Club You to Death Anuja Chauhan (best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT) 📖

picnicking!’ Ganga says to the child quite audibly as she passes. The child chuckles.

Padam goes even redder. Much to his humiliation, he hears his men laughing behind him. He opens his mouth to utter a hasty retort, but realizes that they’re not laughing, just talking excitedly, bent over one of the meshes.

Another false alarm, Padam thinks irately. They’ve probably found a ballpoint pen cap, or a Kurkure packet or a stick that’s shaped like a knife or something.

He glowers down at them, disproportionately angry with Ganga, with himself and the world at large.

Then a constable straightens up. He beckons excitedly with both hands. ‘PK sa’ab! PK sa’ab! Come and look!’

They’re going to make me walk, Padam thinks bitterly. I can’t just stand here in this sunny spot and drink my tea. No! I have to pick my way through the filth and descend into that accursed hole again …

Shaking his head, he picks his way over the uneven muddy ground to the lip of the hole.

‘What?’

But then the excitement in the eyes of the squatting men causes his own heartbeat to quicken. As a thrill pierces his heart, Padam Kumar thinks – could this be it? Could Bhavani sir’s hunch be right after all?

‘What is it?’ he asks, and his tone is quite altered from the surly one he’d used moments before.

‘Sa’ab, look.’

Triumphantly, they hold up a mesh trowel for him to inspect.

Padam drops to his knees, suddenly unmindful of the dirt and squelch. ‘Clean karo,’ he says crisply.

With slightly trembling fingers, the men brush aside the mud and loose grit around the object till it is easily identifiable.

‘Ohhh teri!’

Their gazes lock in a moment of shared triumph then drop down again to feast on their trophy.

It is rusted, partly decomposed and covered in a greenish mould, but every man present can identify it for what it is.

A standard-issue army revolver.

LOVE’S SURGICAL STRIKE

NEW DELHI

In a shocking development, the nation’s much-loved hero, Lt General Mehra, PVSM AVSM Yudh Sewa Medal, the mastermind of the 2016 surgical strike into Pakistan was revealed to have a less than exemplary personal life today, when he was apprehended and taken in for questioning for the murder of Leo Matthew, a celebrity personal trainer who was found poisoned and crushed to death beneath a loaded bar at the gym of the posh Delhi Turf Club.

Shortly after Matthew’s death, the Crime Branch team that was investigating the incident made some discoveries that lead them to dig up the organic kitchen garden on the club premises – which is, interestingly, dedicated to Gen. Mehra’s late wife – where they unearthed a second corpse.

ACP Bhavani Singh of the Chanakya Puri Crime Branch remained tight-lipped, but our sources speculate that the body is that of one Ajay Kumar, the estranged husband of young DTC employee Ganga Kumar who is allegedly in a romantic relationship with the widower general.

It is further alleged that three years ago, the General fatally shot Ganga Kumar’s husband post a heated argument, and buried the body in a shallow grave in the kitchen garden. Leo Matthew somehow got wind of this and began blackmailing him.

It is being speculated that this is what drove Gen. Mehra, who was anxious to be elected president of the Delhi Turf Club, and is very low on funds, to take the extreme step of poisoning Matthew.

The police identified the General by his licensed, standard-issue service revolver, which had been wiped clean of prints and thrown into the grave along with the body.

‘I can’t believe this.’ Pankaj Todi shakes his head over the newspaper in his opulent dining room the next morning. ‘General Mehra? Such a great man! A hero! How little we know our closest friends!’

Bambi, who is pretty shaken by the article herself, is finding this reaction of her father intensely irritating.

She looks up and says coolly, ‘Well, you knew he’s a bit of a predator as far as women concerned. And you knew he’d killed people in hand-to-hand combat – he tells that Behra Mehra story to anybody who will listen! If you put those two things together, then this seems fairly logical.’

Todi stares at her in disbelief. ‘Those are entirely different things, beta! Killing enemy soldiers during a war—’

‘Killing is killing,’ she says harshly. ‘Let’s not kid ourselves.’

‘And what d’you expect the man to do when his wife is too unwell to have physical relations with him?’

‘Cheating is cheating,’ she concludes firmly.

She looks at her father with decidedly judgemental eyes. He lowers his own hastily and reaches for a toast.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ he admits. ‘In which case,’ he continues thoughtfully, ‘we should probably distance ourselves from this man. His good days are clearly over.’

If he’d been hoping to placate his daughter with this statement, he’s in for a big disappointment. Bambi lets out an angry exclamation.

‘Typical! When people’s good days end we should discard them as if they’re past-their-expiry-date vegetables!’ Her voice is trembling as she attacks her bowl of diced papaya savagely. ‘Like you’re doing with Mammu?’

Pankaj Todi purses his fleshy lips worriedly. ‘I have not discarded your Mammu, beta. Our relationship has merely changed a little – I may soon cease to be her husband, but I will always be her provider, friend and well-wis—’

‘Oh please!’ She fidgets with her fork agitatedly. ‘You call Mehra uncle your friend, you invite him to all your parties – when the surgical strikes happened, you boasted to everybody that he was your buddy! And now you want to drop him! Why?’

Todi’s liquid eyes harden. ‘Because now I realize that though he appears strong on the surface, he is weak! The way he allowed himself to be pressurized – by that same bloody thug who pressurized you, don’t forget – is utterly disgraceful! There’s no mention of that orphanage in this article, though. I am going to sue those bastards and get our money back.’

‘What?’ Bambi is appalled. ‘You can’t do that! The children must’ve been so happy with the