Club You to Death by Anuja Chauhan (books to improve english .TXT) 📕

out of his sight for even a moment. And before that, the item it contains had been kept safely at our Alipore residence for the past five years. Be assured it is the genuine article. All the best with your investigations and requesting complete confidentiality if possible. God bless you.

Arihant Poddar

‘Sqyooz me for asking, but in this current case you are investigating, the murdered man turned out to be alive only, no?’

The girl asking this artless question is wide-eyed and very pretty – prettier than all the other prospective Mrs Padam Kumars Padam Kumar has met so far.

Pink with embarrassment, he puts down the cup of fragrant Assam tea he has just accepted from her.

‘Yes,’ he admits, somewhat huffily, to the little circle of people in the formal drawing room. ‘But it is a very complicated and strange case—’

She giggles. ‘Obviously!!’

Padam goes pinker than the flower he is named for. The girl is being intolerably cheeky. Humiliatingly, her mother, instead of restraining her, also giggles. ‘We all saw it on TV,’ she confides. ‘It was too good! The way the murda showed up, making the mote-thaanedaar sa’ab look like such a fool—’

‘He is not a thaanedaar, but an ACP and a very respected officer!’ Padam begins stiffly, but is interrupted when his entire chest starts to thrum. It takes him a while to make his excuses, put down his cup and saucer and extract the phone, which he had buttoned away, out of sight, in the chest pocket of his formal blue shirt, fearing it may not be ‘latest’ enough to impress the girl’s side. When he finally holds the despised device to his ear –

‘Where are you, yaar PK?’ Bhavani demands irritably. ‘Aryaman Aggarwal ne OD kiya hai. Come to the Medicorp Emergency at once.’

It is a very disgruntled Padam who motorcycles down to the Medicorp Hospital about half an hour later and takes the elevator to the VIP suites on the top floor. He feels nothing but resentment and contempt for his unglamorous superior, with his eccentric eleven-minute workout, his womanish insistence on non-violence, and his naive, colour-sketch-penned “The Four Golden Rules”.

When he emerges on the top floor, slightly dazzled by the plush décor which looks more suited to a five-star hotel than a hospital, Bhavani materializes at his elbow like a genie.

‘You got the forensics report?’

Wordlessly, Padam Kumar holds out a manila envelope.

Bhavani puts on his reading glasses, tears open the envelope, scans its contents, and smiles the beatific smile of a lost child who has just found his mother again, and she is holding a packet of Lays Magic Masala chips in one hand and a Cadbury Silk in the other. As an exultant glow suffuses his square brown face, two young nurses on a tea break whisper, ‘George Clooney’ to each other, giggle and scamper away.

Entirely oblivious to this little by-play, Bhavani tells Padam, ‘Good man! Now we know who the murderer is.’

‘That’s excellent, sir.’ The young policeman doesn’t try very hard to disguise his disbelief.

Bhavani looks up from the report for one keen moment. ‘Don’t believe me?’

Padam’s face reddens slightly. ‘Is he dead, sir? Aggarwal? What are the doctors saying?’

‘Ah.’ Bhavani gives a quick little nod. ‘He’s weak but he’ll live.’

‘Was it … attempted murder, sir?’

‘All in good time, PK!’ Bhavani smiles. ‘Send all our guests into Suite 3. Wait inside, with the rest of the team positioned just outside. And keep your handcuffs ready. When we leave from here, we will be taking a murderer with us.’

He hurries away, moving as buoyantly as a sixteen-year-old.

The Khuranas, husband and wife.

Bambi Todi.

Fr Victor Emmanuel and Randy Rax.

Ganga Kumar.

Kashi Dogra.

Cookie Katoch.

Roshni Aggarwal.

And on the hospital bed, weak, but well on his way to recovery, Aryaman Aggarwal.

‘Hai hai, it was all so goose-pimply, babe,’ Cookie Katoch tells her girlfriends breathlessly over lunch at Olive the next day. ‘Matlab, the décor in that hospital is better than Leela ka presidential suite, but there was also this total, rongta-raising, climax-wala atmosphere. And I toh was waise hi feeling SO much guilt, ki Roshni will hate me for telling the ACP about Arya’s fight with that wretched Ajay Kumar … Wohi jo dead ki jagah alive nikla! That is why I rushed to the hospital to suck up to her as soon as I got the news! I thought the horrid boy had OD’d because of me and my big mouth only! But then the whole story turned out to be quite different.

‘Anyway, he was out of danger by the time I got there – lying on the bed and sighing like a Devdas, with a whole mehfil around him! I found out later that some of them had showed up like that only, and some had been summoned by the ACP. Rosh looked like she’d been snorting some of her son’s maal, her eyes glittered so strangely. And her skin was so stretched over her face – if she does any more facelifts she’ll get stretch marks on her face, I tell you! Mukki’s eyes were darting everywhere, like a cornered chuha’s, and he’d worn those wretched yellow suspenders again, this time over a black shirt! He looked like a taxicab you don’t want to take. And Urvashi, dressed in white chikan mulmul, looking like Benazir Bhutto about to be assassinated! And Bambi Todi, so sweet, and Balbir Dogra’s son, so cute, and my God, there was so much tension in the room!

‘And then ACP Brownie stepped forward, his face ekdum grim, and all my chakras started whirring and jangling. All I could think was one of us is a murderer. One of us is a murderer! And I decided then and there ki no-carbs-after-seven rule be damned and pulled out my emergency muesli bar and started munching.’

As Cookie Katoch polishes off her muesli bar, Bhavani Singh looks about the room, his expression grave.

‘Our thanks to Roshni madam for permitting us to hold this