Event: Delhi police gunning down two terrorist in the wake of largely unsolved cases of terrorist bombing at Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi. // posted in SARAI readers list -
GROUND ZERO
Something happened early yesterday! It invaded my sleep. I am a trip for a while. I am a trip, quite bad, at the rainy night!
Shameless tragedy engulfs me!
In my fitful sleep last night a dream: I saw the specialist Daya Naik and ACP Rajbir wringing their hands, sweat on the brow, cursing, they missed their appointment with their rightful fame. They are mouthing confused obscenities… ‘…we are heroes too…. will someone listen all you idiots out there!’ But hero is the one who meets death falling in the line of duty, and escapes the flood of questions that might, or very well might not, come on! Not to malign a dead man, how long till somebody starts probing the gray areas of the respectable trail of encounters my hero Mohan Sharma meandered to the screams and kicks of his Kafkaesque puppet masters on the pillared castles at the Hill.
A father rises from the sickbed of his son and smashes himself into the den of vice. He is gored to death by invisible ghosts, two vanishing into thin air, and two perennially buried beneath some sogged sheets. A father, a hero, and the ghosts ……my tv girl please please show me the ghosts!
My trusted chief sits surrounded, swamped, and throws aggressive facts at the byte collectors’ tubes … ‘we recovered a cache of arms and aah and aah and also…’. One imagined idiot without a microphone - this stupid obviously cannot belong to the breed, they don’t ask such inanities - shouts ‘we saw none exhibited after your encounter…isn’t that the happy, right, procedure that you exhibit the confiscations straightaway on a white chador on a dirty string-cot charpoy…yes immediately after your catch?’. Exit the scene. Exit All Fools!
In my seditious dreams my scenes shift like shameless change of clothes by my honorable minister…not so honorable my lad not so honorable, some voices hububbb! In the house opposite, from where the cannons were fed the fodder, people complain of a temporary land acquisition, legal trespassing, and of being blindfolded for those some unfortunate moments. Some said they heard guns booming from one direction only. They might be wrong!!! Isn’t this a dirty confused dream only!
Oh my seditious dream!!! And then I see an opportunist writer lurking in the shadows of the momentous Encounter….s/he thinks, the plot can be more fun very saleable to festival circuit filmwallah (or maybe to hardboiled realist too, why not!) if our Hero actually remains, reinstated, a hero, but because he is hardworking, and very foolish that ways, and in The Encounter lies the scenic opportunity for his corrupt nameless higher-ups and the dirty-filthy cronies down below in the ranks struggling with all their dark underdog skills to keep their vulnerable pot bellies still pointing straight, to finally bump off this much disliked priest of a difficult justice! Or what, my shameless writer thinks, if a plot is whirled around maybe as banal an incident of what the whites call The Friendly Fire ( a title at least Apoorva Lakhia in Bombay would kill for, or maybe even Madhur Bhandarkar would shop happily), and a meaty murky cover-up tale in the follow –
wouldn’t it make for an ideal new wave bollywood film?
I am butterflies in my stomach. I am sweating in my dreams. This writer bastard surely watches a lot of LA Confidential(s) and The American Gangster(s). I feel a dark force clutching hard at my innards…”confess bastard you condemn this writer, this purveyour of imaginary truths, confess or we will make you vomit your own blood, confess bastard, confess….”
The scene shifts again: I see again an almost indecipherable figure riding up the steps of a ghetto apartment going up almost lazy-pace towards ‘his prideful kill’…I almost shout in my dreams ‘oye take at least your bullet-breaking vest oh warrior’. He keeps moving up, while a voice drums into my ears ‘he need not one, there is nothing to fear…regular drill mister!’ ‘But then why such a big gun in the hand?’ “Why, just to put it planted there…don’t we need a case?…backup plan mister, backup!”
The sound continues…. more sounds, the accompaniments emerge, more pitch more sounds and more dark
My dangerous dream having me in the eye of its unabating dark storm!
20th September 2008
