by BS Murthy
While she was upbeat at that thought, coinciding with Satish's trip to the U.S, came Dhruva's ad for a lady assistant; it was her idea to incite his curiosity by loitering at the gate that rainy day as a prelude to taking him into her arms; but when she realized that Kavya was proving to be a source of distraction, she had goaded him to Ooty to have the best of him. But lost in his passion, she lost the desire to unearth his past, and as he began to love her, she developed an urge to conceive his child, which she hoped she would. She would have loved to make love to him until she had missed her periods, but as Satish was due by the weekend; it had to be a premature end to their liaison, but for all she knew, their child might be in the offing.
Dhruva in despair begged her to divorce Satish and marry him but she said that she would rather stick to her man than tie up with a philanderer like him. Even though he vouched for his lifelong fidelity, she didn't relent to be his wife, and to turn her around, he played up to her ego and said that he could not imagine life without her. Unmoved still, as she said that he being a ladies' man, she was sure that there wouldn't be any dearth of mates for him, he begged her not to make it a sudden death to his ardor and keep their affair alive until he could douse the flame. She told him that it was no way to make the best of the hoped for change in her life and he said that she was being unfair
to him; maintaining that it was part of life, she told him that he would be able to put all that behind him well before someone else caught his eye.
Chapter 11 Psyche of Revenge
When a dejected Dhruva returned home that evening, Raju informed him that a woman named Radha came to see him in the morning. What with the lost love and his hurt ego haunting him, he thought no more of petticoat chasing, even if it were Radha the suspected murderess, so he thought. Whatever, to catch up with the lost time and to get back to business, he invited Shakeel to review the Operation Checkmate afresh over a couple of drinks.
Lying in wait in mufti near Maisamma temple, said Shakeel sipping Teachers on rocks, he sighted the earmarked Santro, driven by a young woman in her twenties. When she brought the vehicle to a halt opposite the roadside shrine, though she didn't readily alight from it, yet he alerted the patrol parties at all the exit points. When he nearly tired of keeping focus on the target in that dim light, he saw the woman lead Kavya out of the vehicle and into the vaulted staircase. Shortly thereafter, he spotted a young man stepping out of the staircase with the handbags that he had arranged for the Operation Checkmate. While the guy got into the Santro, a Skoda passed him by, and in the flash of its headlights, he was surprised to realize that the kidnapper was Pravar. When Pravar steered the car to the Ramakrishna Mutt Road, he had alerted the patrol party in wait near the Dharna Chowk, and by the time, he joined them, the police had already nabbed the stunned culprit. However, during interrogation, as Pravar revealed his hand in the unresolved double murder of M adhu and M ala, it was Shakeel's turn to be shocked at his own investigative naivety.
Sparing Shakeel further humiliation, Dhruva, for once, didn't spar him with his barbs, and instead wanted him to picture Pravar's background for him to gauze its likely affect on Kavya's perturbed psyche. Shakeel, as he began to sketch Pravar's skewed past, was rather surprised at Dhruva's never before eagerness.
M ala was ten when Pravar was born, and soon after, as their mother became sickly, their father took to drinking, further denting their family resources. What with a drunkard father to contend with, a sickly mother to tend to and a young sibling to groom, Mala began to mature more than her age. When Pravar was ten, she married the miserly Suraiah, a measly clerk in the civil works department; she herself believed that a paisa spent was far more worthy than a rupee horded. Soon, her mother died, making Pravar an orphan in his own home that was nearly impoverished by then; but when their father too kicked the bucket, she took him under her wings for his succor and support. Pravar was fourteen then.
The move didn't auger well for Pravar as he was torn between his sister's affection and his brother-in-law's resentment to his presence in the house, which turned him into a schizophrenic: as his physical proximity with her induced in him a sub-conscious sexual affinity for her, her marital closeness with the man he abhorred bred a sexual jealousy in him. When his sense of helplessness eventually turned him into a bully in the galli, even as his rowdyism perturbed Mala, it attracted Rajan, a minor bootlegger, who took him under his tutelage. As Suraiah began to jibe at Mala on that count, it only furthered Pravar's subconscious oneness with his sister; however Suraiah died soon, leaving Pravar with no rival to M ala's affections insensibly augmenting his sense of possessiveness of her. Pravar began to dote upon Mala like never before, which suited her as well, for it catered to her innate need for male attention. But things changed when she was absorbed in the department on compassionate grounds and Radha's man
Madhu, who happened to be her boss lost no time in wooing her on the emotional plane.
Around that time, Rajan happened to meet the sixteen year-old Natya in an orphanage and tricked her into eloping with him; even as his boss boasted about his conquest, bitten by her charms, Pravar was obsessed with possessing her, however, perceiving it as a betrayal of his devotion to M ala. While he was beset emotionally thus, the lifting of prohibition in the State ending bootlegging had hurt him monetarily too as the contraband was disbanded.
Then, Rajan thought of extortion as a way out for the three of them, and as Pravar gained ground on the crime front, Mala slipped on the sexual ground to become Madhu's mistress. While that development distressed Pravar morally, seeing Mala bestow all her attentions on M adhu, he was depressed emotionally as well; however, he found a soul mate in Raghu, Radha's young son, whom Madhu began reducing into M ala's errand boy. Pravar took up cudgels with M ala on Raghu's behalf but perceiving that was the privilege of a mistress, she paid a deaf ear to his protestations. Soon Pravar came to identify himself with the hapless Raghu, and that made him resent M ala's liaison even more.
Abetted by Pravar when Raghu rebelled, an irate M adhu said that for all he knew, he could be a bastard and as Raghu in humiliation committed suicide on the railway tracks; Pravar felt that M adhu had no right to live, and so also M ala, who was no less callous. Also Pravar came to perceive Radha as a cock-pecked wife, unwilling to protect her hapless son, and that evaporated the sympathy he felt for her, as a neglected wife, owing to his sister's trespass onto her marital bed. So it was Pravar's conscious sense of hurt, abetted by his subconscious righteousness that steeled his heart against the trio.
After Raghu's death, as M adhu started taking M ala home, Pravar worked on a plan to eliminate them all without soiling his hands that developed the skill to tamper with bottle seals during his bootlegger days. Aware that under M adhu's influence, M ala took to drinking, he presumed that Radha would like a drink as well, so he poisoned a bottle of Teacher's Scotch, and waited for the day that M adhu and M ala gloated over as their Union Day. On that U-day, he presented the 'bottle of death', sans his fingerprints, to Mala for 'celebrating' with her lover and his wife. When Mala said that Radha was 'no game for that', Pravar suggested that they might as well leave the dregs for her to rue later, and true to his word, he sought to implicate Radha by poisoning Shakeel's mind about her involvement in the double murder.
As M ala's death ended Pravar's emotional divide, so his passion for Natya came to rule his heart, and being bolder for the double murder, he plotted to kill Rajan to usurp his woman, and waited for the opportunity, which presented itself soon enough. That midnight, the three of them were at a secluded spot in Shamirpet to collect the ransom from a businessman, whose kid they kidnapped the day before. While Rajan and Pravar waited for the father at the agreed place, Natya stayed in the background holding the kid; when the dad came with the ransom, Pravar went to Natya to fetch the kid for barter. On their way back with the booty, Pravar shot Rajan dead and to mislead Natya, he fired from his as well as Rajan's revolver to fake an encounter, which the police made out
to be a real thing to score a few Brownie points of 'law and order'.
Having thus gained an entry into Natya's hapless life, Pravar doled out from the booty to worm his way into her enamored heart. After their marriage, though she wanted him to give up his bad ways, as he was too far down the road of crime; she had no choice but to keep pace with him. While he planned to kidnap Kavya, wiser for the hazards a secluded place posed in collecting the ransom, he conceived the ingenuous rendezvous on the Tank Bund. What with Natya playing her part to perfection, they
almost pulled it off, but only almost. While Dhruva's genius spoiled the party for Pravar, Natya gave the slip to Shakeel when he went to nab her in their den.
When Shakeel ended the remarkable tale saying that he was confident of seeing Pravar on the gallows for the double murder, Dhruva said that any novice of a lawyer could induce the courts to set him free for want of evidence. However, when Dhruva said that Pravar was too dangerous to be left alone, Shakeel agreed to put him under constant scanner.
Chapter 12 Victim of Trust
Next day, Dhruva woke up earlier than usual to Radha's thoughts, and sipping the bed-coffee in the portico, as he thought about the inimical twists and turns in her chequered life, he had a gut feeling that it was she, who came to see him the other day. What with his earlier fascination for the alleged murderess coming to the fore again, he was seized with an urge to see her. While he was lost in his thoughts, as Dicey began to bark, he looked towards the gate, and seeing a fascinating dame, he seemingly lost his heart to her, but bitten once, even as she approached him seductively he subdued himself. Just the same, when she introduced herself as Radha, he couldn't resist holding out his hand to her, but as she offered her services to him, he wanted to have her resume, before he made up his mind.
Radha was the only child of her parents, who pampered her much beyond their middle-class means. She was rather studious and methodical and even excelled at her studies that is relatively speaking, and to the delight of his parents, she was on expected academic course to be a Chartered Accountant. However, when she crossed eighteen, her life went awry, as she lost her heart to a newcomer in their locality, whose identity she preferred not to reveal, as the world was small after all. What with love ruling her head, she failed to apply her mind at her studies to end up at the bottom of the class, and her father, who entertained visions of seeing her in the 'Brahmaiah' mould, was aghast at her poor showing. When he wanted her to explain her low scores, she spilled the beans, and that left him with no choice but to approach her lover's father, who roundly condemned her for enticing his gullible son and outraged by the slur, her father prohibited her from meeting her lover any more.
However, as her lover assured her that he would prevail over his father, blinded by love, she carried on with him on the sly, but as her escapades came to her father's notice, he restricted her movements, and started looking for a suitable boy for her. While the prospect of her marriage with another alarmed her, and as her lover too was averse to losing her, they eloped, when she was barely nineteen. While that made her scandalized parents disown her, her lover's parents were engaged in weaning their son away from her.
Her lover's will to stick to her through thick and thin began to wane as he came to wilt under the emotional blackmail of his parents, which forced her to remind him of his own vows never to part with her. When she was thus hard-pressed to hold her lover, his father upped the ante by pitting his son's mediocre life with her against the rosy future as the son-in-law of a well-heeled man with a vivacious daughter. While the parentinduced insecurity played upon his mind and the envisaged beauty of the bride-to-be blunted her own charms in his vision, her lover came to perceive her as a source of his own undoing. As if the prospect of losing her lover was not nightmarish enough, she missed her periods, regardless of which, he chose to desert her, and that sealed her fate. Left in the lurch, as she burnt her bridges with her parents, so she thought, she in
desperation, tried to contact her childhood friend, her full-soul mate her half-namesake, as she put it.
Seeing a twitch on Dhruva's brow then, Radha felt that some namesake of hers might have stirred his heart before, while he, staring at her, wondered what if she were to be as soulless as her half-namesake who had just then jilted him.
When she learned that her friend, having married in the meantime, moved out of town by then, Radha recapped her life and times; she had to turn to an elderly neighbor to help her find a job. But as he tried to snare her into being his keep, which made her realize the pitfalls of a single woman in the man's world, swallowing her pride, she, a prodigal daughter, approached her parents, who took her back into their fold. As she was keen to bear her child, which proposition her mother supported, her father had to find a groom for her on a war footing, and that brought M adhu, an Engineer in the Civil Works Department, into her life.
While M adhu jumped at the prospect of marrying her, as she found him not to her liking, she dragged her feet, but her father asked her to choose between aborting her child and marrying the Engineer. With the lurking danger the bulging belly posed, she bowed her head to let M adhu tie the knot and he, blinded by his adoration for her, not only turned blind to her reticence in the bed but also failed to grasp the import of the early arrival of her son, Raghu. While she doted upon her son, more out of a sense of guilt than any affection for the man who fathered him, M adhu was never enamored of him though not out of suspicion.
However, it took the seven-year itch for Madhu to get wind of her conjugal indifference towards him, and that hurt his ego and crushed his heart. She always knew that she had to involve her body and mind to save the nuptial tie, and yet she couldn't bring herself around to obey the dictates of cohabitation. Maybe vexed with her cold embrace, Madhu sought to pep up his sex-life with call girls, whom his bribe money fetched in their scores, and even as she thought that life couldn't get worse than that, fate had other indignities in store for her.
When Madhu's assistant died in an accident, Mala, as his childless widow, with a brother to support, got a job in the department on compassionate grounds, he lost no time in ingratiating himself with her as a neglected husband, deprived of woman's affections and all. Succumbing to his falsity, owe be to the vulnerable woman, Mala agreed to become his mistress, to be set up in a chinnillu and supported by his vasool money. While Madhu lavished his attention on Mala, as if to add insult to the injury, he used force Raghu to run errands for her, and when Radha chided him for reducing his own son as a valet of his mistress; he implied that she herself being so cold to him; her boy, for all he knew, could be a bastard.
Worried about her boy's future in that setting, when she raked her brains to save him, she thought of his biological father, who so cruelly ditched her to hitchhike with a moneyed dame. However mean he might have been, she thought, won't he come to his boy's rescue by putting him in some boarding school? So she tried to locate him, more out of desperation than in hope, for she knew how mean he was. When she managed to find him, though after a long haul, as she pictured their son's plight, he painted himself as a lovelorn, paying the price for his betrayal in his wife's cold bed, which left him childless in that marriage. As that triggered her innate empathy she has had for him, and with no love lost for her spouse; she had no qualms in bedding with him, though in the hope of propping up their son.
At the end of a weeklong rendezvous in which he overwhelmed her with his passion, she set aside her past bitterness and asked him to take her as his second wife to give their son his due. But lo, the bastard made her feel ashamed of herself; what cruelty to
say that she was a first grade maal all right, but she should've known that even for a second wife, he wouldn't have a third grade slut. Slighted though, she swallowed her pride and tried to impress upon him about his obligations to his own offspring, but he inflicted the cruelest cut on her body soul - if she could recall correctly, why she never forgot his words, he told her that the plight of a bastard was not something for
him to lose sleep over. When she retorted, what if she told his wife about his past, he warned her that she might as well forget about her future whatever little it might have held for her, as he would engage a supari to eliminate her without anyone ever getting wiser about it. How disgusted she was with the man she once loved and compromised with again, she only knew.
However, things came to a head when Raghu questioned M adhu as to how he could reduce his own son as an errand boy of his mistress, he callously retorted what proof he had of his own paternity, and rubbed salt on his paternal wound with the adage that maternity was a fact but paternity was only a faith. Given Raghu's premature birth, he said that he didn't think that he was indeed his father, and unable to bear the humiliation, her boy committed suicide on the railway track. Madhu though saw in the tragedy an opportunity to slight her further, and so he began bringing M ala home, as a prelude to a menage a trios, as he put it. But Radha decided to call a spade a spade, and sought divorce, to which, he was averse, as his sexual interest in her had resurged, as a byproduct of his passion for his mistress. M oreover, adding insult to injury, he said that not counting alimony; a house maid could be more expensive than a wife, but as she refused his demands for threesome orgies, he further debased himself as a wife-beater.
When Radha was all set to press for divorce regardless, tragedy struck her that fateful day; as he tried to force her to have a drink with him and his mistress, as she refused to oblige, he necked her out of the house in a fit of rage, forcing her to turn to a friend for a shelter as her parents were dead and gone by then. When a neighbor called her the next day to tell her that M adhu and M ala died of poisoning and the police were on the lookout for her, she rushed to the police station to clear her name, but to be locked-up as the main suspect. How Shakeel the inspector on duty had abused her, she only knew, oh, what a diabolical character he was!
Though Shakeel failed to book the real culprit to date, she always had a hunch that Pravar, the awara brother of Mala, would have been the killer, and so with a little detective work, she gathered that he became an object of ridicule because of his sibling's conduct and all taunted him on that score. While that could be a motive for him to murder the illicit couple, he had a criminal background to boot, though not on the scale that Shakeel tried to picture on the TV screens. Well, it smelled something fishy really; whatever, she knew that the poisoned drink the couple drank to their death was a present from Pravar for their cherished occasion, and as she was going through an old issue of Eenadu that she missed earlier, coming across Dhruva's ad, she turned hopeful.