Agniputr Page 5

  ‘Give me a couple of hours Major Kant, I might just have something for you,’ Sheila murmured, her attention already back to the report. ‘Girls, step in if you may.’

  It was a dismissal and an order at the same time. She did not look up to see the look of utter outrage on the Major’s face as he withdrew from her doorway. The three girls stepped in demurely, giving the good looking army man sympathetic looks.

  In exactly one hour fifty-five minutes, Sheila picked up her phone. It had taken her all of fifteen minutes to understand the implications of the report and the rest of the time in strategising on how much of the information she wanted to part with to tempt a full scale investigation on the phenomena in Gudem. Their requirements, going forward with the investigation, were pretty clear. Only, she needed to say the right things to get the Defence Ministry to work with her.

  ‘Let’s take Sathi’s report at face value for the moment. There’s not much else to go with. What do we need to take this to the next level?’ Sheila asked.

  Priyanka said, ‘We need satellite imagery ma’am. Not just that, we need to upload detection drives on to the satellite so we can see what’s under the ground. We need infrastructure in place, ground level detectors that can facilitate subterranean infra-red scans. It costs money and manpower to put these things into place.’ Priyanka said all of it as cogently and plainly as she could manage. The boss did not like show offs.

  Sheila raised her long naturally well-shaped eyebrows a fraction of an inch and her mouth almost twitched in a smile.

  ‘That’s...good, impressed I am sure. So what do you think we should reveal to get this?’ she asked.

  ‘Tell them whatever it takes ma’am, if I may say so. SRK just got engaged, we need to find him,’ Sheetal pointed out, ‘and I loved his south Indian accent.’

  ‘That’s quite enough Sheetal! I guess it should take about three hours to set up the subterranean detectors and, depending on the position of the satellite, a few hours before we take the final reports out. In all, I think, it should take a day or little more for us to understand the full potential of this thing if, and only if, I am able to convince a politician about something he has no clue about.’

  ‘Yes ma’ am, how are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’

  Sheila nodded, a short jerk of her head. The three girls filed out of her cabin. Taking a deep breath, Sheila rose blithely and smoothed her grey trousers and her light blue shirt. She was already on the phone with the Defence Ministry when she left the office. She was headed for Rajpath, the Secretariat, on Raisina Hill which housed the most powerful politicians in India. Her destination was the south block of the Secretariat, where the Prime Minister had his office along with the Defence Ministry and the External Affairs Ministry.

  CHAPTER 8

  HUMILITY-UTTER.

  Gratitude-Forever.

  These thoughts surfaced each time Sheila was at the Secretariat. Selfless sacrifice, a dream of freedom, the idea of self-rule. Many lives laid down like so much hay, not one lesser than the other, so the Indian people could breathe free air.

  The Secretariat was one of the symbols of that colossal five-hundred-year struggle for independence of the Indian people from their British colonial masters. The massive block of metal and stone was something every freedom fighter had wanted Indians to occupy when the country was still a colony of the British Empire.

  Things had not gone according to plan.

  A country’s history was chequered with plans gone awry. Sheila knew that there was always a percentage allowed for flaws in every experiment, every measurement taken, and there had never, in the history of man, been something that was perfect the first time around.

  So too, India was experimenting with her leaders. Sheila had realised early in her life that there was no substitute for hard work, no excuse against smart work, and there was no such thing as a free lunch. The sooner the Indian people realised it and stopped expecting silly gifts from their political masters, the better for them.

  She stepped out of the council’s pool car. She took down the driver’s mobile phone number to recall the car after her meeting was over. Getting a parking slot at the Secretariat was next to impossible and she’d realised it long ago that the chore was better left in the hands of a chauffeur. After the usual security checks, she stood at the reception.

  ‘Room no. 104, the Defence Minister,’ she said.

  The receptionist, a wizened old man close to retirement who had seen her many times before, took her card and picked up a phone. He spoke in rapid-fire Hindi and then replaced the instrument. He smiled at her, a genuine smile that lit up his eyes; the way her father had smiled when she sorted out one of his mathematical equations. Sheila found herself smiling back at the man ruefully. The receptionist saw through her smile and at the pain it was hiding.

  ‘Kya baat hai beti?’ he asked.

  ‘Kuch nahin Chacha, thank you.’

  Sheila took the permission slip the man offered her. Climbing a flight of stairs, she walked straight down the wide veranda, turned left once before she reached room no. 104.

  Manjulal, the personal secretary to the Defence Minister was at his desk, picking his teeth. ‘Ayiyae Scientist sahiban. Minister saab aap hi ke liye ruke huey hain, sirf aapke aane ki deri hai,’ said Manjulal with a broad and evidently false smile.

  ‘There is no need for anyone to wait for me Mr. Manjulal. If the minister wants to leave, I am not going to stop him. No one’s doing me any personal favours by seeing me and I haven’t brought petees full of cash either,’ Sheila snapped back, her brown and violet eyes blazing like sixguns.

  The babu culture of the Secretariat always managed to bring out the worst in Sheila. These guys lived and died thinking they were doing the people of India a personal favour. It was their job for god’s sake.

  ‘Are baap re baap, you have lost you temper. No, no, no, no. This will not do. Give respect and take respect. Aapko tameez se pesh aana hoga,’ Manjulal said, shaking his finger like an outraged school master.

  ‘Or what?’ It was a whisper, yet a whip lash.

  The secretary stared at her mutely. He was clearly not prepared for the fire and brimstone responses.

  ‘I am his personal secretary! Remember where you are!’

  ‘You’re not a civil servant, you’re a political appointee because you’re ready to pick up the crumbs they throw at you and because you paid through your nose to be in the position you are in, either way you’re shameless. Aapki aukaat kya hai Manjulalji ki aap mujhse baat tak karein? I don’t need you people, you need me, don’t forget that for a moment. Now, get a move on and tell him I am here,’ she snapped, settling down in one of the sofas.

  Sheila knew she was being excessively aggressive with the man but she could not help it. Political stooges brought out the worst in her.

  Red faced, the man glared at the seated scientist for a moment before he whipped around and strode into the inner room. A few minutes later he came back.

  ‘You may go in now,’ he said, looking down at her.

  Sheila rose to her feet, towering over the man. Without as much as acknowledging his curt invitation, she strode into the Minister’s room. Her fiery temper, her mild jasmine perfume and his own powerlessness only angered the secretary further. Manjulal set out to do what he did best. He stalked out of the office for a cup of heavily subsidised tea in the cafeteria.

  Sheila seated herself on the leather straight back chair, set the folder with the report in it on the large table, and looked around the room. Though she had been to the room several times she still liked to take in its splendour.

  Flowing burgundy curtains adorned the ten foot French windows. The Victorian showcase against the wall displayed the various citations and honours that Choturam Choudry, the Minister, had won in his long political career. There were photographs of him with many world leaders. The furniture was Victorian. The carpets were Persian. The air-conditioning was pleasan
t, not too cold. The power the room exuded was deep and majestic.

  The Minister was a gaunt man with a rectangular bespectacled face. He was on the wrong side of his sixties but in a graceful way. Clad in a Nehru suit, he appeared alert and patient. He was across the desk, engrossed in a report.

  Not long ago Choturam Choudry had decided that his rustic charm and amiable disposition did not have the least effect on the woman sitting across the table. He learned to keep his conversations with her as crisp and brief as possible. Sheila did not care for political masters or for any favours that they might show her. She was invaluable as a scientist to the CSIR and at present to military intelligence. Choturam cleared his throat.

  ‘Tell me Sheilaji kaise aana hua?’

  ‘Good morning sir. This is the report we got from our man at the location. The last time we met I said to you that there were clear indications of mysterious electrical or electromagnetic activities in a little village in Andhra Pradesh. If you recall, we were studying the report at that time. Our study is now complete.’

  ‘What do your studies reveal?’ the Minister asked.

  ‘The report makes it pretty much clear that either there is something terribly wrong with the Earth or...there’s something else growing under us,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Something else is growing under us? What do you mean? Be specific please?’

  Choturam had his master’s in business administration from Oxford University. When he decided to cast his rustic appearance aside, his manner could be pretty brusque and business-like and his English, crisp and smart.

  ‘Yes sir. I can be more specific. The report shows tremendous radiation, heat and magnetic interference in a localised area.’

  She took out a piece of paper with a black picture on it. The picture looked like a spider’s web with vertical and horizontal lines criss-crossing each other at regular intervals within the web. Around the centre of the web, the black picture had a whitish smudge, like a negative image of ink blotched paper.

  ‘The centre of the activity is the bright spot in the middle in the spider graph, sir. From the intensity of the activity, the circumference of its influence should have been much larger, almost a few thousand kilometres, yet it is not even half a kilometre in radius. It is concentrated in one spot and radiating energy under a small hamlet. As you can see, the smudge does not cross between the first and the second borders of the image. It is as though the power source, whatever it is, is somehow arrested. Sir, the power, it is immense. The reading is going way off the charts. If it goes off one way or another we’d have a holocaust, the proportions of which could be biblical. Or, it could be perfectly natural phenomena that we haven’t, for some reason, witnessed till now. I have cross-referenced all available data from...’

  ‘Can others detect this power as well?’

  Sheila knew what the Minister was getting at. International attention should be avoided until such time that the government was ready for it. They would not want super powers attacking India for its resources, much like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Sheila said, ‘Not till now, sir. We did not know the phenomenon existed. Our man stumbled on it quite by accident when he was out investigating a regular ghost story, so to speak. He is missing, sir, we are investigating. Going back to the topic, whatever it is, is confined to a particular area, a very small area. I don’t know how…’

  ‘What do you need to do now?’ Choturam asked her abruptly.

  ‘We need to study it further.’

  ‘How do you intend to do that?’

  ‘With technology. We can have detection drives installed in satellites. We can use them to collect data about the energy. That’s step one. If the data matches with the original set of readings, we need to investigate at the site. That would be the second step to determine exactly what it is.’

  ‘Sheilaji, what do you think it is?’

  ‘I really can’t tell you that now, sir. It could be a cancerous growth into the earth, some kind of a fall out of global warming, nuclear testing, subterranean life form, potential energy source, a ghost or a demon for all we know; it’s anybody’s guess at the moment.’

  ‘Where’s this place?’

  ‘Its one of those hamlets sir, it’s close to Eluru, the headquarters of the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.’

  ‘I am familiar with those parts. You know those lands are highly fertile,’ the Minister suggested.

  ‘Err...no sir. The source is underneath a memorial house of the erstwhile local royalty. Apparently, they were respected in their time and were by far the richest in that part of Andhra Pradesh. There is only one surviving member of the family and he is a lawyer; he lives here in Gurgaon. I have his address and phone numbers. Until we receive full confirmation of what we are up against, we don’t want to bring him in or warn him off.’

  ‘Good thinking. What’s his name?’

  ‘Raghuram Surya,’ she said.

  Immediately, the Minister’s eyes lit up. ‘Surya Prasad Surya’s son? Is it their land we’re talking about?’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Not personally, no. I knew his father. I met Surya Prasad on behalf of the party several times back in the early sixties to seek his support in the local elections. His people loved him Sheilaji but that’s not why I remember the man so well. Sometimes people say things that always sticks with you, no matter what. Sometimes it changes the entire course of your life and sometimes, well, you wish it had. More times than not, I thought he was right in his assessment of governance. None of us acted on it, though. I wish we had.’

  Sheila’s interest was piqued, she waited for the Minister to say further. When he was silent she said, ‘What did he say, sir?’

  Choturam cleared his throat. ‘You must remember that I met him back in the nineteen sixties. The entire country was alternating between celebrations and turmoil. I always thought Surya Prasad was a rather intuitive and intelligent man. Someone way ahead of his times. He could see things that others could not. He was lame, mind you. He was suffering from muscular dystrophy. People with that disease don’t last too long. Anyway, he said India was too immature to be a democracy. He said, unless the people understood the real meaning behind democracy, what we are doing is a mockery. He was so right. For instance, we abolished the Princely States but even today you have scions of these States in politics. All they did was convert holdings from their names to a number of shell companies, trusts and the like. What did we actually gain?’

  ‘The right to elect who rules us is what we gained,’ Sheila said haughtily.

  The Minister laughed. ‘Have we?’ Private enterprise by the very same inherently rich people has kept this country afloat, not the people whom we voted to power. We, as elected representatives, merely facilitated the inevitable growth of the Indian people in some cases and delayed it in other cases. Some of us did it for the love of the country while others, for monetary gain.’

  ‘So what was Surya Prasad’s solution?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Surya Prasad said it was possible for the Princely States to unite under one banner and commit themselves to self-rule and still make the country powerful. I am not sure he was completely wrong. Look at the Middle East, Brunei, England, Japan, and Denmark to name a few developed kingdoms. All that we’ve achieved with democracy is to open the doors of the parliament to criminals who either influence or threaten a bunch of ignorant people who have no clue about democracy to do their bidding. You see, we did mock democracy in the end by thrusting it on a people who did not know what it was.’

  ‘I can’t say I don’t agree with you,’ said Sheila, biting her lip.

  Choturam sighed sadly. ‘There are more criminals today in politics in India than in any other country in the world. The seeds that we had sown back then are producing a rotten harvest of crooked politicians and shamster godmen. But, who would listen to Surya? The country was young, the people were angry at anyone and everyone. Independence was a heady drug.’ The Minist
er shrugged dismissively, ‘His words stuck with me though. They’ve rankled me more times than not. If his son is anything like him, you must recruit him for this project,’ the Minister observed.

  Sheila had not seen Choturam speak well of any one of his colleagues till date, let alone anyone else. In fact, other than at public gatherings, she had not seen the Minister speak so much in recent times. She softened to the old man. There was a shred of decency in him after all, in spite of his high office. Maybe it was because he was old. Maybe he was tired of the political game. Maybe he wanted out and it did not matter to him anymore that his opinion ran contrary to so-called democratic norms of behaviour.

  ‘But didn’t we suffer at the hands of the princes and kings? Didn’t they tread on the people for their own riches?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes, of course they did. But there is a much more important question you need to ask. What are we doing now? Are farmers not committing suicide now like they used to under the kings and zamindars? How much out of the government declared welfare schemes are actually reaching the target audience? Is there even accountability of where it goes? How different is an elected representative from a king or a zamindar in India, today? What are we doing about it? Aren’t we unearthing scams day after day, every month of the year? Is that not worse than it was? Ask yourself Sheilaji, have we really attained independence or is it just freedom from foreign rule we are gloating about?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  Choturam smiled sadly, as though it was painful to learn that he had to explain such a fundamental difference to a highly educated person.

  ‘When an adolescent moves out of his parent’s house to go to college, he considers it freedom. He gets pocket money, does not have to give accounts for it, does what he pleases, and experiments with all the goodies his age and life have to offer. That is freedom, unbridled, uncontrolled, without a care for anyone and anything. Independence brings responsibility with it, not only for yourself but for the other independent people around you. It sets a value system which rests on respecting your neighbour’s independence and expecting him to respect yours. It comes with the ability to understand the rules of peaceful co-habitation. One look at the traffic management system in Delhi and you know a majority do not respect traffic laws, be it one-way roads, speed limits, lane rules, the list goes on. It is a singular indicator of how we treat our independence. Are we respecting and therefore acting as responsible people who value their collective independence? Or are we simply saying we don’t care about the others as long as we get to do what we like? We are dependent on a corrupt non-functional system that allows us to do what we want, just like the adolescent who gets his pocket money that he does not have to account for. And if that is the case, then Surya was right, we are too immature to be a democracy because we really are incapable of making a choice. Instead we choose those who promise to give us the most pocket money.’