4

By the time the alarm went off at 5 a.m., Satyajit Kumar had already been awake for half an hour. But he’d stayed in bed, mulling over a problem that had kept him awake half the night. What was the right amount of time to wait before attacking the Prime Minister for putting family over country? Was one week a long enough interval? Was a fortnight more appropriate? Or should he wait even longer?

If there was one thing that Kumar was good at, it was waiting. After all, he had spent nearly half his life doing just that: waiting.

In his 30s, Kumar had been widely tipped to take over the leadership of the SPP but had narrowly lost out to his fellow Young Turk, Girdharilal Sharma. Kumar had made his peace with the defeat, going on to become a strong and faithful number two to Sharma in the party. But when Sharma succumbed to cancer, and Kumar thought it would finally be his turn to get the top prize, the party decided to give the top job to Gyanendra Mishra, an old Sharma loyalist, who would keep the seat warm until Girdharilal’s son, Jayesh, was old enough to occupy it.

Once again, Satyajit Kumar had been obliged to put on a brave face and accept working under a new party president. But canny politician that he was, he had made the most of a bad deal and negotiated a return to his home state, Bihar, to lead the party in the next Assembly election. His return had galvanized the somnolent state unit into action, and his homespun wisdom and rustic wisecracks had electrified crowds on the campaign trail. Against all the odds, Kumar led the SPP to an improbable victory in Bihar and was duly installed as chief minister.

There, the undisputed king of his little fiefdom, Kumar had gone a little crazy. Setting up corrupt deals and hoovering up kickbacks, Kumar had soon amassed a personal fortune that would keep his next seven generations in clover. But all the money in the world could not help him win another term as Bihar chief minister.

And that was just fine with Kumar. He had had enough of being stuck in Bihar, far away from the centre of action in Delhi. So, he had lobbied for and got a Rajya Sabha berth and settled down to being an elder statesman for his party, and a dial-a-quote politician for all the TV news channels. Nobody gave a soundbite quite like Satyajit Kumar and soon his TV persona gave him a higher profile than he might otherwise have had.

Kumar would have been quite content with this existence, but circumstances had recently given him a fresh lease of life. After SPP leader, Jayesh Sharma, had been personally implicated in the release of Asha Devi’s naked pictures, the party had been scrambling around for a new party president. There were a handful of young dynasts who had been vying for the post, but none of them could cobble together enough support to get the top job. Just when things were getting too messy with factional fights breaking out in each state unit, the party’s parliamentary board had decided to come up with a ‘compromise candidate’, an elder statesman who would be acceptable to all.

After mulling over a few names, they had decided to offer the job to Satyajit Kumar. He had accepted with alacrity, pushing the party to make the announcement before it changed its mind. And so, a good three decades after he had first tried for the job, Satyajit Kumar was the president of the SPP.

So yes, you could say that Kumar was very good at waiting. Or, conversely, that waiting had proved to be good for him.

As the alarm sounded on his mobile phone, Kumar turned it off before it woke his wife, snoring gently by his side. He quietly slipped out of bed and into the bathroom to brush his teeth. And then, still in the crumpled white cotton pyjama kurta he had slept in, he stepped out of his bedroom through the side door, walking down the lawn towards the back garden.

He heard them before he could see them. Bleating piteously, they came scrambling up to the gate of their enclosure, pushing each other aside to be the first to greet him. He opened the gate and went on his knees to pat them on their gnarly heads.

Other people had dogs, cats, or even cows. Satyajit Kumar had goats.

It had started when he was a young politician looking to set himself apart from the others in the field. Watching a programme on Mahatma Gandhi one day, which had shots of him milking his goats, it had come to him in a flash. That is what he would do: keep goats in his backyard, and milk them every day. It would reinforce his image as a rural leader, a son of the soil, who had not let the evil ways of the city spoil him.

But what had started as a conceit had soon become a habit. And now he couldn’t conceive of a life without his beloved goats.

Settling down on a plastic stool, Kumar placed a steel bucket under one of the goats’ udders and began milking. There was something about that rhythmic pull and squeeze that relaxed him, that allowed him to think about the problems plaguing him without being distracted. Truth be told, Kumar came up with some of his best ideas while he was filling the bucket with goat milk.

Not to mention that it also made for great visuals when he gave interviews to the media. Over the years, Kumar had made a habit of calling journalists over at milking time and talking to them as he went about his business. His party trick was to fill a glass with freshly squeezed milk when he was done and hand it over to the hapless hack in question.

‘Udderly, budderly delicious’, Kumar would grin, in his Bihari-accented English, taking great delight in the discomfiture of those journos who were repulsed by the idea of drinking goat’s milk fresh from, well, the goat.

‘Arre bhai, aap shehri log goat cheese toh khaate hain. Toh goat ka dudh bhi pi lijiye na!’ (You city people eat goat’s cheese all the time. Drink some goat’s milk as well) he would chortle, refusing to take no for an answer.

But today, as he squeezed and pulled, pulled and squeezed, Kumar was on his own, using this quiet time to come up with a strategy to take on the Prime Minister. He built it up in his head, he turned it over and over to examine it from all angles, made a few tiny adjustments, and then finally, he was satisfied with his plan of action.

Asha Devi would not know what had hit her when he was finished with her.

* * *

It was now a week since the Kautilya terror attack. And Asha had kept to her resolution of not watching any of the Indian TV channels. That, she was convinced, was the only way to preserve her sanity.

That didn’t mean that she didn’t know what the media was saying about her. Asha knew full well that she was being dismissed as a pushover, a softie, a tender-hearted but essentially ineffectual woman, a weak leader who could not be trusted to keep India safe. And she also knew that she needed to change this narrative—and change it quick.

And the man who would help her do that was joining work today. Nitesh Dholakia, her father’s trusted private secretary, who had been on sabbatical all these months to look after his cancer-stricken wife, had agreed to come back to work with her now that his wife had passed away.

Nobody knew how to work the media like Dholakia did, how to generate the right headlines; and Asha would be relying on him to do just that. She had set aside an hour to discuss strategy with him this afternoon and was looking forward to a fresh perspective from a man who had seen it all.

But before she headed out to the PMO, she had to see her mother. Even though the two of them shared the house at 3, Race Course Road, given Asha’s mad schedule, it was a massive effort to make time for her mother during the day or the evening. So, mother and daughter had fallen into the habit of having breakfast together every morning, because that was the only uninterrupted time they could spend with one another.

Sadhana Devi always had breakfast in bed. Or more accurately, in her bedroom, at the small round table set against the window that looked on to the back lawn. As Asha stepped into the room, she cast an apprehensive eye on the table. Amma, who feared that Asha was not eating properly, had begun to order very elaborate breakfasts in order to tempt her daughter to have more than a piece of toast and coffee in the morning.

Today, she had outdone herself. The table groaned under the weight of a platter of idlis and medu vadas, a big bowl of poha, a plateful of aloo parathas, some fluffy pooris and aloo subzi and a stack of pancakes for good measure.

Honestly, whom did Amma think she was feeding? A platoon of the Indian Army?

But looking at her mother’s hopeful face as she pulled out a chair to join her at the table, Asha could not bring herself to berate her. If this was what brought her joy, putting together a frankly ridiculous breakfast buffet for her daughter, well then that’s what Amma would do every day for as long as she liked. And Asha would play along, sampling just a little bit from every dish on display.

Today, however, Asha was in luck. Help was on its way and knocking on the door. Even before Sadhana Devi could say ‘Enter’, the door opened to reveal Kavya and Karina, still in their pyjamas, being held back by a wan-looking Radhika, who asked quietly, ‘Is it okay if the girls join you for breakfast, Amma?’

Sadhana Devi nodded, a delighted look on her face. There was nothing she loved more than feeding people. And nobody demolished a breakfast buffet with quite as much alacrity as her granddaughters.

Asha got up to add a few more chairs to the table and said gently to Radhika who was making to leave, ‘Why don’t you join us Bhabhi? I haven’t had a chance to talk to you in a while.’

It wasn’t as if Asha hadn’t tried. She had spent many hours in 7 RCR, where Karan and his family lived, trying to coax Radhika out of the near catatonic state into which her sister- in-law had retreated after being taken hostage in the terror attack. But no matter how much effort she made, Radhika remained sealed off in her own private hell, replying to remarks at random, her eyes glazing over as she retreated into a space where no one else was allowed entry.

It had been a difficult week for everyone. Even though the adults had tried their best to shield them from the truth, the kids had soon found out what their mother had gone through. Neither of them had said very much, but ever since the attack they never strayed very far from Radhika, gravitating back towards her every few minutes as if to reassure themselves that she was still okay. They refused to sleep in their own room, snuggling between their mom and dad every night. But even that didn’t stop the nightmares that had them waking up screaming in the early hours of the morning.

Between looking after his wife and consoling his children, Karan had had his work cut out for him. For the first time in her life, Asha was actually worried about her brother. Like their father, Karan tended to internalize his grief, his fears, his tensions. The only person he had ever opened up to or leaned on was his wife. But now that she was the one who needed support, he had bundled up his feelings and locked them away in a hard-to-reach compartment of his heart.

Asha had tried her best but she could not get through to him. He was enormously grateful for her decision to save his wife no matter what the cost. In fact, he never stopped relaying his gratitude, much to her embarrassment. But that’s as far as it went. It didn’t matter how hard she pushed; her brother refused to open up and tell her what he was going through.

Clearly, Karan wanted to preserve the image of the strong man that he had always believed himself to be. And Asha was terrified that this show of strength would prove to be his ultimate weakness.

But those thoughts would keep for another day. This morning was about Radhika and the kids. So, Asha put her worries about Karan aside and applied herself to coaxing a smile out of her sister-in-law and her nieces.

It was hard going but she finally got Kavya and Karina giggling as she related the story of one of her more outrageous escapades at boarding school. Radhika smiled along but Asha could tell that she wasn’t really paying attention.

Finally, as Asha drained her coffee and got up to leave, she leaned down and asked Radhika to walk her to the porch. Radhika looked startled at the request but got up and followed her out of the room after a moment’s hesitation.

Once they were finally alone, Asha said bluntly, ‘Bhabhi, I am worried about you. You don’t seem yourself at all.’

Radhika’s lips cracked open in a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘No, I’m fine, Asha. Really, I am. I’m just a little tired because I didn’t sleep too well.’

‘Have you slept at all since the attack?’ asked Asha.

Radhika paused and then said quietly, ‘Not really. It’s been difficult. Especially since the girls can’t sleep through the night either.’

‘Bhabhi,’ said Asha, returning to a theme she had been harping on for days now, ‘you really should see a therapist. You’ve been through a very traumatic experience. You need to talk about it to a professional . . .’

‘I’m not doing that,’ Radhika cut in sharply. Then, softening her voice, she added, ‘Don’t worry about me, Asha. I am fine. Well, I will be fine. But you’ve got to let me deal with things in my own way—and in my own time.’

Asha shot a glance at her watch and bit off her reply. She really needed to get going. This discussion would have to wait.

* * *

Nitesh Dholakia was back in his usual office at PMO. As he settled down in his swivel chair, resting his head on the white towel that had been placed on its back in the true tradition of Indian bureaucracy, his eyes fell on the picture frame that occupied pride of place on his desk. It was the same picture that had accompanied him through every office he had ever worked in. It featured his wife, Neelam, in her red wedding sari, her hair festooned with flowers, sitting on the stone staircase that had led to their first government house.

He still remembered the moment he had taken this picture. Their simple court marriage had taken all of ten minutes to solemnize. And then, they had partied all night long with family and friends. It was well into the early hours of the next morning when they had finally driven to their first-floor government flat on Satya Marg. There, Neelam had collapsed on the stairs to take off her heels before she climbed up the staircase. And as she sat slumped, looking happier than he had ever seen her look, Nitesh had snapped a picture of her laughing face.

Memories like these were all he had left of her now. Neelam had been diagnosed with cervical cancer a year or so ago, and when the disease progressed more rapidly than anyone had expected, Dholakia had taken a leave of absence from his job as private secretary to Birendra Pratap Singh to look after her. While he was away from PMO, Birendra Pratap had been assassinated, Karan Pratap had taken over as Prime Minister, and then the election that followed had propelled Asha Devi to the top job.

Meanwhile, Neelam had struggled bravely in the face of an implacable disease. And by the time she finally succumbed to it, Nitesh was almost grateful to see her go, so unspeakable had been her suffering. It was only after her funeral, when he came back to an empty house—they had never been able to have children—did the reality of her departure hit him. And then, the grief was like a punch to his stomach, leaving him breathless and in actual physical pain. The very idea of living in a world without Neelam was unthinkable.

And yet, here he was, less than a month later, back at work, at his old job, this time working for the daughter rather than the father. Partly it was that he could not rebuff Asha, when she came asking for help. He felt he owed her father that much. And partly it was that he knew he needed to get out of the house and do something before his sorrow drove him mad.

Staring at the picture of his dead wife on his desk, Nitesh asked himself if this was a good idea. Did he really need to spend every day looking at a face that produced a piercing agony in his heart? On the other hand, how could he possibly exile Neelam from the place she had always occupied in his office? Or indeed, in his life?

Dholakia’s ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of his PA. The SPG had called ahead to say that Asha Devi would be arriving in PMO in the next five minutes.

By the time the prime ministerial cavalcade drove up to the sandstone building in South Block, Dholakia was already positioned at the main entrance to greet his new boss and walk her up to her office. In his hand was a file with her schedule for the day, neatly typed out, and annotated in his own hand.

First on the list was a call with Poriborton Party chief, Sukanya Sarkar. She had been phoning incessantly over the last week, getting more and more querulous with every call. Did Asha not realize that the government was getting a bad rap because of its handling of the terror attack? Was she aware that people were dismissing her as a soft touch because she had capitulated to the terrorists’ demands in a matter of hours? Didn’t she see that the government had to take some stern steps to correct that impression?

Today, Asha was ready to brief Sukanya on the ‘stern steps’ she had decided upon. In her meeting last night with the service chiefs, she had been briefed on a proposed surgical strike on terrorist training camps run by the Pakistan Army across the border in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). Satellite imagery showed that training activity in two of the camps nearest the Line of Control had picked up over the last few weeks. And the army feared that this meant that another terrorist strike was in the works. The only way to deal with this was to take preemptive action by striking the two camps simultaneously and obliterating them completely.

The operation would be undertaken jointly by the army and the air force, Asha explained to Sukanya. Military choppers would air-drop commandos at the Line Of Control and would provide air cover as they went in around three kilometres beyond the Line of Control to destroy two training camps and three terror launch pads. It was estimated that the operation would be over in an hour and would, with luck, wipe out the Pakistani presence in that sector.

‘What about our own casualties?’ asked Sukanya. How many men could they lose by mounting such an enterprise?

The service chiefs had assured Asha that the last such surgical strike had resulted in the death of some thirty-odd terrorists and a handful of Pakistani army officers while the Indian side had suffered no casualties at all. But Asha could not begin to take such an optimistic view of events. They could lose a significant number of men, she warned Sukanya, never mind the army chief’s assurances. And they had to be prepared for that.

Sukanya, who had the politician’s trick of ignoring bad news when it did not suit her to listen to it, paid no attention to this. She was more interested in how the announcement would be made by the government. The press release, she insisted, must specify that the decision to conduct the surgical strikes had been taken jointly by Asha Devi and Sukanya Sarkar.

Asha agreed and hung up with a wry smile. With every passing day she was becoming more and more familiar with the cynical opportunist behind Sukanya’s ‘woman of the people’ image. And every such incident left her more disillusioned than ever with the state of Indian politics.

Meanwhile, the Cabinet Secretary was waiting in the antechamber with a clutch of files that she needed to weigh in on. Asha got up from behind her large desk and moved over to the sofa on the far side of her office. Settling down in her usual place, and hastily gulping down the cappuccino that had gone quite cold while she spoke to Sukanya, Asha gestured to Dholakia to ask the CabSec (as he was called in government speak) to enter.

Kalpesh Mishra arrived looking as if the woes of the world were upon his shoulders. And as he took her through the many matters that required urgent attention, Asha realized that he was right to look so burdened.

There was a fresh snag in the extradition proceedings of Sagar Prajapati. Sagar, who had been arrested by the French for his role in the L’Oiseau arms deal, had challenged his extradition to India in the International Court of Justice at the Hague, pleading that the conditions in Indian jails were far too terrible to warrant sending him back to serve his sentence back home. The government was hopeful of winning the case when it was finally heard next week, but this meant a further delay in getting Prajapati back to India. Only once he was back in India, undergoing what Mishra euphemistically referred to as ‘sustained interrogation in custody’, would they be able to build an airtight case against Madan Mohan in the arms deal case.

And then, there was the investigation into her father, Birendra Pratap’s assassination, in which the prime suspect was again Madan Mohan. But despite the efforts of police forces across the globe to trace the former defence minister, there was still no sign of him. The government had, however, tracked down three more Swiss bank accounts linked to Madan Mohan and had frozen them with the cooperation of the Swiss government. Mishra hoped that cutting Madan Mohan off from his source of funds would help in smoking him out. But Asha, who had a better idea of just how vast Mohan’s black money holdings were, was not very optimistic.

There was one piece of good news in today’s briefing, though. Satellite imagery had picked up the ten freed terrorists as they were escorted into a hideout in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. With technical help from the National Security Agency (NSA)—the premier American agency when it came to collecting intelligence by monitoring phone calls, and tracking activity on the Internet—the NIA had been keeping a tab on all the calls made in and out of that building and its vicinity.

Two days ago, they had finally had a breakthrough. One of the phones in use in that building had been used to make a phone call to a mobile phone in Delhi. The Delhi number had been traced to a Kashmiri student who was studying in Jamia Millia Islamia and living in Jamia Nagar, near the University. The phone of the student was now being tapped and the investigators hoped that it would help them break open the case.

Why didn’t the IB just pick up the student in question and bring him in for interrogation, asked Asha. Wasn’t that a better way of dealing with this than allowing him to go about his life normally? What if he suddenly upped and ran? What if he slipped across the border as well? Why risk losing such a valuable lead?

Kalpesh Mishra was his usual bureaucratic self, humming and hawing as he went into his ‘On the one hand’ and ‘On the other hand’ routine. Asha bit down on her impatience and decided to consult with Madhavan Kutty and Arunoday Sengupta instead before coming to a final decision. Relieved at having shifted the responsibility to someone else, Mishra nodded gravely and acquiesced.

Dholakia saw him to the door and then came back and sat down on the armchair opposite Asha to discuss their media strategy over the next few months.

‘Okay,’ said Asha wearily, ‘Let’s start by discussing where I am going wrong.’

But Dholakia was not interested in conducting a post-mortem of her media performance. What was done was done, he said, dismissing the past with a wave of his hand. Now, it was time to focus on the future and how she could build a relationship with the media, how she could better control it, and how she could use it to further her own interests.

In order to do all this, the first thing she needed to do was build relationships with the editors and anchors who decided how stories were covered in newspapers and on television.

‘Stop right there,’ said Asha, holding up her hand as if to ward off a blow. ‘I have zero interest in building relationships with editors and anchors. I don’t trust these people as far as I can throw them.’

‘Trust?’ asked Dholakia. ‘Who said anything about trust? Trust doesn’t enter into the equation. You are never to trust them. You just have to use them for your own purposes.’

And with that, Nitesh Dholakia laid out his masterplan for Asha to rewrite the narrative about herself in the media. Operation Outreach, as he termed it, would begin with her having regular Friday evening meetings with a small group of editors and anchors, not more than six at a time. These meetings would be held on a strictly off-the-record basis. The media invitees could ask her any questions they liked and she would answer them as honestly as possible. But they would have to give an undertaking that nothing they discussed would ever appear in the public domain.

But, asked a frustrated Asha, how exactly would that help her? She needed more positive coverage of her prime ministership. She needed to recover her image in the mirror of public opinion. How would staying off the record help?

The idea, explained a patient Dholakia, was to launch a charm offensive. The aim was to make these media people feel privileged because they had been given special access to the Prime Minister. If they felt that she was seeking them out and being honest with them, they would be seduced into giving her the benefit of the doubt. And if they felt more warmly towards her privately, they would treat her with more kindness on the front pages of newspapers and on prime-time TV.

But that, explained Dholakia, was only step one. There were at least three other things she needed to do on a priority basis to improve her media coverage. Today, however, he was only prepared to discuss one of them: the interview she had to grant a news anchor to discuss the agenda for her government.

Who would she feel most comfortable talking to?

There was just one name on that list. Manisha Patel, the woman who had conducted the interview with Asha in the aftermath of the scandal involving her naked photos with such empathy and deftness of touch. If she was going to speak to anyone, it would be Manisha.

Dholakia, who had watched the interview and admired Asha’s performance, nodded in agreement and promised to set it up soon. And then it was time for her to go into another meeting.

As Asha Devi was rapidly discovering, a Prime Minister’s work was never done.