VORTAL: SHOCKWAVE – Excerpt#4

4

In Which Viveka Gets A Balcony Ticket To A War, Vir Gets An Emergency Phone Call At Office, Vhy Hears A Strange Story At A Hospital, & Viveka Is Challenged By An Armed Stranger–Whom She Recognizes!

4.1 Viveka

I had nothing to compare it to, except maybe Hollywood war movies. But not the Civil War. This was more like the opening battle between the Roman army and the Germanic barbarians in Gladiator. Or the war sequences in Braveheart. Except that the detailing and costuming was more like, maybe, Mughal-e-Azam…no, no, not the Mughal era, before that…Like Asoka. Sort of. Except that this was no movie scene or set.

Two armies were facing each other. On the far left, a huge horde was ranged in ragged lines. This one was massive, tens of thousands of men. From my vantage point, they were as small as bugs. And I could see them massed for miles to the North, perhaps all the way to Andheri, or what would have been Andheri in my world.

This huge army was advancing slowly but steadily on foot toward the South. Or South Bombay, as it would have been called in our world.

Less than a mile away was the other army, if you could call it that. A ragged group of opposition that looked pitiful in comparison to the approaching horde. There couldn’t have been more than ten thousand people in this army.

I shivered as I realized I was about to witness a massacre.

Who were these groups? The North Mumbai army seemed to be the aggressors, the South Mumbai one the defenders. That much was obvious.

But I was too far away to make out details of the actual people down there, let alone identify them. The smoke-filled air and the dark, overcast sky also made it difficult to see clearly.

But I thought I saw men as well as women in the two armies. And from the dull reflections, it seemed they were armed with metal weapons, perhaps swords and axes and knives, things like that. Not guns and modern weaponry.

As I watched, the North Mumbai army halted suddenly. Figures riding horses rode before the massed soldiers, obviously giving orders. From the way they arranged themselves in a long frontline facing their destination, I could tell they were preparing for the first assault.

Absorbed in watching this incredible tableau, I took a step back and stumbled over something. A jagged metal object rushed at my face and neck, threatening to injure me dangerously.

Luckily, I caught myself on a broken brick wall, centimetres from the jagged edge. God alone knew what would happen if I injured myself in this world.

I glanced down to see what had tripped me.

It was a shoe. A Nike Cross Trainer, black with two white racing stripes on the sides, curling up in that trademark Nike swoosh.

The sheer incongruity of the sight made me stare at it. Somehow, I didn’t think there were such things as Nike shoes in this world. Or Fountain Pepsi. Or Lays Onion Cream. Or McDonald’s. Or any of the normal consumer culture of our technologically advanced civilization. That’s why the shoe was so obviously out of place.

But there was something else about it that caught my attention. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. In the distance, the faint sound of roaring began. The leaders of the North Mumbai army were pepping up their forces for the attack.

I bent down and picked up the shoe. It was almost mint-new, in perfect condition. Which it couldn’t have been had it lain here long. Which meant it hadn’t been here long.

And it was the exact same design and about the same size as the black Nike Cross Trainers that Mikey always wore.

4.2 Vir

I was in the middle of a ‘rap session’ when the emergency call came.

‘Rap session’ is what we call our brainstorming meetings at Virtual Reality Systems Inc. We had this giant contract to develop thrill ride CGI for a chain of US amusement parks and it was taking up many more hundreds of man-hours and grey hairs than I’d expected. Whenever we were stuck on a problem, we didn’t just sit around and bang our heads against the walls—we called a ‘rap session’ and banged our heads against each other!

Since the average age of our staff is 23, these ‘rap sessions’ are often similar to a Friday night get-together of coeds at a pub. There’s always music playing, food and non-alcoholic beverages floating around, plenty of caramel popcorn, pool and snooker balls clicking together at the four full-size tables, a basketball bouncing off one of the two backboards—one at either end of the office, giant TVs playing DVD movies, other screens showing the current cricket ODI or Olympics or KBC or whatever show people want to watch at that particular time, and general mayhem and madness.

As I said, it’s a lot like a teenage pub hangout, but without the alcohol. And as amazing as it sounds, we do get a lot of productive work done this way. Except when one of our projects turn out to have more glitches than glitter. Those rare times (sigh) when that happens, we just add an ‘e’ to the word ‘rap’ and you can imagine what those sessions are like.

But this wasn’t one of those times. This was a total victory. My Hrithik Roshan team—our workteams named themselves after their favourite celebs, however unlikely—had come up with a set of applications that delivered everything we’d promised our clients, and then some. It was a zinger of a winner and the mood in the office was celebratory. Half a dozen of the Hrithiks were desperately trying to convince me to relax the office rule on no-alcohol during office hours. Their argument was that since the staff at VR works in shifts, the office is working around the clock.

“So, like, Vir, that means it’s always office hours,” said Sajal, a bright young programmer who had dropped out of LSE to come back to India to ride the new IT wave.

“Which means, yaar, that there’s never a time when alcohol is allowed here,” grumbled Geetha, a wiz designer who hadn’t even gone to college yet but intended to do so after earning her first crore.

I winked at them. “You got it!” Raised my mug of chai and said, “But you can get high on tannin too, you know. You should try it sometime.”

They were muttering ominously about a possible mutiny when my cell phone rang. I glanced at it: one of our home numbers. It was our new maid and she seemed hysterical. I had to hold the phone away from my ear, she was talking that loudly.

I left the main office area and went into my cabin. We have an open-door policy at VR, and my cabin is actually just a glass cube, but I shut the door to get as much insulation from the hubbub outside as possible and tried to get the maid to calm down.

Finally, I understood what she was trying to tell me.

“Kya?” I understood what she was saying but I couldn’t believe it.

She repeated it, obviously in tears now.

“Theek hai,” I said. “I’m leaving right now.”

I left the cabin, speaking the word ‘Anant’ into my cell phone. I shook my head at the various people who tried to stop and speak to me. As the phone auto-dialed the number, I scanned the office and found Shoma, my COO. I beckoned to her. She came over smiling, but saw instantly from the look on my face that something was wrong.

“Family emergency,” I said. It was all she needed. She nodded and walked me to the exit. Anant came on the line as I punched the button for the nearest lift. Shoma walked over and pressed the buttons for the other two lifts as well. For the first time in two years since I’d moved into this new office I wished it wasn’t on the 37^th floor of the smartest new downtown office complex. It’s only in a crisis that you realize what big barriers space and time can be.

My brother’s voice was friendly and relaxed as always. For all I knew, he was in the middle of some extreme medical crisis right now, but he sounded like he was sitting by a pool with a pina colada in his hand. That’s the kind of calm and nerve it takes to become one of the country’s best neurosurgeons.

“Vir?” he said. Anant’s not known for his loquaciousness.

“Anant, Sarla’s been injured. She’s being brought by ambulance to the hospital ASAP. Are you there?”

His response was instant and unruffled. “Right here, just out of surgery. Where are you?”

“I’m just leaving office, on my way. Can you–?” I didn’t have to finish the question.

“I’ll make sure she gets the best attention immediately. What exactly happened?”

I paused, aware of Shoma standing by, watching me with concern on her face. “Anant, I don’t know for sure. She’s unconscious and I only spoke to the maid. Apparently, Sarla was able to call for an ambulance before she lost consciousness and the neighbour is waiting downstairs to direct the medics up as soon as it arrives.”

The lift came just then and mercifully it was empty. Shoma gestured, asking me silently if I needed her to come along. I shook my head and gestured to her to go back inside, hold the fort while I was gone. She gave me a thumbs-up sign for good luck as the lift doors slid shut. I’m blessed to have a great staff.

As I rode down, my mind raced through what the panicked maid had told me on the phone. She must have been mistaken somehow—but she had repeated herself thrice or more. Each time she had said the same thing.

That Viveka had attacked Sarla and wounded her badly before running out of the house.

But it just didn’t make any sense.

Why would my daughter attack her own mother?

4.3 Vhy

Like, by the time I reached the hospital, I learned from a nurse that Mom was out of the operation theatre and back in a private room. She was still under the effect of the anaesthetic and nobody but Dad had been allowed to go in and see her. But Anant-tau was in the waiting room and he looked calm.

Then again, Anant-tau always looks calm. Even though I hadn’t actually seen him for ages, he had always had that calm in-control doctorish look, as far back as I could remember. He could have played the Michael Douglas character in ‘Coma’, maybe even the Hugh Grant character in ‘Extreme Measures’, or the maha cool Anthony Hopkins playing Dr Hannibal Lecter in the under-production movie ‘Hannibal’, but as usual I’m ranting on about movies galore. What can I say: it helps me chill and I really needed to chill at a time like this.

I had got the news about Mom’s condition hours after it happened. That’s because I spent the afternoon watching a phillum with Ruchi that neither of us really paid much attention to, and after that we just did TP, had a bite, wandered around, the usual stuff. It was only when I came home in the evening that I got the news from our maid Mala, who was still shuddering from the memory. I got goosebumps when she came to the part where she found Mom…I don’t even want to repeat it right now, okay? I was feeling lousy as it is for not being there, not coming home sooner…I knew it wasn’t my fault, then why did I still feel so guilty, damnit?

I took a moment to breathe, trying to calm myself down. For the first time ever, I wished I had listened to Viv’s constant yammering about how yoga helps you control your senses, breathing, vagaira, vagaira…After I was sure I could have a conversation without falling apart, I moved forward again, heading down the corridor and entering the glass-walled waiting room.

Anant-tau was talking to Mikey and Mrs. Mudgal. Mrs. Mudgal is our neighbour; she’s a bit of a gossip and I can’t stand the way she yaks to Mom for ages about celebs. Mom says that it’s because she’s from a middle-class background and she’s embarrassed by her son suddenly becoming famous, but it’s a hell of a strange way to show it.

They saw me and Anant-tau nodded, calling me over.

“Vaibhav-bete,” he said, putting his arm around me and squeezing, “there’s nothing to worry about. Your mom is out of danger. She’s anaesthetized, so you can’t see her for a while. When you do, you’ll be a little taken aback at the sight of the stitches, but really, the bandage looks more scary than the wound, and she’ll be fine within a month or two.”

“A month or two?” I was shocked. “Is it that bad?”

He smiled, but his eyes had that same look that Dad’s have when he’s dealing with a crisis: strong but also hard. “She’ll be home within a week, but yes, the cuts will take a few more weeks to heal completely.”

Mrs. Mudgal had her hand to her chest, and a hankie clutched in the other hand looked damp. She looked up at me and moaned, “Vaibhav-bete, you should thank God she’s all right. When your bai called me, she was so frantic, I knew something terrible had happened and when I came into your house and saw Sarla-ji lying there, I thought she was…”

She covered her mouth as if trying to block her own words, then continued, “So much blood. And those cuts! Hey Ram.”

I glanced at Mikey. He was quiet.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He shrugged as if to say: As okay as can be expected under the circumstances, big brother. The gesture was so Mikey-like, I almost thought for a moment that it was him, my kid brother.

But I knew better.

Anant-tau excused himself for a moment to go speak to someone.

I asked Mikey if he’d go get Mrs. Mudgal some coffee from the vending machine down the hallway. The old Mikey, the real Mikey, would have looked at me like I was nuts and turned the volume on his Discman even higher. But this Mikey nodded and went without a word of protest. Proof.

I checked to make sure nobody else was within earshot, then turned to Mrs. Mudgal.

“Aunty,” I said gently. “Aunty, did you see what happened?”

She shook her head, sniffling a bit into the hankie. I felt sorry for her. She was, like, an old chicken, this was like a shock for her. Major. Watching her struggle to control herself actually made me feel more determined to keep my emotions in check.

“Nahin, bete. Your servant rang my bell. I was on the telephone. I couldn’t follow her babbling, so I came to see. I saw your mother lying there on the floor in the passage, next to the telephone. She was conscious still, and she said she had already called an ambulance, and she was to be taken to Hinduja Hospital because your tau is a surgeon here. Bas, that’s all I know.”

I wanted to shake her, to scream at her, ‘What do you mean that’s all, you must have seen something else? Come on, tell me every last detail!’ Like Russell Crowe interrogating a suspect in ‘LA Confidential’.

Instead, I said gently, “When I reached home, the other neighbours said that they saw Viveka running down the stairs some time before the ambulance came. Did you see her too?”

“Na hi, bete, I didn’t even know who had attacked your mother till the servant told me. I thought it was these gangs who go around to houses in the afternoon and stab the housewife and rob the house. But when I asked your mother, she wouldn’t say who hurt her. And then she lost consciousness.”

“Did you see Viveka?” I paused after I said it, not wanting to say too much. Although I had already heard the whole story from the maid when I came home from college.

Mrs. Mudgal shook her head at first. Then she paused and looked at me through her old-fashioned horn-rimmed glass spectacles.

“Pata nahin, bete, who that person was. But just before the maid rang the bell, in fact just as the bell started ringing, I was sitting in my hall and looking out the window. You know my window faces the downslope of Pali Hill, that empty plot behind our building which is under court dispute for some FSI problem?”

I nodded, willing her to get to the point quickly. I didn’t want the duplicate Mikey to return and hear this conversation. I didn’t know how much I could trust the guy.

Mrs. Mudgal went on:

“So I was talking to one journalist—you know how they are always calling to ask me to comment on Ravi’s success, no? I was talking to her on the phone and I was looking out of the window at the empty plot. And I saw someone, I think it was a woman, jump over our building wall into that plot, then run like a mad person across the plot and jump over the other wall on that side. After that I couldn’t see where she went and the doorbell was ringing.”

She looked at me, a strange expression in her eyes. I could see that Mrs. Mudgal was trying just as hard as I was to make sense of this bizarre incident.

“That could not have been Viveka, no, bete? Why would she be running away like that? And those walls! How could she jump those walls?! They must be at least eight-ten feet high!”

I was about to say something when Mikey returned.

“Coffee, ma’am,” he said maha-politely, offering her a steaming plastic cup. She took it thankfully. Mikey offered one to me too.

I hesitated, then took it. I could always dump it in a trashcan after pretending to take a sip or two. I didn’t want him to suspect that I suspected him.

Neither did I want to continue the conversation in front of the duplicate Mikey. So I just said, “Mrs. Mudgal, aunty, I don’t know how to thank you for taking so much trouble to help my mom at a time like that. I really appreciate it, aunty.”

She flapped a hand at me admonishingly, embarrassed but pleased. “Arrey, don’t say that. It was my duty, bete. What sort of neighbour doesn’t help at a time like this?”

Silently, I thought to himself: And what sort of daughter attacks her own mother and injures her enough to put her in hospital, then leaps over ten-foot walls to escape like a runaway criminal?

Definitely not my sister, Viveka.

4.4 Viveka

I was still holding Mikey’s shoe in my hand when a sound startled me. I realized I’d been hearing it for several seconds but had assumed it was from the battlefield below. Now I recognized it for what it was.

It was the sound of a horse’s hooves, cantering. It grew louder, the rider approaching in my direction. The smoky air and the distant sounds from the battlefield below made it difficult to tell from which direction the person was coming.

I looked around frantically for a place to hide. I couldn’t be sure that the person would be friendly. After all, I was in the middle of some bizarre war zone that only resembled the world I knew in its geographical details. I had no way of knowing who this rider might be.

The broken wall by which I’d found the shoe was around three feet high. There was a pit in the ground beside it, probably caused by the same thing that had destroyed the house itself. I jumped down into this pit and crouched low. I was almost completely concealed by the wall on one side. But if anyone came around the other side and looked down, they would definitely see me. I couldn’t help it; there just wasn’t enough time to search for a better hiding place. Hopefully, the rider was just passing by.

The sound of the horse grew louder and finally the rider came into view. The same wall which protected me from the rider’s sight also blocked my view, so I had to rely on my ears for information. To my dismay, I realized the horse was slowing down, not riding on.

The sound of hooves slowed to a trot, the horse snickering lightly as the rider reined it in. When I was around 10, for about a year or so I had taken riding lessons. Mikey wasn’t born then but Vhy had insisted on doing everything I did back then–my ‘tail’, I used to call him teasingly. I still remembered the two of us riding together at Mahalaxmi Racecourse at dawn, the rich smell of dew-wettened grass in the air and the sound of the ocean across the Haji Ali Causeway clearly audible in the absence of traffic. For some reason, the sound of the horse approaching now reminded me of those mornings that summer eleven years ago. It made me long to be back at home, in my own world again.

The horse snickered again and now it was so close I could smell it. Then the sound of its hooves stopped completely. I thought I heard a voice pitched low, as if the rider was speaking to himself or herself, or perhaps to the horse. My brother Vhy, a movie maniac, would have commented wryly that it was probably Robert Redford in ‘The Horse Whisperer’!

Just the reminder of Vhy’s obsession with movies made me miss him. I wished I had listened to him when he had tried to tell me about Mikey disappearing. He had tried to warn me that something weird was going on–and he was right. But I hadn’t listened to or believed him. Was that just this morning? I could still taste the flapjacks I had cooked for breakfast.

Then the sound of the horse moving came to me again, growing louder as it picked up speed. It was cantering again, and this time the sound was definitely moving away, growing softer. As it faded completely, I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Climbing out of the pit, I grabbed the broken wall for support. As I pulled myself back up to level ground again, a voice spoke behind me:

“Keep your hands out where I can see them. Reach for a weapon and I will put this arrow through your heart before you can blink. I can put three arrows through a bird before it hits the ground, from three hundred yards, so don’t think you can move faster than me.”

The voice was a man’s. And it spoke in Hindi, but not the shudh Hindi of North India like my parents spoke. This was a strange mixture of Hindi, English, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and whatnot. It was like the Bambaiya Hindi that street-wise characters speak in Bollywood movies. The gutter-bhaasha we call tapori.

I understood it well enough to obey. I raised my hands, just like I had seen people do in the movies.

“Good. Now turn around. Slowly, very slowly. Sudden moves are bad for your health.”

Trembling from a sudden wave of heart-stopping fear, I turned slowly to face my captor. Turning seemed to take forever.

When I saw the face of the man who was pointing a crossbow at me, I cried out in shock and disbelief.

VORTAL: SHOCKWAVE is a complete fantasy adventure in one book, as well as the first of a series, The Vortal Codex. It is also directly related to my Ramayana Series, Gods of War series, and other series. Signed copies of the limited edition large paperback are available at Rs 400 per copy, delivery by courier free anywhere in India.

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Nov 28, 2009 | Ashok | Comments Off