Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  “Let’s face it Rani, none of us had much of a life before coming here, so I guess if Happy is leading us to slaughter in these mud fields we don’t have much to lose,” Rajat said calmly. For the first time there was some kind of change in him, and looking at him closely Ragini realized why Happy was not as close to Rajat as he was to the rest of them. Beneath the sober, peaceful exterior the banker had, there was some inner quality, some strength that no one seemed to be able to tap into, not even Happy. It was some kind of reserve developed not by education or work, but inherent to the person like his bone structure or eyes. She remembered him standing his ground during the fox attack and then shooting the villager in head one moment, trying to restrain the mad cop the very next. Violence did not come to him easily, but instantly, when he needed it the most.More importantly the smell of blood failed to travel from his nasal passages to his brain, the way it seemed to be traveling for everyone else.

  “But on the action part I go with Rani Madam, so thank you but no thank you Happy. We will discuss the finer points of what is going on later on, for now let’s decide what is needed to be done and let’s do it,” Rajat completed.

  “Ah a man of action, I am proud of you son,” Happy said.

  Vinit interjected, “I think you people should leave in your Scorpio and reach Sindhudurg.”

  “And you Vinit?” Rakesh asked in a soft voice.

  “I can’t leave till this is over Rakesh. There is no other law enforcement officer in the whole town right now and I also have to think about a senior who seems to be having a breakdown of some kind.”

  “If what that gun toting bitch had is called a breakdown, then this downpour is a drizzle. Not too put too fine a point Vinit, but currently she is crazier than Neeraj the serial killer and Happy the philosopher,” Rani said.

  “You people don’t understand. It is my job. There might be sick, hurt, citizens of the town out there, they need help. I can’t run away from my responsibilities,” Vinit said.

  “So what is it, Vinit? You against a town full of bad guys? Yippee-ka-ye motherfuckers?” Rakesh asked sarcastically.

  “It may not be as bad, there might be other survivors and I am sure my district office is sending some help. I just need to hold fort for a while,” Vinit said, though he seemed unconvinced himself.

  “I know my credibility in this episode is low at the moment, but if there is one thing I am sure of, it is this - we try to run we are dead,” Happy said and this time when Rani tried to turn on him angrily, he cut her off with an impatient wave of the hand “These guys want us to run away. Remember Patton - an Enemy’s rear is a happy hunting ground for a soldier. We try to make it out of the town in this weather over a waterlogged and possibly broken bridge, we are dead meat.”

  “Oh now you want to fight too, Happy?” Rani asked.

  “No baby, but I don’t think I will wait for help, because none is coming.”

  “Why do you say so?” Vinit Asked.

  “Because officer Kamble, we are the help,” Happy told him calmly. Then he began humming in his tuneless way.

  Saket climbed the staircase in pitch-black darkness with his gun extended in front of him. His eyes, by now accustomed to the darkness, confirmed what he knew already. The house was empty and the door was neatly locked from the outside. Apparently, the other tourists had forgotten about this heroic soldier in their haste. Saket opened a window and a gust of heavy wind and rain almost knocked him back. However, keeping the window pressed against the wall with one hand, he was able to extend his arm enough to open the door from the outside and let himself out. Now he reached inside the duffel bag he carried over his shoulder and took out his flashlight. He cupped the beam with his free hand to survey the scene outside.

  It was beautiful; the way only a seaside town could be at midnight in monsoon. The rain had created a curtain which made him see things a little distorted, as if he was seeing the same in a movie by a maverick moviemaker. The sea, so majestic in its anger and the coconut trees swaying precariously till one would think they would topple over. Saket turned the beam in an arc till it rested on a dead body.

  Even from a distance there was no doubt that the man lying in a ditch towards the beach side, where the narrow road ended and the sandy beach actually started, was dead. Saket’s soldier’s instincts in full gear, he stepped out of the porch and into the blinding rain. He pulled the hood of his jacket as far as it would go and walked towards the body in a crouch. His eyes were constantly scanning the surroundings.

  Saket reached the muddy ditch and trained his torch on the dead man. It was not a pretty sight. His head was bashed in to a point where the skull fragments and the brain matter was mixed with the mud below. His arm was twisted at an unnatural angle and from the way his body was at right angles, it was obvious that the poor man also had a broken spine.

  Saket felt no revulsion, no fear. There was a throbbing in his temples, but that was more due to his misadventures than any revulsion at seeing the gruesome sight. After all in Dras he had seen dead bodies in far worse conditions. He was now only wondering what the hell happened when he was asleep. He cautiously turned and saw a small leather wallet lying near the body. Saket picked it up, the few hundred rupee bills were soaked and useless, but the driver’s license was laminated and he could read the name of the owner. It was registered to one Ranbir Patil aged forty in 2000. Saket wondered if the dead man was the owner of the vehicle, but decided it did not matter. What did though was the fact that the license also had the owner’s address and it was not far from here. Saket walked to his car and climbed into it. He kept the gun on the passenger seat where he could pick it at a moment’s notice. He changed gears and maneuvered the old Zen onto the main road again.

  Though he felt alert, the alcohol and the pills still had a disorienting effect on him. So while driving towards Rajaji’s house, which was on one end of the road, he assumed he was driving towards the police station which was in the opposite direction. He drove at a cautious speed marveling at how still and (dead) everything felt. There was not one soul in sight which was not surprising in itself considering the lateness of the hour and the downpour. What was surprising was the utter stillness of the night despite the howling storm and the rain. There was not one municipal vehicle out clearing debris from a fallen tree. When he passed a series of single storey thatched cottages he could almost feel the emptiness beyond their thin walls.

  After driving for about a mile, he came to a small intersection and just as he was wondering whether he was lost, there was an unmistakable sound of human footsteps coming from his right. Saket stopped and tried to see through the thick sheets of rain. His experienced eye noticed a few villagers hunching in the verandah of an old fashioned thatch roofed cottage. At first he thought that they were huddled close to escape the fury of the rain, but then realized that if that was the case, they would have been inside the house. In such a small village where everybody knew everybody, it was impossible that villagers would crouch outside rather than seeking shelter inside.

  And the fact, that they all were wielding swords.

  Saket felt his arm breaking out in gooseflesh, as he realized what he was witnessing was an ambush in the making. Carefully, one hand on the butt of his gun he backed and turned right and killed the engine. He switched off the lights and waited for something to happen. His night vision was better than the villagers; he could still spot their movements from his vantage point. Unbelievably, they had not seen him even with his car headlights on. Saket cautiously got out of the car, and sought shelter behind a tin shade nearby. He was getting soaked through his raincoat and the constant drumming of rain made hearing close to impossible, but Saket still preferred to be outside. He knew, from bitter experience, that in guerilla warfare any closed space, be it a vehicle or a lift was a death trap. He scanned the muddy landscape and tried to make sense of what was happening.

  Twenty minutes of this, and he saw rather than heard the movement from his right. Someone w
as walking from the same road he came from, going in the same direction where he was headed, before spotting the villagers. Saket strained to see and finally made out the form.

  The person coming from the other side was very definitely a woman and an urban one at that. She was dressed in a dress shirt with long a collar and body fitting trousers. Both garments were soaked through and were clinging to her like a second skin. Saket could see that she walked absolutely impervious to the rain. She did not hunch against the rain, nor did she try to tug at her wet clothes with an attempt at modesty. She walked at leisure. Saket could not remember ever having seen a woman so much at ease at midnight on a deserted street, even in a big city.

  Saket stepped out of his shelter and walked into the path of the girl. He was about to warn her of the danger. It was a move that could have cost him his life. Shilpa, the cop turned killer, turned maniac, saw someone approaching from her left side and automatically raised her gun to shoot. She felt another delirious wave of pleasure ripping through her body.

  After the mayhem at the police station, Shilpa had run towards the town with no other thought in mind apart from killing. She spotted two teenage girls hiding behind a tree, and calmly, methodically shot them. This had brought a violent wave of arousal that made further walking nearly impossible. The ambush laid for her ten feet from where she saw Saket was the second one she had met. The first one had come from the now infamous beach road and one villager had managed to give her a nasty cut with his meat cleaver before Shilpa gunned him and his buddies down. By that time, the whole thing was a blur to her. Visions of naked bodies along with visions of dead bodies hanging by trees made any rational thought difficult.

  Saket, operating on instincts, shot his hand out and grabbed Shilpa’s wrist, twisting it away from him. He pointed her wrist towards the ground and turned her around so that she was half bent and in his grip. There was a sub-human howl from her that chilled him, but he did not let go. He was dragging her towards the shelter when the villagers attacked. Saket pushed Shilpa away, pulled his gun free and shouted for them to stop. But there was no use of that warning.

  Shilpa on her knees in the mud raised her gun and opened fire. She shot three of the villagers running at full speed with swords raised; they were flung back towards the second column. Saket, knowing that no truce was now possible, opened fire too. He always thought he would never again bring himself to this, but in the heat of the battle his primal instincts were as fine as ever. Together they shot and killed the attackers. Saket brought his gun in a sweeping arc and found that the mysterious woman was no longer there.

  Standing in the downpour that gave no sign of stopping, Saket the soldier, tried to think whom he killed and for what but could make no sense of it.

  Chapter 15

  Back in the police station, Ragini pulled Rajat and Rakesh aside and started talking.

  “Guys we know something very bad is happening in this place. Something that, no rational logic can explain. And let’s face it, we are stuck right in the middle of it, whether we like it or not. So what do you say we try to find a way out rather than having hysterics or philosophizing about it?” She asked.

  “Hey, we are not the ones having hysterics when the sword swinging nuts came remember and I did not remember you helping us with the disposal of the dead bodies,” Rakesh said. His tone was so full of resentment that Ragini and Rajat stared at him in surprise.

  “She knows it Rakesh, but let’s make an assessment of the situation at hand, Happy is… well, Happy is happy, he will sit here and continue spawning out theories till the time someone comes right here and slits his throat. Rani has a mental buck fever and she is too mad at her husband to think straight. That leaves the three of us and that cop.”

  “And that serial killer boyfriend of Ragini’s, tell me baby did you fuck him?” Rakesh asked. This kind of cruel sense of humor was a sign that their alcoholic buddy was operating at normal again.

  “Matter of fact I did, and it was awwesomme, but like Rajat said what do you say we try to figure out how to get out of this goat fuck?”

  “What do you say?” Rakesh asked.

  “Just hear me out, from time to time, there are events that happen where the only survivors are the ones who suspend disbelief and go with the flow. Now let’s assume for a minute that something evil is at work here and maybe Happy is right when he says we are the help. So, the question is how can we be of help?”

  “You mean you want to fight?” Rakesh asked incredulously.

  “Yes, look at ourselves, a bunch of losers if there ever was one. Did I tell you the number of Johns who slapped me around because they could not get it up? Did I tell you the kind of sick things they make me do for their money’s worth? They have had their fun; then they threw money at me and went back to their wives and children. They have used my body for celebrating and then they have made me stand in a dark corner so that they can go back to the well lit world and enjoy their status. And don’t tell me you don’t know that kind of existence Rakesh, because you know, knowing that your wife is fucking her boss and being unable to do anything about it. Getting the shit kicked out of you by some goons for a late payment and then begging them for time. Society has treated us like shit and now it wants us to die in the godforsaken little no good town as part of some mythical uprising.”

  Rakesh’s eyes actually watered as he remembered Shweta, his wife and her boss calmly telling him all the details of their amorous liaisons and then the Boss’s threat of ruining his career. Rakesh had to take it lying down, because he was going through, say a personal setback.

  “We have run away from everything in our lives and the society laughs at people like us, the drunks and the unemployed, the sex workers. Now you want to complete the circle by running away from here too? Wait for a fresh place and fresh insult?” Ragini was now speaking with the fervour of an evangelist.

  “Men or mice?” Rajat asked softly.

  “Tell me, what do you want to do?” Rakesh asked.

  “I want to find out just who is the conductor of this little opera, and stop him.”

  “You mean like Buffy the vampire slayer?”

  Ragini ignored the cautious sarcasm in Rakesh’s tone and suddenly stood there with her mouth open. She was pressing her slim fingers to the side of her head as if trying very hard to contain a headache, or trying to keep some thought from escaping.

  “We need to do a post mortem on one of the villagers that got killed.” She said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  Neeraj Joshi lowered his high power night vision binocular, and moved a bit in the tree he was sitting in, to get comfortable.

  After shooting the lamp and escaping, Neeraj had not gone far before running in to the sword wielding mob. But this time he had managed to duck out of their sight and then climb a tree nearby. It was from there that he witnessed the massacre of the villagers and the crazy cop running. He was waiting patiently for her to be gone, before deciding to pay them a return visit. He knew to a certainty that he needed their help and they needed his, for mutual survival.

  Neeraj led a singular life that actually prepared him for this kind of event. He spared no thought for logic and how far fetched the idea of drowned men coming back to life was, nor did he stop to think why these undead could not stop bullets. He had seen them going into the ocean, he had seen some of them back with swords and he had seen them dropping like clay pigeons when shot. It was all important information from survival view point and Neeraj was content to leave it at that. The city folks would take some convincing though.

  Neeraj left the binoculars hanging by his neck and climbed down from the tree. He approached the station compound, his gun held at waist level. He was now not worried about Shilpa, since he had seen her wandering in a dazed state far away from the station. He just did not want to run into any villager.

  The walk to the station compound took around ten minutes, and Neeraj saw Ragini, Rakesh and Rajat drag a dead body to the backside of the
station, Neeraj, now on a half crouch, used the cover of the trees surrounding the station to follow them. He saw them setting the dead body of a village woman in the toilet shade and then Rajat flicked on his power flash torch. Neeraj vaulted over the fence and ducked behind an abandoned rusted hulk that was a police jeep in some age and watched.

  Ragini removed the woman’s pallu from her breasts and then tried to unhook her blouse.

  “You aren’t doing her bridal make up baby,” Rakesh said, and in one quick motion tore the blouse apart.

  “Look at the tits on the village momma,” Rakesh said. Rajat was about to say something sharp, but then he saw the tension in his friend’s face, and realized that probably he was just trying to remain calm.

  “If I throw up please stand clear,” Rakesh said, and then held the knife he was carrying against the throat of the dead woman.

  “This won’t hurt a bit my dear,” Rakesh said, trying not to choke on the bile rising through his throat. He pushed the knife deep in the woman’s breastbone and ran it through her cleavage, opening the skin till her navel. Then he cautiously bared her lungs beneath the skin. Then he moved quickly out and threw up violently against the toilet door.

  Ragini and Rajat, now operating on some kind of auto mode, moved closer. Rajat’s hands holding the torch shook violently as Ragini saw what she needed to see.

  “Water logged lungs, this woman was drowned,” she said in a flat voice.