‘You say you have proof of this,’ Kashi says in a low voice. ‘Can I ask what proof you possess?’
‘Perhaps you did nat mean to kill Bambi ji’s fiancé. Perhaps you had only sought to teach him a lesson. But once you realized he was dead, sanity returned. The enormity of what you had just done dawned on you. A man was dead at your hands, the son of a very rich and powerful man. Remembering the beetroot patch that you had seen being dug up in the lawn, you made a phone call to Guppie Ram, the old gardener, who was sympathetic to your cause, and had always been very taken up by the idea of you and Bambi ji getting together. Being a poor man himself, his sympathies lay with you, the poorer suitor, and nat with the arrogant Anshul. It was an easy enough task to persuade him to help you dispose Anshul’s body into that shallow grave.’
There is a small stifled gasp from the other end of the room. Ganga has slumped forward onto the coffee table, her head in her arms.
‘She’s fainted,’ Bambi, sitting next to her, says crisply. ‘Her pulse is steady enough. She should come around in a moment. It must be all this stress.’
‘What about you, Bambi?’ Urvashi leans in to whisper. ‘Isn’t this all … too much for you?’
Bambi’s face is very pale, but she shakes her head determinedly. ‘I’m sure he’s building up to some sort of twist in the tale,’ she whispers back. ‘It’s okay.’
Ganga revives, looking apologetic, and asks weakly for a glass of water. Rather self-consciously, Randy Rax holds it to her lips.
Bhavani, who has not looked away from Kashi even for moment during this bit of by-play, picks up his narrative from exactly where he has left it.
‘Fortune favours the brave, they say. God alone knows if you sent Anshul’s expedition members a message from his phone, and what you said in that message, or what answers you dreamt up to the questions that were sure to be raised the next day, or if you even managed to get any sleep that night. But by the time you woke up, the news was in. Anshul’s bus had plummeted into an abyss and all on board were dead. Nobody would go looking for him, or ask why he had nat shown up on the bus that morning. Miraculously, you were safe.’
‘Please, for the sake of clarity,’ Mukesh Khurana asks pleadingly, ‘you’re saying ki Bambi’s fiancé never got on the bus to Garhwal at all? That he was murdered that night and buried right here in the DTC? That he’s been here all along? You’re saying the body in the kitchen garden is Anshul Poddar? That’s your theory?’
Bhavani nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Fuck.’ Aryaman Aggarwal turns to look at Kashi with awe in his eyes. ‘Respect, bro!’
‘And so vakeel sa’ab was safe, but nat satisfied. Because Bambi Todi shunned him. Women have a special feminine intuition, they say, and perhaps, subconsciously, she sensed that the man who seemed to bear her no malice for the way in which she had jilted him, was actually the murderer of her fiancé and the architect of her grief. She did nat speak to him for the next two years.’
‘But the proof?’ Kashi insists again, in a low intense voice. ‘What proof do you have to substantiate this richly imagined tale?’
Bhavani turns to look at him more fully. ‘The shards of blue stone found in the mud correspond exactly with materials Cookie ji uses.’
‘That proves nothing.’
‘And the DNA from Anshul Poddar’s hair, plucked from the root … It was sent to us by his father and it matches the DNA of the skeleton found in the kitchen garden patch exactly. We have the report here. There is no room for error at all.’
‘That doesn’t prove Kashi did it,’ Bambi says hotly. ‘It just proves the man in the kitchen garden is Anshul! Which,’ she swallows painfully, ‘is horrible, of course, but I’ve … already mourned Anshul and I cannot do it again. You have no proof against Kashi, ACP!’
‘But we do, Bambi ji,’ Bhavani says softly. ‘When the newspapers reported that it was Ganga’s husband, Ajay Kumar, who was buried in the kitchen garden, Cookie ji came forward with a video recording of that night – a short clip of Ajay Kumar arguing with Aryaman Aggarwal in the parking lot.’
Urvashi leans forward, her beautiful brow furrowed. ‘But what’s that got to do with young Akash?’
‘Because parked beyond Ajay Kumar and Aryaman Aggarwal, in that video recording, is a car we recognize very well, because we helped push it up the driveway of the DTC only very recently. An old Maruti Swift, with a Noida registration number, belonging to—’
‘Me,’ Kashi says, very low.
Bhavani leaps on in this confession like a large jungle cat. ‘You accept it!’
Kashi’s handsome face is very white about the lips. His eyes glitter strangely. ‘Yes.
Everybody gasps. Bambi’s eyes skitter from Bhavani to Kashi, wide with fear.
‘So you were there that night, vakeel sa’ab?’ Bhavani’s voice is sharp. ‘You don’t deny it?’
Kashi throws up his head. ‘No.’ His voice is defiant. ‘I don’t deny it.’
His eyes go to Bambi’s. They stare at each other, communicating wordlessly. They stare at each other in a manner that makes everybody else feel slightly embarrassed. They stare at each other like there is nobody else in the room.
‘You … came back?’ she says finally, in a halting whisper.
He smiles ruefully and gives a tiny shrug. ‘I came back.’
He turns to look at Bhavani then, his gaze meeting the older man’s steadily. ‘Bambi called me a bunch of times. But my friends wouldn’t let me take her calls – they even took away my phone. We were all drunk, of course. So, after they dropped me home, I drove back to the Club to see what she wanted. I parked the car and rang the bell of Guest Cottage No. 1. When nobody answered, I left.’
Then he looks directly in the ACP’s eyes. ‘But I did not murder anybody.’
Bambi gasps raggedly and whirls to face the policeman.
‘Well, of course he didn’t! It wasn’t Kashi! I tell you it wasn’t him! You talked about my female instinct earlier – they say he would never do anything like that! He’s too nice … too decent … too clean!’
Bhavani regards her calmly. ‘Then who else could it be, Bambi ji?’
‘Oh!’ She pushes her hair back from her forehead, breathing hard. Her eyes travel around the room, flying from face to face. Then they light up. ‘Arya! It must have been Arya – it has to be Arya – he said just now that he spent the night snorting cocaine in the garden and hating on Anshul! He said so! Cookie auntie has a video of him on the spot, for fuck’s sake! He must have seen Anshul coming out from my cottage, got maddened with jealousy and attacked him! Yes, that makes perfect sense – you’re so smart, Bhavani ji, why haven’t you thought of that? Why aren’t you arresting Arya?’ Her young voice grows unthinkingly cruel. ‘He’s a waste of space, anyway! You should be arresting Arya!’
Bhavani Singh ignores her and steps forward. ‘We have a warrant here for your arrest, vakeel sa’ab. Please come into the next room with us so we can record your statement.’
‘What a shit show.’ Kashi gives an incredulous little laugh, but he gets to his feet readily enough. ‘I thought you were an intelligent man, ACP. Clearly, I was wrong.’
Bhavani smiles blandly. ‘Handcuffs, PK.’
The cherubic inspector looms forward, clinking slightly. Light glints wickedly on the metal links of the cuffs as he hands them to his superior.
Bhavani steps closer to Kashi, with his back to the now sobbing Bambi. He looks calmly into Kashi’s bewildered, furious eyes and then, very deliberately, winks at him.
For one uncomprehending moment Kashi thinks he has imagined it. Then understanding floods his eyes.
‘No!’ he whispers, stricken.
Bhavani nods back gravely.
Yes.
And in that moment Kashi perceives everything. What the ACP’s game plan is, and what is expected of him. A soul-searing sadness sweeps over him – a wave of sorrow s
o strong that he almost staggers. But strangely, he feels no surprise at all.
Yes, this is where it was headed all along. This is how the story ends.
He holds out his hands.
‘I confess,’ he says lightly. ‘I did it.’
Bhavani places the manacles around his wrists.
‘No!!!’
The scream that emerges from behind them is both shrill and guttural. An animal scream, rising from a deep, secret darkness into the light. Heart-rending, blood-curdling and exquisitely violent.
‘I didn’t mean for this to happen! This wasn’t in the plan at all! Kashi didn’t do it! He didn’t do anything! It was all me, all me! I killed Anshul, I phoned Guppie Ram ji, Guppie Ram ji came to help me and somehow Leo wormed it out of him, the slimy bastard, so I had to kill him too!’
Sobbing incoherently, Bambi Todi crumples into a childlike heap onto the ground.
17
Icky Slime
Kash, d’you remember the night you passed out from NLS? You came to my place straight from the airport so proud and happy and I made you unpack your graduation robe and wear it, and then we made love on the carpet while ‘Whole New World’ from Aladdin played on my red speaker, and you joked about the double meanings of ‘magic carpet ride’? Well, once you sneaked out of my bedroom that night, Mammu came in and said well, I hope you enjoyed that.
I said, wait, did you know Kashi was here?
And she said, oh yes, I knew, I always know when he’s here, and what-all you’re up to, but you must understand that you’re older now. Just like childhood ended, and school ended, and college ended, your childish ‘best-friendship’ with that boy also has to come to an end.
She said everybody should marry people who are from the same faith, social standing and community as themselves because if they don’t, there would be too many differences in background, and no matter how much you love each other, these differences would eventually drive you apart.
She was SO sure and SO chill about it! And Paapu and she did seem to have the dream marriage, built on all this ‘logic’ of hers. It rattled the fuck out of me.
They then produced Anshul out of a hat, literally. ‘A prince for my princess’ was what Paapu called him, very triumphantly, before we went on our first date. He was handsome, charming, thoughtful, witty, amazingly strong and, of course, crazy wealthy. TBH, what I dug most was that all the Maaru girls were panting after him – it’s so fun to screw with them – so I couldn’t resist making him fall for me. It was easy enough to pretend I would love to sleep in a tent and bathe in melted glacier water (As if! I’m not like your perfect little GF who I hear has turned into an actual villager, and is probably harvesting paddy as I write this) – but I swore I was up for all sorts of outdoorsy ghar-ghar games and he was hooked.
It broke my heart into a million bits to end things with you, but I swear that at that time I really thought I was adulting properly and doing the correct, mature thing. I REALLY did.
I visited him at his flat a few times, where I met his domestic help – a sweet, large-eyed brown thing called Ganga – she’d ask me for water and tea very sweetly, even though I never had any. Soon after, she randomly quit. I didn’t give it much thought but then, just a few days before our big engagement, she accosted me on the road and insisted on speaking to me.
She told me that one day, while she was dusting the bottles in the bar, Anshul had grabbed her, thrown her to the ground and forced himself on her. She had pleaded with him and pleaded with him, but he hadn’t listened. Afterwards, he had given her ten thousand rupees, plus her monthly salary in advance, and told her he didn’t need her to work in his house any more.
Of course I was fully shook up. I asked her what she wanted me to do about it, and she said, nothing didi, you look so sweet and nice, just don’t marry that man, he is a monster and will destroy your life.
I told my parents about the incident, but they pooh-poohed it. They said Ganga was making up the story, maybe in the hope of extracting money from me, maybe because she herself was obsessed with hot, hunky Anshul. They said I should ignore the incident completely.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I started watching Ansh all the time, observing little little things – the way he spoke to servants, how curt he was with his mother when he thought nobody was watching, or even how bossy he sometimes was with me … and I started having doubts. On the night of the engagement – Bhavani ji was correct about that, I told him to sneak back to meet me after everybody was asleep – I brought up Ganga with him.
He laughed it off, of course. And then he started asking me all these questions about YOU. He said he’d sensed something between us – it was like he was trying to turn the tables on me, to put me in the wrong. So I told him, ya sure, Kashi and I had a scene, but it was always consensual – not like him, groping Ganga against her will! And then he started calling me a slut! Me! So I told him that while I’d had a few guy friends, I’d certainly never grabbed a manservant in my house and copulated with him forcibly and given him money afterwards! He made a mistake then. He said, I never grabbed her in the bar, and so of course I said, but I never mentioned the bar. He knew he’d been caught then, and, Kash, he … he just lost it.
It was like a mask had slipped from his face. He started talking all crudely, telling me it was time I stopped living in la-la land. He said all men were like this, and that he wasn’t going to pretend to be goody-goody any more, that it would be hypocritical and that he was above all an honest man. Yes, he’d raped Ganga but he’d paid her, her full salary and ten thousand rupees in cash besides, so what was she complaining about?
I started feeling all panicked and sick. I was alone with a raving man and all I could do was fiddle with that blue, Swarovski-encrusted ShivBling Cookie auntie had given us – we’d opened a few presents earlier in the evening, just for fun.
Anshul kept ranting – by now I’d realized the guy had serious issues – and I just sat there frozen with horror at the mess I was in. He said women didn’t mind what you did to them as long as you gave them enough money – his mum was the same and so was mine. He said Paapu was famous in whorehouses all over the world, that everybody on the Marwari network joked about Paapu and called him the human Zomato of strip-clubs. He had a rating for each club and he was never wrong. He said Mammu knew all about it.
He kept hissing and hissing in my ear, like the snake he’d revealed himself to be, and I kept thinking he’s a rapist, a rapist who rapes MAIDS, not even girls of his own class, not that I’m a snob or anything, and I’m really fond of Ganga, but STILL! I kept telling him to shut up, but he wouldn’t shut up, and so finally, just to get him to shut the fuck up, I swung the ShivBling, and whacked him across the side of the head with it.
It shattered with a horrible crashing sound. Ansh crumpled to the ground and didn’t move. There were shards everywhere. His mouth was all slack and open and stupid – how could I have ever thought he was handsome? I didn’t know what to do, so I started calling you. I called you at least six times, till I realized the Doscos weren’t going to let you pick up my call. After what Ansh had just been saying about my parents, the last thing I wanted to do was phone them up. I was going to have to adult properly, and handle this one all by myself, like a grown-up.
I stared at the stupid, ugly body on the ground for a while, repeating, I’ve made a mess, I’ve made a mess, I’ve made a mess, to myself like fool, and then I did what I always do when I make a mess. I called Guppie Ram ji and said, I’ve made a mess. Come clean it up.
There must have been something odd in my voice because he came from the quarters at once.
He was so sweet! He wasn’t at all psyched by the fact that Anshul was the mess. He’d never liked him anyway. I told him that Anshul had tried to rape me, which made him only too happy to roll that SOB in a sheet, drag him out of the cottage and into the patch. It was a distance of just 200 metres and
it was a foggy night. We managed it easily enough.
Anshul’s phone started ringing at about 5 a.m., so I sent his group a WhatsApp message saying I’d had too much to drink at the engagement party and would join them all one day late. Then I broke the SIM and the phone and told Guppie Ram ji to get rid of the bits in some manhole or something. He was always hanging out in places like that.
Then I went to sleep. I had no idea what the next day would bring or how I would cope. But I remember sleeping really well that night.
When I woke up to the news that rapist Anshul’s bus had fallen into a khai and everybody on board was dead, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If I had left well enough alone, he would have died anyway, and I wouldn’t have had blood on my hands! The thought almost drove me insane … but the relief at not being found out kept me going … I faked grief – faked it really well, I even pretended to believe he wasn’t dead, that he had somehow survived – if I did all that nobody would think to look for him in the DTC veggie patch!
You called me that evening, remember? You’d heard about the accident, I guess – but when I stared down at your name on my phone, this sickening realization swept over me that I couldn’t talk to you any more. It was like the Aladdin song, I’d travelled to a ‘whole new world’ and I now had a ‘new fantastic point of view’ and I could never never share it with you and fuck up your life like I’d fucked up mine.
Besides, I had enough survival instinct to know that if you sat me down somewhere and held my hands, and I looked into your eyes, my stomach would heave and the whole story of that ghastly evening would come pouring out of my mouth like thick, foul vomit. So I avoided you.
I don’t recommend murdering anyone. Even the vilest person in the world – even a person like rapist Anshul. It leaves you coated in a sort of toxic, icky slime – like your soul has blocked pores that no amount of steaming can unclog. And there’s this constant, giant lake of puke in your stomach, puke that you can’t throw up, not ever. And of course, you can never be truly carefree or go drinking or smoke up ever again, in case you lose control and spill your guts to some nosy rando.
Club You to Death Page 32