Page 27 of Born in Ruin

“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.

FIFTEEN

Ishaan

What happened that night at school? Why did you guys leave like that?

Ishaan sat in a meeting with his senior leadership team, his gaze on a screen that scrolled endless lines of code. And still, his brain played that message in a loop.

“We’ll need to push the launch date by three weeks to a month.” His project manager looked like he’d slept three hours in the last three weeks. He had been steadily drinking from a humongous mug of black coffee and his knee was jiggling under the table, the vague noise a hum of dissonance that was giving Ishaan a headache.

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