Fatal Mistakes Read online

  ‘Lunch then. How about lunch?’ her father’s voice cut through her thoughts.

  She glared at the mobile phone lying on the dining table next to her mug. Ring, damn you, ring. Do a girl a solid. Beep, buzz, emit some sound that I can use as an excuse to go into the next room. At which point, to her surprise, and to the everlasting smugness of any book written on the power of wanting something bad enough, her handset buzzed with a new text.

  ‘Ihavetotakethisitswork,’ she said, nearly running out of the room, phone in hand.

  In the safety of her bedroom, she opened the message. Mystery number again. This time it said 22042019bandra help avntika madm do smthng. OK, that’s it, she was going to get to the bottom of this. She had already tried calling the number via TrueCaller, but it had shown up as Unknown, a sure sign of a spam number if there ever was one. But it didn’t explain how the caller knew her name. It wasn’t even as if they were calling and offering her a shady personal loan or a credit card she’d never heard of. Just these random numbers and a call for help.

  She drummed her fingers on the desk as she considered going to the police for a moment. But no, they’d laugh her out of the police station. Nobody was threatening to kill her or rape her or was harassing her in any way and the police had enough of that to deal with without having some woman come at them with what looked like someone playing a badly thought-out prank. No, she’d have to figure this one out herself.

  She started her laptop, which she’d left on standby mode after working on the Dharini Farm piece. It had turned out quite nice, she thought. It wasn’t a piece on a waste-management farm anymore. It was about the strength and resilience of its women, of the spirit of optimism that powered their efforts and the embodiment of all those qualities in Nalini Gupta. She had peppered the piece with quotes from the farm’s investors and customers, and was waiting for a couple more responses to her emails.

  Of the lot she had received, one was an emailed reply from the secretary to Mukta Chougule. Once upon a time, Mrs Chougule had simply been the dour-faced wife of mafia kingpin Anant Chougule. But since her husband’s retirement from active crime, she had made a name for herself in politics and was now a corporator who was headlining her party’s Clean Up Mumbai campaign. Avantika remembered her press conference a couple of years ago, after a building had collapsed in her ward, killing five people. The woman had vowed to get the builder punished and, to the surprise of many, had actually managed to get it done. Not to mention getting the guy to pay a hefty sum in compensation to the families of the dead and injured.

  Menaka Gujaral’s response had come over the phone. Avantika had been surprised—COOs, even of start-ups, preferred to email across carefully worded, PR-team-approved quotes. No, scratch that, the assistants of COOs usually emailed their quotes because guess what, peasant? COOs are important, busy people who’re too important and busy to have a chat on the phone. Not Ms Gujaral. In a cheery, mellow voice, the WSpot COO had called Dharini Farm ‘a beacon of hope and a testimony to the good that women can create if they work together in a spirit of sisterhood’—which, while being wordy, did hit the nail right on the head. When Avantika had thanked her, she had made a derisive sound and ended the call with ‘keep in touch’. Another surprise. Bet you say that to all the girls, she’d thought.

  The last quote had just come in: from the corporate communications department of Chauhan Builders, on behalf of the owner Poonam Chauhan, who was well known for her ruthlessness in the boardroom and in the market. There were reports that Ms Chauhan had the ethics of a hungry hyena, reports that only grew in volume when work on one of the group’s big-ticket projects was stalled by workers demanding a wage hike. The workers’ union leader disappeared overnight. The workers got their pay rise. The project was completed in record time without any further hitch. There had been no follow-up demands.

  Avantika had been impressed when she’d first found that bit out during her research. Ms Chauhan clearly believed in the carrot and the stick. Now, as she added the woman’s quote to the story and mailed it to Nathan, she hoped like hell he’d like the piece. It was Saturday, so she wouldn’t hear anything from him till after the weekend.

  Oh well. Her self-esteem could wait till Monday to blow itself into smithereens.

  She opened up her internet browser and keyed in 10062019Kandivali. If Google didn’t know what this was, who would, she thought. An eight-digit number. Well, that ruled out mobile phone numbers. And Aadhaar numbers. Bank account numbers? Perhaps. Was it an amount of money? One crore sixty-two thousand and nineteen rupees. A lot of money, then. Who had that kind of money anyway? The search results came back just then, a list of dividend results for a consultancy, followed by a whole ream of sites which all opened to the message ‘This XML document does not seem to have any information. Document tree is given below.’ Whatever the hell that meant. After that came a site for something called a BCARE report, which was full of numbers so closely typed, it made her head swim. Back to the search results. Next up, a courier company’s page with shipment numbers. She hadn’t even considered that. What if the numbers were parcel codes? Then the next logical step would be checking the tracking codes of major courier companies in India and seeing if these tallied with any of those. She made a note on her to-do list and tried with the second message.

  Google asked her to make sure that all words are spelled correctly. She took that as a personal affront and put a space between the numbers and ‘Sion’. Now the page threw up hundreds of results for ‘Sion’ but none that included the digits with it. She sighed and keyed in the numbers in the last message. Just one result, that too, without any mention of Bandra. She clicked on the link, out of pure curiosity. How often do you search for something on Google and get just one result? One page of results, sure, but just one search result? The site opened. It was a railway timetable. Two months old. For a train that ran in Norway.

  Avantika sighed and sat back, fiddling idly with the keys. Et tu, Google? You couldn’t take a few microseconds out of your busy schedule of making new Doodles for World Necromancy Day or whatever, and unscramble this nonsense for me? Fine. She was about to get up when her gaze fell on the date of the Norwegian timetable on the screen: 22 May 2019. She blinked, then held up her phone: It was a date! 22.05.2019. Her mind was a tumult of questions. What happened on 22nd May? What happened on the other dates? Why were they important? Why was someone sending her these dates and places? She picked up her phone and regarded it for a second. Calling the mystery number hadn’t worked. Nobody had answered. Yet she had got a text again. Perhaps the sender couldn’t talk? Maybe they preferred to communicate through SMS? She shrugged and keyed in a message:

  Hi, got your messages. What is your name? What happened on these dates? Tell me so I can help you. – Avantika.

  And now, we wait, she thought.

  Four

  ‘Pandit!’

  Avantika clicked her tongue and got up from her seat, locking her mobile screen as she did. It was Monday morning, there were no replies to the text she had sent the mystery number and to make the unholy trifecta perfect, Nathan was calling her to his office so it was probably something bad. Cross that; it was definitely something bad. In the past year, she’d visited his office several times, and had been made to feel like a schoolgirl caught reading smutty novels during Physics class. Particularly during that whole episode last year involving Aisha Juneja, Dhruv’s sister. And that bit with Prajakta Bhise’s grandmom. Avantika had really hoped she was inching her way out of the doghouse, but this new summons was telling her otherwise.

  Popping her head into Nathan’s cabin, she asked, ‘You called?’

  He was standing at his desk, skipping the comforts of the swivel chair, poring over some proofs. On the wall behind him hung framed black-and-white photographs of the stories he’d covered over the years. The Bombay riots of 1993. The Bombay Stock Exchange bombing. An interview with Nana Chudasma. In sharp contrast to them were the ones taken at Press Club event
s. In some of the photographs, Avantika spotted faces she knew, legendary journalists who’d passed away long ago and a young, smiling—smiling!—Nathan without a trace of cynicism in his eyes.

  ‘When you’re done gawking, perhaps you can explain this to me.’

  Nathan’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

  ‘What?’

  He pointed to his computer, where a copy of her Dharini Farm story was open.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Avantika’s forehead wrinkled in confusion.

  ‘Precisely my point,’ Nathan replied, taking off his spectacles and pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘I thought it was supposed to be about a waste-management farm and this whole sustainable Swachh Mumbai trend in the city. But it’s reading like My Days as a Nalini Gupta Fangirl. Explain.’

  ‘Well, yes, Nathan, I went there with every intention to cover the wonderful world of methane and hydrogen sulphide,’ she said with a straight face, ‘but it’s a waste-management farm run by an acid-attack survivor! And she’s employing battered women! So, I thought, hey, here’s a human-interest angle that will be more engaging for our readers. Millennials love feminism almost as much as they love saving the planet, you know,’ she added shamelessly.

  Nathan seemed to consider this. Then, with the faintest ghost of a smile on his face he said, ‘OK. Send it for layout.’

  He returned to the proofs. A moment later, without looking up he said, ‘You’re still here.’

  ‘Oh, I thought …’ she said. What? Nathan had no other feedback? ‘Right. OK. Great. Thanks.’

  She was about to walk out of the cabin when he called out, ‘Good job. It’s a good story.’

  She froze. What. Was. Happening. She turned around slowly. Nathan was looking at her, amused.

  ‘Thanks?’ she mumbled, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  ‘You look surprised,’ Nathan said, ‘but then, truth be told, so was I. I had fully expected you to phone this one in, Pandit, but it’s actually not bad. And the fact that you have shown this kind of maturity and done a good job on a piece you weren’t keen on shows me you’re growing as a reporter. Keep it up.’

  Avantika was taken by surprise; she had not expected quite so much praise. She had no idea what to do. To her helpless horror, she saw her thumbs rising up. Was she giving her editor a double thumbs up? Good God, she was. She willed the thumbs down, then smiled awkwardly and dashed out of Nathan’s cabin. Nathan had called her story good. Then she had given him two thumbs up, like a nitwit stuck in a time warp. But let’s focus on the positive: Nathan liked the story. It was going into print. This was reasonably good.

  Yet, she felt only relief. A sense of having gotten out of a hairy situation intact. That feeling of excitement, that little kick she had felt when she had reported the ward-boy autopsy piece, that was missing now. She knew why, too. It was because no matter how much Dharini Farm helped women, no matter how much good Nalini did, in the end, there was no justice for those women. The wrongs they had suffered hadn’t been reported, their perpetrators still walked free. There was no accountability and, as far as Avantika herself was concerned, the whole point of a newspaper was to make people accountable for their actions.

  Or maybe she wasn’t feeling all that happy because she wasn’t able to do what she usually did when a story was approved: brag about it to Uday. Well, perhaps that could change. She saw Uday typing away on his computer and sauntered over.

  ‘So, I turned in the waste-management farm story and Nathan liked it,’ she announced, perching on his desk, next to his computer.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said with a quick smile at her, before returning to his typing.

  ‘And you?’ she asked, trying to sound casual. ‘How’s your story coming along?’

  ‘The one on the potholes? I have to speak to someone in the BMC today.’

  ‘How exciting,’ she sighed, ‘I wasn’t talking about that one.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the Kandivali suicide? Yeah, it’s going OK.’

  ‘OK? Just OK? Come o—’ she stopped. ‘Wait, did you say Kandivali?’

  ‘Yes, Avanti,’ he replied patiently, ‘All Bless High School is in Kandivali East, remember? And Tushar Prasad lives … lived right down the road from the school.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ she said faintly.

  ‘What?’ Uday asked, looking at the faraway expression on her face.

  ‘Umm, listen, what date did he commit suicide on?’

  ‘Avanti, Nathan has categorically told you to stay away from this,’ he frowned.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said hurriedly.

  She didn’t want to piss him off again. But Kandivali. The suicide had happened in Kandivali. She scrolled through her phone till she found the message she was looking for.

  ‘Did it happen on tenth June, by any chance?’ she asked, not looking at him.

  Uday stopped typing. He gave her a searching look that she avoided by scanning the ceiling of the office. He sat back in his seat and folded his arms.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ she said, now deeply engrossed in looking at the wall behind him. ‘I’m not doing a thing. Not. A. Thing. I’m not going anywhere near this story. It’s all yours. I want nothing to do with it, I promise. OK?’

  Uday shook his head and returned to his typing.

  ‘So, it is tenth June, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Now will you let me finish my work, please?’

  She nodded and hopped off his desk. Tushar Prasad had killed himself on tenth June in Kandivali, huh? How interesting. How very, very interesting. She looked at the message on her phone as she walked back to her desk. 10062019Kandivali. It could be a coincidence, of course. Kandivali was a big place. And lots of things could’ve happened there on the tenth of June. The message could be about something else entirely. It probably was. It had asked her to help and how could she help someone who was already dead? It made no sense. No, the message had to be about something else. It just ha—

  ‘Oh!’ She stopped with a sudden start.

  She had almost bumped into someone while looking at her phone. She looked up to say sorry and stopped.

  ‘Hi,’ Dhruv said, ‘you have a minute?’

  ‘Sure, what’s up?’ she said, fighting an impulse to smooth down her hair.

  ‘I need to talk to you. Will you come outside?’

  She followed him to the verandah outside the Mumbai Daily’s office. Binoy Saha, the paper’s gossip columnist, was smoking at the far end. She nodded to him. He nodded back and returned to his cigarette and his phone.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked a little warily, hoping that Dhruv was the kind of guy who didn’t take rejection as a personal insult. He seemed sane enough, but these days who could tell?

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘I like you,’ he said simply.

  ‘What?’ For a moment she was sure she hadn’t heard him right.

  ‘I like you. I really like you. And I’d like to take you out for dinner or coffee, or whatever you’re comfortable with.’

  Her brow furrowed. Nope, there was definitely something wrong with her ears.

  ‘You’re … asking me out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.

  ‘You said I shouldn’t flirt with you because it isn’t real,’ Dhruv said. ‘Well, I flirt with you because … I like seeing the look on your face when I do. There’s this … exasperated half smile and you look away, as if you’re unable to look me in the eyes and it’s … nice. I like it. The way you look, the way you talk, the sarcasm—I like all of that. And I want to get to know … more. So, have dinner with me. Unless you don’t want to, in which case I’ll leave you alone and I promise, things won’t be weird.’

  She blinked. Dhruv Juneja was asking her out. Dhruv Juneja. Was asking her out. Across the years, her fifteen-year-old self gasped. She owe
d that girl this. Her mouth was still open. And her phone was buzzing with a text. Saved by the buzz, she thought.

  ‘Sorry, just give me a …’ she pointed to the phone apologetically.

  It was a text from the mystery number. She wanted to open it. But Dhruv was standing before her, looking slightly anxious. Wait, was he … nervous? About what she’d say? Oh boy. She cleared her throat and mumbled.

  ‘Sorry, what?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, dinner is … yes.’

  ‘Great. Day after?’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I’ll see you then … Actually, we’ll plan first … pick a place and … yeah. Cool.’

  He was smiling as he left and she felt her mouth turn up at the corners in response. Holy shit. She had a date with Dhruv Juneja. She looked up and took a deep breath. It was fine. Be cool. Be coooool. It’s just a date. Just dinner. With Dhruv Juneja. Oh dear God. Strange things were happening in her stomach. She cleared her throat. From the other end of the verandah, Binoy was looking at her curiously. She waved at him as she walked back into the office. Okay. She needed to distract herself or she’d be grinning like a buffoon all day. She fished out her phone and read the new message:

  Hi im anu dates r merder date pls hlp dnt call jst msg

  09032019Ghtkpar

  13022019Mahem

  01082019Vrsova Yash Ready

  Avantika stared at the message. People were murdered on these dates? And this Anu person knew about this. But didn’t that mean …? She remembered her conversation with Prajakta Bhise about how Tushar Prasad and his friends used to eve-tease girls. Tushar Prasad had died in Kandivali on the same date Anu had put in one of her texts. She had to tell Uday. Even if things were a little strained between them. She had got him into trouble with Nathan. She hadn’t meant to, but she had. She had to make things OK. She looked up from the phone and saw Uday coming out of Nathan’s cabin. She waved to him and gestured towards the door to the verandah. His brow furrowed, but she saw him move in her direction. A few minutes later he was in the verandah with her.