by Gabbar Singh
“What are you doing?” Finally some words managed to escape Manika’s mouth. “Nothing dear,” Rinki assured her. “We just want you to call your parents and tell them to deposit 25 lakh rupees in your account. We are not ask- ing that money for us; it is to launch you in the movie and then you can return the amount to your parents once our film releases.”
“They don’t have the money.”
“Don’t fool us. I am calling your home,” saying this, Rinki grabbed Mani- ka’s phone, but realizing she couldn’t operate it, passed it to Dheeraj. Dheeraj called Manika’s mother and put the phone close to her ear. Rinki shook Manika by the shoulders to make her talk. “Mama, I have been kidnapped,” she sobbed.
“Ask for money,” Rinki growled.
“Mama, help me. Mama, I am sorry.” She did not mention money at all.
Rinki summoned Dheeraj to demand money. “Tell them we have a blue film of their daughter.” “Listen, Mummiji, if you want your daughter back, then deposit 25 lakh rupees in her account.” Rinki could comprehend that they were not will- ing to give in to his demands. Dheeraj continued, “We have made a blue film of your daughter. And if you try to act smart, we will put it on the Internet. Now hurry up and do as you are told.”
“They don’t have money,” cried Manika.
“Who are you trying to fool?” asked Rinki sternly. “What about your uncle in Nepal? Your castles?” “They were all lies. I don’t have any castles. I come from a poor family. Please leave me. Please, please. I will work for free for you. I will do any- thing for you.”
“How dare you lie to us, bitch. Who do you think we are? A bunch of morons. And you? Princess of Bakwaas? We spent so much money on you. Now who is going to repay? Liar. This will teach you a lesson.” Rinki grabbed a folding chair and smashed it on Manika’s head.
“Stop it,” Dheeraj held Rinki’s hands. Rinki was still burning with indignation. The bitch was quiet. Rinki had beaten the royal swag out of her. Rinki stopped to observe Dheeraj. He was touching Manika’s face and hands. Was he sympathising with her or feeling her up? Rinki kicked Dheeraj’s waist in a huff; he fell on top of Manika’s tied-up body. He gathered himself and moved his hands towards Manika’s left breast. En- raged, Rinki went to the kitchen to fetch a knife to teach Dheeraj a lesson. When she returned, she found him shaking Manika’s body deliriously.
“She’s dead,” he let out a panicked cry. “She’s dead. You killed her.” Rinki’s anger evaporated, her heart in her mouth. “No,” she cried, “I didn’t hit her that hard.”
“What are we going to do now? She’s dead. You killed her. She’s dead.” Rinki started to hit Dheeraj with her fists. “You made me do this. It was your plan to get money from her.” She left him when he hit her back and rushed to Manika. “Oh God, oh Mata Rani, save us.” She shook Manika. “Come back, come back. You are not dead. Stop pretending.”
They untied her and tried to revive her, first by shaking her and then splashing water on her. She looked malnourished. Her body was all bone. Her eye make-up had spread over her face, making her look like a ghoul.
Manika’s phone started to ring. Rinki looked at Dheeraj, who picked the phone with trembling hands and went to the other end of the room. Rinki could hear him say, “Deposit the money or you will never see your daughter again.”
Rinki went to the bedroom, and sitting cross-legged on the bed, began chanting, “Mata Rani, Mata Rani.” She nourished a faint hope that Mata Rani would bring back Manika.
*** Dheeraj was stomping all over the house. This was Rinki’s house, he thought. If he sneaked away, only Rinki would be held responsible for what had happened. He will go to his wife and she will testify that he was with her all this time. In an unobtrusive manner, he started to collect his things, making as little noise as possible. He also slipped Manika’s mobile phone and ATM card into his suitcase. When he looked up, Rinki had stopped praying and was staring at him with burning eyes.
“What are you doing? she asked.
“Nothing. You also pack your stuff.”
“What will we do with the body?”
“Let’s bury it in the garden.”
“We have a septic tank there. There! Nobody would be able to find the body until it is beyond recognition.” They dragged the body to the bathroom. To make it difficult for the police to identify the corpse, they decided to dispose the body and the head at different places. For the same reason, Rinki removed the earrings and the watch from the corpse and then brought her father’s axe. Dheeraj closed his eyes and chopped off the head. They wrapped the body in an old bedsheet and carried it outside. Dheeraj removed the lid of the tank with some difficulty and they pushed the headless torso into it. The water turned purple, as if someone had added permanganate into it.
Dheeraj wanted to say, “Let’s part ways,” but couldn’t muster sufficient courage. “Let’s pack and leave.” he told her instead. Rinki looked ex- hausted. They cleaned the house and packed their belongings as well as Manika’s suitcase. Dheeraj wrapped the head in a plastic pouch, covered it with a towel and put it in an airbag.
They boarded a bus to Delhi. On their way, Rinki kept reciting Mata Ra - ni’s name. Leaving Manika’s suitcase at the Delhi bus station, they bought tickets to Jammu thereon. If they stopped, they’d be caught, they feared. It was late at night when somewhere midway in Punjab, the bus stopped for the passengers to relieve their bladders. Dheeraj got down and threw the bag with the head into the bushes.
Back in the bus, both of them reverently chanted “Jai Mata Di,” with the other passengers. Mata had called them. She would fix everything. *** Two days later, when Nidhi couldn’t reach Manika on the phone after innumerable attempts, her husband said, “Why are you getting worried? You know how Manika is. The slut was offered a lead role, wasn’t she? She must be comfortably ensconced in the director’s harem.”
***
11. The Perfectly Poached Egg
Ramya Maddali
“An egg represents everything that is right with the world,” said Aruna, as she lowered a large brown duck egg into water that was simmering in a large steel pot over the gas stove. Her shiny new Williams Sonoma sauce- pan was being used for the first time. Normally, she disliked heavy pots and pans but the weight of this particular one was reassuring. It felt right. The one saucepan brightened her 12’ by 10’ kitchen in a way that the 8-piece Tupperware set couldn’t. They were lighter; that was an advantage but with the lightness came the tendency to not take them seriously. In fact, only yesterday, she had dropped the little yellow Tupperware bottle onto the kitchen floor. It had rolled into the darkest corner of her little food factory, the dungeon under the sink. Aruna had casually retrieved it and forgotten all about it afterward.
“You see,” she said, “there are so many ways in which you can make eggs. Boiled, half-boiled, poached, scrambled, in omelettes, and of course, you could eat them raw but you wouldn’t want to do that. There is the Salmo- nella.” She looked at her watch to time the boiling of the egg. She wanted to make what Chef John called the ‘perfectly hard-boiled egg’ and one couldn’t do that if one was too Indian about it and paid no attention to time. Seventeen minutes he had said and seventeen it was going to be.
“But my mother says she ate eggs raw while she was pregnant with me,” said Madan, her husband of two years. Currently on a sabbatical from work as the assistant curator at a little known museum in Vizag, Madan was a short, thin man who liked his striped shirts and full-length polyes- ter blends. He tried his best, on the one hand, to pretend to help his wife in the cooking and on the other, to keep out of her way in her cramped territory as much as he could. He settled in a chair near the entrance to the kitchen; a comfortable distance from the scene of action – not so close that he was obliged to fetch and carry yet not so far that he couldn’t actually help her – a responsible distance, he assured himself.
“Eggs must never be eaten raw,” Aruna repeated, with a relentless surety. At the thirteenthminute, she wa
lked to the refrigerator, a blue single-door LG one that they had bought last year. As she opened the door, her large nose wrinkled as it caught a whiff of unpleasantness that Madan referred to as “the LG blues,” the odour that permeated the tiny kitchen every once in a while, when food was left to forget inside this modern, cold larder. Both of them subconsciously held their breaths ever so slightly every time they opened the door of the fridge, as if screening the frigid air before allowing it inside their nares. Aruna tried to locate the miscre- ant. Was it the onion soup? Or the vegetable broth that she had prepared just in case they made more of the soup? Neither had looked appetizing nor had tasted very good but they had eaten half the soup nevertheless. It had tasted chalky and raw. Pureeing it hadn’t helped either; now it was just a brown mass of soft blandness, ashamed with itself as it sat, for days on end, inside one of the Tupperware boxes. The box deserved better, she thought, making a mental note to gulp down the soup for breakfast the next day. She knew the maid would not so much look at it.
“Remind me how much the saucepan cost us?” asked Madan, standing up and closing down on the distance between him and the kitchen. He walked inside and peered into the saucepan. On the outside was engraved Williams Sonoma with a sharpness that made a statement, very much unlike the dotted, apologetic, engraving of Madan’s mother’s maiden name on the sides of the now ancient utensils she had passed down to him. The egg actually seemed delighted to boil away in a saucepan of its calibre; bobbing up and down, buoyed by the bubbles and by Aruna’s saucepan sentiments.
“Not much. Remember how Rama went to Italy with her son on a holiday last month? She found this pot being sold for a third of the original price at a smuggler’s market. She knew I always wanted this and she almost gifted it to me,” said Aruna. She wheedled the door of the refrigerator back and forth trying to recall what she wanted. Water, was it? She pulled out an unopened Qua bottle, a brand, that like many others, boasted of packaging its bottles with the water of a random stream off the Hima- layas. Aruna smirked at the brand graphics as she removed the seal. Yet, she liked the look and feel of the stately bottle. She emptied a quarter of the water into a large steel tumbler, one of the many jaded ones that belonged to Madan’s mother. In another three minutes the boiled egg will have to be dunked into the cold water to ‘freeze the cooking process’ so that the yolk doesn’t turn algal.
“Almost gifted it?” repeated Madan? He saw her staring, with renewed concentration, at the supposedly sparkling mountain water in the tum- bler. Perhaps he’d rather not press her about the price of the saucepan. She rarely ever threw away money. He browsed for another choice of conversation, one that was preferably less traumatic than having to repay utensil debts. He dragged his chair from the threshold of the kitchen, and placing it near the fridge, settled down comfortably, cross-legged.
Aruna’s three minutes were up. She removed the egg from the tumbler and tapped it lightly on the counter. She smiled at Madan while rapidly shelling the egg, a process that the cold water had made quite easy. He grinned back at her. He collected the fallen chips from the shell and crushed them in his hands, without her looking. He slyly deposited the white dust in the dustbin under the sink and returned by Aruna’s side, dusting his hands.
“Shall we eat proper Andhra food tonight, for a change? The pulihora is still in the fridge,” said Madan. “It keeps for a long time because of the tamarind,” he added. He opened the refrigerator and looked for the sim- ple yet delicious fare his wife had made a couple of nights ago. She had stored it away in a transparent, air-tight box that had on its label, a smiling woman holding up fresh vegetables by their roots. With a muted snap, he undid the flippers holding the lid and the box together and sniffed at the once- gorgeous meal that now resembled a heroine past her prime. Smita Patil, perhaps, if she lived now.
“Alright, I can reheat it for you but are you sure you don’t want to eat a selection of eggs tonight? All made in different ways?”
“This one egg took nearly half-an-hour to cook.”
“I am making a poached egg next. It will take less than five minutes, re- ally.”
“I am aware of just one meaning of ‘poach’.”
“I will show you how to poach an egg. It is one of the healthiest and nic- est ways to eat them. But poaching is a tricky process.” Aruna emptied the warm water from the pot and examined the streaks of salt that had formed on its sides. No new utensil could escape the ceremonial scaling that the hard water of Vizag performed on every steel vessel, Williams Sonoma or otherwise. This new pot was now branded as one of the rest. She frowned at it and refilled it with more water. As it started to boil on the stove, Madan noticed that she looked rather flus- tered. She had enjoyed boiling the egg earlier; all she had had to do was pop in the egg and wait. This business of poaching an egg, whatever that was, seemed a tad dramatic, like boiling milk. One could never be too cautious while boiling milk. You look away and at that precise moment when your attention is caught by the ungrateful money plant in the bal- cony, the milk decides to puff up and explode. But it does so very quietly, with such deliberation that you are allowed to see the drama only after it happens: a stream of sticky, creamy, yellowish liquid, draining into the sink but leaving behind a distinct, slightly sickening smell.
“I have never poached an egg before,” said Aruna. “I only know what it should look like after it is done. So if you don’t like it, it means I did not do it well,” she added. The tiny kitchen had, by this time, become warmer and steamier. Madan stationed himself right by the side of his wife. He stared at the opened box of tamarind rice and wondered if he should eat a few spoons of it, just in case the poached egg tasted like it sounded. The rice would have thawed by now, but he decided against it.
Aruna had assembled all the properties she needed to perform the poach - ing. The water was simmering rapidly, and resembling one of the calendar goddesses with multiple armed arms, Aruna furiously stirred the hot wa- ter with a large spoon. She continued to stir until she created an unstable vortex right in the middle of her shiny pot. Madan gazed at her bright eyes and dishevelled hair, wondering what he could do to help. Realising that the vortex was very important to her, he grabbed another spoon and continued to stir the water. She chuckled quietly and brought the egg high above the vortex. He stopped stirring the water. With a fork, she cracked open the egg and pivoted her hands gently, careful not to disrupt the yolk. The yolk first hit the surface of the water but then got caught in the vortex and started to swivel down in rapid circles. The white followed the yolk and threatened to envelop the yellow blob from all sides. As the vortex gradually started to slow down, white froth formed on the surface, making it difficult to get to the heart of the drama.
Neither husband nor wife took their eyes away from the spectacle of the white ambushing the yolk. After Aruna siphoned the excess froth with a spoon, the couple saw what looked like a delicate embryo in the water. Madan badly wanted to squeeze it but he knew that if he did do that, he will exile himself to spending the night in the balcony, underneath the money plant. He placed both hands behind his back and knotted them together. After two minutes, when Aruna decided that the egg-foetus was firm enough to be handled but not too firm to have been cooked through, she carefully removed it from the pot and ladled it onto a small porcelain dish.
“Can we eat it? I want to pop it,” said Madan, with a cruel two-pronged fork in his hand. “Allow me to garnish it so that it resembles something edible.” “It is enough if it tastes good. Just add some salt and pepper.” “The chefs use cayenne pepper and chives” “What are they?” “I am not sure. Herbs and spices I could not find in Vizag.” “So salt and pepper it is.”
Aruna stared at the eggy contraption wondering what could possibly make it look less scary. It looked like an ugly baby: something that you would not want to hold because you’re both scared both of dropping it and of getting the slime on your hands. Endearing yet disgusting. Since coriander tended to brighten the most inane of foods,
she chopped up a few leaves of the fresh herb over the egg. Madan resolutely sprinkled salt and pepper, albeit sparsely, over it. She did not bother to stop him. Both of them held a fork in their hands and sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, with the wronged egg in between them.
Aruna first ventured to prod the surface of the egg, ever so lightly with her fork, followed by Madan. They took turns to probe the yolk, neither daring to puncture it. After almost a minute of groping the egg thus, Madan decided to get dirty. He held Aruna’s forked hand away from the plate, for this was his moment. He got close to the surface of the plate and focussed the two fangs of the fork right at the centre of the blob, mercilessly impaling it. Nothing happened. Aruna looked away for she knew that a perfectly poached egg had to have a liquid, runny yolk. She started to get up. The next moment, Madan held her hand and brought her back to the floor. From the ominous bite-mark on the yolk was ooz- ing a yellow liquid that trickled out onto the plate, like an unending stream of glorious magma.
12. Sawai
Arjun Bhatia
*****
“But all it means is one and a quarter.”
“No, it means so much more...”
***
Mehhh. “Surili! Don’t go there,” said Nand Lal, listening to the sound of the bell tied around his beloved sheep’s neck. She had drifted off the path being followed by the flock.
“You’ll get caught in the thorns!” Surili didn’t respond to his call. He rapped his stick – a crooked branch of a tree – on the ground, directing the other sheep to come to a halt. He paced in the direction of the ringing sound and probed a bush with his stick till it hit the sheep’s legs. Mehhh.Her bleat was so meek that it would have been inaudible to anyone but a shepherd. He surveyed the outline of her body to determine how badly she was trapped.