Biff! Bam! Whiz!
In the dark, billy clubs, rods, and hockey sticks went into motion. A sudden crashing sound from somewhere. Someone fired a pistol. Glass was breaking.
Lacchu Guru, the notorious town goonda with a police record a mile long, lay writhing on the ground of Room 112 with his four underlings, covered in blood. He had been relieved of his pistol. He’d sustained fifty blows in under a minute.
The five goondas were in a state of shock. They were being dragged into the hallway.
“Be careful. We don’t want them to die. Take them downstairs. .” Rahul was issuing instructions. His beefed-up arms were pulsating. The six-foot-three skinny skeleton O.P., center forward on the field, was using his hockey stick to score a few more goals on Lacchu Guru’s skull. Pratap and Kartikeya looked dead serious.
Eighteen-year-old first-year Niketan, who hardly had a trace of facial hair, had transformed into Bruce Lee and was in the middle of the goondas lashing them with his belt like a whip.
The main circuit breaker was switched back on. A simultaneous chorus ushered from all four hostels. “Ho! Ho! Hurray! The electricity’s back!”
It had been a first-rate success. In their eagerness, some of the students wanted to torch the goondas’ jeep, and had even poured gasoline on it. It came so close they were ready to toss a Molotov cocktail down from the roof, or light a match. But Pratap and Masood talked them out of it. Nevertheless, this didn’t mean that the goondas would be able to make a getaway in their jeep; to make sure they didn’t, the air had been let out of all four tires.
The goondas were marched down the steps down to the field in front of Raman Hostel. More than three hundred students had materialized in a flash. Their faces beamed with the pride of the victorious and delight in their success.
“Hip, hip, hooray!”
Hip hip hip hip.
“Down with goondas!”
“No more goondas!”
Ajay Devgan took a giant leap from somewhere in the crowd and landed both his boots on the goondas’ backs, just like Bruce Lee, shouting “ho, shu, shu,” showing off his karate-judo moves, whipping his belt around in the air. He removed his shirt with the bloodthirsty look of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator and, grabbing the bewildered goondas by the scruff of their necks, hoisted them in the air, just as a massive monkey arrived on the scene and used his bare fist to rain blow after blow on the goondas’ ugly mugs. The chant of victory echoed from the crowd—“Victory to Hanuman!”
Rahul, as Pierce Brosnan of James Bond fame, pretended to help Lacchu Ustad to his feet while simultaneously kicking his legs out from under him, then laughed deeply.
And in the middle of the chaos emerged Johnny Lever and Jim Carrey from Mask, as the two clowning jokers flashed their teeth and began leaping around in song—
Shall I kill you, or let you go — speak. .
and
I am the Don, I am the Don. .
The six-foot-three ostrich became the superstar Amitabh Bachan, dancing away, kicking his sticklike legs into the air.
“Ab tera kya hoga re, Kaliyaa? Looks like the end of the line!” Gabbar Singh and Sambha said to the cowering, blood-soaked goondas.
Someone placed his hand on Rahul’s shoulder. It was Dinamani. He’d come from Manipur to do a postgraduate degree in geology. “He’s the one! Now I can make it out. He’s the one who beat Sapam. I recognize him. It’s 100 percent confirmed, I tell you!”
O.P. and Kartikeya had to restrain Rahul. He resisted like a wounded leopard, trying to break free. “I’ll kill him!”
“Control! Control yourself, Rahul! Rahul!” Kartikeya screamed.
The goondas were loaded into the back of the jeep. Students took up every inch of remaining space, from the hood in front to the spare tire in the back. The jeep, with no air in its tires, set off very slowly toward the residence of Vice-Chancellor Ashok Kumar Agnihotri, trailed by the throng of students.
Rahul noticed that amid the crowd of hooting and hollering students following the jeep were Sapam and his brother, walking silently. Rahul’s eyes met Sapam’s for an instant, and he saw Sapam’s brother. Blood still flowed from his temple. It was the spot on his head where the police, thinking him a terrorist, had shot him dead while he was on his way to school to teach.
“Every civilization absolutely needs to have a big collective dream, a utopian ideal, one without self-interest. History has shown us that there hasn’t been any civilization without some sort of craze or madness,” Kinnu Da had once said.
“Have you read Michel Foucault? The fear and avarice in the West toward lepers and nonwhite indigenous peoples in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was nothing more than a craze, a frenzy, a collective neurotic disorder. The notion that ideas, religions, philosophies, and political theories are great ones, or worthless ones, depends on the kind of utopia or frenzy or dream they manage to create in the minds of the individuals of that civilization, and to what extent they contain a minimal degree of violence, hatred, fear, and destruction. Buddha and Gandhi were so remarkable because there was no place in their dreams for violence or hatred. Meanwhile, most of the ‘constructs’ that have issued forth from the West have not been fully devoid of violence or hatred.”
Kinnu Da’s voice echoed in Rahul’s ears. “Rahul, the West has beaten Gandhi for good. My fear is that soon we’ll have a bloodbath and everything will be broken up into tiny pieces.”
Rahul looked at Sapam and his brother. Then he saw the great master, Chaitanya, mortally wounded, standing beneath the neem tree along with his broken drum and cymbals. Then he saw that a map of the country he loved with all his heart was breaking into tiny pieces, scattering, and disappearing into a black hole.
“I’m not opposed to the market. But the market is no ‘collective dream,’ no utopia. No dream can be seen in the marketplace. There is nothing in it that is great, moral, or lofty. All its ingredients — gains, losses, profit, cash — are tiny and base. The market is operated by the science of exploitation, greed, gambling, thuggery, and self-interest.” Kinnu Da’s voice was grave and sad. “Can’t you see with your own eyes that wherever a market comes to a country, the place is torn to bits and handed over to violence and bloodshed.”
The great countries and united republics — those that had been eaten away by market forces — flashed before Rahul’s eyes: Kosovo, Serbia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union.
America and some rich European countries had become countries of commerce, and then transformed third world societies into their wholesale markets, turning them on their heads, bringing destruction and violence, flooding them with their brokers. The limbs were dismembered and organs ripped from one society after another, from one once-sovereign country to another, and then brought into conflict. Scattered, wasted, spoiled.
It’s interesting that television and newspapers only report the daily ups and downs of the stock market index, but not the nonstop destruction, disintegration, violence, and conflict happening everywhere, from all sides, twenty-four hours a day.
Now is it our turn? Who is the agent representing this market? Who is the real enemy of the country? Is it the offspring of the demon Ravana, cast across the ocean by Pulastya? Have they returned, the English having, in fact, handed over power to them?
Rahul, O.P., Kartikeya, Parvez, Imroz, and Hemant were standing together on the back of the jeep. Their hands were clasped together and they sang:
Let the time come, O heavens, and we’ll tell