Prakash and Ismail watched and followed Salim for the next four days. His daily routine was more or less the same, with the only variation being what he did after lunch at the Malakpet restaurant. On the second day, after lunch he went to a farmhouse located on the outskirts of the city, which bore a sign saying ‘Al-Hilal Poultry’. He was there for two hours before he made his way back home.

On the third day, he went to meet somebody at Basheerbagh, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood in the north of the city. He stayed in the ground-floor flat of a three-storey building, which seemed to house government employees, for forty-five minutes before leaving for home.

Prakash, who was hanging around at a tea shop located nearby, casually asked a fellow customer who stayed in the ground-floor flat.

‘Sukhram Tiwari. He is a senior babu in the municipal corporation’s sewage department, responsible for handing out contracts to clean up the gutters and drains,’ the customer said.

On the fourth day, after lunch at the restaurant, Salim went for a drive on the Mumbai–Hyderabad highway and drove as far as Viqarabad, a good twenty kilometres away from the city. On the way back, he stopped at a PCO for a minute before returning home.

On Sunday afternoon, Salim did not drive to his office. Instead, he went to Maulana Chirag Ansari’s palatial yellow bungalow, known to locals as the ‘Peeli Haveli’, in Old Hyderabad. There, Salim was seen mingling with a band of young men who were practising with five-foot-long sticks and nunchakus under the watchful eyes of two tall wiry men who seemed to be their instructors. Salim joined in the practice and was even asked to show his moves to the rest of the class by the instructors.

Rathod was at CTC’s regional office located in an unmarked bungalow in Old Hyderabad, poring over surveillance reports. One of his teams was keeping a watch on Salim, who was exhibiting his skills in stick-combat at Peeli Haveli.

Salim had received calls from and made calls to the Malerkotla PCO number under the CTC scanner at least a dozen times in the last three months. He had also received calls from a Lahore landline number, which was one of the four known numbers belonging to the headquarters of Al-Cheema. He had also made frequent calls to PCO numbers located in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hooghly and Kanpur.

‘Salim seems to be making final preparations for D-day, which could be an attack on temples or on a religious procession culminating at the Musi River. He is ripe for plucking,’ Rathod told Shekhar on the phone that same Sunday evening.

‘Do it tomorrow, I am reaching Hyderabad tonight,’ Shekhar said.