14. Mayukhi
FOURTEEN
Mayukhi
Her mind spun in a million different directions, the past and the present colliding. Her palm flexed, the old scar, mostly forgotten but more likely suppressed, rising to the fore bringing back memories she never wanted to relive.
Ishaan Adajania had brought it all back. She should resent him for it. Instead, all she did was welcome the sharp blade of vengeance she hadn’t known existed inside her. She’d come into this wanting to take Ishaan down and now found herself in the unlikely position of an ally.
She snorted, laughter bubbling up inside her. An ally of Ishaan Adajania. Her mind filled with images of his skinny self glaring at her from across the lunch hall. She was laughing loudly now, the cab driver giving her strange looks in the rearview mirror. Her phone pinged with a message and she glanced down. Ishaan would live to be a hundred years. He was messaging right as she was thinking about him.
Reached safely?
Curt, annoyed and to the point. Just like the surly teenager she’d known in what felt like another lifetime. The cab pulled up in front of her home and she paid up, stepping out and replying to Ishaan.
Yes.
“Yukhi.” She looked up from her phone to see her father standing there, looking like he’d come back from a late night walk. He was sweating through his t-shirt, his scanty hair sticking to his scalp.
“What is happening?” he asked, huffing as he came to a stop beside her.
“Just getting home after dinner at Adajania’s,” she told him, her voice cool with the hurt of how easily he’d handed her future over to the other man. It didn’t matter what she knew now or what her own decisions were, it didn’t change the fact that both men had taken from her – her choices, her power, her voice. Mayukhi wasn’t sure that was something she would ever be able to forgive.
Her phone rang and she glanced at it. It was a group call from Naveen and Ashish. Her heartbeat sped up, the reality of what she’d taken on hitting her.
“I need to take this,” she told her father who was still staring at her, looking mournful and apologetic. She turned away from him and headed towards the elevator trying to get to somewhere private before she picked up. Her father followed, right on her heels.
“I’m working with the legal and financial advisors to see what I can do, Yukhi. I’m trying to fix this.”
She came to an abrupt halt and her father walked right into her.
“You are?” she asked, allowing the call to go to voicemail. “What can you do at this point?”
“I don’t know,” her father admitted. “But I’m trying.”
Throat tight, Mayukhi nodded. “Thank you Baba.” She knew it was fruitless and yet, it meant more than she could ever express that her father hadn’t just thrown her to the wolves, or one wolf in particular.
Theirs was not a particularly affectionate family and so they just stared at each other in awkward silence before her father patted her on her back and walked off towards the elevator. Mayukhi followed and they rode up to their floor in silence. She branched off from her and to her room before calling Naveen back.
“Hi, I-“
Naveen interrupted her prepared excuses. “Wait. I’m conferencing the others in.”
Mayukhi’s brows rose at the peremptory tone but she said nothing. A minute later, Majid, Parash and Ashish joined the call. They had an almost full complement, unless Varun was there in spirit, she thought sardonically. Damn, she shouldn’t joke about that. That bastard was capable of coming back from the dead. It took a lot to keep Satan down.
“Talk to me boys,” she said, keeping her tone light. She couldn’t afford to sound any different from her earlier self. Contrary to what Ishaan and his posse thought, these guys weren’t fools. Vicious, predatory dickheads maybe but not fools.
“We want you to get to know his friends,” Naveen said now. “Pretend to gain their confidence and bring us information.”
She rolled her eyes at that very unimaginative ask. “Information on what?” she asked, trying to sound curious but sounding a little weird to her own ears.
“They’ve been trying to plant evidence against us,” Ashish said.
“Evidence?” This time she managed a believable impression of confusion. “Evidence of what? I thought you said Dhrithi was accusing Varun of abuse and he’s dead. What evidence can they plant against you guys?”
Silence. It was a good thing Mayukhi wasn’t on a video call because she was grinning like an idiot.
“Yukhi,” Ashish sighed, the sound loud even over the phone. “These guys have some kind of childish grudge against us. It goes back to school. Do you remember they got expelled from school? Immediately after the farewell party?”
She remembered Ishaan and his friends leaving school overnight. Before the final week of social events. And the only reason the memory had stuck was because everyone had been talking about it. They hadn’t been the only ones who’d left. There had been one other…a girl. Celina. Why had she left though? No one had known.
“I remember,” she murmured now, her mind going back to the rumours that had spread like wildfire through the school. Helped along, she recalled, by the men on the call with her now.
“They blame us for it and they’re trying to take revenge.” Parash had always been the stupidest of the lot. It hadn’t surprised her at all when his first wife had left him three months into their marriage. Even three years must have felt like thirty.
“Why do they blame you guys?” Mayukhi wondered if she could prod a bit and then decided to try her luck. “What exactly happened that night?”
Silence again. It felt like each one was waiting for someone else to take the lead with answering this.
But for all the bluster on this call, she knew who the most dangerous one was. Especially now that Varun was no longer there to hold that title. Majid spoke the least but there was a darkness in his eyes that spoke of unleashed violence and a deep enjoyment of it. She wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear his voice next.
“It doesn’t matter what happened. They think we ruined their lives,” he said quietly. “And now they want to ruin ours. You know who Virat Jha is, right? We can’t afford to take this lightly.”
Time to stop playing games, Mayukhi thought. “What should I look out for?”
“Anything they discuss about us,” Naveen said. “Anything and everything. If you can record it, even better.”
“I don’t think that’s safe. If I get caught recording something, it will ruin any chance we have at getting information.”
“She’s right.” Majid again. “Let her relay the information to us. We trust Mayukhi. She’s one of us.”
She noted the implicit threat in the simple statement. A sliver of fear snaked through her but she shook it off.
“Alright then. If there’s nothing else, I’m going to bed. I have a heavy workday ahead of me tomorrow.” She wanted to get off this call, fencing with this lot wasn’t high on her bingo card.
“Keep us posted,” Naveen said importantly before the line went dead.
Dipshit, she thought, tapping her phone on the palm of her hand. A moment’s thought and then she texted Ishaan.
What happened that night at school? Why did you guys leave like that?
She left her phone on the bed and went into the bathroom to remove her makeup and change for the night. She came back and checked but there was still no message. Mayukhi got into bed with a book and settled into letting her mind unwind and lose itself in another world.
At some point, she fell asleep, her book in her hand. She came awake the next morning to the alarm on her phone. She tapped at it till the annoying noise stopped. It was only then that she noticed that she had a deluge of messages. She scanned through them all but only one thing jumped out at her.
Ishaan hadn’t replied.