The Benefit Season Read online

  ‘Don’t try anything reckless’, she said.

  ‘ I don’t see how else I can put an end to our collective shame. In society you’ve made me look impotent- now that, I cannot allow’!

  Monal sniggered. ‘I wish the society for a moment would ask me about impotence. You and that Arabic bastard whore- talking about shame and love! Ha!’

  Vishal writhed in his seat and nudged the driver with his pistol to drive faster. Soon they came to a landfill site off the highway where one of the many new flyovers was being constructed. They swerved sharply off the road into the service lane and halted.

  ‘Get down’; Vishal motioned to his two captives. He held the Uzi in one hand and the Beretta in the other- with safety levers on both on ‘F’ position. He forced them to the edge of the yawning evacuation- it was at least 50 feet deep and equally wide. The driver shuffled through the piled earth on the edges to a JCB parked nearby. He started the engine and blinked the lights twice and shouted from its window,’ ready boss!’ He sounded eager and glad.

  Vishal turned towards them. His hand shook a little. One could say a fleeting wave of remorse passed over him like a stray cloud. But his heart was resolute, and his mind made up long ago.

  ‘Jump’, he said, glad he could not look into her eyes in the darkness.

  ‘Please don’t do this- I love you!’ Monal pleaded, taking short, wary steps toward him, her hands held out in entreaty.

  ‘Get back’, Vishal waved the pistol at her menacingly. But it was too late; wiry Monal had already closed in. She gripped his wrist and sharply twisted it, wringing the pistol out of his grip. It fell on the ground while the two wrestled, with Arjun watching, still dazed. Vishal, though a crack head was still in very good shape, and on a high right now. He was proving too strong for Monal. He had managed to free his other hand and was now bringing the Uzi to point in her direction. It was going to be over, quickly. But suddenly Arjun snapped out of his stupor and dived to the ground. He had the Beretta in his hand and the shot fired in Vishal’s heart in one swift, blurry motion. Vishal slumped to his knees, his hand clutching his chest, and then he fell forward on his face in the dirt. Monal felt his neck for a pulse and collapsed on his back, crying. ‘Vishal! Vishal! Oh no, he’s gone’, she cried, shaking his motionless body. Vishal’s body, which had fallen close to the edge, began to slide into the hole. Monal, realizing the body slipping out of her grasp, tried to hold on to it, but it was too late. The body slid down the slanting walls of the pit, several feet down, out of their reach. Arjun grabbed Monal before she could lunge after the body, and fall to certain death. He pulled her away, while she scratched and bit him desperately.

  ‘Let me go, let me go’, she screamed. ‘You killed him… you killed my husband you bastard!’ she beat down on his chest with her fist and arms.

  ‘Please, let’s get out of here’, he implored, dragging her towards the car parked beyond the service lane. After bundling her into the rear seat Arjun scuttled to the other side, and punched the powerful engine into life. Without turning the headlamps on, he drove off on the highway towards Jaipur. As they were leaving, they saw the JCB piling earth into the cavernous gap, its driver blissfully unaware of what had just transpired in the darkness. In a few hours, the hole would be covered fully, and the body lost forever in the monument Vishal meant to construct to their love.

  ϖ

  Chapter 12

  The Shiny Monologue at Neemrana

  Arjun remained quiet during the drive. Monal was still sobbing softly in the backseat, lamenting the death of her husband.

  ‘You could have shot him in the leg’; she spoke finally.

  Arjun veered off the highway and parked on its soft shoulder. He pressed his forehead on the steering and remained motionless. Then he raised his head and said,’ I wasn’t thinking straight. Perhaps they were drugging me. I think it was a soldier’s instinct- shoot to kill. But that man was going to put us in that dump, and you are moping about him!’

  Monal said nothing and blew her nose. Finally she stopped sniffing. ‘I guess you’re right. No one could have controlled what happened. There’s no point in blaming each other now. Let’s find a place and lie low for a couple of days.’

  ‘I want to go home’, Arjun said.

  ‘Are you crazy? Vishal was mixed up with all kinds of bums. Sooner or later they’ll discover it was he and not we in that pit, when they find him and this car missing. And then they’re going to come after us. And the police will be looking out for both of us too.’

  ‘I don’t understand why him being mixed up with bums concerns us. I don’t even know why Vishal kidnapped me. Why wait for so many days to push me into a hole so dramatically? If he had so strong a grudge he could have finished both of us a long while ago- why take so much of trouble? My head is spinning with so many questions and I can’t find any damn answer!’

  ‘He was a crazed man, an egomaniac. He could go to any lengths to get what he wanted or to put people out of his way. He couldn’t stand the thought of you stealing his wife and his thunder from him in the office- you’d begun to do rather well. Maybe it suited him to let both of us go missing and then wait till we got together to finish us off. Two lovers elope and go missing- no one to ask any questions. And then there was the merciless beating you gave him in the hotel in front of everyone. And he hated that you wouldn’t make your clients throw matches like so many others. He was under a lot of pressure from the bookies- and maybe mafia guys. And you are wondering what reasons he had for wanting to put you away? You obviously miffed the wrong kind of guy.’

  ‘So be it. He’s gone and so are his reasons. I just want to go home and start my life again’.

  ‘Fat chance of it Arjun! Those guys will be swarming all over like pests, looking to serve vengeance. They don’t take well to one of their own being put down- it’s bad for their image they say. Take my word for it; let’s lie low for some while I figure out a way of getting out of this one. I got you out of that house didn’t I?’

  ‘In that case I would like to go to the police, and tell them everything’.

  ‘Are you out of your mind? They’ll put you away for murder- you won’t even make bail!’

  ‘It was in self-defense…your defense. And the man kidnapped me! Isn’t there a law against it?’

  ‘Maybe. But the case could run for years in the courts- and you would be cooling your heels in the rotten prison system of this country. Guys like you won’t last there’.

  ‘Then I don’t know how they’ll find out that I killed Vishal? Or who will care? Unless you tell them!’

  ‘Why would I tell them? You saved me. And he did wrong by you- kidnapping you. Trust me, I’ll take care of this. I’ll handle his bum chums and try some influence to keep them off our tail. Till then you’re to keep out of sight and not to contact anyone- even your family’.

  ‘At least let me call them and tell them I’m okay- they would be so worried. I can’t bear to think of what my mom would be going through.’

  ‘You call them and the police will know. They are sure to be tapping your lines. And what the police know, the goons know too- they’ve got insiders everywhere. Another day or two won’t hurt you Arjun- what could you have done inside that house? When you tell your mama you’re okay- what then? What will you tell her- why you aren’t coming home? Will you tell her that you killed a man and are on the run from the mafia as well as the law?’

  Arjun bowed his head in silence- the poor man was confused. Monal reached across and patted his shoulder. ‘A day, Arjun, is all. Trust me’.

  He sighed and nodded.

  ‘Drive on then, Neemrana is close, there’s a place I know where we’ll be safe’, she told him.

  Arjun started the car and swung back onto the highway. They paid the tolls at Kherki Dhaula and Shahjahanpur and continued on their journey towards Neemrana. The fog was dense and the air chilly. Stalks of cotton and sugarcane rustled in their gusty draft as they sped past on the empty road. Tho
ugh there wasn’t any traffic at this time Arjun had to watch out for mauled dogs, stray buffalos and tractors that appeared from nowhere with their front wheels suspended in thin air as they climbed the steep, rutted ditches lining the dusty highway. It began to drizzle, and soon it turned into a thunderous tearing up of the skies. The shabby Indian countryside suddenly turned dark, dank and somber after the downpour, and did nothing to lift the dampened spirits of the two passengers wrapped up in their individual worries and pains.

  Repentance tugged hard at Arjun’s conscience and he grieved at his heart for the innocence lost. He was on the run and life would never be, as he’d known it. All because of a foolish affair- that too with a married woman! Could he sink any lower, was their any salvation for him, any hope, any prayer, any light, at the end of the dark, gaping tunnel? Would Aarti ever take him back? How his mother would pine for her lost son, his bright future grounded in ashes and dust, her dreams for him done in by moth and rust and by his sick taste for the bitter flesh of a wanton wench, the taste that caused this curse. Khosla would scream from the rooftops that he’d been right about this loser boy who’d chucked everything for a romp in the sack, for dipping his hand into somebody else’s till. He’d stolen, murdered, committed adultery and burned incense unto Baal; he was cursed above every beast of this earth and all the crawling things and the fowl of the skies, and dust he would eat for all of his days.

  And it was a dusty track that he turned into now as Monal nudged him from his pained dialogue with the self. Seven were his deadly sins and seven the mangy dogs, eating dust unsettled in their wake and barking sevenfold, that chased their car. Seven the notes of music that moved him, seven the colors of the rainbow that broke through the dark skies, seventh the day of that fateful week, seven the blessings he sought, seven the sages he prayed to, seven, the lamps of the Menorah that he dreamt he would light someday in the Synagogue close to his mother’s home, seven the parts of his body that ached and cried, seven the openings in his head that shouted to let the demons out, seven the seas that he wished he were far away, seven the heavens he implored to, and seven the directions whence came cries of reproach; all sevens were dear.

  ϖ

  They soon arrived at the rabble of the dung-smeared hovels of the Neemrana village, filled with mounds of garbage and open sewers. Idle, skinny old men with hefty grey whiskers that fluttered in the wind, slouched on frayed charpoys positioned next to the road for best views, and sucked on their hookahs, while cattle and goats tied next to them squatted on the ground and moodily grazed or dozed, and the womenfolk wearing loose-fitting clothes moved in and out of the houses for no apparent reason. Sometimes adventurous white faces sipping tea from steel saucers with the locals flitted past. The tourists reveled in the decay and soaked in the grime for an adventure to be chronicled on Instagram and Facebook.

  Soon they left the fleapits behind and came upon the majestic plateau with the earthy fort towering above them in the rutted, steep Aravali Ranges. The stone and concrete structures rose like colossal steps carved into the mountain, topped with surly ramparts and bastions. They climbed the two-odd kilometers to the fort and came upon the grand entrance archway - the Suraj Pol. Arjun followed Monal who got them booked into the Ramji Mahal on the 12th level. She also hired a vintage car for a jaunt about town for later. The sun deck of the opulent, duplex suit gave them a breathtaking view of the surrounding forests and hills and the flat valleys below and the cloud-laden skies above. Like the royals long before them, they sipped tea at the Shatranj terrace- shaped like a giant chessboard, and later wine, at the hanging gardens- the Uncha Bagh.

  The 15th century fort was named after Nimola, the brave local chieftain who, defeated by the descendants of Prithviraj Chauhan, was granted the last wish that the fort be named after him. It was built over twelve levels and had nine palaces; each named and color-coordinated after the navratnas- the sacred nine gemstones linked to the nine planets as per Vedic texts. The resort was filled with an eclectic mix of antiques, colonial furniture and objets d’ art that transported them back in time into its medieval past. The fort was a maze of narrow stairwells, passages and dungeons and it was easy to lose the way in them. The fort that once lay in ruins had been restored as a heritage resort after its owner had moved out when its ramparts had begun to crumble and give away.

  It was an architectural marvel picked up from the dustbin of history and lovingly turned around. Nostalgia and a romantic mourning of his own past swept over Arjun as his gaze turned upon the weeds and dandelions wedged in the crevices of stones and cracks of the grand old ruins. The whitewashed walls with the peeling paint tearing from the stone and mortar rose to vaulted ceilings with overbearing arches, plucked of precious stones and gems that once were filled into its mortar for decoration. To Arjun the scarred ruins embodied our ageing, and commemorated our grand failures. They were the testimony to our fallibility before nature, god and destiny. God gave man this earth and man created objects of beauty. Man and nature seemed to be in cahoots here, man had once turned nature’s materials into a work of art, and nature had transformed it back into materials for her own expression. Human history seemed merged inexorably into the degenerated physical setting and the deep womb of time. The ruins of the fort served as a reminder of irreversibility of time, and of man’s temporality. His ambitious reaching out heavenwards to create marvels in stone that would face inevitable demise laid bare the futility of all materialness. But the vain creator had ensured that when the building decayed, it decayed magnificently. It was decayed, not dead. Its voids were like silence, absent of words but full of the tension of meanings. You could stay and lose yourself or leave and find yourself. You could pause, wonder, breathe in the fresh, cool air, or just wander off again. Arjun, looking out upon the still, foggy countryside, mulled over what ruinous future awaited him, or whether there was a miracle lurking in a corner somewhere waiting to rebuild the scattered remnants of his being.

  In the evening, at the mashal-lit open-air amphitheater, a customary Rajasthani folk artist performance with fire spitting and song and dance about chivalry and love and the pain of separation preceded the sumptuous thali (buffet) dinner with 16 spicy dishes. Arjun, hungry and exhausted, despite the bleakness of his prospects, ate with gusto, and slept a dreamless sleep under the latticed window on the narrow single bed where many a royal baby might have been made, ignoring the repeated overtures of Monal who tried to entrap him into her cold cradle.

  ϖ

  Krishnamala drummed her fingers on her green cloth baize covered wooden desk and hummed and hawed. There had been no news of the missing persons. Agent 9 had gone looking for any faxes that might be of use. The fan whirred above at low speed. Agent 9 had hung a hammock for the baby from the fan; the baby was lulled into sleep by the fan’s slow rotary motion. When the baby started to swing too wide, by its own momentum and the centrifugal force, whichever agent was awake would switch the fan off. It was the brilliant, makeshift shaker cradle they’d designed in the office for the little one, for office was where they spent most waking hours. They did not have to pat the baby or rock the cradle- the device saved time and the results were pretty instantaneous, though one couldn’t really say if it made the baby dizzy.

  Krishnamala dreamt, ate, walked, talked and thought only police work. The only reason she went home was to refill the baby’s supplies of food and nourishment and change of clothes, and to ride her meek husband’s obliging boner, eight delicious inches of it, eight fold or more till it became black and blue.

  ‘Why did you cancel your maternity leave’, her boss had asked when she’d applied for permission to bring the baby to office to take care of it. She was the ace detective, so actually he was quite glad to have her back on his team.

  ‘Back home in the village the mom-in-law was taking care of the baby. When she died there was no one else, so it was better that we came back to the city.’

  ‘Oh, sorry to hear that’, he said, beaming inside. ‘What happ
ened?’

  ‘It was raining- we had a huge well in the backyard- she had gone out to water the cows and slipped in the mud and fell into it and died’.

  ‘She couldn’t swim, or shout…?’

  ‘She knew swimming- like all village lasses who have to ride the buffalos into the ponds for washing. But it’d rained for two days and what with the baby crying all the time- we didn’t hear her- even if she’d shouted or screamed. By then it was too late’.

  ‘Then how come…?’

  ‘The water of our well was very sweet. Whenever there was a wedding in the village people would come and carry water from our well for the guests. She was a diabetic. It was two days in that sweet water that killed her.’

  ‘Oh. There’s no one else’?

  ‘Naah, pop-in-law died because of alcohol’.

  ‘Oh. Drinking problem eh?’

  ‘Naah. A full bottle of liquor fell on his head in a wedding. He bled to death. He was a teetotaler.’

  He’d approved her application- barely able to hide his astonishment at the impossible rusty logic. He was okay with it as long as she brought in the crooks, and that she did with the regularity of one’s monthly credit card bills.

  The crook that she was to bring in now- she didn’t know. She didn’t even know if a crook existed, and if it was just two loopy sex freaks on the loose. That Vishal had a thing going, she was sure - no one lived in that kind of luxury at that pay scale. And she’d managed to scan through his tax returns and bank statements with the help of her batch mates in the tax department. He and Monal both had a number of cash transactions that couldn’t be explained. The mortgages on their plush penthouse came from unknown sources. The flashy cars they drove were not in their names. On the other hand the boy, Arjun was squeaky clean. He lived frugally and transferred most of his salary to his mother who seemed to be on a high on splurging. An eye on the street had informed her that Vishal had been laid up recently in a shady surgeon’s clinic for treatment for bad burns and beating. Long ago, the surgeon had been banned for life by the MCI. Now he worked in a shady part of town, repairing damage cases who couldn’t be taken to a hospital, or whom no hospital would accept. And he made good money, better than most doctors threescore better qualified than him.