‘I have understood the meaning of complete hatred. Does that help?’
Prisha felt weird sitting and talking to a stranger who sounded like a wacko. She decided to leave. When she was about to stand up, she felt the woman’s hand on her shoulder.
‘There’s something on your forehead,’ she said, making Prisha sit down. Just as Prisha tried to feel what it was, the woman punched her on her temples. A phoenix-eye fist punch. The next moment Prisha had collapsed on the bench, unconscious.
As usual, neat! the woman whispered to herself.
Saveer woke up with a start in his hotel room in Udaipur. He didn’t remember it but the aftertaste told him it had been his worst nightmare ever. He checked his phone. It was 10.30 p.m. Only three hours had passed since he had called up Shetty. He didn’t know when exactly he had dozed off. Saveer checked the message he had sent to Prisha. It was still undelivered. He was about to call her up when his phone flashed Shetty’s name. He picked it up.
‘Mr Rathod, we are sorry. We couldn’t locate Prisha at her address. And her roommate, miss Gauri, says she had lost her phone earlier in a mall’s washroom in the evening. As of now she is untraceable but my men are on it. I’m sure . . .’
Saveer didn’t even hear the rest of the sentence. He had broken into a cold sweat knowing that his nightmare had perhaps turned real somewhere.
27
It was excruciating pain which woke up Prisha. She didn’t know where she was, what time it was, or what had happened after the woman had punched her. She was only aware of an acute pain in her knee joints and in her elbows. As she slowly opened her eyes, she realized she was lying sideways, with her hands and legs tied up and her mouth gagged.
‘I had to bundle you into a bag to get you here. The joints may hurt for a couple of days. Though I’ve given you an injection to dull the pain,’ the woman said. She was sitting across from her. Prisha tried to say something.
‘I can pull it out if you promise not to scream. Not that anybody will hear you anyway.’ There was a pan on an induction cooktop. The woman was boiling tea. She turned around and put a little sugar in the pan and with her back to Prisha, said, ‘Just that I don’t like noise. Especially screams. Helpless screams.’
Prisha nodded when the woman turned around. She pulled out the cloth from Prisha’s mouth. She couldn’t see the woman’s face clearly. She was wearing big shades and had thick, long hair. Was she the same woman Diggy was mad about?
‘Where . . . Where am I?’ Prisha asked. The woman helped her sit up. Once Prisha was comfortable, the woman went back to the pan.
‘All you need to know is that you are somewhere safe,’ she said. Prisha looked around. It looked like the interior of a house boat with a corrugated bamboo roof and bamboo walls.
There was water at one end, land on the other. They were harboured. And it was quiet. As if there was nobody around for miles.
‘I discovered this place a year ago,’ the woman said, following her eyes. She strained the tea into two paper cups. ‘Then I bought this from a fisherman.’ She approached Prisha and untied her hands. Prisha felt as if there was no life left in them. She twisted her wrists and stretched her arms a bit before taking one of the cups. The woman sat facing her with the other cup. Prisha could now see her face clearly. It was the same face that she had seen in the mall during the flash mob. The woman read her mind. She removed the shades. Suddenly, Prisha’s hands started shaking.
She was strikingly similar to Saveer. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
The woman smirked. ‘That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for three decades now. Who am I! The day I get the answer, I think I’ll have a shot at life.’
The woman was glaring at Prisha. She distinguished an indomitable fierceness on her face. As if nothing could touch her. It scared her.
* * *
Saveer had never experienced the kind of anxiety that he had since Shetty had called him up. His message to Prisha was yet to be delivered. He took the scheduled morning flight to Bengaluru and directly headed to the police station from the airport. Shetty was already there. So were Gauri and Karthik. Saveer wasted no time in telling him his actual reason for visiting Udaipur: the fact that he never knew he had a twin brother.
‘The case clears up. Well, almost,’ Shetty said. ‘I’m dead sure the woman is an alias. He is your twin brother.’
‘But my brother died twenty-five years ago,’ Saveer tried to sound as confident as possible.
‘Any death certificate? Any proof? Anything you remember?’ the officer asked. Saveer, however, was lost in thoughts. Shetty passed a glass of water towards him. He gulped down some of it. Gauri was sitting across from him. She had uncannily predicted the current situation angrily a day after Diggy’s death. Saveer turned away his face from her and racked his brains trying to remember any other detail of his brother but he couldn’t. His parents had told him that his uncle had taken Veer to his ashram when he was around five or six. Then he had run away from there and later, he was informed about his death.
‘Nothing,’ Saveer said. ‘I remember nothing concrete to prove to you or to myself that he is dead. And the people who could have are dead.’ Or not reachable, Saveer thought about his uncle.
‘Perhaps, killed,’ Shetty said. Saveer remained quiet.
‘We have begun a massive manhunt for your brother. Now that we know he is your twin, we also know what he looks like,’ Shetty said, leaning back on his chair.
‘But it was a woman on the phone,’ Saveer said.
‘Changing one’s voice is no big deal, really.’
After a pause, Saveer added, ‘I hope the search is an incognito one because . . .’
‘I know he told you he would keep Prisha alive till your birthday. That’s a lot of time for us to find him.’
‘Alive,’ Saveer’s voice sounded brittle as he said it.
‘Of course!’
Saveer looked at Shetty and then furtively at Gauri.
* * *
A day went by. Prisha didn’t know when she had fallen asleep. But when she woke up with her head feeling heavy, She understood that her food was spiked. The body pain had somewhat dulled. She looked around. It was night-time. Everything was bathed in moonlight. The woman was sitting outside at the edge of the boat, her legs dipped in the water. She was holding a fishing rod.
‘Fishing is what I like doing the most. It’s such a true reflection of life. To first trick someone using a bait, then catch them, take them out from where they ought to be and then put them where they’ll perish. That’s the underlying philosophy of this world.’ After a pause, she added, ‘Of course, I let my fishes back into the water. Unlike life. Unlike people.’
‘Were you the one who lured Diggy?’ Prisha asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you rape him?’
The woman looked up at the sky and said, ‘I didn’t rape him. He touched me inappropriately.’
‘Inappropriately?’
‘It wasn’t his mistake. He was in love with me. And he touched me. He wasn’t wrong. But I hate a man’s touch. It triggers the beast in me. The same happened that night as well. Before I could calm down, Diggy was no more. He was a nice boy. I’m sorry he had to die. In fact, I am sorry about the other few innocent people who had to die as well.’
Prisha gulped nervously. The last line had come out rather flatly. As if, for her, killing someone was like squashing a mosquito.
After an hour of silence, Prisha asked, ‘Was it you who had come to see me at the hospital? Your voice was different.’ She knew the answer and yet she wanted to confirm.
The woman smirked, ‘Yes, it was me. I had warned you. You can’t complain now.’
‘Why did you tell me Saveer was not worth it? That I should choose a better person in my next life?’ she asked. She saw her roll up a fish. After holding it in her hand for some time, staring at it struggling, the woman threw it back into the water.
‘I told you so because i
t’s the truth. He isn’t trustworthy.’ The woman threw the rod with the bait back in the water.
‘Why would you say that? He has never broken my trust.’
‘If he hasn’t, he will. He broke mine.’
‘How? I want to know.’ Prisha sounded desperate. There was no response.
‘Come on, tell me. Talk to me. You look so much like him. How come? You can’t just keep me in the dark,’ Prisha insisted. The woman looked at her diabolically. She didn’t say anything. Some time later, when the woman went inside the boat, Prisha asked, ‘May I know your name at least?’
‘You already know my name,’ she said. Prisha shook her head. ‘It’s Saveer Rathod.’ She readied her bed beside Prisha and lay down it. Prisha felt nauseated. More so because she knew the woman wasn’t kidding. Her only relief was that the drug was taking over her senses. She soon fell asleep.
* * *
Three more days passed. Shetty’s team was finally able to locate the house that Saveer’s brother had been staying in. They were flummoxed to know that the rent agreement was done in Saveer’s name. Neither Saveer nor Shetty could guess why he’d done that. It didn’t take the police long to find out where he worked. But there too he had carried on his alias of a woman so convincingly that both her office colleague and the guard were shocked after knowing the truth. When interrogated, the colleague wasn’t of much help but the guard told the police that he had mentioned once that he’d go fishing during holidays.
‘Fishing?’ It made Shetty think of all possibilities.
‘Mandya has fishing camps,’ Shetty’s subordinate said. Mandya, around 100 km from Bengaluru, was where the woman had taken Prisha and held her captive in a boat by a lonely riverside.
28
Nine days had passed since Prisha’s disappearance. The police were close, yet far. By now, it wasn’t just Saveer and Gauri who were extremely worried but Prisha’s parents as well. Her father’s blood pressure had shot up. It had not taken them long to understand that their daughter was in danger. When she did not call back a day after telling her mother that she had dropped her phone in the mall’s washroom commode, they got suspicious. One call to Gauri and they got to know everything. Prisha had not told them about Diggy’s death, and when her father met Saveer after rushing to Bengaluru, he realized that the entire professor-meeting episode was a fake show. Livid and worried, her father warned Saveer of consequences if anything was to happen to his daughter. Saveer said nothing, knowing that he was at fault. I shouldn’t have got involved with Prisha after she was discharged from the hospital, he thought, regretting. But it was too late to wonder about such things now. The foremost priority for him, for the police, for Gauri and for Prisha’s parents was to find her and bring her back alive. Saveer could live with the unsolved mystery surrounding his brother but wouldn’t be able to live if Prisha had to pay the price for his mistake.
Back in the boat, during those nine days, Prisha had grown a little used to the woman. She’d said her name was Saveer. But nothing other than that. There were no clarifications. She was still a captive, but somehow, Prisha wasn’t scared any more. The monotony of the captivity had made her come to terms with her fear. Her food was still spiked so she slept more than she was awake. And in a way she was happy to sleep away those days. The woman would disappear for some time during the mornings and would be back with food later. She would carry Prisha out and allow her privacy while she finished her ablutions, but her eyes would be blindfolded so she would never know where she was.
But as fear dissipated, impatience started growing inside Prisha. She was tired of the silence, of her restricted life and of the questions that were never answered. On the morning of the tenth day, Prisha lost her cool and started screaming at the woman, demanding to know her plan.
‘What is it that you want? It has been so many days. What are you waiting for? You want to kill me, right? Then kill me.’
‘I will. On his thirty-sixth birthday. Till then you and I will stay here.’
‘Why on his birthday? Why not now?’
‘Old habits die hard,’ the woman smiled.
‘All right, I shall resign to what destiny has in store for me. I won’t fight you. But I know that you have a lot to share which you perhaps have not shared with anyone before. Maybe, you never got a chance. I want to listen to you. I’m all ears to whatever it is that turned you into this . . . I asked you on the very first day itself and I’ll ask you again, and I’ll keep asking you this—who are you?’ Prisha could tell that the woman was getting irritated. But it was her best bet to squeeze out more information from her.
The woman was sitting on the edge of the boat, sunning. She stood up and jumped down on the shore. Prisha could tell she hadn’t gone very far because she could soon hear her sob.
‘You there?’ Prisha asked. She heard the sobs increase in intensity. Then suddenly the woman came back. And in a heavy, manly voice that sucked the air out of Prisha’s lungs, she said, ‘I’m his elder twin brother. Elder by a minute and thirty-seven seconds.’
‘But Saveer told me his brother, Veer Rathod, is dead, just like his other family members. He never told me he had a twin brother,’ Prisha said, realizing that her mouth had gone dry.
‘He is a liar. He betrayed me and scarred me for the rest of my life.’ She sat down opposite her.
Prisha could sense that she had hit the right nerve.
‘You are right. I have never told my side of the story to anybody. It has now become like acid churning inside me. And acid corrodes even the vessel that contains it.’
A few minutes later, Prisha said softly, ‘I’m listening.’
Eyes glistening with tears, the woman looked down at the floor, and drew her knees up against her chest and said, ‘I am the elder one. My parents named me Saveer and my brother Veer. He was born a minute and thirty-seven seconds after me. But that’s not the only difference between us. I was an early bloomer. I started speaking and walking before Veer; I started understanding things before him. Unfortunately, it worked against my favour. I was sharp. At the age of four, I understood why our uncle, Raghuveer Rathod, the so-called saint, visited us from his ashram. He didn’t come to visit my family. He came to visit us: Veer and I. We aroused him. We, at the age of four! Can you believe how twisted and pathetic humans are? How filthy their fetishes can be? He used to sexually abuse me. He would touch me inappropriately and play with my genitals when nobody was looking. Though I was too young to understand sexual abuse, I did realize that he was doing something very wrong with me. Something I abhorred but could do nothing about. I told my parents that I hated my uncle, but they scolded me and told me to behave myself. I bit him once only to be slapped by my father.
‘Then one day, I saw him doing the same with Veer. I thought it was my duty to protect my brother. I was always possessive about him; I cared for him. So from that day onwards, whenever Raghu uncle visited us, I would tell Veer to go hide himself. And when he called for him, I would go meet him as Veer. He couldn’t guess. We were identical twins. I absorbed the abuse so my brother could be normal, be happy. But the experience changed me. I grew wild and unruly, becoming increasingly unmanageable, throwing tantrums, disobeying my parents. I turned anarchic and chaotic. So much so that my parents scolded and thrashed me almost every other day. I guess it was a reaction to not being heard.
‘At the age of six, I again complained to my father about my uncle. He slapped me and my mother scolded me. They were getting concerned. I had grown increasingly aggressive and hyperactive over the past two years. They couldn’t understand why, especially when Veer was normal and displayed no such mutinous behaviour. They decided to take me to a doctor and told my uncle about it. Seizing the opportunity, Raghu uncle made his abominable proposal. He convinced my parents that instead of a doctor, he was better suited to reforming my wayward ways. He said unchecked, I could grow up to tarnish the Rathods’s reputation, bring a bad name to the family pedigree. Bad name, huh! He said I needed to
be ‘disciplined’, ‘reformed’, not with medicines, but rather by staying with him in his ashram. That in the absence of my parents to give in to my tantrums, the austere life of the ashram might mend my ways. He said I would be returned to them in a few years. And my parents agreed!
‘We are told that parents are living gods. But they are not. They are humans, who don’t think twice before falling into the devil’s trap. I was taken away; away from home, away from my parents, away from the one I loved the most: Veer. In his ashram, my uncle got a free hand to abuse me almost every other night. No one saw my tears, no one heard my cries. By that age, I knew that a man and a woman had sex to make babies. But I didn’t understand why my uncle, a man, was fucking me, a boy. Did that mean that I was a woman? Who was I?’ The woman paused. Prisha could almost picture the gut-wrenching scene of a small boy, pleading, crying helplessly as the devil himself trampled all over him.
‘But, I soon ‘reformed’ my uncle. When I was ten, I hatched a plan against him. I decided to kill him. And I almost did. I caught a snake from a nearby zoo and left it in his chamber. I did this at the age of ten! Can you believe it?’ she chuckled and continued, ‘I planned the attack after faking my own death by burning a hut in the ashram. It was razed to the ground. No one suspected anything. One clever kid I was!’ She laughed.
‘After making sure that the snake had bitten my uncle, I ran back home. I could’ve gone back earlier after faking my death at the ashram, but who knew, maybe my parents would have sent me back and my uncle would have monitored and restricted my movements. I was happy, hopeful. I knew my parents would be shocked to see me alive. I wanted to tell them everything. I was certain that they would accept me with open arms.
‘But what did I see upon returning? My brother was cutting his birthday cake. My parents were happy. They had forgotten me. Just like that! The brother for whom I had fucked up my own life, had erased me from his memory. How could people be so thankless? So selfish? So bloody greedy? It must not have been that long since I had left home, since I had been proclaimed dead. And my family was busy celebrating.
Forever Is True Page 14
