JANUARY 28, 2022
T.NAGAR, CHENNAI
The clock on the wall chimes eleven but sleep is the last thing on Ganesh's mind. For someone as punctilious to the core, one who ensures lights are off before nine, tonight was quite an aberration. The 57 year old paced up and down the hard floor of his humble rented r bachelor pad, his mind engrossed in some deep thought even as his arms flailed all over, his long legs flinging all around and in real danger of dashing into the central wooden table that took up almost a third of the space.
The spartan room looked as empty as a middle class housewife's purse at the middle of the month. At some point, Ganesh stopped, turned around and gingerly sat at the only other furniture in the room__a rickety wicker chair, a contraption so suspect that it could any moment fall apart, its occupant dashing onto on the hard floor.
A few minutes of quietness followed ably aided by the cigarette smoke that he vigorously pulled into his lungs. The man was an addict, in more ways one.
His mind now at ease, Ganesh, the master tactician began to muse. And to aid him further in that endevour was his BLUE BOOK. He extricated the small pocket thing from an inner drawer, and picking up a pen, he spent the next 45 minutes drawing a blueprint.
A clear, point by point elaboration on how he would actuate his plan. At the end of this exercise, Ganesh stepped back, and inspected the plan, this time going through every detail with a fine comb.
Fully satisfied, he relaxed and broke into a smile. It was the curve to beat all curves. The smile of a winner, of a veteran, one who’d won several wars even though he knew the one war that he was about to wage was the mother of all wars, the battle to beat all battles.
Phew! How much he needed a release! He picked up his phone and stabbed a few keys. As the call went through, Ganesh felt a red hot wave pass through his loins.
"Rati, come soon. I’m famished. I want to devour you badly".
***
RATI
Everybody knew her as Ganesh's girl. But everybody also knew not to cross swords with her. Despite being born in a back of beyond Chennai slum, Mother Nature had been kind to her. Of above average height and enough brains, she also had what many lacked, and what drove men crazy: sex appeal.
Oodles of it.
It was in her kohl lined come hither eyes, in her thick luscious lips, in her lustrous jet black hair, in every single gesture that she did. Her ample bosom and her well framed posterior could stop a train in its tracks.
Such was the power of her sexuality.
Plus, she was a chameleon and given the right set of clothes, could switch from poor lost soul to super rich spoilt brat to weeping saint to bad ass bitch in a jiffy.
She was every male's wildest wet dream, and the best part was that she knew that and leveraged it all to her advantage once too often.
And that's exactly how she landed herself the role of a lifetime as Ganesh's Girl, his bitch, the whole sole possessor of the heart, mind, and body of the most feared man in half of Chennai.
Ganesh: her guru; Ganesh, her benefactor; Ganesh, her friend, philosopher, guide.
Also, Ganesh, her lover for ever.
She was at the hospital when the call came, nursing to her mother. The poor soul was at the end stages of her life, battling the debilitating effects of fourth stage cancer. Thirteen cycles of chemo had sucked the innards of the 69 year old's body.
Rati bent closer, kissed her mother's forehead, and bid adieu. Her mother was lost to sleep, lost to life. It's what happens when grief is too overwhelming.
Once outside, Rati stood in front of a passing auto. A three wheeler slowed down. She jumped into it's backseat.
"T NAGAR", she barked.
All through the fifteen minute journey, the middle aged driver didn't even dare to glance through the rear view at her; instead, maintain a stoic silence. Such was the fear unleashed when infamous as Ganesh’s Girl.
***
GANESH KANDASWAMY AKA BOSS
An orphan, Ganesh had a rough start, the roughest of rough starts. His parents, whom he hadn't ever seen, died in a horrific transit camp fire, barely hours after a midwife had helped bring him to the world. His mother, heavily pregnant with him, had accompanied her husband from Jaffna on a boat crowded with fellow Sri Lankan Tamilians fleeing the wrath of the army as civil war raged all over the pear shaped island nation.
In the camp at Meenambakkam on the outskirts there were some fifty other families. The triple whammy of losing one's parents, having none to call his own, and also stuck in an alien land ensured that the first ten years of his life were a matter of life and death.
A sickly child left to the mercy of hapless men and women who themselves were struggling to make two ends meet, Ganesh met reality face to face pretty early in life.
The camp life, harsh as it was, was a prison in more than ways than one. One night, a man who he called Mamma, a sixty something drunkard, lifted the ten year old under the cover of darkness. The next morning he was found at a ditch a mere 100 meters from the camp. There a was a three inch deep knife wound that ran from his left ear to his lower lips. His shirt was missing and the kid's entire puny frame was swathed in blood.
Some kind souls took him to the nearest medical centre. There he lay, unconscious and barely alive for the next 36 hours. It was only on the fourth day that the doctor was able to detect some pulse. A week thereon, once the medics confirmed that the boy would live, he was discharged, the medical bills all taken care of.
His benefactor: Sattar, another Tamilian, an oak of a man, a criminal to boot, but also one ever ready to help a fellow Sri Lankan, especially someone who was an orphan as well as one who was brutally raped and left to die on a cold Chennai wintry night. Sattar Mian, took the boy to his palatial home, a gargantuan seven room double storied sea facing structure whose front gate had a gold embellished name plate etched with the eponymous legend SATTAR'S. It was he with whom a young Ganesh lived the next decade of his life till the day Sattar was brutally hacked to death in his sleep by an unknown man who entered the otherwise fortified bungalow posing as a masseuse that Sattar had requisitioned for.
Having lost his parents, and now his saviour, Ganesh, now all of twenty, was once again back on the streets. But this time, he was clear he needed no saviours for he knew life's battles needed to be fought all alone. Though he hadn't seen the inside of a school, young Ganesh knew very well Darwin principles. It's a jungle out there and it was a matter of life and death. The name of the game was survival of the fittest.
***
RAMI REDDY aka GUTTER
Day or night, Gutter was always found in or near the gutter. Perennially drunk, the man, shabbily dressed in a torn vest and half jeans that looked as if it had seen much better days, had no fixed address.
Wherever the bar was (or, more specifically where ever there was a bottle, or even the smell of a bottle) his wobbly feet went. No one knew where he came from, what he did, where he bathed or ate or not; but anyone who came in close contact with him knew the 39 year old was a very dangerous person. And so they kept their distance.
At around three in the afternoon, he was found lying face down in a drain that overflowed with chemical discharges in Ambattur Industrial Area. The man who pulled him out of the gutter, dragged him to a water pipe nearby, and splashed no less than five buckets of water all over him.
An hour later, thus washed and dried, he found himself seated in a roadside beer bar, downing a bottle of whisky. An hour further on, he was riding pillion on a stolen bike that headed towards Third Street, T. NAGAR.
The man riding the bike was six feet tall. A full flock of thick black hair crowned a rugged pock marked face that was not quite unlike of a Tamil film villain A beedi dangled from his swarthy lips from which he dragged copious puffs not stopping till he screeched his massive bullet to a halt outside a single story ramshackle building that stood at the end of a nondescript inner lane that was as silent as the non-existent Chennai wind.
His name was Dhanush aka Bullet
***
Thirty Minutes Later...
Ganesh sanguinely strode into the room. Both he and the room reeked of several abhorrent odours, cheap country liquor being the overriding smell. Condoms, used, disused and abused, umpteen Uncle Chips packets, half torn women's undergarments and vomit and spit and blood and several other undesirables stuck to the decrepit walls and all around, a few even hung upside down from half broken, fully rusted hooks.
It was Ganesh's den. One even the Devil would think twice before stepping in.
A minute later he was joined by Rati, who sauntered in nonchalantly wearing an itsy bitsy pale yellow skirt and an unbuttoned maroon top that ensured most of her ample bosom popped out her blouse. Her eyes shone bright, and why not! She had just been hungrily ravished and ravaged by that beast she knew as her soulmate.
Beside her, standing tall in his full six feet glory was the man himself, Ganesh. His steely eyes bored into every single person present in the half it room.
"Ok, so here's the deal. Fifty lakhs for each one of you. That is if we get the entire loot, and that too if we don't get caught". A palpable gasp escaped into the air.
Rami Reddy looked at Bullet. The latter's face was as bland as last night's leftovers. At the instant, the door flung open, and in came the smallest, littlest dwarf one could imagine. 'Sorry, Bullet Bhai gave the message very late".
Four pairs of eyes turned around to look at the creature who was standing at the door, one puny hand holding on to the edges of his dark grey half pants that barely reached his skinny upper legs.
Ganesh smirked, opened his mouth to say something but at the nth moment checked himself. Instead, he nodded at the 69 year old new entrant who looked no more than an emaciated nine year old.
Standing to his right, Rati nudged him with a slight touch of her left shoulder. That brought Ganesh back to the business at hand even as it shot a fresh flow of hot blood into his loins.
Temporarily brushing all thoughts carnal aside, Ganesh looked at his gang members who by now had seated themselves on makeshift chairs, a few on the floor too.
"Ok", commenced Ganesh, "Here's the plan. We are robbing the State Bank of Madras next Friday, just after closing hours. The bank is closed for Saturday and Sunday. Monday being Raksha Bandhan, would reopen only on Tuesday. Meaning it would be over 72 hours before the crime would be detected, enough time for us to vanish. "That is if we don't get caught, right"?
Ganesh looked at Bullet. There was respect in his eyes for the latter. Ganesh smiled back. It was a case of mutual respect. Both were made of the same cloth; both hard core criminals, both intelligent and full of daredevilry, and both ambitious and beastly to the core.
"Yes, that's if we don't get caught. And for that not to happen we all must do our respective jobs to perfection."
For the next two hours Ganesh explained in minutiae his grand yet highly audacious plan to rob the biggest bank of South India of a mind boggling 25 crores.
***
D DAY
11.30, FRIDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 20, 2022
Gutter, followed by Sattar entered a fifty feet deep gutter that led to a tunnel that ran parallel to the bank. For the next 100 metres the two slithered their way through the narrow drain until they found themselves staring at a manhole straight above their heads. It was Bullet who lifted it's lid, and hurled himself up. Gutter followed suit. The two were inside the strong room of the bank.
The spadework had begun three months ago. Rati had worked her charm on the bank chief cashier and the two night security guards. Video footage of the three, all married, as well as some gentle 'coaxing' by Ganesh did the trick. The gang had the bank’s entire blue print besides also ensuring all cameras and alarm systems turned dysfunctional. The next twenty minutes was all it took for the gas cutters to work their magic, and for the duo to stuff all currency into two white suitcases that 'miraculously' entered the bank along with Rati and Ganesh and hid themselves during non-banking hours.
At exactly 12 midnight the bank doors opened itself (again miraculously!) for the four to straddle out with the loot. It was then that there was a spanner in the works.
The gateway vehicle didn't materialise.
Reason: Stupid.
The best car driver in all of Chennai dozed off at the wheel. As precious minutes ticked by, Ganesh activated Plan B. He coolly ordered Bullet and Gutter to disappear in the opposite direction and not to be seen or heard for the next six months. Then, the duo, each holding a suitcase, walked the next fifty metres, and helped themselves straight into the lobby of Diplomat Deluxe, the 24 story 5 star hotel at the end of the street.
It would be a mere twenty minutes before Mr and Mrs Aravinda De Silva would be checked into Room No. 404 as guests from Colombo slated to attend the 44th Annual South Asian International Business Summit. Two days later, Flight NO. 319A Sri Lanka Airlines took off from Chennai International Airport. Looking out from the window was a very beautiful Rati alias Alia Quereshi. Seated next to her was Ganesh alias Usman Quereshi. It would be another hour before they would land in Colombo. And another week before they could lay their hands on 25 crores__their just desserts sent via hawala channels. And it would be another year before they would be joined by the other intrepid gang members.
***
A YEAR LATER...
SINGAPORE
MORNING HOURS...
The weather was proving a loyal customer. As predicted, it was raining cats and dogs since morning, right from daybreak. Ganesh mounted his lady love and so began yet another pulsating session of hard core love making. From Rati's well sucked lips emanated enough delirious screams. Sensuous pleasure dripping aahs and oohs emanated that threatened to gush out of the 40th floor penthouse and echo all around the emerald emblazoned Singapore skyline.
An hour later, the two were ensconced in French sofas, stark naked, and nursing the finest scotch distilled from a 12th century cask. The beverage was especially imported all the way from Scotland, courtesy one of their overseas business partners.
The duo stopped and looked into each other's eyes. They then kissed, and the love making commenced all over again. Four hours later, all washed and bathed, their bodies satiated in more ways than one, the two stepped out of Palace in Heaven, their uber sea facing bode. , Impeccably dressed in top end business suits, they smelled and looked a million bucks. More than a million bucks, that is!
And why wouldn't they! The last year was a life changer. The 25 crores was enough to resettle themselves and the other gang members. Was enough to gift themselves new names, new identities, new businesses to start and a few to take over.
And haven't we heard of the dictum: money begets money!
Ganesh, the ever ambitious kind, had forged new alliances, converted all his money into white, and through some prudent investments, was now worth five times over.
Amazingly, he had done the impossible ably assisted by Rati, Bullet, and others.
As the two fell into comfy leather seats of their chauffeur driven cherry red BMW that was draped in diamonds, Rati aka Eva Samudraselvam slided upto Ganesh aka Sundar Samudraselvam.
The husband and wife duo, one MD, the other COO of Blueberry Airlines, the newest low cost airline that was creating aviation history with their best in class, best in-flight and best on time services the industry had ever seen, looked and smiled at one another.
They were the smiles of two winners who knew they had gotten away.
As Rati never stopped reminding Ganesh, Stupid's no show was 'a blessing in disguise'.