TRAMPLED

Ajit Koshy could see his hands shivering. He was also getting an unbearable ache in his joints. It was afternoon and he hadn't had his smoke yet. Ajit was addicted to brown sugar and he knew he had to get down to the local dealer to get his 'package'.

But today, he was excited and confused. He had caught something on his camera that could fetch him a lot of money, but it could also be very dangerous.

Ajit was the 24-year-old son of Antony 'Tony' Koshy, the reputed wildlife photographer of the seventies and eighties. Tony Koshy's magical reproduction of the Asiatic lions of Gir forest, the Royal Bengal tigers of Ranthambore, and the Elephants of Nilgiris were still considered as the best reproductions of Indian wildlife by any photographer.

Then while on a trip to shoot African elephants in Kenya, he got too close to a herd and was attacked and trampled by a protective female.

After three months in a hospital in Nairobi, he came back to India in a wheelchair, a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down. And incredibly fortuitous to be alive. After all, very few survive an elephant attack.

A jit was only 14 then and they lived in a big apartment overlooking the sea in Shivaji Park, an up-market area in Central Bombay.

Post his injury, his friends and colleagues quietly disappeared and Tony took his ire out on his wife Shirley and Ajit.

Unable to bear him, Shirley left him for his best friend, or rather his ex-best friend whose only condition was that she should come alone.

That left Ajit at the mercy of his bedridden, cynical father and he never forgave his mother for abandoning him at that formative juncture of his life.

Tony needed a full-time nurse and someone to take care of Ajit. The doctor treating him arranged for a nurse and Tony recruited an ex-assistant of his named Michael to look after Ajit.

Medium height, dark, wiry and mean, Michael moved in with the Koshys and soon was humping the ugly nurse in the day and sodomizing Ajit at night.

Michael was addicted to hashish and brown sugar and he got young Ajit addicted too.

Tony passed away in 1995 leaving behind huge debts. Ajit had to sell their swanky apartment to repay the debts and got himself a small one-bedroom apartment just outside the city limits in Dahisar.

He got rid of Michael and the nurse and lived alone. The locality was shady and surrounded by pick-up joints and 'rent by the hour' lodges.

The area suited Ajit because it was easy to get his daily dose of brown sugar without much fuss.

His father's Nikon SLR with telescopic lenses was the only inheritance he had left. With no source of income and an expensive addiction, Ajit hit upon a novel idea for subsistence.

From his bedroom window, he could see the rooms of Night Palace Lodge which was across the road. He would train his camera into the rooms, with the powerful telescopic zoom catching details that were beyond natural eyesight.

Every other day, he would catch a drunk, married man with a prostitute in the room on his camera, before the lights were switched off.

Ajit had an accomplice who worked at the reception of the lodge. He would provide him with the contact details of the man from the hotel register.

Ajit would then approach the man and offer to sell the photos and negatives to him for a small cost. He was careful not to be too greedy and conducted his blackmailing with a great deal of honesty. He would ask for Rs 5000 and if the victim haggled, he would settle for Rs 3000.

This way, the victim would not feel the pinch and avoid going to the cops. After all, the victim knew that the cops would extort a lot more than Rs 5000 if he went to them.

But last night his drug-infused sleep was disturbed by a nightmare of an elephant chasing him down and trampling him.

Ajit had woken up with a start, his heart palpitating and sweating profusely.

He had peed a little in his pajamas, so he had gotten up to empty his bladder and change into dry shorts. Since he was too scared to go back to sleep, he went to the window to peer outside.

Through his sleepy eyes, he could see a shadowy figure climbing the drainage pipeline of the hotel from the outside.

Ajit immediately took out his camera and started clicking. He could see the man get onto the veranda of Room 109 on the first floor and knock on the glass of the French windows.

Soon the light to the room was switched on and a pretty girl, who looked like a high-class call girl opened the veranda door and let him in.

They seemed to be arguing over something. After a couple of minutes, the light was switched off. Fifteen minutes later he saw the man leave the same way as he had come in and get into a car and drive away.

Ajit was a little confused. His telescopic lenses had clearly caught the man. He had seen that he was wearing leather gloves that bikers wear. But he had come in a car.

It all seemed very fishy to Ajit. He couldn't sleep at first but dozed off later only to be woken up by the sound of thunder. It was dawn and raining heavily. When he went to the window, he could see a police van parked outside the lodge.

He immediately called his accomplice from the lodge and found out about the murder. A bead of sweat trickled down behind his ear.

His initial reaction was that he had stumbled upon a jackpot. But then, it was a case of murder, suddenly a chill ran up his spine.

Blackmailing a murderer could be extremely life-threatening. After all, every murderer knew that the punishment for one murder and multiple murders was the same under the law.

He immediately dismantled his camera and hid it in a trunk under his bed. He knew that the right thing to do was to go to the police. But the cops being cops would dig into his modus operandi and would book him for blackmailing instead of being thankful.

'No cops,' he thought, 'I have to lay low for a few days.' He was shivering and it was not just because he had not had his fix yet.

All of next week, he could see cops coming and going out of the lodge. Ajit would get daily reports about the progress of the investigation from his friend. He was so scared that he did not even tell his accomplice that he had captured the murderer on camera, but he had a feeling that given his interest in the case, he knew.

Finally, he decided to destroy the roll. Just then the doorbell rang.

'Who could that be?' wondered Ajit, he hardly had any visitors.

He gingerly opened the door.

A stocky, middle-aged, nondescript man with a pencil-thin mustache and oily hair stood in front of him, smiling amicably.

"Hello Ajit, I am Ram Shastri, your friend, and your greatest well-wisher!"

And before his drug-dazed eyes could focus, Ram Shastri had already wedged his foot in the door and pushed himself inside.

"I believe you have something that is of interest to me. Don't worry; I am willing to pay you well for it." Shastri waved a thick wad of 100-rupee notes at him.

"Err… no… nothing… what do you mean?" Ajit was flustered and distracted by the wad of notes swaying in front of him. He was broke and turkeying.

"Be a good boy and hand over the roll to me and you can forget that I was ever here," continued Shastri cheerfully.

"How did you k..k..know? Are you a c..cop?" Ajit was ready to faint.

"The police are dumb. They know nothing and they need not know anything," came the reply, "come on son, you don't want me to report you to the police, do you?"

Shastri was still smiling but a chill went up Ajit's spine. There was something very scary and real about the man.

Ajit immediately took out the film from the camera and gave it to him. Shastri smiled again and threw the wad of notes at him and patted him on his back.

"Good boy… now you can forget I was here."

By the time Ajit bent down to pick up the money and looked up, he had vanished. Ajit closed the door. He was sweating profusely. He was never so scared in his life. He was sure the man would have shot him dead for the film roll if he had refused to comply.

For the second time in the week, he found that he had wet his pants.