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Domestic Terrorism

Posted on June 25, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

The melee quickly spiraled into a fracas and all that was known was that someone had called someone else an objectionable name. By the time the noses had been bloodied and a couple of limbs broken, by the time the cops had got in there and done their own damage, nobody knew what really started this latest minor disturbance. There was little to do save for blaming law enforcement for everything that was wrong with the city. The scene had been enacted in the city of Mumbai but it could so easily have been a major metropolis in any part of the world. That is the thought Karan took with him on his train ride home. It is the idea that he grappled with on the bus journey that followed. When he finally unlaced his shoes in the single room apartment he called home he was so upset about the state of the world he didn’t have an appetite anymore.

He confessed to Abraham, his friend and confidante, the following afternoon at lunch that he was sick of it all. Life, as they knew it, was far worse than it had been in their parents’ time. Sure bribery had been a way of life and would continue to be so for all eternity but people didn’t go for each other’s throats over trifles back then. Sure the streets were dirty and epidemics threatened with every monsoon but people didn’t blame each other for everything from AIDS to inflation. Sure the rich got richer while the middle class got squeezed over everything from electricity bills to the quality of food but nobody reached for a knife or a hammer every time a disagreement cropped up.

Abraham nodded and focused on his vegetable pulao in the hope that his friend would pause to take a bite of his own lunch or because he had run out of steam. Karan traveled with a lot of angst. He blamed politicians and movie stars, he blamed the riots and terrorism and he wished that things would go back to the way they used to be even though he had no real memory of anything from before all the trouble.

One afternoon he met Neena and everything changed. He was no longer concerned with the problems of the city or the world at large. He no longer noticed when strangers grappled in the streets or quarreled over change and weighing scales. He could think of nothing other than the woman who had waltzed into his life and stolen his heart.

It was the opinion of the people that worked with her as well as those that merely passed her in the corridor or heard stories about her exploits that Neena was the office femme fatale. Right from the way she dressed to the manner in which she interacted with any male within arm’s length, she communicated sexuality. Co-workers completed reports for her while superiors permitted her access to everything from executive washrooms to information her pay grade was not supposed to be privy to. She used the information she gleaned from her conversations and flirtations to make an impression on the big boss. She needn’t have bothered to go to all the trouble.

He was smitten from the moment he laid eyes on her. The snugness of her clothes as well as the easy familiarity with which she touched his arm or laughed at his slightest attempts at humour had ensured that she enjoyed any attention she sought. Little did she know that Karan had been about to profess true love right around the time she decided to focus her amorous attentions on the boss.

The truth about Neena was that no one had any proof that she had actually indulged in improper conduct on office premises. Sure she flirted and she had definitely been guilty of adopting provocative poses when she knew that an influential man was due to pass her station but no one had actually come anywhere close to procuring actual proof that Neena had promised or exchanged sexual favours for career advancement.

Even so, it was the most prevalent theory that everybody offered for how fast she rose through the ranks at their firm. It was not too long before the rumours and innuendo reached Karan’s ears. That’s when the bad times began to roll.

In the months before he finally got the job he had slaved at for four long years Karan had spent several months in the company of his home computer and little else. His mother rarely saw him and he was a ghost to his father. They thought he was working when in truth he was amassing a huge collection of online pornography. His tastes were fairly simply but he particularly enjoyed lascivious encounters set around the workplace.

It never occurred to him that the scenes were staged or that the big-breasted temptresses servicing all types of co-workers were actresses earning a wage. So he was incredibly disappointed when he finally found gainful employment, at an outsourcing firm with American ties, no less, and discovered that co-workers did not dress like glorified hookers. Nor did they make conversation laced with innuendo every time a male colleague walked by prior to getting on their knees and really going to work. Even so, his imagination coloured by the graphic content he had voraciously consumed during his months of unemployment allowed him to envision his beloved Neena in all sorts of compromising positions with the big boss. He was further distressed by the fact that the boss was a married man.

So Karan plotted his revenge.

His fantasies ran the gamut from confronting Neena in the mess and branding her a whore in public to setting up an elaborate network of video cameras to document her nocturnal encounters with the boss so that he could sell the tape to pornographers and make a fortune.

He eventually settled for something much less effective.

At 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning a bomb went off in the Western suburb of Malad, destroying the entire floor of an office building and gutting the company’s onsite communications and storage systems. The losses were estimated to be in the millions of dollars and it was determined that the loss of productivity would affect seven American businesses for a period of seventy-two hours, resulting in additional losses.

Local police were not immediately able to determine the significance of the explosion but there was little doubt in everybody’s mind that it had been an act of terrorism.

Karan was homebound for less than a fortnight before he found employment in another call centre not too far from the one that was destroyed by the explosion. On some afternoons, while he was taking a coffee break he looked out the window and tried to figure out what the cleaners were working on. He wondered idly if they had gotten around to cleaning his old station.

He sometimes wondered about Neena and then laughed to himself when he thought of how crazily in love he had been less than a week ago. Then he turned on his heel and returned to his station where he spent fifteen minutes thinking about his true love Maria. She was not showy like Neena had been. She possessed what Karan liked to think of as quiet beauty. Though he had been staring at her for four days straight he hadn’t yet noticed the simple gold band on her ring finger.

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