THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Read online

  THE BUTCHER OF BENARES

  Mahendra Jakhar is an ex-journalist currently working as a scriptwriter for feature films and television shows. He did his BA (English Literature) from Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, and started working as a freelance photo-journalist for an English daily. Soon, he was working full-time as a crime reporter.

  He shifted to Mumbai in 2006 to pursue a career as a freelance scriptwriter. His first film project was a Mahesh Bhatt film, The Killer, starring Irfaan Khan and Emran Hashmi. He has done scripts for shows like CID, Mano Ya Na Mano, Seeta aur Geeta, and others. He also did research and writing for the documentary on the hijack of IC-814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar for Discovery Channel.

  His latest film project is the soon-to-be-released Mountain Man directed by Ketan Mehta. Currently, he is working on a script for a film to be directed by Ashwini Chaudhary. He has also worked with Tigmannshu Dhulia on the film script of Shaagird, starring Nana Patekar.

  A voracious reader, his all-time favourites are crime thrillers and murder mysteries. Jakhar says he hopes to come up with more such interesting and universal stories.

  His film script, Bhiwani, was selected for the Co-Production Market at the India International Film Festival, 2013, held in Goa.

  Interestingly, he shares his birthdate, 15 September, with the likes of Agatha Christie, Marco Polo and Oliver Stone.

  THE BUTCHER

  OF

  BENARES

  Mahendra Jakhar

  westland ltd

  61, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095

  No. 38/10 (New No.5), Raghava Nagar, New Timber Yard Layout, Bengaluru 560 026

  93, 1st Floor, Sham Lal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

  First published by westland ltd 2014

  First e-book edition: 2014

  Copyright © Mahendra Jakhar 2014

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-93-83260-77-5

  Typeset: PrePSol Enterprise Pvt. Ltd.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, events and locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

  To Hawa Singh Jakhar,

  my father, my hero!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First and foremost, I would like to thank all my teachers, who moulded me into the person I’m today. Especially Mr Allan Lewis, who hooked me onto reading and writing, Mr K.B. Kain, my history teacher who turned history into an exciting mystery, and Mr D.N. Saxena who taught me the art of discipline. Also, my mother, who has been a teacher throughout her life and packed me off from a small town infested with criminals to a boarding school near Delhi. It changed my life.

  Heartfelt gratitude to the exceptional team at Westland, for their superb guidance. Extra special thanks to Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO, Westland, who believed in this book from the start, and to Prita Maitra, my editor, who slogged with me to craft this book at every stage. My sincere thanks to Gunjan Ahlawat, art director, and the entire art team for coming up with an exceptional cover design. I also express my thanks to publisher Paul Vinay Kumar, Vipin Vijay, general manager production, and Shatrughan Pandey, manager production.

  I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Anuj Bahri and Shravani Pandit of Red Ink Literary Agency, who motivated me to complete this book. They led me by the hand into the amazing world of publishing, of which I had no idea.

  I thank my entire family, especially my wife, Priya Raman, for her patience while I researched and redrafted (thanks for letting me off those shopping trips for vegetables and milk!), my son, Hridai, whose enthusiastic questions helped me spot any holes in the story, and my father, Hawa Singh, whose name I have borrowed for my hero. My father was a simple army man who always found the money to buy me books (although I sometimes squandered it on movies and fast food), and who didn’t once object when I resigned from three jobs in less than a year, assuring me that he would always be there for me. Well, he passed away, and that has left a deep void—one that I can fill only by my writing. It’s his spirit that lives in the character of Hawa Singh in this book.

  PROLOGUE

  Eventually everyone dies, but death, in various forms and ways, still comes as a shock. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Or they consign you to the flames. The flesh sizzles and the bones crackle. Be grateful it happens in that order.

  There are very few who have tasted death and come out of it alive. It could be the cold barrel of a gun pointed at one’s head, a mountaineer hanging from a slender rope, or lying on a hospital bed surrounded by one’s family all waiting for the last breath, or simply a car stopping an inch away from you that could have struck you dead. Everyone will tell you that the taste of death is not of this earth.

  Death is all around us and it takes a fraction of a second to blow out the flame of life. A simple toaster or a gas stove in your kitchen could fry you. That fine vegetable knife could chop you to pieces. And the car you drive could crush you to pulp.

  Full of such thoughts, Hawa Singh, a thirty-one-year-old sub-inspector with the Delhi Crime Branch, inched ahead through the dust-laden air. He led a team of eight policemen armed with self-loading rifles and police-issue pistols towards a brick kiln on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border.

  Hawa Singh had received information that the dreaded dacoit of Chambal valley, Nirbhay Singh Gujjar, was hiding there. He had kidnapped Kavita Venkateshwaran, star reporter on a prominent English news channel.

  In the afternoon heat of June, the police team hiding in the fields of sugarcane fought a combination of sweat, dust and fear. They could see dense black smoke spewing from a chimney, the clay bricks stacked around a huge furnace and the baked red bricks that labourers carried to nearby trucks.

  The policemen waited with bated breath for some sign of Gujjar’s gang. There was none.

  This was the kind of time when they smelled and tasted death. To some it was the smell of rusted iron but for Hawa Singh it was like pure steel between his teeth. Any moment a bullet could come ripping through the sugarcane and make a hole large enough to let out life.

  It takes nerves of steel to hold on waiting for the first bullet to be fired. Then it would be a free-for-all. Only the lucky would survive. Only the very lucky.

  Hawa Singh towered over the others. He was six foot, two inches tall and of athletic build, with a shaved head from which the sweat now trickled down to his brow. No way could he botch this operation. Nirbhay Singh Gujjar was on the most wanted list of seven states for cases of murder, kidnapping for ransom, robbery and abduction of women.

  More important was Kavita. She was precious. It was only for her that he braved death.

  Kavita and Hawa Singh had met some two years earlier when they started seeing each other. A fortnight ago they had got engaged after much bickering between their families. Hawa Singh was a Jat from Haryana and Kavita, a south Indian, Tamil Brahmin.

  ‘You couldn’t find a girl in our own community?’ his family asked him. ‘She is dark. Short. She talks too much on TV. Does she know Hindi? Can she make chapattis? Those people eat only rice and dosa!’

  ‘Jats!’ countered Kavita’s family. ‘They are uncouth. Rowdy. All they know is to eat, drink and sleep. Uncultured!’

  Finally, both families came to terms and the couple were engaged. They had planned to get
married both south-Indian and north-Indian-style. They couldn’t help laughing whenever they thought about what their wedding would be like—Jats from the villages of Haryana mingling with the Brahmins of Chennai.

  Just a week earlier, Kavita got a call that promised her an exclusive interview with Nirbhay Singh Gujjar. She took the risk and ventured out all alone to meet him.

  But Gujjar held her captive and demanded a ransom of five crore rupees from the government, along with the dismissal of all cases against him. Kavita was a prize catch.

  The government didn’t want to give in to a dacoit. They sent in the right man to get Kavita back—Hawa Singh.

  Hiding in the field, he could hear the faint voices of labourers and the rustle of sugarcane leaves all around them. They had been waiting at the same spot for four hours. The men were nervous. They had heard stories about Gujjar beheading policemen. They wanted revenge.

  Hawa Singh focused on the brick kiln, waiting for the right moment to charge in, grab the captive woman and lead his team out safely.

  Around sunset, as red, orange and crimson streaks spread in the sky, intersected by the dense black smoke from the brick kiln, he got the sign. Through the foliage he saw two jeeps coming towards the kiln. Spotting them, he hurried ahead, signalling to the team to be prepared to strike.

  The jeeps came to a halt, one of the drivers stepped out and walked ahead calling out, ‘Everything is ready.’

  At this point, Hawa Singh made a sign to his men to surround the area. Four men then charged from the left and another four from the right.

  Hawa Singh looked at his men as fear gave way to a new high, ‘We are not here to make arrests. Shoot to kill. I’m going to get Kavita.’

  The guns were cocked and ready, in sweaty palms. There was a rattling sound and Hawa Singh saw a large circular sheet of iron being lifted off the dusty ground. Out from there appeared the members of Gujjar’s gang. They were armed with AK-47s, police rifles and pistols. They stood guard, looking around the veil of darkness slowly enveloping the place.

  Hawa Singh was sitting on his haunches to hide his tall frame. The crouching position he adopted also allowed him to emerge, at a chosen moment, to attack with the ferocious speed of a wild animal. The motto he lived by was that of the Delhi Police: ‘With you, for you, always.’ And he would go to any length to save the city and its citizens.

  As he looked ahead, he saw Nirbhay Singh Gujjar coming out of his underground bunker. He was dressed in a kurta and dhoti with an AK-47 casually slung around his shoulder. He wiped off the sweat lingering around his heavy handlebar moustache.

  He shouted at his men to hurry, and two of them pulled Kavita out of the bunker. She looked in bad shape but her spirit was pretty much intact.

  ‘You better kill me because I won’t let you get away with the ransom money,’ she shouted at Gujjar.

  Nirbhay Singh Gujjar smiled at her, and turned to nod to his men to climb into the waiting jeeps.

  They had let down their guard and that was the moment Hawa Singh was looking for. He leapt from his hiding place towards the Gujjar gang. He didn’t need to signal the team or call out to them. They knew the drill and ran right behind him, fanning out around the dacoits.

  Hawa Singh moved determinedly, with the sure footing that came from years of experience in battle. One wrong foot, and you could be food for the worms. He was aiming for the head of the notorious dacoit who had massacred twenty policemen and had beheaded two senior superintendents of police.

  Suddenly, a small group of reporters hiding in the nearby fields came out with their cameras, wanting to catch the action live. One of the police officers looking for a big jump in his career seemed to have leaked out the information to them.

  As the reporters approached, the members of the gang shouted in warning, ‘Press!’

  Hawa Singh had already aimed and fired. A dacoit’s head exploded in crimson as grey matter and shards of skull flew out.

  Hawa Singh had given out the battle cry and a bloody encounter ensued. The police team took cover behind the stacks of bricks and fired at the Gujjar gang. Nirbhay, hiding behind one of the jeeps, opened up his AK-47, tearing through a wall of bricks and ripping apart two policemen behind it.

  By this time, the camera-toting reporters had run back to cover in the fields. They were seeing more action than they’d catered for.

  Hawa Singh kept shooting, cracking open three more skulls. The sound of gunfire, the screams of dying men and the smell of blood brought vultures out into the grey sky. They silently circled the sky overhead, waiting for the living to turn dead. Flesh. Blood. Death. The birds had only to wait.

  Three other policemen were knocked out by the heavy onslaught from the Kalashnikovs that the Gujjar gang had commandeered from soldiers of the Central Reserve Police Force. Hawa Singh saw his men falling one by one as he took cover behind the long chimney of the brick kiln.

  The sun had disappeared and the sky was turning black. Flames. Fumes. Fury. Fear.

  Kavita was being held by two men while three more stood around her, barring any attempt from her to run. Nirbhay was in a hurry to escape and take Kavita with him. As he pushed her into the jeep, the remaining three policemen charged towards him. Before Hawa Singh could even shout to them, all three were shot through their eyes. It was said that the dacoits of Chambal were the greatest snipers and the most accurate marksmen. They lived up to their reputation.

  Kavita finally managed to free herself and run. She ran towards the fields crying, ‘Singh! Singh!’

  Hawa Singh shot at the gang member trying to run after her. He saw Nirbhay turning towards Kavita. Nirbhay raised his AK-47 and fired at her. The bullets found their mark. Suddenly, the battlefield became quiet; the shrieks of the vultures grew louder and louder.

  A deep fury washed over Hawa Singh and he came out of his cover shooting wildly, shouting in grief, ‘Kavita! Kavita!’

  He could smell death and steel right close to him. Inside him. Blood was oozing from his head. He held it and ran through the darkness with shots ringing all around him.

  He ran towards the Gujjar gang speeding away in their jeeps. He raced across the field of sugarcane, over the dusty roads, through the narrow lanes, and hit the tarred road.

  He felt the gravel under his chin, the smell of tar coiling up his nose, and then saw a line of blood trickling down from his head onto the road. Then, darkness engulfed him.

  ***

  As Hawa Singh opened his eyes, he felt the hard, cold ground under him. He felt a severe pain in his head and his legs refused to move. He looked around to see dense fog. The visibility was almost down to zero; he couldn’t see even his own hands.

  Then he heard the sound of temple bells and the chanting of mantras. He could hear the sound of waves rippling in water. The fog brought with it the sweet smell of incense. The loud clang from the clock tower shattered his dream state. Hawa Singh realized that the ground under him was a cemented floor and he was lying on the Dashashwamedh Ghat in Benares, on the river Ganges.

  It had been more than seven years since the encounter with Nirbhay Singh Gujjar, in which a bullet had lodged close to his brain.

  Kavita had died on the spot.

  He was bedridden for more than ten months and underwent multiple surgeries. The doctors were unable, however, to remove the bullet from such a sensitive part of his skull. Finally, it was decided to let the body itself take care of the bullet. With time, a layer of fat covered it, preventing it from moving in further.

  Luckily, it was a bullet from a small-calibre pistol and didn’t find its way right up to the brain. But it gave him a constant headache, and at times he would lose consciousness for hours. Hawa Singh had tasted death and had learnt to live with it.

  The shoot-out with Nirbhay Singh Gujjar, in which he lost Kavita and his entire team, was a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. It was almost two years later that Hawa Singh, in a joint operation with the Madhya Pradesh police, managed to kill the dreaded Gujj
ar. He had emptied twelve bullets into the hated body.

  But the revenge could never sooth his soul. The nightmares remained. The smell of death was his constant companion. He was already half-dead, and people called him ‘the Ghost’.

  With great effort he curled up his legs and sat up on the steps of the Dashashwamedh Ghat. He tried to remember how he had got there in the first place, and then his father’s voice echoed in his ears.

  ‘I’m not going to die lying on a hospital bed or in that cramped room of yours. Just take me to Benares. Finally, with my death on holy soil, I will acquire salvation,’ said Fauja Singh, his seventy-nine-year-old terminally ill father.

  Now thirty-eight years old, with a seven-year-old near-mortal wound, Hawa Singh was a senior inspector with Delhi Police, crime branch. He had brought his ailing father to die peacefully in Benares.

  He still carried the six-inch-long zigzagging scar from the cut that opened his cranium from the left ear up to the crown of his head. There was a time when he tried to hide it by growing his hair long, but he soon gave up. He preferred to keep a crew-cut that clearly showed the mark—his medallion from the battle.

  It was 4 am as he came out of his nightmare, lying on the ghat in Benares. The darkness was still hanging over him, along with fog that was waiting for the sun to melt it away. There were a few naked tungsten bulbs hanging above him, emitting the golden glow of haloes around them.

  As his brain started registering more sounds, he heard a tremendous uproar, as if hundreds of feet were pounding along the ground. Then the wind carried the chanting to him—‘Om namo Narayana!’ The air vibrated with the sounds and the fog parted to give way to the godmen.

  He saw hundreds and hundreds of naked men, their bodies covered in ash, carrying trishuls as they fiercely rushed with impressive speed and strength towards the holy waters of the river. These were Naga sadhus, who had come to bathe in the Ganges on the holy day of Makar Sankranti, which fell on 14 January that year, one of the coldest days in the coldest winter month in northern India.