by Gauri Sinh
2 p.m.
Lunch break. Which is truly unnecessary, because no one here looks like they’re actually eating. If diet isn’t causing a complete loss of appetite, the present circumstances we’re caught in, certainly are. Two days to go to a contest finale, two unsolved murders and we’re still cramming in two contest schedules. At least that means we’re close to the end of this bizarre contest.
All the girls are wrung-out emotionally, big time. Every contest has some measure of stress I’m sure, but this year it’s definitely on another level.
Tomorrow seems like a lighter schedule. It’s just a day before the finale. Last minute sessions with our fitness mentor, Josy Joseph and the event head, Anjali Rodrigues. One rehearsal in the morning, then nothing … just mental preparation for the contest the day after.
An awful situation to have to be living through, and nobody is leaving either. This can only end when the contest does. Unless somehow, somehow—we find the missing piece. Laddo … where are you? Who are you?
3 p.m.
Lunch break done. But I’ve not been able to get the girls together or even a few of them, to ask about Laddo. They are so excitable. I really need this to happen. We have been told to go rest, reconvene at 5.30 p.m. for the talent round. Maybe we can talk to some of the girls then.
3:15 p.m.
In my room, roomie Tania’s already asleep, her afternoon siesta time. I need time to think. I saw the morning’s papers when we came up. Awful headlines, Akruti is in most of them. But what’s interesting is that the papers haven’t yet suggested the contest will be cancelled or postponed. It isn’t even on the table, anywhere. So Eye India has been successful in feeding ‘the show must go on’ propaganda to all, the final pageant will happen.
There is speculation in the papers that there is a serial killer on the loose. That makes sense, it’s most possible the two crimes were linked. But a serial killer killing just to spread fear and besmear the contest as the Eye India group is claiming to the media? To what end? No, there is more to this. We need to find that more. Do the papers know any additional information to what we do, right now? Doesn’t seem so.
There is immense pressure on the police, the media has been reporting that too. But naturally. This is a national contest, with international ties. And an iconic one. ‘The lives of all the other young contestants at stake,’ one of the headline phrases used … I only hope the Addl.CP manages to remain calm and not resort to hastiness in his investigation process.
Wonder if the man Akruti said she saw outside the window just now, is one of Mhatre’s men? Her instincts are quite good, she felt he appeared suspicious. But she also seemed a bit overexcited in anticipation of the results of the swimsuit title, she knew they would be due this morning.
It is possible she could’ve just seen a lurking journalist. I made out as if not paying any attention to her, but I did make a mental note of her observation. Could this mystery man tie in at all with Brij’s concern? We’ll see how that plays out, it’s wait-and-watch time. Strategy is required. Just like in our hunt for the mysterious Laddo.
The fact that we are all suspects is not written about overtly in the media either. Which is Eye India’s doing, keeping in mind that we do not want our Miss India 1995 to be a murder suspect should the killer not be found till the finale.
But we must find the person before that … because if it is indeed a serial killer, as everyone is saying—this person might kill again …
13
Akruti
‘I WON, I did it!’ All that was going on in my head the moment my name was announced as Miss India Perfect 10. For a moment I had doubted it, with everything being the way it was. But the swimsuit title came through, and with it intense relief for me. In all that was going wrong, this, at least, needed to go right. I wished Avi was around to share my joy and relief. But he was still not back, presumably still with the Eye India bosses, second day in a row. No doubt he would learn of my victory soon enough.
Parvati wanted me to help the police and I was happy to, but I also knew my goal. The reason for pressuring my parents and Jehaan to be able to continue here was clear to me, despite the mayhem—I wanted the crown, the same as when we began this contest. And winning this round helped me move a step closer to it.
Post the cheering and congratulatory photo-ops, and lunch, we were told to go back to our rooms. We had been instructed to gather downstairs at 5.30 p.m. The talent round was to begin at 6 p. m. When I reached the room, Roxanne was already asleep, she had wanted to rest before the evening’s round. She was going to do a Bollywood dance.
Each of us had to perform, or reveal some talent we had. I was going to sing a song—it wasn’t amazing but I had no intention of wasting my time on this particular round. It didn’t count in terms of points towards the crown as much as the swimsuit round had. Nor would it really bring in any sort of positive publicity, since at present the media was all about the killings. I wanted now to conserve my mental and physical strength for the finale in two days. That evening’s talent round would simply be a ‘going through the motions’ affair for me.
I knew Parvati would be reciting some poetry she had written herself. How like her to choose something so bookish as a talent. Not everyone understands poetry, and I would’ve advised her against it, had the round been important. But it really wasn’t, so I let it rest.
In any case after what I had learned from Jehaan, I doubted she was actually here for a shot at the crown. But why enter a Miss India contest if you don’t want the crown? My eyes shut as I pondered this. Next thing I knew Roxanne was shaking me awake as usual.
‘We need to be down in fifteen minutes!’ she semi-shouted. I smiled at her grumpy expression. Roxanne might appear to hate my guts, even prod me maliciously on occasion, but she had clapped the loudest when I won the swimsuit round. She knew she didn’t have a chance in it, and I could tell she was genuinely happy for me, a person she knew closer than the others, as her roommate. I liked Roxanne’s gruff, loyal, rambunctious attentiveness, so similar to my Jehaan’s.
‘On it,’ I mumbled, sleepily, then as an afterthought, ‘Do you happen to know any Laddo here, Roxanne?’
‘Why would you ask that?’ Roxanne looked at me, a trifle put out. ‘Ten minutes to reporting time? Of course not! What is a Laddo? Are you talking of that Indian sweet?’
‘Never mind,’ I said to her, and proceeded to get ready at speed. By the time we had all gathered, this time in a make-shift green room near a huge stage constructed in the open air, it was nearing 6 p.m.
‘Any luck?’ Parvati found me immediately, I got the sense she had been waiting for me to arrive.
‘Roxanne knows nothing about the name Laddo,’ I said to her. ‘Did you ask your roomie Tania?’
‘She was asleep, and then got up and dashed to change—there was no time. But I will. Let’s ask the rest when we can,’ Parvati replied.
The area was swarming with police personnel. After the last two events, it was clear the Addl.CP and his team wanted to take no chances. Many media types were around too. I recognized a few familiar faces, but we were too far away for them to approach us, I was grateful for that.
There were around four-five minutes to go as we awaited the arrival of the judges. Parvati decided to tackle the pressing issue head first, there was no time to dilly-dally.
‘Girls, there’s a phone call outside for Laddo …’ she shouted out in the packed green room. That was the best way she could’ve asked about Laddo, under the circumstances, without appearing to be curious herself. All twenty contestants were present. Whoever Laddo was, she’d get up to take the call.
But to our surprise—no one did. There were a few curious stares, but the majority the girls were preoccupied, getting ready for their performances.
‘What now?’ I asked Parvati. She looked speculative, but we were out of time. Harried chaperones were directing us to different dressing tables.
The contest began. Roxanne started
the proceedings, opening the event with a rousing Bollywood number. The music echoed around that huge stage. I clapped as hard as I could for her from backstage where we all stood. This round wasn’t competitive for us, and besides I had genuinely enjoyed Roxanne’s performance during rehearsals. She scored high too. Pia followed, with a Bharatnatyam performance, classic and touching.
Then there followed a display of immense physical strength from Vandana, which had us hooting in absolute amazement, backstage. Who would know she practised bodybuilding in her spare time? Lifting huge barbells whilst balancing precariously on one foot had the audience marvel at her muscles, as her control.
‘Would you believe Vandana being able to do that?’ I overheard Samantha whisper to Anuradha. ‘How powerful she must be—wow!’
Nina was next. She was going to do a Bollywood item number apparently, one in which her idol SRK had also featured. It involved dancing on top of a moving train. Unfortunately, there was nothing she could use in terms of props that would move on stage as a train would.
So she improvised. Nina was to have a line of chairs up on stage, all placed at regular intervals with great gaps between them. She would show her dancing talent and her balancing and jumping skills as she danced on top of these, then leap from one chair to dance on the next, all on stage, in rapid succession.
This was not too dangerous in itself. But I think looking back now, Murphy’s Law applied to every aspect of that contest in 1995. When she began, none of us noticed that the stage hands had placed one of the chairs too close to the edge of stage.
Nina’s routine itself was flawless, luckily. You could tell she had practised and practised for it. She finished her performance with élan. But even as she dismounted from that final chair so close to the edge of stage, bereft of weight—it toppled over.
There were many from the audience right underneath that raised stage, there was no separating boundary. Someone would have been badly hit. But to our eternal awe and surprise, Nina, always so timid and afraid, deftly reached out and caught that falling chair, using her stocky, muscular build to bodily lift it safely back to stage.
Spontaneous claps erupted, both from the audience and from us backstage. We were all thrilled at her quick response, we had always believed Nina to be a bit on the slow side. We were also amazed at her strength, to have caught a heavy chair mid-fall and hosted it up back to stage, working against all that momentum, so fast! I think Nina clinched the Miss India Dream Talent title there and then with this masterful save, though we didn’t know it as yet.
The next contestant, Samantha followed immediately, performing a comic skit she had written herself. The audience laughed appreciatively at her effort, the earlier scare forgotten.
Then Anuradha decided to wow the audience singing a contemporary ghazal number. There was a hushed silence at her sonorous voice. Followed by terrific applause. And the show went on.
I performed to a fair bit of applause, and even Parvati, despite her obscure choice of talent, I thought, managed to garner polite claps. The time came for Nuzhat to go on stage. The compere, on the mic announced her name. No reply. Again, the compere called for Nuzhat. Still she didn’t appear.
‘Nerves?’ Roxanne whispered darkly to no one in particular, backstage. ‘Nuzhat? Never!’
We all knew what she meant. Nuzhat wasn’t a nervous girl. Neither was she a popular girl, which was why, even after two announcements on stage no one was leaving to go search for her. The chaperones were running helter-skelter, as were the backstage personnel. Let them handle it, that was the mood among the contestants.
‘HELP!’ we heard Vandana call out just then. The panic in her voice had us all on our feet dashing towards the mobile restroom area adjacent to our green room. And there, once again, in a macabre replay of the past two incidents, we saw her.
Nuzhat lay immobile near the entrance to a restroom, her body bent at an angle, blood flowing from her head, which appeared bashed in. And near her, Vandana, holding the wall and Nessie both, for support, wouldn’t stop screaming.
14
Akruti
Three successive murders at a Miss India Pageant—this was too much calamity even for Murphy’s Law. The general air of hysteria ran rampant, spreading like wildfire from backstage to the audience. There was quite simply an uproar.
The police cordoned off the stage area almost immediately, even as event head Anjali Rodrigues rushed to the mic and declared as calmly as she could, that the talent round was over. The few contestants remaining would later be assessed privately by the judges, and Nina would be declared winner, but all of that seemed rather irrelevant in the awfulness of what had just transpired.
A frantic Vandana was being questioned by the expressionless Addl.CP Mhatre, and he was not going easy. This had happened on his watch, in full glare of the media and his bosses in the top rung of the Mumbai police force, who happened to be invited today. We gathered round her as Vandana sobbed.
‘We were going to use the mobile restrooms, Nessie and I,’ she explained to the Addl.CP between sobs. ‘And we saw her. Lying like that, not moving …’
Vanessa, or Nessie, as all of us called her, interrupted. ‘I checked for pulse. I would’ve called for Nina, as she has medical experience, but Vandana’s screaming got everyone running to us immediately. Including the hotel doctor, who was here.’
‘Did you see anyone else around?’ the Addl.CP asked them.
‘There was nobody. Not even in the restrooms, both stalls were empty. We were perhaps the first to discover her like that,’ Nessie shuddered.
‘Did you move the body at all?’ the Addl.CP enquired, watching them closely.
‘No,’ Nessie answered, and Vandana nodded her compliance. ‘I only checked to see if she had a pulse, but I didn’t move her. Vandana didn’t touch her at all.’
‘Did you’ll discover her together?’ the Addl.CP asked.
‘Yes,’ Vandana said. ‘We were both going to the restroom and met in the passage leading to it, so we walked to the mobile unit together. We saw her immediately.’
Nuzhat was no more. The doctor told us death had been instant when the skull had been smashed.
‘Who was she with last, when alive?’ this time the Addl.CP addressed us all.
Nobody spoke up. We all disliked Nuzhat intensely. But she was always around some of us, it wouldn’t be that hard to recall who.
‘… fight with her, where is she?’ I heard a whisper behind me. Tania and Nina had their heads together speaking in low voices. But if I had heard them, so had everyone else. Including the Addl.CP.
‘Speak up,’ he turned to them. ‘Who fought with whom?’
Tania and Nina exchanged surreptitious glances.
‘Tara was with Nuzhat,’ Tania’s big, scared eyes looked into the Addl.CP’s. ‘She was telling her not to pick on her. I believe they had a bit of a scuffle. We heard them near the restrooms, when we were going in.’
‘What did you hear?’ the Addl.CP asked the two girls.
‘Just a fight,’ Tania said. ‘Voices were indistinct, we couldn’t make out the words. But we knew they were arguing, because they both sounded angry …’
‘Where is Tara?’ the Addl.CP looked around. But she wasn’t in the room. We were told to stay inside the green room, not disperse till the police had located Tara.
If the atmosphere in the past had seemed funereal at such gatherings, today it seemed positively sepulchral. The fact that one among us was missing was grave indeed. Where was Tara?
For an hour, we waited in that green room, in near-silence. Then, sounds of a scuffle and a heartbeat later, Tara, being led out, held by two women constables, weeping that it was not she who had killed Nuzhat.
I would not have thought that the cool and collected Parvati would react to this scene the way she did. But at the sight of Tara passing us, being dragged out by the two lady constables, she was up in a flash, blocking the entrance of the green room.
‘Tell me Tara,�
� she said urgently, looking into the girl’s eyes. To understand Parvati’s intense reaction, it would perhaps help to go into Tara’s personality. Tara was twenty-three, one of the oldest contestants in this pageant. Conversely, she also appeared to be the most naïve. This, despite the fact that she was a big city girl, as she kept explaining to anyone who would listen. We knew she wanted the crown dearly, not so much for the glamour of it but because she hoped it would do what she hadn’t been able to do for very long … attract lasting love from the right men.
Emotional and easily swayed, Tara had been at the receiving end of many of Nuzhat’s taunts for her distinctive pigeon-toe’d style of walking all through our training these past weeks. She had pleaded, threatened and finally cried at the bullying, but to no avail.
Nuzhat had been relentless. Parvati had intervened on more than one occasion, asking Nuzhat to back off, telling Tara to calm down. Both girls somehow always heeded Parvati’s words. She had that effect on people. Regardless, it was possible Nuzhat and Tara’s scuffle earlier that day might be related to this on-going bad blood between them.
‘Sit down, miss,’ the surprised lady constable urged Parvati, even as a desperate Tara, freeing herself, violently caught hold of Parvati in a vice-like embrace. Her lips pushed close to Parvati’s ears, she mumbled fierce words in the few seconds that elapsed before the constables managed to wrestle her away.
Parvati’s face showed extreme emotion, but she was holding it in, like a mask. Her eyes searched the room, then rested on me. She came and stood behind me, whispering into my ear in a low tone.
‘Tara says she hit Nuzhat, but not hard enough to kill her,’ Parvati’s voice was so soft, I strained to catch it. ‘She was weak, but conscious and moving when Tara left to go on stage for her talent display. Tara’s display was the one before Nuzhat’s …’
‘Did she tell you this?’ I asked Parvati, unbelieving at the turn of events. We both understood, without voicing it that Nuzhat was officially off our suspects list. How could she be? She was gruesomely hit and body bagged, and was now victim number three.