Rendezvous with Indrani

‘Indrani wake up!’ A feeble voice mumbled in the mechanical silence of J J Hospital. Eyelids accustomed to heavy eye shadow looked aged and naked. She opened her clouded eyes and saw a beautiful heavily made up face with fake eye lashes beside her. Her muddled memory ran haphazard. Who is she?

‘Don’t just sleep like that!,’ the beautiful face warned.

‘Who are you?’, Indrani looked at her with disbelief. ‘And how did you get here? The police guarding the ICU let you in?’

‘You think I need a pass to come here. I am dead for some time now. Don’t you know me. I was all over the media almost a year back?’

‘Tunanda Kushkar!’, Indrani almost came out of her unconscious state that soared the TRPs of national channels.

‘Don’t get hyper. You might just alert the nurse and the whole media crew waiting outside the hospital since you got drugged’

‘I didn’t get drugged,’ Indrani objected.

‘I know honey. Do I look like someone with an appetite for polonium?’

Indrani looked away. She seemed to be lost.

‘Sweetie, let me tell you this. I didn’t get an interim stay at a hospital. It all happened so quickly in that damn hotel room while the twitter world was entertained with my barb with that silly Pakistani journo,’ Tunanda took a deep breath and coughed as the polonium still troubled her. Indrani listened to her predecessor and didn’t want to pack her bags so quickly. After all she had planned her life meticulously.

‘So my point is don’t believe the men around you. You get confused with the ways of business in modern India and remember its blasphemy to let the flood gates open,’ said Tunanda remembering the sweat equity she was fooled with.

‘I didn’t let the flood gates open,’ Indrani fumed.

‘Ave Maria!’ Tunanda sympathised to that innocent rant.

‘Don’t remind me of that name – Maria! He has done enough damage in the name of investigation!’ Indrani felt her BP was returning to normal and surging ahead.

‘Our lives are so similar. We had three husbands and it turned out that our last catch was a steal. But unlike me you were very fertile! We mingled with the best in town and life seemed like a tabloid. But then tabloids don’t last long,’ Tunanda sighed.

‘But let me warn you! If you make it to the trial stage, don’t ever…I repeat don’t ever go anywhere near Karnab Joswami and his studio! Hell is quieter!’, Tunanda signed off and a whiff of smoke clouded Indrani’s eyes; she slipped back to sleep.

Who took my beef?

It was a long weekend some years from now. Airline tickets were crazy as usual. The airline counters at Bombay airport snaked around in circles like a satellite image of a threatening cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. It’s been more than an hour and passengers were getting impatient.
     ‘Which city?’, the bald guy ahead of me asked. 
     ‘Cochin,’ I replied rather disinterested to start a conversation. 
     ‘Dying to eat beef, right?,’ he said with a broad smile. I was not surprised at his guess; it was rather an easy guess though. It was common knowledge that Beef was available only in Kerala and banned all over India.

     ‘I am off to Calcutta. Fish is still not banned there’, he revealed his plan. 
     ‘In fact there was an offer from Orissa State Tourism on special packages for unmarried couples to spend weekends in the state without the fear of arrest,’ he said and pulled out a few pamphlets.

     ‘Karnataka Tourism board’s offer tops all others. They target Keralites with liquor coupons and all roads and rail/airport stations are witnessing long queues every weekend,’ he said. 
     By then I had reached the airline counter. The airline staff asked me to sign an undertaking that I was not carrying any liquor or pork to the state. Brochures on restricted items to each state were displayed. Beef, Pork, Liquor, Knee length dress, Unmarried couples – the list was growing every week. 

The Prime Minister continued not to acknowledge any of this in his Radio shows which was now persuasively forced into mobile phones through MKB App. His office has now even started to tweet in Swahili and Aramaic. He continued his Madison Square show in more remote corners of the globe and had by now over taken Aishwarya Rai’s record of consecutive annual appearance at Cannes. 
Life is more complicated these days. I buy genetically modified beef that smells like paneer when cooked, so that my neighbours don’t lynch me to death. 
     ‘Sir, here is your boarding pass. Since you have not preferred your seat based on caste preference, I have tried my best to offer you a seat next to an atheist,’ she smiled and folded her hands.

My phone beeped. It was a tweet. Lalit Modi’s 13006th tweet on the IPL scandal from UK. Life continued for him and others. Swiss banks continued to be gate keepers.