The Court of Lanka: Chapter 2
Bhoothāla
Sanjaya uvaacha(speaks)
31st December 2018
When you look across the world on your terrace in the night, glazing across dim and distant lights. Its soothing. Everything calm and orderly. The world seems not so bad after all. But I know the strangest and mysterious forces are acting in plane sight. It has been 10 years since the cleansing.
A lot has changed since then. The international borders are just for the sake of geography and history. You might think wow! Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ( The whole world is our family). If you thought that, you are right. But the only problem is this whole family is on fire. Utopia? Complete opposite. Murder, Abduction, Bombing, Human trafficking and Synthetic Drug dealers in broad daylight. To make you understand the graveness of the situation in your language, it was like if The Joker was the president. How did everything go back down to the ground? So in 2009, when we promised we won't wield weapons again, uhm we were Exaggerating. We managed to stay self-reliant and without any crime for three years. Which meant we governed ourselves and policed ourselves. Government and Institutions like police rely on us being reliant on them. But when we had absolutely no necessity of them, they became irrelevant and hence they fell. So no government and no law enforcement. The new found peace we had was us being fed up of doing the same thing for years i.e. being violent. The long wars had made everyone violent by nature, you could say survival instinct. For three years, we suppressed our true nature to do what we know was the right thing to do. But, everything has a threshold. All it took was one guy with hot trigger and deep PTSD from the war. One public kill in Times Square, New York created a domino effect, sending ripples of violence that everybody had been agressively containing within themselves like a battery being recharged of chaos across the world. The situation is same as when there was war. But this time, it was worse because people did it out of their own accord, not for some rich fat white guy who inherited money from five generations. They were so inventive and creative in their crimes, there were dead body art galleries. 10 years since the cleansing and we are living among more rakshashas(demons) than humans. Gods? They seemed non-existent. I call this spiralled out of control situation of ours as, Bhoothāla i.e. when bhoomi has become pathala.
Who am I? What role do I have here?I am Sanjaya, a silent concerned spectator. I have decided to not just watch anymore so I invest on people. People you fear, people you run away from, people with so much skills it’s a shame they are what they are and I have decided I'll do something about the hell loop we are in. Instead of unorganised, brutal and random killings I plan on cleaning the streets and organise crime to exactly what it is: Art. Still don't know anything significant about me? Don’t worry you won’t, even when I am right in front of you.
My plan is quite an ambition. I can't do this alone. In fact, I won't do it at all. My investments are going to do it for me. My endeavors are irrational and unconventional but I am only human. My first investment was someone I greatly admired, A public speaker of ethics with a legitimate degree and striking intelligence. A mastermind with eye that leaves no stone unturned. An idealist of anonymity and reformation, he believes in true reformation not the one where people are locked up, but the driving force of purpose. With tactics so efficient he has a 100% success rate. Most importantly a strong moral compass. He is the perfect Chanakya. Weapon of choice- just hope there never comes a time when he has to pick one up. Before cleansing Chanakya was the strategic advisor of the Asian forces. He planned courses of action for sustaining the invasion from Saddam Hossain. It was impossible to defeat Hossain but it is because of visionary masterminds like Chanakya, it was possible to hold the forces of West at bay.
Like I said he has a thing for reformation of people on the run from their own chaotic nature.
He first sheltered a phenomenal getaway driver. He drives everything from fighter jets to cruisers even horses. Hence, I call him Nakula. After the cleansing, Nakula became an F1 driver. He was the son of a spy in the midst of the Indian government who covertly worked for Saddam Hussein. Everything he knows now he learnt from his father. Weapon of choice: 8mm in the glove compartment of his ford Mustang Shelby GT350.
The second refugee under Chanakya’s roof is a sneaky son of a gun. He knows his cards, knows what strings to pull, information is his business and his weapon of choice: words. He is currently hiding as a stock market expert.
Before cleansing he was a negotiator and bookkeeper of the army. He managed the heavy costs of war and in critical situations also mediated the forces to safety by countering a deal. He is a beyond perfect Narada.
The next one excites me the most. She was a chess grandmaster at 15. She has backdoors to places on the net you didn’t even know existed. She built the search algorithms used by every single person by 19. Hacked intergalactic space authority for attack and defense(ISAAC) and Neutral evaluation of warfare and threat observatory network(NEWTON) and planted an undetected Trojan by 21. She’s the borderline of good and evil with an ideology that the end justifies the means just like when lord Vishnu takes the form of Mohini to smuggle the potion of immortality from the demons to the gods. No doubt she is a Mohini. Weapon of choice: A laptop.
The last investment is a brother-sister twin package deal: Yamuna and Yama raj. For obvious simplification reasons we’ll call them Yami and raj. For three years Yami was a bounty hunter and Raj, a big man was recruited into the army, and was soon recruited into covert special ops project: Bahadur. Weapon of choice: A whole goddamn arsenal but anything they can grab on is just fine.
Mr. Chanakya has everything to lose in this. Teaming up with a bunch of criminals is not easy to keep under a leash. I have challenges too. I can’t let my investments blow over me when things go south. I have to tell them what to do anonymously.
I created an archaeological website. And I posed as a fellow historian with the user-name sanjaya_18. Sanjaya is indeed a perfect name for me too just like he witnessed every battle that occurred in Kurukshetra but did nothing, I see everything but far away from the battle field. While my investment is surrounded by enemy guns I would be sipping coffee and just watching things go down. After all, the rest of the country is like the father of Kauravas, blind. In the archaeological website, sanjaya_73 is a private researcher. He uploads his research to his only client: Chanakya. I send pages of history about certain topics and then include information and instructions about the targets in the hashtags. If the information is to be delivered directly…they have to download the archaeological software which has an encrypted data file.
Their Base of operations is quite sophisticated and in plane of sight like everything else. Located in Bangalore, The top five floors of a stout tower with technology and facilities as good as they come. The tower to normal eyes is a Company headquarters of Reva, A cold storage facility that provides cryochambers for storing dead bodies for future in case advancements in science allow reviving the dead. The best part? Right in the center of all the chaos owned by one of my dead-end aliases with no digital footprint. It is perfect for my people to take control of the chaos widespread in the city. Hence it is called Lanka, like the demon King Ravana’s kingdom. That's right they aren’t saints. What they are is necessary and they’ll do what ever it takes to get the city in control.