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

‘Finally, Pankaj Todi and I decided that enough was enough. There was no way Anshul could have survived the accident – the bus had rolled over twice, exploded, then plunged into the roaring river. The bodies were all so battered and dismembered that it was hard to tell their gender, let alone their identity. We zeroed in on one body – a young man, six feet tall, fair, muscular – and identified him as Anshul.’

He pauses, his eyes far away, seeing things Bhavani cannot.

‘It was Anshul,’ he says strongly. ‘As a father, I felt it in my bones. I remember the moment I held my baby boy in my arms for the first time, I had such a strong sense of confirmation then! When I saw that battered body, I got the same sense of confirmation. It was a soul recognition. It was him. Not everybody is blessed with a long life, and Anshul’s, though short, was complete. He had lived a full life – adventurous and successful. He had found true love, bid goodbye to all of us on that final night, and embarked upon a new adventure. Except the journey he had embarked upon turned out to be far greater than the one he had anticipated. Pankaj Todi and I identified him, cremated him, and brought the ashes back to Delhi.’

He pauses, then continues.

‘We all travelled together as a family to immerse the ashes at Banaras. After the prayers were said, and we sailed upon the holy Ganges at dawn, I thought both my wife and Bambi had found their closure. They certainly seemed to settle down, stop railing against the fates, and accept that a terrible, random tragedy had ripped apart the fabric of their lives, and slowly, very slowly, come to terms with their grief.’

‘That’s good,’ Bhavani murmurs. ‘You handled it brilliantly, sir, so sensitively, so correctly.’

Poddar gives short, mirthless laugh. ‘Hardly correctly!’

‘Why do you say that?’ Bhavani asks, confused.

Poddar raises pained eyes to Bhavani’s. ‘My wife still sleeps with a lock of Anshul’s hair beneath her pillow. Every single night. And if Bambi is “receiving letters” from him, then that means that the poor child has still not found her closure.’

‘Meaning?’ Bhavani asks, confused.

Arihant Poddar rests both arms on the armrest of his chair and steeples his fingers. ‘Don’t you see, ACP Singh? It is Bambi’s deepest desire that Anshul be alive. Bambi wants Anshul to be alive. It is her dearest fantasy. Investigate all you like, but my personal theory is that she’s been sending those letters to herself.’

‘Well?’ the chief demands. ‘How did it go?’

Bhavani breathes a heavy sigh. He is sitting outside his departure gate, eating a very soggy mayonnaise sandwich; the flight has been delayed by two hours. ‘It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, sir,’ he admits.

Squawking noises emanate from the other end. Bhavani winces, holds the phone away from his ear, and continues to chew.

When the sounds die down, he ventures to speak again. ‘Sir, Mr Poddar was very cooperative but he seemed to be of the view that …’

Lowering his voice, he brings his superior up to speed.

‘Sending them to herself!’ the chief says finally, sounding rather relieved. ‘Well, that isn’t so bad at all! Much better than having a crippled, demented, billionaire scion on the loose! Do you think that is what she’s been doing?’

Bhavani licks the mayonnaise off his fingers. ‘Well, as to that, sir, we couldn’t say. Of course, her mother is a little unbalanced …’

‘So it runs in the family.’ His chief sounds quite satisfied. ‘Well, well, we did our due diligence, basis this new evidence, and now it’s time to put General Mehra away!’

Bhavani registers his protest by keeping quiet. There’s no point telling the chief that he has already contacted Flames&Flowers – the wedding planners mentioned on the back of the ornate Bambi–Anshul photograph displayed in the Poddar’s living room. He fully intends to commandeer the recording of the entire engagement ceremony, and spend the weekend watching the footage minutely.

‘Are you listening, man?’

‘Sir, there is still the angle about Ajay Kumar being Aryaman Aggarwal’s dealer,’ Bhavani replies doughtily. ‘And we’ve made a new discovery as well.’

He briefs the chief about his 7 a.m. encounter with Cookie Katoch.

‘This woman’s reliable? Not a client of drug dealers herself, is she?’

‘She has provided a video recording, sir. And then there’re the Khuranas too – Urvashi Khurana has been behaving very oddly lately …’

‘They have no motive, Bhavani!’ the chief interrupts. ‘You’ve found absolutely no evidence of an affair between Urvashi Khurana and the Zumba master, and I doubt the husband, no matter how crazed with jealousy, could have been worked upon to commit a murder without some evidence. Even Othello needed to see Desdemona’s underwear, or whatever it was, in Cassio’s sweaty grasp. In modern parlance that would mean a sex tape at the very least! Besides, didn’t you say the Zumba master was having an affair with the Todi girl? And with the woman who was making his YouTube videos? How many women could he have been pleasuring at the same time?’

Bhavani, who has wisely used this long speech to finish his sandwich, finally manages gets a word in.

‘Sir, please can we ask – why is everybody so eager to pin this on General Mehra?’

‘Nobody’s trying to “pin” anything on anyone, Bhavani,’ the chief says virtuously. ‘I grant that this Aggarwal angle seems worth pursuing, but the Khuranas have no link whatsoever to the older corpse, unlike the general who definitely does.’

‘Yes, sir. We just feel all angles should be investigated, sir.’

The chief sighs heavily. ‘There is only one angle here. You’re going to have to put Mehra away, you know. Somebody much higher than you and I is moving the pieces.’

Bhavani wipes his hands on the small tissue provided by the sandwich seller. The gesture feels very Pontius Pilate-ish.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t sulk, Bhavani. If you can find any concrete