Sometimes ugliest faces hide sweetest souls, sometimes it’s not that way. Faces rarely tell the story of the heart hidden behind. A rare flicker of emotion may expose the soul but there are crafty minds that hide poisonous soul behind a calm, sometimes lovely face and behaviour.
He was an ugly man, with a very calm, poised manner; very educated and knew how to talk and present himself.
He mixed with dozens of people; mostly more, rarely less yet only hand-counted people knew that he was a hardcore terrorist.
A crooked mind, spewing with hatred was hidden behind all that intellectual gab. That gab was used for two purposes, conning and hiding. He used that slithery tongue to brainwash his recruits and fool others.
Such was his expertise with his tongue that none got a whiff of what is going on inside him.
He squeezed out money from fanatics using that gab, and used it to fool his root level workers. His organization was multilayered. The lowest rung was truly fanatic, do or die type. The higher they grew the viler they became.
He had to play this pretense because the money he squeezed out from fanatics was not that little, and that money helped him to build the rest of his ladder in initial stage and now it works as his defense mechanism. If he knew someone knows too much, he tracked him out, tricked his terrorist outfit to blow out his office building or shop as another “operation”- enemy gone! His terrorist outfit of-course took the blame.
Outside world knew he was a publisher; those who knew him from this side believed he had strong connections in the world of journalism and publishing. He was a very powerful man, it was smart not to displease him, forget about angering him.
.
This avatar was used to the utmost excellence.
He used it to crush and create “stars” and of course ordinary people.
If he tried to suck in someone in his trap it was better that he or she gave in; if they resisted that meant the end of their career.
He had a special division that kept excelling itself on spying techniques; name any gadget, software it was with them.
This division had its arms full; it tracked, spied on preys meant for absolution, destruction or character assassination.
If someone truly annoyed him he used to spy on that person using modern gadgets, and sometimes he did it for money, if someone irked some big honcho and that guy offered him money he used to do it for them.
Now, suppose an army officer freaked him out, he used to utilize his spying skills and publishing house to paint him as a traitor. If he did not found any weakness in him, he creates some; siphoned out information from his laptop, cell phone or computer and passed it on to unworthy hands.
If a budding writer freaked him out he used to steal his unpublished stories, works and ideas and give it to his own writers as a generous gesture. “Try this theme” or “Work on this piece, I was writing it but I could not finish it.”
His spiteful nature urged him to use his spying technique as spiteful technique, mocking his “enemies” in his works, works of his writers, of course the idea used to reach them through him directly or indirectly.
His enemy used to feel the sting but could not do anything; after all, he could not tell anyone that the employees of an entire newspaper (almost) were snooping in his personal computer.
His advantage was satiation of his malicious heart and it kept his newspaper from becoming monotonous, he stole these ideas and churned out pretty good stories by his writers with expertise in writing.
He had quite a handful of houses all over the country, houses bought in methodical way, clustered together. These houses were managed by members of his family.
“It keeps the secrets limited to one house.”
Then something happened, one of his best looking boys fell for a girl. A girl who was by no means a terrorist and there was no chance that she will join his murky world.
There was another problem too, his sister, who accidentally was a female version of him, by looks and every other means had her eyes on that boy for years. She was trying to manipulate him to her life.
So, she feigned to play the cupid, lured the boy to appoint the girl into one of his white-washed offices and gathered all her details.
In the short span of time the girl stayed with her she tried to black-wash her image to everyone in the gang and partially succeeded.
The boy got the whiff and absconded, she used his cell phone and email address to lure the girl into one of their housings, the housing which she managed.
“She knows too much! So we will have to screw her reputation so badly that no one believes her.” She cooed to her boys and girls and displayed fake evidences to convince them.
They unleashed all their murk on her.
He settled his and her score by almost ruining the organization.
Sharmishtha Basu
26.7.11
