Dr Srinivas Rao finished his paperwork and put aside his reading glasses. He picked up the mug of coffee that was set before him and took a sip, its rich strong taste rejuvenating his senses. Sitting back in his chair, he began to ponder upon the thought that had been lingering in his mind for some time. Was he really guilty of resurrecting the devil?
It had all started the previous night………..
Dr Rao was fast asleep when the jarring noise of his mobile phone rudely awakened him. The caller was no less, the Minister of State for Health, informing him that his colleague, the Minister of State for Petroleum was returning home from a function when his car was ambushed by some unknown people. The assailants had shot him several times in the chest. The victim was in a critical condition and was now en route to Dr Rao’s hospital. He mentioned that Dr Srinivas Rao was expected to personally attend to him.
As the Chief of Cardiothoracic surgery services at the famous Sardar Patel General Hospital and being one of the best in the business, he was used to dealing with ‘VIPs’ and their patients. But he deplored them. They were usually arrogant, demanding and ungrateful. But well, duty is duty, he thought as he made his way to the hospital.
Dr Rao parked his car and turned off the engine. As he began to get out of the car, he felt the presence of a person standing in the shadows watching him intently.
“Excuse me, Dr Rao, may I have a word with you?”
The voice was feminine and sounded strained. Dr Rao squinted and tried to perceive its owner, the darkness concealing her face effectively. She now stepped out of the shadows and hesitatingly walked towards him. The feeble light of the sodium vapour lamp of the parking lot fell on her face and now he could see her more clearly. It belonged to a woman he had never seen before. She was well dressed, but with a face that had aged beyond her years and spoke of a harsh and traumatic past.
Dr Rao closed the door of his car and locked it. He smiled apologetically, “I’m sorry, but I’m busy at the moment. I have to ….”
“I KNOW!!!” the woman suddenly shouted, cutting him short.
Dr Rao looked at her, astonished. The woman looked away, flustered, almost regretting her outburst. Biting her lip, she again turned to him and continued in a more quiet and apologetic, almost pleading tone, “I’m sorry ……….I know….. you are going to operate on Mr Sawant. Please… Dr Rao… I beg of you…”
Dr Rao nodded and smiled reassuringly, “Don’t worry, we will do our best to save him.” He started to move towards the building.
“NOOOO!!” Her anguished scream froze him in his tracks.
He heard a sound behind him and before he could realize it, the woman had rushed up to him. She moved closer and hissed in his face “No, Dr Rao, you MUST NOT save him!:
Dr Rao stared at her, bewildered. She continued in an urgent, pleading tone, “Don’t you understand?! He is a ‘Shaitan’….. doctor..…the Devil! He has destroyed my life. And that of many others! Do not save him Dr Rao, I beg of you….please do not save him.”
Then suddenly becoming aware of what she was doing, she started to back away, a trembling hand pressed over her mouth. Her pale face was tear-stained and her eyes shone with anger and helplessness. And as quickly as she had appeared, she turned and vanished into the darkness of the parking lot, leaving an unnerved Dr Rao staring after her.
As Dr Rao collected himself and made his way to the Operating Room, he tried to recall what he had learnt from the media regarding his patient, the honorable Member of Parliament, Mr Dagdu Sawant.
Starting as a small time thug in the Naigaon area in Mumbai, Sawant’s ruthlessness and shrewd mind helped him ascend the ranks of his gang in no time. There was no crime he had not indulged in and he soon caught the attention of a local political leader. He served the politician well during the elections and in turn, his master ensured him his complete support. Finally, his political patrons granted him a ticket to stand for elections from his native place where he won a unanimous vote, following the ‘sudden ill-health’ of his rivals. His political status virtually bestowed him with complete immunity from the law and he began to carry out his nefarious activities with greater impunity. His lifestyle was rude and extravagant. His loud parties overflowed with liquor. His fascination for women of ill-repute was proverbial. Time and again, the media would expose his crimes which ranged from extortion to murder. But every single time, within a few weeks, witnesses would turn, evidence would disappear and Dagdu Sawant would emerge a free man, stronger and more brazen than before.
‘Truly, the Devil Incarnate,’ thought Dr Rao as he washed up for surgery and entered the Operating Room.
The situation was as bad as he had expected. The patient’s condition was deteriorating by the minute and his assistant-surgeons informed him that there were five bullets in his chest with two of them very close to his heart.
His eyes fell on the face of the unconscious Dagdu Sawant and the woman’s words rang in his ears. For a moment, Dr Rao thought, could it be possible? After all, Sawant was in critical condition and all he had to do was, actually, not do anything at all. Within minutes, the injuries and bleeding would take their toll. And the world would be rid of one more burden.
Dr Rao shook his head in disgust. How could he even consider such a possibility? After all he had to do his duty. He would have to try his hardest to save his patient regardless of anything.
And so for the next six hours, Dr Rao struggled to save the man. Under the expert hands of Dr Rao, all the bullets were extracted and the anatomy was restored to perfection. As he concluded the surgery and pulled off his blood-stained gloves, Dr Rao declared that the surgery had been a grand, albeit miraculous success.
Dagdu Sawant, the ‘Shaitan’ would live.
The thought brought him back to the present.
Had he then, indeed resurrected the devil?
Dr Rao’s musings were interrupted by a knock on the door. The door opened and a nurse entered the room. “Sir, your wife called. I told her you’ve finished the case and will be leaving within 15 minutes.”
“Thanks, Rita and good night, or rather good morning!” Dr Rao rubbed his tired eyes and yawned. He decided to lay his doubts to rest. He needed to get some sleep and there were too many things on his mind anyway. He had done his duty, and that was that. He collected his things and left for home.
Sawant recovered surprisingly well over the next few days and finally the day arrived when he was to be discharged from the hospital. Dr Rao, his wife and a team of staff nurses and resident doctors entered the room. Much to his annoyance, Dr Rao found it teeming with Sawant’s supporters and relatives, noisily talking among themselves. Sawant was himself sitting cross-legged on the bed surrounded by his cronies and Dr Rao was appalled to see, drinking from a bottle of beer. Dr Rao strode up to him and seizing the bottle from his hand, discarded it. Some of the people started to get up and protest but were duly silenced by hard look on Dr Rao’s face.
Dr Rao’s voice was laden with ice, “While you are in this hospital room, Mr Sawant, you will follow the rules of the hospital. Upon your discharge, you can go home and do as you please. Please ask these people to leave immediately. I will not examine you until they do so.”
Dagdu Sawant glared at Dr Rao arrogantly but the latter steadily met his gaze. For a few moments there was a tense silence in the room and then Sawant grudgingly waved his hand. Murmuring their protests, his companions filed out of the room.
Sawant continued to glare at Dr Rao as the nurse disconnected the intravenous set from the needle saline drip from the former’s arm and moved the stand holding the bottle of Saline to one side. Dr Rao ignored Sawant and began his examination. On completion, he instructed the staff nurse to reconnect the intravenous line, finished the formalities for his patient’s discharge and left the room. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!!” he exclaimed to the staff nurse before they left the hospital.
Dr Rao and his wife left the building, got into their car and drove off; unaware of the woman dressed in a staff nurse’s uniform, who was observing them from the second floor.
Five hours later, a young staff nurse arrived and removed the needle and intravenous drip set from Sawant’s arm. She then discarded them along with the empty Saline bottle into the dustbin and hurried away in order to avoid hearing the lewd suggestion from Sawant.
In her haste, she had not noticed the unusual object that was lying in the dustbin amidst the other waste.
Four years later
“We regret to announce the demise of the former Member of Parliament Shri Dagdu Sawant. He passed away in a hospital in Switzerland. For the past three years, Shri Sawant had been suffering from an undisclosed long-standing illness and even had to resign from his Parliamentary post because of the same. Shri Sawant was an outstanding leader and …..”
Dr Rao stared the television set. “Ho! I say, did you hear that? I wonder what happened to him. He was fine when I last saw him, four years ago.”
His wife called out from the dining room, “Please come for dinner, dear. We are waiting for you.”
‘Well, I dare say the world will be far better off without the likes of him,’ thought Dr Rao as he left the room to join his family.
The corporate offices of the MedVaxx Pharmaceutical Company, world-renowned for its revolutionary work in the field of vaccines, are located in a tall, imposing, white coloured structure situated at Nariman Point in Mumbai. The Meeting Room of the Board of Directors is situated on the 23rd floor of the building and its large French windows offer a spectacular view of the Mumbai skyline and the shimmering Arabian Sea below.
But today, the splendor of the view held no charm for the man looking out of these windows. For the President of MedVaxx Pharmaceuticals was a troubled man. He looked impatiently at his watch. It wasn’t usual for the Head of their Immunology Department to be late.
Just then, the door opened and a smartly dressed lady entered the board room. She waited till everyone took their seats. She looked around, greeted everyone and apologized for being late. She briskly opened and started up her laptop computer, aware that everyone in the room was watching her intently. She calmly took a sip of water and started her presentation.
“Five years ago, we started a project to develop a vaccine for AIDS. We used a virus which is a member of the same family as the HIV; the AIDS virus. We genetically altered it and thus the ‘B99’ molecule was born. The B99 was very similar in structure to the HIV, or AIDS virus. The idea was that when injected as a vaccine into a person, his immune system would be stimulated to recognize and develop a counter-offensive reaction to the actual HIV, if the person were to contract the latter. The goal was to do this without causing harm to the person by itself.”
She paused to take a sip of water. “One fascinating characteristic of the B99 was that for some unknown reason, it was not secreted into other body fluids like saliva and semen. Otherwise, it behaved remarkably like an actual HIV and stimulated an adequate immune response. In fact, the B99 could have been the ideal vaccine for AIDS.”
“Then if the B99 behaved just like the HIV, what indeed was the problem??!!” the President exclaimed.
She patiently nodded and continued. “That sir, was precisely the problem. It behaved too much like the actual HIV. We found that within a day or two after injecting the B99 into an animal, the B99 would mutate and develop the same characteristics as the HIV. Electron Microscope studies of this mutated B99 showed that it structurally resembled the HIV in almost every way. Even the blood tests routinely used for AIDS would show false-positive results in these animals. All our laboratory animals ended up with an illness terribly similar to AIDS.”
She looked around to see if everyone had understood and continued, “In fact I would say, worse than AIDS, because this disease would progress slowly but relentlessly, the complications being more numerous and severe than those seen in AIDS itself. The worst feature about this AIDS-like disease was that it was resistant to all current antiviral therapy. Not one of the animals survived.” She paused to register the shocked expressions on the faces around her.
“Over the next few years we tried our utmost to modify the molecule and make it safer, but all our attempts failed.”
She paused to let the news sink in. The President muttered a curse under his breath and smacked his hand on the table in frustration. He could visualize his billions of dollars disappearing into thin air.
She continued, “In conclusion, we have no option but to declare the B99 Project a complete failure, terminate it and start afresh.”
Fresh sighs could be heard from the audience.
She looked around. “A copy of the report is in front of each of you. I require you all to sign the permission for me to terminate the project and destroy all the material that we have used in our research.” She observed the heads shake in disappointment as the members pulled out their pens to sign the papers in front of them. The meeting concluded and everyone filed out of the boardroom.
Before leaving, the President came up to her and conveyed his sympathies that her project had not been a success. He wished her well in her future endeavors. She smiled politely and thanked him. At the door, the President paused for moment. He could not help but wonder how someone could be so comfortable with the fact that her five years’ hard work had all gone down the drain. In fact, he could have sworn that there was almost a hint of satisfaction in her attitude at certain times during the presentation. He turned and looked back at her. She looked back at him, her face impassive and revealing nothing. He shook his head, gave no further thought to the issue and left the room, closing the door behind him.
She slowly sat down on her plush chair and resting her hands on the large mahogany table, gazed absently around the vacant room. Normally she would have immediately wanted to leave and get back to her unending work.
But not today. She wanted to savor the moment for a while longer. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She felt supremely happy. Five years of hard work had come to an end. Five years of work that the President of the company may have found futile, but which from her point of view had been a resounding success.
She gave a sigh and extracted an old photograph from her purse depicting two small boys in their school uniform. Tenderly, she caressed one of them as a tear rolled out from the corner of her eye.
She remembered the day the photograph was taken. The events of that fateful day were engraved in her mind. She remembered returning home from the photo studio after taking the photograph. The carefree laughter of her children echoing down that lonely street as they walked home, hand in hand.
And then that horrible moment when the car had suddenly come tearing around the street corner and hurtled towards them. Her own desperate scream as she tried to pull her children out of the oncoming vehicle’s path. The blur of the car as it sped past them, seemingly missing them by inches.
And then that horrible, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she desperately groped for and found her elder son by her side.
But alas, not her younger one.
And she recalled the subsequent events as if she was seeing a film in slow-motion. The car screeching to a halt at a distance. The driver sticking his face out of the window for a few seconds to look back at her. The drunken, hideous grin on his face, before he started his car and sped away again. The cloud of dust that he left in his wake, which ultimately settled, revealing the lifeless, bloodied and broken body of a young boy, sprawled like a rag doll in the middle of the road.
But she had seen his face! A mere glimpse, but it had been enough. Its features had been woven into the very fabric of her memory. The same face would haunt her dreams and waking hours for years to come. The same face would be thrust into her eyes to her everyday thereafter, in the newspapers, in the magazines and on television.
The face of Dagdu Sawant.
And she remembered how she had kept that fact to herself. No one in the world knew that she had seen the face of the driver. She had not told the police, not her relatives and not even her husband.
She had been so thrilled four years ago, when she had heard that Sawant had been shot by some gangsters. She had fervently prayed that he would not make it. And then she had heard on the news that the city’s best cardiothoracic surgeon Dr Srinivas Rao had operated on him and saved him from the jaws of certain death. She had wondered how any doctor, even considering it to be his duty, would try his best and save the life of a demon like Sawant.
And then the next day itself, while working in her laboratory, it had struck her, that as yet, all was not lost. She could still exact her revenge and justice would still prevail. She had waited for an opportunity and finally she had got it. It had been on the day Sawant was to be discharged from the hospital after recovering from his surgery. It had been almost too easy. She had entered Sawant’s room quietly along with Dr Rao and his team of doctors and nurses, unnoticed by anyone.
She had waited until the time when the others were occupied either in assisting Dr Rao, preparing the patient’s medications, or in doing their paperwork. Then she had seized her chance. She had sidled up to the stand holding the intravenous saline bottle. On the pretext of adjusting the intravenous set and saline bottle, unnoticed by anyone, she had injected an entire vial of the B99 virus into it. After Dr Rao had finished with his patient, she had even helped a staff nurse to reconnect the intravenous set to the needle attached to Sawant’s arm. And then she had stood aside and observed with satisfaction, the lethal fluid running down the intravenous tubing into Sawant’s blood. Her plan had been implemented successfully; it was the beginning of the end for Sawant.
She relished unashamedly, the thought of how Sawant must have suffered from the AIDS like illness and its severe, debilitating complications for three long years. She only wished she had been there in person to see him suffer.
The plan had been foolproof. Sawant’s blood tests would come out positive for AIDS and he would be labeled as such. No one would suspect any foul play because Sawant was known for his weakness for prostitutes and everyone would assume he had contracted it from one of them. If the virus sample from his blood was studied in detail by the Microbiologists at his hospital, they would just presume that it was a mutant version of the HIV itself. It would simply become a topic for discussion at an academic level, perhaps even be presented in a paper at a conference. But no one would be able to trace it to her.
And he would not have infected anyone else through sex because the B99 was not secreted in body fluids. This was the reason she had not used the AIDS virus itself because she had not wanted Sawant to transmit it to anyone else. If he donated blood to a blood bank, which was very doubtful, his donated blood would test positive for HIV and therefore be discarded.
In a few more hours, all the material, the evidence, would be destroyed and the B99 would become just a piece of data, a part of the company’s unwanted records.
No one would realize what had actually happened!
That reminded her that in her hurry to get to the meeting on time, she had forgotten to sign the project report herself. As she opened the file, a thought entered her head. She actually felt indebted to Dr Srinivas Rao. By saving Sawant, he had actually created an opportunity for her to take her revenge, all by herself. She smiled to herself at the thought. She whispered to herself, ‘Dr Rao, you may have done your duty and saved his life as a doctor, but I have done my duty as a Mother!’ Then she took out her pen and signed her name in full, ‘Dr. Mrs. Vidya Srinivas Rao.’
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