5
The noise is unbelievable, and the concert hasn’t even begun. People are still streaming in from several entrances at the back. There might already be a hundred thousand on this field! Jatin is important enough to have a second-row seat.
At the last minute, I leapt back into his head. Before deciding whatever the fuck else I was going to do from here on with my spectral ass, I’d been planning to attend my own cremation. Most of all, I wanted Didi to hear first-hand what had really happened, rather than some PR version Ma would willingly regurgitate. But Shivani insisted that Jatin needed to be followed.
‘Needed by whom, Shivani? When are you going to trust me enough, or respect me enough, to tell me? Isn’t that the minimum courtesy, when you’ve made someone sacrifice their life, to at least reveal the great cause?’
We were at City Police Station in Gurgaon, a few hours before the concert. I’m now officially (but still impossibly, unbelievably) no more, and will soon be led away for a post-mortem. Jatin, the screenwriter and director, has, I must concede, magnificently controlled the narrative.
Two hours before that, and Shivani and I are having the same argument inside Sukkhi’s head, while Jatin has gone to another corner of the basement to make a phone call. Sukkhi just put my jeans back on (on my orders, although he didn’t seem to twig), and is now swigging liquor from a bottle he produced from behind one of the mattresses. Kanwaljeet is away cleaning the blood off his face.
‘I’m sorry, Shivani, but our situations are slightly different. Please excuse my pointing it out, but your body was irrecoverably smashed. You objectively died from that fall. You heard those two experienced rapist-murderers. Neither can quite work out what happened to me. And you’re asking me to follow Jatin for the sake of some plan I know nothing about, instead of making sure my slightly scratched body and perfectly functioning brain and heart remain intact until I can return to them? How do I know, how can you be sure, this condition isn’t temporary?’
Suddenly Sukkhi startles me by yelling out, ‘Sahab, she’s back. The witch is still in my head. Come and listen, because she’s shouting in English.’
Jatin, in the far corner of the basement car park about thirty metres away, doesn’t turn around. I can feel the heat inside Sukkhi’s head. He’s drinking more. We lower our voices.
‘I will go with them’, Shivani says, ‘to find out where you will be buried. Believe me, you need to be with Jatin. He’s a much bigger player than them.’
‘No, let’s do exactly the opposite, please. And Shivani, you turned up in my head and yelled at me to jump as though I had no other choice, but without warning me once that departing my body would be irreversible. Was that detail too trivial to mention? Who reads the small print, eh?
‘I’m sorry about your condition, but who actually killed me, Shivani? These men have a point, you know. It wasn’t, technically, one of them.
‘Whose orders are you acting on?’
When Shivani gives me nothing, I feel a bizarre solidarity with Kanwaljeet and Sukkhi, as though we’re each being manipulated by unseen powers. In my case, Shivani is their unlikely agent; she has just caused me the maximum harm!
‘Sukkhi,’ I say in Hindi, ‘that Jatin Sir is organising your death. You too are going to rest in that field next to that bitch. If you want to save yourself, this is your last chance.’
‘What are you doing?’ Shivani asks in English, but I drown her out by shouting, ‘Now, Sukkhi, NOW, NOW! He’s got permission already, and he’s carrying a gun. He needs Kanwaljeet to bury you both, so it’s your turn first.’
Sukkhi throws down his bottle and begins to run. He has thirty metres to cover, and Jatin is absorbed in his phone call (Kanwaljeet is in the bathroom). I can see Sukkhi is going to strangle Jatin with his bare hands.
When he is five metres away, Jatin turns around, still holding his phone in his left hand, and shoots him point blank with the gun in his right.
Sukkhi had no chance. I’d leapt across to warn Jatin as soon as he began running.
Now I’ve hurried off to hide in Kanwaljeet, who has come out on hearing the shot.
Shivani is furious with me.
‘Aunty, do you know what you just did? You nearly killed me. If I hadn’t left that man’s body before he died …’
‘Oh, is that how it works? See, no one told me. No one thinks to pass on any of these useful tips.’
‘Sirji, what happened?’ Kanwaljeet is staring at Sukkhi, who has no face.
‘He was coming after me from behind.’ Jatin sounds shaken, and clearly clueless about who just warned him.
‘He’s lying, Kanwaljeet.’ I work myself up to the same pitch again. ‘He called Sukkhi over and shot him. And now he’s waiting for you to get closer … run, Kanwaljeet, run, or kill him yourself if you can. Your boss has received orders to finish you.’
Another man, also in security uniform, appears through the door leading to the ground floor.
‘Wait, Kanwaljeet,’ I whisper. ‘Pretend to obey Jatin. Hide the bodies if he asks, but not in the field, because if he can’t kill you now, he’ll frame you for the deaths later.’
Meanwhile Jatin explains to the new guard (Ajay) that he had happened upon Sukkhi raping and murdering me, a would-be guest checking into this building. The shooting had been self-defence. Jatin is fabricating on his feet once more, and offering Kanwaljeet a choice of parts: go down as Sukkhi’s accomplice, or stay afloat with me.
I would have given anything to have all three of them dead on the basement floor. But this Ajay fellow hasn’t harmed me, and might be killed as well for being a witness.
‘Yes, Ajay.’ Kanwaljeet repeats my dictation verbatim. ‘Jatin Sir couldn’t save that Madam. I also heard the shot and came running.’ This is nice: he knows ‘the witch’ is inside him, and is yet obeying. I have somewhere to perch for the moment, kind of like an Airbnb for a ghost.
‘As I was saying, Shivani, I’m staying right beside my body. Our situations are very different. I cannot believe, one way or the other, that this condition is permanent. In any case, why should I listen to someone who …’
I stop, because I’m stunned. ‘Was this your revenge, Shivani, because you never forgave me for the pretence of Chandra Sir? Like your mother, you decided I had pushed you over the edge, and waited for the perfect moment to strike back.’
No reply, until I wonder if she has left Kanwaljeet. Then she asks, ‘Aunty, have I really harmed you more than the men who might have killed you?’
No, you fucking girl, I break down. You’re my guardian angel. My trigger of change. When you died, or, I should say, when your body was smashed, I had to let go of one whole life.
And now you’ve appeared again, and I can’t even take in what I’m losing, or have gained.
By the time the police appear half an hour later, Jatin, acting on orders now as well as initiative, has further refined his story: ‘An unfortunate case that claimed two victims, Inspector, although an intended rape was somehow averted.’
‘How come you had a gun on you, Mr Khatri?’
‘The gun is registered, and I’m carrying it because of the sensitive nature of the series I’m working on. You’ll soon hear about it: it’s called Mind-Reader, and launches day after tomorrow on YouTube.’ His voice alters faultlessly for his next line: ‘That is my heroine, Inspector. The genius around whom my show is … I mean was centred. A true mind-reader who shouldn’t have fallen into this monster’s trap at all, which makes me think the crime was spontaneous. This Sukkhi decided to go for it only when he was down in the basement with her.’
The three policemen and the woman constable look baffled, and Jatin explains about my Shakti, even calling it so. While speaking, exactly as he coached me to do over the past couple of days, he pauses more than once, covers his face or closes his eyes, and each time we glimpse his ocean of grief. Even I’m entranced, watching from inside Kanwaljeet, who is suddenly prodded to speak, in a breaking voice, by the master director.
Neither Shivani nor I interfere as Kanwaljeet more or less competently repeats his lines: ‘Sir, I was on main entrance duty, and Jatin Sir had said Madam needed to be shown where her car would be waiting tomorrow morning. I sent Sukkhi with her, but when they didn’t appear after ten minutes I came down to check. You can see yourself what Sukkhi did to me; some beast had awakened inside him, so I ran upstairs and called Jatin Sir for help, and he grabbed his gun from the car and came down immediately.’
The inspector asks about CCTV within the basement. Kanwaljeet replies there is none, since the guards often bed down here in between shifts.
‘We’ll need to see footage of the lobby, in that case, and outside the main entrance as well’ — which makes Jatin stare hard at Ajay, as if to prompt him to notice his cue. I know what he’s about to say, not only because I can read his mind. Jatin went over these lines with them after calling the police. He’s a dab hand at rehearsals, that one, and at getting the best out of non-professionals, as I myself can testify.
‘Oh yes, sure, Sahab, all the footage is there until day before yesterday, when the building was full of guests. This Madam was also staying here. But we knew these three days the guest house would be empty, so the system is down for routine maintenance. It will be up by tomorrow evening.’
Jatin expertly intervenes before the inspector can address this convenient coincidence. ‘When I got here, I tiptoed up behind them with my gun, because Sukkhi was sitting astride Miss Jaya but not actually assaulting her. Initially, I felt blessed because I thought he had come to his senses in time, but as I drew close I understood the horrific truth, that Miss Jaya had either been strangled or else had suffered a heart attack from sheer fright. At this point, in fear, I started running, whereupon Sukkhi noticed me and gave chase. Kanwaljeet had come back down again, and will confirm how many times I yelled at Sukkhi to stop. I only fired in absolute panic as he came roaring right at my throat. I felt sure he would do to me whatever he had done to Miss Jaya.’
‘And then I came running down, Sahab, when I heard the shot.’ This time Ajay takes over, and all of this, recounted smoothly in much the same words but with some further convincing details thrown in (Jatin is nothing if not a continual refiner), is written up as the official report at the police station an hour and a half later.
Inspector Hooda also receives a phone call in which I overhear a Union Law Minister take two minutes out of his busy day to underline that Mr Jatin Khatri is an extremely respectable person and should not be inconvenienced any further. ‘His testimony is what has happened.’ Jatin himself is the picture of courtesy and cooperation as he gets up to leave shortly after, assuring the inspector that he will be in Delhi for the next few days, shooting the second episode of Mind-Reader, and henceforth, for as long as required whenever he is away, his producer Chetna will keep the police station informed.
‘Don’t forget to catch the first episode, all of you,’ he tells everyone within earshot. ‘It’ll be on YouTube from day after. Forward it to your friends as well. It is also that late Madam’s last legacy, but we are privileged to have on film at least this one record of her incredible powers. As for Kanwaljeet and Ajay, Hooda Sahab, you know where they live and work.’
And that is how my life ends, on something of a fucking downer. Two men responsible for my death are sharing a cab back to the guest house after a mere two-hour hold-up in their day, and my body waits at a police station in Gurgaon for a cursory post-mortem that will completely vindicate Jatin’s version of events, before being dispatched for cremation to my mother, who also willingly obeys the very people who killed me.
I thought I was prepared to die, but still the way it came stunned me. Although what kind of dignity or honour had I imagined after the deaths of Arati and Shivani? From the moment it entered our lives, everything the Shakti has made of us, including our manner of dying — this is its promised land.