Darya had walked the length of the corridor. Mathias. Kulkarni. Almeida, from left to right, she’d read the nameplates.
Then 34C.
She’d registered it with a pounding heart.
It was the same as on Debbie’s note.
But perhaps, this wasn’t what Debbie had meant. Darya wasn’t sure if the number referred to an address at all.
There was no nameplate. The door was bolted and locked.
Sighing and somewhat disappointed, Darya had retraced her steps back to the centre. Then, as soon as she’d halted, the door to 33C had opened, as if the woman on the other side had been waiting, looking through the peephole.
‘Namaskar,’ she’d said coyly.
She was Kulkarni.
‘He was drunk, I could tell,’ the woman was saying now. ‘Smelling very bad. He looked upset.’
‘Did he ask about the Monteiros?’
She nodded.
‘What did he ask?’ Darya asked casually.
The woman leaned on the door. ‘I came only three years ago. This was before my time,’ she said. ‘But everyone still talks of the scandal. The poor girl. That horrible drunk man. Her father. Deva!’ She made an action of spitting. ‘Can’t call him a father also. Devil. Shaitan. Everyone in the building knew, but no one did anything. What to do? We are coloured so deeply by society’s rules.’
‘Where did they live?’
The woman seemed surprised at the question. ‘In this very house,’ she replied, a quizzical inflexion in her words as if wondering why Darya was here if she didn’t already know this. ‘The flat was empty for many months. No one wanted to move in. But my husband died leaving me very little money. I couldn’t afford anything else. But it hasn’t been bad for me. Tough sometimes…’ She shook her head vigorously as if to shake off a bad thought. Her bun swayed with her. The bangles jangled at her wrists.
‘Yes?’ Darya prodded gently.
‘It’s nothing. It’s paap to even think about it.’
‘What is it?’ Darya asked.
The woman’s eyes sparkled. ‘Karma,’ she whispered. ‘Do you believe? I do. Maybe this house carries old karma. So much sin. First the father, then his children. I did pujas. I tried my best.’
‘The children sinned?’ Darya said slowly. ‘What do you mean?’
She looked thrilled at being asked. ‘I heard they killed their father,’ she whispered, her face comically animated. ‘I heard the boy went crazy when the police were questioning him some days back. Attacked a constable. The police found the murder knife and the dead man’s bag in his house. Now I am hearing he is being thrown in jail.’
‘We don’t know if he actually killed anyone,’ Darya said, surprised the woman knew so much. ‘He was damaged as a kid. Because of how his father brutalized him.’
‘What do I know?’ the woman said. ‘That’s what they’re saying.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Neighbours,’ she retorted. Then she quickly changed tack. ‘Kadācita, you’re correct,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be speaking this way. That man was no father. Treating his daughter shamefully. Taking on with his neighbour. Always after one woman or another. Shocking. How his wife must have suffered, poor woman.’
‘He killed one of his sons too,’ Darya said. ‘Beat him until he died of his wounds.’
The woman’s eyes widened in shock. ‘What?’ she sputtered. ‘I did not know!’
Darya let her digest the news, then asked, ‘How did Emmanuel die?’
‘Drunk as a dog. Pushed from the balcony. Fell on the jungle gym. You saw it in the playground?’ She shuddered. ‘It used to have iron bars on top. Now they are removed.’
Unbidden, the image sprang into Darya’s head. A limp, bloodied body. Eyes wide open. Head split, brain matter splattered on the playground.
With great effort, she calmed herself. Focus. You’ve got work to do.
‘Did the police conduct an enquiry?’ Darya asked.
The woman shrugged. ‘Must have.’ She had started to withdraw into the flat, making a gesture as if to close the door. Darya realized something had changed. She had asked too many questions.
‘Wait. Wait!’ Darya begged, willing to try her luck one last time.
The woman stopped.
‘When you said that man was no father, treating his daughter that way… what did you mean?’ Darya asked breathlessly.
When Mrs. Kulkarni told her, in a barely audible voice, Darya had a hard time keeping down the bile that rose to her throat. She’d already known, but hearing it, along with the details, was too much to bear.
‘That’s what I said,’ the woman added sombrely in the end, her face a slim wedge hovering on the side of the door. ‘The two were fully damaged after that. Capable of doing anything. Viktor’s in jail, nako? The sister will follow. Now everything will stop. Baghach tu.’
Once again, Darya walked to flat 34C with soundless steps. Outside, the sky had changed from a bright blue to a coarse grey. Dusk was falling.
A large, shiny lock hung on the door. It seemed new. Darya thumped on the door with her knuckles. Sturdy. Light brown once, the door had turned a moss green over the years. A pale patch at the centre indicated a nameplate had once been there.
Darya sniffed the air. There was a faint smell of camphor. Her eyes scaled the length of the door. Two lizards were curved on the top, around a broken bulb, watching her intently. Her eyes scanned the walls around. Plenty of scribbles, with ball point and pencils. Slut, chutiya, Monu loves Pinky, chudail, she read.
There was a picture of a naked woman blindfolded and tied to a bed—a remarkably good depiction. The words ‘missing girls’ were written under it.
Darya took a picture with her phone. The graffiti looked like what she’d seen outside room 101 back at the villa, also what Veda had said she’d seen next to Kamala Snack Mart. Could they have all been made by Parthiv? She recalled the time in the villa when they had bumped into each other late at night; he had smelled of paint. Parthiv had come to Kamothe too, most likely also to this building. Why? And had he made this graffiti too? Again, why?
She rapped on the door several times, then stood staring at it, disappointed by its commonness.
Inexplicably, she thought of Aaron. She was furious with him. It had been two weeks since that night on the terrace. She had written to him every single day after that, until two days ago when she’d stopped. Aaron had replied only twice, asking for ‘time’. Darya hadn’t told him about Veda yet, but if she did, would he talk to her? She wished Aaron was with her now.
Wait.
Was that faint breathing? From behind the door?
Darya moved closer and was surprised to note that despite being old and eroded, the door was free of dust.
Was that… the sound of a ceiling fan? Or… was it low, guttural music?
But Darya couldn’t be sure. She sensed rather than saw these things, suspecting it was the eerie silence around, the pair of eyes from flat 33 most definitely trained on her through the peephole and her thudding heart which collectively were concocting these imaginations for her.
She stood for a few minutes, leaning on the door.
A low-wattage bulb flickered on in the ceiling, throwing slithering shadows on the walls. It crackled and hummed.
Darya straightened up.
She must be mistaken.
With a sigh, she started to walk away in reverse, her face to the door, as if at any second she expected it to open and reveal the answer to her questions.
Her slippers grazed the floor, as she walked past the smutty passage windows, towards flat 33, and towards the edge of the stairs.
Suddenly, she froze.
Whipped upright.
Retraced her steps.
She’d seen it from the corner of her eye, looming like a ghost in the periphery of her vision.
A weird feeling crept through her body.
Her breath came out fast.
She’d had a déjà vu.<
br />
Darya pushed the pane and leaned out of the window. A gentle wind caressed her face, cooler now because of the setting sun. A deserted wasteland lay in front of her. The highway looped in the far distance, tiny cars and trucks rising and falling over it. Two billboards—one advertising a clothing brand; the other a car—stuck out on the sides.
But her eyes were riveted on the abandoned building a stone’s throw away, the view to which was clear and unhindered from the window she was looking through. It looked like an industrial building, as decrepit as the one she was standing in, but clearly abandoned. She counted ten windows, opaque, blackened.
She had seen a similar building. At Walkeshwar. The parallels were hard to ignore.
A story was beginning to form in her mind.
Feigning nonchalance, she walked down the first flight of stairs. Then as soon as she thought she was out of sight, she rushed down, her feet skipping steps, landing hard each time. Unthinking, as if led by an invisible hand, she walked past the empty playground and out through the main gate. She got lost twice but went back over, took the correct turns. Moved past evening strollers, rickshaws and cars.
Finally, she arrived.
It emerged in front of her, a dark apparition. A dragon raising its head from the ground. Crumbling concrete and black glass. About two storeys tall.
A plain, nondescript façade. Enclosing it was a four-foot partition wall with barbed wires. An LED bulb hung from a utility pole out front.
Darya’s phone vibrated in her bag. She ignored it. She looked around for a security guard.
She noticed the locked metal gate next to the pole. A board was stuck on it.
Property of MP Corporation.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Stuck on it was also a half-torn demolition notice from March 2006.
Then she noticed something else.
Leaning forward, her breathing ragged, Darya started to peel off the paper from the board, alert for sounds of running or shouting, anything or anyone who might prevent her from doing what she was trying to do. She scratched and tore fervently. The wind sang in her ears.
When she was done, she stared in front of her.
A creeping sense of dread wrapped itself around her.
In runny red paint this time, underneath the demolition notice, was the curved snake on a sword.
The mark of the goddess.
And below, the words:
Matangi.
Come with us.
Into the darkness.
Into The Onion
The dark web.
Darya remembered Aaron talking about it. One time, he had enlisted expert help to bring down a malicious phantom company that was using it to sell hard drugs under the same label as his own. Darya knew that the dark web was that part of the internet that couldn’t be indexed by search engines and was accessible only by means of special software configurations or authorizations. This allowed website operators and users to remain anonymous, and therefore untraceable. And since it couldn’t be tracked or traced, the dark web was a hotbed of criminal activity, a dark internet alley that housed the seamy underbelly of the electronic human experience.
And the right place for her to start looking.
Darya was only guessing because she presumed a website offering the services she was looking for could only exist on the dark web, if at all. The sign on the abandoned building hinted at it. Afterwards, she remembered Jasmine’s notebook with the various onion websites listed; Darya had learned in the past few hours that websites on the dark web changed their URLs frequently to avoid discovery and, subsequently, a shutdown.
It was a gamble. Darya wished she could ask Aaron, have him help her, but she needed to hurry. In any case, she wondered if Aaron would let her do what she was planning to.
‘There’ll be time to wonder that later,’ she scolded herself. ‘Just get to it now.’
She had reserved two hours at the cybercafé, in her usual secluded corner. The owner knew her by now and didn’t raise an eyebrow when she asked to be seated there. Perhaps he’d had this request far too often even from others to react anymore. At any rate, at that time, no one else was in, except for the bespectacled teenager two rows down, whose lascivious grin Darya had silenced with a hard glare earlier.
Darya’s heart bounced about in her ribs as she tried to settle more comfortably into her chair. Her face was so close to the computer that her nose almost touched the screen.
She downloaded the Tor files first; she had done her research before coming in. It was laughable how scantily protected these cybercafé computers were, but Darya didn’t feel much like laughing. She was thankful.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
She had learned that accessing the dark web required the use of an anonymizing browser called Tor. The browser routed the web-page requests through a series of proxy servers operated by thousands of volunteers around the globe, rendering IP addresses unidentifiable and untraceable. But while it appeared as if Tor worked like magic, the result was an experience much like the rest of the dark web: unpredictable, unreliable, maddeningly slow.
Words came into view and disappeared from the screen. Websites popped open and were impatiently closed by Darya. She was surprised by how primitive everything looked, as if it had been programmed by amateurs.
‘Most of it sucks,’ Aaron had told her. ‘But if you really want to find anything, go to Hidden Wiki. That’s Wikipedia for the dark web.’
Now Darya looked at the entries that appeared on the screen. What she saw made her mind boggle.
UK weed
Free weed
Weed heaven
Blow your Brain Magic
Underground tunnels to enter important buildings
Porn in burqa
Big guns for cheap
Hiring hitmen
Babies wearing hijabs
Suicide videos
None of the onion links from the photograph she had taken at Jasmine’s house existed anymore. After a while, she realized, she had to change course and try something else.
‘Did you know the dark web always knows who’s looking?’ Aaron had told her. ‘Government agencies and criminal groups have their ways to know. You’re never anonymous or safe. But there are ways to bypass that,’ he had added. ‘One way is to disable JavaScript in the machine you’re working on. And disable its webcam and microphone. But even with these precautions, one can never be sure.’
An involuntary shudder ran through Darya. She had already checked that the old computer’s webcam was non-functional and had disabled JavaScript, but she knew there were more ways to get caught. She was not safe, even with the café’s relative anonymity. While it was legal to access the dark web, she had little idea how illegal the group she was looking for was or what they were capable of.
Darya heard the swish of air as the sliding doors of the café opened to let someone in. Narrow shoulders and a shifty gait. But he had moved away.
Darya readjusted her position on the chair. She scrolled through the websites that came up, squinting as she did so. After a dozen broken links and disconcerting but irrelevant webpages later –
‘There… that!’ Darya muttered excitedly.
She clicked.
Tapped impatiently on the tabletop.
As she waited, her mind raced. She knew whatever this was, she couldn’t fight it alone. She needed help. And right now, despite everything, there was only one person she could ask. She had to try again.
The webpage came up a whole minute later.
Darya gaped.
The screen was pitch-black. At the centre was a familiar motif—a snake curled thrice around a pointed sword—both in bright orange. The motif bounced about on the screen like a football. After a few seconds, six lines emerged, one below the other in quick succession, the text in flaming yellow.
Looking for a goddess to transform your life?
Get invited to an exclusive event by answering the follo
wing.
Are you a man or woman and over twenty-five years of age? Our goddesses serve both, but only adults. (Type: Yes/No)
Do you live in Mumbai? (Type: Yes/No)
Enter your email ID (
Submit.
‘What the holy fuck?’ she whispered.
The snake and sword motif shuffled around the screen, coursing a haphazard path. It was hypnotic.
‘Well, do it,’ Darya whispered to herself.
But while her mind was telling her to plunge right in, her head was protesting. She had little idea what she was getting into. Terrorists, cannibals, drug peddlers, child pornographers, serial murderers… the dark web harboured the worst of the worst. Even if Darya created a new email ID and an altogether anonymous identity, shit could hit the fan. She’d never done anything like this before. She didn’t remember what Aaron had said about his experience with it. She had no other friend she could ask, and right now, time was of critical importance.
One thing she knew for sure though: no way was this safe. She was never going to be able to fully discern and resolve the intrigues of the dark web before she went in.
But she knew this: she needed to find Veda, and this was the key. And Darya was going to do anything to get to her.
She let out a heavy sigh, looking uneasily at the screen as the motif danced a mad dance.
She began to type.
Heaven Or Hell
The club was located inside a narrow by-lane of Mahim, behind an abandoned junkyard. Darya moved past skeletons of cars scattered on an empty patch of land to reach the first in a row of four contiguous and uniformly decrepit garage-like buildings. Each had a heavily corroded metal door. The first one was lit by a single blue halogen lamp, with 36 MP etched on a tiny brass plate above. The remaining three skulked in absolute darkness as if waiting for suitable prey.
That’s what Darya felt like anyway—a prey—walking willingly towards her end.
She had no doubt that what she was about to do was foolhardy, mired in danger. The tingling sensation in her spine just wouldn’t go away.
But… what else was she to do?
The Darya Nandkarni Misadventures Omnibus: Books 1-3 Page 46
