The Darya Nandkarni Misadventures Omnibus: Books 1-3 Read online

  The Darya Nandkarni Misadventures

  Books 1-3

  Smita Bhattacharya

  Contents

  About the Author

  KISS OF SALT

  Prologue

  1. Heliconia Lane

  2. Sea Swept

  3. New Friends And Old

  4. Swallowed By The Night

  5. Ghost Baby

  6. An Odd Phone Call

  7. Of Half-Truths And Deception

  8. They All Fall Down

  9. A Cloak Of Smiles

  10. Chased By Shadows

  11. Cobra Woman

  12. The Two Faced Heart

  13. Phantom Caravan

  14. Bohemia

  15. The Inquisition

  Epilogue

  THE SECRET ANGELS

  1. Chapel Road

  2. An Unexpected Visitor

  3. Oddballs

  4. Whispers In The Dark

  5. The Elephant’s Tale

  6. A Bad Man

  7. A Witch’s Tale

  8. Breaking News

  9. The Very Peculiar Young Girl

  10. Looking Into Things

  11. The Bloody Knife

  12. Peeping Tom

  13. Cracks

  14. Twelve Years Ago

  15. Benefactor

  16. Not Two But Three

  17. New Evidence

  18. Slithering Shadows

  19. Into The Onion

  20. Heaven Or Hell

  21. Coloured Deep

  22. Reset

  WHO THREW DRACO DOWN THE CHIMNEY?

  Preface

  Prologue

  Key characters and words

  1. Week 12: The Present Day

  2. Week 1: 6 weeks before Brian goes missing

  3. Week 12: The Present Day

  4. Week 2: 5 weeks before Brian goes missing

  5. Week 12: The Present Day

  6. Week 4: 3 weeks before Brian goes missing

  7. Week 12: The Present Day

  8. Week 3: 4 weeks before Brian goes missing

  9. Week 12: The Present Day

  10. Week 6: 1 week before Brian goes missing

  11. Week 12: The Present Day

  12. Week 7: The week Brian goes missing

  13. Week 12: Present Day

  14. Week 8: 1 week after Brian goes missing

  15. Week 9: Brian is found

  16. Week 12: The Present Day

  17. Week 10: 1 week after Brian is found

  18. Week 12: The Present Day

  19. Week 10: 1 week after Brian is found

  20. Week 12: The Present Day

  21. Week 10: 1 week after Brian is found

  22. Week 12: The Present Day

  23. Week 11: 2 weeks after Brian is found

  24. Week 12: The Present Day

  About the Author

  SMITA BHATTACHARYA is an author and management consultant based in Mumbai. She loves to read, watch, and write atmospheric mystery thrillers. Her heroines are weird and wonderful, as she imagines herself to be.

  Smita is an avid traveller and has solo-travelled to over forty countries. Therefore, her books have a strong element of travel in them.

  Smita thrives on crime and coffee. Though she prefers cafés, she occasionally also hangs as @smitabe on Twitter and Instagram. You can read her colourful travel and life stories at www.smitabhattacharya.com.

  KISS OF SALT

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

  In her sepulchre there by the sea—

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  ‘Annabel Lee’ — By Edgar Allan Poe

  Prologue

  She watched him arrange the books on the table.

  After a few minutes, he turned to her and asked, ‘Bored?’

  She shook her head and smiled. Resting her head back, she turned her eyes to the window, towards the dark night, and listened to the sea crash against the shore. She touched the gold chain around her neck: a gift from him. It felt itchy against her skin. She turned the pendant over in her fingers.

  She thought about how the sky had been overcast the past couple of days. There was the talk of a thunderstorm. Unseasonal. Nevertheless, a welcome occurrence. The days had gotten much too hot.

  Farideh barely heard his question over the sound of the sea and the din of her thoughts. She stared at him. Paritosh repeated it.

  ‘You don't need this anymore, do you? You know it by heart.’ He held up a book.

  She looked at it: her memory of home, her succour in the days she felt lonely.

  But he was right. She knew it by rote. But was she ready to give it up yet?

  When he placed it back and said, let's keep it, she breathed out in relief.

  Then after he had finished arranging and dusting to his satisfaction, he moved to adjust the photograph over their bed. He was careful with how things should be, and she let him do whatever he wanted.

  They had been to a party earlier that night, and both had had something to drink. It usually made her drowsy, but he grew energetic. The fervour to clean up was partly to expend that energy, she knew.

  She wanted to sleep but thought it better to wait until he was tucked in bed too, cuddled against her, his breath a mixture of ripe coconut, ginger, and whatever he had had to drink that night.

  Now he seemed almost done.

  ‘Don't sleep,’ he said, winking.

  But her eyes dipped in spite of herself.

  ‘Don't,’ he urged, a finger pointing in playful warning.

  ‘I won't,’ she promised.

  Ten minutes.

  Five minutes.

  Now he was done.

  She watched him take off his shirt and place it on the back of a chair. Then walking to the switchboard in long strides, he switched off the lights.

  She shifted to make some place for him, smoothing the sheet underneath.

  He lay beside her. Kissed her ear.

  Her heart thudded wildly in her chest.

  The sea crashed into the dark rocks.

  And once again, in spite of herself, fear crept into her heart.

  Heliconia Lane

  Valsolem Beach is located south of Goa, two to three kilometres away from the more popular beaches of Rajbaga and Palolem, and about an hour's drive from the tourist-packed beaches of the North. It's a little-known, unexplored, fine-as-baby-powder-slip-through-the-fingers sand beach. One can walk for miles along the beach—the thick, wild sea on one side and the soaring, vegetation-cloaked cliffs on the other—and not see a soul in sight. The reason, partly, is that it can hardly be seen from the main road given the barrier of grass, boulders, and palms in between. A rutted track leads down from the main road to the beach, but not many know of it. After a fifteen minutes' drive on it, the track falls into a circular clearing from which the shore can be glimpsed. A bit farther down... and rearing its head like a dragon from the sea... is a grassy, peculiar patch of heaven called Heliconia Lane.

  Heliconia Lane is three hundred metres of a cobbled pathway, flanked by well-tended lawns and shaded by palms, jackfruit, and banana trees. The sides are bound by a profusion of Heliconia: tubular orange flowers with petals outlined in yellow and hanging like clusters of firecrackers. Entering Heliconia Lane is like setting foot into an explosion of colours and trumpery, yet it's not overpowering. Instead, one feels buoyant and lightheaded. The sea air is soft on the face. The sun comes in filtered through a canopy of leaves and isn't as troublesome. The smell of Heliconia, jackfruit, and coconuts blend together into
a heady concoction.

  It's a blissful place to stumble into. You'll never want to leave.

  Until you discover the secrets that linger behind the closed doors of the three houses that stand on it, that is.

  From left to right, the houses are in blue, yellow, and white. They look like parts of an organism, as if attached together by invisible hooks. Arranged in a descending order of size and grandeur, they share little architectural harmony, yet fit neatly together. Like cohesive parts of a whole.

  The first is Casa De Primavera, or House of Spring, the most ostentatious of the lot. Its façade is a royal blue, which was grand once but is now replete with cement sealed cracks. The walls are made of thick laterite stone with carved lintels. The roof is terracotta tiles set on coconut wood rafters. The floors are oxidized stone. Windows are brightly coloured stained glass with flower-shaped iron grills. White colonnades line the circumference of the two-storeyed, six-bedroom mansion. A well-maintained garden with a canopy, some hammocks, and servants' quarters are outside. An Acacia tree reaches up to the top floor.

  Filip and Zabel Castelino live in this villa. Filip, fifty-five, is the retired deputy director of Goa's tourism board, this being the other reason no one knows of Heliconia Lane; he likes to keep it that way. His wife, Zabel, five years younger, is a Reiki master, although everybody, in particular, she, has forgotten all about it. These days, she spends most of her time in bed watching TV or on the phone with one or the other member of her sizable, far-flung family. They have one son, Anton, who is twenty-eight years old. He left home when he was very young and has barely called or visited since.

  The next house on the lane is the recently refurbished Constellation. Winged granite dragons guard the front gate that opens into the landscaped garden bursting with fruits and vegetables. A long covered balcão, or veranda, extends across the front and sides. It has built-in seating, open to the garden. The windows have oyster shells inserted into their wooden frames that make the light coming through look as if filtered through lustrous tissue. The house is painted in sunny yellow with a red-tiled sloping roof. Inside, the house is a single floor of four bedrooms and a reception hall. Beautifully done.

  Varun and Rakhi Salgaonkar lived here for over twenty-five years before passing away in a freak boating accident a year ago. They were fifty-seven and fifty-five years old respectively. The house stayed empty for half a year after that and was only recently done up in the hopes of attracting well-heeled travellers who preferred a chic stay over the tumble-down North Goa shacks.

  The Salgaonkars' have a son and a daughter.

  The daughter, Vidisha, is thirty-four, married and settled in Mumbai. Five feet four inches tall, she is tolerably comely to look at and is the one who thought about turning her parent's cottage into a tourist homestay. She used to be their favourite and is certain they would have wanted this new identity for their beloved house as well.

  The son, Gaurav, whose name means pride, is anything but. Thirty-years-old, six feet tall, and stocky in a hard-ass military way, he believes in living a life of ease and dissipation. He'd just about managed to pass high school, stopped studying soon after, instead preferring to loiter in beer shops, whistle at local girls, and ogle at tourists. He had several cases of harassment and petty thefts registered against him at the Panjim police station that his father, along with his friend Filip, had managed to hush up in the past. Gaurav moved to Gurgaon a couple of years ago to work as a real estate broker, but the offenses only escalated: shady property deals, gambling debts, goons on his heels to collect them, the works.

  Vidisha hasn't told Gaurav about the house—that it was ready, and she was interviewing potential lodgers. The idea to convert the house to a tourist lodge had been originally his, but he had since changed his mind. And now she doubts he'll ever come around again. And he'll fight every step of the way if she tried to do it. A troublemaker is always going to be a troublemaker.

  The last house on the lane is the prim and staid Sea Swept. Its walls are painted a church-like plain white, the door a bright cobalt blue. Whilst the smallest of the three houses, its porch has a clear view of the sea. Two love-chairs sit on it, their surfaces tarnished by years of disuse and saline wind. The lawn is bare: a coconut tree, a flowerless rose bush, that's all.

  Inside, the house is only slightly better preserved but not without its redemptions. Four rooms open out to a central courtyard whose one wall houses a spectacular work of art. It looks as if it's made up of pieces stolen from a medieval mosque. The wall is inlaid with shiny ceramic tiles that have stylized landscapes, cypress trees, flying birds, geometric figures, calligraphic bands, quotations from the Qur'an. It's exotic.

  The wall perpendicular to it has a teak wood shelf with an ancient black rotary dial telephone. Two wooden benches and a wickerwork divan are arranged under it.

  By 2009, the year of the events in the story, Paritosh Nandkarni had lived in this house for twenty-two years, most of them on his own, after his wife Farideh disappeared one night. He'd used only about a quarter of the house since, and mainly only the master bedroom.

  The bedroom has a clear view of the sea from one window. The room itself is decadently proportioned. It has a four-poster bed, an imposing teak study table, an intricate Persian rug—the last, a gift from his wife. A large photograph of the couple embracing in front of the Taj Mahal hangs over the bed.

  But the room is in a state of disorder. A heap of clothes, papers, and other scraps have been pushed under the bed as if after accumulating them day after day over many years Paritosh finally decided he wasn't going to take the trouble of cleaning up.

  This is the room Darya Nandkarni steps into one hot May afternoon after the untimely death of her uncle, Paritosh. She hopes for it to be a time of some labour but mostly quiet contemplation by the sea. She imagines it would take her a week or two at most to get rid of her uncle's effects. After that, she plans to meet some of her childhood friends, with whom she'd played during her summer school breaks. Heck, she's even considering swinging by the North to lounge in a beach shack or two. Soak herself in feni. Crash a rave party. The opportunities appeared sweet and endless.

  But what she isn't expecting at all is to play detective and solve the mysteries lurking in the shadows of Heliconia Lane.

  Sea Swept

  Soon enough, Darya realized cleaning up after her uncle wasn't going to be as easy as she'd imagined. Her father had told her it would take her a day, two at most, a week at worst and that was stretching it. But while it was only Uncle Pari's room that had largely been occupied in the house, it was still a mess. There were piles of paper, photographs, ripped books, bills, clothes, stacks of old medicines, product pamphlets, cassettes with their loops unwound, newspapers, and newspaper cut-outs—some decades old. And in between were also pieces of broken furniture, nails, duct tapes, scissors, stapler, stapler pins, a wrecked pair of slippers, and some ugh, what's that? A floor mop thick and crusty with a dark liquid. She dipped a finger and smelled it—was it kerosene?—then pushed it away to a corner with her feet.

  What's happened to this place? How am I ever going to sort this out?

  Not that she was short of time, she thought to herself. There was no job to go back to. No love interests. She had quit both and thankfully so. She was going to have to make a fresh start, a new beginning. But before that, she had some serious thinking to do.

  How had it come to this?

  Six months ago, she broke off with her boyfriend of three years, Spandan Gupta, the man she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with. She'd thought he was the one, as soon as their eyes met, their hands touched. Something electric passed between them. As if they'd touched a charged wire and branded each other for life.

  This notion had solidified so wholly in her heart that dislodging it nearly cost Darya her life.

  Two years younger, suave, well-travelled, and blessed with a glib tongue that swept everyone off their feet, Spandan was also very aware of h
is charms. He was the only son of rich business folk, a natural heir to his father's business, who grew up spoilt rotten. It also helped (or not) that he was gifted: knew several languages, did complicated mathematics like he was eating cereal, and looked like an Olympic swimmer.

  They'd met at a work meeting. Darya and her boss had paid a visit to Spandan's father and team—which included Spandan—to sell one of their services. In an earlier life, Darya was employed in a workplace consulting firm, the kind that advised enterprises on how to make their offices more efficient. After the meeting was over, he asked her out. Then again. Said he was smitten. Couldn't take his eyes off her. Endless legs, rap star confidence, a gorgeous sardonic smile... She had been seeing someone else then, but it took her little to cut that off and collapse into Spandan's arms.

  Her friends warned she had fallen for the glitter. Inside the tall, smooth exterior was a deeply troubled and insecure man. There was too much show, not enough core. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, one announced, noting the symptoms from social gossip and common friends. His need for admiration and lack of empathy was cited as proof.