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 connection, he warned her that she might as well forget about her future whatever little it might have held for her, for he would engage a supari to eliminate her without anyone ever getting wiser about it. How disgusted she was with the man she once loved and compromised with again, she only knew.
However, things came to a head when Raghu questioned Madhu as to how he could reduce his own son as an errand boy of his mistress; not only her man callously retorted what proof he had of his own paternity but also rubbed salt on her son's paternal wound with the adage that while maternity was a fact, paternity was only a faith. Given Raghu's premature birth, he asserted that he never thought that he was indeed his father, and unable to bear the humiliation, her boy committed suicide on the railway tracks.
Madhu though saw in the tragedy an opportunity to slight her further, and so he began bringing Mala home, as a prelude to a ménage a trios, as he put it. But deciding to call a spade a spade, she sought divorce, to which, he was averse, as his sexual interest in her, by then, had resurged, as a byproduct of his passion for his mistress. Moreover, adding insult to injury, he said that not counting alimony; a house maid could be more expensive than a wife, but as she refused his demands for threesome orgies, he further debased himself as a wife-beater.
When she was all set to press for divorce regardless, tragedy struck her that fateful evening; as he tried to force her to drink with him and his mistress, as she refused to oblige, he necked her out of the house in a fit of rage, forcing her to turn to a friend for shelter, since her parents were dead and gone by then. But the next day, when a neighbor informed her on her mobile that Madhu and Mala died of poisoning and the police were on the lookout for her, she rushed to the Saifabad Police Station to clear her name, only to be locked-up by the Inspector as the main suspect. Oh, how he had abused her, she only knew, oh, what a diabolical character he was!
Though that cop failed to book the real culprit to date, she always had a hunch that Pravar, Mala's awara brother, would have been behind the murders, and so with a little detective work, she gathered that he became an object of ridicule because of his sibling's conduct and that all taunted him on that score. That could have been a motive for him to eliminate the illicit couple, but whatever it was, she was certain that the drink the couple drank to their death was poisoned by Pravar, who had a criminal background to boot, though not on the scale that the police tried to picture on the TV screens in the fake-notes case. While it all smelled fishy, the other day she chanced to see Dhruva's ad in an old issue of Eenadu, which prompted her to reach him.
Finishing her tale of woes and looking into his eyes desirously, she said enticingly that she hoped that at last, her hopes won't turn out to be dupes after all, and that he would set things right for her while she herself assisted him in his endeavors.
Since Radha's version jelled with Shakeel's account, Dhruva felt it was indeed a poetic justice that Pravar, who tried to implicate her in a murder she didn't commit, found himself in the dock for a crime that he had nothing to do with. Besides, he felt that her experience with her lover illustrate that even as love emanates from sexual union, in spite of it, lust remains barbarian.
While she looked at him in hope, he asked her what she thought could have been behind her lover's refusal to part with a penny being in a position to do so; she said that in hindsight it was clear to her that besides being a mean-being, he was money-minded as well. Moreover, the way he used and abused a trusting woman indicates how despicable he was.
When he extended his hand to her in anticipation, as she held it a little longer, he recalled Ranjit's twenty-thousand dole against the promised half- a million bonanza.