Fear Is the Key Read online

  JUGGI BHASIN

  Fear is the Key

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FEAR IS THE KEY

  Juggi Bhasin was one of the first television journalists in India. He has worked with Doordarshan News and Lok Sabha Television as a reporter and anchor. Among the first Indian journalists to go to North Korea and report from there, he has also covered Kashmir and other insurgency-hit areas. He also has to his credit news reports on the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

  Bhasin, who acts on stage, is the creator of the popular graphic novel Agent Rana, which appears in a major national daily.

  He can be contacted at [email protected].

  By the Same Author

  The Terrorist

  The Avenger

  Blood Song

  Bollywood Deception

  As you grow older, you treasure and hold on to the things that are most important. And that, undoubtedly, is the love I have for my wife, Sonu, and my son, Karan. As always, this book is for both of you.

  It is also in memory of my mom, smiling from far above, beyond the clouds.

  Prologue

  How it all started . . . She was all over the place, the life of the party. She was laughing and joking, drinking hard and fast, backslapping, teasing, with her high-pitched laugh rising and ebbing in all corners of the apartment. The music playing that evening was hip-hop. The choice of spirits to raise animal spirits was varied: you could take your pick from all manner of whiskies, malts, vodka and beer. That millennial favourite, rust-coloured hash wrapped in cigarette paper, was also in circulation. One could hardly find a pair of sober feet in the excitement and the excess. In this melee, she simply disappeared.

  She was gone, do you hear me? Gone as in gone. Vanished, disappeared, out of sight, but certainly not out of mind. At first, when I could not find Simone, where do you think I looked for her? It was in that piss-soaked space around the toilet. There were cigarette butts, small pools of yellowed piss, leftover bits of toilet paper . . . but no Simone. Maybe she had come here to empty out the hash and wine from her guts. I wouldn’t know. She wasn’t under the bed reading that damned book she had taken a fancy to lately: Games People Play. She wasn’t in the closet.

  Maybe, just maybe, she could be crouching at the end of the stairway? If you believe that, then you got it all wrong, mister. That wasn’t her style; it would be most unlike her. She wasn’t in the building complex, or walking distractedly around the granite lobby. She wasn’t trapped in the elevators, and she had not been abducted by that pot-bellied, middle-aged pervert, Mehta, who lived directly above my apartment.

  ‘Stop playing games, Simone,’ I said to myself. ‘Enough is enough.’ A bitter winter wind blowing outside the compound spoke to me. There was no one else around. And then it struck me. She might have truly disappeared! Sometimes, you get a sense of these things. My ears began to burn as I fully understood the embarrassment and the horror of it all. After all, she had disappeared from my apartment, from a party that was in full swing.

  To be honest, I was full of conflicting emotions at that moment. I felt humiliated and perhaps a bit angry at her disappearance. Wouldn’t you? Especially if you were the chief executive of the company where she worked and she disappeared from among friends and colleagues. You want people remembering the good time they had at your party, not their colleague’s disappearance that night.

  Why, Simone, why? Why did you make me go through all that? But wait . . . wait. It’s about her, not me. It’s certainly not about my embarrassment. She could be in real trouble. She could be in captivity, in a basement somewhere, in real pain.

  God! I feel so miserable when I remember my first reaction to her disappearance. Was I actually concerned more about my embarrassment than her safety? Can you ever forgive me, Simone?

  Anyway, I searched like a madman, trying to find her in the building complex. I think it was after the search yielded no results that I felt the real emotions I had for her grip me. This was no prank or jest or an attention-seeking disorder! She was truly gone, and she could be in trouble. I had been in touch with my own feelings so far in this episode. What about her? What if . . .

  Fear began to eat into me as my instincts told me that Simone might have disappeared not only from my apartment but perhaps from the world itself. My eyes stung with tears and I felt hopeless, shock running through me like an electric bolt. How could something bizarre like this have happened? I think after some time I must have wanted to scream my guts out, but I felt chained to the ground. I no longer cared about what the people in the compound, my sloshed colleagues in the apartment and just about anyone I had known and not known thought about me.

  Simone was gone.

  Just like that.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was crazier than a usual, normal, working day at Yummimages. Manic Monday had arrived, and people had turned up at the office in loafers and Janpath sling bags, pretending to look sharp. It was as if one had been forcibly pulled out of a weekend of booze, song and rest.

  But there was something more than Monday blues killing the day. A first-rate crisis was blowing through the corridors of Yummimages as the stream of techies and creatives walked in.

  But let’s slow down here. We will talk of the crisis a little later. Let’s take a Wikipedia peek at this strange beast called Yummimages and the short—but so far eventful—journey of its young founder, Rahul Abhyankar.

  Rahul had graduated from IIT Delhi (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) about five years ago. On the day he graduated and took his first step into the outside world, he knew that he was destined to become a billionaire. His face contributed partly to his confidence. It was the face of a man given to pensive moods, with eyes that reflected genuine empathy. Behind the lost, puppy-dog look was a razor-sharp brain that gave him an unusual edge. The women he interacted with felt protective of him. They wanted to cup Rahul’s face in their palms and reassure him that he need not go far to seek true love. They were there to fill the gap. An unexpected shock of white hair in one so young added to the boyish lost look. Rahul accepted his good looks from his family’s genetic pool with humility, but that could get him only so far.

  It really was his ability to get an idea to work that made him a winner. To top it, he was a whiz kid when it came to numbers. In school, even before the maths teacher could write the solution to a problem on the board, Rahul had solved it in his mind.

  His combined abilities gave him enough confidence to ignore the campus placements at IIT and start his own venture. He took a close look at his cellphone to realize his drea
m. The mobile phone had already become the king for bankers, financial players and information services. Rahul wanted to raid and pillage the cellphone’s reach for an entirely different purpose. He wanted millions of his generation to become addicted to a new kind of entertainment that only they could identify with and fully accept. He started an irreverent, content-driven company that promised 24x7 spots via an app on the cellphone. To ensure his mission was possible, he roped in his batchmate from school and college, Suhel Bagga.

  Suhel was everything that Rahul was not. He was big-built, and cursed with shifty eyes and a slight hunch. If Rahul was usually the good cop in office, Suhel excelled at playing the tough-talking bad cop. These roles were allotted not so much by design as by choice. Ever since school, Rahul had been the natural leader and Suhel the model deputy. Rahul was the perfect fit as the sensitive-looking, suave pioneer talking numbers and strategy with international investors. Suhel, schooled in rough-and-tough ways, took charge of operations and would not hesitate to crack the whip to keep the ship’s sails trimmed and the vessel seaworthy.

  Legend had it that the iconic name ‘Yummimages’ was adopted on a cold, foggy winter night in Delhi when the two friends had ended up at the Pandara Road Market. They sat at Gulati Restaurant and tore into succulent kebabs and naan.

  ‘Yummy!’ remarked Suhel between mouthfuls of appetizing chicken.

  ‘You are an image,’ Rahul responded.

  Suhel’s shifty eyes shone with a strange light and the word ‘Yummimages’ formed on the lips of the two friends almost at the same time.

  To put their ideas into practise, the two friends hired a top-end creative person for the content. Simone had joined as a high-cost hire, and she soon proved that this was one of the best decisions ever taken at Yummimages. She also brought with her a lot of talent from her previous employer, and soon enough the place had transformed. An army of talented creatives in shorts and rubber slippers, with funky hairdos and laptops, got down to work. They christened their circular workstation the ‘pot’. It served as a place where you ‘dumped’ ideas. For the idea extraordinaire, one was even rewarded with a joint that made you ‘potty’. This was the antithesis of the other section in the office, unofficially called ‘brain dead’ by the creatives. It housed the techies, the number crunchers and the accountants. No surprises there. And finally, the triumvirate of Rahul, Suhel and Simone was housed in the ‘pea pod’, which was really three open-air cabins partitioned only by glass.

  So, on to the programming. Simone turned around traditional methods of gathering news and entertainment. Quirky was in, and boring anchor opinions and long-winded sync were out of the window. A battery of twenty-something anchors were recruited and handed a one-point agenda: Don’t formalize the subject. Irreverence is your bread and butter.

  And what about the topics? They ranged from how you could survive exploding mobile phones to the art of smoothly calling off an uninteresting date to top five midnight snacks. Many more day-to-day useful and useless things we all do turned into a vehicle for fun and entertainment. Politics and politicians were a strict no-no as spot subjects, unless of course one was caught watching porn in the Assembly and other such vices.

  Soon, in a matter of months, programming with offbeat titles such as ‘Burnt Toast’, ‘Metro Ride with Katrina’, ‘Gurugramwapsi’, ‘Ai Dil It’s Not Difficult’ hit the mobile networks. Psychiatrists recorded an increasing traffic of young mobile addicts coming into their clinics. Most of them were addicted to opening the Yummimages app every five minutes.

  Yummimages was on its way! Foreign investors were knocking at its doors and the management think tank began to make plans for a grand IPO (initial public offering), which would give the company a leg up in the billion-dollar league.

  With power comes responsibility, some say, but at Yummimages it only bought more irreverence. A big mistake, therefore, was waiting to happen. And it happened. On a manic Monday.

  Joshua, the anchor of ‘Burnt Toast’, attended a rally called by the country’s fiery youth leader Navin Sikand at Jantar Mantar. Bored out of his mind because of the political garbage being spewed there, he was about to leave when he spotted a yellow stain on the back of Navin’s crumpled, starched white kurta. He took a selfie, laughing his guts out, with the yellow stain in the background. And then and there, Joshua started a contest on ‘Burnt Toast’.

  ‘Stain on our stained netas! How did it get there? Top five answers get an all-expense paid, three-day vacation at the Taj Holiday Village Resort, Goa.’

  Within hours, the contest was trending at the number one spot on Twitter. A handle had been given to young Indians to express their disgust with netas who did not know when to stop speaking. Irreverence turned to abuse, and it was not funny after a point. Social media was flooded with messages which said that either Navin had shat his pyjamas or he had jerked off in them.

  In real time, Joshua watched the mayhem spread far and wide on his laptop. He grinned and headed back to the office, expecting a Roman emperor’s triumphant welcome.

  Meanwhile, at Yummimages, all hell had broken loose. The office telephone was ringing off the hook as rival channels, irate politicians and newly sprung custodians of society wanted to give Yummimages a piece of their mind. India’s Parliament had taken it upon itself to debate the issue. Lawmakers passed a resolution condemning Yummimages for its ‘pornographic’ content. Some members called for an investigation into the foreign hand propping up Yummimages. Another lawmaker gave a shrill speech blasting the debauched taste of the English-speaking elite.

  Joshua arrived at an office that was bereft of cheerleaders holding up a banner. The atmosphere was more like a funeral home expecting a body to arrive any minute, one that was labelled ‘Joshua Fernandes. R.I.P.’. Even the woman behind the guest relations counter, Tripti, did not sport her trademark smile.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she snapped. ‘A team meeting is on in Rahul’s cabin. They want you there double quick.’

  Sensing that something had gone wrong, Joshua ran to the pea pod and barged into Rahul’s cabin. The entire decision-making team was there, faces drawn with tension. Simone saw Joshua, took off her juti and flung it at him. Joshua ducked and the juti missed his face, but not his pride.

  ‘Arsehole! Junkie!’ thundered Simone. ‘You just flushed six months of hard work down the toilet!’

  That was the cue. Everyone pounced on Joshua with choice abuses and threats, even as he stood stunned, unable to understand the change in his fortunes.

  In front of him was Rahul, sitting like a sphinx, observing the chaos. Then he held up his hand, asking for some quiet. ‘People,’ he said calmly, choosing his words carefully. ‘None of us here was born right. So before judging him, let’s examine what he did. I say Joshua took a call. I think he was trying to manufacture what we in advertising call a ‘nicotine patch’. He wanted people to get hooked to his irreverence. The jury’s out on whether he was right or wrong. Tell you what, let’s take a vote on if Joshua stays or not. Put up your hands if you want him to stay. But don’t vote against him if you are merely jealous of his success.’

  Sheepishly, all except Simone put up their hands. Rahul nodded at Joshua.

  ‘You stay. I will debrief you later on what went wrong. Take down the ‘stain’ campaign. Issue an apology. We need to calm the political witch hunters coming after us.’

  Shaken and stirred, Joshua muttered an inaudible ‘thanks’ and fled.

  Rahul quizzically looked at Simone. ‘You wanted his head. I thought he was your protégé?’

  Simone’s face was flushed as she glared at Suhel.

  ‘He was my protégé. Until someone corrupted him . . . ’

  And then, in an instant, Suhel and Simone were at each other’s throats. The room exploded with cuss words. Simone, prone to throwing things, flung a sheaf of papers at Suhel’s face and stormed out of the room. She rushed to the unisex washroom and closed the door behind her. Breathing unevenly as she balled
her hands into fists, she hit the toilet mirror repeatedly. Grunting in frustration, she kept on hitting it till she could do so no more. Hot tears flowed down her cheeks, and her insides screamed. Drained, she sat on the toilet seat and set off the flush. She quietened down, but she knew the veneer was coming off.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two days after the blowout at Yummimages, Suhel and Rahul strategized in the conference facility. Suhel was not entirely in agreement with Rahul’s idea of giving an exclusive interview to the country’s leading newspaper to clarify things. The idea that an open-ended interview could shake off the hounds snapping at your heels was a risky proposition. Such exclusives in the past had only caused more damage. Nothing could shake Suhel’s belief that the best companies operated below the radar. But he went with Rahul’s suggestion, and on the same day, they sat down with top reporter Shalini for a Q&A. Shalini fired a barrage of provocative questions at them.

  ‘Do you encourage mischief as a strategy to build a consumer base?’

  ‘A controversy a day keeps Yummimages in play?’

  ‘There are reports that your reporters deliberately malign reputations to blackmail innocents later.’

  ‘What do you say to the demand that the company law board investigate your business model?’

  And so, it went on and on with no end in sight. Suhel could almost feel the pain of so many nails breaking into the coffin. Suddenly, Rahul changed the narrative by stretching in his chair and announcing, ‘I don’t know about you two, but I could use a cup of tea and some cookies.’

  Shalini smiled. She knew she had pinned them down. Well, never mind if they wanted a break. She would come back to it later. She never left her roast half-done.

  ‘Sure, let’s take a break,’ she agreed. ‘While we sip tea, my photographer will take some photos. Suhel, you might want to wipe that sweat off your collar.’