When they converged on Shorty, Bhuria slapped his face and woke him up. He watched his eyes slowly focus, turn to disbelief and then to horror. Then he placed a pillow on his head and shot him twice between his eyes with the Luger.
Back in the truck, they changed their blood spattered village clothes to their regular jeans and tees and dumped them over a cliff on the way.
By 9:00 am when the bodies were discovered, the mini-truck was already in Mumbai.
The elimination of the Shorty Gang made big news in all the newspapers and though Bhuria was suspected to be involved and was even arrested, he was let off after 14 days of remand due to lack of evidence linking him to the murders.
Of course, Vardhan’s influence over the police and his political clout made an important contribution to his release.
Out on the streets of Chembur again, Bhuria had clearly risen in stature from a black marketing thug to a dreaded gangster. He was feared by one and all and this meant that protection money flowed in.
The more he earned, the more he invested in shares through Roy and Chika.
Zaheer had returned from his honeymoon a changed man and plunged into the business with renewed vigour. They were making 5 to 6 installations every day and there was waiting list to be covered.
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Rita and Shameem had become friends and at last Rita felt that she had a friend with whom she could share her secrets.
In fact, Rita found the slim, feisty girl with a language that was endearingly punctuated with profanities, quite hilarious.
Chika was getting marriage proposals which he kept refusing.
“Why don’t you give a serious thought to marriage?” His parents asked him.
“I have given serious thought to the prospect of being married. That’s why I’m single,” he replied.
Rita, on the other hand, was a little concerned about Sunil. The man was driven. Meetings followed meetings. There were a lot of cash transactions. She suspected that Sunil’s current line of business was not totally legit. But then, she rationalised, all successful businessmen stretched the law, if they did not break it blatantly.
Then one day in a routine road check, the police stopped his car and searched it. They found a
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briefcase with Rs 20 lakh cash in it. The money was a bribe for the Vice President of the bank that was underwriting shares for Sunil’s company.
Sunil could not satisfactorily explain where the money had come from and for whom it was intended. He was arrested and the cash was confiscated.
Harshal Mehta immediately paid off the cops and hushed up the matter. A few newspapers carried the incident but did not name Sunil. Of course they got their pound of flesh for cooperating.
After that incident, Sunil appeared a little scared, his blood pressure shot up and he was sweating a lot more. Rita begged him to take a few days off, but his schedule was chock-a-block.
The Maruti 1000 was replaced by an imported Toyota Corolla as a gift from Mehta and soon Sunil’s confidence in the corrupt Indian system was restored.
The day that the Corolla arrived was the day that Rita got the news that she was pregnant. She had missed her period couple of weeks ago and had gone to the nearby pathology lab for a
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urine pregnancy test. The nurse from the lab had called her and given her the good news.
Rita wanted to keep the baby but the only problem was that she had not had sex with Sunil in the past two months.
That night, on the pretext of celebrating the arrival of the new car, she got Sunil high and then wore her most sexy lingerie and seduced him.
She had to use all her oral skills to get Sunil hard enough to enter her and it was all over within a few strokes. It seemed that Sunil was already snoring before he rolled off her.
In the darkness, Rita was smiling. She would wait for a month and then declare to Sunil that she was pregnant. Sunil would be too busy making money to realize that she had delivered a month early.
The next day she broke the news to Roy.
Roy was absolutely elated, he hugged her tight and asked her to divorce Sunil and marry him.
“We will Roy,” she replied, “but not yet.”
The same afternoon, she called Shameem to give her the news.
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“I was about to call you,” Shameem squealed, “I just got my urine test result, I am preggers!”
“What a coincidence!” Rita squealed back, “I called you to say I am pregnant.”
Both of them howled with laughter. Coincidentally, both were due in the month of January 1993.
‘This is going to be a great year,’ thought Rita. If only she knew how wrong she was!
That very moment, a senior journalist at the Daily Times was arguing with her Chief Editor that the investigative article that she had written exposing the nexus between top banks and Harshal Mehta be published.
The article exposed the modus operandi in which the banks were using public money to fraudulently finance an artificial bull run in the BSE.
The Chief Editor knew the ramifications of running the article and was sceptical. He also knew that it was the scoop of the decade.
The Chief Editor was no fool. He realized that if the journalist quit and approached their rival, National Express, they would lap it up. Hesitantly, he decided to run the article the very next day.
The strongly worded, well-researched article was the beginning of the end of the great Indian Stock Exchange scam.
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Overnight, the effect was seen in the BSE and the banking industry. Major banks set up in-house investigation and enquiries and heads of many top executives rolled.
The Bombay Stock exchange saw one of the biggest falls in one day, thereafter it continued to plummet and soon became a blood bath.
Investors lost everything. Many had invested their life’s savings and had mortgaged their jewellery and homes caving in to the dream of instant riches.
Harshal’s own story of how he had mortgaged his wife’s jewellery and his modest one bedroom apartment in Ghatkopar to attain unthinkable wealth had played on the mind of the middle-class.
Suicides rose, banks closed, heads rolled and Sunil decided to have a heart attack.
On the way to the hospital, he broke down and told Rita, “I am sorry, Rita. I chased a lifestyle instead of building a life. I am very, very sorry, I got our family into this mess.”
That evening, Rita went through their cupboards and the safe. She quietly mustered all the cash
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and jewellery she could find into a bag. She was careful not to touch share certificates, bonds or any valuables that could be traced.
Then she rummaged out the spare key to Roy’s apartment and hid the bag in the loft over the toilet.
On her way out, as an afterthought, she left her spare key on the key hanger and locked herself out.
She also called up Roy and told him to not come to the apartment for a few days. Rita then gave Rs 5000 to Shobha and packed her off to her native place in Ratnagiri.
The next morning at the crack of dawn, the Income Tax department raided her place. The raid was immediately followed by a raid by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Government’s Special Investigation Team.
They seized all the share certificates, bonds, cheque books, locker keys and all the incriminating documents they could find.
They also grilled Rita. They asked her about his investments and assets he had amassed.
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She cooperated with them and told them what little she knew about Sunil’s doings and the truth that Sunil had not bought any assets as he had reinvested all that he earned into the Stock Market.
She was also glad that she had resisted the urge to rush to the bank and empty out their accounts and safe deposit lockers. That would have really got her into trouble.
Rita wa
s smart, she realized the precarious position she was in and also knew that in the days to come, she would have to fight for survival and not opulence.
She was saving for a rainy day with a storm brewing around her.
In the week that followed, Sunil’s bank accounts were frozen and all his assets including the Corolla and the apartment were sealed.
Sunil was taken to his parent’s home from the hospital after a fortnight and was promptly arrested for fraud. Despite the lawyer, that his parents hired pleading for leniency on account of his poor health, he was taken into custody.
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A month later, he was released on bail on a bond of 5 lakhs, but his passport was impounded.
Sunil came back depressed, tainted and humiliated. He, Rita and Rohan lived with his parents in their small uncomfortable apartment. He refused to see or talk to anyone and Rohan even refused to go to school.
Then one day, he took Rohan out for a walk and did not return.
Their bodies were found on the railway tracks of Ahmedabad a few days later.
Why did they travel over 500 kms from Bombay to Ahmedabad?
How did they travel?
Were they abducted by investors seeking revenge for their losses?
Was it a contract killing by influential people who did not want their names to be exposed?
The answers were never found.
Roy, Chika and Zaheer were reeling under the stock market crash too. Their entire savings were wiped out and were up to their ears in debt. The most dangerous being the money owed to Bhuria.
Bhuria, who had been singing their praises a couple of months ago when the going was good, changed his tune. He had lost close to 40 lakhs including the 10 lakhs he had loaned to Roy and Chika.
Roy and Chika agreed to repay the loan amount, but Bhuria wanted them to make good the loss his own investments had made too.
They tried to reason with him that it was not their responsibility to repay the losses that his own investments had suffered, but then they did not have the logic to answer the snub-nosed Luger that stared at them.
The cable industry was also going through a phase of transition. An industry that was run by
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enterprising but largely uneducated entrepreneurs was being replaced by large Multi System Operators (MSOs) owned by huge corporates.
These MSOs were slowly but surely taking over the small operators.
In case, the operators refused to sell, gangsters were used to persuade them to sell at a ‘reasonable’ price. Having their lives intact was a bonus.
Bhuria saw the opportunity when one of the bigger MSOs approached him to ‘persuade’ cable operators in his area to sell them their subscriber bases.
He realized that Roy and Chika were not in a position to return his 40 lakhs, he coerced them to sell FCN’s subscriber base to a large MSO for 25 lakhs.
Bhuria wanted to sell the garage too, but the MSO had no interest in the shanty garage, moreover, the garage was owned by Daya Shetty and not FCN.
Over 5000 subscribers for 25 lakhs was a steal for the MSO but Roy, Chika and Zaheer had no say in the matter. It was an all-cash deal and the entire 25 lakhs was pocketed by Bhuria.
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In addition, they were given a month to repay the balance 15 lakhs that they ‘did not’ owe him.
With no work, no income and a huge sword hanging over their heads, the trio was back in the garage looking for solutions for their problems in cheap whiskey.
Meanwhile, Rita was still in her in-laws’ apartment as they prepared for Sunil and Rohan’s 13th Day post death ritual. In the middle of the function Rita cramped and doubled up in pain and fainted. Her white sari was covered in blood and even though she was rushed to the hospital, she had miscarried her baby.
Roy, Chika, Zaheer and Shameem met her at the hospital. They were shocked to see a woman who had lost everything stare back at them.
But the ordeal was far from over. Roy and Chika were constantly threatened by Bhuria and his cronies to pay the 15 lakhs they did not owe them.
They made it clear to Bhuria that they did not have the money and that they did not owe any to him. Bhuria had invested in the stock market
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and lost his money like half of Bombay had! They were, in fact, still smarting about the way the firm that they built from scratch was snatched away from them.
But Bhuria was in no mood to relent. Power had gone to his head and he was not willing to let them off the hook and threatened to have them killed.
It was not the money that irked Bhuria, but it was the fact that they were standing up to him.
His business was built on fear and he just had to make an example of them.
Then on a fateful day towards the end of November, what they dreaded came true.
Roy was cycling home around midnight after a drinking session in the garage with Chika and Prakash when he realized that he was followed by six men on three motorbikes.
Roy was high, but not drunk, and the imminent danger to his life sobered him up immediately.
Bhuria had thought hard before picking on Roy as the target. Chika’s dad was powerful and had
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a lot of influential friends. Zaheer’s brother had links with the powerful Pathan gang of South Bombay.
Everybody knew that Bhuria liked Roy and if he could do that to a friend, it would establish his ruthlessness and strike the fear of the devil in the hearts of the businessmen of the area.
Roy knew there was no point trying to escape, because they would corner him in a place of their liking. So when he came across the well- lit concrete bridge over a 20 feet open industrial waste and sewage canal, he stopped and got off the bicycle.
He placed the cycle down and took out his hand kerchief rolled it on his right palm and pulled out the cycle chain with a jerk. The chain snapped with sound and slid out into his hand.
He then waited for the three bikes to surround him. He knew the thugs. Some of them had black marketed tickets with him.
The men had a surprised look on their unfocussed, hazy eyes. They had expected him to run. It was always easier to kill a cowering man.
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‘They are high on Brown Sugar,’ thought Roy, ‘that would make them unfocussed but also numb enough to be ruthless!’
Roy braced himself. He was not ready to die yet. Quietly, he analysed the situation. Two of them had swords, one had a chopper and three had hockey sticks.
‘No gun,’ he thought ‘that is good.’
Just then a police van on patrol duty paused on the opposite lane.
For a second, Roy thought he was saved.
The cops looked very drunk themselves.
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