The Taj Conspiracy (37 page)

Agra

M
ehrunisa looked around, amazed at the wave of humanity cascading down the Taj complex towards the forecourt. On the heels of the fleeing humans came the panicky monkeys, in turn fleeing from the fierce langurs. Her plan had worked.

Astonishing but true: the mob was in retreat.

As pandemonium rippled through the crowd, she racked her brains. Where could a man with his loudspeaker hide in the Taj complex and evade detection so successfully?

It had to be in the labyrinthine basement somewhere....

Now that the charbagh was free of the mobs, Mehrunisa walked across from the Mihman Khana to the west, lost in thought. A nervous Pamposh tagged along reluctantly, saying, ‘Mehroo, we
have
to leave!’

With a finger to her lips Mehrunisa motioned for silence. Pamposh shook a rueful head.

Mehrunisa had reached the mosque and it struck her then that the octagonal tower to the south of the mosque housed a unique construction: a baoli, a well tower with three floors below ground level, unlike the other towers which had only one subterranean level! Functionally, the step well provided water independently of the waterworks outside the complex. Symbolically, it was connected to the mystical saint who found the Water of Life and gained immortality. For Hindus, Shiva was the Lord from whose locks Ganga spouted, and the act of pouring water over a shivalingam was replicating Ganga’s descent from heaven. A water body was symbolically the perfect spot for a madman seeking eternal glory.

Mehrunisa’s heart sank.

Licking her lips, she scanned the grounds for SSP Raghav or R.P. Singh but could not see them anywhere. She gulped.
Basement issues, Mehrunisa,
a tiny voice inside her cautioned. She swung her eyes from the mausoleum to the gate where stragglers were exiting. If Arun Toor was indeed hiding within the baoli, there
was
no time to lose. He might even have used the opportunity to join the fleeing crowd to make his getaway.

Which meant one thing: she would have to overcome her fear and descend to the basement.

Mehrunisa headed to the door in the southern wing of the mosque that would lead her to the passage that led to the baoli. Immediately, Pamposh’s arm snaked out and gripped her wrist. Her eyes flashed as she said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Mehrunisa! Stay out of it.’

Mehrunisa gave her a puzzled look, thrust her hand away, and ran to the door of the windowless room.

She descended a dark stairway into a cool dank chamber. There was little light and she used her fingers to feel her way as she went deeper into the circular well shaft. The noise of the charbagh was left behind and all she heard was her own heart beating. Visions of the time when she was trapped in the Taj Mahal’s labyrinth flashed before her eyes and she shut them out. Rounding a corner, she slipped and clutched at the cold mossy wall, her hands dragging until she recovered her foothold.

Breathe, breathe, she counselled herself as she reached the lowest landing.

A snarl greeted her and in the dim light she saw a man. The jaw twisted with wrath, his lips had disappeared, his eyes were pinpricks and his hair was ablaze. He looked like neither the Arun Toor nor the Raj Bhushan that she knew. It was as if he had shed his external trappings to reveal an accursed core.

‘Why?’ Mehrunisa asked, her voice distraught. ‘Why destroy the Taj Mahal?’ Her voice sounded tinny as she suddenly realised how foolhardy she’d been. She had rushed in, impetuous, without a plan, and now she was facing a madman with not even a stone for self-defence.

With an animal sound he lunged forward and slapped her. She cried out and staggered. He whipped out a pistol, smacked it against her temple, ‘Move!’ He walked Mehrunisa forward where an electric light blazed. Swiftly, he tied her hands above her head and handcuffed her to an overhead pipe.

As Mehrunisa struggled, a shrill voice sang out, ‘Fool!’ Heels clicked into the chamber.

Mehrunisa’s stomach caved in as Pamposh appeared and slung an arm around Toor.

‘Fool,’ she rasped again, ‘we’ve always hated the mongrel that you are, much like your precious Taj Mahal.’ Her eyes were wide with wrath, her tiny frame swelled with loathing.

‘But why attack the Taj? Why make it the symbol of your anger?’

Pamposh sniggered. ‘How like you to ask an obvious question! In that sense, you are quite like the professor: you’ll know everything there is to know about a centuries-old event, yet you fail to notice what is in front of your eyes. Haven’t you seen enough proof that the Taj Mahal was never built by the womaniser Shah Jahan?! We have to restore it to the pristine form it was in before it was usurped by the thieving Mughal.’ Pamposh paused, her chest heaving as she attempted to steady herself.

Toor watched with narrowed eyes. ‘Don’t waste your breath on her,’ he hissed.

But Pamposh stepped forward and jabbed Mehrunisa in the chest with her index finger. ‘Do you know what it is like to be driven out of your home? To have intruders occupy your bedroom, strange hands pluck the fruit from your apple tree, never again see the chinar you grew up with blaze with its fiery flowers? Do you, Mehrunisa? You who are
so
removed from reality, all you want to do is your project on Indo-Persian linkages!
Do you
?’

Pamposh’s face was the simulacrum of pain—the sort of pain frozen by artists in their great works. It was surreal— her friend, a co-conspirator, in league with a madman?

In that susurrus tone she continued, ‘Sun Tzu, have you read him? Keep your friends close, he says, your enemies, closer.’ She leaned into Mehrunisa, her eyes agleam. ‘And we have always been close, haven’t we, Mehroo? Oh, how I have hated you, ever since we were children, and the best part is that you never knew! Imagine my plight—under the care of an uncle who was drunk on Mughal grandeur, playing with a Persian mongrel-cum-gypsy who had no roots. Where have you lived? Isfahan, Dubai, Rome, Delhi—do you even know where you belong? Is there one place you can truly call your own?’ Pamposh snorted.

So this was the angst that Arun Toor had leveraged as he deployed Professor Kaul’s niece against him.

‘Quit wasting your time,’ Toor sniggered. ‘She is from the same region and religion as the bloody Mughals!’

Mehrunisa pulled against the manacles. ‘Don’t gloss your communal rhetoric with bullshit.’

‘Oh! And she’s an intellectual, I forgot to add,’ Toor simpered. ‘An art historian, hunh?’

‘Any day better than a fraudster like you, right?’

Arun Toor lurched towards Mehrunisa and bared his teeth within inches of her face. ‘Who’s interested in history? What is critical is what people believe, what they want to believe. And we are this close,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘
this
close to reclaiming the Taj Mahal as a Shiva temple!’

He swivelled, grabbed Pamposh and started to pull back. ‘As a child little Mehroo got locked in the basement, remember? Now, we’ll leave her here to die.’

He smirked at her, grabbed the torchlight, turned it off and the chamber plunged into darkness. ‘Our work is yet to be finished,’ he whispered.

Mehrunisa heard footsteps moving away. She squinted her eyes and tugged at the overhead pipe.

From a distance Toor’s low voice socked her in the gut.

‘After her, we’ll finish the Mughal-lover Kaul. With the great expert on the Taj gone, let’s see who can stand in our way!’

The memory of the professor, a distended plastic bag around his head, roused Mehrunisa and she started to holler. Twisting and turning she wrenched at the pipe. As she yelled and screamed, her voice started to echo. Mehrunisa paused suddenly. There was another sound beside the echo. Toor had forgotten to switch off the loudspeaker and her yells were resounding around the charbagh.

Mehrunisa filled her lungs and burst into a volley. ‘R.P. Singh ... SSP Raghav ... Toor is in the baoli! The baoli in the south tower of the mosque. Quick! He’s escaping ... The south tower of the mosque...’

In the gardens of the Taj Mahal complex the loudspeaker crackled to life again. But this time, instead of the exhortation to Shiva devotees, the voice pouring forth was an anguished woman’s. Mehrunisa’s appeal floated above the police and the CISF as they herded the troublemakers and cleared the charbagh. Her pleas reached R.P. Singh as he stepped out of the mausoleum with a prone Raghav. Singh froze.

The man who pursued the Naxals in Bastar was a hunter. In every successful hunt he underwent a state of extreme alertness—when his mind processed everything with slow deliberation even as his body sprang into action. He experienced that heightened consciousness now as with calm motions he handed charge of the wounded SSP to a deputy, silently beckoned his men to follow and shot towards the narrow door.

In the well shaft Mehrunisa heard Toor swear loudly as he realised his mistake. But she heard their footsteps hurrying—they must have decided to make a run for it. A desperate Mehrunisa struggled with the pipe. It held firm. She attempted to wriggle out of the rope shackle but it was futile.

The pipe had to be old, she thought, pulling downwards with all her strength. Then she crept her fingers along the pipe, grasped it and swung her feet up, folding her knees so her weight was suspended from the pipe. A creak. She swung harder. Using her right toe as lever, she lurched forward, pendulating awkwardly as her knee scraped on the return. As her hands slipped, she screamed in agony and outrage and anger.

Again she held onto the pipe, folded her knees and launched the oscillation. The rough rope cut into her wrists. She felt as if her shoulders would pop out. There was blood in her mouth from biting her lip. Crrr-eak. She swung again. The crunching sound grew and the pipe snapped, breaking free and hitting her head. She landed in a heap on the cool concrete. With her wrists still in the makeshift cuffs, she stood up, spun on her heels, and fell. Her knees were jelly, her shoulders seemed like footballs swelling from her neck.

Slowly she crawled on the floor till she reached the stairs where she started to drag herself up. As she squinted ahead to locate the fleeing couple, gunshots rang out.

Above her a scuffle erupted. Feet pounded on the steps. Something clattered down and landed above her. Pamposh’s red high heel. A powerful torchlight shone. She heard Pamposh scream. Toor swore, then choked loudly. A shaky Mehrunisa craned her neck up from the step where she had collapsed.

The next instant footsteps bounded down. Powerful hands gripped her upper arms, and R.P. Singh eased Mehrunisa up.

Agra

A
run Toor stirred uneasily on the mattress on which he lay in a cramped cell inside the central police station. The thin bedding and a narrow wood bench were the only furniture, a barred window set high in the rear wall the sole ventilation. In the distance he could hear the murmur of traffic.

Since his arrest, Arun Toor had stayed silent. The manner in which the ingenious plan had gone awry, especially when he was so close to victory, was driving him insane. He had failed his God. The marble monument would persist in its false glory as a Mughal monument of love—temple bells would not ring in praise of Shiva. The Lord would not forgive him.

Growing up in the holy city of Varanasi, he had gone every morning to the Dasaswamedh Ghat—where Lord Brahma himself had paved the way for Shiva’s return to the city after a spell of banishment—for a ritual bath and prayers to the rising sun. In the library of the Benaras Hindu University, he had trawled through books on the glory of the Jats. When he worshipped at the Kashi Vishwanath temple, he made sure to avoid even glancing at the Gyanvapi mosque, which clung to the temple like a leech. He had pledged to eradicate the curse of the Mughal conquerors and return his city’s great religion to its ancient glory—but all of it had come to naught.

Arun stared at the dark ceiling, oblivious to what had appeared at the window. About three feet long and slim, it started to slither noiselessly down the wall towards the recumbent man. Its light brownish colour made it almost invisible in the dark, the brown-black splotches merging with the ill-lit shadows cast from a single low-watt bulb outside the cell. Nocturnal by habit, it was skittish at night. In addition, it had been prodded into irritability. Now, as it glided along the cement floor, it emitted a low rasping sound. Denied its daily diet of rats, field mice, birds, it was irascible as it approached the prey.

Sunk in his anguish, Arun became aware only when, raised above his chest, a head swayed. At the base of it was a pair of dark spots. His eyes followed the thin neck to its coiled body and he heard the hiss.

Shiva, the Lord of regeneration, had sent his emissary to put him out of his misery. It was time to submit to the master and fulfil his dharma, his sacred duty. The chapter, he reflected, had begun with snake venom and now it would end with the same. A full circle. But it was only one chapter—the story was longer, much longer. Shiva was also Ardhnarishwar, half woman. He might go, but his other half, the Shakti to his Shiva, would remain. And there was always Narada, the wise one. Arun closed his eyes and waited, trying to calm his breath.

With lightning speed the snake flashed to Arun’s head and stung. The venom began to course through his body. The poison, a potent coagulant, would soon destroy tissue and blood cells. Its reputation was fearsome: the Russell’s viper accounted for most snakebite deaths in India.

There was a faint whistling,
oo-hoo-oo-hoo
, like a call, and the viper obediently started to slither back to where it had come from.