21

Madan Mohan Prajapati had been in an unusually good mood that morning, as he rolled out of bed. Late last night, he had managed to transfer all the money from his two secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Lichtenstein just hours before the Indian authorities had finally traced and blocked them, thanks to a tip-off from a source in the Enforcement Directorate.

So, he now had just over 225 million dollars stashed away safely, more than enough to keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed for as long as he lived. He had, on the other hand, lost around 127 million in all the numbered accounts in Switzerland that had been traced and frozen by the Indian government. But, as he told himself, pulling on his sneakers, easy come, easy go!

He walked down the staircase and made for the front door, which was guarded by four armed men, all of whom had come highly recommended from a local agency. They saluted smartly as he appeared and then two of them broke away to follow him at a discreet distance as he did his usual walk around the property.

Madan Mohan slid in his airpods and clicked on his playlist of Bollywood hits. That was the only way he could get through the forty-five-minute daily walk that his doctor had recommended on pain of death—quite literally. A bout of uneasiness a few months ago had led him to a local hospital, where tests had shown that his calcium score was 430. Before discharging him, the doctor had warned him that if he didn’t adopt a better diet and incorporate some exercise into his life, he couldn’t expect to last much longer.

Frightened out of his wits, Madan Mohan had immediately hired a dietician and trainer. And thanks to their joint ministrations, he had lost about ten kilos in the last three months. He felt healthier and lighter than he had for a long time. And with every passing week, he felt happier as well, feeling more and more confident that he had outwitted the Indian authorities, and that they could never trace him to his current hideout.

Lulled into this false sense of security, he ambled on, humming along to Yo Yo Honey Singh, completely unaware that his days of freedom were finally at an end.

The loud music in his ears meant that he was oblivious to the fact that his two security guards had caught up to him as he slipped off the road and headed inside the wooded area where he liked to take a break on a bench that had been carved out of an old piece of driftwood. But today, Madan Mohan did not make it that far.

As he slowed down his pace, one of the guards came right up to him and plunged a syringe into the side of his neck. Madan Mohan remained conscious just long enough to utter one cry of protest before he collapsed on the ground. The two men picked him up, one holding him by his shoulders and the other holding his legs, and carried him a few hundred yards along the road, where a car was waiting, hidden in the foliage of the trees, with two Dark Matters operatives in the front seat.

The trunk was opened, Madan Mohan was dumped unceremoniously inside, one of the men took out his phone and snapped a photo of the unconscious man and sent it off into the ether.

Then, the two guards got into the back seat of the car, which drove off at great speed along the deserted road, heading straight for a nearby airfield.

The Gulfstream was fuelled, fired up, and ready to go. The men in the car handed over their ‘package’ to the four-member crew on the plane and drove off. Madan Mohan was still unconscious but the Dark Matters agents were taking no chances. They slipped on plastic ties on his hands and feet and deposited him on the sofa at the back of the plane, buckling him up for take-off.

It was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean that Madan Mohan Prajapati finally woke up. For a moment, he wondered if he was having a nightmare. But the sharp pain that shot through his wrists as he tried to loosen the plastic tie around them convinced him that this was no dream, but real life.

A quick look around confirmed his worst suspicions. He was on a private jet, and that could only mean one thing. He had been taken prisoner and was being flown back to India.

But Madan Mohan was not one to give up in a hurry. In his world, everything ran on money. And this situation too, he felt, could be ‘managed’ if he threw enough money around.

Swinging his legs off the sofa, he struggled to sit up. The moment he stirred, the two men seated opposite him rushed to prop him up. His mouth felt so dry that he could barely get a word out. He muttered that he needed something to drink. A glass of orange juice was conjured up and one of the men held it up to his mouth so he could drink.

Madan Mohan asked if he could have his restraints removed. After all, what harm could it possibly do? He was their prisoner on this plane. Even if he wanted to escape, where could he go? Out the window?

But no, the restraints stayed on.

By now Madan Mohan was convinced that these men—both of whom were Caucasian and blond—had not been sent by the Indian authorities. They were probably mercenaries for hire, who had kidnapped him on the instructions of some Brazilian gang, which was looking for a handsome ransom.

So, Madan Mohan tried his luck again. How much money have you been paid to capture me, he asked.

The men stayed silent.

It doesn’t really matter, went on Prajapati. However much you have been paid, I will give you double the amount if you let me go. Just get me a mobile phone and I will transfer the amounts right now.

At this, the two men looked at one another. An unspoken message seemed to pass between them. Then, after an infinitesimal pause, one of the men reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone.

‘Twenty million dollars,’ he said tersely, cutting Madan Mohan’s ties and handing the phone to him.

Madan Mohan’s hands were trembling so much that it took him double the time to go through the four layers of security to access his account and transfer the money to the numbered account his captor provided. Once the transfer was done, he handed the phone back with an unctuous smile, and gestured to his feet, that were still shackled, indicating that it was time they were freed.

The man put his hand into his pocket. But instead of bringing out a knife to cut him loose, he took out another syringe, which he plunged into Madan Mohan’s neck.

Madan Mohan fell unconscious again. And that’s how he stayed for the rest of the journey.

* * *

Madan Mohan Prajapati’s arrival in India was very different from his departure from the country. The only similarity was that private planes were involved in both instances. But while his departure had taken place in secrecy, under the cover of darkness, his arrival happened in full glare of the cameras.

Except that these cameras did not belong to the TV news channels, which remained in the dark about these developments. Asha Devi had taken a decision that she would not brief the press until Madan Mohan was on the ground in India and behind bars. The last thing she wanted was a media circus at the airport when he landed.

But that didn’t mean that Madan Mohan’s ignominious return to India in handcuffs would go unrecorded. Not a chance. The government would send out its own videographers to record the event—with the Prime Minister and her family watching in real time on a video link—and the clips would then be released to all the channels.

So, there were just two cameramen, one still and one video, who were at the Air Force Terminal of Delhi airport when Madan Mohan’s plane landed. But what the welcoming party lacked in media attendance, it more than made up in security forces, which were blanketing the airport, some of them in full riot gear.

Madan Mohan was escorted off the plane, still wearing the track suit he had put on for his morning walk nearly a day ago, his face frozen in a rictus of embarrassment and, daresay, shame, as he was frogmarched into the terminal.

Asha, sitting in the living room at Number 3 RCR, squeezed her mother’s hand tight as that familiar jowly face came into view. Both women found themselves in tears as they watched the fugitive who was behind the murder of the man they had loved most in the world finally brought to justice. At long last, thought Asha, Baba’s soul could rest in peace.

She cast a quick look at the sofa on which her two half-brothers were seated and saw that they had tears in their eyes as well. Clearly, they were experiencing the same feeling of catharsis as Amma and herself. As their eyes met, the siblings exchanged tremulous smiles, semaphoring their relief that the hunt for their father’s killer was over at last.

Asha took comfort from that little unspoken exchange, hoping that it meant that Karan and Arjun had forgiven her for keeping them out of the operation to capture Madan Mohan.

She had called them both over to Number 3 the moment Madan Mohan’s flight took off from Tel Aviv to Delhi. The first to arrive was Karan, bristling a bit at being summoned by his sister. Asha had ignored his hostility and hugged him in welcome. She had still to disengage herself when Arjun came through the door, eyebrows raised at this little display of sibling love.

But if the Pratap Singh brothers had started off by being irritated, they soon progressed to full-blown anger as Asha began recounting the story of Madan Mohan’s capture. How could she have kept them out of this, they asked, with mounting indignation. This was a matter that concerned their father’s killer; his sons should have been kept informed about this from the beginning.

Asha tried to explain that the secrecy had been enjoined on her by Dark Matters. But her heart was not in it. She knew, at a visceral level, that she was in the wrong on this one, and her brothers were completely in the right. She had just gone along with Alok’s insistence on secrecy because it was the path of least resistance, when she should have pushed for taking her family into confidence.

So, Asha had apologized abjectly, and after some pushback, had been forgiven. Amma, thankfully, hadn’t made an issue of being kept in the dark. Having spent her entire life retreating from rooms in which business was to be conducted, Sadhana Devi was used to being the last one to know.

As for Radhika, she had greeted this news with the same indifference with which she treated the rest of life. Even now, as images of Madan Mohan in handcuffs flashed on the screen, and the entire Pratap Singh family grew emotional, Radhika watched in a catatonic stupor. Clearly, the wounds left by the time she had been captured by terrorists still lingered, so many months later.

Asha turned her attention back to the video feed, which now showed Madan Mohan being placed inside an armoured jeep, with two machine gun-toting security guards on either side of him. As the jeep began its journey to the army cantonment area, flanked by motorcycle outriders and two army trucks, there was a knock on the door.

Nitesh Dholakia popped his head around in answer to Asha’s command to come in. It was time for her to prepare for her address to the nation later tonight. He had jotted down some thoughts if the Prime Minister wanted to cast an eye on them. Asha reluctantly turned away from the live images on the TV set, contenting herself with one last look at the sullen visage of her father’s killer, and headed for the study.

Casting aside the notes that Dholakia had made for her, she opened a new file on her computer and began typing rapidly.

This was going to be the speech of her life. And she was damned if it was going to be in anyone’s words but her own.

* * *

The clips of Madan Mohan’s arrival in India were released to all the news channels in time for the 8 p.m. shows. And from the moment they flashed on TV screens across the country, the media went into meltdown.

Madan Mohan Prajapati had been captured and brought back to India, without a hint of this operation being leaked to anyone. How had Asha Devi pulled this off? Who had been in the know? Which government agency had been in charge of the operation? The questions piled up—but answers were scarce on the ground.

Gaurav Agnihotri had called his usual sources in the CBI, the IB, and R&AW but had drawn a blank. All he could gather was that Prajapati was now housed in a special prison block created for him within the army cantonment in the Dhaula Kuan area. There was a three-tier security cordon around him, to make sure that he didn’t meet the same fate as his nephew, Sagar Prajapati. His close protection was in the hands of the army, which was guarding his cell and the immediate environs. The second layer of security comprised an entire battalion of paramilitary forces, while the third and last layer was composed of Delhi Police.

But that was about all the information he could gather. From what he could tell, no Indian agency seemed to have any knowledge of the operation that had resulted in Madan Mohan’s capture. Gaurav knew the security agencies well enough to know that if they had had the slightest involvement, they would have been scrambling to take credit. The complete denials his questions met with meant that they really had had no clue.

So, that was the question that Gaurav Agnihotri addressed as he began his show. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, in his usual overblown style. ‘Today is a great day for this country. Today is the day that the death of our Prime Minister has been avenged. His killer is now in custody, and he will soon pay for his crime.’

Gaurav paused dramatically and then went on, ‘But the big question still remains: how did Madan Mohan Prajapati end up in the custody of the Indian government? Our investigations have proved that no Indian security agency was involved in the operation that finally captured him. So, how did Asha Devi manage to track down her father’s killer and bring him back to India?’

Gaurav turned to the former R&AW operative on his panel. ‘What do you think? Did the Prime Minister use the offices of a foreign country to get Madan Mohan Prajapati? Do you think the Americans were involved in this? And where do you think Prajapati was hiding all along?’

The ex-R&AW man had been texting his contacts at his former agency frantically. And he had managed to extract one fragment of information after calling in some IOUs. The aircraft that had arrived in Delhi carrying Madan Mohan, he was told, had taken off from Tel Aviv. He presented this little nugget to Gaurav Agnihotri with all the pride that a cat takes in bringing a mangled bird back to its owner.

That was all the information that Gaurav needed to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory on the spot. ‘Thank you for confirming that,’ he shouted excitedly. ‘I have always believed from the outset that the Prime Minister had tasked Mossad with tracking down Madan Mohan. That is why the Indian government chose to go with the anti-missile system that Israel had developed over the French and American ones. That must have been the quid pro quo for Mossad to find Madan Mohan wherever in the world he was hiding and render him back to India.’

Now that he had a hook that no other channel did, Gaurav doubled down on his theory, despite the complete lack of evidence supporting it. And in no time at all, he had fashioned a new narrative. In this telling, Asha Devi, the grieving daughter, had lost all confidence in the Indian agencies and had turned to Israel for succor. ‘That is the mark of true leadership,’ he enthused, ‘the ability to think out of the box. I can say with full confidence that no other Prime Minister would have had the guts to use Mossad, like Asha Devi has done. And she has done her father proud in the process.’

In Manisha Patel’s studio, the debate had taken an entirely different turn. In the absence of any real information on how and where Madan Mohan had been captured and by whom, Manisha had decided that the best way to approach her show was to turn it into an obituary of sorts for the former defence minister. Given that he was a dead man walking, it made a certain kind of sense to go back and examine his life to see why it had led to this day.

‘Why do you think relations between Birendra Pratap and Madan Mohan went so wrong?’ she asked the former editor on her panel. ‘They were good friends all their lives, and such close political allies. How did it end up like this? With one of them dead, and the other charged with his murder?’

The editor smirked in his usual superior fashion. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Manisha. There is no such thing as “good friends” in politics. These are all opportunistic alliances, and they last so long as they are mutually beneficial . . .’

Not taking kindly to being condescended to in this manner, Manisha interrupted, ‘Yes, yes, we all know that “friendships” in politics are opportunistic. But they don’t usually end with one politician being charged for the other’s murder, do they?’

The editor, not in the least bit abashed, smirked some more. But before he could patronize her any further, Manisha turned to the LJP spokesman on her panel. ‘You have worked with both Birendra Pratap Singh and Madan Mohan Prajapati closely, you have seen their relationship from up close, how do you explain this?’

‘You must understand, Manisha ji,’ he began earnestly. ‘Our respected late Prime Minister was a man known for his honesty. If there was anything that he could not stand, it was corruption. And if he got to know that Madan Mohan was making money from defence deals, he would have ensured that Prajapati ended up in jail for life. Maybe that’s why he had to die . . .’

The voice in Manisha’s ear interrupted at this point. Sukanya Sarkar’s office had called. The Poriborton Party leader wanted to join the show and give her reaction to the arrest of Madan Mohan.

Manisha immediately cut to the link and went into split-screen mode, so that only Sarkar and she were visible to the viewer. Sukanya was in a rare good mood, smiling and congratulating the Prime Minister on getting her father’s killer to justice. This was a great day for the country, declared Sukanya, their Prime Minister’s assassination had finally been avenged. And it was all down to Asha’s Devi’s grit and determination.

The moment Sukanya hung up on Manisha, she asked her PS to put her in touch with Asha Devi. There had been so much bad blood between them lately. This was an ideal opportunity to put that behind them, and bond over some good news.

Sukanya Sarkar had had time to mull things over—and she had come to the realization that for now she needed Asha Devi more than Asha Devi needed her. So, it was time for some damage control. And what better time to do that than when the Prime Minister was in a euphoric mood over getting her father’s killer to justice?

There was just one problem with this plan. It was impossible to get Asha Devi on the phone. The Prime Minister was getting ready to make an address to the nation, her office said. And she simply could not be disturbed.

On the face of it, this seemed a reasonable enough excuse for not taking her call. But it still left Sukanya Sarkar with an uneasy feeling.

Had she taken things too far with Asha Devi? And if she had, was there any way back now for the two of them?

* * *

Asha had asked Doordarshan to set up their cameras in Number 3 RCR rather than in Number 7, as they usually did. Number 3 was the house that she had shared with Baba. So, on the day that his killer was in custody, there was a certain poetic resonance to addressing the nation from the very room in which she had shared so many loving moments with her father.

She walked into the room to find that Alok Ray was already there, checking out the shot, and asking for some lighting changes. Asha’s heart lifted to see him there, and with a gesture she asked him to stay while she read out her address.

Her heart was thumping as Nitesh Dholakia uploaded her speech on to the teleprompter. His mutinous expression made his misgivings clear; he thought that she was making the biggest mistake of her career. He had tried hard to convince her of that, but Asha was adamant—it was her political life, and it was not up to anyone else to tell her how to live it.

She had always operated on her own instincts, and they were yet to let her down. And today, with Baba’s killer finally in custody, her instincts told her that this was the only path forward.

The red light began blinking on the camera and the DD producer began counting down. Asha took a deep breath and began reading off the screen.

‘Mere pyare deshvasiyon, Namaskar,’ she began. ‘Today is a blessed day for me, as indeed it is for every Indian. My father, the father of our nation, can finally rest in peace. The man behind his death is now behind bars. And Madan Mohan Prajapati will pay with his life for taking the life of Birendra Pratap Singh.’

Asha paused to control the quiver in her throat and then resumed: ‘Now that his killer is behind bars, where he belongs, we can finally begin to celebrate the life of my father. The man who made India the shining example it is to the rest of the world. The man who moulded me into the woman I am today.

‘The life lessons that my father taught me are the rules by which I have lived my entire life. He taught me that public service is the highest calling of all. He taught me that staying true to my principles is more important than staying in power. And, most important of all, he taught me that the people are supreme in any democracy.’

Asha could see a dawning comprehension in Alok’s eyes, as she came closer to making the announcement that would leave India—and Sukanya Sarkar—gasping in disbelief.

Smiling slightly, as she imagined Sukanya watching her address, her jaw dropping with every sentence, Asha continued: ‘That is why today, on the day that my father’s death has been finally avenged, I am turning to the people of India and asking them to give me a fresh mandate to run this country as it deserves to be run.’

There were a few subdued gasps in the room, as the TV crew grasped the import of what the Prime Minister was saying.

Asha continued, ‘Over the last few months, the limits of coalition government have hemmed me in and forced me to deny my own instincts and go along with the judgement of other people because I had to keep my government afloat.

‘I did that, not because it was the convenient thing to do or because I wanted to stay in power at all costs. I did that because I felt I owed it to the people of India, to all of you watching at home, to provide a stable and secure government in which everyone would prosper and thrive.

‘But today, as I sit before you, a daughter who has finally brought her father’s killer to justice, I realize that this is not enough. Instead of doing what others consider to be expedient, I should be doing what I consider to be right. But that, I am afraid, is not possible in the coalition government that I currently run.’

Asha paused and drew a long breath. ‘So, it is time to go back to the people of India and ask them for a fresh mandate, a fuller mandate, so that I can serve them without all the pulls and pressures that currently operate on me. Which is why, earlier today, I sent a letter to the President of India, asking that Parliament be dissolved and fresh elections announced.

‘And after these elections, if I am privileged enough to win your trust, I hope to be back at the helm of a majority government, that will allow me to govern in a manner that would make my Baba proud.

‘The people of India deserve no less. And in a democracy like ours, it is only the people who matter. And, by the grace of God, I hope to dedicate the rest of my life to their service.

‘Namaskar. Jai Hind.’