He was extremely intelligent and extraordinarily handsome. His self-estimation was that of a god and he considered women as mere playthings to be used and then discarded.
Arjun Nalwa was a first-generation professional from a Punjabi family, which had transplanted itself in Bihar after Partition. His father started with a tea trolley service and was now the proud owner of four grocery stores, driving the locals to the dust with his Punjabi diligence.
Arjun had decided that the adulterated haldi and dhania powder, which was his father’s stock-in trade, would never sully his hands. And, in a huge act of willpower, coming as he did from a household that only possessed account books, Arjun decided he would set up an IT company after completing his engineering degree.
Sensing that Arjun was not to be thwarted in his mission, along with the fact that he, too, believed in the collective Indian psyche that an engineer is like a god with great dowry potential, his father supported him. As Arjun proved his brilliance, standing first in exam after exam, despite the ramshackle regional education system, his family started treating him as a family deity of sorts.
His family’s constant pandering to his demands added to his ego and gave him the temper that he was shortly to regret possessing, but Arjun arrived in Delhi, proud, wilful and blind to his shortcomings.
The pressure of the back-breaking engineering course in IIT-Delhi and the disdain of his fellow students and professors, none of whom seemed to be believe he was a god, and the discipline that he encountered for the first time in his life, nearly broke him. Arjun was dismayed to discover that he was not even the most intelligent student in his class and that nobody bowed to his bullying ways. Immediately, Arjun tempered himself. After all, he was from the most adaptable stock. He developed a sense of humour which, coupled with his looks, made him popular with the professors and his classmates.
Very soon, Arjun started selling the freely available drugs in the IIT lab at a hefty premium to the town merchants, some of whom he knew. The honour system in IIT rather amused him.
I should have just stuck to one goal—the trade gene did me in. I was so cocky I thought I was so untouchable, yet I got caught. By then, the Cuckoo trap had closed inexorably around him.
He was caught red-handed by a fellow student when he was delivering drugs to one of the town merchants. The fellow jeered at him as a ‘drug lalaji’ in front of the shopkeeper and Arjun, who could not brook public humiliation with his wafer-thin ego and who was high on an amphetamine, which he had taken to help study for a punishing exam, attacked his classmate. He did not stop battering him until he beat his classmate to a pulp.
He was expelled from IIT-Delhi the next day and now had a criminal record to boot. Arjun ran away to Chandigarh the very next day and, with his characteristic mixture of charisma and chutzpah, convinced Bindra, the big daddy in Chandigarh, to invest in his fledgling start-up. The fund infusion was tied to Cuckoo Bindra.
Dealing with drugs was my first mistake but, the second one was giving in to the so-called angel investor’s blackmail and money and surrendering and marrying Cuckoo was the worst. But what could I do expelled as I was from IIT without a degree with no capital and a criminal record? I should have faced the end of my hopes and dreams rather than selling myself to Cuckoo’s father, he thought almost every day.
I gave up my dreams of being an engineer, an entrepreneur, and entered this loveless marriage, which was made bearable only by Ambika . . . And for what? I have lost my life.
And, after the IT set up with her father’s money collapsed and left him with multi-crore debts, she and her damn father owned him, lock stock and barrel.
I even took up this damned lawyer’s profession I utterly despise, perhaps that is why I so excelled at it. His only release now was the occasional woman. He had also been denied the solace and adulation of his loving family after Cuckoo branded them ‘junglee and not of their stature’.
Arjun’s father had been thrown out after a short, extremely strained visit when Cuckoo felt he was being nosy by asking Arjun about how much he earned from his cases. She screamed that they were parasites who wanted to leech money out of them.
His proud, entrepreneurial father could not bear the insult and left. He occasionally called Arjun, though never at home, and yearned to meet Ambika.
Snapping back into the present, Arjun Nalwa looked at Cuckoo with narrowed eyes and did not answer.
She was extremely short-tempered and he did not want to set off a hysterical tirade, which always led to the inevitable breaking of his spectacles. He had replaced six pairs last year and at Rs 20,000 a pop they were not cheap. Pouring more scotch into his glass, he finally said, ‘Have you called Atul? He was supposed to handle the sarkari doctor. When the crime branch comes tomorrow, you tell them that I had sacked Mohan, my trusted assistant, for inefficiency at the firm’s office and that he had got drunk on several occasions, abused me, and was a gaon wala bhai of Babloo’s.’
His wife did not answer him but continued to stare at him sadly. Uneasy, with the alcohol churning in his stomach, Arjun Nalwa, in a grotesque travesty of his court manner, said, ‘Look we will handle it but, please, I can’t talk about it now. It’s late. Have a drink. It will relax you or if you want, I can call our compounder and give you a shot.’
That was the opening she was looking for. ‘You want to sedate me and then what will you do? Rather, who will you fuck?’ she screamed.
Arjun’s face crumpled. ‘Please let’s not fight tonight. I promise you that will never happen without you knowing.’
‘Bastard! You mean, earlier you were doing it like a dog in heat with every bitch you encountered!’
Her husband moved towards her but she abruptly turned and left the room. Arjun followed her as he saw tears brimming in her eyes. They were in their daughter’s room. He stared at the photographs of their daughter that his wife had pulled out and he felt a lump in his throat. He did love his little girl—maybe a bit too much. Maybe more than he should have, in a way that was out of the world. But love her he did.
There were pictures of her at every stage, from a new-born to a toddler, her first day in play school, then looking solemn with her hair in two neat pigtails for school, Ambika in a kilt on a family holiday in Scotland, dressed as Jhansi ki Rani for a school play—looking triumphant as she had been allowed to use the lipstick she coveted. Ambika as a teen. Her make-up fetish visible in every picture. A carousel of memories that kept going forward and backward until they abruptly stopped before she could’ve turned eighteen, an adult, a woman in her own right. Cuckoo Nalwa sighed audibly. Sometimes she missed Ambika so desperately that she almost hallucinated about her. She felt as if her daughter would come alive if she stared at the photos for long enough. Sometimes she imagined that Ambika was on a school trip and would come bounding back and tell her all about her holiday. Then sometimes telling her about her plans for college abroad. What could we not give her?
Then she sighed, ‘If success equals survival, we denied our child even that.’ An all-encompassing grief drowned her fragile attempts to master it. Her thoughts moved to what life had been for Ambika. Was she happy? Was she better dead than alive? She dimly recalled a session with a child psychiatrist she had taken a ten-year-old Ambika to, hoping to get treatment for her ungovernable rages.
The session had not been a success. Ambika had refused to talk, staring stonily at the therapist when asked gentle, probing questions. She had also wrecked a doll, which was given to her to offer her reassurance, by pulling its head off. After destroying the doll, she calmly told the doctor, ‘Dolls are for kids, I hate them! I am not a small kid.’
That doctor had not been able to treat her rage. She feared that someone was behind it, grooming the anger, and talked about how the child had to be provided a safe home environment for her to be able to confide in her parents about what was affecting her.
Should I have told her that Ambika was fleeing from her own parents? Should I have taken her anger m
ore seriously and helped her instead of running away myself? As she came closer to the yawning mouth of the abyss of pain, Cuckoo started biting her lips till they bled. The pain and the blood finally calmed her down, and she thought that perhaps the doctor was useless. But she also thought about her own failure as a mother. After all, the child was hers. How could a father have thought of her like she did as a mother? How could he have, in fact, thought of her the way he did? The first time she’d realized his love for her going beyond the usual, she’d felt shocked. Then Ambika had steadily veered towards Babloo. She was a lost child and now I am lost without Ambika . . .
With Arjun being her only hostage to fortune, she always took her small, mean revenge on him. She enjoyed the fact that Ambika was moving away from him. But, before that day, she had often wondered if Ambika was a changeling; her little girl whom she could never understand or connect with. In any case, Arjun and their mutually enjoyed private life had always taken precedence. She loved him in the way only a very plain woman can worship a handsome man.
By marrying her, even if it was due to blackmail, he had given her some sort of distinction and he could do no wrong. After all, if he had never committed serious crimes, she could never have achieved her dream marriage. She was reconciled to a lot of things but not the plans he had for Ambika as she felt a twinge of premonition of the pain that lay waiting with its jaws wide open to swallow her whole. She dimly remembered a time before Arjun was obsessed with Ambika. The time when it was just her and her daughter. The way they made dinner of only corn during the rainy season. How Ambika would anxiously check and ensure that her Ma got the sweetest, most milky piece. Her peals of laughter when she discovered where Cuckoo had hidden trails of toffees for her when she returned from school. How they clicked photographs making the weirdest, most hilarious faces—the photos that hung in front of her and danced before her eyes.
All that changed when Arjun discovered he had a daughter, thought Cuckoo, bitterly, the tears refusing to flow.
Even Ambika’s birth had not snapped her obsessed preoccupation with Arjun and his needs. She thought that he loved her when he put up with her violent bursts of temper.
Arjun always encouraged her to get out of the house, to study, go shopping, go to the gym and be ‘more modern’, but she always resisted. She wanted a simple life—a life where she was a housewife and her husband came home in the evening. A home where she took care of the children and other household activities. But life is never how one wants it to be. Her husband had wanted her to be more attractive and after he pestered her for two years, she got a bust augmentation done and went up to a 36 C, in competition with the buxom Anju, who she hated. It sure helped with the ‘parties’ though. The new bust and her avid willingness had men, who had initially passed her over, coming back for more. His fucking needs! Look where they got us. Maybe I should have stopped at least when she grew up to became a teenager and figured out what was going on. But did she ever really blame me? Didn’t she know the score—her father was the sun in our lives. We all needed to bow to his wishes, and there were many!
Ambika was her father’s daughter and never put up with anything meekly. She was always ready to gouge and hurt. As the familiar litany continued in her mind, her justification that was maybe, just maybe, Ambika had it coming for all her rage and the insults she had meted out, that disgusting relationship with Babloo. Just then, a tiny voice quickly stilled her, ‘She was my baby, my Golu, an innocent till we . . .’ But she clamped down hard on that train of thought. On the other side of this abyss was unbearable pain and a permanent vacuum that was threatening to engulf her.
Arjun Nalwa sat frozen thinking, Does honour, a man’s honour, matter so little? He remembered with painful clarity that he had no interest in Ambika as a baby but tolerated her for the picture of the wholesome family man that her birth created, which was dear to him. He recalled the exact, searing moment when Ambika stopped being just a figure in the perfect family portrait. It was two days after she turned nine and developed a personality that she could have only inherited from him, along with his eyes and temper, and he was obsessively hooked. He used to look at her and repeatedly tell himself, ‘I want to do everything with you that’s possible in a lifetime.’
He remembered on a brief trip to London, when he had to wait for a billionaire client, he had impatiently picked up The Spectator lying bound in a pretentious purple leather cover in the huge waiting room and been transfixed reading Harold Pinter’s lines, ‘I know the place it is true everything we do connects the space between death and me and you.’ They were addressed to his lover, Antonia Fraser, but he realized with a bone-chilling intensity that they only applied to one person in his life—Ambika.
After the meeting, he had rushed off to Waterstone’s book store and bought Pinter’s whole oeuvre, but nothing else had such eloquent appeal for him except those lines that were seared in his brain.
Suddenly, he shook himself, rubbing his head in a characteristic gesture and dialled a number from the landline phone. After a two-minute conversation, the worry lines around his eyes seemed to recede a little and he got up, squared his shoulders, and left the living room. Seeing Cuckoo near the shrine of their daughter, he looked away and said, ‘I have finally managed to get an appointment with Client Number One, early tomorrow morning. You must come with me.’ The rest was left unspoken.
The next day, both the Nalwas dressed in spotless white left at an unearthly hour in the morning to go and meet the client in a posh colony in Delhi.
4
That morning, Meera left a less splendid part of Luytens’ Delhi to meet Apoorva Kumar Sinha. She had swallowed her pride and called him early in the morning. A suspicious Shoe Polish tried to confirm that it was sans Raman and then agreed to meet her. Meera was left clutching at straws, since Singh had not replied to her increasingly less-breezy texts. In the bright daylight, Sinha looked even worse for wear than the evening before.
The living room looked even seedier, with a thin coating of dust sparkling off all the surfaces. As the dust motes danced in the eerily empty house, Shoe Polish was all business, the geniality of the Cristal long forgotten.
Dismissing her dirt fetish and tossing her hair back, Meera gave Shoe Polish her full attention. He said, ‘I want you to do a story on the CP. The story will have to be on page one and then I might give you the Nalwa report,’ he said in a cold, matter-of-fact manner.
Meera said plaintively, ‘The CP is friends with Bhagwan Bhalla, so I can’t guarantee a page one display.’
Next, the asshole will also demand that it will have to be above the fold and at least an eight-column flier, thought Meera, despairingly.
Shoe Polish sneered and said bitingly, ‘You are not much of an investigative reporter if you don’t even know the score in your own newspaper. Bhagwan and the CP have fallen out over a Lal Dora deal. Bhalla, the king of Lal Dora, will be receptive.’ He added, ‘I could easily have given the report to Raman who has always delivered what I wanted but that will lead the trail to me. So I thought of you. Otherwise, Raman is a good friend who has always been grateful.’
Meera had too much at stake here. This story, which she had been chasing frantically, meant too much to her, so she said slowly, ‘I did not know about the Lal Dora deal gone sour . . . That changes things. Look, give me the CP documents and I will work on them, but could you at least let me read the Nalwa report?’
Shoe Polish said mockingly, ‘Meeraji, let the story appear, then we will talk. Now these are big stories. How the CP has grabbed a huge house with a two-acre garden in Connaught Place, which was meant to be a club for our poor sub-inspectors and other ranks, and is using it as his personal house.’
Despite the fact that this lacked the sexy, big-story appeal of the Nalwa report, Meera thought it was a story worth doing. She smiled at Shoe Polish and it was such an infectious grin, with her two dimples flashing, that he could not help but return it. Even though the CP was living in the house, on pap
er it was claimed that the property was being used as a club for police lower ranks.
Meera checked out the documents Shoe Polish had whipped out. ‘I will send over a questionnaire based on these documents. It’s a routine practice to return it within twenty-four hours for the story,’ said Meera, after looking over the papers. The fraud was apparent. The house was earmarked, then allotted and then done-up, complete with a swanky swimming pool, but its insides had never seen an SI, except as guards.
The permanently tense Meera relaxed a little and decided to go out and meet some of Ambika’s friends whom she had tracked down using Facebook. She also called Dev in the office to update him about the story. And Dev, who cultivated an air of disinterest in order to deflate cocky reporters, actually sounded interested. So Shoe Polish was right. God has fallen out with the CP! thought Meera and a small laugh escaped her lips.
Driving to a Noida mall, while tunelessly and loudly singing along to the Dire Straits hit ‘Romeo and Juliet’, on her way to meet two of Ambika’s classmates, Meera thought it was eerie that Ambika’s digital presence continued even after her murder. Her Facebook page was open and her friends were posting all sorts of emotional messages on her timeline. This had been a shock to them, since they were all at an age where every child looks forward to life. Meera couldn’t imagine how she would’ve handled a similar situation.
As she turned in to the parking space of the mall, she hoped that the two friends would be punctual and would not be completely guarded and suspicious. Meera had tracked them down—a boy and girl who studied in Ambika’s class since Class Five. They had agreed to meet at the mall after refusing to meet her either at home or in school.
They met at the atrium of the mall—the boy, Angad, was really handsome, in a pretty boy sort of way, and a suspicious-looking, skinny girl, Soma, who looked dirty, like she hadn’t bathed for weeks, with her lank, uncombed hair hanging down her back. ‘Should we get some coffee?’ asked Meera in a concerned, caring way.
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