She starts to clap. Everybody joins in. There is laughter and cheering.
Urvashi smiles somewhat tremulously and thanks everyone. Mukki beams. ‘Rakesh has agreed to live with us and take the surname Khurana,’ he announces stolidly. ‘He’s had training in accountancy and will be joining my firm.’
Bhavani, who has let the reins go slack for a bit, now effortlessly gathers them up again. Padam, watching from the door, is reluctantly impressed.
‘Sach bataun toh I never thought ki Bhavani sir ki itni personality hai,’ he confides to his family exultantly the next morning. ‘I felt like I was watching KBC! Matlab how Bachchan sa’ab says pehla padaav and then dramatic music plays, and the camera and the lights sort of drop down and zoom in? Haan, it was same like that only! Bhavani sir’s voice got ekdum heavy, and I forgot what he said, but he might as well have said aakhri padaav. That was the effect he managed to create!’
‘Let us come back to the beginning,’ Bhavani says. ‘We have shared with you the details of three people who were being blackmailed by Leo Matthew, who had a motive to kill him, as well as a link to the body in the kitchen garden. Now there is one more thing that has a curious bearing on the case.’
He looks around the room, his steady gaze meeting every single person’s face, one by one.
‘Three years ago, Anshul Poddar and Bambi Todi had a beautiful engagement party to which several of you present here were invited. The engagement was tragically short-lived, because the very next morning, Anshul boarded a doomed bus to Garhwal, which went off the road in the fog, plummeted four thousand feet and crashed into a river, resulting in hundred per cent fatalities.
‘Naturally Bambi ji was devastated. But she is young, and resilient, and two years after Anshul’s death, she started socializing again. But this is when a strange thing happened. Every time Bambi ji went on a date, an anonymous letter claiming to be from Anshul would be found stuck under the windshield wiper of her car.’
This statement creates a sensation. Everybody turns with exclamations of surprise and concern to Bambi, who herself is staring in confusion at Bhavani.
‘But … I don’t understand,’ she says falteringly. ‘You didn’t believe me when I told you about the letters. You said I’d been sending them to myself! That I was delusional!’
‘What the hell!’ Kashi’s face darkens. ‘When did this happen, Bambi?’
She turns towards him deliberately, her voice scathing. ‘Oh, are you speaking to me again? How come?’
Kashi’s face reddens. ‘I’m not not speaking to you.’ He mutters, ‘I just … got busy…work…my mom…’ He trails off incoherently.
Bambi shoots him a look of pure scorn, then faces way.
‘We owe you an apology, Bambi ji,’ Bhavani says to the still fulminating girl. ‘Actually, we did nat want to tell you anything because we knew the stalker would be watching you all the time – perhaps it was even somebody you were coming into contact with regularly! So we thought it is better if you think the police is nat suspicious of the stalker or exploring that line of investigation at all.’
‘But you were?’ Hope suffuses her face.
He nods benignly. ‘O yes.’
They smile at each other.
Urvashi asks worriedly. ‘What’s all this, Bambi? What letters? What stalker?’
‘We are explaining.’ Bhavani looks about the room. ‘Essentially, the letters all said versions of the same thing – that the man Bambi ji was dating was unworthy, and that it would be better for her to wait till the letter writer, who signed himself as “the A” to her B came back to reclaim her.’
‘That’s what you called Anshul in your speech on your engagement day!’ Cookie recalls. ‘You said, “You’re the sun to my sea, the A to my B.” Kitna romantic tha!’ Her face crumples suddenly, overcome with sympathy. ‘Hai, bichaari bachi … what a sick joke for somebody to play!’
‘But what if it wasn’t a joke, Cookie ji?’ Bhavani says soberly. ‘From our experience in the Crime Branch we know that very often bubbly girls like Bambi ji attract the attention of neurotic types. Quiet, mild fellows who underneath are a seething volcano of pent-up emotion! They are too introverted to make their move but they brood, and they obsess, and they watch, and they stare with their nose pressed to the glass – what we used to call “window shopping” when we were young! It is entirely possible that there really is a stalker – somebody obsessed with Bambi ji, who has been watching her for years, and is pretending to be Anshul to keep her from dating other men till he makes his move.’
‘But what’s stopping him from making his move?’ Cookie demands.
Bhavani shrugs his chunky shoulders. ‘Who knows what goes on in the head of a madman, madam? Maybe he wants to lose weight before he meets her first, maybe he is burdened with a wife and wants to get divorced first, maybe—’
‘Maybe it really is Anshul, grievously injured, and he wants to heal completely first,’ Bambi says defiantly. ‘It could be that too, couldn’t it?’
‘Bambi.’ Raw pain has made Kashi’s voice very deep. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. Anshul is gone. You have to face up to it.’
Bambi’s eyes grow stormy, then fill with tears. She dashes them from her eyes, then smiles blindly and reaches for a glass of water.
‘Or maybe,’ Bhavani’s voice continues, now very softly, ‘he has a drug habit, a very hard-to-break, debilitating, life-destroying drug habit, and he wants to kick it before he makes his move …’
His eyes travel the room till they come to rest on the reclining figure on the bed, pale and propped up on a hospital pillow.
Bambi gasps. ‘What? No!’
The unguarded revulsion in her voice makes Aryaman flinch. Pain flashes on his face, then is swiftly replaced with a dull flush of resentful shame.
‘Surely you didn’t write those letters, Arya!’ Bambi makes a credible effort at sounding kinder. ‘Why would you?’
‘Maybe he’s an incel,’ Randy Rax volunteers suddenly to the room at large. ‘An involuntary celibate – as opposed to my friend Father Vicky here, who is a voluntary celibate. It’s a word for men who have been sexually rejected by women for years and years – so they get all messed up, and start hating women and mass-shooting people and boasting about it to each other on the internet – kind of like in that movie … The Joker.’ He pauses for a moment, head cocked to one side, eyes beadily bright, face sober. ‘I think I was an incel for a while. But not any more. Now I’m gonna go to my stepdad’s office every day and do yoga with my mum and ask a nice lady to marry me, and she will say yes, because I’m nice now too.’
‘That’s very nice, Rakesh,’ Urvashi says softly, ‘but you’re interrupting the investigation. Shusshh now.’
Silence fills the room. Roshni Aggarwal has buried her face in her hands. Her narrow shoulders are shaking.
‘Arya?’ Bambi says apprehensively. ‘I know you’ve been low-key stalking me. I caught you looking at me through that peephole again yesterday … and I’m sorry I yelled at you … especially if it made you overreact like …’ She pauses, takes a shaky breath, ‘Like this! But I never thought—’
‘I liked you,’ Aryaman Aggarwal interrupts her sullenly. ‘You know that, Bambi Todi, I’ve liked you for years – right through school and beyond. And you can deny it till you’re blue in the face but you did hook up with me on the library roof that one time! I went through hell on the day of your engagement – Mom insisted on bringing me to the party, fuck knows why – you wore yellow and gold – and he … Wow, was that alpha-male bastard a prince of choots! Maybe I’m an asshole, but trust me, an asshole can spot another asshole faster than anybody else – he wore yellow and gold too. I couldn’t bear it – couldn’t bear watching him put his bulked-up ape arm around your tiny waist like he’d fucking bought you from your fat bastard of a dad or something. So I asked Ajay Kumar to get me some shit and I went out into the garden and s
norted my brains out that night. I rejoiced when I heard the fucker died the next day – but I didn’t send you any letters and I didn’t kill Leo when I found out you’d been dating him – another asshole, by the way, who got killed by some other asshole … Why’re you such an asshole magnet?’
Everybody listens to this rambling tirade with horrified fascination; it is like watching a animal who has miraculously been granted the gift of speech. When he’s done, they all sort of blink in wonder collectively.
‘Arrey wah!’ Cookie Katoch says shakily. ‘So nicely you can speak, Aryaman beta, I haven’t heard you speak so many long sentences in years! Good boy!’
‘Thank you, auntie,’ he says dully.
Roshni looks up with naked, desperate appeal towards Bhavani. He nods and takes charge of the room again.
‘Aryaman, because of his drug dealer contacts, had access to as much Pinko Hathni as he liked. Things were looking very bad for him indeed and so he is fortunate that we soon found evidence that he was nat the person we were looking for …’
Roshni’s eyes widen. She steals closer to her son’s bed, and sits down by his feet.
‘We travelled to Kolkata,’ Bhavani continues, ‘where we spoke in the strictest confidence with Arihant Poddar who confirmed what you Bambi ji, and Mr Poddar’s own wife had always suspected. That the battered body that was identified and cremated as Anshul’s had nat been confirmed as hundred per cent his. There had been some room for doubt. And though the family had been in possession of Anshul’s DNA in the form of a lock of hair plucked out by the roots and fashioned into a locket for his mother on her fiftieth birthday, Arihant Poddar had nat used it to confirm if the body was that of his son. He had just relied on what he called his “father’s instinct” to identify the body. But perhaps he was relying more on a “husband’s instinct” and his driving motive was to protect his wife from the agonies of uncertainty and give her closure.
‘It does nat matter. The main takeaway from the meeting was that Anshul could very much be alive, at large, and the murderer we were seeking.’
There are gasps and murmurs from all over the room. Padam, standing by the door, braces himself, and discreetly touches the handcuffs buckled to his waist.
‘And now we started looking for Anshul in earnest. We spoke to people in Garhwal. Had they rescued somebody that day? Pulled a body out of the water? Given somebody a lift? We checked hospital records all along the route of the river.
‘At the same time, we checked if anybody had been stalking Bambi ji on social media. Instagram especially, where she was the most active, both on her own account and the account of the DTC. We checked Google search histories to see if anyone had been checking up on her steadily, compulsively. And slowly, a likely name started to emerge.
‘Nat Anshul Poddar, no. But somebody else. Somebody whom Bambi ji had known for years. Since she was six years old, to be exact. Whom she went to school with, whom she trusted, a regular visitor to her house. Somebody she had lost touch with for a while, but who had recently resurfaced and easily recaptured the place he had always held in her heart.’
He turns to look deliberately at the handsome young man on his left, who has been listening silently to him all this while.
‘Akash Dogra fit the bill exactly.’
Kashi looks up at that, utterly startled. ‘What?’ He stands up abruptly.
Padam Kumar surges forward at once, handcuffs clinking.
‘Stop!’ Bhavani’s voice is like a whip.
Padam halts.
Bhavani turns back to Kashi. ‘Vakeel sa’ab, please sit down.’
Kashi slowly retakes his seat, a thousand emotions flickering over his face.
‘Carry on, ACP,’ he says politely.
Bhavani inclines his head. ‘Very well. As we said, if Bambi Todi had a stalker, then Kashi Dogra fit the bill exactly. He had motive. His closest friends confirm that while he has a girlfriend who is perfect in every possible way, he is still emotionally invested in Bambi ji. Because of his constant, secretive stalking, he knew all about her dating Leo, even though nobody in the Zumba group did!’
The DTC Zumba ladies exchange startled looks. Clearly, this is news to them.
Bhavani nods gravely. ‘O yes. He had easy access to Pinko Hathni from the anti-social elements he represents in the lower courts all the time. As for opportunity – he dropped in on the DTC gym on Tambola Sunday to familiarize himself with the place, which had recently been renovated. Just a short visit perhaps, but it gave him ample time to observe the placement of the security camera and note that the gas balloons could easily be released through the window to obscure it at the correct moment. Later, when an argument broke out between Mukesh Khurana and Leo in front of the whole Club, he seized the opening to establish himself as a friend and well-wisher of the very man he planned to murder the next morning! And then, late that night, it was a simple enough matter for a fit young man to jog down to the DTC from Nizamuddin with his hood up, and then in through the gates as the security guards huddled up to their heaters in their boxes – and out the same way ten minutes later!’
‘You’re saying Kashi killed Leo because he was jealous?’ Bambi says incredulously. ‘Have you taken a good look at Kashi? I would’ve picked him over Leo any day!’
‘Bam,’ Kashi mutters. ‘Please. Behave.’
‘Shut up, Kashi!’ She turns back to the old policeman. ‘But I didn’t because Kashi has a girlfriend, and we’re just friends now. Wow, ACP, your age and your moral compass are really showing!’
‘Bambi—’
‘He’s accusing you of murder, Kashi!’
‘Yes, I know,’ Kashi replies in a low, level voice. ‘And it’s ridiculous and will never stand up in court.’
‘You’re right, Bambi ji,’ Bhavani replies easily. ‘Even we know that you would have picked vakeel sa’ab over Leo Matthew any day. And that is where we finally move forward out of all the fogs and confusions and come to the crux of this whole case, because you see, Akash Dogra did nat murder Leo Matthew because he was jealous of him. He murdered Leo Matthew because Leo Matthew was blackmailing him.’
‘Blackmailing Akash?’ Father Victor Emmanuel says blankly after the uproar in the room has subsided. ‘But Lambu didn’t even know Akash properly! I knew him! He repped some of our boys, he donated money to the orphanage because of me, not because of Lambu!’
Bhavani Singh gets slowly to his feet and looks about the room. Everybody watches him with bated breath.
‘Let us go back three years again. To the night of Bambi Todi and Anshul Poddar’s engagement. A glittering, spectacular night, put together in haste because the groom has to leave for a mountaineering expedition early the next morning. A guest list comprising of the wealthy Marwari committee, business associates of the Todis and Poddars, family friends, long-time retainers, and school friends of both Anshul and Bambi. And amongst this list of school friends, there is the twenty-two-year-old Akash Dogra, fresh out of law school with nothing to offer Bambi ji but his heart, putting up a brave front after being tossed aside by his childhood friend and girlfriend of the last few years.
‘We have seen the videos of that night. Akash Dogra arrives with two Doon School friends, and steers clear of Bambi ji all evening. He speaks little, eats even less, flinches when Bambi ji calls Anshul the A to her B, and drinks a lot. He meets Bambi for one short moment, hugs her awkwardly and shakes hands with Anshul, who gives him his hand in an open friendly fashion, with no suspicion whatsoever that the man he is shaking hands with has black hate in his heart.’
‘You can’t just say things like that, Bhavani ji!’ Bambi says in a shaking voice. ‘You weren’t there, you can’t possibly know the state of Kashi’s heart from a video. You’re acting like Guppie Ram, now!’
‘Yes, do please cut out the filmi flourishes, ACP,’ Roshni Aggarwal says testily. ‘I’ve given you access to this space because I want to get to
the bottom of this wretched business, but this situation now seems to be entering the realm of wild guesswork.’
Bhavani spreads out his hands.
‘We are just now coming to the point, madam. Here is what happened that night, and we have abundant proof of it. Akash Dogra left the party after congratulating Bambi ji and her new fiancé, and went out drinking with his friends. Presumably they tried to cheer him up and so on. Eventually they dropped him to his house and left.
‘But instead of going upstairs and to bed, Akash Dogra got into his parents’ Maruti Swift, drove back to the DTC, parked in the parking lot, and went back into the gardens of Guest Cottage No. 1.
‘Because Akash Dogra had dated Bambi Todi for years, he knew that she would do with Anshul what she had done with Akash many a time. Sure enough, a few hours later, when the party had well and truly wrapped up, and everybody including Bambi ji’s parents had gone home, and she herself had retired to Guest Cottage No. 1 where she was spending the night, Anshul Poddar returned. He had stowed his bags on the bus leaving for Garhwal and was dressed in his travelling clothes. A giggling Bambi ji let him into the cottage and they were cloistered there for two hours, while Akash Dogra waited outside. When Anshul finally emerged, alone, at about four in the morning, Akash Dogra was waiting for him. We do nat quite know how the lapis lazuli Shivling Cookie ji had carried into the party so proudly as a gift to the engaged couple entered the picture, but our guess is that Bambi ji gave it as a “joke” parting gift to her fiancé when he left her for the mountains.’
Kashi is staring at Bhavani with open fascination. ‘Then what happened?’ he asks.
Bhavani shrugs. ‘We cannat exactly say. An exchange of words perhaps, followed by a physical fight – in which the ace mountaineer, at the peak of his physical training, but wearied perhaps by a night of non-stop revelry, was bested by the jilted lover who had been waiting jealously in the freezing cold for two hours. Vakeel sa’ab here is definitely smaller and slighter, but they say hatred can power a man with superhuman strength. Or perhaps he had had the element of surprise.’
Club You to Death Page 31