Race Course Road

by Seema Goswami

  It was a punishing schedule. One day, Asha was dispatched to tour the far-flung tribal areas of Chhattisgarh and assure wide-eyed audiences that the LJP cared about preserving their natural habitat and protecting it from those big, nasty corporate behemoths who were just motivated by greed. The next day saw her flying to the newly-created state of Telangana to promise its citizens that her party would leave no silicon chip unturned in turning it into an IT hub to rival Bangalore and Chennai. Then it was off to a series of smaller events in the coastal towns of Tamil Nadu, which were limping back to life after the worst flooding in recent memory. And then came a roadshow in Rajasthan, which started from Jaipur and ended up in Jaisalmer, taking in several smaller towns in between.

  So relentless was the pace that Asha often felt like she was on a rollercoaster that simply wouldn’t stop long enough to allow her to get off. But, she kept telling herself, the bruising tempo and the toll it took on her was well worth it. Her return to the campaign hadn’t just brought life back to LJP rallies. It had also enthused the party cadres, who were fired up by seeing the delirious response Asha got from crowds all across the country. And most important of all, it had brought the party’s polling figures back up to previous highs.

  The exit poll figures after the fourth phase of elections proved it. The LJP’s vote share that had gone down to 34 per cent was back up at 42 per cent. The party’s projected seat count had increased from 65 to 70. Asha’s re-entry had changed things around for the party.

  The SPP’s internal polling told much the same story. According to the surveys Rajiv Mehta and his team had conducted, the LJP’s downward slide had been arrested. And in the fifth and final round of polling, the LJP’s vote share would be around the 48 per cent mark, while its projected seat count stood at around 95.

  Jayesh Sharma, who had been banking on a downward trend in LJP numbers after the L’Oiseau scandal, was thoroughly alarmed by these numbers. But no matter how hard he tried to keep the focus on the arms deal, trying to paint the Pratap Singh clan as a bunch of corrupt dynasts, the law of diminishing returns was setting in. Just as the sympathy wave had ebbed after Birendra Pratap’s passing, so too the anti-corruption feeling was waning after Madan Mohan’s resignation.

  And now with the fresh blitzkrieg launched by Asha on the campaign trail, the LJP was gaining lost ground—while the SPP was losing it. The gains that Jayesh had made in the small window of opportunity presented by the second and third phases of polling were proving to be quite ephemeral.

  A fortnight away from the final phase of polling, Sharma was a desperate man. And desperate men have no choice but to resort to desperate measures. Or so Jayesh told himself as he sat down with Rajiv Mehta and Anisa Ahmed to examine the latest internal polling figures. They made for dismal reading. Extrapolating from the projected vote share, the LJP would be home and dry with a simple majority, squeaking past the 273-seat mark. The SPP simply didn’t stand a chance.

  Unless, of course, he triggered the nuclear option.

  If those pictures of Asha (safely tucked away in a password-protected file on Rajiv’s laptop) were leaked to the public, they could change the narrative—and the fortunes of his party. But the tricky bit was to leak them in such a way that they could never be traced back to Sharma or the SPP; if they were, the stunt could backfire on him and his party quite spectacularly.

  Jayesh didn’t want his campaign besmirched in the public eye. But more importantly, he didn’t want Malti to ever find out that he had gone behind her back to release the pictures. Not only was he petrified of her wrath if she ever discovered the truth, he was also terrified that his marriage would not survive that body blow.

  So, Jayesh needed enough distance to be able to tell his wife that the leak had come from somewhere else. After all, if someone had mailed them the pictures anonymously, it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine that they had been sent to other people as well. It was entirely possible that Malti—always a healthy sceptic at the best of times—wouldn’t believe him. But she would have to give him the benefit of the doubt. And he’d take a chance on that. The stakes were too high to back off now.

  And thus, it was decided. The pictures needed to be out. But Jayesh also needed plausible deniability after the event. How could they achieve these twin objectives?

  Rajiv—who had been itching to release the pictures for weeks—heaved a sigh of relief and told Jayesh to leave it to him. He would manage it all. Jayesh didn’t even need to know how things would unfold. How was that for plausible deniability?

  The next morning, the three major news channels and two leading newspapers headquartered in Delhi all received an identical padded envelope, hand-delivered with no return address or covering letter. All it contained was a shiny compact disc. Someone had used a black Sharpie to write ‘Asha Devi Exposed’ on the back of it.

  What the caption lacked in imagination, it more than made up in accuracy.

  ▪

  Of course, it didn’t play out as simply as that.

  The first person to open the package was the editor-in-chief of The Independent News (TIN). Ashish Banerjee, unlike most newspapermen of his generation, was a morning person. So, he was invariably the first to arrive at the offices of TIN, often beating even his peon to it. Today, however, Shambhu was on hand to get his black coffee along with his mail.

  Banerjee’s eyes zeroed in on that slim brown envelope as he sorted through the usual junk mail that inevitably found its way past the filters he had set up to intercept it. A life spent in the trenches of reporting had given him almost a sixth sense when it came to sussing out news. And that envelope looked like it could contain something worth reporting.

  He picked up his silver paper cutter and slit the envelope open. The disc slid out and tumbled down the table and on to the floor. Damn. He would have to get on to his knees to retrieve it. And he didn’t know if he could manage to get up again, given how weak his joints had become. But it was humiliating to have to ask for help to accomplish such a simple task.

  So Banerjee sank to his knees and retrieved the disc. Asha Devi Exposed, said the lettering in bold black type. Oh God, just another crank after all.

  He heaved himself back on his swivel chair, feeling his knees twinge at the movement (ah, the small indignities of ageing!) and was about to chuck the CD into the waste bin when something made him hold back. He powered on the laptop that was not connected to the paper’s server and slipped the disc inside. This way if it contained malware, it couldn’t do any damage to the newspaper’s systems.

  The moment the ‘external device detected’ icon showed up, he clicked on it. And the images that flashed up took his breath away. He clicked right through to the end of the picture gallery, his heart racing, his breath quickening with every frame.

  This was a dynamite story. But Banerjee, a man with two teenage daughters, knew that it wasn’t in him to run it. He ejected the CD and locked it away in his top-most desk drawer. Nobody need even know that he had received it.

  Parikshit Sachdev, the editor-in-chief of the National Post, saw the pictures a couple of hours later. But his reaction was quite different. He summoned the senior editorial staff to his room and showed them the images. In the stunned silence that followed, he asked what they should do.

  Did they publish the pictures knowing full well that there may be a huge backlash against them? Could they afford to alienate Karan Pratap, who was all set to be Prime Minister again, by running naked pictures of his sister? Did they want to risk straying into tabloid territory by running images that really weren’t suitable viewing in a family newspaper? Was this a legitimate news story that would justify the intrusion into Asha’s privacy? And more to the point, was it even legal to publish the pictures, given their shady provenance?

  On the other hand, could they really ignore the photos? It was (just about) possible to make the ‘public interest’ argument given that Asha Devi was now a politician who was leading her party’s election campaign. And if the
y shied away from them, wouldn’t the pictures merely surface in some rival newspaper, which decided to publish and be damned?

  The editorial team was more or less evenly divided, with three people in favour of publishing and four against. But as the argument went back and forth, it was clear that no consensus was likely to emerge any time soon. So Sachdev decided to postpone the decision till the evening news meeting, which would give him enough time to discuss the story with the legal department. The last thing he wanted was to get sued for criminal defamation and risk imprisonment.

  This was not the kind of story worth going to jail for. Or was it?

  There was no such doubt in Gaurav Agnihotri’s mind. The moment his managing editor, Ashutosh Rawat, loaded up the pictures for him on his laptop, Gaurav had experienced an almost visceral reaction of disgust. Whatever one thought of Asha Devi’s politics, nobody deserved to have their privacy destroyed in this fashion. As Rawat began navigating the gallery, Gaurav held up one hand in protest. ‘Please stop Ashutosh. I don’t want to see these pictures. And nor should you, or anyone else, be looking at them either.’

  Ashutosh turned a delicate shade of pink. Truth be told, he had already scrolled through the photographs a couple of times now, lingering over the curve of Asha’s derrierre, the shape of her breasts, the concavity that was her belly. In fact he had had to wait a few minutes so that his arousal wasn’t quite so evident before he set out to share the images with Gaurav.

  But in the face of his boss’ blazing indignation, he flailed a bit. He had arrived determined to convince Gaurav—who could be a bit of a self-righteous prig at times—that this was a story worth running. They could air the more modest images and pixelate the more revealing ones. After all, Asha was now a public figure. And what she got up to in her private life was fair game.

  And in any case, if ever a woman needed a bit of a slapping around, it was Asha. The uppity bitch would not even return their calls, or answer the many begging emails they had written her asking for a one-on-one interview. Surely, she deserved to be punished for daring to ignore the great Gaurav Agnihotri?

  But, for once, that less-than-subtle appeal to Gaurav’s vanity didn’t work. Gaurav was revolted by the pictures. And he was appalled that anyone would even think of using them. End of discussion.

  Manisha Patel was fighting much the same battle later that day in her own newsroom. But in her case, victory hadn’t been so easy. The fight had gone down right to the wire. And at the end of a fractious meeting with the owners of the channel—both SPP supporters—she had had to threaten to resign before they would drop their demand that the pictures be aired right away.

  Losing their star anchor forever seemed like a steep price to pay for running a story that would have legs for a month at most, so Amit and Sumit Rahlan decided to make the best of a bad deal, and backed off.

  It seemed as if Asha Devi would be safe, after all.

  ▪

  Rajiv Mehta had spent the entire morning flicking restlessly from one news channel to another, checking into Twitter and Facebook, and monitoring WhatsApp.

  Surely, it was only a matter of time before Asha’s pictures flashed (‘Haha! Flashed is right,’ he chortled to himself) into the public domain. Even if his chosen newspapers and TV channels decided to go the ‘responsible’ route and ignore them, he was certain they would be leaked sooner rather than later. There was simply no way you could keep a secret in a city like Delhi. And certainly not when the secret was so delicious and the people privy to it were journalists.

  So Mehta monitored the news feeds, social media and his smartphone, and waited. And waited.

  It was just after noon that the chatter began. First, he was forwarded a WhatsApp message from a journo friend, which talked about a ‘sensational story’ brewing that would blow the lid off the ‘sleazy world’ of Indian politics. Did Rajiv know anything about this? Mehta pled ignorance.

  Then came the Twitter rumours. They were sparked by a high-profile PR guru—whom Rajiv had known and cordially disliked for decades—who tweeted coyly about how ‘a young lady may not be all that ladylike after all. More, coming soon…’ This tweet immediately sparked off a storm of speculation as journalists begged the PR pundit to tell more. But much to Rajiv’s annoyance, the man refused to respond.

  Soon, the story had spread to Facebook, with everyone laying bets on the identity of the ‘lady’ who was not so ‘ladylike’ after all. But, Mehta was crestfallen to discover, almost everyone seemed convinced that the gossip was about Radhika Pratap Singh. After all, the stories of her indiscretions were legend in the capital. It had to be her. Nobody even mentioned the sainted daughter, Asha Devi.

  By late afternoon, though, the story was beginning to flag. And much to Mehta’s annoyance, the pictures had yet to leak.

  He knew by then—thanks to his many moles in media newsrooms—that none of the media outlets he had sent the pictures to meant to use them. The media had suddenly discovered morality—and in its usual bloody-minded manner, chosen a truly inconvenient time to do so. But Rajiv Mehta was not unduly worried. Because, as always, he had a Plan B, all set up and ready to go.

  When 6 p.m. came and went with no leaked pictures in sight, Rajiv pulled out his mobile and called his tech wizard, Rajesh Ramanujan. It was time to launch ‘Operation Bombshell’.

  It wasn’t a long wait after that. In exactly six minutes, an anonymous account called @AshaDeviExposed popped up on Twitter. It sent out the same tweet a dozen times, marking all senior journalists who had more than a lakh followers on it. The tweet read: ‘She may look like a Sati Savitri in public. But she is quite the Slutty Savitri in private. Click here to see Asha Devi in all her glory!’

  The link led to a YouTube video that Mehta had made Ramanujan create a few days back. The banner had the words ‘Asha Devi Exposed’ branded in deep red on a stark white background. That was the only text on the title page, which was divided into two vertical sections, each carrying a blown-up image of Asha.

  The first had her sunbathing on a beach. The sand was golden-white, the sky a piercing blue, and the sea an indigo splash in the distance. But all you saw was Asha, lying on her stomach, her bikini top undone so that her breasts spilled over as she turned around to smile at whoever was behind the camera. Her bare bottom, covered with the slightest sprinkling of sand, gleamed golden brown.

  The second picture was a selfie. This featured a bare-breasted Asha burrowing deep into Sunny Mahtani’s naked chest, as he raised the cameraphone high to capture their image. Both of them were laughing helplessly in the picture, their bottom halves entwined in grey bedsheets. From their body language, it seemed clear that this picture had been taken in a moment of post-coital bliss.

  Once you clicked play on the video—and after a teaser like that, how could anyone resist?—a series of images flashed up. Asha skinny dipping in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, as the Mahtani yatch, with the name ‘Sunny’ blazoned across it, hovering in the background. Asha contorting around to rub suntan lotion on her bare back as she sunbathed naked on the terrace of the Mahtani villa in Tuscany. Asha poised on the diving board at a swimming pool, arms stretched upwards as she prepared to take the plunge, wearing nothing but a fetching swimming cap and a few tan lines. Asha and Sunny tangling tongues at a dinner table at some tony restaurant, giving the side-eye to the camera as they took yet another selfie.

  Anyone who viewed the entire video, which ran for exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds, would know every nook and cranny of Asha’s body just as intimately as Sunny Mahtani had. How could she possibly recover from this, chuckled Rajiv as he looked at the images yet again? Who would take her seriously now? Her political career was over.

  Asha Devi was dead in the water, without so much as a bikini to save her blushes.

  ▪

  Strangely enough, the first member of the Pratap Singh clan to find out about the pictures was the one who hadn’t any interest in either politics or the media.

>   Sadhana Devi only watched TV to catch up on her favourite soap operas. But she always tuned into the Hindi news channel, Khabar Din Bhar, every evening, when it ran a summary of all that had happened in the world of the saas-bahu sagas that proliferated on Hindi entertainment channels and were her nightly viewing.

  The programme had just about started airing clips when the screen suddenly cut to the studio. A solemn looking female anchor, clad in a business-like black pansuit, was standing against a giant video wall. And on that wall, three words were flashing big and bright: ‘Asha ki Aiyaashi’.

  Sadhana Devi was startled. There was a soap called ‘Asha ki Aiyaashi’? ‘The Decadence of Asha’? Which channel did it play on? And how come she had never heard of it?

  Her confusion lasted for only a few seconds. And then, the screen was full of pictures of Asha and Sunny, pixelated for the benefit of the family audiences watching at home. But even with the blurring and fading, it was quite clear to Sadhana Devi what she was looking at: naked pictures of her daughter, some of them solo and others with her may-have-been son-in-law.

  The blood ran cold in her veins as she tuned out the high-pitched commentary of the anchor. How could Asha have allowed herself to be photographed in such a manner? Why would she expose herself to a camera lens in this state? What on earth had she been thinking?

  As the photographs flashed by—my God! How many were there?—Sadhana Devi felt paralysed by a curious combination of shame, embarrassment, anger and helplessness. How could Asha have destroyed herself in this manner? How could she even show her face in society after this, let alone get married and have a family? Or even have a political career, for that matter?

  As her mind flash-forwarded to what the future held for Asha, Sadhana Devi’s tears began to flow. Her daughter’s life was over, just as hers had been with the death of her husband.