Seduced by Murder (2 page)

“Hello? Vishal?” The urgency in her voice brought me back.

I composed myself and said calmly, “Yes, Aditi. This is

Vishal.”

“You recognised me!” she said, evidently pleased.

“Lucky guess. Everything okay?”

She sounded distressed.

“Something terrible has happened, and I didn’t know whom to call.”

“What happened?”

“Sunil’s elder brother was found murdered at our farmhouse an hour ago. No one knows what to do.”

Sunil was her husband, the man for whom she had dumped me. All three of us had been classmates in college.

“Have you informed the police?”

“Yes, Sunil has just called them.”

“Okay. Everyone else safe?…Okay. Give me your address. I will be there as soon as possible.”

T
he farmhouse was in the suburbs, about sixty kilometres from the city. The uphill road meandered dangerously, with a steep fall on one side and a rocky cliff on the other. Pranay winced when I overtook a police jeep in front of us, on a particularly narrow stretch of the road. I could feel my Honda City dangle in the air for a few heart-stopping seconds, before it screeched back to the road and zoomed ahead.

Pranay screamed, “Easy dude! You want the police to pull you over? That would delay us further!”

“Where do you think they are heading, Sherlock?”

One phone call from Aditi, and nostalgia was pulling my mind faster than quicksand dragging mating hippos.

I swerved the car at a sharp right angle, resulting in a four-wheel drift that made the tyres screech. Pranay made another attempt at conversation. He likes to talk when he gets nervous.

“She is the same dame, right?”

Pranay was twenty-nine years old, a year elder to me by birth, and several years younger to me personality-wise. He had joined me as a partner at Hunt Detective Agency. It was an arrangement in which I spent my time and money handling affairs of the office, he…well, spent it.

He used to be on my team when I worked in an American IT company. After my MBA, I had pursued the dollar dream, worked eighteen hours a day, over achieved my targets and became the youngest general manager in the history of the company. In the first six months of my job, I had been motivated by the ambition to prove worthy of Aditi. She liked her man to be successful. After she dumped me, I joined the bandwagon of workaholics, becoming a part of the matrix where each day began with a phone call over coffee; and each night ended in a pub, entertaining some client. Life had become some kind of profound competition, where my emotional loss was substituted by my professional success. I became a part of what they call the rat race.

It would have continued so, making me the stereotypical young, obese vice president who has a heart attack at thirty-five, and then finds solace in a hefty bank balance, a model wife, and two luxury apartments.

Fortunately, the great recession of 2008 happened, and I was asked to sack a couple of team members. Now, there are a few dominant personality traits that guide my actions. One of them is an exaggerated sense of accountability for people or things I am entrusted with. Aditi used to call it my Samurai Code of Honour. I refuted the company’s decision, threatening to quit if any of my team members were terminated. I was confident that they would not risk losing me. I was wrong.

I gave my team members positive recommendations, and we parted. One of the sacked employees was Pranay, the technical advisor in my erstwhile team. We used to get along well, so it was only natural for him to move into my apartment to save on the rent. The reason why Pranay had become one of my better friends could be attributed to him possessing the
rare talent of sitting with me over drinks, without feeling the need to fill the silence with mindless chatter.

With my new unemployed status, I suddenly had time. Lots of it. Pranay and I decided that we needed a break for introspection purposes, and zeroed in on Goa. We were sure that a few weeks of sea breeze and sunshine was what we needed to clear our minds.

Pranay managed to procure a shack on a beach. This turned out to be the wrong course of action, as a substantial part of our holiday was spent lying intoxicated on the beach, with a bunch of French people who subscribed to the philosophy of Epicureanism. It was difficult to ponder over future prospects of your professional life, while marijuana lingered in the air, a bottle of Jack Daniel was always at arm’s length, and a couple of topless French girls applied buckets of sun lotion to their deliciously-toned bodies.

After a month of vegetating, I realised that I was too materialistic to spend the rest of my life waiting for spiritual enlightenment on a beach, and decided to come back. It was on the bus, during our journey back, that I had one of those epiphanies that led to my becoming a private detective. It must have been two in the morning, and all the other passengers were paying their tribute to Morpheus. I could hardly keep my eyes closed and I decided I was disillusioned and disgusted with the confinements of corporate life that demanded sycophancy as talent, and offered egotism as the reward. Translated, that meant the only other job offer I had in hand was at a salary reduced by thirty per cent.

The bus had stopped at one of those ghats. I looked out from the window, and was overcome by a sense of wonder. The pitch-black sky was lit across the horizon by millions of
coruscating stars. There was deep silence, and I suddenly felt a sense of empowerment. I felt content with being rather than becoming. There was a time when I used to enjoy nature. During the past years in the success marathon, I had become oblivious to its joys.

It was mesmerisingly peaceful. I felt intrepid, and was possessed by a sense of destiny that mocked my worries, which seemed insignificant as compared to the vast cosmos of opportunities that existed before me.

What was I worrying about? I was born to die anyway. As I sat in the lap of nature with my new-found power, I suddenly remembered my maternal uncle’s will. The old man had been my idol and used to run a detective agency in Bhopal. As a teenager, I used to visit him during the summer vacations. I had distinct memories of sitting in his one-room office, and being regaled by tales of his cases.

The pattern was the same. He used to recall a case, and lay it in front of me. I was supposed to guess who the culprit was. When I got it right, he used to make a big fuss over me. Enthused by his encouragement, I used to promise myself that I would be a part of the fraternity that restored order in people’s lives. It was the closest-guarded secret till I was fifteen or sixteen. Then one day I had given it up. I wondered why. The passions that I had indulged in as a boy, an eternity ago, did not feel silly now.

On the contrary, I was surprised how conveniently I had subdued my dreams and chosen a vocation, which had much to do with circumstances rather than free will. A month before I lost my job, a relative had called informing me that my uncle had died of kidney failure brought about by diabetes. He was sixty-six, and had died alone, and broke.

The only worthwhile possession he had had was the one-room office on the first floor of a rundown building. I was informed that he had left the property in my name, and its approximate valuation was eight lakh rupees. It’s not every day that you can gamble on someone else’s money to pursue your whims. In Goa, a French woman had said to me, “Everything happens for a reason. You may not know it yet, but wait and see. Do not doubt the wisdom of the universe.”

Could it be that the universe was sending me a signal now? I was suddenly excited. Pranay was asleep next to me when I jabbed his abundant midriff at two-thirty in the morning.

“Dude, I think we need to start a detective agency. You know…solve mysteries, create order from chaos and all that. What do you think?”

He replied with a thunderous snore. I took that as an omen. To cut a long story short, we joined as apprentices in one of the globe’s biggest detective agencies, or so they claimed. During the first two months of my training, I was oscillated between domestic, and corporate and banking fraud investigations – getting more training in mechanical gadgetry and corporate communications rather than the real stuff. As soon as the training period was over, I opted for domestic investigation. It seemed that I had made the correct decision as, very soon, I developed a reputation of being an effective resource; and finally, the director of the agency was allocating all the tough cases to me.

Eight months later, I had travelled to Bhopal and sold my uncle’s property, returned to Bangalore, taken a small office on lease and started my own private detective agency with Pranay and Aarti. Things were running pretty much to my satisfaction. It was all fine, until Aditi called that Sunday afternoon.

L
ost in thought, I almost missed the yellow hoarding, where Aditi had told me to take a turn. I pushed the brakes hard. Pranay’s upper body merged with the dashboard.

“Sorry, dude. You okay?”

“No, I am not!” He put his hand over his heart, and breathed in dramatically, “I feel a faint pain. Right here!”

Pranay suffered from a subdued form of hypochondria – courtesy his mother, who was some sort of quack, and owned a homeopathy clinic.

“Just your heart fluttering. I don’t see anything.”

“Uh … no, but it could be something internal. Feel this.” He put my hand on his chest, and looked at me in anticipation. “Do you feel this?”

“Feels like a lump. Could be breast cancer.”

The road was too narrow for a U-turn, so I reversed the vehicle into an arterial road next to the hoarding. Soon we arrived at a gate surrounded by a wall that was at least twenty feet high. The driveway took us past lawns and flower beds. I was soon in front of an enormous house that looked like it could house a family of two hundred.

I parked my car behind a red Porsche. I pressed the horn to give the bereaved family notice of my arrival. The front door opened. It was Aditi.

I got out of the car, and started walking towards the house. Each step was heavy, and my heartbeat had trebled. She looked different. She had let her hair grow, and had put on just the right amount of weight that accentuated her womanly curves. Her breasts were fuller, and hips rounder. The eyes were the same, black holes pulling me towards them.

She nodded to me in her idiosyncratic style. No enthusiastic wave; no superficial hug. She was called the ice queen in college. To everyone else she seemed callous and emotionally undemonstrative, but I had experienced the passion that existed beneath that serene exterior. She was wearing a yellow diaphanous negligee that stuck to her tall and statuesque frame like second skin, and gave me a glimpse of her round breasts. Behind me, Pranay gasped audibly.

I nodded back at her because I didn’t trust my voice. I saw she had been crying. The first and last time I had seen her cry was when her father had had a heart attack, just before we became lovers. Or rather, before she
decided
to take me as her lover.

I felt angry at myself for falling victim to this recurrent nostalgia.
She dumped you, you fool
. Her shapely pink lips curved into a faint smile as she approached me. I took a deep breath and said in a matter of fact tone, “Hi. Tell me what happened.”

She ushered me into the house. The grandeur of the hall made me feel under-dressed. The decor was obviously the work of a connoisseur, who knew how to achieve a pretentiously elegant effect.

I observed the scene before me. The setting was one of obvious melancholy, with various people sobbing in varying degrees of sorrow. I was pleasantly surprised to see everyone
weeping quite soberly. No one exceeded the decibel beyond which sorrow becomes hysteria. If I hadn’t known that a murder had been committed in that house, I would have thought they had just had a domestic squabble.

The controlled sorrow had an air of inevitability about it, as if the death was brought about by old age, or a prolonged terminal disease. Not the kind of grief I would have expected in a household that was still coming to terms with the murder of a family member. Seated on the divan sobbing silently, was the father of the deceased, Paras Kapoor. Even in his grief he looked regal. Sunil sat next to his father, trying to comfort him. On seeing me, his surprise was evident.