpa’s eyes followed him, and she too forgot about Neeraj for a minute.

  The street coming from the beach to the police station was no longer deserted. Now there was a group of about twenty people walking in a soundless procession towards the police station. They were a mixed bunch, men, women, and children. The group seemed totally impervious to the falling rain which was coming in sheets. Each one of them also had a shining sword held in front of them.

  Shilpa took a step backwards and bumped into Rajat who had walked out and seen what she had seen. In her high strung state, she almost shot Rajat in the face.

  “Guess the mysterious Mr. Joshi was right, he is the least of your worries right now,” Rajat said and retreated inside the police station. The crowd, turning left, was slowly entering the station compound. Shilpa and Raje raised their guns and started retreating back into the station room.

  “What the fuck do these people think they are doing?’ Raje asked in a husky whisper.

  “Stay where you are. Drop those swords, I order you” Shilpa’s voice had completely broken, a step away from hysteria. The crowd continued their silent march.Now their leaders were a few steps away from the station porch.

  Vinit pushed Shilpa aside rudely, and fired a shot in the air with the .303 rifle he had found inside his barrack. “Go away, or we will open fire” he shouted.

  “What are you doing?” Shilpa asked.

  “This is my town and I am taking charge, so now shut up, and stay out of this,” he said. Shilpa saw Rajat and Rakesh too were out now, each had a .303 rifle in their hands aimed squarely at the crowd.

  Shilpa was furious at being talked to like this, but she saw Vinit’s tactic working, the crowd was taking hesitant steps backwards. Watching their movements, she thought they were not human at all, but some set of bizarre string puppets. None of them had any individual moves, when they stopped, they stopped together and when they walked they walked together. They looked like the world’s worst dressed, but most disciplined army.

  Rajat started climbing down the stairs of the porch, and towards the parking lot. He was on the last step of the porch when there was a loud scream. Rajat kept his presence of mind. He knew if he turned, there would be a dozen swords poking out of his lungs, before be could take so much as a step. He held the railings for support, and climbed backwards, only when he was back on the porch again, did he turn. It had taken no more than ten seconds.

  Raje was down on his knees, screaming with pain and terror. His left hand was hanging by a few tissues from his torso. There were now villagers on the porch. In a moment Rajat knew what had happened. This was a coordinated attack, where the crowd coming from the front was a distraction. While they were busy pushing them back, another set of villagers armed with swords had climbed the fence of the building from the back, and had crept onto the porch unnoticed. Raje, who was standing nearest the railings, was the first one to get hit. If Rajat had not started going down to take out their jeep it would have been him.

  One of the attackers brought his sword down in a flat arc and severed Raje’s head from his body. Everyone near got drenched as the arterial blood gushed out like a fountain. Raje’s head rolled and dropped in the muddy ground beneath.

  Vinit, whose mental vapor lock had lasted for less than a few seconds at being flanked, was the first to react. He turned his rifle and shot Raje’s killer point blank in the stomach, slamming him back against his comrade, the impact of the shell threw both the men against the railings and they went over backwards.

  Rajat sat heavily on the porch, and carefully aimed at the crowd beore him. They were moving towards the porch again. Rajat Sathe, the banker who had never so much as broken a bone in his life so far, took aim and shot the man nearest to him. It hit him in the chest, and threw him against the crowd. There was some hesitation again. And then there was one more shot fired from behind him, and a howl which was barely human.

  “You sick fucks” Shilpa screamed and ran into the crowd. She had a pistol in each hand and she was firing at hip level. The crowd now broke and began running towards the exit. Shilpa did not stop, her aim was impaired by poor visibility and rage but she more than made up for it by the volume of gunfire. Rajat was dumbfounded as the cop emptied both the clips before she was standing on the muddy ground below him. She reloaded in less than a minute and ran towards the dispersing crowd again, shooting everything that was moving. Her luck was good too, when a couple of swordsmen tried to come from behind her, Shilpa, almost by sixth sense, turned on her heels and shot them both in the head.

  “Where do you think you are going, you bitch, it’s not over yet,” Shilpa screamed and shot a woman who was clumsily trying to climb the fence to escape. The bullet hit her in the spine and she lay twitching on the fence. Shilpa came out of the compound and saw a couple of teenage boys running away from the station. A delicious feeling ran over her. There were no explanations to be given, no count of bullets, no tedious paperwork. It was killing time. Her head felt pleasantly light the way it felt after consuming a glass of very expensive vintage wine. She took aim and shot one of the boys in his back. He was lifted off his feet as if hit by a truck and thrown against a tree. The second boy turned in dumb terror as Shilpa took careful aim and shot him in his thin bony shin. The boy was thrown backwards by the impact and lay in a puddle of water, twitching.

  Once again operating purely on sixth sense, she turned at right angles and saw two women noiselessly charging towards her their swords held high, probably their fear of the guns overcome by Shilpa’s madness. Shilpa smiled and lifted both the guns in her hands. She had difficulty in keeping her eyes open, a delicious wave of orgasmic pleasure was running all over her. She shot both the women just below their b
reastbones. They both dropped to the ground in a heap. Shilpa let out a moan of pleasure. She was shaking.

  “AAhhhhh” Shilpa said and walked to the women lying in a heap. She was now having difficulties in keeping her legs together. Dropping to her knee next to them, she turned the woman on top over, a forty year old villager. She was dead; her eyes open in the final terror. Shilpa pushed her aside and saw the woman beneath her. She was about Shilpa’s age; her sari pallu was smoking with the gunshot. She was alive, only barely so.

  “Think it is fun killing people, bitch?” Shilpa asked her in a gentle voice.

  “Hurts…. Oohhhhh…”

  “I know, it hurts, my friend” Shilpa said in a breathless moan then she squeezed the trigger with the barrel of the pistol inside the bullet hole. There was a loud explosion, and then there was no more sound barring Shilpa’s jagged grasping breaths and the sound of rain pelting away.

  ***

  After ensuring that the compound area was clear of all intruders, the search party comprising of Rajat, Rakesh and Vinit cautiously stepped out of the boundary of the police station. Unbelievably, it was not the sword wielding villagers that they were worried about now.

  While Shilpa had ran out to take care of the villagers, there were three villagers still inside the station who had not been distracted. Miraculously, there were no damages to the group from the city since Vinit had shot two of them as they entered the main room through a window and Rakesh and Rajat had knocked the other one senseless with their rifle butts. Later, for a reason known only to Vinit, he had stepped over the prone form and shot him through the head. By then Shilpa in Rakesh’s colorful words, had gone “postal” and was pumping the woman on fence with bullets. After ensuring that the police station was clear of attackers, Vinit rushed out to help Shilpa. Rajat and Rakesh followed him, ignoring Rani and Ragini who were screaming in a thin continuous monotone. Vinit no more than stepped out of the awning of the porch in the rain outside, when he heard Shilpa’s hysterical scream from beyond the wall and the sound of gunshots. The next moment he heard two more gunshots and a gut wrenching scream of a boy from beyond the boundary wall.