Pretty Vile Girl

by Rickie Khosla

  ‘I have an unusual request for you,’ Manjrekar began slowly after clearing his throat softly a couple of times, betraying his discomfort at putting Suresh on the spot. He was about to request his ex-deputy to do something outside of protocol.

  ‘Is it a personal matter, Sir?’

  ‘Personal?’ Manjrekar wondered aloud. Frankly, what he was going to ask for was police business, but not something that could be requested through proper channels. So, perhaps, yes, ‘personal’ was indeed the best way one could describe it. ‘Well, maybe, in a way, yes,’ he said, ‘but I feel this is something important.’

  ‘In that case, Sir, how can I help?’ said the always-eager Suresh.

  ‘Do you recall an old investigation of murder victims whose heads had been shaved by their killers at the time of their deaths? This was a couple of years ago. I had suspected there to be a connection in those cases, but we had not been able to complete our analysis because of workload. And then I got transferred out of Dadar anyway.’

  ‘Yes, Sir, I do have a faint recollection. What about those cases? I’m sure they have been closed now, Sir.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I need your help. Can you get me the photocopies of their case files?’

  ‘Sir…?’

  ‘Oh, I know, Suresh, it is highly irregular of me to even ask you to do this. In fact, I wouldn’t have made this request had I not thought this was very important.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that, Sir! It’s just that,’ the Constable suddenly got coy, ‘my wedding is coming up in a month’s time. I will be going away to my village for a while. Is it OK if I check this out for you when I return? It may take a few weeks.’

  Manjrekar was quick to cover his disappointment. ‘That’s wonderful news! My best wishes! Don’t worry about the information. Look into it when you return. There is no rush!’ he added.

  The two men exchanged a few mundanities and some general information about Roshni’s health before hanging up. Manjrekar sighed. He figured there was nothing more that could be done for a few weeks.

  It was a few more months before Manjrekar was even able to pursue the line of investigation he had in mind. Around the same time that Suresh Joglekar’s wedding came up, Manjrekar’s daughter became severely ill, decimating what little normalcy existed in the lives of Manjrekar and his wife, almost threatening to shred up their marriage itself.

  That unexpected event meant that the connection between Jazmeen’s terrible past at Innocent Dreams and the murders that had happened under Manjrekar’s watch was going to remain cloaked for some more time.

  But not for very long.

  The wrath of fate couldn’t have been any crueller as it didn’t allow Jazmeen a chance to say her final goodbye to Arty. But how could she have, when they had never solemnised their relationship to the world?

  Two days after his grisly death in Mumbai, Arty’s last rites were conducted quietly in Gorakhpur in a private ceremony. In attendance were the dead man’s brother and mother and a few of their closest relatives. Subhadra and Karan remained a picture of serenity throughout the event. No one who met the surviving Rathores during the sombre ceremony could have even guessed the emotional turmoil that was ravaging them from within. Their public personas were too cultivated to give any of it away.

  Getting Arty’s and his assassin’s bodies silently out of Mumbai had been reasonably painless. It had been possible with the aid of a few factors—chief among them, Karan’s unreserved access to money and resources. And, perhaps the most important factor of all—unshakeable loyalty. The Rathores’ faithful driver and general-purpose Man Friday, Kartik, and two other household employees had been specially summoned to Mumbai from Gorakhpur in the middle of the night via a chartered plane. Karan’s own personal aircraft, a Cessna Caravan Turboprop, had flown him from Delhi soon after Jazmeen’s phone call, and was kept on alert to fly him and his lifeless ‘cargo’ back to Gorakhpur on a moment’s notice.

  Ignoring Karan’s advice to leave the penthouse right after they had spoken on the phone, Jazmeen had decided to stay put and wait for his arrival. She had used that time to clean up the flat and put it back to order as best she could by herself. Every place, except the bedroom where the dead bodies lay. She hadn’t entered that room at all. Once Jazmeen was reasonably satisfied with her efforts, she had taken a long shower.

  The cool water had taken care of the blood and dirt smudges on her body, even soothed her swollen face—but it had done little to douse the fire of aimless rage that was scorching her insides. Her anguished mind was looking for reasons for the tragedy.

  ‘Why the hell did you have to cut short Dubai and rush back, Arty?’ her mind wailed. ‘Why couldn’t you have just believed me when I said I was OK?’

  Then, even more disturbing thoughts.

  ‘Did the man come here to kill Arty?’ But that didn’t make sense. Arty was not even supposed to be in Mumbai.

  ‘Or me? But why would anyone want to kill me?’

  ‘No, it has to be a case of a botched robbery. He came to steal—and then panicked when Arty walked in on him. Yes, that has got to be what happened!’

  It was the only answer that made any sense to her.

  Her hour-long shower had been disturbed by the doorbell. Absent-mindedly, Jazmeen had snapped on her panties, donned Arty’s white kurta that hung in the spare bathroom, and reached the main door. It was only after she had opened the door that she had realised that her face was a dripping mess. No, not just from the water trickling down her wet hair, but from the bloodshot eyes that had not stopped crying for hours.

  As Karan stepped inside the flat and closed the main door behind him, Jazmeen wordlessly walked into the man’s arms and dissolved into a puddle of wretched misery. It was then, for the first time in hours, that the tragic enormity of what had happened finally hit Karan. Arty was dead.

  His little brother was dead.

  And it had all been Karan’s fault.

  It was the first time that Karan had seen his mother have a physical reflex to any news—good, bad, or cataclysmic like the one he had just shared. By contrast, for example, his mother had had no reaction to her husband’s mangled remains after his fatal car crash decades ago. Karan had been a teenager at the time, seeing his mother’s unyielding stoicism had bothered him. Over time he had learned the real reason for Ma’s stoney lack of emotion —she had never really loved her husband in the first place.

  Braced for more stoicism, Karan was relieved to see his mother’s response to the news—a sudden and sharp intake of breath, as if a cruel punch had been inflicted to her stomach, followed by a pitiful single wail, and an uncontrollable quivering of her lower jaw and chin. The woman’s face had turned grey and her eyes white like fresh snow. No tears were forthcoming, as if they were marking some kind of protest at their banishment from her life years ago. Karan offered his her his hand to clutch.

  The ravaged mother and son were seated in the study of the Rathore mansion. They were alone. Outside, under the darkness of a clear Gorakhpur midnight, Kartik stood next to a Toyota Innova awaiting further instructions. The van’s air-conditioning was running full blast, demolishing even the faintest traces of the putrid smells emanating from the bodies of Arty and his killer. The dead men lay together one atop the other, triple-plastic-wrapped with dry ice, sealed within a massive aluminium air-crate meant to courier large, fragile items like expensive musical instruments and valuable sculptures, and not a morbid communion of the dead that could have only resulted from practicality and a paucity of time.

  Karan and his faithfuls had landed at Gorakhpur with the bodies only minutes ago. Since all movement could only be done at night, it had already been almost twenty-four hours since Arty’s death. And now, it was finally time to break the news of the tragedy to Subhadra. Karan knew that he owed his mother the cruel courtesy of mourning the loss of her most beloved possession for one solitary moment of peace, before he proceeded to ‘fix’ Arty’s death. He had already planned to mak
e the death look like a deadly car accident.

  ‘Do you want to… see him?’ he asked. ‘Though I wish you wouldn’t.’

  His mother sat silently in front of him. The rush of heartsick emotion had come, and gone just as suddenly. The eyes were still dry and the face was still pale.

  Subhadra shook her head. There was no point in seeing him. Maybe later, just before they cremated him.

  There was another moment of silence. Then, as if he needed to corroborate the exit plan one last time, Karan elaborated upon the next steps to his mother. Kartik was going to ferry the bodies in the Innova to a quiet stretch of the Rapti river that flowed close to the Rathore farmhouse. The road from the town centre to the farmhouse travelled along this river and about a kilometre and half from the farmhouse, at a spot popularly known as Chaubeji ki koni (The Elbow of Mr Chaube), the river and its companion road made a sharp angle to the right. It was at this spot that Kartik was going to swerve the Innova off the tarmac and make it look like the vehicle lost control and plunged into the river at high speed. The flow of the Rapti in Gorakhpur was pretty languid so it wasn’t going to take very long for the police to recover the Innova and its battered occupants—Arty, in the rear seat, and the assassin masquerading as a new driver that the Rathores had recently hired, his head bashed in in the high speed crash.

  All that Subhadra could do was nod her assent. She wanted to say—‘I will never forgive you’—to her eldest son, but she didn’t need to. She knew that Karan was wise enough to know that.

  Within a week of Arty’s cremation, the local police and media circus around Gorakhpur had already abated, as is often the case after the surprising but non-scandalous death of a low-profile relative of a well-known public figure. There was no reason not to believe that Arty’s death was anything but an unfortunate accident. Except for some loud yelling at the Gorakhpur Civic Administration to have better streetlights at Chaubeji ki koni, public anger calmed down quickly too, mainly as a mark of respect to the bereaved Rathores. The familiar twitter of condolences was mainly aimed at the mother. ‘First her husband and now her son—both snatched so cruelly in car accidents!’ and ‘Such is fate. It doesn’t see whether you are rich or poor!’ were tossed around amid the tut-tut sounds of pity.

  The cloak of falsehood covering Arty’s tragic end was in place. For now.

  Karan had not one but two important reasons to make frequent trips to Mumbai now, but neither could be shared with anyone. One of those reasons was the new push from Romesh Lakhani.

  ‘Again? Is there a problem with your brother’s legal paperwork?’ asked Satyendra Saran when Karan announced that he needed to travel to Mumbai. Arty had been dead for four weeks and this was to be Karan’s third trip to the city. Normally, Saran, as a friend, would have been accommodating to his protégé’s needs, but his government was at the last-stretch of tabling the Right-dot-Comm legislation in the Lok Sabha, and Karan’s frequent absences from Delhi were proving to be an inconvenience.

  ‘Arty had three films on the floors. If I don’t sort this out now, I’m afraid everything will go to shit,’ Karan lied. Yes, there were three films in pre-production, but no hell was going to break loose even if Karan were to have simply shelved the projects over the phone.

  The real reason for the trip, of course, couldn’t even be whispered.

  Saran nodded, pretending that he understood. But he didn’t look happy. If Arty hadn’t been Karan’s blood relative and had his death not been as recent as it was, Saran would have liked to have said, ‘Are you really that concerned about losing some tens of crores of your dead brother’s money when it is about to rain billions in just a few months?’ But Saran kept his mouth shut. He was a man of immense self-control.

  ‘How is your mother coping?’ he asked instead.

  ‘She’s getting there. Slowly but surely.’

  ‘It must be unimaginable to lose one’s own child to something as meaningless as a road accident,’ Saran said, as he sighed in sympathy and started to attend to the open file on his desk.

  Karan responded to the man’s consolatory sentiment with the classic Indian gesture of helplessness—the shrugging of the shoulders, raising and dropping of the eyebrows, shaking the head slowly, and exhaling, all done in orchestrated unison. Saran didn’t even notice, for he had already got busy reading some filed documents intently. Karan observed his boss’ face as it furrowed in concentration. ‘Here sits the most powerful man in the country. And the fool has no idea of how his own Right Hand is fucking him!’ The thought almost made Karan smile.

  ‘So, back in Delhi in three days then?’ Saran enquired without looking up from the file as Karan prepared to exit the super-deluxe Prime Minister’s Office.

  ‘Yes, boss! I’ll be back from Mumbai as soon as I take care of a couple of things.’ Karan walked out of the door.

  A couple of things. That clandestine meeting with Lakhani was one of them.

  The other, more important one was with Jazmeen. Karan was dying to see his brother’s mistress again.

  Arty had died less than four hours ago in what could only be described as the worst-possible outcome of the best-laid plans, but once the jolt of that loss, especially at seeing Jazmeen’s pitiful tears, had ebbed, Karan had started to become acutely aware of another emotion. A thoroughly indecent one.

  Karan could feel Jazmeen’s warm skin beneath the thin fabric of the wet and flimsy kurta she was wearing. Her hair was wet; it looked like she had just come out of a shower. She smelled of small, white flowers. As her body convulsed mildly, almost rhythmically shaking with every sob that rose from her gut, he could feel the mounds of her breasts pressing at his diaphragm. He hurriedly dismissed the thought of him tearing open her oversized kurta and putting his mouth to what lay within.

  He realised that there was no morality in a man to be dreaming about fucking his dead brother’s woman.

  The first time Karan Rathore had been sexually aroused by Jazmeen was when he had seen her dance at his party in Gorakhpur seven months ago. The woman had been on fire that night, leaving everyone gasping for air. Her audience had included Amrit Singh Yadav who, of course, had parted with all forms of breathing later that night. The deadly outcome that Jazmeen had dealt to Karan’s political rival had made her provocative appeal in his eyes rise to alarming levels. Had Jazmeen not been Arty’s girl, and had she not been safely tucked away a thousand miles from Gorakhpur, who knows how Karan might have acted on his urges?

  In a way, the reason why Karan had so willingly acceded to Subhadra’s orders of ‘getting rid’ of Jazmeen from their lives had stemmed from his carnal longing. He was almost scared of the prospect of her being formally attached to the Rathores. How could he have allowed her status to be elevated to Arty’s wife? He needed to get rid of her before that became a reality.

  And yet, here he was in Mumbai, holding her in his arms. She was clinging to him in a pitiful grasp of hopelessness, trying hard to expend all her bottled grief through the salty rivulets cascading down from eyes that were tightly closed. Despite the coldness of death all around the Bandra penthouse, the only thing Karan was aware of was the feel of Jazmeen’s warm body.

  When she’d managed to rein the grief in, she’d peeled herself off her visitor. Karan seated her quietly in one of the dining chairs and sat beside her. Jazmeen’s hands were in his. It could have been described as a very solemn moment had he not been mindful of the open plackets of her kurta, with the buttoned side falling carelessly astray under its own weight. Her coffee-coloured areolas seemed insistent on marking their presence through the damp, almost transparent cloth. Desire rose in him in spite of or perhaps as the result of the hollowness of his brother’s death.

  He explained how he planned to dispose of the bodies of Karan and the assassin. Jazmeen had heard him with all the attention that a battered soul can muster.

  ‘I am here now. I will fix everything,’ he had said finally.

  Jazmeen had wiped her eyes with the sleeves of
the kurta.

  ‘I will take care of you,’ Karan had added, but Jazmeen wasn’t listening.

  The first meeting between Karan Rathore and Romesh Lakhani had happened the day after Arty’s cremation. Kailash Kheterpal’s initial proposal of a meeting at Xanadu over dinner had been dropped on account of Karan’s family tragedy. Instead, once Karan had landed in Mumbai and spent the morning with Jazmeen to see if she was doing OK, he had arrived at The Oberoi Hotel. The meeting between him and Lakhani, with Kheterpal keeping company, had taken place in a suite overlooking Marine Drive. The conversations had been less political and more personal. It was simply an opportunity for both sides to tip their toes in the pool of swirling ambitions. Both wanted to know that if they were to dive into that pool, the other guy would not only follow suit, but would also have their back in case there was trouble. Establishing trust was paramount before any negotiations could begin.

  It was because the first meeting had been such a great success that the busy allies were meeting again barely six weeks later. The venue was the same hotel as last time, but this time around, there was no Kheterpal. This meeting was one-on-one. On equal terms.

  Karan knew that it was time to get serious. But first, he had one important question he needed to ask Lakhani.

  ‘Why did you choose me?’ Karan began, as he twirled the single ice cube in his glass of outrageously fine Macallan.

  Lakhani had just poured himself a glass of the same. He settled himself into the elegant Armani velvet armchair by the window. Despite Karan’s pointed question, Lakhani’s gaze was steadfast outside, at the vast Arabian Sea. He said nothing as he took a slow swig from his glass.

  ‘You could have picked anyone,’ Karan repeated. ‘Heck, you could have put your money on Saran himself. Saran would have happily danced to your tune. So, what I want to know is—why me?’