What Did Tashi Do

by Anangsha Alammyan

  “We must interrogate the next suspect. He works in a reputed IT firm, sir.”

  “I know. Something doesn’t fit here, Rajat. Amish Grover’s record is too clean to be true. You said you had our experts check through his computer and phone?”

  “Yes, sir. They combed through all his hard drives but found nothing. According to the ISPs, he had been using Tor, but he claims it was only to download some movies. He denies having ever seen Tashi.”

  “Hmm,” Indrajit said, rubbing his forehead with his thumb. “Did his house have a printer?”

  “Yes, sir, it did.”

  “And what about Karan’s?”

  “The kid only had a laptop and some external hard drives, sir; no other gadgets.”

  “Okay. Go to Grover’s house with a team and search through everything he owns, even the trash. We might be missing something important here.”

  “Yes sir,” Rajat saluted and left as Indrajit picked his phone to make a call.

  ***

  Tashi stood before the man the Police suspected was the blackmailer. He hadn’t confessed yet and there wasn’t sufficient proof either. “Do you recognise him?” the inspector asked.

  A wave of emotions overwhelmed her: was this it: the moment when the truth would unfold and her ordeal would end? Her heart beat faster with anticipation.

  The suspect was slouched in a chair inside the interrogation room, staring into blankness, unaware he was being watched. He must be in his late 20s with a svelte beard and a crisp shirt that was ruffled now – proof that he had remained overnight in police custody. There was no telltale sign on his face that he might be the one who had caused her so much pain. In fact, Tashi thought, if I had seen him in some other context, I might have even found him attractive. What need did a man like that have to resort to blackmail?

  Tashi shook her head.

  ***

  The suspect, Amish Grover was seated inside the interrogation room and Indrajit was leafing through some reports outside when Rajat returned. “Sir,” he saluted, ”we found some interesting items in the suspect’s home.”

  Indrajit turned to look at the evidence Rajat and his team had gathered.

  Then, his weathered face broke into a cold smile.

  He entered the interrogation room. Amish‘s face registered fear as Indrajit loomed closer and said in a voice that sent chills down his spine, “You claim that you don’t have anything to say, eh? Well, don’t worry. We have some fascinating ways of bringing your memory back.”

  ***

  “You deny having anything to do with the blackmailing, eh?” Indrajit shouted.

  Amish was clutching his throbbing cheek, sweating profusely under the light of the single bulb pointed at his face. A thin stream of blood trickled down his chin, losing its way in the tangle of his beard. Even then, he held his resolve. “I don’t know what blackmail you are talking about.”

  “How do you explain this then?” Indrajit said, pulling out a Ziploc bag with a crumpled sheet of paper. It was a printed photograph showing Tashi in with half her clothes off.

  Amish gaped, words suddenly failing him. “What – what is this? This doesn’t prove anything,” he said at last.

  “It proves everything, Mr Grover. The victim had stated in her FIR that the blackmailer had jerked off on a photograph of hers and sent a picture to show it. How do you explain that picture appearing in the trash-can in your bedroom?”

  Amish’s resolve was crumbling. He stared at his feet, mind working furiously to think of an excuse.

  Slap.

  Indrajit’s hand landed sharply on his cheek. His head fell back, and an inadvertent grunt of pain escaped his parted lips. The pain was so intense, his eyes started watering. He had bitten his tongue hard in the impact. A new trickle of blood joined the stream that had turned brown under the piercing light.

  “We are having a forensic team look at the DNA on the semen on this photograph and match that with yours. Do you want to wait until then or will you save us both time and effort and confess?”

  “I – I – I want to call my lawyer,” Amish stuttered.

  Indrajit slapped him again, harder this time. Amish‘s form slumped lower in his chair, eyes tearing up with pain.

  “Do you think this is a bloody Bollywood movie where you get a chance to call your lawyer?” Indrajit demanded, leaning close and clutching his collar. “You have two choices: either tell me everything or I will beat it out of you, you filthy scum.” He raised his fist in the air.

  Amish ducked, anticipating the blow. “Please, sir, stop. I will tell you everything,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. When he looked up, there was resignation in his eyes. Strangely though, there was no remorse. He had the look of a man knowing his game was up and yet having no second thoughts about having made a wrong move. “But first, let me ask you this: what gave me away? How did you narrow it down in the first place?”

  Slap.

  Indrajit’s blow landed so hard on Amish’s face, that his head was flung back, sweat beads flying in the air. The inspector turned his chair around and sat to face the criminal. “Do you honestly think you are in a position to ask me questions?” he asked.

  With a trembling voice, Amish Grover shrugged and started narrating his story.

  ***

  This started around five months back when I was at a colleague’s party at a bar in Gurgaon. Everyone had had quite a few drinks, and I was roaming around aimlessly when I came across a small group of four black-suited men laughing the loudest. I joined them and one guy introduced me to everyone. All of them were discussing women – just some drunk men trying to make their sex lives sound cooler than they are. The one called Ravi was telling a story about a woman he met on a solo trip to Kasol, and everyone else was egging him on for juicier details. After his story was done, it was another man’s turn to share his anecdote. This one was called Akash.

  “Tell us about that hot chick in your office,” Ravi said, downing his sixth whiskey of the night.

  “I had scored her a few nights back. Man, what curves that one has,” Akash said, pulling out his phone and showing a selfie of him with an attractive woman. “Isn’t she hot?” he asked. The others looked at the image and remarked, “Fuck man, her assets look smoking hot in that revealing top. Pretty sure you had lots of fun playing with them”

  Akash blushed.

  “Bro, you have become a big player these days!” Ravi remarked, slapping him on the back.

  After a general round of laughter that followed, the other two men excused themselves from our little gathering, saying they had a long journey ahead as their home was in South Delhi. Only the three of us remained – Ravi, Akash and I.

  The music in the club changed, and the DJ started playing a dance number. Several young people dashed onto the dance floor, among them, the most eye-catching was a group of girls from the North East.

  “Damn, these North Eastern girls are hot,” Akash remarked.

  “But whatever you say, she was something else, man,” Ravi nudged Akash with his elbow and winked, his hands tracing a big hourglass shape in the air.

  Akash’s face lit up when he talked about her. “Oh damn, that chick, man, that was one hot ass.”

  Curious, I asked, “Who is this chick?”

  “There was this one girl from the North East. Bro, she had such plump thighs. This lucky bastard fucked her for three years,” Ravi slurred happily.

  "Oh really?” I asked. “Show us some pictures then.”

  At this, Akash laughed and pulled out his phone. In his drunk state, he found it difficult to scroll through all the images in his gallery, but he finally settled on one and showed it to me. It was an image of a younger version of him with his arm around the waist of a beautiful woman. “She is really something,” I said.

  The woman in question was breath-taking, and I was intrigued enough to want to look at more pictures. To challenge Akash’s male ego into obliging my wish, I taunted him, “Bro, no offence,
but there is no way such a stunner would date a guy like you.”

  Ravi burst into laughter at this, spluttering some drink into the air. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and eyed Akash, who looked indignant. He took his phone and told us - “I am going to call her right now and prove it to you that she and I used to date.”

  After that, he must have called her up at least twenty times, but there was no answer. Akash looked dismayed. To goad him further, I shook my head and arranged my face into a sympathetic smile. I patted him gently on the back. “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, bro,” I said in the most patronising tone I could manage. “I am sure even the best of us sometimes pretend to have banged a chick so clearly out of our leagues.”

  Akash looked indignant, enraged at the audacity of my claim. To calm him down, Ravi said, “Chill, bro. Show us those pictures you clicked on that beach holiday,” he said and scrolled through Akash’s gallery with cigarette-stained fingers. I leaned in for a closer look and what I saw took me by surprise: there were nudes in that folder.

  Ravi and Akash showed more pictures of him holding that beautiful, scantily clad woman. But I couldn’t get an image I had just seen out of my mind: of a curvy woman being fucked from the behind with her hair held in a man’s fist. Akash was so drunk, that when was clicking on another image to show us, his phone slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor. He was slouched on a beanbag, so I offered to pick it up. As I bent to retrieve the phone, the folder from which he had selected the photo was open on the screen. I looked at it for a second longer. He had over 300 images and videos of this beautiful woman in several erotic positions. I got aroused at the thought of seeing so many pictures of a naked woman and decided that I had to see more.

  I gave his phone back and waited till the party cleared up. The bar was almost empty when I asked them where they lived. Ravi said he was from Sushant Lok and Akash had his house in Sohna Road. Although my place was in Sector 29, I lied that I lived in Sohna Road too and offered to share a cab with Akash.

  “Dude, you book the cab. I don’t know where I will take us to if I am left unsupervised tonight,” he laughed.

  Jumping at the chance, I said, “Bro, my battery has run out. Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure,” he said and handed over his phone. I noted that it had a fingerprint lock. I booked a cab and dragged an almost unconscious Akash to the car when the driver arrived. He sat down and started talking some gibberish, when I said in a soft voice, “Bro, you have drunk a lot. You should sleep – our destination is at least an hour away.”

  His phone was still in my hand when he passed out. I waited a few minutes before I could hear him snoring softly. Then, I lifted his hand to press his forefinger on the fingerprint panel to unlock his phone. It was a tempting thought to enjoy the pictures right then, but I held back. I set up a Bluetooth transfer of the first fifty pictures and videos to my phone. The transfer was completed in around forty minutes, and once I was done, I deleted the transfer history and put the phone back in Akash’s front pocket without waking him up.

  I knew he wouldn’t remember any of this the next day.

  “That is how I came to have Tashi’s pictures,” Amish told Inspector Indrajit Bhowmick in a low voice.

  The confession enraged the inspector. He was tempted to strike again, to inflict more damage on this sick bastard. He grit his teeth to hold himself back, mentally repeating something he had learned in training - that unjustified violence wasn’t mandated by the law. “That is when you decided to take the life of an innocent woman in your own hands? What did you wish to achieve, huh, you psychopath?” he spat.

  “Nothing, actually,” Amish mouthed, refusing to meet the inspector’s eye. “I enjoyed those photographs and videos for many months until I had got bored with them. I wanted more, and the idea of getting explicit content directly from that North Eastern woman was more intriguing than watching porn. The one thing that took me longer was that I wasn’t sure what her full name was. I remembered it was Tashi-something, but her last name somehow eluded me. And then, suddenly, it came back to me - Chotten, Tashi Chotten.”

  “Did you snitch her contact details from Akash’s phone as well?” Indrajit demanded.

  “No, I had no intention of blackmailing her then. But the name, Tashi Chotten, was so unique, that all I had to do was simply search it on Facebook. Her profile wasn’t private, and I got her phone number and email ID with one click.”

  “What about her house address?”

  “That was simple. She had shared some of her Instagram photos on Facebook where she had geo-tagged the location of her house. It was only a matter of days before I went to her building and spent a few hours strolling in front of it – to know her timings and which floor she lived in. The thrill of seeing the woman I had fantasised about so often in real life was something else, I tell you, inspector. She was even more good-looking now that she was older, and I knew I craved badly for her.”

  “And just like that, you decided to blackmail Tashi for five long weeks?”

  “Not blackmail, inspector," Amish said looking up to meet the inspector’s eyes. The lines around his mouth appeared to be etched with a cold confidence. “I decided that she has had enough fun, and now it was my turn to have some fun with her,” he said. A distinctly cruel note had crept into Amish’s voice that made the inspector sit up. “Anyway, women like Tashi who sleep around with men they have no intention of marrying need to be taught a lesson. They go around breaking hearts like it’s second nature to them. Such women deserve to be given a taste of their own medicine, Inspector, don’t you think?”

  Indrajit winced. “So, you perverted fuck took it upon yourself as your job,” he cussed.

  “Who else would do it if not me?” Amish said in an unwavering voice.

  Just then, the door opened and Rajat entered the room carrying a file. He called Indrajit to the corner and whispered in his ear, “Sir, the criminal was careful in erasing all evidence from his laptop, but our team recovered an external hard drive hidden behind a painting in his bedroom,” he said, handing him the file. “The data was encrypted, but this fool had used the same password as his social media accounts. Our experts found photographs and screenshots of email drafts proving that this man has been blackmailing not only Tashi but three other women. This has been going on for the past three years, probably even longer. And also, sir, there are photographs of unsuspecting women changing clothes or taking showers captured from open windows. I believe he either blackmailed those women or simply went on clicking more pictures without their permission.”

  Indrajit stared at the evidence in his hands, aghast. Shaking his head, he said slowly, “Make sure you assign teams to investigate the other cases. I want no stone to be left unturned in this regard.”

  He took the file from Rajat and slammed it on the table in front of Amish, making dust fly in a small cloud around his face. The man looked up and stared Indrajit in the eye. All traces of the shaking, sweaty Amish of a few minutes ago was gone, and Indrajit was left staring into the eyes of a cold-hearted criminal.

  “You turned out to be a serial blackmailer,” Indrajit shouted.

  “Blackmailer doesn’t sound classy, inspector. I am a man who likes to have his fun. And for me, the high of having a helpless woman under my control is the most addictive – when she doesn’t love me, and yet, is ready to do anything I ask her to. It gives me a kick like nothing else,” he said with a twisted half-smile.

  “And let’s face it, inspector, I am sure Tashi Chotten must have enjoyed being the centre of attention of a man for so long.”

  He had made her name sound like a curse.

  “You creep,” Indrajit growled. “You are charged under Section 66 A for deliberately sending emails to cause annoyance to a person, section 67 A for circulation of obscene content, section 509 for insult to the modesty of a woman, section 500 for attempts at defamation, and section 67 B for attempting to distribute obscene content.” />
  Amish looked up with defiance in his eyes. “I will be locked up for five years at the most. But will you be able to give those five weeks back to Tashi?”

  “You are going to be locked up for many, many years, you vermin. And I will make sure I use every ounce of influence I have to make sure your term is non bailable.”

  The criminal slumped back in his chair with a strange light in his eyes that Indrajit couldn’t quite place – was it guilt?

  Why did it look so much like pride then?

  Chapter Ten

  Blackcurrant or chocolate?

  Tashi and Manav were seated opposite Inspector Indrajit in his office. He sat facing them from across the polished desk, his uniform crisp.

  The police had called Tashi in the morning to inform that the blackmailer had been found and put behind bars. After hanging up, she had immediately called Manav and asked him to accompany her to the police station.

  “The blackmailer worked in the sales department of a reputed IT company,” Indrajit said, showing them the first page of criminal’s file. “He had a well-paying job, and his friends would have been prepared to swear that they knew the man well. On the surface, he was an average IT professional with a normal day-to-day life and nothing to hide.”

  Manav nodded, while Tashi looked at the inspector with rapt attention, her shaking hands hanging by her side.

  “But inherently,” the inspector continued, “he was a hardened criminal – a pervert who derived pleasure by preying on unsuspecting women and blackmailing them into doing his bidding.”

  Tashi stifled a sob. Manav put a protective arm around her and gave her shoulder a little squeeze.

  “This man was an animal hiding in plain sight,” Manav said. “It is heartbreaking to imagine how many more lives he might have ruined had Tashi not gathered enough courage to bring this matter to the police.”

  “Exactly,” the inspector said. “In most cases like these, the victims are afraid their identities might be publicly disclosed or their reputations might suffer if they reported the case to the police. They aren’t aware that their silence is doing them more harm than raising their voices would ever do.”