A Man among Wolves

Chapter 3

It took Selva seven months to get used to the job.

Alternatively, it would be more prudent to say that it took him seven months to accept his fate. In a more accurate sense, he had learnt to accept the decision that he had let chance make for him. Even then, there were numerous occasions when he chided himself for not being assertive enough to make that decision by himself.

Every time Selva learned something new about the people he worked with or the person he worked for, the fear would come back to engulf him in its arms tightly, like a physically abusive lover. It would only go away when he lay down to sleep. He had wanted to avoid the details. He had tried to supress his curiosity on most occasions but it was hard not to pick them up as time went by. He liked very little of what he learnt and it only served to reinforce his resolve to stay emotionally distant from every single one of these men.

Selva learnt that Agilan worked for a popular political party. He wasn't an official member of the party but he essentially functioned as a 'Knight' who enforced their political propaganda from the shadows. And as Selva had presumed, it was performed illegally.

Agilan blackmailed the party's political opponents into submission or eliminated them silently. The methods he employed to achieve this ranged from simple phone threats to spying to blatant violence. The ones who tried to throw dirt on the party had to face this man's intimidation and survive it. The few who did were usually backed by another party with equal manpower. Agilan also toiled aggressively to destroy any amount of evidence that was capable of affecting the party's political interests. Selva came to know that there were many like Agilan in Chennai and the latter regularly co-ordinated with all of them. He was just a spoke on the wheel of the infrastructure that the party had built for themselves.

To add to this, Agilan was responsible for organising protests. When the party he worked for was in power, there were none and he silently dealt with the ones that did spring up. However, when his party was the opposition, Agilan's hands were full. He was also notorious for fanning (or igniting) the flames of violence in a few of these protests.

Again, men like Agilan were abundant and almost every party had them, from what Selva understood. They were the military chiefs in the political war that these parties waged against each other, on the broken backs of common men.

Another one of Agilan's speciality was fundraising for the party. This was achieved by his ever expanding drug business. This was one of the first things Selva came to know about his employer. He had been required to drop some goods off at different localities, all of which were remote. His horror was unimaginable when he comprehended a long time later that they were illegal drugs. A nauseating feeling possessed him for several days, making him feel like he was walking around with a noose around his neck. The prospect of running away flashed across his mind but his fear of Agilan wrestled it to the ground. With each passing day, the urge to flee and his fear of Agilan increased, as if they were competing with each other.

Apart from drugs, many other goods were smuggled and delivered to numerous parts of the city. They were mostly picked up from the harbour at shady hours. For his own sake, Selva didn't wish to interest himself in the details of these goods.

There were also wine shops and CD shops that Agilan owned. Wine shop, Selva knew, were a very profitable business especially when it was backed by a political party like Agilan's were. However, he found it strange that CD shops were still running good even when CDs had run out of fashion a few years ago. Pen drives were the latest trend. So, he highly doubted if there were a lot of people who still bought CDs of movies and watched them.

Once, he curiously raised the question to one of the men who accompanied him to drop off several boxes of CDs at different shops in Parrys Corner. He had forgotten that man's name as soon as he had heard it. His hair was dyed a dull shade of red for some reason. His ears were pierced. He let out a high pitched giggle at Selva's question and let him know that the CDs didn't contain mainstream movies alone.