She had Binoy to thank for that nugget of gossip. He was the one who had told her of Yash and Menaka’s public spats over his many indiscretions.
Nalini burst out laughing. It had a hollow quality.
‘Interesting theory,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Even if you’re right and Yash was cheating on her, there is such a thing as divorce, you know; alimony too.’
‘But Menaka isn’t interested in the alimony,’ Avantika saw the beginnings of doubt cloud Nalini’s face. ‘She wants the company. All of it.’
The clouds on Nalini’s face darkened.
‘What,’ she asked levelly, ‘are you talking about?’
‘Menaka consulted a lawyer,’ Avantika said, ‘to explore what she could do to take the company away from Yash. There’s nothing. She can get paid a hefty amount, but the controlling stake will remain with Yash till he dies. It’s written into the company by-laws and she can’t change those.’
‘You’re lying,’ Nalini scoffed.
‘Why would I? The lawyer happened to mention this to a potential client. My colleague happens to know that client.’ She hadn’t believed her ears when Binoy had supplied this piece of information.
‘What are you saying? That Menaka was just … she is trying to use me?’
‘Yes. You have a bias, Nalini. You believe all women are good and men are all evil. That’s sort of the theme on your farm. Heena knew it. Menaka knew it. She used it to manipulate you. And now …’ Avantika shook her head, ‘now, she’s going to go disown you in the press and tell everyone you killed your husband.’
Avantika had expected Nalini to laugh off this suggestion as well. But the woman looked startled.
‘I …’ Nalini faltered. ‘No, she wouldn’t do that.’
‘Nalini, she just threatened to kill my friend, the same friend she had beaten up—I’m guessing—and she offered me a bribe and threatened to have me injured, if not killed,’ Avantika said. ‘She is desperate enough to do anything, believe me.’
Nalini’s eyes fell to her hands that gripped the bars. She was quiet for a few moments.
‘She told me he hit her,’ she said finally, in a voice still tinged with disbelief. ‘And she has been … she has … you have no idea how much she has done for me. And now …’ She shook her head sadly. ‘She could’ve just left him.’
Avantika blinked and, in an instant, the years had flown by, till once again she was a heartbroken mess, seething with rage at Rishi’s betrayals, reduced to imaginary acts of violence in the confines of her mind, plotting hypothetical revenge, her hands tied by her own impotence. What would she have done, she wondered, if she had the means to move beyond just imagining those acts?
‘Yes, but she wanted him punished,’ she murmured, ‘Leaving him wouldn’t have been punishment enough.’
‘No,’ Nalini nodded, an odd look on her face. ‘It wouldn’t.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘Thanks for telling me all this, Avantika.’
‘Likewise,’ Avantika said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
‘Go ahead,’ Nalini said lightly. ‘You know most of my secrets by now, anyway.’
‘Those men you had killed, what had they done, exactly?’
‘You’re going to have to be more specific,’ Nalini replied with a small smile.
‘Um …’ Avantika scanned her memory for names. ‘Derek Aranha …?’
‘He aborted female foetuses.’
‘Hasan Aziz?’
‘Molested his niece. She’s nine.’
‘Viral Patel?’
‘Locked up and starved his mother till she agreed to sign over her property to him.’
‘Ashok Kadam?’
‘Marital rape. The sadistic kind.’ Nalini leaned forward and rested her head against the bars. ‘You see why I had to do it?’ she asked almost plaintively. ‘You see why they didn’t deserve to live.’
When Avantika didn’t answer, Nalini gave her an appraising look.
‘If I’d let them live, they’d go on doing what they did,’ she said, ‘And if they were ever found out, taken in front of the law, they’d say they had made a mistake and they’d apologise and walk free.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It’s always just a mistake when the victim is a woman. I needed to make these animals see that some mistakes, you pay for with your life.’
Avantika took a deep breath.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked. ‘Can you strike a plea bargain or something?’
‘Apparently not,’ Nalini sighed. ‘Karuna says in India you can only make a plea bargain for offences where the punishment is less than seven years. Between your FIR and Heena’s statement,’ she held up her hand as Avantika opened her mouth to protest, ‘I don’t blame you for that. You did what you had to. You’ve more than made up for it by meeting me here today.’ She smiled, a small bitter smile. ‘Anyway, so according to Karuna, depending on the evidence the police manage to get, I’m looking at ten years to life …’
Avantika knew she shouldn’t sympathize with the woman, but it was proving difficult at this point.
‘I can see the headlines now,’ Nalini continued, looking out of the bars, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘The Murderous Monster of Mumbai.’ She turned to Avantika. ‘But I bet you could come up with something better for your story. No?’
Avantika didn’t reply. She already had something in mind.
Twenty-One
THE COOPERATIVE SOCIETY OF MURDER, the headline screamed in 48-point Helvetica bold. Next to it was a colour snapshot of Nalini’s acid-scarred face. And under it, not ‘A staff reporter’ or ‘Our correspondent’, but ‘Avantika Pandit’. Avantika sighed as she folded away the newspaper. She’d made it to the front page reporting a crime story. A story so convoluted, it had spilled on to the inside pages. She had tried to be as fair as possible. Nalini wasn’t a monster and she didn’t want to paint her as one. But she wasn’t exactly a hero either. A terrible backstory didn’t excuse multiple murders. She’d written it like it was and it was now in print. Theoretically, she should’ve been grinning till her cheeks protested. But she didn’t feel like smiling now. She didn’t feel … anything.
She crammed a chocolate-cream biscuit into her mouth. It was her fifth. She was at her desk, but she was wondering if it would be better to be someplace else. The verandah, maybe. Or under a rock. All morning, people passing by her desk had been congratulating her, telling her what a great story she had put out. It was making her feel sick.
It was difficult to believe that only two days ago, she had been in the ladies’ lock-up, telling Nalini all about Menaka’s nefarious plans. Things had happened fast after that. She’d rewritten her story, putting in all the things she now knew. Uday had helped with the fact-checking. Nathan had suggested things to be added, things to be removed, things to be rephrased. They wanted to get all the details exactly right this time. And finally, late last night, they had put the story to bed with today’s paper.
She helped herself to another biscuit.
Till yesterday, she’d felt all the right things. The excitement, the strumming of nerves she always felt while pulling together a coherent story from snippets of facts. The joy, the jubilation. Nathan had okayed the story, even said ‘Good job’. She was finally, finally going to see her byline under a crime story again. She’d done it. She’d proven that she could handle stories like this. That she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. That she was cut out to be a serious reporter, no matter what Rishi or anybody else thought. And then, all that excitement had turned to dust.
She had woken up this morning to the sound of her mother talking to a puffy-eyed Radha, who seemed on the verge of tears. The police had broken the news of Sapna’s fate to the maid two days ago, and Avantika couldn’t bear to look at the woman’s face when she had shown up for work today. She looked like someone utterly defeated by life. Avantika had forgotten about Sapna in the past few days. No, forgotten was the wrong word. But the girl had been shoved to the back of her mind as she focu
sed on getting together all the strings that wove her story together. The story that had, let’s face it, been responsible for the girl’s death. Her story.
She closed her eyes for a moment. Bad idea. The second her lids shut, Sapna’s face appeared before her. Between sobs, Radha had confided that ‘Sapna’ was what her daughter was called at home. The name on her birth certificate, on her school-leaving certificate, was Anu, picked according to custom by the girl’s paternal aunt, on the twelfth day after her birth. ‘I called her Sapna because to me, she was a dream come true,’ Radha had said, before breaking down.
Reaching for another biscuit, Avantika wondered what name they’d write on Sapna’s death certificate. If she’d even get a death certificate. A girl had lived and then disappeared from the face of the earth. And Avantika would never get rid of the feeling that she could have stopped that from happening.
She had been so wrong. Ultimately, Nathan had it right all along. She had been impulsive and reckless. She’d been so excited, so keen on getting her byline under a crime story that she’d lost sight of everything else. And other people had paid the price. Dhruv had been beaten up, because she hadn’t been careful. Dhruv, who had wanted to date her and whose only fault was that he hadn’t bothered to hide it. And Sapna—who had just wanted a fresh start, away from the creep who called himself her stepfather—Sapna was dead. If only she had … if only …
She sniffed and reached for another biscuit.
‘A whole pack? That’s a bit much, isn’t it, even for you?’
Uday was standing next to her, hands in his pockets. He smiled at her, but she found herself incapable of smiling back.
‘Hey,’ she said without enthusiasm, offering him the biscuit pack. Only one biscuit remained in it.
‘Why the mood?’ he asked as he took the biscuit. ‘Front-page exposé not good enough for you?’
‘It’s just … Never mind.’ She shook her head.
‘That bad, huh? You want to talk about it?’
‘No, I just want to eat my feelings like a normal person.’ She stared dolefully at the empty biscuit pack. ‘You got any chocolate on you?’
‘Whoa, easy there,’ he said, settling on a chair next to her. ‘Tell me.’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’
‘Just say it. Why are you so low? You just wrote something that’s going to put away a psycho for a long, long time.’
‘Is she, though?’ Avantika asked. ‘Is she a psycho? What she was doing was … was that so … wrong?’
Uday’s eyes widened.
‘You’re taking her side?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’ Avantika ran a hand through her hair. ‘Think about those women, Uday. Think of Sapna. How angry, how desperate she must’ve been, to turn to a complete stranger! You don’t do that if you have faith in the system, but even fast-track courts are slow in this country …’
‘Look, I just came to congratulate you on the story,’ Uday said, holding up his hands in a pacifying gesture. ‘It’s sympathetic without being emotional. Very balanced. And the stuff you dug up on Menaka Gujaral …’
‘That was all thanks to Binoy,’ she said, looking away, ‘and you. Thanks for fact-checking and … everything.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, looking at her for a moment. Then he turned away and said, ‘Look, just take things slow for a bit, OK? Try to take life as it comes.’
‘What, like a serial killer?’ she asked and he snickered.
‘You’ll be OK?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ She rubbed her face with both hands, then gave him a brittle smile. ‘Yeah, I guess.’
It would take time, she knew. But she’d be fine. She’d have to be. If she wanted to keep doing what she had fought so hard to do, she was going to have to be OK. Eventually. And till then, she’d fake it. She’d have to.
‘Good, because Nathan wanted to see us …’ Uday said, glancing dramatically at his watch, ‘… ooh, ten minutes ago.’
She gave him an appalled look.
‘And you’ve been standing here chit-chatting all this while?’ she asked, brushing biscuit crumbs off her shirt as she got up.
Uday shrugged. ‘He can wait.’
‘What the … what is going on with you?’ she asked incredulously, as they made their way to Nathan’s cabin. ‘He’ll be livid, you know.’
‘I can always tell him it’s your fault.’ He dodged playfully as she turned round to hit him. ‘Almost everything is, these days.’
They had just turned towards Nathan’s cabin when the peon approached them with an envelope in his hands.
‘For you, madam,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘Someone left at the reception.’
She thanked him and opened it. She pulled out a bunch of folded A4-sized printouts and riffled through them. Her eyes stopped on the name of the sender on the last page. She frowned.
‘It’s from Nalini,’ she told Uday.
Twenty-Two
Dear Avantika,
Thanks for the wonderful story. I managed to read it this morning. It exposed those monsters for who they really are and I’m grateful to you for that. Now that their stories are out, now that the world knows what consequences their actions brought upon them, men everywhere will think twice before laying a finger on women. And if they don’t, they’ll know what’s coming to them.
This was exactly what I had imagined it would be like, having you working with us. I know, you don’t consider yourself one of us. But you are. You just haven’t accepted it yet. Even though it was you who opened my eyes. I see now that it isn’t just men who are capable of hurting women. It isn’t just men who deserve to be punished. And I assure you, it won’t just be men who pay the price for their actions anymore.
You may have realised as much after reading today’s paper. We don’t expect men to be on our side but if we as women can’t be worthy of each other’s trust, what hope do we have of surviving in this world? There’s nothing we can’t do, but only if we stick together. Heena found that out the hard way, I guess.
As did Menaka. You were more right than you know about how much I owed her. You see, Menaka didn’t just save my life by inviting me over to stay. She was my alibi for the night Ravi died. I wasn’t at her house when the gas explosion happened. I was in the kitchen of my home, engineering it.
I can imagine your expression as you read this. The questions that must be running through your mind. Let me explain. See, in the weeks after the attack, I used to get these sudden bursts of rage. Because, I’d think, Why me? Why had those men targeted me? Usually in these cases, it’s always some spurned idiot, isn’t it? Girl rejects guy’s advances—guy throws acid at her. That’s how it usually goes. Then why me? I’d rage against the injustice of it all, against those two men, those strangers who had turned my life inside out in a matter of seconds.
Ravi had got used to these rants and one day, while reading the newspaper, he casually remarked that maybe they’d just mistaken me for someone else. ‘How could they possibly make such a huge mistake?’ I snapped. ‘You know what they say about bald men,’ he said absently, ‘empty scalp, empty brain.’
Which is when I remembered something I had forgotten. One of those two men had, in fact, been bald. Except, I hadn’t told the police that. I hadn’t told anyone that. I hadn’t even remembered, till that moment. Doctor Arora had said that this happened in PTSD. The mind is under shock, so you remember certain details much later. Details like the fact that the person who hurled the acid at you was bald. There was no way Ravi could’ve known about this. Correction, there was only one way he could’ve known about this.
I didn’t believe it at first. It didn’t make sense. Why would a man pay someone to do something like this to his own wife? And he’d been there for me after the incident. Doctor visits, counsellor visits, temple visits, he was by my side the whole time. It didn’t make sense. But when I stopped asking myself why he did it and started wondering if he was capable of doing it, I realised that
he was. Ravi had anger issues. It’s like he became a different person when he was angry. He’d say the filthiest things. He’d throw things. And even after he’d calmed down, there would be no remorse. Almost as if he’d find a way to convince himself that what he had said, what he had done, was justified.
We fought a lot, so I got to see that side of him pretty often. Our arguments mostly revolved around him not wanting me to work. He wanted me to quit my job and start a family with him. It’s not like I didn’t want kids, just not right away. He couldn’t understand why. The days leading up to the attack, we’d had arguments every day. He had gotten it into his head that the reason I didn’t want to quit was because I was having an affair with a colleague. His evidence? He’d seen us laughing and chatting by the college gate one day, when he’d come to pick me up. He used to drop me to college and pick me up in the evening on his way back from work. Every single day. Except the day of the attack.
It had always puzzled me how those men knew where I’d be. The logical guess would be they followed my movements for a few days, figured out a pattern and knew exactly when to catch me alone. But I usually travelled with Ravi. There really was no way they could’ve known I’d be standing at that particular bus stop, at that particular time, unless someone had told them that’s where I’d go to take a bus home that evening. And after his idle comment about my attacker, I knew that someone was Ravi.
I didn’t know what to do. Who to turn to. I spoke to my parents. My father refused to believe me. He wouldn’t hear a word against Ravi. My counsellor told me it’s normal for patients suffering from PTSD to imagine these things. I even went to the police, but they didn’t take me seriously either. Which is when I realised a simple fact about men. They protect their own. Find me a man who takes a woman’s word over another man’s and I’ll show you a pretender.
Anyway, I confronted Ravi about it a few days later. And he admitted it. He sat there in our living room and admitted to my face that he’d paid two thugs to throw acid on my face. He wanted to teach me a lesson. He wanted me to know what happens to people who try to make a fool out of him.
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