Let Her Rest Now

by Vijay Nair

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

When you decide to go like that, you don't just lose your life - you lose the right to any privacy that you had a claim to when you were alive. My mother after all had made the cardinal sin of getting murdered...' For a long time after her mother's gruesome death Neha is enraged with her, convinced it was her mother's own scheming ways that brought it about; after all don't the murdered invite retribution? But then a distress call from her childhood friend Samir brings Neha back to the hills of Coonor, to find that he has been implicated in the murder of the new paramour of his married lover, Sujala. And much though Neha would like to help him, she cannot shut her mind to the fact that the circumstances in which the victim was found bear an uncanny resemblance to the manner in which her own mother had been murdered. Nor can she deny the fact that she too is irresistibly drawn to the seductive charms of the luminously beautiful Sujala...

Release date: August 7, 2012

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 244

Sample

First the traffic, then the forest with the monkeys, then a herd of elephants, then a lone bison – the world turns beautiful as I leave it behind. The rain that was a mere trickle half an hour ago is a steady downpour in these parts, washing the trees and turning the leaves a lush, glistening green. The sly creeks in the hills are small waterfalls that gurgle their jest. The road is treacherous now with ‘Careful, Hairpin Bend Ahead’ signs that slow us down. Man and Nature have conspired to gift travellers a longer time to take in the breathtaking view.

I have taken this road many times as a child.

It used to feel ominous during those days; a painful reminder that the home I shared with my mother during the holidays was being left behind.

An old familiar ache takes over, priming me for the restless nights and the relentless jibes and bullying of the older children in the days that, once, lay ahead.

We grow up. We don’t learn to forget.

The driver is moved by Nature’s elegance. He has discarded the sullenness he had affected after I reprimanded him for trying to overtake a bus in the new four-way linking Bangalore with Mysore, and almost getting us squashed by the angry man at the wheel in the process. Drivers of hired cabs almost always try this on unsuspecting passengers at the start of a journey. To test how far they can be pushed.

The driver wants to know the purpose of my visit. Do I have family living here? He looks dissatisfied when I tell him I have work in Coonoor. I have caught him checking me out in the rear-view mirror many times. I am not surprised. I am hardly the sort of a passenger he ferries routinely from the congestion of the city to the starkness of the hills. I have refused to step out of the car for lunch even though it has been nearly five hours since we started from Bangalore.

I must have appeared all the more vulnerable to him; a young woman, picked up from the airport and making a seven-hour road trip alone. My petite frame and the confusion I customarily carry in my eyes makes me fair game for all types of men. Drivers of cabs and auto-rickshaws, bus-conductors, cinema-hall ushers, Delhi eve-teasers and sometimes even vegetable vendors, think they can take liberties with me. The malls with branded clothing lines that endorse empowered women in business suits might have sprung up in the cities but the man in the street still wants to punish me for walking and travelling unaccompanied. He is usually outraged when I refuse to take the bullying lying down.

My appetite for grief is insatiable. I have cried for most part of the trip. Not expansively. Not in large heaving sobs. But the tears have flown unrestricted as small hamlets and villages have sped by. There is no way he doesn’t know, that as I sit behind him, I have given myself to unmitigated sorrow. Thankfully, he has not tried to make conversation until now. After I have composed myself enough to ask him how much longer it’s going to take us to reach.

The handful of people who had turned up afterwards had commended me for being strong. I had quietly gone about attending to all the chores that death brings in its wake. And hers had been a particularly messy one. Even the police had played a part in the funeral arrangements. The presence of pesky journalists hadn’t helped. When you decide to go like that you don’t just lose your life, you lose the right to any privacy that you had a claim to when you were alive.

My mother, after all, had made the cardinal sin of getting herself murdered.

For a long time after her death all I could feel was an enormous rage directed at her. I stayed up nights thinking she had brought the violence on herself. If she had been a different person and led a different life, it wouldn’t have happened. Respectable folks don’t get killed like that. And didn’t the murdered always invite the brutal retribution? They lied, they cheated, they blackmailed, bringing out the worst in others. I knew my mother was capable of all that. Who better than me to testify against her way of life? I knew everything that she had kept hidden from the world. Her shrewd appraising gaze that could sum up what a person was worth in a matter of minutes. The way she could figure out what she would be able to extract from a person. Her ruthless streak when it came to realizing her own agenda. She was incapable of giving unconditionally. I was the only exception to the rule and, ironically enough, I had never wanted anything from her. Love always demands reciprocity and I had not been able to love her for a long time, at least not in the way she wanted me to.

Despite the anger, I resolutely made the trips to Lucknow to meet the cops, even after I realized that they were not so much interested in finding out who had killed her as they were in digging out all the salacious details of her personal life. Worse, they seemed to be more titillated than horrified by the crime. More than one of them had been eager to supply the details about the circumstances in which she had been found.

I repeatedly heard from them that her face, battered to pulp, had been caked with blood. The murderer had bashed in her face so brutally that one of her eyes had nearly fallen out. Her hands had been tied in front, in a gesture of supplication, as if owning responsibility for having invited such a death.

I did not see her like that. They had worked on her in the mortuary and made her somewhat presentable. But in my nightmares she always appears as the cops described her.

They all made the same statement with little variation: ‘She was living alone but everyone in the city knew of her connections.’

After her violent death, my murdered mother amounted to nothing more than the set of powerful connections she had – though none of them were around to put pressure on the authorities to investigate the crime more thoroughly. The proverbial rats had deserted the sunken ship.

And that included the man.

He was the one to discover her body. Or so I believed. After all, it was he who had called me from the phone in my mother’s house. He who told me that she had met with an accident and that I should leave for Lucknow as soon as possible. I knew from the tone of his voice that there was more to the accident. Somehow I knew as soon as I had finished speaking to him that I wouldn’t see her alive again.

He wasn’t around when I reached Lucknow. In fact, I didn’t meet him on that trip at all. He called once in those days to tell me that it was best if he stayed away as the media was impatient for scoops. ‘There are others who can get hurt in all this.’ Others meant his family. The legitimate one. One wife. Two sons. One daughter. And a large dog. They were all accommodated in the family photograph I spotted in the Sunday supplement of a leading newspaper that had carried a story on politicians of royal blood a few weeks after the murder. I am sure he had got a journalist crony of his to do the story. To make the gullible world believe he was a family man and any speculation to the contrary owed to his jealous political rivals – and not because it had any basis in reality.

I had placed the newspaper on my bedside table; it was a painful reminder. My eyes were drawn to the photograph every night before I tried to sleep. I didn’t look like any of them. I had taken after my mother. Still, I desperately sought a connection, even though I knew that if I ever ran into any of them in a public place they would either not recognize me – or not want to.

My weekend trips to Lucknow stopped after I saw that picture. Along with my yearning to be a part of the photograph, the awareness that my mother and the man had been having a lot of fights in the months preceding her death had settled in. On my last visit, before she died, I had heard her arguing bitterly with him on the phone. That realization led to a new fear. Did he have anything to do with her being bumped off? Had she turned into an inconvenience for him? I was terrified at the possibility. If he were to be nabbed as the killer, the hints and the innuendo in the media reports would turn it into a front-page scandal leaving me with no place to hide.

And I have spent all my adult years wanting to hide.

After my trips to Lucknow stopped I had found myself an expensive shrink. She had kind eyes and a shy smile. Week after week I went to her to pour my heart out. To tell her my story. To find out from her why I couldn’t rid myself of the rage I felt towards my mother even though she was no longer around for me to vent it on her. To understand why I was unable to shed a single tear at her loss. To figure out how I could maintain the facade of ‘all’s well’ at work while storms raged within.

I dropped out of counselling after a few months when I realized that all the sessions were designed to lead to the same outcome. Session after session, she tried to gently point out to me that I was like my mother in many ways and in order to heal I had to forgive her.

I didn’t know how to do that and the impassive shrink sitting behind an even more impassive table could offer no suggestion in this regard.

I had to concede she was a waste of time.

The only thing that had helped was work. The office I worked in was no different from other organizations. Many make friends with those they work with, but people like me make it clear we come to work because we are paid to. Since making friends is not a part of the brief, we are happy to smile and exchange pleasantries with those who work with us and ignore the rest. Sharing family secrets is not part of the deal.

The newspapers in the capital had carried a small piece on the inside pages. One of them hinted at Mother’s alliance with a powerful minister in UP. Even if her death had been announced more prominently, I doubt anyone at work would have made the connection. My face gave nothing away. I was always dressed staidly in business suits when I went to work. My hair was cut short and apart from a dab of pale lipstick there wasn’t a hint of make-up on my face. They say children own up to the disowned parts of their parents. My mother and I were exception to the rule. She had owned up to any wild streak I may have possessed. And I had inherited the sobriety I don’t think she knew she possessed.

Before leaving on that fateful day I had called Prerna, a colleague, and asked her to inform my boss, Pulkith. He was in London and I couldn’t get hold of him on the phone.

Prerna and I often had lunch together at work when we weren’t travelling. It was a comfortable relationship but we weren’t friends and that kept my voice from cracking when she told me softly to take care and not worry about anything.

No one intruded my space when I got back to work, maintaining a respectful distance. Only Pulkith and Prerna asked a few careful questions before offering their condolences. I was grateful for the sensitivity and immersed myself in my work, clocking twelve hours on most working days.

It’s strange how grief has found me after so many months. There is something about this journey that has made me go back to the days when innocence was still present in my life, unfettered by the filters of adult judgement through which I had viewed my mother in later years. Somehow the car journey brought back happier moments we had shared. Like the holidays and shopping trips she took me for when I was younger. She used to cuddle me a lot until I reached my teen years and put an end to that practice.

Maybe the tears are flowing because it’s another death that is taking me back to the place where I spent most of my childhood. Another woman has been killed. A stranger. This time it is not the dead but the living who want my presence.

Samir is in police custody. They believe he killed her. According to his mother, the only person he wants to talk to is me. She called me yesterday to relay the message from her son. After my mother, Samir is the only one who comes close to being family. I don’t want to lose him too.

I took the first flight from Delhi to Bangalore this morning after I was told that all the flights to Coimbatore were full.

It’s almost dark by the time we reach the cottage. We have driven past the hotel and the deserted church where Samir and I used to rest after the walk up the hill. The lone bulb hanging from the porch illuminates the carefully tended garden resplendent with flowers of every conceivable colour. Samir is a painter. He has always loved flowers. When we were in school, he spent all his free time with the gardener, learning about natural pigments and dyes that he could use for his paintings. I pay off the driver and add an extra two hundred as his tip. He looks at me and smiles. We are at ease with each other now that the journey is over.

Vrinda opens the door. She’s as beautiful as she has always been. Every time I meet her, I am struck by the resemblance between mother and son. Especially after Samir grew up and lost all his baby fat. They share the very fair complexion that hints at a foreign bloodline. Samir had told me once that his great-grandmother was Belgian. Mother and son look at the world with the same sleepy eyes flecked grey-black. It’s in the mouth that their faces differ. Samir has a more generous one. It doesn’t take much to make him smile. Vrinda is more guarded. Maybe she has never learnt to trust.

‘You have come,’ Vrinda whispers, her hand reaching out tentatively to touch my face in a gesture of rare affection.

‘I wish I could have been here earlier,’ I blurt out, a little overwhelmed by how vulnerable Vrinda is looking at that moment. ‘All the flights to Coimbatore were full.’

‘It must be because of the big industrial fair that started there today. Now they won’t allow you to meet him until tomorrow in the afternoon,’ she says resignedly and then composes herself. ‘Do you want some tea? I made some pork pickle sandwiches for you. The ones you used to love when the two of you visited me from school.’

‘Thank you, I am famished,’ I tell her. ‘Somehow I couldn’t bear to have lunch on the way.’ Both of us are trying hard to bring a semblance of normalcy to our words. To postpone the inevitable conversation we must have about Samir and where he is right now. It is not fair on either of us. Especially Vrinda. Women should not be forced to seek help from the friends of their children. I start to get angry. For how long does Samir expect others to clear up the mess he creates?

‘I really don’t think he had anything to do with this,’ Vrinda pries into my thoughts. As usual she has been canny enough to read them and can’t wait to tell me that what I am tempted to believe about her son is wrong. When I was younger, this trait of hers used to frighten me. My mother could never intrude into my head like Vrinda did. Maybe Ma immunized herself from the very beginning. Maybe she didn’t want to know what I was thinking; she was always scared of my thoughts.

Vrinda can take that liberty with me. After all she can’t be held responsible for anything that’s happened in my life. When she leaves me alone in the guest room, I wonder whether she dares to be as perceptive about her own son. Mothers learn their defences early. They want to believe that their children live in the world they have created for them. I am sure that in the space Vrinda had imagined her son occupying, getting arrested for a heinous crime had not been factored in.

She arranges the plate of sandwiches on the table and pours me a cup of tea. ‘I would have liked you to stay with Randeep and me in the club but I thought that they would realize by this morning that it was all a mistake and release Samir. I was planning a celebratory lunch for all of us. It would have been a nice surprise for him to find you in the cottage when he came home. But it has been the kind of a day when everything goes wrong. They told me yesterday that they had taken in Samir only for questioning. But this morning they formally arrested him. The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that Karla’s house does not fall under the jurisdiction of the police station of this town. And the cops out there are being really unreasonable. But we are going to get him out…’ Vrinda chatters on and on. I have never heard her talk so much. Her words are clouded by an unarticulated fear.

I tell myself Vrinda will succeed in getting Samir out of this mess. She always gets whatever she sets her mind on.

She is that kind of a woman.

Karla, the murdered woman, was Vrinda’s friend. They were together at school in Dehradun. Everyone in Samir’s family seems to have had their initial education in boarding school. The irony of it strikes me later when Vrinda has retired for the night after sharing with me what she knew about the murder and how her son got implicated in the mess.

I was banished t. . .