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.
