When dreams turn in to nightmares, sleep is one inescapable prison. I have seen the way her recent experience torture her in the form of nightmares. As I had told her before I do know where to look and listen.
My nights are usually longer than hers. I do not dedicate much of my time to survey my dreams as I have much more complicated realities to comprehend and overpower. Miss Gadodia was one of those complications.
The fingerprints on the murder weapon belonged to a servant of the Gadodia house hold, since the knife originally came from there; they had concluded it of no importance to the case. There, one dead end. It does not bother me much, as I can easily go on with the planted finger prints theory, but whom and why, still remained a question. I need to interview Ragini Maheshwari, the only fish beyond my waters at the moment. It is a fact that she is lying….but why? I can understand her fury and insecurity…even her ill placed vendetta, but I refuse to believe it unless she voices the same. The Gadodia sisters are made of some different stuff…a big part of it owing to their strange house hold.
I hear her soft footsteps pass the study, going towards the kitchen. She might have woken up from another nightmare. It has been days since we have fallen in to this routine, of one staying awake the other waking up from a terrible sleep, both sharing the sugar-less bitter mug of dark coffee.
‘Casper!’ I call out, as I shuffle my study. ‘Where is my blue file?’
‘What blue file?’ She questions back, I can hear the sound of boiling water in the back ground.
‘The one Vic brought this morning.’
She sighs, apparently annoyed.
‘That was red,’ I can imagine her shaking her head at my obvious carelessness in a very disapproving way to match her tone. ‘It’s in your bed room, where you were reading it earlier.’
I mentally smack myself and go back to get it. There it is, lying innocently on the top of my bedside cabinet, red, exactly as she described it.
‘Casper?’
‘Now what?’ I hear her voice getting louder as she made her way towards my room. ‘Your phone is back in the study…I saw it there, the organizer is in the left drawer,’ she enters the room, muttering away and hands me a mug of smoking coffee. ‘Here is your coffee. Anything else sir?’ Her crooked eyebrow and the mocking tone make me grin.
‘You’re spoiling me,’ I tell her as we go back to the hall and sit for our coffee. ‘I don’t know how I will survive the big bad city waiting for me back in Mumbai now.’
Her face fall a little, as she sips her coffee silently and picks out a file from the pile I had been checking earlier. It is the one with crime scene photographs.
‘What are these?’ She asks curiously.
I stand up and walk across to the sofa she is sitting, lean against it and takes a look at what she was pointing over her shoulder.
‘That’s the path leading to the crime scene, see the tire marks, I wanted to examine them.’
She gives the photograph a long, considering look.
‘How can you tell one from another?’
‘Umm,’ I say, slipping in to the seat next to her and pulling up the file. ‘It differs from the vehicle and its weight for one. You know different models have different tires are well.’
She is still pondering my answer.
‘As for example, this,’ I say pointing a certain track. ‘Is the taxi you took, this was Vansh’s bike, older than your taxi …’
‘And this is Ragini’s car?’ She supplied. I don’t say anything and she looks up at me. ‘Right?’
I fletch the file with the records of court proceedings from her earlier trial and scan through it for a moment.
‘Can’t be,’ I mutter then. ‘She didn’t drive this far, she parked the car a behind the corner and walked in to the crime scene…or so she said.’
‘Maybe she lied.’
‘No, Casper. The taxi driver would have seen her had she came there… this is someone else…someone who came after Vansh and before you and your sister.’
‘The murderer?’
‘Probably.’
‘Shouldn’t we inform the police?’
I almost laugh at her innocence, it is hard not to, looking in to those eyes glittering in childish excitement.
‘That would be like ringing up Durga Prasad and telling him my arguments for the day….hilarious Casper!’
‘You don’t like him do you?’ She says, narrowing her eyes at my sarcasm.
‘I usually don’t love my opponents,’ I say, with a wistful smile. ‘But he is very good at what he does.’
‘Then so are you…’ She objects in her mild tone. I arch an eyebrow at her. This is a historical moment, where my extraordinary client is praising me for the first time. ‘What?’ She asks noticing my look. ‘I know you haven’t lost a case in your history…Vic…Vikram told me.’
‘Oh, Vic and you are on nickname terms?’ I take in the new development with surprise. ‘And you two gossip about me?’
‘I don’t gossip,’ she snorts. ‘I was asking him why you were so after me and…’
‘What did he say?’ My voice is cold with dared for a moment.
‘He said; you like challenges.’ I let out the breath I was holding. ‘And you’ve never lost one.’
‘He isn’t completely truthful there.’ I tell her, tilting my head. ‘I lost once, to this particular prosecutor, Mr. Durga Prasad Maheshwari. That was my last case in Kolkata before yours.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some people Casper, can do anything to win…even evil things. They just need a weapon, that’s all. Someone, I would trust with my life chose to betray me in the worst possible way. You might not imagine that…losing everything in one move, family, trust, love.’
‘Why?’
‘You should never ask a woman to go against her husband; they never do it, not even for their own.’
‘Especially when she thinks she owes that husband.’ She adds in a low tone. I watch her slightly amused not expecting her to catch up so easily. Then I notice the glitter in her eyes and her trembling lips. I know exactly what she is thinking and I do not want it voiced out, at the moment.
‘You do know, don’t you?’ She says after a moment in a shaking tone. ‘That’s why you let me stay here. That’s why you never blame Ma for the way she behaves, you know everything.’
I bow a little, not wanting to meet her questioning gaze and affirm her doubts. But she does read me a bit too much to my comfort. Yes, I do know what her mother was going through.
‘I know how hard it is to be an unwanted child,’ I tell her after a moment. ‘It’s not relevant to our case, so you can keep your secret.’
She watches me with an amazed expression for a long while as I try to stand up. Swiftly she holds my wrist, her cold fingers stopping me with their gentle pressure. Unintentionally my eyes snap and meet her gaze, those coffee color eyes glittering behind a veil of tears.
‘She wasn’t wrong,’ her voice speaks in a tone a little higher to a whisper. ‘She only trusted the wrong man…loved someone who did not deserve it.’
‘Did she wait for him?’ I ask her, in a daring tone.
‘He never came back…’ She says in an empty tone. ‘He was too compressed by his family. So was she…she had to marry Baba…abide her family’s decision.’
‘Did he know she was pregnant with another’s child when he married her?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘He loved her, or what he imagined she was. When that perfect image broke…he couldn’t take it anymore. He hates me for that…for breaking his fantasy…for cursing his fate.’
Her voice breaks and dies, before she starts with a new tone.
‘All my life I tried to be the perfect daughter he would accept one day. All I wanted was to be loved but all I did was reminding him of his failures. He hates me too much, my happiness irks him. He wants me to suffer like he does. I had accepted that punishment…lived the life he created for me…the life full of rules, walls. Never doing anything I wanted, always doing what he decided for me. I thought he might feel; it was enough; one day. But…then I realized hatred never faints with time, it only grows…grows beyond, no matter how much pain you inflect on another you just want them to suffer more. I was getting suffocated there…too tired of waiting, I wanted to be free.’
‘Lakshya,’ I mutter gradually.
‘Hmm. He offered me that freedom. Said the things I yearned to hear for so long. You were right, it wasn’t love. I was never in love with him…I was in love with the idea of being loved finally. I was too glad to marry someone and free Baba from seeing me every day, free myself from the clutches of that hatred…. I just flew towards the chance, not thinking twice, not noticing anything, just flew towards the light…’
‘And burned yourself,’ I supply.
‘I didn’t know they were planning Ragini’s engagement with Lakshya when I said yes to his proposal. Baba was too angry then…thought I was trying to mess with my sister’s life.’
‘It was never your fault. Lakshya should have known better.’
‘He did save me there. Talked to everyone, made everyone agree… He was so in love with me…’
‘I know broken dreams hurt Casper, but you should really let this go now.’
‘I’m falling SK, my wings do not help me anymore.’ She says slowly. ‘If you lose, I would die; if you win they would kill me slowly and daily. I’m about to sink in to the endless depths, either way.’ Her eyes again find my gaze and keep it halted unblinkingly. ‘That’s why I asked you to leave that day. Leave me to die. I can take death…but no more pain or hatred, no more broken hopes. I can’t fight anymore.’
‘Death isn’t as pretty as you think it is.’
‘But it is finite. Not endless like hatred is.’
If there is something you could love instantly, deeply and thoughtlessly it would be your own reflection, mirroring every thought, feeling, experience and pain you’ve been through, matching your every imagination, complimenting your every dream and on the same time fitting into the gaps left in them. In a puzzle you call it the counter piece; in life you call it soul mate.
‘But now I don’t want you to leave,’ she says after a long frozen moment, her grip still on my wrist, her eyes still holding my gaze. ‘I don’t want to die as long as you’re here… It’s stupid I know… but I want to keep falling, because the moment I find ground or water, the moment you save me or not, you would leave…and I would be dead or wanting to die. I want to keep falling…keep falling forever.’
I have thousand qualms with her theory, or her visualization of me, but I cannot remember what they were at the moment. My world is a sheer blank space, except for those eyes staring at me and her voice, echoing in every cell of my being.
Who would want to leave?
There is a blank period in my memory in which I had covered the distance between us, her eyes still holding my gaze; they are darker now, like two orbs of molten chocolate. I can smell her breath; feel its warmth fanning on my face as I place my lips on hers. Our breath mingle and so do our thoughts. Her lips, fragile and cold, as I smooth them softly with my harder ones transferring the warmth of hopes I dare to hold within me, melting the ice of her insecurities, her grip on my wrist loosens as her hand travel up my arm, holding my shoulder and leaning against me, her other hand resting against my nape. I let my fingers wave in to her hair, cupping her face as I taste her lips, she parts her lips breaking the last of doubt I had of my actions, too insistent on holding me close and inviting me to explore her, and the last of the wall between us is tossed forever.
It is not a logical thought, neither is factually explained and rationally understood, because it is the edge of logic, where thinking just stops, brain doesn’t function anymore and heart wakes up from a frozen slumber. Before you realize you have reached the cliff edge, you are falling and surprisingly you don’t worry about your life anymore, because you have already reached the destination, you have already lived. In that moment only flying is what matters, not the wings nor the sun.
*