Club You to Death

by Anuja Chauhan

  It’s like a part of her had fallen asleep once she let Kashi Dogra leave her life and now that he’s back, he’s casually flicked on a switch – and all the old connections and emotions are flickering back to life. Memories she’d suppressed, jokes she’d forgotten, smells, songs, feelings, sensations, even the noise the rain makes when it comes pelting down on the roof seems hyper-real now!

  This is how paralysed people must feel when they start walking again, she thinks. Walking, then running, then dancing, then kissing … No! No kissing. Strictly no kissing. There’s the GF in Kalahandi and Bambi will be a good friend and not intrude on the GFs space … no, kabhi nahi, never.

  She raises cool, wet fingers to her hot cheeks, shakes her head at herself sternly in the mirror, then bends down to see if the stain has washed out from her sweater, when a sudden sound makes her whirl around.

  This is the small wooden cloakroom next to the Rose Garden, meant mainly for little kids with unpredictable bladders who can’t make it to the main bungalow in time, and it has just one commode and basin. Bambi is quite alone in here.

  Silence.

  She does a slow three-sixty turn to take in the whole space. Nothing. For some reason – probably the alcohol or all the idiotic obsessing over Kashi – her heart is thudding extra hard and the hair at the back of her neck is standing on end.

  She pulls a face at herself in the mirror. ‘Stupid girl!’

  Then goes back to scrubbing her jumper with great dedication. It’s a favourite and it goes with everything.

  And then, as she’s scrubbing, she sees it in the mirror. Quite clearly.

  An eye.

  The white of it, slightly veined and bloodshot, the dark brown of the pupil, and a bit of hairy lash.

  Looking at her through a small gap in the wooden slats. There is a small knot in the wood, which has created a gap just wide enough for somebody to peer in.

  And somebody is peering in at her as she stands there scrubbing her sweater, wearing just a skimpy, lace bra and jeans.

  Furious, Bambi whirls around and bangs the wall hard.

  ‘Fuck off!’ she yells. ‘Fuck off, you fucking pervert!’

  The eye vanishes. Breathing hard, Bambi bends to press her eye to the gap, but there is nothing to be seen. Just a dark, empty veranda and a swinging screen door.

  10

  The Hottie-Culture Committee

  Inspector Padam Kumar heads for his boss’s cubicle very cockily on Monday afternoon. He has met a very attractive new candidate for the post of Mrs Padam Kumar over the weekend, an encounter which has quite erased the memory of the embarrassing scene with Ganga. And after a fruitless search of Leo’s spartan bachelor digs that went on for almost two days, his men have, early this morning, finally struck gold with a custom-built, beautifully concealed storage compartment in the dead man’s Hayabusa – recovering a hard drive full of recordings from Shonali’s camera.

  They are still sifting through all the footage – but there is one particular recording that he is sure Bhavani sir will be interested in seeing right away.

  He enters with a hasty step, his cherubic face glowing.

  ‘Sir!’ He waves a pen drive at Bhavani excitedly. ‘See this, sir!’

  ‘Show, PK, show!’ Bhavani greets him, clearing away the remains of his lunch at once. ‘Quite a breakthrough you have had with the motorcycle compartment. Fantastic! Stick that thing in and press play!’

  Saying which, he settles down in his chair to watch, his chin in his hands, his fingers still smelling of chhole bhature and his eyes scanning the computer screen with keen anticipation.

  Ten seconds of static and then a wiry, ancient man appears on the screen, wizened, whiskered, the colour of dark chocolate, dressed in a bright, oversized, striped T-shirt. He is toying with a glass half full of what appears to be neat whisky. The camera seems to be placed on a dining table and is recording surreptitiously.

  ‘You’re my type of guy, Lambodar! I like you! You’ve got a big heart, and a pair of big balls! The first keeps you happy, and the second makes you rich!’

  The man’s whiskered face splits into a wide, white smile. His teeth are surprisingly good. His fingernails, as he puts his glass down, are filthy with grit. He puts more ice into his drink, stirs it with one dirty finger and knocks it back. Then he slams the glass down and stares almost straight into the lens. His eyes are red-rimmed, slightly glazed and have the milky beginnings of cataract.

  ‘The things I could tell you!’ he says with a chuckle. ‘Oh, the things I could tell you, Lambodar!!’

  ‘Tell na, Guppie Ram ji,’ Leo’s deep voice says persuasively. ‘I want to learn from you – you’re such a smart guy. You know I grew up in an orphanage – you’re like a father figure to me.’

  The old man chuckles. ‘You’re no West Indees,’ he says knowingly. ‘I’ve heard you gas to the Club ladies that you’re half West Indees but you’re not! Maybe you’ve sailed on many ships and swum in many seas, but I’ve seen your kind of face in my community again and again – you can grow your hair down to your arse, get as many piercings as you like and change your name to Matthew or Thankyou – but I know those features – and those aren’t features that come from abroad. Oh no! They come from right here – they belong to a certain caste, and that certain caste has certain tasks to perform. They’ve been performing them for centuries, and if they stop, evvvverybody will soon be drowning in their own shit!’

  He points a peremptory finger at his empty glass. Pour, bitch.

  Leo’s hand enters frame and refills it liberally.

  ‘You’re right, of course.’ Leo admits easily. ‘And I’m not ashamed of who I am. I’m proud. But you know what snobs these women are – if they figure out my roots, I’ll end up losing half my clients. But Guppie Ram ji, tell me more about what you were saying before. How you’ve spent your whole life cleaning up the filth of the so-called high castes …’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘And you’ve helped clean up after some crimes too …’

  The old man’s face grows vaguely wary. ‘Arrey, naee naee naee naee naee!’ He wags his whiskery old head. ‘I promised. I promised – and I’m a man of my word!’

  Leo’s voice grows even more persuasive. ‘Aww, c’mon, Guppie Ram ji – tell me! I’ve already guessed half the story anyway from all the hints you’ve dropped! It happened three years ago, didn’t it? You’d spent a few days preparing a composting trench, a really deep, four-foot trench, when you got a phone call in the middle of the night …?’

  The old man nods, and assumes a more official tone. ‘I dug up that trench at the orders of Gennil Mehra’s hottie-culture sub-committee. He was the head, and Missus Aggarwal, Missus Khurana and Missus Todi were all members of it too.’

  ‘And late at night you got a phone call …?’ Leo eggs him on gently.

  The old man nods. ‘Yes. I was told ki there had been an accident, there was a mess, and could I please come and help clean it up? So I went along … and found that the “mess” was a body. But he was definitely a very bad persons – an evil persons – and he deserved it! So I agreed to help. We wrapped him in a bedsheet and dragged him out to the trench together … there was jabardast fog that night, so nobody saw us … I made the trench a little more deeper and … rolled him in. What a thump he made when he landed! Then I layered kitchen waste and dirt and topsoil over him nicely and left him to the earthworms. It was almost dawn by the time I finished. Of course, I was given money also – but more than that, I did it for the friendship! Who says rich, high caste folk and people like me can’t be friends, eh?’

  ‘You only said,’ Leo replies. ‘And I told you you were being too cynical!’

  The old man looks reflective. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right, Lambodar. Perhaps I am being too cynical. That night I really felt I was not being used, or given orders, or being paid. I felt that what we shared, we two, when
we buried the body, was love … and dosti – and equal-equal trust. Yani ki friendship!’

  He lapses into a rather pensive silence.

  ‘Here’s to friendship, then!’ Leo refills the glass again.

  The old man knocks it back. ‘To friendship.’ He blinks solemnly.

  ‘But who are we really drinking to, boss?’ Leo presses. ‘Let’s put a name to it! Or a gender, at least – was it a man or a woman?’ His voice is eager. Too eager.

  The old man’s face closes down at once. His head vanishes from the camera’s frame as he gets to his feet abruptly, and all that is visible is the bottom of his T-shirt and the beginning of his pyjamas. His dirty-nailed fingers fumble at the waistband.

  ‘Paishaab,’ his says hoarsely. ‘Toilet. I have to do toilet. Where is it, Lambodar?’

  Static fills the screen again – Leo has clearly turned the recording button off.

  ‘That’s it?’ Bhavani cocks an interrogative eyebrow at Padam Kumar.

  ‘For the time being, sir.’ The inspector nods fervently. ‘Though of course we are still looking through the rest of the files!’

  ‘Know who the man is?’

  ‘Yes, sir! An old gardener called Ram Gopal aka Guppie Ram, who died a year ago! He looked after the DTC garden!’

  ‘Excellent,’ says Bhavani. ‘He’s talking about the kitchen garden, of course. Where we found Bhatti sa’ab digging carrots the other day.’

  Padam Kumar gives a superstitious little shudder. ‘I didn’t like that place, sir! The soil was too smelly, too black, too sticky. Full of jhoothan and garbage that should be thrown away. I can fully believe ki uss chyawanprash mein laash hai!’

  ‘Rubbish! Composting is a very good and hygienic way to garden, PK. It’s completely organic.’

  ‘Organic is a good name for it!’ Padam Kumar snorts. ‘All the dead man’s organs are in there! Layered in kitchen waste and topsoil as lovingly as a biryani! No wonder the beetroot is so red!’

  His big breakthrough has clearly made the inspector more outspoken than usual. Bhavani smiles.

  ‘Well, well, maybe you’re right, PK! But great work! Take your chaps out for a drink tonight.’

  Padam Kumar goes a little pink. ‘We were all just following your lead, sir! You said find the hard disk, and we found it. Sir, should I start on the paperwork required to get us permission to dig?’

  Bhavani nods, delighted at this show of enterprise from his usually sleepy inspector.

  Padam Kumar bounces out of the cubicle energetically, a man on a mission. Bhavani settles back in his chair and plays the recording again, taking painstaking note of all the little details. The grilled windows behind Guppie Ram, the bottle of Teacher’s whisky, the digital clock on the wall … but that thing that strikes him most is the voice of the unseen Leo. Perhaps because of his association with the Badshahpur orphanage, his healthy, wholesome charisma and his massive fan following, Bhavani has unconsciously slotted Leo Matthew as an essentially good, Robin Hood-ish character.

  But the voice speaking so easily and cajolingly to the inebriated Guppie Ram is not a ‘good’ voice. It is soft and cunning and opportunistic. A serpent’s voice.

  Impulsively, Bhavani logs onto Lose It with Leo and stares at the image on the home page fixedly. The instructor has been captured in all his glory – frozen mid-movement with his mane of hair flung back, and his lithe, sinewy body on full display.

  This man had been playing a dangerous game, wielding sexual charm, sympathy, information and the moral high ground like a weapon. How many rich, powerful people had he hurt, humiliated, antagonized? Yes, the money he extracted from them had gone to an orphanage, but surely he had also been doing it sadistically, to exert power over them, to watch them squirm and sweat and suffer endlessly?

  He was different inside his head too, Father Victor had said. He said watching people spend his entire month’s salary on a bottle of wine on the cruise ships had changed the way his brain was wired. He was nicer in some ways – but he was also darker in some ways. It troubled me.

  Bhavani minimizes all the screens and frowns down at his brown knuckles.

  Of course, the old gardener could have been lying, he muses. Or exaggerating. For the fancy alcohol, and for all this attention from the glamorous trainer. But in that case, would Leo have ended up dead underneath a loaded barbell? No, it stood to reason that he had been onto something solid.

  Love ... and dosti – and equal-equal trust.

  Whom would’ve old Guppie Ram enjoyed receiving that from?

  Gen. Mehra, the hero of the surgical strikes? Helping him could have made Guppie Ram feel like a crack soldier himself, even as he went about performing his sordid mission! But then, whose body had it been? Who was the ‘evil persons’ who deserved to be eaten up by the earthworms in the composting trench?

  Ganga’s husband, of course. A wife-beating villain who totally had it coming. And who had vanished three years ago. Yes, it made sense.

  What about the hotties on the ‘hottie-culture’ committee? They too would have been aware that the composting trench was available that night – a highly convenient place in which to bury an inconvenient body …

  Roshni Aggarwal? Could her ghastly son have killed somebody in a drugged-out state? He was clearly a mess. Could she be the provider of ‘love … and dosti – and equal-equal trust’. At a pinch, yes.

  Bambi Todi’s kleptomaniac mother had been in the US at the time of Leo’s death so she was out of it, but what about Urvashi Khurana? Her beauty and grace could certainly have charmed the old man. But whose body could she have asked Guppie Ram to bury? Who was the ‘evil persons’ in this scenario? Some enemy of her weird husband, perhaps? Or perhaps some ex-lover who was threatening to talk?

  Leo had said that this happened three years ago – and Guppie Ram hadn’t contradicted him.

  Bhavani gets up and starts to pace up and down his cabin. We will have to pull back and focus on what had been happening at the DTC roughly three years ago, he thinks. But first, we will have to dig up the Shrimati Savitri Mehra Udyaan and see if there really is a corpse layered like biryani beneath the carrots and the radish and the blood-red beets …

  ‘I feel so bad for her, Kash.’ Kuhu’s voice is drowsy. It’s late in the night and they have been talking for over two hours now. He has done most of the speaking – updating her on what’s been happening in his life since he met his family at the DTC for Tambola Sunday. ‘Your Bambi Todi. I mean, she’s been through so much shit! First her parents made her break up with you, then her Prince Charming died, then her mother was revealed to be severely psychologically damaged! Then her dad turned out to be a real slut, which blows a hole right through the whole marriage-within-our-own-community-only recipe for marital bliss, doesn’t it? Which sucks big-time for her because she’d accepted it as the gospel truth her whole life! And then, when she finally got her shit together, somebody started blackmailing her about her klepto mom! And then he gets murdered! How is she even managing?’

  ‘That’s the nicest thing about Bambi,’ Kashi responds in an equally sleepy voice. ‘She’s tiny. But she’s tough. She’s got the most amazing coping mechanism of anybody I know.’

  ‘Walli and Kalra are worried about you.’ Kuhu sounds like she’s turning onto her side. He knows exactly how she would look – the dark curls, the thick, straight black brows, the dips and curves of her firm, strong body. ‘They both messaged me today. Kalra dropped some dark, garbled hints about how while I was so busy building homes for other people, my own home was being destroyed. And Walli entreated me to watch you better. His exact words were “Bannerjee, apne saand ko baandh”.’

  Kashi bursts out laughing. ‘Horndogs. Anything to slide into your DMs. They’re both in love with you.’

  ‘No they’re not!’ she protests immediately. Kuhu always has a hard time believing anybody could be in love with her. ‘They just don’t trust po
or Bambi, clearly. Or you.’

  You shouldn’t trust me either, I’m not as safe from her as you seem to think.

  Aloud, he says. ‘Any other girlfriend would be jealous.’

  Kuhu gurgles with laughter. ‘Oh, I am jealous. Of this doughty, crime-fighter cop you’ve described. You sound totally besotted!’

  Kashi laughs.

  ‘I do love the guy!’ he admits. ‘He’s so organic! Just sits there radiating sympathy and nodding and staring at his hands and people spill their guts to him! It’s a masterclass in interrogation!’

  ‘And you’re going to help him catch a killer? Be the bumbling Hastings to his Poirot?’

  Kashi frowns. ‘I think Inspector Padam Kumar is his Hastings.’

  She laughs. ‘You’re too smart to be Hastings, huh? Well, you’re certainly having fun on your three weeks off!’

  Kashi flips over onto his stomach with a little groan of longing. ‘I was planning to have so much fun, babe, till you stood me up!’

  ‘Ewww. Don’t be cheap. Did my books come?’

  ‘They did indeed. They look boring AF.’

  ‘They’re not,’ she retorts. ‘They’re fascinating. All about how to create natural air-conditioning – with water channels and cross-ventilation and high ceilings. Like the Mughals did. And the ancient Egyptians.’

  She holds forth enthusiastically on this topic for a while and he imagines her sitting up now, her razai sliding down to reveal the firm, moulded shoulders, the animated gestures, the clear, passionate eyes.