Free KALYUG by R. SREERAM Page B

it is now believed that Mrs Qureshi had actually finished her business at the mall and was on her way out when the attack took place, killing her instantly.
    Mrs Syeda Qureshi worked as a teacher in Don Bosco International before leaving to accompany her husband. Sources close to the General reveal that Mrs Qureshi was a devout woman who was socially very active and well-liked by everybody at the camp. She was also involved in setting up vocational trainings for the spouses of the soldiers, as well as heading the Widow Welfare Association that looks after the families of soldiers lost in service.
    While Major-General Qureshi himself was unavailable for comment, the local Army Liaison office has requested that he be allowed to grieve in private. The Qureshis have a son who has also followed in the father’s footsteps and is in active service in an undisclosed location in the country. At the time of this report, it is not confirmed whether the son is aware of his mother’s death. –PTI
    They came for me at midnight, a posse of them . . . armed with truncheons, flashlights, pipes and evil grins . . . there were too many of them to fight . . . blink, blink them away, I thought, but each time I shut my eyes and opened them again, there seemed to be even more of them . . . I held up a hand to protest as they threw a gunny bag over me . . . the world went dark once again . . . no, not dark. Brown. A dark light that was actually brown. The smell of jute. Rancid breath, of cigarettes, alcohol and meat. Hands slapping the bag, slapping me, not caring where they hit . . . I begged, but even I couldn’t hear anything coming out of my mouth. A nightmare, muted . . . but familiar . . . far too familiar . . .
    I woke up with a start.
    I was in New Delhi.

4
    16th September, 2012. Siliguri.
    The prime minister woke up from his nap, not really refreshed, not really sleepy – and not really too bothered about his predicament. He was, after all, the prime minister of India, and the second most powerful person in the country. Someone had to be searching frantically for him, even if the party headquarters had decided to re-evaluate his value to the party.
    Eventually, as he continued to ponder his predicament, he had another thought. Was GK behind this? The Bihari hadn’t been too pleased about being nominated for the president’s post – the Indian politician’s equivalent of the elephant’s graveyard – and had made it abundantly clear that he would have preferred the more active relevance of a trouble-shooting minister; in which case, at some point of time, the natural progression would have been to his – Kuldip’s – prime ministerial seat.
    In one of the rare politically-savvy moves in his entire career, Kuldip Razdan had weighed in with the party’s leadership on the importance of having someone as dependable and loyal as Gopi Kishan Yadav in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Ever since that meeting with an apolitical president, the party leadership had been more respectful of the powers of the apex office. The arguments were accepted and Gopi Kishan Yadav had succeeded a fellow party-man to the role.
    But then, he argued to himself, GK couldn’t have done this. As respectful as you might be of the Constitution, you could not escape the fact that the president of India was more a ceremonial position than an operational one – much like his own tenure, he thought with familiar self-pity. There was no way a president could ever orchestrate the virtual hijack-slash-kidnap of the prime minister of the country, at least not without support from everyone else within the innermost circles.
    That particular phrase took his thoughts on to a tangent. Circles. Circles within circles. At the heart of any government – democratic, dictatorial, monarchy, Occidental, Oriental, whatever you called it – was not the public face of the rulers, but the invisible contributors who gave with one hand and demanded with the other. Kuldip Razdan knew that,