Daddy's Girl

by Swati Chaturvedi

  SWATI CHATURVEDI

  daddy’s girl

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Epilogue

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  DADDY’S GIRL

  Swati Chaturvedi is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist who has worked for the Statesman, the Indian Express, Hindustan Times and Zee News. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first book.

  Prologue

  Ambika looked more peaceful than she had ever looked before. A bundle of restless energy, she now lay in bed, straight, with her hands folded across her middle; the white, spotless damask sheet coming up to her chin and neatly tucked around her.

  Two teddy bears, raggedy from too much loving and handling—warriors from a childhood which was still incomplete—were the sentinels, the guards sitting near her head.

  The only thing that took away from the idyllic scene was that Ambika’s body had the give of a rag doll, a simulacrum of life . . .

  The huge room, with three state-of-the-art air conditioners running on full blast, turning it into an icy chamber, did not share Ambika’s final peace. It still held an echo of the violence that had shattered the tiny family of three, unless you counted the poor relative who lived with them.

  At ten minutes past 7 a.m. Chanda, the maid, crossly pressed her hand on the bell in the huge colonial-style bungalow, set amid a sylvan 1-acre lawn with a stunning gazebo, in Delhi’s toniest neighbourhood—East End Greens. Chanda was surprised to find the ornate filigree-worked door ajar; there was also a strange wail emanating from within. Wondering what had happened, and starting to worry a bit, she pushed the door open and was nearly jolted out of her wits when she suddenly saw the memsahib, the lady of the house, Mrs Cuckoo Nalwa, with tears streaking down her face, her make-up clown-like, gesticulating and crying. Chanda was surprised to see her as Babloo always let her in. Mrs Nalwa slept much beyond 10 p.m. when Chanda would usually leave after the marathon three hours she took to clean the bungalow.

  Chanda’s forehead creased. Something seemed drastically wrong. There was a certain violence, a disturbance in the air. She could feel it in her bones, virtually sniff it out, being long habituated to it at home with her alcoholic husband who seemed to crave beating her up as much as he yearned for his cheap ‘narangi fix’.

  Chanda stood at the entrance, transfixed. She pushed the door, which swung open slowly as if it was reluctant to give up the bloody secret of what lay within, where the tiny nuclear family had lurched into an implosion. Then she walked in.

  Mrs Nalwa grabbed Chanda the moment she stepped in and screamed, ‘Dehko Chanda, Babloo ne kya kiya . . . sab khatam kar diya . . . Ambika ko khatam kar diya and he has run away somewhere!’

  She continued wailing about how their nephew Babloo had finished everything by killing Ambika and half dragged Chanda to Ambika’s room, which lay just off the living room.

  Once inside the room, Chanda’s eager eyes took in the scene and the horror of it all. Her heartbeat quickened as she saw the young girl, Mrs Nalwa’s daughter, lying on the bed in deathly peace. She looked pityingly at Mrs Nalwa thinking, ‘Even though she is filthy rich, she has gone mad. Who will say their child is dead when she is fast asleep before their eyes?’

  Mrs Nalwa interpreted Chanda’s glance correctly, and screamed as though some final dam that was holding her crumbled, ‘Arey bevakoof, meri bachhi ab nahi rahi!’

  As Chanda stared at her with silent disbelief, Mrs Nalwa walked reluctantly to the bed, every inch of her body a silent shriek of protest, and gently picked up Ambika’s left hand and, just as gently, dropped it lifelessly back on to her thin concave chest.

  Chanda screamed finally. It was the kind of violence her trained senses had been ringing alarm bells about. And, giving in to the melodramatic instinct of her class, she started wailing loudly. Her sobs were abruptly cut off as a weeping Mr Arjun Nalwa walked in, shook her and screamed, ‘Shut up!’

  An unearthly silence prevailed in the death chamber as the parents stared with hunger at the body of their daughter, lying in utter peace and innocence. Only the teddy bears returned their gaze with a merciless, unblinking, glassy-eyed stare.

  Chanda ran from the room, and stood outside and sobbed. The end of her sari was stuffed into her mouth. That girl! That little girl she’d seen grow up! She knew that despite her husband’s daily beatings, she was far from inured to violence and she had an overwhelming urge to see her three daughters, just to ensure that they were safe and alive. Unlike Ambika.

  United in this shared grief, the parents simultaneously averted their eyes from the bed the second Chanda ran out of the room. Through the veil of tears, they looked at each other.

  Mr Nalwa was the first to look away, taking off his foggy spectacles and helplessly trying to wipe them on his kurta. Mrs Nalwa met the teddy bears’ remorseless stare defiantly and walked out of the room.

  Mr Nalwa was ripped apart by sobs as his spectacles fogged up again—this would become a recurring feature in the coming week. Why am I still alive? How can I still be breathing when my heart has been ripped out? That inanimate girl cannot be Ambika. My baby could never sleep so peacefully! Why, she used to fight sleep! Every night, she would kick against it, as if she always wanted to be someplace else. Then how is it possible that she is so quiet now? He shook his head. I will soon wake up and she will come bounding in delight towards me . . . Then he raised his eyes to look at her face—slightly tightened as rigor mortis was setting in—and burst into tears again.

  ‘Take!’ It was his wife with a glass of water. His red eyes met hers. He obeyed her and gulped the water down noisily. He then kept the glass down on the Italian marble floor next to him.

  ‘It’s all because of you!’ his wife hissed at him, startling him with the suddenness of her words. She kept her volume low enough so the maid wouldn’t hear. ‘Too much love, independence and too little control! So much money and freedom at a child’s disposal! Now where is she?’

  Mr Nalwa just stared at his wife. Am I to be blamed? He began shaking at the thought and the enormity of her implication. He got up, his stomach queasy. He ran to their room. In the bathroom, he retched and threw up. Nothing came out but burning yellow bile. His wife did not comfort him or rub his back. Instead, she walked out of the room, as if in a daze, past the maid, to the phone in the living room.

  As a terrified Chanda watched, stunned into silence, her pallu still stuffed into her mouth, Mrs Nalwa picked up the phone. In a shaky voice she called the police, ‘I’m calling from East End Greens in Delhi, please come immediately. My daughter has been murdered by my husband’s nephew.’

  Nearly, an hour had passed and the relentless sun of the May morning was mercilessly beating down on the broken body of a man, who looked like he had been flung, as if he was a bag of garbage, on the side of the terrace of the huge bungalow.

  His eyes had rolled up in his head, his mouth a silent rictus of pain and his hands still above his head, as if he was warding off a blow. The young man was only clad in a pair of dirty, brown, fake Adidas pants; the blows and cuts to his naked torso clearly visible.

  Whether he w
as alive or dead was almost impossible to deduce as his face had been beaten to a bloody pulp. His left eyeball was hanging out of its socket and his mouth had caved in as his jaw was broken.

  His neck had a single, grazed gunshot wound, but it had bled so that the area around him looked like the blood drain of an abattoir, with the sun drying the blood up in clumps as it steadily congealed on his many wounds.

  Babloo had not been stupid, only broken. He had often felt like he was garbage, been treated like that by many people, but the rage that had turned him into the bloodied pulp, baking in the fierce May heat, had defiled his body.

  He had been denied even the dignity of discovery.

  Finally, Babloo was found, miraculously clinging to life, by a nosy neighbour who wandered up to the terrace and started screaming.

  This was a day after Ambika’s murder and Babloo had become notorious—emblazoned across the front pages of all the country’s newspapers and TV news channels as his cousin’s killer. A protector and a defiler of family honour. He made it to the page one fliers of every newspaper and channels devoted half-an-hour specials to him; prime time debates were conducted by hysterical anchors, who bayed for his blood and attacked the police for not arresting the murderer.

  The police held hourly briefings—talking about the teams sent across the country to forensically trace the killer. The home minister extended his sympathy to the parents and promised speedy justice.

  The next day, when Babloo was finally discovered, perilously close to death, it took two surgeons three hours to attend to his wounds and put him in an artificially induced coma as his system sought to recover from the awful abuse it had suffered.

  Even in the ICU, his body kept seeking to curl up in a foetal position, disarranging the tubes and wires keeping him barely alive.

  Meanwhile, Ambika had been cremated, her ashes immersed in the Ganga and the media had turned to its old, trusty flogging horse—police incompetence. How could they ignore the trail of blood, now turning a peculiar brown and smelling foul, that led to the terrace? What kind of useless murder investigation was being conducted by the Keystone Kops in the police?

  Who killed Ambika Nalwa? And who nearly murdered Babloo, the prime witness? Or as Arun Singh, the cerebral chief of the crime branch, who eventually cracked the case, asked, ‘“Cui Bono”—who benefits?’ A question first posed by Cicero a millennia ago, which, Singh maintained, was still the first principle of a murder investigation.

  1

  Struggling in vain to conceal a yawn while gulping down her third dirty martini, Meera wondered what was wrong with her. This leaden boredom that her boyfriend and the evening outing had provoked was not even lubricated by the copious quantities of alcohol she had ingested.

  Images of twenty-five-year-old Babloo, clad in the fake Adidas pants, killing his almost adult, seventeen-year-old cousin Ambika in the lavish precincts of their bungalow, kept trying to take precedence in her head. The young girl was murdered in a locked house—it was one of the most sensational crimes in India.

  And Meera, the special correspondent in the investigative bureau of the National Express, who had never been very effective while controlling her obsessive thoughts, felt something was not quite right about the whole case. And that, perhaps, was the reason why the story was playing on a loop in her head.

  To make up to her boyfriend, Jai Prasad, who was paying for the very expensive drinks at the Blue Bar in a five-star hotel in Luytens’ Delhi, she dimpled and leaned in to steal a quick kiss. The narrow bar overlooked the hotel pool and was packed to the brim with filthy rich Delhites who were getting drunk silly. She looked around to distract herself and yet, try as she might, the recurring images of Ambika and Babloo refused to retreat from the recalcitrant recesses of Meera’s brain.

  At least the kiss gave her an excuse to surreptitiously check her cell phone to see if her elusive sources from the special branch had called.

  Meera flicked back her long, sexy hair—the only nice thing she claimed to have inherited from her mother—when her phone started to buzz angrily. It was Arun Singh, the deputy commissioner of police.

  Flinging off the boyfriend, who let out a cameline snort of protest as he was shoved off, Meera cooed into her phone, ‘Of course I will come to police headquarters . . . I am free . . . what’s a good time for you? Aap boliye na.’

  And, there it was, the sheer, compelling rush of a scoop, straight to the gut, mood altering and, best of all, followed by no hangover the morning after!

  Meera, with her addict-like craving for the story and her impatient desperation to reach the police headquarters, could not even coherently explain to her poor boyfriend that the date was over. ‘I’ll explain later, angel,’ was all she could say.

  Enraged, he drove away in his BMW 7 Series, but not before shaking his head and ruing what Meera had transformed into after joining the Special Investigative Bureau of the National Express. Their relationship had hit an all-time low. ‘What was the point of having a fabulous body, being young and wasting it like this, Meera?’ he had asked her. Meera had felt incredibly disgusted by this statement, but realized she had not ever looked at their relationship for a high. She’d always wanted her work to do that for her.

  Meera reached the grimy entrance of the police headquarters. As she waited, playing impatiently with her phone, occasionally staring up at the impossibly dirty ceiling, she thought about how Singh was forced to follow his standard protocol with the media—to make them wait outside while pretending to be busy and important in his shabby room.

  Meera thought that the only thing that could be said of the police headquarters was that it was opposite the income tax office and both buildings made the public equally miserable. About half an hour later, she was finally ushered in to meet the DCP. Arun Singh’s pot belly often preceded him by several paces. His neatly oiled hair was shedding as his belly grew, thus maintaining a very fine balance. He used to tell himself that the reason for his increasing frustration with policing was that he was cerebral and honest, a combination as rare in the Delhi police as snow in the capital.

  He sighed heavily before he spoke, ‘Hello, Meera, I feel I can trust you.’

  She smiled impatiently. That’s how they all began a secret.

  ‘Both your parents work in the government, so I know you can understand the ways of the world. You are a nice girl; we are both from Delhi University. This Ambika/Babloo case is sick. A seventeen-year-old school girl having sex with an older, yokel cousin . . . I know you are shocked and so was I. I also have a young daughter and, yet, it took me time to process this information,’ he said, seeking to find common ground with the young reporter sitting opposite him.

  ‘But why, Mr Singh . . . what do you think possessed her?’ asked Meera, fishing for the all-important details, staring straight into Singh’s hard eyes with their incongruously long, Bambi-like lashes. She could sense his discomfort.

  Looking away from Meera and shuffling some yellowing paper, Singh said, ‘Well, it could have been precocious sexual curiosity, but, after our initial investigation, it seems she was acting out because of her rage against something. Her friends said she was always disturbed and distracted.’

  Meera felt an itchy unease sweep through her, making her toes curl. This really was a strange discussion to be having with a middle-aged cop.

  He continued, ‘We’ve learnt that Mr Nalwa apparently has his share of beautiful, rich clients and a hurt Mrs Nalwa was looking for material satisfaction all the time. You should see her gaudy make-up and dramatic gestures.’

  He sighed again and looked at her, ‘It seems they were least bothered what the child was learning. No scruples or worries about what they were exposing their kid to. You know what bothered me the most was the complete lack of the so-called middle-class morality. After fifteen years as a cop, nothing shocks me anymore. I have seen fathers rape their daughters in slums, drunken, drug-fuelled murders for a mere couple of rupees, but, the one thing the so-call
ed middle class or even the super-rich, so-called high class hang on to,’ said Singh, his voice thick with scorn and a bitter expression on his face, ‘is reputation—like Biharis to caste and netas to their chair.’

  ‘Aren’t you a Bihari, Mr Singh?’

  He looked at her and, said in a cold, deadpan voice ‘That’s why I know.’ There was a challenge in his voice that Meera could not begin to understand.

  Navigating her way through the suddenly adult world of reporting, while being utterly clueless about the caste system, which seemed to govern most things in the world of crime and politics, was tough.

  Meera remembered being bewildered in class eight when she was asked by a classmate in her convent school, ‘What are you?’ She remembered coming home and waiting for her parents to return from office to ask them the same question. And being told, ‘Gudda, Upadhyayas are Brahmins, but these things don’t really matter except to silly people who are obsessed with caste. You need not bother about it, the world is changing.’

  Had the world been changing? Had it changed? From as far as she could see, even in the past ten years, the world had only regressed—narrow-mindedness, intolerance, imposing one’s view, had all only increased. That’s why this police officer was still hung up on caste.

  Meera got back to the subject. ‘So, according to your investigation, Ambika was having an affair with her cousin Babloo, that too, because she was angry about her parents’ deviant ways?’

  ‘She was doing hanky-panky with Babloo and the parents caught them in the act,’ said Singh bluntly. ‘But this wasn’t the first time. We have reports from neighbours and relatives that any efforts to separate the two always fell flat. Of late, they had become even more demonstrative about their love for one another, openly exchanging gifts, going out together, etc. Looks like it really upset her father, nearly driving him mad.

  ‘The night of the murder, Babloo had just returned from Jamui, his native village in Bihar. He had earlier been caught with Ambika and was thrown out of the house by Mrs Nalwa, after being brutally bashed up by Mr Nalwa. The family had come to some sort of agreement after the first time they’d caught the two together.’