“You’ve already performed Kamla’s shradh ceremony, honey, so you needn’t worry about her soul. Now peel off your sari and...”
But Mukta was adamant. She threatened to scream and alert her neighbors if she wasn’t allowed to do her penance at the temple.
This woman was a pain in the ass, Bakshi thought, but she was good in bed. She had ample flesh in the right places, and he loved kneading her dough. And, like a good whore, she also knew how to fake an orgasm. In fact, she was better than his skinny wife and the other women he’d molested, threatening them too with his hissing cobras. One has to suffer the kicks of a cow if it yields milk, he thought. If a brief visit to the temple would stop her sniffing and make her bedworthy, so be it.
The evening aarti had just begun when they entered the temple. A bare-bodied priest was rhythmically waving a flickering brass lamp, revealing the immaculate stone idol of Lord Swaminatha carrying his mace. Like the other devotees, Mukta joined her palms and chanted paeans to the Lord. Earlier, as they had climbed the stairs, she had explained to her companion that in the north Lord Swaminatha was worshipped as Kartikeya, the handsome warrior god who was the son of goddess Durga, the destroyer of Mahishasur, the demon. Bakshi was not a religious person, so after Mukta had bowed before the idol for the umpteenth time, he whispered in her ear that she had done enough penance for the day and now they should return to her house and eliminate three more hissing cobras. Mukta sighed and allowed him to gently push her through the crowd of devotees toward the exit.
But when they were outside the temple, Mukta stopped short as if she remembered something.
“Now, don’t tell me you have to complete your thousandth bow before the idol to complete your penance,” Bakshi said.
“I won’t tell you that,” Mukta assured, looking very solemn and contented. “I only want to stand and pray for my mother-in-law on the spot where she spoke to me for the last time.”
“I don’t give a fuck about that evil woman.”
“Mind your language, inspector,” Mukta frowned, even though she was amused by his unexpected surge of hatred for Kamla. “I wonder, have you really fallen in love with me?”
Bakshi squeezed her shoulders and whispered: “I have, darling. You are so special to me.”
“Then come with me for just one minute. Once I have offered my prayers for Kamla’s soul we can go back to my house and have some fun.”
Bakshi felt elated. So, she had finally accepted him as a lover. Wow! He had fortified his virility with a Penagra tablet before mounting her each time, and his performance must have favorably compared with her previous lovers. Whistling “Crazy Kiya Re,” he followed his ladylove to the back of the temple and then skirted a huge PVC water tank mounted on a stone platform. Away from the traffic of devotees, this was a desolate area used only by the temple staff and the priests. A faint light from a distant lamppost illuminated the staircase.
“So this is the spot where you stood that evening with your beloved mother-in-law?” Bakshi said.
Mukta nodded. Then she told him how, after finding out about her affair with Rakesh, Kamla had tortured her. Hadn’t he noticed those scars on her body, the branding mark on her pubes?
Of course he had, but... well, married women were prone to getting a few bruises due to their obstinacy and unwarranted intrusion into the male zone. He’d actually found Mukta’s bruises cute, even aphrodisiacal. “You should have filed an FIR against her,” Bakshi said, squeezing her arm just to show that he was a sympathetic male.
“But the police don’t take notice of domestic violence unless it’s a murder or there’s some pressure from someone powerful.” Mukta looked up at the inspector and whispered: “So I decided to take things into my own hands.”
Bakshi grinned. A confession at last! It was a nice jolt, like the one he often got from a big shot of whiskey. The oppressed had finally turned the tables on the oppressor. How fascinating! How filmic! The very idea of fornicating with a murderess gave him an instant hard-on.
“So you bumped Kamla Agarwal?” Bakshi said. “Wonderful!”
“Are you surprised?”
Bakshi nodded. Indeed, in his twenty-odd years in the profession, he was yet to come across a single case of a tortured wife liquidating her mother-in-law. “I guess you gave her a mighty push with your hands?”
“No, actually, I used my leg.” She smiled and hitched up her sari.
His hard-on still intact, Bakshi was staring at Mukta’s thunder thighs and imagined having a quickie right there behind the water tank. But a sudden shooting pain ended this fantasy. With all her might, Mukta had rammed the heel of her right foot into his crotch. Bakshi screamed as he keeled over clutching his balls. In the semidarkness, the inspector’s left hand desperately groped for the iron railing. But Mukta, the veteran kaabadi player, was quick enough to land another kick on his flank. Bakshi fell like a ton of bricks and hurtled down the steep stairs. Then there was that stomach-churning sound again — a cranium cracking on a big boulder. She took a peek at the bloody mess sprawled on the massive stone on which someone had chalked Om Shanti Om and then returned to the temple. She bowed deeply before Lord Swaminatha, whose aarti had just reached its crescendo, and then weaved through the crowd of devotees to make a quick exit by the main door of the temple.
Part II
Youngistan
The railway aunty
by Mohan Sikka
Paharganj
I lay in my dark little veranda, the space I occupied in my bua’s Delhi flat. The windows were open to the nonstop honking from Panchkuian Road. There was no breeze. The cool weather hadn’t arrived and the sulfurous smell of popping fireworks made breathing difficult. I remembered how, in our old house in Jalandhar, my sisters hid behind each other as I lit bottle rockets on Diwali. Ma gave us sweaters and woolen socks she’d knitted herself. This coming winter, my sisters would even be lucky if their old sweaters were darned. The middle one was in a boarding school for orphans, the youngest with my frail grandfather.
I woke up late the next morning with a sensation of suffocation. I left the flat without breakfast and walked to Paharganj. I bought a cup of tea and sought out the quiet of the large Christian cemetery by Nehru Bazaar. Putting down my satchel under my favorite neem, I took out my chess set and my bitten paperback of the champion Kasparov’s classic matches. I drank tea and practiced the grandmaster’s moves. Worn concrete graves surrounded me on three sides.
I didn’t see Johnny, the caretaker with the salt-and-pepper hair, until he was standing next to me, his stocky arms folded. With a grin on his long, craggy face he said, “Didn’t you know an open chessboard attracts spirits with scores to settle?” I packed up my things, thinking he was going to escort me out. But instead he took me to the workshop by the main gate. Workers inside were sawing and hammering wooden planks for coffins. Johnny ushered me into the cemetery office at one end of the shop. He fumbled in a drawer and took out a book, as beat-up as mine, about grandmaster Karpov, my hero Kasparov’s archrival. “Kasparov played like a bull,” he said, making a meaty fist in the air, “but Karpov was the wily fox.” When he asked me to take out my chessboard, I knew I’d made a friend.