Delhi Noir (13 page)

“May I have a look at those statements?” Mukta said.

Bakshi shook his head. “Your lawyer can see them when we produce them as evidence before a judge.”

“So you’re dragging me to court?” Dodging a murderous mother-in-law was certainly easier than coping with a vindictive policeman, Mukta thought.

Bakshi nodded. “The Patiala House criminal courts. In the meantime, we’ll have to arrest you, Mukta Agarwal. Here’s the warrant.” The inspector brandished a smudgy printed form made impressive with several signatures and rubber stamps. So, the inspector had come well-prepared for a real showdown. This must be the handiwork of Savitri, she mused. The inspector now took out a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them before her eyes. Mukta visualized the shocked women of Sector 7, even her best friend Neela, watching her from their verandas and balconies as the inspector frog-marched her to his jeep, her head bowed in shame.

“I have to inform my husband,” she said, flicking away a teardrop from the corner of her eye.

“Of course. But before you do that, I can offer you an option to postpone your arrest.”

The inspector’s eyes were contemplating her thirty-eight-inch bust. Mukta got his drift. She was not surprised since she remembered that even on his first visit he had ogled her with his piggy eyes. He could in fact be blackmailing her with a few incriminating documents collected from dubious sources. But she knew she was powerless against him. Neither Ashok, her husband, nor Anand, her ex-lover, would come forward to get her off the hook. If only Rakesh, the bold, sinewy jawan, were by her side. He alone had the guts to call the inspector’s bluff.

“I am a married woman, inspector,” she said. “My husband—”

“You needn’t worry about him,” Bakshi cut in. “He is impotent, after all, and you have taken lovers from time to time to fulfill your needs. Haven’t you, Mukta Agarwal?”

Mukta winced. That snooping bastard had dug out all her secrets. She stared hard at Kamla Agarwal’s beaming likeness, which seemed to be jeering at her from the wall.

“I know about Rakesh, and Anand too,” Bakshi continued. “I can produce a couple more names from your past, your glorious Meerut years, if you’d like. Why not add one more name to your list of lovers, eh?”

“I am not a veshya, you loocha-lafanga shaitan!” Mukta hissed. “Go and mount your sister if you’re so horny.”

Bakshi smiled at Mukta’s outburst. This was the right moment to plunge the knife deeper and twist it a little for greater effect. “I like spirited women,” he said airily. “Look, I have twenty-one incriminating documents in this file. Each one of them is a hissing cobra that can raise its hood and strike you dead when you are on trial. Unless, of course, I kill them.

The question is, do you want me to destroy these hissing cobras?”

In spite of herself, Mukta began to nod.

“Good. You are a sensible woman, Mukta. Shall we start our first session right now? This divan looks pretty good for a roll.”

“When are you going to destroy those papers?” Mukta asked, realizing she was stepping into a dark tunnel without a torch.

“I will kill one cobra after each session.”

“Impossible!” The very idea of being ravaged by this gorilla for three weeks nauseated her. “I’d rather go to jail.”

Bakshi didn’t like negotiating terms with victims, be it over money or sex. But he also understood that what was most important in this delicate situation was a good beginning. More hissing cobras could eventually slither out of their holes and crevices, ensuring the continuance of his pet project until he discovered a new and more appetizing female suspect within his fiefdom. “Well, if you are so fastidious, dear, I will destroy three cobras after each session. Right?”

Mukta wanted to shout,
Wrong!
But she knew she couldn’t stop this randy bastard from molesting her.

It was when the inspector had gone to the bathroom after his third rape session that Mukta managed to take a peek at the nest of hissing cobras. The papers the inspector had been blackmailing her with and destroying so scrupulously at the end of each encounter, she discovered, were actually pages from a recent police report on cybercrime. Mukta covered her face with her palms to hide her pain and fury when Bak-shi returned, whistling “Crazy Kiya Re” from
Dhoom 2
, last summer’s chartbuster. He’d presumed that with her big bindi, voluminous sari, and other signs of backwardness, Mukta was a perfect specimen of “behenji,” a woman from one of the Hindi-speaking states where English wasn’t a compulsory subject. But Mukta had studied up to class eight, and in addition to showing her prowess in the school’s kaabadi team, she had also learned just enough English to read the newspaper headlines and understand what they were all about.

“Don’t worry, sweetie, we just have a dozen cobras to destroy,” Bakshi said, squeezing one of her ample breasts.

“I’m not worried,” Mukta said, removing her palms from her face. “I was just wondering how many women suspects you’re helping out these days.”

The inspector tweaked her nipple and winked. “Jealous, huh? Well, at the moment there’s just one, but she’s not as young and sweet as you.” He kissed her and then looked at his watch. “Got to rush back to the office for an important meeting with my subinspectors. See you next Monday.”

Mukta didn’t tell Ashok about the inspector’s biweekly visits because he’d just throw a tantrum without actually offering to protect her. If—and it was a big if—the inspector kept his word, her suffering would come to an end in another two weeks. She couldn’t, however, withhold her other secret from Ashok. Her vomiting had stopped but her small bump would soon be visible.

“Do you really love me, Ashok?” It was a Saturday night, they were in bed, and he hadn’t started snoring yet.

“Of course, Mukta. Haven’t I snapped my ties with my sister Savitri for you?”

“I am sorry for that,” she said, and pecked him on the cheek. After all, until Rakesh rescued her from her dud marriage, Ashok was definitely her best bet. He had never joined his mother or sister in humiliating her. And since Kamla was no longer around to complicate matters, Mukta could now afford to be brutally honest with her husband. If he insisted on a divorce, so be it. “I’m going to be a mother, Ashok.”

Her husband sat up bolt upright on the bed. “You aren’t joking?”

“Are you blind or what? Haven’t you seen me puking almost every morning?”

“Yes, but I never thought …” He broke off and looked searchingly at his wife’s face. But Mukta couldn’t meet his gaze.

She lowered her eyes and whispered: “You aren’t the father of my child.”

“Oh!” Ashok clutched his throat as if he wanted to strangle himself. His jaws hardened, his eyes became flinty. “Who’s this lucky guy, may I know?”

“Rakesh, the fauji from quarter no. 353. We met—”

“Bas!” He snatched a pillow from the bed and dashed out of the room to spend a troubled night on the divan.

But Mukta knew Ashok would eventually cool down. He wanted to be a parent as much as she did. He would soon realize that what happened between his unsatisfied wife and the hot-blooded jawan was inevitable, if not providential.

And she was right. Ashok returned to his wife in the wee hours and quietly lay beside her. She turned and drew him to her bosom as if he were a child.

“Kamla is haunting my dreams,” Mukta said when Bakshi visited her on Monday afternoon. “She looks so horrible, with blood dripping all over her face. And she stares at me as if I were responsible for her death. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep.” Mukta started crying. Sex with a crying woman could be disastrous, so Bakshi stroked her head and made some soothing noises. Ah, these chicken-hearted middle-class housewives. Whether they lived in R.K. Puram, Sarojini Nagar, or Lodhi Colony, they were all the same. Even before the police had filed a First Information Report, they rushed to the nearest thana to spill their story. How boring! A woman from Vas-ant Vihar or Greater Kailash would strangle her husband in the morning and dance the night away with her boyfriend at Athena or Climax, one of those thousand-rupee-a-drink nightclubs. And if the law finally came knocking at her door, she’d just throw wads of five-hundred-rupee notes at everyone concerned, even the lowly chowkidar. Bakshi wanted to work among these smart, filthy-rich people, who drove BMWs and Benzes, carried BlackBerrys, and attended glitzy parties at the Hyatt or Maurya Sheraton. But till that prize posting came his way, he’d have to make do with the whimpering Mukta Agarw-als of the babu colonies.

“I want to visit Malai Mandir and pray for Kamla’s unhappy soul,” Mukta declared, sniffing.

Bakshi grimaced. This woman was really going too far. She needed a little roughening up to clamp her mouth shut and spread her legs wide open. Harita, his reedy wife, also needed a mild thrashing now and then, especially when she complained too much about his philandering. The whining bitch had run away to her parents with their two daughters after he’d given her an egg-sized bump on the forehead and a few welts and bruises on her back. He normally would have kept her home with just a hard slap, but then Harita threw a vase at him and accused him of fucking their fifteen-year-old daughter on the sly, buying her silence with a sumptuous allowance.

“You’ve already performed Kamla’s shradh ceremony, honey, so you needn’t worry about her soul. Now peel off your sari and …”

But Mukta was adamant. She threatened to scream and alert her neighbors if she wasn’t allowed to do her penance at the temple.

This woman was a pain in the ass, Bakshi thought, but she was good in bed. She had ample flesh in the right places, and he loved kneading her dough. And, like a good whore, she also knew how to fake an orgasm. In fact, she was better than his skinny wife and the other women he’d molested, threatening them too with his hissing cobras. One has to suffer the kicks of a cow if it yields milk, he thought. If a brief visit to the temple would stop her sniffing and make her bedworthy, so be it.

The evening aarti had just begun when they entered the temple. A bare-bodied priest was rhythmically waving a flicker-ing brass lamp, revealing the immaculate stone idol of Lord Swaminatha carrying his mace. Like the other devotees, Muk-ta joined her palms and chanted paeans to the Lord. Earlier, as they had climbed the stairs, she had explained to her companion that in the north Lord Swaminatha was worshipped as Kartikeya, the handsome warrior god who was the son of goddess Durga, the destroyer of Mahishasur, the demon. Bak-shi was not a religious person, so after Mukta had bowed before the idol for the umpteenth time, he whispered in her ear that she had done enough penance for the day and now they should return to her house and eliminate three more hissing cobras. Mukta sighed and allowed him to gently push her through the crowd of devotees toward the exit.

But when they were outside the temple, Mukta stopped short as if she remembered something.

“Now, don’t tell me you have to complete your thousandth bow before the idol to complete your penance,” Bakshi said.

“I won’t tell you that,” Mukta assured, looking very solemn and contented. “I only want to stand and pray for my mother-in-law on the spot where she spoke to me for the last time.”

“I don’t give a fuck about that evil woman.”

“Mind your language, inspector,” Mukta frowned, even though she was amused by his unexpected surge of hatred for Kamla. “I wonder, have you really fallen in love with me?”

Bakshi squeezed her shoulders and whispered: “I have, darling. You are
so
special to me.”

“Then come with me for just one minute. Once I have offered my prayers for Kamla’s soul we can go back to my house and have some fun.”

Bakshi felt elated. So, she had finally accepted him as a lover. Wow! He had fortified his virility with a Penagra tablet before mounting her each time, and his performance must have favorably compared with her previous lovers. Whistling “Crazy Kiya Re,” he followed his ladylove to the back of the temple and then skirted a huge PVC water tank mounted on a stone platform. Away from the traffic of devotees, this was a desolate area used only by the temple staff and the priests. A faint light from a distant lamppost illuminated the staircase.

“So this is the spot where you stood that evening with your beloved mother-in-law?” Bakshi said.

Mukta nodded. Then she told him how, after finding out about her affair with Rakesh, Kamla had tortured her. Hadn’t he noticed those scars on her body, the branding mark on her pubes?

Of course he had, but … well, married women were prone to getting a few bruises due to their obstinacy and unwarranted intrusion into the male zone. He’d actually found Mukta’s bruises cute, even aphrodisiacal. “You should have filed an FIR against her,” Bakshi said, squeezing her arm just to show that he was a sympathetic male.

“But the police don’t take notice of domestic violence unless it’s a murder or there’s some pressure from someone powerful.” Mukta looked up at the inspector and whispered: “So I decided to take things into my own hands.”

Bakshi grinned. A confession at last! It was a nice jolt, like the one he often got from a big shot of whiskey. The oppressed had finally turned the tables on the oppressor. How fascinating! How filmic! The very idea of fornicating with a murderess gave him an instant hard-on.

“So you bumped Kamla Agarwal?” Bakshi said. “Wonderful!”

“Are you surprised?”

Bakshi nodded. Indeed, in his twenty-odd years in the profession, he was yet to come across a single case of a tortured wife liquidating her mother-in-law. “I guess you gave her a mighty push with your hands?”

“No, actually, I used my leg.” She smiled and hitched up her sari.

His hard-on still intact, Bakshi was staring at Mukta’s thunder thighs and imagined having a quickie right there behind the water tank. But a sudden shooting pain ended this fantasy. With all her might, Mukta had rammed the heel of her right foot into his crotch. Bakshi screamed as he keeled over clutching his balls. In the semidarkness, the inspector’s left hand desperately groped for the iron railing. But Mukta, the veteran kaabadi player, was quick enough to land another kick on his flank. Bakshi fell like a ton of bricks and hurtled down the steep stairs. Then there was that stomach-churning sound again—a cranium cracking on a big boulder. She took a peek at the bloody mess sprawled on the massive stone on which someone had chalked
Om Shanti Om
and then returned to the temple. She bowed deeply before Lord Swaminatha, whose aarti had just reached its crescendo, and then weaved through the crowd of devotees to make a quick exit by the main door of the temple.