SANTOSH OPENED THE door of his hospital room and peered out. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The corridor lights had been dimmed to night mode. Santosh knew that he was on the tenth floor. Room 1016. It was the same floor on which the chief administrator’s office was located.
He should have been discharged by 5 p.m. but he had complained of severe stomach cramps. The doctor on duty had been forced to extend his stay by a day. Santosh had then requested Nisha bring him a flashlight. His cell phone—which had an inbuilt flashlight option—had been shattered during his altercation with Ibrahim.
He walked barefooted toward the nurses’ station that was next to the elevator bank. The corridor ended there and a right turn from that point would take him toward the administrative wing. He wondered how many nurses would be on duty at that time.
He reached the end of the corridor and stopped. He needed to know whether any of the night-duty nurses were looking out of the glass panel that separated the nurses’ station from the corridor. He peeped from the corner of the panel. Two of them were inside, both with their backs to him. They seemed to be helping themselves to coffee from a machine.
Santosh quickly crossed the station and took a right turn toward the administrative wing. Another corridor. This one was entirely dark. Administrative staff had left for the day and no lighting was required. Santosh squinted his eyes to adjust to the darkness and felt his way along the corridor. He tried to recall how far along the chief administrator’s office had been. As far as he could remember, it was about halfway down the corridor.
He tried one of the doors but it was locked. The second door opened with a gentle push but it opened into a storage closet. He was in luck with the third. He entered the room and shut the door behind him. Once he was sure there were no footsteps in the corridor, he felt for the light switch and turned it on.
The harsh overhead lighting hurt his eyes. He quickly turned it off. The office had a window that overlooked the hospital’s entrance porch and it was possible that the security guards could become suspicious seeing a light in a supposedly closed area of the hospital. He switched on the flashlight instead and headed to MGT’s office, which connected to the outer office where his secretary sat.
The inner office door was locked. Santosh walked back to the secretary’s desk, opened a drawer, and took out two ordinary paper clips. Putting down the flashlight on the desk, he straightened out both the clips. He converted one into a pressure pin by bending it at ninety degrees. The other clip he converted into a rake by creating a zigzag pattern using the secretary’s scissors.
Santosh bent down and inserted the rake into the key slot and pulled down in an effort to push some of the lock levers down. He then inserted the pressure pin and rotated it left then right. Two minutes later the door was open.
He picked up the flashlight and walked into the office, shutting the door behind him. The desk was untidy and several files and documents lay strewn across it. Santosh began looking through the papers on the desk. Most of it was mundane stuff. Uniform requisitions, staff attendance and overtime reports, equipment repair orders, and canteen instructions.
Santosh tried the desk drawer. It was locked. He used his paper clips to open the simple lock and shone the flashlight inside. A single register with several slips of paper clipped together sat inside. Santosh took it out and began looking through it.
What he found were names of patients and the date and time on which they had checked in. The register then outlined their ailments and the date of surgery. So far so good. After that came the details of organs that had been removed and whether the patient had survived or not.
There were plenty who hadn’t. Eleven? Santosh counted. More than that. He had a feeling that if it were possible to match the names here with the bodies found at Greater Kailash then they would indeed correspond.
What’s more, in all cases there was only one consulting doctor. Dr. Pankaj Arora. The register was being used by MGT to maintain a macabre record of surreptitious organ removals that were communicated to him through those ubiquitous slips.
It was evident that he was fully supporting the activities of Arora. But why? He was from a very affluent family and certainly didn’t need the money. Wilson’s disease! MGT had lost his only son due to nonavailability of a liver. It would have been easy for Arora to emotionally blackmail MGT into allowing the racket to go on, almost convincing him that his son could have been saved if such a service had been available back then.
Santosh examined the back of the drawer. There was a carton of cigarettes. It was in silver finish with an impressive crest at the front. It read “Treasurer.” That was the cigarette brand Nisha had found at the Greater Kailash house, the one by Chancellor Tobacco. Santosh remembered that MGT had lived in England as a young man. No doubt that was when he had acquired the taste for those expensive cigarettes.
There was the sudden sound of a door opening. Someone was accessing the outer office. Santosh froze. He cursed himself for having switched on the lights initially.
He quickly put the register back inside the drawer, closed it, switched off his flashlight, and crept under the desk, fervently praying it wasn’t MGT himself.
He heard the door handle to the inner office turn and the door open. Footsteps headed toward the desk and a beam of light from a flashlight danced around the room. Santosh attempted to bundle himself tighter while restricting his breathing.
The beam danced around some more. The man in the inner office called out to a colleague in the outer office, “It’s empty. I told you that you were imagining it. Let’s go back to that card game I was winning.” Santosh heard the door close.
He sat crumpled like a paper ball under the desk until he was satisfied there was no one there but him. Then he gingerly began to make his way into the dark outer office, the door of which had been closed by the guards on their way out.
He didn’t see who was waiting for him. Didn’t see the blow coming. Just pain as he hit the deck.