Thriller *** IT ***

[Antar]

#1

‘You never teach life anything’. Great words from a great author!  I have no intention to start with this line from Marquez, but that is true, in essence. Leaning from the balcony of the rest house at the nestled in the forests near Bhopal, I straightened up and thought about the bombshell that I had dropped on the co-resident couple. Simply put, I had put in an indecent proposition for Dolly to walk into my room and thereby turn that sissy husband Tarun to a helpless cuckold. 

This is no way to start a narrative – I know that am rambling.

 

Let me try again!

Me, Rudra, a Chartered Accountant by training and (a considerably successful businessman as well) of 32 years of age, had my wife Lisa detected for leukemia for the previous five years. Her battle had taken us from super-specialty hospitals in Mumbai and Delhi to conventional shrines of all faiths, throughout India and to myriad forms of oracles and soothsayers as well. All in vain! If you have presumed that Life guarantees you satisfaction – then you have earned it – a swift and painful kick in the ass …. 

 

Six months earlier, Lisa had departed forever and I had been tossed aside like chaff from a cane juice vendor. 

 

‘Tcchhha!’ I threw away the burning cigarette with all the impotent rage I could muster against fate …

 

 

But remember, this is not the story of Lisa but of Dolly.

 

But then this is still the story of Lisa.

Wrong way to start again. I am still rambling.

 

As they say, let us start at the beginning. Let me preface with a little personal history. I was born in a small town of the then state of Bihar to a middle class family. Moved over to Mumbai to complete professional education as a Chartered Accountant and got into one of the Big Four firms upon completion. It was there that I had come across Dipak, who was an rising industrialist at that time. Like all first generation entrepreneurs, he was a strongly ambitious man with a high-octane drive. Although, the less charming features of his persona included arrogance and self-belief to the point of stubbornness. And pertinent to my narration is the fact that he had a lovely sister Lisa who I was to marry a couple of years after we had entered into a business partnership. 

As the Ganges was carrying away her last earthly remains, I felt the gentle caress of her fingers in the wind. She was smiling somewhere out there and telling me that she was freeing me from all our bonds. 

 

“No Lisa no! Our oath was togetherness for seven life times” I had cried out.

The apartment was just as it was when she had to be moved to the hospital for the last time. Catheter tubes, sterile gloves packets, disposable syringes and the plastic sheet on her bed.  I looked at these and tried to work up an emotion. There was none.

Timely advice from Dipak. “Get out of Mumbai. Go somewhere else. Anywhere for that matter. Just don’t get rooted in the flat. Drink. Dance. Do anything you feel like. Even mourn her, but not here. Just get out of here.”

As in a dream that stays with you I remember the sequence of looking up Seth Jaichand - an old acquaintance (who had professed eternal gratitude to me after I had saved him from the clutches of an unscrupulous brethren of my profession) and him suggesting that I could take residence in a sparsely used rest house of his company and my moving in there about four months back.

The rest house being located in a forest township some fifteen miles from Bhopal suited me fine, for it had the necessary quality of solitude. Double storied with the ground floor entirely taken over by the caretaker except for the common hall with a TV and dining table that could accommodate ten persons easily - at first glance it resembled a government inspection bungalow. The top floor had two suites, separated by a passage but with a common running balcony. Built in an era when the British influence was still pervasive, for the solid walls and the high ceilings bore testimony to its genesis; there were redeeming aspects viz. modern plumbing  - thank goodness for that. But when I had to beckon Bahadur, there was no calling bell but a curious system of a ghanti placed downstairs with a jerking rope leading to our balcony. 

In the two years that fate had given us together before it threw a spadeful of shit it my face; Lisa and I had been to several places where we had shared our intimacy and our dreams of the future; but never once a place like this “privacy as much as you want thank you albeit in a careworn moldy sixteen foot high ceiling room where an ancient Usha fan whirred on mindlessly. I know what she would have said. “Pack up”. 

I had stayed!

These days Dipak would be facetious. “I am ensuring that long term sources are being used for long term uses only and you just stay put”, he had said referring to one of my oft used advices. Our business partnership had flourished because of the inherent trust in each other and due to fate, which had directed us to profitable shores. Once astern, there had been no looking back. He had been just married to Ketaki Bhabi when we had started out. Two years later Lisa and me had tied the knot. And all through the five years of my fire-walking once Lisa’s leukemia had been pronounced, he had vindicated himself as a friend, brother-in-law and business partner – all without a blemish.

Did he ever feel guilty having fostered Lisa on my life? 

I would never know the answer to that. 

So I had stayed put in the rest house for the last four months (Jaichand was happy that at least there was someone occupying it). Life was simple. I woke up and again went to sleep with some odd meals and a sundry thought thrown in between.

This was till three days back when an obviously honeymooning couple came into the rest house and occupied the other suite on the first floor. I had a fleeting glance of them together and although I had a glance at the young woman from a distance, her face seemed vaguely familiar …

 

But suddenly, my world turned upside down.

It was the scent of the Devil.  IT had walked in unannounced.