Pretty Vile Girl

by Rickie Khosla

  Soon he found himself being ‘serviced’ by a 32-year-old prostitute who was known in this part of town as Tara. Tara’s pitara was quite a well-known commodity and, over the years, thousands of men had partaken in what it had to offer. Many of them had been first-timer hostel kids like Yunus, eager to lose their virginity as quickly as possible before being ridiculed by their peers. And so, after a great evening of bun maska, khari chai and biryani at Bastani and Company Irani café and more than a few swigs of the popular Guru beer in his friend’s Fiat, Yunus was ready for his groin to take over his brain. At 3 AM that morning, the three brand-new medical students had easily managed to spot Tara, their Pole Star destined to lead them to manhood. The rate had been quickly decided. Yunus had mounted Tara first. But, maybe because of his overindulgence at the dinner table earlier in the evening or simply due to the performance anxiety of a virgin (aided certainly, by the two bottles of Guru that he had guzzled), by the time he finished, he had been a mess of tears and sweat, and Tara a picture of bored anger. Yunus’ buddies had cheered on for a bit, but had since left—one to throw up into the closest gutter, and the other back to the car to take a nap.

  For Yunus, of course, his first time had been a seminal achievement. Clearly, he would have not have had this opportunity for another seven or eight years had he stayed back in Bhopal. That is, not until his parents had found him a young bride from a well-established gharana as theirs, and after ‘Qabool Hai!’ had been uttered three times. But now, with performance anxiety finally gone, and flush with newfound vigour, the teenager was quickly ready for a second round.

  Tara, though, had had enough.

  ‘I am able to take three customers in the time you took, you ignorant fool!’ she had yelled at the puppy-eyed young buck.

  ‘You want more money?’

  ‘You think I am running a charitable hospital?’

  A new rate was negotiated, and service resumed.

  When the night finally ended for the satisfied boy-man, Yunus had a story to tell everyone at the hostel. For Tara, it had been a lucrative return to work after several days of malaria. With her unexpected windfall that night, she decided to take another week off. While the bug itself was gone, vestiges of her sickness had still remained in the form of weakness and loss of appetite, both dietary and sexual.

  ‘I shall rest for a few more days. Hopefully, I will run into some more idiots when I get back,’ she thought.

  As luck would have it, the woman’s malaria relapsed. By the time it left her system several weeks later, Tara discovered she was pregnant. ‘Haraamzaada!’ she exclaimed angrily, but not at the acned boy with hyper-productive sperm whose bastard was now growing inside of her.

  It was the first time Tara had cursed her baby. Toby had only been the size of a pimple at the time.

  ‘Oye Behench.…!’ Toby whistled in his mind when he saw Jazmeen for the first time. It was the normal reaction of all men. Jazmeen was wearing a see-through shirt, but the white t-shirt she had on underneath was full and modest. Nothing really showed, not even the hint of a cleavage. Nothing, except the promise of what lay within.

  They were back at the flat that Toby and Rubina shared in Matunga West. Rubina had got dinner packed from Jai Jawan. She figured that while Toby’s mind was being intrigued by Jazmeen’s proposal, his taste buds wouldn’t mind getting serviced by some scrumptious Butter Chicken.

  ‘How do you even know so much about Leena?’ the curious man demanded. Jazmeen may have never met Leena Bindra, but she appeared to be extremely familiar with the old woman’s habits, her likes and her interests. As well as her family background, her bank balance and her solvency situation. The information sounded solid because the source who had shared this information with Jazmeen was beyond reproach.

  ‘And why do you think she will take to you?’ Toby had questioned next.

  Jazmeen laughed. ‘With a name like mine, do you think she will have a choice?’

  The man and the woman staring at her chewed on their chicken tangdi slowly and deliberately. Only one pair of eyes among them dropped down to Jazmeen’s chest momentarily. Then, Toby turned his head to look at his partner.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked Rubina.

  ‘You know, I don’t mind screwing that old hag,’ the girlfriend concurred. Then, turning to Jazmeen, she asked, ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me!’

  ‘No, no, you have just landed in Mumbai. Don’t we all know how difficult it is to find a decent place to live in this city? Just pack whatever shit you have and bring it here,’ Rubina offered, the unsaid being that she wanted to keep an eye on her new acquaintance while the trio put a plan together to ‘screw’ Leena Bindra.

  Toby simply assented by nodding his head. Suddenly, the chicken he was eating tasted even more succulent than before.

  The plan was devised over the next four weeks. On paper, the action steps seemed fool-proof. There was some legwork required, but nothing that Toby couldn’t have managed through his network of rascals. As per plan, they would also need to hire a new chap at the parlour, and Jazmeen had already pin-pointed someone insignificant-looking for that job. It was now just a matter of executing the devious programme properly, leaving nothing to chance, and then patiently waiting to watch Leena Bindra’s life collapse in a heap and her riches fall straight into the lap of the scamming trio.

  The evening before ‘Action!’, Toby treated the women to some incredible pav bhaji at Chowpatty. There was a lot of laughter and joy, stories and jokes. Jazmeen even handily won a burping contest after much food and drink had been devoured. Toby had the most fun in the camel ride portion of the evening, especially the part where his hand accidentally brushed Jazmeen’s hip while helping her mount the animal, and later, observing her bosom rise and fall seductively when she and the humped beast moved in unison. Jazmeen was wearing a red top (nothing really showed, as usual) and a modest dark-green skirt that hemmed at the knees. Well, not when she was riding the camel, it didn’t. And when the skirt rode up, one couldn’t miss the largish mole she had on her right thigh, almost equidistant between her pelvis and her knee.

  ‘I want her so bad!’

  The aroused man relived Jazmeen’s images from the evening in his head as he made love to his girlfriend later that night.

  Next day, the plan to plunder Leena Bindra was put in motion.

  When a fourth ‘very expensive’, ‘imported’ hair vitalizing shampoo bottle went missing from the parlour, Leena Aunty was left with no choice but to raise her voice at the only staffer she had. That seemingly mild rebuke was promptly inferred by Rubina as an insidious attack by the overbearing employer over her chaste morality. The slanging match that ensued was dirty and loud. No Hindi gaali was left unflung. Fingers were pointed repeatedly. Luckily for both women, scissors, hairdryers and other weapons were left outside the purview of this pink Kurukshetra. A customer, who dared to open the parlour door in a vain attempt to request a perm, beat a hasty retreat when she saw the two giant volcanoes spewing filth at each other.

  In the end, Rubina Peter had successfully managed to enrage Leena Bindra to such an astounding degree that the employer was ready to throw her employee out of the door physically and replace her with whoever walked in next looking for a job. Yes, even a blind monkey would have been a better option at that moment!

  Luckily for Leena Bindra, it was someone much more accomplished than a blind monkey that showed up looking for a job at Hair and There Beauty Parlour three days later.

  It had been six months since the plan had been underway. By now, Jazmeen had established absolute trust in Leena Bindra’s eyes, the parlour now had a men’s section, and Toby, posing as Gokhale, had been inching ahead with the education of Leena Bindra on the new real estate townships in the north and east of the city. It had been going slower than they had expected, though.

  ‘Why is the fatso not biting your bait?’ complained Rubina after dinner one night. They had just finis
hed some awesome haleem that Jazmeen had experimented with in the kitchen. Toby was still licking his fingers.

  ‘She will, she will,’ Jazmeen said as she cleaned the plastic sheet on the tiny dining table. She had had to almost yank the plate from Toby’s hands. They both exchanged a furtive smile, as he sent a toothpick inside his mouth on an exploratory mission.

  ‘What if Leena doesn’t agree to check out that Vashi place?’ Rubina continued in her awful voice. She was now sitting in front of the TV, absent-mindedly filing her nails.

  ‘Jazmeen is saying, na, she will, so she will. What is your rush? Do you have a train to catch?’ responded Toby.

  ‘Actually, Toby, Rubina is right. Let’s not wait indefinitely for Leena to come around. Let’s do that picnic at Ghosale Lake and swing by the Vashi place on our way back. Leena will come around immediately when she physically sees the place. I am certain of it,’ Jazmeen said.

  Rubina stopped her nail-filing action momentarily, looked up and blazed a contented ‘See, I told you!’ smile at her boyfriend. Then she resumed her monotonous task of self-beautification. The other two people in the room looked at each other too. Jazmeen tossed a furtive wink at Toby.

  Neither Jazmeen nor Toby did need to follow up on their Ghosale Lake picnic idea, after all. As luck would have it, the Chinchpokli riots erupted, doing their bit in convincing Leena that her current location had gone to the dogs, and that she needed to shift.

  Toby felt it was time to bell the cat. With such a sensuous house guest in close proximity at all times, his libido hadn’t left him much of a choice. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘what is the worst that can happen? That she will say no?’

  Then, as if to reassure himself that more pleasant outcomes were also possible, he mumbled, ‘Saali, if she were to just say yes once…’ He felt the beginnings of a swell in his pants.

  ‘I think we should make… this… more exciting,’ he said to Rubina after they had finished making love that night.

  ‘Listen, I am not going down on you… there, I have already told you!’ the nasal voice complained.

  ‘No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean… I mean, what if we got someone to, you know, service both of us?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you have never thought about Jazmeen like that!’

  Rubina’s face flushed with anger. In the darkness of the bedroom, Toby could not make out the red hot rage on her face nor see the white-hot ire in her eyes.

  He couldn’t gauge the fury in her voice when she spoke either.

  ‘What kind of a tharki are you, besharam!’ she said quietly, seething.

  ‘So, what do you say?’ Toby pressed on, not quite realising the error of his proposition. ‘Try karen?’

  ‘And what new tricks will she do that we don’t already do to each other to make sex more exciting for you?’

  ‘Well, there is only one way to find out…’

  ‘By inviting that bitch into our bed?’

  Toby finally picked up on Rubina’s hostility. This was not going to go as per plan.

  ‘I mean… obviously, if you don’t agree…’ he said, in his best cajoling voice.

  ‘Well, I can think of another way that will make this more exciting. At least for me, Toby…’ she continued. ‘Do you want to know how?’

  Toby dared not speak.

  ‘I could chop your Jazmeen into a million little pieces and cook them as boti kebabs for you. Heck, I could even use her own recipe, if you want. I know how much you love her cooking, behenchod!’

  ‘Arrey meri Mukherji,’ he said disarmingly, addressing Rubina with the moniker for Rani, that he often used with her, ‘don’t get angry with me! It was a kinky idea—you didn’t like it, so we drop it. Doesn’t matter! What is Jazmeen? Just a disposable polythene bag; we use her for as long as we need to carry home Leena Bindra’s millions, that’s all!’ he added, as he pulled her close.

  ‘Then how do you even get such nonsensical ideas in your head?’ Rubina said, her voice slowly regaining its usual nasal pitch.

  ‘Yaar, our entire life, you and I have been putting together 2+2 and making it a 5. I thought why not this time we put 1+1 and call it a threesome?’

  ‘Such a haraami you are!’ she said.

  ‘But I am your haraami, meri Mukherji!’

  Rubina’s anger dissipated entirely.

  ‘Putty in my hands,’ thought Toby as the two kissed.

  The property that Toby/Gokhale showed Leena Bindra was a vacant retail space under a legal dispute between two warring brothers. Both the brothers were blights on society, one more of a blight than the other. The worse one was Toby’s friend, and luckily for Toby, held the property papers that were otherwise worthless until the court case was settled. OK, so maybe not entirely worthless. With the promise of a small cut, Toby’s leech-friend was happy to play his part in the Leena Bindra scam. After all, what was there to lose? The two crooks had agreed that the property papers were going to be ‘borrowed’ for a few days. The leech-friend didn’t even need to make an appearance. It was the easiest way to make a lakh or two if there ever was one.

  It had been an emotionally draining day for Leena Bindra. She had wept on Jazmeen’s shoulder as the signage of Hair and There Unisex Salon was being torn down. Just to give solace to the wretched woman (but mainly because the old hag had insisted), Jazmeen had decided to stay over at her Sion flat that night.

  Toby and Rubina were alone in their home for the first time in a long time. Which meant that Rubina could yell at the top of her nasal voice because her lover was having trouble performing in bed.

  ‘What the bloody hell, Toby?’

  ‘Sorry, yaar, what’s the big deal? We will do it tomorrow when Jazmeen is back home.’

  ‘Do you really not understand what I am angry about?’ screamed the exasperated woman.

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘That your head is full of that bitch! Even though she isn’t here physically, she is still in our bed!’

  ‘Shut up! It’s been such a long and stressful day—and you know that! While you were merrily filing your nails and checking on your lipstick all day, Jazmeen and I were toiling in the sun with that fat budhiya. Can you not see? I am just not in the mood right now!’

  ‘You are not in the mood?’

  ‘Just calm down, OK? Look, I am seriously tired, and that’s not a joke. But if you really want to do it, we’ll still try,’ the limp lover offered.

  ‘No, you bloody bastard, I don’t really want to do it as if it’s a punishment!’ Rubina continued as she started to pull away and get up. Her appeasing partner yanked her back towards himself.

  ‘OK, now stop talking about her and let me get on with my job, meri Mukherji,’ Toby said with an infectious giggle.

  ‘You are a bloody…’ the woman began but was quickly smothered by his lips.

  ‘You do realise that we can’t have her around us all the time, don’t you?’ she resumed later when the tired lovers were seconds away from slumber.

  ‘Mm... hmm,’ Toby mumbled.

  ‘Once we are done with this job, I am going to kick her out,’ Rubina said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Another week, ten days? Will all the money be in by then?’

  ‘Haan.’

  ‘OK, good!’ she smiled, as sleep finally took over.

  Toby was smiling, too. His had been a great performance tonight. As usual, his mind and his body had been making love to two different women at the same time.

  When ‘Gokhale’ finally decamped with everything she owned, the hapless and broke Leena Bindra got dangerously more hapless and broken each day. She had no one in the world to turn to, so she, as expected, flung herself at Jazmeen for succour and support.

  ‘Find that kameena and make him pay for what he has done to me!’ beseeched the pitiful woman to her daughter-like employee.

  ‘Yes, Aunty, he will be caught soon. Everyone has to eventually pay for the miseries they inflict onto
others,’ Jazmeen said, through very convincing tears.

  Jazmeen filed an FIR on Leena’s behalf. But what could the police do in a crime that involved a foolish elderly woman and a sleazy, untraceable, and seemingly professional fraudster? They had no interest in solving the crime—it wasn’t as if anyone had been raped or murdered. If the police got distracted chasing every silly property scam in Mumbai, how could they be expected to ‘Protect the Good and Destroy the Evil’, as their motto claimed?

  After that, Jazmeen waited patiently for Leena Bindra’s pathetic life to seek its own path to a sorry end. She already knew that the woman had a weak heart, so she spent her time perched on Leena’s bedpost like a vulture enacting its finest Florence Nightingale impression. Her ticker finally gave way in about a week. By the time Jazmeen dialed 102 to call for an ambulance forty-five minutes later, the bedridden woman had stopped convulsing, gone blue in the face and had lost consciousness.

  As he watched the lone resident of No. 23, Noor Bano Apartments, Road No. 14, Sion, being carted away on a trolley with squealing wheels, the building security guard grandly predicted to the dhobi, ‘Aunty is not coming back. Not even a miracle can save her.’

  ‘Who is that girl with her? Looks a bit young to be her daughter,’ the dhobi with the missing front teeth asked.

  ‘Who knows! Visits occasionally. Whoever she is, bandi is top-class maal!’

  Tobias ‘Toby’ James and Rubina Peter had awesome sex the night the hospital confirmed the demise of Leena Bindra. It was the best sex they had had in days. Afterwards, Rubina reminded Toby of something they’d discussed a few nights earlier.

  ‘Aren’t we done with Jazmeen now? When can I kick her out of the flat?’

  Toby, of course, had no such plans. No such plans at all.