Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  There was a hesitant knock on the door. Sadhana Devi tried to compose herself. But before she could wipe the tears off her cheeks, the door opened and a white-faced Radhika entered. ‘Amma, have you heard?’ she began, before she saw the images playing on the television.

  Radhika lunged for the remote and switched off the TV. ‘Amma, you really don’t need to see that,’ she said, sitting down beside her mother-in-law and putting a gentle arm around her.

  That touch set off Sadhana Devi’s tears yet again. ‘How could she, Radhika? How could my daughter do something like this?’

  Radhika, shaken to the core herself, tried to console her mother-in-law. ‘She didn’t do this, Amma. Someone has done this to her. She is the innocent party in this…’

  She didn’t get any further. Sadhana Devi interrupted in a rare flash of anger. ‘Innocent? How is she innocent? It is clear from the pictures that she posed for them quite willingly. That any daughter of mine could behave in this shameless manner…’

  Radhika, a frequent victim of slut-shaming herself, had heard enough. ‘Amma, please don’t blame Asha. This is not her fault. Yes, she posed for the pictures. But she obviously thought that she could trust Sunny, as she was going to marry him. Clearly, she misjudged him.’

  ‘You don’t think that Sunny himself could have leaked these pictures to the press? Surely he would never do that. He loved Asha. He loves her. He has been trying so hard to get back together with her.’

  ‘And when she wouldn’t agree to take him back, this is how he wreaked his revenge on her,’ said Radhika bitterly.

  ‘I can’t believe that he would do something like that, beta.’

  ‘Well, who else could have done it? He’s the one who took all the pictures. They were on his phone. He was the only person who had access to them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sadhana Devi tentatively. ‘His phone could have been stolen…’

  ‘Oh come on, Amma,’ snapped Radhika, quite at the end of her patience. ‘That’s not what happened. He took the pictures. And when she left him and he was sure that there was no chance she’d take him back, he leaked them to the world. It happens all the time these days. There’s even a phrase to describe it. Revenge porn, they call it.’

  The very mention of the word ‘porn’ brought on a fresh flurry of tears as Sadhana Devi grappled with the idea that there were now men all over India who were masturbating to images of her daughter. How had it come to this?

  Radhika felt her impatience wane as she saw the hurt and sorrow on her mother-in-law’s face. What an awful thing for a mother to witness: her daughter stripped bare for the entire world to leer and lech at. Wiping away Sadhana Devi’s tears, she said, ‘Amma, please don’t cry. You must be brave. All of us need to be brave for Asha’s sake. She is going to be devastated when she finds out. She is going to need our support and our love to get through this.’

  Sadhana Devi nodded and tried to get emotions under control. ‘Where is Asha today?’ she asked, as her sobs subsided. ‘Does she know about this?’

  No, said Radhika. The moment she had heard about the pictures from a friend in the media, she had got in touch with the campaign office to find out where she was. Unfortunately, Asha was addressing a rally in Srinagar and as a security measure the phone lines were being jammed in the vicinity of the rally ground. So, nobody had managed to get through to Asha’s cell phone, or the mobile numbers of her staff members, as yet.

  But Sadhana Devi was not to worry. Karan had been informed and was trying to get word out to his sister so that he could bring her back into the safety of Race Course Road, away from the scrutiny of a jeering media and a salivating world.

  And with that Sadhana Devi had to be content.

  ▪

  Just as her mother was descending into full-blown hysteria at Race Course Road, Asha was on stage in Srinagar, addressing a sparse and rather sullen crowd. She couldn’t understand why she had been sent out here to make a speech in the last stages of the campaign. The LJP didn’t have much of a party organization in Kashmir; its primary strength lay in Jammu and Ladakh. And given the abysmal turnout in the last election, it was unlikely that even those who had come out to listen to her would turn up to vote for her party.

  She was pretty sure that some serious inducements must have been on offer to get them out of their houses on a day that threatened thunderstorms and rain. But while a few thousand people had deigned to turn up, they were not prepared to grant her any further encouragement.

  To begin with, Asha tried hard to get them going. But after ten minutes, by which time she had the measure of her audience, she abandoned the effort and began to just go through the motions. As she repeated the lines that had become part of her standard patter, she allowed her mind—and her eye—to wander.

  The layers of security that enveloped the event were astonishing even to Asha, who had become accustomed to living within an armed citadel of sorts. There was an entire platoon of the army guarding the perimeter. She was pretty sure that she could see some BSF uniforms at the entrance and exit gates. There was a swarm of J&K policemen in the space between her and the crowd. And she was certain that there were a fair number of plain-clothed security guys mingling in the crowd. If you added up all the security forces in attendance, she thought cynically, they would probably outnumber the Kashmiris who had turned up to hear her speak.

  Her attention next wandered across to where the media were stationed. Here too, the attendance was much below par. Some reporters must have dropped out because they believed that this desultory nod towards the election process in Kashmir wasn’t much of a story. And some must have been deterred by the over-the-top security measures in place. But whatever the reason, her media contingent was at half-strength—or less—today. There were usually at least forty reporters or so in the media enclosure, looked rather ill tempered for having been penned into an area meant for twenty. But today, there was more than enough space for them to sit comfortably, tapping away assiduously on their phone and tablet screens.

  Asha was about to turn her attention back to the crowd, when something made her turn her gaze back to the media enclosure. No, she hadn’t been mistaken. Something had happened to turn that uninterested pack of flacks into a shimmering mass of activity. All of them had abandoned their seats to gather around one of their colleagues, who was showing them something on her laptop. There was some pushing and shoving as everyone vied to get a better view of the screen, followed by much animated conversation.

  Distracted and a little discomfited by this (what could have got them so excited?) Asha raced through the rest of her speech. She needed to get off stage and find out what was going on. Dispensing with her usual cries of ‘Jai Hind’, Asha thanked the audience and clattered off the small flight of steps that led her off the dais. Her SPG contingent—on the highest state of alert today—immediately fell into place around her, practically frogmarching her back to the helicopter.

  As she ran along, out of breath with the effort to keep pace with her bodyguards, Asha saw the media corps running behind them, trying hard to catch up. Ever sensitive to the need to keep the media sweet, she turned around to acknowledge them with a wave, struggling to hear what they are saying above the sound of the helicopter, which was already whirring into life. As the journos drew nearer, she could only make out two words. But those two words were enough to strike terror in her heart.

  Sunny. Photos. Photos. Sunny. Sunny. Sunny.

  Her face a mask of terror, Asha swivelled right around and sprinted for the safety of the helicopter, ignoring the questions being shouted at her fleeing back. Only once the copter had taken off and the media pack was reduced to a few specks on the ground, did she let her breath out.

  In her heart, Asha had always known that this day would come. That the photos she had posed for, flushed with love for her boyfriend, would one day come back and burn her world right down to the ground. That Sunny, angry and vengeful after being rejected, would share the pic
tures with his friends, who would share them with their friends. And then, it would only be a matter of time before those most private of moments became public fodder.

  She had known—at some level—that this would happen one day. So, she should have been better prepared. But now that that day was here, she felt as if the bottom had been knocked out of her world. And she could barely breathe, let alone think straight.

  Perhaps it was down to shock, or the fact that she had finally let her guard down. In the initial weeks after their break-up, Asha had been paranoid about the pictures. She was sure they would surface on Facebook or Instagram, so she kept monitoring such social media sites incessantly. But as months went by and there was no sign of the photos, she had finally begun to relax. Maybe she had misjudged Sunny, after all. He wasn’t the type who would resort to revenge porn to get back at her.

  But no, she had been right the first time around. Sunny was exactly that sort of guy. And she would now always be seen as that sort of girl: the girl who posed naked for her boyfriend’s cameraphone, the slut who thought nothing of sunbathing or swimming in the nude, the whore who didn’t even wait for a wedding ring before jumping into bed with a man.

  Her political career was over. And so was her life. This rally would be the last time she showed her face in public. Once she got back behind the gates of Race Course Road, she was never leaving home again.

  Assuming, of course, that she could still call RCR home. She could only imagine her mother’s reaction to those pictures. As for her brothers, they would never get a better excuse to disown her for good. And Asha couldn’t see them letting such an opportunity go.

  This truly was the end of the line for her.

  FOURTEEN

  It was coming up to two days since her pictures had gone viral, and Asha was already on to her third bottle of Grey Goose. Bedroom door locked against the world, she burrowed deep into her duvet, as she flipped feverishly between the TV channels covering the news of her humiliation and political demise. As an exercise in self-flagellation, there really was no beating this.

  Exactly forty-six hours ago, she had returned home to Race Course Road, the car dropping her at the porch of Number 3. The SPG guards stationed outside the house had studiously avoided her gaze as the stony-faced butler held the door open to her. From the corner of her eye, Asha saw her mother huddled on one of the sofas of the drawing room, her usual gaggle of ladies around her. She caught Sadhana Devi’s eye for just a minute, and the devastation she saw there brought on a fresh flood of tears.

  Turning away so that she didn’t embarrass herself in public (ha, bloody ha! It was a bit late for that), Asha had sprinted to her room at the back of the house. She’d locked the door behind her and since then she’d been hunkered down in her bedroom, refusing to open the door, no matter who knocked.

  To their credit, every single member of the Pratap Singh family had made an effort. First up was Amma, who had knocked on the door for ages, plaintively calling out Asha’s name every few minutes. After fifteen minutes of this, she became hysterical, thinking that her daughter had killed herself.

  ‘Just tell me that you are okay, beta,’ Amma had shouted against the door, in between loud sobs.

  ‘I am fine,’ Asha had finally yelled back. ‘Now go away and leave me alone.’

  That had bought her a couple of hours.

  The next visitor to her bedroom door was Radhika. Having watched the ‘Asha Devi Photo Scandal’ unfold on television through the evening, Radhika was a cauldron of mixed emotions. The scandal had achieved what Radhika had failed to do: destroy Asha’s political career. She would no longer be a challenger to Karan. But now that Asha had been neutralized as a political weapon, Radhika could find it in herself to feel compassion for the traumatized young woman.

  Knocking softly on the bedroom door, Radhika had begun, ‘Asha, we don’t need to talk if you don’t want to. You don’t even need to see anyone if you don’t feel up to it. But you must eat something. Can I send you some soup? A bowl of pasta? Or maybe some bread pudding?’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Asha had shouted back, trying hard to keep the tears out of her voice. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  Radhika had persisted. The teary notes in Asha’s voice had reminded Radhika of her daughters, and she was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion as she thought of Kavya and Karina ever being in a position like this. Honestly, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  Radhika blinked back the tears in her eyes. God, she was going soft in middle age, she thought to herself, as she knocked on Asha’s door yet again. ‘Can I send the girls in to say goodnight, Asha? They are asking to see you. They’ve missed you so much.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bhabhi,’ came the subdued reply. ‘I’m really not up to it. I’d just like to go to sleep now.’

  But, of course, she hadn’t slept. She had just watched TV obsessively, switching from one channel to another, flinching every time her pixelated naked figure showed up on the 60-inch TV screen, but impelled by some strange imperative to find out what the world was saying about her.

  An hour later, Arjun had arrived at her door. It must be time for him to head out for his nightly carousing, Asha had thought sourly, and he had decided to squeeze in a visit to her before he did that. She had ignored the knocking and after calling out her name a couple of times, Arjun had departed. No doubt he considered his brotherly duties done, so now he could party in peace.

  At midnight, she had swallowed a couple of Ambien with a shot of vodka, and then kept drinking steadily until she finally dozed off in the early hours of the morning, even as the pink edge of dawn was peeking out anxiously through the expanse of ink-blue sky.

  She had woken up to loud knocks on her bedroom door. There was something about their firmness, their no-nonsense staccato beat that told her that it was Karan at the door. Asha buried her head deep into her pillow as if that would keep that incessant sound out. Of all the people in the world, the last one she wanted to deal with was her half-brother.

  If she had opened the door, Asha would have been surprised. Hell, Karan had even surprised himself by feeling genuine sympathy for his half-sister. But that had been quickly subsumed by a hot flash of anger that had yet to subside.

  Nobody messed with his family. And however he may have felt about her up until now, however much he had resented her very existence, there was no denying that Asha was family. She was his father’s daughter. And anyone who messed with his father’s daughter was messing with him. Whoever it was—and he would find out who it was, no matter what it took—would pay dearly.

  ‘Open the door, Asha,’ said Karan firmly. ‘I know you are awake. I need to speak with you.’

  Asha stayed silent. There was no way she could face Karan while her entire being still burnt with shame at the thought that he must have seen those same images that had been flashing on the TV screen the entire evening.

  When the knocking persisted, Asha dragged herself out of bed, her legs wobbly with the vodka-Ambien combination that had been powering her. She walked right up to the door and whispered against the well-polished teak, ‘I’m sorry, Bhaiya. I’m so sorry. But there really is nothing to say.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise, Asha,’ said Karan, employing gentler tones than she had ever heard him use. ‘You have nothing to apologise for.’

  At this unexpected kindness, Asha felt her throat constrict yet again. Would her tears never stop? Surely she should be all cried out by now?

  ‘Please don’t cry, Asha. You need to be brave now. You need to be Baba’s daughter, who can take on anything…’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bhaiya, but I can’t. I truly can’t. I just want some time alone.’

  ‘Okay, I understand. Take all the time you need. But you can’t starve yourself while you do that. Radhika has organized some breakfast for you. The bearer will deliver it. You don’t need to speak to anyone or see anyone till you are ready. But you do need to eat.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Asha meekly, f
eeling herself reduced to the status of a recalcitrant child. And in an effort to keep the peace, she had kept picking up the trays left outside her door with a discreet knock (even though she couldn’t do more than force down a couple of mouthfuls each time) and depositing them back after a decent interval.

  And through it all, she had kept the TV on, a witness to her own destruction, one pixelated image at a time.

  ▪

  The media had gone into meltdown. So much so that anyone watching news TV would find it impossible to tell that there was an election on. Instead, it was Asha, Asha, Asha, all the way, the stories luridly illustrated with those explicit pictures duly blurred for the benefit of family audiences.

  Boyfriends she had forgotten ever existed had crawled out of the woodwork to tell salivating journalists what a wild child she had been, and how it had been impossible to keep up with her in bed. Pictures of her cavorting at parties she didn’t remember attending were being posted on social media every day. Even the uncropped version of that topless picture she had shot for a fashion designer friend so many years ago had resurfaced, and Twitter was awash with helpful illustrations on how her body had changed over the years.

  And then, there was the commentary. Everyone had an opinion about her character, her morality, her life choices. What kind of Indian girl slept with a man without first getting some sindoor in her maang? Actually, scratch that. Slept with men. Slept around. Not a decent girl, for sure. Only a slut behaved in this manner. A shameless whore. Yes, whore. So what if she didn’t sleep with men for money? This kind of promiscuity was nothing less than prostitution.

  Even those high-minded channels that had refused to run the pictures could not resist hosting debate shows on prime time to discuss the story. Of course, it was all dressed up as a serious discussion on Asha’s political future and how the scandal would impact her party’s prospects in the last round of polling, when as many as 167 seats were to be decided. But all that high-minded political commentary was just window dressing. Once the politically-correct stuff was out of the way, it was back to business as usual.