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

She nods, very pale but composed, her eyes looking around for her husband. ‘Mukesh?’

‘Yes.’ Mukesh Khurana steps forward, grasps his wife’s hand firmly, and looks around the mystified room. ‘We’ve discussed this,’ he says gruffly. ‘We don’t want to hide anything and we damn care what people think!’

Bhavani nods. ‘Thank you, Mukesh ji.’ He raises his voice slightly. ‘Well, it did nat take us very long to do the mathematics. The incident Urvashi ji seems to be referring to – “with rioters at the door and the entire city burning” – could only be the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. And Urvashi ji got married in 1990, at the age of twenty-three.’

‘That could just be a mistake,’ Bambi, who has been listening intently, leans forward to say. ‘Maybe she was so angry that she exaggerated a little bit? We all do sometimes. Maybe some chhota-mota rioting happened in the nineties too! I mean, this is Delhi we’re talking about! She could’ve been flexing about that!’

Bhavani shakes his head gently. ‘We checked it out, Bambi ji.’

Her eyes widen uncertainly. ‘And …?’

‘And there is a record of a seventeen-year-old Urvashi Narang giving birth to a boy child in Civil Lines’ Teerath Ram Shah Hospital in 1984.’

The entire room seems to suck in its breath collectively.

‘A child subsequently given up to the Badshahpur Children’s Village. A child christened Rakesh, and known as—’

‘Rax!’

The word bursts from the crippled man’s lips with pride. His crutches clatter to his feet as he raises his arms in uncertain triumph, his beady eyes still slyly mocking, but now also bright with hope, and a vulnerability which is heart-rending.

Everybody turns to look at him, slack-jawed. Even Aryaman Aggarwal struggles to sit up.

‘It’s true,’ Rax confirms happily. ‘I still can’t believe it but it’s true. This beautiful lady is my mother. She explained everything and she’s going to adopt me! I met her husband, and my half-sisters already and I know I’m gonna fit right in.’ He leans forward and adds confidentially, ‘They’re all as ugly as me!’

16

The A to my B

‘Girls, mera mind toh ekdum blow ho gaya!’ Cookie declares to her girlfriends the next day. ‘Matlab, we all used to say ki she is in too good shape to be mother-of-two, and now we were finding out ki she is mother-of-three! And here I am with my bums so big after only one C-section delivery twenty-three years ago! It’s too unfair, yaar, but what a chhupa Rustam she turned out to be, no? That woman can really keep a secret!’

Rax’s statement is met with a stunned silence by the group, and then, as comprehension dawns slowly upon their faces, there are exclamations and whispers all around. In the midst of this muted uproar, Urvashi gets gracefully to her feet, walks up to Rax and stands behind his chair to face the room. Mukki follows, solemn-faced and fiddling nervously with his yellow suspenders.

‘I don’t owe anybody in this room an explanation except Rakesh and Mukesh and they’ve both already had one,’ she says with quiet dignity. ‘But for the sake of justice, and for the proper investigation of these crimes, I will share this much. Yes, my parents did send me away to my father’s ancestral village in Punjab when I was seventeen. It was supposed to be a sort of punishment for being so wild and disobedient and flirtatious, but I decided to turn it into a punishment for them by having an affair with a local boy. What I hadn’t bargained for was getting pregnant. I didn’t have the guts to tell my parents about it till I was quite far along, and so then, of course, I had no option but to have the baby. It was given up for adoption as soon as it was born – they didn’t even let me look at it, or tell me the gender, or even the fact,’ her voice drops, she bites her lip, ‘that it was born with some physical and mental challenges …

‘The only information I had was the name of the institution that had taken the baby, and so I sent them money every year. I pictured my first child as healthy and happy, and hoped he had been adopted into a loving home, so imagine my horror when Leo showed up, and told me that this was very far from the truth. Nobody had adopted the baby, he had stayed in the orphanage all his life, and what, asked Leo, would my husband, and the world, say when they found out that Urvashi Khurana had abandoned her firstborn simply because he was not as perfect as she would have liked him to be?’

‘So you paid him off,’ Roshni murmurs.

‘Yes,’ Urvashi says quietly. ‘But I didn’t poison him. And the ACP can theorize all he likes, but Guppie Ram and I were never close, and I attended his funeral only out of common decency. He never told me anything about burying a dead body in the kitchen garden, and I didn’t order for it to be dug up in order to get General Mehra into trouble. I had enough going on in my own life, thank you very much.’

She bends and hugs Rax, who glows as proudly as a child.

Bambi Todi jumps to her feet. ‘You just put the mum in Chrysanthemum!’ she cries in a trembling voice, dashing tears from her face. ‘Three cheers for Urvashi Khurana!’

She starts to clap. Everybody joins in. There is laughter and cheering.

Urvashi smiles somewhat tremulously and thanks everyone. Mukki beams. ‘Rakesh has agreed to live with us and take the surname Khurana,’ he announces stolidly. ‘He’s had training in accountancy and will be joining my firm.’

Bhavani, who has let the reins go slack for a bit, now effortlessly gathers them up again. Padam, watching from the door, is reluctantly impressed.

‘Sach bataun toh I never thought ki Bhavani sir ki itni personality hai,’