Pretty Vile Girl

by Rickie Khosla

  The murder weapon, the iron bar, had come off the window of the toilet next to the cell. The perpetrator had somehow managed to reach up to the ten-feet-high window, unfastened it, taken the iron bar out, and used it to commit the heinous crime. The police concluded that he had then used the gap in the window to escape from the facility. There were no eyewitnesses to either the crime or the escape.

  Ujjwal Ahluwalia had vanished into the night without a trace.

  The police made a bit more than half-hearted attempts to find the rampaging killer, but India is too large a haystack to find a needle that makes no sound and has no shine.

  Deepika received the news of her brother’s disappearance with stoicism. This time, there were no tears. She felt just one thing.

  Determination.

  She was determined to destroy Jasmine Bhatia for the carnage she had wrought on her life.

  6

  Girl-on-Girl Action

  Killing a person, even the one who has all but destroyed you, requires fortitude and planning. The hunter must cast aside all fears or inhibitions if she wishes to succeed in her mission.

  A month later, the police still had no clue where Ujjwal was. It was as if he had vanished into thin air. It was hard to look for him in any case because the only existing photograph of the boy was a family photo taken years ago. Foolishly, no one at the Police Station or at the Juvenile Remand Home had deemed it necessary to take a mugshot of the boy when he was in custody. Growing teens acquire a brand new face more or less every year.

  With each passing day without any news of Ujjwal, Deepika felt even more resolved to destroy Jasmine.

  The only other person aware of this was Jolly.

  Jasmine hadn’t failed to notice that Deepika had shut down after her brother’s disappearance. ‘Hey, if that is how she wants to deal with it, by going goongi like her mental brother, what the fuck do I care!’ she thought. She was surprised when one day Deepika approached her asking if she could speak to her.

  ‘What is it?’ Jasmine asked warily.

  ‘Didi, can you get me a job outside?’ Deepika said. ‘I can’t concentrate at school anymore. I feel like I am wasting my time there.’

  ‘What?’ Jasmine was genuinely surprised. ‘Are you mad? Why would I let you leave school?’

  ‘After the way Ujjwal dumped me and ran away, I keep thinking, what is the point in continuing with school? I am hardly going to become a doctor or a flight stewardess. I feel it is time to find a normal job, earn some money—stand on my own two feet. I’m already seventeen. I don’t want to be a burden on you anymore, Didi,’ Deepika said earnestly. Her voice shook.

  ‘Oye, you don’t have to sacrifice anything on my account, do you understand? In any case, the government pays me to keep the likes of you off the streets. Nothing is coming out of my pocket!’

  ‘Maybe so, Didi, but if I don’t find some distraction in life, I feel I will go mad! Every single thing reminds me of Ujjwal…’ Deepika said, looking absolutely miserable.

  ‘I don’t know what is going on inside me,’ Deepika continued, ‘but my mind keeps getting these dirty thoughts about Ujjwal and… and… that bitch! I keep thinking about where all they must have had their… relations. Was it on our beds? When did they even do it? And how come I had no clue that they were… you know… doing it?’

  This time, Jasmine couldn’t help but smile at the young girl’s helplessness. It. The girl was having trouble even saying the word ‘sex’ and yet that was all she was thinking about all the time. ‘She is becoming a woman, after all,’ she thought. But that was not going to stop her from bullying the horny teen.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Thinking such thoughts about your own brother!’ she said, sounding disgusted.

  Deepika began to cry.

  ‘You should be focusing on other things, you pervert!’ Jasmine went on. ‘Haven’t you already seen what happens to children who think of sex at such a young age? One of your sisters is already dead, and your brother… well, who knows, maybe he too is lying in a ditch somewhere!’

  The girl’s sobs got more intense. Jasmine realised she may have been a bit harsh.

  ‘Achha, achha, stop this drama now!’ she said.

  ‘Listen, just banish these dirty thoughts from your mind. Focus on school and studies, it’s your last year. Look after your other brothers and sisters. You have a responsibility towards them.’

  ‘But, Didi…’ Deepika’s voice broke through her pathetic whimpers, as she used both her hands to wipe her eyes, ‘Please help me get out of the house. Everything here reminds me of those two! Maybe I could be with you for a few hours each day? I can be your helper, your maid, whatever you want.’

  ‘Arre, I don’t need anyone like you hanging around me,’ Jasmine said, shaking her head with contempt. But she was having trouble keeping her eyes off the weeping girl. Deepika was wiping her wet face with her hands, and then brushing those hands on her cotton-draped bosom.

  ‘Didi, please give me a chance! I will do anything you ask me to do. Anything!’ Deepika continued to sniffle undeterred.

  ‘OK, let me think about it. Now just get out of my sight!’

  When she wasn’t conniving at Innocent Dreams, Jasmine’s hobbies included leisurely lunches with ‘the girls’ at chic restaurants with French names, shopping at expensive stores with American names, and visiting a spa-like gym bearing the Sanskrit name for ‘inner peace’. The ‘girls’ were a bunch of eight women similar to Jasmine in looks and size, approaching the expiry date of youth. The ultra-exclusive gym, Moksha Fitness Clinic and Spa, was visited every morning for about an hour—four minutes of which were spent on the treadmill; fourteen on flirting with the gym instructors sporting immodest bulges on their arms and groin; and the rest on catching up with the ‘girls’ over a healthy potion of kheera or lauki or mixed-vegetable juice. This was also the time when plans like ‘Let’s check out that boutique in Lado Sarai—it’s got the most divine Pakistani suits collection ever!’ were made. Or that trip to Olive to have the latest unpronounceable mushroom dish which is ‘to-die-for’ and which ‘you know, I really shouldn’t be having, I’m on a diet…see you there 1-ish?’

  Each of the girls availed of an assistant, their man Friday, who had to be at hand to run for cash to the ATM, hold the bags during a shopping trip to the plush new malls of Gurgaon or South Delhi, purchase movie tickets, make restaurant bookings, and for all other odd jobs where the mistress simply needed to say ‘I’ll send my fellow over to collect it’ on the phone. Jasmine had one too, a fellow named Prabhu, clearly made for her by the Gods, without whom her life couldn’t possibly go on. This Prabhu had been supplied to her by Jolly some years ago when she had demanded someone smart to help her with her daily chores.

  Sadly for Jasmine, Jolly had abruptly decided to end his wife’s match-made-in-heaven that morning.

  ‘I’ll be needing Prabhu from now on. I have some important work for him,’ Jolly said to Jasmine over breakfast, two days after Deepika’s Oscar-worthy tears.

  ‘Are you mad? I can’t spare him!’ was the wife’s cursory dismissal of her husband’s request. She didn’t even bother to look up from her Delhi Times supplement.

  ‘I have already told you a hundred times over that you need to find yourself another helper. I need him to sort out a supplier in Mumbai.’

  This time, Jasmine did look up. ‘Mumbai? When do you need him?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Then I’ll need him to take a parcel from me when he goes. I’ll have it ready by the evening.’

  ‘OK.’

  This was normal. Jasmine always had a parcel to send to Mumbai. She did it three or four times every month.

  ‘Will Prabhu be back by the weekend?’ she asked, resuming her interest in the Page 3 gossip.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘He had better come back by then, OK?’ she said, her tone edged with warning.

  ‘I’m getting late,’ Jolly said by way of answ
er. He got up from the dining table and left the room. No other pleasantries were exchanged between the couple.

  Three days later, while Prabhu was minding some useless business in Mumbai, Jolly extended the staffer’s stay there by another four weeks. ‘Something’s come up. Deal with it…’ was all he deigned to tell his furious wife.

  A few days after her husband had snatched Prabhu away so thoughtlessly from her, Jasmine was left with no choice but to look for a new assistant.

  ‘But don’t forget, this is just a temporary arrangement, OK? Just for a few hours every other day. Now that Sumi’s gone, we need your help at the orphanage too. You already have much to do back at the orphanage,’ she declared to her gushing new helper.

  ‘I will make you really happy! Thank you, Didi!’ said Deepika, mustering barrels of excitement that seemed dangerously close to overacting.

  ‘Don’t get overexcited, if Prabhu doesn’t come back soon, we need to find someone full time anyway and it won’t be you… stupid girl…’ Jasmine said dismissively.

  ‘Well, we’ll see who the stupid one is now… won’t we?’

  The first time Jasmine had noticed that she was different from most girls in school was when she and her friends bunked middle school to watch the film Tezaab. OK, technically it wasn’t really a bunk, because the girls had just finished their exams and instead of waiting for their school buses to ferry them home later in the afternoon, they’d decided to sneak out of school and catch the new box office smash at Regal in Connaught Place.

  The movie was great—and what made it so was the raw action, the bold love story, the popular music and the gritty dialogue. The schoolgirls were unanimously gooey-eyed for the rugged machismo of the new star, Anil Kapoor. It was only Jasmine who had not even noticed him. Actually, she hadn’t registered anything in the film other than the transcendent Madhuri Dixit. Her face, her bust, her thighs, her back; every bittersweet smile, every cheery mannerism and, not to forget, every pelvic thrust had convinced Jasmine that she had just witnessed the most perfect thing God had ever created.

  Jasmine’s father was often travelling for work, leaving her mother to single-handedly raise their daughter in their cosy home in Defence Colony. Jasmine’s mother was a rigid disciplinarian, who took pride in her. She had every reason to—Jasmine was tall and slim, with a round and lovely face comprising large, dark eyes and naturally deep-pink lips. Her straight long hair was usually tied in a plait that trailed all the way to her buttocks, and rocked languidly from side to side each time she walked. ‘My Princess will grow up to be a Queen, and the world will be at her feet,’ she would often tell the other women in her kitty circle. There was no option for her friends but to agree—one look at Jasmine and everyone knew that there was going to be a long line of fine suitors for the girl when she was to be of marriageable age.

  Jasmine kissed a boy for the first time when she was sixteen. She hated it. Then, three days later, as part of a dare during an all-girl all-night sleepover, with Madonna’s ‘Like a virgin’ fittingly blaring from a tape-recorder, Jasmine kissed a girl. Her partner was an audacious tomboy in her class named Arundhati. The next day, when she had recounted this to her mother, the woman had been horrified. ‘In which universe is it OK for well-brought-up girls like you to behave like sickening Roadside Romeos? I will break your legs if you ever do such a stupid thing again. Do you understand?’

  Jasmine, of course, had not only loved the liplock with Arundhati, but had also dreamt about it almost every night since—until she had her first proper sexual encounter three years later in her college hostel.

  After Jasmine ended school, her father decided to settle down in Mumbai. His wife joined him there, giving Jasmine a free hand to finally explore her sexuality without familial restraints. The father never did find out about his daughter’s carnal compulsions for as long as he lived. But the mother did—when Jasmine was twenty.

  The daughter was visiting her mother in Mumbai. It had been two weeks since they had cremated Jasmine’s father, who had died suddenly of heart failure.

  ‘I have someone in my life, Ma,’ Jasmine had approached the topic tepidly.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘But I don’t know what to do about it. I mean, it will be difficult to…’ she added, not quite knowing herself where her unlabelled relationship with her college roommate was supposed to go.

  ‘Isn’t it too soon? You’re only twenty, Jasmine!’

  ‘It is, and we are not thinking of getting… I don’t know, married…?’

  ‘Someone from your college?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve been expecting this. You are young, you live by yourself in a hostel thousands of kilometres from me and so you need company. But you are right, you can’t be thinking of marriage this early. Wait until you are twenty four or so. That’s the right age for a girl to get married.’

  Jasmine merely nodded.

  ‘Treat this as a crush, a fling—a college romance, nothing more. I am sure the boy feels the same way too.’

  She remained quiet. But the mother—unable to control her curiosity—had to ask, ‘Is he Sikh too? Not that it matters right now, really.’

  The moment of truth had come. Jasmine first nodded to concede her lover’s religion—and then dropped her bombshell. ‘The name is Amarjit. Her family is from Darjeeling.’

  There was stunned silence in the room for a few moments. And then the chapter was decidedly put aside for the time being when the mother left a resounding slap on Jasmine’s face.

  The first thing that Jasmine had to do to ‘fix’ her new helper, Deepika, was to work on her appearance—that is, to buy her new clothes. Jasmine couldn’t have had her traipsing around in secondhand rags. The women went to Central Market in Lajpat Nagar and picked up a bunch of pants, tops, salwar kameez and skirts. The prices were lower than modest but, despite that, Jasmine couldn’t help but notice how Deepika had a keen eye to spot the best in a pile, and mix-and-match her choices to make even the most limited options look great.

  Then, later, as they strolled around the inner by-lanes of the bazaar, Deepika had another request.

  ‘Didi, I need some…’ she started and then stammered to a stop.

  ‘Speak up, you stupid girl!’

  ‘Bra and…’

  ‘Oh, OK!’

  They stopped at a small stall with a large, colourful sign which said Kanchan Pantie and Bra Corner.

  ‘What size do you wear?’ demanded Jasmine.

  ‘I don’t know, Didi,’ Deepika said sheepishly. She really didn’t know, but not because she was ignorant on matters of cup size. She simply didn’t know by how many more inches her breasts had expanded in the past few months. So, she decided to simply put them in Jasmine’s hands, so to speak.

  ‘What size do you think they are, Didi?’ she said, perking up her torso and ensuring that Jasmine got a full frontal view of her prime real estate. Jasmine’s large eyes matched those of the silent delighted shopkeeper’s.

  ‘Did you use the perfume I sent you through Prabhu?’ Jasmine asked her mother. They had been on the phone for the past fifteen minutes. The women spoke several times a day. It was a habit that had formed during Jasmine’s college days, when her mother had decided to keep a sharp eye on her life.

  Jasmine’s mother sounded non-committal.

  ‘It’s very good, Ma, believe me!’

  ‘Well, if you must know, I didn’t like it one bit. Why couldn’t you just send me Chanel? You know that’s the one I always use!’

  Jasmine was suddenly angry. ‘Why do you always do this? I am just asking you to try something new once for a change, that’s all! Look, just send it back through Prabhu if you don’t want it. You can stick to your stupid Chanel,’ Jasmine said.

  ‘Prabhu? Is he still in Mumbai? How are you managing over there?’

  Jasmine was immediately alert.

  ‘I have taken an assistant from the orphanage.’

  ‘Better make sure he is
n’t stealing.’

  ‘She’, Jasmine corrected.

  ‘I see…’ ‘It’s fine, Ma. There is no such thing. She’s just a child, anyway!’

  ‘Whatever you wish, my dear. I’ll talk to you later.’

  And the line went dead before Jasmine could say another word.

  The reverberations of the thunderous slap inflicted on Jasmine’s face in her mother’s Mumbai bedroom were strong enough for her to give up the twelve-month long romance she had with Amarjit. The broken-hearted Jasmine had ended it as soon as she returned to Delhi, breaking Amarjit’s heart into just as many tiny pieces as her own. Amarjit took a place off-campus. And as soon as she took her final paper for her BA Psychology degree, she left Delhi for her hometown.

  Life moved on for Jasmine as well. She started receiving photographs of potential suitors from her mother. No more ‘wait until twenty-four to be married’.

  The money and esteem that came with marriage had as much importance in her life as any other girl of her age. What Jasmine did mind was that all those benefits came with a penis attached to them.

  Almost three years later, after finishing her post graduation studies in Sociology and with nothing better to do in life, Jasmine left Delhi to be with her mother. The women lived together for almost six months. It was the most tiresome period of Jasmine’s life.

  ‘You have to settle down, you know,’ was typically how the anxious mother’s pestering would begin.

  ‘Ma, you know that can’t happen.’

  ‘Why are you so afraid? Men can’t tell such things!’

  ‘And that makes it OK?’

  ‘Well, do you have any problems with expensive foreign holidays, lots of jewellery, and dinners at five-star hotels? A fancy car? A large house filled with servants?’