Kumbhpur Rising Read online

  Kumbhpur Rising

  Mayur Didolkar

  Text Copyright@2013, Mayuresh Didolkar

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved, this book is a copyrighted to the author and any unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.

  Acknowledgements:

  My many thanks to my numerous friends for encouraging my habit of writing right from my teens. Many thanks to those who followed the amateur promotions of the book since August 2013 and then read the paperback with great enthusiasm.Your comments on my book’s facebook page encouraged me and helped me run the final mile. They also encouraged me to publish the book in Kindle.

  My mother Sunanda has been a stabilizing influence on me since my childhood and without her constant support through my personal struggles I could not have finished this book. Thanks Mom.

  Many thanks to Deepali Vengurlekar who designed the final cover of the Kindle editon and to Falguni Gokhale for her creative inputs and concept.

  Vinay Rathi, you are Alan Shore to my Denny Crane. Thank you for being there. Jignesh Furia, without your enormous and selfless support this would never have happened.

  Last but not the least, my debt of gratitude to all the authors whose writings inspired me to write. These would include Stephen King, Michel Connelly, Thomas Harris, & P G Wodehouse among others. Thank you for years of joy and inspiration Sirs and Madams.

  Disclaimers:

  The content of the novel deals with subject matter that some people may find disturbing. You may exercise due caution before you begin reading.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people living or dead, and places is completely unintentional. The town of Kumbhpur described in this book only exists in my imagination and if any town by such name exists really I do not know nor is the town based on any real towns I have seen or lived in.

  The Farmer’s Union of Maharashtra party described in the book is based on no real party. Having lived in rural Maharashtra, I have first hand seen the good work done by many parties for the agricultural community and the name I have taken is a pure creative license.

  Two law enforcement officials depicted in the novel deal with their personal demons at some point in the book, it is neither my intention nor the point of their character to blame their department for their emotional troubles. I have great admiration and respect for various arms of law enforcement in our country.

  Parts of this book have descriptions of explicit violence which some readers might find not to their taste. Please be cautioned.

  Most of all, please remember once you turn this page over, everything narrated from next page never happened.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Happy Days

  Book 2

  Kumbhpur Rising

  Book 3

  Heart Attack County

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The doctor ushered his young patient inside his comfortable consulting room and directed him to the chair. The young patient wished him a very good evening, politely as usual. The doctor smiled at him.

  “So how are you feeling now?” the doctor asked.

  “Sleeping better I guess, also that strange feeling I described last time…. The way I always felt I was …. I was being attacked, I don’t feel that way always now” he said.

  The patient had been under therapy for the last 3 months, a self admission. The doctor liked his young patient.

  “Good, so what do you want to talk about?” the doctor asked.

  “Can I smoke in here?”

  “You always ask me, and I always say no,” the doctor replied and the patient laughed, their ritual completed.

  “I read in the newspaper about a ship sinking near the Sindhudurg harbor, the crew is missing, all four of them,” the patient said. The doctor, knowing his patient’s history with the place, said nothing.

  “The strange thing is when the coast guard found the wreck they said it must have hit something sharp in the sea, looked like the wood was sawn, like someone went through it with a chainsaw,”

  “I am sure the coast guard did not add the last comparison,” the doctor observed.

  “They did not,” the patient admitted.

  “Your friend came to me last week. Nice man,” the doctor said after a pause of perhaps two minutes.

  “A little weak in the head, but you would not find a better man when the chips are down,” the patient said.

  “Have you even been together when the chips were down?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” the patient replied and averted his gaze.

  “He specifically asked me to discuss this with you, but if you are uncomfortable we can talk about something else,”

  “Yeah, like who should succeed Anil Kumble as India’s captain,” the patient remarked.

  “Of course his attempted murder of his wife. He claims he went to her with a real gun, and when he tried firing, it turned in his hand. Like a snake and became a toy pistol,” the doctor said “and he insists that it was a real gun, he is in the grip of that delusion,”

  “Well so he is,” the patient said.

  “Tell me something, it was really disturbing the way he described the whole incident, isn’t it?”

  “It was a disturbing incident, oh and the wife shooting bit, that was disturbing too,”

  The doctor left it to the patient to explain what other disturbing incident he was referring to was. The patient did not reply.

  Book One

  Happy Days

  Chapter 1

  “Life Sucks,” Rakesh said placing his beer mug back with a thud. The thud serving to emphasize his point, like an index finger pointed during a heated argument.

  If he was expecting an argument, he was not going to get one from me. I simply raised my own beer mug to my lips and drained it. “I will drink to that,” I said, lighting a new cigarette.

  My name is Rajat Sathe. I am twenty-eight, single and work with a bank in Pune as an investment advisor. Rakesh is twenty-eight and single too, only he works with a software company, and is single via divorcé Ville.

  Three years back he was happily married, and working with an upstart dot company as a creative director. The upstart was to bring the technology of making movies to every household in India. Need I say more? I mean, unless you are not only a non-Indian but also someone who never read a business paper related to world economy prior to 2004, you would know pretty much how this story would turn out , wouldn’t you?

  Still to fill in the blanks in case you care, Rakesh’s company 3POINTS.COM went bust in one hot summer of 2001. Rakesh lost his swanky two bedrooms flat in Andheri, Mumbai, and his Maruti Esteem. Six months down the line Rakesh found out that his wife of four years was having an affair with her boss, and the child that she had lost due to a miscarriage was not his. Rakesh divorced her, and moved to Pune where he took to drinking as a profession.

  A year later in which he spent three months in a hospital with a swollen liver, and another three running from a loan shark, Rakesh finally got his act together. He convinced another upstart software company to hire him. This company developed educational software for schools, a business proposition far more viable than turning every housewife into Steven Spielberg. Rakesh was good at his work, so the company offered him good growth and he stopped drinking completely.

  That was some time back. Now Rakesh had relapsed, (what a wonderful word for getting sucked in to quicksand) though now his drinking was quite moderate. Of course to understand the term moderate, you need to know a little more about our group.

  Before Rakesh’s dotcom saga, there were six of us, all working with an office automation company in Pune. We were all bright youn
g sales people with fire in our belly. Now I wonder if the fire in our belly had anything to do with the all night drinking binges that we indulged in. We worked hard and partied even harder. So, moderate drinking in our context was like five mild beers a night, or a couple of strong pegs of whisky.

  Right now waiters had pulled an additional table next to ours. Rakesh had a superstition about removing empty bottles before his drinking was over. So now, the table next to us had nine bottles standing in a neat row like pins in a bowling alley.

  Coming back to Rakesh’s opening remarks about life’s resemblance to a Eureka Forbes Vacuum cleaner; they were not brought about by his own fall from grace for once. (The guy could whine, I could tell you that). We were discussing a certain Mr. Alok “Happy” Shukla.

  In retrospect nothing could top the irony of that nickname “Happy”. How so, you ask me? Let me tell you how.

  There are some parts of this story that would come later. For now let me just tell you that Alok shukla was our boss in my first job. He was a boss, an elder brother, and a role model all rolled into one for us. We would have followed him anywhere. He was handsome, charismatic and also happily married to his high school sweetheart. We all wanted to be like him some day.

  Of course being like him now would have meant being a delusional maniac, with a suicide attempt and the unfortunate habit of diving under the sofa set whenever a car pulled into the driveway on his resume.

  I guess that pretty much explains Rakesh’s opening statement.

  Chapter2

  For a murderer of six, Neeraj Joshi is a very simple man.

  As he now sits in the balcony of his tenth floor one bedroom apartment and reflects(while waiting for his boss to call him),we see a reasonably good looking man with high cheekbones and a receding hairline in his early thirties. He works as a sales head for Royal Heritage shares and stock brokers. His firm is in the newspapers lately, for all the wrong reasons. Neeraj and his boss Sanket Shah are two of the major wrong reasons.

  SEBI has accused Royal Heritage of acting in collusion with a speculator named Raman Dixit with suspected drug lord connections, in timing the markets, and making small investors lose millions of rupees in the bargain. What these small investors were doing in a place like the stock market was beyond Neeraj. As of this moment a special SEBI team was questioning Sanket Shah. Two CBI officials are assisting the questioning.

  But Neeraj feels extremely calm. Ever since he had found out that, the acid that clears drainage blocks is also equally effective as a tool of threat, he is calm all the time.

  The phone rings. Neeraj answers it on the second ring, and listens to what his boss had to say.

  “I will be there,” he says quietly and hangs up.

  Ordinarily the news that he has been sold out by his teammates, would leave a man shaken when three to five years in prison is at stake. Neeraj simply shakes his head, and marvels at the amazing rat likeness of his fellow men. Then he walks to his bedroom to get ready.

  The bedroom is untidy like a teenager’s. There are a couple of big posters of soccer stars like Van Nistelrooy and Zidane. Apparently our man is a soccer fan. There is a wardrobe full of blue and white shirts and identical grey and blue trousers. The ties are nearly all blue in color. This wardrobe is expensive and accumulated with good taste, but with not much thought to style. There are a few jeans and a couple of soccer tee shirts, obviously our man doesn’t socialize a lot.

  Neeraj is extremely well built. He does not have an ounce of fat on his body. His hands and forearms, while not large, are certainly strong and wiry. But unlike most of men who have taken good care of their bodies, Neeraj does not spend much time watching himself in the mirror.

  He dresses quickly in an adidas tee shirt and blue Levis jeans. He puts on a pair of dark glasses, and pulls on white runners, no socks, humming ‘Walk of Life’ from Dire Straits under his breath. Possibly once upon a time, before smoking and stress did him in, this man had a good singing voice.

  This is where the preparations take a turn for the bizarre. Neeraj opens a small drawer of his wardrobe, and takes out a small plastic bottle. The bottle contains H2SO4, also known as Sulphuric Acid.

  Neeraj is comfortable handling it, but he shows the deadly liquid the respect it deserves. The bottle has a special cap that prevents accidental spillage, and Neeraj’s car has a special pouch very much like the water bottle holders found onVolvo buses. He rarely carries it on his person, unless he is sure he is going to use it. Tonight he leaves it alone.

  From the same drawer he extracts a pair of leather and lead knuckledusters. He has spent countless hours practicing their use at home, and once when he had actually used it the results were remarkable. Neeraj counts on the knuckle duster almost as much, as he does on the bottle of acid.

  The second last item to come out of the drawer is a six inch switch blade knife. This too has been used once when things were looking bad for him. That was in a dark alley of South Mumbai where a goon had tried to mug him. Now, that goon begged for spare change in front of Haji Ali mosque. He had lost all his fingers in that botched mugging. Neeraj had also given him a scar running from his navel to his ribcage.

  Neeraj detests that knife, it is a crude weapon, and he is a man of taste and discernment. But in a close hand to hand fight, using acid is dangerous and the knuckle dusters need space to swing your basic haymaker. A knife, on the other hand, can slit open an unsuspecting stomach, when it is pressed against you.

  Last, but in no way the least, is a 9mm HN35 handgun with a well worn holster. Neeraj removes the gun from its holster and hefts it once against the flat of his palm. Then he tucks it in his jeans and pulls the tee over it.

  He carefully turns off all the lights before leaving, stopping only to pick up the car keys from the coffee table.

  In a few minutes he is driving his four year old Santro, a jet black car which he has maintained very carefully. He drives like a man who learnt driving relatively late, but learnt well. He drives with complete concentration on the road ahead. The acceleration is smooth, and the gear changes copy book style. He observes every traffic rule. It is funny how someone, who is very likely to threaten another man with grievous bodily harm in a few minutes time, takes so much care for something as mundane as traffic rules.

  “Appearance of law must be upheld, especially when it is being broken” Neeraj remembers this line in the Daniel Day-Lewis flick that he likes so much, and smiles to himself.

  Neeraj rang the door bell to his boss Sanket Shah’s house. He knew his boss would be alone at home, waiting for him.

  Sanket answered the door in a red tee shirt and track pants. He was already a little drunk. They hugged each other, and Sanket ushered Neeraj to his spacious living room. He was a man in his late thirties with a receding hairline and startlingly brown eyes. He was charismatic, in a geeky sort of way. He gesticulated a lot with his hands while talking, and when he was in full steam, people were known to stand well clear of him, to avoid being hit on the nose with those pin wheeling arms.

  Neeraj accepted the glass of Signature Whisky from Sanket and sitting comfortably, lit a cigarette. He sipped his drink in small sips, and refused to join Sanket for the next round. Sanket sat opposite Neeraj. He petted his tomcat “Shot” absentmindedly.

  “You have cut a deal,” Neeraj said slowly, and sipped his drink. Sanket finished his, and lit a cigarette. Neeraj noticed a tiny tremor in his boss’s hands.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” he replied, and puffed. Neeraj sat motionless staring at him. He knew Sanket would continue.

  “I am trying to get all of us out of this with minimum damage. I have a responsibility to seventy families. If this shit hits the fan, not one of the Royal Heritage guys will have a career left. We are talking about married men with mortgages on their houses, and a couple of kids going through school. Today when I was speaking with the board members, I kept thinking about the responsibility I have towards all my guys,”

  �
�That includes me,” Neeraj said, and filled his glass with a second peg. In some distant part of his mind he admired Sanket. This was his boss at his absolute best, charismatic and articulate. Sanket’s ability to talk with conviction always amazed Neeraj, especially when he was lying through his teeth, like now.

  Having worked with the man for more than three years, Neeraj had seen Sanket’s visionary side, his charismatic side and his ruthless, maneuvering side. All this talk about being responsible for the team was so much bullshit. Neeraj could remember offhand at least a dozen people Sanket had fired in the course of last three years. These people had families too, at least a few of them certainly had.

  Neeraj especially remembered a South Indian Wealth Manager who managed the HNI desk for Royal Heritage. Sanket had sacked him for losing a big investor to competition. The man’s wife was eight months pregnant when this happened. Neeraj recalled how that man had pleaded, in fact begged Sanket for a second chance, or at least to let him stay till his wife delivered. Sanket was not moved then. He had told the man the same thing he was telling Neeraj now, that he was responsible for a lot of people.

  “That of course includes you, but on the whole it could have been a lot worse for you,” Sanket said.

  Neeraj finished his drink and spoke, “three to five years of prison time, with a guarantee that I will never work on the Dalal Street again. Nice to know it could have been worse,”

  “You seem to be forgetting the five million we are going to pay you in cash,”

  “And you seem to forget that I make that every two years in my present job,” Neeraj said, his voice progressively growing toneless. Sanket took that for a sign of resignation. Not so smart.

  “You want more?” Sanket asked, he was sure Neeraj had accepted the deal, and now just wanted more money. Strike two.