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- Chapter 2 - Abdul Rashid's other inventions and his biggest invention......
And yet there was one invention, the greatest achievement of all, which never came to the light of the day. Rashid conceived it, produced it, and perfected it to its last extraordinary detail and then shut it around with a vast and omnipotent silence. Locked away in his great laboratory high up among the roofs of kings way, he brought his Invention to its last ultimate degree of perfection.
he tried it , tested it , and proved it out to the last degree. then he sat back quietly to think things out.
it’s possibilities were amazing, it’s potentialities colossal, frightening. it held out opportunities that were enough to make even the most avaricious master criminal on earth tremble.
for that amazing invention of his had given to Abdul Rashid the mastery of a million secrets. it held out to him the keys of all knowledge. it put him in possession of information by which in twelve short months he could have well-nigh wrecked the social system. he could, without the shadow of a doubt, have created a corner in money. he could have forestalled every enterprises worth while. he could draw on the very well-springs of secret information, and using it with only a smattering of skill could have shaken the whole social fabric to its very roots.
And Rashid, after a desperate month of mental stress, called up his reserves of courage, took his destiny in both hands and began to pick the luscious fruits of his Invention.
That laboratory became the nerve centre of the most extraordinary cross-web of tangled intrigues, the nightmarish conversations that ever existed outside the demented brain of a madman. He built his own apparatus. no other living soul had ever looked inside that room. He himself had taken the place under an assumed name. so far as the landlord knew that particular office was let to a Mr. Shoaib Hussain, export merchant a highly respectable and worthy gentleman who paid his rent with fastidious regularity and conducted the greater part of his business by telephone.
even they had no knowledge of the amazing transformation that had been effected in their own property. the place was no longer an office with a tiny annexe. it was a Network of shinning wires and little polished dials set row on row all round the walls. Rashid himself had carried up the various fittings an inconceivable number of journeys , and had assemble them with a patience that was as precise and unflagging as the skill employed in their making.
And the thing had grown on him. only Rashid himself knew how tremendously this hobby of his had become his dominating master. imperceptibly at first, but with a dreadful surety it had come to be the be-all and end-all of his existence. Very slowly his old haunts ceased to know him. his own home out at chandni chowk became little more to him than an occasional bedroom. Rashid was a sporadic lodger in his own house. Equally slowly he became more and more Mr. Shoaib Hussain, of the top floor offices in kingsway.
That was Abdul Rashid, the man , the strange contradiction of power and subtlety of notoriety and anonymity of public fame and complete mystery who sped in his high powered car sheer across the teeming city to post a letter card to New Delhi— a letter-carded. moreover, which was printed and not written, blocked up in tiny perpendicular capitals which completely disguised his handwriting an which for some definite reason known only to himself, contained his own right thumb print pressed firmly into the sealing wax.
He drove along till he got into the mazy heart of the Streets that clutter the East end. Round by the Aldgate pump he went and pulled up finally at a garage in the Mile end Road.
“petrol, sir?” asked the blue -jean mechanic.
“please. two gallons.”
It was indicative of the man that instead of asking for a can, he asked for the exact liquid measurement he required.
Though petrol was the ostensible reason for his pulling up at that particular garage, his real reason was that there was a pillar-box immediately in front of it.
He took out his wallet to pay the mechanic, he game him a pound note and while the mechanic went inside to get his change, he nonchalantly dropped the letter-carded into the gaping maw of the Scarlet box.
And that, as he subsequently realized, was the fatal action of his life. the simple little gesture that was to lead finally and without halt or hindrance to his undoing. it was a gauntlet thrown with the indifference bred of long immunity at the face of fate. the thirty-fourth gauntlet he had flung at her unoffending Majesty, and that was the particular gauntlet which fate decided had overstepped the bounds of all propriety. unseen and quite unnoticed fate stopped down, picked it up and flicked it back neatly in his teeth.
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- Chapter 2 - Abdul Rashid's other inventions and his biggest invention......