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

distance of just 200 metres and it was a foggy night. We managed it easily enough.

Anshul’s phone started ringing at about 5 a.m., so I sent his group a WhatsApp message saying I’d had too much to drink at the engagement party and would join them all one day late. Then I broke the SIM and the phone and told Guppie Ram ji to get rid of the bits in some manhole or something. He was always hanging out in places like that.

Then I went to sleep. I had no idea what the next day would bring or how I would cope. But I remember sleeping really well that night.

When I woke up to the news that rapist Anshul’s bus had fallen into a khai and everybody on board was dead, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If I had left well enough alone, he would have died anyway, and I wouldn’t have had blood on my hands! The thought almost drove me insane … but the relief at not being found out kept me going … I faked grief – faked it really well, I even pretended to believe he wasn’t dead, that he had somehow survived – if I did all that nobody would think to look for him in the DTC veggie patch!

You called me that evening, remember? You’d heard about the accident, I guess – but when I stared down at your name on my phone, this sickening realization swept over me that I couldn’t talk to you any more. It was like the Aladdin song, I’d travelled to a ‘whole new world’ and I now had a ‘new fantastic point of view’ and I could never never share it with you and fuck up your life like I’d fucked up mine.

Besides, I had enough survival instinct to know that if you sat me down somewhere and held my hands, and I looked into your eyes, my stomach would heave and the whole story of that ghastly evening would come pouring out of my mouth like thick, foul vomit. So I avoided you.

I don’t recommend murdering anyone. Even the vilest person in the world – even a person like rapist Anshul. It leaves you coated in a sort of toxic, icky slime – like your soul has blocked pores that no amount of steaming can unclog. And there’s this constant, giant lake of puke in your stomach, puke that you can’t throw up, not ever. And of course, you can never be truly carefree or go drinking or smoke up ever again, in case you lose control and spill your guts to some nosy rando.

Friending Ganga helped me cope. She never suspected the truth of what had happened that night, but she was happy for me – I had been spared a life with rapist Anshul, and he had, in a way, got his just desserts. I got her a Daily Needs franchise at the DTC, and even though her husband showed up now and then and accused her of sleeping with rich sahibs for money (he had seen the ten thousand she had come back with that day), she was happy.

I found I couldn’t get the stuff rapist Anshul had said about my parents out of my head. They were flawed, and fucked up. It was high time I stopped accepting everything they said to me as gospel truth and started thinking for myself.

That made me feel a bit better.

I started gymming, and working hard at Todi Corp, and after a while, decided to start dating again. I’d burnt my boats with you, but I figured it was a big world, I’d find somebody else, equally nice.

Slowly, though, I realized that Kashi Dogras were thin on the ground in the real world …

Still, I liked Leo – he was charming, and funny and really handsome. Besides, he was wildly ineligible and long-haired and used to be a waiter and grew up in an orphanage so that would drive my parents nuts. Dating him was like sweet revenge on them for making me break up with you and getting me involved with rapist Anshul.

But then one evening in the DTC’s kitchen garden Leo started giving me all this Roman Catholic, Exorcist bullshit about how he sensed a ‘presence’ hovering in the beetroot patch behind me. Somebody has died violently here, he said, and their blood is crying out for vengeance. Naturally, my blood froze. Then he sucked in his breath and widened his stupid, hooded eyes, and whispered that he could see a disembodied spirit floating behind me. And like a total chutiya, I whirled around and stammered, ‘Anshul?’

God, I’m SUCH a little idiot!

Now of course I know that Leo got his info from Guppie Ram ji, but back then, I really thought it was divine revelation. So I blabbed out the whole story to him, and once I did, he showed me his real face. It was like the whole Anshul nightmare all over again. Except that Leo added goody-goody religious righteousness to the mix. He told me all piously that I had sinned but that Jesus still loved me and that I should repent by donating money to that freaking orphanage he was so obsessed with. The hypocritical self-righteous bastard! He didn’t even have the guts to fucking call it blackmail! He called it penance!

I coughed up the damn money – it wasn’t much anyway. Leo really was SUCH a small-timer, I was almost insulted when he bleated out ‘50 lakhs.’ Anyway, I transferred the money and froze him out, and he slunk away for the time being …

But then something else happened. I realized that Gagan Ruia was starting to look more and more stupid around me. He used to totally hero-worship Anshul and after he heard the story of my tragic engagement, he began to build me up as this amaze, #goals chick or something in his brain, because one night, after he ate too much dahi kebab and red