‘Right.’ He looked sheepish. He really was a misfit for this job, I mused. ‘So you were sleeping with a married man.’
‘You had to bring out the barbed wire, didn’t you?’
‘I was merely confirming facts.’
‘Yes, I was sleeping with a married man.’
‘You wanted him to leave his wife and marry you. Is that why you killed him?’
‘He and I have been a couple much longer than Pakhi has been his wife. Why would I want to kill him? He is no use to me dead.’
‘He left you and married her. You must have been angry.’
‘He had to marry her. I understood.’
‘Why did he have to marry her?’
‘Bharat Desai’s money.’
‘He married her for money, then he fell in love with her, and you became insecure.’
‘You watch too many movies.’
‘That’s not an answer to my question.’
‘You were merely speculating.’
‘But I was speaking the truth.’
‘Look, his relationship with her had nothing to do with me. He loved me, and that was enough. He has always stood by my side when I needed him—until now. The bastard has got himself killed, and now I am left dealing with the likes of you who have no regard for time and place. You think it your right to walk into a lady’s home whenever you wish and treat her like garbage. If he weren’t dead already, I would most likely have killed him if he were here now, for letting all this happen to me,’ I shouted, and then, to my utter horror, I burst into tears.
Once again, I woke to the doorbell’s insistent ringing. I had to do something about the freaking problem, I decided. I sat up groggily and considered my options. I could remove the doorbell, but then these unsavoury intruders would hammer at my front door until I went mad.
I could remove the door itself, and then perhaps I could have some peace. But the freaking idiots would gallivant in as though they were taking a walk in the park, I thought miserably. Maybe it was time to move. Was the Mars colony established? Would that be far enough?
The doorbell chimed again. Cursing the creep, Choudhary, I checked the time and searched for my robe. It was 7:30 a.m. I must have unsettled him more than I had dared to hope. He had finally left after exhausting his list of inappropriate questions about my less than proper relationship with Piyush.
I had been right. He had been on a fishing expedition. Discovering our clandestine love affair sealed the deal as far as he was concerned. His team took some stuff they called evidence. I couldn’t care less. I was glad to see the last of him.
The doorbell rang again. Rubbing my eyes, I went to open it, expecting the CBI to be there with an arrest warrant. I was surprised to find Pandurang there instead. He asked if he could come in, even as he stepped indoors. He was brisk and business-like, his face red with fury. What had ticked him off this early in the morning?
‘You were sleeping with him,’ he said accusingly.
Right, so that was what this was all about. ‘Is it in the papers today?’ I replied sarcastically, making a dramatic scene of rushing back to the door to gather the day’s papers, which were still lying on the doorstep.
‘Avinash told me.’
‘I knew he was not fit to be an investigator the moment I met him. He had no business telling you anything.’
‘I am the chief operating officer of the company. I get updated about the investigation.’
‘Really? Why are you exempt from suspicion? Because you are best friends with Avinash?’
‘No, I am not exempt. I am coming from the CBI’s office. They had summoned me for questioning.’
‘Hooray!’ I muttered, furious with Pandurang.
Again, my actions had belied my public personality. Usually, with him and other IndeGeners, I was on my best behaviour. I had somehow lost all ability to control myself, and I was speaking my mind all the time.
I knew that this new compulsion to tell all was bad for work. Plus, my stomach was heaving again. The rush to the door appeared to have disrupted its equilibrium. Even as I heard Pandurang utter something, I dashed past him to the washroom.
◆◆◆
When I returned, he had cleared enough of the mess in my living room to have some space to sit. He had found the remote and turned off the TV. The morning paper in one hand, he was speaking in his mother tongue over the phone. Updating his wife, I guessed. I waved to tell him I would be in the kitchen and went to brew coffee. After a few minutes, he joined me.
‘You are a wreck,’ was his first comment.
I did not reply, so he continued, ‘You should take a few days off and rest. I could send housekeeping people to clean up your house.’
‘Are you suspending me?’ I had to ask.
‘No, should I?’ he asked frankly, sitting down at the dining table. He looked worried and confused. He was missing Piyush, I realised. We all were. Everyone was coping differently. Was that why he was here—in search of a friend, a kindred soul?
He and Piyush had been a good team. He had blossomed under Piyush’s able care. Without him for support and saddled with the unexpected mess, things must be difficult for him too.
‘Maybe you should. I am the prime suspect.’
‘Did you do it?’
‘Tell me how he died, and I will tell you if I did it or not.’
‘I am not joking, so stop kidding me. I am dead serious.’
‘You are not dead. You are very much alive, unlike Piyush.’ I had to pause as emotion overcame me. ‘I am not joking, Pandurang. I am dead serious too.’
‘Did you do something that could have gotten him killed?’
‘You mean besides telling the board that Piyush was no longer fit to be CEO?’ I asked morosely. I had done that with the best intentions, but sometimes best intentions alone were inadequate.
‘Yes, besides killing him with your opinion. It must have been hell for him to know that the woman he loved thought so little of him’
‘Yet he sent that email offering to cooperate.’
‘Do you think he had a choice? He stood to lose everything he had worked so hard for over the past ten years by antagonising the board. ‘Anyway... Nalini, he was poisoned,’ Pandurang said softly.
‘Poison. How?’
‘Datura poisoning.’
◆◆◆
Datura? Where had I heard the word before? Memories came flooding back, making me reel. ‘Nalini, that beautiful white flower shaped like a bell, that’s datura,’ my grandfather’s soft voice echoed in my ears. I had been eight years old. We were walking back home from school, and I was more interested in the butterfly fluttering around me than in paying attention to his words.
When I was older, my grandmother insisted on sending me flower-picking for daily prayers at home. I hated the chore and used many tactics to express my dissent. One way was picking all the daturas I could find. My grandmother never used them as offerings.
I would wait until minutes before the prayer to complete the chore and return with a basketful of the inauspicious blossom. It would be too late to send somebody else to pick fresh buds, and that day’s prayers would proceed without flowers, frustrating my grandmother and raising my spirits sky-high.
But no one had ever cared to inform me that these beauties were poisonous. How stupid of me to not have guessed. Why else would they be inappropriate for God? They were capable of murder—wow!
I was shocked.
Pandurang told me that datura caused delusions. The victim lost his or her ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. It made a person imagine unreal things. To somebody under the influence of datura, his or her worst nightmares became real, causing bizarre behaviour. Body temperatures rose, and the individual became hypersensitive to light.
The doctors who performed his autopsy believed that Piyush too would have experienced the same symptoms. His body temperatures must have shot up, making his datura-influenced mind panic. In this fever pitch, he took asp
irin—the only medicine he had with him—but that clearly hadn’t helped. His hallucinations must have continued to torment him because he had emptied the whole bottle and gulped down the pills.
He had also sought out Chirag for some reason. That was why he had called him and later rushed to his room barefoot. His manner on the phone had frightened Chirag, who fled before Piyush arrived. The empty room obviously compounded his anxiety several times over.
The doctors concluded that the aspirin in his system added fuel to his already upside-down state of mind. Symptoms related to aspirin overdose might have manifested, and he might have disproportionately imagined their effects. Whatever the reason, hematidrosis set in. That was the last straw.
Pandurang explained that hematidrosis was a rare physiological condition in which a person sweated blood.
The pathologists postulated that the extreme physical trauma—which would include headaches, abdominal pain, and skyrocketing body temperature—that Piyush believed he was experiencing might have frightened his tipsy mind. He must also have been in the grip of some intense worry because of which he had gone to Chirag’s room. All of this played havoc with his deranged mind, causing extreme fear.
In rare cases, when subjected to acute physical and emotional trauma, people developed hematidrosis, a medical condition that caused bleeding from all the pores in the body, including the forehead, nails, nose, and skin. However, loss of blood in this manner would have been minimal if not for the aspirin—a blood thinner.
The medical reasoning was that to Piyush’s already confused mind, the sight of blood all around him must have set off demons from a different dimension. The red floor tiles, blood-stained shower curtain, stained bath towels, pink water droplets in the wash basin... everything must have petrified him. To his delusional mind, it must have seemed that the bathroom was bleeding. This would have horrified him. That could be why he fled the room in sheer panic.
Because the datura poison made him photophobic, he would have chosen the first dark path he found: the way to the pier. The road to the cliff was dark and sheltered by trees on both sides because of which even the moonlight would have been mellower. His problem was that the blood kept following him. At some point, he might have realised that his skin was bleeding as well, heightening his fear.
When he reached the cliff, the moonlight would have blinded him, spooking him out. The only dark space was the wide expanse of sea that lay before him. Its noises may have frightened him too. But whatever his final fears—light, blood, or noise—he stepped off the cliff and plunged to his death because of the severe delusional state he was in.
This update shook me to the core. Datura. Aspirin. The words flashed across my mind, making me giddy. I focussed on the flower. A robust and cherished life lost because of a pretty thing that grew in the wild like an innocuous weed. The next instant a chilling thought crossed my mind. Somebody had deliberately poisoned Piyush. Who could that person be?
How was the poison administered? It couldn’t have been slipped into his drink or food during dinner. We had all dined together, and the rest of us were alive. How did the killer single him out?
My thoughts returned to Creep Choudhary. Now that he knew that Piyush and I had been a couple, he would connect all the dots. The common door between our rooms, my access to his things, my fingerprints in his room. From what I could see, all accusatory fingers pointed in my direction.
Pandurang told me that they had questioned him about the murder, but the CBI had mostly wanted to know if he knew about my relationship with Piyush. How widely was it known, and how strong was our bond? He admitted that the questioning had been primarily about me and any motives I might have had to kill him. That didn’t surprise me at all.
Chapter 14
The rest of the day was one long nightmare.
I arrived late, upsetting my routine. My mind kept drifting off, making me lose focus. When I finally got into the groove of working, Chirag walked in and refused to leave. He rambled on and on—about the funeral, missing his brother-in-law, his dad saying that the police would find the killer, Pakhi meeting the CBI... For him, I was his agony aunt; for me, listening to his chatter was sheer agony.
Creep Choudhary strolled into my office around 4:00 p.m., behaving as cordially as a man could. Chirag refused to budge, and for once I was glad. There we sat, the three of us, in my cabin on the ninth floor for a full hour, with Chirag going on about the fun games we had played on Saturday and how happy he had been then.
Choudhary had to endure the repetitive accounts. He couldn’t throw out Bharat Desai’s son. I enjoyed myself for the first time that day. Watching him put up with Chirag was pure joy.
Creep Choudhary wanted the personnel files of all the IndeGeners present at the resort. He had a warrant. I had the legal cell verify the document before calling Pandurang to inform him that I was sharing private information about our team with the CBI. He told me that he already knew about the warrant. I had forgotten about the nexus Creep Choudhary was forging with Pandurang. He was still on track with that plan.
I had the files copied and brought up. In the meantime, I informed the concerned employees about the development. The news displeased them.
I left soon after. On the way home, I was once again overcome by a wave of nausea. I had to park on the roadside and throw up on the street like some journey-sick traveller.
A crowd had gathered around me. An elderly lady dressed in a faded cotton sari offered me a much-used, scratched plastic water bottle. I attempted to refuse, but she insisted that I take a sip. Not wanting to offend her, I obliged, fearing that I was ingesting all the diseases in the world through the contaminated tap water.
After that episode, I drove straight to the hospital. I knew I would be sick. Not only was I throwing up a few times a day, I had also consumed unpurified tap water. My doctor suggested tests, which I underwent. Then I had to wait to show her the reports. It was a tiring experience. When she finally saw me, I was too drained to understand what she said and went home in a daze.
I did the strangest things that evening. I ordered a meal, cleaned my house, washed dishes, did the laundry, and every other mundane task I could think of. By midnight I was exhausted. I slept like a baby that night.
The next day, I woke early and went for a morning walk to clear my head.
Before leaving, I studied my doctor’s report to understand what everything meant. I also assessed if I was showing any symptoms that I needed to worry about but found no cause for concern. I had important decisions to take, and with Piyush out of my life for good, I had to do this all by myself.
I returned to find Creep Choudhary at my door. The man had insomnia or perhaps he was not human. He certainly had streaks of the devil in him. His mind and body were alert despite lack of sleep. I wondered if he ate. Looking at his lean frame, I suspected he needed little food to sustain himself. He probably survived on the blood of those he harassed.
I tried my best to offer a chirpy good morning, but I was unhappy to see him and could not fake even a simple greeting. Giving up the wasted effort, I held out my hand, and he stared back at me, puzzled.
Understanding his confusion, I asked for the arrest warrant. He replied shortly that he merely wanted to question me again. I mentally prepared myself for yet another ordeal. At that moment my nausea returned, and I threw up violently onto the beautiful shrubs bordering my front lawn.
The gardeners had trimmed them before the New Year. The tiny violet flowers dotting a dark green backdrop presented a pleasant appearance. Now with slimy, creamy, yellow puke all over them, they looked like a dinosaur-sized crow had shit on them. Just the sight of my vomit mangling the green shrubs brought forth a fresh bout, and this time I shut my eyes tight to avoid looking at the mess.
Creep Choudhary’s female assistant held my hand, but I still had to sit down after the episode. I rested for a few minutes, and they waited. Even in my weak state, the shock on the Creep’s face was hard to miss. He
had expected to find my house the same pigsty he had exited the day before. Hell, even I was stunned at everything I had accomplished in one evening, all on my own.
◆◆◆
The questioning at the CBI offices was, as always, a bore. The Creep was more thorough this time. He was sure of what he needed to know.
As soon as we arrived, I spotted a white flower lying on the table in the interrogation room. Out of habit, I picked it up and examined it. It was a datura.
‘You recognise it, I see,’ the Creep’s voice boomed behind me. He stepped into the room. ‘It’s not just a flower. It’s a murder weapon.’
I stayed quiet. He hadn’t asked a question. He continued after a weighty pause.
‘Do you know where I found it?’
‘No.’
‘In your own backyard! It was in the evidence we collected yesterday. So don’t tell me you did not know that.’
‘I did not receive a list of the items you collected as evidence from my house. Besides, it’s impossible that this plant is growing in my yard.’
‘Why?’
‘I am paying the gardener good money to maintain that patch. For the amount I pay him, if he is swindling me and planting things that grow without any care in the wild, he is in for a rude shock.’
‘What will you do? Kill him, just like you killed Piyush?’
‘I haven’t killed anyone—yet.’ I snorted, leaving the obvious implication out in the open for him to ponder.
‘Why do you have datura growing in your garden?’
‘I just told you that the gardener does the planting. I only pay him. Ask him.’
‘We did. You did not think we would question you without speaking to him first.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he only plants what Nalini madam asks him to.’
‘I never asked him to plant that.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
He pushed a piece of paper at me. I peered at it and recognised my credit card bill from a few months ago. He had underlined something—a payment made to the local nursery. Attached to it was a thin flap of paper: a copy of the bill issued by the nursery. I had purchased many seeds that day, and ‘Blackcurrant Swirl’ was highlighted on the list.
The Murder Suspect Page 11