Immortals (12 page)

It had the wrong kind of people appointed as its supervisors. And the lack of resources made supervision of the supervisors difficult.

Yousuf learned about the world rapidly in the orphanage. He was a scrawny, sickly child who was bullied constantly by the other inmates. He generally kept to himself and the happiest moments were the moments that he shared with Yasmeen. He took as much care of her as he could. The boys and the girls slept in separate buildings at night and Yousuf eagerly waited for morning to meet up with his sister again. The night brought his private terror back to him as he battled the demons in his ‘Somali nightmares’ that had started about the time he joined the orphanage. He was subjected on a regular basis to a hundred different deaths of Abdi in his nightmares, and every time he had a nightmare, he woke up with a shriek, drenched in cold sweat.

The orphanage housed children until the age of fifteen and fifteen is an old enough age in the school of life in certain circumstances. The child-men and -women growing up in the orphanage had a ringside view of all that was dirty in the world. Yousuf had seen a vanload of girls being led out of the orphanage at odd hours of the night. Most of them returned in the morning, barely able to walk on their feet. Some returned a couple of days later and worst of all, a few did not come back at all.

Yasmeen was nine when she was whisked away in the night and did not return for three days. When she came back, she was running a high fever and was barely able to talk. Yousuf rallied around her for days but to no avail. She barely looked at him and never spoke a single word after coming back. She succumbed to her fever a few days later in the orphanage, before the authorities could decide on shifting her to a hospital. Yousuf cried his heart out and his stifled sobs kept his dorm-mates awake for a full week.

Yousuf was now truly an orphan with no one to call his own.

Then one day, not very long after, he snapped.

That day a girl, barely older than Yasmeen, returned after a similar nocturnal sojourn and fell very sick. She had bruises all over her body and succumbed to a deadly infection a day later. The children watched in horror as the orphanage supervisor and two of his assistants returned after burying that girl’s body. The cause of death was fever of unknown cause and a medical certificate was obtained to that effect.

That night Yousuf sneaked out of his room after lights-out and before lock-in time and waited in the dark of the verandah…

***

The next morning Yousuf, and not the supervisors, unlocked the doors of the children’s dorms.

‘Those of you who want to leave can leave now,’ he murmured under his breath, his hand covered in dried blood. One of the children found the bodies of the supervisor and his two assistants in a massive pool of congealed blood, all of them stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife. There was chaos in the orphanage as the news spread and the orphanage was empty in less than half an hour as the children ran out, to be engulfed in the vast underbelly of Mumbai.

Yousuf had nowhere to go and therefore he waited until the laundry man
came a couple of hours later and
found out about the carnage. Yousuf was then carted off to the police station and branded the devil incarnate. He was the toast of the local media for a couple of weeks.

The how and why of the entire affair was never solved but Yousuf found himself in Adarsh Juvenile Home in Vikhroli two weeks later.

The warden of the place, Shankar Waghle, was a devout Hindu and he came across the tidbit about a saffron thread around Yousuf’s neck when he was found by his father in the dustbin, long ago. He took it upon himself to correct that gross wrong inflicted on the boy, and re-christened him Jaidev and ‘converted’ him back to Hinduism, his rightful and birth religion.

It did not really matter to Yousuf but everyone called him Jai thereafter.

It was in this Mumbai Borstal that Jai met Ali a couple of years later. Ali helped Jai escape, mentored him, and let him loose on the Mumbai underworld scene at the age of thirteen.

Superintendent of Police Ajith Swaminathan was aware of what had followed after that. Now he had a dangerous criminal on the run who probably had nothing to be in fear of, save the safety of a gangster’s moll, whom the criminal was probably blindly in love with.

His enquiries at the moll’s house had turned up the bizarre story of a shoot-out in the dead of the night that had left three dreaded local goons dead. Initially the moll’s mother had kept mum but on further prodding, she had confessed to her daughter having been there on the fateful night of the shooting with a boy matching the description of Jai. It had been Jai who had taken down the three goons and both he and the moll had left soon thereafter. That had happened two days before the shooting of Rashique
Bhai
.

That meant that Jai had headed straight to Mumbai and killed
Bhai
in his farmhouse while he was surrounded by a sizeable number of his cronies.

Many things did not make sense. It was most bizarre, even for an excellent marksman, to be able to take down so many armed men, and in fact, to come seeking them and killing them. It was incredibly brave and incredibly foolish at the same time, and to live to get away from all that was incredibly lucky too.

There was a lot of heat coming through now, from within the police department and indirectly from the political bosses who had been close to the erstwhile Rashique gang. Rashique’s gang had since regrouped under Munna Bashir and things had transitioned smoothly. Munna
Bhai
had promised
Baba
that he would bring Jai to his death.

‘Where are you, Jai? It’s going to be a bloody good game of cops and robbers now,’ Ajith thought pensively as he leaned back in his reclining chair.

Chapter 16

Tomorrow’s News

Mumbai, India

17 May, 2012

Ajith had dispatched his constables with posters of two blown-up pictures of Jai and Juliet, offering a reward of fifty thousand rupees for any leads about them. He had asked them to put up the pictures in all the bus stops and railway stations in and around Mumbai and Pune. The fugitives could have left by taxi but there was no way to cover the millions of taxis running around in Mumbai.

Later that evening Ajith went round to brief the Commissioner about what had happened in the case. The Commissioner was his usual self and did not miss the chance for pontificating:

‘One of the reasons the Mumbai
janta
takes notice of surroundings around it is the constant and looming threat of terror in Mumbai. It has been targeted numerous times, and despite all the tales of Mumbai’s vibrancy, there is a deep-seated fear of the all-too-familiar terror attacks. People are constantly wary, notice everything around them furtively and are always in a constant hurry, scurrying away from the bomb that is going to rip the pavement twenty paces behind them the next instant.’

Ajith nodded as the Commissioner droned on about the psyche of the city. The Commissioner continued:

‘It’s like they are walking on egg-shells. Everyone is afraid to lose something. They are scared of being dead, being handicapped, losing their loved ones, losing their livelihood. Everyone is scared of something or other all the time.’

Ajith nodded his head. He had intentionally kept the reward amount at only fifty thousand and had insisted on putting up a photograph of the girl along with that of Jai.

The low cash reward made the duo appear petty and harmless for the public. The girl’s picture added to the effect. It was unlikely anyone would risk snitching on a menacing big don worth a ten-lakh reward and much more likely that many would come forward to rat on two innocent-looking kids worth some fast bucks.

Things panned out as Ajith had hoped.

The first call had come the same evening. There were many more. But thirty-four of the forty-five callers reported sightings from platform eleven of the Victoria Terminus railway station. The police searched for outbound trains at the purported time of the sightings and found an intercity to Pune, an express to Ahmedabad, and a long-distance superfast to Chennai.

The Commissioner wanted Ajith to alert all three cities. However, to Ajith, it was inconceivable that Jai and Juliet would go towards Pune, when in fact they had just run from
Bhai’s
farmhouse from that very direction. Ahmedabad was in close vicinity and therefore less likely, unless there was some friend or family there. Chennai was a possibility if the couple wanted to start anew in alien territory, very far away from Mumbai.

Nevertheless, Ajith agreed with his boss.

‘I’ll inform all the cities.’

‘That’s better. How are you going to search for them in Chennai? Do you have any connections down there?’

Ajith understood what the question meant.

‘Does the gang have any connections down there, Sir?’

The Commissioner laughed.

‘Ajith, my boy! They have connections in Timbuktoo!’ He laughed again.

‘Sir, I’ll wait for your command. But please ask the gang not to get involved.’

‘Hmm…’ The Commissioner mulled over it a moment.

‘You give me a lot of credit, Ajith. These people do not work for me. All I can get you is a head start, say three days. After that they will get involved.’

‘I think three days should be enough, Sir.’

***

Mogappair

Chennai, India             

20 May, 2012

It had been a week since Jai had landed up in Chennai. They were still staying at Raja’s place. Henna had taken to handling the affairs of the household as a woman of the house would. Henna was still in shock over what had happened to her and was in constant fear for her parents. The happiness over Rashique’s killing did not last for long. She kept quiet most of the time and sobbed a little when she thought she was not being watched. But Jai, still scared to venture out of the house, watched her cry in solitude and wondered if he had dragged her into a hell-hole worse than her previous life.

At night, Henna would take up the only bed in the house and Raja and Jai would sleep on the floor in the other room. They had called Henna’s home umpteen numbers of times but no one had answered their calls. Henna had no other contact number. There was no news from Nasreen, either. She too had not answered her mobile and had not reported for duty since that fateful day when Jai and Henna had made the run from her apartment in Mumbai. Henna was sad and felt guilty that she had brought misery and possibly death to the only people she could call her own.

Jai was different. He was a part of her; an inalienable part of her very being. They were in it together. She wasn’t sorry for him. She was sorry for both of themselves and glad at the same time that they were in it together. She had heard of what had happened at
Bhai’s
farmhouse. She knew the quirky story of Jai’s parallel lives and believed in it despite herself. It seemed incredible but she had seen what had happened in her village and had now heard of the single-handed demolition of
Bhai’s
citadel
.

And she had seen the card trick. There was no beating the card trick. It had to be true.

There were undefined feelings in her for Jai and she did not want to belittle them by giving them the much-maligned name of love. She wanted to give herself to him, yearned for his touch on her skin, for his lips to brush hers again and yet felt defiled and dirty due to her haunting and ever-present past.

Jai too was engulfed in an inner darkness.

He had no clue to his nightmares, no light for the future and no answers for his feelings for Henna. He had loved her from the first time he set his eyes on her in
Bhai’s
house and that love had grown with each passing moment. He cherished the kiss that had blossomed spontaneously between them in a moment of grief and uncertainty, and which he had relived three times in the three lives he had used up to get to Rashique
Bhai
. He longed for her and felt the need to caress her tender body and to love her the way she ought to have been loved. But he was scared that she still bore the scars of her traumatic past and wondered if she would ever be ready to accept him in her bed. But that and the hardships surrounding them notwithstanding, he still loved her deeply and he knew he would continue to do so forever.

Raja saw his indecision and consoled him many times.

‘It’s a lot better this way. No news is definitely good news. It is better not to keep looking for them. I have followed that rule since leaving Mumbai. Do not trouble “trouble", my friend.’

Jai bought newspapers every day and scanned through them, half expecting his photograph on a wanted list somewhere or expecting to hear some news about the world that he had left behind in Mumbai. For him, not having any information was as bad as having bad news. He could not just assume that all was well and that he should just get on with his life.

He had just finished with the papers and was browsing the news channels on television on that fateful evening.

Some hot-shot Indian nuclear scientist, Professor Ananthakrishnan, had been shot dead that afternoon just outside his residence in Kalpakkam, the little nuclear town fifty kilometres south of Chennai along the eastern seaboard.

‘The following footage is disturbing and viewing discretion is advised,’ ran a footnote on the screen. It was followed by a grainy video from a surveillance tape that showed two men on a motorcycle riding up to an old man just outside the gate of his house, possibly pretending to ask him for an address. The man riding pillion on the bike then drew a gun and shot the old man directly in his chest. Jai counted three flashes from his gun. The motorcycle sped away and the old man fell to the ground. He had died instantaneously.

The reporter then went on to the back-story about the professor and his accomplishments.

Kalpakkam was the nuclear centre that was developing the latest cutting-edge thorium-based fast breeder nuclear plant. A thorium-based reactor would reduce Indian dependence on the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group for uranium and thus go a long way in guaranteeing energy security for the country. Professor Ananthakrishnan was a physicist working for the development of the reactor. He was also involved in the last Indian nuclear test in Pokhran and had interests beyond nuclear physics, that bordered on the paranormal and the fringes of psychology and the human mind. Of late, he was semi-retired from his post at the reactor, visiting it only occasionally in a consultant’s role. He was devoting most of the rest of his time unravelling the mysteries of the human mind in the field of ‘noetics’.

There was then some file footage of the slain physicist making concluding remarks at a recent seminar where he was speaking on the tricks that our mind played on us

‘The more I understand the way our brain functions, the more it mystifies me. The human brain is the most powerful computational tool on the face of this planet. It is so powerful that even we, the owners, are not aware of its true capabilities. We see more than twenty dreams every night but remember only one or two. Why is that? Why are we not made aware of what our brain does… or can do? We hear of people who can foresee future, can bend spoons, can talk with the dead and discount them as tricksters or charlatans. What if it is not? What if there is a true “miracle”?

‘What is a miracle? To me, it is just something that is possible but beyond our understanding. It is something that we perceive but refuse to acknowledge because our limited logic fails us. An average human being uses only ten percent of his or her brain circuitry; seems like an awful amount of wasted redundancy to me. What will happen if we were to realise the full potential of our brains? What if there are individuals amongst us who are using more of their brain than the rest of us? What are the intriguing possibilities? How do they perceive the world around them? Do they see differently, hear differently, feel differently, dream differently from us? I wonder.’

The physicist left the dais to thunderous applause and then the footage cut back to the news-anchor.

It was a definite setback for the government and there was a possible link to terror groups trying, yet again, to hurt and derail India’s spectacular rise on the world stage. This was being seen as an attempt by terror outfits to hit where it hurt India the most: to hurt its institutions. Professor Ananthakrishnan was an institution in himself.

Then a picture of the scientist was flashed with his birth and death years written under the picture.

There was an advertisement break and that was followed by the sports news round-up where India had just handed Australia a thumping 120-run defeat in the series clincher Down Under; South Africa had defeated New Zealand in a rugby series in Cape Town with a three-point margin; and Vettel had notched up yet another F-1 victory.

He switched to another news channel that was telecasting live the rescue efforts underway to drag the victims of a bus that had fallen into a gorge in Rishikesh.

The phone rang, startling Jai from his preoccupation with the TV.

Jai picked up the receiver, not saying anything.

‘Hello. Jai?’ It was Raja’s voice at the other end.

‘Yes,’ Jai responded.

’I have some news,’ Raja was almost whispering at the other end. It was obvious to Jai that he was speaking from the food court telephone, judging by all the noise in the background.

‘Mm-hm,’ Jai grunted.

‘I had gone to the market for a bit and while I was away, there were two men looking for me at the food court. The manager at the desk hadn’t seen them here before and they also took my home address from him.’

Jai listened carefully, trying to understand what to make of it.

‘Okay… um... I have to assume that they are looking for us?’ It was more a deduction than a question.

‘I don’t know, man. Thought I should tell you. I mean, I don’t know... but part of me wants to run away from Chennai this instant and start over at some new place. You can never be sure with these things. What do you think?’

Jai did not know what to make of it yet. But the more he thought about it, running away seemed to be the safest option.

‘Okay, Raja. I don’t know what I am going to do, but if you do come back and find that we aren’t here... then, just thanks a lot for all you have done for us. I will never forget the favour, my friend.’

‘Yeah, if I do come back… In all probability, I will not. Well, all the best, in case we don’t meet again – and say hello to Henna for me.’

‘I will,’ said Jai and put the phone down.

Jai peeked into the other room, where Henna had fallen into a short, tired, evening nap. She looked so peaceful in her sleep. For all her worries in her waking hours, she probably did not have the horrible nightmares in her sleep, which she used to have earlier. Jai absent-mindedly picked up an air-bag and started to pack, still unsure what he was going to do. He tiptoed around the room not wanting to disturb her from her sleep.