by Juggi Bhasin
‘Hello?’ he said in his best rude voice to the help. ‘Have you never seen the TV? Don’t they keep talking about how these big notes are worth nothing! Who do you think I am? An ATM machine? Get me change or be prepared to serve your masters burnt chapattis!’
The help looked really offended and marched back into the apartment to complain to Mrs Vaswani. Fredo held his breath. He heard a door open inside. Mrs Vaswani came out, exceeding Fredo’s expectations. The help was nowhere to be seen. She wore a crumpled cotton saree, and the distance between her blouse and navel seemed to be never-ending. Her hair was dishevelled and she had the high-noon angry look on her face, the kind that comes over housewives who are disturbed from watching their favourite soap operas.
She lashed out at Fredo for being rude and, in true Delhi fashion, asked for the name of the manager of the outlet so she could sue it, bring it down, maybe even call the cops, or exercise all three options. Immediately, Fredo switched to his apologetic, humble persona and, after profusely apologizing, came up with a solution.
‘Madam, I don’t have change, but there might be a card machine somewhere in my hot case. Do you have a card?’
Mrs Vaswani felt superior in the verbal transaction. Looking more composed, she told him, ‘I will get one.’
She turned, and in an instant, Fredo took out his handset and clicked pictures of her swaying hips as she walked back inside. She came back and gave him a card, which he promptly inserted into the machine. His face fell as he punched the buttons on the machine.
‘Sorry, Madam, the machine is not charged. Can I come in and charge it for five minutes?’
Mrs Vaswani debated if it was worth the trouble, but then she gave in, thinking of the hot cheese melting in her mouth. Fredo came in and plugged the machine into a switchboard. Just then, the house phone rang and Mrs Vaswani walked to the living room to take the call. It was her husband at the other end. She propped herself up on a table, with her back slightly turned towards Fredo. He could see her navel and the slope of her left breast from the side. She had propped herself on the table in such a way that her saree came up a little at the feet.
Fredo licked his lips. The angles were perfect. It was too good to be true. He worked frantically on the photo button of his handset. He captured more than fifty stills of Mrs Vaswani with some of her skin exposed.
Later, as he came down the staircase, he realized with a sense of joy that the day had begun well. It would probably end the same way in the evening when he made the transaction. It was a good life, he thought, as he rode back to the outlet.
Late that evening, Fredo sat with the owner of Harami.com in his top floor office at Nehru Place. The front portion of the shop offered photocopying services, but the back end was where the owner, Prasad, ran his semi-porn site. Harami.com specialized in showcasing body part stills and videos of real women from everyday life. Almost all footage on the site was illegal, taken without permission by foot soldiers like Fredo. The authorities kept closing the site, but Prasad had contacts in the Baltic region and Russia, which helped the seedy entrepreneur re-route his site all over the globe. In a very short time, Prasad had built a huge database of avid voyeurs who paid top rupee to satisfy their addiction.
Prasad and Fredo sat across the table as the former sipped his whisky. He eyed Fredo sceptically, who was gushing about his latest ‘kill’. Prasad stopped him mid-sentence, took the proffered pen drive and plugged it into his desktop computer. He viewed the footage and thought for a moment. Then he opened his drawer and counted a couple of hundred-rupee notes. He tossed them in front of Fredo.
‘That’s all?’ responded Fredo in shocked surprise. ‘It’s worth ten times more. Look at the shots and the detailing. It’s the work of an artist . . .’
‘Yeah, I have heard that before,’ growled Prasad. ‘That artist bit. M.F. Husain Sahib, what you have given me is basically junk. These are nothing but shots of a middle-aged woman going fat. I know you have a mother complex, but that’s all I will pay to a slimeball who is still stuck to his mother’s teats in his mind. Take the money and scram. I have had a long, tough day. The whisky is not helping to settle the fatigue.’
Fredo was close to tears, but he was not prepared to give up so easily. He pleaded his case again.
‘Listen, Boss, you are tired and angry. Take another look at these pictures. They are erotic . . . they are . . .’
‘I said bhaag, run! Don’t you understand what I am saying?’
‘But how can you, Boss? Do you have any idea about the kind of planning and effort I have to put in to fetch these results? Not to forget the risk involved? I want a fair compensation.’
‘Scram, kid. You are beginning to piss me off.’
‘No, I ain’t leaving unless you . . .’
Prasad pushed back his chair and swiftly came up behind Fredo. He was a thick, hirsute man with powerful arms, which he now used to choke Fredo. Fredo’s eyes opened unnaturally as Prasad applied pressure. He struggled to free himself, but Prasad was relentless. He whispered fiercely into Fredo’s ear, ‘You smooth-faced pansy, you don’t impress me. There are thousands of perverts like you in the city who work for me. You call yourself an artist? You are nothing but a pimply faced pervert who should be thankful for the scraps I throw at you. The city is filled with either those lurking in the dark enjoying your filth on their screens or the rest who keep clicking pictures of women without their knowledge. None of you are, or ever will be, artists. You are F-grade purveyors of porn, and I can’t stand people who pretend to think otherwise.’
The oxygen supply to Fredo’s brain had almost been cut off before Prasad finally released him. Fredo gagged as the air rushed back into his system. His head was pounding, and his body felt as if it had morphed into jelly. Shakily, he got up, and Prasad once again held him by the throat and pushed the crumpled notes through his belt into his underwear.
‘That’s what you are, pansy, a low-level pimp,’ spat Prasad. ‘And don’t you ever forget that when you deal with me. Next time you show me your face, I want photos of young girls with perky tits and not your fucked-up mamas with sagging upper racks. I know you have a stash of photos of some young office girl. I want to see those. Now fuck out of my office, and if you ever think of reporting me to the police, then I will take the greatest pleasure in putting up your intestines on a string as a photographer puts up his negatives.’
Fredo rushed out, gagging, tears streaming down his eyes, his legs unable to take his weight. The day had not ended the way he had hoped it would.
*
In another corner of the city, Rahul stood in front of a full-length mirror and looked at his changed appearance three weeks since Simone’s disappearance. He hardly recognized himself. A thick beard with flecks of grey covered his face. His hair was cut very short. His eyes were sunken with the strain of a man looking for something. Rahul picked up his satchel and left the apartment to conclude a negotiation he had begun a couple of days ago.
CHAPTER 14
Janki moaned in pleasure as calloused hands played with her bra clasp and opened it. It had been such a long time. She turned and tried to study the features of the man through the screen of her tousled hair. The wave of pleasure inside her opened the gates of imagination, and in that moment she visualized that the man making her happy was her young neighbour. Not her wheeler-dealer husband. But it was indeed the husband who had descended on her, more out of duty than lust after she had shamed him repeatedly, telling him she would have to hire someone to satisfy her because of his sexual negligence. She felt him growing hard in his pyjamas and hope soared in her. She greedily felt his tool and pushed his face against her breast. She felt him struggle and then hope slowly turned to despair. The wave, which had reached the shore slowly but surely, began to recede. She desperately pulled at his tool to revive it, but she knew it was a battle lost. Janki knew she would be left to satisfy herself by watching www.desiman.com.
The prospect of a life barren of passion star
ed at her as her husband fumbled atop her to tie his pyjama strings.
‘Bastard!’ she screamed as she threw him off her. She pulled at his hair and slapped him repeatedly. Then she ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. She put two fingers into her vagina and tried to resurrect the image of the young neighbour standing on his balcony in his vest, smoking his early morning cigarette. It was of no use. The neighbour and her passion had left with no forwarding address. She cleaned her fingers in the sink and washed her face, coming out to face the remains of her ruined day with her husband.
‘Call yourself a man, huh?’ she spoke staccato, her verbal bursts revealing her state of mind. ‘You can’t get it up. I can’t get it out. So what do we do? Stalemate? Sit on the bed and clap our hands? Go to the priest in the temple and pray for a miracle? Or go to the moustached man at Daryaganj offering sex pills? Maybe a dose of iron pills will do the trick?’
He did not reply, hoping the storm would blow over on its own. But she was only just beginning. She went up to the mirror in the room and buttoned up her blouse. She took a cream off the shelf and rubbed it on her face. Her frustration continued to drip.
‘Look at me. I was beautiful once. All the colony boys were after me. And now?’
She pulled her cheeks and looked closely.
‘The flesh is beginning to sag. I colour my hair with mehndi. My lower half is always on fire with unrequited desire. I work the evening shift as a chemistry teacher at a government school. The boys there poke fun at me when my back is turned towards them. They sense my frustration. They make nude drawings of me with my mouth wide open, desperately eyeing a huge, dripping cock.’
She combed her hair and turned to face him.
‘Mr Eshwar Dubey, you have done this to me! I curse the day you entered my life. You, with your swagger, false promises and big dreams.’
She mocked him as she tied her hair.
‘Honey, I have opened a chit fund! I have roped in a few hundred members. It’s growing by leaps and bounds. We will soon be multi-millionaires. Sweetheart, I have become part of a pyramid scheme. I am building a chain and once that is complete, I will make money from that for the rest of my life. We will be rich, and the company will send us for an international cruise as a reward. Honey, forget all this. I am operating a Zuber taxi, but I won’t do that for the rest of my life. I have a scheme in mind. I will create a parallel taxi network using the Zuber network. We will be rich, honey . . .’
Her eyes watered, and her tone hardened once again.
‘For fifteen years, I have been hearing your false promises. We will be rich is as much a pipe dream as the myth of your big cock satisfying me.’
She flung the comb at the mirror and Dubey could not hold himself any longer. He got up and took off his pyjama, reaching for his trousers and shirt. He spoke without looking at her.
‘Wretched woman, do you know how it is out there? Do you have any idea what it’s like to drive a taxi for more than twelve hours a day? Step out of your school and see life on the streets of Delhi. The violence and abuse, the fucking, choking pollution . . . it’s the damned pollution that has affected my performance in bed . . . all the doctors say that . . . ’
She laughed hysterically, and he quickly put on a sweater to make his getaway. He rambled on.
‘I work hard, and yet I have not given up my plans to become rich. So what if my plans have not worked out so far? When my next big idea fetches me millions, you will be jumping all over me, praising my performance in bed . . .’
She continued to laugh, and he grabbed the taxi keys from the table in a bid to escape her potshots. He was almost at the door when she called after him.
‘You continue to do that, dear husband, keep dreaming big. I won’t tax you on that. But don’t come back to the house if you come back empty-handed.’
‘What do you want?’
She replied with a straight face.
‘A dildo, dear husband. I want a really big, black-coloured one. You can have your dreams, let me have my electric dildo.’
Dubey went down and sat in his taxi, reviewing his life. He was stuck with her and she with him. She was not really a bad sort at the end of the day. It was her constant need for sexual fulfilment that drove him up the wall. He tilted the rear-view mirror and looked at himself. Crow’s feet had sprung up around both his eyes. His eyes were watchful like those of a rare bird that patiently waits a long time for a worm to appear. He was balding and greying in the middle, but that was hardly an area of concern. His face still retained the determination of a man looking for that unexpected break in life. He felt it in his bones that the time was close at hand.
His cellphone, which was attached to the windscreen, pinged. He saw a request come in. A passenger wanted to be picked up from Sheikh Sarai and dropped to far-off Mayur Vihar. It was not a short distance, and he thought of the prospect of scamming the ride to make a quick buck. He accepted the request and drove towards Sheikh Sarai. He held the steering wheel with one hand, and with the other he took out his second phone and called Zuber’s call centre operations. He spoke to his contact, Pushkar.
‘Are you logged into my route? If you are, then just double the distance. Make the destination some far-off place beyond Mayur Vihar in east Delhi.’
There was a moment’s silence as Pushkar pushed in some keys and manipulated the destination. That done, he spoke to Dubey.
‘Done. You owe me commission on the last five trips. Include this and the tally goes up to six. You want me to give you the total?’
Dubey responded. ‘I know the amount. Times are hard. I need cash to buy my wife a dild . . . yeah, a necessary household appliance. I will square it off with you beginning next week. Promise.’
He kept the cellphone down, feeling better, and stopped at the pickup point. His master plan, a much larger version of his scamming, was beginning to form in his mind. But there was a key element missing. Something inside told him that it would present itself before him sooner or later.
Unknown to Dubey, the vigilance department at Zuber had the likes of Pushkar in their sights. They had recorded the conversation of how the two employees scammed the company. It was time for payback.
Late that night, Dubey parked his taxi not far from his hole in the wall residence in Pushp Vihar. He stepped out and buttoned his collar as the cold bit into him. He kicked an empty soda bottle lying in his path and looked up at his apartment window that faced the street. The curtains were drawn, but he could make out a faint bluish light in the room. He knew Janki must be pleasuring herself in front of her favourite porn site. It suddenly struck him that getting a dildo for her was not such a bad idea after all. She would stop bothering him, and he would be able to focus on his master scam plan.
That’s when a sharp blow at the back of his head sent him reeling towards the open gutter. A shadow came up to him and punched him viciously in the stomach. The shock and pain of the sudden attack numbed him momentarily. But more punishment was in store for him. He covered his face with both hands. The attacker pulled him up by the collar and forced him to look into his coal-black eyes.
‘Don’t make a sound,’ hissed the man. ‘You are being punished for the scam you put in place with Pushkar.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ Dubey managed to ask his attacker.
‘I am the collector. I settle the score. Zuber does not believe in filing police complaints and registering cases. We settle these matters in our own way. You scammed us, and now you will pay.’
The blows rained on him again and continued till small streams of blood broke out all over his face. His left ear rang with a strange, high-pitched noise, and a network of broken blood vessels had appeared in his eye. The man finally let go of Dubey and placed his boot on his face.
‘Okay, so here’s the deal, you fuck. You have paid only part of what is due to us. You have scammed us of nearly a lakh of rupees over a period of time. You will pay us that amount along with 26 per cent interest first t
hing Monday morning. You have the weekend to get the cash. If you try to run away or ignore this warning, I will simply put a bullet in your skull. Enjoy the weekend, wise guy!’
As the man walked away, Dubey managed to stand and croak, ‘What have you done with Pushkar? He was a friend, you know.’
The man turned, and his coal-black eyes glittered in the night as he smiled and spoke slowly, making each word count, ‘Pushkar’s body is floating in the Okhla barrage. Maybe you will get to read about him in the papers tomorrow morning.’
The man walked away, and Dubey collapsed as he continued to stare at the bluish light coming from his living room window. His body was on fire, but strangely, his master scam idea formed in his mind more clearly and urgently than ever before. He passed out, still looking at the light.
*
At a roadside dhaba on NH-8, Ajaib Singh blew the steam off his cup of tea and sipped the brew. He smacked his lips and, by force of habit, twirled his moustache. He saw that the bearded man wearing dark glasses had not touched his tea.
‘Tea is not high-class, huh?’ he asked Rahul, sitting opposite him and observing him intently. ‘Not to worry. You won’t get hepatitis. The water’s boiled.’
Rahul had more important things on his mind than worrying about hepatitis. He could not mask the impatience in his voice.
‘So, we have a deal?’ he asked the cop.
‘Sure. Show me the money, and you get the key.’
Rahul took out a bundle wrapped in black polythene from his coat pocket and pushed it towards the cop.
‘One lakh rupees as agreed. The key, please?’
In typical cop fashion, Ajaib Singh made Rahul wait an eternity. He pocketed the money, finished his tea, twirled his moustache again and then placed a key and a photostat copy of a document before Rahul.
‘This is the panchnama copy. It catalogues all the items seized from your Shamona Devi’s residence and office. It includes her laptop.’
‘What about her cellphone?’ asked Rahul with urgency. ‘It seems to have disappeared with her.’
