Soumitra, alias Mr S Nandi, threw off the mask of his grave seriousness the moment he bumped into his old college chum Abhimanyu Mukherjee near the freshly painted ADDA building. Getting off his patrol car and telling his armed escorts to wait in the parking zone, he took off his cap and sunglasses, and walked forward with effortless grace and dignity to greet his pal, unable to hide his glee.

“Hello, Abhimanyu?”

Abhimanyu sprang forward. A moment’s pause, and then passionate hugs and handshakes followed like they were still at Jadavpur University.

“Soumitra! What a pleasant surprise!”

“How are you?” He still held his friend’s hand tightly, his face conveying a wistful and reminiscent expression.

“Fine, just fine. And you?”

“Same here,” Looking at his friend’s robust muscular frame and the thick black moustache on the upper lip, Abhimanyu was surprised that Soumitra was no longer that lanky, shy and reserved guy. With his gaze as penetrating as laser beams, he looked quietly confident and assured with an aura of authority about him.

And when his glance fell on Soumitra’s shoulder strap, he was almost awe-struck, “I didn’t believe when I heard you’d become an IPS officer. I supposed an engineer rarely wanted to be a cop.”

“But what about you?”

“Minding dad’s business, and that too against my will.”

“You seem to be worried? Any problem?”

“Property’s a problem, my friend. Either you create problems for others or others create problems for you. Either way, you’re sure to lose peace of mind.”

“So you aren’t happy, right?”

“How can one be when there are hidden plots, rivalries and when you can’t see through feigned friendship and invisible enmity? Life isn’t all beer and skittles when you’re in business.”

“Married or still single?”

“Single.” Abhimanyu gave a wry smile.

“Single! Oh, my God! Do you fancy any girl?” Soumitra’s curiosity got the better of him.

“No girl can fancy a fellow like me who has no time for romance. What about you?”

“It’s been six months since I tied the knot. Well, could you please give me your contact number so that we can remain in touch?”

With his eyes in the back of his head, Soumitra turned around and lithely took the address card that Abhimanyu passed on to him.

“Well, don’t tell anybody we’re friends. In public, we’re strangers, in private college mates.”

“You’re in uniform. It means you’ve been posted here, correct?”

“I took charge just two days back,” Soumitra smiled at him with an air of intimacy and took a turn.

“Bye!” he waved his hand and slipped into the waiting car.

“Bye! More when we talk over phone.” Abhimanyu waved back.

***
Abhimanyu chose a bottle from an eclectic array of beers, cocktails and spirits from a bed room cupboard and began to reflect on his chance meeting with Soumitra. His thoughts soon started to slip into a familiar groove. An electric engineer, he wanted to be a researcher but he couldn’t chase his dream as he’d to bow down to the wishes of his father and wear the mantle of directorship of Mukherjee Pharmaceuticals.

Coincidence or no coincidence, soon after he took over, all hell broke loose, and the company became a hotbed of intrigue and backroom manoeuvring. He felt a lot of the company’s dead wood needed to be removed but it was an uphill task.

In this morass muddled by the accusation of his incompetence, his problem was compounded by the fact that he couldn’t identify the cold-blooded snakes. The whole scenario had him on edge.

Although Abhimanyu rarely drank himself into a stupor, his reflection was slowly getting a little blurred as he mulled over life, his eyes closing, his head bending back over the wing chair.
Just then his smart phone pulsated into a bright glow.

“Good evening, Abhimanyu!” A voice came from the other end.

“Good evening, Soumitra!”

“Doing any important work?”

“Not at all. Just relaxing.”

“For your information, we’ve decided to reinvestigate your dad’s missing incident afresh.”

“What a piece of heart-warming news!”

“We’re in the quest of some specific clues.”

“Soumitra, if you can bring the truth out behind his disappearance. . .” he couldn’t complete, his voice getting choked.

“My friend, the case has been hanging in the air like deep, dense fog preventing visibility. It’s strange no staff member could shed any light why he’d to visit Delhi.”

“Apart from that, nobody even knows how he travelled– by train or by air.”

“Is there any other shareholder of the company?”

“No, he’s the sole proprietor of Mukherjee Pharmaceuticals. A self-made man, he made the company look like a joint venture.”
“But how?”

“Because of the presence of cousins and distant relatives. They’ve managed to land key posts and assignments. Some of them are even in the board of management.”

“Did he face any trouble on that count?”

“I’m not aware of it. Apparently, his relations with all of them were excellent and there was an atmosphere of trust and amity.”

“Abhimanyu, I request you to remain alert. You must identify the people working behind the scenes. They may harm you as well. But I’ve a plan and if we execute it properly, we can get to the bottom of the mystery. I’ll tell you about it at an appropriate time. Okay. Good night.”

“Good night.”

***

It was yet another black morning when Abhimanyu joined his father in being reported missing. The rerun of the missing incident after a lull of two years made friends and acquaintances cringe. The news startled them like lightning accompanied by thunder.

He was last spotted coming out of his Skoda Rapid the previous morning and walking into the Roy Market nonchalantly, looking smart and intelligent in his blue T-shirt, his near-pink shaved face glistening in sweat but conveying an impression of his innate simplicity.

A pall of shock and horror hung over the neighbourhood where his father Arjun had built his dream house Mukherjee Mansion, designed by a renowned architect and painted in crimson with an impressive street presence after his son’s birth 30 years ago.

To his neighbours and office employees, Abhimanyu was a symbol of Good Samaritanism, a rare trait with consumerist culture bringing about in its trail the erosion of age-old values and lowering of moral standards.

Aaradhana, Abhimanyu’s mom, was inconsolable, her eyes swollen with crying. She thought her worst fears had come true. She was vehemently opposed to their son being named Abhimanyu on grounds that the epic warrior had a premature and tragic end. But Arjun tried to assuage her fears with a cryptic comment, “In the epic Arjuna is invincible but in real lifeArjun will be vulnerable and Abhimanyu invulnerable.”

“Will Abhimanyu meet the same fate?” People could feel the suspense on their skin.

Into the month-long vacuum of information that followed came the horrific speculation that some extortionists might have kidnapped and eliminated both Arjun and his son in exactly the same way.

Possibilities, assumptions and opinions on television by former police chiefs who never demonstrated any talent while they were in service made the task more complicated for the district police. Every other day, a new theory floated or was being floated in the air — perhaps deliberately, to divert the course of investigation.

Despite being rushed off their feet with pressure from the top mounting on them, the police, however preferred to remain tight-lipped. SP RK Verma, a strongly built man of about six feet with a tip-tilted nose and red-rimmed eyes refused to give any bite to any TV channel. A police spokesperson briefed the media with only one quiet and firm sentence, “We’d crack the mystery.”

Mr Verma assigned the task of unravelling the mystery behind the disappearance of the industrialist Abhimanyu Mukherjee to Soumitra, alias ASP Mr Nandi. Invested with independent charge and absolute freedom to investigate the way he liked, Soumitra was only too eager to accept the daunting challenge.

The amateur sleuth in him got the better of the police officer he was. He brushed up on his acting skills and disguised himself as a job seeker of the locality and frequented the company’s administrative building in the City Centre. In yet another smart move, he deputed a constable in front of Mukherjee Mansion on the plausible ground of the security of Abhimanyu’s ailing and grief-stricken mother.

***
A tip-off from a “source” led to an early evening police raid on the home of Balai Das, employed as a cashier in the administrative building of the company.

A man of short stature in his late fifties with thick grey brows and eyes blinking very unusually, Das was as wily as a fox.

His three-storied house having a dazzling array of mosaics with tiles set in intricate patterns towering conspicuously over the row of rickety or ramshackle houses like a person with a florid face in the company of dark-skinned people. Das’s growing affluence and his paling around with Samrat Chakrabarty, a cousin of Arjun Mukherjee, aroused his neighbours’ suspicion.
Das was not, however, found at home following which the team headed for Van Colony that had come up on a piece of fallow government land through political patronage for migrants and refugees. They had information that Balai was a regular to a home that belonged to one of his “sisters-in-law” named Shashi, a childless widow, who earned her bread as a household cook.
It was only seven o’clock but the whole area, yet to be connected with electricity, lay in pitch darkness. ASI B Halder, who led the team of plainclothesmen, thought that the tolerance level of the settlers bordered on calm resignation and stoic indifference — something that would fill the minds of those unaccustomed to this kind of suffering with pitiful scorn.

They could see glow worms hovering merrily overhead but the little light emitted by them coupled with the flicker of kerosene lamps from inside the hovels only added to their confusion.

The passersby and cyclists of the locality using the road that descended into sharp zigzags were however displaying amazing alacrity.

The informer accompanying the police team suddenly stopped and pointed to the mud-built boundary wall of a cottage. He took a turn and melted through the eerie veil of darkness.

Halder and his team scaled the low boundary wall as easily as show jumpers and lent their ears to the whispers inside with baited breath.

“Are you in trouble, Jamaidada? No passion, no vigour and no charm in your embrace. Are you thinking of someone else?”

“Shashi, the police are after me,” he mumbled, his voice shaking.

“Police?” she uttered a scream.

“Quiet, quiet, you slut! Walls have ears.”

“But what about Abhimanyu Sir?”

“I guess he’s been kidnapped. All they want is the handover of the ownership of the company to Samrat Chakrabarty, but if he refuses, he’ll go the same way as his father.”

“What had happened to him?”

“This much I know Samrat Sir took him to Delhi and — probably, I say probably — had him murdered.”

“And you keep company with such a wolf?”

“For fear of life, my dear. Samrat Sir often submits cheques with forged signatures and gets them cashed. In return, he fills my pocket. If ever I open my mouth, I’m sure he’ll shoot me like a dog.”

Suddenly, the couple heard loud bangs on the door but they didn’t have the temerity to open it. The posse of policemen broke the tottering frame open.
Das was surprised to find Abhimanyu before him.

“Sir, you?”

“Yes, I’m not dead. I faked my disappearance with police help to know the fate of my father. ASP Nandi, I learn, has just left with a large contingent to arrest Uncle.”
While Das stared at Abhimanyu in dumb amazement, two policemen walked forward and bound him with a strong rope and put him in the police van parked at a distance.