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

Bhavani shrugs. ‘We cannat exactly say. An exchange of words perhaps, followed by a physical fight – in which the ace mountaineer, at the peak of his physical training, but wearied perhaps by a night of non-stop revelry, was bested by the jilted lover who had been waiting jealously in the freezing cold for two hours. Vakeel sa’ab here is definitely smaller and slighter, but they say hatred can power a man with superhuman strength. Or perhaps he had had the element of surprise.’

‘You say you have proof of this,’ Kashi says in a low voice. ‘Can I ask what proof you possess?’

‘Perhaps you did nat mean to kill Bambi ji’s fiancé. Perhaps you had only sought to teach him a lesson. But once you realized he was dead, sanity returned. The enormity of what you had just done dawned on you. A man was dead at your hands, the son of a very rich and powerful man. Remembering the beetroot patch that you had seen being dug up in the lawn, you made a phone call to Guppie Ram, the old gardener, who was sympathetic to your cause, and had always been very taken up by the idea of you and Bambi ji getting together. Being a poor man himself, his sympathies lay with you, the poorer suitor, and nat with the arrogant Anshul. It was an easy enough task to persuade him to help you dispose Anshul’s body into that shallow grave.’

There is a small stifled gasp from the other end of the room. Ganga has slumped forward onto the coffee table, her head in her arms.

‘She’s fainted,’ Bambi, sitting next to her, says crisply. ‘Her pulse is steady enough. She should come around in a moment. It must be all this stress.’

‘What about you, Bambi?’ Urvashi leans in to whisper. ‘Isn’t this all … too much for you?’

Bambi’s face is very pale, but she shakes her head determinedly. ‘I’m sure he’s building up to some sort of twist in the tale,’ she whispers back. ‘It’s okay.’

Ganga revives, looking apologetic, and asks weakly for a glass of water. Rather self-consciously, Randy Rax holds it to her lips.

Bhavani, who has not looked away from Kashi even for moment during this bit of by-play, picks up his narrative from exactly where he has left it.

‘Fortune favours the brave, they say. God alone knows if you sent Anshul’s expedition members a message from his phone, and what you said in that message, or what answers you dreamt up to the questions that were sure to be raised the next day, or if you even managed to get any sleep that night. But by the time you woke up, the news was in. Anshul’s bus had plummeted into an abyss and all on board were dead. Nobody would go looking for him, or ask why he had nat shown up on the bus that morning. Miraculously, you were safe.’

‘Please, for the sake of clarity,’ Mukesh Khurana asks pleadingly, ‘you’re saying ki Bambi’s fiancé never got on the bus to Garhwal at all? That he was murdered that night and buried right here in the DTC? That he’s been here all along? You’re saying the body in the kitchen garden is Anshul Poddar? That’s your theory?’

Bhavani nods. ‘Yes.’

‘Fuck.’ Aryaman Aggarwal turns to look at Kashi with awe in his eyes. ‘Respect, bro!’

‘And so vakeel sa’ab was safe, but nat satisfied. Because Bambi Todi shunned him. Women have a special feminine intuition, they say, and perhaps, subconsciously, she sensed that the man who seemed to bear her no malice for the way in which she had jilted him, was actually the murderer of her fiancé and the architect of her grief. She did nat speak to him for the next two years.’

‘But the proof?’ Kashi insists again, in a low intense voice. ‘What proof do you have to substantiate this richly imagined tale?’

Bhavani turns to look at him more fully. ‘The shards of blue stone found in the mud correspond exactly with materials Cookie ji uses.’

‘That proves nothing.’

‘And the DNA from Anshul Poddar’s hair, plucked from the root … It was sent to us by his father and it matches the DNA of the skeleton found in the kitchen garden patch exactly. We have the report here. There is no room for error at all.’

‘That doesn’t prove Kashi did it,’ Bambi says hotly. ‘It just proves the man in the kitchen garden is Anshul! Which,’ she swallows painfully, ‘is horrible, of course, but I’ve … already mourned Anshul and I cannot do it again. You have no proof against Kashi, ACP!’

‘But we do, Bambi ji,’ Bhavani says softly. ‘When the newspapers reported that it was Ganga’s husband, Ajay Kumar, who was buried in the kitchen garden, Cookie ji came forward with a video recording of that night – a short clip of Ajay Kumar arguing with Aryaman Aggarwal in the parking lot.’

Urvashi leans forward, her beautiful brow furrowed. ‘But what’s that got to do with young Akash?’

‘Because parked beyond Ajay Kumar and Aryaman Aggarwal, in that video recording, is a car we recognize very well, because we helped push it up the driveway of the DTC only very recently. An old Maruti Swift, with a Noida registration number, belonging to—’

‘Me,’ Kashi says, very low.

Bhavani leaps on in this confession like a large jungle cat. ‘You accept it!’

Kashi’s handsome face is very white about the lips. His eyes glitter strangely. ‘Yes.

Everybody gasps. Bambi’s eyes skitter from Bhavani to Kashi, wide with fear.

‘So you were there that night, vakeel sa’ab?’ Bhavani’s voice is sharp. ‘You don’t deny it?’

Kashi throws up his head. ‘No.’ His voice is defiant. ‘I don’t deny it.’

His eyes go to Bambi’s. They stare at each other, communicating wordlessly. They stare at each other in a manner that makes everybody else feel slightly embarrassed. They stare at each other like there is nobody else in the room.

‘You … came back?’ she says finally, in a halting whisper.

He smiles ruefully and gives a