Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel, BS Murthy [best contemporary novels .txt] 📗

boy, Pravar took up cudgels with his sister on the boy’s behalf, but perceiving that was the privilege of a mistress, she paid a deaf ear to his protestations.  As a result, he came to identify himself more and more with the hapless boy, and that made him resent her liaison with the tormentor even more.  

However, at length, abetted by him, when Raghu rebelled, an irate Madhu said that for all he knew, he could be a bastard, and humiliated thus, as the hapless boy committed suicide on the railway tracks; Pravar felt that Madhu had no right to live, and so also his sister, who was no less callous either. What’s worse, he came to perceive Radha as a cock-pecked wife, unmindful of her son’s plight, and that evaporated the sympathy he felt for her as a neglected wife, owing to his sister’s trespass into her marital life. So, strangely, it was his sense of righteousness that steeled Pravar’s heart against the disparate trio.

Thus, even as he was morally low, the lifting of prohibition, ending the bootlegging in the State, had hurt him monetarily as well. It was then that Rajan thought of wriggling out of the tight spot through the extortions from kidnappings. But what with the dangerous pursuit emboldening him even more, Pravar developed the nerve to kill, and waited for the opportune moment as by then Madhu started mixing his women by taking Mala home. So, he worked on a plan to eliminate the three of them without soiling his hands that developed the skill to tamper with bottle seals in his bootlegging days.  Being aware that under Madhu’s influence, Mala took to drinking, he presumed that Radha must be a habitual drinker too, so he poisoned a bottle of Teacher’s Scotch, and waited for the day that Madhu and Mala gloated over as their Union Day. So on that U-day, he presented the ‘bottle of death’, sans his fingerprints, to Mala for their cynical celebration with the lost out wife. When Mala said that Radha was ‘no game for that’, he said in jest that they might as well leave the dregs for her to rue later, and true to his word, he implicated Radha by poisoning Shakeel’s mind about her involvement in the double murder. 

As Mala’s death ended Pravar’s emotional divide, so his passion for Natya came to rule his heart, and being bolder for the double murder, he plotted to eliminate Rajan to usurp his woman, and waited for the right opportunity, which presented itself soon enough. That midnight, the three of them were in wait at a secluded spot in Shamirpet to collect a hefty ransom from a businessman, whose kid they kidnapped the day before. While Rajan and Pravar waited for the father at the exchange site, holding the kid, Natya positioned herself at a safe distance. When the father met them with the ransom amount, Pravar went up to Natya to fetch the kid for the barter; but on the way back to her with the booty, he shot his benefactor dead, which he pictured it to her as a police action, and the cops too publicized it as such to score a few Brownie points of ‘law and order’.

Having split the booty with Natya and thus having gained her trust, he induced her to marry him, after which, even though she urged him to give up his wayward ways, as he desisted, being too far down the road of crime by then; she had no choice but to keep pace with him. Thus while he planned the next kidnap, wiser for the possible police action while collecting the ransom in a secluded location, he conceived the ingenuous rendezvous on the busy Tank Bund with its sparsely used staircase to the road below. What with Natya playing her part to perfection, they almost pulled it off, but only fell short owing to Dhruva’s uncanny foresight into their plan though without any hindsight.      

 

Chapter 12

Victim of Trust

 

Next day, waking up earlier than usual, Dhruva began sipping his bed-coffee in the portico, thinking about the inimical twists and turns in Radha’s chequered life; and had a gut feeling that it was she, who came to see him the other day. Even as his newfound empathy for her, coupled with his earlier fascination, seized him with an urge to see her, Dicey began to bark; so glancing at the gate, and seeing a fascinating woman, he readily lost his heart to her, but having been bitten once and thinking it’s better to be twice shy, though she approached him seductively, he subdued himself consciously. Just the same, when she introduced herself, he couldn’t resist holding out his hand to her, but as she offered her services to him, he wanted to have her resume before he made up his mind.

Radha was the only child of her parents, who pampered her much beyond their middle-class means. Studious and methodical, she even excelled at her studies that is relatively speaking, and seemed to be well on the way to become a Chartered Accountant after her parents’ dreams. However, when she crossed eighteen, her life went awry for she lost her heart to a handsome newcomer in their locality, whose identity she preferred not to reveal, for the world was small after all. What with love ruling her head, fuelled by his wooing, she failed to apply her mind at her studies to end up at the bottom of the class, and her father, who had all along entertained visions of seeing her in the chartered mould of ‘Brahmaiah’, was aghast at her poor academic showing. When he sought her explanation about her low scores, she showed him her lover’s letters vouching eternal devotion to her, and that left him with no choice but to approach the boy’s father, who roundly blamed her for enticing his son, and outraged by the slur, her father asked her to break up with him.

However, as her lover assured her that he would prevail over his parents in the end, blinded by love and guided by fate, she carried on with him on the sly, but as her escapades came to her father’s notice, he strictly restricted her movements, and started looking for a match for her. So, she eloped with him when she was barely nineteen and they got married in a temple; while her disgusted father disowned her, his unreconciled parents began weaning him away from her. However, the fortuitous presence of an aunt of her childhood friend in that town afforded her some badly needed succor and support.

Soon, however, as he came to wilt under the emotional blackmail of his parents, his will to stick to her through thick and thin began to wane, and thus, even as she was hard-pressed to hold him, his father upped the ante by pitting his mediocre life with her against the rosy future as the son-in-law of a well-heeled man with a vivacious daughter. While the parent-induced insecurity played upon his mind, the envisaged beauty of the bride-to-be proved to be an appetizer for his lust, so he came to perceive her as a drag on his promising life. As if the prospect of losing him was not nightmarish enough, she missed her periods, regardless of which, he deserted her heartlessly, and that sealed her fate. Thus, left in the lurch, as she burnt her bridges with her parents, so in desperation, she returned to her native to contact that friend, her full-soul mate, and her half-namesake, but in vain.

Then seeing a twitch on Dhruva’s brow, she thought that some namesake of hers might have stirred his heart before, and he, staring at her, wondered what if she were to jilt him like half-namesake.

When she learned that her friend, having married in the meantime, moved out of town by then, Radha resumed the recap of her life and times; she turned to an elderly man she knew from her childhood days to help her find a job. But as he tried to snare her into a relationship, which made her realize the pitfalls of a single woman in the man’s world, swallowing her pride, as a prodigal daughter, she returned home to her parents’ subdued welcome. However, as she was keen to bear her child, which proposition her mother supported, her father had to find a groom for her on a war footing, and that brought Madhu, an Engineer in the Civil Works Department, into her life.

While Madhu jumped at the prospect of marrying her, as she found him not to her liking, she began dragging her feet, her father told her either to abort her child or wed that Engineer. With the lurking danger her bulging belly posed, she bowed her head to let Madhu tie the knot, and he, blinded by her beauty, not only turned blind to her reticence in their nuptial bed but also failed to grasp the import of the early arrival of her son, Raghu; whom she came to dote upon, more out of a sense of guilt than an affection for the man who fathered him; but somehow Madhu was never enamored of him, though not out of any suspicion.  

However, it took the seven-year itch for her man to get wind of her conjugal indifference towards him, and that hurt his ego and crushed his heart; well, she always knew that she had to involve her body and mind to save the nuptial tie, and yet she couldn’t bring herself around to obey the dictates of cohabitation. Maybe vexed with her cold embrace, Madhu sought to pep up his sex-life with the prostitutes, fetched by his bribe money, and even as she thought that life couldn’t get worse than that, fate had other indignities in store for her. 

When someone from his department died in an accident, Mala, his widow, with a brother to support, was absorbed on compassionate grounds; and he lost no time in ingratiating with her, picturing himself as a neglected husband, deprived of woman’s affections and all. Succumbing to his falsity, owe be to the vulnerable woman, she entered into an illicit relationship with him, ironically buttressed by his ill-gotten money. Thereafter, while he lavished his attention on her, as if to add insult to the injury, he forced Raghu to run errands for her, and when she chided him for reducing his own son as a valet of his keep; he implied that she herself being so cold to him; her boy, for all he knew, could be a bastard.

Worried about her boy’s future in that situation, when she raked her brains to save him, she thought of his biological father, who so cruelly ditched her to hitchhike with a moneyed dame. However mean he might have been, she thought, with the means at his disposal, won’t he put their boy in some boarding school or the other? So she tried to locate him, more out of desperation than in hope, and managed to meet him, though after a long haul, but as she pictured their son’s plight, he painted himself as a lovelorn, paying the price for his betrayal in his wife’s cold bed, which left him childless in their wedlock. As he managed to light her old flame, in spite of his desertion, and with no love lost for her spouse; she had no qualms in sleeping with him, hoping to prop up their son.

At the end of a weeklong rendezvous in which he overwhelmed her with his passion, she set aside her past bitterness and asked him to take her as his second wife to give their son his due. But lo, the bastard made her feel ashamed of herself; what cruelty to say that she was a first grade maal all right, but she should’ve known that even for a second wife, she was a third rate slut. When she retorted, what if she told his wife about their