‘Oh!’
‘Yes, but then my finances got a bit tight, and then when I got ready, Master Brandy, as you know…’
‘Yes, I know,’ Jazmeen said. ‘Right in front of me, actually.’
‘So, I don’t know if you are still interested in hearing about my proposal…?’
‘I am interested,’ Jazmeen said, making sure her voice didn’t betray her excitement. ‘Can you give me some more information about the film?’
The man did as requested. ‘You know, Master Brandy told me that he wanted to give this to you as a birthday gift! So, belated Happy Birthday, Miss Jazmeen! And may God bless the soul of our dear, departed friend!’
‘He was very nice to me personally,’ she said, acknowledging what was indeed the truth, despite the dead man’s depraved record with hundreds of other girls like her. ‘Thank you so much for thinking of me, Sir… I still don’t know your name!’
“Mohile, Madam. My name is Ankit Mohile.”
11
Pretty, Vile Girl
Four Years Ago
The first lead that Inspector Babu Ram Manjrekar received to solve the Ankit Mohile murder case came in the form of an anonymous tip. It had arrived by post three days after the murder had taken place.
‘The imprints of the killer of Ankit Mohile lie on the dead man’s body. You will find his name locked away in the Central Forensics Lab in Mumbai.’ There was nothing else on the typed note, or on the envelope that carried it.
Mohile’s body had been lying in the morgue at Police Hospital in Dadar East pending further action, as was standard practice for unsolved crimes. There had been only two noteworthy clues found on the body—evidence of recent sexual activity and hair, or rather the lack of it, shaved off the dead man’s scalp.
‘What was the name of the forensics chap involved in this case?’ Manjrekar asked his assistant. Suresh provided the information to his boss, who then picked up his landline to make a couple of calls.
It was the first step in a series of investigations that eventually led to the arrest of Tobias James for the murder of Ankit Mohile.
Three months before Ankit Mohile met with his vicious end, he was sitting with Jazmeen and a few others finalising the script of their maiden Hindi film ‘Gaon Ki Lady-Doctor’ (‘The Lady-Doctor of the Village’). It was an ultra-low budget heroine-oriented ‘social’ film. The main protagonist was an uneducated belle from the fictional village of Rampur who goes to Lucknow to become a ‘Lady-Doctor’, but, later, chucks it all aside to return to her roots to do gaon-sewa. The life of this ‘Lady-Doctor’ was going to be recreated entirely in the cardboard sets of Filmistan Studios in Mumbai. It was going to take around twenty days to film it, and about a month to edit, post-process and release it across dozens of rundown theatres of the rural Hindi heartland. The film was going to be targeted at the ‘family audience’, and therefore, except for one suggestive item song meant to draw in the men folk, the content of the film was very chaste and resolutely melodramatic. Jazmeen was going to be paid a princely sum of Rs 50,000 for her first heroine role.
Not that Jazmeen cared about the money. Who would, when one was on one’s way to becoming a film star! Jazmeen was going to sing and dance and act on the big screen! Mouth filmy dialogues, show emotions! She was going to wear costumes and wigs and make-up! She was also going to wear a white surgical mask on her face and a fake stethoscope around her neck and scream, ‘The patient is serious!’ (in English, no less) at least twice during the film!
Jazmeen was not just happy, she was delirious with joy. She couldn’t wait for the shooting to begin.
For all intent and purposes, the film project belonged entirely to Ankit Mohile, who was not only producing it, but was also its story, screenplay and dialogue-writer, costume designer, and its production and set designer. Mohile was also the lyricist. His raunchy poetry of the sole male-pleaser number in the film went something like this—‘Mere saiyyan tora ang taape yun, lag ja tu mere angwa, jara bukhaar naap lun’—which translated to ‘How warm feels your skin on mine, oh my lover, won’t you cling to my body so I can check your fever?’ Jazmeen was to perform the song in the kind of costume that no doctor in her right senses would ever be caught wearing.
Despite its low quality grade, and the decidedly narrow scope of its mass potential, the one aspect of the film project that had given Jazmeen comfort was the complete absence of sleaze around it. She had seen and heard enough about the favours that young actresses were expected to provide to obtain a role in films. It had made her extremely cautious of Mohile’s intentions early on. But, not once had the man shown any inappropriate interest in her. Her screen-test had been professional, and the other cast members were kind and simple small-time actors. Everything looked above-board and genuine. Even the film’s director was a fatherly-looking elderly man who, frankly, was no more than a glorified cameraman also charged with saying ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’. The hero that Jazmeen was expected to romance on screen was a 22-year-old giggly chocolate boy with the unfilmy name of Pankaj Kumar. He was no threat either. In fact, he seemed too shy to even consider casting a shady eye on her.
It was no small thing for a first-time actress, especially one as wildly attractive as Jazmeen, to feel ‘secure’ in a low-budget film production. Jazmeen wasn’t sure how she had got so lucky, but she was happy to make full use of her opportunity.
Sadly, that mask of normalcy around ‘Gaon Ki Lady-Doctor’ toppled in front of Jazmeen’s eyes just a few days after shooting began. And it happened quite subtly, in the presence of the entire cast and crew with whom Jazmeen was sitting and preparing for the scenes to be filmed the next day. She had chanced upon the covert truth quite by accident.
She had seen it while quietly observing Mohile and Pankaj Kumar discuss a scene a few feet away. It was in the way Mohile had the palm of his hand resting on the small of Pankaj’s back, only inches from his buttocks. It was also in the way Mohile’s thigh would touch the young lad, and each time the boy delicately moved his leg away, the persistent thigh would catch up and reconnect.
‘Silly me, to think that there was no casting couch,’ Jazmeen thought. ‘Anyway, what-goes-my-father?’
Elsewhere in Jazmeen’s personal life, things were going through a period of rough transition. Her decision to walk past Toby and into the arms of Arty, an action that Toby himself had instigated, was not being taken very well by the bastard who had played a huge gamble and lost. By the time Jazmeen returned to Mumbai after her romantic holiday, Rubina had already been missing for a month. Not knowing his longtime partner’s whereabouts had started to take a toll on the hapless lover’s ability to think straight. On one of Jazmeen’s last trips to his flat, where she had gone to pack up her belongings, Toby had been taunting, almost ominous. He was drunk, but not enough to not know what he was saying.
‘So, all the tricks you learned on this bed, on my bed, are now coming in handy while servicing Arty Sir, meri Mukherji?’ he jeered, as she took her clothes out of the bedroom closet and dropped them into a large, open suitcase on the bed. Toby lay right by it.
‘Why are you here in Mumbai, Toby? Shouldn’t you be in Goa looking for your girlfriend?’
‘You know, I had half a mind to go to the police and file a missing person FIR,’ he said, as he took another swig of his whisky.
‘What stopped you?’
‘Oh, I thought,’ Toby said, staring at her as he laid the whisky glass on the bedside table, ‘what if the police asked me if I suspected foul play in Rubina’s disappearance? After all, she was in good spirits when she left Mumbai. That clearly means that she didn’t walk out of our lives on her own accord.’
‘So, what do you think happened to her?’ Jazmeen asked.
‘What do you think happened to her, my dear? You seem to know how this world works way more than I do, don’t you?’ Toby said bitterly.
‘I think the bitch simply found someone else with better prospects,’ Jazmeen answered candidly, while carefully attemptin
g to scratch a small dried speck off a folded T-shirt with her fingernail.
Toby bristled in anger. ‘No, no… you know what I think?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That someone whacked her off. And buried her in one of those fields in Goa,’ Toby turned to pick up the whisky glass again.
‘Or maybe strangled her and threw her into the sea,’ she said. Her remark made Toby freeze. He turned sharply to look at Jazmeen. She was still studying the mark on the T-shirt closely.
‘What did you just say?’
‘I just said that you have an overactive imagination, that’s all, Toby,’ Jazmeen responded, as she finally dropped the T-shirt into the suitcase. Then she looked at him.
‘Well, you should have filed that FIR,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. She noticed Toby’s sharp eyes easing a bit.
‘But what if the police asked me if I suspected anyone in particular for making Rubina disappear?’ he asked, as he took another sip. He savoured the drink for a few moments before gulping it down. ‘What if I was unable to hold back my suspicions and… and gave them a name?’ he added, not once taking his eyes off Jazmeen.
‘And whose name would that be?’
It was a simple question. Toby laughed, but said nothing. The laugh was extremely bitter. It made Jazmeen tense. Toby was a dangerous and foolish man. She knew she would have a price to pay if she did not address that bitterness. Soon.
Jazmeen’s new home just off Linking Road in Bandra was a sparkler. It was on the top floor of an eight-floor building. There was a very large drawing room, a hall and two big bedrooms with their own independent balconies yielding splendid views of the south west. One could see the blue glow of the neon sign on top of the Lilavati Hospital close by.
Inside, the décor was modern, professionally done. The colour scheme in each room was different, and Jazmeen’s personal favourite was the orange-and-grey of the master bedroom. It was as if the colours gave the room a different ambience depending on what mood the user chose to be in—orange for bright and cheerful, and grey for sombre and mellow. The furniture was designer Italian, contemporary and angular. The TV was massive and impossibly thin. There were light fixtures aplenty, with an option to set them as bright or subdued as one wanted. Clearly, not only was Arty Rathore a very rich man, he was also plenty tasteful.
And tasty, too. In the bedroom. It was a place where lots of good things were going to happen to the new lovers for the next couple of years.
Also, the place where one terrible night was going to turn their world upside down. But only after a couple of years.
For now, this penthouse in Naveli Apartments on 16th Road, high above the cantankerous streets of Mumbai, was the place Jazmeen had begun calling home. A perfect haven. Where she could rid herself of her angst against those stubborn pieces of shit known as Toby James and Rubina Peter. Where she could seek respite after sixteen-hour-long slogs known as film-shootings. Where she would find her naked lover waiting alluringly for her each night, offering an open sanctuary between his arms and a phenomenal toy between his legs.
Once upon a time, the A to Z of Jazmeen and Arty’s liaison was sex. Now, it felt as if sex was just a part of it, say, from A to L. Still significant, but not everything. There was now enough space to fit other elements like Respect, Caring, Loyalty. After all, Jazmeen and Arty really did enjoy each other’s company a lot. They laughed at the same jokes and found the same people ridiculous. Their foods were the same. Both loved to cook, and eat what they cooked. Their music choices were identical too. They both loved the concept of a good life, like clothes and travel. The only difference between the two was that while one of them had already experienced a lot of that good life, the other had only dreamed of it until now.
Yes, Jazmeen was starting to have very high hopes from Arty Rathore.
Arty offered to her possibilities that she wasn’t even aware she was searching for. He could be the key to all the doors that had remained closed to her for so long. Even those that had remained yet unseen in the dingy corridors of her life. Arty’s network and reach in the film industry, for example, could be worth a goldmine now that she was trying to become an actress.
All Jazmeen would have had to do was to ask.
And she might have, too, if her pride had permitted her to.
‘What does it make me if I ask for a “payment” from the man I’m sleeping with?’
Jazmeen didn’t like the answer to that question.
No, now was not the time to cheapen their relationship by asking for professional favours. Especially so, when she was sensing that what she was conceiving with Arty was something way more meaningful to be trivialised with a vulgar—‘Can you do this for me, darling?’
Life was seducing Jazmeen with a flicker of a seemingly impossible hope. The Hope of a Tomorrow. ‘Could it really work between Arty and me?’ she had started asking herself often. Though, just as quickly as those tempting thoughts would appear in her mind, she would dismiss them. ‘Let me not get too carried away about my golden Prince,’ she would rein in her galloping mind. ‘All that a playboy wants is a hot body, not a head stuffed with fairy tales.’
And so, Jazmeen thought it best to live in the moment. A moment that was deliciously ripe with prospects. There was no point in overthinking the future she could have with Arty. Just as there was no reason not to relish the present she enjoyed with him. Like his delicious presence in her bed. Arty was like an aphrodisiac stimulant she couldn’t live without—ridding her of the weariness of a backbreaking work day just as effectively as re-energising her to face the drudgery of the next.
‘It’s like plugging myself into a magical power socket,’ she thought each time she would take him inside her at night for a fresh supply of vitality.
That’s how great the sex was!
Jazmeen and Arty had already been living together for almost three months when Gaon Ki Lady-Doctor approached its half-way mark. Jazmeen had begun to sense some real trouble on the sets of the film. She chose to unload her concerns to her lover one night, after they had finished their lovemaking.
‘You know, that Pankaj Kumar…?’ she said, as she lay snuggled under Arty’s right shoulder.
‘Your chikna superhero?’ he teased. Arty had jokingly labelled Jazmeen’s film hero with that moniker the couple of times she had brought him up in the past. He knew that she cared for the boy, like one would for a little lost puppy in a big bad city. ‘Yes, what about him?’
‘Something is wrong with him. He was completely… off today.’
‘Off? What does that mean?’
‘I mean—off. Like, very disturbed. As if something bad had happened to him. He couldn’t say his dialogues right today. Couldn’t do his movements in front of the camera properly. Kept missing his cues. And then he broke down when Mohile yelled at him for wasting everybody’s time.’
‘Did you talk to him to find out why?’
‘I did, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Then, he just left the set early, leaving all of us stranded! I have never seen Mohile as angry as he was today. Didn’t leave a single maa-behen gaali unsaid.’
‘Looks like a lovers’ tiff between those two,’ Arty joked. Jazmeen had shared with him her suspicions of Mohile’s amorous designs on the boy. Since the first time that Jazmeen had noticed it, there had been several more sightings of ‘playful’ touching and brushing that the older man had indulged in with his film’s hero.
‘What lovers’ tiff, Arty? I told you, if there is anything, it is one-sided from Mohile! Pankaj already has a cute little thing tucked away back in his home-town. He showed me the girl’s photo the other day. He said he was going to bring her to Mumbai once he made it big here,’ Jazmeen said. She sighed, since she knew that the young actor was unlikely to go very far with his paltry talent. Except for slightly better than average looks, he had nothing to offer Bollywood.
‘Well, how likely is it that your chocolate hero will make it big?’ Arty verbalised h
er concerns. ‘Unless, of course, he gives a few favours and takes a few favours. Unless he does whatever he is asked to do, you know, on and off the set. That is how you survive here,’ Arty said knowingly.
‘But Pankaj is not like that. I know him!’
‘You can never be sure about these things, baby.’
‘That boy is too upright to do something that he doesn’t want to do. I don’t think he will willingly fall for these kinds of tricks you film people play on young, innocent newbies!’ she asserted.
Her comment made Arty laugh. ‘You know,’ he said with a grin, ‘when these young, innocent “newbies” don’t submit to wolves like us willingly, we simply snatch their stupid innocence from them!’ The comment made Jazmeen plant a playful slap on her lover’s face. They both laughed, and the topic came to a close on its own. Slowly, sleep was taking over both of them.
Then, as a parting shot before his eyes closed for the night, Arty said, ‘Once innocence is lost, the strong know what they have to do. As for the weak, well… they simply…’
Arty was fast asleep two seconds later. But Jazmeen lay wide awake, thinking about Arty’s words. He was right, of course. When their innocence was wrested from them, the strong became stronger. Like she had.
As for the weak, they simply—crumbled.
She thought of her chocolate superhero. And her film producer. She had the most perturbing mental imagery of the two men together. She was scared that Mohile had taken things too far.
What the fuck did you do to Pankaj, Mohile?
Jazmeen’s apprehensions were not unfounded. The next morning, when she reported to the sets of Filmistan Studios, she saw her glorious dreams of becoming a film heroine lying in tatters. And it was all because of Pankaj Kumar.
And Ankit Mohile.
Manjrekar sat at his desk that appeared battered by the weight of ugly files. He, though, looked pleased, almost ecstatic with a sense of accomplishment. So much so that he had returned to the Police Station around midnight after putting his daughter to bed. He had felt an urge to look at the case file of the Ankit Mohile murder again.
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