Dark Places

It was blacker than a coal wagon. His nostrils were blocked with dust. His head hurt badly when he tried to lift it. He tried to stretch his hands up. They hit something hard and he yelped in pain.

He felt something moving on the side of his left thigh. It was his phone, vibrating. He pulled it out of his pocket. The phone was giving two warnings: no range, low battery.

By the light of the phone he saw that he was inside a box. A strong sense of deja vu hit him. Had he beem here before? Caged like this, like an animal.

He tried to remember how he brought upon himself this grave predicament. Fragments rushed through his mind, like a slideshow on fastforward. The face of a person he loved dearly. And suddenly he felt guilt. And then he saw flashes of something made of metal hitting his head.

And then he knew from where he had got the deja vu.
It was a movie he had seen last week with his wife. The DVD of which he had rented from the video store down his street. It was about a person who was buried alive in a coffin.

**

Today was the day Raj had been waiting for the last six months. Waking up to the glum, cloudy Saturday, Raj had a sudden deep sense of foreboding. He quickly brushed the feeling away. Today, he was not to be brought down. He would not let a fleeting sense of mellowness break down this day. This day he was going to be defiant; he thought, protecting his inner thoughts from any outer distortion.

Opening the voicemail, he went to the bathroom. A series of messages from his friends came in quick succession.

“Hope you all packed up and ready bud. We will be at you and Ria’s by eight in the morning”.

“Hey, don’t forget to pack your socks this time. I am not lending you mine”.

“The jeep has broken down man, sorry. We will have to drop the plan this time. Sorry for backing down the last moment.”

The bedroom door knob turned and Ria entered holding the glass of orange juice Raj liked to have every morning.

“Who is it you were talking to? Was it Gopal? It sounded like him.”, Ria asked holding out the glass to Raj.

Before Raj had time to reply, Gopal’s booming voice came out of the telephone, “I had you there, didn’t I? Pack up man. Goa is calling. No one’s going to stop us being there this time. And yeah, ask Ria to remind you to pack your own socks man. And also ask her to bring something delicious. That way she won’t have to fall sick eating by the roadside dhaba.”

“You haven’t told them I am not coming?” enquired Ria looking taken aback.

“I don’t think so, honey. Must have failed to mention it.”

“How can you not mention it? You have beem nagging me the whole week about it. And I have told you a hundred times that I don’t enjoy their company.”

“I am sorry, Ria. I will call and tell Gopal now itself. Or do you want to tell him yourself”.

“Mummy, I am leaving now, bye”, Rohan, their son yelled from the lower front door of their duplex flat.

“Bye, honey”, Ria yelled back going towards the bedroom door. Then she looked back at him, “No thanks. I can’t endure any of his stupid jokes this morning. You tell him and yes do it now. I don’t want them to hate me for supposedly backing out at the last moment”.

She took the empty glass of orange juice Raj had quietly gulped down and kissed him gently on his nose. “On the contrary, I think they will be quite happy to know that I’m not coming, won’t they?”

“No, sweetie. Don’t think like that. They love you. And we will miss you.”, Raj said holding her hand.

Ria chuckled and patted him gently on the head. “And also tell him I have packed your socks already.”

She winked at him, unknowing that inside his mind Raj was congratulating himself for working out the plan so neatly.

**

Ria waved back from the drawing room window to Raj. Gopal and Akash had helped him put his travel bag in the hood of the car. They waved at her gleefully.
Looking at Raj hugging his best friends, the two guys he had known the oldest and best, Ria felt a wave of affection wash over her.

Raj, Gopal and Akash went way back. Ria knew that. She had seen the first pic of the trio taken at a resort they had gone to for a school picnic.

Raj was just about to enter the car when he started searching for something in his pockets. He looked up at her realizing he had forgotten something.

“Must be his phone”, Ria concurred although she was surprised by it. In the past few weeks Raj never seemed to want to lose sight of his phone. Maybe it was work pressure. Not wanting to miss a call from his boss and hear hell for it later.

Ria smiled and showed up a hand, “I will go fetch it for you.”

As she walked towards Raj’s bedroom where she knew the phone would be, she felt constrained. When Raj had looked up knowing he had forgotten his phone, there had been a look in his eyes that Ria had never seen before. A look of panic, of fear.

The cell phone was lying where it had been since morning, on Raj’s study table. As she went forward to pick up the cell, she could see that the display was on. When she picked up the phone, she realized it was because it had just received an incoming message.

‘What was Raj thinking about that moment when he looked up at her? What was there to panic about? Did missing a call from someone at work really vex him this much?’

Lost in her thoughts, Ria’s fingers automatically clicked on the read button.

The message was from an unknown number. It read just one line, “221 B”.

It was then that the feeling of affection Ria had been feeling for Raj seemed to have disappeared. Nothing would have aroused Ria’s suspicions about her husbands fidelity, let alone this innocuous message. They had been happily married since two years and their relationship was still strong. But when she saw the string of smileys next to the text, she began to wonder whether she had been wrong, whether she had been too trusting.

The smileys were all the same and showed a winking face blowing kisses at the reader.

*

“She is simply unbelievable”.

Gopal replied to a question posed by Akash. Raj was sitting in the back seat, while the other two were talking about the girl he was going to be spending his time with the next two days. He took out his phone from his jeans pocket, letting out a sigh of relief.

Raj had been careful not to make Ria suspicious about the ‘Goa trip’ that he and his friends were planning. He never kept his phone out of arm’s reach, lest a message or a call arouse her suspicions. And so far the trick had worked.

When he had ran up the stairs to his third floor apartment, he had rang the door. Maybe he had rang the bell a couple of times and it seemed like forever after that Ria had opened the door. The moment the sound of the door opening hit his ears, he had suddenly felt stupid. He had tried to look less panicked. But as it turned out nothing had happened.

A smiling Ria had handed him the phone and asked him to take care not to waddle too much deep into the beach.

“The beach”, a smiling Raj said out aloud causing Gopal to turn back enquiringly.

“She asked me to be safe, not to go to the beach”.

Raj was laughing now, inspite of himself. Gopal joined him, albeit awkwardly.

“You sure she didn’t see anything man?”

“Yes, I am sure of it.”

“The way you ran to the apartment man. I thought you had gone out of your mind. That you had panicked up at the last moment and were going to blurt it all out to Ria.”

“I would never do that.” Raj replied, “Even if I had panicked. I would never have told her you guys helped me on it”.

“Love you man”, Gopal tapped him on his knees.

“Did she buy on the voice-mail? Did she hear the messages?”, Akash asked, looking at Raj through the rear-view mirror.

“Oh yes. She was in fact angry that I haven’t told you guys already.”

“Told us what?”

“That she can’t come.”

Gopal sniggered, “It isn’t hard to guess, you know? Behind all that courtesy, she does not seem to really like us both.”

Akash supplemented him, “We knew she wouldn’t be wanting to come. It’s hard to believe that she let you.”

“I hope you have packed your socks”, Gopal winked, “Did she wash it? Don’t want smelly socks to ruin a romantic night, if it was me.”

To which Akash said, “Same goes with me. Aisha hates her when her olfactory senses detect something distasteful. One time she was with me and the bed smelled of someone else’s sweat, she gave hell to the hotel guys for it.”

Gopal laughed at this. “She is a crack of a character, isn’t she? But still enough fun to de-stress you over the weekend.”

“I am actually jealous of you man”, Gopal said turning to Raj, “You get to be with her for this whole long weekend. Hell I haven’t been with her more than a night at a time.”

“Now don’t say that you want to join him tonight”, Akash said rolling his eyes at Gopal.

“Well, if Mr. Raj here allows me to.. We can have plenty of fun, you know. The three of us…”

“Aisha would not like it. And control your senses, Gopal. You just spent the last Sunday with her.”

The Honda City rounded a curve and a tall building came into view.
“And here we are hero, we have successfully reached your destination.”

The parked cars on either side narrowed down the two way street. The gate announced in bold, “Welcome to the Grand Sunrise Hotel. We wish you a pleasant stay.”

**

Raj walked into the lobby and waited. Aisha had promised her to text him the room number, which Gopal had booked for them. He took out his phone and checked his inbox. There wasn’t any message from her.

He walked towards the reception and asked, “Hi. I wanted to check on a reservation made under Gopal Singh.”

The reception guy checked his computer for a few seconds and then looking up at Raj said, “Yes sir. We have your reservation. Here are your keys. The other set is with your wife”

Raj jumped when he heard this.

“My wife?”

“Yes sir. She arrived here an hour earlier. She said… Why there she is.”

Raj turned around. Aisha was standing there a shy smile on her face.

“Hello Raj”

Aisha moved forward offering to pick up the travel bag.

“No. It’s okay. I will carry it.”

“You must be tired now. Come let’s go the room”, she said sheepishly.

She began to lead her way to the elevator.

“You still look the same as you did the last time I saw you, Aisha.”

“You mean to say I still look like a child”

“No. You look pretty.”

Aisha blushed as she cranked open the doors to the elevator. Raj suddenly felt an intense want to touch her. He had been waiting for this day since what felt like forever. He brushed his arms against her as he entered the elevator. She seemed to recoil away from him. When Raj looked back at her, she smiled back.

Raj now knew what they had meant when Gopal and Akash talked to him about her. Aisha was their senior in college. Through a mutual friend, Gopal had come to know that she was a hooker now. Then Gopal had called her and made her an offer to pay her enough money for her not to worry about it anymore.

Gopal and Akash had pooled the money. In return, she was to stop hooking up with anyone else than them. They never missed the whooping sum of money they had given her, for it was magic to be with her. Gopal and Akash had kept this a secret between them. They had told Raj since they always shared everything with each other. In return for keeping their secret, they had offered him time with Aisha for a weekend.

And he knew that he needed it. Five years with Ria had started to make him lose interest in her. He needed this to rekindle that relationship they had shared previously. He was doing this for her, or so his friends had assured him whenever he felt a moral conflict.

Aisha opened the door to the room with her keys. It was pitch black inside. If he hadn’t been so engulfed in the want for Aisha, that he couldn’t help but check out her curves, Raj would have seen a figure shifting in and out of sight across the room as Aisha turned on the lights.

Raj walked ahead and sat on the bed as Aisha closed the door and bolted it.

“Aisha”, he said staring at her lasciviously, “Come sit near me.”

Aisha sat down on the bed beside him. She placed her hands on his thigh. Then lifting her left hand up towards the nape of his neck, she pulled him towards her. Raj’s lips caressed the side of her neck, as she let out a moan.

“Now”, Aisha said suddenly. “Do it, now”.

There was the sound of rushing feet from behind him. Raj turned back and before his skull burst and he fell back on the bed, his eyes registered the face of a person clearly holding a metal lamp in it’s outstretched hand.

It was Ria.
*
Ria and Aisha looked down upon the muddy mess of the body they had placed in a coffin. They covered the coffin with a lid and picked it up. Climbing down the pit they had dug, they placed the coffin at the bottom. Then, picking up their spades they began to refill the pit with the mud.

Ria was shocked when she had found the message from Aisha on Raj’s phone. She went to the message details and called her number.

When she picked up she did not give a chance for her to speak.
“How dare you try to steal my husband away, you wench!”

A surprised Aisha replied, “Is this Raj’s wife?”.

“Yes it is. And you better hear this. Tell me the name of the hotel where you are to meet my husband. Or I am letting the police know this instant”

There was a pause on the other side.

“Don’t try to act dumb now. Speak up.”

A trembling voice spoke.

“It was all because of his..his friends ma’m”

“Who? Are you talking about Gopal and Akash?”

“Yes, them”

“Well, go on”

“They.. they forced themselves on me a couple of times before. And your husband, he recorded it when they were doing it. They threatened that they would put the video on the internet, ma’m. They made me come everyday to that hotel.”

Ria was confused now. Was this woman accusing her husband of raping her?

But then she remembered the smileys in that message.

“So you also flirt with someone who forces himself on you? I saw your message, woman. Stop lying.”

“It wasn’t me, ma’m. It was that friend of his.. Gopal. He was here a while ago. He asked me to bring my phone so that he could message Raj the room number. Thank God you called ma’m. Please don’t call the police. I can’t let my family know what I have been through.”

Ria suddenly felt sympathy for the woman.

“I am going at the Grand Sunrise Hotel. Please try to be here before your husband comes.”

“Don’t worry”, Ria’s voice quivered, ”I shall be there.”

Tbe bell rang. Ria composed her face and tried to look normal. There was only one way to know if this was true.

She would have to witness it for herself.

She opened the door sporting a smile on her face. Handing his phone back to him, she said, “Don’t waddle too deep in the water when you are at the beach, okay? Be careful.”

She closed the door. If God forbid what the lady spoke were true, Ria had no idea what to do. Rage filled her as she remembered Raj’s panicked face, probably thinking what his wife would do if she learnt of his plan. What punishment befitted him?

Her eyes then fell on a DVD copy of ‘Buried’ on the tea trolley and she made her decision.
If her husband was a cheater and a rapist, then she would bury him alive.
__END__