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

to refine. When people are surrounded by everything aesthetic, they begin to have a genuine, civilized exchange of thoughts and ideas! That is my dream for the DTC – that it will be so beautiful that the best minds will gather here to have free and fearless discussions about art, music, literature, governance, policy—’

Bhavani’s eyebrows rise internally. The good lady is clearly living in some sort of dreamworld.

‘But President Bhatti told us the Club has to toe the government line or they come for all your licences and permissions!’ he points out, cutting her off mid-speech. ‘All this free and fearless exchange of ideas won’t work with them! They’ll cut your water supply or something, madam!’

‘Oh that!’ She shrugs, her expression growing inscrutable. ‘That can all be managed.’

‘O really?’ Bhavani is greatly interested. ‘How, madam?’

She smoothens the folds of her firan carefully.

‘The IJP government is oafish, ACP. They’re crude and violent and just plain illiterate – but even the crudest minds can be sensitized and refined by consistent exposure to beauty, kindness and yogic meditation. Those are the three tenets on which I have built Chrysanthemum, my lifestyle brand.’

It sounds more like religion than a brand to Bhavani, but he nods enthusiastically. ‘O yes.’

‘People come into the store with money, but no taste. It has been my task to open their eyes … sensitize them to good aesthetics, to refinement, to class. Of course I use the word ‘class’ not in the crude, literal sense!’

‘Of course, of course.’

She fixes her clear glowing eyes on his sympathetic face.

‘I hope to do the same with the elite of Delhi! We began all wrong with the IJP government, I feel! We got their backs up. Most of them just have an inferiority complex because they’re small-town bumpkins who resent us for being well-educated and well-off for a hundred years or more! If we had been less patronizing and less snobbish and just … nicer generally – half of the nonsense that’s happening in this city and the country would never have happened!’

A vision of the Club as Urvashi Khurana would like it to be rises before Bhavani’s eyes. Scented candles, soft cushions, pools of water, the best wines, right-wingers and liberals appreciating Korean cinema or the latest Booker Prize–winning novel together in hushed voices, while the High Priestess of Beauty strides softly through her domain in robes of embroidered white, scattering goodness and light.

‘Wah!’ he declares. ‘Your vision is beautiful, madam!’

She smiles graciously. Then her tone grows a little matter of fact. ‘Instead of despising this one for being uncouth and that one for being a lala, if we give a few, judiciously chosen, influential or wealthy people out-of-turn memberships … educate them about beauty and civilized society, then at least all our licensing and financial woes will be sorted …’ She gives the tiniest of shrugs, letting her voice fade away.

Bhavani starts to understand the secret behind Chrysanthemum’s success, and why Urvashi Khurana is tipped to win the coming election. It is because she exists simultaneously in a beautiful fantasy la-la land – and a very practical lala land.

‘Madam, one last question: who supervised the placement of the balloons in the gym yesterday?’

Her chin rises. Her husband has clearly told her about the loose balloons that had floated up and obscured the camera.

‘I did.’

The words hang in the air like a challenge. Bhavani lets them.

Then he leans in and looks the beautiful woman in the eye. ‘Things are not looking good for you, madam,’ he says gently. ‘Or your husband. You decided that balloons should be part of the décor of Tambola Sunday. You instructed that four bunches of gas balloons be placed in four corners of the gym! One of those bunches floated up to block the sole camera in the gym at the exact moment when your husband was there alone, and could have poisoned the flask of Creatine Monohydrate Thampi had prepared for Leo. It is common knowledge that Leo had hit your husband hours before, after a very public disagreement. And now this song has surfaced! Along with evidence of your payouts! A very good case can be made by from joining all these pieces, that you, Urvashi Khurana, were having an affair with your Zumba instructor, that he started blackmailing you with some intimate photos or videos or something, that you finally told your husband about it, and then the two of you conspired to kill the blackmailer to save your standing in society and that you succeeded.’

She glares at him, white-faced, tight-lipped and absolutely furious.

He stares back. For a moment it seems to him that she may crack, may break down, may let him in and confide in him, but the moment passes.

‘Intimate photos?’ she says finally, with a small, scornful laugh. ‘Do you think I am a schoolgirl, ACP Singh? Or a pathetic, middle-aged woman having a midlife crisis?’ Her chin comes up proudly. ‘I’m an independent, successful, self-made businesswoman and I think with my brain. I would never, ever put myself in somebody’s power like that! And as far as your four bunches of balloons are concerned, anybody with even a minimal knowledge of Chrysanthemum’s design principle would know how fiercely committed I am to four-cornered symmetry! It is at the core of all my designs!’

He sighs and sits back. ‘So it is your stated position that you were not being blackmailed?’

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘And if you do your homework properly, you will find that I have been donating money to Badshahpur for decades, much before Leo Matthew arrived on the scene.’

This is brand new information for Bhavani. He can’t stop his mouth from falling open.

‘O really?’

‘Yes, really,’ Urvashi retorts, faint triumph in her voice. ‘Do check. And check my WhatsApp history with Leo too. He has sent me several songs – not just this one. Our conversations were almost exclusively about music and dance and exercise.’

‘We will do that at once,’ Bhavani says. ‘My apologies if I have in any way offended you