'The magazine is fully loaded.'
Mohan takes the gun in his right hand and feels its weight. 'Can I try?'
The man looks around. 'Here, in the garden?' he asks doubtfully.
'Why not?' Mohan removes the safety catch and aims at an empty Coke bottle standing on the wooden railing of the gazebo. He presses the trigger and with a deafening blast the glass bottle shatters and disintegrates. He nods his head approvingly, blows at the smoking barrel, and tucks the gun inside his kurta pyjamas.
Shanti races screaming into the garden. 'What happened? I heard a gunshot. I thought someone had-'
'Shanti, you imagine too much,' Mohan says calmly. 'Death is blessed at any time, but it is twice blessed for a warrior who dies for his cause – that is, truth.'
That same evening a gilt-edged card arrives bearing a commissioned artwork by M. F. Husain on the cover. 'Vicky Rai invites you to a celebratory dinner on 23 March at Number Six' it says inside in cursive black letters.
He reads it and his lips curve into a cunning smile.
9 Love in Mehrauli
THERE ARE only three ways of becoming instantly rich – inheriting a family fortune, robbing a bank or receiving an unexpected windfall. Some receive it in the form of a winning lottery ticket, some as an unbeatable card combination at a poker game. I found mine two days ago in a dustbin.
After retrieving the briefcase from the rubbish bin I caught a bus and headed home to the temple. Mother was in the kitchen and Champi was listening to the TV. I entered my room and tried to find a suitable hiding place for the briefcase. But a small kholi does not afford too many locations for concealment. Eventually I had to push the briefcase underneath the mattress, where it formed a rather bulky outcrop.
Later that night, after Mother and Champi had gone to sleep, I took out the briefcase and began counting the money with the help of a torch held between my legs. There were twenty wads of notes in denominations of one thousand and five hundred. The notes were brand new, fresh from a bank. I opened the first wad and began adding up. One thousand… two thousand… ten thousand… fifteen thousand… fifty thousand. My head started spinning with all the zeroes I had never used. By the time I reached the twelfth wad, my fingers had begun to ache, the saliva in my mouth had run dry and my eyes were losing focus. To put it crudely, there was more money inside the briefcase than I could count.
A wave of happiness swept over my body, providing me with a more exhilarating rush than high-grade smack. I had more money in my possession than seven generations of my family would have seen. But even as I was rejoicing at my good fortune, the first doubts crept into my mind. What if someone had seen me take the briefcase and reported it to the police? What if a robber came into our hut and stole the briefcase? Desperate men know no bounds. The adjoining Sanjay Gandhi slum has plenty of hired killers willing to slit a man's throat for just five grand. To get their grubby hands on my briefcase, they would stop at nothing. The rich can sleep easy because they have money in the bank and round-the-clock guards and alarms in the house. But how can a poor man protect his stash of cash? I fretted, I sweated, I stayed up all night.
This is the strange thing about money – too much of it can be as problematic as too little.
When I was studying in the government school, we had a teacher called Hari Prasad Saini who liked to play mind games with the students. Once he asked us, 'What would you do if you suddenly got a hundred thousand rupees each?' I remember Lallan said he would buy an entire toyshop. Another boy said he would spend it all on chocolates. I said that I would give the money to my mother. But now, when I actually have much more than a hundred thousand rupees, the last thing I am going to do is tell Mother. She is quite capable of dragging me to a police station and making a public announcement: 'Inspector Sahib, please find out where my son has stolen all this money from!'
I had intended to keep the news of my fortune even from Champi, but within two days I knew that was impossible. I never keep secrets from her, and I have to tell someone. So when Mother goes to the temple for her daily chores, I call Champi to my side of the room.
'I have got money for your operation,' I tell her.
'How much?'
'Much more than we need to pay the doctor.'
'I don't want any operation,' Champi says. 'I am happy as I am.'
I know she is lying. She wouldn't mind the operation, if not for her sake then for Mother, who worries constantly about her marriage. 'Who will marry my Champi, the way she looks?' she frets all the time.
Mother is right. Who will marry Champi? She is a walking disaster. The nicest girl in the world, she is also the ugliest. She has a harelip which makes the lower half of her face a grotesque caricature. Her left arm is completely wasted, and she has pockmarks all over her cheeks. The good thing is she cannot see her ugliness. She is as blind as a bat. Yet she is more famous than anyone in our locality. They often put her picture in magazines and newspapers and she has even been featured on CNN.
Champi is known all over the world as the Face of Bhopal. There was a big industrial disaster in Bhopal more than twenty years ago. Poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked out from the Union Carbide plant and all those who inhaled it died, or went blind or became mad. Champi's mother Fatima Bee was living in Bhopal at the time. She too was affected by the gas, although she didn't know it then. She gave birth to Champi five years later. When the doctors saw the newborn baby, they told Fatima Bee that the gas had caused the blindness and all the deformities. It still intrigues me how the gas was locked up in Fatima Bee's body for five years and did nothing to her, yet pounced on poor Champi the moment she was born.
The people affected by the gas were promised some money by the government, but it didn't cover people like Fatima Bee who were affected later. So she joined an organization called Crusaders for Bhopal which has been fighting for compensation. As happens in our country, the case has been dragging on for over twenty years with no resolution in sight. Every three months Fatima Bee would come to Delhi, do the rounds of the Supreme Court, participate in a couple of rallies, and go back to Bhopal. Ten years ago she decided to move to Delhi permanently, along with her husband Anwar Mian and Champi. They lived in the Sanjay Gandhi slum in Mehrauli, which is full of Bangladeshi refugees. Anwar Mian found work in a cement factory in Mahipalpur. I am told he was a grim, taciturn man who drank like a fish, smoked twenty beedis a day and hardly ever spoke to anyone. One fine day, he went to work as usual, returned home in the evening as usual, and dropped dead during the night. Bole toh, heart failure.
It was a big blow to Fatima Bee, who now had to support Champi all alone. She was forced to start sewing clothes for a living. That is how she came into contact with Mother, who got a couple of my shirts stitched by her. She was a superb tailor. The shirts she made me fitted me more perfectly than anything I have worn since. Unfortunately, Fatima Bee also fought a running battle with illness. Three years ago she passed away of tuberculosis, leaving Champi all alone. That is when the Crusaders for Bhopal people came to the temple. They sought a volunteer family which would be prepared to take care of Champi's upkeep in return for three hundred rupees (subsequently increased to four hundred) per month. There were no takers for their offer, till Mother showed up. She is the queen of all do-gooders, ready to feed even a sick snake. Mother took one look at Champi and embraced her like her own daughter. There was some grumbling from the temple management. The slimy priest, who makes a tidy profit from the daily offerings, objected to a Muslim girl being given refuge inside the precincts of a Hindu temple. But Mother had made up her mind. 'What kind of priest are you? Does humanity have a religion?' she rebuked him, silencing his protest. Since then Champi has lived with Mother and me in our house at the back of the temple. I suppose I could call her a sister of sorts. Crusaders for Bhopal pay Mother the regular monthly stipend and take Champi away for just one day each year – 3 December, which they call Bhopal Action Day. They try to raise awareness of the disaster by going on a huge rally, often with volunteers in outrageous costumes. Last year they had people dressed as skeletons. But the star of the show is always Champi, who doesn't need any make-up to remind people of the horrors of Bhopal.