by Salil Desai
The slight hesitation in Motkar’s reply was enough to send alarm bells ringing in Saralkar’s mind. “What is it?”
“Sir, we rescued Geeta Chaudhuri from the farmhouse as planned, without any hitches. Murgud played his part without mischief and there was no resistance from the two caretakers. But the hostage is in pretty bad shape. We are not sure if she can make it yet.”
“What? Why? Explain.”
“Sir, Anushka Doshi has damaged Geeta Chaudhuri quite badly. It could be fatal.”
Saralkar finally sat up. “Motkar, tell me clearly what has happened.”
“Sir, Anushka Doshi sliced Geeta Chaudhuri’s nipples off both breasts last night and worse still she’s been injected with a nearly lethal dose of testosterone.”
“Testosterone? You mean the male hormone?” Saralkar said slowly, feeling unreal.
His eyes strayed towards Dr. Mahendra Dhingra who was staring at him anxiously, his ears pricked up at the mention of testosterone.
“Yes, sir. The dose injected was several times bigger than normal. Doctors think she most likely won’t survive,” Motkar replied.
“Oh, my God!”
The alarm bells were clanging in Saralkar’s mind now. Why would Anushka Doshi have done that to the hostage while agreeing to meet Dhingra? Something was wrong. Those weren’t the actions of a kidnapper who expected to get her demands met. Why would she want to endanger her bargaining chip so perversely? It would’ve been understandable if she’d done it after her demands had been fulfilled, not at this stage. Something wasn’t right.
“And that’s not all, sir,” Motkar said. “Anushka Doshi also gave the Karnataka Police tracking team a slip somewhere near the Goa border.”
Saralkar could almost feel the sedative inside his body, physically trying to restrain his blood pressure from shooting up. “How the hell did that happen?” he growled.
“Sir the car stopped at a food plaza along the highway. Anushka Doshi had already gone in by the time the team following her reached the place. They waited while one of the plain-clothes men went in to have a look. She was nowhere to be seen. They are not sure exactly what happened but she didn’t return to the car. The driver of her taxi knew nothing. They think she probably changed her get-up in the restroom and fled in another car that must’ve already been waiting outside the food plaza. The plaza has two CCTV cameras and the footage is being checked.”
Expletives and abuses had been rising to Saralkar’s lips and for once he would’ve liked to scream ‘serenity now’ to see if it really worked. “Look,” he said to Motkar, holding back his exasperation, “she’s probably changed into Rahul Fernandes to escape detection . . . and I think he might’ve jumped into some waiting luxury bus not a car. Check if there were any luxury or state transport buses that he might’ve got into.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get it done. You think Anushka Doshi knows that she was being lured into a trap, sir? That Murgud might’ve somehow leaked the information to her?”
“She certainly suspects something, that much is clear, unless she’s just taking precautions to double-check she’s not being followed. But what she did to Geeta is pure vengeance, so I’m doubtful she’ll turn up at Dhingra’s clinic now,” Saralkar said, then caught Dhingra’s eye and immediately regretted having mentioned Geeta. “I just hope we haven’t lost him again. Rahul Fernandes has shown himself adept at disappearing.”
He disconnected and braced himself to tell Dr. Dhingra, fearing the worst but hoping for the best.
Anushka Doshi alias Rahul Fernandes didn’t show up at Dr. Dhingra’s clinic nor was he nabbed either by the Goa or the Karnataka Police in the days that followed. Geeta Chaudhuri just managed to survive after battling with death for three days.
Saralkar fretted in the waiting room of the pathology and diagnostics laboratory, a week later. He had finished the blood test and urine sample, and now he was supposed to go the whole nine yards with ECG and sonography and double echo tests. All because of that stupid bout of giddiness in Goa!
His wife had finally put her foot down. She sat next to him now, reading a newspaper, throwing hawk-like glances in his direction every now and then, as if she expected him to fly away any minute.
Saralkar’s thoughts went back to Rahul Fernandes. Not that criminals hadn’t outsmarted him before but Anushka Doshi had made him feel like a complete fool. He wondered if he’d been too clever by half in suggesting an elaborate ruse to Dr. Dhingra. Would it have been better to have kept it simple? Would it have worked if Dr. Dhingra had been instructed to simply tell Anushka that he was accepting her demand? In a bid to make it convincing, had Saralkar overplayed his hand and alerted Rahul Fernandes to some kind of a trap?
He had to admit to himself, if not anyone else, that perhaps that’s what might have happened. He was not alone, of course, in making a mistake. The annals of crime were full of misjudgements made by policemen that had led to criminals escaping. So there it was—another over smart policeman who had let a smart criminal get away. Saralkar bridled at the thought. “How long do we have to wait for the damn ECG?” he grumbled to his wife.
“Don’t fret like a kid,” Jyoti rebuked him, looking up from the newspaper. “You like Remo Fernandes?”
“Who’s that?”
“Come on, don’t tell me you don’t know Remo, the Goan popstar! Remember Jalwa?” she replied, referring to a cult Hindi movie, the title song of which had introduced Remo Fernandes to the larger Indian public.
“Hrrmp,” Saralkar said. “What about him?”
“He’s in the news. It seems Remo had adopted Portuguese nationality several years ago, like many native Goans whose parents and grandparents lived under Portuguese colonial rule till 1961. This fact’s just come to light because of some recent accident his family member was involved in,” Jyoti replied, showing him the news item.
Saralkar read the item. Like native descendants from the former French colony of Pondicherry in South India were eligible for French citizenship, it seemed eligible Goans too could apply for and get Portuguese citizenship, which ensured they had access to nearly a hundred and seventy countries without a visa. A buzzer went off in Saralkar’s mind. He knew exactly how and where to look for Rahul Fernandes and stop him from fleeing India, if he hadn’t already done so.
“You can come for the ECG now,” a nurse came up and announced.
But Saralkar paid her no attention. He was too busy calling up PSI Motkar to order him to get in touch with the Portuguese embassy in India.
Portuguese passport holder Rahul Fernandes was nabbed seven days later as he showed up to board a Malaysia bound flight at Chennai airport. Saralkar’s hunch had hit bullseye.
Saralkar regarded Anushka Doshi, as he and Motkar entered the interrogation room. She looked back at him full in the eye, without flinching. It was a cruel, cynical face—not yet feminine but no longer manly.
It curled into a defiant, sly smirk almost immediately. “Shouldn’t a woman cop be present too? Technically I’m a female suspect, you know. I could claim you tried to molest and rape me in custody.”
The voice had that peculiar quality, of sounding as if it could have belonged to either sex. Perhaps Rahul Fernandes had also undergone voice feminization therapy.
“Well, that’s been your tragedy, Rahul Fernandes. Anushka Doshi has always remained an unfulfilled fantasy, hasn’t she?” Saralkar mocked.
The smirk vanished from Anushka Doshi’s face and bitterness surfaced in each feature. “Do you know what it is to feel the way people like me do? To be a man outside and throb like a woman inside, every minute! To live like a totally different being than what you are born as, to feel a stranger in the body you have not chosen for yourself, year after year? To want a vagina, where there’s a penis? To be bloody trapped! And then when you change into a woman, to feel cheated, deceived, left stranded! To want to go back to being a man, if you can’t really be a woman . . . it’s hell. Damn it, it’s a living hell.”
A
nushka Doshi blazed all her hatred and fury for the world at Saralkar.
“So first you had the urge to become a woman and became one. Then you wanted to return to being a man again,” Saralkar said in the same scornful, mocking tone that pricked like a needle. “But looks like one urge remained constant throughout—the urge to kill. Whether as a man or woman, eh Rahul, sorry, Anushka?”
Anushka Doshi’s eyes flashed in response. “You would have done the same thing if you were in my place. Anyone who feels threatened and trapped can kill. It’s a basic instinct.”
Saralkar gave a derisive chuckle. “You know a good headline I can think of, Motkar? Unsuccessful Transgender, Successful Murderer.” He looked at Motkar deliberately then back at Anushka Doshi. “By the way, you proved that saying right—the female of the species is deadlier than the male. You just murdered Shaunak Sodhi when you were a man. But as Anushka Doshi you slaughtered Krishna Bhupathi, Meenakshi Rao, and almost killed Geeta Chaudhuri. Three and a half murders! Bravo! Kudos to woman power! Tell me, which slaying did you enjoy the most?”
Anushka Doshi didn’t respond. She looked away and PSI Motkar wondered whether his boss was going about this grilling in the right way. Perhaps it was time to step in with a different approach. He glanced at Saralkar, unsure whether the senior inspector would like him to interfere. But Saralkar was in fact staring back at him, as if waiting for Motkar to take over.
“You think I’m just a depraved pervert, don’t you?” Anushka Doshi spoke suddenly before Motkar could begin. “Some kind of a despicable, weird, murderous sexopath on a killing spree?”
“Sexopath? There’s no word like sexopath, but I like it,” Saralkar sniggered, “although you flatter yourself, you freak! Perverts and psychos can’t control themselves. You are just an ordinary, cold-blooded killer.”
Anushka Doshi exploded. “I’m not an ordinary, cold-blooded killer. I fooled the law for seven years. I almost got away even this time.”
“Ah, not just a cold-blooded killer but vain too, with delusions of grandeur. So you think you are a criminal mastermind, is it?”
Anushka Doshi looked at him nastily. What she said next took Motkar’s breath away.
“You are a fool, Inspector Saralkar. You have in front of you a criminal mind with extraordinary motivation and instead of giving respect and cajoling and coaxing me to reveal more, you scoff at me, thinking I’ll talk. I might or might not be a criminal mastermind but you surely are one stupid, dumb policeman.”
A shocked, ominous silence, crackling with tension prevailed for a minute. Motkar dared not look at his boss, except from the corner of his eye. Saralkar’s expression was stony-faced, as if molten rage had condensed into rock. Anushka Doshi was eyeballing him, cocky and defiant, kicked with her self for heaping the insult and awaiting a reaction.
Motkar fervently hoped his boss wouldn’t lose it. He was relieved when Saralkar spoke in an even tone. “You do have a point, Anushka. You might not be a run-of-the-mill killer, after all, but I am still not sure whether you ought to be classified either as a psychopath or a mastermind. Whatever it is, I must say you do have balls, sorry guts, because your balls must’ve been removed by Dhingra, right? Yes, it’s a rare criminal who’s had the guts to call me a fool to my face.”
Motkar watched Anushka Doshi’s face. A satisfied expression had started creeping over it as if she’d managed to put the policeman in his place.
“And frankly in my long career I haven’t seen too many fugitives who’ve given cops the slip for as long as you have,” Saralkar acknowledged in a brilliantly modulated grudging tone of sneaking admiration.
Motkar marvelled at his boss’s ability to sound and appear convincing even as he made subtle and not-so-subtle course corrections midway through an interrogation. He had witnessed it a few times earlier too. He could see the effect it was having on Anushka Doshi now. She was looking smug.
Saralkar was silent for a second, as if brooding then said, “So tell me your story from the beginning. My professional curiosity has got the better of me . . . I’m swallowing your insult.”
“Maybe you should apologize to me first, Saralkar,” Anushka Doshi responded with a crooked, triumphant grin.
Saralkar fixed her with a look. “You know I can have you thrashed black and blue, so that you’ll soon be begging to tell us all, but I think you’ve suffered enough in life and your future doesn’t look bright either. So I’ll indulge your vanity. Sorry. Now your turn to convince us whether you are a mastermind or merely a—what did you say?—a sexopath.”
It was the kind of manoeuvre and manipulation that could’ve gone straight into a text book on interrogation techniques, Motkar thought.
“I told you I am nothing of the kind,” Anushka responded disdainfully and glared, and then began her narration. “I knew there was a hardware-software mismatch in my body since I was about nine or ten. All the things I was attracted to were girl things—dressing up like them, dancing to cabarets and girly numbers, jewellery, cosmetics—but I had to do only boy stuff. We lived in Goa, in a village near Vasco; my mother and I. My father had died a few years earlier. He’d been a clerk in the colonial Portuguese administration and later after liberation, in the Indian administration. He had married quite late, when he was nearly forty. I was born almost six to seven years after their marriage. Immaculate conception, I bet, knowing the kind of woman my mother was.” He paused and gave a cynical, mirthless chuckle. “She was a long suffering hag afflicted with religion and superstition. She lost her mental balance completely by the time I was fifteen. So I fled.”
“You mean you deserted her, abandoned her,” Saralkar observed.
“Call it what you will. I couldn’t handle her unique cocktail of religion and looniness, not with what was happening inside me. I went to Panjim for a few years doing odd jobs. My English was good, so it helped in tourist trade. When I went back to Vasco, she was gone. Neighbours had found her dead in the house one day.”
“Sure you had nothing to do with that?” Saralkar asked wryly.
“I didn’t murder my mother, Inspector. I’m no Norman Bates from Psycho,” Anushka Doshi replied. “Anyway, I collected all her stuff which the local pastor had kept in his custody for me, if and when I turned up. Fortunately all my father’s documents, my birth certificate, some money and jewellery were intact. We didn’t have any close relatives, except my mother’s brother, who wasn’t the least interested in me. I returned to Panjim. Soon after I started becoming seriously conflicted—couldn’t completely understand my abnormal urges and impulses. I would get angrier and angrier, even as my lust hormones seemed to go wild. I began to think I was gay, because why otherwise did I feel like being a woman? I also had a few bad sexual encounters, it all added to my confusion and torment.”
Anushka Doshi paused, closing and rubbing her eyes as if to erase the memory from her mindscreen.
“It must’ve been hard,” Saralkar said, almost gently.
Anushka Doshi responded to the tone earnestly. “By God, it was hard! You know what I did then? I began gymming and body building, trying to aggressively make a man out of myself, trying to screw every girl willing to sleep with me. Nothing helped . . . nothing could drive away that girlie self in me. It was as if all my apparatus was wrong. By the time I was in my early twenties I knew exactly what I was—a man who had to somehow turn into and live as a woman to find peace and happiness. Being in Panjim I had met many foreign tourists, with different sexual orientations, and had learnt a little about sex change and stuff.
‘‘I tried to find out more and realized there were surgeries and therapies by which I could actually become a woman some day. That’s when I decided to make money, get rich by hook or crook, enough to be able to change my sex and live as a woman for the rest of my life. I knew big money would never come just like that, working as a tourist guide and driver, so I turned to petty crime. Nothing serious but anything that earned me a few extra bucks.”
“But you don’
t seem to have a crime record in Goa. How come?”
“I didn’t stay long enough in Goa to get caught for anything, Inspector,”Anushka Doshi replied. “I pissed off a local ganglord by mistake. You see I’d also taken to indulging my fantasies by dressing up like a hot chick sometimes and going off for dances in night clubs and other seedy dance bars. I’d do some dirty dancing with men, it was a form of titillation for me, but sometimes drunken men wouldn’t realize I was a man and get horny. That’s exactly what happened with this ganglord, so when he finally realized that I was really a man dressed as a woman and that he’d been aroused by me, he felt humiliated and infuriated. He came after me with his gang next day and I just escaped by the skin of my teeth. I had no option but to flee Panjim for some time . . . and that’s how I landed up in Bangalore.”
“When did this incident happen? When did you reach Bangalore?” Motkar spoke for the first time.
Anushka Doshi gave him a slightly surprised look. “Signs of life! So you are not mute after all. Just the strong, silent type, I guess, because your boss does all the talking?”
She turned to glance at Saralkar spitefully. Saralkar said nothing.
“Answer the question, Anushka,” Motkar spoke again.
“Well, let me see. I think it was 1995 or 1996. But it was just the right time to be in Bangalore. The city had just begun exploding into a real metropolis. Real estate was booming—the biggest respectable scam on earth—and I jumped in. I was soon making more money than I had made earlier. I took to Bangalore like fish to water, learnt Kannada and Tamil with surprising ease. The city was my lucky charm. I made the right contacts, got my foot into all the right money making rackets—betting, chit funds, dance bars, escort services. All the businesses had legitimate and illegitimate sides. I realized that if things continued that way, I could actually manage to get rich enough in a few years to be able to attempt undergoing sex change procedures.”
“Had you consulted doctors?”