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

‘Take Bhatti sa’ab’s basket, PK,’ Bhavani tells his subordinate. ‘And dig up some more vegetables for him. Was it carrots you were wanting, sir?’

‘Beets,’ grunts the old man. ‘They’re damn good here. Red as blood.’ He addresses PK, ‘You understand beets? Chukkandar.’

Padam Kumar, resplendent in a pink Rajasthan Royals jersey today, nods, but not very happily. Squatting resignedly down in the vegetable beds, he plunges the khurpi into the beetroot patch. As he inhales the sweetish, overripe scent of organic compost rising from the damp earth, he shudders quietly. Tea leaves and eggshells and rotting banana peel and jhootha leftovers and what-not! Why people just can’t use honest, government-backed urea fertilizer is beyond his comprehension.

Meanwhile, Bhavani and Bhatti sit down on a stone bench under the jacaranda tree.

‘I still say it was suicide,’ Bhatti maintains stubbornly. ‘Or if it wasn’t, then Behra Mehra did it.’

‘O really, sir? The general? Why, sir?’

There is a longish silence.

‘My stint at the Home Ministry didn’t end too well,’ Bhatti says finally. ‘My boss and I didn’t see eye to eye. My values were secular, while hers were rabid.’

Bhavani blinks. Bhatti sa’ab is clearly going to be taking the long route home. So be it. He settles his buttocks as comfortably as he can upon the stone and stares down at his knobbly knuckles, radiating sympathetic attentiveness.

‘Anyway, I had hoped, after serving my time in the seething snake pit that was North Block, to retire in peace and have some good times with friends and family here in the DTC. I love this place – I grew up here and I suppose I idealized it when I was too busy to visit it regularly.’

‘And now, sir?’

‘And now, ACP, I realize that every paradise has a snake in it.’

Bhavani looks about the garden perplexed.

‘Snake, sir?’

‘Yes! There was a snake in the Garden of Eden and there is a snake here too!’

He stares at the policeman, panting a bit. The slightly obsessive gleam in his eyes makes Bhavani speculate uneasily about paranoid delusions and early onset dementia.

He nods soothingly. ‘Understood sir!’

‘No, you haven’t understood anything,’ Bhatti says irascibly. ‘Let me explain properly! We hold elections for the post of Club president once every two years. Traditionally, the presidency alternates between the defence chaps and the bureaucrats. So it was the faujis’ turn this time, and that slick sycophant Behra Mehra was more or less the agreed-upon candidate, damn his eyes! He’s a big darling of the press, a great war hero – Amitabh Bachchan played him in the disgracefully jingoistic Jhelum Bilge. So he was sitting around smugly, waiting for me to bugger off while he wrote his acceptance speech and planned his tie and socks combination, when Urvashi threw her hat into the ring and queered the pitch!’

He gives a dry chuckle of laughter. It’s an odd, gleeful laugh.

‘She doesn’t give a damn about our alternating fauji-and-civil tradition! And she has some bloody good plans too! Tax-saving ideas her hubby’s come up with, and a brilliant scheme for a new rain-harvesting plant. The fact that Chrysanthemum just received a fifty-crore investment helped sway the voters in her favour too! Naturally Mehra’s chaddis got into a twist!’

He stares at the rows of vegetables pushing quietly upwards in the winter sun, and slowly his face darkens.

‘Unfortunately, Urvashi’s husband, like the husbands of so many other good-looking, capable women, is her weakest link. And so Behra Mehra and his supporters, crafty trench fighters that they are – launched an attack on her, through him. They started taking Khurana out for drinks and suggested to him that she was having an affair with our dead boy on the bench press.’

Bhavani nods sombrely. ‘Yes sir, we heard about that-all, a little. You suspect that these people wound Khurana up like a cuckoo clock till he went cuckoo and killed Leo in a fit of jealousy, sir?’

‘Well it sounds terribly melodramatic when you put it that way,’ Bhatti admits, ‘but now that you say that it is murder, after all – that’s my theory, yes. My theory B, I mean. My theory A remains suicide.’

‘So the snake in this particular paradise is …?’ Bhavani murmurs.

‘Mehra, of course!’ Bhatti explodes, bits of spittle flying out of his mouth and hitting a startled butterfly. ‘The so-called hero of the so-called surgical strikes! He struts around like he polished off a nest of terrorists himself, but all these generals do is send out young men to die, while they themselves sit safely in Army HQ, massage the egos of their political masters, strike heroic poses before the press cameras, and negotiate fancy posts for themselves post-retirement in exchange for agreeing to reduce the pensions of their brother officers!’

Bhatti’s voice has risen to a squawk and his Adam’s apple is bobbing alarmingly.

Bhavani attempts to soothe him. ‘Sir, the surgical strikes are well documented—’

Bhatti’s eyes bulge. ‘Pakistan has never acknowledged them! They say they never happened! Never!’

‘Yes, but we are not Pakistanis na, sir,’ Bhavani points out gently. ‘We are Indians.’

‘You’re a fool,’ Bhatti says bluntly. ‘If that chap becomes DTC president, this whole place will be overrun by uncouth Gujarati riff-raff, wearing chappals and pyjamas and demanding we only serve veg food …’

He rants on in this vein for a while. Bhavani lets him. Padam Kumar, still industriously harvesting the beetroots, thinks privately that the defence minister is right – the DTC is a den of anti-nationals.

When Bhatti finally stops, Bhavani says gently, ‘Sir, but even if Mehra instigated Khurana, the point is that, according to your theory B, Khurana is only the actual murderer, sir.’

Bhatti stares at him with glazed eyes for a while, panting lightly. Then he continues as though Bhavani hasn’t spoken at all.

‘On top of that, he’s constantly harassing the girl who works at the Daily Needs here! Sweet, simple child, young enough to be his granddaughter! It started when his wife was alive and her husband was around! Now his wife is conveniently dead and the husband has