When I initially began this writing project, I had to witness objections from many different sources. But today, I am sixty years old and the incident no longer worries the participants. Today, I am free to write about it.
I was twenty five when I joined Daniel school of business. The year was 2199; B-school education was undergoing a period of tumultuous competition. Schools competed for an image; there were a couple of big firms that recruited only from schools with good repute. Shadows of glistening brand image cast by these firms’ affiliation with the schools put them on the top of the students’ choice list. Our HAL 9000 CRM had indicated a spur of reactions from the most loyal clientele in the coming days. We had no time to loose. Our team set out to find the potential trigger points. We had molecular biologists working on our HAL 9000 to locate fractious elements within the DNA of our loyal network. The results pointed to a man from Ken’s school. We had no choice but to eliminate the fractious elements. Mercenaries like me were employed by B-schools, and we worked undercover. This was not a new project to me, neither was the nature of the project.
‘I understand the consequences’ I signed and left in the chilling winter night of Hyderabad to exchange the papers in my hand with the ones in the hands of the gentleman from Ken’s school of business. When I reached there, it was quite dark; I waited for the man to show up. When he showed up, I surveyed the surroundings before stepping out of the hiding myself. I was sitting with my legs crossed in the hiding and my leg fell asleep, so I stood ground for a while before covering the hard gravelled ground beside the railway track. Our meeting spot was far away from the city; I had no difficulty getting there, but the return journey was going to be rough.
With great calm and demeanour of a learned expert, I proceeded towards him; he was wearing a leather jacket, in the distance I could spot his Bajaj pulsar behind the bushes. He was a man in his thirties, he was lean and tall; his hair was neatly combed and the belt’s buckle had a metal dragon embossed that glistened every time he stepped into the light that trickled through the shifting branches of the mango trees to our right. The only route to escape was into those bushes, I shuddered at the thought of going round and round in dark inside the mango farm. A distant dog’s cry and a nearby cricket’s chirp; I paused in my slow gazing walk. A flutter in the bushes beside me; I pointed my torch and found a squirrel nipping at a seed with both his hands held up as if in reverence to the scene before him.
He held out his envelope and I pulled out my revolver. He was staring at me with blank eyes, fear had benumbed his person. He cleared his throat and mumbled something as if in a state of denial of his situation. Killing him would clear out the path for our school. He had spotted something unusual in our school’s activity. I approached him with an innocent voice of despair and promised to hand him the copies of surreptitious student loan activity through which our school benefited. He fell for the scheme, poor thing. He was holding the originals of incriminatory material in his hands. Without further delay, I aimed at his temple and shot him through his eyes. He dint even try to run away, such a state of disbelief he was in, he could hardly believe his fate.
The night was calm and the place desolate. An air of vehement vacuous pleasure bore upon me as I slipped my pointed fingers into his leather jacket. He had no weapon on him, save a pack of unopened cigarettes. I slipped out of the place with the envelope smeared in blood. Smoking my victim’s cigarette, encircling the puzzlingly heavy incensed smoke around the tip of my tongue, I crouched my way through the thicket. The undergrowth had unusual bumps in it; I felt an itching in the back of my head and the breeze stertorously heaved in my ears.
Chapter 2
The ugly cop with bald head and hunched shoulders tore the envelope apart and flung it across the desk to his partner. His partner, a man with keen eyes and charismatic personality, intently stared into the contents of the envelope. With an askance glance, he eyed me curiously as if sizing me up which sent a chill down my spine. Throwing his keen glance back onto the paper, he put it down beside the crystal table weight and observed ‘looks like you have gone to a lot of trouble in getting this envelope out of the other guy’. With those words, he rose up from his chair. Wearing his brown cap on neatly trimmed head, he tapped on his partner’s shoulders who was by now drowsing with his mouth wide open and facing the roof. The wooden chair on which he sat crouched like a guinea pig stooped under his weight with the plastic cords, some tattered and others on the verge of.
With no words exchanged, the two officers got into their jeep and drove away. I ran after them seeking for an explanation. The sheet of paper for which I took the life of an innocent man was now in the hands of the ugly cop; he tore it into two and flung into air with a mocking defiance of the state I was in. these cops were employed by my school, they were the most crooked of all the officers in our constituency. These were meant to be discreet; apparently, they had a track record of unmatchable delinquency. Whatever their gain, I was lost. Someone else was paying them to act against me and the school that represented me. With no one else to turn to, I walked back to my school.
Next morning, I woke up with heavy eyes to let in my roommate who had by then concluded that I must have been dead in my bed, for it was ages that he had been banging on the door. The room looked a lot different from how I had left it last night; the glass table, for instance, had a crack that ran all the way through the centre to the other side. The window sashes were yellow in colour, I consulted my memory and they were painted white in my mind. It was all too vague and unclear.
I fell back into sleep only to wake up with the keen and observant cop sitting on a chair beside my bed. Facing me, with his legs perched atop my cot, he was reading up from the last night’s envelope. As I woke up from the overwhelming slumber, he shifted his gaze and rested upon me, heavily perhaps, for I found it hard to lean out of my bed, as if it sank into itself. He referred me to a tea stall owner and promised a job by the bus terminal. The usual protocol: to drag oneself away from the source of crime for a while until things clear up. It took anywhere between six weeks and six months depending on the nature of the job. I needed another job, a discreet one, and the arrangements were made hitherto. But the ugly cop turned out to be a rat; I was supposed to go into hiding under the guise of a guest lecturer to a B-school in Dubai. Turns out, the keen cop is all I have got for now.
The man with a thick brown mane and yellow eyebrows examined me before confirming my stand on atheism. My deep convictions on the grounds did fare well with him and he offered me the job at his tea stall. It was a small room the size of a mini van, I had to stand on the other side of the raised platform and make tea. A small table fan was turned upside down and pinned up against the wall to my left. The tea stall was not in itself a long term solution. However, I made a lot of friends, the cleaning women and newspaper guys were the friendliest of all.
Some of my friends came to visit me at the tea stall, they were inquisitive but I held my secrets up close and never faltered. Then I met Dilip from Ken’s school of business. He persisted; he and I studied in the same school. ‘I cannot trade off BA for consultant in Cognizant’ he added ‘besides, the rules were clear, you brought this upon yourself’. Yes, indeed, he was right, there was no point in worrying him for a failed cause. Daniel’s school renounced me, for I was now a liability to them. Things paled out real bad, they found evidence that strongly pointed in my direction. Through Dilip, I tried to patronise Ken’s school, which required Dilip to let go of the best job in the country and take a job as ordinary as Consultant at Cognizant. Needless to say, he won’t do it.
Chapter 3
‘The cops are all over the place looking for you’, the cleaning woman explained to me in bursts of heaving breaths. There was no time to loose, I jostled the doors of one of the toilets, left my revolver there and slipped into the theatre for one last meet up with my family. But before I could slip out of the theatre, the cops with their armoury had presented themselves brazenly. I sat crouched in a corner behind my handicapped girl friend. All was well until a female from the row behind us raised her voice, for my handicapped friend was blocking her view of the screen. A cop came by and I could take it no more. Lifting the steel chair into folds, I banged it against the female’s chair until it broke into scrap of metal. By now all the cops were upon me.
I managed to break out of the theatre and lock the door behind me. But the cops in civil dress broke into attack with what looked like an electrocuting device. They threw themselves against me with their devices all over me. With few brief moments of shock and a terrible crush of my head into an adjoining wall, I eventually reached the toilet where I left my revolver.
While inside the toilet, another cop in civil dress was trying to break open the door, as I desperately tried with my other hand to reach out for the window door planning for an escape. My revolver was resting on the window sill and the cop was unbearably efficient. He drove me further back and finally got himself inside. Not only that, he grabbed me by my arm so tight that I could not reach for my revolver. Then he explained, he was not a cop. He was helping me.
Who was he? A student from Ken’s schools of business; why? What motive?
Chapter 4
I woke up to find the morning sun beating down on my face and pointy leaves of the thick shrubs rapping against my cheeks. The cigarette pack was lying by my side; all but one was missing, one I smoke so ebulliently.
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