Terror on the Divine - Part 1 : Behind the mask

Chapter - 9, The conceit of Niharika

The doorbell was rough to press, I mean hard; we waited for exactly a minute for the response; a beautiful young voice of a final year MBBS student asked: "Who is that?"

A voice which always cared about her father's life. Niharika, Adyapak's daughter, had always expected her father to stay close to her after returning from the military, but her patriotic father was not under her control; he conducted strikes and rallied against social evils, and we four had stood along with him during each and every move of his protest. Niharika believed that I was also one of the primary reasons for her father's health issues. She hated me the most. And, this time, she would have thought again I had come here to ruin the precious time of her and her father.

As expected, after opening the door, she did not even bother to greet me; she walked off without welcoming me, and asked her father loudly. "Why are they here? I had asked you to stay away from these guys, right?" She was angry. "Tell them to have a cup of tea and get lost." Saying so, she went inside the kitchen, and continued her tirade by saying, "Daddy, remembers you are left with just a few hours to catch the flight, and you need to have slept for a while. Ask them not to disturb you too much." It was an indirect warning for me to leave their home right now. Adyapak sat without responding.

My intention wasn't to involve Adyapak in social services again, but it was the need of the hour to discuss the whole issue with him, and to get his suggestions from his experience; this would help me to plan my moves by taking the lead to move on and fight. Niharika wasn't in a mood to understand; neither had she ever wanted to attempt to understand. All that she had ever wanted was her father's health; after she lost her mother recently due to high blood pressure, she made her father quit all the social fights he was into and brought him back home, arranging special yoga classes for him; she also kept him busy by opening a grocery shop for him on the ground floor of her home.

"Sir, I won't take much of your time. I need your expert suggestions, that's all. Well, the first thing which I noticed in Goa is the newspaper headline, which read that a 4-year-old girl was raped and murdered. And the police have arrested the culprit, but the innocent kid is dead. This actually disturbed me, but, I didn't consider it seriously as the culprit was arrested by the police. Last night, accidentally, we met a kid who was running into the Arabian Sea to collect a toy without any awareness of the turbulent seawater. We rescued her and took to a police station where her sister was arrested in the name of prostitution. After hearing her story about how she got into prostitution, I am sure that many innocent young and elderly ladies, unknowingly or forcefully, have been pushed into prostitution; the link for prostitution is drugs. Drug dealers somehow make people become addicted to all kinds of stuff; they especially target females. Targeting females is a trick to hit two birds with a single stone. Drug dealers slowly get females to consume drugs; slowly by increasing the dose of drugs, they will ensure the drugs are daily consumed by those targeted females; they will supply the drugs until the consumer feels the drug is an important part of their life and they can't live without it. Once the female consumer reaches the level where she acts crazy in order to consume drugs, the waiting drug dealers take advantage of it and reject providing the stuff to make the consumers more desperate about wanting to consume the drugs. Once the female consumers show the level of their desperateness for consuming drugs, then the drug dealers ask the female customers to spend a night with their foreign customers, so that they will provide the weed to smoke. Desperate female drug victims agree to the offer provided by the dealer and fall into a trap. This process is repeated by drug dealers regularly, and they push innocent females into a dark world of prostitution." I said all this in a single breath, so that Niharika would not interrupt.

Niharika interrupted all of a sudden, pointing her forefinger towards me. "Get up and get lost," she said, throwing a silver cup towards my face. "My dad isn't going to help you, nor he will listen to you. Never try to convince him and ask him to join you guys." Saying so, she pushed me, and then she covered her face and cried like a baby.