by Polly McGee
‘You must be blessed,’ she said.
Gaurav nodded. ‘I did try to resist, find a simple dwelling, but, you know, my father can be very persuasive …’
Sita was looking at Gaurav expectantly, waiting for him to finish the sentence that had slipped into a silent resentful reverie.
‘You were saying, Gaurav?’
‘Besides appeasing the old man, it made sense to be in the heartland of my ratepayers.’
Gaurav swirled the tea in the pot, and poured it into two translucent porcelain cups. His hands-on attention was gallant – and confusing. Sita accepted the perfect cup of tea he handed her, and a carefully selected nutty ladoo.
‘Diwali, it gives you licence to eat sweets,’ Sita said, as she barely resisted another one.
Gaurav gave her a charming smile. ‘My favourite holiday for the same reason.’ He moved closer in the large armchair adjacent to Sita. His knee kept a barely respectable distance. ‘Thank you for coming out to meet me at home for the interview, Sita – I wanted us to not be interrupted by the noise of the frontline.’
Gaurav topped up her cup from the pot.
Sita swallowed the remnants of a peda, briefly thought about some burfi as breakfast had been sludgy office coffee, and lunch wasn’t scheduled. She resisted and turned her focus on Gaurav.
‘Please – it’s a pleasure; I wanted to get a sense of the “real” Gaurav Kamboj, not the NDMC powerbroker in his office.’ Sita gave him her best high-octane smile – she could compete for charm with the best of them.
She pulled out her phone and turned on the recorder app. Gaurav sat back and crossed his legs, every inch of his pose signalling the seasoned politician. And quite handsome, a feature that Sita had not noticed previously when he was theatrically outlining his plans to mass murder animals.
She put on her best Sambhavna Seth talk-show face. ‘Let’s start with what every Delhiite is burning to know: who is Gaurav Kamboj, or GRK as the press calls you?’
Gaurav took a moment to respond. Then he leaned forward slightly. ‘Who is Gaurav? He is a humble Indian who loves his country and is honoured to serve some of its people in a time of crisis.’
‘A humble Indian, na?’ Sita’s eyes flickered around the luxurious room and across the antique table laden with glistening mithai. ‘And the GRK moniker – that doesn’t sound too humble; you’ve got quite the media profile.’
Gaurav laughed and gestured with his hand, as if wiping her words from the air. ‘Sita, my dear, you’ve got me all wrong. You’re in the media; you should know more than anyone how the press likes to create a persona.’
Sita wasn’t sure she had him all wrong, but he was doing a good job at maintaining his nice-guy, anti-bureaucrat act. ‘Your family has been prominent in council politics for years, yet you have been absent from the political scene until lately. Fill us in on what kept you out of the Kamboj dynasty spotlight for so long.’
***
Gaurav gave a heavily edited account of his life: some time in the UK undertaking business studies (acting college where he just scraped through). A period back in Mumbai working in a vaguely described but very important stakeholder management role (his failed film career), then the call from his father begging him to return home and join him in the family business: politics (Gaurav called and begged his father for a job at the council so he could support the wife he had hastily married when they thought she was pregnant. It was a false positive). Gaurav had desperately wanted to live in a cool, contemporary apartment in Gurgaon as part of his council gig. He hadn’t counted on being forced to move into number 33. He had heard the stories about the house at Hastinapuri Marg: that it was haunted, that people had died there. Important people. Important political people, to be more precise. His wife didn’t believe in all that superstitious nonsense. She wanted to live there so that damn dog of hers would have a garden to play in. Between her and his dad, he didn’t stand a chance. And there he was, abandoned by that bitch in this creepy house, all alone. At least the dog would be dead by now. And so would all of the other dirty kutta of the sprawling metropolis in a few days. Gaurav raged internally with bitterness and hate, maintaining his devoted husband, responsible son, India’s champion façade as he spoonfed Sita sound bites.
‘Of course politics is in my blood, and as a red-blooded Kamboj, you know I have ambition to go as high and as hard as I can.’ That statement was punctuated with a pause and a look at Sita that suggested this wasn’t only a political ambition.
‘But please keep that off the record – I stand alone in terms of my career. I don’t want to be seen as the bullish son pushing the father aside.’
Gaurav appeared sincere and committed to supporting his father as his blood-tie successor. Sita questioned him for a while about his interests outside of work. The responses were classic sound bites: his love of cricket and hockey, his love of film and music, his devotion to family, the community and God in no specific order.
***
The real Gaurav’s profile was turning out very vanilla flavoured. Thus far Sita had not heard anything that correlated to the unhinged ego machine she had seen when she’d first attended the briefing.
Sita stood up and walked to the window under the guise of finding the best light to photograph him in, angling to look at the photos and get some intel on his personal life. She picked up the photo of the woman holding the dog. ‘You haven’t mentioned love, Gaurav. You know, our female readers will want to know who is the special woman sharing your life.’
Sita waited to see if he would take the hook, and give up something she could dig around in. He stood up and walked over to Sita, reaching for the photo in her hand, brushing her fingers as he took it and then assumed what Sita could only describe as his best putting-a-brave-face-on-it expression. ‘There is no one sharing my life, Sita. I’m lucky to have experienced deep love, and I hope I will again.’
He put down the photo and stood by the window. Sita picked it up again. ‘This is not your sister?’
‘No, she was my wife. I recently lost her unexpectedly.’ Gaurav paused dramatically, rubbing his eye. ‘She is behind all the beauty here. I haven’t even been able to move her things.’
Sita was about to ask for the obviously tragic details when there was a commotion at the front door and the voice of the maid escalated in a heated exchange with visitors who were clearly unwelcome. Sita and Gaurav turned to the door, and two men resplendent in the new uniform of the NDMC surged in, carrying what looked like a dog and a monkey in a net. The animals were struggling and distressed, the council workers proud but harried. Not your usual guests in the formal sitting room.
Gaurav spoke to them firmly about bursting into the house with dangerous animals. Sita moved closer to take some photographs. This is more like it, she thought.
‘I’m so sorry about this, Sita-ji – exactly the situation I was trying to avoid, but, what can I tell you, I am on call 24/7 to get this job done.’ Gaurav was obviously in his element, like he was building to the denouement of a scene and she had accidentally stumbled on stage.
Sita tried to work out in the chaos what was going on. The nets struggled and wiggled. The dog appeared to be tangled up with a baby monkey. The other monkey was shrieking and trying to chew through its restraints. His fur was pressed through the net in diamond-shaped lumps, making him appear quilted, like an angry toy.
Gaurav suggested they go into the garden with the animals. Sita could take her photos and show the readers how committed the New Delhi Municipal Council was to citizen safety through humane animal eradication – and the good results they were having under his leadership. Sita agreed readily – this intervention held all the promise of exactly the kind of drama she had hoped for. Photos would tell the readers the thousand words that Gaurav was yet to speak.
Sita sensed discontent with the council workers. They seemed to be visibly annoyed, holding their bags of prey awkwardly while being yelled at by the maid and the boss. They practised some insu
bordination and shouted back at Gaurav – he had clearly told them on the phone to come to the front door and bring the animals inside the house. Gaurav dismissed them and the animals into the garden. The men begrudgingly trooped outside.
Sita directed Gaurav into a pose for the magazine. She dropped the words ‘cover shot, heroic and hunter’. He gingerly took the nets containing the by now very agitated animals from the men, then waved them away out of shot. The workers had been shooed away by Gaurav, and they stood outside in the street, peering through the open gate, smoking and scowling at their leader. Gaurav held the captive animals high in the classic hunting-photo pose Sita had nominated as the one that would make the magazine cover. She lined up the shot on her phone, accidentally swiping the touchscreen to video mode.
‘Damn, sorry, Gaurav. Just a second.’
***
Rocky felt the net he was being suffocated in swing wildly in the weak arms of his captor. Rocky took the one chance he saw at freedom. He let out a barely audible warning sound to Yanki, and as the net swung near the human’s side, he gave him as good a bite as his teeth could achieve through the gaps in the net.
The teeth hit their mark. The nets dropped to the ground. Rocky wriggled out with Yanki clinging to his collar. He saw the escape route through the gate and began to bolt, pushing his legs to move faster. This was a challenge after the hours in cramped incarceration.
As Rocky passed through the frame of the open gate an unmistakable scent hit him. It was faint, but it was his mark. He stopped and turned his head, confused, and looked back, his nose auditing the air for smells. Yanki pulled his collar furiously as she felt him slow down, like a jockey willing her steed to the line. He took one last deep, familiar sniff, and for the second time he left his home behind and took off down the road.
***
Paksheet had also slid out of the open mouth of the remaining net. His ironic escape at the hands of a dog was momentarily ignored. He was so livid about his capture that his first instinct was to tear a chunk out of the human’s other side. His strategic assessment of the situation was that escape was more time critical. Retaliation could come later. He scrambled up the closest tree he could find.
‘Get your guns, men!’ Gaurav shrieked. ‘Do something!’
The workers looked confused, trying to figure out how the now spent net guns would help the situation. Gaurav had forgotten in the shock of the dog attack that the guns were only props. The monkey swung across onto the roof of the house, through the line of sight of Sita’s camera, before disappearing into a frangipani tree in a shower of fragrant white flowers.
***
Sita had kept filming as Gaurav clutched his side like he had been attacked with a shiv. She caught the pause of the dog as he reached the gate, on the verge of disappearing. As he cocked his head, she noticed he only had one ear. There was something vaguely familiar about this. She stored it in her mind for later review along with the footage.
She put her phone away and went to Gaurav’s aid. She found him leaning against the bathroom sink, shirtless.
‘Sita, can you help me, I can’t do it alone.’
Sita wasn’t sure if he was being this hopeless to get her attention or whether he was truly pathetic. He dabbed at the bloody bite ineffectually.
‘Here, let me,’ she said with a tone of ever-so-slight contempt, grabbing the towel from him.
He had a pained but stoic look on his face, one of the things she was sure he had perfected at acting school. She couldn’t help noticing to her disgust that his abs were impressive. Gaurav would have been devastated to know they actually just made her think longingly of her old flame, Kuldeep. Gaurav’s wound wasn’t too bad. No stitches were needed, even though the puncture marks from the teeth seemed deep. She sluiced the bite with a final wash of strong antiseptic. Gaurav made a very unmasculine squeal at the sting.
‘Don’t be a baby.’
‘Is it bad, Sita? Do you think I should go to emergency? Do I need a rabies shot?’
‘You’ll live.’ Sita threw the bloody towel in the basket, keen to get out of the confined space. ‘There, all done; you can patch the rest yourself.’
She extricated herself from the bathroom, leaving Gaurav to dress the wound. The air was cooler and sweeter outside. Sita had felt very uncomfortable undertaking such an intimate activity with a relative stranger, especially in a work context.
The house was quiet. The hapless council workers had been dispatched with shouted directives to find the escapees. The enemies of the council were to be put to death on sight, Gaurav had screamed on camera. How tough could it be to find a one-eared dog being ridden by a miniature monkey in New Delhi, Sita thought.
In the lounge, Sita took some close-up shots of the framed photos to continue her investigation into the real Gaurav and helped herself to another almond ladoo. Flicking through the photos and videos on her phone, she watched the footage of the escape once again. India’s Funniest Home Videos were missing a star turn here. Tempting as it was to put it up on YouTube, she knew that holding onto it would have far greater cache with Gaurav than alienating him with its early release. Save that for later. The video ended with the furious face of the monkey flashing across the lens. Sita was certain that this was the same monkey from the last unexplained death she had attended, and the dog massacre in the park.
She flicked through her phone to the images she had taken at Hastinapuri House the night Pushpant met his unsavoury end. It was unmistakably the same animal.
Sita nibbled on the edges of some coconut burfi. Of all the monkeys in all the dramatic crime scenes, na, she mused.
The coincidence seemed, well, too coincidental. Monkeys and dogs at war with one another; then the council at war with the monkeys and dogs? Maybe Gaurav was right in thinking that the city was under attack from monkeys. Except there only seemed to be one monkey linked to all of the events. Was it possible that a single animal could go rogue and cause this much chaos?
Sita thought back to Kamla Nehru Ridge and her first meeting with Poona. They were searching for an injured dog with a torn ear when they came across the dog massacre. The puzzle just got more confusing.
Sita had to see Poona and tell her what she knew, find out about the dog and the Bollywood complexity that was being revealed. Gaurav and his puff profile were forgotten as she grabbed a Ghantewala box and packed in the sweets. She couldn’t drop in on Aunty this close to Diwali without something to gift her, no matter how newsworthy the situation. She squeezed the box in her bag and made for the door like she, too, had just escaped from a net.
***
Gaurav prepared to enter the lounge. As he had pulled on a clean, undamaged shirt and pants, he had worked out a new angle to repair the damage done to his simultaneously heroic and empathetic ‘real Gaurav’ profile. Everything had been going so well, he even thought he had made quite a favourable impression on the attractive journalist with the sweet tooth. Damn that dog and those monkeys, making him look like a fool and ruining his outfit. The only silver lining was getting an opportunity to take his shirt off in front of Sita, although this wasn’t exactly the situation he had hoped for.
His side stung under its bandage, and he was hoping that Sita’s tentative cleaning had been enough to ensure it wouldn’t become infected. He pushed these thoughts away. He wasn’t going to be a baby. He took a deep breath, raised his shoulders high and proud and entered the room.
‘Where were we, my dear …’
The room was empty. Her bag was gone. Worse luck, her phone was gone before he could check on the incriminating evidence she had gathered in the heat of the moment. He certainly didn’t want that material in the public domain at this delicate time in his pre-campaign campaign. His perfect set-up was ruined. And it appeared that the council workers had plundered the table of sweets when he wasn’t looking. Sisterfuckers.
Gaurav sat in the chair Sita had occupied earlier and slumped slightly as he reviewed the day so far. A dog had attacked h
im, he had a stress headache brewing and a serious image problem to attend to. Sometimes, acting seemed a less dramatic choice than building a career as a bureaucrat. He crammed a burfi in his mouth. Without an audience to witness the moment, he put his head in his hands and let out an infantile sob.
Chapter Twenty-one
MasterChef
Lola checked the meals. There was something surreal about being in charge in the kitchen where she had once been an unwanted accessory. But here she was, taking the place of her dead almost-mother-in-law. An array of loaded cutglass dishes were laid out on the tray with today’s lunch: saffron-flecked rice, fried spiced potato, tandoori chicken, channa dhal, an assortment of condiments including her own homemade yoghurt, and her proudest moment so far: six perfectly puffed puris.
Lola was an excellent cook. She had been trained well by the taciturn turbaned chefs of Jaipur Nights. Lola’s mercurial heart was at odds with her resilience in the kitchen. No amount of tedious prep or Hindi innuendo could diminish the pure joy that every part of creating food gave her.
The chefs’ resentment at her intrusion into their men’s world had softened to respect when they’d tasted the subtlety and nuance of her spicing. It was traditional. But it was innovative. More importantly, it was better than theirs. The greatest irony of Lola’s destination at Hastinapuri Estate, propelled out of her bubble of love and Indian immersion, was that here, she had truly become the Indian chef she aspired to be in Australia.
Baj pulled on the black service jacket and looked over the tray with approval. ‘Lola-ji, you are MasterChef.’
Lola beamed and nodded at the repast. ‘Ready to go, Baj-ji.’
‘Yes, Chef.’
***
Poona appeared at the kitchen door, as she had done so many times before as service approached. She felt the aftershock of remembrance at seeing the smiling Lola presiding over the lunchtime feast.
Poona offered the food to the silent gods of the kitchen shrine, feeling the pain and stress of the days since Malina’s death. Lola waited a moment, and then quietly asserted her commitment to Hastinapuri’s number-one ranking in the online tourism portals.
