20
Kirit
Present day
Present day
Kirit stared at his phone. The one laying on his teakwood table. The one in his pocket he would not place anywhere someone walking into his office could see it. Only one person used that phone, and not one day went by that Kirit did not curse the day he had taken the phone from Asif Khan. Except, his Kimaya was alive today because he had. But then that was life for those who fought it instead of lying down and taking its punches as they came. Warriors didn’t get mired in guilt and regret, they focused on the goal.
The situation with Asif Khan had become serious enough that he should call his wife. Rupa, of course, was on one of her pilgrimages to Kashi. She had gone there straight from Dharamsala without even bothering to come home. It was one of the five holy pilgrimages she went on every year. Most people strove to complete the five pilgrimages once in a lifetime, but Rupa was not most people. Usually, he would not disturb her spiritual journeying for anything. Communing with your gods was a solitary business, and Rupa made no bones about how seriously she took her communions.
Would she want to know about the threat to Kimi? Kirit hadn’t paid heed to what Rupa wanted for so long that he no longer knew.
The real question he was currently pondering was if he needed to call her.
Many years ago, before he had lost her to her god, his wife had possessed great instincts. The word she preferred was intuition. It had been a huge asset in the movie business. She could take one look at a script and tell him if a project was going to be successful or not. She could take one look at his heroines and tell if they were making passes at him or not. He had been unwaveringly faithful, of course, no matter how hard and fast the temptations came. She had given up her own career to be his wife, and she had borne more pain than he could comprehend to give them a family.
How he’d loved her for it. It had felt unbearable sometimes, the volume of his love. So, yes, he’d been faithful. He’d been her slave. Not only for as long as she had been the woman he had married, but for a long time after she stopped. He had stubbornly clung on to his fidelity like a beacon of hope that someday she’d return.
After Kimaya got sick, her instincts weren’t all Rupa lost. For a long time he didn’t blame Rupa for losing interest in everything other than her god. Back then he shared her belief that their only hope of seeing their daughter reach adulthood lay in the hands of that all-knowing, all-controlling entity.
It had started with Rupa spending more and more time in front of the small altar in the kitchen with its inch-high silver idols of Ganesha, Lakshmi, and Krishna, which were part of every woman’s trousseau. Slowly, the altar had moved to a room upstairs. Then as Kimi got sicker, that room had turned into a full-fledged temple. The small home-sized idols that had been in her family for generations had been replaced with human-sized marble statues that were bathed and clothed every day in addition to being meditated upon for hours and fasted in honor of in increasingly severe ways. Prayers were performed on a schedule to exacting standards and rules for which strotra was acceptable for chanting at which precise hour. Nothing could be out of place, because any error could throw all the hours of prayers out of alignment and incur the wrath of the gods who had so obviously decided to test them.
That too Kirit had understood. He shared Rupa’s desperation to see their daughter live and thrive. But then she had abandoned Kimi. For a long time he had made excuses for her, seeing her actions as a mother’s love, as her sacrifice for her child’s health. It’s what he had always done too. But one day Kimi had been so sick she’d been gasping for breath. Despite that, she had still managed to call for her mother. Rupa had refused to leave her meditation position in front of her idols in the middle of prayer. That’s when Kirit had understood that it wasn’t a mother’s love that motivated Rupa, it was a selfish woman’s inability to deal with the hand she’d been dealt. His own abandonment he could forgive, but the removal of a mother’s loving hand from Kimaya’s head he could never forgive.
He put down the phone he’d been holding. He was being fanciful. Even if Rupa cared, her only response would be to pray some more. No, she didn’t deserve to know. He would handle Asif Khan himself. Just like he had done thus far. Because his love was real, unconditional. And because he was not a coward.
Love was supposed to be courageous and selfless.
It was the only reason he had let the Rahul problem continue. Rupa hated him for it. It had further fueled her mass punitive treatment of everyone and everything.
The boy lives in a chawl, she had said. You might as well let your only daughter consort with the slum kids too.
Truth was, her intuition might not be entirely dead because she had seen it, the danger that was Rahul. But again, she saw only what scared her, not what her child needed. It was obvious to any bystander that Kimaya was not the same after Rahul came into her life. Kirit had considered replacing him, but two things had stopped him. One, his Kimaya was too bright to be friends with any child who wasn’t as intellectually superior as her. And two, Rahul would never cross the chasm between himself and Kimi. Kirit had made sure of that. Rahul would never forget the burden of debt Kirit had piled upon him. The kind of debt that repayment could never cancel out, because with debt timeliness was everything.
More crucially, Rahul would never forget that Kimi came with a guarantee of loss. And no matter what Kimaya believed, Rahul didn’t have the kind of courage it took to bear another loss. Not after what he’d been through. Kirit had seen it in his eyes the night of his sister’s death.
Which is why Kirit could not decide if he was proud of Rahul or furious at him for not disclosing where Kimi and he were hiding out.
The good news was that if Kirit didn’t know, Asif wouldn’t know either.
The phone in Kirit’s pocket buzzed. No wonder the bastard had survived all those bullets. The moment you thought about him, he turned up, like the immortal death god. Kirit sprang up and locked the door to his office.
He didn’t greet the bastard when he answered. Not because he hated him with an obsessive virulence, but because someone else could have found Asif’s phone and might be trying to trap Kirit.
“It’s me. Sorry, not dead yet,” Asif Khan said in that horridly rough diction.
“Pity.”
“The pity is that you think you could send your daughter off to the police safe house and I wouldn’t find out. Do you have any idea how easy it is to get your police force to sing like mynah birds? Turn on the TV.”
Kirit hated taking orders from the bastard, but he turned on the small flat screen he’d had installed in his office mainly because so much of politics and public opinion was traded through the media these days. These television pimps had suddenly become the keepers of the vote bank.
Asif Khan chuckled on the phone when he heard the TV come on.
Kirit pushed off his desk, terror coursing through his body. Someone had shot three people outside a building in Colaba. Two of the bodies were identified as male police officers, and the third one was an unidentified woman.
Kirit’s heart pounded so hard he could no longer hear Asif on the phone. He hung up, refusing to panic.
He called Rahul.
But Rahul didn’t answer.