Race Course Road Read online

  Birendra Pratap’s face looked curiously bloodless as he lay motionless in the ambulance. Dr Saxena and his medical team had been relentlessly trained for just this eventuality: treating an injured Prime Minister as soon as possible and as best they could as he was transported to hospital.

  But even so, the adrenaline rush was making Dr Saxena’s hands shake as he felt Singh’s wrist for a pulse. Nothing. He felt Birendra’s Pratap’s neck. Nothing. One of the paramedics had placed a CPAP mask on the Prime Minister’s face to help him breathe. Another had set up an IV line and was trying to open a port on the PM’s left wrist.

  ‘No, stop,’ shouted Dr Saxena, above the loud wail of the sirens. ‘Get the paddles out. We’ve got to restart his heart.’

  The paddles were charged and applied to Singh’s chest. Once. Twice. Thrice. Four times.

  But Birendra Pratap remained resolutely dead, his sightless eyes looking up vacantly at Dr Saxena and his team.

  ▪

  Karan Pratap Singh, eldest son and designated heir of Birendra Pratap Singh, was conducting a meeting of his party lieutenants in the main drawing room of 7, Race Course Road.

  Contrary to popular belief, 7, Race Course Road, was not where the Prime Minister actually lived, even though it was listed as his official residence. This was effectively the office block, complete with a conference room where the PM could hold Cabinet meetings without venturing out of the fortress-like Prime Minister’s House (PMH) complex, which comprised five Lutyens-style bungalows, spread over 12 acres of manicured gardens.

  The first Prime Minister to move into Race Course Road had been Rajiv Gandhi, who took up residence at Number 5, RCR, in 1984. Arun Singh, his close friend and confidant (in those halcyon days; the two men later fell out rather messily), was assigned the bungalow next door at Number 3, RCR, which was not a part of the PMH complex at the time.

  It was Rajiv’s successor, V. P. Singh who designated 7, Race Course Road, as the official residence of the Prime Minister. And over successive administrations, the other Lutyens bungalows on Race Course Road were incorporated into the RCR complex, until the entire street was annexed and closed off to the public. Number 9 was taken over by the SPG, while Number 1 became a helipad, from where the Prime Minister could fly directly to the airport, without inconveniencing ordinary commuters.

  Every Prime Minister used the complex in different ways. Narasimha Rao lived in Number 3 while Number 5 was given over to his sons and Number 7 became his office. Atal Behari Vajpayee—during whose tenure the helicopter pad was constructed at Number 1 and conference facilities (called Panchvati) created in the RCR complex—chose to live in Number 3, as did Manmohan Singh. His successor Narendra Modi, however, chose Number 5 as his residence.

  After consulting his Vaastu specialist, Birendra Pratap had moved into Number 3 along with his wife, Sadhana Devi. The bungalow at Number 5 was given over to the exclusive use of Karan Pratap and his wife and two kids. Number 7 remained the office block, but one bedroom and sitting room had been set aside as a bachelor pad for the PM’s younger son, Arjun Pratap, with its own separate entrance.

  This morning, as Karan had arrived for his meeting, the door to Arjun’s private quarters was shut despite the advanced hour. No doubt, he was recovering from the rigours of yet another late night, the staple of his ‘bachelor’ lifestyle. When would the guy give up on this endless bacchanalia and do a spot of good honest work? God knows he was more than capable of it.

  Karan suppressed a sigh and turned his attention to the lists in front of him. The general election was a year away but the task of ticket distribution had already begun. And his father had placed him in charge of executing it while ruffling the fewest feathers possible. It really was a hopeless task.

  The quiet of the room was shattered by a loud belch. Karan raised his eyes and looked balefully around the room at all the oily faces with their well-fed bodies clothed in starched white, their expressions carefully obsequious as each tried to get him to nominate his ‘man’. God, how he loathed these creatures, who smiled and smiled with their paan-stained mouths while their beady little eyes told an entirely different story.

  Sighing, Karan picked up the list for Uttar Pradesh once again, noting with a wry smile the plethora of Yadavs on it. It really didn’t matter who he chose, he was going to make a few enemies before the day was done.

  Somehow, he didn’t quite know how, his father always managed to land him with the most thankless job going. If a state party chief had to be upbraided for messing things up, Karan would be dispatched to have a stern word with him. If a minister spoke out of turn to the media, it was Karan who would have to reprimand him. If anyone had to be fired, it would be Karan’s job to give him the news.

  No wonder he was so unpopular with the rank and file of the party, while his father—who floated benevolently above the fray—was so loved. But then, if he had someone to do his dirty work for him, he would have delegated the bad stuff just like his father.

  But whom could he have delegated to? Certainly not to his younger brother, who showed up at party meetings with the gentle whiff of a hangover hovering around him. But despite his exasperation on such occasions, Karan could never find it in himself to take his brother to task. He knew better than anyone else the monsters that haunted Arjun, whose hold he sought to escape with his endless partying and cocaine-filled evenings.

  One day, Karan was sure, Arjun would emerge on to the other side. And when he did, he would find his older brother waiting, the seat beside him empty, ready for Arjun to occupy his rightful place.

  Just as Karan was turning back to his lists, the door opened and Arjun’s head popped through. Karan had turned around when he heard the sound, his face lined with exasperation. This job was hard enough without constant interruptions. But his imprecations died on his lips when he clocked Arjun’s ashen face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked tersely.

  ‘It’s Baba,’ said Arjun, after a beat, ‘He’s being taken to hospital…’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  Karan was now up on his feet, ignoring the speculative buzz arising from all the ticket supplicants. He followed Arjun into the bedroom, where the TV was blaring.

  He stopped short as he saw the images the entire nation had been watching with fascinated horror. Birendra Pratap collapsing on the ground, being hustled away by his SPG and placed into an ambulance.

  Why hadn’t anyone called him yet? Karan checked his mobile phone. The bloody thing was showing no signal as usual. Blast the SPG and their damned jamming of mobile signals in and around RCR.

  Just then, the phone in the living room began ringing. Karan rushed out to answer it, followed by Arjun. He gestured curtly to his secretary, Vikram Sinha, to clear the room, even as he picked up the receiver.

  It was a distraught Shankar Roy at the other end. ‘I am so sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but he’s gone.’

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?’ asked Karan.

  ‘He passed away, sir. Dr Saxena tried his best to revive him. But it was too late.’

  Karan felt himself go cold. His father, dead? How was that even possible? Birendra Pratap was the most alive of men. How could he be dead?

  He could see Arjun collapse into himself as he made sense of the one-way conversation. Even as he felt tears sting his eyes, Karan tried to pull himself together. Somebody in the family had to be strong, now that his father was dead.

  His father was dead. How peculiar those words sounded. And yet they were the truth that would dictate their lives from now on.

  ‘Sir,’ he heard Roy say, ‘What should we do?’

  There was only one thing to do, Karan replied. They must take the Prime Minister to AIIMS and admit him for surgery. No one could know that Birendra Pratap was already dead. They had to sustain the illusion of Singh being alive while they tried to wrest some control over the situation.

  Karan put the phone down and sat down next to his sobbing brother. He
put his arm around Arjun, feeling the same wave of love and protectiveness that he had felt towards his younger sibling when their mother, Annapurna Devi, succumbed to cancer. At ten, he could still make sense of his mother’s passing. But at six, Arjun had been too young to process it. And in some sense, that trauma had shaped the rest of his life. He would always be the lost boy in need of the love and attention that had been snatched away from him so cruelly; a tortured soul trying to fill that hole in his heart with drink, drugs and a party lifestyle.

  Thoughts of his mother inevitably led to the woman who had taken her place in their father’s life but could never supplant her in their own. Sadhana Devi, their stepmother. Oh God, thought Karan. Someone would have to break the news to her. And then, there were his children. How would he tell them that their Daadu was no more?

  Karan’s reverie was broken by a loud knock on the door and the entry of Madhavan Kutty, his father’s Principal Secretary (PS).

  As PS to PM, the deceptively mild-mannered Kutty ran the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with an implacable hand, inspiring both loyalty and fear in equal measure. He and Birendra Pratap went back a long time. They had met when Singh was a junior minister of state and Kutty was joint secretary in his ministry. They had established a rapport pretty much immediately, and remained close ever since. And when Birendra Pratap became Prime Minister, the first appointment he had made was Madhavan Kutty. He needed a PS like Kutty, a man with an iron fist inside an iron glove, to run his office. And Kutty hadn’t disappointed.

  ‘Sir, you’ve heard, haven’t you? We need to get to the hospital fast,’ said Kutty.

  ‘He’s already gone; but we are keeping that quiet for now,’ said Karan, with a calm he couldn’t quite believe he still possessed. ‘We need to tell Sadhanaji before we leave.’

  The news broke Kutty’s preternatural composure for a moment. But he recovered in a minute. ‘I’ll stay with him,’ he said, gesturing to Arjun, ‘while you go and tell the family.’

  Karan practically sprinted through the entrance hall and on to the portico of Number 7. He needed to get to his family and break the news to them before they saw it flashing on some TV channel. His car was already running, with the driver seated at the wheel. He could tell by the solemn faces all around that they had heard the news. Karan got into the backseat while his SPG Personal Security Officer (PSO) took the front seat. The rest of his SPG detail followed in another car as he drove the short distance to 3, Race Course Road.

  Karan entered to find a scene of domestic bliss unfolding in the living room. It was coming up to lunchtime, when the entire family got together at Number 3 (his father always insisted that they have one meal together under his roof; had insisted, he corrected himself) to have a traditional Indian thali meal. He paused for a moment at the door to take in the tableaux they presented, as they waited to be summoned to table.

  His wife, Radhika, was still in her workout gear, wearing a baby-pink tracksuit that clung tightly to those curves she tried so hard to subdue with a judicious mix of Pilates and spinning. Idly flicking through a glossy magazine, her blonde-highlighted hair pulled tightly back from her flushed, makeup-less face, she had never looked more beautiful to Karan.

  In her now thirty-eight-year-old face he still saw the giddy young schoolgirl he had fallen in love with. They had met at a ‘social’ organized by their boarding schools in Dehradun—he the tall and handsome cricket captain of Doon, she the prettiest girl at Welhams. Karan, a shy and awkward seventeen-year-old had taken his courage into his hands and asked Radhika for a dance. The Beatles were playing ‘She was just seventeen’ as they swung out on to the floor. Radhika had giggled, peeking up mischievously from under her upswept lashes. ‘Well, close enough,’ she had said, ‘I am just two years short of that.’

  Karan had lost his heart to her in that moment. And now, more than two decades later, here they were, with two pretty little daughters of their own.

  Kavya and Karina were ensconced on the sofa, flanking Sadhana Devi, their step-grandmother, who was listening attentively as they told her about their latest escapades at their school. It occurred to him, with a pang, that at ten and six, they were exactly the age he and Arjun had been when they lost their mother. For them too, an untimely demise would mean the loss of innocence, the death of childhood.

  Almost as if they had sensed his pain, both girls looked up and saw him. Their faces alight with joy, they abandoned their Daadi and came running towards him. This was an unexpected bonus; Dad hardly ever made it home in time for lunch. Frolicking like over-excited puppies, they almost knocked him over with their enthusiastic welcome. Only Radhika, looking up at him, realized that something was wrong.

  ‘That’s enough, girls,’ she called out sharply, ‘give your Dad some space.’

  ‘Everything okay?’ she asked her husband as he came into the room.

  He shook his head mutely and gestured that she should take the girls away. ‘I need to speak with Amma,’ he said.

  Sadhana Devi looked surprised. Her stepsons took such little notice of her that the idea that one of them should seek her out was startling in its novelty.

  Karan waited till the kids had been shepherded out of the room, protesting bitterly at their eviction. He then sat down on the sofa next to his stepmother.

  There was an awkward silence for a moment. Karan couldn’t remember when he had last been alone with Sadhana Devi. Every time they met, there was always a buffer between them: his father, Radhika, the kids…

  ‘You wanted to speak to me, beta?’ asked Sadhana Devi tentatively. ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s Baba,’ Karan began, his voice breaking. ‘I’m afraid there is some bad news.’

  Sadhana Devi turned as grey as the silk sari she was wearing. ‘What happened? Tell me please,’ she went on urgently, as Karan struggled to get the words out of a throat swollen with unshed tears.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she said, her voice rising on a wave of hysteria.

  This had been her recurring nightmare ever since her husband had scored a surprise victory and been sworn in as the Prime Minister. Every single day when Birendra Pratap left the house, Sadhana Devi held her breath until he was safely back within the secured confines of Race Course Road. But now, it seemed that her nightmares had come true.

  Karan nodded, his tears finally escaping down his cheeks. He was truly an orphan now; both his mother and father gone. All he was left with now was this fraudulent parent, this faux mother, who was rapidly disintegrating in front of his eyes.

  He put an arm around Sadhana Devi awkwardly, the gesture as alien to him as it was to her. Her sobs just increased in intensity and volume. He saw Radhika re-enter the room through the corner of his eye and gratefully relinquished his stepmother to her charge.

  But before he could escape, Sadhana Devi recovered enough to ask, ‘Where is he? I must go to him.’

  ‘No Amma, that is not going to be possible. I need you to stay here. Radhika and the kids will stay here with you.’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me what I can or cannot do! He is my husband. I need to go to him,’ she shouted through her sobs, anger overcoming sorrow for a brief moment.

  Karan turned his back—not for the first time or the last—on his stepmother and walked out, leaving his wife to deal with the grieving widow.

  ▪

  Gaurav Agnihotri was apoplectic with anger. The editor-in-chief of the News Tonight Network (NTN) paced up and down his office, as his deputy editor and production in charge quailed in their seats at the conference table in the corner. The bank of televisions that covered an entire wall was showing what was playing on all the other news channels. By now, every news network had managed to get their OB vans into AIIMS and was broadcasting from there. The only channel whose reporter on the spot was calling in on the phone was NTN. Apparently, there was some glitch in the network, which the technicians were working to fix.

  ‘Just how long is it going to take?’ Gaurav asked yet again
, his voice quivering with fury. ‘It’s been ten minutes since they’ve been working on it. That’s a lifetime on live television!’

  There was no answer from the men quailing in the corner. They were used to Agnihotri’s wild rage, but this temper tantrum was in a different league altogether.

  Gaurav stopped his pacing suddenly and switched on the sound of the television beaming AITNN’s feed to the world. Manisha Patel, her immaculately highlighted hair swishing gently around her shoulders, was looking suitably solemn as she did her piece to camera: ‘The Prime Minister has been rushed into surgery. Our sources inside AIIMS tell us that the PM’s condition is stable but serious. The senior leadership of the party has already arrived at the hospital as have Birendra Pratap’s two sons, Karan and Arjun.’

  Gaurav felt that familiar mix of anger and admiration wash over him as he watched Manisha on the screen. How did she manage it? How did she succeed in getting in front of the story no matter what? And why was it that every minister who trooped into AIIMS was first stopping by to pay homage at her shrine, taking questions they clearly had no answer to.

  As he watched Manisha go into sympathetic-listener mode, Gaurav’s mind flashed back to the time that both of them had started as lowly reporters at Doordarshan (DD) News. Coming up against the tired old bureaucracy in charge of DD News, they had bonded over bread pakoras and masala chai in the office canteen, swapping war stories and comparing battle wounds. And then, with a speed that was both astonishing and inevitable in equal measure, they had found themselves in bed, caught up in a passion that took both of them by surprise.

  Of course, it hadn’t lasted. How could it? They were both Alphas. Both had been competing for the same stories. And neither was willing to back off or compromise. The end had been brutal, with each turning on the other viciously. They hadn’t exchanged as much as a ‘hello’ since then. And now, a decade later, Gaurav felt that old bitterness corrode his insides, as he saw Manisha performing what he derisively referred to as her Oprah Winfrey-number.