Pretty Vile Girl

by Rickie Khosla

  It was the events of the past few months that had made Manjrekar wonder whether his death was of more value than his life could ever be. The hope of a cure for his daughter’s illness was an enticing enough reason for him to consider paying for it with his blood. And, what could be a better way for him to prove that he had not failed as a provider—as his wife had said when lashing out recently?

  Death may have been an easy answer out of all troubles, but sadly, it was not so easy to obtain—especially since suicide was not an option. Self-afflicted death would have nullified the life insurance policy. Which meant that Manjrekar had to find an ally, someone willing to give him death—at a time and place and convenience of his choosing.

  Imagine his surprise when he discovered that partner in Jazmeen! A woman with enough skeletons in her closet, literally speaking, that she was willing to pay any price to keep them locked away forever. And it wasn’t even as if he was asking for a huge ransom in exchange for his silence. All he wanted from her, an assassin, was an assassination.

  His own.

  Shadab’s voice was continuing to pour out of the earpiece. ‘Plus, this is a humanitarian case because of his daughter. So Headquarters have expedited the paperwork.’

  ‘That’s a relief!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Alhamdulillah!’

  There was another pause.

  ‘How did she sound?’ she asked.

  ‘Mrs Manjrekar? Calm. At peace. As though she now realises why he did it. There is no more shock or grief anymore.’

  ‘That’s how he would have wanted it,’ she thought. Then, aloud, ‘She sounds like a very wise woman.’

  ‘Yes, definitely. I think she knows that there is more to me than just her husband’s ex-student, but she makes sure she doesn’t ask me who I am or why I call her so often. It’s almost like… she doesn’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s best that way.’

  Another pause in the conversation marked that it was time to end the call.

  ‘So, I will see you in Delhi soon, Didi?’

  ‘Yes, I will call you, Shadab.’

  ‘Do you know, Didi, you are the only one who still calls me by my first name? As if I was still that tall, gangly boy at the orphanage whose clothes were always too short for him! You remember the time you had fought with Jolly Uncle to get new shirts and pants for me?’

  ‘Listen, my dear, even when the rest of the world addresses you as Commissioner Rizvi of Delhi one day, you will always be my Shadab, OK?’ she said.

  Both laughed quietly. The call ended.

  ‘Delhi,’ she thought.

  Jazmeen wondered what Karan was up to in that city right that instant. Perhaps shortlisting the people he would include in his Cabinet. ‘He already has most of them in his pocket.’ She got up from the sofa and walked back to the dining table.

  ‘Like I have him in mine.’ She smiled. It wasn’t an overstatement.

  ‘We have come a long way from Faridabad, you and I,’ she said aloud, as she took a dining chair next to her brother. He didn’t pay any attention to her, quietly focusing on the task at hand—eating his sandwich. It was always the same with him. Like a brain that processed everything, behind a face that divulged nothing. Distant and unknown, like some mythical village beyond the mountains.

  ‘I have come a long way from Faridabad,’ she corrected herself in her mind. ‘But have you, Ujjwal?’

  She already knew the answer.

  She looked at his calm, impenetrable face. She knew the look well. She had seen it for the first time the day after their parents had died. It was the same one on the day they had moved in to Innocent Dreams—and that afternoon when he had had a fight rescuing his fellow-brothers from their school goondas. Or that time when he had been tossed back to the orphanage by those bastard cops. Beaten. Raped.

  Tonsured.

  The same face. The one that had miraculously appeared at Jasmine Bhatia’s bedroom door on the night of her death. Impervious to hesitation or emotion, it had been! Jazmeen remembered how quietly Ujjwal had walked over to her, like a cat, while she herself sat next to the sleeping monster’s bare breasts with a knife in her hands. She, the confident, fearless girl with a stellar plan of Jasmine’s execution so elaborately laid out in her mind. And yet, at the crucial moment, faltering, naked and shivering, unable to execute the punishment that her tormentor clearly deserved. Until he had arrived. Like karma. And then, just as Jasmine Bhatia had stirred awake, how he had grabbed the bedside table-lamp and banged it on her head in one mighty swoop, making her fall back onto the bed, unconscious, in the same pose from which she had risen.

  It was the same face that he had when he had taken the knife from his sister’s bloodless hands and then…

  Jazmeen was never going to forget that sound. The ‘CHHHAAAK’ as the pointed blade tore through the skin and ribs and smashed into Jasmine Bhatia’s heart with the full intensity of a demented boy-man, his precision and expertise recently honed at the Juvenile Remand Home where he had killed three others. Then, four more ‘CHHHAAAK’ sounds, and the sight of blood and gore oozing onto Jasmine’s bathroom floor, looking black in the darkness. Nor was Jazmeen likely to forget the squealing sounds earlier, of Jasmine Bhatia’s naked skin on the tiled floor as Ujjwal and she had dragged the fat unconscious woman to the bathroom. To the pair of scissors lying next to the exquisite Italian wash basin, which he used to pull and chop her hair at full speed in a spontaneous burst of hatred. Taking apart her dignity with each snip. And finally, shearing even the stubs left on her head with the very knife he had used to kill her. Leaving the plump woman, with shocked, dead eyes, looking like a monster.

  Just the way Jasmine Bhatia had been when she was alive.

  After that night, Ujjwal had run away. Lost forever.

  Months later, when Deepika and Jolly were busy dismantling Innocent Dreams, she had received a postcard. It had a Mumbai address and nothing else on it. It was sent by a name called Sareen.

  And she had known. Instantly.

  ‘SAREEN’ was no person she knew. It was simply a memory, perhaps the most lasting one. It was what was emblazoned on the boat that she had been on with her family the last time they had been together. SAREEN. The last physical memory of their old life.

  Or, the start of Ujjwal’s new one.

  She knew she had to be by his side as he built his. And so Deepika became Jazmeen, and moved to Mumbai.

  Ever since, Sareen had been by her side too. Through thick and thin. Up and down. Happy and sad. Life… and death. He was her Karmic Angel, lockstep with her as she treaded difficult paths. And it was only Sareen she could look to when faced with hard impediments in those tough journeys. Some of them he took care of directly—like Master Brandy, Amrit Singh Yadav, Ankit Mohile and Rubina Peter. Others were erased by way of consequence—like Toby James and Leena Bindra.

  Sareen, her Pole Star. The only constant beacon of reality in her unruly sky. Distant, detached, dispassionate. But, reassuring.

  Like his face.

  It was Sunday, which meant there was no shooting that day. It was the day when Sareen took stock of all of Film Star Jazmeen’s beauty products and supplies. Being her Assistant, Make-up and Hair Expert and Stylist all rolled into one was not a role he took lightly. It took a lot of hard work and behind-the-scenes activity to make a celebrity as big as Jazmeen keep shining brighter than the sun. In fact, the work kept Sareen busy even during hours when he was not directly at her service.

  By noon, there were at least fifty bottles and jars laid out on the giant dining table. They ranged from mundane items such as nail polish to fancy beauty therapies such as Micro Dermabrasion creams. All very routine products for Sareen and his star. Except for one innocent jar in beige. It lay significantly removed from the rest of glass and plastic. Sareen drew Jazmeen’s attention to it by pointing at it. Obviously, he was keen to know what to do with it, now that its purpose had been achieved.

  Inside it lay the poison that had killed Prime M
inister Satyendra Saran.

  Aconite is a pretty plant that grows in the hills with flowers so lovely they are easily mistaken for being harmless. In reality, the flowers are topped with a toxin called Aconitine that can cause effects as benign as numbness or as fatal as paralysis and heart failure, depending on the amount a killer decides to administer to his victim. A little bit of internet research could tell one where to find it—say, from a Chinese Herbal Medicines expert in Andheri West, and also the most convenient way to use it as a poison—for example, applying it innocently on skin rather than making the prey ingest it from the mouth. Once it absorbs through the pores, the poison takes a few days to go about slowly wreaking havoc throughout the body, and exiting the system before it can even be traced.

  The Perfect Killer, one could say.

  Assassinating the Prime Minister the ‘old-fashioned’ way of blasting a bullet through his chest was an option, considering Jazmeen already had Manjrekar deployed on site. But he had been deputed to finish off Karan. Karan was a murderer, as far as Manjrekar was concerned, so it somehow gave the cop the moral consent to punish him for his crimes. But Saran? There was no way Manjrekar would have agreed to kill Saran, too, even if he thought of the PM as nothing more than a scourge to the nation. Jazmeen knew that Saran’s killing could not be risked into becoming a public spectacle.

  And so, Jazmeen had thought of an eminently simple solution. A slow-acting, untraceable poison. Administered by Sareen to perfection. All she had needed to do was to ensure that Sareen could lay his hands on Saran’s skin.

  She remembered how the Prime Minister’s face had lit up after Sareen had finished applying the M.A.C foundation cream on his uneven face. Little did the unsuspecting man know that the dangerous dose of Aconitine in it had already started seeping through the multiple layers and sub-layers of skin.

  ‘I say, that Shah Rukh Khan chap had better watch out!’ Saran had said at the time. Jazmeen had smiled.

  Well, ‘that Shah Rukh Khan chap’ had nothing to worry about. A couple of days after Siri Fort, Saran had felt numbness in his hands and legs. He had mentioned it to his PA, but only in passing. ‘I’m sure it’s only stress,’ Saran had concluded, a logical consequence of having recently escaped an assassination attempt by a deranged gunman. Within a week of the incident, however, once the natural toxin had successfully demolished millions of healthy cells in various parts of his body, Saran had had his first paralytic stroke. He had been admitted instantly to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital, where he had received the best care from the finest doctors in the country. The only disturbing sign of trouble that the doctors had traced was the PM’s elevated blood pressure which had refused to stabilise in spite of strong medication.

  Three days after being admitted to the hospital, Saran’s unstable heart had suffered two cardiac arrests in quick succession. And once his vital organs had started to shut down, he had been put on a ventilator.

  The end came another six days later.

  The unexpected death of the Prime Minister had caused a lot of surprise and conjecture. The doctors were flummoxed by his sudden and fatal deterioration, but the postmortem had revealed nothing untoward. How could it, since all traces of Aconitine had disappeared days ago. All that had remained in its wake had been an ashen carcass of a middle-aged man, lying in repose at Teen Murti Bhavan, waiting for the nation to pay its homage over mournful notes of the shehnai. The people of India, however, had already lost interest in Satyendra Saran even before his funeral pyre was lit. They had moved on to the next big story. Their next Superstar.

  Karan Singh Rathore.

  The young politician with guts of steel and the face of a movie star was released from the hospital the same day that Saran’s mortal remains were consigned to flames. The gunman’s bullet, shot from point-blank range, had caused a lot of damage around the left lung, but it had not been fatal. As Karan gave a ‘V’ for Victory sign towards hundreds of frantic TV cameras camped outside Medanta Hospital in Gurgaon, hundreds of millions of people across the country lit up with pride and joy. Their National Hero was back on his feet.

  The split-screen image on one of the TV channels couldn’t have been more poignant. It showed the burning funeral pyre of Saran on the left, and the confident, gracious face of Karan on the right, as he acknowledged the throngs who had come to wish him well. The bold caption right under it said—Saran–Karan: The Mentor’s parting gift to the Protégé—The Prime Ministership?

  It was obvious that the news channel was merely reflecting the mood of the nation.

  Three days later, the Central Working Committee of the Indian Kranti Party offered Karan Singh Rathore the post of the Prime Minister of India. Their decision was unanimous. Karan accepted their decision on live television with a billion people watching, with all the humility he could muster.

  Jazmeen’s phone rang again before she had a chance to respond to Sareen. She saw the number flashing on the tiny screen and smiled.

  ‘Why are you wasting your time calling an insignificant starlet like me? Don’t you have a country to run, Mr Prime Minister?’ she scolded the caller without greeting.

  ‘Because the insignificant starlet lets me touch her in inappropriate ways, that’s why,’ Karan responded promptly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure you enjoy fucking the country as much as you enjoy fucking her!’

  Both giggled.

  ‘What are you up to now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much. Just sitting with Sareen, taking stock of accessories and things. We do this every Sunday.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  She changed the subject, knowing quite well that her work matters with her ‘Assistant’ were of no interest to Karan. She had decided that her lover was never going to meet her brother.

  ‘How is your shoulder feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘Still sore. I had a long meeting with some Rajya Sabha MPs. It started hurting in the middle of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yaar, I still curse that behenchod every day. He was supposed to graze my arm, not fucking shoot straight at my heart! The lunatic!’

  ‘Hello, I’m saying sorry on Manjrekar’s behalf, OK?’ Jazmeen said admonishingly. ‘The man is already dead, otherwise you could have kicked his teeth in yourself! But don’t forget, he ensured that he made a National Hero out of you before he died.’

  How easy it had been for Jazmeen to play Karan Rathore. Like a cat toying with a mouse! She had done so by masterminding the Siri Fort Plan ostensibly for his benefit—but not once sharing its deadly mission with him.

  To Karan, the events of Siri Fort were planned to achieve one simple purpose. It was to neutralise the immediate threat he faced from Satyendra Saran. Saran was a dangerous and powerful man and could not be afforded any opportunity to thwart Karan’s larger mission with Romesh Lakhani. Yet, despite Saran’s looming threat, it had never been Karan’s intention to kill the man he had always looked up to as a mentor. All he had wanted was to blunt Saran’s potency, nothing more. To that end, Jazmeen’s proposal had sounded perfect.

  ‘What if we did something that made it virtually impossible for Saran to come after you?’ she had said.

  ‘How do we do that?’ he had asked.

  ‘By making you much too important to him.’ She had explained what she had in mind. Karan had been intrigued.

  ‘But who can help us do this?’ he had asked.

  ‘I have a man in mind.’ She had told him about Manjrekar.

  And so, a choreographed drama, to be enacted in a small makeup room but in front of the entire nation, had been planned. It was to have two grand finales. One, of course, was the death of Manjrekar. The other—the more important one—was the fall of Satyendra Saran into such profound indebtedness to Karan Rathore that there could be no hope of repayment.

  ‘The bullet will only graze your arm. One harmless flesh wound, and the PM will be in your back pocket forever,’ Jazmeen had said.
/>   It had made perfect sense. After all, how can a man ever compensate another who has just taken a bullet for him?

  Well, at least that was the plan that Karan had been made aware of. In reality, Jazmeen wanted to make sure that the bullet didn’t just graze Karan’s shoulder. She wanted it to lodge in his heart. The man responsible for the death of her beloved Arty deserved a punishment nothing short of death. And that was exactly what she and Manjrekar had planned for him at Siri Fort, up until their last meeting in Mumbai.

  However, Jazmeen had not been able to put out the nagging unease that had been troubling her—was she doing the right thing in eliminating Karan from her life so soon? The man was, quite literally, going to be anointed King soon. So, why was Jazmeen getting so blinded with rage that she was failing to see how important a Prime Minister Karan Rathore could be to her own future?

  Why was she insistent on slamming the door to karma in her haste for revenge?

  The more Jazmeen thought about it, the less inclined she felt to execute Karan.

  ‘The future is all that matters!’ the young, campy chorus dancer had told her in the makeup room. Those wise words of Latika/Charu just hours before the Siri Fort performance had rid Jazmeen of all the doubt and uncertainty that had been racking her until then. Everything was suddenly crystal clear after that. And so, at the very last minute, Jazmeen had decided to give her transgressor one last reprieve. She didn’t want Manjrekar to kill Karan anymore. Unfortunately, it had been too late to inform the cop that she had changed her mind.

  Manjrekar’s bullet did not pierce Karan’s heart. Jazmeen’s last-second scream had ensured that. Her reaction had taken the cop by surprise. But what had astonished him more was what she had said after saving Karan’s life.