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.