Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  “What the hell?” Rajat said gasping for breath. If he thought Vinit’s shooting the prone man inside the police station was cold blooded, watching Shilpa squeezing shots after shots at retreating villagers was unnerving. They could make out her silhouette in the darkness illuminated by the muzzle flash of her pistols.

  “I need to stop her” Vinit said, and started running in her direction. Rajat looked at Rakesh, and raised his eye brow. Rakesh, who was always the stronger of the two, shook his head in the affirmative. Then they turned and saw the two women charging Shilpa and in a blinding flash of thunder, they saw Shilpa’s face for a brief second. Her conventionally pretty face was now unrecognizable in a mask of animal lust. She bared her teeth, let out a howl and shot the women point blank. Rajat needed to see no more. He broke into a jog, and pulled Vinit inside the compound ducked beneath an old, rusty skeleton of a jeep with the cop.

  “What are you doing?” Vinit asked. They were joined by Rakesh. They saw Shilpa reloading her gun, and walking towards the fallen women. She was walking with her legs very close, like a woman in extreme arousal, or the one who had to pee in a second or risk wetting her pantsuit. She dropped to her knees, and flipped one of the women over.

  “Vinit that woman shot and killed about a dozen men in less than three minutes. The woman hanging on that fence was probably fifty years old and there are a couple of teenage boys lying in the gutter by the roadside, bleeding. You have heard her howling and …” Rajat was cut off by the sound of the gun going off once again, and then the blood curdling scream from Shilpa. It brought goose bumps on Rajat’s wet hands and arms.

  “ She has gone postal buddy, approaching her like this will only result in us losing the only sane person left in this town and that would be a tragedy” Rakesh said and laughed nervously.

  “I can’t leave her like this; obviously she had some kind of a breakdown. We need to calm her and for that I need to bring her in.”

  “Calm her? In her current condition, nothing short of a bullet in the brain would calm her.”

  “Hey, don’t even think about that” Vinit snapped. Rakesh waved an apologetic hand.

  “At least approach her cautiously, make sure she is disarmed before we bring her in. You yourself have agreed that she has had a breakdown, so God knows what is going through her mind right now” Rajat said.

  They finally decided upon approaching Shilpa from both sides. Rajat and Rakesh would go over the back wall and circle around the station to come back on the main road where Shilpa was sitting in the middle with her gun in her lap, howling like an animal in heat. Vinit would approach her from the main gate and peacefully ask her to surrender. Rakesh and Rajat left together and Vinit sat on his knees watching Shilpa closely. He wanted to ensure Rajat and Rakesh were at least over the wall and on their way, before he moved. Of all the horrifying incidents he had witnessed this morning, watching an educated, intelligent woman going berserk like this had been the most shocking. He looked up to the sky as dark as the depths of the darkest sea and saw no lightning but just a steady thump of rain.

  He stepped out of the notional safety of the compound and out onto the muddy road. Carefully circling the fallen body of the first teenage boy, he left the main road and turned right angle on the unpaved dirt road. The squat police station building looked suitably sinister in the rainy darkness. There was a big tamarind tree near the compound wall and it was near that tree the violent climax of Shilpa’s orgy had taken place. Vinit approached the tree with gun drawn and held forward, muzzle pointing downwards like he was taught, but the only people he met there were his own back ups. Rajat and Rakesh stood there looking equally lost. The dead women were lying near the trunk of the tree and their blood was slowly losing its darkness after being diluted in the rainwater. But there was no Shilpa. She was gone.

  “Neeraj Joshi is out there, sword wielding villagers are out there, now your boss is out there too. So many crazies, in such a small place.” Rakesh remarked.

  “Let’s go back and calm down the women, they must be flipping out by now.” Rajat suggested. Nobody had any argument over that. They retreated and without a word being spoken they walked in a loose circle with backs to each other, and guns cocked and drawn. The last ten minutes had taught them the value of being on guard.

  Chapter 14

  Remarkably, the only person to have slept through the entire carnage, beginning with the dead foxes in the early evening, was now slowly stirring.

  Saket, the fugitive soldier, wondered if what he did could be classified as a suicide attempt. He had started drinking in the early afternoon and after consuming eight large pegs of whisky, he had emptied the entire strip of Restyl SR tablets in his final peg. He did not expect to wake up after that. But he had and now was feeling disoriented.

  The reason for the botched suicide attempt was very simple. Saket had large quantities of alcohol on an empty stomach and in less than twenty minutes after falling asleep he had thrown up right across his room. He had fallen asleep again after vomiting violently a few times. Now that he woke up in total darkness, he could feel some of his vomit drying across his bare chest and his bed sheet. Fumbling in darkness, he flipped his lighter and lit a candle that was by his bedside. He saw a thick strip of vomit right from the foot of the bed to the door of the bathroom where he must have tried to reach unsuccessfully in his slumber. His stomach churned, and he felt bile rising again. His headache was nearly blinding him and his stomach felt unsettled, like he was on a cruise in an angry sea. When he tried to get up from the bed, his legs would not carry him and he collapsed on the bed again, his breath coming in harsh gasps. He didn’t know if it was due to the sickness he felt in his stomach or his heart.

  Still fighting for normal breathing, Saket reached for the water bottle by his bed side. His hands were so shaky that he had to hold the bottle against his stomach in order not to drop it; he pried the lid open and drank the entire bottle in a few gulps. He felt the bile rising again, but this time he could at least hold the water down for some time. He rested for about ten minutes and then decided to try walking again.

  He had to hold on to the wall for most of the way, but he could walk to the attached bathroom without falling down again. He walked to the shower with wobbly legs, and opened the tap full stream. Cold water sprayed his already cold body and he shivered, but he did not move from the shower. Slowly, with the cold water stinging his body, he regained his senses.

  He knew that he was not going to die now, at least not by the sleeping pills. There were forces at work larger than him, larger than the army he served. Those forces had conspired to keep him alive, despite taking what was enough to kill at least two men. He had decided to kill himself because despite begging and praying for it every day for the last two years, the girl on the hills had remained unforgiving and his hope of redemption was lost. Saket could live with this burden no longer, so he had decided to end it, thinking that if he is not forgiven, at least in death he would be forgotten. But now he knew that this was not to be. He felt despair and hope at once, strange as it may sound.

  Despair, because he knew that there was no refuge even in death from his deeds; and hope because he knew that if death denied him refuge, maybe the life had something in store for him. Something that would probably come close to salvation for his crimes. Saket was no coward; he had fought in the famous Dras Sector battle with the Pakistani insurgents for five days in sub zero temperatures. On his way back he had carried a gunshot wound in his abdomen and shrapnel wound in his calf, but refused to give up his post till the time he was ordered to. The medal in his bag was a testament to his bravery in one of the harshest, highest cold battlefields seen by man kind. But there were wounds he carried from the war that no surgeon could remove and that had plunged his life into a vortex of alcoholism and depression. And then the girl on the hill had happened.

  After standing below the nearly ice cold water for some time, Saket’s headache was replaced with a dull throbbing pain. He
turned off the shower and walked out naked into his room. There was a towel hanging by the nail near his bed. Saket used it to dry himself and opened his suitcase to take out a fresh set of clothes.

  He was dressed in a black jeans and t-shirt, when he suddenly realized how quiet the house was. He looked at his wrist watch, it was nearly nine pm, but the house felt eerily silent. There was no sound of the women’s shrill laughter, or the deep belly guffaws of the men who were drinking since the time they had arrived yesterday evening. No footsteps, no smell of food or smoke, no sound at all. Saket went to the window and opened it for a second before latching it shut again. The rain had turned into the kind of fury only seen in coastal towns. The quick look out was enough to soak his tee shirt enough to warrant a change. Saket peeled it off, and as he again dried himself, he wondered where the hell everybody was. Probably noting the weather deteoriating, they had cut short their vacation and decided to go back to wherever they had come from. But then at least the owner who was also among them would have informed his paying guest about the worsening weather. And what about that strange bald man? Had he left with them too? Fighting in Dras had helped Saket develop almost telepathic understanding about his surroundings. Not only did the house feel empty, the whole town felt empty. There was a feeling in the air(Saket could describe it no better), that seemed to indicate that somehow his near fatal sleep had not only left him disoriented but also seriously out of synch with reality.

  Not believing that he would ever do such a thing again, Saket opened the hidden compartment at the bottom of his suitcase, and held a handgun for the first time in years. Stranger still, it made him feel better.

  ***

  Inside the station the atmosphere was hysteric. Rajat had done a bang-up job of cooing and sweet talking both the women in inaudible whispers till the time they stopped screaming and sobbing. Now he had found a pot and some tea powder and was preparing tea on the station stove. Happy was sitting with his wife in his lap and Ragini resting with her head on his thighs. They looked like extremely sad rappers in some bizarre threesome video. Rakesh and Vinit attended the more gruesome task of removing the dead bodies from their sight. Rajat could hear Rakesh’s dry heaves and admired him for holding on.

  Rakesh and Vinit came back in and Rajat poured tea in aluminum mugs. Happy shared his with Rani, while Ragini and Rakesh shared one. Vinit and Rajat had theirs standing by the stove.

  “What a place. God!” Rani whispered and shivered against Happy.

  Vinit sighed and leaned against the sink near the stove. He was putting his thoughts together; knowing what Neeraj had told him could not remain with him anymore.

  “Folks it gets worse…” Vinit began narrating what he had learnt from Neeraj about the mobs rampaging through the town, about Rajaji losing his nerve upon seeing his dead children. When he told them about Neeraj’s fracas with the villagers who seemed to have committed mass suicide in the stormy ocean, the temperature in the room dropped a few notches.

  “Legend of thousand swords” Happy said.

  “What do you mean?” Rakesh asked.

  “The mob outside was wielding swords, weren’t they?” Happy asked.

  “Hey don’t go connecting dots Happy, we don’t know if Neeraj was telling the truth, or if he was just jerking us off. He could do that, he is a murderer remember?” Rajat said in a sharp voice.

  “Whatever he is, he was not lying.” Happy said with eerie calmness.

  “How do you know for sure Happy?” Ragini asked in a small voice.

  “Because it is moving in a predestinate manner, that’s why. Neeraj saw that, that’s why he took the risk of walking into a police station knowing that these cops were hunting for him. He saw it the same way I did, because both of us are different from the rest of you. We can accept the truth, no matter how irrational it is, if it stares us in the face and probably because both of us saw the invasion coming,”

  “Also, because you both are more than a little crazy,” Rakesh said and laughed lightheartedly. Rajat winced and scowled at Rakesh. Rakesh ignored him.

  “May be that,” Happy said with the air of one conceding a minor point. “But you could not ignore the logic of it.”

  “Logic?” Vinit failed to see a single logical thing in a whole village becoming homicidal.

  “Logic of a revolution officer, I will take you step by step and illustrate how everything is moving in a predestinate order. This is copybook revolution stuff.” Happy said, and motioned for Rani to get off his lap. He stood up, stretched, and asked for a cigarette from Rajat. Rajat lit one and gave him.

  “There are three essential ingredients to any good revolution. One you need an order set for generations, a monarchy in its third generation, a dictator ruling for a couple of decades, or a puppet government being run by a big brother economic superpower. Its no fun overthrowing a government elected democratically which is doing a bang up job of running their nation”

  “Second you need suffering at mass level. You need unemployment, and you need inflation in double digits. You need your average Joe blow to be scavenging food out of dumpsters on one hand, while the rulers are eating in gold bowls with silver spoons on the other, if you don’t mind my literary turn.”

  “Third, and most important, is a visionary who will see both these things at once and realize how he can use the masses to become a ruler, that’s your revolutionary leader. He is the ray of hope that comes in the life of the people who have lost all hopes and are too dumb to know that all they are doing. He is trading one form of exploitation for another.”

  “You see Hitler in Germany, what he gave them was hope and promise of an independent proud nation; while in reality he was nothing but a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur. A whole country follows him, and bang we have World War II.”

  Rajat and Rakesh were listening to Happy, gape mouthed. This was Happy at his charismatic best, Rajat felt he was back in the company, listening to Happy tell them how it was.

  “The visionary leader does not believe in negotiations, he does not believe in letting the machines of a democratic rule take over, he does not believe in courts, he does not believe in diplomacy. He is the original architect of destruction, with the revolution being his masterpiece. And he is street smart above all. That’s why most of regimes do not think of him as a threat till mobs are rampaging through their homes, beheading them, and decapitating their children. The revolution needs to be bloody for the leader since he wants to ensure that nobody ever comes back to kill him and it has to be bloody for the mobs since this somehow acts as a catharsis for them, teaching them it is bad to be violent and unruly.”

  “And boom! Just like that, the older regime is overthrown, its emperors/leaders either killed or hiding in some European country, giving that occasional interview on BBC. And the mobs think that finally they have won freedom for their generations to come. What everyone seems to forget is that they are now controlled by a person who is only a strategist of death. His most difficult challenge is to convince people to follow him when there is no more war to be fought.”

  “So then what does the regime do? It finds voices of dissent, however small and goes on silencing them, one by one. The liberals are the ones to go first usually, the disillusioned poets, the freelance journalists and the occasional Booker winner who tried to tell that something is not as per the promise.”

  “What happens essentially is the shrinkage of a society, till the time only people who are left are brain washed and brain dead. Remember a dictator is the ultimate ruler of the dead. But unfortunately, by the time his society has evolved in to a zombie team, the commercial demands of keeping a country afloat become very severe and the dictator fails through incompetence where his predecessor had failed through greed. Again comes poverty, unemployment and double digit inflation and by then probably another economic superpower takes pity on the piss-poor country It invades them; exit the old dictator, enter a new puppet who is really a lapdog for the superpower. Life begins
to resemble normalcy.”

  “Excuse me Happy, but I think comparing Hitler to whoever is behind this seems a little hmmm… pardon me, crazy” Vinit said. He had called Happy by his nickname for the first time without even realizing it.

  “No crazier than a bunch of armed villagers cutting your colleague to ribbons and then your boss going berserk.” Ragini pointed out to him. Vinit threw his hands in air as if to say give me a break here.

  “Happy, Vinit your exchange is quite fascinating in its own right, and someday believe me I would like to take the whole thing down in shorthand, but can you please cut the crap and start dealing with whatever is going on rather than dicking with it,” Rani said.

  “Baby I am not the practical kind. I can only tell you what is with the soul, you want to deal with the bodies, then you have these guys here. I guess they all are getting used to killings now.” Happy said. Rajat looked hurt, Rakesh grimaced and turned his back, only Rani stood with hands on her hips and thrust her face till it was inches apart from Happy’s.

  “Wake up big boy; you led us into this, now you will lead us back.” Rajat tried to pull her by the arm, but Rani brushed him off and continued, poking Happy in the ribs, for emphasis. “The fresh air and cheap boarding were eyewash for us, wasn’t it? How about it ‘Rajat I am a little sort on cash now man’,” Rani mimicked Happy, and lowered her voice before continuing,”You knew what was going to happen and you led us here on the pretext of your health, you bastard. I am your wife, but why did you bring these poor jerks here? Hasn’t life kicked them enough to suit you? What you want them to do? Die fighting the good war?”