Guha recalled his early days as a newspaper reporter at the Daily Express. He had been one of their best reporters. He had imagined that his outstanding work would also make him popular among his colleagues. He’d almost imagined himself as universally loved and admired. That had been when he’d decided to contest elections for the Press Council of India.
It was a twenty-nine-member body ensuring press freedoms were maintained and that members of the fourth estate exercised responsibility and maintained ethical standards in their reporting. Guha had been convinced he would be able to force the mainstream press to report freely and fearlessly once he was on the council.
Of the twenty-nine members, thirteen represented working journalists, of whom six were to be editors of newspapers and the remaining seven were to be working journalists other than editors. These seven positions would usually be filled by nominations from newspapers around the country but the Daily Express was different and egalitarian. It allowed for internal elections that would decide who would be sent as the newspaper’s representative to the council.
Guha had lost badly.
Dejected, he had been about to hand in his resignation at the Daily Express when his editor had called him into his office. “Even though you lost, I like your spunk,” the editor had told him. “I had a chance to hear some of the talks that you gave to your colleagues. They were pretty good. Have you considered a career in television?”
The editor had proceeded to tell Guha that the Daily Express had decided to start a twenty-four-hour news channel called DETV. A consortium of investors had agreed to fund the project. The editor had felt that Guha would be ideally suited to anchor the primetime news show and spearhead the channel’s investigations. Guha had jumped at the opportunity.
Life was suddenly being kind to him. During his stint contesting elections, he had met a young columnist who worked the entertainment desk. Her name was Rita and she’d had the most gorgeous dimples when she smiled. Guha had fallen head over heels in love with her and they had ended up getting married just three months later.
Guha had worshiped the ground Rita walked on. Never had a day gone by without him sending her notes, flowers, and little presents to tell her how much he loved her. They had taken weekend trips to romantic hotels and on one such trip Rita had collapsed as she was getting into the car. An ambulance had rushed her to hospital, where a series of diagnostic tests had been performed. The doctor had informed Guha that Rita had a condition known as cardiomyopathy. It was a disease in which the heart muscle—the myocardium—progressively deteriorated, eventually leading to heart failure. While less severe versions of the condition could be handled with medication, pacemakers, defibrillators, or ablation, the severest forms would eventually result in death. The only alternative was a heart transplant.
Guha’s life had been turned upside down yet again. While Rita had remained in a hospital bed, Guha had begun to meet cardiologists and heart specialists to find ways to save the life of the woman he loved. He had eventually settled on a brilliant surgeon from Kerala whose practice was from a private hospital in New Delhi. He had successfully carried out eleven heart transplants and was acknowledged as India’s leading specialist in the procedure. He had painstakingly put out the word to various hospitals that he was in need of a heart that matched the age, weight, and size requirements of Rita.
Usually such requests took months for any response, but then there had been a miracle. A young man who was brain dead was being taken off life support at a hospital in Pune and the family had decided that the best tribute they could pay their son would be to allow his organs to live on inside others. The Pune surgeon had telephoned Rita’s doctor to convey the good news. “We’ll ensure that the organ reaches you within four hours of removal,” he’d said.
The next day they had waited. And then waited some more. And then there had been a call from Pune. There had been a delay in transporting the organ to Pune Airport owing to traffic. They had diverted the organ to Mumbai instead in order to ensure that the ischemic time requirement was met and that the organ was put to use for another patient.
A week later Rita had died.
Guha had been a broken man but he had refused to cry. After all, he was the Deliverer. How could the Deliverer go soft? His whole life had been a series of terrible events. Guha had picked himself up and gone back to the studio and that had become his new battlefield. It was Rita’s death that had made Guha into the aggressive and relentless television crusader that people now knew him as.
Several months after Rita had died, his Kerala-based doctor had met with him. He’d revealed to Guha that he was suspicious of what had transpired. Upon making inquiries, he had found that there had been no transport delay in Pune. He had been convinced that someone somewhere had been bribed in order to make the organ available to someone else.
“Who?” Guha had asked.
The doctor had shrugged. “Difficult to say. There are many unscrupulous people and dodgy organizations that are profiting from such activities. This is nothing short of a war.”
It had been no longer sufficient to seek the truth by ruthlessly pursuing criminals and scammers in his studio. The entire nation depended on him to clean up the mess created by politicians and corrupt officials. The nation wanted justice. It was the Deliverer’s job to deliver it.
Chapter 108
CARROT AND STICK began. And what the watching public saw was Ajoy Guha in his usual black leather seat. Sharp-eyed viewers might have noticed that there was a splodge of blood on the sleeve of his white shirt, and that he was a little more agitated and unkempt than usual, but otherwise it was the same Ajoy Guha in his usual place, legs crossed, cheek bulging slightly with a lozenge that he sucked, beadily regarding his viewers through his glasses.
“Good evening,” he said. “Tonight I would like to talk to you about our wonderful city’s health care.”
He held up Maya’s essay and read the title. “‘Health Care, Fair and Square?’ by Maya Gandhe. This essay came into my possession a few days ago, when I was in the act of murdering the pedophile Amit Roy.”
Here Guha paused, as though to leave room for the audience reaction. However, there was never any audience for Carrot and Stick, and on this particular occasion there were no production staff present either. Moments before the show had gone live, with the producer and various researchers panicking that their presenter had not yet appeared, Ajoy Guha had turned up. He had been using one hand to push a bound, gagged, and beaten-looking Jai Thakkar into the studio. In the other hand he’d held a Glock 17.
In moments Guha had cleared the studio, using locks designed to prevent intruders disrupting the show to lock himself and Thakkar alone into the studio. A skeleton staff had remained behind in the control room. Guha had warned them that Thakkar would die if they failed to broadcast events as they unfolded. Threats or not, all involved knew full well that the broadcast would continue.
Among those locked out were the Private team, Sharma, and a small squad of armed response officers, all of them watching on monitors in a corridor outside the studio. Guha had set the camera to roll but couldn’t change the angle or depth of vision, so what it failed to broadcast was that at Guha’s feet lay Thakkar, his eyes nervously fixed on the Glock Guha held to his forehead, also out of sight.
At the mention of Maya, Nisha’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh God,” she said, as Guha continued his monologue.
“From the pen of this young girl comes hope for the future. A simple desire that health care for Delhi, for the whole of India, should be delivered in a more egalitarian fashion.” He held up the essay, now somewhat dog-eared. “This essay—I’ve posted it to my Twitter account and I urge you to read it—this essay is a vision of the future penned by a little girl. Just a child. However, the piece of film I’m about to show you is a terrifying vision of the present—though soon, I hope to consign it to the past—run by the so-called adults, our leaders and representatives, our corporate heads and ministers, the doctors who command our trust—all of them committed not to saving lives as they would have us believe, but to lining their own pockets at our expense.
“This bit of film will shock you, I guarantee it. And you may watch it and feel the familiar sense of injustice and impotence. You will ask yourself if things will ever change. Well, ladies and gentlemen, when the report is over, we’ll come back and I will show you change. I will show you change in action.”
He looked over the top of his glasses at the control room, waggling the Glock threateningly. Those in the control room did as they were asked, and as newsmen, they did it gladly. They ran the story.
In the corridor outside, cops and the Private team gathered around a flustered studio manager. “The idea is that if you know the code you can lock the door from the inside,” she explained nervously, “and of course Ajoy knows the code.”
“There must be a way to override it,” said Santosh.