Mechanically trotting over the paved earth, the ekka made a final stop before the High Court. Ravi got off, in a sweaty neatness, and walked in a stiff manner untypical of him. A week had passed since he started practicing in Calcutta, but no day was more anxious than that day.

The Kumar vs Sehgal case was too petty for law, inviting repulsion for itself. Ravi had taken the case only to give a meek cover for his mission, which returned to his memory by Saheb’s words:

“Remember, Wallace is the one… in the judge’s seat, he’s a sitting duck. Don’t miss him.”

But what the ‘terrorists’ didn’t tell him was that he was a sitting duck too. To lash out a Model ’22 in front of everyone itself looked stupid. But the pervasive talk they gave brought him round, and now he proceeded to the trail, the gun concealed in his lawyer’s coat.

But the rational side of his brain advised against the details of the plan. It had processed all the avenues of the judge’s in-court habits and told him: the best shots to take were the dying minutes before the judge got in his Royce, or during the trial. Ravi rejected the latter and entered the courtroom.

Ravi won the trial easily. The eloquent convincing to the guy he planned to kill gave him some breathing space. Now, his scheme in detail. He would hurry the fee-collecting from Sehgal in about five minutes, rendezvous behind the tamarind tree twenty yards from the Royce, and take the shot. He had seen Judge Wallace exit the premises many times and roughly sketched the schedule of his habits: the jolly talk with his legal friends in the corridor, a stumble by the 'unlucky' step which he cursed, and the finishing touch of swearing at his Madrasi chauffeur, for unknown reasons, just before he got in. Ravi decided that he should take the shot just before the chauffeur takes his dose of insults.

Ravi proceeded as per plan. Sehgal was too happy to fast-track the repayment of his legal gratitude. To reach the tree with no one looking was done in time (just before Wallace cursed the step) but the toughest was just to come.  Ravi held the FN with both his trembling hands, coating the handle with sweat. He aimed for the mind that planned to colonize. But recoil and nervousness brought it lower, to the neck, just before he pulled the trigger.

DAMM….

The 9 mm blob of lead pierced the right carotid artery, eliciting a cry of agony and pain. That moment, Ravi ran, dropping the Model '22 behind, deep in a heap of sand. He exhausted whatever energy his body had saved for extraction. A dozen yards off the premises, he found his breath and thought.

A sense of triumph soon filled his body. The lightness he felt that day gave new energy. He smiled and thought of Saheb's next words in his typical humorous tone:

   "You killed one tyrant of a Sahib, but there are still hundreds more in our chained motherland."