The Stranger was finally right in front of her—in flesh and blood. It was a face all too familiar for her. But how could it be . . .
‘Firstly, I would like to apologize to you for those life-threatening attacks. My intention was never to kill you but I had to push you towards finding your link to Hiya because time was running out.’
‘Time was running out? What do you mean?’ Rivanah asked.
‘We are a highly classified network of emotional-surgeons spread across the nation, working underground for a social revolution. Nobody knows how big or small the group is or who all are part of it. Believe me, even if your closest friend or family member has a Stranger in his or her life, he or she won’t ever share it with you. We manipulate people in such a way that nobody has the option to talk about us. Like you too couldn’t talk about me to many. Even if you did, there was no substantial evidence. We are the best-kept secret for the public at large. Our own statistic is that every seven-hundredth youngster in India has a Stranger in his or her life, as we speak. We are committed to raising the number.’
‘What do you mean by “emotional-surgeon”?’ Rivanah mumbled. She was still trying to absorb it all. He looked at the sea in front and said, ‘One of the weakest things about humans is we can be easily influenced. We are inherently gullible though we are one of the most intelligent creatures. This weakness is our group’s strength. We initiate a change in people by influencing them. We don’t perform physical surgeries on our targets but we work on their emotions. We push them to the edge. And we work within a time frame. We famish them emotionally as much as we nourish them. We alter their way of thinking, of perceiving things, their beliefs, their conclusions—in short, we alter them as an individual. You know, Mini, our everyday fight is between what we are holding on to and what we are letting go of. What we let go of changes us, what we hold on to alters us. Changes are irreversible. Alternations aren’t.’
Like you initiated an alteration in me the first time I landed in Mumbai, Rivanah thought.
‘Our social revolution is all about crushing that individual self in us, which is a product of a myopic and materialistic society, and knowing our real worth. If one observes people, one will know that people can be categorized, because there’s a pattern—nobody is exclusive. Why do you think these social-networking platforms are a hit? Because deep down, we all are lonely, bitter and depressed. The extent varies, the extent of acceptance varies but we are these things. We all feel an urgent need to connect, to communicate without filters all the time, and yet we tell ourselves it isn’t possible. That’s where we emotional-surgeons come in. We pick our targets, we clean their bitterness by making them accept their deep-rooted mistakes, blunders which otherwise they would never embrace and always try to run away from. We sweep away their loneliness by explaining to them why one must love one’s own self in the garb of the “share your good luck” endeavour.’
Like you made me learn to cook when I was depressed, you made me teach those slum kids and find happiness in simple things, you made me offer money to Mr Rawat, which told me I wasn’t a bad person, after all.
‘Everything needs time. Even sunlight needs time to explain to the seed why it is falling on it. The kind of social design we have knitted over years trains us subliminally to see things not as they are, but as we are told they are—no questions, no objectivity. We emotional-surgeons push people to question, to doubt their subjectivity, because otherwise, it makes our emotional selves blind with time. I too was made a part of it after being pursued by a year and a half by a Stranger who wanted me to know my worth. Not everyone we pursue is made a part of our group. But the ones who are—like I was—are given a target. Hiya Chowdhury was my first target. I had to perform an emotional surgery on her so that she could take on life better and realize her potential to the fullest. Our meticulous and collective planning is our strength. And my surgery on Hiya would have been successful had you not interfered, Mini. You drugged Hiya and she thought it was my doing. Before I could reach her, she had hanged herself assuming that I was some lunatic stalker harassing her.’
Nivan had both his hands in his trousers’ pockets as he talked.
‘But what about Danny’s number in your phone labelled as Stranger?’
‘He wasn’t my Stranger. I was his. I’d recently started pursuing him, after the way he behaved with you inside the ATM in Kalyan. How do you think he cracked a film deal this quickly?’
‘We all have secrets to hide, Mini, truths to confess. Danny coming to drop the chat transcript at your place yesterday was my manipulation, just the way I made you resign from your job, compelled you to go to Prateek’s place and the like.’
Everything added up now. Danny looked anxious when he came out to smoke with me in Boveda, looking around all the time, Rivanah thought and asked, ‘But why didn’t you come clean in front of Hiya like you are coming clean right now? Or did you come out clean in front of every target of yours?’
He gave her a tight smile and said, ‘No, we don’t come out clean in front of anybody.’ A few silent seconds later, he added, ‘Remember, how I had made you breathless on your terrace in Kolkata?’
The holding of hands . . . the pressing of the mouth . . . the clipping of the nose . . . Rivanah nodded.
‘That’s what you made me feel as well. Acutely desperate. Love’s power of influencing us is always more than our scope of understanding it. In the quest to alter you, I fell for you, Mini, though I always believed I would never fall for anyone except Advika.’
Rivanah’s lips parted but no words came out.
‘Initially, I was angry with you for snatching an opportunity from me to influence Hiya. That’s why I had attacked you in your flat too, but I let you go . . .’
Rivanah remembered the night clearly when she was alone in her flat, waiting for Danny, but she was attacked instead, stripped to the bare minimum.
‘Why did you let me go that night, Nivan?’ she asked.
‘Not every pain you want to let go of, Mini. Some you want to keep by your side and watch it grow, because you know you too shall grow with the pain. You are one such pain for me, Mini,’ Nivan said.
Rivanah didn’t how to react. The initial shock of seeing Nivan as the Stranger had somewhat died down, but she wasn’t ready for the fact that Nivan could actually love her. It was always supposed to be a fantasy. Or was this a fantasy?
‘I could have told you on the first day itself that you were made to forget about Hiya through hypnosis, but I had to make sure that first you had the necessary strength to take such a thing. One can take as much shit as possible, but when it comes to one’s own shit, the mind works in a different way, activating the weirdest of defence mechanisms.’
There was silence.
‘Will you . . .’ Rivanah stopped, feeling choked, and started again, ‘Will you believe it if I say I love you, Nivan?’
‘I know it, Mini.’
‘What about Advika?’ she asked.
The way Nivan looked at her first and then away, she knew their dilemma was the same.
‘What happens next?’ she asked.
‘Next is this.’ Nivan took out a piece of paper from his trousers’ pocket and gave it to Rivanah. She was about to open its fold when Nivan stopped her.
‘Not now. Before you read it, you have to listen to me carefully. I have played a big gamble on you. Don’t you dare disappoint me on this, Mini.’
‘What is it, Nivan?’ she asked. She had a bad feeling about it.
‘I told you there are rules in the world I’m a part of and one has to stick to those rules, come what may. And the foremost rule is a Stranger can’t appear in front of his or her target. Come. What. May. I have already broken that rule for you, Mini. Thus there will be a price for me to pay.’
‘What’s the price?’ The bad feeling in her guts became worse.
‘It’s in the note,’ Nivan said, and in a flash took the note from her hand. He held it against the wind. He took out
a lighter and set aflame one of the corners of the note as Rivanah watched in shock.
‘Finish reading it before it all turns into ash. Don’t follow me. Or call out to me. Whatever happens in the next minute happens because of me and not because of you. Remember that always and never be guilty about it. It was important for me to come clean in front of you,’ Nivan said and planted a kiss on her lips, taking her by surprise. He turned and walked off. With a frown, Rivanah started reading the note which was slowly turning into ash. It read:
By the time you read the last word of this note, you’ll know what I meant when I said last night that our meeting will have consequences. Ours is a doomed love story, Mini. And the doom is planned. I know of it. So does Advika. But she won’t be able to deal with it alone. So she will be your responsibility from now on.
The rules of our underground group of Strangers are simple: if you know who we are, then you are one amongst us. Once you are in, you can’t get out. If you don’t comply, you are dead. You breach, you are dead. And our biggest strength is our secrecy because of which we convince people we don’t exist. Like this paper shall turn to ash, swallowing all the words in it.
Don’t let what you see when you are done reading this note break you in any way. In fact, don’t react since we both are being watched right now. Any unfavourable reaction from your end, and they won’t think twice before eliminating you. Someone will contact you in the next five days to tell you what’s next for you. Accept it. Take care, Mini. Goodbye. We shall be together in some other life, maybe. This one was too complicated.
Rivanah let go of the paper as the fire licked the last bit up. As some of the ash slipped out of her hand, Rivanah heard a commotion at a distance. A car had run over someone. People had gathered. Rivanah wanted to throw up. She knelt by the edge of Nariman Point, trying to shut the noise around her. She could hear people screaming for someone to call the police. Her phone rang next. It was Inspector Kamble. She didn’t take the call. He called again. She picked up.
‘Rivanah, are you coming to meet me today?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ She was finding it difficult to talk. ‘I’m out of the city right now.’
‘Oh, not a problem. Let me get this done on the phone itself. I wanted to tell you there’s one more person who lodged an FIR a few days back, claiming someone was stalking him. A little investigation told me that this guy too received messages on white cloth like you once did. Are you still getting them?’
‘No, sir. They stopped coming long back.’
‘Hmm. Okay, that’s all. Thanks. You carry on.’
Glancing at the last piece of ash of Nivan’s note being swept off into the sea by the wind, his words came back to her: Advika is your responsibility from now. The dreadful feeling was actually an intuition. If she knew this was going to be the end, then she wouldn’t have ever asked the Stranger to reveal himself. Rivanah wanted to see Nivan for one last time, but she knew she couldn’t. We are being watched, he had written. She stood up, hailed a cab and headed to the Residency Enclave, breaking down inside the car.
It took an hour and a half for her to reach her destination. She took the elevator and reached the sixteenth floor in no time. Standing in front of 1603, she was trying hard to not think of how she would react or in what state she would find Advika in. The servant opened the door and gestured towards the bedroom immediately. Xeno was sitting in a corner. Rivanah went towards the bedroom. As she stood by the door, she could see Advika sitting by her window, looking out at the sea. Rivanah approached her with heavy steps. Once there, she placed a trembling hand on Advika’s shoulder. The latter turned. Her eyes were swollen. Rivanah understood that Nivan must have told her about it beforehand. Advika threw a hand around Rivanah’s waist and hugged her tightly. As she felt her body shudder against hers, Rivanah put her arms around Advika holding back her own tears. From someone who was always in need of a shoulder to cry on, the Stranger had turned Rivanah into someone who could lend a shoulder to someone in need. And for that, she would be forever indebted to Nivan . . . to her Stranger, whom she would never forget.
Epilogue
11 MONTHS LATER
Indigo flight 6E-332, Mumbai to Kolkata, 12.30 a.m.
Manish Agarwal switched on his mobile phone even before the flight had landed. He knew it was against the rules, but he didn’t care. One after another, messages started pouring in on different social platforms. One of his close friends had sent him a dirty MMS on WhatsApp. It was of a girl giving a guy a blowjob. The next message read: Rohit: 13. Manish: 11, followed by a devil’s emoticon.
Pretty soon, I’ll up my score, asshole! Manish replied.
He looked up to see the air hostess he had been fantasizing about all through the flight. Her name tag read: Anita. Manish gave her a big toothy grin. She smiled back at him awkwardly.
After the exit doors opened, passengers started moving out of the aircraft with their luggage. As Manish reached the exit, he looked at the same air hostess who was now standing beside the door.
‘Have a pleasant night, sir,’ Anita said in the typical I-am-programmed-to-say-this manner.
Manish stopped and looking at her said, ‘What are you doing later tonight?’
‘Excuse me, sir?’ Anita wasn’t expecting it.
‘Okay, let me be straight. Are you free to hook up tonight?’
‘What do you think of yourself?’ Her raised voice made others shoot a suspicious glance at Manish. It made him uncomfortable and also pinched his ego.
‘I’ll have to file a complaint against you if you repeat it,’ Anita shot back.
Manish gave her an angry look and stepped out of the airplane. He was walking furiously on the aerobridge as he called his father.
‘Manu beta, has your flight landed? I have already sent the new Jaguar to fetch you,’ Mr Agarwal said. He was the largest sponsor for the ruling party in the state.
‘I need to get an air hostess fired. Right. Now.’ Manish was fuming.
‘Oh. What happened?’
‘I will tell you later. She needs to be fired first.’
‘I’ll see to it. You come home first.’
Manish cut the call and promised himself he would make Anita his bitch in no time.
After collecting his luggage, he pushed the trolley to the men’s washroom to take a dump. Stepping in, he tried to locate the light buttons since the toilet was concealed in utter darkness. Before he could find it, someone held him by his collar and pulled him right inside one of the toilets. The door was pushed closed while his hand was held behind and twisted hard. Manish opened his mouth to scream but a sock was stuffed inside his mouth. There was a strong smell of some deodorant. Manish didn’t know it was It’s Different, Hugo Boss. Manish tried hard, but couldn’t free himself from the tight grasp. It all happened in a way he had only seen in Bruce Lee films. It was evident that the attacker, whoever it was, knew martial arts. He felt something on his groin.
‘That’s a nutcracker right between your legs,’ a girl spoke in his ears. ‘Tell me, are you going to listen carefully to what I’m going to say or . . .’ Manish nodded out of fear.
‘Good. You will take the next flight back to Mumbai right now. The ticket is inside a packet by the washbasin outside. And when the flight takes off, you will hold your ears and do ten squats before Anita, the air hostess, and apologize to her.’
Manish started fidgeting only to feel his arm being twisted even more. He stopped for his own good. He heard the girl’s voice again.
‘Or else, I will crush your nuts first and then every bone of your body.’
The sound of it made Manish freak out. He shrank like a timid dog.
‘Did you get what I just said?’
Manish nodded.
‘Will you be a good boy, Manu?’
Manish nodded again, sweating profusely by now.
She removed the sock from his mouth.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said, gasping for breath.
�
�Anonymity is power, Manu.’
‘Huh? What do you mean?’
‘You can call me . . . Stranger,’ said Rivanah.
Acknowledgements
I have always dreaded the moment when, after working on the Stranger trilogy for three years, the time would come for me to move on to a different story. The Stranger trilogy has been an educational journey for me. It was a deeply emotional experience as well. And as is true for every journey, there are always souls to thank when it comes to an end.
First and foremost comes my publisher, Milee Ashwarya; my editor, Gurveen Chadha; Shruti Katoch from Marketing; Rahul Dixit from Sales; and to each and every one in Penguin Random House who has shown faith in my work and supported me in presenting the trilogy to my readers. Heartfelt thanks, a loud cheer to you all!
Authors are mostly selfish about their work. And to balance it out, one needs a selfless family. My sincere respects and gratitude to my family for being there whenever I need them.
Since I’m a borderline social recluse, I would also like to thank the few friends I have, for being there, for inspiring me, for teaching me, rectifying me in innumerable ways, and supporting me too. Arindam, Rahul, Rachit, Arpit and Reetika: double thumbs-up!
Then there are people with whom you can’t define your relationship, because it is a lot of everything and a little of nothing. Yet, you learn so much. Ranisa, Pauli, Anuradha, Siddhi, Pallavi, Trisha, Titiksha and Rashi: you guys may not realize it, but I’ve learnt a lot from you people, especially over the last one year. Thank you!
Pallavi Jha: as the trilogy draws to a conclusion, I thank you once again for planting the seed of the concept (though unknowingly!) in my head during one of our innumerable phone calls. I hope you continue to be happy and blessed. Here’s to many more phone calls, cheers!
R, for . . . guess I should rest my words for once and let the dots take over . . . for it’s in the dots that we define ourselves the best, isn’t it?
Forget Me Not, Stranger Page 20
