As they turned a corner, Avantika saw a shape looming ahead and suddenly a pit opened up in her stomach. It was the biogas plant. What was it Nalini had said? The thing turned organic waste into cooking gas and fertilizer. Organic waste like leftover food. Or slaughterhouse waste. Meat, blood, bones. And wasn’t the human body made up of just that? She stopped dead in her tracks.
‘Wait!’ she called and turned round, her hands held up in a pacifying gesture.
‘Keep moving,’ Heena said curtly, pointing in the direction of the biogas plant with the gun.
‘Listen, please, don’t do this!’
‘I said, keep moving!’ Heena yelled. ‘You can either walk or I can drag your body after I’ve shot you; you decide!’
Avantika was about to reply when her gaze fell behind Heena’s shoulder. A look of complete relief came over her face and she took a couple of steps forward, saying, ‘Thank God, Nalini! Good you’re here!’
Heena whipped her head around in surprise. It took her about a second to realise there was nobody behind her.
Sometimes one second is enough.
Avantika lunged.
Fourteen
Heena stumbled backwards. Avantika grabbed the hand that was holding the gun. She held it high above the woman’s head, trying to wrestle the gun away. Heena was two inches shorter than Avantika but her wiry frame disguised how strong she was. When Heena tried to push her away, Avantika slid back a few inches. She tried to get back her foothold, but in a trice Heena had twisted around. Her back was now to Avantika. Her elbow shot out. It hit Avantika in the ribs. Avantika gasped. Dull pain shot through her, loosening her grip on the gun just a fraction. She rallied. Breathing heavily, she tried to force open Heena’s grip on the gun handle. Heena grunted as Avantika’s fingers curled under her fingertips, forcing them open. She twisted around again. Her face was inches away from Avantika’s now. Their arms were twisted around one another, their fingers trying to claw the gun away. Avantika tried to wrench the gun away from Heena’s fingers. Heena grunted and yanked it downwards. Her wrist hit Avantika’s nose hard. The impact disoriented her for a second.
Sometimes one second is enough.
Avantika’s grip slackened. Heena pulled the gun out of her hands. Almost. Avantika grabbed the gun as it very nearly slipped out of her grasp and rushed forward with all her might. Heena, her hands still on the gun, was thrown back. Her grip on the gun remained strong, however. Her wrist was level with Avantika’s nose now. Avantika saw the hateful look on her face as she lashed out with her wrist again. Avantika jerked her head back, just in time. Then, she charged ahead, teeth out, and bit the woman on her hand as hard as she could.
Heena screamed. Her fingers uncurled and, in a flash, Avantika was standing a few yards away from her. The gun was in her hands, pointed directly at Heena.
Avantika was breathing heavily. Her arms were shivering, making the gun shake. Heena looked murderous for a moment, as she rubbed her hurt hand. Then, with a sneer, she took a step towards Avantika.
‘Stop!’ Avantika said, wishing her voice wasn’t trembling right now. A wet trickle was dripping from her nose.
‘Or what?’ Heena asked, an insolent smile on her face. ‘You’ll fire the gun? You’re not even holding it properly.’
She was probably right, Avantika thought, trying not to focus on the way the gun was shaking in her hands. But that wasn’t important right now.
‘I can still pull the trigger,’ she said through clenched teeth. It was difficult to keep the tremor out of her voice.
Heena’s face didn’t betray a thing. So, Avantika was taken aback when the woman began shouting.
‘Jyoti! Shama! Anita! Come here! Fast!’ she screamed, once, twice, thrice.
She’s calling for backup, Avantika realized with horror. She’s calling for those women who took Nalini away. Maybe others. If those women, if anyone heard her, Avantika would be outnumbered in moments.
‘Keep quiet!’ she hissed, taking a step towards Heena.
Heena just smirked. Avantika’s throat went dry. She had to shut this woman up. She adjusted her grip on the gun. Her breathing turned ragged. Her throat was dry. She swallowed. Then she pulled the trigger.
Two shots rang out.
The air was filled with the sound of wings, as birds from nearby trees took flight. Avantika brought her hand down slowly from its position above her head and pointed it at Heena again. The recoil had jogged her elbow and shoulder in unpleasant ways that she’d probably regret later. But at least the woman wasn’t smirking anymore.
‘Lie down on the ground,’ Avantika said, her gaze moving from Heena to the expanse behind her.
The gunshots had been loud. Someone from the farm must have heard. Would they think it was Heena who had fired the gun? If not, they’d be here in seconds. Her only hope was to get Heena on the floor, tie her up somehow and make a run for it, before they got here. Fuck, she had not thought this through. And Heena probably knew that, because she just stood there.
‘Do you know how many bullets were in that gun?’ she asked, a slow smile spreading over her face.
‘Two,’ she said, before charging at Avantika.
Before Avantika could react, Heena was upon her, hitting her with a ferocity she hadn’t expected. She lost her footing and fell to the dirt floor. Dull pain throbbed in her back, as Heena’s punches landed on her stomach, her chest. Her face stung with the woman’s slaps. Avantika held up her hands to shield herself from the blows, and Heena yanked the revolver from her, pointing the gun at her forehead. Avantika stared at her uncomprehendingly. Then the slow, painful realisation dawned. The woman had lied. There were more bullets in the gun.
Avantika felt like screaming. Angry tears were sliding down her cheeks now. They mixed with the sweat streaming down from her hairline. It was over. No, she told herself. NO. Fight back. DO something. Do something NOW.
‘Stand up!’ Heena ordered.
Avantika didn’t move, and got a ringing slap across the face for it.
‘Fine,’ Heena hissed. ‘If you won’t come on your feet, you’ll come on your back.’
She grabbed Avantika by the hair and began dragging her across the dirt floor of the farm. Avantika struggled, trying to ignore the searing pain in her scalp, trying to dig her toes into the earth, trying to twist around so she could grab Heena’s arms, claw at them, trying to pull her own hair away. She wasn’t aware when she began screaming. But all the rage, the sorrow, the helplessness she felt, now rang out across the farm in a hoarse, feral scream. And then, through the haze of sweat and tears, she saw the uniforms.
Three, four, five people in khaki uniforms were running towards them. One, an inspector, shouted out an order and Avantika felt the pressure on her scalp ease, as her hair fell out of Heena’s hands.
Two women constables rushed towards them. One crouched at her side, helping her up while the other grabbed Heena, wrestled the revolver out of her hands and pulled her hands behind her back. Avantika stood up. She wiped her nose, her eyes, her face on her sleeve, leaving pale red stains behind. The constable was asking her if she was all right. The inspector was giving instructions to the rest of the men. Then he was asking her if there were any other hurt people inside the main building. To Avantika, it was all just a sea of noise. All she could focus on at that moment were Heena’s eyes glaring at her. And the deep, burning hostility in them. She’d see these eyes in her nightmares. They’d haunt her for a long time. She tried to look away, but couldn’t.
Then, one voice interrupted the chaos in her head. She knew that voice.
‘Avanti?’ it was asking. ‘Avanti! Can you hear me? Are you OK?’
She turned blankly towards the voice. A boyish face, full of concern tinged with fear.
‘My God, Avanti.’ Uday looked at the scratches on her arms, the blood she had wiped on her sleeves, the fresh bruises on her face. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Oh, this?’ she tried to laugh. It came out as a cough
. ‘You should see the other girl …’
She chuckled. The chuckle turned into a hoarse laugh. She was alive. She laughed again and then, without warning, her face twisted into a grimace of fear and pain and relief, and the laugh turned into something ugly as her throat seized up. Uday put an arm around her. She hugged him back gratefully, as dry sobs wracked her body.
Fifteen
There were goats outside the police station. Avantika watched, as a constable tried to shoo the creatures away, with little success. They just stood there, peering inside with a disdain that indicated they had seen better police stations on their travels across distant lands. Avantika shook her head and looked away, trying not to inhale too deeply. The air was a rank medley of traffic smoke and eau de offal. She was sitting inside the Deonar police station, which lay right behind the Deonar abattoir. That was what the place was called on the road signs leading up to it. Abattoir. In Hindi, right next to it, was the word Kattalkhana. Which translated loosely to ‘room of murder’. How ironic, Avantika thought, that this was the neighbourhood Nalini had chosen for Dharini Farm.
She massaged her neck, which was feeling tender after Heena’s attentions to her scalp. Why is it, she wondered, that when two women fight, it’s called a catfight? It sounded amusing—two little kittens fighting, meowing, their tails all puffed up, slapping each other with soft paws. It almost sounded … cute. But only if you’d never seen two cats fight. Because there was nothing amusing about the violence of creatures who had descended from sabre-toothed tigers. There was nothing soft about the claws inside those paws. Blood isn’t cute. And women, like all humanity, had descended from apes, after all. Had the people who came up with the word ‘catfight’ ever seen chimpanzees fight? That wasn’t very cute either. Like all wild animals, women fought tooth and nail. Fucking catfight. Hah. She grimaced, remembering Heena’s fists pounding into her stomach.
The police had rounded up Heena and the occupants of the farm, minutes after arriving on the scene. She had to admire their timing. This wasn’t a Hindi movie. Had they come fifteen minutes later, she would’ve been dead, slowly dissolving in the foul mess of the biogas plant. She shuddered at the thought and felt a sharp sensation at her breast. Reaching inside her bra, as furtively as possible, she took out the small square box she had hidden there. The GPS tracker was black, a little smaller than a Tic-Tac box and had nestled, a little uncomfortably, near her heart from the moment she had left the office to meet Anu at Churchgate. Thank God for that listicle on spy gadgets, she thought. Nasir had actually acquired a couple of pieces he intended to use for the story, and passed them on to her before going on sick leave. This little beauty had been among them. It had a live tracking feature and could send an SOS to any mobile number you had pre-entered, if you pressed a handy blue button on its side. Which is what she had done the moment she had woken up in that room at Dharini Farm. Uday had immediately got an alert on his phone and had risen to the occasion admirably.
She sneaked a glance at him now, talking quietly to the inspector in charge. He had watched anxiously as the women constables had given Avantika basic first aid from a kit in the police car. He had sat next to her wordlessly as they’d travelled to the police station. He had listened to her anxious babble as she recounted everything that had happened since she saw him last. Not once had he admonished her. He had done everything she had asked and so, so much more. She felt her throat constrict. It would be easy to say this is what friends are for. But Avantika knew, from experience, that not all friendships ran this deep. You had to be lucky to have friends like Uday. Friends who’d do just about anything for you. She saw Uday nod at the inspector and come towards her. She smiled.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hey, they’ll call you in five minutes to take your statement,’ he said briskly. ‘By the way, they took that Nalini woman to some hospital nearby. They’ll take her statement when she wakes up. They’ve already taken Heena’s statement and you’re not going to believe … Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Nothing, go on.’
‘Heena has told them it was Nalini’s idea to get rid of you.’
‘What? But that’s not true.’
‘You can set the record straight when you give your statement,’ Uday patted her hand reassuringly. ‘Have you figured out what you’re going to say?’
‘The truth, obviously,’ she said. ‘Erm …’
‘What?’
‘What do you think will happen to Nalini once I tell the cops what she told me?’
‘I’m guessing jail?’ Uday shrugged. ‘Why do you care?’
‘I don’t, I just …’
‘Good, because you have other things to worry about.’ He rolled his eyes, and started dialling a number on his phone. He held the handset to his ear and waited for a second. ‘Yeah, she’s here,’ he said, before holding out the phone to her. The name on the screen said Nathan. She shook her head frantically. She did not want to talk to Nathan and tell him how she had let him down. Again. But Uday gave her a stern look and held the phone to her ear.
‘Hello? Nathan …,’ she said hesitantly, taking the phone from his hands
‘Pandit. You’re alive.’
‘Yes?’
‘Good. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because when you get to office, I’m going to kill you.’
‘Yeah,’ she grimaced, ‘I’m sorry. I just—’
‘Do you need to go to a hospital?’
‘No … I don’t think—’
‘Yes, we’ve established that,’ Nathan sounded exasperated. ‘Give the phone to Uday.’
Uday took the phone and listened for a few seconds.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said, before hanging up.
‘We’re going to a doctor, once we’re done here,’ he told her.
‘But—’
‘Do you have an MBBS, Avanti?’ he asked. ‘No? So how would you know if you have internal bleeding or a broken rib or something?’
‘Well, a broken rib would probably hurt like hell, so there’s a chance I’d know …’
‘Let’s just get someone qualified to check, OK?’ Uday said. ‘Nathan has insisted.’
‘I can’t believe you told him,’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her anyway.
‘Obviously I told him!’ he exclaimed. ‘I hadn’t heard from you for hours, your phone was switched off, what was I supposed to do? You could’ve been dead, for all I knew and you came pretty damned close, didn’t you?’ He lowered his voice, as a few constables looked in their direction. ‘You don’t know how worried I was, you idiot. I had told you that plan was stupid, but no, she just has to do what she wants. Forget what the rest of us have to go through …’ He glared at her. ‘And just so you know, when I told Nathan, he didn’t wait one minute—not a minute—before getting on the phone. He called all his contacts in the police, Avanti, called in a favour he was owed and got a police car on standby. The moment I got that alert, we were on the move. You think the cops would’ve pulled out all the stops just for me? I’m a nobody, Avanti, but Nathan …’
You’re not a nobody, you’re the guy who saved my life, Avantika wanted to yell. But at that moment, a short, bespectacled woman in a beige handloom saree entered the police station and walked straight up to the inspector.
‘Namaskar, Saheb,’ she said in flawless Marathi, ‘I’m Karuna Kumar.’ She held out some official-looking papers. ‘Nalini Gupta is my client. Can I meet her?’
The inspector read the papers she had presented.
‘Your client is at Chikitsa Hospital,’ he replied with a nod. ‘You can go meet her there. Or wait here. She’ll be brought here in some time, anyway.’
Karuna glanced at her watch. She seemed to be giving the matter some thought.
‘I’ll wait,’ she said finally. ‘It won’t take much time, no?’
‘No, no. She’s conscious, she’s given her statement. We’re just waiting for the doctors to discharge her.’
Karun
a frowned but nodded and sat on one of the plastic chairs next to the entrance.
‘That was fast,’ Avantika whispered. ‘Nalini’s lawyer is here already?’
‘Looks like it,’ Uday frowned. ‘I feel like I’ve seen her somewhere before.’
‘This is a terrible time to use that pick-up line,’ Avantika replied under her breath.
Uday ignored her, looking at the lawyer in a way he clearly thought wasn’t obvious.
‘Uday, you’re being creepy.’ Avantika nudged him.
‘Shut up,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sure I know her from …’ His expression cleared and he whipped out his mobile phone and opened a search page.
‘What? What are you looking for?’ Avantika asked.
‘Ssshh,’ he told her, looking intently at the screen. ‘I knew it! I knew I’d seen her somewhere before.’
He passed her the phone. It showed an old article in the Deccan Journal with a black-and-white picture of a young Karuna Kumar. The headline above it read, LAWYER OF GHORPADE HIT-AND-RUN ACCUSED FOUND.
Avantika raised her eyebrows at Uday.
‘This is the same case where that MLA’s son ran over some old woman?’ she whispered.
‘Yup, and forced his driver to take the fall. She,’ Uday nodded slightly in Karuna’s direction, ‘represented the driver.’ He dropped his voice even lower so Avantika had to lean in to hear what he had to say. ‘When the date for the trial came up, she had disappeared. For three days, nobody could find her. And when they did, it was in a locked shack, some two hundred kilometres away from the city. She had been beaten and raped.’
Fatal Mistakes Page 13