Pretty Vile Girl

By Rickie Khosla

Everything she touched turned to gold, everything she said turned to scandal, everyone she wanted out of the way...died.

Beautiful, talented and wildly sexy, Jazmeen is Bollywood's most in-demand starlet, and in a relationship with to one of the country's most powerful politicians. Even though she's known for her outrageous candour in interviews, no one could guess at the dark secret she's carried for years. And no one will escape her vengeance, not even the prime minster.

Following her journey from her loving family to an orphanage run by a sadistic matron, from the fringes of the Mumbai underworld to the casting couches of Bollywood and beyond, Rickie Khosla crafts a racy, pacey and explosive debut about a woman who'll do anything to settle scores and get what she wants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9789386950246

Book preview

ONE

1

Hair Today and Nowhere Tomorrow

Six years ago

She still remembered the morning she had stepped out of Mumbai Central with the fake Louis Vuitton suitcase she’d bought from Lajpat Nagar. It was the first day of the dreaded monsoon. She had never seen that kind of rain in her entire life—incessant, colossal, rampaging. In her childhood dreams in Faridabad, she had always imagined herself stepping into glittering Mumbai in style, with the poise and grace of Madhuri Dixit in a chiffon suit from Dil Toh Pagal Hai. Instead, the lashing of gallons of water on her crepe kurta had reduced her to a bawdy Mandakini in Ram Teri Ganga Maili, if Mandakini had been drowning in brown filth rather than enjoying a virginal Himalayan stream.

The first person she had ever spoken to in her new city was an autowala. The man had communicated almost entirely with her bosom. She had been more amused than angry, especially when the man had refused to take his fare when they reached her destination. He had even helped her with her heavy suitcase as he slowly climbed the stairs behind her, his eyes not once moving from the imprints that her black underwear made inside the wet, white tunic.

The next few months had seen the same struggle that every independent young girl trying to gain a foothold in the City of Dreams is destined to endure. Many people see Mumbai like a prostitute selling her wares at a street corner—it is, after all, a city that is willing to be whatever you want it to be, depending upon how loaded your wallet is. To the rest, it is no more than a voiceless pauper, destined to be continually trampled under a million uncaring feet. But that wasn’t so to her. To her, Mumbai was no whore or starveling. If anything, the megapolis was a teacher, eager to part with invaluable lessons on life at the mere asking. And she was willing to be its pupil, imbibing all that came her way, analysing the information, and then coming back for more.

One of those lessons had been the name she had chosen for herself. A new identity in a new city.

‘Full name, with spelling!’ spat the woman behind the teeming BEST bus-pass counter, not even bothering to look up at the pretty girl facing her.

‘Jazmeen. J-A-Z-M-E-E-N. No surname,’ she answered. Her confidence belied that it was the first time she had called herself that in public.

It was not the name she’d been born with.

The new name originally belonged to a woman she had destroyed back in Faridabad some years ago. A monster named Jasmine Nagra. She hated the name as much as she had despised the woman who bore it. And yet she had decided to adopt it. She wanted it to serve as a constant reminder of the demons of the past she had left behind. Of why she needed to keep running away from them for as long as she lived.

Far, far away.

Of course, she had tweaked the name slightly to make it her own. To make it a bit masaledaar for Mumbai. ‘Jazmeen’ sounded stylish. Sexy. Catchy. Tasty. Like some spiked lassi served at a posh lounge.

Decidedly better than Deepika Ahluwalia, the name Jazmeen had been known as for the first nineteen years of her life.

In three months, Jazmeen found a job at a hair salon in Chinchpokli, Lal Bagh. The establishment was hardly top class, but its location was great, situated right by the ITC Grand Central Hotel. The salon was rather clownishly called Hair and There Beauty Parlour. When Jazmeen joined it, there were no customers to be found, neither here nor there. The owner was a 60-year-old rotund Punjabi woman with pencilled eyebrows and shoulder-length, hennaed hair. She had a sunny disposition, and in spite of the emptiness of the salon, a generous bank balance on account of a legacy from a dead husband. Her name was Leena Bindra.

At first sight, Leena Aunty, as she liked to be called, fit the bill of someone who spent all her time flitting from one kitty party to the next, not someone who ran a small business. Reality was not much different—Leena Aunty may not have had too many kitty parties to attend, but she was not much of a businesswoman either. She had started her beauty parlour with great expectations (and a bountiful grant from her benevolent daughter) a decade ago, but had failed at turning it into a success. Success, after all, involved hard work and creative planning, two attributes almost entirely missing from Leena Aunty’s makeup kit. The dream of having the most immaculate salon in town had long been abandoned. No wonder, then, that her parlour usually had only flies and spiders lounging in its air-conditioned confines. A fact that always made Leena Aunty a trifle despondent.

But, at long last, Leena Aunty had felt that she had made an advantageous decision for her parlour. She had hired Jazmeen as soon as she had laid eyes on her.

Leena Aunty had kicked out her previous assistant at the parlour just a couple of days earlier. That girl used to smell, whine and steal—the most lethal combination in an employee. And, to add insult to injury, she also had an infuriating nasal voice that grated on Leena Aunty’s nerves like nothing else. After a nasty skirmish over a missing shampoo bottle, Leena Aunty had finally shown her the door, inconvenient though it was. When the tall and attractive Jazmeen, with her bouncy hair, impressive figure, and easy, confident tongue, knocked on the parlour’s glass door looking for a job a couple of mornings later, Leena Aunty had thanked her luck and Wahe Guru above in equal measure. She had smelled immense potential in Jazmeen immediately. After all, what more did a middle-class rotund woman want than to look alluring, and who better to make her just that than a young, alluring girl herself? So, without much ado, Jazmeen had been hired, and at a relatively generous salary too.

Within just a couple of weeks of hiring Jazmeen, Leena Aunty had started to revel at her far-sightedness of taking in such an unknown, untested Punjabi kudi. And that too, purely on a hunch! She was delighted by the new girl’s charms. She liked that Jazmeen was impish but deferential, and hardworking but not servile. They had similar tastes in films, fashion and food. It was almost uncanny how much their preferences matched!

Jazmeen already had a natural flair for makeup, hair and skin. Those matters had been of great interest to her even during her teens when she didn’t have a penny to indulge in them. But even then, old issues of Femina and Cosmopolitan were easy to come by, and those beauty Bibles had informally trained her on aesthetics related to personal grooming, clothes and accessories. Later on, just months before she had left Faridabad for good, formal training had come by way of a short stint at a local parlour where she had worked as an apprentice without pay. It had made Leena Aunty’s job of showing her the ropes considerably easier.

Seeing an impeccably attired and coiffured Jazmeen around every day, with an easygoing friendliness in her demeanour and an assured deftness in her work, Leena Aunty, too, started to take more interest in her parlour. The presence of two highly presentable, eminently deft and charmingly chatty women manning the salon started to have an impact. Soon, those women in the locality, loaded with time to kill and money to burn, that Leena Aunty had always desired to see in her parlour, started to walk in. They told their friends, and business began to boom, and that made Leena Aunty very excited She had never imagined that her small business had so much potential! She wanted more.

Thankfully, her assistant had ambitious plans for the parlour too.

‘There must be some way for us to increase business in a big way, don’t you think, Aunty?’ Jazmeen said one night as the two women sat at the counter counting notes.

‘How?’

‘The ladies are already quite happy with us...’ Jazmeen continued.

‘Yes, you are right. After all, everyone likes to look good these days.’

‘Yes, Aunty. Everyone likes to look good these days, not just the ladies…’

Leena Aunty continued to count a stack of fifties but, suddenly, the pace of swiping notes from one hand to the other slowed, and then stopped entirely. She looked at Jazmeen with the gleam of a brand new idea.

‘I know what we should do!’ she said excitedly to her assistant.

Within months, the large hoarding above the glass door outside was pulled down to make way for a new, shiny one that said Hair and There Unisex Salon. The parlour was now open to male clientele, as vain about hair and skin as their female counterparts. All that Leena Aunty and Jazmeen had needed to do was to cordon off some space at the back of the salon and split the place into two gender exclusive sections. They’d bought some new chairs and equipment and made the men’s section look as slick as possible, and hired a pappu named Sareen to man it. The tall and lanky boy was trained to service the new male customers when it came to their haircut, shaving and maalish needs.

Jazmeen was available to service their eyes.

Shailesh Bhimrao Gokhale had always been quick to grab an opportunity when he saw one. The moment he saw Jazmeen he’d wanted to grab her. He’d restrained himself so far because he already had a girlfriend—and she had a vicious temper.

Gokhale was the first male customer at Hair and There. He looked tentative as he walked into the salon, but grew more comfortable once a more thorough visual examination of the place and its inhabitants had been made. He sat on the brand new barber’s chair and got a shave from Sareen. Gokhale then got a head massage from Jazmeen. He kept his eyes open throughout the whole thirty minutes. It wasn’t because he was insufficiently relaxed to close them, just that this way he could watch the young woman in the mirror as her breasts swayed gently with the motion of her arms.

Gokhale and Jazmeen didn’t speak much that first day. Nor when he came back the next day, and the day after. By the fourth visit, he had become a ‘regular’ customer. He would arrive around 4 PM when the salon was virtually empty, and stay for an hour. He would get a shave from Sareen, followed by a massage from Jazmeen—different parts of the body on different days of the week. The head was attended to on the first day, followed by the neck and shoulders, then the back, finally the feet—and repeat. The timing of his daily visits was so consistent that it was only natural that he was soon invited by Leena Aunty to join them for some tea and samosas.

‘Would you like to have some garmaagaram tea?’ Leena Aunty asked her visitor as he was getting his toes kneaded by Jazmeen.

‘Yes, sure, Aunty…’ he said hesitantly. Jazmeen smiled, not taking her eyes off the calloused feet.

‘I was thinking for the past couple of days that since you come every day around this time, I should ask you to have some evening snacks with us,’ Leena Aunty explained, as if the invitation had been the subject of some great deliberation at the salon. ‘Our Chintu should be coming with tea and samosay shortly,’ she added.

Chintu, a tall errand boy in dirty half-pants, timed his delivery just as the foot massage was completed.

‘Do you work around here?’ Leena Aunty asked politely as she, her two staff, and their most loyal male customer were sipping the sweet, brown concoction.

‘I have my office-cum-home at Charat Naka,’ Gokhale explained.

‘Business?’

‘Yes, trading. Also branching into real estate now.’

That seemed to explain the 4 PM shave to Leena Aunty. Only a businessman in property dealing could want to get a shave at that stupid hour, she thought. All property dealers were crooks as far as she was concerned.

‘Real estate prices are already touching the sky with the new Monorail at Lal Bagh coming up soon. Dhanda is going quite well.’

Everyone nodded. Even Sareen. Then there was silence, except for the slurping sounds that Sareen made each time his tea cup touched his lips, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.

‘Have you been doing this haircutting business for long, Auntyji?’ the visitor asked.

‘Yes, since 1998. My father-in-law had this shop space which was lying vacant. When he passed away, I thought I should start something. I was trained by stylists from Elizabeth Arden and The Red Door, you know.’

‘Who Elizabeth? Like, the Queen of England who took our Kohinoor?’

‘No,’ she said, somewhat curtly. ‘Bloody property dealer! Uneducated buffoon!’ the woman recoiled in her head at the man’s abhorrent ignorance. Jazmeen sensed her boss’ rising anger when she saw that she had refrained from offering a second samosa to Gokhale who was holding an empty plate. She quickly stepped in to explain what Leena Aunty meant.

‘Oh, I see,’ said the man who probably still saw nothing. ‘Pardon my ignorance, Auntyji. I am sure you can tell by just looking at my face that I have no knowledge about these things!’

‘Obviously!’ Leena Aunty thought. The man’s face reminded her of a depressed-looking Amol Palekar from the movie Gharonda. Suddenly she felt pity for him. Moreover, she knew better than to be outrightly rude to such a good customer.

‘So, what else do you do, bete? What about your wife?’

‘Oh no, Auntyji, no wife yet. I live by myself,’ Gokhale said. ‘Usually, work takes all my time. When I have some spare moments, I do some cooking and gardening.’

‘Gardening!’ Leena Aunty’s eyes lit up like a Punjabi wedding. ‘I love gardening too!’

‘I limit myself to bonsai and cactus. After all, where is the space to do anything more elaborate in these tiny flats of Mumbai?’ the man said sheepishly.

‘I have over forty different bonsai in my home garden!’

The two mini-tree huggers looked at each other with instant and rampant adoration.

‘Here, beta, have some more samosay,’ she said, suddenly, piling his plate. ‘Take chutney also!’

‘Seems like a nice fellow,’ Leena Aunty said at the day’s closing, as they took stock of their earnings.

‘You think so?’ Jazmeen asked. ‘He seems chaalu to me.’

‘Why so?’

‘He is a property dealer, Aunty. They are all chaalu.’

‘Arre, no, re… this one seems ok.’

Jazmeen knew it was only their mutual adoration of gobar ka khad that had made her beautician mentor warm up to Gokhale.

Since the salon was flourishing like never before, and Gokhale was a trader willing to dabble in all types of business opportunities, Leena Aunty and Jazmeen soon started to rely on him for stock purchases of beauty and hair supplies. The prices that the man offered were not always competitive, but Leena Aunty had taken a liking to the man who shared her passions. Gokhale became a teatime regular.

‘Do you still not like him?’ Leena Aunty would ask Jazmeen occasionally.

‘He is OK,’ Jazmeen would say.

‘He is young and single, too, you know?’

‘Haye Rabba!’

‘No, I am serious. Think about it!’ Leena Aunty would say excitedly. ‘Men like him go far in life.’

‘You are crazy, Leena Aunty!’

The two women would laugh.

One fine afternoon, the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation councillor representing their area was knifed. The man didn’t die, he wasn’t even seriously hurt, but the political storm that followed was ferocious and terrifying. The ruling political party the councillor belonged to waged a frenzied verbal attack on the opposition, calling them murderers and worse. The opposition party was not going to take things lying down, and they launched a full scale attack on not only the ruling party’s goons, but also the entire neighbourhood. Rampaging mobs were out on the streets. Shop owners were forced to down shutters to demonstrate their ‘solidarity’. People living in the locality were left with no option but to huddle inside their homes. Four days of ruckus was finally brought under control when scores of paid hooligans from both sides of the political divide were arrested by the police.

Many businesses around the area had to face the wrath of the wanton mobs. There were crazy rumours about the number of people killed. The TV news shows couldn’t agree on exact counts, but the buzz on the streets was that it ran into dozens. The main and side roads of Chinchpokli were littered with the carcasses of burnt out black-and-yellow taxis. The place looked like a war zone.

A stone thrown by an unknown assailant had managed to go through the pigeonholes in the iron shutter and crack the thick glass front of Hair and There. It hadn’t shattered the glass completely—strong duct tape might have held it together. But it looked hideous, especially at an establishment that was run for the image-conscious.

‘These bastards have no morals!’ Leena Aunty complained bitterly. It was the first day they’d felt confident enough to reopen their doors to customers. Business was slow. No one was in the mood to get a haircut or a massage so soon after millions of rupees had gone up in smoke all around them. Leena Aunty and Jazmeen felt that it might even be weeks before the rotund ladies of the locality felt bold enough to stop waxing their moustaches on their own.

Gokhale at least was back the moment they were open for business again.

‘I wish I could just leave this awful locality,’ Leena Aunty said after taking her first bite of samosa.

‘This will soon pass,’ Jazmeen said in an effort to calm her.

‘No, but I do agree with Auntyji. This locality is not the same as it used to be,’ Gokhale said.

‘Hain na? Don’t such things always happen around this area only?’ Leena Aunty complained.

‘Why don’t we ever hear of such goondagardi in other parts of the city, in say, Navi Mumbai?’ Jazmeen asked.

‘That is because all the sane people have left this part of town and moved there!’ Leena Aunty said.

‘The future of Mumbai is in the new parts of the city that are coming up. Slowly, everyone will just move there,’ Gokhale said.

Sareen nodded in agreement. He slurped some tea.

After a few moments of quiet, Gokhale turned towards Leena Aunty and asked, ‘You have always wanted to expand your business. Why don’t you shift there, too?’

‘Shift? But what will I do with this space?’

‘Sell it! What else?’

‘Oh no, no!’ Leena Aunty said shaking her head, quite horrified. ‘This place has belonged to my late husband’s family for more than fifty years. I can’t sell it!’

‘Then just rent it out and buy another one in a newer part of the city.’

‘And which bank should I go and rob to get the money to do all that?’ she laughed. ‘At least earlier I could have just asked my daughter for money. Now even that option is gone.’ She sighed and continued after the pause, ‘Arre beta, I am only saying all this because I am angry. Anyway, I am too old to get into this whole buying and selling of property headache!’

‘Those are only excuses, Auntyji. Everyone is buying and selling property these days,’ Gokhale said. ‘A person as kind and talented as you deserves a great salon in a great location,’ he added.

Everyone nodded—including Sareen.

The samosas were devoured at an unusually leisurely pace that evening. Maybe it was because business was slow. Maybe it was because everyone was lost in thought.

Or, maybe it was because at least one of them had started to dream of owning a spanking new salon in one of the swish new malls up north.

On their traditional Tuesday off, Leena Aunty invited Jazmeen over for lunch at her house. She rented a pretty two-room flat with a giant balcony in a quiet little building in Sion. Jazmeen had visited a few times earlier too.

The flat was well sized by Mumbai standards. It bore a cosy look with lots of plants, and trinkets and memorabilia of Leena Aunty and her family’s former glory days. Her late husband had been a factory manager of a motor parts company in Thane, who had met with a fatal accident on the factory floor some twenty years ago. That explained the decent pension that his widow had been receiving ever since. There had also been a daughter, but she had passed away tragically about two years ago, leaving Leena Aunty all alone in this world.

Dozens of photos occupied all the wall space and every table top. Most featured Leena Aunty’s husband; a handsome man, bespectacled, thin, slightly stern. ‘I wonder how things might have been different had he been alive today?’ His wife had multiple styles of the exact same look in all of them—like a hundred poses of the Laughing Buddha. Together, the couple made the perfect figure ‘10’—one tall and lean, the other short and round. There weren’t many photos of the dead daughter. ‘The memory is too fresh,’ Jazmeen concluded.

Leena Aunty hadn’t slept well for the past four nights. She had been constantly wondering about Gokhale’s idea of shifting her business to a better location. Ever since that thought had sprouted in her head, her mind and heart had been waging a battle against each other. Shifting out of Chinchpokli made perfect business sense; doing so by selling the space that the family had owned for decades was like severing a deep-seated emotional bond. Plus, a move to such a distant locality would also mean swapping her Sion flat for something closer to the new location. That meant more expenses. The turmoil of indecision was too much to bear for Leena Aunty and her poor heart—and despite trying valiantly to dismiss the entire idea, she had failed to do so.

She needed someone else, someone rational, to help her resolve her predicament. Someone to talk to. Who better than Jazmeen, she thought. ‘I will ask her to come over to have her favourite rajma chawal and then ask her what she thinks about it.’

Until the time Leena Aunty had asked her big question, the two women had been discussing silly matters such as how fun Farhan Akhtar’s new film was, and how strange Himesh Reshamiya had looked in a recent reality show on TV. Jazmeen knew Leena Aunty had something on her mind but was dithering over whether to let it out. In the end, unable to contain her own curiosity, she had bluntly asked Leena Aunty herself.

‘Now tell me what it is that you really wanted to talk to me about today,’ she had asked point blank, not allowing the older woman to jump into yet another inane subject—possibly Akshay Kumar’s umpteenth comedy.

‘Oh, Jazmeen, I have not been able to sleep for days!’ Leena Aunty gabbled, relieved.

In fact, so excited was she that not once did she stop even to draw her breath. Once she’d got it all off her chest, she told Jazmeen that she’d not wanted to discuss it at the parlour with Sareen around.

‘Aunty, I have been thinking about this ever since Gokhale mentioned it.’

‘And?’

‘It does make sense to move to a new and more happening locality. We will have better clientele, that’s for sure.’

The older woman looked mighty relieved. This reassurance meant that she wasn’t totally out of her mind for thinking such brazen thoughts.

‘Is it possible to sell the Chinchpokli place to some developer—and then lease it back from them? That way, we will have the money to buy a new place in Navi Mumbai, and still keep Hair and There going at this location too. That will give us two salons. You know, like a main outlet and a branch outlet!’

Leena Aunty went wide-eyed at the suggestion. Jazmeen’s idea was even better than Gokhale’s. Two locations!

‘Is it… is it possible?’ she asked, almost breathlessly.

‘I don’t know. We will have to ask Gokhale.’

‘Yes, of course! Should I call him on his mobile now? Maybe he can join us for lunch too!’

Gokhale joined them later in the evening. He heard the two-salon idea, eyebrows raised, surprised that it had come from the parlour ladies with no seeming exposure to property matters. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘definitely possible!’ Commercial real estate prices in their area were sky high and there was no reason why they could not get a profitable deal that allowed them to develop the current location, as well as expand to a new one.

The news was like music to Leena Aunty’s ears. The three decided to go to Chowpatty to celebrate over paanipuri and ragda patties.

It took a few months but Gokhale eventually managed to find two NRI contacts—one was looking for a commercial shop space in South Mumbai for investment purposes and another was selling his vacant space in a new mall in Vashi. Since both the clients were based outside India, they had authorised Gokhale to conduct the deals on their behalf via a Power of Attorney.

‘As you saw, the mall is almost complete. The builder has promised that it will be operational within six months,’ explained Gokhale to Leena Aunty and Jazmeen as they were returning to Chinchpokli in a blue and white Cool Cab after their fourth trip to Vashi.

‘Don’t you think it’s too big? Do we need so much space?’ enquired Leena Aunty.

‘But won’t you be interested in expanding your services as Vashi becomes more developed?’ Gokhale reasoned.

Jazmeen still appeared sceptical, but nodded at the man’s point. ‘You mean like starting a spa or a gym someday?’ she asked.

‘Oh, that would be so thrilling!’ said Leena Aunty, immediately excited.

‘But we have six more months before the mall gets ready. And the other party wants us to vacate Chinchpokli within a month after the sale so that they can renovate the place,’ Jazmeen said.

‘I still don’t understand why they are asking us to go!’ interjected Leena Aunty. ‘We could have just continued to carry on. After all, it’s not as if they are renting it out to someone else. It’s just us!’

‘Well, I don’t mind that they are renovating the premises at their own expense,’ Jazmeen said. ‘So why stop them? Let them redo all the walls, paint, electricals and water pipes.’

‘Yes, and I think they will take only about three months to completely scrape off the old construction and rebuild it,’ Gokhale said.

‘More like six to nine months, I think…’ Jazmeen said, sounding doubtful. ‘It’s the timing that is bothering me.’ She looked at Leena Aunty and then at Gokhale.

‘Three to six months tops,’ Gokhale bargained.

‘So what are we going to do with all our stuff in the meantime? And no salon to run for six months?’ Jazmeen asked.

‘To get such a good deal, we will have to make some sacrifices,’ Gokhale said. Jazmeen looked back at Leena Aunty.

‘Yeah, a little bit of sacrifice, dear. Six months will be up even before we know it!’ the older woman said, supporting Gokhale’s point of view.

Gokhale was nodding his head vigorously. Momentarily, Jazmeen also gave in, nodding her head at her two listeners.

‘And remember, dear, six months is the outer limit. It may all be over in three months!’ chirped the old woman, very excited at the prospect of owning two salons soon.

Sadly, it didn’t take even that much time for it to be all over for Leena Aunty.

Leena Bindra signed away the possession of the Chinchpokli space that had been bought by her dead husband’s father in 1952. Most of the proceeds from that sale—and 90 per cent of her lifetime savings—went towards buying her new, huge commercial property at the upcoming Glory Mall in Vashi. The rest of the money was kept aside to set up the interiors of the new salons as soon as the places were going to be made available to her after construction and renovation.

Gokhale had been like a rock, explaining the property sale and purchase process to her in great detail, reassuring her when she seemed to worry, and revelling with her when she was joyous.

If Gokhale had been solid as a rock, Jazmeen had been calm like the ocean. Leena Aunty was so grateful for having her by her side. ‘Once we have the Vashi place running, I will make her my business partner,’ Leena Aunty vowed to herself the day all the property paperwork was finalised.

She watched Jazmeen work tirelessly to get the items in the Chinchpokli salon packed and stored. The boxes were carted away to a temporary storage facility nearby, from where they were going to be extracted once full-scale renovations were complete—hopefully in three months’ time. Even though Leena Bindra was officially just a tenant in Chinchpokli now, she was glad that Hair and There—The Original Salon was going to make its grand beginning soon. And, God willing, flourish even more than its previous avatars.

When the proud sign of Hair and There Unisex Salon was torn down, Leena Aunty clung to Jazmeen, who hugged her back. Sareen stood respectfully a few feet away.

‘It is going to be all right, Aunty…’ Jazmeen said.

‘Had my daughter been alive today, she would have said the same thing to me!’ Leena Aunty thought, fighting back happy-sad tears.

As they all finally left the place that afternoon, she hugged Gokhale and thanked him for helping her with what was perhaps the most courageous decision of her life.

‘Kya, Auntyji? Why do you say thanks? Would I have not done this for my mother?’ he replied.

It was the last time Leena Bindra saw him.

The first stirrings of trouble began when he didn’t call to check in on her the next day, or the day after. Then, he didn’t show up for their lunch appointment in Sion on Sunday either. When she tried calling his mobile, the automated message claimed that the number she was calling did not exist. Dialing the same number repeatedly did not change the outcome. Panicked, a trip was made to Glory Mall in Vashi, where it was discovered that the store space that she had bought just days earlier had never even been on sale. It’s real owner was no NRI; it was a Gujjubhai from Surat, who planned to open a saree shop there in six months time.

It took almost a month for the 61-year-old Leena Bindra to finally face the devastating reality that her Man Friday Gokhale had vanished from the face of the earth, shattering all her dreams and robbing her of most of her worldly possessions. The shock was so intense that she suffered a massive heart attack because of it. The last phone call that she made in her life was to Jazmeen, who rushed the suffering woman to Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in an ambulance. That, unfortunately, was not good enough.

‘I am sorry, but she has still not regained consciousness. We have put her on a ventilator,’ said the doctor when he emerged from the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

‘Ventilator?’ Jazmeen enquired.

‘If only we could have attended to her a couple of hours sooner, her already weak heart may not have suffered such extensive damage. And because of a lack of blood flow for a while, we suspect that her brain might have suffered irreversible damage too. That’s why she was already in a coma by the time you brought her in.’

‘So… it looks unlikely that she will ever recover?’

‘At this stage, it looks very unlikely. But, rest assured, we will take very good care of your mother while she is with us.’

‘She’s not my mother.’

The doctor looked at her questioningly.

‘She doesn’t have any family. I had worked for her as an employee for some time in the past. I am still not sure why she called me when she had her heart attack. She should have just called for an ambulance instead.’

‘I see. Yes, she may have been in much better shape now had she called for an ambulance immediately,’ the doctor agreed. Then, looking directly at Jazmeen, he asked, ‘In case we need to reach out to someone about her condition, should we call you? Looks like you may be the only one who meant something to her, considering, like you say, she didn’t have any family.’

‘Why should you call me? Like I said, she is nothing to me. I just did what I had to.’

The bewildered doctor simply watched as the girl turned and walked out of the double doors of the Visitors Lounge. That was the last anyone in the hospital saw her.

Leena Bindra never regained consciousness. She died in hospital four days later.

That night, Shailesh Bhimrao Gokhale, whose real name was Tobias ‘Toby’ James, and his girlfriend Rubina Peter made frantic love at Rubina’s flat in Matunga West. It was the best sex they had had in many days; the news from the hospital undoubtedly adding that extra kick to the proceedings. It was, after all, exactly the final outcome that they, and their house guest Jazmeen, had hoped for when they had first put plans together on how to dupe Leena Bindra of her possessions. Things had gone exceedingly well. In fact, the only surprise to Rubina and Toby had been how easily everything had fallen into place.

With Jazmeen away running errands, the lustful couple had had the entire flat to indulge in raucous, spirited lovemaking. When they were finally finished, Rubina put her mouth up to Toby’s ear and licked it softly, making the man ticklish. Toby playfully swatted her face away and got out of bed.

‘Chal, get dressed,’ he said as he walked to the tiny bathroom naked. ‘Jazmeen must be on her way back. She said she will make us mutton biryani today to celebrate!’

Still lying in bed, Rubina made a face.

‘So, Toby, when are we kicking this fool out of our house? Aren’t we done with her now?’ she called out in her nasal voice that many, including the deceased Leena Bindra, found infuriating.

Inside the bathroom, unseen by his girlfriend, Toby stared at himself in the mirror. His lips were tightly pursed, his face a curious mix of indecision and defiance.

2

Girl, Interrupted

Ten years ago

The worst day of Jazmeen’s life began cheerfully enough.

Her name was Deepika Ahluwalia at the time.

A family picnic by Pashwar Lake in south Haryana was a fairly regular event on the Ahluwalia family calendar. The family made sure that they did one around late July or early August each year, usually picking a breezy and overcast day when a good amount of rainfall was anticipated. The Ahluwalias loved the rains and monsoon was their favourite season. Unlike most people, they looked forward to frolicking in the pouring rain, drenched to the bone! The kids would run after frogs along the lakeshore and collect little shankhs and perfectly rounded stones for their collections. They would spend hours playing antakshari or board games with their parents (and beating them roundly each time), and listening to spooky stories that their father told in scary voices.

The lake itself was a delight during the monsoon, bountifully brimming with greenish blue water and surrounded by vegetation that was lush, clean and dense. The rain transformed everything it touched.

Parmeet, Deepika’s father, had not been made to practice the Sikh tradition of kesh or keeping long hair when he was a child, and this unconventional family tradition had continued with his son Ujjwal. Ujjwal was a year younger than Deepika and was the exact opposite of his sister when it came to personality, temperament and looks. While she was a boisterous, outgoing and fashion-conscious girl on the cusp of glorious womanhood, Ujjwal still remained a gangly, introverted teenager, happy being a passive loner blending into the background. She was the kind who made friends of strangers easily, leaping across boundaries of propriety or restraint like it was a game of hopscotch, always asserting her presence and needs emphatically. He the type who would quietly accept whatever came his way, silently brooding if nothing did, his unhappiness hidden from all except his family, especially his sister. It was because of that reticence that Deepika always made sure that she demanded attention for his sake too, playing, even relishing in the role of Ujjwal’s guardian and protector when they were at school and among friends. In many ways, if it wasn’t for the elder sibling, the hushed yearnings of the boy would remain locked away inside the confines of his mind, their only physical articulation being a single creaseline of heartache on his forehead.

The only turf where Ujjwal allowed himself to be noisy and playful was with his parents, especially with his father. The boy was in awe of him, as was Deepika. It was perhaps because each saw their father as an older buddy who had already accomplished all the exciting things that they wanted to themselves – to know everything, to travel everywhere, and play all kinds of adventure sports, and sing and dance like a movie star. Their mother Sheetal was clearly the source of the good looks that Deepika seemed to have inherited almost entirely, leaving practically nothing for poor Ujjwal to receive. With a faint and mostly feigned frown that only very beautiful women like her can carry off and her no-nonsense demeanour, Sheetal was the authority figure in the Ahluwalia household. Though always loving, when Mummy said ‘No’, it meant ‘No’. In fact, a few minutes in the company of Parmeet and Sheetal and it was pretty clear who wore the pants in their house!

It was a Tuesday, and after just one look at the overcast sky that morning, Sheetal had decided that it was too good a day to be wasted on mundane activities such as school and office.

‘We will go to Pashwar today,’ she had declared amidst loud hooting by her husband and kids.

The family was well prepared to deal with such expedient circumstances on short notice for they did it three to four times a year—Bunk Days as they called them. A few quick phone calls were made to make the appropriate excuses. Parmeet called in sick at the private bank where he worked as a Marketing Manager; Sheetal, the Head of Reservations at a popular 5-star hotel in Connaught Place, excused herself on account of ‘son has 102 temperature’. Thankfully, no excuses needed to be made at school. The children had just taken their weekly class test on Monday, and in school, one could always carry a Sick Leave Application the day after taking a day off.

Armed with a dozen butter-and-jam-mixed sandwiches, several packets of chips, jumbo bottles of Pepsi, board games, umbrellas and sunglasses for each household member—and stories and jokes to last several hours—the four drove in their little Hyundai Accent to the pretty lake about seventy kilometres away from their housing complex in Faridabad. Many years ago, when Parmeet and Sheetal were kids themselves, their families used to