SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis – Excerpt#4

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4

Blood pounded in Kamsa’s head with the ferocity of a kettle-drum. His vision blurred for a moment and once again he saw the same horrendous vision that had met him moments ago: The sabha hall was filled with fierce kshatriyas and mighty yoddhas, all determined to destroy him and his kin. To wipe out his entire race from the face of the earth. He recognized many of the faces as new aspects of old foes, reborn in this age for the express purpose of decimating and committing genocide upon his true blood-kin. He had met them before, in another city, another age. A place named Ayodhya, where twice before he had bravely attempted to strike a blow for his people’s cause, and had tasted the bitter fruit of their deceitful thwarting of his noble efforts. He had been in possession of a different form himself in that age and place, and been known by another name. It eluded him now, but he knew that his given name in this life simply meant ‘amsa’ of ‘K’, K being the first vowel of that ancient name and amsa being a partial rebirth, similar to an avatar. This was but the newest round of battle in an age-old conflict with the greatest enemy of his kind.

He glanced in the direction of their leader, the one who sat on the Andhaka throne bearing the raj-mukut, the crown of beaten gold that was placed upon the head of the people’s chosen leader, for the Andhaka Yadava nation was a republic in the truest sense of the word.

The being seated there glared down at him with a look of pure fury. He bore the familiar aspect and human garb of Chief-King Ugrasena, he even moved and spoke like him, shouting stern commands that he foolishly expected Kamsa to obey. Kamsa was not fooled by this clever disguise and performance. That old man seated upon the Andhaka throne was not his true sire; that honour fell to a noble being named Drumila, a powerful daitya from the netherworld. Unable to take birth in this age in his true form, he had disguised himself as the chief-king of the Andhakas, Ugrasena, and in this fleshly diguise, he had deceived Ugrasena’s wife Padmavati in younger days, siring a male-child upon her. Kamsa was that child, and he felt the rich, noble blood of his true father raging in his veins now as he did at such times, and he ignored the blathering objections and orders of Ugrasena, a feeble old man who possessed neither the will nor the strength to do what had to be done: Exterminate all enemy. Kill them where you find them, by any means possible. Yet, somewhere within Ugrasena’s incompetent form, there remained a vestige of Drumila and it was to this smriti truth that Kamsa bowed and conceded lordship.

“Fear not, father!” Kamsa said aloud, as the stunned assemblage still reeling from the shock of his bold intrusion and even bolder act of heroism turned to stare at him. “I have slain the enemy in our midst. No more will his deception veil our senses from the true nature of his evil mission!”

He saw Ugrasena blink several times as he absorbed this shouted missive. Beside him, Kamsa’s mother Padmavati, once legendary for her beauty, now a wasted shadow of her former self, covered her face and seemed to weep. Tears of joy, surely, Kamsa told himself. She must be overjoyed at my speed and boldness. His true father Drumila did not respond as Kamsa had expected either: he did not loudly hail his son’s achievement to the assembly or come to Kamsa and press him to his breast in that fierce embrace that Kamsa had craved for so often during his growing years and received so rarely. But that was only to be expected as well; in his human disguise as Ugrasena, Drumila must needs conceal his true feelings for his son. No matter. Kamsa knew his parents were proud of him and that was enough.

He executed a deep bow in the direction of the throne, and raised his head smiling.

The smile faded as he saw the crowd encircling the spot where Vasudeva had stood only moments ago, part to reveal something quite extraordinary.

Vasudeva stood as he had before, facing him. The stupid cowherd that he was, he had neither flinched nor taken evasive nor defensive action when Kamsa had flung the spear. Not that anyone could deflect or dodge a throw by Kamsa easily; but at least the man might have made an attempt. To simply stand there facing death was an act so contemptful it made Kamsa want to spit his mouthful of tobacco on the polished floor in disgust. Of course, such steadfastness might be misconstrued as heroism, a yoddha facing certain oncoming death without so much as flinching. But Kamsa knew better. The man was a coward and so unexpected and stunning was Kamsa’s action that he had no time to react. He simply stood there as the spear, flung by Kamsa with force enough to punch through armour, bone, flesh, gristle, sinew, spine, and emerge out the man’s back – he had done precisely that to other men a hundred times before and knew exactly the force, trajectory and impact of his throw – sped towards him to end his life.

The spear still stood there.

In mid air.

Before Vasudeva.

Kamsa stared, blinking several times to make sure his eyes were not still obscured by the blood from his last skirmish with some cowherds who had strayed across the demarcated border into Andhaka territory. Well, technically, they hadn’t strayed, but the heads of their cattle were pointed towards Andhaka territory, so it was obvious they intended to cross over. He had slaughtered the cowherds, and their kine, down to the last suckling calf and mother of both species. Their blood had spattered on his face, obscuring his vision, and it had taken considerable scrubbing to remove the stubborn spatters. Damn enemy blood. Burned like acid too.

But no amount of blinking or rubbing of his face made the sight vanish or change.

His spear stayed there, floating in mid air, inches from Vasudeva’s chest, its deadly barbed tip pointed precisely at the point where the breastbone met the ribcage, that soft yielding centre spot where the spear would have punched through with minimal resistance, bursting through the heart and emerging out the rear of the Sura’s body.

It just hung there, suspended by no visible means. Floating in mid air. Not floating exactly, for it did not so much as move an inch, merely hung there as if deeply imbedded in some solid object.

But I heard it strike! It hit bone and flesh and cartilege with that typical wet crunching sound they always make at this distance and force.

Then again, he was so accustomed to hearing that sound that it was possible he had simply remembered it from previous occasions. The outburst from the onlookers that exploded the instant he flung the spear had drowned out everything else, after all.

He strode towards the Sura chief-king, people stepping back or moving away, wide-eyed, to give him a wide berth.

He saw a man standing beside Vasudeva stand his ground staunchly, alongwith several others he recognized as the Sura’s clan-brothers and allied chieftains. They stared fiercely at Kamsa with the look he had seen so often before. He saw fists clench empty air, muscles tighten, jaws lock, and knew that they were prepared to take him on with their bare hands if need be. They did not worry him; he could take them on single-handedly, even if Haddi-Hathi was not there to back him up, which he was.

Kamsa stared at the spear. He walked slowly around it. He examined it from all angles.

He could not fathom how the trick had been done. The spear simply stood there, embedded solidly in…in thin air!

He took hold of the spear and grasped it. He felt a shock as it failed to budge.

He yanked down upon it, hard.

Nothing.

He pulled it to the left, then to the right, then pushed upwards. His biceps and powerful shoulder muscles bulged, and he knew that were this a lever he was pushing upon, he could have moved a boulder weighing a ton with this much effort.

Yet the spear just stayed there, as immobile as an iron rod moulded into solid rock.

It was impossible.

He looked at Vasudeva. The Sura chief-king’s face was hard, ready for anything, yet not cruel and mocking as Kamsa had expected. Not the gloating glee that a triumphant enemy ought to have displayed at such a moment.

“How!” Kamsa screamed. “By what sorcery did you do this?”

Vasudeva looked at him for a moment with eyes that seemed almost cow-like to Kamsa’s raging senses. The kettle-drums played out their mad rhythm in his blood, pounding his brain with unending waves of agony.

Then, to the sound of a shocked Aaah from the watching assemblage, Vasudeva reached out, took hold of the spear, which came free of its invisible hold as easily as if he had simply picked it up from a wall-stand. Several spectators clasped palms together and cried out “Sadhu! Sadhu!” in reverential tones – for what had happened was no less than a miracle.

And to Kamsa’s continued disbelief and amazement, the Sura chief-king held out the spear upon raised palms, the action of a man surrendering rather than opposing.

“It was not I,” Vasudeva said quietly. “But the great Lord Vishnu who did this. For it is clear that he desires our people to be at peace. Accept this as proof of his grace and a sign of his protection over all those who work to achieve Shanti upon Prithvi-loka.”

The fantastic adventures of the Hindu God Krishna have entertained and inspired people for millennia. Playful cowherd, mischievous lover, feared demon-slayer, the legendary exploits of this super-being in human form rival the most rousing fantasy epics. Now, the author of the Ramayana Series®, the hugely successful epic retelling of the ancient Sanskrit poem, works his magic once again with the tales of Krishna. All the pomp, splendor and majesty of ancient India come alive in this extraordinary eight-book series.

SLAYER OF KAMSA

The Krishna Coriolis: Book 1

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The Harper mass market edition will be in Indian bookstores October 2010!

Sep 02, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 2 Comments »

SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis – Excerpt#3

Start at the beginning! Click here to go to Excerpt#1.

3

Devaki shrieked as her brother threw the spear at her betrothed. Her planned union with Vasudeva had yet to be formally solemnized yet she already thought of him as her husband-in-waiting. There was no man she would be happier to unite with in matrimony than the chief-king of the Sura Yadavas. The fact that their joining would only help further the cause of peaceful alliance between the two neighbouring nations was incidental to her. She had always been a woman led by her instinct and spirit, and she knew that she would love Vasudeva deeply, indeed had come to feel great affection and admiration for him already after only a few meetings, and that mattered more to her than politics and statecraft.

She had watched with rising horror as her unruly brother stormed into the sabha hall, then proceeded to slight, dishonour, and variously embarrass her royal dynasty as well as their entire clan by his behaviour. To come thus armed and armoured was bad enough, but to bring a war elephant – especially that brutalized and perverted beast for whom she simultaneously felt pity and disgust – was a terrible act, a flagrant slap in the face of their royal guests. When Kamsa had stared at Vasudeva with that peculiar expression, she had thought that perhaps, for once, sanity and sense had percolated into that dense brain.

When Kamsa had turned, plucked out a barbed spear from the side-saddle of Haddhi-Hathi and flung it with vehement force at her husband-to-be, it shocked the life out of her and she could hardly help shrieking her dismay.

To her further amazement, Vasudeva made no move to twist, turn, dodge, avoid, or otherwise avoid the trajectory of the missile.

The spears Kamsa favoured were brutal things. Metal heads barbed in an asymmetrical pattern of recurved points, any one of which were sufficient to rip to shreds a person’s flesh and organs, and impossible to remove without further damaging the wounded individual. His aim with these inhumane missiles was so renowned, she had once seen him fling a spear at a grama chieftain in a dense milling crowd and strike the grama chieftain in the throat without touching anyone else to either side.

This time too, his aim seemed perfect. The spear was out of his hands and at Vasudeva’s chest, poised to shatter the Sura chief-king’s unprotected breastbone and destroy his heart, killing him instantly.

Her shriek was echoed by an outburst of like screams and shouts of dismay, male as well as female, from across the crowded sabha hall. The distance from Kamsa’s hand to Vasudeva’s chest was barely twenty yards, and the spear flew that distance in a fraction of a moment, yet in later years, as the legend grew, it would be said by some that the spear had slowed in mid air as if travelling through water or against a powerful headwind, rather than simply across empty stillness.

If such a phenomenon truly occurred or if it was merely a product of the active imagination of those watching, she would never know for certain. For no sooner had the spear flown than a man rushed forward, blocking Devaki’s view. It was Akrur, a close friend and ally of Vasudeva and a chief scriptor of the peace alliance between the Sura and Andhaka nations. Later she would learn that he had attempted to fling himself into the path of the onrushing spear, to take the death that was meant for Vasudeva, but at that instant, all she knew was that his body blocked her view and, as if galvanized by Akrur’s action and the violence that had abruptly exploded into a peaceful event, everybody else began moving as well, further obscuring her ability to see.

She saw only bodies and moving heads, none belonging to Vasudeva. But even above the cacophony of shouts and exclamations that had erupted, she heard one sound clearly. The sound of the spear striking flesh and bone came to her like a half-remembered nightmare that would plague the deep watches of restless sleep for many moon-months to come. This sound she would remember because, with her vision obscured, she sincerely believed that it was the sound of her brother’s ill-intentioned spear shattering the bone and flesh of her beloved betrothed; the sound of widowhood even before her nuptials could be completed. It would haunt her until another, far more terrible sound replaced it for sheer nightmarish horror. But that other sound still lay in the future. For now, the sound of metal flung at great velocity shattering bone and splintering it like matchwood, flesh and fluid resounding wetly from the impact, were a horror beyond all imagining. She shrieked again, and would have flung herself forward, directly at her brother, whom unfortunately, she retained a clear view of, and who stood in the centre of the hall, like one of the many stone pillars marching in even rows to either side, like a general flanked by marching cohorts.

In that instant of panic and terror, she saw him turn his head at the sound of her voice. For it was his name she was shrieking. “Kamsa!” His eyes found her in the melee and locked on her briefly. The malice and glee she saw therein, the sheer lascivious delight at what he had just done, was in such start contrast to the awestruck expression he had exhibited only moments earlier, that she could not help thinking, as she had a thousand times over the years, My brother is no mortal man, he is a rakshasa reborn in mortal form. For even if a mortal man had done such an act, for whatever the reason, surely he could not have such an expression on his face, a look that was more demoniac than anything the most imaginative artists and sculptors could conjure up when recreating scenes from the legendary wars against the rakshasas in the Last Asura Wars or that even more legendary battle of Lanka waged by the great King Rama Chandra of Ayodhya. Kamsa could have modelled for those artists and sculptors yet none would have possessed sufficient skill or art to capture the sheer malevolence of the look his face bore at this moment.

Then the moment passed, and he turned back to look in Vasudeva’s direction, no doubt to gloat over the new murder he had just added to his epic tally. And Devaki wished at that moment she had a spear of her own within reach, for she would have surely flung it at this instant, and to hell with filial loyalty and feminine propriety. Just because Andhaka women were no longer permitted to go to battle did not mean they were good only for the bhojanshalya and bedchamber. A daughter of raj-kshatriyas, she had been trained and schooled in the arts of war as thoroughly as her brother. Better, probably, for she had not been banished from Guru sdiekdckcid’s ashram as a child as Kamsa had been for incorrigible behaviour. But of course, there were no weapons here and even at the peak of outrage, Devaki could not simply murder her own brother, however just her motive under dharma.

But in her mind, she flung a barb of retaliation no less deadly and far more portentous: Someday, my brother, your reign of brutality will end. And mine shall be the hand that flings the spear that ends it. This I swear here and now, by Kali-Maa, avenger of the oppressed.

Then she pushed her way through the crowd, desperate to go to Vasudeva’s side, if only to offer her lap for his head in his last moment. The crowd did not resist her for everyone there knew what she was to the Sura chief-king and they stepped aside willingly to let her through. She reached the circle that surrounded Vasudeva and looked upon a heart-stopping sight.

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Sep 02, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | Leave A Comment »

SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis – Excerpt#2

Start at the beginning! Click here to go to Excerpt#1.

2

The massive oak doors of the banquet hall flew open as if struck by a battering ram. They swivelled inwards on smoothly oiled tracks and crashed against the stone walls, swatting aside the guards milling about the entrance. Vasudeva glanced up from his meal just in time to see a young soldier’s foot caught by the lower bolt of one door, dragged to the wall, then crushed against the relentless stone with a bone-crunching impact that left the poor fellow’s face white.

The other guards, milling about jovially until now, caught up in the festive atmosphere, responded belatedly joining their lances and challenging the rude entrants. The armored bull elephant that trundled into the banquet hall paid no heed to their shouted challenges. It was armored in the fashion of Andhaka Hathi-Yodhhas, the dreaded war elephants of the Andhaka clan, its head couched in a formidably moulded headpiece bristling with spikes that made it resemble some demon out of myth, its tusks capped with brass horns tapering to spearlike protrusions, and rows of ugly spikes decorating its sides.

Vasudeva had seen the havoc that these Hathi-Yodhhas left in their wake during close combat. His heart lurched at the thought of what destruction even a single such monster could wreak in a confined, crowded space such as this hall. The dried brownish smears on the elephant’s armourplating left no doubt that its aggressive appearance was not merely for decoration. This particular Hathi-Yodhha had seen active combat this very day and had taken lives in that action. Vasudeva prayed silently that they were not Sura lives, then felt mean and small for having thought so. All life was precious, all humanity united in brotherhood. No matter whose blood lay dried upon the armourplate of this Hathi-Yodhha, it was a death he would not have wished upon anyone.

Supremely confident in its strength and tonnage, the hathi trundled forward without heed for the puny sipahis waving their spears before it. Its flailing trunk, pierced with studs, knocked three of the sipahis carelessly to the floor, then it proceeded to pound their prostrate forms with its leaden feet. The sipahis convulsed and screamed, the screams cut abruptly short as the massive grey feet smashed their heads with practised ease, spilling their lives onto the polished marble floor. Gasps and exclamations of protest met this callous life-taking.

The Hathi-Yodhha swung its massive head from side to side, checking for more challengers before covering the last few yards into the centre of the banquet hall. The surviving gate-guards, brave though they were, shuffled aside hastily, their faces blanching at the fate of their companions. Even the lot of them combined could hardly expect to face a battle-ready war elephant, and this, as they well knew, was no ordinary war elephant. This was the feared and hated Haddi-Hathi himself, named for the pleasure he was rumored to take in crushing human bone. It only made things worse that the elephant, like its rider, was on their side. Theoretically speaking at least.

In fact, Vasudeva thought grimly, they had more to fear from their kinsman mounted on the elephant’s back than from the hathi itself.

That heavily muscled figure, clad in blood-spattered brass armor to make himself resemble an outgrowth of the elephant rather than a separate being, was none other than the universally feared and hated master of Haddi-Hathi, Prince Kamsa himself, evidently returned from a new campaign of reaving and ravaging. Vasudeva glanced around to see his aides-de-camp, indeed his entire entourage of clansmen, all reaching instinctively for their swords and maces. They found no weapons: the party had divested itself of its metal implements at the gates of the keep before entering at dawn in accordance with the terms of the treaty. But even so, their faces and clenched fists betrayed their rage at the sight of the man mounted atop the elephant. That man–nay, that beast, for he was more truly an animal than the creature astride which he sat–had left his bloody handprint upon the spotless reputation of every last one of the Sura houses represented here.

Over the last few years, none of these proud clanschief families had escaped the rapacious raids and ruthless violence of Prince Kamsa and his Marauders. Vasudeva raised his hands to quell the muttered noises of provocation rising from his party, feeling the desire for justful revenge that swelled in their proud warrior hearts. He himself, as king and chief justice of the Suras, had grown heartsick at hearing the numberless atrocities committed by the prince of the Andhakas and his White-clad mercenaries. Their exploits far exceeded any conceivable desire for revenge or simple war-lust; their’s was a campaign of brute destructiveness.

The list of war crimes, in utter violation of all Arya warrior codes, streamed past his memory’s eye like a herd of sheep impatient to return to the stockade before duskfall: women kin violated, homes and herds put to the torch, entire families wiped out overnight…yes, the White Prince had much to answer for. But that reckoning would not be here, or now. King Vasudeva kept his hands raised to either side, and his clansmen subsided reluctantly, their faces still dark with angry blood.

Atop the blood-marked elephant, Prince Kamsa’s proud, handsome face turned from side to side, his piercing gray-blue eyes sweeping the length of the banquet hall, briefly and contemptuously scanning the faces of his many enemies assembled here. He lingered briefly on the women, dressed in colourful and enticing festive garb. The leering grin that twisted his face betrayed his utter lack of respect for any regal protocol.

Even Vasudeva felt his jaw clench as the prince stared with rude intensity at an attractive woman amidst the throng of richly clad nobility only two tables down. That was Lady Pritha, Vasudeva’s own sister, who had travelled here from her home at Hastinapura. Her husband Pandu had been unable to attend due to his ill health, but Pritha’s presence was official and was more than sufficient to prove the solidarity of the great Kuru nation. The unbecoming stare that Prince Kamsa directed at her, a leer actually, was offensive in the extreme.

Vasudeva’s own hands clenched into fists as he struggled to restrain his own warring emotions. What manner of beast was this man, that he would storm thus into his own keep’s banquet hall in bloody armor, dash down his own loyal kin-soldiers, insult a noblewoman under the protection of his father’s hospitality? Often had he heard the tales whispered along the length of the Yamuna among the many clans and sub-clans of the Yadava nation. It was said that Kamsa was a rakshasa begot upon his mother Padmavati by a demon who assumed the form of his father Ugrasena. Vasudeva was a man of rationality and science not given to superstition. Yet, looking at those almost translucent greyish blue eyes that glared at the gathered nobles and chieftains with such unbridled hostility, he could almost believe the gossip. Rage and violence exuded from Kamsa like heatwaves from a boiling kettle.

Then Kamsa’s gaze sought out and settled upon Vasudeva himself. And his entire aspect changed so suddenly, it was almost as if he had seen something quite different from merely the king of the Suras.

As if he’s seeing some terrible foe rather than just me, standing here over-dressed in my ceremonial robes, Vasudeva thought. Kamsa took a step back, then another, and Vasudeva thought he saw something akin to…fear?…cross the prince’s otherwise handsome face. Kamsa’s magnificently wrought arms rippled with muscle beneath the chainmail armour he wore.

Vasudeva was caught off guard by the look on Kamsa’s face. What had the feared reaver of the great and powerful Andhaka clan to fear from a simple peace-loving man like Vasudeva?

The stunned silence in the hall gave way to surprised whispering as the assemblage took note of Kamsa’s strange reaction to seeing Vasudeva. At the same moment the Haddhi-Hathi raised his trunk and issued a bleating call that oddly echoed Kamsa’s own mixture of awe and terror. The sound served to snap the Andhaka Prince out of his reverie.

At once, his face changed. The fearful, awe-struck expression dissipated and was replaced instantly by a mask of such inscrutable blankness that it was beyond mere anger or even fury. This expression Vasudeva was much more familiar with. It was the mask a warrior wore when he prepared to launch an attack on the battlefield, severing his normal human self from the battle machine he was about to become.

But it was that glimpse into Kamsa’s naked inner self that caught Vasudeva’s attention. Yes, that look had been unmistakably an expression of fear. He was still pondering the meaning of that expression when Kamsa issued a loud curse, raised a barbed spear, and flung it with a roar of fury–directly at Vasudeva’s breast.

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Sep 01, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 6 Comments »

SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis – Excerpt#1

KAAND 1

1

King Vasudeva raised aloft the ceremonial sceptre of the Sura nation. The rod, shaped to resemble a cowherd’s crook, was impressively cast in solid gold, studded with precious gems at the curve of the handle. It caught a bar of morning sunlight streaming in from a slatted window high upon the vaulting walls of the Andhaka palace and gleamed. Beside him, King Ugrasena of Andhaka also raised his own rajtaru. The Andhaka sceptre was no less impressive than that of the Suras.

Both rajtarus–the Sanskrit word literally meant kingsrods–refracted the strengthening sunlight, sending shards and slivers flashing to the farthest corners of the great hall. A calico tomcat curled in the south corner closed his eyes to slits and bared his teeth, peering against the blinding gleam of the rajtarus. The well-fed palace cat’s expression resembled nothing so much as a satiated grin.

The watching assemblage crowding the sabha hall to the limit of its capacity, each lord and lady resplendent in their finery, blinked, then caught their breaths. The sight of the two lieges standing on the throne dais, their traditional rajtarus raised and glittering in the sunlight, presented a startling tableau. To some of the older clanschiefs in the great hall, it was a sight they had never believed they would witness as long as they lived: two ancient enemies, sovereigns of two of the wealthiest herding nations in the great land of Aryavarta, standing together with sceptres, not swords, aloft! Could it be true? Surely it was merely maya? That sight–nay, that vision–could not be real, could it? After generations of cross-border blood feuds, broken only by intermittent outbreaks of war, after so much bloodshed and bitter enmity, after so many failed peace summits and parleys, after so much bloody history had stained the pure soil of both nations, polluting the sacred river Yamuna with the offal of vengeful violence, could peace finally be at hand?

Most of the assemblage, as well as the enormous throng crowding the palace grounds without, doubted it severely. Suspicious frowns creased the faces of many clanschiefs, ministers and merchant lords. Only a few hopeful souls smiled beatifically and fingered their rudraksh-bead rosaries, silently chanting slokas to ensure the fruition of this historic pact.

There were few such personages; the golden age of brahmanism had long since ebbed, and the long-dreaded age of Kali-Yuga was imminent, the dark prophesied age of Iron and Death. Most doubted that this historic pact, wrought after months of anxiety and expectation, would last, or that it would be honoured at all. Yet even the most sceptical of ministers, the most cynical of generals, even the hardened veterans who had somehow survived through the first violent decades of this dark age, prayed as fervently as their brahmin brethren. For while few believed, all hoped. All desired. If it could somehow be brought to pass, if the Devas truly saw fit to grant them this release, then they would accept peace, nay, embrace it, with all the warmth and welcome they could muster.

So, when both kings brought their rajtarus together in an inverted V, touching the gem-studded crooks lightly together, every citizen, high and low, watched with bated breath. Even the calico tomcat, stretching himself in preparation for a foray into the royal bhojanshalya–he smelled the unmistakable, delectable fragrance of sweetwater fish being grilled in the palace bhojanshalyas–paused and turned his head, smelling the sour sweat of hesitant hopes and anxious prayers in the close air. The rhythmic martial count of the dhol-drums underscored the whole scene, omnipresent in the background, like a giant unified heartbeat, marking the four-by-four count to which all Arya ceremonies were performed.

King Vasudeva’s soft tenor blended with King Ugrasena’s aging gruffness as both kings recited the ceremonial sloka aloud, each line cued to them by whispering pundits seated behind the dais. The sacred flame, symbol of the firelord Agni, flared up brightly as a purohit, one of the many ceremonial priests who oversaw the arcana of traditional rites and customs, tossed a ladle of ghee onto the chaukat. The flames shot up almost to the raised sceptres, licking briefly at the point of their unity. Sunlight above, fire below. It was an impressive and auspicious moment, brilliantly and meticulously conceived and staged by the purohits of both nations. To the dwindling brahmins of Aryavarta, such occasions grew more precious with each passing decade, as the world turned away from the old ways and traditions. For the duration of this ceremony, the pomp and grandeur of Aryavarta, literally the Noble and Proud, would shine as brightly as a beacon fed by the light of brahman shakti itself. The chanting of the two kings rose to a peak, ending with a final sloka that seemed to echo from the very stone walls of the sabha hall. This last bit of theatrical magic was wrought by the brahmins again, strategically positioned at the far walls of the hall, joining in with the chanting of the kings at the penultimate quartet, raising their voices–to match the raised voices of the well-rehearsed kings–until it seemed that the world entire spoke the sacred Sanskrit verses.

||yadrcchya copapannah svarga-dvaram apavrtam||

||sukhinah ksatriya partha labhante yuddham idrsam||

The chanting died away, the omnipresent drumbeats fading away at precisely that instant. Into the sudden silence that followed, the watching assemblage could hear the cracking and snapping of the sacred flame as the purohit fed it incessantly with ladlespoons of the sanctified ghee. The faces of the kings had grown warm from the heat of the flames, a few beads of sweat standing out on the clean-shaven good looks of the young King Vasudeva and the tips of the grey-shot beard of aging King Ugrasena.

Moving in perfect unison, they lowered their rajtarus until the inverted V assumed its correct shape. The crooks of the sceptres dipped directly into the flames themselves, and the purohit ceased his ghee-tossing to allow the sacred fire to quell itself somewhat lest the kings lose the skin from their arms. The beads of perspiration swelled and then rolled down their over-heated faces as both monarchs kept the crooks of their rajtarus held in the fire just long enough to let the heat travel up to their bare hands.

Finally, the royal purohit gave the word quietly enough so that only the kings could catch it, and both lieges broke their stances, stepping around the fire. They exchanged sceptres, each handing over his proof of kingship at the exact same time as he accepted the other’s royal seal. This was handled with surprising ease, considering that both rajtarus were blistering hot by now. The watching assemblage could hardly know that both kings had had their hands anointed with a special colourless herbal paste prior to their ceremony, or that the near-invisible paste obscured the transmission of heat quite effectively.

The sight of the red-hot rajtarus being exchanged and then held aloft, to allow every individual in the hall a chance to see this momentous event, seared itself into the minds of all present. The painstakingly staged ceremony had served its purpose. Then, with obvious relief, and great smiles cracking their tense faces, the two kings embraced.

The crowd released its breath. Upon the fortified palace battlements, waiting courtiers blew long and hard on their conch shell trumpets. The low mournful calling of the conches filled the air for hundreds of yojanas, echoed from end to end of both kingdoms, calling the most welcome news in over two centuries. Peace. Shanti. Outside the Andhaka palace walls, the waiting crowd, now swelled to several tens of thousands, broke into a ragged roar that almost drowned out the conches. Royal criers rode out through the avenues and streets, pausing at corners to shout out the news in Sanskrit then in commonspeak, officially confirming the details of the peace pact. Stone pillars, carved and ready for weeks, were hastily but ceremoniously erected at strategic spots in the capital city and at crossroads along the national kingsroad, setting down the same details for posterity–or at least as long as stone and wind and rain would allow, which would probably be a millennium or two.

Sadly, the peace pact itself would not last a fraction of that time.

Click here to read the next excerpt from SLAYER OF KAMSA

Sep 01, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 9 Comments »

Vengeance of Ravana: Book 7 of The Ramayana Series – on the path to publication

This is the almost final cover design for the Penguin India edition of VENGEANCE OF RAVANA: Book 7 of The Ramayana. I’m posting it here along with some good news. The first is that I have finally resolved the textual issues I had with the manuscripts of VoR and SoS and as a result I’ve finally (finally-finally-finally!) decided that both books ought to be published. This means that the series will end at eight books, not six or seven, and that I have finally been able to deal with the Sita banishment issue in a manner with which I feel satisfied. It’s only taken me six years – which is longer than it took me to write the first six books in the series! But it’s done. VoR will be released in a mass market edition by Penguin in a few months, followed within three months by the mass market edition of SoS. I’ll confirm publication dates once Penguin informs me of the same.

For those of you – “you few, you happy few!” – who’ve bought and read the exclusive limited signed AKB BOOKS edition of VoR and have ordered the exclusive limited signed AKB BOOKS edition of SoS, this may not be reason to jump up and down, which is bad for your joints anyway. But for the vast majority of Ramayana Series readers out there, I’m sure you will be happy to see why I chose to rescind my own earlier decision to end the series at six books and chose to continue it in these two additional volumes. I can’t promise that the answers I provide in these two books will please everyone. Indeed, they may please no one. Because the point of writing these books is not to please or displease, it’s simply to complete the mental journey I embarked upon when I began writing Prince of Ayodhya and finished that first book way back in the year 2000, long before any publisher was willing to even look at such a manuscript, let alone publish it. Today, I have journalists, readers, editors, booksellers, publishers and others who keep writing to me and telling me that I’m responsible for a wave of resurgence in Indian mythology. I really don’t give a damn about any resurgence or the commercial ramifications of making mythology “cool” as one editor put it. What I do care about is the wealth of great Indian literature that has been ignored by the world for so long in favour of other mythologies and legends of the western hemisphere and that deserves a wider readership and exposure.

As I’ve always said to anyone who praised me for the series: This is not about me. It’s not my story alone. It’s our story. Our history in fact. I’m proud and happy to have been the one to retell it in my humble and flawed attempt. But I’m not anyone special or talented for having done it, just a product of a great culture and people that share one of the world’s finest storytelling traditions. In my opinion, the finest.

Jul 30, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 21 Comments »

SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis – Book your copy now!

Courtesy of designer Pinaki De and Editor Saugata Mukherjee, here are two sneak peaks of the almost-final cover design of the Harper edition of SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis, published by HarperCollins India. It will be available in all Indian bookstores in September. If you want the AKB Books Signed Limited Edition Hardcover, all you have to do is fill up the AKB Books Request Form to book your copy. (No advance payment required.)

Jul 19, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 12 Comments »

Sons of Sita, Slayer of Kamsa, Dance of Govinda…and Mba: Book 1

Update: Corrected from 5 to 4 titles based on availability.

Just a reminder to use the AKB Books Request Form to book your limited signed copies of the above titles. This particular list of my next 4 titles will stay online until 31st August 2010. After that, a new list will be put up which will be valid for the next three or four months. And so on. Due to the number of my published titles and the high demand, I am not able to offer signed copies of previous books at present, just the titles listed above. Each of these will be limited signed (but not personalized) editions and once this limited stock is over, these titles will not be available again! So book your signed copy now and don’t miss your chance to be one of very few readers worldwide to own one!

And in case you were wondering, it doesn’t cost you a rupee (or even a paisa) to book these copies!

Jul 19, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 14 Comments »

Dancing with Govinda, Slaying with Krishna

And, coming close on the heels of the glowing praise from Chiki Sarkar of Random House India after completing work on my first major non-fiction book The Valmiki Syndrome, here’s another outpouring of compliments from Saugata Mukherjee, my editor at HarperCollins India who will be publishing SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis, my retelling of the life and adventures of Krishna and also a companion series to my Mba. Saugata sent me a very warmly worded email after reading the final draft of DANCE OF GOVINDA: Book 2 of The Krishna Coriolis recently. I’ve only edited out the other business-related matters, but didn’t need to edit a single word or phrase of negative comment on the two books – because there were none!

Spent most of last evening reading this – it’s got everything in equal measure to make it a blockbuster! It’s simply unputdownable (probably also because I am at the end of the KAMSA edits) and I can see you’ll probably lead a whole new generation of readers into mythologies but in a cool, contemporary way. Also, on the other hand, I feel SLAYER will in many ways bring back a lot of AB (not the grand oldman of Bollywood!) lovers – it’s a perfect first book for a series like KRISHNA…there’s hardly much I can do to enhance the readability of the book, since it is quite beautifully written.

Jul 14, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 6 Comments »

News and Updates: The latest from the Bankerverse (again)

As with the last update on 11th June, those of you who’ve been keeping tabs on the right-hand News & Updates column may not find many surprises here. But there was one important announcement that wasn’t in that last update and a couple of minor ones, so here goes…

Waiting eagerly for my next books? Book your copies now!
AKB Books, the limited signed editions of a few select titles of my work, available exclusively via this website, are all currently sold out. However, if you wish to ensure your copy of any forthcoming AKB Books title, all you have to do is fill in the Request Form to book your copies! Don’t worry about payment – you will be contacted once the book is available and informed of the necessary details.

AKB MBA is on its way at last!
After all the ups and downs of the past several months (and years), I have finally found a way to share my Mahabharata retelling with all those of you interested in reading it. No, it still won’t be mass published and distributed in bookstores worldwide – I’ve already explained earlier why that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon – but it will be available from this website in a few months, before the end of this year. If you wish to ensure your copy, please fill in the Request Form now, and keep in touch with this website from time to time.

THE VALMIKI SYNDROME
Next in line for publication is THE VALMIKI SYNDROME, my first major non-fiction book being published by Random House India in a few months. As mentioned earlier, I have chosen not to offer any sneak peeks, previews or sample chapters from this book, unlike all my earlier titles. In fact, I’m not saying a word about this book until it’s released! You’ll just have to wait and see what it’s about.

SLAYER OF KAMSA
As outlined in my Epic India Library plan, my Mba Series will run in parallel with the Krishna Coriolis. While my Mba will be available exclusively via this website, the Krishna Coriolis series will be on bookshelves across India, thanks to HarperCollins India, the publishers! The first book, SLAYER OF KAMSA, will be out in stores before the end of 2010. The series is an action-packed retelling of the life and adventures of Lord Krishna from before his birth until after his death on the mortal plane, written in a narrative style suitable for Young Adult readers. The Krishna books will be much shorter than the Ramayana Series books and written in a far more compact and thrilling narrative style. SLAYER OF KAMSA will be followed soon after by DANCE OF GOVINDA. These first two books in the series will follow Krishna’s story from before his birth until the day he confronts and kills Kamsa. I’ll post excerpts as well as the cover design here sometime in August. So don’t forget to check back!

SONS OF SITA
Delayed but not forgotten! My seemingly interminable revisions are finally approaching an end. As I’ve mentioned earlier, after considerable thought, I decided to cancel mass market publication of Vengeance of Ravana, extract a substantial portion of that book (VoR) and add it to the manuscript of SoS. That required a fair amount of revision and rewriting, hence the delay. Many of you have pre-ordered copies of SoS and have been waiting eagerly for them. Once again, apologies for the delay and thanks for your patience. SONS OF SITA will be available in its signed limited AKB Books Edition in August. For those of you who have been asking, there will be a few copies of VENGEANCE OF RAVANA also available. Please note that I’m unable to inform each person individually by email, so you will have to keep in touch with this website for further updates.

PRINCE OF AYODHYA, the Graphic Novel
The first volume of my long-awaited graphic novel adaptation of my Ramayana Series, written by me and illustrated by Argentinian artist Enrique (Quique) Alcatena is ready to enter the publication pipeline. Those of you who have seen sample artwork from this comic or have been following its development for the past several years will be aware how much work and patience has gone into its creation. I will confirm publication dates in a month or two, once I know for sure.

TEN KINGS
My first historical battle epic, TEN KINGS based on the Dasarajna incident in the Rig Veda, has been bought by new imprint Amaryllis Books in a very good deal. Thanks to Jay and Priya of Jacaranda, and Sanjana Roy Choudhury, Chief Editor of Amaryllis! TEN KINGS will also be my first book published in Hindi and other Indian languages. The book is currently scheduled for mass market publication in January 2011. If you thought my Ramayana Series was good, and if you think my Krishna books are action-packed and fast-paced, then just wait until you read TEN KINGS. It’s by far my best book ever. A great story, a magnificent battle epic, and a historic saga of the founding of the Bharata nation.

THE KALI QUARTET
A BLOOD RED SAREE opens my first contemporary fiction series, The Kali Quartet. This is a global thriller featuring three strong women protagonists who are caught up in a major financial conspiracy involving financial institutions secretly profiting from human trafficking. This is likely to be my next internationally published series as well and currently, my agents are fielding offers from Indian publishers for subcontinental rights. I’ll update when I know more, but look at this as my next major work for the next few years, now that my Ramayana Series, Mba, Krishna Series are all complete and in the publication pipeline. It’s also, in my humble opinion, my best work ever!

More news and updates every month from now on…

Jun 26, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 8 Comments »

A BLOOD RED SAREE – Book 1 of The Kali Quartet

This is an earlier post (from May) which I’m reproducing here as this is going to be my next major publication after TEN KINGS. As I write these words, at least two major publishers are in negotiations with my agents to purchase publishing rights to The Kali Quartet. It will be at least a week or two, possibly even several weeks, before I’m able to confirm which publisher and roughly when the first book, A BLOOD RED SAREE, will be released. But for the moment, I thought these brief notes would help keep you informed about this, perhaps my most ambitious contemporary fiction series ever.

Some of you have been writing in asking me about The Kali Quartet. Some have assumed it’s another mythological epic like my Ramayana Series. I thought I would set your minds at rest and tell you a little about this upcoming project.

For one thing, The Kali Quartet has nothing to do with the Ramayana Series or mythology. The ‘Kali’ reference is just that, a reference. The story is completely contemporary.

So without further ado, here’s a short note on The Kali Quartet and the first book in the four-ology, A BLOOD RED SAREE.

The Kali Quartet by Ashok Banker
A BLOOD RED SAREE
THE BURNING SAFFRON SKY
THE AGE OF KALI
THE COLOUR OF RAIN

A Blood Red Saree

Synopsis

Three abused women unite under the guidance of a mysterious American benefactor to battle a powerful conglomerate profiting from the trafficking of women and children.

An international conglomerate of financial masterminds is secretly funding human trafficking and passing off the multi-billion dollar profits as a legitimate international investment opportunity.

Can three ordinary women stop this barbaric conspiracy of profit? They are not alone in their fight for justice. A powerful caucus of wealthy high-placed women in Washington DC led by the First Lady herself meet in the White House to pledge to end this despicable business. With financial aid and secret information from these anonymous benefactors, the three women form a Trimurti, a sacred troika.

Now, the battle is on as each of them uses her considerable skills and determination to attack on a number of fronts: legal, financial, and when all else fails, through violent confrontation.

One will not survive, the other two will face brutal opposition and immense challenges. Like three aspects of the Eternal Goddess KALI herself, they risk their lives and loves in a struggle to the death.

Each volume of THE KALI QUARTET is complete in itself, while forming a section of the larger story. Read consecutively, this is one epic thriller in four volumes.

Series Synopsis

Sheila Ray: daughter of a disgraced dead police officer, she’s finally put her traumatic childhood behind her to establish the first successful women’s gym in Kolkata. When she protects a pair of persecuted lesbian Olympic women boxers from a vengeful politician, she finds herself literally under fire and on the run both from the powerful forces running the Maoist insurgency in India, as well as the Government and police.

Nachiketa Shroff: her ex-husband and his family’s attempt to kill her for not bringing a dowry for her arranged marriage put her in a wheelchair for life; after using the law to destroy them financially, she now runs her own NGO offering free legal representation to battered Indian women. But when her office burns down, destroying a decade’s work and almost killing her (again), she knows it’s time to step up the activism and go after the people at the top of the pyramid of exploitation.

Anita B: The first Indian woman private investigator, unabashed lesbian and LTBG activist, she returns home to Kerala to attend the funeral of her childhood best friend and runs smack into a cobra’s nest of trouble. Not only was her friend murdered for opposing the development of a major five star tourist resort but Anita’s own misogynist brothers are part of a ring of child traffickers using a Christian mission and orphanage as a cover.

Three women, each of whom has been abused by men in different ways and has built a life and reputation designed to help other women from similar abuse, are unwittingly drawn into a web of international human traffickers. Working alone at first, each discovers a different face of the hydra-headed monster that is modern-day slavery. Their individual quests for justice and survival lead them up to the top of the pyramid of power, where they discover a terrible secret. An international conglomerate of financial masterminds – bankers, insurance executives, fund managers – who are secretly funding illegitimate activities such as the enslaving of women and children in the third world, drug trafficking and even terrorism, and then whitewashing the multi-billion dollar profits under the guise of a legitimate international investment opportunity!

The stakes are phenomenally high, the parties involved are the Who’s Who of the financial and political world, and their resources immensely powerful. What can three women do to stop this barbaric conspiracy of profit?

But they are not alone in their fight for justice. An equally powerful caucus of wealthy high-placed women in Washington, DC, led by the First Lady herself, meet in the White House to pledge to end this despicable business. With financial aid and secret information from these anonymous benefactors, the three women are able to form a Trimurti, a sacred troika, and unite together.

Now, the battle is on as each of them uses her considerable skills and determination to fight the forces of unbridled profit by attacking on a number of fronts: legal, financial, and when all else fails, through violent confrontation.

Like three aspects of the Eternal Goddess KALI herself, they risk their lives and loves in a struggle to the finish. One will not survive, the other two will face brutal opposition and immense challenges. But at the end, they will triumph and succeed in substantially crippling the enterprise and as importantly, exposing it to the world at large.

Jun 23, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 5 Comments »

TEN KINGS: The historic battle that founded the Bharata nation

The 7th Mandala of the Rig Veda (quoted above) tells us of a great and terrible war called Dasarajna: The Battle of Ten Kings. In that legendary conflict, ten major tribal chiefs (kings) of the ancient world sought to displace and destroy Raja Sudas of the Bharata tribe.

The ten kings were supported by numerous individual champions and smaller forces, and were instigated by the great seer Vishwamitra. Many of them were allies of Raja Sudas and traded with the Bharatas and were friendly with them. But that fateful day, they turned against Sudas and his small but strong tribe of Bharatas, surrounded them with forces so superior that Sudas could have no chance of survival.

Their intention was to destroy Sudas and the Bharatas, take them as dasyas (slaves) and divide the Bharata lands and possessions as spoils of war. One day, out of the blue, their great army assembled on the banks of the Parusni river (present day Ravi in the Punjab region) and challenged Raja Sudas.

Vastly outnumbered, outmatched, and outplanned, Sudas should logically have surrendered. But he knew he had done nothing wrong, and being a righteous king, with the support of his people who loved him and respected his leadership, kindness and generosity, he chose to fight.

He was also supported by the spiritual mentorship of his guru, the legendary Vashishta.

And so, upon a stormy day by the banks of the Ravi, the battle was fought.

Legend tells us that in fact, Sudas might well have been Raja Bharat himself, son of Dushyant and Shakuntala, grandson of Vishwamitra.

The Rig Veda tells us that against all odds, Raja Sudas of the Bharatas (hence Bharata-Raja) fought that day against the Ten Kings…and won. The battle was impossible, the victory a miracle. The Rig Veda also tells us that the devas themselves watched from above as the battle progressed, and due to the moral superiority of Raja Sudas, Lord Indra chose to support the Bharatas.

Not only did Sudas and the Bharatas win, they routed the enemy in a massacre that was aided by nature itself, when the river and weather came to their aid. Was it Indra himself or merely a brilliant battle strategy by Raja Sudas? Either way, the Bharatas won the day. And as a result they became the dominant tribe of the Indian sub-continent.

Later, Raja Sudas’s descendants split into the Puru and Kuru lines, and waged another great war for Arya supremacy: the Mahabharata yuddh.

In a way, DASARAJNA (Battle of Ten Kings) was the turning point in the itihasa of the sub-continent.

Because it was by winning that war that King Sudas Bharata established his tribe as the ruling tribe of this part of the world.

And it is in his honour that all people of the sub-continent came to be known in time as Bharatas.

That story has never been before been told in all its glorious detail. Indeed, while the Rig Veda tells us some details of the war and its aftermath, very little is known about why the war began, how it became inevitable, and so on.

It’s a rousing tale filled with intrigues, conspiracies, back-stabbing, fierce erotic encounters, brutal court politics, family conflicts, and race against time in the hours before the battle. All the enemies and allies who will face one another on the battlefield are seen in the first half of the novel, playing their shrewd politics and pretenses in the court of Raja Sudas, pretending to be his allies, his friends, his neighbours, well-wishers, advisers, while secretly plotting and preparing to go to war against him. The reason they do this is because they intend to destroy his kingdom from within first – and if that fails, their armies are already assembled and waiting at the boundary of his kingdom, ready to invade. And as the story progresses and Sudas stands firm to his principles – his dharma – they all desert him, one by one, and go to join the other side, until finally Ten Kings stand against him, outnumbering his force more than ten times.

Leading and instigating them is Anu, the longtime arch-enemy of Sudas and the Bharatas, and Anu’s spiritual adviser, none other than the legendary brahmarishi Vishwamitra (of Ramayana fame). Vishwamitra has an old history of enmity with Sudas’ own adviser, Vashishta, and has an axe to grind by instigating this attack on Sudas and the Bharatas.

DASARAJNA is based on events described in the Rig Veda and confirmed by historians and archaelogists as being a true story. It is the seminal tale of the great battle that established the Bharata nation in the sub-continent which is present day India.

TEN KINGS will be published in English and Indian languages by Amaryllis Books, an imprint of Manjul Publishing, in early 2011.

Jun 20, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 25 Comments »

Request A Book

Hi. As requested by several of you, I’ve created a Request A Book page where you can fill in your details and book a copy of any of the forthcoming AKB BOOKS Limited Editions.

The best thing about it is that you don’t need to pay in advance to place a request. That’s why it’s called a Request and not an Order. Even if you already have my bank details, please DO NOT pay or transfer money for any book. That’s why I haven’t mentioned any prices either.

Once each book is printed and copies are ready to despatch, you will be contacted and informed of all necessary details such as price, etc. At that point, you can choose whether to buy it or not, change your delivery details, ask for more than one copy, etc.

Unlike previous AKB BOOKS, these titles will NOT be personalized. That means that when I sign each copy, I will not be able to address it to you or anyone else by name. It will only be signed by me.

Right now, all you need to do is fill up the Request Form, providing all the details correctly as of this point in time, and selecting the titles you are interested in getting – you can always change your mind and details later. This form is just a way to Book your copy of each of these AKB BOOKS Limited Editions so I know roughly how many copies of each one to order from the printer.

And you don’t actually have to pay even a rupee in advance!

Isn’t that cool? Well, what are you waiting for then? Go for it!

Click here to go to the Request A Book page.

Jun 18, 2010 | Ashok | 6 Comments »

Mba: The Limited Edition – okay, let’s do it!

Thanks to one of those extraordinary events that nobody can predict, the situation with my Mba has changed. I’m not going to explain what happened and go into details here, but let’s just say it’s completely unexpected and out of the blue. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have guessed this would happen and the fact that it did is probably the exception rather than the rule.

First the not-so-good news. This doesn’t change the situation completely. I still don’t know if or when the series will be published in the mass market. Probably never. So those of you who have been voting to buy copies after they’re available in bookstores – or even to buy the full series once it’s in bookstores – you’re not likely to get that chance.

But for those of you who have voted (and are still voting) to pre-order a copy or buy it once it’s available here from AKB Books, well, this news is meant for you all! In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that all those who voted for Option 1 in the poll – you are the ones who gave me the motivation to do this. If you’re so eager and willing to pay to get the AKB Mba in hand, then I’m willing to bring it out in a limited AKB Books edition. It won’t find the much larger audience that it probably deserves (in my humble opinion) but at least it will reach those who want it the most.

In fact, you guys are willing to pay in advance and pre-order it, but I’m not going to ask you to do that. It’s enough that you’re willing to order it online and that there are enough of you who do for me to issue it in this limited edition for you. There will be no pre-orders or advance bookings as I’ve experienced too many delays and put you through too many postponed deadlines already. This time, I’ll wait until I have the printed copies in hand, and then offer it for sale via this website.

The good news is that I will be accepting all major credit cards as well as direct bank transfers and payment via cash deposit. There will be only a limited number of copies and each volume of the series will be available for a limited time only. But at least it will be available in this way. The limited number of copies means that you will need to place your order at the right time and make the payment promptly.

I don’t have a definite date for the release of volume one yet. But I’m hoping to be able to offer it by November or December this year. That means that copies will be ready to order in November of December 2010 and are likely to sell out within a few days of opening orders. It could even be sooner, it’s possible.

Due to the limited number of copies I’m able to offer this way, and the presumably large number of readers who would be interested, I’ll be giving first priority to those who have ordered books issued under my AKB Books imprint already. I already have your email addresses and will be emailing you closer to the release date. But mainly I’ll be using this website to post the information and so I’d request you to kindly keep in touch and visit here as often as possible.

This is official and confirmed by me – the first book of Mba will be printed sometime before the end of 2010 and will be available in a limited edition exclusively via this website. It will not be available in bookstores anywhere. I can’t confirm about overseas orders just yet but they’re highly unlikely. If I’m able to offer them, they will be at a high price, I’m afraid, as the bookstore had serious issues despatching boooks via postal service earlier. The only option would be courier and that would cost far more than the cost of the book itself.

I’m also able to confirm that the Krishna Coriolis will be published in full – all 8 volumes, not just the first two. And that, as planned, it will run in parallel to the Mba series. Ideally, both should be read together since the Krishna Coriolis is actually the Harivamsha section of the Mahabharata, split into a separate series by me because the main Mba was getting too massive already.

And finally, the Mba books offered via AKB Books will be more expensive than regular mass market books that you find in your local bookstore. That’s the price of a limited edition.

So to sum up:

1. AKB Mba will be published after all – but only in a limited edition available directly via this website.
2. There will be no pre-orders or advance bookings and payment. Payment will be accepted only once the book is ready for immediate despatch.
3. The first volume should be printed by November or December 2010.
4. Keep in touch regularly with this website – it’s the only way to be sure you know when the first book of the Mba is out, and the only way you can order a copy.
5. Due to the limited print run, only one copy per order will be despatched and once the print run is sold out, it will not be reprinted – that will be the first and last edition issued by AKB Books, truly Limited Collector’s editions.

I guess you should know that by doing this, I will lose money. A lot of it. The higher price per copy won’t make a great difference – the reason for the higher price is because publishing is economical only when printed in large quantities on offset. This limited AKB Books edition of the Mba will be for you loyal readers, and you alone. Why did I change my mind and decide to do it this way after all? Well, that’s just it. I didn’t change my mind. Something happened that nobody could have expected, and it changed the situation dramatically.

Better an epic read by a few than by none. Keep in touch! Don’t be a stranger, wokay!

Jun 18, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 45 Comments »

News & Updates: The Latest from the Bankerverse

Those of you who’ve been keeping tabs on the right-hand News & Updates column may not find many surprises here. But I thought it was time to round up the most recent happenings and developments in the Bankerverse for those who haven’t.

SLAYER OF KAMSA
Close on its heels comes Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis, SLAYER OF KAMSA, published by HarperCollins India. The series is an action-packed retelling of the life and adventures of Lord Krishna from before his birth until after his death on the mortal plane, written in a narrative style suitable for Young Adult readers. The Krishna books will be much shorter than the Ramayana Series books and written in a far more compact and thrilling narrative style. SLAYER OF KAMSA will be followed soon after by DANCE OF GOVINDA. These first two books in the series will follow Krishna’s story from before his birth until the day he confronts and kills Kamsa. I’ll post excerpts as well as the cover design here sometime in August. So don’t forget to check back!

SONS OF SITA
Delayed but not forgotten! My seemingly interminable revisions are finally approaching an end. As I’ve mentioned earlier, after considerable thought, I decided to cancel mass market publication of Vengeance of Ravana, extract a substantial portion of that book (VoR) and add it to the manuscript of SoS. That required a fair amount of revision and rewriting, hence the delay. Many of you have pre-ordered copies of SoS and have been waiting eagerly for them. Once again, apologies for the delay and thanks for your patience. I can now confirm that SONS OF SITA, the 7th (not 8th, since VoR now stands cancelled) and final Book in the Ramayana Series, will be available in its signed limited AKB Books Edition in August.

More news and updates every month from now on…

Jun 11, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 2 Comments »

Want to read the AKB Mba? Vote for it now!

UPDATE: 16 JUNE – The poll remains active but I’ve now decided to go ahead and print my own limited AKB BOOKS edition of the Mba Series on a not-for-profit basis. Details will be posted on this blog in time. Meanwhile, you can still continue voting and showing your support for the series, as well as visit the Request A Book Page and place a request without having to pay a rupee in advance!

My long-awaited Mahabharata retelling is facing cancellation. Support it by voting in this online poll! Please be honest. There is no ‘right’ answer! To know what voting for these four options would achieve, read the explanation below…

UPDATED: I shall be printing the Mba regardless of the votes now. However, this means that there will be NO bookstore edition as yet of the series, and perhaps no such edition in future as well. The only way to get a copy of my Mahabharata retelling (Mba) is to visit the Request A Book Page and place a request without having to pay a rupee in advance!

NOTE: Since some of you have asked, I’ll explain briefly what these options mean:
Option#1: If I get 1,000 readers willing to pre-order (and pay) in advance, I can print and sell the whole series myself.
Option#2: If I get 2,500 readers interested in buying it, I can offer copies of the first book via this website – but if much less than 2,500 actually buy, there will be no further books in the series.
Option#3: If 25,000 readers are willing to buy the first book soon after it reaches bookstores, it will be possible to release a mass market edition.
Option#4: The series stays cancelled. No publisher can issue such large print runs of ten massive volumes and keep them in stock nor will bookstores keep the books on shelves for years (until the full series is published) in hopes of readers coming in someday and buying copies.

Jun 02, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 12 Comments »

7 not 8: Vor+SoS = Sons of Sita: Book 7 of The Ramayana Series

As those of you who have been in touch with me over the years know, I always share my works in progress online with readers and take into account their views and suggestions.

After considering reader feedback to the limited signed AKB BOOKS edition of Vengeance of Ravana I felt it was best to cancel mass market publication of the book and have requested my editors at Penguin accordingly. They have been supportive as always, and I’m very grateful for that.

I’ve taken a part of the text of Vengeance of Ravana and added it to the text of Sons of Sita, merging them into one final book, which I plan to submit to Penguin for publication.

This will be the 7th and final book of the Ramayana Series (R), and will most likely be called Sons of Sita: Book 7 of The Ramayana Series.

PS: Those of you who have ordered the AKB Books Limited Signed edition of Sons of Sita will receive this version, and this is the reason for its long delay. In my opinion, the book now rocks big-time and is a truly fitting end to the series…thanks to your input!

This is just to let you know what’s happening. I’ll post a longer explanation here once I’m done with the revisions, which, let me add, will not be for another month.

This also means that those of you who bought the AKB BOOKS limited signed editions, hardcover as well as paperback, of Vengeance of Ravana, now have the only copies of that version of the text in existence. That version will never be published and distributed in stores now, so hold on to your copies and who knows, they might actually be worth something someday!

May 17, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 8 Comments »

Mother’s Day – short story

Mother’s Day

An Anita B Story

Early on a Friday morning in December, Shubra Basu, 37, mother of Rabin, 14, and Shanti, 10, opened the front door of her flat in Andheri, Bombay, and slipped out.

She shut the door behind her, using her key to turn the latch so that the sound of the door shutting would be virtually inaudible. Then she took one last look at the door of the brand new flat she and her family had shifted into barely two months earlier, the flat her husband Avijit Basu and she had scrounged and saved up to buy over 16 years of marriage.

Finally, she turned away from the door, a tiny sob escaping her, hefting the VIP suitcase from her left hand to her right. She went down the stairs, walked quickly out the compound of the co-operative housing society. A row of yellow-and-black taxicabs were parked at the corner taxi stand. She got into the first one and told him her destination. As the seafacing seven-story building fell away behind her, she felt a great weight lifting off her chest. She was really doing it. She was leaving her family for good. It was a terrible moment. It was a wonderful moment. It was the worst moment and best moment of her life.

She was never seen again after that morning.

The yellow-and-black Mumbai taxi, license number MH-31904, picked her up outside the building, and took her to Dadar Khodadad Circle. From there, nobody has a clue where she went. That was seven years and eight months ago, plus a few days. She’s never been seen since then by anybody who knew her.

Seven years and eight months. That’s a hell of a long time to go missing. It’s also a hell of a long time to wait before you start looking for someone. Especially if that someone happens to be your wife, and the mother of your children. Which is why, when I met Avijit Basu at a fast food restaurant not too far from where I live, the first question I asked was: “Why did you wait you so long?”

Before I tell you what he said, a couple of words about me. I’m Anita B. I’m 30-something, I drink too much, have never been married. I’ve learned that pumping iron is no replacement for dealing directly with life’s problems, but it helps get me through the night. I’m colour-challenged, which, in case you’re not up to speed on politically correct talk, means I’m dark-skinned. Like a Keralite, which I also am.

I don’t have a private-detective’s license and don’t consider myself one. I do favours for people, and I charge them whatever I think it’s worth by way of my time and effort. I haven’t been working at this long—just a couple of years—but I’ve had a couple of good cases, and even got my name and picture in Mid-day. It was right next to the picture of the Mid-day Mate on Page 5, which should tell you something. I’m medium height, medium looking (except for the taut muscle tone, I guess), I keep my hair short, never touch make-up, love jewellery although in my line of work it’s not a good idea to wear too much, and I guess the closest celeb I compare to physically is the singer Toni Braxton, or maybe Rahul Bose without a dick.

I live in a tiny one-room place at Nepean Sea Road, Bombay. The address on the visiting card looks real fancy, but it’s basically a store room-cum-servant’s quarters. The owner rented it out because she’s a widow with virtually no income except for a piddly monthly cheque from Unit Trust, and in any case she can’t afford a servant, so the room was lying vacant anyway. The rent is low, the address is impressive, and as long I ignore the ratcheting-gnashing noises from the lift shaft, I can pretend I’m comfortable. I have a phone line which I share with my landlady and I used to have an answering service until I failed to pay their bill three months in a row. Now, the old hag answers the phone for me, and though she always grumbles about doing it, I think she enjoys being a part of my sleazy crime-infested lifestyle. And just for the record, the B in Anita B stands for Bitch. Or whatever you find most offensive, and it’s none of your business anyway, buster.

“I was scared,” he said.

“You were scared you wouldn’t be able to find her?”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head like one of those little dolls with a spring-neck that goes on bobbing for hours if you even brush it accidentally. “I was scared I would find her.”

I blinked at him. “Let me get this straight, Mr Basu. You waited almost eight years to start searching for your wife because you were scared you would find her? Excuse me, but in that case, why are you doing so now?”

I took a sip of my coffee. It was too hot, too sweet and too thin.

He looked down at his own untouched cup of coffee. “I blame myself.”

I didn’t say anything to that. After a moment, he went on: “Shubra wasn’t happy. She hadn’t been happy for a long time before she left. When she disappeared, it was as if some part of me had expected it….Do you know that feeling of deja vu…Not deja vu exactly, but that sense

that you knew this was going to happen…had dreamed about it, maybe…dreaded it? Am I making any sense?”

I nodded briefly.

“And there were these signs. She’d been telling me she was leaving for a long time before she actually flew the coop. I just didn’t see it until it was too late.”

A bunch of teenagers came clattering up the stairs and went past us in a flurry of short skirts, tight jeans and loud, raucous chatter. A second later, an explosion of laughter behind me. I didn’t need to turn around: I’d seen the teenage birthday party decorations at the far end of the fast-food place when I’d entered. Above the noise, I said, “What signs?”

He paused, looking down at his still-wrapped fish burger and large fries. “Does it matter?” He glanced up at me, and I could see the embarrassment in his eyes. They were nice brown eyes. “I mean, what difference could it possibly make after all these years? The thing is, I think she was unhappy for a long time before she went. And then she left.”

“Mr Basu. I don’t know what’s important and not important unless you tell me. Besides, if it sheds light on her motive for leaving in the first place, I think it damn well matters.”

He considered that. Then still without looking up, said: “She wouldn’t let me into her bed.” So softly I had to lean forward to hear it over the sounds of teenage party-in-progress mayhem and Backstreet Boys music.

“You had separate beds?” I’d seen only one large bed in their bedroom, and two bunk beds in the kids room.

“No, no. What I mean is, she stopped letting me…you know…”

“Have sex with her?” I volunteered.

He glanced up again, those brown eyes fluttering nervously. “We stopped making love.”

“Whatever.” I slurped my coffee. “So she was never in the mood during those last days? Weeks? Months?”

“About a year, actually. And it wasn’t just a question of not being in the mood. It was as if I…repelled her. She would shove me away, say ‘No! No!’ And there was real disgust in her voice. I couldn’t understand it. One time…” He paused, running a hand through his hair and looking around sheepishly. “One time, I touched her while she was sleeping…you know, put my hand on her—” he brushed a hand against the general vicinity of his chest. “And she screamed. She went berserk, getting up, punching me, abusing, hitting. I’d never seen her like that before. And then—.”

“Yes?”

He licked his lips. Looked down at his untouched burger. Toyed with a french fry, dipped it in ketchup, half-heartedly raised it to his mouth but didn’t actually eat it.

“Mr Basu, I can understand that you’re uncomfortable talking about things like this. But like I said before—”

He wiped his mouth with the napkin. Though he hadn’t eaten a morsel.

“She hurt me,” he said.

I leaned forward. “Are you telling me she raped you?”

He looked away. He was a good-looking man, I saw that now for the first time. Not in a macho, mannequin way, but plain good-looking. “Yes. And sodomized.”

I blinked at that. But wasn’t sure how to ask the obvious question.

He saved me the trouble. “With a candle.”

I looked at him dead straight. I wanted to know this was for real, he wasn’t just jerking my flush-chain, putting me on. He looked sincere, those brown eyes filled with real pain, real shame. And this was Mcdonald’s. Who takes an investigator you’ve hired to find your wife to Mcdonald’s, then lies to her about, of all the possible things on earth, how your wife raped and sodomized you before she ran out on you? With a candle?

A pair of young girls passed us, heading for the stairs. They were in a hurry, calling out something about being late for the movie. The first one was dressed in jeans so tight, I wondered how she could breathe. The second one was in a miniskirt that I could easily have mistaken for a short blouse. She had large breasts and in her hurry to get past, she lurched and almost fell on Avijit. Her breasts brushed his cheek, and her rear end grazed the back of his left hand.

She passed by without even excusing herself and was gone. He didn’t react, didn’t even give her a second glance. He hardly seemed aware that she had touched him.

Without taking my eyes off him, I raised my Styrofoam cup to my lips.

Nothing came. The coffee was over. And so was this conversation.

“What did I tell you about thinking too much, sweetie?” said Mrs Matondkar, my landlady. She was sitting in her rocking chair as usual, eating channa. “Thinking too much is bad for you. It keeps you from doing. And in your line of work, all you have to do is do, not think.”

After that impressive speech, she picked up another handful of channa from the steel katori beside her, rubbed it between her palms to separate the shells from the channa nuts, then proceeded to pop the channa one by one into her mouth. How she managed to chew them without teeth—she was 73 and almost totally toothless—was beyond my understanding. But she seemed to relish them, rocking back and forth on that chair in rhythm to her methodical mastication.

“Shut up,” I said, although she wasn’t saying anything just then. I had a headache that morning. I usually had a headache most mornings. Maybe drinking and watching too much television the night before had something to do with it. But what good is urban life if you can’t belt down a few big ones and burn your eyes out watching late-night cable movies?

I swallowed an analgesic pill and tried to wash it down with a sip of Mrs Matondkar’s oversweetened tea. The tea was scalding and I coughed, spraying the room, and was forced to chew the tablet down quickly. It tasted horrible.

She clicked her tongue sympathetically from across the room. That tongue-clicking enfuriated me even more than the rhythmic squeaking of her rocking chair.

“Shut up,” I mumbled again, slurping the tea greedily from the saucer.

Most of it had slipped into the saucer anyway. When I finished it all, I felt a little better.

“What you should do,” she said slowly, like a schoolteacher instructing a kindergarten class in the alphabet for the first time, “is spend as many days trying to find her as possible. When he says ‘achcha, bas, that’s enough’, then you stop, settle your bill, and forget about it. As long as you do your job and get paid, what more you want? Why? Am I telling sense or not, girl?”

She was telling too much sense. That was what irritated me.

“You don’t understand,” I told her. “It isn’t as simple as that.”

“But it is, girl,” she went on in that irritating, explanatory way. “It is very extremely simple. He wants to hire your services, you are in need of the money. Do your best, and whatever happens, happens.”

“There’s a question of individual rights involved here. His wife obviously left because she wasn’t happy. It wouldn’t be fair of me to lead him to her after all these years. If she wanted to be found, she would have contacted him years ago. Or she would have contacted someone or the other, her mother, sister, anyone. The fact that she didn’t means that she wants to be left alone. Who the hell am I to intrude on her life now?”

“Achcha, okay, baba.” She took another handful of channa and rubbed it. The flakes fell like black snow into the katori. “So you do one thing. You try to find her. If you succeed, you speak to her personally. Tell her the situation. If she is willing to meet her husband, fine. You direct him to her and your job is done. If she says No, Please, I don’t want to see that man ever again, he was such a bad man to me I cannot bear to live with him again and suchlike, then fine. You go back to him and tell him you were not able to find her, so what can you do? Take your money and go home.”

I thought about that. It had a certain charm to it, especially the part about taking the money and going home without leading Basu to his estranged wife. But what really made me think was something else she had said in the course of that dissertation.

“What was that you said? About not wanting to see that man again? Because he was such a bad man to her? What did you mean by that?”

She munched channa thoughtfully. “You only said it, no? Why would she leave if she was happy? Must be something in the marriage that made her go away like that. Something very bad.”

I stood up, still holding the empty saucer. I put it down on the table, my fingers sticking to it. “Thank you for the tea, Mrs Matondkar. If anyone calls, I’ll be back late tonight.”

“Arre, at least tell me what you’re going to do? What you have decided finally?”

I walked over to her rocking chair, over by the window she sat by and looked out of all day to pass her time. I picked up a couple of shelled channa from her open palm. They tasted like besin-ka-atta in my mouth.

“I’m not going to try to find her at all,” I said.

She sighed, shaking her head disapprovingly.

“I’m going to find out why she left in the first place.” I turned to go. “If I can find that out, I think I’ll find out everything that matters. Wish me luck.”

Instead of doing that, she raised one thigh and issued a slow, musical fart. I grinned at her and left. It was as close as she ever came to giving me her blessing.

P.K. Sunil was one of those completely self-centred, work-involved men who either don’t have the mental capacity to concern themselves with anything apart from their own careers or don’t want to make the effort.

Smugly contented, slightly over-weight, and giving off a pulsating aura that beeped “look at me, ain’t I cool?” at regular intervals, he sat before a console of some kind of computer-aided-design set-up and made me watch him for almost twenty minutes. He had a swivel chair with wheels that he used to slide deftly from one end of the console to the other. Typing on a keyboard with machine gun speed, then sliding over to roll a designer’s mouse-ball carefully, then working a lever on a Betacam Player to rewind the film a frame at a time, he took obvious pleasure in his efficiency and speed. So, when he finally completed doing whatever it was he was doing for those twenty minutes and froze the image on the multiple monitor screens, he clapped his hands together once sharply, nodded brusquely and swivelled around to face me. It was about time; I was sick of staring at his ponytail.

“Not in here,” he said.

His eyes pointed threateningly at the pack of cigarettes I was holding in my left hand. I had been toying with them for a while, afraid he had forgotten I was waiting behind him and was going to go on all afternoon.

“Oh, these,” I said casually. “Actually, I quit a couple of months ago, but once in a while…you know.”

He didn’t respond, didn’t blink, didn’t even nod. Friendly bastard.

I put the pack away and pulled out a picture of Shubra Basu, taken a few months before she had disappeared.

“Her hair was shorter when she was with me,” he said. “It suited her better. She had a fleshy…” he touched his cheeks. “But then she started to grow her hair long, and we dropped out of touch completely.”

He made it sound as if one thing was directly related to the other.

“How closely did you know her, Mr Sunil?”

“She wasn’t happy with him,” he said unexpectedly. He looked at me as if for confirmation. “She used to tell me she was thinking of getting a divorce.”

“Did she say why?”

He rolled his chair over to the A/c, took hold of the remote control that hung suspended, and made some adjustments. The room seemed to grow even more frigid than before. My lungs screamed for a cigarette. “He was not right for her,” he said. “I told her before they got married only. But…” he shrugged.

“You and Shubra started this business together, didn’t you? You met in college and found you had a common interest in electronics. Started tinkering around with technology together, won some prizes. Then, when you passed out, you set up this business as partners, right?”

He didn’t nod, agree or disagree. Inscrutable as an American in a bad Indian English novel.

“We wanted to go to California together,” he said. “Start our own company. Like the two Steves started Apple. A free, non-conformist culture. Like a computer commune. Shubra was from a very conservative Bengali family. Her grandfather was a founding member of the Communist Party of India (undivided). She had grown up very repressed and controlled. In college, she blossomed, found herself. She became a different person. Technology was her way of escaping their feudal tyranny. Asserting her own identity.”

This was getting a little too idealogical for me.

“So you’re saying that she found her salvation through microchips and keyboards? And became a kind of, what, techno-hippie?”

He looked at me coldly.

“Metaphorically speaking,” I added, controlling an irrepressible urge to wink. He was so stiff I wanted to tell him to bend over and touch his toes so I could extract the long pole he obviously had up his ass.

“She married Avijit because she couldn’t resolve her feelings for me,” he said abruptly.

“What feelings did she have for you?”

He looked at me as if I was a computer glitch he wanted to remove from a program.

“She was in love with me. We were both in love with each other. We were going to be together, setting up the company, building our future together. But she began to get scared of the commitment. Shubra couldn’t commit, that was her problem.”

“So you think she married Avijit just to avoid making a commitment to you? Isn’t that self-contradictory?”

He glowered at me. I could almost feel the temperature fall further—15. 14. 13.

“We were soul-mates, sex was only one part of the whole template. Shubra and I were more perfectly matched than any other couple I’ve ever met.”

“Yet she ditched you for a Bengali brahmin as conservative as her own parents, didn’t she? How do you explain that, Mr Sunil?”

He was silent. The airconditioning hummed subvocally behind us. The soundproofing was effective enough to make the singing of blood in my veins audible. It sounded like a sad, old ghazal.

I figured the answer to that last question wasn’t coming. Not from him at least. And I needed a cigarette the way a Kamatipura prostitute needs an AIDS check-up.

Nishi Saigal lived in the kind of Pali Hill bungalow that you usually see only in a scene from a big-budget Hindi film: a long winding driveway rising higher and higher until you turn the last curve and come upon a breathtakingly beautiful log-and-stone cabin that seems to belong to a Swiss mountain retreat rather than a Bombay residence. The lawn before the bungalow was immaculately manicured, gleaming crewcut green in the late afternoon sunlight. An underground garage housed more expensive cars than I could count at a glance, let alone name. I felt like a character in a displaced Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, a mistress arriving home after a much-needed summer break.

“Have you had lunch?” she asked as I was shown into a living room that looked like a photograph out of those interior decor magazines. She was dressed in something long, flowing, off-white and designer-looking, and looked anxious and distracted. “You must excuse the mess, I’ve been so busy with the elections.”

I didn’t know what mess she was talking about, unless it was my hairstyle. But the bit about the elections I deduced was a reference to her husband, the ex-filmstar-turned-MP who was apparently standing again for election.

“Well, I had some breakfast,” I said, remembering Mrs Matondkar’s channa and chai. “But I haven’t got around to lunch yet. I’m running a bit late.” That also took care of my apology for arriving an hour and ten minutes late, I hoped.

She gave instructions to a very healthy-looking albino maid who reappeared barely five minutes later with a platter of salads, sandwiches and assorted cold cuts that looked like an entire section of a five-star hotel Sunday buffet.

“Please,” she said, indicating the food as we sat down at the ornate marble-topped table. “I know it’s not much, but help yourself.”

I munched on what looked like a roast-beef sandwich and tasted like one too. “I believe you and Shubra were good friends.”

She gestured vaguely. “Our children studied together from playschool onwards. Do you have children, Miss Anita? Well, then you wouldn’t understand. But yes, of course, we were friends too. We became friends over time. Although I have to say, our natures were quite different.”

She managed a short, choked laugh. “Quite different.” She added cryptically: “No. 4 and No. 7 usually don’t mix.”

“Excuse me?”

“Numerology. My hobby. Do you read the Tarot? I do. It’s fascinating.”

I put down the sandwich and took a sip of the iced tea. I could get used to this kind of life.

“Tell me, how intimate was your friendship?”

She glanced out at the lawn, visible through the large floor-to-ceiling french windows which dominated one entire wall of the living room. A servant was exercising the three pedigreed Alsatians, who were dancing in and out of the arcs of the lawn sprinklers. Sunlight gleamed on the wet grass. One of the dogs shook the water off himself, sending up a shower of glittering drops. I could smell the scent of grass, wet earth and wet dog even though the house was centrally airconditioned and the french windows were shut.

“We didn’t discuss politics,” she replied, frowning. “And she didn’t like to talk much about her husband either.”

“No, I meant other matters.” I dabbed at my mouth with the monogrammed napkin and looked at her in what I hoped was a secretive feminine way. “You know what I mean, women’s talk. Bedroom matters. That kind of thing.”

She stared at me so intently and for so long, it started to get uncomfortable. I was about to take another bite of the sandwich, and maybe try some of the cold cuts with a little salad on the side, but she suddenly snapped her head around, barked: “Anjali, clear the table.”

I watched as the food, including the plate with my half-eaten sandwich was carried away by the albino maid and a young dark-skinned boy with wall eyes and an infectious grin. I shot him a wink and he blushed, almost dropping the salad bowl.

After this little display of Pavlovian conditioning—obviously intended to show me her displeasure at being asked such an impertinent question—Nishi Saigal made a show of looking at her watch several times and said, “You really must excuse me, I have so much election work to take care of. In fact, I would have left in the morning and not come back till night, but somehow today—.”

Mrs Nishi Saigal then proceeded to call in a dozen-odd local Maharashtrian boys and began to interview each of them in turn as possible candidates to go on a door-to-door search of the constituency to check voter’s lists. She even told Anjali, the albino maid, to organize water and tea for them in the kitchen before they were sent out, conspicuously not asking me.

I tolerated about ten minutes more of this bullshit, then I moved in.

I raised my voice and asked with deliberate clarity, speaking in Hindi to make sure all and sundry heard and understood:

“So Mrs Saigal, you do admit you were having an affair with Avijit Basu?”

Pin drop silence. You could hear the depreciation mounting on all the valuables in the bungalow. The volunteers looked at me, then at Nishi Saigal, then back at me, back at her, en masse, like a bunch of extras in a bad Hindi film—or in any Hindi film, let’s face it, they’re all bad.

“Please, if you don’t mind, you will leave at once,” said Nishi Saigal.

I looked at her face and had the satisfaction of seeing her attractive, milk-white Punjabi complexion turn scarlet. She was standing and pointing in the direction of the doorway, just in case I didn’t understand English.

I ignored both the verbal and the visual message and continued in Hindi: “Because that’s what the whole neighbourhood says, including another close friend. And your reaction a few minutes ago when I asked you a question confirmed it. You and Avijit Basu were having a sexual affair for over a year. Right until the time his wife disappeared, wasn’t it?”

She was going from scarlet to purple now. She snatched up an object, and I thought it was a piece of statuary she was about to fling at me. But it turned out to be an extravagantly designed telephone which she used to call the security. Then she folded her arms on her not-so-ample chest and struggled to keep her emotions under control.

I went on. My audience was relishing every word.

“But after his wife left, Avijit suddenly stopped the affair, didn’t he? He wouldn’t take your calls, changed his phone numbers, and when you sent your driver or your maid to his house with a personal message, he would reply with a cold, computer-printed message that the affair was over and you should leave him alone. When you persisted, unable to get over your obsession with him, he sent you a letter threatening to go to the police—or the press. I think that last one was what really did it for you, wasn’t it? And that’s when you began your campaign of hate-gossip against Avijit Basu. You began spreading rumours that his wife left him because he was impotent, alcoholic, neurotic, a wife-abuser, and God knows what else.”

The security arrived. Two well-built Punjabi guards in such smart, crackling uniforms, I almost felt obliged to salute them. Nishi Saigal pointed at me, her finger trembling with rage. I raised my hands and smiled to show them I wasn’t going to be any trouble. I walked up the short stairs to the upper lever of the duplex.

“Now that,” I told the impassive security guards as we emerged into the brilliant afternoon sunshine, “was what I call a one-sided conversation.”

But it didn’t matter. Because I had already gathered my facts before visiting Nishi Saigal. And because her reactions alone had been enough to confirm all my suspicions.

Mrs Matondkar chewed sugarcane strips as she mulled over the events of the day. “So this woman, she gave up her full career, even though she was so talented. And she became an ordinary housewife, while her husband pursued his career. And what happens? He goes and has an affair with some other man’s wife. How will she feel after a thing like that? Men, always such cheaters.”

I sipped my cola. I would have preferred it spiked with some rum, but Mrs Matondkar didn’t favour my drinking or smoking in her presence. She probably wouldn’t have been able to tell if I slipped out to my room and added a dollop to the cola, but it had never even occurred to me to trick her that way. One of my many flaws: Honesty.

“Actually,” I corrected her, “it was worse than that. She had enjoyed a great sexual awakening in her college years. A kind of hippie sexual liberation. And as you said, she was talented. Probably brilliantly suited for technological work. So when she married Avijit Basu, she probably expected a husband who would share some things in common with her—Bengali language, culture, history—but allow her the freedom she wanted. To follow the career she wanted. To explore her sexuality and invidivuality further. And to raise a family.” I took another sip. “But as things turned out, she only got one out of three.”

“So I told you first only. She was unhappy, that was why she went away.”

“I agree. She was unhappy. My interviews with relatives, friends, neighbours all suggest that after he began to find success, Avijit began drinking harder, behaving more arrogant and chauvinistic, and began taking her role as a mother and house-wife more and more for granted. She must have felt stifled.”

“So now you know the full story. End of case.”

I smiled. “Not at all. In fact, it’s only the beginning. I already started with the premise that Shubra was unhappy. All I’ve learned in the past few days is why. But I still don’t know what actually happened to her.”

“She went away. You told me. She left her purse also in the taxi, that’s why the Union still had the record, no?”

“Yes. And I found that strange. The last thing you’d expect a woman to leave in a cab when running away from home and family is her handbag.”

“She was upset, confused, it happens. Now she must be in some far away place, living a new life, on her terms. Not being a servant to that man.”

I nodded. Everything Mrs Matondkar said was undeniably true. It leaped out at me from every interview I conducted, every little fact I added to the growing pile. Even eight years later, everybody who knew Shubra Basu agreed on one thing: She was trapped in an unhappy marriage. And she was not the kind of woman to sit and take it indefinitely. So she had left. There was only one problem with that whole line of argument.

“The children,” I said to Mrs Matondkar. “How do you explain the children then? All right, so she was frustrated at not being able to explore her career, so she was sexually frustrated as well. Her husband had changed from the likeable, apparently liberal man she had married into a chauvinistic, self-centred, philandering bastard. Her friends knew about his affair with a beautiful ex-film star, and that must have been humiliating. But she loved her children madly. Why would she leave them behind?”

Mrs Matondkar chewed thoughtfully on a small strip of ganna, then removed the chewed-up residue from her mouth. She dropped into her lap, where a small pile had collected. “She could take them with her, no?”

“She could have filed for divorce and custody.”

“And she would have won this divorce?”

“Probably not. He was the only earning member, she had no income. But if she had made the effort, in a few years, she could have succeeded. It’s not impossible today.”

“Yes, but this was not today. This was eight years ago. You know the divorce laws. The court always favours the husband, the man. Is that right?”

That was right.

“But it still doesn’t explain why she would have abandoned her kids and left. That kind of selfishness I can understand in a man, but not in a woman. I don’t think Shubra Basu would have deserted her children for her own sake. They were already 14 and 10 years old. All she had to do was wait a few more years, and they would have been out of the house and on their own. Then she could have done what she wanted with the rest of her life.”

Mrs Matondkar nodded, rocking steadily to and fro. The evening light from the window behind her made her look like a painting of an artist’s mother. Whistler, was it? Except that Whistler’s mother was never so over-weight.

“But still she went, no?” she said said at last. “So probably she could not bear to wait even so long.”

“Just tell me this, Mrs Matondkar. Do you agree with what I just said or not? If you were in Shubra Basu’s place eight years ago, wouldn’t you have waited a few more years rather than walk out there and then? After all, he was unfaithful and a dominating husband, but he wasn’t beating her up or abusing her. What would you have done? Abandoned your children to pursue your own dreams or wait a few more years?”

She chewed the last piece of sugar cane. When she took it out at last, it was as dried out as straw. She spat little flecks of cane into her left hand, then licked the stickiness of her lips.

Finally, she looked up at me and nodded: “I would have waited.”

My thought exactly.

Taxi driver Aftab Husain was a thin, elderly man with a patient look. Clean-shaven and balding, he faintly resembled the Hindi film character actor A K Hangal. His right hand shook visibly, probably the result of a silent stroke he wasn’t even aware of having had. I didn’t enlighten him on the symptoms of strokes and their consequences on the nervous system.

Instead I showed him a picture of Shubra Basu that Avijit had given me, and asked:

“Eight years ago, you drove this woman from Carter Road, Bandra, and took her to Dadar TT. She left her purse in the back seat, and afterwards, you took the purse to the Union. Do you remember?”

He frowned, scratching his high, balding forehead. “Pata nahin, memsaab. Bahut log bahut kuch chhod jaate hai. Sabki pata kaun rakhta.”

“Not like this one, Husainbhai. This lady left her purse in the back seat. The Taxi Union said when you handed in the purse, it had a lot of cash and credit cards in it. You very honestly turned it all over to the Union.”

A light dawned in his eyes. He replied in Hindi: “Achha. That one. Yes, yes, I remember that now. She was carrying a very heavy suitcase, I think,” he said at last. “I remember because I helped take it out of the dicky, and it was very heavy.” He shook his head. “That’s all, memsaab.

That and the wallet.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “You mean, purse. Ladies purse.”

“No, memsaab,” he said, his hand trembling as he let it rest on the top of his meter. “It was a wallet, a man’s wallet.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean, a man’s wallet? How could it be a man’s wallet?”

He shrugged. “That’s why I first thought that maybe it was left by someone else. But she was my first bhada of the day, my bonee. I clean my taxi every morning before I start work, so I knew it must have been her’s only. It was a big leather wallet.”

With a sudden burst of excitement, I kissed Aftab Husain on his bald forehead.

“Thank you!” I said happily. “Thank you so much!”

Avijit smiled politely when I arrived and asked me if I’d like some iced tea.

I looked at him silently for a moment, examining his face closely, the cut of his hair, the nape of his neck, the shape of his body in the oversized black cotton shirt and faded blue jeans. He began to blink in embarrassment, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“Take off your clothes,” I said.

He froze.

“I want to have sex with you,” I told him casually. “I’ve wanted you since the first day we met, Avijit. I can’t resist you any longer.” I sounded like a Silhouette Romance, even though I’ve probably only read two in my entire life. I’m usually more the horror-and-crime novel type, but in the situation the purple prose sounded appropriate.

“Don’t tease me any longer,” I went on. “Please. Just take me. Ravish me. Make me your’s right now. I can’t wait another minute!”

I began unbuttoning my own shirt. “All right,” I said. “I’ll start first.” I worked open all the buttons, reached behind and snapped open my bra strap. I bared my bosom to him, as Victoria Holt would have said.

“It’s all your’s, Avi. Take me now!”

He stood up, face burning red with embarrassment and anger. “Put your clothes on,” he said. “Are you mad? What’s wrong with you, Anita?”

I went over to him, caught him by the wrists and pinned both hands behind him, slamming him against the wall. A cluster of cartoon characters jumped off the magnetized writing board. Keeping his wrists behind his back with one hand, I used the other hand to unbutton his black shirt quickly. Weight-lifting does give me a certain amount of muscular strength. Avijit struggled ineffectively to break out of my grasp.

“Stop it!” he said, genuinely alarmed now.

“Please, my love! Don’t resist me! I must have you now or die!” I was beginning to enjoy my performance now. Perhaps I had a future in acting?

I had most of his buttons open now. I tore the rest off, yanking the shirt aside to the left and to the right, exposing his chest completely.

And then I stopped abruptly.

And stared down at his exposed torso.

Avijit Basu’s breasts were small, almost flat. The nipples were large and full, engorged with the physical stimulation of our struggle, but if you wore a thick double-pocketed cotton shirt like he was wearing now, you wouldn’t be able to see them. And if he wound a strip of thick cloth around his breasts when he went out, they would be effectively invisible.

But damn it, why am I still calling him Avijit? For that matter, why am I still calling him “him”?

“Sit down, Shubra,” I said gently to her. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“A mean, selfish bastard of a man doesn’t turn into the best father in the world overnight, Shubra. Avijit changed too much. You could take on his outward persona, the two of you almost looked similar, and being Bengali and having just moved into this new flat, your neighbours hadn’t had time to look at either of you closely. Except for the weight, of course. A couple of them commented on that. But they assumed it was because of the grief at the wife abandoning him. Other than those things, you did a pretty marvellous job of posing as your husband for the last eight years. I have to congratulate you, it was the perfect crime.”

“What do you mean, crime? What crime did I commit? Avijit may have been a good man when I first met him, but he changed so much in those sixteen years we were married. He couldn’t make the business work, couldn’t cope with his sexual urges, his eating and drinking, couldn’t be patient enough with the children. He was a complete mess. And instead of trying to make it better, he kept making it worse and worse. By drinking even more. By sleeping around. By boasting about it in front of the children—can you imagine that? He used to boast at parties right before the children that he had slept with X, Y, and Z.”

“Even then, Shubra, you had no right to murder him. You could have got a divorce, custody—.”

“What are you talking about?” The puzzlement in her eyes was genuine.

She had no idea what I was referring to. “What do you mean, murder? Who said I murdered him?”

I caught my breath. “You didn’t? But then…I mean…why else would you…why this whole charade then? Wasn’t that his body you carried away in the big suitcase? The one you took to Dadar TT?”

She nodded. “Yes. I put it on a bus to Valsad, Gujarat. I waited till they put it on top of the bus, tied down all the luggage, and watched till the bus left to make sure they didn’t suspect anything. I don’t know what happened after that, but I suppose they didn’t discover the body until they reached Valsad, found nobody claiming the suitcase and finally turned it over to the State Bus Authorities, who must have kept it until it began to stink.”

“But if you didn’t kill him, then how did he die?”

She sipped some tea. “He had a massive heart attack in the middle of the night. Died instantly. I sat up for two hours, trying to decide what to do. Finally, I thought of putting him in a suitcase and dumping it on a state bus.”

She was leaving something out, I could tell. “But what brought on the heart attack, Shubra? Come on, you might as well tell me the whole thing.”

She paused, looking around at the house, the life she had built for herself. A very good life. Definitely not the kind of life she would have had if Avijit Basu had continued living, and if she had stayed on as his wife.

“He tried to hit me,” she said slowly. “He had become brutal lately. Wanting sex even when I wasn’t inclined. Trying to do all kinds of things, sadistic things. He was so shameless, he would even try to lift my dress up in front of the children. And once, I caught him watching Shanti bathe, and he had an erection.”

I nodded. I had some idea of the depths to which human beings can sink once they allow themselves.

“That night, he tried to force himself on me. I resisted. He hit me. I hit him back. It became a fight. Then he picked up something to hit me with, and I knew he was drunk and crazy enough to kill me right there and then. So I…I threatened him.”

“With what?” I asked, gently, touching her arm.

“There was a pair of scissors on my bedside table. I only meant to scare him away, but he was out of control. He grew even more angry when I threatened him with the scissors. He tried to hit me again, but I slashed him a few times with the scissors and that’s when he began to have the heart attack. He collapsed on the bed and began to have convulsions. I realized what was happening, his doctor had told him some months ago to lose weight and stop drinking. The number of the doctor was right there by the phone. I knew I should have given a heart patient an analgesic immediately to help reduce the clotting. But I didn’t do anything. I just stood there and watched him die. It took half an hour.”

She was silent for a few moments. I put the glass of tea down. I wasn’t very thirsty any more.

“So, you were scared that you would be arrested for attempted murder? And that you would lose the children?”

“Everything,” she said, tears in her eyes now. “I would lose everything, don’t you see? Because no matter what they say, it’s still a fucking man’s world, let’s face it, Anita. That’s why, to stay with my children, I had to become a man. Literally. That’s why I did it all.”

I nodded. I coudn’t argue with that one.

She wiped her eyes, got over her emotional outburst and looked at me intently.

“So what will you do now?” she asked. “Go to the police?”

“What’s the point?” I replied. “He’s dead. He was a mean, selfish bastard, everybody agrees on that. You, on the other hand, are a really fine mother to your children. Mother and father, both rolled into one. You’ve done a great job bringing them up. You’ve built a career, a man’s career in a man’s world. I don’t hate you, Shubra, if that’s what you’re thinking, I admire you. The answer is no, I’m not going to go to the police or anyone else. I’d never forgive myself if I were to do anything to hurt you after all you’ve gone through already.”

She hugged me then. Took me to herself and held me so tight, I could feel her heart beating against mine. Then she kissed me on the cheek, as only a woman can kiss another woman.

May 17, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 4 Comments »

Flesh Songs – short story

Another oldie-goldie from the archives, this one featuring a series character Sheila Ray who first appeared in my 1993 crime thriller The Iron Bra, and returns in A Blood Red Saree, the first book in The Kali Quartet, which is being offered for publication only outside India.

Flesh Songs

by Ashok Banker

A Sheila Ray story

The police gave her a bitch of a time. They wanted answers. She didn’t like the questions, and the way they asked them.

There were a half dozen of them in the lock-up, constables and a couple of sub-inspectors. One man stood behind her and when she didn’t answer, he boxed her ears like a man in a band clashing cymbals together.

She’d been expecting it, had clenched her jaw tight and her lungs emptied of air, but it still drew trickles of blood that dripped from her earlobes. Later, they handcuffed her hands over her head, tied her feet together and someone punch-jabbed her kidneys from behind. Flashes of red lightning exploded behind her eyelids. She knew she would piss blood for days.

Then one of them mauled her breasts, and that got them started. A constable with a gut like a sumo wrestler started to unbutton his khaki shorts. The others whistled and egged him on in guttural Marathi. The sub-inspectors didn’t give a damn.

She turned her face away. She had no doubt what would happen next: Either she would play along and they would use her brutally, leaving her bleeding and mauled. Or she would fight them, as she knew she would, and they would punch, gouge, claw and flay her within an inch of death. They wouldn’t kill her–not deliberately, at least–because while a gang-rape in custody was one thing, murder was a tad more difficult to brush away. Just a tad.

But it never went that far. Just then the door slammed open for a new arrival. A khaki uniform again, but the epaulets and sleeve-stripes were way beyond any of the ranks already in the interrogation room.

It was the Assistant Commissioner, Crime Branch, D Ward. At the sight of his rank, all the other cops scrambled to attention. The hawaldar mauling her breasts, his other hand unbuttoning his shorts, muttered a familiar abuse and stepped away from her. The ACP scanned the room. He didn’t seem to care about what had happened, or what had been about to happen. He gave a terse order, turned and left the room, leaving the doors open.

When she was brought in, dressed again, he offered her coffee. Her clothes were ripped and without the tampon, she could feel the wetness oozing through her panty and soaking her jeans. Everything hurt. She sat in the high-backed wooden chair and waited.

“Sheila Ray,” he said, reading from a file. “Ashok Ray’s daughter.” He glanced up at her, as if trying to compare his memory of Ashok Ray with this battered slut who sat before him.

“Your father was a very good policeman,” he said.

She waited for him to get to the point. She had to pee– again. Though they had let her pee before bringing her to the ACP, she had been unable to relax enough to let her sphincter open.

Now, she felt like she would burst at any moment.

He sipped coffee. She drank down the glass of water before picking up hers, Indian style. Her hand didn’t tremble, but her forearm was so taut, she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. Her lips blazed where she had been bitten by the fat hawaldar.

“A child has been kidnapped,” he said at last. “An important man’s child.” He named an industrialist, a name she had read in the newspapers in connection with a billion dollar power project, an Indo-US joint venture.

Her forearm was so taut she had difficulty bending the elbow and relaxing the muscles enough to hoist the cup to her lips. She had lived with a venture capitalist once, for two brief months: satin sheets and Baskin Robbins, a laptop or Palm-held always within reach, room service and lots and lots of sex, especially when the Nasdaq closed high, at 6 a.m. Indian Time. She remembered the name from those days, from pink-sheeted financial papers and glossy American magazines with pompous single-word names.

The ACP explained the deal. The kidnapper had been caught and killed in a police encounter when he tried to retrieve the ransom. They knew the address where the child was being held. An apartment in a chawl, a windowless two-room apartment with only one door. But somebody was there with her, an accomplice. And he would kill her if they tried to break in. They needed someone who could talk him out.

She didn’t ask the obvious question. The coffee was too sweet and too strong, made with chicory, South Indian style. She drank it all down. She hadn’t eaten a morsel for a day and a night, had no idea when she might eat again, and the sugar, milk and caffeine would bolster her for a couple of hours.

He answered the unspoken question. “You know the man, the accomplice.” He had left his coffee too long on the desk and when he sipped it, a skin of cream came onto his lip, hanging like cobwebs. He exclaimed in irritation and dabbed it away with a tissue from a box on the desk, rubbing hard.

“His name is Bhasker,” he went on after he had wiped away the cream. He now had flecks of tissue on his lips, but didn’t know it. It was evident what he expected her to do. He didn’t specify what she would get in exchange; they both knew what it would be. She had done this before.

She said she would need one thing before she agreed to do it.

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“A sanitary pad,” she said.

His clean-shaven face twitched reflexively. She realized then that he didn’t have a moustache.

The chawl was one of the many vast, sprawling Government-built monstrosities that festered like leprosy sores across the suburbs, built to provide accommodation to relocated slum dwellers and homeless paupers, back in the Eighties when saving the poor was still fashionable in Bombay high society and political circles.

The slum dwellers and homeless, brought in garbage trucks by the hundreds of thousands, had stayed long enough to sell the tenements for hard cash. In less than six months, they had all moved back into the inner city, raising new plastic-and-tinfoil lean-tos and huts to replace the old. After three tries and three changes of Government, the project had been shelved. Now, the tenement structures were worse than slums.

She made her way around a paved area occupied by dozens of little children, some nearly infants, others almost teenagers, squatting for their daily business. Some younger ones squatted on the highway, boldly sticking out their tongues at the passing truckers and motorists who slowed or swerved to avoid them. This was the route to the international airport. A happy sight to greet foreigners arriving in the city for the first time.

The chawl was dark, filthy and stank of the usual assortment of Bombay chawl smells: all the fluids and solids the human body could possibly produce lay on the stairs and in the hallways. The apartment she was seeking–kholi, they called it here–was on the third floor.

On the top step, a gangly young boy with a large goiter lump on his neck, sat studying a school textbook. It was probably the best light in the place to read. She had to step over him and she glanced down at the book. It was a history book, opened to a page on Clive of India.

She ignored the Marathi women sitting on the floor in the hallway, churning a grinding stone in tandem as they jawed tobacco and occasionally spat out onto the veranda.

Like most Government-built tenements, the building was a giant cube, with verandas running around the perimeter of every floor. The tenements were grouped in a cube within the cube, clustered right next to each other as close as cells in a hive.

This meant that no room could have access to light and fresh air, and the ones on the extreme inside didn’t even have ventilation, except for a central chute down the length of the structure that was used as a refuse dump. Windows that opened into this central tube had to be kept closed to keep out the stench and the rats. It was worse than not having any windows at all.

She found the number she wanted and knocked on the door, softly. There was no response.

Further down the hallway, the sound of a tape recorder playing a Hindi film song blared through an open door, and a baby’s crying was punctuated by the angry voices of a man and a woman.

The song was an oldie by Mukesh, a dead singer with a nasal voice that made the soul twist in delicious agony. He sang about time and how it changed everything, even the face of love. The same song was also playing somewhere else, more softly. Radio then, not tape. In yet another kholi, a TV tuned to MTV was blaring out a nauseatingly familiar Indipop hit, a direct rip-off of “In The Summertime”.

She focussed on the low, mournful lyrics, shutting out the louder music and the other chawl sounds. Seeking a small, momentary envelope of privacy, Mukesh’s spine-creeping voice and the tortured songs of her own silent flesh.

From within the apartment, she heard voices. A man’s low tones. And a little girl’s whining complaint. They were muffled by another door. She knocked again, much harder.

“Bhasker,” she said, putting her mouth to the metal-framed mail slot… “Mee aahe, Sheila.” It’s me, Sheila.

There was absolute silence from inside. The Mukesh song ended and a radio deejay’s low silky voice spoke inaudibly for a moment. Then, as another song began–Geeta Bali, not her favorite, but an oldie at least–she heard the faint scuff of cautious feet as they approached the door.

“Kashasaati Sheila,” he said softly in Marathi. “Tuzha aiicha janam diwas kai?” If you’re Sheila, then tell me your mother’s birthday.

A memory flashed like a television screen switched on and then off: Her mother in a brand new red saree, laughing, for once unconcerned about her teeth showing, Sheila’s father on her left, Bhasker on her right. “Thirty-first August, Nineteen Forty Six,” she said.

There was a pause, as if he experienced a flash of memory too. Then he said quietly, switching to Hindi. “Sapnon mein bhi nahi socha tha ke tumko bhejenge.” You’re the last person I expected them to send.

She glanced at her watch. She had less than half an hour left. “Open the door,” she said. “I have a deal for you.”

She heard the child cry from inside the apartment. It sounded muffled, as if she had been gagged.

He opened the door.

They sat on the floor in a room that was completely bare, but clean. A ridiculously small fan–each span barely six inches long–spun like a dirty CD on the ceiling.

The girl was in the corner, gagged and tied, eyes bulging with curiosity but otherwise unharmed.
There was nobody else in the place. A peculiar odor hung in the air, something undefinable but vaguely familiar. It seemed to come from the direction of the little toilet, so she paid it no attention.

“It’s a set-up,” he said. “We were assigned to guard the girl from a kidnapping attempt. The ACP told me to take her away and keep her in a safe place for two days, where nobody would think to look for her.”

He gestured at the empty room. “This was my kholi, until I shifted to the police quarters in Worli after the promotion.”

She noticed the sub-inspector’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform. “We brought her here on Monday morning, and were told to wait for further instructions. The next thing I knew, Vardhe and Sahu had some argument about how much ransom to demand, and then they shot it out. Vardhe’s body is still in the toilet. Then Sahu said he was going to collect the ransom and we would split it 70-30 when he returned, and he never came back.”

He glanced at the girl and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked older and wearier than she remembered, his hair shockingly more grey. Plus he had lost a lot of weight.

“I never intended to take the ransom, but I thought I’d have it out with him when he came and then take the girl over to HQ and explain everything…”

She spread her palms.

He nodded. “I know, I know. They won’t believe a word. Because the ACP set us all up. He lured Sahu and Vardhe with the promise of money, and me…” he paused, flicking at a fly that was trying to sit on his ear, “with me, he knew money wouldn’t work, so he used duty to get me to help. I was an idiot not to see through him in the first place.”

His face had a keening, desperate look, and he gazed at her as if he felt she had the answer to everything in her head and might tell him at any moment.

“So what to do now?” he asked.

She stood up. “Get up,” she said. “They’ll be here any minute. To kill all three of us. That’s the plan, obviously. Let’s go.”

He blinked and stared. “All three of us?”
His eyes went to the child.

“She’s a witness,” she said. “Besides, they’ve got what they wanted, the money. No point keeping her alive.”

An expression of utter darkness came over his face, like a cloud blotting out an already weak yellow sun. “But then why send you?” he asked. “Why not just come and kill me.”

She sighed. “I was supposed to kill you and save the girl. In exchange for my being released of all charges.” She showed him the blade hidden in the lining of her jeans. He blanched, and looked up at her face. She smiled and shook her head.

He started towards the front door. She stopped him. “This way,” she said, and led him to the toilet.

It took them several minutes to break through the bathroom ventilator. And even then, it would be a tight squeeze for Bhasker’s wide shoulders. She hammered at the crumbly concrete on the sides, trying to widen the hole. Then she heard them banging on the front door. Bhasker flinched, his sweat-washed face quivering. He stood astride the body of the dead inspector, Vardhe, his shoes squishing in the sticky pool of dried blood.

“Okay,” she said. “You go first, I’ll hand you the child.”

“No,” he said, pointing at the hole. “No room for me. You go. I’ll hand her up to you.”

She hesitated. The sounds at the front door stopped, replaced by ominous silence.

“Go!” he urged.

She went. The girl whimpered in fear as Bhasker handed her up, and when she saw the three-floor drop, she moaned softly, and started to cry. Sheila went out the hole backwards, the girl followed and clung to her neck, almost choking her.

Gunshots rang out at the front door. They were shooting the lock. But there was still one more door, the one to the inner room, to get through.

Bhasker called out to her as she was about to dip out of sight. “The blade,” he said.

She hesitated again, knowing what he meant to do, then pulled it out with one hand and threw it at him. It stuck in the thigh of the corpse, and the last sight she had of Bhasker was as he bent to pull it out. She climbed down the water pipe, praying it would hold her weight and the kid’s, and gunshots rang out at the door of the inner room.

She hid in a latrine on the ground floor, keeping the child quiet for the two hours it took them to search the chawl. She narrowly missed being found at least thrice. Finally, they assumed she had escaped–there were many entrances and approaches–and went away.

The industrialist was grateful but somehow resentful, as if he had already accepted his daughter’s death and couldn’t deal with the fact that she was alive. Or maybe it was just the fact that she was covered in excrement that prevented him from hugging her on sight.

But he paid a hefty reward. Sitting in an office on the ground floor of the bungalow–the girl had been taken away by servants to be bathed and cleaned and sterilized and fumigated presumably–he counted out crisp new bundles of 500-rupee notes. She shoved them carelessly into her duffel bag and zipped it up.

“It’s all politics,” he said, evidently feeling the need for some explanation. “To do with bureaucratic corruption. I didn’t pay the right people the bribes they wanted at the right time, so they thought they could shake me down this way. It’s all politics in the end, everything is politics.”

“I know,” she said, sliding out the gun she had deliberately not shown Bhasker. “So is this.”

She shot him twice in the head, and then once more in the groin. That was for not hugging his daughter.

The ACP banged his knee against a chair in the darkness and cursed in English. She had deliberately set the chair in the way. He fumbled for the light and switched it on, putting on the desk-lamp instead of the overhead tubelight by mistake, then stood there, swaying drunkenly.
She had heard about his drinking problem: He liked to drink Scotch in five star hotels. In exchange, he turned a blind eye to certain irregularities–like prostituition. Once in a while, he made use of those same irregularities himself; she had heard it all from an old friend who was now a prostitute.

When he saw her and the gun, he jerked back, startled. The chair caught him in the backs of his knees and he sat down heavily, grunting.

“Bitch,” he said. “Took all my money.”

She shook her head. “He paid me the money, as a reward for bringing the girl back.”

He snorted, letting her know how much he believed of that.

“Anyway,” he said. “You did good job with Bhasker. He looked like someone had tried to cut his throat three times to find the vein.”

“Artery,” she corrected automatically, then was silent, trying to picture Bhasker’s last seconds in that toilet with the rotting corpse, trying to slice through his own neck, having to do it again, and then yet again, hands growing slick and slippery with his own blood, collapsing to the floor as the corrupt cops came in with their guns ready to shoot anything that moved.

He was wagging a finger at her admonishingly. “But you were not supposed to kill Singh. That was not part of your brief. Now there is going to be big trouble for you.”

She raised the gun. It gleamed faintly in the dull yellow light of the desk lamp.

He started to laugh. “You will shoot me? You bitch, the day you shoot an Assistant Commissioner of Police, your life will be worth two-kaudi. You understand? Two pennies!”

She shot him in the teeth. His mouth shattered and turned red, half his face disappearing. He slumped in the chair, his shattered head falling onto the desk. Perfect.

She wiped the gun clean of her prints, put it in his right hand, fired it once into the wall as if his first shot had gone drunkenly awry–now he had the powder burns on his hand–and then dropped the bagful of cash beside him. There was no need for a suicide note: The industrialist’s visiting card was inside the bag. The afternoon tabloids had already speculated on a possible ‘inside link’ in the police department to the kidnapping.

“You’re the do-kaudi ka bastard,” she said as she walked away. “But this time you earned your two pennies.”

She drove all that night, the next day, and the next night, stopping only to relieve herself by the roadside and to snatch occasional naps in the back seat. She knew no search would be made for the stolen car for at least a week, if ever, but to be on the safe side, she switched license plates at a trucker’s diner–a dhaaba–outside the Rajasthan border.

When she reached Pokharan, the tiny desert village where the Indian Government had tested their nuclear devices, she stopped and slept for two straight days in the car.

A month later, she was in Delhi, and heard from a local blackmarketeer that she was accused of the kidnapping as well as the murder. Luckily, the Delhi police had bigger fish to fry, what with protests over nuclear testing and the national and state elections. She wasn’t afraid of being recognized.

Sometimes, when she soaked in the whirlpool tub in the Delhi Regency’s Princess Suite, sipping cold beer, and listening to old sad Mukesh songs on the brand new CD player, drifting in that dream-state between sleep and sobriety, she thought, not of Bhasker, although that last sight of him bending to pick up the blade in the toilet was mixed up in the memory too, but of the industrialist’s daughter.

And then, for some reason, she remembered the goiter-neck boy she had passed on the chawl staircase. She wondered which of those two would grow up less twisted, better able to resist the seductive warped lusts of the body, those luring siren songs of the flesh.

She was betting on the goiter-neck. He had less to lose to begin with anyway.

May 14, 2010 | Ashok, Blog | 3 Comments »

Mumbai Noir: ‘The first (three) crime novels in English by an Indian author, or so the media called them at the time

This is the final cover for my ‘Mumbai Noir’ collection. The next title from AKB Books. Again, as with the previous AKB Books titles, this will also be a limited signed edition available only through online orders via this website. It contains the complete original text of my first three crime novels (also my only three crime novels published in print editions, since Bad Karma was published only as an online novel). They’re short novels, almost novellas, so the omnibus is less than 500 pages, but as a bonus I’ve written a long essay on Indian Crime Fiction as well as notes on the writing and publication of the books.

Click on the image to read the back cover blurb. As the title of this blog post says, these three slim novels were hailed at the time (1993) as ‘the first crime novels in English by an Indian author’. Were they really? To know that and much else, you’ll have to wait and read the introductory essay.

Meanwhile, feast your eyes on that beautiful cover design by the very talented Chandan Crasta, who also takes credit for that very evocative graveyard photograph and many other equally mesmerizing pics.

Apr 25, 2010 | Blog | 2 Comments »

The best book in Ashok K. Banker’s Ramayana Series?

The results pretty much speak for themselves. People’s enjoyment of the series seems to increase as they keep reading, rising steadily until, after the mid-point, it spirals upwards. What’s interesting is that not only did the 7th book, Vengeance of Ravana, virtually tie with the 8th book, Sons of Sita for the highest number of votes, even though only the limited edition of VoR has been released so far and SoS hasn’t even been published! I guess that means expectations are sky-high, and I finish better than I start.

Personally, I think that my approach to the retelling was so densely detailed, unexpected (“The Ramayana? Retold? WTF!”) at the time, and with so many quirky personal choices (the use of mixed-idiom, Urdu, Gujarati, slang, etc) that it was hard to take for most readers – almost a culture shock of sorts. Once the initial shock wore off and readers began to ‘get’ what I was reaching for, they could sit back and start to enjoy the story. And by the time they passed the third book and still went zipping along, they began to realize that the real fun was only just starting. I also know for a fact that as a writer, it was only by the third book that I really began proficient at my own chosen style and approach and really got going. That’s why the later books in the series are my own personal faves too.

What do you think?

Apr 22, 2010 | Blog | 4 Comments »

Your last chance to enter the Vortal!

Copies of VORTAL:SHOCKWAVE are almost sold out. I expect the remaining copies to be sold during April. I’ll be keeping the book out of print for a while, to focus on other upcoming AKB Books.

As you know, AKB Books isn’t a trade publisher (not yet at least), just a private imprint through which I offer limited edition signed copies of a select few of my books. Some, like VORTAL:SHOCKWAVE aren’t available anywhere else except directly from this website. So this is quite literally your only chance to get a copy of the book.

To know more about the book, read excerpts or to place your order visit the AKB Books Order Page.

Apr 13, 2010 | Blog | Leave A Comment »

TRRFIC 2SUM: Buy a signed VoR Hardcover and get a signed vortal:shockwave FREE!

OFFER OVER! THANKS, FOLKS! That’s it in one line: Buy a hardcover copy of VENGEANCE OF RAVANA: Book 7 of The Ramayana Series and get a FREE copy of vortal:shockwave, my most fun, action-packed, fast-paced fantasy thriller! How’s that for a great twosome! Visit the AKB BOOKS ORDER PAGE.

Mar 29, 2010 | Ashok | Comments Off

Sons of Sita will be out in June

SONS OF SITA: Book 8 of The Ramayana Series, the long-awaited final volume, has been postponed again. The AKB Books edition will now be available in mid-June. If you’re one of those who were able to book a copy and have paid for it as well, thank you for your support and I hope you’ll be patient another two months. Because this is the phinal-phinal book in this long series, I really want it to be as perfect as I can make it, and perfection takes a little longer.

Mar 27, 2010 | Ashok | Comments Off

VoR Hardcovers (finally) despatched – did you get your’s? (SoS delayed, sigh.)

VoR (Vengeance of Ravana) Hardcovers have finally been despatched this past week. If you had ordered a hardcover limited edition or won the auction for the #1 Collector’s Hardcover Edition, you should have received it by now. If you have not received it, please visit the How To Pay Page and post a message there alongwith your full postal address with pincode+tel.no. (the address will be edited out before approving the comment) to save time.

Thanks for your patience waiting for these hardcovers – it’s been a very long wait for me as well, with the printer repeatedly messing up the printing, binding, etc, and endless delays. Thankfully, the wait is over now…

…and another wait begins, for SoS (Sons of Sita)! But don’t worry, it won’t be as long as the VoR Hardcover delay. The AKB Books Signed Limited Edition of SoS (hardcover as well as paperback) is now scheduled to be released by end-April. Updates will be sent to you closer to the date.

As always, I welcome reader correspondence and always replies to every message. You are most welcome to post a message to me at the Readerswrite Page

CLICK HERE FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ON AKB BOOKS
CLICK HERE TO ORDER AN AKB BOOK WITHIN INDIA
CLICK HERE FOR ALL PAYMENT AND DELIVERY RELATED MATTERS

Mar 06, 2010 | Ashok | Comments Off

« Older Entries

Yes, I want to read AKB’s Mba! Here’s how I’ll support its publication… (Choose any one option)
	I’ll happily pay in advance to pre-order a signed copy from this website.
	Hmm. I’ll wait until it’s published, then order a copy from this website.
	No thanks. I’ll wait for it to hit bookstores, then buy a copy.
	I’d rather wait for the full series to be published, then buy the whole set.

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Confessions of an Epic Indian The website+blog of Indian author Ashok K. Banker

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