Murder, She thought - Part 3

I was lost and I needed someone to bounce ideas off. And as always my feet turned towards Divya. She was my quiet place in between the rough sea that my life was. I went to her to imagine me. She was all I was at that age, or rather what I could have been at that age. Smart, cheerful, pretty, a genius and in love with somebody. Divya loved her husband despite all his faults. Despite all his faults.

It was an old fashioned arranged marriage when her parents had fixed her with a stranger who was of the same caste, same region and same line of work; finance as she had told to me. But there could be nothing same about them, the guy was lethargic, dumb, and in the belief that god, fate, the government and the frogs in the pond were against him. He was waiting his whole life, waiting for the economy to turn, waiting for his luck to change, waiting for the government to change and so on. He was some kind of small time day trader who always made the wrong bets.  Hustler is his own words though, “Hustlers never work, workers never hustle” he had said these lines before he had winked and took my 2^nd drink off my hand. Good for him he had only taken my 2^nd drink. 

But Divya was a love fool who was happy that any love had come her way, she made her peace that this was going to be husband and started adapting to it. He supported him and moved cities when he did, changed jobs and even stopped for 2 years when he had gone to Dubai. To work on his grand plan. The grand plan never worked and Divya had supported him till he worked from one random tip to another on the stock market. It was because of him that Divya was still a software engineer when she could have been anything she wanted. That was before I had discovered her and given the quality of work she deserved. Flip bit algorithms, AddRoundKey encryptions, hiding and modifying of data. She was a puzzle creator where I was only a puzzle solver. Our small IT Company had grown over 50 times when we had found a way to encode critical financial data of the companies from hackers and inside traders by using a special date based algorithm which made true financial data invisible till the time of publication  of it from even the CEO.

She was at her computer again, probably trying to read something in Wikipedia perhaps which she would enthusiastically recount to me again. I was happy to know about Masai drinking their blood from straws and latest nipple slip; because I was happy living my life through her. Surprisingly she never hated me for it. Like Kavita did, as most kids hated their parents for them to live their lives and correct their mistakes though them. But she wasn’t reading Wikipedia but some news report about a death. She turned towards Rajeev and said “It is still being considered a hit and run. No angles lead towards us”. Rajeev strolled around talking on the phone, came near her, kissed on forehead and started talking on the phone again. “Nahi nahi abhi bhaav aur upar nahi jayega. Kya Prasanna bhaai aap mere baat pe yakin nahi karte? Haan agle quarter ka agle quarter ka agla quarter bataunga. Lekin job bhi information hogi solid hogi. Haan haan … Jai shri Krishna” and he hung up.

“Next quarter ka kya scene hoga?” he asked Divya. “Agle quarter ka abhi se kaise keh sakti huun? Abhi to is quarter ke result aaye hai” she replied. “Apne software mae dekh ke bata na!” he shouted. “Kitni baar samjahu aapko? Ye koi alladin ka chirag nahi hai. Sirf financial postings respective GL accounts se decrypt karke batata hai kee is baar revenue aur profit kitna aaya”. “Haan haan” he spat back “Zyada funda mat jhaad, agli baar bhi bas result aane se pehle bata dena kee company ke stock pe position long leni hai ya short? Agli tip ke main apne investors se 20% charge karunga!”.

“Agli baar kiska murder karna padega ye sab chupaane ke liye? She quipped back. Anger flashed in Rajeev’s eyes and he strut back to her.

 “Kya boli?“

“ Wahi jo aapne suna. Is baar program modify karke ulta run karne pe ek insaan ko notification gaya tha. Usko aapne ye sun nae pe maar daala. Ho sakta hai agli baar koi aur PM ho, usko notification jaaye kee hum encryption program run karke unka data hide nahi read kar rahe hai, taaki unke financial results ka pata chal jaaye hume. Tab kya usko bhi maar daaloge?

He came and slapped her. She didn’t waste a second in disbelief, she got up and went to her bedroom to cry. Maybe she was worse than me, I would have left Naresh’s for doing this to me. Or maybe she was even better than me; she had broken the code that she and I had together developed to hide the financial data. Not only she had broken the code but also found a way to collate all the GL accounts to consolidate the total financial data to find out how was the company doing before it could declare the results and trade in its stocks.

Only problem was that I had built in a code which notified her and me whenever any other user tried to change the program. But her master stroke was that she herself had modified the program and I am the only person to know it, or rather was the only person to know about it. So now I knew.

I only imagined the happening of events. She was in office finally cracking the code enthusiastically telling it to Rajeev who would have instantly thought about somehow running a scam through it. He calling the people to tip them of the results before they were announced. She receiving an email with me cc in it and telling it to Rajeev in panic and he deciding to kill me to forever keep his secret. It was a good plan. Only someone with the intelligence of her could have pulled this off. I was impressed more than angry.

I felt like walking up to Divya and patting her back, I walked up to her room expecting to find her crying in the pillow. But she wasn’t; she was talking into the phone steel faced and eyes burning like a hunter. She went on “Haan Malik Bhaai jaisa maine bola tha waise hee kaam karta hai, Prasanna nae isi baar usi se paisa kamaya hai. Proof chahiye to us chutiye ko dekh lo. Haan lekin mereko pehli baar ka paisa nahi chahiye”. She drew her breath in and sneered at the other room “Haan ek aadmi ka naam batati huun, wo kisiko kabhi nahi milna chahiye. Naam hai Rajeev…” She continue with the description, whereabouts and finished with “haan jaane ke baad koi use nahi puchega, khush hee honge uske biwi baache, ye mujhse likha lo”. With that she put away her steel face and spouted a few tears and walked out into the hall.

I have no words to describe what I felt like at that point of time, maybe there were no words because nobody has felt that feeling. Somebody had taught me that to know a word is to know a feeling, but maybe it wasn’t that, maybe to feel a feeling was to coin a word. Maybe it wasn’t that either, it wasn’t anything.

If this was a love story I would have been found true love in Naresh and we would have kissed our last kiss, if this would have been a family drama Kavita would have repented at my death and would be transformed knowing that she was wrong all along,  if this was a horror story I would have haunted Divya, if this was a poem Malik Bhai would have killed Rajeev in a car accident only. But this wasn’t any of them.

Sometimes a story is just a story, it’s not a fable, there is no learning, and there is no metaphor in it. There is no denouement, the climax never arrives and the protagonist never has an epiphany. Sometimes a story is just a sequence of events which happened and nothing more to it. Maybe it was just to make me realize that only after dying you realize what you life was. And the last thought which comes to my mind before I completely fade away knowing the bittersweet truth is “For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike”

Curious Incident of the Restaurant in the nighttime

It was like one of the many instances when I was travelling to Bangalore, and like most times I was about to reach before time to the bus stand. In fact this time I was an hour earlier and was travelling light as I was only going for one day. 

So I asked to the auto driver if I could get to eat something nearby, he said “Haan bahaiya paas mae kaafi hotel hai”. I asked him to drop me there instead of the bus stand, got down after a while, paid him and starting walking towards where I saw the crowd was. Hyderabad’s government bus stand (I always travel by government buses or at least wherever I can help it) is in a place called Afzalgunj and it’s a predominantly Muslim place as the name suggests. And you can feel it by the way people are dressed, by the sign boards in Urdu, by the whole green coloredness of the place. Ironically that street I started walking into was called ‘Ram Mandir Road’ (I came to know this later). But as I said it is predominantly Muslim place near to the bus stand where people of all religions come and go; and there is this Hotel named ‘Jai Maa Durga Hotel’ on that street and it is so overtly and in your face Hindu that you almost get jarred by it. If the name isn’t enough for you it has lot of big pictures of Hindu Deities hung over the counter which is quite visible from the street and on top of that it has Gayatri Mantra playing in loop very loudly. So that is what that place’s USP is, that it is a Hindu place in a Muslim locality, it doesn’t compete on price, it was expensive than the place I ate; it is not clean or orderly, that is why I decided to give it a skip; it is just pretty garishly Hindu. There are a few Muslim cafes on the other side of street which look dingy, Irani Hotels as they are called here and their owners eye ball me while I’m walking down the street looking left and right for a place to eat.

They know I’m not their customer; I’m dressed in a grey t shirt, blue jeans, expensive shoes , clean shaven, short hair and I could be any one, any religion, an atheist maybe, but they know, somehow they know. I’m never more aware of my religion than this point, my last name, the fact that I’m allowed to worship an idol and I’m not circumcised. Anyways after a few paces I come by this place called Hotel Nandini which is a lodge which advertises “Restaurant Attached. South Indian North Indian Chinese”. I know these kinds of restaurants, I trust these kinds of restaurants. Order a Butter Roti and Dal Fry here and you can never go wrong.

So I enter this one intending to do just that. But it’s a busy place, the table I took is in one corner and a place like this doesn’t want to score very high on service and waiter response time. So I sit there waiting for someone to notice my waving hand or hear my cry of “Bhaiya”, which automatically labels me as a North Indian. I could have said Guru to be from Bangalore, Thambi to be from Chennai, Boss to be from Bombay, Dada, Babu or Dost or anything else. But being from where I am I start with Bhaiya. And nobody notices me or at least bothers with me for some time. Till then I hear two waiters being called from the manager, one was Aslam and other one was some common South Indian Hindu name which I don’t remember now. I decide in that instance whom to call and shout ‘Aslam’ as soon as he is dismissed by the manager. My decision was based on the fact that Aslam being Muslim has a good chance of understanding Hindi and thus it would be easier to explain to him what I want. And I am correct, I say “Bhaiya ek Dal Fry aur ek Butter Roti laga dena” and he nods and asks “Mineral Water chahiye aapko?” I reply in the affirmative and he walks away.

I look around and I see most people are eating that fixed thali or meals as they are called here with their hands, they are mixing curd, rasam, some kind of Pulusu into rice and eating with their hands and making, to me, a mess of it like South Indians usually do and I look at that with the derision North Indians usually do.

A curious incident happens at this time, Aslam trying to practice his newly learned Telugu asks another waiter standing near the fridge ‘Okaa Bottle Ichindi’ and everybody starts laughing at him (he should have said ‘Okaa Bottle Kavali’, and even I know he’s wrong) and he gets embarrassed and looks around for some sympathy, his eyes meet mine and I smile at him knowing how does it feel to make a mess of a simple statement in a foreign language. I have made a mess of Kannada, Bengali and many other languages in my life. I know the kind of alienation he feels at this moment just because he doesn’t know the local language. It’s not his fault, he wasn’t born here, he wasn’t taught this is in school, his father and mother didn’t speak this language to him when they first tried to make him talk, he didn’t watch any movies in this language; it’s not his fault and he knows it, but he feels embarrassed nonetheless. He smiles back at me and gets back with his work, feeling slightly reassured that there is at least one more guy in this room who is as incapable as him in speaking Telugu, that he is not alone, that somehow we are bonded. And then the words of my mother flash into my head that she had said to me probably more than 15 years before.

And it is going to sound like Nirupa Roy from a 1970s movie but I’m quoting that line Verbatim “Beta dharm kabhi jodta nahi hai, dharm hamesha todta hai”

Murder, She thought - Part 2

 

I still remember that fateful night, I relive it every day. Like a slapping scene on a Soap Opera it keeps repeating on and on. Every time I took a step and it pained, every time I looked into the mirror, every time Naresh introduced me to someone and he went from his name to Oh ….

We were an insane couple who were insanely young and insanely in love with each other. It was when Kavita was 6 years old; we had left her with the neighbor and finally had some time to ourselves. It was the welcome party for his friend who had left India for USA and had to come back when the dot com bubble burst. As any America returned he was full of energy, the idea that India was shit and good Bourbon. 

And Naresh had plenty of it; every time I asked him to slow down he sped up. He was drunk and driving his new bike that he bought with the royalty cheque. We were giggling like school children and I punched him in the arm every time he sped up. I remember my laugh, because that was the last time I ever laughed. It was over in a flash, it was blind turn and he got a car coming in from the side, I saw a headlight in my eyes and in the next second I heard was scratching, like metal sliding on metal. And then nothing. 

I woke up in some place which looked like a hospital. Naresh was crying, the first time I had seen him like that and he swore on my life never to drink again. He didn’t have a scratch on him, while I had tubes running in & out of me everywhere. I had one tube going in my mouth, one coming out of crotch and the third coming out of my arm. The mouth one fed me food, the crotch one took it out and the arm one sent things through me to lessen the pain. Morphine they kept feeding me, just enough to make the pain tolerable, not enough to make life tolerable. I had the same dream every night, Naresh pushed me off a building and I fell screaming, screaming until I couldn’t scream anymore. Then there was this silence, a tranquility like no other, an agreement reached with death, then there we no worries, no anger, no pain, just the spirit of being in the moment. And then I used to wake up. Why do our dreams never continue after death, why doesn’t anyone see this life, the life which is better than life?

After 3 months I was released from the hospital with a stern warning not to look in the mirror. I limped my way through my daughter with extended arms, though the ‘Welcome Home’ sign, through everything which was supposed to make me feel better. I limped directly to the mirror where I saw my disfigured face, they had tried their best to stitch my face, but it was worse than the worst patch job I had even seen. I had a scar and stich marks running across my face and the right leg which didn’t work well as it had lots of plates and screws in it. I was asked not to walk too much, not to pass through a metal detector and to see a Physiotherapist. I didn’t do the first or the last.

I took a job in an IT company near my house as an Accounting consultant and gave up on my dream of being a financial advisor, I took a desk job where I didn’t have to travel at all, and I used to walk to and back from my office and hardly ever saw the Physiotherapist assigned. It was a shit life and I got used to very fast. Naresh used to apologize to me every night and he used to mean it, he tried to kiss the scar on my face but I pushed him away, I closed my eyes and waited for him to push me off the roof. I wanted his love instead of pity. I wanted to pretend that this never happened, instead of coming to terms with it, but looking into his eyes always made me remember, so I stopped looking into his eyes. After a while my cynicism won and he stopped trying; trying to apologize, trying to reach out to me in spite of my sarcasm and anger, trying to pose in front of my daughter that it was all right.

We had finally become the couple we were always supposed to be, broken, bitter and non-believing. Only Kavita kept us together, the 6 year old girl who used to walk around with her Barbie was soon transformed into a 16 year old discontented child who used to walk out on during arguments, family outings and us in general. “If you two can’t live with each other, how can you expect me to?”, her words.

But even after all this she was my greatest regret, greatest regret of dying. Leaving her alone in this world. She was a typical 16 year old, angry, insecure, illusioned, and worrying over pimples and hair extensions. I wanted to tell her that all this will pass, and life’s biggest worries have not even crossed her mind yet. But I don’t think she will listen to me, like all teenagers she also thinks her parents were born old and will never understand them. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t always this bitter, self-righteous bitch that I am. I was young, pretty, carefree and risk taking like her; who used to sneak out at night to try cigarettes and watch Madonna videos. And her dad was handsome, slim, funny, charming, confident guy who used to debate professors to tears and steal answer copies from their desks while they were sleeping. I wanted to tell her that whatever we advise her to do is not something copied from a scripture or a “Morally correct mother’s guidebook” but something that is statistically proven to yield best results. But as I said, she wouldn’t listen to me.

Naresh was sleeping off his hangover when Kavita was ready and out of the house. She was practically jogging and didn’t go through her morning beauty routine, which meant she wasn’t going to school. She took an auto and I realized to follow I had to hop on to it, so I did.

She was texting the whole time and I was having a difficult time following what she was typing. Apparently she was informing someone of coming over to her. It was a short drive, didn’t realize the time at all. She got out, paid the auto guy and started walking into a thin street. The locality looked pretty dingy, I was getting worried about her safety but she didn’t, she took calculated confident steps, she walked up stairs and walked straight into a house.

It was Sid, her ex-boyfriend. Or at least that’s what she had said when I had caught her with grass in her handbag. It was her ex-boyfriend’s, she had meant to return it, she doesn’t smoke, and it’s all over; that all was her answer. I gave her a stern warning and a promise that I will toss her out of the house the next time she did drugs, along with the promise that I won’t tell Dad and she won’t see that guy again.

But she was seeing that guy again, in fact she just ran upto him and hugged him. He was too groggy to say anything; he just held her and tried to breathe her in, like I used to breathe Naresh in when we first used to date. As soon as they separated she let out a scream and shouted “I’m so happy that she is dead, you know I wasn’t convinced it was you the first time when they told me, but then when they told me it was a hit and run by a car I was sure it was you.”

“You know when Najeeb Bhaai first told me”, she continued “that an SMS is going to go to the owner of the card, I was so shit scared. I thought we were caught and like she is going to find out that I am paying to get her ring out of mortgage from her own card.... She is very smart you know, that way my Mom.... She was gonna come around here sniffing and she was gonna find out that I paid for our stuff from Najeeb bhaai by mortgaging her wedding ring. She never used to wear her anyways, just this credit card would have been the pain". "But what could I do?" She let out an question to no one in particular, "Najeeb Bhaai was after my life to pay the money and take it back, I really had no option.”. She stopped for breath and continued “I swear baby when I first called you about our problem I didn’t know what could you possibly do? But killing her was the master stroke, she is gone now. My Dad is happy, I’m happy and she is never gonna find out about her card”. She punched in the air and lit a cigarette, or maybe it wasn’t just a cigarette considering the stuff that was lying around in the house. There were rubber tubes, syringes, silver foil, candles, rolling paper and lot of other stuff present to prove that this wasn’t just another teenage boy’s house.

I let out my breath,  fell on my knees and started laughing while tears fell down my eyes. I suddenly remembered Nietzsche “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter”, I couldn’t agree more. But I was happy that I was killed for more than a few thousand rupees that my daughter had borrowed from a drug dealer, I was killed for love. That guy Sid did it to protect Kavita from me even though I would have done nothing so bad, I probably would have ignored that SMS like the dozen others I ignore every day. But I was glad, there were only two reason men waged war, money and love. And wars waged for love were always more brutal. I was bittersweet about the whole affair, while I was just murdered, my daughter had someone who would kill someone for her love.

As I was gloating over the whole thing when I realized that Kavita had already left and Sid was left on bed. He crawled over to drink some water, light a cigarette and started typing on his phone. His hands were shaky and he had to correct a lot but in the end it read something like this “Im sorry Ka bt it wasn’t me. It ws someone else. Bt I luv u anyways.”

God Damn! So  it wasn’t him either. So maybe it was some other random guy in that dark sweat shirt, just a random hit & run after all. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t want a witness and me made sure by running over me twice, maybe some psychopath looking for kicks on a Tuesday night. But my gut feeling; and I still had one, didn’t let me believe that and I still needed to know who killed me.

<To be continued... >

James Bong - The Spy who Scrapped me

It was the summer of 03 when Jishnu banerjee aka JB first saw American Pie on his friend’s new PC . He had lied to his parents about going to Debashish’s house for studying. Debashish had lied to his parents about his stomach ache so as not to go on his parent’s trip to Digha. They were home alone and that only meant one thing, watching forbidden American movies. There were too afraid to ask the CD Rental guy for the real good stuff and no fun in Schwarzenegger movies now so they settled for the movie which would change his life, American Pie. While Debashish could only care about Shannon Elizabeth’s bare breasts JB saw the deeper meaning in the movie. It was not a teen – comedy, or love story or social commentary. It was but a Rallying cry for ‘every man who should be getting laid but isn’t’. It was a message for the involuntary celibates of the world to unite and fight for their right, that is sex. Of course it required some modifications for Indian Culture. Most kids around him didn’t even know what second base was, let alone been to it. Indian high schools were nothing like American high schools, there were no cheerleaders, everybody wore uniform, and only high point was when Mrs. Das looked down to correct the papers. But hope was around the corner. Across the corner lay short skirts, songs in the canteen, dances in basketball court, freedom or in other words College.

JB got into Jadavpur University, his dad’s dream or rather second dream, first was IIT Kharagpur. Though his dad was a little disappointed of him getting into Mechanical Engineering; according to him the real action lied in IT, he would soon realize that, but not in the sense his dad meant.

After 6 months of short hair, formals, dancing on ‘atariya pe lotan kaburtar’ and running around in his underwear finally he got to step into fabled hallows of the canteen. And it was nothing like he imagined, no girls in short skirts, no guys dancing on table tops, nobody sharing a cold drink with two straws. Instead there were girls with hairy arms, guys fighting over a piece of samosa and the fat canteen owner scratching his belly. This is not what he had hoped for, after finding out there was only 1 girl in all the 4 years of mechanical and she was a girl by a long stretch of imagination, all his hopes laid on the canteen and girls in the IT departments. All his dreams came crashing down, this seemed even worse than school, at least no one came to school in bathroom slippers. At that he moment he realized that there was no strip poker, no beer funnel, and no frat parties in store for him. And all the few girls that were there lay way out of his league and his social circles. Most of his time would be spent attending soporific lectures, drooling over Jenna Jameson and the company of his left hand. The world was a very dark place now.

But then came light in his dark world, the shining beacon in the place devoid of any hope, joy or coitus. Orkut. The story was that the guy created this site to meet his ex girl friend who was lost for 8 years. JB didn’t give a rat’s ass for whom and why, all he heard that there is where the hot girls of Calcutta were, posing in provocative poses and waiting for the right guy to seduce them. On Orkut you didn’t need a car, not even a bike to pick up a girl, money didn’t make your profile better and girls would never get to know if you stammer or spit when you talk. It was a level playing field; he was sure that god was out there somewhere, for nothing less divine could have made such a site. It was time to dig out his old e-mail address JB_007@hotmail.com which he had formed to ask his cousin studying in Texas to get him a cowboy hat, apparently the mail got lost before reaching him, as he never replied to him.

Project Orkut was initiated. He realized that his normal persona was not going to help him pick chicks, not in the real world, not online or alien. He needed a new personality, a character that was smooth yet restrained, cool yet sophisticated, someone who got all the women but wasn’t trying too hard. In short someone exact opposite to him. And this only meant one man, the legendary agent from MI- 6 with his numbers as 007. In his excitement he didn’t even notice the typo when he named his profile as JáMěs BōnG. It was now time to flesh out the rest of the profile. Of course he wasn’t actually in horse breeding and fast race cars but he would have been if he had the money. And of course he didn’t play polo and squash or was in body building but he would surely like to and he hadn’t read, War and Peace and all the 16 sonnets of Shakespeare but he would someday. Orkut was the place where you weren’t bogged down by your current circumstances and could be all that you aspired to be. The real tricky part was the ‘About Me’, this was like the heat tempered, 108° drill bit of the drill which would penetrate the material. So he decided to extra research on that finally he came with his masterpiece. If Mrs. Sequiera had seen this she would have surely kissed him, he mentally made a note of looking up for Mrs Sequiera or her even hotter daughter on Orkut. Here it was – 

Hello there cute and charming gals and girls

i would to u make new friend and im introducing about my self ..
Im a positively possessive attitude that fuels the undying zeal to work for broader prospects puts me where I am today. A young lad hailing from Asansol who has seen the dark side of the life only to light up the future. A man with proven track in intelligenze (I study in Jadavpur University, 1^st year B.E.) and dreaming of one day to have one my own software company. I like guns and fast cars and my Martini shaken not stirred.

By the bye my name is "Jishnu banerjee" with 18 ears of experience on the earth. I would like to make friendship with u if u are interested please add me or feel free to call..
Awaiting for your reply

P.S. - I wrote this 4 years back when Orkut was cooling down and the star of Facebook was rising. But today I thought what the hell and posted this. Coz I wanted to post something on my blog just for the heck of it. I had a whole series of these planned earlier ,  next one was - James Bong : From Calcutta with love.Might still do it if enough people 'Like' this.

And of course there was no intention of making fun of Bengalis (this time), but just James Bong rhymed with James Bond, so I'm sorry for doing this.

P.P.S - I plan to continue my 'Murder She Thought' Trilogy (ooh I love this word - Trilogy) but I'm stuck up on one plot point here and not able to resolve it. I will get back to it as soon as I do. Mental note to self - Get all these ready before you start writing a story and don't get ideas mid-way.

Tell me where do I draw the line?

Travel for days and hope

For an hour with you

A lifetime in return to, for you, pine

Tell me where do I draw the line?

Wither away in the day, daydreaming

And go hungry all evening. Why?

Only so with you I can dine?

Tell where do I draw the line?

 Suffer from your indifference

And hide behind my smile.

You really think for no reason I whine?

Tell me where do I draw the line?

Of course we are not Just friends

I have done much more already

Too much tears for me and bitter wine

Tell me where do I draw the line?

Tell me how much is enough

So that I get some love back

Or at least you care, a sign?

Tell me where do I draw the line?

Late night phone calls, messages.

Scented letters and rings. My gifts

Enough for this life and nine?

Tell me where do I draw the line?

I love you so much that

I will let you kill me

Tell me if that we will be fine?

I think here I will draw the line

Murder, She thought - Part 1

Every story teller starts his or her story was setting in the time and rules of the world that the story takes place in. I intend to do the same; the time is right now, 2012 A.D. And the rules? I don’t know about the rules of this world. I do not know what I am, a spirit, a specter, a poltergeist. The only thing I do know is that I am dead and I want to find out who did it.

When you think of the word murder the mind always thinks of stormy nights, murderer in a cloak and big knives. But mine wasn’t any of this, in fact it was a calm Tuesday night, the kind where you go on romantic walks and take your kids out for ice-cream.  It was my routine walk back from office, I was carrying my laptop and my handbag and thinking about the mails to be sent from home, the changes to be made in the document; work in short. It’s funny how all that seems pointless after being dead. Then there was a sudden roar of the engine as somebody stepped on the pedal just before it hit me and carried me into the wall. At this point I am assuming my spine was broken as I couldn’t move; there was no pain, but an overwhelming sense of dread. My ears were ringing so I couldn’t hear and I was too scared to scream. I was lying on the pavement face up, so that I could see the last face before through the blinding headlights as a man with his jaws clenched backed up and rammed into me once again to finish the job. Then there was the darkness, coming in from all sides, something like if you had too much morphine. It’s numbing, calm and doesn’t matter how much you try to fight it, it always wins. So that’s what dying is, no white light, no life flashing before your eyes, so gates of heaven or hell,  just the darkness akin to too much painkiller.

But dying sucks. It’s one thing being not able to see your grand children, the Grand Canyon and the grand opera at Melbourne. But your plans cut short at the fancy of another human being is too much for me to stomach, and I want to going to find out the Son of a bitch who did it! And why? That’s the beauty of death, after death you don’t need to explain why.

By the time I got wind of what was happening my post-mortem was already done. Doctors said the cause of death was internal bleeding; they laid out the contusions, ruptured veins, broken bones and a plethora of other medical jargon but nothing about the Cause of my death. Probably that’s how my users felt like when I used to send them the report of why our software crashed. Life is funny that way, or rather life after death in my case. I didn’t know where to go after that, the cremation was tomorrow and I had the night to kill. Suddenly I had all the time in the world, no mails to read, no orders to be barked, no documents to be reviewed, no house to help out in, no dinner to eat, no Physiotherapist to worry about, no sleep to catch up on. So I wandered off as a ghost, into the city.

The city was nothing like I had ever seen before, it was no restaurants serving biryanis late night, no BPO cabs trying to run over everyone on the road, no neon lights flashing, no tall IT buildings trying to proclaim one better than the other. There was a calmness, a familiarity, a oneness with the city. I felt like we could talk, even though I could only listen. Listen to the young waiter throwing away his apron in frustration and others trying to tell him that this is going to pay for his college; the drunk crying for cheating on his wife, the whore swearing to one day get out of this, the traffic sub-inspector worrying about the his son’s football kit while taking bribe from all of them. The city was not about the debauchery and thieveries that they had me believe in the night, at night the city was the most moral and true to itself. I just wished why I had not seen this earlier, but then life is so restraining, choking even, but death …. Death is the ultimate liberty.

As I wandered in the city hearing one man’s talk after another, peeking in one woman’s window after another I realized it was the morning. About time they would burn my body. Burning my body seemed a total waste now. Now there were no communicable disease to ward off, no dangers of being haunted by zombies, no fire god to give offerings to. I am sure they would be a hungry lion or two in the city, that would have been better than a horde coming to watch me burn on a Thursday morning. But that was a ritual that would be done even though I don’t want it now. So I started walking towards it now that walking wasn’t tiring.

It was a small gathering, rag-a-tag army of white and most didn’t know each other thanks to my severe attempt to compartmentalize my life. More people had turned up from office though compared to my blood relatives; I didn’t know whether to think that as a triumph or a failure. This was a good place to start looking for my murderer. I was assuming my murder was personal and not a random hit-and-run like the police said it was. I had seen the eyes of my killer; those were someone bent on killing me. But everybody looked sullen, though most were because my death had inconvenienced them in some way. Some wanted some approvals for me, some to earn them money, some were just pissed because they were dragged here in the early morning of a workday, and some just wanted to be sad because it was expected of them to be in such occasions and were not to able to. The only 3 people I couldn’t read were my daughter, my husband and my best friend. If God was out there, he was one hell of a prankster. Someone spoke the word eulogy and there was uncomfortable silence as my people tried to wrinkle their noses to block out the smell of burning flesh. Divya, my colleague, my best friend and my mentee stepped forward after minutes of people looking at each other. She went on at some length to recount my contribution to the company, my handling of crisis situations, my being tough but fair etc. So that’s what my life was, being a well-oiled, smooth running part in a very big machine. There was silence again for a few minutes before my 16 year old daughter stepped forward but choked on her tears. Divya had to come and remove her. All this while my husband Naresh stood stone faced throughout, like he used to when he had too much weed.  I tried to get close to him to smell the weed on him, but I couldn’t. So that what my life’s concoction was – A few awards, one unhappy friend, and an unhappy daughter who was never close to me.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, Leo Tolstoy once wrote. Mine was no exception, it has it's own story. My husband, Naresh didn’t love me, and he made that amply clear when I caught him trying to clear the bill of a hotel through my credit card. He was not supposed to be there and nor was the young lolly who fell for his old school charm and Shakespeare lines, like I had, 20 years back. He had cried and begged and swore never to do this again and I knew that wasn’t true, but I agreed. Was I too busy to realize or too tired to even fight for his affection I never will know. But the woman in her 20s, standing right behind him in the White Saree was proof enough that he hadn’t changed? Was it him in the car, I don’t know; I need to investigate further.

Maybe it was him, the man in the dark colored sweatshirt with a cap over his head, grinding his teeth when he rammed the dark colored SUV into me. I needed to follow him. But what would he gain from killing me? I never objected of his philandering, never asked for love or comfort or companionship, the most I wanted from him was to pose as a happy couple in front of my daughter. So that she still has hope, and not grow up into a bitter women as me. In fact he stated to lose much, I was the earning member of house. He was a washed up writer whose last collection of poems had come 10 years ago, that too of poems he had written 10 years ago. He had a perennial writer’s block which he tried to remove from time to time with weed and young dumb women. Muses as he called them in front of his friends, who joined in with laughing at his joke. Perhaps they too thought it was only fair that their college heartthrob married to a limping, bitter, ice princess sometimes got the taste of the life that had waited him before he stupidly married me. I was too drunk that night to wait for a condom, and he was too chivalrous to suggest anything else when he found out I was pregnant. He picked me up from the way to college and next morning and took me to a Mandir before dropping me back to college. I had left home as a bachelorette and was married before the second lecture. I still remember the face of the girl who gasped when she found out and said this was right out of a romance novel. Now I don’t know whether she would have compared us to a tragedy or a farce?

After the tons of formalities he reached home and sank in the couch.  Signs of a guilty conscience? He sat there stoned for some time while I went to see what my daughter was doing. She had updated “At my mother’s cremation” on Facebook and was now checking the responses on her laptop, apparently two of her friends ‘liked’ it too, I couldn’t say what they liked, that I was dead or she bothered to get up in the morning for something as tasteless as watching a corpse burn.

I turned my thoughts back to Naresh, when I came back in the living room he wasn’t there. He was on a call; he in slow thoughtful speech confirmed his identity to the caller, verified that I was in fact dead and that he had the death certificate and the caller could come tomorrow to give him the cheque. I let out a chuckle when I realized what had happened. It was the life insurance company who had after months of dogging me finally insured me for 10 crores very recently, some underwriter would be fired because of this. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, cry that it was money after all, or laugh that my miserable life wasn’t cheap, in the end it was sold for 10 crores. Now he could finally go to Las Vegas like he had always dreamed and drink himself to death like ‘Leaving Las Vegas’. I began to understand why he had murdered me, it was the logical step. After 10 years he had finally become the man he was always destined to be – smart, dynamic and successful. In that very moment I was proud of him.

But instead of fist pumping or calling his new girlfriend about the Las Vegas plans, he dragged his feet to the most unlikely place, the small room he called his study. He hardly went there, maybe except to show off his collection of books or to play on his computer. But today he wasn’t doing either. He took out the crystal glass along the way that I had gifted him on our first marriage anniversary and poured out a large of Chivas Regal 18 year old ,again gifted by a friend of his on our 10^th marriage anniversary who didn’t know he had quit. And then he took out a pad and a pen and started writing.

“If winds can carry me to you, they would,

Or my love else perhaps if, they could.

Across the hate between us, they should.

To whatever world in now, you stood”

And then a tear drop mixed in the ink. It was been ten years since he had last drank, and ten years minus one day since he had cried.  It couldn’t have been him ….. <to be continued>