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…
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.
“Indian crime writing doesn’t exist as a genre, only as a poor pastiche parody of western tropes and devices”
Saira Kurup, Assistant News editor for Sunday Times Delhi, sent me this questionnaire for an article she was writing on Indian detective fiction. You can read the article in today’s Sunday Times Delhi here. I’m pasting the full interview below:
1. Your books were among the first Indian crime thrillers in English. What do you think of the books being published today in the genre? Do you see any qualitative differences in plots, location and style of writing compared to the time when you wrote your first crime fiction?
Sadly, I think Indian crime fiction – be it mystery, detective, thrillers or any other sub-genre – has yet to find its footing. I personally wrote my three crime thrillers for a lark, playing around with sub-genres in each of the three books. It was more a writing experiment for me than a genuine commitment to the genre of crime fiction. I was more than a little taken aback at the rave reviews I received across the country (over 230 of them, by my count). Because, as a lifelong reader and admirer of great crime and literary fiction, I myself found my own work wanting and lacking. Bluntly put, they were disposable pulps. But what’s being published today in the name of crime fiction in India is itself a crime! It’s as if publishers, editors and authors think that you have to stoop to the lowest common denominator in order to be read and break the bestseller charts. It’s all trash.
2. You have said on your blog that the sales graph of crime and mystery fiction is declining. But were the sales ever good for Indian thrillers? Considering the numbers of new books being released, is there a market for them in India today?
Lol. That blog post was about the declining sales of crime and mystery fiction internationally, not in India. Here we don’t have a market for crime fiction, period, so where’s the question of it declining!
2. The racks are still full of Agatha Christie, PD James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler etc. Do you think readers who have grown up reading these authors would easily accept Indian writing? Would it be easy for them to relate to a thriller set in Meerut or Panipat, etc?
Well, there are authors trying to cater to this kind of ‘Indian’ crime writing – like a new book called The Betelnut Killers by Manisha Lakhe. Horrendous, patronizing, class-snobbery at its worst. Bad writing, pastiche plots and characters that read like parodies of Ram Gopal Varma film characters don’t make these stories ‘Indian’, they just make them awful writing. So yes, it’s probably better to read a good imported classic than a bad contemporary Indian novel.
3. Do you think Indian crime writing has its own identity or is influenced by the classic greats?
Indian crime writing doesn’t exist as a genre, only as a poor pastiche parody of western tropes and devices. Really great crime writing is great literature, great writing, real characters in real situations. Not ex-army commandoes dropping into PoK on secret missions and terrorists running amok. There isn’t a single Indian crime novelist worth mentioning – and yes, I include my previous work in that list. The sole exception would be Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games which far transcends any genre to be a great novel in its own right.
4. There’s little confidence in the fairness of the law and justice institutions in the country. Doesn’t that make a charismatic Indian detective / crime investigator unbelievable?
You said it. In a country where rich and powerful industrialists can perpetrate a gas leak that kills thousands and get away with it, where’s the question of a detective or investigator being able to bring the murderer of even a single Muslim or Dalit to book? It’s a fantasy.
5. Do you think Indian detective fiction has been ignored for a long time because of the focus on writing about Indian exotica, questions of identity, diaspora dilemmas etc, meant largely for the western market?
No. It’s because Indian detective fiction has been trash, while at least those exotica novels do have something going for them, even if it’s only export-quality prose and judiciously chosen metaphors.
6. What should be the qualities of good detective fiction? Which of these qualities are lacking in Indian crime fiction?
I’ve been working on a book titled A BLOOD RED SAREEfor some years now. It follows three women, a lawyer, a social activist and a former journalist as they get entangled in various events that are ultimately connected. There’s no murder, no mystery, no investigation. Just these three women, their lives, their involvement with Maoism, running a women’s gym in Kolkata, battling corruption at the civic level, fighting for the rights of dowry-abuse wives, their personal relationships, their struggles in a male-dominated society at different levels and professions…I don’t know if it’s a crime novel, but it’s my attempt at writing one. Perhaps if it succeeds, it will answer your question simply by existing.
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.
(c) Ashok Banker 1990-2010. All rights reserved.
SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis will be out next month (October). Written in a pacier style than my Ramayana Series, this short impactful book details the rise to power of the monstrous Kamsa and his brutal campaign to thwart the birth of the prophesied 8th Child. 