Captain Jack Sparrow
Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.
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INDIAN WIFE AND THE BUS JOURNEY CH:01
"Listen...listen."
"Hmmmm?" I opened my heavy eyes to the darkness. The bus was hurtling along the bumpy country highway.
"I am feeling really cold. Can you get a blanket from the blue handbag?" my wife Niyati whispered, shivering in the ramshackle bus with no heater and poor insulation.
"Hmmmm."
Groggily, I got up and went to the front of the bus where our bags were kept because our seats in the back didn't have luggage shelves on top. It was the sort of bus I had never traveled in, except for a few trips with college friends. The whole layout, its general ramshackle structure, and even the type of co-passengers we had were a big change for someone upper middle class like me. It took me a couple of minutes in the darkness to find the blanket. A couple of sleeping passengers stirred because of the little noise I was making.
As I walked back to our seat, I first thought I had forgotten where we were sitting. In the darkness from a distance, it seemed like there was a different couple in what I thought was our seat. But as I approached the seat, I realized with a sense of anger and trepidation that it was our seat.
I was too shocked to even say anything. Sitting next to my wife on my seat was a burly bearded guy I had noticed him eyeing us meaningfully when we got on the bus and walked past his seat. Regardless of the fact that her husband was with her, he had ogled her shamelessly. I remember thinking that if she were alone, he definitely would have groped her. So I had decided that we should sit in the back, as far away from him as we could.
And now, a few hours later, he was sitting next to her, his thick arm around her shoulder. Her face wore a look of utter terror. Her wide eyes stared into mine.
"Whaa..." I started to say when Niyati put a finger on her lips signaling me to be silent.
Then with her eyes, she signal towards the thug's waist. His left hand was holding a gleaming gun there. I stared at the gun terrified and then looked at the ugly bearded face. He was smiling.
"Sit there." he whispered, signaling to the seat across to aisle to his left. There was another man sitting there by the window. Presumably his friend, because I know that the seat was empty when I had left to get the blanket. He saw me and raised his right hand to display a gleaming knife.
"Sit down saab." the other man said with a smile. He was skinny and short, not a big lug like his friend. Barehanded, I could have taken him. But with a knife in his hand, I didn't want to take any chances.
I sat down as ordered and tried to reason with the big bearded fellow.
"Listen sir, please leave us alone." I whispered.
"You leave us alone." he growled in a low voice and pointed his gun at me. "This beautiful lady is cold. I am going to warm her up."
Petrified, I looked around. Everyone around us seemed to be sleeping. The couple of rows in front of us were empty anyway. I started considering my options. But they were limited with a gun pointed at me.
I looked over at Niyati. Our eyes locked. She seemed as helpless as I was, flinching every time the big lug rubbed her shoulder with his hand.
"But listen...please...you cannot..." I started whispering again, when the guy to my left gently poked the knife against my stomach.
"Ustaad told you to shut up."
I clammed up, still staring at my shivering petrified wife. We were both so tense, but our two tormentors seemed very much at ease, as if threatening people was second nature to them. Normal people don't carry weapons with them, especially not gleaming foreign-made semi-automatic guns like that big thug had. Clearly they were criminals of some sort, maybe muscle-men for a local politician which is common in the cow-belt.
Which really limited my options. I could, of course, raise an alarm, wake up the other passengers, and hope for some help. But what if these two started using their weapons? Besides, this was a really low-end ramshackle bus with mostly poor and lower-middle class people. I didn't know how much they could help us out when confronted by two armed bullies.
Niyati was staring back at me. The thug was still rubbing her shoulder and holding the gun in his other hand. I was that he was also sliding closer and closer to her, pushing her towards the cold window on her right.
"Throw me that blanket." he said. I did as was told and it landed on his lap. He then said to my wife. "Cover yourself, darling."
Niyati's shuddering hands unfolded the blanket and she pulled it up to her neck. The thug smoothed it out with his other hand.
"Raju, make sure saab here behaves." he whispered and then put the gun on the seat next to him on the left.
For a moment I considered lunging and grabbing the gun. It was just an arms length away from me. But Raju must have read my mind because he increased the pressure of the knife, as if to warn me. Soon some movements started under the blanket. I could still see Niyati's face, although she had turned it away from me. I could see tears starting to stream down her face.
"So saab...what brings high class people like you to a bus like this?" Raju asked.
I closed my eyes to fight back tears, cursing the decisions I had made to put us in this situation.
"Saab?"
I wasn't in the mood for chit-chat. The movements under that blanket were now getting a bit more hectic.
"Saab?"
"Just shut up." I said to him.
"Suit yourself. Just trying to pass the time."
With the knife still pressed against my stomach, I alternate between looking to my right and looking straight ahead, trying to figure out a way to end this. But nothing came to mind.
We would not even have been in this position if I hadn't been so obsessed with my career that I forgot the basics of being sensible and safe. Here is the chain of incidents that landed us in this pickle.
We are both in our mid-30s and we live in Delhi. I am one of two co-founders of a very lucrative tech start-up, and my wife is also involved in it. After years of putting in long days and weekends at multinationals in our lucrative post-MBA jobs, we started feeling the entrepreneurial itch. We had no kids, so decided to take the risk. Quit our jobs and entered the start-up world with one of my classmates from b-school. This other co-founder was getting married at his ancestral home near Hazaribagh. We had gone to attend that wedding. I cursed him for having the wedding during the school Christmas break, because that meant everyone was traveling and tickets were very pricey and in high demand. When you are working at a start-up, you have to be careful about such expenses. Why didn't he get married a month later I asked. He said that was obviously the only time his relatives and friends with kids could travel all the way to Hazaribagh. I cursed him some more, although I understood his compulsions.
So we flew into Patna. Took a private cab to his home. Had fun at his multi-day wedding. The very day of the wedding, I got a call from a friend at a Venture Capital firm. Our spunky start-up had caught the attention of a Silicon Valley investor who was visiting India. He thought there was real potential to make us a multi-hundred million or even a billion dollar company. And the investment he was thinking of was massive. The only problem was, he would be flying back to the US in a couple of days. So if one of us couldn't meet him before that, we would have to fly all the way to California.
I spoke to my co-founder. He instantly said we should both fly out after the ceremony. I told him not to be an idiot. Big investments are fine, but a newlywed should be with his wife and on a honeymoon. I told him that I would take the meeting. As soon as the wedding was done, my wife and I were going to take the private cab to Patna. And that's where we got the first piece of bad news through SMS. The flight was cancelled. I called the airline. In fact all flights out of Patna were cancelled or postponed due to fog. They did not expect the fog to lift for at least 24 hours. Which meant I would not be able to get back to Delhi in time for meeting the investor. I called other airports nearby, asked others around me for advice. And the most optimum plan was formed.
The only flights available for the next morning were out of Lucknow. So the plan was to take a private cab to Lucknow. And from there take a 1 PM flight back to Delhi. So we set off. We were on the road for a couple of hours when the next unfortunate thing happened. Because of the fog, there had been a couple of accidents on the highway and traffic had slowed to a crawl. One of the cops we spoke to said the delay was such that it would be tough to reach Lucknow in time for the flight. So the driver suggested taking backroads through the countryside. He assured us that he knew the area well and would get us past the accident soon.
So we set off through the back-roads. That is when I should have started thinking about just postponing the meeting. So what if we had to go to California? It would be a few lakhs more. Hardly anything when you look at the total investment potential of so many million dollars. But start-up guys will understand how we like to pinch pennies. And so we were traveling those back-roads.
"This looks so...shady and weird." Niyati said to me in the cab.
"Yes it does. But it will be over soon."