The Nidhi Kapoor Story (30 page)

Nidhi looked at Rujuta and was surprised. She did not think that Rujuta was the one to shed silent tears like that. “I am really sorry,” she said, “you loved him, no? I did not mean to separate the two of you, but it was important for me to do it. I had to complete the mission that I was on. It was going to be my masterpiece.”

Rujuta looked up and nodded slightly. Nidhi’s expressive eyes suddenly went sad. Her insolence suddenly changed into resignation. Her shoulders slumped and she looked ready for doing a long time at the prison. Very few crimes were more serious than the murder of a police officer on duty. If not death by hanging, the most severe punishment prescribed in the Indian Penal Code, Nidhi was looking at a life sentence at least. It was a different matter that she would be out on parole in less than six months.

Before she could do anything or say anything, Nidhi spoke again. “I have written everything in my diary. I want you to read it.”

Nidhi walked to the table where the dock was playing music from the 50s and 60s. She retrieved a thick, old journal from the table and leafed through it. “I want you to read it and you would know why I did what I did. I had to, Rujuta. I had no other option.”

It was a thick diary and it was dog-eared at some places. Rujuta took it reluctantly. While she was leafing through it, a wrinkled photograph fell down on the carpet. The paper had yellowed with time and the print had faded from the edges. It showed the four Kapoors standing against Ronak. Nishant had flung his arm carelessly over Neelima’s shoulders. The two daughters were huddled at their parents’ feet. Rujuta bent over to pick the photograph. In the photo, it was evident that Neelima was tense about something and Nishant looked as burly as he always did.

“You can read the entire thing later but I want you to read a few pages with me right now, the ones I have folded along the edges. Start from the beginning please.”

Rujuta had no reason to indulge Nidhi but she decided to play along. It was a long night ahead and this was going to be her only opportunity to get answers from Nidhi. She noticed that Nidhi’s handwriting and words slanted towards the left. Apart from that, it was neat, eloquent and had little or no blemishes. It was a journal of a thoughtful and calculative individual.

Nidhi went back to the sill. She lit another cigarette and egged Rujuta to start reading. “I think the first note would be about my school. I don’t remember the date. I don’t write dates. They mean little to me. I just write what comes to my head,” she said.

Rujuta nodded silently and flipped through the journal. The entries started abruptly without dates or headers or locations or any indicators of the forthcoming text.

The first one was apparently from the time when the two Kapoor girls were in school.

I hate going to school. Everyone laughs on me. Even Payal takes their side. She is the one who started calling me cookie cutter. I don’t like her. But I get bored without her. She is my best friend. But mumma has told me to not tell anyone that Payal is my sister. Aren’t we sisters? But Payal likes those ugly girls more than me.

When I told mumma, she asked to forget it. She made my favorite chocolate milkshake. She is the best.

Rujuta looked up at Nidhi. She nodded and motioned her to move onto the next one. In a simple riff though the pages of the journal, Rujuta fast-forwarded Nidhi Kapoor’s life. The next place where she stopped, the language was more mature and more coherent. Like the last entry, there were no dates, no precursors, no headings. Just Nidhi’s left-slanted scrawls.

How dare Papa hit mumma? That too in presence of strangers? I am not letting him go without a punishment this time. I’d make him answer for his actions.

I hate that damn wretch Preeti. I just don’t like her. I have to get her away from Papa. Papa becomes a monster when she is around. And she can’t come to our home so often like that. She’s in Papa’s study all the time. Why? And Papa gets so rude to mumma when she is around. Damn her. Everyone likes her but she doesn’t even know how to dress up.

After the party while I was helping mumma get in the bed, I wanted to go to Papa’s room and take my
revenge. But mumma asked me to stay quiet. She said that if I spoke against her, Papa would beat her again. But I dare Papa to touch me or mumma again. I am not a kid anymore. I will give it back to him.

Rujuta had heard from multiple sources about that party when Nishant beat Neelima in public. Nidhi, as if reading Rujuta’s mind said, “Preeti. His heroine from
Lahu Ka Rang
. She was dearer to him than any of us. Apart from Payal. But definitely dearer than mumma or me. That woman, Preeti, is the reason why my father thought that my mother was an old hag and had retorted to inflicting pain and punishment on us.”

Preeti had disappeared suddenly right after
Lahu Ka Rang
. All attempts to find her went in vain. She was headed for great things if she hadn’t disappeared like that. “What happened to her? Where did she go? Do you know where she went?” Rujuta asked.

Nidhi merely smiled at her. Her lips curled up the way Nishant’s curled when he laughed. “You’d get to know in a minute. Read on. You need to read a lot more if you are to make sense of things. Just don’t get angry. OK?” she said.

Rujuta, rather than getting angry, got curious about what was next. She flicked the pages and rested on the next crease.

Goa. Probably the most gifted place in all of India. I love it every time I come here. Goa makes me realize how powerful I really am. I have the power to control the lives of other people around me. It’s so
intoxicating. Better than any whiskey, any other trip that I have ever been on

Kunal deserves a mention here. The dude thought he could fuck around with Payal, and get away with it. When Payal told me that she liked Kunal, I told her to stay away from him. She won’t listen and Kunal somehow took her to that secluded corner in the fort. Luckily, I was around. All men are fucking bastards. All they want is sex. All they can think about is their dicks.

When he tried to force himself on Payal, I thought Payal also wanted to get laid. But when she started screaming, I asked Kunal to stop. He laughed at me, sneered at me. How dare he mock me like that? I flung this stone at him. It hit him in the neck. He was surprised. Probably, as much from pain as from the realization that I could hurt him. I wish I could capture the look on his face. I wish I had carried one of those cameras that Papa likes to record things on. It would have made an excellent tape. Maybe I could add it to Papa’s collection.

The bastard said he would kill Payal and me. How dare he threaten me like that? I pounced on him and hit him in his head with a sharp stone. I hit him till he went quiet. How dare he say that he would hurt me?

Payal, the stupid cow was braying like a kid. I had to ask her to shut up. She would not. I had to slap her to calm her down.

When I realized that I had killed Kunal with my hands, I felt so powerful. I realized the power that I had. So far killing was just an idea. An alien concept to me. I had killed Papa, Preeti, Tiger, so many times in my dreams. But this was the first time when I actually took away a life.

I feel so much at peace. I realized that inflicting mortal punishments makes me happy and powerful. Let that bitch Preeti come home next.

So, I flung Kunal off the edge of the fort. But he landed on a shallow rock. I had to sit there and wait till the waves washed his body away. I loved sitting there and waiting for Mother Nature to clean up after I had killed someone.

Rujuta was appalled. She read the confession again. Slower this time. Changing the speed with which she read wasn’t going to change what was written. Rujuta thought about the dual personality that Nidhi was living with. She pitied her.

Rujuta also thought about the unsolved case of a missing young man that would still be lodged in some Goa Police Station. Then she remembered that Prakash had said that Payal’s couldn’t be the first murder that the assailant was committing.

Nidhi caught Rujuta in the middle of her indecision. “I know it makes me sound like a monster. But what about Kunal? Preeti? Papa? Weren’t they wrong? Didn’t Kunal step out of the line when he forced himself on Payal? Why did he have to threaten me?” she asked.

Nidhi was trying to justify the murder with logic. But no amount of justification was going to absolve Nidhi from a murder. Rujuta believed that killing someone was an irreversible process and one had no right to embark on something that one couldn’t undo. She wanted to give Nidhi a piece of her mind but decided against it. She let Nidhi do
the talking.

Nidhi continued. “I don’t care if you trust me or understand me. I know what I did was right. I had to. He had reigned in for too long and someone had to tame him. I had to tame him. Why don’t you read the next one, Rujuta? Please?”

Rujuta could see that Nidhi was bitter towards Nishant. She could picture the regular scenes in the Kapoor household after Nishant would come home drunk and beat up Neelima and Nidhi. Any sane child growing up in such a house had to be bent in her head. It actually explained a lot of Nidhi’s actions.

She moved onto the next place where the diary was marked.

The nurse said they couldn’t save mumma. She said mumma was already dead when we got her to the hospital. I don’t know if I want to live anymore. Who do I live for, now that mumma is gone?

Papa called mumma a slut and said she slept around with everyone but him. How could he? And he did not stop there. He just let mumma die. When mumma put herself on fire, instead of saving her, he did not bother at all. He just walked away. He is a fucking monster. If I were around, I wouldn’t have let that happen.

I hate you, Papa. I hate you. I will make you pay for mumma’s death. She has not died in vain. I would make your suffer. I would take away everything that is dear to you. I would make your cry. You would beg to be killed. I would make you miserable Papa. You’d
see what I am capable of. Nishant Kapoor, you’d fucking die. A more miserable death than you can ever imagine.

I.. I..

Rujuta was stunned. She could not believe that things were so bad at the Kapoors.

Rujuta noticed that a couple of more pages in the diary were marked for her. But she had no desire left to read anymore. She looked up at Nidhi.

“You know why I did not kill Papa all this while?” Nidhi asked, her voice lower than before.

Rujuta was trying to get her head around things that she had read in Nidhi’s diary. She could not believe that a bright young girl like Nidhi could be this twisted in her head and do such bizarre things.

“I wanted him to suffer,” Nidhi continued, “suffer the way my mum had suffered when she was alive. The way I have suffered all my life. All I wanted from him was a little love for mumma and a little affection for myself. He knew we craved for tiny trinkets of emotions from him and yet he chose to tend to everyone but us. That whore Preeti, how could she be more important to my father? You know when I saw him struggle and plead for his life after I mixed anti-depressants in his drinks, I realized… I realized that I wanted to keep him alive and kill him inch by inch. Kill him so slow that he begs me to hurry up. I wanted him to see the imminent end.”

Nidhi got up from her place and started to pace
around the room. “You know how I did it? It was so easy. It started with Preeti. She was the second person I killed. Like Kunal, I beat her to death. But Preeti got a glass bottle in her abdomen. No one was home and she had come to Ronak hoping to meet Papa. I just had to give her some sleeping pills to make it easy for me to kill her. Once I was done, I buried her in the garden, next to the umbrella. She’s still there, I think. And then it was easy after that.”

Rujuta felt sorry for Nidhi. She was an actress par excellence and it was sad that she wouldn’t continue working in the industry. She was staring at a life term at least.

Nidhi was still talking. “I had to wait for a few years, but it was very simple. All I had to do was to kill things and leave letters behind. It was so easy to fool everyone like that. I left so many clues behind in every letter and still no one could figure things out. People just see what they want to see, I guess. You know, you derailed my plan a bit when you saved Payal. She should have died in that fire. Just the way mumma died. I was so angry with you for saving her. That’s why I came to your house the other day. To shut you up for good. But you were good, Rujuta. You fended me away.”

Rujuta shuddered. All the open loops seemed to be closing one by one. There was nothing left in the case now. Apart from relatively minor charges like making a threat, impersonation, criminal wrongdoing and other, Nidhi would be charged with culpable homicide. She knew that Nidhi had at least killed Kunal, Preeti and Payal. That’s three. Four, if she included Prakash in the list. Four homicides. By someone who was twenty-seven, and who happened to be
arguably the most recognized woman in the country. Media would have a field day when the story would break. She was now worried about Nishant. She still hadn’t seen any sign of him.

Nidhi meanwhile, slowly walked off towards the table. She flicked off an invisible switch in the music dock and the room was suddenly engulfed in silence, as if all noise was sucked out of it. Rujuta could hear faint sounds of an air-conditioning unit humming in the background. Nidhi flicked her Zippo and lit yet another cigarette.

Rujuta made her mind to let the law take its own course. She just wanted to wait for the police to come and arrest Nidhi. She had sent Tambe to the station after he had dropped her at Ronak.

Nidhi took deep long drags on the cigarette. “Hope you understand me. I had to do this. There was no way I would be at peace if I did not punish Nishant like that. You know, I have never been sorry for anything that I have done. Except for this one mistake. I am really sorry, Rujuta. I did not want to hurt Prakash. It… it… just happened. I’d ask for Prakash’s forgiveness when I meet him up there. But before that, I hope you pardon me…”

And then, without a warning, without waiting for Rujuta to react, Nidhi put the muzzle of the .500-caliber gun in her mouth, cupped it with her lips and pulled the trigger.