Saturday, June 17, 2017

SWAPPED - The Final Part


Ajay was another 15 minutes into Game of Thrones when the door burst open again. This time, it was
the Boss with his gun-totting men along with Anu.

"What do 'you' want??" Ajay said feeling tired of men repeatedly barging into his house.
"Shut up and sit where you are! Your wife stole my money!" the Boss shouted at him.

Ajay nodded understandably as if this was an everyday occurrence and sat back down on the sofa to
continue watching GOT while the men turned the house upside down searching for the gold.

A couple of minutes later, one by one the men returned back to the living room.
"It's nowhere in the bedroom," one of them reported to the Boss.
"I searched the kitchen, nothing there too," said another one.
The others too turned up empty-handed.

Ajay sighed irritated at all the ruckus and frowned trying to concentrate on the GOT with
his one good eye. The Boss turned to look at him and felt his anger boil over. He grabbed the TV
preparing to throw it on the floor, when Ajay jumped up,
"No! Not the TV, please!!"

The Boss stopped, looked at him with a mixture of confusion and anger.

Ajay went down on his knees and begged,
"Please, break anything else but the TV!"

The Boss sighed and let go of the TV. He then searched for the power button and carefully switched
it off. Ajay sighed, relieved, but still troubled that he was missing out on GOT.

"There's a repeat tomorrow afternoon," Anu said to Ajay.
"Oh!" Ajay said looking up at her, his face lighting up with hope.
"Yeah! I was worried I missed it too because... of whatever all this is, but then I remembered that
there's a repeat tomorrow!" she added cheerfully.
"Oh! That's so good to know! I will make sure I...."
"BOTH OF YOU SHUT UP!!" the Boss shouted.

Anu got irritated and said,"She's not here! What are you going to do now? Let me go. I don't have
anything to do with this!"
"Of course, she isn't here! I synced her phone's location to mine, so I always know where she is!
I wanted to see if she hid the gold here, and now that we know it isn't here, we are going to go get it from her!" the Boss said with an evil smile, pulled out his phone and waited for it to pinpoint
her location. After a minute of awkward waiting, the phone chimed as it updated her location.

"Let's hurry up! I think she's trying to get out of the city!" The Boss said rushing out.



***

After about 10 minutes, the van came to a stop. Priya was forcibly pulled out as she kept
struggling. It looked like they were at a huge garage. It was dark all around except for
headlights from a road about a kilometer away.

"Let's go, dhidhi. My father is waiting for you," the Young Man said.

Priya struggled even more, but she was held by 2 strong men who dragged her to the garage-like
structure.

It looked like nobody was around, but once they entered, they noticed a group of men huddled around
a TV watching GOT. As soon as they saw that the Young Man had arrived, they all jumped up and ran
to their guard positions.

An old man in a wheelchair with a tube running through his nose and IVs in his hands smiled at her.
"No need to be scared, beta. I am going to make sure you are well-compensated for this," the old
man said, his voice weak from ill-health.

"Screw you!" Priya said, only to be slapped by one of the men holding her. The Young Man,
angered by the man's action, pulled out his gun and shot him in his chest. The man fell down
curled up in pain. As Priya watched in horror, the man stopped struggling with a final groan and was still.

"I am sorry, dhidhi, but he must have known by now that this is not how we treat our guests. Come,
dhidhi, let me get you comfortable," the Young Man said.

The man holding Priya gingerly accompanied her to a sofa and made her sit on it.

"We have a doctor here who is going to get the kidney out of you, and then we will take the organ
and my father to a nearby hospital and get it transplanted," he said. A man in a white coat
dutifully walked in from another room with an IV needle in his hand.

"The doctor said I can't give you anything to eat or drink, so would you like to have some IV fluids??"
the Young Man said with a smirk on his face and waited for her to get the joke. When she didn't respond, he motioned the doctor to go ahead with a disappointed look on his face. Priya struggled and tried to get her arm away while one of the men held her down forcibly. The doctor grabbed her arm and concentrated to find the vein to stick the needle in when gunshots were heard from the outside.

"What's going on??" the Young Man said jumping up. The men inside grabbed guns and rushed towards the door only for the door to burst open. The Boss walked in along with half a dozen men holding machine guns.

A moment of absolute silence prevailed while The Boss looked around the place, taking everything
in, and his eyes finally rested on Priya sitting on the sofa.

"So, I see you have a bigger operation that I anticipated," he said taking steps towards her.

"You will not touch her!" the Young Man said jumping in front of him.

The Boss stopped, looked at the Young Man from head to toe as if measuring him, then laughed.
“Is this all you got?? These scrawny 'kids'?? If you thought you can cheat me and get away with it, you are wrong! You fucked with the wrong man this time, bitch!" he said ending his monologue while the Young Man tried to make sense of everything that he said. All he understood was that this man, the Boss, was trying to humiliate him.
“You think you can come into 'my' home and talk down to 'my' face?” the Young Man said moving threateningly closer to the Boss.

Meanwhile, one of the Young Man's men, realizing they were understaffed, took out his extra gun and handed it over to the doctor. The doctor hesitated. His life's mission was to save lives, not to take them. All he wanted was to finish this darn operation and get the hell out of this place with his life. But the man insisted, pushing the gun to the doctor. He gingerly took it and held it up pointing at the Boss' men. The man motioned the doctor to cock the gun. The doctor had watched enough action movies to know what he meant. He steadied his shivering hand and proceeded to pull the slide back, but what he didn't realize was that this caused his finger on the trigger to squeeze it and as soon as he let the slide go back, his gun fired.

This caused the Boss' men to start shooting, and so did the Young Man's men.
“KILL THEM ALL!!” the Young Man shouted punching the Boss and both falling to the ground struggling and punching each other.

"Get my father away!" the Young Man shouted, in between the punching and getting punched, at the doctor, who put his gun down on the floor and rushed to the old man in the wheelchair. But bullets ripped through the old man killing him instantly. The doctor left him and ran to the other room.

Priya was still in shock, sitting all out in the open as bullets whizzed past her. She finally
came to her senses and ducked behind the sofa. A moment later, she realized that the sofa wouldn't protect her as bullets were passing through the sofa as if it was made out of butter. Keeping her
head down, she quickly crawled on her arms and knees to the room that the doctor had run into.
Once in, she shut the door. The doctor was quickly packing up his bag unaware that Priya
was in there. The room had a dirty table and surgical instruments on a tray close-by. She realized
this was where they were going to extract her kidney. In a rage, she rushed to the doctor who
turned around in horror, and kicked him between his legs. He fell down holding his crotch and
groaning in pain.

She looked around and noticed another door. She opened it and ran outside. There were
cars parked around that weren't there before. Gunfire continued from the inside. She noticed the faint headlights from the road far away. She decided to make a run for it.

That's when she heard thuds and muffled voices. She stopped and listened. It was from an SUV, the
Boss' SUV. It was Anu and her husband.

She tried to open the door, but it was locked. Finally, she found a huge rock and broke the
window. Anu's hands were bound. She tried to untie the ropes when a bullet hit the
passenger side door of the SUV. No, there was nobody trying to kill them. It was a stray bullet from
all the fire exchange happening inside the garage. A sense of urgency came over them. Priya pulled Anu through the window. Then helped her up and started to run towards the road. More noises from the SUV.

"Its Ajay!" Anu said running back to the SUV, but Priya got hold of her and pulled her back
towards the road saying,
"We don't have time! Lets get out of here!"

Ajay managed to push himself out through the broken window and fell down on the ground. He stood up and saw Priya and Anu running towards the road. Right then, a stray bullet hit him in his leg, and he fell down on the ground. He shouted for help, but Priya and Anu kept running without a backward glance.

A few minutes later, they reached the road. They could no longer hear the gunshots. May be it was over or may be the noises couldn't reach all the way out here, but they didn't want to wait to find out. They could hear sirens in the distance.

Now that she had stopped running and the adrenaline was wearing off, Priya felt a sting in the
right side of her abdomen. It felt wet. It was blood. She had been shot.


***


When Priya woke up, she was in a hospital bed. Her wound bandaged. Anu sitting next to her.

"What happened to those bastards?" Priya said.
"Most of them are dead, including your boss. The cops arrested the ones that survived," Anu said.

Priya sighed and looked at the TV running at the end of the ward. It was a news channel showing
the blurred images of the shootout site.

"What do you mean you can't put Game of Thrones in here??!" a familiar voice shouted from the bed at the end of the ward.
"Sir, this is a hospital, not a movie theater!" the nurse shouted back.

"Is it...." Priya asked Anu.
Anu nodded grimly.

After a while, Priya got up fighting her pain and dragged her IV stand to Ajay's bed. He had a huge bandage on his leg, and his face was swollen.

"Hi, Ajay. I need to talk to you about something that's been long overdue.." she said with a guilty look on her face.
"Well, me too! I dont know anything about what all those people wanted, but I know what I want!! A
fucking divorce!" he shouted.
"Okay," Priya said, taken aback.

A few moments of uncomfortable silence prevailed while both avoided each others gaze.
"Okay, I will just be over there in my bed," Priya said finally turning back, then hesitated and turned back to him and asked, "Is there anything else you want to ask? Any....."
"I do have one thing to ask!!" Ajay shouted back. Again, a few seconds of dramatic uncomfortable silence prevailed. Priya wondered if she was supposed to specifically ask him what it was that he wanted, but then thankfully he added,
"The new TV that we bought?? It's mine!! I get to keep it!"
"Okay," Priya said blankly. Once again, Ajay avoided her gaze.

Priya finally turned around and gingerly made her way back to her bed when she
noticed someone very familiar in one of the beds. It was the Pani Puri guy! She pushed away the
privacy screens and rushed in. He had bandages around his head and most of his body.

There was nobody at his bedside. She took the opportunity to try to wake him up and ask him where the gold was. A girl walked in.
"Who are you??"
"I.... is he alright??" Priya said.
"My brother is in a coma," the girl said sorrowfully.
"Oh!.... Listen, can you ask him to call me when he wakes up?" Priya said jotting down her number
on a paper at the table beside him.
"The doctor said he might never wake up," the girl said, her voice breaking.
Priya ignored her, finished writing her number, then smiled awkwardly at the girl and left.


***


A month later, the Pani Puri guy's family brought him home. He was still in a coma, but they
couldn't afford the hospital bills, so they decided to instead take care of him at home.

The neighbors complained about the stink from his pani puri pushcart which had been lying their
untouched for a month since the accident.

The sister pushed the cart to the end of the slum where there was a huge concrete dustbin to throw away the rotten pani puri masala, rotten samosas and other eatables.

"We already cleared out the dustbin, hand it over here!," said the garbage truck driver.

The girl handed him the spoilt pani puri masala, and the man dumped them into the back of the truck.
What neither of them noticed was a small cloth pouch at the bottom of the masala that fell into the garbage. After they finished emptying everything, the driver locked the backdoor and got
into the driver's seat as he watched the girl push the cart back into the slum. He lit up a cigarette as he always did at the end of his workday, then turned on the ignition and started his long drive to the landfill.

THE END.

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