Kavya’s Quagmire
When Radha took Dhruva to cloud nine, as if to bring him back to the mundane setting, Dicey got seriously indisposed; though he was gratified to see her tending the pet like her own child, when it succumbed to the mysterious ailment in a week’s time, he was truly downcast. While it took him quite a while to recover from his loss, courtesy Natya, Radha could cover a lot of Pravar’s ground into which Kavya had ventured deep that she mapped for Dhruva over drinks one evening.
After securing his bail, Kavya was wont to spend long hours with Pravar to work out their defense strategy. In that process, even as he was charmed by her suaveness, she was discomfited by his outrageous manner, yet she put up with him so as to atone herself for Ranjit’s foul on him. However, she readily struck a chord with Natya, who was all empathy for her, for her sympathy for them, but her proximity made Pravar fantasize about the mature woman, and it was only time before he turned obsessive of possessing her, by means fair or foul. What with her misplaced samaritanism blinding her vision, Kavya mistook his advances as manifestations of his exaggerated gratitude for her, and Natya, though quick to sense his ill-intentions, yet failed to caution her, for the fear of losing her support, all the while pleading with him not to scandalize their benefactor. Yet, in time, he pressed her to pander to his whim by bringing around Kavya, and as she refused, he threatened to end his life, which made Natya see the merit in the adage of ‘yielding to the temptation as a way of avoiding it’. So, reckoning that he would get over his obsession for her rival only in her possession, willy-nilly, Natya became his accomplice to trick Kavya into his bed.
Thereafter, as per the script, Pravar faked suicide, ostensibly to save their benefactor from his passion for her, and Natya played upon Kavya’s sympathy for him to try to woo her for him. So, distressed at the development and embarrassed to the core, Kavya was at a loss as to know how to handle her unrequited love. Were she to shun him altogether, it would amount to her rescinding his vakalat, and with Shakeel braying for his blood, wouldn’t that mean throwing him to the wolves? Why abandon him after all the hard work and on the verge of success? However, to overcome her predicament, she thought of putting sense into his deranged head that it was not proper to covet a woman old enough to be his elder sister. Though she strived to put sense into his head to put an end the nonsense, he reiterated his resolve to end his life if she were to fail to yield to his raging passion that was killing him any way.
Thereby, Kavya saw no way out to save her honor but by cold-shouldering him, hoping that he would get over his obsession for her in time, and so kept away from him, but soon as her unrelenting lover faked suicide yet again, she was thrown into a dilemma - if she gave in to him, she would be unfaithful to Ranjit, but should Pravar take the plunge, that would fail her mission. What with her obsession for justice coupled with her empathy for him tilting the scales, she could hold no more, and as he began to overwhelm her with his youthful urges, she felt as if her life was under siege in their liaison. Soon, as Pravar tended to ignore Natya, she insisted parity to make it an equitable love triangle, but with his ardency for her ever on the raise, he began pestering her to leave her man to make it a ménage a trois for them.
As that’s how things stood as per Natya’s brief, Dhruva blamed himself for Kavya’s fall, and Radha felt the only way to rescue her was to nab Pravar, he said that he would talk to Shakeel to handle him. So, as he reached for his mobile, he received a call from him, by then shifted to the Jubilee Hills Police Station.
The cop said that around six in the evening, he received a call from Kavya, informing him that Ranjit lay dead at home; so he rushed to Spandan to take stock of the situation. He learned from her that Ranjit had left for his office at ten and, as was her wont, she too went out after lunch, but on her return, finding him dead in his bed in the master bedroom, she felt it could be a cold-blooded murder. However, he saw nothing amiss in the house and there were no injuries on the body, all of which pointed out to a possible heart attack, but yet he moved the body for post-mortem, and sounded his informers to pick up in the grapevine.
While Dhruva became pensive, Radha said that she knew for long that it was in the coming; after all, didn’t Natya tell her that Pravar was hell-bent to have Kavya all for himself? Surely, adept at the art of poisoning, he would have done in Ranjit to gain Kavya’s undivided affections. However, Dhruva told her not to jump the gun; for all he knew, he could have as well committed suicide, unable to bear the ignominy of being a cuckold or for that matter, he might have died even of heart attack, stressed as he was by his wife’s infidelity. But as Radha insisted that it could have been Pravar’s way of grabbing Kavya and her property as well, Dhruva maintained that time only would tell whether there was a foul play and they better waited for the post-mortem report.
Next evening, Shakeel came to tell Dhruva that by all indications Ranjit’s death was owing to poisoning and that Kavya got an anticipatory bail for herself making him wonder whether she had a hand in the sordid affair. Then Dhruva told him that she was no fool to soil her hands with her husband’s blood, as it won’t be beyond her to know that she would become the prime suspect in the case that too given that she had a paramour to boot. But Radha maintained that it was apparent that Pravar, keeping Kavya in the dark, would have poisoned Ranjit, and it made sense to apprehend him forthwith for extracting his confession and be done with it.
Then Shakeel, as if as an afterthought, said that of late, whenever Kavya was away, a burka-clad woman was seen visiting Ranjit, which made Dhruva say whether it was a woman in burka or women in burka. At that the cop said that he thought as much, but the neighbors were certain that it was only one woman that Ranjit was receiving for some time then. When Radha interjected by saying, what if the woman in burka was Natya, Pravar’s red herring, to mislead the police; Shakeel said that it was not a bad line of investigation. However, Dhruva cautioned him not to oversimplify matters but wide-scan Ranjit’s present and deep-delve into his past as his death by poisoning that pointed towards Pravar’s hand raised the possibility of a hidden hand behind his murder.
At that Shakeel said that the foolhardiness of the criminal impulse always puzzled him but Dhruva reasoned that even as the calling of crime clouds reason, its execution itself impairs caution, imperiling the cover up. As for the victims of crime, he said, what one would say about the credulity of a cuckold, who would have thrown caution to the winds by indulging in a drinking binge with his wife’s paramour? Or can any explain the stupidity of a philanderer who walks into his death trap laid by the man he has been cuckolding? How such dig their own graves!
Though Shakeel wanted him to make it to the Spandan along with him, Dhruva felt that his premature association with the investigation of the case would jeopardize his future involvement in it. However, while the cop saw merit in what the detective had said, as Radha insisted that their strip to the crime spot might yield the keys to Pravar’s tricks, Dhruva said that they better stayed on the sidelines as Shakeel kept the main course. But after seeing Shakeel’s back, as Radha wondered whether the cop was equal to the task, the detective hoped that by dawn, they might yet see the case in some fresh light for there may be something more to that than met the eye.