Revolution 2020 (28 page)

‘I’m
not,’ Aarti said.

‘I love you,
bye,’ Raghav said smartly.

‘Do you?’
Aarti said.

‘Aarti, c’mon.
I have to hang up. I do love you. Say it, no,’ Raghav said.

‘Love you.
Bye,’ she said.

I withdrew my hand
from her face.

‘What?’
she said.

‘This is what
I mean by getting him out of your system,’ I said.

‘It was just a
simple chat,’ she said.

‘You said
“love”. With me you don’t like that word.’

‘I wanted to
be normal. That’s how we end calls,’ she said. She walked
up to the window and stared outside.

‘I’m
sorry, it’s not easy hearing you say that to another man,’
I said. ‘It’s not easy being a cheat,’ she said and
turned all teary-eyed.

I took her in my
arms.

‘At some point
he will find out,’ Aarti said, her face buried in my chest. ‘I
just want to tell him myself.’

‘Will you be
with me?’ I said.

She gave a barely
perceptible nod, without lilting her face.

‘I will love
you forever, Aarti,’ I said.

She hugged me tight.
After a while she looked at me. ‘Should I tell him?’ she
said.

I shook my head.

‘I will,’
I said. I wanted to rub it in his face.

It took just a
mini-van to move my stuff from my old house to the brand new
directors bungalow. I had clothes, my father’s old books and
family pictures. The contractor purchased the rest. I didn’t
need a three-bedroom duplex bungalow, but the director couldn’t
hole up in a hostel room. I stood in the lawns of the new house,
supervising the move early morning. A truck with the new purchases -
furniture, carpets, appliances, utensils and furnishings - drove into
the compound.

A labourer held up
some old photographs of my father. ‘Where should I keep these?’
he said. In one framed picture Baba sat under a tree smoking a hookah
and watching the fields. I, all of five years, sat naked next to him.
My father’s farmer friend had taken that black and white
picture with a camera his son had sent him from abroad. I picked up
that picture and saw my father’s face. Unlike the Baba I
remembered, the person in the picture looked young and healthy. I saw
the tree and tried to gauge its location in the current campus. I
couldn’t.

I hadn’t cried
over my father once in the four years after his funeral. Yet, I
didn’t know why I felt so overwhelmed that day. Baba would’ve
loved to see me move into such a big house. He probably died thinking
his loser son would never get anywhere in life. If only he could see
this!
Gopal
doesn
’
t
cry.
Gopal
fights
the
world,
a voice inside told me.

‘Put them up
in the front room,’ I said.

We finished the move
by ten in the morning. My first guest, I had planned, would be the
person who made this possible - Shukla-ji. I had invited him for
lunch. I hurried the hostel chef. The gas stove at my new home didn’t
work, and the chef wanted to go to the hostel kitchen to prepare the
dishes.

‘Bring the
stove here!’ I shouted. ‘MLA sir is coming. I can’t
trust the hostel cooking.’

Of course, I also
wanted Aarti to be one of my first guests. However, I had promised
myself that Aarti would come to my new house as my girlfriend, not
someone else’s girlfriend having a parallel affair with me.

She SMSed me: 'How's
the move gng? When do i c the place?'

I replied: 'U can
come anytime but i won't let u leave. Let me meet Raghav first.'

'R u sure? Am so
nervous about u meeting him.'

I was composing a
reply to her when my phone rang. I picked up Shukla-ji’s call.

‘Sir, we are
making puris. Come hungry, okay?’ I said.

‘Come home,
Gopal,’ he said.

‘I am home. My
new home. I mean, this is also your home.’

‘I’m
screwed,’ Shukla-ji said, his voice unusually tense.

‘What?’

‘Come to my
place. Your fucker friend, I wont spare him. Come right now.’

‘What
happened? We have lunch ...’ I was saying but he cut the call.

The chef arrived
panting at my house, carrying the heavy stove on his shoulders.

‘It will take
only an hour,’ he said reassuringly to me.

‘Lunch has
been cancelled,’ I said and walked out of the house.

My phone beeped.
Another SMS from Aarti.

'U should let me
decorate the house. After all, hotel industry & all.'

1 sent her a smiley
and kept the phone back in my pocket.

‘MLA Shukla’s
place,’ I told the driver.

                                                                  ♦

MLA Shukla’s
men stood in a circle in Shukla-ji’s verandah. They looked
mournful, as if someone had just died. Pink-coloured papers lay
strewn on the coffee table.

‘Where’s
Shukla sir?’ I said.

One of his party
workers pointed to his office. ‘Wait here. He is on an
important call,’ he said.

‘What
happened?’ I said. The party worker did not respond. He looked
pointedly at the pink papers. I picked one up.

Revolution
2020
> said the masthead, as pompous as ever. A
miniature map of India, showing the so-called command centres of the
revolution, was the logo.

‘
MLA
makes
money
by
making
holy
river
filthy!
’
said the headline. A poor quality, black and white picture of
Shukla-ji occupied a quarter of the page.

‘Rs 25 crores
sanctioned for Dimnapura Sewage Treatment Plant. MLA pockets Rs 20
crore,’ said the sub-headline.

‘These are all
old, done to death, bullshit allegations, right?’ I said.
Raghav liked to stir things up, but surely nobody would give a fuck
about his rag.

No one in the room
responded to me. Half the party workers couldn’t read the paper
anyway. The others seemed too scared to talk. I read on.

Early Monday morning
in Navabaga, a group of children walk towards their school waist-deep
in sewage water. It is a gut-wrenching sight to see filthy water
everywhere. Stink pervades the air. People of the neighbourhood don’t
know what happened. They do know that this hadn’t happened
before the government implemented the Ganga Action Plan (GAP). Yes,
the same plan meant to clean up our holy river has ended up spreading
more filth around our city.

How? Well, because
none of the projects meant to clean up the river were implemented.
The Navabaga flooding apart, the river is filthier than ever. To give
you an idea, the presence of fecal coliform, a form of bacteria,
should not be more than 2,000 units/litre. At the ghats, the fecal
coliform levels are 1,500,000 units/litre. Not only is our river
dirty, we are living with serious health hazards.

I saw Shukla-ji come
out of his office. I rushed to him. He signalled me to wait and I saw
that he was still on the phone. He picked up a few files and returned
to the office. I continued to read.

Revolution
2020
found many truths about the GAP scam. However, the
most shocking one is about MLA Raman Lai Shukla’s Dimnapura
Sewage Treatment Plant in Varanasi. Built at a cost of ?25 crores,
the plant remained dysfunctional for years. When finally made
operational, it never cleaned the water.

We have startling
facts, with proof, on what happened inside the plant.

‘The
opposition has done this,’ one party worker said to another. I
sat down to finish the article.

When untreated water
reached the plant, eighty per cent of it was diverted downstream into
the Varuna river, and dumped right back without any cleaning. The
remaining twenty per cent of water was released at Dimnapura plants
own exit, untreated. When the inspectors took the input and output
measurements at points before and after the plant, it showed an
eighty per cent drop in pollutants. Meanwhile, the water dumped into
the Varuna river met the Ganga a few kilometres later. The net effect
- no treatment of water at all and the river remaining as polluted as
ever. Shukla took credit for the plant showing an eighty per cent
drop in pollutants. The construction company, AlliedCon, is owned by
the MLA’s uncle, Roshan Shulda, who made fake invoices for
pumps that were never purchased (scans below)

.

‘We will kill
this newspaper,’ a party worker whispered in my ear as he saw
me read with such concentration.

The bottom of the
page had several images. These included fake invoices for pumps
amounting to Rs 15 crores. However, the actual site pictures showed
no such pumps installed. A scanned letter from the pump manufacturer
showed they never supplied the pumps. The ownership structure of
AlliedCon confirmed links to Shukla-ji’s family. Finally, the

paper had a picture
of the Varuna river, with a dot to show the exact point where the
effluents were released.

‘The CM is
coming down from Lucknow,’ a party worker announced and worried
murmurs rippled around the room.

I could tell Raghav
had worked hard on the story. He had suffered earlier for doing a
story without evidence. This time he had left nothing to chance. The
fake invoices, contractor-MLA link, and the audacity to dump the
dirty water right back into the revered Ganga didn’t spell good
news for Shukla-ji. Locals would be livid. A politician stealing is
bad enough, but to rob from the holy river is the worst sin.

‘It’s
not even a real newspaper,’ Shukla-ji’s PA was discussing
the matter with someone. ‘Couple of thousand copies, nobody
will pay attention to it.’

The low circulation
of
Revolution
2020
had become the MLA’s
only hope. Party workers had removed as many copies from the
newsstands as they could. However,
Revolution
2020
came free, like a brochure inside newspapers. It would be impossible
to get rid of it completely.

Aarti was calling. I
stepped out to the lawns.

‘Saw
R2020
today?’ she said. I didn’t know the paper had an acronym.

‘I have it in
my hand,’ I said.

She breathed audibly
before she spoke again. ‘Is it too much?’ she said.

I sneered, ‘It’s
Raghav. When is he not too much?’

‘It is
shocking, isn’t it? They dump the dirty water elsewhere in the
river and claim to have cleaned it!’

‘He is taking
on big people. He should be careful.’

‘But he is
only speaking the truth. Someone has to stand up for the truth.’

‘I just said
he needs to be careful,’ I said.

‘I don’t
want him to be in trouble,’ she said, scared.

‘He doesn’t
like to stay out of it,’ I replied.

‘Is he in
trouble?’ she said, pausing after every word.

‘How would I
know?’ I said. I heard the noise of traffic outside the house.

‘C’mon,
Gopal, you and MLA Shukla she said and paused.

‘I’m not
involved in any scam, okay?’ I screamed.

Horns blared outside
as I walked towards the gate.

‘I didn’t
say that,’ she said softly. ‘I just don’t want
Raghav to be in danger. I may not be faithful to him, but I don’t
want him to get hurt.’

‘Hold on for a
second, Aarti,’ I said.

I came to the gate.
My eyes popped as I saw the scene. Six vans from different TV
channels had parked themselves outside the house. The guards were
struggling to keep the reporters out, as they stood there airing live
with the MLAs house as backdrop.

‘What’s
going on?’ I asked the guard.

‘They want to
come in,’ the guard said. ‘They know the CM is coming.’

‘Everything
okay?’ Aarti asked anxiously on the phone.

‘Yeah, so
far.’

‘Promise me
Raghav won’t get hurt.’

‘It’s
not in my hands, Aarti,’ I said, exasperated. ‘I don’t
even know what will happen. It’s a small paper. Maybe the story
will die.’

‘It won’t,’
she said.

‘What?’

‘All the
mainstream newspapers and channels are in
Revolution
2020
’
s
office,’ she said.

‘Fuck,’
I said, as a fleet of white Ambassador cars approached the house.
Photographers went berserk as they took pictures of everyone around,
including me.

‘Will Raghav
be okay? Promise me.’

‘Aarti, I have
to go.’

I jogged back to the
house.

32

Everyone stood in
attention as the CM entered the house. The aura of power could be
sensed along every inch of the ML As bungalow. Shukla-ji came running
and greeted the CM with folded hands.

‘Who called
the media?’ the CM said, his voice purposeful.

‘What?’
Shukla-ji said, as clueless as anyone else in the room.

‘Let’s
go inside,’ the CM said. The two leaders disappeared into MLA
Shukla’s office. The CM’s minions mixed with the MLA’s
minions in the hall. Even the minions maintained a hierarchy. The
CM’s minions stood with their heads held high, while the MLA’s
minions looked at the floor. I didn’t fit in anywhere.

I sat on a wooden
chair in the corner of the room.

‘Gopal,’
Shukla -ji’s booming voice startled me. I looked up. He asked
me to come into his office.

Once in, the MLA
shut the door.

‘Gopal, sir.
He runs my college, my trusted man. Bright and ...’

‘You know the
person who did it?’ the CM asked me, with no interest in my
qualities or capabilities.

‘Raghav
Kashyap, sir. Friend once, not anymore.’

‘You couldn’t
shut him up?’ the CM said.

‘We had him
fired from
Dainik.
He started his own rag after that,’ I
said. ‘Nobody cares about it.’

‘The media has
sniffed it out. The rag doesn’t matter much, but if he gives
interviews or provides all the evidence to the media, it is going to
be bad’