The Bestseller She Wrote (37 page)

After a quick glance to gauge if he was making sense and if what he was saying was sinking in, he continued, ‘While I was talking to Maya, Shreya called a few times. I thought she was calling me. But she was actually calling Sanjay. That too at 11.30 at night. No one calls the head of HR at that hour unless there is something very important and urgent. A few days later when I was mulling over what happened, it just struck me that I had used Sanjay’s phone to call Maya. And our passcodes are the same. That’s why, when I picked up his iPhone assuming it was mine, the passcode worked.’

‘How come both of you have the same passcode?’ Ramesh Karia stepped into the discussion and asked Aditya.

‘You need to ask him. I can explain mine. It’s 2309. 23rd September is Maya’s birthday. I think his is 23rd September because of the same reason. I know he was fond of her right from our college days. He had even proposed to her,’ Aditya said, stressing on the last sentence.

‘That was before she started seeing you,’ Sanjay countered.

‘Yes. It was before she started going out with me. And when he had proposed,’ he paused and looked at Sanjay, ‘. . . under the water tank, she had politely declined. They stayed good friends. But I didn’t imagine that he would be so fond of her as to keep her date of birth as his passcode; to mess up her life by attempting to sabotage her husband’s career and passion. Well done, Sanjay,’ Aditya said bitterly. He was beginning to get upset and it was showing. Diana looked at Sanjay, in anger.

‘Is this true, Sanjay?’ she asked him. ‘It comes as no surprise that you kept postponing our wedding date. Looks like you were hoping that you would be able to separate the two of them and then cast your dice.’

‘No, Diana. He is lying. It is not true at all. 2309 was just an arbitrary number which came to my mind.’

‘Why was Shreya calling you at midnight?’ she probed further.

‘I have no clue. I didn’t speak to her.’

‘You are such a liar Sanjay. Wonder how I got myself entangled with you,’ Diana said. She stood up from where she was sitting and went and stood right next to Aditya.

‘Can you explain this?’ Diana pulled out a copy of a 24000-rupee voucher and placed it on the table.

‘How would I know?’ Sanjay exclaimed. ‘It is signed by you.’

‘Yes it is, but I never signed it. I think you know that, Sanjay,’ she said, staring at him in anger.

‘It has been sent for payment processing from your office. Your office records prove that. Can you explain how Diana’s signature appeared there?’ Aditya queried.

‘And what were you doing in Goa with Shreya?’ Diana was furious.

‘Me?’ Sanjay asked. He had a sincere look on his face. ‘Why do you even ask? I didn’t go there with her.’

‘Let it be, Sanjay. Don’t bother pretending. We have a copy of the hotel bills and confirmation from the hotel. They are a big corporate client for the bank. So it was easy to pull strings and get information,’ Aditya lied.

‘The room is in her name. Isn’t that what you said?’ Sanjay asked him.

‘Yes. That’s what I said. The room was in her name but it was paid for using your credit card. I don’t know whether you were there with her in the same hotel,’ he paused. ‘In the same room,’ he added forcefully. ‘Or whether she had access to your card and paid using that, I can’t say. If I wanted to, I could have dug deeper and found out. But I didn’t want to raise any more muck on it, Sanjay,’ Aditya declared.

‘If it is true, you could lose your job on multiple counts,’ Tim stepped in. ‘For forging Diana Moses’ signature, for wilfully billing wrong expenses to the organisation and passing off a personal holiday as an official trip.’

Sanjay had no answer.

‘This is turning out to be a potboiler. Even better than the book,’ Anurag stepped into the conversation. ‘But Aditya, how did you figure out that it was his phone and not yours that you had called from that day?’

‘I was an idiot to not have figured it out the day all this happened. I only figured it out much later—the day Diana and I realised that there was something wrong with Shreya’s Goa voucher. After my discussion with Diana ended, I was brooding over the entire issue when Shreya called me. Her name flashed on my screen as Ram Kumar which is how it’s stored on my phone.

‘That’s when it came to me in a flash. The night I was speaking to Maya from Sanjay’s phone, Shreya had called. I recalled that she had called thrice and her name had flashed as Shreya. It never struck me at that time that had it been my phone, her name would never have flashed as Shreya. Once I figured it out, I checked my entire call list. There was no call made to Maya that night from my phone. It was not difficult to put two and two together. It was not my phone, period. I had called Maya from Sanjay’s phone. It couldn’t have been any other way.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Seems like a truckload of bullshit to me,’ Sanjay yelled. He looked at Shreya. ‘Count me out,’ he screamed. ‘I am out of here.’ He got up from his seat.

‘Leaving already? But the real story is yet to come,’ Aditya said. Sanjay started panicking. He looked at Diana and held her hand and pulled her. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. This guy here has gone nuts.’

‘Hold on,’ a voice thundered through the café. Everyone turned towards the source. ‘No one leaves the room till I say so,’ Ramesh Karia’s baritone resonated in the room. When the Commissioner of Police says something you have no option but to listen. Sanjay’s shoulders began to droop.

‘On your birthday, when you went to drop Maya and accidentally left your phone behind,’ Diana started. ‘Remember . . .?’

Sanjay just stared at her. She was beginning to cry. The feeling when you know that your love has failed you can be crippling. That’s exactly what Diana was going through.

‘There was nothing accidental about it. The phone was there with me, in my pocket. I didn’t give it to you intentionally. We wanted to, and were able to, see everything on your phone,’ she continued. ‘Your messages, your mails, your facebook posts and chats, everything. Those messages are on your phone right now. We challenge you to prove us wrong. The mail trail to Shreya with the plagiarised lines is there in your mail box. You didn’t even tell her that you copied those lines. You just told her to use the edits supposedly made by you to impress Aditya. And that morning when Aditya called off his relationship with Shreya and she came running to you to complain, you sent the plagiarised lines to her. Your exact message to her was, ‘Keep it. Use it under extreme circumstances.’

‘Your mail trail with the
Bombay Times
journalist, giving pictures of Shreya in the hospital with Aditya and the audio file which Maya presumably air-dropped to your iPhone for safekeeping just before she was taken to the hospital, are also there. The Dropbox link you sent the journalist is still active. Do you want me to show you that, Sanjay?’ Diana was in tears.

Aditya had a shattered look on his face. He had lost his family, he had walked away from the one he loved and now his friend of fifteen years had turned out to be a traitor. ‘There is no way you can now say you didn’t do it, Sanjay. The question is: why did you do this?’ he asked.

‘Aditya,’ it was Tim who spoke. ‘It is a bit difficult for me to comprehend what’s going on, but the fact is that you are not coming out clean in this entire episode. Yes, Sanjay may have fudged bills, may have tried to fix you for he had a soft corner for your wife and hated your success, but yet, your tryst with Shreya is something which cannot be just written off as a rendezvous between consenting adults.’

Aditya knew this was coming. Tim had been quite caustic about his relationship with Shreya. ‘Undoubtedly, Tim. Save this for later today. We will talk about it, after the event,’ Aditya killed the discussion. ‘I will surely give you an answer; I am not avoiding it,’ he reassured him.

Tim nodded and turned to Sanjay and asked him, ‘Any explanations here, Sanjay? I am definitely going to relay this conversation to the CEO. It is for him to decide your future in the company.’

‘These guys are lying, Tim. They are setting me up.’

‘Oh really?’ Diana spoke up. ‘Really, Sanjay, I never knew that you were such a venomous character. You tried to set up your own friend and pushed him down the path of adultery.’

‘No, Diana.’ Aditya turned towards her. ‘I don’t think you can push anyone towards adultery. It’s a state of mind one gets into. It was my own vanity. And to be fair, I pushed Sanjay into hiring her. Once she was hired, he sensed an opportunity to disgrace me. Maybe not immediately, but somewhere along the way, he did. The mutual interest that Shreya and I showed in each other just helped him smell blood and go for the kill. He was never the perpetrator of the adulterous relationship. He just fanned the fire and took advantage of it to drive a wedge between Maya and me by doing the
Bombay Times
article and further disgraced me by accusing me of plagiarism.’

‘You are just making me the convenient reason for your sins. You did what you had to, and now that you are facing the heat, you are conveniently passing the blame. Grow up!’ Sanjay was furious.

Aditya chuckled, more out of desperation and pain than humour. ‘Sanjay,’ he started off. ‘You are a friend, an old friend. Relationships that thrive for two decades are not written off in a hurry. If I have not called the cops to accuse you of compromising my writing and of fraud in your professional life it’s because . . .’

‘Oh?’ Sanjay cut in. He had an expression of ridicule on his face as he glanced at Ramesh Karia, before looking at Aditya.

‘Mr Karia is not here as Commissioner of Police. He is here as a patron. And he will not do anything on this, till either me or you or anyone else complains formally. So relax.’

Sanjay looked the other way with a wry smile on his face.

‘If I have not called in the cops it is only because I value those years,’ Aditya continued. ‘I don’t need to prove anything to you. And I don’t need you to own up. You know what you did. All I can say is that as of today, you have lost your dearest friend in me, your ardent supporter in Maya and the love of your life, Diana. You have lost almost everything you had. What more am I going to gain by getting you to confess? Unlike the courts of law, in matters of relationships, we all don’t look for evidence. We look for honesty. And that’s where you have failed miserably. All along I thought Shreya was using me, without realising that you were using her. Manipulating her from behind the scenes . . .

‘And Shreya,’ he said, turning to face her. ‘I am sorry. But I really loved you. You are old enough to judge what is right and what is wrong. But you made the choice of working with Sanjay against me. Maybe you did what you did without realising its impact or maybe you did realise it. In any case, I didn’t lie when I said I loved you. I just said loving you was inappropriate. You never loved me. The day I got to know that you went to Goa with Sanjay for the weekend break during your induction in Lonavla, despite the fact that we were in the thick of our relationship, I realised that.’

‘I was upset with you. You were planning the entire awards show without me,’ Shreya said, desperately.

‘And that justifies what you did? How lame!’ Aditya cried out. ‘My doubts were confirmed the day I saw that Sanjay had paid for the trip with his card,’ he said. ‘Now, I am sure our relationship was a mistake. I put my family at risk for you. It was not worth it. Actually nothing is worth putting one’s family at risk. I liked the time I spent with you. Thank you for those memories. I committed to you that I will make you a star—you are already a star. You cannot blame me for not keeping my promise. From after this event you are on your own.’

‘Come. Let’s go,’ he said to everyone in the room, and walked out of the café.

As he was striding out, Vaishali walked alongside. ‘Aditya, I know you well. It could not be the commitment made to Shreya. It has to be something more. What was it that made you wait for this day? You could have confronted everyone earlier.’

‘I am not a fool, Vaishali . I could have confronted these guys the day Diana and I figured out that something was wrong. Melwin only proved to me what I already knew. I chose today because it is a big day for Shreya. She won’t mess it up at any cost. Any other day, she would have walked out and maybe even dragged me into a legal suit. Sexual harassment cases are not easy to deal with. People pass judgements even before they investigate. But today, the odds are in my favour. The media is here, the readers are here, no one can contest my revelation. I have a winner all the way.

‘Any other day, had they gone to town on the plagiarism issue, I would have looked like a cheat. Anything I offered to say in my defence would have sounded like a reactive explanation. Today it will sound like a genuine mistake which I am correcting. I will emerge the hero in this. Today I have hit them the hardest. Both of them will spend their life under the realisation that I knew what they were doing, all along. Whenever they relive this incident in their life, they will always live under the ignominy of having come out as losers. Isn’t that a bigger punishment?

‘As far as my side of the story is concerned, Poonam Saxena is coming out with an exclusive issue on me and my books this Sunday in HT Brunch. I gave them the story as an exclusive. As we speak, it’s going into print. Shreya set out to write a bestseller. If I was convinced that what happened over the last two months was only her mistake, my approach would have been different. But I was equally responsible. It was my mistake as well. If we allow others to take advantage of us, we lose the right to cry when they do. I allowed Shreya to take advantage of me. And that made me vulnerable. Sanjay all along wanted to show me down. Jealousy at a personal and professional level can be dangerous. Sanjay exploited this vulnerability. The problem was me, Vaishali. Me. Why blame others?’ Aditya concluded.