Club You to Death by Anuja Chauhan (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📗

back for my ordination ceremony, I couldn’t recognize him, men! His hair was long, and he had this accent, and he moved differently – the dancing had opened up something inside him! He was different inside his head too – he said watching people spend his entire month’s salary on a bottle of wine on the cruise ships had changed the way his brain was wired. He was nicer in some ways – but he was also …’ Fr Victor’s voice dips, ‘darker in some ways. It troubled me.’

He goes quiet for a while, seeing things they can only sense.

‘I spent the day I received my holy orders feeling jealous of my best friend. I resented the amount of money he was clearly earning, his dashing looks, his expensive clothes, the motorcycle he showed up on, his casual sexual conquests – not that he boasted of them or anything, but I could sense a certain smugness in him. It made me feel small on what should have been my big, glorious day. We fought.’

He falls silent. Outside, the basketball game seems to be getting more boisterous.

‘Rax tried to stop it, but not wholeheartedly. He is essentially a mischief-maker – the kind of person who enjoys it when people around him fight. The Lord makes some people like that. Lambu was hurt and angry. I was self-righteous and envious – both terrible things for a priest to be. It was horrible.’

‘But it got better,’ Kashi says.

Fr Victor nods gratefully. ‘Yes! We lost touch … six years went by … but I remembered Lambu in my prayers every single day! Perhaps, he too thought of me … Rax was the only point of contact between us, and Rax … is Rax. “Blessed are the peacemakers” was a psalm he’d always laughed at! Just enjoying the importance of being the guy in between, and doing nothing to heal the schism! Anyway, then I was transferred back here and one blessed day, out of the blue, Lambu came to see me. He said he knew a lot of rich people who wanted to do good works – donate money and volunteer and so on. He said he wanted to contribute in some way too; BCV was his home and that Rax and I were his family.

‘I was so relieved I can’t tell you, men! My prayers to the Lord to heal the rift between Lambu and me had finally been heard! And then, what blessings poured down on us from above! Lambu’s clients were generous – too generous! We have done so much good work with the money he has been sending us! The new wing for the younger boys, the laptops for the senior boys, the new basketball courts … it has all happened through Lambu’s donors!’

Bhavani Singh puts down his teacup. ‘Would it be possible to see your list of donors, Father Victor?’

It is a very pale, taut-jawed Kashi Dogra who arrives at Bambi Todi’s 6, Aurangzeb Road home that evening. The guards at the gate aren’t impressed when he emerges from a ramshackle UberGo – they make him wait for a while. Finally, after a short exchange on the intercom with somebody inside, their manner changes and they allow him in with a deferential bow. He strides quickly through the familiar driveway and garden and into the portico, pressing the bell above a massive marble Ganesha impatiently.

Still as smug and loathsome as ever, he thinks as he surveys the Ganesha with undisguised hostility. They have a history – at the age of eight he had knocked the trunk off that thing with a cricket ball, and it had to be stuck back with Araldite. The faint crack is visible even now. Bambi’s mother had pretended not to care, but she has disliked him ever since – which is cool, the feeling is mutual. He hopes she isn’t home; he really doesn’t want to meet her or drink any of her foul mocktail concoctions. All he wants is a quick, no-bullshit conversation with Bambi. She must be home – there’s no way they’d have let him in if she wasn’t.

She is. She answers the door herself, dressed in a Red Riding Hood–type flannel dressing gown, loosely tied over a short white nightie that leaves her smooth, creamy thighs bare. She beams at him, looking more like a cinnamon-sugared cupcake than ever. Kashi struggles to hold on to his anger.

‘Oh my God! Kashi Dogra in the house!’ She holds out her arms in enthusiastic greeting. ‘How long has it been since you came ho—’

‘Can we go up, please?’ he cuts her off abruptly. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Oookay.’ Bambi pulls a face, then grabs his wrist and leads him up the marble staircase. ‘C’mon! I’ve redecorated since you were last here – what d’you think?’

She throws open her bedroom door and turns to him with a smile. He registers a cool mintiness where there once used to be a lot of hot pinkness, then locks eyeballs with her.

‘Was Leo Matthew blackmailing you?’ he asks quietly. ‘Why? And don’t even try to lie to me – you know I’ll know at once.’

Staring down at her with angry, entitled eyes, he watches as a live, breathing girl turns into a statue. She goes so stony and still that for a moment, Kashi is reminded of the marble Ganesha downstairs. Suddenly scared, he gives her a little shake.

‘Bee!’

‘Hmm?’

‘Talk to me!’

She blinks. Her eyes lose that scary blind look and focus on him – which should be good – except that they’re blazing with anger.

‘Why?’ She gives him a little push. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Another little push. ‘What makes you think you can just barge into my house, and demand I tell you stuff I haven’t told a single human soul?’ It’s turning into a series of little pushes punctuating her words, each slightly harder than the one before. ‘What makes you so special, huh?’

Backed against the closed door now,