Maya's New Husband

by Neil D'Silva

  He almost pushed his way into the house once the safety chain was down, and placed his hand right on the woman’s mouth. The feeble woman was about to pass out from the lack of breathing resources. But her strong son-in-law held her firmly. “No aunty, don’t pass out on me, please, I beg,” he said.

  Anuradha couldn’t speak now, but her eyes grew large in horror. She meant to ask what it was that he was after.

  “What did you see that day, aunty?” he asked.

  The woman shook her head vigorously, meaning to say she didn’t understand him, but he was too wise to those tricks.

  “No, you definitely saw something, didn’t you?” he said, his grin refusing to leave his face. “I know, I know, little old woman played detective. I know you followed me. I have friends there, you know? People who tell me things. And, what did you think, I did not understand the way you shushed your daughter? What conversation were mother and daughter having before I came? What did you tell her?”

  Anuradha continued to shake her head.

  He took her on the wooden chair and made her sit, still not removing his hand from her mouth. Then, procuring a dupatta from a wardrobe, he tied her wrists behind the back of the chair. He worked with one hand but it was enough for the old woman. Then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, made a ball of it and gagged her mouth with it.

  The woman wriggled, trying to free herself, but couldn’t. This was beyond her wildest nightmares.

  He increased the TV volume so that no one passing by outside could hear the muffled sounds she made.

  “Look,” he said. “I want to know if you told Maya anything. Did you?”

  Anuradha had always suspected the villainy of her son-in-law but now that she was seeing it in its full glory, it made her scared. She saw what an unholy mess this was. The man was too strong for her and she too weak. There was no way she could fend him off. There was no escape, whether she told the truth or lied. The best option, she thought, was to stay mum.

  “You realize it was all about Maya, right?” he said. “Everything was about her. Right from the beginning. There’s something about your daughter that brought out the beast in me. The good beast, I mean. Good for me anyway.” He smiled. “It’s okay to tell you now, aunty. As it stands, you are not going to be able to tell anyone anything after this little meeting.”

  Blood fueled by rage filled in Anuradha’s eyes. Her perpetrator mistook this to be an expression of fear, but there was something else, something more passionate and intense, welling up within those eyes, and it was not fear. It was anger. Pure unbridled anger.

  “That fair, fair skin, and those expressive eyes full of pain…” he spoke on, closing his eyes as he did. “Oh, how smooth those lips are! The first time I felt them, it was like a current flowing through my nerves. And those breasts! Did she get them from you? How are your breasts, aunty?”

  He looked down at the woman. Even at that age, Anuradha was one of the good-looking aunties. Her hair still had a lot of black left in it and her wrinkles had only given her character.

  It horrified her. It repulsed her. The very thought of this man looking at her breasts that way threw her off-balance. She suspected her son-in-law to be a lot of things but she hadn’t suspected him to be a sex pervert. Was he? The thought caused her to hyperventilate.

  “Don’t breathe so hard, woman,” said Bhaskar, looking at her heaving chest. “You don’t want to die before you tell me what you told Maya. Tell me what did you tell her that day? Will I have to kill her too?”

  Her eyes went round in fear and rage. She lashed her legs trying to escape but it was not possible. Just not possible. The man loomed over her.

  “That got you, right?” he laughed. “I like it when you get shocked like that. That beautiful round face of yours looks real smashing when your eyes go round like that. Like the first time I came home. Remember that day? Oh, that younger one of yours. What the fuck’s her name? Nimisha something… She is one to kill for, right? I could have gone at her right there at the dinner table that day, so hot she is! What a bombshell you must have been twenty years ago to produce such lovely ladies! The world thanks you, madam, and I surely do.”

  The wriggling increased. Even if a kitten is backed into a corner and threatened, its fighting instincts come to the fore. Then this was a woman, even though old. The strong emotions welling up within her unleashed her fighting spirit but the physical bonds restrained her.

  “You won’t be able to fight back, dear,” Bhaskar said. “None of them could. It is five so far, you know? Starting with that first son-in-law of yours.” And then he grinned and said, “Oops!”

  “Samar?” Anuradha mumbled. “Samar?”

  There was no response, but the glint in his eye told her what she wanted to know.

  If Anuradha had been free, this would have been the moment. She might have taken whatever she could and hit the man right on his ugly face and torn his skin apart with her bare hands. But she wasn’t free. The anger rose within her and remained simmering on the surface, not finding an outlet.

  “Anyway, I don’t want to spend the night here,” he said, “though that wouldn’t be a very bad idea. She will come, won’t she? Your youngest?” And, he smacked his lips in his perverse way again.

  “I am now going to take this thing off your mouth,” he said, creeping closer to her. “You will tell me what you have told Maya. Fair warning though—if you don’t speak, things could get gruesome.”

  Anuradha moved her head this way and that, trying to escape having to look at the ugly brute right in the face. But he crowded her sight and came closer and closer until there was nowhere she could go. She felt the stink on his breath, on his face, and made a smirk even through that gag. The odor assailed her senses; it was like that of a dead rotting mouse and it seemed to emanate from his armpits.

  “Yes, that’s the oil, the magic oil,” he looked at Anuradha and smiled broadly, exhibiting his white teeth. “I have to wear it, you know? That’s what attracted your daughter to me in the first place. My father’s gift. And this is what keeps her in line. Don’t you feel the attraction too? No? Perhaps it works only for one person.”

  He proceeded to take the cloth off her mouth. With one swift blow, he pulled it off. The pulling was so hard that he scratched Anuradha’s upper lip and it began to bleed.

  He came closer to her bleeding lip. His eyes began to twitch with some mysterious emotion.

  “Oh blood!” he said. “Forgive me if I cannot control myself now.”

  He moved closer towards the blood and put his tongue out. Anuradha felt she would puke right in his face, and she should have. Oh, why wasn’t she able to at least muster enough phlegm to spit at this person in his face?

  And he kept moving on, closer and closer, with eyes shut and his tongue out in the most obscene manner, hoping to lick the blood off the lip of the old captive woman.

  But this woman wasn’t one to go down so easily.

  She lurched forward and clamped the man’s right earlobe with her teeth, using every ounce of might that still remained in her withering arthritic body. She held as tightly as she could, with her natural teeth as well as the four artificial caps that she had, and bit. She bit like she had never done before, even though she felt her canines crumbling under the effort, till she heard him yell in pain and bring forth his hands to push her head away from his earlobe.

  Bhaskar knew that Anuradha was physically weak. But he had not counted on the strength of her strong inner character.

  He held her head, and pushed it as far as he could, but the woman was a tigress now and she wouldn’t let go.

  Then he reached out and his fingers touched the glass bowl in which she had been peacefully shelling peas not a few minutes ago. He inched his fingers towards the bowl till he got a firm grip on it, and raised it, and brought it down with all his angry might onto the head of his bound mother-in-law.

  The shelled green peas from the bowl flew all over the place, some of them ricochet
ing from the television set that still went on at full blast. And the bowl itself broke into irreparable halves, one of which remained in his hand and the other dropped to the floor and smashed into dangerous little bits.

  Anuradha’s head fell backwards on the chair, but her teeth were still clamped around the earlobe; and when her head suddenly jerked that way, the earlobe tore off and stayed in her mouth.

  “You bitch, you motherfucking bitch!” Bhaskar yelled out, holding his torn ear, but the woman was already out of hearing.

  Still nursing the ear, he went behind the chair and saw the trickle of blood originating from her head where it had been hit.

  He took the handkerchief with which he had gagged her mouth and tied it around his head in a haphazard manner. The bit piece of ear was the lower part of the earlobe and there wasn’t as much blood as he had seen previously from his severed toes. As he tied the cloth around it, the wound began to hurt and he looked at the woman with contempt.

  He didn’t see any movement in her chest but he wanted to take no chances. So he took the jagged half of the bowl which was still in his hand and proceeded to finish the task.

  He held the end over the neck of the motionless woman and positioned it for full impact.

  At that moment, his phone rang.

  ~ 22 ~

  Where the Chawl Ends

  “What is it, Maya?” he asked on the phone with unmasked impatience.

  The tone scared Maya. She had heard his angry tone earlier and had grown to be afraid of it; this was definitely that tone. “I just wondered where you are,” she said meekly.

  “I will be back home in a while,” Bhaskar barked. “Cannot speak now.”

  “You know Padma, don’t you?” she said.

  “Who the fuck?”

  “Padma, my friend from school? The English teacher?”

  He suddenly fell silent, wanting to hear more.

  “She was to come to Naigaon three days ago. She even reached here, at the station. But she never made it to the house. Her husband has filed a missing report.”

  Maya’s tone was guarded. She wasn’t giving out information as much as fishing for it. She had debated long in her mind how to go about this conversation with her husband.

  “Uh huh,” he grunted.

  “I wondered if you could come back home and we could go looking for her?”

  “What?” said Bhaskar with annoyance but under that annoyance was a trace of fear. “Where can we go?”

  “Maybe go to the police station?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she reached here at the station. I have her message on my cell. The police will want to know that.”

  Bhaskar thought quickly. The police didn’t yet know the woman had reached the Naigaon Railway Station, or it would have been on the news already. There wasn’t any manhunt going on for him, not anything that he knew of at least. Which meant, the authorities didn’t know much so far.

  But he wasn’t delusional. He knew they would inevitably stumble upon this information through some source. Since Padma had made the news, it meant the police were looking. It was only a matter of time before they scanned the footage from the railway station cameras.

  “I don’t think it’d be of any use,” he said, not because he really meant it but because he wanted time to think how to circumvent this new problem.

  “How can it not be of any use?” said Maya quickly. “If the police find out she had messaged me last and then went missing, I will be under the scanner too. They will want to know why she was visiting me and I have no clue about it. I have to clear this out. Maybe they are not pursuing this case very seriously yet, or they would have knocked at our door already.”

  A surge of great panic coursed through Bhaskar’s body.

  “So, are you coming?”

  Bhaskar thought about this again. He had to take a split-second decision. He could not risk going with Maya to the police station. He had heard about the devious instincts of the police. They were trained to sniff a criminal from a mile away. If he made one slipup, the noose would be around his neck. He had to avert the eventuality of him facing the police at any cost.

  “If you cannot come,” said Maya, “can I take someone else with me?”

  “Who?” There was hesitation in Bhaskar’s voice, but also a sense of relief.

  “I don’t know,” Maya pretended to think. “Maybe that landlord’s son?”

  “Akram?”

  “He will help, won’t he? He’s right there, downstairs at the bakery… I can see him.”

  Bhaskar weighed the pros and cons. On one hand were his suspicions as regards his wife going somewhere with another man. On the other hand, there was the fear of being caught by the police. He decided to go with the former option. He could anyway deal with it if his wife was developing a soft corner for another man. It was the police he couldn’t deal with.

  “All right,” he said, “but come back soon.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “As soon as I am done here,” he said, nursing the wound around his earlobe and disconnected the phone.

  After the conversation, Bhaskar cradled the phone in his arms for a while and contemplated. On one hand, he had the dead woman and on the other, his wife was ready to go on a manhunt. The woman was already dead, and in his experience, the dead told no tales. He had taken all precautions anyway. If he set some things in order, like breaking a window, this could be easily discounted as a botched burglary attempt in the house of an old lonely widow.

  So, he did that. He smashed a window and was happy that the window had no bars, and then broke a flowerpot that was kept on the sill.

  He then gathered the torn bit of ear from the woman’s mouth and placed it in a gift envelope he found on her coffee-table. Finally, further increasing the volume of the television set, he climbed down the window.

  ***

  Maya ran down the stairs and came into the street where the lecherous workers hooted and catcalled, but she did not give a damn. Akram was down there speaking with the owner of a bakery shop. She had seen him before she made the call to Bhaskar and that is what had initiated the call. She had never intended to take Bhaskar along for this ride. She wanted to take Akram, the affable young man who could help a lonely woman in distress. The call had only been a ruse to seek her husband’s permission.

  Evening was approaching as she came out of the house. She had never stepped out of the dingy house after dark. She was nervous but this was a deed that needed to be done.

  She stood outside the shop till he saw her. Puzzled, he came out of the bakery.

  “I spoke with Bhaskar,” she said. “I told him to accompany me to the police station. But he is elsewhere.”

  Akram nodded, not understanding what the woman was trying to say.

  “He told me to take you along,” said Maya.

  “He did?”

  “Yes, and he said that was fine.”

  “I don’t understand. Why doesn’t he come?”

  “Let me only tell you this, Akram,” said Maya, “I don’t want to go with him.”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t. Oh God, I don’t know what to do. Where is Padma?” There was fear in Maya’s eyes and Akram worried that she would break into tears on the street. That could be an awkward situation for him.

  However, he didn’t know that Maya wasn’t one to weep so easily. The last time she had wept was when they had shown her Samar’s body at the railway morgue. And, after the embarrassment that had caused, she had vowed never to let her emotions get the better of her again.

  She was afraid, though. The fear came from the suspicions that played on in her mind. She knew they wouldn’t be allayed till she did her bit of research.

  “You want to go to the police now?” asked Akram.

  “No,” said Maya. “There is something else.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know of an old garage area somewhere here?”

  “There ar
e many garages in Naigaon and at least a dozen of them here. Which one do you want?”

  “It is a desolate place. Away from the buildings. The garage itself is abandoned.”

  Akram thought. “I don’t recall any such place here.”

  “It is at the end of this road, I think.” Maya pointed to the road that spread out in front of them. “Where does this road lead?”

  “This road goes directly to the railway station,” said Akram. “There is nothing desolate on this stretch. In fact, there are many residential buildings up ahead.”

  “And what about this side?” Maya turned and pointed to the other end of the road.

  “This goes to the highway,” said Akram. “Hmm, but before that, there is a patch of land where there are not many buildings. Why are you asking all this?”

  “Because my missing friend might be trapped somewhere in there… in an abandoned garage.”

  For a moment, he did not know what to say. But there was conviction in this woman’s eyes. She truly believed in what she said.

  And there was also the little fact that he found the woman lovelier each moment that he saw her.

  “All right, I’ll come with you,” he said. “But on one condition. The moment I say we leave, we leave.”

  “Okay.”

  ***

  They walked together on the path, uneasily, because they had nothing to talk about. Maya was focused on her mission, but for Akram it was difficult to walk with a woman he did not know anything about. For all his good looks and physical strength, his shyness was a deterrent when it came to women. He wasn’t much interested in this mission of looking for a lost person; he thought more along the lines of spending some time with this beautiful damsel in distress.

  Why had the woman come up to him with her cock-and-bull story? There was really some undercurrent here, he felt. He had heard a lot about these young married women who were unhappy in their marriages and spent a lot of time alone in her houses and fantasized about the nearest available good-looking man. Akram wasn’t a narcissist but he had been told he ought to try out for the movies. He let the woman lead him; and as he walked behind her, following her directions, he smiled at the thought of what her ulterior motive might be.