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

he confides to his family exultantly the next morning. ‘I felt like I was watching KBC! Matlab how Bachchan sa’ab says pehla padaav and then dramatic music plays, and the camera and the lights sort of drop down and zoom in? Haan, it was same like that only! Bhavani sir’s voice got ekdum heavy, and I forgot what he said, but he might as well have said aakhri padaav. That was the effect he managed to create!’

‘Let us come back to the beginning,’ Bhavani says. ‘We have shared with you the details of three people who were being blackmailed by Leo Matthew, who had a motive to kill him, as well as a link to the body in the kitchen garden. Now there is one more thing that has a curious bearing on the case.’

He looks around the room, his steady gaze meeting every single person’s face, one by one.

‘Three years ago, Anshul Poddar and Bambi Todi had a beautiful engagement party to which several of you present here were invited. The engagement was tragically short-lived, because the very next morning, Anshul boarded a doomed bus to Garhwal, which went off the road in the fog, plummeted four thousand feet and crashed into a river, resulting in hundred per cent fatalities.

‘Naturally Bambi ji was devastated. But she is young, and resilient, and two years after Anshul’s death, she started socializing again. But this is when a strange thing happened. Every time Bambi ji went on a date, an anonymous letter claiming to be from Anshul would be found stuck under the windshield wiper of her car.’

This statement creates a sensation. Everybody turns with exclamations of surprise and concern to Bambi, who herself is staring in confusion at Bhavani.

‘But … I don’t understand,’ she says falteringly. ‘You didn’t believe me when I told you about the letters. You said I’d been sending them to myself! That I was delusional!’

‘What the hell!’ Kashi’s face darkens. ‘When did this happen, Bambi?’

She turns towards him deliberately, her voice scathing. ‘Oh, are you speaking to me again? How come?’

Kashi’s face reddens. ‘I’m not not speaking to you.’ He mutters, ‘I just … got busy…work…my mom…’ He trails off incoherently.

Bambi shoots him a look of pure scorn, then faces way.

‘We owe you an apology, Bambi ji,’ Bhavani says to the still fulminating girl. ‘Actually, we did nat want to tell you anything because we knew the stalker would be watching you all the time – perhaps it was even somebody you were coming into contact with regularly! So we thought it is better if you think the police is nat suspicious of the stalker or exploring that line of investigation at all.’

‘But you were?’ Hope suffuses her face.

He nods benignly. ‘O yes.’

They smile at each other.

Urvashi asks worriedly. ‘What’s all this, Bambi? What letters? What stalker?’

‘We are explaining.’ Bhavani looks about the room. ‘Essentially, the letters all said versions of the same thing – that the man Bambi ji was dating was unworthy, and that it would be better for her to wait till the letter writer, who signed himself as “the A” to her B came back to reclaim her.’

‘That’s what you called Anshul in your speech on your engagement day!’ Cookie recalls. ‘You said, “You’re the sun to my sea, the A to my B.” Kitna romantic tha!’ Her face crumples suddenly, overcome with sympathy. ‘Hai, bichaari bachi … what a sick joke for somebody to play!’

‘But what if it wasn’t a joke, Cookie ji?’ Bhavani says soberly. ‘From our experience in the Crime Branch we know that very often bubbly girls like Bambi ji attract the attention of neurotic types. Quiet, mild fellows who underneath are a seething volcano of pent-up emotion! They are too introverted to make their move but they brood, and they obsess, and they watch, and they stare with their nose pressed to the glass – what we used to call “window shopping” when we were young! It is entirely possible that there really is a stalker – somebody obsessed with Bambi ji, who has been watching her for years, and is pretending to be Anshul to keep her from dating other men till he makes his move.’

‘But what’s stopping him from making his move?’ Cookie demands.

Bhavani shrugs his chunky shoulders. ‘Who knows what goes on in the head of a madman, madam? Maybe he wants to lose weight before he meets her first, maybe he is burdened with a wife and wants to get divorced first, maybe—’

‘Maybe it really is Anshul, grievously injured, and he wants to heal completely first,’ Bambi says defiantly. ‘It could be that too, couldn’t it?’

‘Bambi.’ Raw pain has made Kashi’s voice very deep. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. Anshul is gone. You have to face up to it.’

Bambi’s eyes grow stormy, then fill with tears. She dashes them from her eyes, then smiles blindly and reaches for a glass of water.

‘Or maybe,’ Bhavani’s voice continues, now very softly, ‘he has a drug habit, a very hard-to-break, debilitating, life-destroying drug habit, and he wants to kick it before he makes his move …’

His eyes travel the room till they come to rest on the reclining figure on the bed, pale and propped up on a hospital pillow.

Bambi gasps. ‘What? No!’

The unguarded revulsion in her voice makes Aryaman flinch. Pain flashes on his face, then is swiftly replaced with a dull flush of resentful shame.

‘Surely you didn’t write those letters, Arya!’ Bambi makes a credible effort at sounding kinder. ‘Why would you?’

‘Maybe he’s an incel,’ Randy Rax volunteers suddenly to the room at large. ‘An involuntary celibate – as opposed to my friend Father Vicky here, who is a voluntary celibate. It’s a word for men who have been sexually rejected by women for years and years – so they get all messed up, and start hating women and mass-shooting people and boasting about it to each other on the internet – kind of like in that movie … The Joker.’