Fatal Mistakes Read online

  Uday held out a hand as if to stop her.

  ‘Nathan’s right,’ he said softly, his chest rising and falling as he struggled to control his emotions. ‘I should just go do my job and not let you distract me.’

  He walked away, leaving Avantika standing with her mouth open. What the hell just happened? she asked herself. But before she could even frame an answer, her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. Incoming call from Aai. She answered.

  ‘Avanti? That photo na …’ her mother’s voice sounded in her ear.

  She rolled her eyes. Ah yes, the photograph. One of the many that had found their way into her inbox since her father had decided it was unacceptable to have an unmarried daughter in his house. Ignoring the lot of them clearly wasn’t working.

  ‘Aai, tell Baba this is not a good time to discuss boys with me.’

  ‘What? Arré, no, no. Sapna’s picture. Remember?’

  ‘Who?’

  Her mother clicked her tongue.

  ‘Sapna? Radha’s daughter? You had put the missing ad in your paper?’

  ‘Oh, right, right,’ Avantika said, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘She hasn’t heard anything from anyone yet, so I was wondering if we should put the ad again. Maybe someone will see and …’

  Avantika listened to her mother’s voice as she tried to remember what the maid’s daughter looked like. She vaguely remembered Sapna as a cheerful, skinny girl who had come over once to draw mehendi on her hands before a friend’s wedding. The only other time she had actually met her was when she had come home with Radha to give them pedhas after passing her SSC Board exams. When Aai had asked her what she planned to do next, she had shyly confessed that she wanted to do a beautician’s course and start her own beauty parlour someday.

  When news of her going missing had reached them, Avantika’s mom had asked if anything had troubled her at home, anything that might have made her run away, but Radha had turned down the idea. She had gone to the police two whole days after her daughter failed to return home, a genius-level move, Avantika thought, when she’d first heard. What kind of mother doesn’t report a missing daughter for forty-eight hours, she had asked. The kind that thinks twice before involving the police in her troubles, her mother had replied with a glare. The police had assured Radha that they were looking for Sapna, but with at least thirty-five people going missing every day in the city, Avantika didn’t think Sapna’s chances looked good. That was what she’d told her mom when the latter had first suggested she put a missing person ad in the Mumbai Daily. But Alka Pandit had drawn herself to her full height of five feet three inches and asked what good it was to have a journalist for a daughter if she couldn’t even help her own help.

  So, despite knowing what she knew—that the likelihood of a teenage girl surviving alone on Mumbai’s streets unharmed was microscopic, that the chances of finding someone who doesn’t want to be found are marginal, that the search is exponentially tougher after the first forty-eight hours—Avantika had told her mom to send her Sapna’s details along with a recent photo. The missing person ad had come out weeks ago and if there were no leads yet … But she knew better than to dampen the hopes of a mother—especially her own. She assured Aai that she’d get the ad out again. One call to the guy she knew in the Response Department to sort out the details, and she was free.

  Free to dwell on the fact that in the matter of a single afternoon, she had got her best and possibly only friend into trouble and lost all the progress she had made with her editor in the past year. She glanced at Uday, hunched over his computer, frowning with concentration. She owed him her job and most of her mental health. She had almost dragged him into the mud with her, and for what? The chance to get her byline above an exposé? The chance to prove to Nathan that she had what it takes? Well, duh. She wasn’t just going to give up on that. And she would do whatever it took to get her way, whether Nathan liked it or not. She’d just have to keep Uday out of her shenanigans, but he’d probably be thankful for that anyway.

  The question was, where was she going to get her big scoop, now that she had been ordered off that suicide. It definitely wasn’t going to be at—she glanced at the A4 sheet Nathan had handed her—Dharini Farm. A waste-management farm, she thought, shaking her head. Of all the things he could’ve asked her to write about, he had chosen this garbage. Literally. She sneaked a look at Nathan. She could see him through the glass panels of his cabin, talking on the phone, the worry lines on his face pronounced in the harsh fluorescent light. Perhaps she needed to lie low awhile, till he calmed down. Even if it meant visiting a farm that processed actual, physical shit. She was about to dial the number on the sheet to set up an appointment with the manager of the farm, when her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number? She frowned as she read it:

  10062019Kandivali help avntika mam do smthng pls

  What the hell? Who was this? How did they have her number? And what the fuck did this mea—

  ‘Hey, there.’

  She knew that voice.

  ‘Go away,’ she said, not looking up from the phone.

  ‘I would, if I thought you were being serious,’ Dhruv Juneja, ace photographer and one of the two heirs to the Juneja business empire, grinned as he sat down next to her.

  ‘Oh, you think I’m not serious?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Very presumptuous of you.’

  ‘God, I love it when you use long words!’ he grinned. It was a nice grin, with the dimples and the twinkly eyes.

  Avantika shook her head in amused exasperation.

  ‘Do you mind, I’m trying to work,’ she lied, trying not to smile.

  ‘Sure, sure, just tell me when to pick you up.’

  ‘What?!?’

  ‘Nathan’s asked me to go with you to take some pictures. At a … I’m not sure I heard it right, but it sounded like “waste farm”?’

  ‘No, you heard right.’ She scowled. ‘Why can’t Gupte come, though?’

  The Mumbai Daily’s staff photographer was a veteran. Avantika got along with him in a way only two Maharashtrians with an unhealthy obsession for puran poli can.

  ‘Down with malaria, I heard,’ Dhruv said.

  She cursed inwardly. Malaria. One good thundershower and Mumbai’s puddles turned into crèches for mosquitoes. Who then joyfully flitted about spreading malaria, dengue and other delightful diseases through the city. Financial capital of the country my ass, she thought.

  Aloud she said, ‘Don’t you have some crumbling buildings or something to take pictures of?’

  ‘I do,’ he said, ‘But I like a challenge. Focusing on anything, and garbage of all things, when you’re around? That’s going to be pretty damn challenging.’

  She rolled her eyes at the compliment, although secretly she was pleased. When she had first heard that he was photographing forgotten parts of the city for a Mumbai Daily photo feature, she’d assumed he’d barely be in the office. Except every time she looked up, there he was, hovering around, saying things that made fluttery things happen in her chest. Which wasn’t to say that he let his work slide or the pictures he turned in weren’t good. They had a nostalgic quality to them, making you want to be in the place in the picture, at the time it was taken; and somehow that time seemed to be a long time ago. They blew her mind, those pictures. Not something she was going to admit to him in a hurry, though. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’m just making an appointment with the manager. Let’s try to do this tomorrow itself. I’ll keep you posted on the time.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ he grinned.

  It was a really nice grin.

  Two

  The wind whipped Avantika’s hair across her face as she sped down the empty road with Dhruv, the windows of the BMW rolled down. The early rays of the sun spilled on the grey concrete, turning it into liquid gold. Soon, it would be crawling with buses and bikes, cars and trucks, and rickety rickshaws. But for now, it lay before them, qu
iescent and beautiful, with the kind of grungy urban charm that only the city-bred could appreciate.

  They had left early to avoid the traffic, with Dhruv showing up at her house at 7 a.m. She’d had her doubts about that. She didn’t want her parents to catch sight of him, standing next to his BMW, ridiculously out of place in the middle-class Santacruz neighbourhood where she lived. They’d have asked to be introduced and once her father got a whiff of Dhruv’s ‘family background’ as he called it … well. She’d have had to tie Baba to a chair to prevent him from kidnapping the guy and forcing him to marry his daughter. Assuming, of course, that he didn’t stumble upon the less savoury details of Dhruv’s family history. But she needn’t have worried. Both Aai and Baba had been asleep when she’d snuck out, with the vague feeling that she was doing something wrong.

  Why was that, she wondered as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Sure, he was attractive. Intelligent, charming, all the romcom requisites, really. For some inexplicable reason he seemed to be into her, even. Then why was it that she felt she wasn’t so much being flirted with, as flirted at? Or had she been flirting back all along, without realising it? Hadn’t she read a study somewhere that flirting was difficult to detect? Good God, was she so brain-dead she didn’t realise what constituted as flirting, even when she was the one doing it? She hoped not.

  He caught her looking and smirked. She frowned and turned back to her Google Maps app.

  ‘Take the right at the next signal,’ she said.

  They were entering Deonar now, a suburb with the infamous claim of being home to the city’s largest garbage dump and Asia’s largest slaughterhouse—and, apparently, to the waste-management facility known as Dharini Farm. They took a narrow gully that probably wanted to become a service road when it grew up, the BMW drawing curious glances from pedestrians as it inched past cramped one- and two-storey houses that had been built so close together they practically shared a wall.

  Avantika kept her eye on Google Maps. One wrong turn in this congested warren and there was no knowing where they’d end up. Someplace straight out of Shantaram, probably. Her phone pinged with a new message alert. 01042019Sion help avntika mam do sm, it read in the preview. What the … Again? She frowned. What did this even mean? And could it come at a worse time? She frowned and swiped the message away. Right now, she needed to focus on the map before her and navigate them to the hopefully safe walls of Dharini Farm. She did not have time to ponder mystery texts.

  About fifteen minutes later, Dhruv was parking the car outside a large, semicircular gate, above which hung a board painted with the words ‘Dharini Farm’. The gate was wide open. They parked the car inside an unpaved courtyard that seemed to have been recently swept. The courtyard led to an old-fashioned house, all red-tiled sloping roof and wooden beams, the walls painted cerulean blue. It looked incongruous in this neighbourhood, with its tall smoke-spewing chimneys and the distant smell of rotting innards.

  Moments after Avantika rang the bell, the door was opened by a young woman in a floral polyester salwar kameez. She listened politely as they explained the purpose of their visit, then invited them inside. The inside of the house was sparse, but tidy. There was hardly any furniture in the living room—just a few mismatched moulded-plastic chairs and a plastic table near a wall. The floor was grey kadappa stone, the walls the same shade of cerulean as outside.

  The young woman led them out of the living room, down a corridor filled with potted plants to a small room that served as the office. She indicated two metal chairs placed opposite the kind of desk you found in government offices. ‘Please wait here, I’ll get Didi,’ she said in Hindi, before leaving the room.

  Avantika looked around, as she eased into the chair. The place looked more like an empty Gram Panchayat office than a waste-management centre. Next to her, Dhruv was unpacking his camera. He fixed the lens and aimed it at some point out of the window.

  ‘Should’ve got some lights,’ he muttered.

  ‘That’s not enough?’ she asked, gesturing at the fluorescent tube up on the wall behind the desk.

  ‘No,’ he replied, peering through the lens, adding in Hindi, ‘We’ll have to shoot her outside.’

  There was a clink of glass from the doorway. Avantika looked up to see a young girl holding a tray bearing water glasses and looking alarmed.

  ‘No, no, he was talking about shooting with a cam …’ her voice trailed off as she looked closely at the girl. She looked familiar somehow: that face, the plait dangling over the shoulder. ‘You’re … Have we …? I feel like I know you,’ Avantika said with a hesitant smile.

  The girl stood rooted to the spot, eyes wide, hands shaking. She didn’t seem to have heard a word Avantika said.

  ‘Please, please don’t tell them!’ she whispered in Hindi, a rush of words delivered with a trembling voice, as she glanced furtively at the door behind her.

  ‘Wha …?’

  ‘I don’t know what they’ll do if they find out … please, please don’t say anything!’

  Avantika couldn’t put her finger on it. The girl looked very familiar. Avantika could’ve sworn she had met her before. But where? When? She squinted at the young, scared face. And like the silhouette of a vase suddenly becoming two faces, the picture fell into place. She recognized the girl. This was Sapna. Radha’s daughter. Avantika frowned. Surely Radha and her husband would be happy to hear that she was alive? Yes, they were Indian parents, so there would be some heavy lecturing about running away from home, once the tears of homecoming had dried. Maybe she’d even be grounded for some time. Why did Sapna look so scared? Or was she underestimating the parental wrath the girl would face at home? Sapna was shivering and her eyes were brimming with terrified tears.

  ‘OK, OK, relax, I won’t say anything, alright?’ she said, patting the girl’s arm reassuringly.

  She opened her mouth to say something more when she saw Dhruv looking at the doorway. The young woman who had led them into the office was standing by the door, and her eyes were on Avantika’s hand which still gently held Sapna’s arm. Avantika thought she saw the slightest frown on the woman’s face. The young woman cleared her throat.

  ‘Nalini Didi is coming in five minutes,’ she said in Hindi, looking from Avantika to Sapna.

  Sapna turned and walked silently out of the room.

  ‘You’ll have some chai-coffee?’ the young woman asked.

  ‘Chai, please,’ Dhruv said with a smile and the young woman smiled back.

  ‘I’ll get it right away,’ she said, hurrying out of the door.

  ‘What was that?’ Dhruv asked her, once the woman had left.

  ‘Oh, that was … my maid’s daughter,’ Avantika said, her voice tinged with disbelief. Sitting on one of the chairs, she fished out a notebook and pen from her bag ‘She’s actually been missing for a few weeks.’

  ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘No clue,’ Avantika shrugged. ‘We had put out a missing persons ad for her a few weeks ago. You know, it’s weird, her mom took two whole days before she went to the police. If I had a sixteen-year-old daughter I couldn’t find, I’d be outside the police station in ten minutes. And I wouldn’t leave. They’d have to drag me away.’

  Dhruv gave her an appraising look.

  ‘You’d make a good mom,’ he smirked, ‘Strict with kids, but also … hot.’

  ‘I’d be hot with kids?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘No, generally hot.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘Yeah, crazy about—’

  ‘Don’t even think of saying it,’ she warned.

  Dhruv looked like he was going to reply, but stopped and looked meaningfully at the door behind her. She turned around and felt like someone had knocked the wind out of her. A slim woman in a handloom saree had entered the room. Her long hair was neatly tied in an elegant knot at the nape of her neck, she walked with the ramrod-straight posture of a queen, yet there was a welcoming
smile on her face—all of which were shoved unceremoniously in the background by the fact that her face was …

  Avantika tried not to stare. The woman’s face was a mess of scar tissue. The skin on her cheeks, stretched tautly across the cheekbones, was the colour of raw meat, whereas the skin on her neck was a darkened nut brown. Neither colour matched the skin on the rest of her body. One eye was smaller than the other and her lips had fused in one corner, so she couldn’t open her whole mouth while speaking. She looked like something out of a Ramsay Brothers’ nightmare. There could be only one explanation for her appearance and Avantika felt her gut twist when she realized what it was.

  ‘You’re from Mumbai Daily?’ the woman asked, walking to the desk.

  ‘Uh … Avantika Pandit,’ Avantika said, jumping to her feet and holding out a hand, ‘and this is—’

  ‘Dhruv. Dhruv Juneja,’ Dhruv finished.

  ‘Like Bond, James Bond,’ the woman said with a lopsided smile, shaking their hands. ‘I’m Nalini Gupta.’ She read their expressions. ‘I see. You didn’t know I’m an acid-attack survivor.’

  Avantika shook her head. Bloody Nathan with his A4-page summaries. He couldn’t have mentioned this? She cleared her throat.

  ‘You manage the farm?’ she asked.

  ‘And own it,’ Nalini said. She watched them trying to unscramble their thoughts for a few moments. Then she took pity on them. ‘Chai? Thanda? Questions?’ she asked.

  Dhruv recovered first.

  ‘I’ve already asked for the chai; she can take the questions,’ he said, pointing at Avantika with a smile.

  Avantika tore her gaze away from the woman and looked through her notes.

  ‘So, um … Ms Gupta …,’ she began.

  ‘Nalini.’

  ‘Right, Nalini. So, a waste-management farm. That’s not a typical career choice.’

  ‘Really?’ Nalini asked with a smile. ‘You’re not going to ask about the acid attack first? I’m surprised. Which doesn’t happen often. This is … interesting.’

  ‘No, we can talk about that if you’re … OK with it.’