Brains Over Brawn

 The year was 1984. India was still reeling from political unrest, bomb scares, and a new era of espionage. Amidst all this, RAW had paired up two very unlikely investigators.

One was Raghunath Sharma, a wiry sixty-one-year-old with a peppered moustache, thick glasses, and an ever-present cotton kurta. He looked like he should be sitting in a library reciting shlokas rather than sniffing out threats to national security. People underestimated him, at their peril.

The other was Arjun Singh, twenty-seven, six feet three, and built like a railway pillar. Arjun looked like he could uproot a lamppost if it irritated him. He spoke little, flexed much, and often believed problems could be solved by pushing, kicking, or throwing something, or someone.

When RAW assigned them together, whispers in the corridors went: “It’s like pairing a paperweight with a bulldozer.”

 

A series of intercepted messages hinted at a planned bombing in Lucknow during the Prime Minister’s visit. Nothing was clear: no date, no place, no device type, only fragments. A single line stood out:

“The heart of the city will stop beating when the clock strikes noon.”

Arjun cracked his knuckles. “Simple. They mean Hazratganj. Always crowded. We set up barricades, frisk people, and wait.”

Raghunath chuckled. “My dear boulder, if terrorists were that obvious, we’d all be retired by now. Words are never plain in this game. We must read between them.”

 

The two arrived in Lucknow under the cover of “postal inspectors.” Arjun, restless, would barge into suspicious shops, flex his arm muscles, and bark questions. Shopkeepers often gave him tea instead of answers.

Meanwhile, Raghunath wandered around with a small notebook, jotting strange details, train schedules, electricity timings, even when pigeons gathered near the clock tower.

One evening, Arjun caught three shady looking youths whispering near the Chowk area. Without hesitation, he grabbed two by the collar and lifted them off the ground like hens. “Tell me where the bomb is!”

The boys shrieked in panic before blurting out: “We were planning to… steal mangoes from the orchard!”

It turned out they really were mango thieves. The old man laughed so hard that even Arjun cracked a smile.

“Brawn, my boy,” Raghunath said between chuckles, “must be used selectively, like chili powder, too much and the whole dish is ruined.”

 

The intercepted message about “the clock” kept tugging at Raghunath’s mind. He spent hours observing the grand Hussainabad Clock Tower. One day, he noticed a peculiar thing, the clock hands had stopped working, stuck permanently at noon.

Arjun scoffed. “So? It’s just broken. Happens all the time.”

“No,” Raghunath muttered, eyes narrowing. “If I were a terrorist with a poet’s mind, where better to hide than inside a symbol everyone ignores?”

That night, they bribed a guard and climbed up the creaking staircase of the clock tower. Inside, the old gears and pulleys creaked with disuse. Then, in one dusty corner, Raghunath spotted something unusual, a wooden crate, disguised with cobwebs too perfect to be natural.

Inside was a crude but deadly time bomb, set to trigger during the Prime Minister’s convoy the next week.

Arjun whistled. “We found it! I’ll carry it down and…”

“Stop, you ox!” Raghunath hissed. “It’s rigged with a vibration sensor. You so much as sneeze near it, we’ll both be decorating the sky.”

 

Now came the real test.

RAW’s bomb squad was miles away. They had to defuse it themselves. Arjun looked pale for the first time. His strength was useless against ticking wires.

Raghunath calmly opened his cloth bag. Out came his “weapons”: a steel hairpin, chalk, a fountain pen, a shaving mirror, and a half-eaten guava.

“What are you going to do, Baba?” Arjun asked nervously. “Charm the bomb with poetry?”

“Shhh.”

The old man used the shaving mirror to reflect light inside the dark crate without disturbing it. He scribbled quick diagrams with chalk on the wooden floor.

Then he did something outrageous: he rubbed the guava in the side of the crate.

“Guava?” Arjun gawked.

“The fruit releases a sticky sap,” Raghunath explained calmly. “See, the vibration trigger is a ball bearing that shifts when moved. The sap will glue it just enough to stop rolling. Temporary, but enough for me to cut the correct wire.”

He bent the hairpin into a hook, carefully isolating the wire. With the fountain pen’s nib, he scraped a coating to identify live current. After a tense five minutes, he snipped the blue wire. The ticking stopped.

Both men exhaled deeply.

 

The case couldn’t make the newspapers, terrorist threats back then were hushed for fear of panic. RAW officially declared it a “fault in the old clock tower mechanism.”

Arjun sulked. “We nearly died, and no one will even know!”

Raghunath patted his broad shoulder. “Heroes are often unheard of, my boy. That is the burden of our service.”

 

The next morning, as they boarded the train back to Delhi, Arjun leaned back and said: “Fine, old man, you win. Your brains saved the day. But admit it, without my muscles intimidating half the city, we wouldn’t have flushed out any leads.”

Raghunath smiled. “True. Brawn clears the thorns, but it is the mind that knows which flower to pluck.”

Then he added with a mischievous glint: “Besides, without you carrying my heavy bag of tricks everywhere, I’d have died of backache long ago.”

Both men laughed, their odd partnership sealed.

History never recorded the near-catastrophe. No one knew how close the Prime Minister had come to death that week in Lucknow. Only two men remembered, one with arms like steel, the other with a mind sharp enough to outwit a bomb.