Prey on the
Prowl – A Crime Novel
BS Murthy
ISBN 81-901911-4-4
Improved Edition © 2021 BS
Murthy
Original copyright © 2014 BS Murthy
Cover design of Gopi’s water color painting by Lattice Advertisers, Hyderabad.
Blurb
Even as
Detective Dhruva was enamored of Kavya, whom he rescues from her kidnapper,
Radha, an alleged murderess on the run, gatecrashes into his life.
But
when Kavya too joins him after her man was poisoned there ensues the tussle of
a love triangle, which gets unraveled in a poignant end, but not before a
series of murders.
So,
then who could have poisoned Ranjit the realtor, Shakeel the Inspector, Pravar
the criminal and Natya his accomplice?
Well
the needle of suspicion tilted towards Pravar that was till he perished with
his mate, but then who was the one?
Could
it be Radha under the scanner for her role in the death of her husband Madhu
and his mistress Mala, Pravar's sister?
Or was
it Ranjit's spouse Kavya, who owing to Stockholm Syndrome, takes to Pravar her
kidnapper.
As
these deaths by poisoning puzzle Dhruva, Radha avers that Kavya had the motive
and the means to kill her spouse, her paramour and his wife besides the cop.
However,
reckoning that when the ill-motives of the natural suspects to commit a murder
are an open secret, someone with a hidden agenda might be tempted to use that
as a camouflage for his subterfuge, Dhruva begins to look around for the
culprit.
Self Imprint
F-9, Nandini Mansion,
1-10-234, Ashok Nagar,
Hyderabad – 500 020
Other books
by BS Murthy –
Benign Flame – Saga of
Love
Jewel-less Crown - Saga of
Life
Crossing the Mirage –
Passing through youth
Glaring Shadow - A stream of
consciousness novel
Of No Avail: Web of Wedlock
(A Novella)
Stories Varied - A Book of Short Stories
Onto the Stage – Slighted
Souls and other stage and radio plays
Puppets of Faith: Theory of
Communal Strife
Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of
self – help (A translation in verse)
Sundara Kãnda - Hanuman’s Odyssey (A translation in verse)
Agenda for Revenge
Chapter 1: Prey
on the Prowl
Chapter 2: Shakeel’s Fixation
Chapter 3 : Ranjit’s Predicament
Chapter 4 : Rags to Riches
Chapter 5 : Dhruva’s Dilemma
Chapter 6:
The Gatecrasher
Chapter 7:
Operation Checkmate
Chapter 8:
Foul on Pravar
Chapter 9:
Stockholm Syndrome
Chapter 10:
An Aborted Affair
Chapter 11:
Psyche of Revenge
Chapter 12:
Victim of Trust
Chapter 13:
Backyard of Life
Chapter 14:
Cuckoo’s Nest
Chapter 15:
‘Untried’ Crime
Chapter 16:
Kavya’s Quagmire
Chapter 17:
Murders to Mislead
Chapter 18:
The Other Woman
Chapter 19: Shakeel’s Demise
Chapter 20:
A Perfect Murder
Chapter 21:
Deaths in Spandan
Chapter 22:
Arraigned in Remand
Chapter 23:
Depressing Discovery
Chapter 24:
The Red Herring
Chapter 25:
Wages of Abuse
Chapter 26:
Decoding the Crime
Chapter 27: A Poignant End
Dedicated to all those women,
whose loving glances have made
my life’s journey a joyous sojourn.
Prey on the Prowl
That June evening, the crimson sun gave in to the dark monsoon clouds
to let them end its long summer reign over the Deccan skies. What with the
thickening clouds thundering in triumph, Detective Dhruva woke up from his
siesta, and by the time he moved into the portico of his palatial bungalow at
9, Castle Hills, the skies had opened up to shower its sprawling lawns. It was
as if the eagerness of the rainfall matched the longing of the parched soil to
receive its fertile mate in an aroma of embrace, and in the ensuing echoes of
that seasonal union, the roots of the garden plants devoured every raindrop,
that is, even as their leaves shed the overburden to accommodate the new
arrivals.
In that setting, as Dhruva, impelled by all that, stood engrossed,
Raju, the housekeeper, fetched him a plateful of hot pakodas, which,
facing the spatter, he began to savor, and before he had finished with the
snack, Raju returned with a mug of steaming Darjeeling tea for him. Soon, as the refreshed sun resurged
to warm up the leaves, even as the satiated roots let the bounty go down the
drain; done with the beverage, the detective picked up the sachet of lanka
pogaku to roll a cigar,
and then as he reached for the cigar lighter, the rainbow, in its resplendent
colors, unfolded in the misty skies. However, when he began puffing away at the
exotic cigar, as if dispelled by its strong scent, the dissipated clouds began
disappearing from the horizon.
Having savored the cigar to the last puff, as he stubbed the butt and
stepped out onto the lush green wet lawn, Dicey, the Alsatian, followed him, as
if to leave its own footprints on the damp canvas in its master’s tracks. Then,
even as the rainy clouds began regrouping in the skies, he covered the garden
to caress every croton and coleus as he would his pet. But when it portended
downpour, Raju led Dicey into the portico and the detective headed towards the
study to pick up the half-read Crimes Digest
of the month.
But yet again, as it was a downpour, Dhruva
reached the first-floor window, standing by which, he thought that it was akin
to the urge of an assassin to revisit the scene of the crime, for a review of
the same. Amused by his analogy, he thought the sky was at obliterating its
earlier footprints on the earth, but when it ceased raining and it turned
murky, as if mourning the loss of its resplendence, he too began immersing himself
in the dark world of crime the Digest
pictured, even as Raju let the pet do the patrolling of the premises.
Soon though, Dicey began barking at the gate, again inducing Dhruva to
reach to the window, through which he saw a sensuous woman, tentative at the
half-open Iron Gate of his mansion. Enamored of her attractive face and
desirous of her middle-aged frame, as he stood rooted, the pet sprang up to the
gate, forcing the tantalizing trespasser to beat a hasty retreat. No less
affected by her sensual gait in her retreat, the detective lost his eyes to
her, until she went out of his sight, but readily alive to her loss, he cursed
himself for not sticking to the portico. Thus, obsessed with her, though, inexplicably,
he rushed to the gate, only to see her turning the bend, even as Inspector
Shakeel came into view on his Bajaj Pulsar.
When the cop greeted the detective, feeling lost, he forced himself to hug him, even as his pet leapt up to the visitor in welcome; however, as Raju took away Dicey, wondering aloud what made him scarce, for nearly three months then, Dhruva led Shakeel into the portico. So, as the cop began to detail how he had reached the dead-end of a double murder investigation on hand, the detective closed his eyes, as if to avoid reading the script from his body language.
Shakeel’s Fixation
“Where was it?”
asked Shakeel.
“Last night
sir at 13, Red Hills,” said Karim.
“Are you sure
about our jurisdiction?” asked Shakeel, who was newly posted there.
“Very much,
sir,” said Karim unable to hide his irritation as if the question questioned his
procedural knowledge.
“Who’re the dead?”
“Man and his
mistress, sir.”
“What if it’s
a suicide pact?”
“No sir, they
could’ve been poisoned by the man’s wife.”
“What makes
you think so?”
“Pravar told
me, sir?”
“Who’s he by
the way?”
“He’s the
dead woman’s brother, sir.”
“What else
did he say?”
“He said that
Radha the murderess is on the run ever since.”
“Let me see
how long she can evade me,” said Shakeel, getting up.
“Not long
enough, sir,” said Karim stepping aside.
When the duo entered the drawing room of that dwelling
at 13, Red Hills, Pravar had drawn their attention to two empty glasses and a
half-empty Teacher’s Scotch bottle on the teapoy, with kaara boondi for company. When Shakeel surveyed the scene there,
Pravar ushered them into the adjacent bedroom, where Madhu and Mala lay dead on
a double cot bed. Soon, as the forensic squad, present by then, was at work,
providing Radha’s photograph to Shakeel, Pravar made out a case of her
poisoning the couple.
Leaving the
corpses to Karim’s care, when Shakeel returned to the police station with the
suspect’s photograph, he was surprised to find her there ‘to aid the
investigation’. But in spite of her pleas of innocence, Shakeel, influenced by
Pravar’s assertions, could not but see her hand in the double murder, and so
arraigned her as the sole suspect. Not only that, even though his sustained
custodial interrogation failed to crack her, believing in her guilt, so as to
extracting her confession, he brought every police trick up his sleeve into
play, including the third degree, but to no avail. Eventually however, he had
to set her free, owing to the judicial intervention, but yet he failed to free
himself from his sense of failure to pin her down to the murder of her man and
his mistress. As he was cut up thus, seeing Dhruva’s ad in The Deccan Chronicle for a ‘lady sleuth to assist him', he had a premonition that she might
try to secure the position to insulate herself. So as to preempt her move, he
had set out that evening to 9, Castle Hills, even in that inclement weather.
While Dhruva was grappling with that sum and substance of Shakeel’s recollection of the bygone
incident, the cop said in a lighter vein that if she were to come
under the detective’s wings, it could as well portend a romantic opening for
him in his middle-age.
“When you began, I too thought that a
murderess on the run makes an ideal prey to any womanizing cop like you that is
from what I’ve heard of you” said Dhruva jocularly; and then assuming a serious
look he wanted to know from the cop if
he had noticed a pretty woman at the bend. But picking up Shakeel’s blank look,
Dhruva said in jest that he had expected the cop to have an eye for women, if
not an ear to the underworld. And to Dhruva’s light-hearted banter, Shakeel
said that though he fancied himself as a womanizer, from what he had heard
about him, he was no match to him. Dismissing all that as exaggerated hearsay, the
detective led the cop into the study, where the latter poured out the problems
the death of Madhu, and Mala posed to the investigation.
On Pravar’s account, Madhu was hell-bent on divorcing Radha and that
would have left her in the dire stairs; won’ that be an enough motive, apart
from her rivalry with the other woman, to poison her man and his mistress. Never
mind her alibi that she was away with her friend when the illicit couple drank
the poisoned liquor to their death, won’t her possible means to poison the
drink make her the prime suspect. So her motive to murder them made it an
open-and-shut case; there was no difficulty in guessing that after somehow
poisoning the drink, she might have picked up a quarrel with them as an excuse
to leave them in a huff. But yet for Shakeel, her alibi had become a big hurdle
for him to cross over to pin her down, more so as she withstood the sustained
interrogation and came out clean in the lie-detector test as well!
Unable to hide his admiration for the unknown woman, when Dhruva said
as to how such a steely woman could have allowed herself to be so ill-treated,
Shakeel said what if, as a wounded tigress, she prowled on its prey in the garb
of a lamb. With the detective evincing a keen interest in the perplexing case,
the relieved cop savored the hot pakodas
that Raju had fetched, all the while detailing his investigation that led him
nowhere. However, when he ended his account by stating that the old guard, Appa
Rao, told him that Radha reminded him of Mithya, whom Dhruva could not bring to
book, the detective, with a perceptible change in his demeanor, dismissed it as
learning curve. But as Shakeel persisted with the topic, Dhruva said that it
was better they skipped it for it involved a dead woman, and when Raju served
them some Darjeeling tea, he changed the topic to the politics of the day that
was after committing himself to solving the intriguing case.
Long after Shakeel had left him,
Dhruva, having delved into his memory bank, was at fathoming the perplexing
present.
Could the trespasser be the murderess after all! But then, given his
focus on her, surely, if indeed it were she, Shakeel wouldn’t have failed to
spot her from a mile, even though the weather was foggy for a proper sight. And
in spite of her compelling face, he himself might fail to recognize her if he
were to espy her again before the contours of her exquisite frame would have
turned hazy in his memory. Was it possible that she was indeed innocent save
Shakeel’s silly theories; if it were indeed Radha, what had brought her to his
gate; did she, as the cop thought, came to seduce him so as to stall Shakeel’s
future maneuvers? If it were so, why should she have been so tentative to begin
with only to beat a hasty-retreat in the end? Could she be as ingenuous as
Mithya though she seemed as seductive; would history repeat itself after all?
Well, only time would tell; he thought.
Even as he seemed to love the idea of the trespasser being the alleged murderess, a restive Dicey went up to him making him wonder whether it sensed his distraction from its dead mistress. Soon though, he changed into his shorts and took the pet for a stroll in the twilight, by which time the drains got cleared to let the roads wear a fresh look to glisten under the newly lit streetlights. However, as the roadside trees were set to dry up themselves, the pet and its master got wet, and with the chilly winds too making it uneasy for them, as Dicey turned its tail homewards, Dhruva led it home, where Raju said that someone was waiting for him in the anteroom.
Ranjit’s Predicament
As Dhruva stepped into the anteroom, he came face to face with a
handsome man with an anxious face that bore the apprehensions of one who feared
for the life and limb of a dear one. When the visitor introduced himself as
Ranjit, the owner of the Oasis Builders,
assessing the middle-aged man as self-assured, Dhruva gave him a questioning
look. But as Ranjit said that he came to seek his help in freeing Kavya, his
thirty-six-year-old wife, kidnapped that very afternoon, Dhruva said in jest
that he was not in cohorts with the kidnappers. Hiding his irritation, as
Ranjit told him that his ad for a ‘lady sleuth’ had led him to the Castle
Hills, Dhruva in wonder led him into the study, where Raju fetched them some
steaming tea.
Ranjit said that he lives with his childless spouse in the Spandan, their bungalow in Jubilee Hills;
while he is an engineer, she has a L.L.B. added to M.A. in English, and yet at
his behest, she remained a homemaker for he was averse to a working wife. Of
late though, having become a bored housewife, as she was keen
on becoming a criminal lawyer, he didn’t
stall her from enrolling at the Bar, and yesterday, as she chanced to see
Dhruva’s ad for a ‘lady sleuth’, she felt that a short stint as his ‘assistant’
could come in handy in her career pursuit as a criminal lawyer. Aware though he
was about the hazards such an occupation posed, as there was no way of stopping
her for once she makes up her mind, there was no going back for her, damn the
consequences. So, on the way to his office, he posted her application for the
post that very morning, of course, without visualizing that by the evening, he would
be seeking the advertiser’s help in rescuing the applicant from her kidnappers!
But as Ranjit said that he was unable to fathom the vicissitudes of fate, the unexpected
development made Dhruva ponder over the imponderables of life.
As for the details, Ranjit said that as Kavya’s Alto was in the garage,
she telephoned him after lunch to know if he could spare his Audi for her to
reach her friend’s place by three-thirty; but given his own hopping schedule of
the day, he asked her to be on her own by hiring an auto. Nevertheless, when it
started raining heavily by three, he thought it fit to send her his car, so he
tried to reach her over phone but as he failed to connect with the land line as
well as her mobile, he called up her friend, who told him that she hasn’t
reached there yet. When he realized that Kavya didn’t make it there even at
four, he rushed to Spandan, only to find
a ransom note slipped in through the main door, which warned him not to
approach the cops. However, saying that as Dhruva was fresh in his mind, he
came to seek his help regardless, Ranjit handed over the missive to him, which
read:
Ranjitji, ensure your presence tomorrow
evening at the Tanesha statue on the Tank Bund from four to six in dark
trousers and a white shirt to convey your consent to pay three-crore rupees in
thousand denominations (less luggage, more comfort, for us all) to reclaim your
wife. Thereafter, you have only four days to exchange your black money with
your bright wife; so whenever you are ready with the money for the barter
before the deadline that is, be present at the Tanesha between five and eight
in the evening (mind the dress code) to take further instructions. But beware
of involving the khakis as that would only fetch you your wife’s body bag; it’s
no empty threat as you have her testimony hereunder. Also be warned, if you
carry any mobile phone with you, we will take the booty as well as your wife
over your dead body.
Yours expectantly,
Your wife’s captor
Testified by
Sd/-
Kavya Ranjit
When Ranjit confirmed that it was Kavya’s signature in that otherwise
unsigned note, as Dhruva secured it and said that they may better alert the
cops, Ranjit said sarcastically that for that instead of coming to the Castle
Hills, he could have directly gone to the Jubilee Hills Police Station. But as
Dhruva sternly retorted that he saw a case to apprehend him as the prime
suspect in his wife’s kidnap, Ranjit lost his cool and demanded an explanation for
the accusation. By way of response, the detective said nonchalantly that since there
was no way for Ranjit to receive the ransom note with his wife’s signature on
it, within an hour or so after her alleged kidnap, he should be put under the
scanner above all else. Unnerved though by the proposition but appreciating Dhruva’s
mental acumen and eye for detail, Ranjit confessed that preoccupied with his official
chores, he not only failed to track Kavya’s whereabouts after his call to her
friend at four but also reached home late in the evening, and added that he
just tried to test the waters before he entrusted the case to him.
As though to outsmart Ranjit, Dhruva turned naughty and said that since
Kavya’s signature was genuine, it indeed was a good news; but as Ranjit seemed
lost at the comment, lest he should take him for a cynic, Dhruva explained that
if it were a forgery, it would have meant that the captors were out to barter
her body for the booty. Then Ranjit, who remained apprehensive, said what if
Kavya was bumped off after having obtained her signature, Dhruva had assured
him that the kidnappers were no morons to harm her as he wouldn’t part with a
farthing until he had ensured that she was kicking and alive. However, as
Ranjit expressed his fears about his wife’s possible molestation in captivity,
Dhruva assured him that when a man kidnaps a woman for ransom, his lure for
money would act as her chastity belt; moreover, as the handwriting in the missive
betrayed a feminine slant, the captor was either a woman or a male with a female
accomplice, possibly a lover; if the kidnapper were to be a woman, then there may
be no violation but for a lesbian aberration, and were it to be a man-woman
enterprise, then any male enthusiasm for Kavya’s possession would have to
contend with the female proclivity of his accomplice to stall the same;
whatever, the idea of kidnap could be to collect ransom from the man and not to
molest his wife.
When Dhruva wanted to know Ranjit’s financial position to pay the ransom, just in case its inevitable, he said that he came to seek his help as he did not have so much money to cough up, and that prompted Dhruva to say in jest that he was no moneylender; but as Ranjit offered to pay him half a million to bust the kidnappers, Dhruva said that it might come in handy as and when he handled the cases of the ‘hand to mouths’. At that as Ranjit offered to take Dhruva to the Spandan, but in an auto for he made it to the Castle Hills by changing into a couple of them via a circuitous route, patting him for his presence of mind, Dhruva led him to his Esteem, and on their way to the Jubilee Hills in the snarling traffic, Ranjit narrated his life and times with his wife.
Rags to Riches
Kavya, a child prodigy, was the only offspring of a financially
hard-pressed couple from Kovvur, on the banks of the Godavari. As her parents
went to lengths to groom her well, she began to live up to their expectations,
and that prompted them to shift to Hyderabad to cater to her big-ticket talent.
While her father became a clerk in a real estate firm, her mother took to catering
for a couple of working women’s hostels, she strained her every nerve to top
the school. But coinciding with her entry into the college, her father ventured
into the real estate business, which by the time of her graduation in arts,
grew into Oasis Builders.
Soon, her parents made her marriage their dining table-talk; her
mother, wanting her daughter to have a better start than she herself had, was
bent upon a well-heeled groom, but her father, still smarting from the snubs of
his poor-groom days, vowed to give her hand to ‘a promising nobody with a
potential to become somebody’, as he put it. Un-enamored of riches, as Kavya
sided with her father, he soon zeroed in on Ranjit, and bowled by his looks,
she batted for him against her mother’s objections. However, in deference to
her mother’s wishes, she married Ranjit in Lord Balaji’s precincts at
Tirupathi, but sadly, in the return journey, as her parents were killed in a
road mishap, the Oasis Builders too
landed in the groom’s ownership lap.
By the time Ranjit finished the recap of his life and times with Kavya,
as they reached Road No. 69 in the Jubilee Hills that leads up to the Spandan, Dhruva brought the Esteem to a
halt at the street corner. Letting Ranjit go down the desolate road, and wanting
to be alerted on the mobile just in case, the detective stayed back to see if
anyone waited in the wings. When it was all clear, Dhruva followed suit by focusing
his torch all the way on the road, and entering the compound, he observed the
rain-drenched pathway and said that Kavya had left home when it was still
raining, and might have unwittingly hired an auto-rickshaw, lying in wait for
her.
Then stepping into the Spandan proper
and having scanned the insides, when Dhruva wanted to see Kavya’s photograph,
Ranjit handed him her photo album; and struck by her stunning features stunning
looks, he felt that they could be the portrayals of her fabulous persona. While
envisioning the poise of the vivacious woman, who would have become his
assistant in the normal course, the detective wondered whether her kidnapping
would be the loss of his lifetime. But when the impropriety of holding on to
the album dawned on him, he handed it back to Ranjit with the assurance that
she would be back in her man’s arms before he started missing her.
Soon, revealing the opening moves of the Operation Checkmate to set Kavya free from her kidnappers, and
leaving Ranjit thereafter, Dhruva called up Shakeel, on his mobile, wanting him
to set the informers behind the usual suspects. However, as the cop broached
the topic of Radha, recalling the mysterious trespasser, the detective wondered
if the temptress was indeed a murderess and whether she would ever venture into
9, Castle Hills or not might as well lie in her destiny.
Back home, after a quick shower, with his favorite Old Monk with Thums
Up for company, Dhruva began working on various moves of the endgame, and soon
succeeded in affecting a mental checkmate of Kavya’s captors. But, the thought
that she may not have any stomach left for the risky endeavors of a sleuth made
him feel like he was back to square one in his quest for a capable hand.
However, after an unappetizing dinner as he retired to bed thinking
about both the women in the same vein, he wondered if the woman ‘at the gate’
was indeed Radha, and felt that it was difficult to imagine her as a murderess.
He thought; if only Shakeel had showed him her photograph that Pravar gave him,
and wondered why he failed seek it himself? But feeling that it won’t behoove
well to ask for it afresh, he cursed his lack of the presence of mind, but
nevertheless thought that maybe, as a seductress, Radha could rival Mithya but
there could be no temptresses like Kavya for sure. Besides, won’t Kavya be an
invaluable asset even if she were half as cerebral as her husband pictured her?
When it suits him to have either Kavya or Radha to assist him, what a bonus it
could be if both of them joined him. Won’t it be real fun with both of them
around but given the attendant jealousies, it could as well be a hard grind for
him. But then, after all this mess, would she like to join him?
What with the myriad thoughts about them continued to storm his head; he had a disturbed sleep that long night.
Dhruva’s Dilemma
Waking up early and finishing his chores readily, Dhruva found himself
in the portico, fixing his stare at the gate, though wondering at his obsession
for an unknown dame, possibly a murderess. Having had his breakfast there
itself, and weary after a long vigil thereafter, as if he became wiser to the
hopeless wait, he retreated into his study and lost himself in fine-tuning the Operation Checkmate of Kavya’s captors. So,
when Raju appeared at the lunch-time, he wanted to have his meal in the study
itself; and after his prolonged siesta, grabbing the mail that was fetched to him,
he found the expected application from Kavya and an unexpected letter from one
Radha Rani, C/o. Begumpet Post Office.
‘How ingeniously inviting; is she the alleged murderess?’ he thought having
read the latter. ‘But then Shakeel was referring to her as Radha and not as
Radha Rani; maybe he gave a damn to the superfluous Rani, akin to the
vainglorious suffix of Devi; but sans the suffix, could this Radha be the real
one or merely her namesake? Isn’t the duality of the possibility intriguing,
but whoever it is, can she be as good as Mithya where it matters? But of what avail
her eagerness if she were to be a plain thing; why won’t she spare me the
perils of attraction in the portals of proximity. At any rate, for man’s peace
of mind the serene presence of an un-alluring dame serves better than the
flirty tempest of a desirable woman. But then, sans the tumult of the heart,
can there be life in life; oh, how the absence of woman is killing!’
Given her eagerness for the job, Dhruva felt that waiting for his reply,
Rani could be right up there at the post office, and so he penned a call-letter
post-haste and hurried Raju on the errand wondering what the future had in
store for him. However, seeing Raju’s back, as he readily picked up Kavya’s post,
he was amused at his fickle mindedness for having given precedence to an
unknown woman over someone he fancied.
‘Added to the stream of boldness, isn’t there a strain of rashness to
Kavya’s persona?’ he thought folding her letter. ‘If not for the fiasco, wouldn’t
she have filled the gap that Mithya’s death had created in his professional
life? Why foreclose the option, as all it takes is to see that my interview
call greets her on her return to her Spandan,
and who knows, after the dust settles down, she may not be averse to answer my
call. Whatever, Ranjit should be cautioned not to let her know about my
involvement in the Operation Checkmate
for even if I were to click with Radha, nay Rani, why shouldn’t Kavya provide
the second string to my investigative bow? What if I fall in love with her as
well; so what, that would be the second one to the Cupid’s thing, what a
welcome prospect that could be? But then, why place the cart before the horse, or
horses to be precise, when life would take its own course anyway.’
When the clock struck four, attired in black trousers and a white shirt
- Dhruva thought of dressing like Ranjit, and be present nearby the Tanesha
statue every day till the D-day to let Kavya’s captors take him to be a regular
- he stepped out of his abode to step
into an auto. Soon reaching the Tank Bund, and alighting from it at the Nannaya
statue, he walked up to the nearby Siddhendrayogi’s; and finding Ranjit at the
Tanesha’s, he himself settled nearby on the lush green lawns where with a book
in hand, and seemingly engrossed in it, he kept a hawk’s eye on the traffic and
the passers-by alike.
Then around five, a white Maruti Zen, driven by a twenty-something guy,
slowed down as it neared the Tanesha from the Ranigunj side, and before it was
six, as that car of Karnataka registration made two more rounds in like
fashion, Dhruva thought the one at the wheel could be the driving force behind
Kavya’s kidnap. Since the suspect came alone to pick up Ranjit’s signal of
consent, the detective reasoned that his accomplice, possibly the woman who
penned the ransom note, might have held back holding Kavya in captivity. Though
he suspected that the Zen could be a stolen one, yet he called up Shakeel to
pass on the vehicle number, after which, he left the scene leaving Ranjit
alone.
Back home, as Dhruva awaited Rani’s expected arrival, Shakeel came to
him seeking his helping hand to close in on an inter-state counterfeit-note
racket that came to the fore just then. Though he was disinclined to leave home
lest he should miss out on Rani, if she were to show up, yet his proclivity to
face professional challenges got the better of his need for courting the woman
he enamored; so, briefing Raju as to how to deal with her, in case she turned
up, he accompanied the cop to the Saifabad Police Station.
After burning a lot of midnight oil at the police station along with the
cop, the detective developed a blueprint of the Operation Moolah for the former to fine-tune its logistical
aspects; and thereafter as he reached home, fearing that he might have missed
the date with Rani, Raju informed him that none came to see him.
‘How I hoped this woman would fill in the void; am I flattered to be
deceived?’ he thought in all disappointment.
What with his obsession for Rani that accentuated the pain of his year-long
loneliness occasioned by Mithya’s death growing by the hour; he became pensive
thinking that she might have developed second thoughts about joining him. Soon
though, as his thoughts insensibly turned to Kavya, he felt that had Oscar
Wilde espied her, perhaps he might have paraphrased his smoking quote as an ode
to her - the perfect example of a perfect beauty - and began to wonder what
would have happened had she, instead of being kidnapped, made it to 9, Castle
Hills.
Thus he spent the rest of the night imagining the possibilities till
his tiredness induced him into a deep sleep.
The Gatecrasher
While Dhruva was still lounging in his bed, as Raju announced the
arrival of a middle-aged woman, wondering whether it could be Rani, he asked him
to make her feel at home in the study before he could meet her there. Thereafter,
as Dhruva took his sweet time to put his best foot forward, Raju began lifting
him to the skies before her, but when he heard approaching footsteps, he left
the scene to make way for his master’s entry.
Sensing the import of the moment, even as she stood up in all eagerness,
realizing at the threshold that she was the one he was craving for, ogling at
her unabashedly as he turned ecstatic in his approach, enamored of him, she turned
coy, making him all the more covetous. What’s more, as he advanced towards her,
bowled by his masculinity, and as if to quench their common thirst in the sands
of lust, she too rushed to him as one would towards an oasis in a desert. So, while
he opened his arms impulsively, parting her lips sanguinely, she sank into his
arms amorously, and as if to cement their union, he closed in on them
passionately. Then, induced by his ardency, though her femininity came to the
fore, and his dream came true, she unlocked his lips, as if to regain her
breath. Thereby, as he crooned into her ears that ever since he saw her at the
threshold of his domain, he had a premonition that she would come back to him,
averring that she just tried to test the waters before venturing into the
whirlpool of his life, she reached for his lips all again.
Then, gripping her in his ardent embrace, when he asked her if she was
Radha, the alleged murderess, having crooned into his ear that she was Rani the
man-eater, she bit it coquettishly. Writhing in pain, as he told her that he
fell in love with her as Radha the killer, she said alluringly that she came
for the kill and so he was better be on guard against her ambush. But feigning
alarm, as he withdrew from her, taking his arm enticingly, as if to reassure
him, she said that he might as well banish Radha from his mind and engage her
with single-mindedness; and as he hugged her endearingly, smug in his embrace,
she said coyly that she craved for a live-in with him. Then as he told her in
jest that he needed to take the consent of Raju and his wife Vimala, who
attended on him, she said teasingly that she would beseech them to ‘let her in’
so that she could ‘let him in’. When he told her that it shouldn’t be a hassle
for Raju was a retired constable who was ever devoted to him, she said in half
jest that she hoped to be blessed with a like devotion from his master; and as
if to demonstrate his intent, going down on his knees and hugging her at her
declivity, he assured her more of it. Thus enthralled by his romanticism, as
she lifted him to her bosom, he led her into his bedroom, where, giving herself
in coition, she goaded him on to their orgasm.
After a sensually fulfilling time followed by a sumptuous lunch, when
he went into his siesta, she left for her dwelling to fetch her belongings.
And for his part, waking up at three, he left for the Tank Bund, and as
soon as he sat with a book in hand at the Tanesha statue to monitor the moving
vehicles, he cited a blue Santro slowing down; noticing that it was the same
guy who made rounds in the white Maruti Zen the other day, he could discern his
puzzled look at finding a different character in the stipulated dress code
there. However, at five, after making a couple of rounds, as the explorer sped
away towards Ranigunj, the intruder in satisfaction left the place to reach home
in anticipation.
Back home, as the thrill of finding Rani-in-wait seemed so reminiscent
of his times with Mithya, he told her how he looked forward to her filling the
emotional void in his lonely life. When she teased him that after having had
his fill with her, he might as well be craving for a refill with his dream girl
Radha, leading her to the liquor-cabinet, he told her that she might as well
fathom his mind by keeping him high. Saying
that she was a game for it, she opted for the ‘ladies’ Gin when he offered her
‘manly’ Rum, and having had a couple of drinks they ate Vimala’s ‘spicy’
preparations with great relish only to rush into his bedroom. What with her
company affording him a regular night for the first time after Mithya’s demise;
he had gone into deep sleep thinking about the regular day to follow.
Waking up late and having had an exhilarating day with the doting live-in, in the evening, he took her along with him to the Tank Bund, where she strolled around the place and he sat near the Tanesha, waiting for the rigmarole to begin. When the guy, this time in the white Maruti Zen, slowed down near him, he could clearly see that he was puzzled by his presence that day as well. However, after making a couple of rounds, as that chap drove away for the day, Dhruva joined Rani and took her for a boat-ride in the abutting Hussainsagar. Though she wanted to hear about the nitty-gritty of the Operation Checkmate in the making, so as not to spoil their joy-ride, he said that she might as well see the drama unfold itself on the D-day the next day.
Operation Checkmate
When it was 4 P.M the D-day, though Dhruva was raring to go, Rani was
in no hurry to desert her dressing table; but when he began hurrying her, as
she hastened down the stairs, she slipped on the staircase. Even though she
said that she was fine, yet he drove her to the Hyderabad Nursing Home, where
the doctor ruled out even a hairline fracture, but ignoring her pleas to be
taken along with him, he sent her home with Raju, whom he brought along with
them.
Shortly thereafter, reaching the nearby Tank Bund, he quickly made it
to the Siddhendrayogi statue, and seeing the white Maruti Zen in the parking
bay, he realized that the game was on though there was none to be seen around.
But even before he could settle down on the lawns aside the majestic statue,
Ranjit drove his Audi into the same parking bay, and alighting from his car
with two bulging travel bags, and visibly nervous, he passed by Dhruva towards
the nearby Tanesha statue. Soon, beginning in trickles, as people started
flocking to the place to occupy vantage points on the sprawling lawns as well
as on the tank-side benches, as if on cue, a handful of fast food vendors
descended upon the scene to spread all over; even as they were trying to induce
those present to taste their recopies, the toy-wallahs, who followed them, did not lag behind in tempting the
kids with fancy playthings.
When a fast food vendor, apparently in disguise, posited his chaat basket near the Tanesha statue,
seeing him ill at ease in the calling, Dhruva knew that he was indeed the one
to be marked. As the sun began to set on the Hussainsagar Lake, the vendor went
up to Ranjit and preparing some chaat,
he began chitchatting with him; soon, handing over the stuff in a paper-plate
to Ranjit, the imposter, on the sly, passed on his mobile to him. With a
satisfied look on his face as Ranjit unzipped both the travel bags, elated, the
guy took away the mobile from him, and having connected it to someone; he gave
it back to Ranjit, who seemed relieved as he held it to his ear. But as Ranjit
tended to hold on to it, the guy snatched it away from him, and waited in the
wings without taking his eyes off him. Soon, when it got a little darker, he
signaled to Ranjit to go down the staircase in the backside that led to the
road below; so when Ranjit picked up the luggage and ventured into the vault of
that staircase, the guy called someone on his mobile; and abandoning his wares
as is where, as he too followed suit, Dhruva reached for his mobile.
Shortly thereafter the detective noticed a young woman, her face hidden
in the pallu of her sari, emerge from the staircase and walk towards the Maruti Zen, and discerning the excitement
in her nervous gait, he knew that she was the accomplice of Kavya’s captor. However,
arraigning her was not a part of the Operation
Checkmate, he let her drive away in the white Maruti Zen; moreover, without
espying her visage, yet he had experienced an unusual empathy for her.
Soon thereafter, as Ranjit too passed him by with Kavya, his eyes
followed her all the way to the Audi; what with her glowing persona and
pleasing poise, even in that dull setting, appealed to his romanticism, he
could not help but divine her provocative figure in her evocative gait; and
finding her enchanting in her state of confusion, he began wondering how
enticing she could be in the moments of her excitation. So, when Shakeel called
him to inform him about the capture of the kidnapper, he was still under the
mesmeric spell of Kavya’s ethereal charms that paled his photographic visualizations
into insignificance.
However, the breaking news from Shakeel that the culprit turned out to be Pravar diverted his mind to the mysterious Radha, the suspected murderess. Amazed though at the development, he turning business-like, wanted the cop to send someone to pick up Pravar’s chaat basket, whatever be its forensic worth; and waiting for a constable to come to pick up the thing, he called up Rani to enquire about the state of her ‘leggy self’. Learning that she was jumping like a jack and was eager for the news, as he apprised her of the developments, she blamed him for having deprived her thrill of participation; and having cajoled her; he said in half jest that he hoped she would not hold it against him to deny him the thrill of their nocturnal indulgences.
Foul on Pravar
On reaching home, and seeing Rani at the gate, Dhruva could realize how
eager she was to hear it all from the horse’s mouth. So, as if to drive home
his empathy at her having missed to see the exciting race, lighting his cigar, he
began his narrative in the portico, and she said that in the excitement of it,
the aroma of the lanka pogaku was
more exhilarating than ever. Ending his move with the rescue of the captive, he
said that for the checkmate of the captor, they have to wait for Shakeel to
come on air at 9.
So, tuning into TV9, they began having their drinks; and in time, Shakeel
was seen on the screen along with a handcuffed youth, whom he named as Pravar,
the kingpin of the fake-note racket that he had busted that evening. As Karim
laid some bundles of thousand-rupees notes on the table before a dazed Pravar,
Shakeel boasted that the police would catch the other members of the gang
sooner than later.
“I don’t believe a word of that cop, why his body language spoke all
lies,” said Rani
“Given the stock of the khakis, you can’t be faulted,” said Dhruva.
“But I’ll fault you,” she said coyly, “if you default in telling the
truth.”
“What struck me in the ransom
note was the kidnappers’ choice of the rendezvous that too at a time when it
gets crowded the most,” he said, switching off the TV and lighting a fresh
cigar. “Maybe the idea was to enable the kidnappers to spot the cops in the mufti, if any, but still, it was risky
as the police could lay in wait for them on either side of the Tank Bund.
Wouldn’t have the kidnappers taken that into account? It only suggested that
they could hit upon a foolproof plan to facilitate the Operation Exchange. But why were they specific that Ranjit should
wait near the Tanesha statue; surveying its environs, I could see a nearby
vaulted staircase that led to the roadside Maisamma temple down below.”
“When we were in Gaganmahal, I used to use the stairs for my morning
walks on the Tank Bund,” she said reminiscently.
“How I wish I had met you then,” he said.
“Why, it’s better late than never,” she said.
“But not in the affairs of heart; thank god we have aligned before it
was too late to write home about it,” he said squeezing her hand. “Well, given
the location of the staircase, it wasn’t difficult to visualize the envisaged
plan of exchanging the maal for the moolah;
even as the male captor would deal with Ranjit on the Tank Bund, his female
accomplice would hold Kavya on the road below, usually desolated at that hour. And
once Ranjit is made to go down the staircase with the ransom, Kavya could be
led up for the operation exchange midway with the violators blocking the way
both ways. Even if someone happened to use the staircase then, the Ranjits
could be silenced with advance threats, and what is more, the double entry or
exit, as the case may be, affords the kidnappers a two-way get-away in the
escape vehicles, one parked on the Tank Bund, and the other stationed nearby
Maisamma Temple.”
“Isn’t it foolproof?” said Rani, “But how come they came a cropper.”
“No denying that but ironically it’s the brilliance of the plan that
betrayed their idea behind it,” said Dhruva. “Initially I thought of freeing
Kavya, by arraigning her captor without her partner on the Tank Bund getting
wind of it but as you know, by then, Shakeel laid his hands on those fake notes
in the Operation Moolah though the
culprits gave him the slip. I don’t know why, but I got a naughty idea; what if
the fake money was clothed as ransom amount and the kidnapper pictured as the
kingpin of the counterfeit racket? Though Shakeel was excited at that prospect,
yet he was afraid of the pitfalls, and it took a great deal of effort on my
part to make him fall in line.”
Though Rani admired him for his ingenuous idea, Dhruva said that on
second thoughts, he felt that it was morally reprehensible and conceptually
unethical; and turning remorseful as he said that, given a chance, he would not
repeat it for sure, she told him that the episode brought to the fore her own
guilt in her cynical enterprise, and like him, she too would not like to repeat
it. Puzzled by her mane and manner, though he pressed her to confide in him,
but smiling sweetly, she said that he might as well wait for she was not
running away from him right then. At that, he said in jest that he would break
her legs to stop her from leaving him, and she reminded him coquettishly that
she was within his arms reach, so even as he took her into his arms, he
received a call from Shakeel.
Complimenting him for the finesse in the execution of the Operation Checkmate, though the detective invited him to exchange notes, the cop excused himself as he had to rush to his native place to see his ailing mother.
Stockholm Syndrome
Next day, when Ranjit reached 9,
Castle Hills, Dhruva was playing shuttle badminton with Rani in its backyard,
and as Raju announced his arrival, Dhruva playfully told Rani that he would
like to flaunt her before the visitor. Turning coquettish, she told him that
she had no eyes for any other man, and not to be outdone, he said that had she
been there on the Tank Bund the other day, Ranjit would have lost his eyes for
her, thereby putting Pravar in a fix. She said joyously that though she was
flattered, she was eager to know how Kavya could have spent the time with her
captors, and he told her that she better eavesdrop as he closeted with her man.
Chiding him for wanting to spoil her morals, she got into the swimming pool,
and he went into the study to meet the visitor.
Dismissing his apologies for having kept him waiting, Ranjit lost no
time in blaming him for the fake-notes mess he had created for him, though
falling short of demanding compensation for the damage caused. Turning
apologetic for not having taken him into confidence, the culprit explained to
the aggrieved that had he been privy to the plan, he would have probably
fumbled in handling Pravar, and that would have put his wife’s life at risk.
However, Ranjit bemoaned that Kavya was cut up with him for playing foul with
Pravar for he treated her fairly in her captivity.
At length, cajoled by Dhruva that all that would come to a pass, Ranjit
placed the Kavya-cards on the table - in the pouring rain, around three that
day, she stepped out of the Spandan wondering
how to hire an auto; what a hassle it was in Hyderabad as the auto-wallahs tended to veto the savaaris. So, when a youth drove his
auto straight up to her, thinking it was a Godsend, she got into it, and to
spare herself the spatter, she gratefully accepted his offer to unwind the
Rexene windshields. Not long after they turned the bend, as a well-drenched
young woman was beckoning for an auto, he asked her if she would like to
accommodate the hapless lass, out of humanitarian consideration, she consented
to his proposition.
However, the next thing that she could recall was that she woke up in
an alien place with the pair around, who, after introducing themselves as
Pravar and Natya, began to press her to disclose her man’s monitory worth. Though
she kept mum initially but as he warned her that she better revealed that
before he forced her to tell about her man’s manly worth as well, she retorted
that it was unbecoming of a man to trick a woman on the sly. But when he asked
Natya to leave him alone to enable him to assess her womanly worth, afraid of
rape, she agreed to cooperate. When he thought of a ransom of five-crore rupees,
she told him that he might forget about it; and even as he scaled it down to
three-crores, yet as she protested, but he told her that she might count her
days if her man was not prepared to cough up even that much.
While confining her in the guestroom of at desolated house on the
outskirts, and having warned her against any misadventure, they took turns to
guard her, lest she should give them a slip. Though Pravar was younger to her by
twelve years, but whenever she was alone with him, she was ever in fright that
he might turn eager for her; and during the nights, though he was fast asleep
on the floor, holding the rope that tied both her hands, keeping an eye on him,
lying on the cot, she used to keep awake all night. However, he always tried to
win her sympathy by picturing his wayward life, and Natya too went out of her
way to earn her goodwill by catering to her every need. So, when she told him
that once freed, she might practice law, he said jocularly that if only she
took his briefs, he would ensure that her wallet bulged like a pregnant womb.
Well, his semantics only helped aggravate her lurking fear of rape that was at
the back of her mind all the while - that was the long and short of Kavya’s
ordeal of a kidnap.
Asked about his rendezvous on the Tank Bund, Ranjit said that after
verifying the ransom money and ensuring that there were no khakis around in the
mufti; Pravar let him talk to Kavya
on the mobile phone. Later, followed by Pravar, as Ranjit was half way down the
staircase, he saw Natya leading Kavya up the steps, and after the operation exchange, as Natya ascended
the stairs; Pravar descended the vault with the booty. Moved by his concern for
her, though his wife thanked him all the way to the Spandan, but seeing Shakeel implicate Pravar in the fake-note case in
that TV presser, she became so furious that she wanted an explanation from him.
When he told her that he had no inkling about it at all, she saw it as a dirty
trick of the police to serve their own ends, and he tried to pacify her by
saying that, in either case, Pravar had to serve the sentence. However, maintaining
that it was no justification for such falsification, she said that Pravar used
to joke about her carrying his briefs and wondered aloud what if she took up
his case.
While Ranjit lamented that he was at a loss to understand Kavya’s
inexplicable behavior, cautioning him not to let her ever get wiser to the
nuances of her rescue act, Dhruva counseled him to keep his cool while she got
over her nerves. But harping on how the misadventure had upset his mate, Ranjit
wondered of what avail it all was, and thus having put her rescuer on the back
foot, he extricated himself from his commitment by handing the latter a cheque
for a paltry twenty-thousand. Measuring Ranjit’s meanness in that meager
amount, yet the detective told him to call on him if he ever needed any help,
and as an after-thought enquired about the fate of his call letter to his wife.
Glad for being saved from playing the blame game, Ranjit said that having read
it, without a comment, his wife had tucked it in her handbag.
Seeing Ranjit’s back, as Dhruva turned pensive, Rani, failing to enliven
him with her coquetry, nevertheless, managed to cajole him into breaking his
silence; he said that he was worried that the foisted case on Pravar might end
up hurting Kavya in wayward ways; and urged by Rani to elaborate his
conjecture, he elucidated the intriguing aspects of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.
“It’s a psychic state in which the kidnapped turn sympathetic to their
captors after they are freed,” he said. “It is said that the survival instinct
activates the defensive mechanism in the captives to let them identify
themselves with the captors to ward off possible violence against them. In that
state of emotional stress and physical duress, accentuated by a sense of
helplessness dominated by fear, the captives magnify small acts of kindness by
their captors. Wonder how I failed to factor that!”
“What an irony is that!” said
Rani.
“Courtesy those four days in
Pravar’s captivity, apparently her latent sympathies for the underdogs
resurged,” he said pensively. “Maybe, she came to identify herself more with
her depraved captor rather than with her mean man, who came to enjoy her
father’s bequeath by default.”
“I’ve heard of a story, fact, or
fiction I can’t say,” said Rani. “Seeing a murderer being paraded to the
gallows, it was love at first sight for a girl, and what’s more, she wanted to
marry him before he was hanged, and so begged the king to spare his life; my
memory fails me at that.”
“Dear, it’s all about the perplexities of human psychology,” said Dhruva. “Coming back to Kavya, it is possible that in Ranjit’s move to deny Pravar the ransom, she could have seen the propensity of the rich to deprive the poor. Now that Pravar was falsely implicated, her sympathy for him would have acquired weird emotional wings as well; and given Ranjit’s presumed deceitfulness towards Pravar, she might begin to lean towards her ex-captor even more. What is more, where it all might lead her to, her fate only would know; how I wish she wouldn’t become another Patty Hearst; you may know that Hearst even became an accomplice of her captors to assist them, of all things, in bank robberies. May God forbid that to Kavya, but the silver-lining is that Hearst could come out of her psychic aberration to disown her gory association. Maybe, as I created the mess, I may have to clear it up as well.”
An Aborted Affair
When Rani proposed a trip to Ooty to let him bide his time as she did
his bidding, Dhruva pitched in for ‘train journey’, but as she wanted to ‘air
dash’ so as not to ‘lose time’, they boarded an Indian Airlines flight that
very evening. Upon landing at the airport, on their way to a star-hotel, even
as the serene surroundings of the hill resort refreshed his mind, her innate
romanticism too insensibly enamored his heart; and once ensconced in the hotel
suite, making it their love nest, they rarely ventured out of it.
Soon, amidst the ‘time of their lives’, Ranjit him rang up to lament
over the ugly turn of the events in his vexatious life.
Kavya went to the Cherlapalli jail to apologize to Pravar for what had
happened, and as the culprit played up to her psyche by exaggerating his
plight, she became obsessive about earning him a reprieve, and disregarding his
objection, she took up her ex-captor’s vakalat,
making him wonder where all that would lead her to; so he was at a loss as to
how to wean her away from that vagabond.
Dismayed at the unforeseen development, Dhruva said that it was better
that Ranjit kept his cool for the best course of action seemed to be inaction
then; he also advised him to leave her alone until she got over her obsession
for any hurdles he might place in her way could only buttress her resolve to
surmount them, leading her to a disastrous end. Though he tried to shore up
Ranjit’s spirits, he himself was saddened that the beauty he coveted has come
under the emotional grip of the beast of his own creation, he couldn’t warm up
even to Rani he began to love.
However, as he began to resign himself to her fate, making it a double
jeopardy for him, soon, a furious Shakeel rang him up to recount how Kavya had hauled
him over the coals in the court hall on Pravar’s account. She urged the judge
to take note of the fact that Pravar was a petty thief and not a mafia don as
is being made out by the police, and drove home the point that as he was the
sole accused, it was inconceivable that he single-handedly ran a multi-crore
fake-notes racket. Besides, arguing that Shakeel had foisted a false case on her
client; she suggested that the cop could’ve seized the booty while the bootleggers
gave him the slip, or who knew, he might have let them off at the behest of the
powers that be; so to cover up his lapses, and to earn some false laurels, he
made Pravar the fall guy.
That was not all, she produced Natya in the court, who sensationally
revealed that not only Kavya had stayed with Pravar and her for four days prior
to his arrest but also she accompanied them to the Tank Bund in the very car in
which the fake currency notes were allegedly found by the police. She also swore
that having parked the car nearby Maisamma Temple, all three of them went up to
the Tank Bunk to relax and recreate, and at some point, as Kavya complained of
headache, Pravar went down to fetch the Saridon tablets kept in their car, and
it was then that he was apprehended by the police to foist the fake-notes case
on him. And that stunned all, including the judge.
What with Natya having come up trumps in the intense cross-examination
that followed, there was no way the public prosecutor could have pulled the rug
from under her feet as no case of kidnap was registered against Pravar or her.
As the judge was quick in passing strictures against Shakeel, making him curse
Dhruva for once, he nevertheless asked the public prosecutor to seek time for
further investigation. Thus when the judge ordered the release of Pravar on
bail, all applauded Kavya’s sterling performance, and as a grateful Pravar
thanked her no end, an appalled Ranjit led her out of the court hall.
Then, a dumbfounded Dhruva had to strain every nerve to convince Shakeel
that their failure was owing to the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ that he had failed to
factor in while fashioning the Operation
Checkmate; and having vented his anger against Kayva, the cop stunned the
detective by revealing, as if as an afterthought, about Pravar’s damning admission,
during the interrogation, of having poisoned his sister and her lover, and
vowed to book him for the double murder. However, seeing the futility of
apprehending Pravar, based on his confession in police custody, for any novice
of a lawyer could induce the court to set him free for want of evidence, the
detective advised the cop to better guard himself against the wounded Pravar.
Nursing his self-inflicted wounds thereafter, and having realized that
his meaningless obsession with Radha failed his investigative logic in heading
towards Pravar, Dhruva felt ashamed of his professional incompetence. That his
ill-conceived idea to bring the fake notes into the ransom play has come to
derange Kavya and embarrass Shakeel has only added to his depressive feeling. Thus,
with the damage done and his pride dented, he showed no inclination to return to
action, though the cop was ever on the phone to goad him to be back soon.
However, as Rani was all-eager to make the best of their sojourn, in
the euphoria of their whirlwind romance that rolled days and nights into one,
time seemed but a fleeting moment of their passion. So, when he sought her hand
in marriage, she sought to excuse herself, and perplexed by her inexplicable rebuff,
he became unrelenting in his pleas; but as she disclosed that she was a married
woman, he was aghast beyond belief. Nonetheless, bowled by her charms, though he
insisted that she divorce her man to adorn his life, she remained unmoved, and devastated
by her refusal to yield, he demanded to know what prompted her to become such a
heartless flirt.
Rani’s parents hailed from Waltair, where she graduated in arts; after which
as she moved over to Hyderabad, she met Ramesh, to whose advances she had
readily yielded; but realizing the gravity of her transgression, she goaded him
to regularize their irregular union. While he wanted time to sort out things
with his parents, who were averse to their union on caste considerations, her
parents were in a hurry to give her hand to Satish, who they thought was a suitable
boy in every way. So, as Ramesh continued to dilly dally even though she ran
out of excuses to spurn Satish’s hand, she forced the issue with her lover, who
revealed that he was already a married man; and shaken to the core, she married
the latter to repair her life as his wife.
What with Satish’s charm and wit inducing warmth in her jilted life,
she soon got over the bitterness of her betrayed past; so they had been reaping
the fruits of their conjugation, well past the seven year itch, though without
laying the seeds of it, which was the only hitch in their blessed match. Maybe
to make up for that lacking, as Satish got obsessed with his career to the
exclusion of all else, she came to bear the brunt of her barrenness; and what’s
worse, three years back, he developed an ambition to start a mega venture of
his own, which only turned their home into his office in the offing. So, as
courted his career with passion, keeping her libido in the cold, she began
entertaining the idea of an extramarital affair.
When she made up her mind to spice up her life in a liaison, as she
recalled Ramesh’s trickery, her erotic idea came to acquire a vengeful edge, inducing
her to develop an urge to play a la
Ramesh with a man to get even with him in the man’s world. It was then that
she recalled the cop who had put her cousin Ashok’s murder under the carpet,
over which he led his murderess wife to the altar, and that motivated her to
avenge the foul play. But when she came to know that Mithya the killer was no more
and her cop lover became Detective Dhruva, she came to see him as an ideal
target for her sexual revenge as well.
While she was upbeat at that thought, coinciding with Satish’s exploratory
visit to the U.S for a business tie-up, appeared Dhruva’s ad for an assistant
lady sleuth; it was her idea to incite his curiosity by loitering at the gate
that rainy day as a prelude to taking him into her revengeful arms. But soon, lost
in his passion, she lost her appetite for revenge, and as he began to love her
too, she developed an urge to bear his child; so she would have loved to make
love to him until she had missed her periods, but as her man was due by the
weekend; it was time she ended her sojourn with him, but for all she knew,
their child might well be in the offing.
Aghast at that, as a despaired Dhruva begged her to divorce her man and
marry him; she said that she would rather stick to her husband than tie up with
a philanderer like him. Even though he vouched for his eternal fidelity, as she
didn’t yield on the emotional ground, so as to turn her around, he played up to
her ego by praising her beauty and brains no end. But unmoved still, as she
said that he being a ladies’ man, there wouldn’t be any dearth of desirable mates
for him, he begged her not to make it a sudden death to his ardor and continue
their liaison till he could master his emotions. Still remaining unrelenting, as she said
that it was no way to make the best of the hoped for change in her life, he retorted
by saying that she was being cruel to him; and yet maintaining that it was part
of life, she told him that he would be able to put all that behind him as soon
as he fancies some dame.
Psyche of Revenge
When a dejected Dhruva returned home alone that evening, Raju informed
him that some Radha came to see him in the morning. What with the lost love and
his hurt ego haunting him, he thought no more of petticoat chasing, even if it
were the coveted Radha, whom, after Shakeel’s revelation, he came to pity as
well, so he thought. Whatever, to catch up with the lost time and to get back
to the brass-tacks of his business, he invited the cop to review the Operation Checkmate afresh over a couple
of drinks.
Lying in wait in mufti near
Maisamma temple, said Shakeel sipping ‘Teachers’ on the rocks, he sighted the
earmarked Santro, driven by a young woman. After she brought the vehicle to a
halt, nearby the roadside shrine, he alerted the patrol parties stationed at
all the exit points. When he was nearly tired of keeping focus on the target in
that dim light, he saw the woman alight from the car along with Kavya, whom she
readily led into the vaulted staircase abutting the in-built temple. Shortly
thereafter, he had seen a familiar looking figure emerge from the staircase
with the handbags that he himself had arranged for the Operation Checkmate. While the guy was about to get into the
Santro, a Skoda passed him by, and in the flash of its headlights, he was
surprised to realize that he was none other than Pravar himself. However, when the
rogue steered the car towards the Ramakrishna Mutt Road, he had alerted the
patrol party in wait near the Dharna
Chowk, and by the time, he himself joined them, they had already nabbed the
stunned culprit. But it was his own turn to be shocked, when, during
interrogation, Pravar revealed his hidden hand in the unresolved double murder
of Madhu and Mala.
Sparing the cop with his barbs for once, the detective wanted a picture
of the captor’s background to bring the captive’s perturbed psyche to the
foreground. So began Shakeel to sketch Pravar’s skewed past.
Mala was ten when Pravar was born, and soon thereafter, as their mother
became sickly, their father took to drinking, further denting their family’s meager
resources. What with a drunkard father to contend with, a sickly mother to attend
to and a younger sibling to provide for, Mala began to mature more than her
age. However, when her brother was ten, their father kicked the bucket, and
shortly thereafter, thanks to her good looks and a relative’s good
samaritanism, Suraiah, a measly clerk in the civil works department, came into
her life as her man. Just the same, she was discomfited as he turned out to be
utterly miserly, for she believed that a paisa
well-spent was far more worthy than a horded rupee, but soon, as her mother
too died, making her brother an orphan, her husband, in spite of his
reservations, had to accommodate him in their home. Pravar was fourteen then.
Sadly, that arrangement didn’t auger well for Pravar as he was torn
between his sister’s affection and his brother-in-law’s resentment to his
presence in the house, which turned him into a schizophrenic: while his
physical proximity to her insensibly induced in him a sub-conscious sexual
affinity with her, her marital closeness with the man he abhorred inexorably bred
a sexual jealousy in him. And that made him an awkward being, perturbing Mala and annoying Suraiah but
attracting Rajan, a hardened criminal, who took him under his tutelage. As his wayward
ways that followed made his brother-in-law take jibe at his sister, it further fuelled
his subconscious oneness with her; but when his nemesis died in a road mishap,
with no rival to her affections, he began to dote upon her like never before,
which suited her as well, for it catered to her innate need for male attention.
In time though, as she was absorbed in the department on compassionate
grounds, she began leaning towards Madhu, her enamored boss, and for its part, destiny
that scripts its acts in life’s plays with some denouement in mind, enabled
Rajan to trick a young Natya into eloping with him. And that proved to be a
double jeopardy for Pravar; bitten by Natya’s charms, even as he was eying her,
seeing it as a travesty of his devotion to Mala, he was beset by qualms. But
soon though, further accentuating his mental distress, as Mala became Madhu’s keep,
and seeing her dote on the new man in her life, he was truly depressed. Soon, as
Madhu reduced his young son Raghu into Mala’s errand boy, Pravar took up
cudgels with his sister on the boy’s behalf, but perceiving that was the
privilege of a mistress, she paid a deaf ear to his protestations. As a result, he came to identify himself more
and more with the hapless boy, and that made him resent her liaison with the
tormentor even more.
However, at length, abetted by him, when Raghu rebelled, an irate Madhu
said that for all he knew, he could be a bastard, and humiliated thus, as the
hapless boy committed suicide on the railway tracks; Pravar felt that Madhu had
no right to live, and so also his sister, who was no less callous either. What’s
worse, he came to perceive Radha as a cock-pecked wife, unmindful of her son’s
plight, and that evaporated the sympathy he felt for her as a neglected wife,
owing to his sister’s trespass into her marital life. So, strangely, it was his
sense of righteousness that steeled Pravar’s heart against the disparate trio.
Thus, even as he was morally low, the lifting of prohibition, ending
the bootlegging in the State, had hurt him monetarily as well. It was then that
Rajan thought of wriggling out of the tight spot through the extortions from kidnappings.
But what with the dangerous pursuit emboldening him even more, Pravar developed
the nerve to kill, and waited for the opportune moment as by then Madhu started
mixing his women by taking Mala home. So, he worked on a plan to eliminate the
three of them without soiling his hands that developed the skill to tamper with
bottle seals in his bootlegging days. Being
aware that under Madhu’s influence, Mala took to drinking, he presumed that
Radha must be a habitual drinker too, so he poisoned a bottle of Teacher’s
Scotch, and waited for the day that Madhu and Mala gloated over as their Union
Day. So on that U-day, he presented the ‘bottle of death’, sans his
fingerprints, to Mala for their cynical celebration with the lost out wife.
When Mala said that Radha was ‘no game for that’, he said in jest that they
might as well leave the dregs for her to rue later, and true to his word, he
implicated Radha by poisoning Shakeel’s mind about her involvement in the
double murder.
As Mala’s death ended Pravar’s emotional divide, so his passion for
Natya came to rule his heart, and being bolder for the double murder, he
plotted to eliminate Rajan to usurp his woman, and waited for the right
opportunity, which presented itself soon enough. That midnight, the three of
them were in wait at a secluded spot in Shamirpet to collect a hefty ransom
from a businessman, whose kid they kidnapped the day before. While Rajan and
Pravar waited for the father at the exchange site, holding the kid, Natya
positioned herself at a safe distance. When the father met them with the ransom
amount, Pravar went up to Natya to fetch the kid for the barter; but on the way
back to her with the booty, he shot his benefactor dead, which he pictured it
to her as a police action, and the cops too publicized it as such to score a
few Brownie points of ‘law and order’.
Having split the booty with Natya and thus having gained her trust, he
induced her to marry him, after which, even though she urged him to give up his
wayward ways, as he desisted, being too far down the road of crime by then; she
had no choice but to keep pace with him. Thus while he planned the next kidnap,
wiser for the possible police action while collecting the ransom in a secluded
location, he conceived the ingenuous rendezvous on the busy Tank Bund with its
sparsely used staircase to the road below. What with Natya playing her part to
perfection, they almost pulled it off, but only fell short owing to Dhruva’s
uncanny foresight into their plan though without any hindsight.
Victim of Trust
Next day, waking up earlier than usual, Dhruva began sipping his bed-coffee
in the portico, thinking about the inimical twists and turns in Radha’s
chequered life; and had a gut feeling that it was she, who came to see him the
other day. Even as his newfound empathy for her, coupled with his earlier fascination,
seized him with an urge to see her, Dicey began to bark; so glancing at the gate,
and seeing a fascinating woman, he readily lost his heart to her, but having
been bitten once and thinking it’s better to be twice shy, though she
approached him seductively, he subdued himself consciously. Just the same, when
she introduced herself, he couldn’t resist holding out his hand to her, but as
she offered her services to him, he wanted to have her resume before he made up
his mind.
Radha was the only child of her parents, who pampered her much beyond
their middle-class means. Studious and methodical, she even excelled at her
studies that is relatively speaking, and seemed to be well on the way to become
a Chartered Accountant after her parents’ dreams. However, when she crossed
eighteen, her life went awry for she lost her heart to a handsome newcomer in
their locality, whose identity she preferred not to reveal, for the world was
small after all. What with love ruling her head, fuelled by his wooing, she
failed to apply her mind at her studies to end up at the bottom of the class,
and her father, who had all along entertained visions of seeing her in the chartered
mould of ‘Brahmaiah’, was aghast at her poor academic showing. When he sought her
explanation about her low scores, she showed him her lover’s letters vouching
eternal devotion to her, and that left him with no choice but to approach the
boy’s father, who roundly blamed her for enticing his son, and outraged by the
slur, her father asked her to break up with him.
However, as her lover assured her that he would prevail over his parents
in the end, blinded by love and guided by fate, she carried on with him on the
sly, but as her escapades came to her father’s notice, he strictly restricted
her movements, and started looking for a match for her. So, she eloped with him
when she was barely nineteen and they got married in a temple; while her disgusted
father disowned her, his unreconciled parents began weaning him away from her. However,
the fortuitous presence of an aunt of her childhood friend in that town afforded
her some badly needed succor and support.
Soon, however, as he came to wilt under the emotional blackmail of his
parents, his will to stick to her through thick and thin began to wane, and thus,
even as she was hard-pressed to hold him, his father upped the ante by pitting
his mediocre life with her against the rosy future as the son-in-law of a
well-heeled man with a vivacious daughter. While the parent-induced insecurity
played upon his mind, the envisaged beauty of the bride-to-be proved to be an appetizer
for his lust, so he came to perceive her as a drag on his promising life. As if
the prospect of losing him was not nightmarish enough, she missed her periods,
regardless of which, he deserted her heartlessly, and that sealed her fate. Thus,
left in the lurch, as she burnt her bridges with her parents, so in
desperation, she returned to her native to contact that friend, her full-soul mate,
and her half-namesake, but in vain.
Then seeing a twitch on Dhruva’s brow, she thought that some namesake of
hers might have stirred his heart before, and he, staring at her, wondered what
if she were to jilt him like half-namesake.
When she learned that her friend, having married in the meantime, moved
out of town by then, Radha resumed the recap of her life and times; she turned
to an elderly man she knew from her childhood days to help her find a job. But
as he tried to snare her into a relationship, which made her realize the
pitfalls of a single woman in the man’s world, swallowing her pride, as a
prodigal daughter, she returned home to her parents’ subdued welcome. However,
as she was keen to bear her child, which proposition her mother supported, her
father had to find a groom for her on a war footing, and that brought Madhu, an
Engineer in the Civil Works Department, into her life.
While Madhu jumped at the prospect of marrying her, as she found him
not to her liking, she began dragging her feet, her father told her either to abort
her child or wed that Engineer. With the lurking danger her bulging belly
posed, she bowed her head to let Madhu tie the knot, and he, blinded by her
beauty, not only turned blind to her reticence in their nuptial bed but also
failed to grasp the import of the early arrival of her son, Raghu; whom she came
to dote upon, more out of a sense of guilt than an affection for the man who
fathered him; but somehow Madhu was never enamored of him, though not out of any
suspicion.
However, it took the seven-year itch for her man to get wind of her
conjugal indifference towards him, and that hurt his ego and crushed his heart;
well, she always knew that she had to involve her body and mind to save the
nuptial tie, and yet she couldn’t bring herself around to obey the dictates of
cohabitation. Maybe vexed with her cold embrace, Madhu sought to pep up his
sex-life with the prostitutes, fetched by his bribe money, and even as she
thought that life couldn’t get worse than that, fate had other indignities in
store for her.
When someone from his department died in an accident, Mala, his widow,
with a brother to support, was absorbed on compassionate grounds; and he lost
no time in ingratiating with her, picturing himself as a neglected husband,
deprived of woman’s affections and all. Succumbing to his falsity, owe be to
the vulnerable woman, she entered into an illicit relationship with him, ironically
buttressed by his ill-gotten money. Thereafter, while he lavished his attention
on her, as if to add insult to the injury, he forced Raghu to run errands for
her, and when she chided him for reducing his own son as a valet of his keep;
he implied that she herself being so cold to him; her boy, for all he knew,
could be a bastard.
Worried about her boy’s future in that situation, when she raked her
brains to save him, she thought of his biological father, who so cruelly
ditched her to hitchhike with a moneyed dame. However mean he might have been,
she thought, with the means at his disposal, won’t he put their boy in some
boarding school or the other? So she tried to locate him, more out of
desperation than in hope, and managed to meet him, though after a long haul, but
as she pictured their son’s plight, he painted himself as a lovelorn, paying
the price for his betrayal in his wife’s cold bed, which left him childless in
their wedlock. As he managed to light her old flame, in spite of his desertion,
and with no love lost for her spouse; she had no qualms in sleeping with him,
hoping to prop up their son.
At the end of a weeklong rendezvous in which he overwhelmed her with
his passion, she set aside her past bitterness and asked him to take her as his
second wife to give their son his due. But lo, the bastard made her feel
ashamed of herself; what cruelty to say that she was a first grade maal all right, but she should’ve known
that even for a second wife, she was a third rate slut. When she retorted, what
if she told his wife about their connection, he warned her that she might as
well forget about her future whatever little it might have held for her, for he
would engage a supari to eliminate
her without anyone ever getting wiser about it. How disgusted she was with the
man she once loved and compromised with again, she only knew.
However, things came to a head when Raghu questioned Madhu as to how he
could reduce his own son as an errand boy of his mistress; not only her man
callously retorted what proof he had of his own paternity but also rubbed salt
on her son’s paternal wound with the adage that while maternity was a fact, paternity
was only a faith. Given Raghu’s premature birth, he asserted that he never
thought that he was indeed his father, and unable to bear the humiliation, her
boy committed suicide on the railway tracks.
Madhu though saw in the tragedy an opportunity to slight her further,
and so he began bringing Mala home, as a prelude to a ménage a trios, as he put it. But deciding to call a spade a spade, she sought
divorce, to which, he was averse, as his sexual interest in her, by then, had
resurged, as a byproduct of his passion for his mistress. Moreover, adding insult
to injury, he said that not counting alimony; a house maid could be more
expensive than a wife, but as she refused his demands for threesome orgies, he
further debased himself as a wife-beater.
When she was all set to press for divorce regardless, tragedy struck
her that fateful evening; as he tried to force her to drink with him and his
mistress, as she refused to oblige, he necked her out of the house in a fit of
rage, forcing her to turn to a friend for shelter, since her parents were dead
and gone by then. But the next day, when a neighbor informed her on her mobile that
Madhu and Mala died of poisoning and the police were on the lookout for her,
she rushed to the Saifabad Police Station to clear her name, only to be
locked-up by the Inspector as the main suspect. Oh, how he had abused her, she
only knew, oh, what a diabolical character he was!
Though that cop failed to book the real culprit to date, she always had
a hunch that Pravar, Mala’s awara
brother, would have been behind the murders, and so with a little detective
work, she gathered that he became an object of ridicule because of his
sibling’s conduct and that all taunted him on that score. That could have been
a motive for him to eliminate the illicit couple, but whatever it was, she was
certain that the drink the couple drank to their death was poisoned by Pravar,
who had a criminal background to boot, though not on the scale that the police
tried to picture on the TV screens in the fake-notes case. While it all smelled
fishy, the other day she chanced to see Dhruva’s ad in an old issue of Eenadu, which prompted her to reach him.
Finishing her tale of woes and looking into his eyes desirously, she
said enticingly that she hoped that at last, her hopes won’t turn out to be
dupes after all, and that he would set things right for her while she herself
assisted him in his endeavors.
Since Radha’s version jelled with Shakeel’s account, Dhruva felt it was
indeed a poetic justice that Pravar, who tried to implicate her in a murder she
didn’t commit, found himself in the dock for a crime that he had nothing to do
with. Besides, he felt that her experience with her lover illustrate that even
as love emanates from sexual union, in spite of it, lust remains barbarian.
While she looked at him in hope, he asked her what she thought could
have been behind her lover’s refusal to part with a penny being in a position
to do so; she said that in hindsight it was clear to her that besides being a
mean-being, he was money-minded as well. Moreover, the way he used and abused a
trusting woman indicates how despicable he was.
When he extended his hand to her in anticipation, as she held it a little longer, he recalled Ranjit’s twenty-thousand dole against the promised half- a million bonanza.
Backyard of Life
The next day, when Radha reported for work, Dhruva led her into his
study to throw open his library of crime, as he put it that included the collections
on Holmes, Mason
et al for her to pore into, and as she was engrossed with the former, Raju went
up to her to usher her to join his master at the dining table. But as she reached
him with the lunchbox she brought along with her, Dhruva said that the
perquisites included free lunches, and smiling coyly, she said that she won’t
mind working extra time if she could’ve free dinners as well.
While Radha came to spend long hours at 9, Castle Hills, Dhruva lost no
time in initiating her to drinks with Gin and Sprite as he had his Old Monk
with Thums UP. When he asked her if his smoking a cigar was any bother for her,
she said that having savored the smell of pogaku
in his breath, she was all-eager to have a feel of its smoke as well. So, as he
lit his lanka, maintaining that she
enjoyed its aroma, she wondered whether he could make rings out of its smoke,
the way Pran does in the movies. So, as he exhibited his prowess at it, she
wanted an encore, and he too goaded her to repeat her booze. While he was
mixing a drink for her, she said that but for her abstinence then, her fate
would have been tied up with the illicit couple, and added that to usurp their
properties, Pravar might have aimed at poisoning three of them with the same
drink.
At length, what with Radha’s seductive balm soothing his jilted wound,
and her eagerness to come ever closer to him dissolving his resolve to be
tightlipped, Dhruva appraised her how Pravar was fixed in the fake-notes case.
When she said that maybe the dubious means justified the deserving end, he told
her that Pravar had already confessed to the cop about his nefarious role in
the double murder, though it was of no avail to book him for that. Saying that
just the same she was glad to hear that, she said cheers all again, and
clinking her glass with his own, he told her that he saw a possible role for
her in tackling the peculiar challenges Kavya’s psychic aberrations the
Stockholm Syndrome might pose in Pravar’s case.
By the time Raju was ready to serve them dinner, Radha had a drink too
many, and as Dhruva led her to the dining table by her waist, he was struck by
her silken skin. However, after a sumptuous dinner, when she said that she
would like to go home, he suggested that she better stayed back for the night,
at which she turned coy and said that it might be risky. When he said that
though a ladies’ man, yet he was a gentleman, and having had a hearty laugh at
that, she said that what she meant was about the risk he ran in her nocturnal
company. Meeting his flummoxed look with her lowered eyelids, she told him that
she heard that a man lets a woman into his house only as a prelude to letting
her into his heart. Elated at her advance, he told her that he was not the one
to shy away from such a welcome prospect, and she coyly reminded him about the
proverbial camel that took over the tent when it was allowed only to cool its
head. Saying that his heart and hearth were too big for any to fill them, he
cajolingly led her into Mithya’s room, and as he enabled her onto the mahogany
cot, she pulled him into her ardent embrace to anoint herself as the reigning
queen of 9, Castle Hills.
Next morning, ushering in a new era in his life, as she served him bed-coffee;
he caught her hand and said that she was hotter in his arms than the steamy
thing in his hand. Turning coquettish, she said that she knew his ardor would keep
her ever eager, and watched him joyously as he savored the strong coffee; when
he took her into his ardent embrace, she entwined with him amorously.
After breakfast, with him in tow, she went to her Red Hills house to
fetch her wardrobe as a prelude to let her transport herself into his life. So,
feeling at home in his house on their return, and later seeing him eating her
preparations greedily at lunch, she said coyly that she had some dessert to
serve as well; while he played innocent, she pushed him all the way to Mithya’s
room that by then, she had already made her own.
Later, breaking up his siesta before her, he went into the study to
check the mail, and began reading a letter in Rani’s hand that read.
Dear deadly:
I’m glad that your child is taking shape
up in my womb, and it’s no blackmail. As I thought he would, my man came
around. But if I were to be widowed when I still have it in me, you can count
on my availability that is if you need me then, and God forbid, should fate
orphan our offspring, I hope
9, Castle Hills’ gates are ever open for it.
Love,
You know who.
Seeing the smudged defacement of the postal stamp on the envelope, he
saw the irony of his only progeny being in anonymity, and secured the letter in
the chest of drawers.
When Radha came to serve him some steamy tea, finding him morose, she
said playfully that she was disappointed that even the newness of her charms
was of no avail to enliven him; and as he took her into his arms, as if to
underscore her position in his life, she told him gravely that not all his
virility would help her as she underwent hysterectomy, and added in jest that
she wondered how he yet failed to father Mithya’s child. When he told her that
Mithya had had a couple of miscarriages, as she wanted to know more about her
life, he said that she would have that by and by. However, when she said in
half-jest that as she waited for a peep
into Mithya’s past, what if he took her to the backyard of his life, so he led
her there, saying mockingly that it was no Garden of Eden.
Possibly a lovechild, he was abandoned at the gates of an orphanage in
Devarakadra, and an ayah there named him Dhruva for she felt that he shone like
the North star. When it was time to put him in school, since none knew his
surname, the headmaster lent the village name to it to make him Dhruva
Devarakadra; but as he showed some prowess at catching the kitchenware- thieves
at the orphanage and retrieving the ‘lost’ pencils from the wrong boxes at the
school, he became Detective Dhruva to all. Thanks to a Good Samaritan, who
funded his higher education, he graduated in humanities and joined the police
department to have a hands-on-experience in dealing with crimes.
While his ignorance about his caste and creed made him blissfully
immune to pride and prejudice, and despite the deprivation of parental love, he
managed not to carry any emotional baggage. Maybe to retrieve the lost ground
of affection, he coveted women’s love and so courted the desirable with some
luck in between. Though he made a mark at his work, owing to his lacking a
caste identity, none knocked at his door to invite him to lead their daughter
to the altar. However, thanks to the women who fancied him, he didn’t miss much
that way, to talk about which to a lady may not be chivalrous for a man; though
all that changed when Mithya came into his life; but her untimely death brought
him back to square one.
Saying she would strive to make good Mithya’s irreparable loss, as she embraced him ardently, as if to draw comfort from it, he rested his head on her ample bosom.
Cuckoo’s Nest
Next day, when Raju announced Ranjit’s arrival, Dhruva said jocularly that Radha might as well meet Mr. Interval, but she told him mischievously that it pays to retain his Ace of Hearts in case the stakes were raised.
Leaving her with a pleased look, Dhruva reached the study to find a downcast
Ranjit, who said that Kavya had come under Pravar’s spell, and sadly, he had
every reason to believe that she was carrying on with him. As Ranjit bemoaned
how his upright wife chose to have an affair with a hardened criminal, Dhruva
said that he should bear with it all till she got over her aberration induced
by the Stockholm Syndrome. Assuming the role of a psychiatrist, the detective
tried to convince the cuckold that he should be considerate to his unfortunate
wife, while he himself would strain every nerve to get her out of her
paramour’s emotional clutches.
While Dhruva was closeted with Ranjit in the study, Radha went about
arranging her things in Mithya’s room and found the main cupboard ajar.
Wondering whether it was Dhruva’s idea to let her gain access to his wife’s
wear, she opened it and came across scores of embroidered saris in an impressive wardrobe. Unable to
resist the temptation to find out how Mithya’s blouses would go on her, she
wore one and as it was well-suited, she wore a matching sari, and reached for the full-length
mirror. While she sized up herself in Mithya’s attire, she tried to envision
Dhruva’s reaction, which gave her a strange sense of fetishism, and drawn by
the amazing collection of saris and
dresses lying in the cupboard, one by one, she pulled them out, and found at
the bottom, a false bottom. Gaining access to the secret shelf, and overawed by
the exquisite jewelry lying therein, in ornate boxes, she couldn’t stop
wondering about the quality of the gems and the beauty of the workmanship. And
finding a framed picture of a young girl, who seemed to be Mithya’s daughter,
she could not help but compare it with her mother’s life-size picture on the
wall, and felt that both exuded a charm of their own.
When Raju informed her about Ranjit’s departure, she joined Dhruva in
the study, and he briefed her about Kavya’s affair with Pravar, at which she
wondered at the ways of life, and said that it could be awful for the husband.
While Dhruva was at a loss as to how to redeem himself by freeing Kavya from
Pravar’s hold before she became his crime-mate as well, she said that they
should bring Natya into play to gauge Kavya’s mind, and that would enable her
to keep a vigil on Pravar, her own bête
noir. Agreeing that they should think of a ploy to bring Natya emotionally
closer to her, they toyed with many an idea before he came up with a plan
involving Shakeel. When he was about to ring up Shakeel, she said jocularly
that he should summon an ambulance as well for the cop might suffer a stroke by
seeing her in his house; and patting her for her naughtiness, he said that he
would ask the cop to come in an ambulance itself.
When Shakeel came as promised, she received him in the portico as
planned and before the guest could recover from the shock of her presence, the
host jolted him further by introducing her as his assistant in a live-in.
Leading Shakeel into the drawing hall, Dhruva joked that it made sense that the
cop made up with her as his future admissions into 9, Castle Hills have to be only
through the proper channel. When Radha extended her hand to Shakeel saying that
they better let bygones be bygones, Dhruva goaded him to make a new beginning
with his old suspect. Over drinks that they had together, as she showed no
traces of bitterness towards him, Shakeel began to feel at ease, and when
Dhruva stressed upon the need to involve her in pinning Pravar and laid the
blueprint to bring Radha and Natya together. Thereafter, ending up befriending her,
the cop left them wondering how his premonition about her coming closer to the
detective came true.
So, that day, when Natya was about to step out from the department stores in the A.C. Guards; a woman constable picked her up for an alleged shoplifting and packed her off to the lock-up of the Saifabad Police Station. Soon, Natya had Radha for company, supposedly locked up for her road rage, and as Radha feigned to take Shakeel to task for having booked her for nuts, impressed with her élan, Natya was drawn towards her. When Radha was about to ring up Dhruva asking him to speak to Shakeel, Natya pleaded with her to take up her case as well, and having been freed thereafter, Radha led Natya to her Red Hills abode, kept under lock and key, and succeeded in cultivating her young heart; as expected Natya spilled the beans on her wayward life and Radha not only solicited her about the need to reform Pravar for her own good but also convinced her about the need to keep him out of the loop as they together worked towards that end, and the latter swore that she would act as directed.
‘Untried’ Crime
That day as Dhruva was away with Shakeel and was not expected till late
in the night, Radha began scanning Mithya’s closets to delve deeper into her
past. Not finding any sleazy stuff therein, as she was about to give up on
spying, she located a false bottom in the dressing table that led her to many
unusual items. Elated at the discovery as she rummaged the shelf, she found
Mithya’s jottings in a leather-bound book, leafing through which, she came
across a story-like entry, Untried Crime,
which read thus:
That was when Mithya’s life was under siege; she faced the unwelcome
prospect of divorce, lo, owing to her own infidelity. Barely turned
twenty-eight, as she was not for losing the good things of life her well-heeled
man afforded her, she began planning a perfect murder of him and her paramour. So,
leaving no lose ends for the cops to tie her up to the killings, she made
discreet enquiries about the Inspector of the Saifabad Police Station, the one
most likely to turn up for questioning her. What with his reputation as an Ace
of Crime Detection increasing her sense of challenge, she spied upon him in a burka, and finding him manly and
handsome, she fell for him. So, she kept track of him, and struck by his élan
and enamored of his mien, she even turned covetous, which give an erotic edge
to her criminal cunning.
That night, after seeing the end of both her men and having anonymously
alerted the police about the double murder, she expectantly waited for Dhruva to
turn up at her
bungalow, the gates of which she deliberately kept ajar, and when he knocked at
the main door, she received him in lingerie.
“Sorry for my rather scanty cladding,” she said alluringly.
“I’m Inspector Dhruva,” he said unable to take his eyes off her
hourglass frame.
“I’m Mithya,” she said coquettishly, extending her hand invitingly.
“Mrs. Ashok I suppose,” he said, grabbing it greedily.
“Yes, I’m Mithya Ashok,” she said leading him into the drawing room.
“Do you know the whereabouts of your husband?” he asked looking into
her eyes.
“Why, he’s aboard the Godavari Express,” she said affecting concern.
“Are you sure about that?”
“You know I’m his wife, don’t you?”
“Can’t there be secrets between the spouses?”
“Have you come to know of any mistress of his or what?” she said
mockingly.
“Maybe he would’ve been better off in her bed, if he had any but….”
“You mean, better off than in mine?” she said interrupting him
“I’ve to get into both to know about that,” he said naughtily, “but
sadly he’s no more.”
“In that case, can’t you imagine the possibilities?” she said winking
at him.
“It’s no joke, he was possibly murdered,” he said observing her demeanor.
“You mean, in the running train!”
“No, it’s in your A.C Guards’ house.”
“Wonder how he landed there!” she said feigning surprise. “But who
could have killed him?”
“Who’s Dilip?”
“Has he killed him?”
“Better answer my question.”
“He’s my errand boy, don’t mind his age,” she said smilingly.
“Is that all?”
“I know privacy is the first victim in crime investigation, don’t I?”
she said coquettishly.
“Don’t mistake me, it’s a routine question.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I am carrying on with him.”
“But I don’t think he’s of your class.”
“Why that should bother you at all?”
“Sorry but surely your man would’ve been concerned about that.”
“You are spot on,” she said taking his hand. “Know that I offered to
divorce him.”
“Are you in love with Dilip?”
“Didn’t you hear me say that I am carrying on with him?”
“When did you last see him?”
“I was with him till ten.”
“Where it was?”
“Where Ashok was murdered that is going by your statement.”
“You mean that you three were there.”
“Are you implying a threesome or what?” she said laughingly.
“You know I am not privy to your sexual proclivities,” he said not to
be outplayed at his favorite game.
“Given a chance, I won’t withhold any from you,” she said not to be
undone.
“You may keep that on hold and...”
“If you put me on hold, I can hang on in hope,” she said turning bold.
“Maybe by the rope,” he said mocking sympathy.
“Don’t worry on that count,” she said nonchalantly.
“Misplaced though, your confidence is admirable,” he said unable to
hide his admiration.
“Cerebral though isn’t it a misplaced compliment,” she said coyly
adjusting her lingerie.
“Could be but how Ashok was in the wrong place?”
“How am I to know that?”
“Maybe you could guess.”
“I’ve no clue on earth.”
“What if Dilip too is dead.”
“Oh God, did they kill each other?”
“I haven’t said Dilip was dead,” he said and as she was startled a
little, he added, “didn’t you give away the clue to the case?”
“Brush up your grammar boy, it was but my question,” she said
recovering.
“Then, ‘yes’ is my answer,” he said bowled by her smartness.
“So, I’ve lost my man and my paramour at once.”
“What a double jeopardy it is, I’m really sorry.”
“Why be sorry dear as I’m doubly free,” she said taking his hand.
“I guess you’ve some way to go before that,” he said holding it.
“Going by your demeanor, I don’t think so,” she said squeezing his
hand.
“Why not follow me there?”
“Can’t you spare me all that now?”
“So be it but don’t fail to turn up at the mortuary tomorrow.”
“Where it is?”
“Sorry for the slip, it’s at the Gandhi Hospital.”
“Don’t I see you’re enamored,” she said winking at him.
“I will wait for you there by ten in the morning,” he said in
embarrassment.
“Thank you for being a considerate cop,” she said taking his hand all
again.
“Maybe you could’ve revealed more,” he said enjoying the touch.
“How unfair to say that without giving me scope?” she said feigning to
be offended.
“You’re impossible ma’am; good night.”
“Sweet dreams,” she said adjusting her lingerie to part-bare her boob.
While she waved at him
amorously, perplexed at her audacity and perturbed by his attraction, he left
her half-heartedly.
‘Stabbed in the abdomen, as
Ashok lay dead in the sofa, how it was that Dilip’s medulla oblongata had hit
the edge of the chair opposite?’ Dhruva began reviewing the murder scene on his
way home. ‘Won’t the empty Bagpiper bottle, broken glasses, and the scattered bhujiya indicate a drinking brawl,
possibly over Mithya that led to their killing each other? But is it as simple
as that? Was there Mithya’s hidden hand behind all that? Why not take her
finger prints?’
The next day as Mithya reached the mortuary, Dhruva obliged her to
leave her finger prints, having which, he was lost in the elegance of her
slender fingers that was not lost on her either; so, pleased with herself she
turned coquettish and said how she wished that he would let her put them for
better use in time. Distracted though by her seductive manner, yet he was able
to discern that her demeanor turned cold as she saw Dilip’s body, and that she
looked contemptuously at Ashok’s corpse, which made him think that she had no
love lost for either of them. Moreover, when he noticed the steadiness of her
hand as she recorded her statement and the coolness in her face as she was all
set to take away Ashok’s body in the ambulance, he felt that she had the nerve
of a killer. If anything, when she told enticingly that she knew he would visit
her again in vardi but he was welcome
even in mufti, he was amazed as well
as irritated by her audacity. But while getting into her sedan that followed
the ambulance as she winked at him invitingly, seeing in her a femme fatale of the first order, he
waved her off wondering whether she was the murderess after all; and as if to
chase his thoughts, leaving the chores of handling Dilip’s body to Appa Rao his
deputy, he headed straight to the forensic laboratory.
The post-mortem report confirmed the instantaneous deaths of both men
and Mithya’s fingerprints were found all over the place and that put Dhruva in
the contemplative mode.
‘Stabbed in the abdomen by Dilip if Ashok died instantaneously, how he
could have pushed away Dilip with such a force that his medulla oblongata took
the hit?’ he began to analyze. ‘Even if Ashok had extraordinary reflexes to
push away Dilip upon being attacked, the latter’s grip on the knife would have
ensured that it was pulled out of his frame, which was not the case. So, as
Dilip couldn’t have died being pushed by Ashok for he died instantaneously
after being stabbed; were it possible that Mithya murdered Dilip in cold blood
after abetting him to stab Ashok to death? Was not the informer too an
anonymous woman! Was it all Mithya’s handiwork then?’
Soon after Ashok’s obsequies were over, Dhruva called on Mithya at 9,
Castle Hills.
“What brings you here dear?” she greeted him heartily.
“Why can’t you guess?”
“Where the need as your urgency shows?” she said winking at him.
“You are mistaken,” he said, hiding his embarrassment.
“Oh! I thought you are a game,” she said, feigning disappointment.
“You may know that custodial interrogation is a different ball game,”
he said assuming a grave demeanor.
“Then you have to go to hell to interrogate both of them?” she said
smilingly, ushering him into her house.
“Not a bad idea if a femme fatale
can lead me there.”
“If you think I’m one, I would lead you to heaven instead,” she said
enticingly.
“Tempting though…,”
“What’s the hesitation then?” she said moving closer.
“Thanks to your finger prints on the murder weapon, I have to lead you to
the lock-up,” he said dramatically taking her hand.
“What a discovery!” she said without taking her hand out of his. “Well,
it was I who prepared the salad besides mixing drinks for Dilip and me. Wonder
how you had missed my finger prints on the Bagpiper bottle and those two
glasses.”
“Whither gone the third glass?” he said releasing her hand.
“I haven’t heard of two drinking out of three glasses, have you?” she
said smilingly.
“But Ashok’s viscera showed that he too drank.”
“Don’t you see that scoring for me as it clearly indicates that they quarreled
to death after drinking to the dregs,” she said triumphantly.
“When Ashok died readily, who could’ve killed Dilip?” he said with a
probing look.
“I know Ashok has quick reflexes, possibly he might’ve pushed away
Dilip before he died,” she said with a poker face.
“Why wouldn’t have Dilip pulled out the knife when pushed?”
“It’s puzzling isn’t it?” she said smilingly.
“What if someone was there to ensure that both died?”
“Eminently possible, but don’t you think it’s too thin a thread to hang
me with?” she said mockingly.
“Could the criminal and the informer be the same?”
“We could discuss all that and more if you stay on for dinner,” she
said invitingly, taking his hand.
“Not now, maybe some other time,” he said making a move.
“You may know that you’re always welcome,” she said pressing his hand.
“Looks like you’re a tough nut to crack,” he said pressing her hand.
“Oh!’ she feigned pain.
“I’m sorry,” he said releasing her hand.
“Why, isn’t it precious to hold?” she said extending her hand
enticingly.
“That’s what is disturbing,” he said waving her goodbye.
“That’s the charm of life,” she said, blowing a kiss
at him.
Bowled though by her charms, as her daredevilry affronted his
professional ego, hell-bent on pinning her down, he reviewed the case for possible
loopholes, and finding none, he thought that he should play ball with her in
her own court.
That evening when Dhruva reached 9, Castle Hills in mufti, Mithya in light pink voile sari,
was in the lawns with Dicey, her new acquisition, and having greeted him
heartily, she warmly led him into the drawing room to flirt with him openly.
Soon, as they had a binge of booze sitting together in that wide sofa, finding
her at her evocative best, he realized how vulnerable he was to her peculiar
persona. But as he remained tentative, teasing him at his unease, before
cozying up to him by drawing closer to him, she revealed her riveting allures
by degrees, and unable to resist her charms, as he conceded his erotic ground
to her, she induced him to lay the foundations for an amorous edifice through
necking and petting.
When she proposed dinner to let them satiate their palates as a prelude
to satiating their libidos, following her to the dining table, as he took to
bottom pinching, she said coyly that she wouldn’t be granting him an
out-of-turn favor. Saying that he would wait for its turn, yet as he busied
himself at her bottom, she said that he could have his way both ways but as per
protocol. After a hearty meal followed by pan, she led her into the lawn to let
him puff away at his cigar, as she
enjoyed its aroma, and as he stubbed the butt, hugging him ardently and
reaching for his lips, she kissed him fervently, inducing in him the urge to
surge in. Thereby, leading him
indoors, she stripped him in the drawing room and pulled him into the bedroom
only to push him onto her sprawling mahogany bed for their erotic exertions.
At length, lying in his arms in satisfaction, she opened her secretive mind
to him.
“I know what brought you into my bed, and as quid pro quo, I’ll satisfy
your curiosity,” she said coyly. “It was Dilip’s idea to eliminate Ashok and I
went along with it, not to acquire a rich widow tag, but to avoid the divorcee card.
With inputs from Dilip, I worked out a plan to slow-poison Ashok, as and when
he embarked on a journey by train and as I was all set, it dawned on me that in
all suspicious deaths, the spouse would readily come under the scanner, so I
realized that to save my skin, I should get rid of Dilip as well. Moreover,
eager to step into Ashok’s shoes, Dilip was getting too big for his boots, and
to give a spin to Ashok’s death, before arranging that fateful meeting to
untangle the love triangle, I booked a berth for him on the Godavari Express.
The rest as you know is mystery.”
“Isn’t it a loss to the crime history?” he said fondling her.
“Why not we together create history,” she said invitingly. “It’s my
curiosity to measure up the cop who would turn up for my questioning that made
me appraise you on the sly; even as your looks surged my sexual passion, your
manner induced a sense of belonging in me. Believe me; my urge to make a new
beginning with you fuelled my desire to be freed of both of them even more;
that way, my man, you are an abettor of the crime. Whatever, in the wake of the
murders, breathing down my neck, you’ve charmed me with your mind as well, and
now with your lovemaking, you’ve increased my craving for being your wife. You
know, all this is for your ears only and not for my trial for sure; try acting
funny and you stand accused - of torture and rape - haven’t you left enough
evidence behind – on both counts.”
“What to make of you?” he said in exasperated admiration.
“Yours if you please,” she winked at him.
“What if I let you loose,” he said contemplatively.
“Why not enslave me.”
“That’s resisting the irresistible.”
“If you can ignore my past, I won’t let you regret making me your wife,
it’s my promise,” she said pleadingly taking him in her embrace.
“I know your value to my life but let me think it over,” he said
disarmingly.
“Won’t you come tomorrow?” she said reaching for his lips.
“You haven’t left me as yet,” he said.
When he reached for his dress after she released him, she pulled out
the tape recorder from his pocket.
“Let this be my keepsake of our first-time,” she said dangling it
before him.
“Oh, you are impossible!” he said taking her into his arms.
However, after the dust has settled down, he led me into our marvelous
wedlock.
Amazed at what she read, Radha thought that Mithya could have been a
temptress in the Cleopatra mold and
wondered what would have happened had she poisoned her men.
Kavya’s Quagmire
When Radha took Dhruva to cloud nine, as if to bring him back to the mundane
setting, Dicey got seriously indisposed; though he was gratified to see her
tending the pet like her own child, when it succumbed to the mysterious ailment
in a week’s time, he was truly downcast. While it took him quite a while to
recover from his loss, courtesy Natya, Radha could cover a lot of Pravar’s ground
into which Kavya had ventured deep that she mapped for Dhruva over drinks one
evening.
After securing his bail, Kavya was wont to spend long hours with Pravar
to work out their defense strategy. In that process, even as he was charmed by
her suaveness, she was discomfited by his outrageous manner, yet she put up
with him so as to atone herself for Ranjit’s foul on him. However, she readily
struck a chord with Natya, who was all empathy for her, for her sympathy for
them, but her proximity made Pravar fantasize about the mature woman, and it
was only time before he turned obsessive of possessing her, by means fair or
foul. What with her misplaced samaritanism blinding her vision, Kavya mistook
his advances as manifestations of his exaggerated gratitude for her, and Natya,
though quick to sense his ill-intentions, yet failed to caution her, for the
fear of losing her support, all the while pleading with him not to scandalize
their benefactor. Yet, in time, he pressed her to pander to his whim by bringing
around Kavya, and as she refused, he threatened to end his life, which made
Natya see the merit in the adage of ‘yielding to the temptation as a way of
avoiding it’. So, reckoning that he would get over his obsession for her rival
only in her possession, willy-nilly, Natya became his accomplice to trick Kavya
into his bed.
Thereafter, as per the script, Pravar faked suicide, ostensibly to save
their benefactor from his passion for her, and Natya played upon Kavya’s
sympathy for him to try to woo her for him. So, distressed at the development
and embarrassed to the core, Kavya was at a loss as to know how to handle her
unrequited love. Were she to shun him altogether, it would amount to her rescinding
his vakalat, and with Shakeel braying
for his blood, wouldn’t that mean throwing him to the wolves? Why abandon him
after all the hard work and on the verge of success? However, to overcome her
predicament, she thought of putting sense into his deranged head that it was
not proper to covet a woman old enough to be his elder sister. Though she
strived to put sense into his head to put an end the nonsense, he reiterated
his resolve to end his life if she were to fail to yield to his raging passion
that was killing him any way.
Thereby, Kavya saw no way out to save her honor but by cold-shouldering
him, hoping that he would get over his obsession for her in time, and so kept
away from him, but soon as her unrelenting lover faked suicide yet again, she
was thrown into a dilemma - if she gave in to him, she would be unfaithful to
Ranjit, but should Pravar take the plunge, that would fail her mission. What
with her obsession for justice coupled with her empathy for him tilting the
scales, she could hold no more, and as he began to overwhelm her with his youthful
urges, she felt as if her life was under siege in their liaison. Soon, as
Pravar tended to ignore Natya, she insisted parity to make it an equitable love
triangle, but with his ardency for her ever on the raise, he began pestering
her to leave her man to make it a ménage
a trois for them.
As that’s how things stood as per Natya’s brief, Dhruva blamed himself
for Kavya’s fall, and Radha felt the only way to rescue her was to nab Pravar,
he said that he would talk to Shakeel to handle him. So, as he reached for his
mobile, he received a call from him, by then shifted to the Jubilee Hills Police
Station.
The cop said that around six in the evening, he received a call from
Kavya, informing him that Ranjit lay dead at home; so he rushed to Spandan to take stock of the situation. He
learned from her that Ranjit had left for his office at ten and, as was her
wont, she too went out after lunch, but on her return, finding him dead in his
bed in the master bedroom, she felt it could be a cold-blooded murder. However,
he saw nothing amiss in the house and there were no injuries on the body, all
of which pointed out to a possible heart attack, but yet he moved the body for
post-mortem, and sounded his informers to pick up in the grapevine.
While Dhruva became pensive, Radha said that she knew for long that it
was in the coming; after all, didn’t Natya tell her that Pravar was hell-bent
to have Kavya all for himself? Surely, adept at the art of poisoning, he would
have done in Ranjit to gain Kavya’s undivided affections. However, Dhruva told
her not to jump the gun; for all he knew, he could have as well committed
suicide, unable to bear the ignominy of being a cuckold or for that matter, he
might have died even of heart attack, stressed as he was by his wife’s
infidelity. But as Radha insisted that it could have been Pravar’s way of
grabbing Kavya and her property as well, Dhruva maintained that time only would
tell whether there was a foul play and they better waited for the post-mortem
report.
Next evening, Shakeel came to tell Dhruva that by all indications Ranjit’s
death was owing to poisoning and that Kavya got an anticipatory bail for
herself making him wonder whether she had a hand in the sordid affair. Then Dhruva
told him that she was no fool to soil her hands with her husband’s blood, as it
won’t be beyond her to know that she would become the prime suspect in the case
that too given that she had a paramour to boot. But Radha maintained that it
was apparent that Pravar, keeping Kavya in the dark, would have poisoned
Ranjit, and it made sense to apprehend him forthwith for extracting his
confession and be done with it.
Then Shakeel, as if as an afterthought, said that of late, whenever Kavya
was away, a burka-clad woman was seen
visiting Ranjit, which made Dhruva say whether it was a woman in burka or women in burka. At that the cop
said that he thought as much, but the neighbors were certain that it was
only one woman that Ranjit was receiving for some time then. When Radha interjected
by saying, what if the woman in burka
was Natya, Pravar’s red herring, to mislead the police; Shakeel said that it
was not a bad line of investigation. However, Dhruva cautioned him not to
oversimplify matters but wide-scan Ranjit’s present and deep-delve into his
past as his death by poisoning that pointed towards Pravar’s hand raised the
possibility of a hidden hand behind his murder.
At that Shakeel said that the foolhardiness of the criminal impulse
always puzzled him but Dhruva reasoned that even as the calling of crime clouds
reason, its execution itself impairs caution, imperiling the cover up. As for
the victims of crime, he said, what one would say about the credulity of a
cuckold, who would have thrown caution to the winds by indulging in a drinking
binge with his wife’s paramour? Or can any explain the stupidity of a
philanderer who walks into his death trap laid by the man he has been
cuckolding? How such dig their own graves!
Though Shakeel wanted him to make it to the Spandan along with him, Dhruva felt that his premature association with the investigation of the case would jeopardize his future involvement in it. However, while the cop saw merit in what the detective had said, as Radha insisted that their strip to the crime spot might yield the keys to Pravar’s tricks, Dhruva said that they better stayed on the sidelines as Shakeel kept the main course. But after seeing Shakeel’s back, as Radha wondered whether the cop was equal to the task, the detective hoped that by dawn, they might yet see the case in some fresh light for there may be something more to that than met the eye.
Murders to Mislead
Next morning, after Radha had gone out to meet Natya, as Dhruva was
wondering how Ranjit’s death might have affected Kavya’s relationship with
Pravar, Raju informed him that a woman came to see him; irritated though about
the intrusion into his reverie, he, nevertheless, headed towards the anteroom.
Seeing Kavya seated therein, even as he was immobilized at the
threshold, struck by his enamored demeanor, she stuck to her seat; but when he
walked up to her, as if out of trance, waking up to the reality, she got up in
greeting, and as he gesticulated at her to be seated, she reposted herself confusedly.
Though he readily sensed the import of her visit and the possibilities it
portended, yet he acquired a questioning look, and pulling out his call letter
from her handbag, she held it out to him.
Perusing it as a ruse to hide his excitement, when he told her in the
end that they could begin the interview, she said that the purpose of her visit
was to seek his assistance but not to offer her services. While he feigned surprise
at that, outlining the circumstances that brought her to him, she sought his
help in unraveling the mystery of her husband’s death. When he wanted to know
if she had any suspect in mind, she said that if it were the case, instead of
coming to 9, Castle Hills, she would have gone to the Jubilee Hills police
station. Bowled by her sense of humor, he said that he wished he had half her
wit, and thanking him for the compliment, she said she banked on her gut feeling
that he could outwit the killer.
Seeing his inclination, when she offered to take him to her place in
her car, reckoning that with her at the wheel, he would be able to assess her
better, he went with her idea, and on their drive to Spandan, watching her closely all the way, he came to the view that
her visage suggested that she could be innocent. As if reading his thoughts,
she asked him if he really believed that she was not involved in her husband’s
murder as the cops thought she was. Pleased with her forthrightness, he said
that though personally he believed she might not have had any hand in the
murder, he would not be worth his salt as a detective if he took her at the
face value. Satisfied with his approach but yet wanting to test his mettle, she
asked him if he cared to tell her about any intriguing murder that he might
have solved. Sensing her intention, he said that her query made him recall a case
in cracking which, Mithya, his late wife, played a prominent role. But as she
acquired a grave look for form’s sake, he said that it was her sudden death a
year back that prompted him to release that ad.
At that, she wondered whether he would have selected her, even if she
had called on him at the right time, he said that, if only she were inclined,
time still beckoned her. While she kept quiet, as a prorogue to his narrative,
he asked her if she could recall the serial killings of some middle-aged women
in the Langar Hauz area that shook the Hyderabadis five years back. Nodding her
head in the right direction, she said that she was aware of the intriguing murders
but there was no news about it later.
Mithya viewed those mysterious murders from the kaleidoscope of liaisons;
he began to recap; so she rented a portion in the Langar Hauz as an estranged
wife and gathered the details of the cheating husbands and wives through the
grapevine. But as he was disinclined to pursue that investigative course for the
list didn’t carry the nerves of a killer, shifting her gossiping gear to reach the
abused women, she came to know about the peculiar relationship between Ramya a
young woman and Haritha, her middle-aged step-mother owing to the unusual will
and testament that bound them.
Shortly before his death that was twenty years back, Ramya’s father bequeathed
his entire property to her, five-years then, and made Haritha, his childless
second wife, her guardian. Besides adding insult to his wife’s injury, he stated
in his will that if his widowed was to wed again, she would cease to be his
daughter’s guardian, and all that goes with it. Further venting his apathy
towards his young wife, he willed that as and when his daughter becomes a
mother, his widow would be only entitled to a meager pension, and should his
daughter die barren, then the orphanage he named gets it all. Finally, as if to
protect his progeny from his wife’s presumed ill-will, he willed that if his daughter
and her heirs were to die before his wife’s death, for whatever reason, all his
assets would then go the said orphanage. Well, as that Will underscored
mistrust and spelled malice, Mithya cultivated the young Ramya, who in a moment
of weakness made her privy to the untenable arrangement her father’s will
ushered in her life.
Widowed, at barely thirty and seeing the death-knell of a will, Haritha
was seethed with a hapless rage, but in time, applying her mind to browbeat the
imposition, she thought of an ingenious solution to bypass its nefarious proposition.
Accordingly, she convinced Ramya, six then, about the need of a male in the
house for their protection, and got her married to the sixteen-year old Rahul, however,
with an eye on him. However, having come of age, when Ramya, realized that her
man was her stepmother’s lover, Haritha sought to palliate her by letting Rahul
consummate their marriage. But soon, turning eager to have her husband all for
herself, Ramya tried to wean him away from her stepmother’s grip, though
unsuccessfully, but once her youth blossomed into womanhood that coincided with
the oldie’s weaning charms, Rahul started leaning towards his wife. At that, a
peeved Haritha began throwing tantrums at them to rob their newfound marital
bliss, which drove Rahul into his wife’s exclusive fold. Thus thrown out of the unethical love triangle
that left in the lurch, the embittered woman turned even more cynical and began
to menace the young couple at every turn.
So Mithya thought that the random killings in the neighborhood could
have been their prelude to target their nemesis under their shadow, and to get
to the bottom of it, as she worked on Ramya’s presumed guilt. So, at length,
Ramya confided in her that Rahul had reckoned that if they randomly kill a
couple or more of the middle-aged women to start with, unless caught in the
act, for the lack of any motive, none would ever suspect their involvement in
those murders, and in time, if they hit their real target, under the
smokescreen of those murders, the police would treat that as yet another of the
same serial. Thus, having laid the path for Haritha’s last journey, when they
were all set to strike at her, she was struck with the terminal cancer, thereby
rendering the youngsters remorseful of killing those innocents, so, in a way, even
after her cancerous death, Haritha continued to torment them.
Saying in conclusion that as Mithya felt that the couple, having been
the victims of subterfuge, deserved a fresh lease of life, he had agreed to put
a lid on the case that his department anyway closed as unsolved, and when he
wanted to know how she felt about it all, she said that she was at a loss to
form an opinion. But as he averred that the discretion to arraign an errant or
not, lent charm of being a private detective, she told him that she hoped that he
would not abuse his prerogative in the case on hand.
The Other Woman
When they reached Spandan, while he recalled his earlier visit
there, she led him in to give a free rein to scan her dwelling, but as he
entered the master bedroom, unable to take his eyes off from the wedding
photograph on the wall, he said that she looked divine in her bridal attire.
Then, as she flung herself onto the bed while sobbing, he apologized for his
indiscretion, and affected by his empathy, she was impelled to confide in him
tearfully.
Ranjit was mean and selfish besides being secretive and so she could
never bring herself to love him, but just the same, she remained faithful to
him until Pravar came into her orderly life to lead her astray. It all began in
the wake of her kidnapping when she started pitting the mean core of her partner’s
soft manner against the sublime inner of her captor’s savage nature. So, when the
inspector foisted the fake-notes case on the hapless boy, her empathy for him
prompted her to take up the cudgels on his behalf, which he mistook as a sign
of her weakness for him, and after his suicide attempts, she shamefully yielded
to him to save his life. Oh, how her life began pushing her to the precipice of
vice thereafter she only knew, but surely her husband could have got wind of
her affair, and to spite her, he might have got into a liaison with some woman,
strangely to his own undoing, which, besides adding to her guilt, has made her
even more vulnerable than ever.
At that, overwhelmed by empathy for her, he
made her privy to the psychics of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, and helped her grasp
the aberrations that led her into that messy affair. So, shocked and relieved
in the same vein after seeing her dark past in a fresh light, she involuntarily
clutched at his hand. Then holding her hand, he said how come her husband, whom
he had apprised about it, failed to share the same with her, and surprised at
that, she asked him when it was, but realizing his slip and wanting to avoid any
premature disclosure; he said that it was when he came to seek his counseling
on account of her disturbing affair. After pondering for a while, when she sought
his psychiatric help to put her odd past behind her, he assured her that he would
help her to bring her life back to normality. Thanking him, as she said that she
would count on him, moved by her faith in him, he said that he would never let
her down, and gratified no end; she said that she believed she met the right
man at long last. At that, as if to augment her belief, he hugged her
tentatively, and asked her, given Pravar’s motive for the gainful murder, what
she thought about his possible role in her husband’s death, she said that he
had an alibi in her. But when he said what if Pravar had induced Natya, or involved
some other woman, to do the job for him; looking at him adoringly, she said
mischievously that it was for him to probe the matter and nab the
murderess.
When he wanted to know who was the other woman in her husband’s life,
she said that though she knew that, of late in her absence, he was receiving
some woman at home, who took care not to leave any clues about her secret visits;
but the neighbors had told her that she always came in a burka. However, from the smell of the things in the house, she was
certain that woman was with him before he was poisoned. When he asked her why
she didn’t catch her man red-handed with her, bowing her head, she said that
she thought she had no moral right to do so. Then he took her hand, as if to
convey his admiration for her sensitivity and she clasped it as though to
convey her gratitude for his understanding.
In time, as he got up to leave, she offered to drive him home, but he
said that though that would enable him more of her company, yet he wouldn’t
want her to drive an extra meter in Hyderabad’s maddening traffic. Thanking him
for his consideration and seeing him off at the gate and mulling over his gestures
of interest and his words of concern for her, she espied him as he walked down
the lane as if in reluctance. What with her self-worth getting a boost with his
enamored attentions, she craved to have more of the same, and soon, as he looked
back at her, pleased with herself, she waved at him all the way.
Hiring an auto and reaching home in Kavya’s thoughts, while briefing
Radha about his visit to Spandan, he discerned
a perceptible change of color in her demeanor, which he attributed to the human
proclivity for sexual insecurity. So, when she sought to probe his mind, he put
the ball in her court with her ‘Pravar might have used Natya to poison Ranjit’
theory, but she said that on second thoughts, she was more inclined to view
that as the handiwork of Pravar-Kavya combine for they had a shared motive as
well as the common means to commit the crime. Wanting to have something
concrete rather than her conjecture, as he said that they better waited for
Shakeel’s report about Ranjit’s past, she asked him to caution the cop for he could
be high on Pravar’s hit-list, and added that Kavya can be expected to aid and
abet the brat for she too bore a grudge against him.
What with Radha bringing him back to square one, Dhruva wondered whether Kavya’s confession was but a red herring, but reckoning that when the ill motives of the natural suspects to commit a crime are an open secret, someone with a hidden agenda might be tempted to use that as a camouflage for his subterfuge, he saw the need to enlarge the scope of the investigation well beyond the apparent suspects.
Shakeel’s Demise
That early dawn, waking up to the first ring tone of his mobile, so as
not to disturb Radha lying beside him, Dhruva switched it off readily, and
moving out of the bedroom, he realized that the call was from Shakeel’s cell. When
he returned the call, as he was kept on hold for long, he dialed the
residential number and found that too was ever engaged; however, soon, ending
the stalemate, Shakeel’s son got him on the mobile. Shocked at learning that the
cop had died in his sleep, he was dumbfounded, and recovering, he wondered
whether he too went the Ranjit’s way. Then, recalling Radha’s fears for Shakeel’s
life, he looked at her instinctively, and finding her in a serene sleep, as he
set out to visit the bereaved, he told Raju to inform her about the tragedy as
she woke up.
When he reached Shakeel’s house in Chatrinaka, he had to wade through the
milling crowd to make it to the corpse, not only to pay his respects to the
departed soul but also to unearth the clues, if any, to his death, even as it
transpired that it was business as usual for the deceased on the day of his demise.
Even though all thought that he could have died of a stroke and he found
nothing incriminating, yet insisting upon a post-mortem and having assured to
stand by the family through thick and thin, the detective left them.
However, on reaching home, when he aired his apprehensions about the death,
as Radha voiced her suspicions about Pravar’s possible involvement in it, he wondered
what if he targets Kavya next, piqued at her possible indifference towards him.
If he indeed had seen Ranjit’s end to own her, would he pardon her for ditching
him? Had he avenged himself on Shakeel for his foisting a false case on him,
would he go soft on his lady-love for being hard on him? Isn’t sexual hurt a compelling
impulse to commit crime, and hadn’t the cop sketched him as cunning and
ruthless; but still, why place the cart before the horse; let the post-mortem
report arrive, so averred the detective to her.
The next evening, when Dhruva reached the Chatrinaka Police Station, as
he was given to understand that the as the forensic tests confirmed that Shakeel’s
death too was owing to poisoning, he was truly worried about Kavya’s safety,
and so as to have a word with her, he readily drove down to her Spandan.
Though she received him warmly, feeling embarrassed by his enamored
look, she instinctively became tentative, but when he managed to camouflage his
ardor, she impulsively regained her poise, and revealed that probing Shakeel’s
death, just then the police came to inquire about her whereabouts the other
day. So, when he wanted to have her take on the probability of Pravar avenging
himself on the cop, she said that, on and off, he was wont to rage for revenge,
when she used to urge him to desist from such thoughts. However, after her
husband’s death, as she turned cold towards him, he begged her not to desert
him for he might go berserk all again, but sick and tired of her shameful association
with him, she was firm not to yield to him anymore, come what may. So, who
knew, he could have killed the cop hoping that she would reach up to him to
renew her counseling, so be it, but there was no way she would succumb to him
ever again.
At that, while he espied her with empathy, saying that she felt
miserable carrying the cross of her weird past, as she broke down, he told her as
that brat was not worthy of her thoughts, it made no sense for her in suffering
on his account. Then, as she looked at him with hope, he unraveled Pravar’s
criminal background, as etched by Radha and sketched by Shakeel, which prompted
her to say that she felt even more wretched for having carried on with such a
character. Moved by the radiance of her visage in her repentance, as he was
impelled to take her into his arms as if to feel her soul, driven by her sense
of emptiness, she insensibly sank into his chest as though for her solace. However,
when he reiterated the need for her to let bygones be bygones for the sake of
her future, she confessed to him in remorse that she reduced herself to be his
accomplice in crime as well. Though he said that was quite understandable,
shamed by her recollections, she withdrew herself, but goaded by him to
off-load her guilt, she briefed him about her life and crimes with that brat.
By the time he kidnapped her, he was a rank broke, having splurged all
the booty, acquired through a boy’s kidnap, for Natya’s endearment, and what with
that farce of a ransom in her case having ended in the confiscation of the
stolen cars as well, he had nothing left to fall back upon. So, she was
constrained to provide succor and support to the hapless couple but while he
was initially content with living on her doles, however, after he won her over,
he came to seek more and more from her, but her man, as if on cue, curtailed
her access to the family purse, and that forced her to play ball with him at
extortions. Why, it was her cynical idea that with right tactics, he could make
the corrupt to cough up part of their ill-gotten money, with none of them going
to town about it for fear of further trouble. At that, he proposed that they
might conduct fake tax raids with forged identities, but she reckoned that, sooner
than later, it would only land him in one gaol or the other as someone at some
stage was bound to call his bluff. So, when he said what to make out of her
non-starter of an idea, she told him that with her brains and his brawn, they
could yet make it workable; what with her contacts in the department, she would
be able to prepare the profiles of the high-end tax evaders for him to pick up
the faint-hearted from amongst them. But still, if someone were to act out of
character, yet there was no way he would go to the police to report against him,
and if only he would keep his greed at bay, it might as well be a smooth
sailing for him.
Then, benumbed by shame, she paused for a while, but as if driven by his
empathy, she resumed, saying that her plan did work to her peculiar excitement,
which made her realize that her heart after all had a criminal beat in it. When
he gently pressed her shoulder, as if to convey his understanding of the human frailties,
she said that she abhorred the darker side of her nature; and even as he
reached out for her hand, she ran inside in despair, and he stayed back to let
her overcome her remorse in solitude.
However, smelling some gas and rushing into the kitchen, as he saw her
picking up the gas-lighter, he grabbed it from her and closed the cylinder
valve, after which, crying inconsolably, she sank into his arms, but as he led
her to the verandah for fresh air, she withdrew from him in self-remorse.
Shortly thereafter, having led her back into the drawing room, even as
he was at a loss to understand as to how to calm her, she told him that she
could not bear the very thought of leading life with a foul soul in a polluted
body. Taken aback at her self-remorse, he pleaded with her not to feel so low,
and told her that it was only a matter of time before she regained her
self-worth; and as if to demonstrate his belief in his prophesy, he was
impelled to embrace her to inject hope in her through his ardent kissing, and
as though she had already realized her mettle, she soon lent passion to her
tongue to deep kiss him for long. However, when she withdrew her lips and presented
her sparkling eyes to him as if to enable him espy her rejuvenated self, elated
at that, he enlaced her ardently as though to cherish her rejuvenated persona.
However, as though to carry forward the moment, when he proposed that
she may put up in his house, where with the Rajus in attendance, she would have
Radha, his companion, for company, thanking him profusely, as she hesitated to go
with him, as if to show her the way, he took her hand, and cajoled by him, she
packed up some essentials.
Thus, when Kavya stepped into 9, Castle Hills, seeing her body
language, Radha realized that she had a formidable rival to contend with, and
reckoned that it might not help her cause if she were to cut up with him on her
score. However, while reviewing Shakeel’s demise with her, when Dhruva wondered
whether it had any connection with Ranjith’s death, she asserted that she could
see Kavya’s extended hand in both the murders. But before she could elaborate
upon that, he received a call informing him that the day he died, Shakeel was seen
with a woman in burka, and as he
shared that news with her, she said that it too could have been a case of
Pravar’s poison at work under Kavya’s burka;
why, she had Natya’s word that having reduced herself as his vassal, she became
his partner in crime no less.
Then, warning her not to jump to hasty conclusions, he told her it was
not wise to go by Natya’s words alone for she could have grouses against her
rival to her man’s affections, and added that she should’ve learned about that
from her own experience; wasn't it Shakeel’s over-reliance on Pravar’s account
that caused her so much grief; so why repeat the mistake to Kavya’s hurt as
well? However, she reminded him how Kavya had given a clean chit to her paramour in her husband’s
murder, and added that it was for him to decide whether she faked that suicide
attempt, a la Pravar, to gain his
sympathy, or if she was only feigning remorse over their liaison just to evade
his investigative radar.
But as he maintained that his gut feeling was that Kavya was innocent, and her change of heart was genuine, she said, half in jest, that his fondness for attractive women tended to fudge his judgment about them. However, making light of her remark, he said that she was free to keep a watch on her suspect, and she told him smilingly that it would be far better for her if he kept his eyes off the charming guest. Then, as he came up with a repartee that her own allure had already blinded him, she retorted by saying that what if her rival uses her rare sex appeal as a laser to restore his vision.
A Perfect Murder
Soon, Dhruva had noticed that while Radha seemed to have reconciled to
his affection for Kavya, for her part, Kavya, having taken to Radha’s peculiar
charm, even became emamored of her.
So, guided by Dhruva’s counseling and buttressed by Radha’s camaraderie,
as Kavya recouped from her trauma sooner than expected, she thought it fit to
go back to Spandan. However, Dhruva
maintained that he was not so naïve as to put his client’s life at risk; and Radha
too chipped in by saying that until the venom behind the poison was identified,
it was as well that Kavya stayed away from her place. But when Radha added jokingly that she might deem it as a
protective custody; Kavya said in half jest that she would like to earn her
freedom by lending them her helping hand at catching the culprits. Bemused by
their bonhomie, as he told Kavya that in the normal course, she would have been
senior to Radha; she said that she bore no grudge against her mate on that
score.
Meaning business, as he wanted Kavya to start gathering Ranjit’s past,
she said for that she would have a lot of ground to cover, as her in-laws were
ever on the move that is until they died two years back. While he felt that
probing his immediate past might save much of that bother, for the impulse of a
recent hurt would’ve a stronger urge for revenge, she said that she has a hunch
that his premarital life might hold the key to his undoing, and thus it was as
well that she delved deep into his distant past. What with Dhruva seeing merit
in her supposition, Kavya left them in search of her husband’s past, where he happened
to stay, when they got married.
Soon thereafter, Radha said to Dhruva that Natya told her that she feared
for the worst as Pravar was mad at the loss of his lady-love, and added as that
the poor girl bore the brunt of his frustration, her vengeful man can be
expected to avenge himself on Kavya sooner than later. What was worse, Radha
averred that he might force the hapless lass to be an accomplice in the crime,
and lamented at her fate that first let her fall into Rajan’s criminal hands
only to lead her into Pravar’s vicious grip; and if only she could help her get
out of the rut and put her on track under his care.
At that, recalling the empathy that girl had induced in him that
evening on the Tank Bund, as Dhruva told her that he would strive to end the
Pravar menace. Radha said that she would love to see him effect a course
correction in Natya’s deranged life, even as he brought Kavya’s derailed life
back on the tracks. But he said that given that Ranjit’s killer was still at
large, and as Kavya’s life too could be imperiled, she may have to wait a while
for him to shift his focus onto Pravar and meanwhile she should apply her mind
as to how to nab him.
However, when she wanted to know whether Ranjit’s murder could be a
perfect murder, he said that he was not sure about that yet, but to her poser about
‘what is a perfect murder’, he theorized that even when backed by the circumstantial
evidence, if an irrefutable motive and an inalienable gain from the crime fail
to nail the suspect, then it’s a perfect murder. Then as she wondered aloud whether
such was in the realms of possibility at all, he detailed the immaculate plan
and its meticulous execution of a murder that he reckoned as conceptually perfect
That was when he was the Station House Officer of the Saifabad Police Station;
one morning, a young and beautiful woman, introducing herself as Neha, lodged a
missing person complaint as Murali, her husband, failed to return home the
previous night, and said that she feared something untoward could have happened
with him. When he asked her whether she could think of anyone who could be
inimical to him, she said sobbingly that he was his worst enemy, and after some
persuasion, she narrated her tale - burdened by debts, ever since her husband
wound up his automobile business, he became a cynic that is besides being an
alcoholic; somehow, he convinced himself that a poor man’s spouse was rich
men’s prey. So, suspecting her fidelity, he began alleging that she slept with
all and sundry, and unable to bear the humiliation, she tried to commit suicide
with an overdose of sleeping pills, but sadly for her, she couldn’t die, but
rattled by that, he became remorseful and started talking in terms of ending
his own life; and it was his psychological imbalance and the hazards of drunken
driving that came to plague her. When he asked for Murali’s photograph, she handed
him one.
But the next day, she came to inform him that her husband had returned
only to remain more depressed than ever before, and even though she urged him
to take it easy, he was still harping on his past; what’s worse he says that he
had no right to live. So, moved by her predicament, as Dhruva sounded
sympathetic, she thanked him for his empathy, and said that she would try to
persuade him to consult a psychiatrist. Believing that that she deserved better
and thinking that if only he met her as a miss, he wished her well and bade her
good bye.
However, shortly thereafter, one evening in the police club, he heard a
colleague say that only recently, at a desolate level crossing, not far off from
Hyderabad, a man’s body was retrieved from his car, accidentally crushed on the
railway tracks, so much for the railway safety! Moreover, as the graphologist
confirmed that the writing in the suicide note found in the victim’s wallet
matched his handwriting, and as the post-mortem report too indicated a drunken
death, the case was closed as there was no reason to proceed further.
But as crime would have it, it readily occurred to him, what if Neha’s missing
person complaint then was but a red herring, so he thought it fit to delve into
her life and times, and as he gathered in the grapevine that Murali, suspecting
her fidelity, was wont to ill-treat her, he could smell the rat. So, out of
professional curiosity, he unofficially involved himself in the case, and upon closer
scrutiny of the suicide note it became apparent to him that it was an odd
tear-out from a foolscap paper and its tone and tenor suggested that possibly it
could be a part of some story penned by the deceased. However, such a possibility
amused him for muse or no muse, these days; all are at writing fiction, which, besides
inundating the world of letters, made it difficult for the readers to separate
the literary grain from the wordy chaff.
Whatever, were it not possible that Neha, having laid her hands on a
manuscript containing that suicide thing, possibly returned by some magazine house,
prepared the script for her husband’s end with it; so he went round the publishing
houses, in one of which, an assistant editor readily recalled the queer story
with that suicide pitch, the manuscript of which was returned to the sender only
recently. With the needle of suspicion so firmly tilted towards her murderous
hand, he confronted her with that damned evidence.
Owning up her guilt, a teary-eyed Neha told him how it all started –
since long, her husband began treating her merely as a sexual bowl, that too
when he could not get hold of some whore or the other, and adding insult to
injury, whenever he laid her, he made it a point to make that clear to her. How
mean men can become to demean women, she lamented, and slighted thus, she
seduced Mohan, his close friend, for sex as well as self-esteem. However, as her
man got wind of their affair, he calibrated his responses cunningly; on one
hand he started sponging on Mohan at the pain of breaking up with him, and on
the other, he began scheming to ruin his marriage by estranging his wife from him.
So, not wanting to be the cause of Mohan’s marital ruin, she alerted him to
Murali’s designs; she even offered to end their affair; but afraid of Murali’s
potential for mischief, Mohan thought of silencing him by a supari, but fearing that the foolhardy
of a third party could spell trouble for both of them, she chartered the course
of that murder, as by then she had that fatal manuscript in her hand.
So, on that fateful day, she induced her man to drink to the hilt, and
when he pissed out, for an alibi, she joined Mohan waiting at the Odeon, which
they left as soon as the movie began. Thereby reaching home on the sly, she got
her husband into her car for him to have fresh air at the city’s outskirts, so
she made it to the earmarked place with him in their car, while Mohan followed
in his vehicle. There, steering her car onto the desolate railway tracks, and making
Murali sit in the driving seat and sitting beside him to ensure that he stayed
put, she awaited the scheduled train to speed in, and upon citing it, got down
from it to witness the good riddance of their bad rubbish. Soon, when it was
all over for Murali, as Mohan drove in from a nearby hiding place, proud of
that perfect murder, they drove back to the city to begin life afresh as man
and his secret wife.
While Radha wondered how Neha’s concern for her paramour’s wife motivated her to murder her own man, Dhruva saw it merely as Mohan’s means to ward off his ill-will and Neha’s escape route from his cruel ways. Besides, isn’t the nature of the species to devour others for the sake of self-preservation? So he buried the murder in the coffin of suicide. Admiring his empathy for the ‘preys on the prowl’, she sank into his arms saying that it would appear as if without some divine hand to guide it, there could never be a perfect murder, and added that should things mundane ever make it imperfect, maybe, the culprit could still count on him.
Deaths in Spandan
That morning, when Kavya returned to Dhruva’s ‘think of the devil’
welcome and Radha’s ‘what’s the news’ query, Raju greeted her with a cup of hot
filter coffee.
However, as Radha began exhorting Kavya to lead her to the leads that
she might have laid her hands on, Dhruva would have none of that for he felt
that, like it’s not wise to mix drinks, it’s imprudent to mix their leads. What
with her enthusiasm reined in thus, as Radha kept mum, he led Kavya into the sprawling
lawns to have a first-hand account of her fact-findings.
Kavya told him that her guesswork at Guntur took her to an old woman,
who, having recognized Ranjit from his old photographs she carried, recalled
that years back; he lived with his young wife nearby. Leave alone him, even she
didn’t mix with any, save Shyamala, an aunt of her childhood mate Rani; so all
suspected that, having eloped, they were covering their tracks. But soon, as he
vanished, leaving her in the lurch, the entire neighborhood was agog with ‘I
told you so’, and when she too left shortly thereafter, no one knows where, the
grapevine only grew with more rumors. Anyway, that was so long ago, and she was
not sure whether even Shyamala knew more about that girl’s elopement that went
awry. However, when Kavya wanted to contact Shyamala, the old woman said that she
had been to the U.S to help her daughter deliver, and thanks to the six-month
cap, she could be back home anytime.
Capping her trip, Kavya informed him, though she gave his c/o address
to that woman to write to her on Shyamala’s return, maybe, she need to go there
after some time to catch up with her. When he wanted to know about the reverse
queries from the oldie, she told him smilingly that luckily, she was more of a
transmitter than a receiver, as otherwise it would have been well nigh
impossible for her to make any headway.
Thereafter, leaving the women to their ways, and reaching his study, he
recalled Radha’s intriguing description of her childhood friend as ‘full-soul
mate and half-namesake’, and thought what if Shyamala’s niece turns out to be her
long lost friend; won’t it mean that Ranjit’s deserted wife was none other than
she herself. If so, what an irony it would be that unknowingly, Kavya had stumbled
upon her husband’s long shadow over the very woman rivaling her for his
affections! But yet, out of consideration for her rival’s position in his life,
she subdues her emotions for him generated in that burst of their passion; why,
was he any less constrained in reining in his raging desire as it’s
inappropriate to woo a widow in her mourning. Yet, when the time is ripe to
court her, as it can never be a case of either/ or of these fascinating women, there’s
no other way for him but ménage a trios with them.
That evening, when Radha proposed that the apprentice should celebrate
her maiden foray with three cheers over drinks and as Kavya said that she was a
game for it, Dhruva said in half jest that the senior might rue her move for the
junior may outwit her. Then, mixing drink for them, as Radha said in jest that
it may pay to keep the other woman high, especially when the stakes were high, Kavya
retorted smilingly that she would oblige her to make good her lost time. Thus,
after a couple of drinks, as if to make good her promise, a tipsy Kavya wanted
to have a third binge, but even though he was against it, yet as she insisted for
a large, Radha broke the deadlock by mixing a small one for her. So, when Raju
came to announce dinner for them, Radha said bottoms up, Dhruva stubbed his cigar,
and Kavya sipped the last dreg.
Towards the evening the next day, when the threesome were playing
rummy, Raju said that Inspector Simon, who replaced Shakeel at the Jubilee
Hills Police Station, came to see him. By then having learned that the newcomer
was advised by all to avoid him as Shakeel had bungled up the fake-notes case
at his behest, Dhruva sensed that his was no friendly visit. So, stepping into
the anteroom tentatively and having greeted the visitor warmly, he enquired in
jest whether he came to the Castle Hills for sightseeing; but when the cop
said, rather tersely, that he was there to question Kavya about the mysterious
deaths in her Spandan, Dhruva knew it was no joking time.
Evan as Dhruva led him into the study, Simon said that informed about foul
smell in her house, they broke open its main door in the morning and found therein
the decomposed bodies of a young couple. With no traces of any bodily injuries
or any signs of forcible entry into the premises, prima facie, it appeared that
they might have died in a suicide pact. But when he was told that the dead were
not the inmates, and it was only recently that the house owner died mysteriously,
he decided to personally investigate the matter. As if it’s not puzzle enough
that the house was found locked from inside even as the housewife was not
residing in it for quite a while, the assertion of a chowkidar in the locality that he had seen a burka-clad woman enter the house four days back made the case all
the more intriguing. Since the neighbors were unaware of the housewife’s whereabouts,
he enquired at the Jubilee Hills Post Office and came to know that her letters
were being redirected to 9, Castle Hills, which should explain his rather
unwelcome visit.
When Dhruva broke the shattering news, shocked beyond belief, Kavya wanted
to go to Spandan to see it all for
herself, but Simon said that first she should try to identify the dead at the
Gandhi Hospital. So, led by Simon, and accompanied by Dhruva and Radha, she
made it to the hospital, where in its mortuary; she could identify the dead as
Pravar and Natya. However, while Simon was recording Kavya’s statement, Radha wanted
Dhruva to have a last look at Natya, but preferring to retain her pallu-covered face for a memory, he
desisted from seeing her decomposed body. Soon, let off after her assurance to
cooperate in the investigation, a perplexed Kavya was led out of the police
station by Dhruva and Radha.
Upon reaching home, saying that she was too dazed to comprehend the
situation as Kavya rushed into her room; left alone with Radha, as Dhruva, reviewed
the stunning development with her; she told him that there were questions for
Kavya to answer after all. Given that she only had the house key, if not Kavya
in burka, who could have led the ill-starred
couple into her house? Besides, who would benefit the most with their end than
her? After all, was she not craving to begin life afresh, and was it possible
with them around her? Moreover, Natya had vouchsafed that Kavya had a cunning
mind with criminal impulses; maybe her going to Guntur was a means to acquire
an alibi.
As if to free himself from Radha’s brainwash, Dhruva rushed to the
Jubilee Hills Police Station to confabulate with Simon, who said that prima
facie Kavya remained the sole suspect and revealed that he had also asked his
men to review the dossier on her husband’s murder to bring her under the
scanner. Then Dhruva assured him that even though she was his client, if he ever
scented her criminal hand behind the murders, he didn’t intend to hold her
brief for sure. When Simon said that he hoped he would not hinder his
investigation as well, assuring him of his bona fide, Dhruva said that he
better took him to the Spandan for a
second opinion in cracking the case.
On their way, Simon said that as there were no signs of the deceased
having moved about in the house, it can be said that they could have died
shortly after they got in, at which Dhruva wanted to know whether the door key
was found in the house. Then the cop said that it was not traced in spite of a
thorough search, for after snaring them in, Kavya could have left with it on
the sly. Moreover, as the Godrej lock was any way self-locking, the deceased, known
to her any way, wouldn’t have bothered much, even if she had told them that she
wanted to take away the key with her for whatever reason. Besides, it was
apparent that the kitchen was in disuse for quite a while and the remnants of the
packed food found in the dustbin would clearly imply that the couple were there
hardly for a day at the most before they met their end.
When they reached the Spandan,
as the guard on duty opened the main door for them, Simon said that, as the
police had to force open the door, the Godrej lock in situ was damaged, which
he had substituted any way. However, as they got into the house, closing the main
door behind them, the detective noticed that it was shorn of its door bolt, so
he asked the cop whether he had seen it in its position when they first came
in. When the cop confirmed that there was none even then, detective had drawn
his attention to the telltale marks of its having been in place until very
recently; and then, having scanned the damaged Godrej lock with his magnifying
glass, he turned his attention to the drawing room and done with it, he got
into the guest room, where a burka
was laid on the clothesline.
Having picked up the garment, and finding neither tailor’s label nor
dhobi mark on it, the detective had noted its measurements with a tape that he
had brought along, at which, as the cop said there were some more of such in
the attached toilet of the master bedroom; seeing that burkas could hold the key to the murders, he tallied them all with
the one found in the guestroom. When Dhruva turned his attention to the empty
wardrobe in the master bedroom, Simon said that as they failed to trace the
keys in the house; they broke it open, but found nothing worthwhile therein. However,
when asked by Dhruva whether the absence a burka
in the wardrobe was recorded in the police panchanama,
Simon said though it was not done, he would make good the lapse in his case
diary; at that, the detective suggested that he should also record the fact of
the missing main door bolt that’s beside sending the original Godrej lock for forensic examination.
Then, as Dhrva began scanning the ground around the guest room window, when
Simon said that it was not a case of forcible entry through it; the detective told
him that he was in fact looking for signs of an easy passage from there to the
main door.
Shortly thereafter, when Dhruva said that he had nothing more to look for there, Simon led him back to the police station, where they spent some investigative time together.
Arraigned in Remand
That evening, closeting with a nonplussed Kavya, when Dhruva asked her
about her house keys, telling him that after her husband’s death, she got the
old Godrej lock replaced with a new one, she pulled out one from her purse, and
informed him that she kept the other two with a bunch of cupboard keys in her
bank locker along with her jewelry. Then when he asked her what for she got the
main door bolt removed while replacing the door lock, apparently surprised, she
said that it was very much intact even as he led her out of her house to bring
her into his that day. Finally, he asked her what made her to leave her burkas on the clothes-line in the master
bathroom, she swore that she never wore a burka
all her life, and wondered what it was all about. At that, holding her in
his reassuring arms, he detailed his findings at Spandan that pointed towards a conspiracy against her, and said
that still there was no need for her to lose sleep about that. However, at
length, taking hold of that Godrej key for his safekeeping, he bade Kavya good
night with sweet dreams.
The next morning, as she volunteered to show him the other keys, as Dhruva
drove her to the Andhra Bank in the Jubilee Hills, greeting her warmly; the
manger wondered why she became so scarce of late. When she told him the purpose
of her visit, he helped her complete the formalities, and after that, she led
Dhruva to her locker, from which she retrieved two Godrej keys with a bunch of
other keys that she entrusted to him,
Thus having left the bank, as they got into the car, though she looked
at him in hope, he said that if the post-mortem report were to come up with some
foul play, she can count on Simon to arrest her and press for her custodial interrogation.
When she lamented how her past came to haunt her, folding her in his arms, as
if in protection, he said that she better obtained an anticipatory bail, before
he could bail her out of her predicament. However, she said that she better
subjected herself to the due process of law to come clean for she was confident
of defending herself in the court. Then, in all admiration, pressing her more
closely to him, he assured her that he would get to the bottom of the crime for
truth to prevail. However, updating all the murders so to help her fashion her
arguments to avoid remand, he dropped her at their place, and headed to the
forensic laboratory with those keys.
However, even before an eager Radha could have a word with Kavya; armed
with an arrest warrant and accompanied by a woman constable, Simon had descended
upon
9, Castle Hills, and led away Kavya to the Jubilee Hills Police Station for questioning
for the post-mortem had revealed that the couple had died of poisoning.
The next day, Dhruva and Radha reached that Nampally Sessions Court well
before Simon had produced Kavya before Purushottam Rao, the magistrate, upon
which her searching look met Dhruva’s reassuring stare. Then, Jeevan Reddy, the
Public Prosecutor, recapped her life from the time of her self-confessed
association with the errant couple till their death in Spandan. While Kavya heard him impassively, turning eloquent, he
stated that she could have murdered her man at the behest of her lover, who
would have brooked no rival to him in her bed, and, later tired of the ruffian;
she murdered him in cold blood, so as to get out of the rut she willy-nilly got
into. Hence, it was immaterial whether she had a motive or not to murder Natya,
as, if left alive, she would have exposed the accused to get the noose. So, as it
a case of her neck or Natya’s, her choice should be clear as sky, even to a
novice of a defense lawyer.
What can be more incriminating against the accused, Reddy exhorted,
than the very fact that she has had an intimate relationship with all those who
died after consuming some slow-acting poison in her house? Besides, there was
an eyewitness to testify that a burka-clad
woman had entered the house the day the young couple could have been poisoned, who
else it could but the accused. The prosecutor further asserted that as the
circumstantial evidence pointed towards the involvement of the accused in the
murder of not only Pravar and Natya but also Ranjit, her husband, her custodial
interrogation was imperative in cracking both the cases. Thereby averring that
if let loose, she would be able to tamper with whatever little evidence that could
have been left to implicate her, and by way of the final nail on her bail
coffin, he had insinuated that she had misused the anticipatory bail granted to
her in her husband’s murder case by killing her paramour and his companion; so
he sought police custody of her for a fortnight at the least.
Permitted by the court to argue her own case, Kavya owned up the facts
of her life as brought out by the prosecution, but pointed out that the Public
Prosecutor seemingly suffers from a selective amnesia as he had conveniently
forgotten that the self-same poison also killed Inspector Shakeel, and that he
too was last seen with a burka-clad
woman. Why not the woman, who poisoned Shakeel, was the one who had committed
the crimes in Spandan, in her proven
absence from it? Since she had no acquaintance, much less a motive to kill the
cop, the police should have looked elsewhere for the killer of what appeared to
be interconnected crimes. When she reminded the court that logic was a
double-edged sword that cuts both ways, Reddy said peevishly that she would
have killed Shakeel too to advance such an argument; but the magistrate, by no
means amused with that wondered why the police failed to pursue that line of
investigation since the identity of the burka-clad
woman, last seen with the cop, was relevant to the investigation of the other
two cases.
As a tamed Reddy said that he had no more to add, the magistrate opined
that while the accused at large might hamper the investigation, it was not a
fair proposition either to interrogate her without any compelling reason, but
at the same time as he has to take the public interest also into account, he
ruled that Kavya might remain in the judicial custody for four weeks, before
which the police should produce prima-facie evidence, if any, against her,
failing which she would be entitled to seek a regular bail thereafter.
Thanking the magistrate for his fair order, when Kavya submitted that any police presence in her precincts was inimical to her public image, Simon volunteered to withdraw the guard forthwith.
Depressing Discovery
While Simon took Kavya to the Chanchalguda Jail in his jeep, Dhruva, in
his Esteem, drove Radha straight to the Spandan,
reaching which he led her in after collecting the door key from the guard on
duty.
Though she alerted him to a heap of burkas
on the clothesline in the attached toilet of the master bedroom, seeing him
seemingly unenthused, she proposed that she might wear one of them to have a
feel of it. Saying in jest that even that tent-of-a-garment might fail to hide
the alluring features of her hourglass frame, he let her take him around the
bungalow before he led her out of it.
Getting into the car, though she reminded him about the burkas on the clothesline and jocularly thanked
him for not having put her through the choking regimen, as he failed to respond,
she became anxious, and asked him what was bothering him. However, he merely said
that he was wondering how breathless women could be in a burka before they get habituated to it, and kept mum pensively thereafter.
Dropping her at home, he headed towards the forensic laboratory, where
he learned that while the main door key retained by Kavya had traces of wax on
it; the other two retrieved from the bank locker were never in usage. Beset
with the mixed feelings the findings induced in him, he then drove to the
Jubilee Hills Police Station to know what the original Godrej lock had to
reveal. Revealing that the lock didn’t show any signs of tampering, when Simon
said that the very fact had tilted the needle of suspicion back towards Kavya, Dhruva
told him that for the very reason he could see her
un-involvement in the crime coming to the fore, and though probed further by
the cop, the detective preferred to keep his cards close to his chest.
However, over drinks that evening with him, Radha said that luckily for
Kavya, the court didn’t reckon her motive to murder Shakeel though it was
apparent that she didn’t take it kindly to him for having falsely implicated
Pravar in the fake-notes case, and owing to the Stockholm Syndrome, wasn’t it
her wont to identify his detractors as her enemies. Besides, aided by Dhruva, having
shed the Pravar blinkers, and being enamored of him in turn, were it not
possible that she might have thought of erasing her past by eliminating the
couple to usher in a new romance in her life?
Saying what if her theories emanated from the Rival Syndrome, he told her
that she might as well wait for the answers until he cut the Gordian knot to
free her rival under siege, and added in jest that in the meantime, she better
reined in her raging jealousy. At that turning coy, she told him that her own
future seemed to be under siege by his empathy for her rival, and as he made
light of her remark, she said that she was afraid she was no match to Kavya in
every which way. Then he told her jocularly that to keep up her spirits; he
would like to keep her on high, and as she said that she was a game for it,
turning away Raju whenever he came to fetch them for dinner, he goaded her to
get really drunk.
However, later seeing her in slumber, he wondered if he was far too indulgent
towards Kavya, and thought, in the same vein, whether he became untowardly suspicious
of Radha. Thus torn between the woman he made his own and the woman he was
enamored of, he resolved to see the former’s place for whatever it might have in
store for the latter’s fate. So, sneaking out of Radha’s bed and asking Raju to
keep a watch on her, Dhruva set out on his nocturnal mission to her Red Hills
house.
Having gained entry into her house with one of the assorted keys he
carried and opening the cupboard with another one, he rummaged through its
contents and found her old photograph with a teen that seemed to be Rani his child
bearer, staring at which, he turned nostalgic. However, as he broke open the
locker of her steel almirah, he was depressed at finding a bottle of some
potion along with two crudely made keys resembling those of Spandan’s Godrej lock. Not able to
believe what he had seen, he looked for burkas,
just in case, and finding none, he left the place with those keys and a
sample of the potion.
Thus, reaching home in a dilemma as to how to handle Radha, he relieved
Raju from his vigil on her, and having secured the evidences and sneaking into
her bed, as if to read her mind, he began espying her in a serene sleep. Maybe,
she had a reason to see Pravar’s end, but didn’t she seem to be fond of Natya?
Surely, she bore a grudge against Shakeel, but was it Ranjit who had jilted her
then? Was it really the case? If so, won’t these bits and pieces jell well to
form an inimical whole? Bogged down by myriad thoughts about his companion’s
motives for those murders, he had a disturbed sleep.
Next morning though as she served him bed coffee, seeing her demeanor, he
found it hard to picture her as a murderess, but during their breakfast, he saw
a change of color in her when she received a call on her mobile. Saying that her
friend had a tiff with her husband, as she left in a huff so as to rush out to
help, it was clear to him that it was the anticipated call about the burglary
in her house; after all, didn’t deliberately keep the main door ajar for some
neighbor to smell the rat.
Thus, with the ever-expanding ‘volume of evidence’ against her, he
rushed to the forensic laboratory with the keys and the sample potion he
collected from her house, only to return forthwith to wait for her return.
Shortly thereafter, when she returned, regaining her composure, he
asked her what came out of her counseling, and she dismissed that as a false
alarm as her friend’s husband was a regular wife-beater, and added in jest that
he only thrashed her a little more than usual. While she said that she was at a
loss to see her friend was averse to divorcing him, he said women in an abusive
relationship tend to perceive themselves as martyrs, and so it’s very hard to
pull them out of their self-defeating groove into which they willy-nilly push
themselves so as to live in a psychic state of bliss.
That evening, when Dhruva reached the forensic laboratory, he was informed that the potion was indeed a slow acting poison like the one that caused the deaths under investigation and those keys were but crude imitations of Spandan’s Godrej door key. What with the incriminating evidence in hand, he felt like confronting Radha with it, but, on second thoughts, he realized that she was bound to dismiss them as his plants to implicate her for saving his Kavya. Besides, there was no way to link her to the murders without a compelling motive to kill each one of them; after all, the public prosecutor had failed to persuade the court for Kavya’s custody, notwithstanding mounds of circumstantial evidence against her, backed by irrefutable motives to kill Ranjit and Pravar, if not Shakeel and Natya. What was worse, the court might infer that Kavya, even in judicial custody, was trying to influence justice by aiding and abetting him; as that won’t do any good for her cause; it’s better to bide his time till he collected the missing links to complete the chain of evidence against Radha.
The Red Herring
With Kavya in judicial custody, Simon had redoubled his efforts to pin
her down to the murders, but seeing no scope for a breakthrough, he thought it
was an idea to ascertain the goings on in her camp. Thus, that evening, having made
it to 9, Castle Hills, and finding Dhruva with Radha in the portico, he told him
that he wanted to have a private talk with him. Then, saying that Radha being
his confident and companion, he should not hesitate to open up in her presence,
Dhruva suggested that they can as well discuss matters over some drinks.
Then, when they sat down for
drinks, Simon said that as Dhruva could be aware, the media, dubbing the crimes
as ‘poison murders’ has already started ridiculing the police for their failure
to nab the culprits, and then lamented how all the clues to Kavya’ culpability
came to naught. And yet, he said that he had a hunch that she, with her
exposure to law and her acquaintance with a criminal could be a readymade murderess, and with a little bit of luck, he
might stumble upon the required evidence to nail her to have the last laugh.
Wondering whether he was directing his shot at him, the detective told him that
he should not mistake his own empathy for his client as his constraint to
shield her; and assured the cop that he would not lose a moment in alerting him
if ever he found any worthwhile evidence against her.
Lauding Dhruva for his professional ethics, when Simon said that he was
hopeful of laying his hands on some damning stuff or the other against her, sooner
than later; the detective opined that if a criminal investigation were to be
driven by an urge to fix someone, whom we want to see as the guilty one, then that
would only end up being in the no- man’s-land. At that, as Simon admitted,
maybe, it was wrong to club all the murders, Dhruva averred that thanks to the
media, as all are aware that a burka-clad woman could have poisoned Ranjit; what if someone else thought of
eliminating Shakeel in a like fashion to make it seem as a sequel to it; and if
anything, the cumulative publicity of both these murders would have encouraged
yet another to adopt the same tactic to do away with Pravar, if not Natya, who,
being his companion, might have become an unintended victim.
Then, agreeing that maybe it was the right approach to de-link the
deaths, after a couple of drinks, though Radha wanted him to stay for dinner,
Simon took leave of them.
However, when only four days were left of Kavya’s judicial remand, as the
cop wanted to get it extended by another fortnight, the public prosecutor told
him that unless they presented a compelling case for her continued detention,
the court was bound to grant her an unconditional bail at the scheduled hearing.
Thus, as Simon was reconciled to Kavya’s release, as the telephone
operator told him that just then a woman rang up to inform that a vital clue of
the ‘poison murders’ could be obtained at 9, Castle Hills. Though excited at
that, yet he wondered whether it was fair to raid Dhruva house after he gave
his word to alert him, if ever he finds anything against her; but, maybe, he was
oblivious of the inimical clue as he would not have pried upon Kavya, his client,
and a guest at the same time. So, it’s obvious that Radha had stumbled upon some
vital clue; surely, she wouldn’t have alerted him on a wrong lead; why would
she compromise herself by embarrassing the detective? So, as it can’t be a
false alarm, it made a case for the raid; more so, was it not his police dharma
to act on specific leads?
Next morning, when Simon descended upon 9, Castle Hills, with a search
warrant, Dhruva said that he didn’t think there were any skeletons in his
cupboards and yet the cop was welcome to do have his way. But apologizing for
the embarrassment, and saying that, to start with, he would only confine himself
to Kavya’s room in absentia, Simon began his search for unknown evidence. At
length, what with a bottle of some potion found on the floor beneath Kavya’s
cupboard, as an elated Simon signaled the end, Dhruva insisted that he would
like to retain a sample of the same for its validation; so after the
formalities of signing the papers and sealing the samples were completed, the
cop left with one of the samples to the forensic lab.
However, having watched it all from the sidelines and wondering why Dhruva
was not perturbed as expected, as Radha said where all that would lead Kavya
to, he told her that he was certain that the arm of her destiny would overpower
the hidden hand of adversity. So, unable to comprehend his conviction about Kavya’s
innocence and his confidence of her redemption, she withdrew into her room, but
finding him morose even when they were having lunch together, she said in jest
what if she substituted Kavya in jail to see if she can enliven him at home,
and in repartee, he said what if the jailor, lost to her allure, loses the key
of her cell as well. For once, not amused by the turn of his phrase, she tried
to study his visage to probe his mind, but confronted by a poker face, she
thought better of it, and so retired to her room.
After his siesta, while Dhruva was waiting for Simon’s call, Raju
delivered him the mail that contained one from Rani, which made him expectant
for it seemed to contain some photograph, which he thought could be that of
their lovechild. But as it turned out to be an old snap of Radha with Ranjit,
even as he initially felt relieved for Kavya’s sake, for long, he remained sad on
Radha’s account.
However, after a while, he read Rani’s letter that sealed Radha’s fate.
My Man:
Having fathered my child what else are
you but ‘my man’.
Even as I sat at the table to pen a
‘Thank You’ note to you for having blessed me with your Xerox Boy, I received a
letter from my Shyamala auntie to inform me that while she was out of the
country, some Kavya had been to her place in Guntur to ascertain the
whereabouts of Ranjit, who once ditched my friend Radha.
Since that Kavya wanted the information to
be posted to your address, maybe she’s the Operation
Checkmate wife of the very man who ditched my friend, whom you could be
nursing now under your investigative wings (or more!).
So be it, but coming to the point, while
I was still in Waltair, my childhood friend Radha - she was wont to say that I
am her half-namesake and full-soul mate - having eloped with her neighbor Ranjit
to Guntur, sent me their wedding photograph, just in case (attached herewith); so
I put her to my Shyamala auntie there for whatever it was worth. Later I came
to know from my auntie that having been deserted by him, she returned to
Waltair, but by then as our family had shifted to Hyderabad; I lost contact
with her.
However, had I heeded to your suggestion
to meet Kavya’s man that day in (y)our place, maybe I would have known if he’s
the one who ditched my friend; also I’m beginning to wonder whether Radha the alleged
murderess you were so obsessed with, is indeed Radha, my friend.
But still, if my inputs are of any use
to you, I would feel that I’ve contributed to your cause, which may recompense you
for my entry into your life on a false note; as for your entry into me, as I’ve
told you, it’s not only fulfilling but fruitful as well.
Now I’ve come to believe that it’s not
fair on my part to deny your fatherly need to see how your son looks like, so I
shall send our boy’s photograph, as, and when, his features begin to show your
resemblances.
Ever Yours,
Rani
Seeing that photograph all again, he saw the irony of life and the hand
of destiny in the affairs of man for unwittingly Rani had provided the means
that undo her own friend. Then wondering how the one-time friends, unknown to
each other, had converged on him to serve their own ends, he reminisced the
time he spent with both of them.
Soon though, stirred by the finding, when Dhruva reached the Jubilee
Hills Police Station, Simon received him with a sheepish look as the ‘poison’
he seized from Kavya’s room turned out to be an inane solution. Thus, shamed by
the fiasco, as the cop apologized, the detective, who came to trust him by
then, briefed him about his housebreak into Radha’s Red Hills house, and
theorized the aftermath thus:
He was quick to realize that Radha would shift the deadly thing into 9,
Castle Hills, for its safekeeping though that could also spell Kavya’s doom.
So, unknown to Radha, he replaced the bottle with a similar one with that
harmless look-alike potion. What with Kavya’s release on hand, Radha cynically planted
the ‘fake thing’ beneath her cupboard and induced the police to look for it,
which was heinous and unpardonable; and to say the least, her malicious intent
to send an innocent to the gallows, eclipses all her murderous acts put
together.
Then, as Dhruva concluded with the parody on the adulterated liquor -
the Scotch you drink is not the Scotch you think – and said that the bottle
that Radha planted beneath Kavya’s cupboard ‘did not contain the poison she
thought it contained’; Simon’s face acquired the look of a devout.
Wiser for his reverses though, as the cop wanted the proof of Radha
having possessed the ‘real thing’ before he acted against her, the detective
gave him the original bottle of poison that was bound to contain her
fingerprints. However, as Simon still remained skeptical about her motive to
murder Ranjit, Dhruva showed him her wedding photograph with Ranjit, who jilted
her.
Then, on their way to the forensic laboratory, Dhruva unraveled the story of Radha’s life abused by Ranjit, scandalized by Pravar, and brutalized by Shakeel.
Wages of Abuse
Next day, as Simon reached 9, Castle Hills, with a woman constable in
tow to apprehend Radha, as if on a cue, Dhruva kept away from the scene.
When Radha, who remained haughty, wanted to know what were the charges
brought against her, Simon informed her that she was being arraigned on the
charge of murdering Ranjit, Shakeel,
Pravar and Natya, in that order. Stunned though by the unexpected turn of the
events, as she remained cool and wanted to know what evidence he had against
her, the cop said that her fingerprints were found on the bottle containing the
poison that was traced in the victims’ viscera. While she was still reeling
from the shock of his disclosure, rattling her further, when he showed her the
damning photograph of hers with Ranjit, seeing that her game was up, she asked
him whether Dhruva was privy to all that. Then, as the cop revealed that it was
the detective who had gathered all the evidences against her, a shattered Radha
offered to surrender.
When Simon produced her in the court, as Dhruva kept himself away, Radha
said that she was willing to confess to her crimes, and the magistrate allowed
her to record her statement.
I, Radha, w/o late Madhu, r/o 13, Red
Hills, Hyderabad, she began to dictate calmly, confess to having willfully
poisoned not only Ranjit but also Shakeel, Pravar and Natya. I am aware that
this averment, being made on my own volition, could be used against me in the impending
trial, and I have no reservations on that count for it is not my intention to
evade the rightful sentence. Moreover, the aim of this painful confession is
not to earn sympathy or reprieve for myself as I am looking forward to the
gallows to end my burden of living. After all, following my those adventures,
an act of murder is no mean an adventure, now I seek death, the most formidable
adventure of life for it forays into the unknown.
When Ranjit ditched me, though I was
pregnant with his child, I blamed only myself for having blindly yielding to
him and then naively eloping with him. But his later day refusal to help the
hapless Raghu, the child I bore for him, that too after using me all again,
induced in me an enduring hatred for him. So, I came to see him as the cause of
my fall and began to abhor him with all my heart and soul; and as Madhu, the
man I married, started humiliating my boy, calling him a bastard, my bitterness
to the deserter only increased. Then, when my son, unable to bear the slights,
committed suicide on the railway track, how I wished that Ranjit met with the
same fate; but how I were to know that a worse fate awaited me.
Pravar, who had poisoned his sister Mala
and Madhu, who kept her, had succeeded in misleading Shakeel into believing
that it was my handiwork, and that set me on a ruinous course. Oh, failing to
make me sign on the dotted line for his credit of cracking the case, somehow the
cop developed an urge to humiliate me; so on the pretext of collecting vital clues,
he was wont to take me out of the jail to rape me at gunpoint. Worse still, he
began sharing me with the magistrate to prolong my judicial custody, and how I
endured the ordeal before I was let out on bail that was after both of them had
had their fill, I only knew.
When I saw that live coverage of the
telecast, in which Shakeel claimed that Pravar was the kingpin of the
counterfeit racket, though I felt the latter got his just deserts, I was seized
with an urge to avenge against the former. Then, guided by the hand of the combined
destiny - of the prey and its hounds – so it seems, I chanced to see Detective
Dhruva’s ad for an assistant lady sleuth. Thus, sensing that a stint with him may
lead me to the avenues of avenge, maybe rendering me vulnerable to the
detective’s charms, a welcome prospect for a single woman anyway, I ventured
into his amorous arena to get even with my tormentors.
However, when I saw him, it was love at
first sight for me and as he too was enamored of me, I wanted to forget about
the past and build my future with him. But how I were to know that afflicted by
the Stockholm Syndrome, Kavya would be pushing Ranjit back onto my anvil of
avenge that too in tow with Pravar, and if anything, as my proximity to the
detective brought the cop too under my radar, I found myself drawing the
triangle of revenge. Then, as if their destiny of death had beckoned me, I laid
my hands on that potion of slow-acting poison; but how I were to know in that my
fate too played foul with my life that I was recasting in the mould of love! Just
the same, my criminal need for a guinea pig to test the potency of that poison and
to calibrate the right dosage to seal their fate made Dicey the first victim of
my vengeance.
When I heard about Kavya’s affair with Pravar,
I gloated over her fall for it would hurt Ranjit no end before I could bring
about his end; so seized with an urge to see the turmoil of a cuckold, I
contrived to meet him, and as he came to beg me to forget the past and grant it
to him again, I led him up the garden path. Oh, what a vicarious pleasure I used
to derive in sexually torturing him before I ended it all for him with that
fatal dose! But by then, as my love for Dhruva began to rule my heart and soul,
thereby quenching my thirst for revenge, I forgave Shakeel and forgot about
Pravar.
But at Dhruva’s behest, as Shakeel began
probing Ranjit’s past, I saw the need to catch him before he caught me, if only
not to lose my love and he too fell into my trap when I invited him to share
some clues to tie Kavya’s hands with Ranjit’s murder. So when we met in my Red
Hills house, I induced him to have some drinks with me, and he readily agreed, maybe
hoping that the rendezvous could end up in my bed, only to be dead in his own
bed. What with my old wounds thus opened up, I wanted to plant my kiss of death
on the ‘malicious magistrate’ too, but to my peculiar disappointment, I came to
know that by then the blackguard was dead and gone.
While Ranjit’s death removed the
bitterness of my past, Shakeel’s end threatened my future for Dhruva started
believing in Kavya’s innocence and began leaning towards her. Beset by
jealousy, as I was bugged to keep her away from him, it occurred to me that if
Pravar were to be poisoned in her house, it would be hard for him not to
suspect her hand in it. So, having accessed her door key from her handbag to
make the duplicates, I raked my brains for a plan that would have spared Natya
and yet snared Pravar into the Spandan.
How badly I wanted to tend her as my daughter being Dhruva’s woman, but failing
to conceive any escape route to her, sadly I had to sacrifice her as I did
Dicey before.
So, when Kavya left for Guntur to probe
into Ranjit’s past, I made Natya believe that while she herself was away for an
alibi, Kavya had arranged a supari for
them. Then, I convinced her that the safest place for them to hide was the Spandan, and, so, she led Pravar, and
sadly, herself as well, to their poisonous end. So, when Natya came to collect
the key to their deathtrap, I made her wear a burka and gave her the poisoned food for dinner, promising to fetch
them breakfast the next morning.
But in spite everything, as Dhruva put
his stakes on Kavya, I was torn between my old sexual jealousy and my new
lesbian libido. However, when it became clear that it was a question of her
neck or my neck, I sought to implicate her with the ‘poison bottle’, and to my
dismay, he saved the day for her by replacing it with some impotent potion.
Maybe, what really spoiled the show for me was Ranjit’s old photograph with me,
and it’s as though he had avenged himself for his death at my hands, never
mind, while alive, he murdered me emotionally. Was it a poetic justice in a
prosaic way, I would never know!
So finished Radha in tears as those present could barely hold theirs, and as she signed her confessional statement, the magistrate ordered her judicial custody, and Kavya’s unconditional release.
Decoding the Crime
Discerning myriad emotions in his demeanor as he read it, as if to
share his feelings, Kavya nestled her head on his shoulder, but as he had
finished with it, seeing him overwhelmed with grief, she exhorted him to be
strong, so that he could be of strength to the hapless woman. Thanking her for
reminding him of his duty, he wanted her to read it herself, and in turn, having
finished it in tears; she sank into his chest only to wet his shirt, even as he
wetted her head. Holding each other thus, for log, they cried for the woman,
whose fate hanged in the criminal balance.
However, in time, when he wished that she pleaded Radha’s case in the
court as well, she said that though she would have loved to do that, yet she
felt that besides making herself tense for it involved her rival’s life and
death, it could cause unease in the arraigned for the same reason. Patting her
in apparent appreciation, he rang up Prativadi, the feted defense lawyer, after
which he fetched Simon to join them.
When the cop wanted to know how and when the detective came to suspect the
culprit, Kavya said that the recap might as well help him unwind himself but as
Dhruva felt that his narrative might embarrass her as well, she assured him,
notwithstanding Simon’s presence, there was no way she would be sore on that
score as she came to treat her past as a bad dream.
Dhruva began the recap by saying that he felt guilty when he heard that
Kavya developed a soft spot for Pravar, believing that Ranjit was hand in glove
with Shakeel in foisting the fake-notes case on him. But when Ranjit said that
he suspected she became close to the criminal, he realized that she was a
victim of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ induced psyche, and he suffered from
remorse, as the misfired idea was his.
Pausing to have a look at her, and seeing her surprised look, his
demeanor became dull, but as she laid her hand on him with love-filled eyes,
holding her hand, he resumed the recap.
His focus had always been to wean Kavya away from Pravar before his inimical
influence proved to be her undoing, but what made it worse for him was he had
no way to prevent her anticipated fall in that brat’s company, and the murder
of her husband, in which, possibly she might have had a hand, only added to his
misery.
However, when she came to seek his help to nab her husband’s killer, he
was not sure whether she came with a red herring or not, but when he saw her
sense of purpose, he was inclined to believe her, (he looked at Kavya as she
fondly caressed his hand) in spite of Radha’s averments about her likely guilt.
While Kavya’s remorseful confession, in the wake of Shakeel’s death, reinforced
his belief in her innocence, Radha’s pointers to Kavya’s guilt tended to dent
her credibility though he was unable to see how Shakeel could have eaten from
either Natya’s or Kavya’s hand, not to speak Pravar’s. Why, it would have been
far more easy for Pravar to bring in his, or Rajan’s, revolver into play, and
that seemingly ruled out his involvement in Shakeel’s murder and Kavya’s too by
extension.
Radha’s innuendoes that he could have been blinded by Kavya’s allure
didn’t help either and being pulled apart emotionally by two superb women he
came to admire; it was as if he was truly sundered on the investigative ground.
But it was the murder of Pravar and Natya in the Spandan that reinvigorated his investigative mind; why, in every
way, it was an extraordinary murder, though Radha tended to picture it as a cut
and dry case of Kavya’s culpability; there was no denying that Kavya had the
motive as well as the means to commit the crime, never mind her alibi, as
Guntur was but a six-hour drive from there.
When Simon told him that the deceased ate packed food, the plot only got
thickened, though it wouldn’t have been hard for Kavya to lure the duo into her
house, but would it have been easy for her to make them eat the poisoned stuff
without herself sharing it with them? Was Kavya as naive as not to know that
lying in her house, the duo’s dead bodies would surely point their fingers at
her role in their death? Why shouldn’t she have poisoned them in their own den
even if she wanted to murder them out of foolhardy? Whatever such a course was
far easier for her, right, but what if Pravar, spurned by her, developed a
suicidal urge to hurt her? True, one’s psychic impulse for suicide stems from
the obsessive desire to inflict emotional injury upon the one, who was the cause
of one’s hurt, but how he got the door key. What if Kavya in their bonhomie
give him one of the keys, but then, why none was found in the Spandan after their death. With the lock
being unhampered, it was evident that the ill-fated couple was snared into the
dwelling, but why would Kavya have them there to implicate herself? When he
realized that Kavya had only one door key with her, and the other two were in
the bank locker, which she did not access ever since she came to stay with him,
it was apparent that her hands were clean.
What about the burka-clad
woman, a common factor in all the
murders? He was certain that it was a woman and not a man in the burka; didn’t Godse give up the idea of
donning a burka to assassinate Gandhi
realizing that man can’t hide his gait behind it? Why burkas in the Spandan
were lying in the wrong place, normally Natya could have hung hers on the
clothes-line of the guest room’s bathroom and not in that of the master
bedroom’s toilet? Given that the talk about some burka-clad woman behind the poison murders was thick in the air, it
made no sense for Kavya, if she were behind it all, not to get rid of them; so
they were clearly planted to derail the investigation, what’s more, it
confirmed that the intruders had access only to the main door key and not that
of the cupboards, the right place for their stacking.
When he noticed that the main door bolt was missing, it was apparent
that it was removed beforehand by the culprit to ensure that the duo don’t get
bolted inside, intentionally or otherwise, for as corpses they could not have helped
the culprit to get in to retrieve the key, before the neighbors smelt foul. So,
the ‘entry key’ to the murders was not the ‘genuine one’, literally as well as
figuratively, and as the house key that Kavya brought with her to his place showed
traces of wax on it, it was clear that culprit got the duplicate keys made out
of it – one to enable the duo to enter into the Spandan and another for her subsequent entry into it to retrieve
the one she gave them. Who could have done that? Not the Rajus for sure.
As it was evident that Natya could have been a collateral damage, who
would have wanted to eliminate Pravar to implicate Kavya? Why not Radha? After
all, she had every reason to see the end of Shakeel, if not in Ranjit, so he
set out to her Red Hills house for hard clues, and found those keys and the poison.
Since he chose to play his cards close to his chest, failing to read his hand,
Radha believed that it was only a case of burglary in her house, and didn’t
lose much sleep over the missing keys. But as expected by him, afraid of a
repeat, she smuggled the poison into his house, while he, fearing that a peeved
Radha could poison Kavya too, had substituted it with a harmless potion (he felt
Kavya’s caress at his back). When Rani, her ‘half-namesake’ and ‘full-soul mate’ as Radha put it, who too
happened to come into his life, sent that incriminating photograph and as the
forensic reports too nailed her to the core, he had alerted Simon about it
When Kavya wondered what would have been the case if, instead of the
indicative burkas, Radha had indeed
planted the implicating poison in the Spandan;
Dhruva said that, in that case, instead of Radha, she would have been hard-pressed
fending to avoid the noose. As Kavya felt that it was ironical that such a thin
thread should have separated justice and injustice; he averred that it was in
the nature of crime to uphold justice by overawing the criminal to leave a way
for it to cry foul. While Kavya heaved a sigh of relief, he added that given
that Radha had planned and executed the murders as she did, it was a
remarkable, if diabolical, job, and if it were only to be Ranjit’s and Shakeel’s
murder, who knew, she would have had the last laugh. Then, recalling Dicey’s
death, he said that as Radha didn’t leave the pet for a moment till it died, he
thought then that how well she cared for it, but as is apparent in the
hindsight, she was only monitoring how the poison worked on it.
At that, overcome with grief, as Dhruva said Dicey’s death at Radha’s hands makes him feel bitter about her, leaning on him, Kavya said in all empathy that like its killer, the pet too was a victim of victim-hood.
A Poignant End
Next day, wanting to strategize Radha’s defense in the impending trail
as Dhruva reached the Chanchalguda Jail with Kavya and Prativadi in tow, she
sent word to him that even as she was ashamed of seeing him, she was averse to
recounting her crimes to any lawyer, but if Kavya were willing, she would love
to meet her.
Thus, when Kavya was led away to meet Radha, Dhruva pleaded with
Prativadi to bear with Radha’s reluctance until they got her around into the defense
groove.
So, even as Kavya set out with empathy, Radha awaited her in
repentance, and when they made an eye contact, they couldn’t take their eyes
off each other; but when Kavya neared her, Radha lowered her gaze. But as Kavya
lifted Radha’s head, as if for an emotional encounter, the latter presented a
tearful face to her, and as the former’s eyes too welled up, Radha wiped them
with a feeling of oneness. So, when Kavya took Radha into her tender arms to
convey her empathy, she could feel her resurgent hope in her quivering frame,
and when Kavya said Prativadi was sure to save her skin, Radha said she would
like to entrust her case to Kavya’s care.
But as Kavya made her privy to her own sensitivities, Radha said she
would have Prativadi if only Kavya was on hand to support her. Before the end
of that evocative meeting, having discovered her latent fondness for Radha,
when Kavya whispered in Radha’s ear about her own lesbian leanings towards her,
as an elated Radha planted a kiss on Kavya’s lips, they both had their first
taste of lesbian love.
Soon, as it was time for them to
part for the day, Radha gave Kavya the missive that she penned for Dhruva.
On Kavya’s return, as Prativadi was led up to Radha to take her brief,
Dhruva began reading Radha’s letter.
Darling:
I am ashamed that I let you
down. What a fate it is to betray your trust and belittle my love! While I lost
my way with you, blinded by revenge, constrained by guilt, I’ve to hide my face
from you; and that’s the tragedy of my life. Don’t I know how hard I made it for
you, so I don’t want to add any more, but with your understanding (I know I can’t
seek your forgiveness) I shall await the noose with fortitude.
What with the fake-notes
case bringing Pravar and Shakeel into the spotlight, I came to you to test the
waters of avenge. But even as I was shifting my goalpost of life in the arena
of our ardor, my fate played foul with my love as Ranjit too came into the
setting. It was as if fate had chosen to place its axe in my hand to grind it on
the anvil of revenge, forged by the poison of abuse. How sad that I allowed my
bitterness towards a deceiver to belittle my affection for my benefactor that
is even as I was recasting my shattered life in the mould of his love, you know
who.
While I shamefully pried
upon Mithya’s cupboards, I chanced upon her personal jottings and her long-lost
daughter’s photograph that has striking resemblances to Natya, and when I
showed it to her, as she identified it as hers, I felt like I was her own
mother. However, I curbed my impulse to reveal her identity to you, but as she
fitted in my game plan, so I bought time, as it were to her peril. Then sadly
for me, I discovered the poison that Mithya acquired; you know for what, and
with that my urge for revenge got the better of my love for you. But on the other hand, I was more determined
than ever to see Pravar’s end, if only to end Natya’s misery.
Believe me; I wanted to come
out clean with you after I was done with the despicable trio, in the hope that
you would own me as you had once owned Mithya, in spite of everything. Probably
you would have, had not Ranjit’s murder pushed Kavya into your enamored fold, for
you have a peculiar weakness for feminine criminality. But after that ménage
a trios with Pravar and Natya, how odd it would have been for her as your
woman to have Natya as her daughter. Maybe, to save Kavya’s life from that
oddity, fate had ended Natya’s tragic life. But then, is my life any less
ironical than Kavya’s - Ranjit jilted me for her money, and I lost you to her
love. Is there a parallel to it by way of fact or fiction?
Perhaps, you and Kavya
deserve each other better, and I want to see you tie the knot as I pray for
your married bliss, for that won’t you earn me a day’s parole. I seek your sympathy,
not as barter, but to end my agonizing life in penitence.
Yours not to be,
Radha
While he broke down reading the letter, seeing Kavya’s concern for him,
he gave it to her to let her comprehend his position herself.
When she too finished reading it with tear-filled eyes, he told her
that had he acted upon the empathy he felt for Natya that day, perhaps, he
could have saved her life, and as Kavya leaned on his shoulder to share his
agony, he sought self-solace in her embrace. Then as she recalled her
association with the unfortunate Natya, he made her privy to Mithya’s
inimitable life.
Mithya was the youngest of three siblings in an orthodox family and by
the time she matured, her sister got married, and her brother finished the
schooling. However, when she was sixteen, even as her mother went to the U.S to
spend some time with her sister, their father’s new assignment involved touring
all the while. That fortuitously left her brother and her together for most of
the time, which happenstance, in the formative years of their sexuality,
ushered in an unusual togetherness between them that insensibly led them into
an incestuous relationship.
On her return even as her mother was horrified at seeing her four-month
pregnant daughter, amplifying her misery, her errant son had hanged himself,
leaving Mithya to bear their shame, for abortion by then became out of redeem, which
forced her parents to let her deliver her sin in secrecy. While her father gave
away her girl child to an orphanage, given the abnormality of its being, she
could discern the dichotomy in its separation; even as the deprivation of her
child afflicted her maternal condition; at the same time, it eased her from the
grip of a guilt complex. Thereafter, as a way of psychic escape for all of them,
her father sent her to Hyderabad to let her pursue her higher studies.
Later, while the nuptials with Ashok erased the shame of incest in her
subconscious, as she was morally constrained in bearing a child having orphaned
one, the prospect of conception instilled in her a sense of foreboding. But when
she was coming to terms with her life, her man lost his moorings in
moneymaking, and though she tried to stop him from entering into the rat race
of life with a no-win goal, he was bent on becoming somebody in the society,
never mind the sacrifices they have to make for that. So, leaving her to fend
for herself, when he left for Dubai for raising the capital for a grandiose
venture, so as to engage herself, she took up a job. In time though, as his irregular
letters failed to fill her emotional void, for they failed to pen his longing
for her, she saw the futility of holding herself anymore.
So, pondering over how to go about her peccadilloes, she opted for
one-night stands for they wouldn’t be intrusive, but her escapades that catered
to her sexual needs, had failed to address her emotional owes. Added to that,
but for his yearly sojourns, as her man showed no inclination to return into
her arms, she felt as if she were reduced as his distant mistress; so as if to
address the emotional neglect and to shore up her self-worth, she started an
affair with a colleague she fancied, which, however, ended abruptly when his
distressed wife committed suicide; she fared no better in her next venture as her
lover deserted her, when his spouse threatened to divorce him.
So, wearied of wooing married men, she sank into a bachelor’s arms at
the next turn, and as his virgin ardor matched her raging craving, she felt
that she was in the seventh heaven. But in time, as his innate need to have a
family of his own broke their liaison, she was back to square one, and vexed
with the vagaries of peer encounters, she thought of a live-in with a lowly, a la Bona
Sera, Mrs. Campbell the movie she happened to see. Like Bona Sera did
before her, she too set up a grocery shop, and took the young Dilip to assist
her in the shop and cater to her in her bed.
When she all but forgot about Ashok, he returned with mounds of money
and an ambition to make a mountain of wealth out of it, but it didn’t take her
long to realize that he was into smuggling and that he returned only to head Indian
operations of an Italian mafia. While she was ill at ease with his escapades,
Ashok was restive at Dilip’s presence in his house, and Dilip too resented
Ashok’s return as that reduced him as a mere servant of the house though Mithya
allowed him to reign in her bed on the sly. But matters came to a head after
they shifted into the newly acquired bungalow at 9, Castle Hills, when Ashok
wanted her to fire her hireling and she insisted that he be allowed to stay put
in their A.C. Guards house that they vacated.
While Ashok decided to bide for time, seeing the writing on the wall, Dilip, played up her
man’s neglect of her, and made her believe that there was another woman in his
life, out to take her position. Soon, he contrived to convince her that Ashok
entertained the idea of eliminating her altogether and also played upon her
weakness for him by hammering that if she were killed, he would be left high
and dry. Goaded by Dilip to act before it was too late, she pondered over the
ways and means of getting rid of her man and get away with it as well.
However, by way of distraction, so it seemed to her, she came to know
of her father’s death, well after the obsequies were over; though her father
had disowned her for her amoral ways, she had informed her mother about her
change of address to 9, Castle Hills, just in case.
In that poignant meeting between the mother and her daughter, after a
decade long separation, being at a loss for words, they lost eyes to each
other. When the mother opened her arms in reconciliation, the daughter closed
hers for an embrace of solace. Amidst their myriad emotions in their state of
closeness, as the ethos of motherhood came to the fore, the mother savored her
daughter while the daughter thought of her own daughter. As the spasms of her
daughter’s heart conveyed her resurgent craving for her child, the mother, in
that moment of self-fulfillment, felt that her daughter too should experience
the same. However, even as the daughter’s craving to hug her own daughter had
increased, the mother turned skeptical about the chances of finding the girl
sixteen years after she had abandoned her. Whatever, as the mother wanted to
take her to the orphanage, where her daughter was left, the daughter felt that it
would be far better for her mother to first befriend the girl, and then prepare
her for the reunion before she herself took her under her wings.
So, Mithya hoped that once her mother rediscovered her daughter, she
would redeem herself by adopting her own daughter, but shortly after her return
home, when her mother informed her that only the previous month, her girl had
left the orphanage without a trace, Mithya was truly devastated. But after he
came into her life, stirred by the resurgent maternal impulses, she wanted to
have children, but, sadly, her two conceptions ended in miscarriages. Wondering
why Mithya never showed her daughter’s picture to him that Radha laid her hands
on, he said, maybe, by then having learned to get over her past, she had put
her daughter’s memories too on the back burner.
So, as he finished that recap of Mithya’s disturbingly fascinating
life, Kavya said that while every life was unique in its own way, as Mithya’s
reveals, some were more unique than the rest. Agreeing with her, he said that
the way Mithya came into his life would only illustrate the truism of that,
and, anyway, that was for some other day, but for that kidnap maybe she herself
would have discovered Natya’s photograph, and that would have been a different
story altogether. Well, if only Mithya had made him privy to the poison in the
bosom of their home, maybe, Natya would have still been alive, for Radha would
not have come into its possession. That Mithya kept him in the dark about the
deadly thing would only prove that even in the closest of relationships, there
was a limit to the openness, and as Radha’s ruse to trap Kavya showed, there
was no end to the mischief, the sense of insecurity could ensue.
Then, he recounted his tryst with Rani, and said that if only he had
allowed her to accompany him to the Tank Bund that evening; she would have
recognized Ranjit and spilled the beans on Radha as well; and maybe that would
have enabled him to nip Radha’s urge for revenge in the bud, which would have
saved her soul besides the lives of all those; and also how fate had played
hide and seek with Ranjit’s life again as he visited 9, Castle Hills, when Rani
was there! Had he insisted that she met him, what a difference it would have
made to him and the rest of them! But it was not to be.
When Kavya lamented that Radha’s paranoia of losing him to her should
have undone Natya, he said that her apprehensions were not unfounded after all;
as she glowingly took him into her arms, smug in her embrace, he confessed to
her that he loved her like none else. At that, as she told him that she would
ever think aloud with him, he said, in jest, that his ears would forever be
wide open, and she crooned into them that she came to love her rival too, and
added that as and when she came out of the cage, he should let her nestle at 9,
Castle Hills, in their ménage a trois.
Then, even as he was reaching for her lips that uttered those words
after his heart, as if to remind him that it was a public place, Prativadi was
about to reach them with the vakalat, at
which, pointing at the last lines of Radha’s letter, Kavya said coyly that if he
chooses to take her to the altar, she would be coming with the Oasis Builders for a dowry. Then, even
as the lawyer came in the earshot, he said to her ears only that he hopes to have
their heirs in time to 9, Castle Hills and Spandan
as well.
Labels: Crime novel, Detective novel, Indian crime novel, Indian fiction, Love triangle, Murder mystery, Murderess, Perfect murder, Poison murders, Serial killer, Stockholm syndrome, Women's fiction
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