Second Lives (11 page)

Sara looked at me, and then asked, ‘Did D’Mello say if he has any other leads on Rachel’s death?’

‘No. He asked me a lot of questions and promised that he would get to the bottom of it. I think he will, too. That man reminded me of a bulldog. But what I don’t understand is why Rachel would be writing about crime, especially one like this. It wasn’t her line of work at all.’

I found the comparison of D’Mello to a bulldog really apt. He even looked like one.

‘That’s what we were thinking as well,’ said Sara. ‘By the way, are Rachel’s personal effects still here? I mean her computer, notebooks and things like that. They could hold clues to her research.’

‘Her laptop was surprisingly missing. The police took away everything else.’ Mrs Fernandes paused. ‘But I didn’t tell him about the box which Melvin, Rachel’s brother, sent over to me after he cleared out her place.’

I could barely suppress my excitement. ‘What was in the box?’

‘Rachel lived alone in a small rented flat, and didn’t have too many possessions. I really wish she had settled down with some nice man. Then all this wouldn’t have happened.’ Her voice choked for a moment. ‘Melvin gave away her clothes and the furniture but he packed a few other items and sent them to me. He said they were memories of Rachel which should remain with us.’

Sara asked, ‘Can we have a look?’

Mrs Fernandes looked uncertain. There was an uncomfortable silence. ‘I suppose there’s no harm,’ she finally conceded.

She brought out a small, sealed carton. ‘I know this sounds strange but I haven’t had the heart to open this so far. You kids go ahead and see if there’s anything in it that will help you.’ She went inside.

Sara pulled out a Swiss army knife from her bag, and cut through the packing tape. We examined the contents of the box. Right on top was a framed photograph of Rachel and her mother. Seeing a smiling, happy, living Rachel made me realise again how much we missed her.

There was a stuffed brown dog with floppy ears and one plastic eye ripped off. A watch with a red leather strap and Roman numerals on the dial. I recognised it as the only one I had ever seen Rachel wear. A jewellery box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It contained miscellaneous earrings, necklaces and brooches. A frayed map of Goa I remembered Rachel always kept hanging in her room to remind her of home. A copy of
The Class
by Erich Segal. Her favourite book and a gift from Melvin. An iPod Nano which she only used to listen to FM radio.

It was strange to go through the personal possessions of a dead person. I felt like a trespasser.

We took out everything. There was nothing related to her work. The last item was a purse. I asked Sara to open it. She methodically went through all its folds and compartments. There were some currency notes, coins, a lipstick, a pack of tissues, old receipts, a miniature bottle of Cool Water. All the usual things one expects in a handbag.

I said, ‘Show me the receipts.’

I wasn’t really hopeful. One turned out to be interesting, though. It wasn’t a receipt but a paper napkin. The ones they fold into triangles and keep in plastic holders at the cheaper restaurants. Rachel had made some notes on it. Probably while waiting for her food. Then stuffed it into her bag and forgot about it.

It was a to-do list for the day. I carefully scanned each item. All were mundane and of no consequence to us. Except the last two.

Remind V about AG p-m report

Catch Sasha watchman on way home

There was another one—
Call back Mrs I
—which I didn’t think much of at the time. It would only make sense much later.

I showed the list to Sara. She said in a puzzled voice, ‘What the hell has Rachel written here? I’m not even sure it’s anything to do with her story. It could be anything.’

‘I think…I know what the first one is,’ I replied. ‘AG must be Anna Grishin, and I’m willing to bet that p-m refers to post-mortem. I’m guessing Rachel was trying to get hold of a copy of Anna’s post-mortem report through some contact.’

‘Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.’ Sara’s expression said that she was seeing me in a new light. ‘That’s brilliant, Neel!’

I smiled briefly. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve figured out the second one as well! And what kind of a watchman is called Sasha?’

I didn’t answer her immediately. There was a nagging thought at the back of my mind. I tried to focus on it. In the meantime, Sara clicked a picture of the napkin with her phone camera. She then put it back in Rachel’s purse. ‘Let’s go, Neel. I think we’re done here.’

It came to me in that instant. I exclaimed, ‘Wait! Do you think Sasha could be that actress who was murdered last year? It’s not a very common name.’

Sara looked at me blankly. Unlike me, she wasn’t a voracious reader of film and gossip magazines.

29

Omar

When Neel and Sara returned, they looked pretty charged up.

I asked, ‘How did it go?’

Sara gave me the headlines from the visit, and showed me the notes in her diary. One word rang a bell in my mind immediately. ‘Does Sasha refer to who I think it does?’

Neel said excitedly, ‘That’s exactly what I told Sara but she doesn’t agree with me. We were arguing about it on the way back.’

I thought for a moment and said quietly, ‘Neel’s right, Sara. I now remember that Rachel had called me a couple of months ago and in the middle of our usual catch-up, she suddenly asked me about Sasha and how well I had known her. In fact, we had a good ten-minute conversation on her. I hadn’t thought about it until I saw this.’

Neel stared at me. ‘You were sleeping with Sasha? I never knew. That woman was smoking hot, you lucky bastard!’

I smiled enigmatically at him. It was true that I had known Sasha well, even before she became famous.

Actually, she was more famous in death than in life.

Her real name was Amita. She came from middle-class Gujarati stock but her widowed mother had big ambitions for her strikingly beautiful daughter. She won a children’s dance show on a regional channel at a precocious ten, and did her first ramp walk for a local club at a well-developed fifteen. But you can only get so far in a small town like Surat, so Amita’s mother took her daughter and moved to Mumbai, taking up a one-bedroom apartment in suburban Dahisar.

Amita changed her name to the more exotic Sasha, and got herself a portfolio made by a reasonably competent photographer. It cost her mother almost all the money she had saved up, and her daughter’s virginity. Helped by a couple of contacts the man had thrown in as a bonus, Sasha bagged a modelling job for an upcoming designer. She wasn’t tall or slim enough to contend for the big league but her porcelain looks got noticed. The trickle of assignments soon became a steady flow, including a television commercial for a major apparel brand.

Sasha’s big break came when she managed to get a ticket to the Miss India pageant. She failed to secure a position in the top ten but succeeded in catching the eye of the middle-aged but celebrated actor who was one of the judges. Egged on by her irrepressible mother, she managed to strike up a conversation with him after the event, and ended up in his bed the same night, not that he needed much seducing.

Sasha made her screen debut with a small role in a film which had her actor boyfriend donning the hats of both hero and producer. Unfortunately, the film sank without a trace at the box office, and Sasha’s mother’s hopes of her daughter becoming an overnight star in Bollywood were dashed. She had no acting talent anyway.

My first meeting with Sasha was quite dramatic. I was walking down a leafy Bandra lane late one night when I heard a commotion ahead. Two men and a woman were having a heated argument and even as I watched, the woman gave a resounding slap to one of the men. The other man grabbed her from behind, and she began to shout for help. I ran towards them. Seeing me approach, the woman got a fresh burst of courage and kicked out at the man in front of her. She must have connected well because he screamed in pain and doubled up. It was enough for the duo—they turned and fled.

Sasha was grateful for my intervention in what was fast becoming an ugly situation. I learnt that the two men had been following her and passing lewd comments, until she had stopped and confronted them. She was wearing a very short white dress and high heels which, if you’re alone on the road close to midnight, is probably bound to attract attention even in liberal Bandra. From her freshly applied make-up, I figured she was on her way to some tryst.

She was a struggling model back then, and not the familiar face she was to become later. Nevertheless, I was struck by her Katrina-Kaif-like looks, innocent but very sexy. We went for coffee to one of the joints on Carter Road and she told me her whole story. I sighed. How many girls like Sasha had come to Mumbai over the years and met the same fate, I wondered, but I promised to help her in any way I could. There were one or two influential folks I knew in the glamour world, I told her.

I made the connections over the next couple of weeks, and Sasha was quite surprised that I had done her a favour without seeking the usual sex in return. I had smiled inwardly, thinking about all those people, including a few of my closest friends, who considered me some kind of a sexual predator. A serial fucker, as Neel had once put it crudely, and here I was, chivalry personified with this woman who would have been so easy to sleep with.

Truth be told, Sasha was just not my type. Sure, she had the face and body of most men’s fantasies but her awkward conversation, rustic accent and desperation to make it big were real turn-offs for me. At one point, I started to get the impression that she was developing a crush on me, which alarmed me all the more. Anyway, we kept in touch and I followed her patchy career with some degree of interest. After all, I had sort of saved her honour once.

At her mother’s insistence, Sasha made a second attempt to break into films with a lead role in a B-grade movie. The story and cast ended up being completely different from what the producers had told her and by the time Sasha realised that she was going to be wearing a bikini made of plastic leaves for the better part of the film, it was too late to back out. After that, she wisely decided to abandon the silver screen and go back to her moderately successful modelling career.

It was a complete shock when I read in the papers one summer morning that Sasha had been found dead in her Andheri studio apartment, where she lived alone. She had been smothered with a pillow.

There were signs that Sasha had fought valiantly for her life until her last breath. Her body also bore the marks of severe bruises and cuts, many of which were post-mortem, indicating that her killer had been in some kind of frenzied rage. The police were convinced that it was someone well known to her and questioned a number of her friends and acquaintances, including me.

Sasha was single at the time of her death but then, promiscuity had become a habit with her. It was the way of the industry. I remember running through the list of people I knew she was close to and came up with at least three men who could have visited her that fateful night. Not to say that any of them had murderous tendencies but anything was possible, I suppose.

The initial press reports had suggested that an eyewitness, a taxi driver, had seen a man running out of Sasha’s building around midnight and getting picked up by a big car. Surprisingly, this was later denied by the police. Her building watchman claimed that he had fallen asleep and not seen anyone enter or leave. There apparently wasn’t much else to go on and the investigation petered out.

The case remained unsolved.

30

Sara

There’s always been something wrong with me.
One doctor who treated me when I was a child had called it a cancer of the mind. It’s gotten progressively worse over the years, and other complications have developed.

It’s my biggest secret—except my parents, and they died long ago, no one else knows. It takes a lot to carry on a normal life as if everything is fine but I’ve managed so far. It is my raison d’être. I don’t want to be an object of pity. I want to live on my own terms but I’ve had enough of this façade now. I’m tired of the past and scared of the future.
How long can anyone carry such a burden?

My mind has been besieged by dark and morbid thoughts these past few days, which I suppose is only to be expected, with all the dark and morbid things going on around me. I keep hearing Rachel’s voice, urging me not to stop until we find her killer. I see Anna Grishin’s disfigured face staring at me accusingly. I imagine a gun in my hand and firing it at Grigor; the bullet enters his forehead but there’s no blood. I suppose it’s all in my dreams but I can’t be sure!

Last night, I had the old nightmare again; except that this time, it was completely different.

The two of us walk along the cobbled, winding path. It’s a bitterly
cold evening, just before the Christmas break. The sky is already dark, even though it isn’t yet five-thirty. All of us are used to being outdoors but that doesn’t stop me from shivering.

We trudge in silence, hands deep inside our blazer pockets and longing to get back into the warmth of the dormitories. I say abruptly, ‘Come, I want to show you something. Let’s go towards the chapel.’

He stares at me. ‘Now? Aren’t you freezing?’

‘You’ll like it, I promise. Just a short detour.’

I take his hand and pull him away from the path, towards the trees only a few feet away. He hesitates briefly, then decides to go along. We keep stumbling over rocks and fallen branches, and walk into low-hanging leaves more than once. My arm brushes against his several times. It feels good.

We’re halfway to the chapel when I stop. He stops too, and gives me a questioning look. At least, that’s what I assume since it’s too dark to see each other’s faces. I move towards him and put my arms around his neck. My lips seek out his. He kisses me back reflexively and our tongues meet for a fraction of a second.