Agniputr Page 8

  ‘What is this business with the Government?’ Kumar asked even before he looked up at Raghu.

  ‘Sorry, Mr. Kumar, I don’t understand.’

  ‘I got a call from the Home Minister’s personal secretary no less, that you are not co-operating with the government on some investigation. He fairly woke me up with a six-in-themorning-dressing down.’

  Raghu stared at the senior partner in complete surprise.

  ‘The who?’

  ‘The secretary to the Union Home Minister of India...and he was so patronisingly sarcastic about it.’

  Raghu was silent for a few moments.

  ‘Sir, I have no clue what you’re talking about.’

  Kumar frowned, a sign of irritation. ‘I believe they need your co-operation about some old property of yours in your native town. According to the Minister, apparently you are not co-operating with them.’

  Raghuram let out a bark of a laugh. Anybody who knew him knew that it was a precursor to a rising temper. He explained, ‘I got a call from my people in Gudem at about eight in the morning that someone from the government and the army wanted to talk to me back in my village. I have no clue the Home Minister was even involved in it.’

  ‘The Army?’ Kumar was perplexed.

  ‘That’s right!’

  ‘Has no one called you from the ministry?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, the man was fairly oozing threat. I thought you were neck deep in trouble,’ Kumar said.

  Raghu did not know what to say. He stared at Kumar and then shuffled his feet for good effect. He felt like a little boy being reprimanded in school.

  ‘Well, get down to it please, see what these people want and do what you have to. They can be pretty nasty if they don’t get what they want.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll look into it,’ Raghu whisked around and walked out of the room, furious. He fairly pulled the door out of its hinges on his way out.

  He stormed into his room, his hooded eyes spewing venom, like Dracula in full blood lust. The Home Ministry had not played fair. First mistake was to serve a requisition notice at Gudem for his property when they knew he was a resident of Gurgaon. Second mistake was to complain to his boss that he was not working with them without first letting him as much as know what they wanted.

  Something was not right.

  Krithi from his team knocked at the open door of his corner office.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  The bespectacled girl stepped into the office with a couple of files tucked into the nook of her arm.

  ‘Raghu, the Trivista telecom matter...you wanted to be briefed first thing in the morning,’ she said in a low voice. She knew when her boss was in a foul mood, he looked more like a vampire than ever, going by screen depictions and he was delicious. Krithi figured he could have her neck anytime he wanted.

  ‘Well, guess what Krithi my love, you missed the frigging bus. You are late for a first thing in the morning date,’ Raghu growled, his intense black eyes had fixed her with a penetrating gaze. She couldn’t help herself, she giggled.

  Bad move.

  ‘Did I crack a joke about something?’

  ‘No Raghu, I...am sorry.’

  ‘Where is Kamesh?’

  Krithi shook her head.

  ‘Well then...what are you waiting for, call him.’

  ‘Sure Raghu,’ she said. She was already on her mobile phone.

  ‘Tell you what, I am out of here for a few days, call a meeting in fifteen minutes, Krishna Iyer room.’

  ‘You going somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah, I am going somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What…?’ his scowl deepened.

  Krithi shook her head again. She wished she had the guts to take hold of that head of his and smother him with the mother of all kisses, pin him down to his chair and then ask him where he was going. She knew with a certain finality that was not going to happen...ever.

  ‘What’s the matter with that girl?’ Raghu asked himself. For all his finesse with women, Raghu could never understand them and nor did he care. He dumped himself on his chair and picked up the phone. He dialled long distance, to Vijayawada.

  ‘Hello...namaskaramu, Sudharshan Reddy garu unaara andi?’ he asked in Telugu. He listened intently for a moment.

  ‘Nenu Raghuram Suryani matladuthuna,’ he said to a query about who he was.

  He waited for a few moments. An older voice greeted him.

  ‘Namaskarallu Babugaru.’

  ‘Reddygaru, Kulasa aena?’

  The eighty-year-old lawyer in Vijayawada still had an active practice and one of the most alert minds Raghuram knew.

  ‘Poti should be there anytime with an order he received this morning. I don’t have all the details with me but it appears the Government wants to requisition the castle and the hall. He has my power of attorney to sign legal papers...yes I know, you know. I want you to file a Writ Petition before the High Court in Hyderabad restraining the company...the name’s in the order... from entering my premises in Gudem. I want the order by the end of the day.’

  ‘You must ask Poti to meet... Oh, here he comes,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘He will give you the letter or order or whatever it is those guys have served on him. Sir, one more thing, call Suribabu, he is the Superintendent of Police for...yeah, ok, you know him...good, tell him I need a clearance for landing a chartered helicopter in Ganavaram. I am coming in today.’

  Raghu had decided to advance the date of his travel after his meeting with Yeshwant Kumar.

  ‘Ok...thank you Reddy Garu.’

  He replaced the receiver and strode out of the room. It was already half past eleven in the morning. There was work to be done.

  CHAPTER 13

  ONCE upon a time, Javaaram was nothing more than a crummy little hamlet. It could boast of two real houses owned by farmers holding the largest pieces of land and a host of huts on the shores of a little stream occupied by landless labourers working for the farmers. There was another segment of population that owned smaller tracts of land living in glorified thatched roofed, mud walled ‘houses’. This was the debt ridden segment of the populace and lived in constant fear of the debt recovery agents of local financiers and the bigger farmers eyeing their lands.

  It had all changed for Javaaram when the young city educated son of a debt ridden farmer discovered an abundance of subterranean granite deposit in their land. The farmer became a millionaire almost overnight, far overshadowing the larger land owners. Others followed suit. Funnily, none of the so-called larger farmers where lucky.

  Thus began the success story of the village which had since then converted its status to a ‘town’ with a three-star hotel, stateof-the-art multispecialty hospital, schools, banks, a magistrate’s court, and a government guest house. The local millionaires of Javaaram were now among the richest in Andhra Pradesh. It was no surprise therefore that the government guest house in Javaaram for visiting State officials and political masters was a sprawling centrally air-conditioned mansion complete with a gymnasium and a swimming pool.

  The guest house had recently been made headquarters for the CSIR-RAW sponsored program unimaginatively named ‘Operation Electric Storm’. Of course the code named program was entirely a secret. No one knew of it outside a very small group of people. The reason for choosing Javaaram as the headquarters was because it was twelve kilometres from Gudem on the way to Eluru.

  A short press release had announced the fact that a company incorporated as the Bharat Electric Generation Company Ltd. had hired a group of scientists to test the lands in and around Gudem. Declared as an industrially backward area, the government had decided to invest in the local area to set up a power generation plant and augment economic growth.

  As per the memorandum of association of the company, its main purpose was to set up a network of electricity generation plants across the country to cater to the needs of the rural population of India as also to generate employment in in
dustrially backward areas. A crucial fact was not mentioned anywhere. The Bharat Electric Generation Company was privately owned. It was commissioned by the Government of India to carry out its avowed objectives. A perusal of the shareholders and first directors of the company would disclose that it was owned by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a Kiromal Industries holding company.

  The project was lauded in the local as well as the national newspapers as yet another effort by a people friendly government to enable the economic upsurge to reach the remote corners of India. The preliminary team was allegedly studying the feasibility of setting up a Hydro and wind turbine electricity generation facility. The local newshounds overlooked the fact that Gudem did not have enough water to have a hydro-plant nor locations to enable the necessary wind power density to set up wind turbines.

  The guest house at Javaaram was silent that day. Major Kant, bereft of his army attire and wearing a white shirt and khaki pants with polished burgundy shoes, was stomping up and down the room that had become his temporary office. The only other person in the room, Sheila, observed him with scant interest.

  ‘We’ve been served with an order of the High Court restraining us from entering the Surya property,’ Major Kant spat out. He was smarting as though he’d been slapped in the face by a defiant rookie cadet. Kant banged a fist against his flimsy desk, deriving satisfaction from the rattle of an empty tea cup and a pen stand.

  ‘What else did you expect Major? If you had read the research we circulated on Surya, you’d have known that he has all the ruthlessness of a feudal warlord and the finesse of a ballet dancer. The man’s a lawyer, for god’s sake!’ Sheila said.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ Kant barked at her.

  ‘Serving a requisition notice on the man that you wanted to grab his ancestral property could not have got any other reaction. You should have taken him into confidence,’ she said.

  ‘And what if he was involved with whatever’s happening here? Some people here think the Suryas are some sort of devil worshippers and that they brought about a curse. Every myth and legend is based on some facts. I can’t help suspect that Surya or his family had something to do with this phenomenon.’

  Sheila rolled her eyes. Firstly, it was a phenomenon, not a man-made thing subject to processes, unless Surya or his entire clan were a bunch of extra-terrestrials who could generate thousands of terabytes of electricity out of nowhere just by sneezing.

  For god’s sake, Raghuram Surya was a lawyer practicing in the Supreme Court of India, not some illiterate pagan worshipper or a green man from Mars or anywhere else for that matter. She did not bother to respond to Kant. It would serve no purpose trying to tell him anything. The man was angry because someone had questioned his might. Period! The order of the court was real, no matter what the explanations were, it could not be wished away.

  ‘What do you intend to do?’ She asked instead.

  ‘I’ll have to seek clarifications from HQ,’ he said importantly.

  Sheila almost laughed.

  ‘Ok. In the meanwhile, I don’t think there is a problem with my dropping into Gudem today. I need more information on what’s in the memorial hall and one way is to ask around,’ she said.

  Kant shrugged disinterestedly. ‘Take a couple of cadets if you like,’ he said.

  Sheila smiled icily, ‘I’ll manage, don’t worry.’

  Sheila wanted to be in Gudem and back well before nightfall, the place gave her the creeps. No matter how logically she thought about it she could not help thinking there was something nasty in the air in that little hamlet. For one, her nightmares had returned.

  ‘Whom are we meeting?’ Sheila asked Vidush, her colleague from the PAD.

  ‘The Mandal panchayat chief was reluctant to meet with us officially. I am told someone from the State Administration had a word with him about it. He doesn’t want to show up in the bad books of the State Government, so he agreed to meet with us unofficially in his mango grove. He said the other panchayat members would be there.’

  ‘Mango grove? Isn’t it a little too clichéd, I mean, murders and other sinister mayhem in villages are supposed to happen around the groves and forests, aren’t they?’ Sheila asked.

  Vidush swallowed. ‘Ma’am, the place already gives me the jitters. I’ve been around so-called haunted places as part of PAD. I’ve never felt anything like I do in Gudem. The last thing I need is to think about getting murdered in the wilderness by savages.’

  ‘Have you ever encountered anything paranormal in any of those other places you went with SRK?’

  Vidush shook his head, ‘no’.

  Sheila threw him a reproachful look.

  ‘Do you think this is really it?’ he whispered to her.

  ‘I don’t believe in anything being ‘paranormal’...everything has a normal explanation, but yes, I think whatever energy is under that memorial hall could be influencing primal emotions like fear.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the villagers also be a scared lot then?’

  Sheila shrugged. ‘Maybe they were at first. Maybe they just got used to living with fear like the rest of us in the big bad world, or maybe they turned into zombies like some of us,’ she said with a straight face.

  Vidush appeared startled.

  ‘When you went to Gudem the last time, whom did you meet?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘We went to this great big fortress or a castle sort of a thing right in the middle of nowhere. There was this rather short guy called...Poti waiting for us in the front yard of the castle.’

  ‘By us, you mean the four cadets who came with you.’

  Vidush nodded slightly. ‘Yes… Well, he took us to a front room, some kind of a reception area. That one room was several times larger than my apartment in Delhi. He opened the envelope, read the order and said in perfectly good English that he would revert to us after a word with his boss.’

  ‘Really, and you think speaking English is what, a sign of intellect?’ Sheila’s voice was steely.

  ‘N-not really, you see, he was dressed no different from a farmer and I didn’t expect him to speak English.’

  Sheila nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘That’s it, we turned away. He was a cold one, that man. He just stared us down, you know, like ‘Amaa kill you!’ He asked the cadets a couple of questions, I had no clue what they were and then we were off.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘No...except that the castle felt safe, it was cold for sure, but it felt safe. Yeah...now that I think about it, there was no dread or fear as long as we were in the castle,’ Vidush said.

  Sheila wore a thoughtful expression. She didn’t say anything else. The rest of the journey was spent in silence until the first shard of dread made her skin prickle.

  ‘It’s back,’ they both said in perfect unison and then stared at each other.

  It was as if deeply buried primal instincts were warning Sheila of some kind of danger, of being in the presence of a predator. Ingrained into the mind through millions of years of evolution, the instinct was triggered by something.

  What?

  She had felt it the first time she was in Gudem a couple of days earlier. At that time, her car had stalled on the roadside. She had stepped out to stretch herself. She could see the memorial grounds, fenced and gated and in the middle of the ground, the hall itself, like a great big church.

  There was definitely something odd in the cold air, indefinable, as silent as a tomb, watching. It was all she could do to get back into the car. As the vehicle moved further away from the hamlet, the terror subsided into cold void. Sheila had the nightmare that night.

  Terror enveloped her like a second skin. The ground under her opened up like a great big mouth. She was sucked into Hell. She could feel the stench. Terror was a lump clotting her throat. Bloated bodies hung around her, empty eyes staring silently into nothing.

  She wanted to scream but the foul tasting muck inside her mouth only allowed her a terrorised gurgle. She w
as flailing her arms. Life was bubbling out of her nose in thick globs of greenish air. Strong hands found her. Alok, her husband, pulled her out of the sewerage duct hidden underneath three feet of drain water. The rain from dark grey skies hammered her relentlessly as she retched and coughed on the footpath.

  Alok jumped back into the open drain. Twice he resurfaced, once with a young girl in his arms, once with an older man. He dived back in again. Sheila was there, waiting for him to resurface. In a way she was still waiting after all these years. The pain just refused to go. She was four months pregnant at the time. The doctors said it was the trauma more than the physical exertion that killed her unborn child.

  After all this time there were nights she came awake with her hands on her stomach and a cry on her lips. Sheila tore her thoughts away from Alok and what might have been if only they had not gone shopping that day, if only she had listened to him and stayed home.

  They spotted a man, dressed in a dirty dhoti, a sleeveless cotton shirt, holding a staff, waving for the vehicle to stop. The chauffeur guided the vehicle to the edge of the road and Sheila rolled down the glass.

  ‘Thamaru Sheila gara?’

  Sheila recognised her name and nodded her head. Then to the chauffeur, ‘Ask him what he wants.’

  The chauffeur and the villager talked in rapid-fire Telugu.

  ‘Madam, he’s here to lead us to the grove.’

  ‘Ask him to get in.’

  Soon, the car, a white Tata Sumo with the words ‘On Government Service’ pasted on its sides and rear windshield, went off road and into the fields. After a fifteen-minute ride which consisted mostly of being tossed around like salad veggies, they found themselves in a mango grove.

  ‘Namaskaralu Sheila Garu, naa peru Chelapathi Raju,’ said a cherubic man.

  Sheila nodded meditatively. They were seated on cane chairs with hot cups of creamy tea placed at vantage points on a square wooden table. The cherubic man had arrived a few minutes earlier. The others around the table were sullen. They probably did not like talking to strangers like most village folk, especially women dressed in shirt sleeves and pants.