Spies & Spice (Completed)

Chapter 3

2 years later, Circa 2017

Lajpat Nagar, a suburb in New Delhi, India.

7 PM

Usual hustle and bustle surrounded Green Towers, one among the many modest block of apartments, but its aesthetic design made it stand out in the street. Loud music was blaring from the ground floor apartment, probably to shut out the cheers and shouts from the cricket playing kids in the adjacent park.

Across the street, the tea vendor from the small roadside stall cheered the kids with enthusiasm, even as he was busy serving snacks and tea to many customers, who conveniently parked their vehicles around the stall, thus making the already congested street a nightmare for the traveling public.

One of the kids, hit a six with full vigour and the ball landed inside the compound of a local church, luckily missing the windshield of the old service bus parked there. The driver of the bus, who also served as the night watchman, warned the kids to move to the other end of the park, and returned the ball back, only after they obeyed his command with sullen faces.

Mrs Mehra, from the first-floor apartment in Green Towers, observed the whole exchange with a smile from her car window, as she drove home through the snail paced traffic. That dingy bus was lying there, unused for so long. But that old and mean driver always picked up a fight with those kids. After parking her car, as she made her way upstairs, she was once again tempted to warn the awful tenant in the ground floor about the loud music. Her eyes, as usual, appreciated the beautiful wooden carving of the God Ganesha and other temple symbols on that apartment's front door, along with the colourful garland of marigolds interlaced with mango leaves, tied as decoration at the top. Sighing, she forgot her initial irritation and made her way up.

Behind that beautifully carved door, Ashish Malik sat glued to his laptop on the lounge, oblivious to everything around him. The incandescent tube lights on the opposite walls illuminated the sparsely furnished living room, with an over flowing shoe rack near the front door, and the dining table pushed to a corner, to make room to the treadmill and exercise bike. A student backpack, half open, lay on the tiled floor along with a mini toolkit of drafting scale and other drawing equipment. Engineering Drawing and Design by D N Ghose along with other civil engineering text books lay scattered around the living area, some even put to use as door stopper to the adjacent bedroom. It was a small apartment with a tiny kitchenette adjacent to the living room and a small bedroom, built initially to house the watchman of the complex, but later given for rent to bachelors, who couldn't afford costly rents of the bigger apartments in the upper floors.

The aircon, running at its top speed could not dissipate the stale stench of tobacco mingled with alcohol from the rooms, whose windows and outer doors looked as though they were seldom opened.

A beep and message on his phone made Ashish startle a bit. As he read the message from his friend Vijay Arora, "Be ready, I will be there in 15 minutes" his body relaxed and he leaned back in the lounge with a smile.

Finally!

He and Vijay had been in India for almost a year now, but this was the first time Vijay was coming to this apartment, just as he promised he would once he got hold of the precious package.

Ashish began to whistle as he enjoyed the peppy tune coming from the stereo and went through the folders on his laptop. He moved the photos he had taken at the various tourist spots in Delhi, high res pictures of blueprints he received to a USB drive and deleted them from the laptop. He checked the time and quickly began to clear the browsing history and close all the open windows, before shutting the laptop down. As he shoved the laptop back into his backpack, the doorbell rang.