by Gauri Sinh
Her absence wouldn’t have been a big deal, but for the fact that this was finale night. Knowing Parvati’s upright nature and how she was a stickler for rules, she wouldn’t have tried to veer off-path on finale night. Besides, my instinct was buzzing so much it was like a siren clanging, a warning that nothing was right at present.
As I ran, the name Gokul had uttered played over in my mind. How could we not have realised it earlier? Parvati had even written the clues down in her precious diary. A person with strength, almost unnatural strength, she had written. I knew now—we had witnessed this manner of strength, all of us had, at one of the pre-contests.
A person who knows how to handle a knife. Of course, this person was in training for exactly this. And such deception! We’d all been fooled.
At last, out-of-breath, I reached my destination. The two minute distance from the open air stage and adjacent green room to here had taken a while because everything was pitch-black.
Cautiously, I felt my way inside. Why was I here? Because I knew, as everyone did, that the lone phone for urgent calls was placed here for our convenience. If Parvati had indeed been summoned for a phone call, this is where she’d have come.
As I shuffled cautiously inside the lightless room, I heard a click. The beam of a powerful torch cast a singular but insistent glow through the narrow room, revealing two figures. They stood directly ahead, facing each other. I peered at them anxiously. One of them, to my relief, was Parvati!
She stood in front of me, framed in the light the torch cast, the frontal glare partially blinding me to the other person’s face, save for a dark silhouette.
‘Parvati,’ I said, urgency making my sentences come out all breathless. ‘What took you so long? You’ve been gone two hours. The contest starts bang on time, and it is 7.45 p.m. now. Whose phone call was it? Is everything okay?’
‘Shhhh,’ Parvati said. She wasn’t looking at me, but straight ahead at the person standing in front of us both, still in darkness because of the blinding glare of the torch.
I shifted my position, edging closer to the silhouette to see who it was. To my horror, I realized the person wasn’t just holding the torch, but a knife too. The blade glistened in the half-light.
‘Hello Akruti. So nice of you to join us,’ Nina said.
‘Nina,’ I said, more shocked than afraid. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I think you should call me by my pet name, since you seem to be familiar with it, anyway,’ Nina said, putting the torch on the table nearby so that it’s glare lit all three of us. Both her hands now clutched the knife. Her eyes glittered, as if with ferocious purpose. ‘‘You two have finally found me,’ she said.
‘Meet Laddo,’ Parvati said quietly, without irony. With a start I realised I was indeed, finally, facing the elusive Laddo; the name Gokul had whispered to me just a while back. In the relief of finding Parvati safe, I had overlooked that for a nanosecond, but the situation now demanded absolute attention.
‘Not to be confused with Lajjo, ofcourse, though there were times I wished it could be,’ Nina was saying. ‘How much I wished I could be such a natural forerunner, winning so many pre-contests, just as she was doing.’
Parvati gestured to me to keep my silence and expression neutral but I couldn’t help gawking at Nina.
‘What’s the big deal?’ Nina’s eyes shone with a decidedly manic light as I watched her, flabbergasted. ‘Just remove the ‘j’ for ‘joy’. And add ‘d’, like in ‘death’, double the dose, of course … and Lajjo becomes Laddo …’
‘Why?’ I asked Nina, confounded by both her explanation and ambition. ‘Why would you want to become Lajjo, Nina?’
‘Because I couldn’t become YOU!’ Nina faced me, her expression suddenly bitter. ‘Miss Snow White, straight out of the beauty magazines, as if made for the fairy-tale crown. Radiant, aren’t you, with your cat eyes and bleached skin-tone? The nation’s darling. Such a strong contender for the title, said the media in all the reports. No, no one could become you.’
‘But Lajjo,’ Nina continued rapidly, ‘her dark skin, her dark eyes—her beauty is accessible, we all have it in some measure. If we tried hard, if people like Avi noticed, with luck and timing and effort … we could all be Lajjo. She was your only real competition. She rewrote the rules, y’know. Made it okay for people with dusky features, normal features, to still be in the running for this crown. She, NOT YOU!’
‘So you’d rather be her?’ I said, still not understanding, ignoring Parvati’s frantic efforts to make me keep my silence.
‘How else could I have the crown, if I couldn’t be you? The chances of her winning were almost equal to yours, she was a very strong dark horse, if I can say that,’ she cackled at her own joke, then eyed me cunningly, ‘I killed Lajjo, so I could take her place as a strong contender. And even better if you were labelled her murderer, don’t you agree? Then the way to the crown is absolutely anyone’s game. So why not mine?’
‘Nina, what are you saying?’ I asked, filled with cold dread. I hadn’t been afraid when she had pointed the knife at us, nor at the odd look on her face. But as she began to talk of Lajjo, I suddenly woke to the fact that Parvati and I, we were now part of a very dangerous scenario. Nina, or as we now knew, Laddo, was actually confessing to murder.
‘It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? All the Addl.CP needs to do is arrest you,’ Nina was muttering, almost to herself. ‘Why is he dragging his feet over it? Your prints are on the blade that killed her …’
‘How would you know that, Nina?’ I asked, my every sense on high-alert. I knew I needed to keep her talking.
‘Don’t aggravate her,’ Parvati whispered to me, the warning note in her voice sharp. ‘Leave her be.’
How Nina had deceived us all, pretending to be shy and weak, fainting at Lajjo’s death, crying out, wide-eyed in fear as the Addl.CP told us we were all suspects the night Lajjo was stabbed. How dramatic her shock when Tara was accused, how innocent her expression at Parvati’s repeated queries about Laddo. And here she was now, cool as a cucumber, discussing Lajjo’s murder with such cold blooded precision.
‘Then all I had to do was ensure that I won, and I would … and soon, soon—Bollywood!’ Nina was still muttering, her eyes feverishly aglow. ‘I would get to be with my SRK, that’s Saurav Roop Kamal to you. Star with him in a movie, not as a sidey in the background, but as a lead actor, as a Miss India winner. He wouldn’t dare ignore me then, he would know me. Know who I am!’
Parvati was edging close to Nina as the girl spoke, taking advantage of the fact that Nina’s attention was fixed on me. Now, in a sudden swoop, she lunged forward, knocking the knife out of Nina’s hands, and picking it up herself in one smooth movement.
But she hadn’t accounted for the fact that Nina was surprisingly strong. We had seen this earlier, at the talent round, when the seemingly timid Nina had leaped astonishingly-swiftly to save the chair prop from tumbling off-stage into the audience. Her powerful arms had guided the half fallen missile safely back up, and we had all marvelled at her quick reflexes.
‘Watch out, Parvati,’ I screamed, as Nina moved, lightning quick. She used her wiry, muscular frame to twist round slender Parvati, who instantly buckled under the strain. A tussle broke out for the knife, Parvati’s slim form versus Nina’s muscular silhouette.
I leaped forward to help Parvati best I could, but I was out of luck. The torch, all this while throwing eerie shadows of the struggle on the wall opposite, was knocked off the table with a crash. For a second or so, the room was pitch-dark and utterly silent.
Just for a heartbeat, that unnerving quiet pervaded, moment enough for each of us to assess the situation. Then a voice spoke up. Calm, without a trace of hysteria, echoing in the stillness: ‘Parvati, you would do well to leave Laddo alone.’
The torch was picked up, switched back on and aimed at us. I caught Parvati’s grim face before I felt the sting of a knife at my throat, before I smelled an all too-familiar perfume,
before I even registered the voice which had just spoken—a voice I knew very well, indeed.
28
Akruti
‘Drop the knife, Parvati! It will not help you now,’ Lubaina Pervez’s strong, well-enunciated voice spoke commandingly in my ear as she addressed Parvati. She was holding another knife to my throat. Her heavy perfume, at such close quarters, made me nauseous in that narrow, airless room. As contestants, all of us had known that smell—it had signalled Lubaina’s arrival.
‘We could go on playing this cat-and-mouse game, but you know I have the ace now,’ she went on. ‘Or shall I say the queen? Queen Akruti, hot contender for the crown.’ She laughed softly near my ear.
Infront of me Parvati, stony-faced, had allowed Nina to take the knife back. She stood facing us now, still.
Lubaina let the knife slide off my throat and moved next to me, so that two of us were now facing two of them. She had nicked me a bit with the knife, enough to draw some blood, but it was unimportant right then. I allowed myself to breathe.
Watching Parvati struggle with Nina had felt like a punch in the gut, and now this. I wasn’t sure what I felt at that moment. Terror? Despair? Incredulity? A mix of all three summed it up, maybe.
‘Smart girl,’ Lubaina said, as Nina brandished the knife, pointing it at Parvati once more, her eyes glittering dangerously. A bruise, purple and angry was already forming over Parvati’s right temple.
‘Part of having a superior intelligence is knowing when to step back. And you are no fool, Parvati, I’ll give you that,’ Lubaina said. She had her knife pointed at me, but her tone seemed casual, like the one she used in class while mentoring us. We could’ve been at one of her sessions for all the matter-of-factness in her manner. There was no threat in her tone, simply knowledge. But oddly, that made it even more menacing to me.
‘So here we are,’ Lubaina said. The torch she had picked up during the tussle was back on the table, illuminating us in a shadowy half-light.
‘A little diversion from this situation,’ Lubaina was saying, as if she was talking about the weather. ‘They’ve managed to get the lights out on the stage to start working, though much of this area here is still in darkness. The contest has begun, you can hear the music. Sadly—both of you won’t be participating.’
The first part of her speech was true enough, I realised with a start. I had been concentrating so hard on what was going on inside this room, that I had blocked out everything else. Now it all came pouring into my consciousness—the music, the beginning strains of the opening number, the compere introducing the judges. The contest was in progress. Despite the inherent terror, a blinding rage gripped me. I was supposed to be out there. I was supposed to be on stage. How had they begun without noticing that contestants were missing?
And then, dully, the voice of reason in my head provided the answer to that query—it was a made-for-television event; of course they would begin, regardless of last-minute lapses. We had been cautioned earlier that it would indeed be so. The show would go on, with or without me.
‘Yes, it must hurt,’ Lubaina was watching me, as she spoke again, this time with great malice. ‘To know that your dearest dream is taking place at this very moment without you in it. It must be awful. You must be in pain …’
Then her voice turned deep, hard; as if rocked with unfathomable emotion.
‘But it’s nothing compared to the pain I’ve been through,’ she said much too loudly. ‘The pain, the awful pain of the loss of the one dream you held closest to your heart. A living, breathing dream, one you nurtured and believed in and encouraged for years and years. Till a cruel twist of fate took it away. Took her away—the one without whom life is meaningless …’
Parvati’s incomprehensible expression changed, her face showed some understanding. ‘Lubaina …?’ she said, her voice oddly hesitant.
‘Do you know what it’s like?’ Lubaina continued, almost as if speaking to herself. She seemed to have forgotten we were in the room with her.
‘Can you even understand? I doubt your pea-size skulls could fathom the magnitude of such loss.’ Her voice rose and fell as she spoke. ‘Real loss, not candy floss sashes and crowns. To have a bright, beautiful dream given to you after years and years of trying to conceive. To be fortunate enough to receive such a gift, to watch it bud and grow, as you lovingly tend it, day after day, year upon year …’
Parvati watched Lubaina, listening intently. I watched Parvati. We both ignored Nina, who seemed to have shrunk somehow, in front of Lubaina’s towering personality and her all-consuming grief.
‘My brave, beautiful child. She was so beautiful. Year upon year as I came to work here, as I mentored every new hopeful, I thought, “One day it will be my baby here.” And then two years ago, it was.’
Lubaina seemed to stiffen at the memory. Then she continued. ‘Only my child, my precious sweetheart—she wanted to look perfect. I told her it was nothing, there was no need for cosmetic surgery, for such a little thing, such a very little thing … But she insisted, and I relented. This is the twentieth century, so many people have had cosmetic surgeries safely, so why not her? And they botched it up.’
Lubaina’s perfectly modulated voice dropped here, guttural, strangulated. Then it rose, a yowl of pure pain, inhuman. ‘They botched it up. My angel, my sure-shot beauty queen, my perfect child. My Shilpi. She died.’
Lubaina’s voice cracked and broke, fading abruptly. In the resulting silence, the music outside didn’t register. Parvati and I were rooted to our spots, shell-shocked at this revelation of terrible tragedy. Only Nina seemed to not understand the poignancy of the moment. She shifted impatiently, one foot to the next, her gimlet eyes darting towards me and Parvati by turn, glittering in the torch light.
‘Which one first?’ she murmured, the whites of her eyes showing, her voice unnatural to our ears. ‘Tell me, aunt L!’
‘Shilpi, stop talking,’ At being addressed by Nina, Lubaina seemed to have come out of her emotional trance. ‘Hush, my child …’
But it was Parvati who couldn’t keep silent now. ‘Aunt L? It falls into place now. She’s your niece, isn’t she? Nina, aka Laddo?’ she addresed Lubaina. ‘That’s why she had to bend the rules to be here. She wouldn’t be allowed, she’s related to a mentor.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Nina spoke up now, leering at Parvati. ‘I am her niece. And I had to participate, how else would I be taken seriously in the glamour business? Life’s tough for small-town girls like me. I needed to star in a film with SRK—this was the easiest, shortest way to gain access to Bollywood without a Godfather, you must know this. And so I bent the rules. Why not? Such silly rules too.’
But Lubaina wasn’t in the mood for Nina’s self-indulgent chatter. ‘Hush I said, Shilpi. I need to think.’
Something struck me as odd, before I could think it out, I was voicing it. ‘Why does she keep calling you Shilpi?’ I asked Nina.
‘Shilpi was my cousin,’ Nina turned towards me, sharp dislike in her eyes, but she answered, even then. ‘Aunt L’s only child, used to model long ago. She died. Cosmetic surgery gone wrong. I look like her, many people in the family think it’s uncanny how much. My aunt forgets sometimes …’
Looking at aunt and niece standing near each other in the dim torchlight, I realized with a start why Lubaina’s face had seemed so familiar to me in early training sessions. It wasn’t because she might have modelled in her youth as I had then supposed …
It was because her daughter Shilpi had been a model, and I had caught the resemblance between them. Before my time, and yet, it was remarkable that I had caught that, only couldn’t quite place how. It was startling how Nina too had it, up close and personal.
Parvati met my eyes. Lubaina didn’t seem ‘forgetful’ as Nina said—she seemed unhinged. In fact, both members in this family appeared dangerously deranged, albeit in different ways. Their varying levels of obsessiveness were starkly obvious now. How had we not noticed earlier? Not their obs
essiveness, nor their resemblance to each other. We were conscious of the unsaid, as we looked at each other—how were we to resolve this terrible dragnet without further loss of lives?
29
Akruti
‘Why won’t you answer me, Aunt L?’ Nina repeated. ‘Tell me which one to kill first …’
‘To kill?’ Parvati said, her voice impassive. ‘Surely you are confused, Nina? You don’t mean that.’
I watched Parvati, she was upto something. Nina wasn’t confused, no one could doubt the intent in her voice. Or the menace.
‘No, Shilpi isn’t confused,’ Lubaina seemed to have registered Parvati’s question and hastened to correct her. ‘You both need to be dealt with. How else will my beautiful girl win the crown?’
‘The original plan was to only kill Lajjo,’ Nina broke in, addressing Parvati. ‘You were never a threat in the contest.’
‘So why now?’ I asked, following Parvati’s lead, hoping to find answers even in this grim situation.
‘Because she found out too much. She was so close to figuring it all out, our game plan. We couldn’t risk her knowing more. We saw her diary, you know. On three occasions. But also—she asked for me by my pet name. Twice, in fact—once announcing that Laddo had a phone call, I saw right through that. And the second time at our breakfast together, those present ignored her question. But sooner or later, she would’ve found out,’ Nina said.
‘You stabbed Lajjo? On ramp?’ Parvati, ever-direct, asked Nina.
‘Yes, it was easy,’ Nina smirked. ‘Lajjo was to die on stage, stabbed so artfully, like in some movie with SRK. Romantic and tragic. And she did.’
‘You know, they really do teach medicine very well, in my home-town,’ she continued. ‘I might be Miss India, but I am a med student too. I knew exactly where to drive the blade in. She might not have felt much pain in her drugged state, but the damage was extensive and fatal because that stab wound would draw maximum blood.
