[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 47: Rahul's Last Card

Poroma's perspective

He called at noon exactly. Rahul was always punctual when he wanted something.

Poroma had been sitting by the phone since ten, showered and dressed, her hair tied back tight. She had not slept. Some time before dawn, on the bathroom floor, she had done something she had never once done in nine months of his calls. She had gone into her phone's settings and switched on automatic call recording.

She let it ring three times. Then she picked up.

"Good girl," Rahul said.

His voice was the same. Low, amused, intimate, as though they were still lying in bed together. Hearing it, her body did something she could not stop: a small involuntary clench low in her stomach, the old Pavlovian answer to that voice. She hated it. She closed her eyes and let it pass.

"How did you know I'd watched it?" she said.

He laughed. "I didn't. You just told me." A pause. "You never watched it before, did you? Nine months. You never had the courage."

She said nothing.

"So now you've seen yourself. How was it? You look good on camera, Poroma. I've always said so."

"What do you want, Rahul?"

"Straight to business." He sounded pleased. "All right. I'll be straight with you too. I imagine you know I'm having a bad month."

"I know you're not answering your phone. I know you told your guard to call the security officer if I came."

"That was for your protection. There are people watching me just now. Lawyers. It wouldn't have looked good, a married woman crying at my gate." His voice cooled a degree. "Your husband has been busy. Did you know that?"

"Ranjeet doesn't tell me anything. He hasn't spoken to me in nine days."

"Then let me tell you. Your wimp of a husband went over Patel's head and wrote to Mumbai. He's accused me of logging into his email and changing his contracts. He went crying to Gupta. Gupta's written to the MD. There's a Compliance team flown in from head office going through fourteen months of my expenses with a magnifying glass, and Patel isn't taking my calls either." He breathed out. "I've been suspended pending inquiry. Since Monday. The same Monday your papers came, actually. Funny, no?"

Poroma sat very still.

Ranjeet had done that. Quiet, careful Ranjeet, who had sent his contracts to Rahul for approval for months without a word of complaint. Who she had told, in their own living room, that maybe he really had made mistakes. That Rahul was only trying to help.

"Did you do it?" she asked. "Change his contracts?"

Rahul was silent for a moment. Then he laughed again, softly.

"Does it matter now?"

It did. It mattered more than anything. Because if Rahul had done it, then he had been working to destroy Ranjeet from the day he walked into the Kolkata office, months before he ever met her at the shoe shop. And she had been sitting in her living room with her blouse open, feeding her son, telling her husband the man who was destroying him was a good man.

"What do you want?" she said again.

"Here's what's going to happen," Rahul said. "Your husband is going to write another email to Compliance. A short one. He's going to say that he's remembered something. That during the period in question, he voluntarily gave me his email password, so that I could review and correct his contracts directly while he was travelling. On the boss's instructions. And that the changes I made were improvements, which he approved, and he simply forgot. That he regrets the confusion and withdraws his complaint."

Poroma felt something cold move down her spine.

"That would make it legal," she said slowly. "What you did."

"It would make it a misunderstanding. And then Gupta's letter is just an unhappy client, and unhappy clients get a discount and go away. And then I come back to work, and Patel stops avoiding me, and everyone forgets." His voice warmed again, coaxing. "And then I delete the file. All copies. I'll even let you watch me do it. And I'll never call you again. You'll never see me again, unless you want to."

"And if he won't?"

"Then I'll send it to him." Very simply. "The whole thing. Not just the sex. He's seen enough of that, I know. The part where you tell me how you'll fight me for nine minutes so he'll forgive you. The part where you tell me you want it more than you've ever wanted anything." A pause. "He loved you because he thought you were tricked, Poroma. Don't you want him to keep thinking that?"

She could not breathe.

"And then I'll send it to that judge," Rahul continued, as calmly as a man reading a menu. "Chakraborty. A mother who plans her own public humiliation to deceive her husband. I don't think your supervised visits survive that, do you? And then—" he let it hang for a moment "—I think your father might like a copy. The Commander. He always said Ranjeet wasn't good enough for you, didn't he? You told me that. In this bed, actually. He'd be interested to see what you turned out to be good enough for."

"You wouldn't send it to my father."

"I won't need to," Rahul said gently. "Because you're going to go to your husband and make him write that email. You've always been able to make him do things, Poroma. You made him accept me. You made him say thank you for it. You'll find a way."

"How long do I have?"

"The Compliance hearing is a week from Friday. The email has to be in before that." His tone changed again, became almost tender. "I'm not a monster, Poroma. I was good to you. You were happy with me. Weren't you happy?"

She thought of the room on the laptop screen. The camera on top of the wardrobe. The wink.

"You filmed me without my knowledge," she said. "In your bedroom. On the first night."

"I filmed us. It was beautiful. I wanted to keep it."

"You told Sutapa to delay the stopwatch. On the video. You say it."

"Poroma." A note of impatience now. "You're trying to be clever and you're not built for it. Yes, it's on the video. Everything is on the video. That's what makes it valuable. Do you think I'm worried about Sutapa? Sutapa does what she's told."

"Not any more," Poroma said, before she could stop herself.

There was a short silence on the line.

"What does that mean?"

She had not meant to say it. She had heard, through Didi, from the uncle downstairs, from somewhere, that Sutapa had been seen at the Ballygunge flat. She did not know what it meant. She only knew that the world had been moving for nine days and she had not been part of it.

"Nothing," she said. "It means nothing."

"Then don't say it." His voice was quiet and flat now, the voice he had used once in his flat when she had refused him and he had pinned her wrists above her head. "A week from Friday, Poroma. Don't make me do something we'll both regret."

The line went dead.

She sat for a long time with the phone in her lap.

Then she opened the call recordings folder. There it was. Unknown number, 12:00, 11 min 47 sec. She played the first ten seconds to make sure. Good girl. His voice filled the empty kitchen, and she switched it off quickly and sat shaking.

She did not know much about the law. But she knew what she had just heard. A man demanding that her husband lie in a corporate investigation, or he would release an intimate video of her made without her consent. To her husband, to a judge, to her father.

She thought about Fatima, the lawyer, whose name was on the custody papers. The notice under the IT Act that Fatima had sent to Rahul's address, which Rahul had obviously received, because he had said lawyers.

She thought about doing what Rahul asked. Going to Ballygunge. Knocking on the door. Ranjeet opening it, and her standing there, and saying: Please. Write this email. For me. For us. And Ranjeet, who had always done what she asked in the end, looking at her with those tired brown eyes.

Except he would not. She knew that now, the way she knew the colour of her own children's eyes. Whatever had happened to Ranjeet in the last nine months, the gym and the running and the fighting classes and whatever had made him go over Patel's head to Mumbai, he was not the man who would write that email any more. Not for her. Not for anyone.

And even if he would, she realised, she would not ask him.

That was the strange part. She sat at the kitchen table and turned the thought over, and it held. She would not ask him. Not because she was afraid he would refuse. Because she had asked him for enough. She had asked him to forgive her for a game she had rigged. She had asked him to accept her lover. She had asked him to say thank you for it. She had asked and asked for ten months, and taken and taken, and every single thing she had taken had been built on the lie in that file.

She was not going to ask him for one more thing.

Which left only one thing. The thing she had been running from since four o'clock that morning on the bathroom floor.

Ranjeet would see the video. One way or another. Rahul would send it, or a court would order it produced, or it would come out at the hearing. The only question left was who would tell him what was on it.

Rahul, gloating, in an email with an attachment.

Or her.

Poroma looked at the crayon drawing she had brought down from Nupur's room and propped against the sugar jar. Four stick figures. The tall one with the moustache. The one with the huge blue eyes coloured so hard the paper had torn.

She was not ready. She did not know if she would ever be ready. She did not even know how to begin.

But she knew who she needed first.

She scrolled through her contacts to a name she had not called in almost a year. Not since the last argument, about the Aya, about the baby's weaning, about everything. Her mother had said you're not yourself, Poromita, something is wrong with you. And she had hung up on her.

Ma.

She pressed it before she could change her mind.

It rang twice. Then a voice she had known all her life, crisp and surprised and instantly alert, the voice of a woman who had spent forty years in hospital corridors being woken by bad news.

"Poromita? What's happened? Are the children—"

"The children are fine, Ma." Her voice broke on the second word, and then she could not stop it. "Ma. I've done something terrible. Something really terrible. And I don't know how to fix it. I need you. Please. Can you come?"

There was a silence on the line, and then her mother said, very quietly, "Your father and I will be on the first flight from Vizag tomorrow morning."