The Benefit Season (28 page)

‘
Let me go, let me go’,
she screamed. ‘You killed him… you killed my husband you bastard!’
she beat down on his chest with her fist and arms.

‘
Please, let’s get out of
here’, he implored, dragging her towards the car parked beyond the
service lane. After bundling her into the rear seat Arjun scuttled
to the other side, and punched the powerful engine into life.
Without turning the headlamps on, he drove off on the highway
towards Jaipur. As they were leaving, they saw the JCB piling earth
into the cavernous gap, its driver blissfully unaware of what had
just transpired in the darkness. In a few hours, the hole would be
covered fully, and the body lost forever in the monument Vishal
meant to construct to their love.

ϖ

Chapter
12

The Shiny Monologue at
Neemrana

Arjun remained quiet during the drive. Monal
was still sobbing softly in the backseat, lamenting the death of
her husband.

‘
You could have shot him
in the leg’; she spoke finally.

Arjun veered off the highway and parked on
its soft shoulder. He pressed his forehead on the steering and
remained motionless. Then he raised his head and said,’ I wasn’t
thinking straight. Perhaps they were drugging me. I think it was a
soldier’s instinct- shoot to kill. But that man was going to put us
in that dump, and you are moping about him!’

Monal said nothing and blew her nose.
Finally she stopped sniffing. ‘I guess you’re right. No one could
have controlled what happened. There’s no point in blaming each
other now. Let’s find a place and lie low for a couple of
days.’

‘
I want to go home’, Arjun
said.

‘
Are you crazy? Vishal was
mixed up with all kinds of bums. Sooner or later they’ll discover
it was he and not we in that pit, when they find him and this car
missing. And then they’re going to come after us. And the police
will be looking out for both of us too.’

‘
I don’t understand why
him being mixed up with bums concerns us. I don’t even know why
Vishal kidnapped me. Why wait for so many days to push me into a
hole so dramatically? If he had so strong a grudge he could have
finished both of us a long while ago- why take so much of trouble?
My head is spinning with so many questions and I can’t find any
damn answer!’

‘
He was a crazed man, an
egomaniac. He could go to any lengths to get what he wanted or to
put people out of his way. He couldn’t stand the thought of you
stealing his wife and his thunder from him in the office- you’d
begun to do rather well. Maybe it suited him to let both of us go
missing and then wait till we got together to finish us off. Two
lovers elope and go missing- no one to ask any questions. And then
there was the merciless beating you gave him in the hotel in front
of everyone. And he hated that you wouldn’t make your clients throw
matches like so many others. He was under a lot of pressure from
the bookies- and maybe mafia guys. And you are wondering what
reasons he had for wanting to put you away? You obviously miffed
the wrong kind of guy.’

‘
So be it. He’s gone and
so are his reasons. I just want to go home and start my life
again’.

‘
Fat chance of it Arjun!
Those guys will be swarming all over like pests, looking to serve
vengeance. They don’t take well to one of their own being put down-
it’s bad for their image they say. Take my word for it; let’s lie
low for some while I figure out a way of getting out of this one. I
got you out of that house didn’t I?’

‘
In that case I would like
to go to the police, and tell them everything’.

‘
Are you out of your mind?
They’ll put you away for murder- you won’t even make
bail!’

‘
It was in
self-defense…your defense. And the man kidnapped me! Isn’t there a
law against it?’

‘
Maybe. But the case could
run for years in the courts- and you would be cooling your heels in
the rotten prison system of this country. Guys like you won’t last
there’.

‘
Then I don’t know how
they’ll find out that I killed Vishal? Or who will care? Unless you
tell them!’

‘
Why would I tell them?
You saved me. And he did wrong by you- kidnapping you. Trust me,
I’ll take care of this. I’ll handle his bum chums and try some
influence to keep them off our tail. Till then you’re to keep out
of sight and not to contact anyone- even your family’.

‘
At least let me call them
and tell them I’m okay- they would be so worried. I can’t bear to
think of what my mom would be going through.’

‘
You call them and the
police will know. They are sure to be tapping your lines. And what
the police know, the goons know too- they’ve got insiders
everywhere. Another day or two won’t hurt you Arjun- what could you
have done inside that house? When you tell your mama you’re okay-
what then? What will you tell her- why you aren’t coming home? Will
you tell her that you killed a man and are on the run from the
mafia as well as the law?’

Arjun bowed his head in silence- the poor
man was confused. Monal reached across and patted his shoulder. ‘A
day, Arjun, is all. Trust me’.

He sighed and nodded.

‘
Drive on then, Neemrana
is close, there’s a place I know where we’ll be safe’, she told
him.

Arjun started the car and swung back onto
the highway. They paid the tolls at Kherki Dhaula and Shahjahanpur
and continued on their journey towards Neemrana. The fog was dense
and the air chilly. Stalks of cotton and sugarcane rustled in their
gusty draft as they sped past on the empty road. Though there
wasn’t any traffic at this time Arjun had to watch out for mauled
dogs, stray buffalos and tractors that appeared from nowhere with
their front wheels suspended in thin air as they climbed the steep,
rutted ditches lining the dusty highway. It began to drizzle, and
soon it turned into a thunderous tearing up of the skies. The
shabby Indian countryside suddenly turned dark, dank and somber
after the downpour, and did nothing to lift the dampened spirits of
the two passengers wrapped up in their individual worries and
pains.

Repentance tugged hard at Arjun’s conscience
and he grieved at his heart for the innocence lost. He was on the
run and life would never be, as he’d known it. All because of a
foolish affair- that too with a married woman! Could he sink any
lower, was their any salvation for him, any hope, any prayer, any
light, at the end of the dark, gaping tunnel? Would Aarti ever take
him back? How his mother would pine for her lost son, his bright
future grounded in ashes and dust, her dreams for him done in by
moth and rust and by his sick taste for the bitter flesh of a
wanton wench, the taste that caused this curse. Khosla would scream
from the rooftops that he’d been right about this loser boy who’d
chucked everything for a romp in the sack, for dipping his hand
into somebody else’s till. He’d stolen, murdered, committed
adultery and burned incense unto Baal; he was cursed above every
beast of this earth and all the crawling things and the fowl of the
skies, and dust he would eat for all of his days.

And it was a dusty track that he turned into
now as Monal nudged him from his pained dialogue with the self.
Seven were his deadly sins and seven the mangy dogs, eating dust
unsettled in their wake and barking sevenfold, that chased their
car. Seven the notes of music that moved him, seven the colors of
the rainbow that broke through the dark skies, seventh the day of
that fateful week, seven the blessings he sought, seven the sages
he prayed to, seven, the lamps of the Menorah that he dreamt he
would light someday in the Synagogue close to his mother’s home,
seven the parts of his body that ached and cried, seven the
openings in his head that shouted to let the demons out, seven the
seas that he wished he were far away, seven the heavens he implored
to, and seven the directions whence came cries of reproach; all
sevens were dear.

ϖ

They soon arrived at the rabble of the
dung-smeared hovels of the Neemrana village, filled with mounds of
garbage and open sewers. Idle, skinny old men with hefty grey
whiskers that fluttered in the wind, slouched on frayed charpoys
positioned next to the road for best views, and sucked on their
hookahs, while cattle and goats tied next to them squatted on the
ground and moodily grazed or dozed, and the womenfolk wearing
loose-fitting clothes moved in and out of the houses for no
apparent reason. Sometimes adventurous white faces sipping tea from
steel saucers with the locals flitted past. The tourists reveled in
the decay and soaked in the grime for an adventure to be chronicled
on Instagram and Facebook.

Soon they left the
fleapits behind and came upon the majestic plateau with the earthy
fort towering above them in the rutted, steep Aravali Ranges. The
stone and concrete structures rose like colossal steps carved into
the mountain, topped with surly ramparts and bastions. They climbed
the two-odd kilometers to the fort and came upon the grand entrance
archway - the
Suraj Pol
. Arjun followed Monal who got them booked into the
Ramji Mahal
on the
12
^th
level. She also hired a vintage car for a jaunt about town
for later. The sun deck of the opulent, duplex suit gave them a
breathtaking view of the surrounding forests and hills and the flat
valleys below and the cloud-laden skies above. Like the royals long
before them, they sipped tea at the
Shatranj terrace
- shaped like a giant
chessboard, and later wine, at the hanging gardens- the
Uncha Bagh
.

The
15
^th
century fort was named after
Nimola
, the brave local chieftain
who, defeated by the descendants of Prithviraj Chauhan, was granted
the last wish that the fort be named after him. It was built over
twelve levels and had nine palaces; each named and
color-coordinated after the
navratnas-
the sacred nine gemstones
linked to the nine planets as per Vedic texts. The resort was
filled with an eclectic mix of antiques, colonial furniture and
objets d’ art that transported them back in time into its medieval
past. The fort was a maze of narrow stairwells, passages and
dungeons and it was easy to lose the way in them. The fort that
once lay in ruins had been restored as a heritage resort after its
owner had moved out when its ramparts had begun to crumble and give
away.

It was an architectural marvel picked up
from the dustbin of history and lovingly turned around. Nostalgia
and a romantic mourning of his own past swept over Arjun as his
gaze turned upon the weeds and dandelions wedged in the crevices of
stones and cracks of the grand old ruins. The whitewashed walls
with the peeling paint tearing from the stone and mortar rose to
vaulted ceilings with overbearing arches, plucked of precious
stones and gems that once were filled into its mortar for
decoration. To Arjun the scarred ruins embodied our ageing, and
commemorated our grand failures. They were the testimony to our
fallibility before nature, god and destiny. God gave man this earth
and man created objects of beauty. Man and nature seemed to be in
cahoots here, man had once turned nature’s materials into a work of
art, and nature had transformed it back into materials for her own
expression. Human history seemed merged inexorably into the
degenerated physical setting and the deep womb of time. The ruins
of the fort served as a reminder of irreversibility of time, and of
man’s temporality. His ambitious reaching out heavenwards to create
marvels in stone that would face inevitable demise laid bare the
futility of all materialness. But the vain creator had ensured that
when the building decayed, it decayed magnificently. It was
decayed, not dead. Its voids were like silence, absent of words but
full of the tension of meanings. You could stay and lose yourself
or leave and find yourself. You could pause, wonder, breathe in the
fresh, cool air, or just wander off again. Arjun, looking out upon
the still, foggy countryside, mulled over what ruinous future
awaited him, or whether there was a miracle lurking in a corner
somewhere waiting to rebuild the scattered remnants of his
being.

In the evening, at
the
mashal-lit
open-air amphitheater, a customary
Rajasthani
folk artist performance
with fire spitting and song and dance about chivalry and love and
the pain of separation preceded the sumptuous
thali (buffet)
dinner with 16 spicy
dishes. Arjun, hungry and exhausted, despite the bleakness of his
prospects, ate with gusto, and slept a dreamless sleep under the
latticed window on the narrow single bed where many a royal baby
might have been made, ignoring the repeated overtures of Monal who
tried to entrap him into her cold cradle.

ϖ

Krishnamala drummed her fingers on her green
cloth baize covered wooden desk and hummed and hawed. There had
been no news of the missing persons. Agent 9 had gone looking for
any faxes that might be of use. The fan whirred above at low speed.
Agent 9 had hung a hammock for the baby from the fan; the baby was
lulled into sleep by the fan’s slow rotary motion. When the baby
started to swing too wide, by its own momentum and the centrifugal
force, whichever agent was awake would switch the fan off. It was
the brilliant, makeshift shaker cradle they’d designed in the
office for the little one, for office was where they spent most
waking hours. They did not have to pat the baby or rock the cradle-
the device saved time and the results were pretty instantaneous,
though one couldn’t really say if it made the baby dizzy.