Kiss and Tell

NISTULA HEBBAR

Kiss & Tell

Contents

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

PENGUIN METRO READS

KISS AND TELL

Nistula Hebbar is senior assistant editor at the Financial Express in New Delhi and reports politics for a living. She was born and educated in Delhi, and has been a journalist for the last eleven years. She has covered everything from the state of the city’s drains to the offices housing its high and mighty.

Addicted to pulp fiction, she firmly believes in its magical healing powers.

For my mother, Kumuda Hebbar.
You are missed every day.

Prologue

Janaki hated red-eye flights. The early morning rush to get dressed and the sickly feeling she got stealing out of a city at dawn. But her office had booked her on the earliest possible flight to Chennai, and there was no helping it. Janaki had been rushed the previous evening with some last minute political developments, and hadn’t looked too closely at her ticket. ‘The sadists at the travel desk probably thought this was a good joke,’ she said angrily to herself, vowing to get even when she got back. ‘Just wait for the next one who wants to get a bloody passport done in a jiffy,’ she added viciously. As a reporter, Janaki often felt she was a passport officer herself, having to help out so many colleagues.

Putting it out of her mind, Janaki’s thoughts returned to her current assignment. Travelling to Tamil Nadu to cover the assembly elections just fell into her lap after her colleague and bête noire Shakira Banerjee had fallen ill. Janaki leapt at the chance; lately, being away from Delhi seemed like an escape.

As she applied her regulation kajal in her brandy-coloured eyes, Janaki shied away from examining too closely just why that was so. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that her boyfriend Saurabh, the only man she had ever seriously been with since college, was the cause of her uneasiness.

As a political correspondent for the Indian Mail, a serious newspaper—one of the big three in Delhi—Janaki was doing fairly well. She was twenty-eight, attractive in an earthy, voluptuous way, and had a steady boyfriend who she planned to marry when the time was right. It was only that last bit that was giving her the jitters. It seemed that Saurabh, an independent documentary-maker mostly of sponsored government work, was quite happy to only take on sporadic work and spend the rest of his days in a haze of pot smoke.

While Saurabh’s long-haired, lazy persona had seemed attractive in ‘rebel without a cause’ college days, Janaki, who had been brought up with a strict work ethic by her university professor parents, was losing her patience with him. A yelling match with Saurabh the previous evening, when she found out that he had borrowed money from their college friends yet again, had not helped to improve her mood.

‘Damn and blast,’ she muttered to herself as she found that her favourite all-weather sandals had broken. ‘Now I’m stuck with new shoes to break in, on top of everything else!’

Janaki’s friends couldn’t quite figure out why she persisted with Saurabh; after yesterday, even Janaki was beginning to wonder. She did a quick check of her toiletries bag—despite being a reporter of some experience, she hadn’t quite managed to learn to travel light. ‘So what, I’m high maintenance,’ she always said to anyone who raised an eyebrow at her luggage. She refused to move out of her house without all her haircare and other products, at least two pairs of shoes and three changes of clothes. ‘With the heat in Tamil Nadu being the way it is, I better have several changes of clothing,’ was how she justified her hefty suitcase this time.

The intercom phone in Janaki’s flat in east Delhi buzzed, signalling that her cab to the airport had arrived. It was still dark as she made her way downstairs from her third-floor flat. She greeted the cabbie, who was familiar to her since she had lived in the area for three years now, and had used that service quite frequently.

The driver’s name was Hoshiar Singh, a philosophical Jat from Rohtak, who regaled Janaki with political gossip from Delhi’s neighbouring state and effectively prevented her from brooding on the long drive to the airport. As a journalist, it was expected of her to be interested in everyone’s opinion of the state of the zeitgeist.

Unaware of the many admiring glances she got while waiting in line to check in, Janaki resolved that something had to give as far as she and Saurabh were concerned. ‘What you want when you’re eighteen and what you want when you’re twenty-eight are different things,’ her friend Kajal had often told her.

Janaki just couldn’t bring herself to broach the topic with Saurabh, however. He always dismissed her issues as a joke and ended up making her laugh at his antics. In a strange way, the dynamics in their relationship had changed from the equal one of classmates to an unequal one where Janaki took responsibility and Saurabh played the carefree youth.

Asking for an aisle seat, Janaki completed her check-in formalities, and she went in search of a bookstore. She needed to pick up the latest bio of one of the top contenders for the chief minister’s chair in Tamil Nadu. ‘I’ll do all my thinking when I land,’ she said resolutely to herself. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she needed no encouragement to postpone a decision.

One

‘Hello?’ Janaki said to the voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Am I speaking to Mr Vishnu Singh? I’m Janaki Rao, from Indian Mail. I believe my colleague Deepak Sharma called you about me; I’ve just landed in Chennai and wanted to see you,’ she said.

A deep voice at the other end replied very tiredly, ‘Oh yes, Ms Rao, he did. What can I do for you?’

Well, thanks for the enthusiastic greeting, Janaki thought to herself as she negotiated her strolley up a particularly challenging set of stairs outside the Chennai office of her paper. Having arrived in the middle of the agneenakshatram, the star of fire period, of the southern summer (a particularly sadistic time to conduct assembly elections, she thought), she was rapidly melting into a pool of sweat, and wanted nothing more than to check into an air-conditioned room. That, alas, was not an option available to her, not with her having to leave for Madurai on the early morning bus tomorrow. Janaki thought longingly of her new air conditioner in her Delhi home, bought with that year’s bonus.

Strictly speaking, the regional third front parties, especially the allies of the present government, were not Janaki’s beat. The assignment belonged to the bombshell of their political team, Shakira Banerjee, or ‘Banerjee of the shapely behind’ as Janaki had dubbed her. A sudden outbreak of typhoid had laid Shakira low, and Simran Kher, their boss, had asked Janaki to pitch in at the last moment. ‘Read up—Google is god in these cases—and carry a list of phone numbers. Who is asking you to reinvent the wheel?’ she had said. Simran believed in the tough love school of reporter training. It was left to Deepak Sharma, the crack investigating guy on their team, to pitch in with some numbers, Vishnu Singh’s among them.

Balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder, Janaki said, ‘Mr Singh, I was hoping to get a background briefing on some of the politics of the state. I’m leaving for Madurai early tomorrow morning, so I can come to your office near Nungambakkam now, but I’m at T. Nagar, and it will take me a little time to get there with my suitcase,’ she said.

She heard a barely concealed sigh and then a very resigned, ‘Very well, please tell me where your office is; I will get you picked up.’ Heaving a sigh of relief Janaki sank on to the steps to wait for the car. Despite the complaints she felt excited about the elections, which in this southern state were always very colourful and brimming with good stories. She tried to feel a little sympathy for Shakira, but just could not muster any.

Janaki had also never visited Chennai before, so it was a great chance to explore the city a little before she left. I will leave some time for it towards the end, she thought. She still had a list from her friend Narayani, who had demanded an impossible number of thokkus or pickles from the city’s famous Grand Sweets shop.

Vishnu Singh, the fast-track blue-eyed bureaucrat of the present dispensation, put his phone down. ‘Muthuswamy,’ he said to his peon, ‘tell Shivalinga, my driver, to go to this address in T. Nagar and pick up this journalist, Ms Janaki Rao.’

Vishnu had met Deepak Sharma during one of his rare stints in Delhi as a bureaucrat. Sharma was a good journalist and very discreet. I wonder what this girl wants, probably does not know the language and wants a quick-fix interpretation of the situation, Vishnu thought. Deepak had called him yesterday, and, while he was tempted to say no, he knew he owed Deepak a favour.

‘She’s smart as a whip; you won’t have to hold her hand on anything, just help her out with logistics and point her to some English-speaking guys in the districts to help her out,’ Deepak had said to Vishnu. Well, I hope that’s all there is, he thought. He vividly recalled Deepak’s other colleague, Shakira Banerjee of the divine backside, who thought she only needed that appendage to get anything. When Shakira turned up at North Block it was an event worth heralding, with every officer and clerk following her progress with their tongues hanging out and drool spilling out like waterfalls. Vishnu had given her short shrift when he realized that her brains were not her best asset, and they leaked the moment she opened her mouth.

As he settled down to do his files, Vishnu glanced up at his mother’s photograph on his desk. Lately, every time he called her up, all their conversation had been on how he needed to get married and settled and reproduce. Good thing Lucknow is so far away from Chennai, he thought to himself. Frankly, it gave him a headache. As a bureaucrat dealing with the finance and, for a while, the rural development department, he met new people every day, just nobody who grabbed his attention in any way. He was romantic enough to believe that attraction was necessary for him to commit. His relationships in college in Delhi had been the usual run till he had met Gayatri at the IAS academy. With beautiful hair, flashing eyes and long legs to wrap around himself, she got to him like no one else. Unfortunately, although amenable to an affair, she was determined to marry within her own community, and losing her remained a nagging ache within him. No woman he met since then had lived up to his memory of her.

Not that there had been a lack of women; it was amazing how many women were prepared to throw themselves at you just because you were in god’s own service, the civil service of the country. Tall, slim and handsome, Vishnu knew he was considered a catch, but he was under no illusions over why. Ultimately it was the crassness of the social climbing which he saw in his professional life that got to him. He only had to meet a beautiful woman—and there were a huge number in Chennai—to begin wondering just what she was after. Not the best strategy to land a wife, he thought.

At thirty-six, Vishnu was a bachelor, and had a lukewarm ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement with his colleague Shashwati, posted in the boondocks in Andhra Pradesh, but the sex was getting so desultory that he wondered whether the monthly trips to Hyderabad were worth it. Being single in the hinterland of India was getting to Shashwati, turning her bitter, he thought. He had been attracted by her looks, reminiscent of Gayatri in that glacial way, and the fact that they had all been part of the same gang. At thirty-six, he was in no hurry, but his mother’s endless nagging and the pervasive feeling of ennui was making him dissatisfied. After the elections, a holiday is in order, he thought.

A tentative knock intruded into Vishnu’s thoughts. His room, kept at a temperature near freezing to beat off the hot Chennai summer, was humming with air conditioning. As he watched Janaki Rao walk towards him and extend her visiting card to him with a beautifully crooked grin, he felt an undeniable kick in his gut—something he hadn’t felt in some time—a visceral sexual jolt at the sight of this petite yet curvy woman.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Here is my card, sir; I’m Janaki Rao. I’m so glad you could send the car; the heat is amazing and, with the suitcase, I would have really struggled to find this place. Is it okay to leave the suitcase in the car?’ she asked.

Stop this, Vishnu; she is Deepak’s colleague; he’ll kick your ass if you try anything, he cautioned himself. ‘Hi! Oh yes, it’s fine. I’ll drop you at your hotel on my way home; please don’t worry,’ he said, extending his hand and gripping Janaki’s surprisingly tough yet tiny hand in his. Physically she was not at all his type, as different from the glacial Gayatri as, well, volcanos and glaciers. As he watched a small trickle of sweat make its way into her kurta and between her ample breasts, he wished to god he was that trickle of sweat and not the puddle of sexual desire he was turning into. Almost as if she could read his dirty thought, she looked straight up and into his eyes, laser sharp, and held his gaze with a directness that went straight to his balls. Those eyes could devour a man, he thought.

‘Aren’t you a little too young to be a political correspondent?’ he asked, almost cringing at the patronizing tone that had somehow slipped out of his mouth.

A frown creased her forehead, but she quickly recovered. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she said and smiled.

Well, well, well, Janaki thought to herself. Mr Singh is not too bad, probably married to one of those IAS begums. Tall, dark and undeniably handsome, although tall men had never been her type, as she stood at a petite five foot two. Saurabh was not really very tall. Suddenly Janaki wished that she had taken the time to wash up at the airport or at her Chennai office, her sweat-beaded face compared to an icy cool begum flashed before her eyes. My kajal must have run, I must look like a raccoon, she thought to herself. She was vain enough to want to impress this very impressive piece of manhood. A little preppier than I’d normally like, but whatever he has is working, she thought.

‘Mr Singh, I know you are very busy, and I’ll try not to take too much of your time. I really wanted to know about the self-help groups in Madurai, and some of the labour issues in the industrial belt that surrounds it,’ she said, fishing out her notebook and pen. ‘If you could also give me the numbers of some activists and rural development NGOs with whom the government liaises, it will be a help,’ she said trying to sound all professional.