1. Death by Decapitation and Dismemberment

This one was gruesome. And about as grisly as a murder could get. Purvi’s killers were evil. The sort of people who deserved to be shot at sight without a trial for what they did to her. She had only just moved into an apartment on the third floor of Le Grande Casa which, despite the unforgivably ostentatious moniker, offered reasonably upscale accommodation for those with relatively deep pockets. I should know. Dad owned an apartment there and I had moved in when I landed my job as an assistant editor at a leading publication. As for Purvi, the previous residents were relatives of hers and when they moved abroad, they had told her she could use the place.

I knew all this about Purvi because back when she was alive and kicking butt, I used to hate-follow her on Instagram. She had the life I always wanted. The great love story. The rewarding, much feted career. The body. Before it was all butchered to shit. A tiny part of me was a teensy bit gladder than sad about what happened to her. And I hated myself unreservedly for it. And while confessing to ugly truths, I might as well add that while I was appalled by what happened to her, the details of the case, which were too awful for words, did turn out to be entertaining in a morbid way. I couldn’t get enough of it. And it was a good way to distract myself from personal crap that was proving a bit too much to handle.

As the brochures for Le Grande Casa promised, the living spaces were luxuriously designed and moderately tasteful. You could count on the fact that there would be no holes in the bathroom allowing unimpeded passage to rodents, roaches and their ugly relatives or faulty fixtures that could result in your tub collapsing through the floor and landing with a resounding thump in the living room of the residents downstairs while they ate bhajjis, sipped tea and watched TV. In addition to this, the place came with an array of amenities that included a rooftop swimming pool, gym, spa, salon, indoor and outdoor playgrounds for kids, tennis, badminton, and basketball courts, a party hall, conference rooms, and even a meditation chamber. It was not a bad place to live. There were intrigues, in-fighting, power struggles, and clandestine romances aplenty but there were no murderers in the building.

You could make friends if you wanted to of course or keep to yourself. The neighbours satisfied their curiosity about their more introverted neighbours by ignoring them when they walked past each other in the carpeted corridor with the enormous marble sculptures and modern art but sincerely stalked them across social media and lurked anonymously on digital property, sniffing about to their heart’s content, which was considered a perfectly acceptable and civilized thing to do by today’s hopelessly deteriorating social standards.

Security was tight and there were nosy parker cameras everywhere. Privacy had been willingly sacrificed in the interest of safety, with none looking askance at that ever present, voyeuristic gaze. Nobody thought it could be remotely possible for hired thugs to saunter onto the property, incapacitate a girl who had just turned thirty (she did a photo dump of her birthday party on social media platforms which her hunky boyfriend had thrown her), take their time to sever her head, place it on her dining table, though the actual murder allegedly took place in her bedroom where her dismembered and naked body was discovered, before vacating the premises, cool as you please.

They were clearly not the fastidious types and the bloodied footprints they left, resulted in poor Mrs. Nayak, the victim’s neighbour who had woken bright and early for her morning constitutional collapsing in a dead faint on witnessing the ghastly sight. She suffered from a dislocated hip and a nasty laceration to the face. Her husband alerted the building’s security officer who contacted the police.

Soon, the minions of the law and the media swarmed over the place like the biblical locusts of yore and the fruit flies of the present. By the time they were done, we were all acutely traumatized.

To no one’s surprise, none of the killers were identified or apprehended. Nobody had a clue. They might as well have been ghosts. No one had seen them come. Or go. Not a soul had seen anything suspicious or heard anything close to a scream or a cry for help. There was nothing to be gathered from the CCTV footage. The cops said it had been hacked.

They didn’t seem keen to offer information of relevance or pertinence, though most of the residents were questioned. And rudely at that. The members of the fourth estate were even worse with their pesky, extremely inappropriate questions, and tendency to stick their lousy cameras in your face, every chance they got.

The cops who questioned me confirmed some of the commonly held views about members of law enforcement in general. They were loud, boorish, and irredeemable jerks. Worse, they seemed hopelessly incompetent. There was a lady cop, but she was every bit as bad as her male counterpart with the ill-fitting shirt and the popped buttons that had given up trying to accommodate his bulging gut.

He scratched himself, demanded tea and biscuits, which he drank and ate noisily, pausing only to glare at me. The man asked only one question. Repeatedly. Why did I live alone?

The unasked question was plain too. Why hadn’t I been gangraped and murdered too?

Lady cop’s uniform fit her better, but she seemed cranky and tended to fixate on the fact that poor Purvi and I were both unmarried, lived in the same building and wrote for a living.

‘Writing ah? It must be nice to be rich and have a pretend job… Does Daddy pay all the bills? Or is it a Sugar Daddy?’ The two of them smirked, overwhelmed with the scintillating wit on display.

I said nothing in keeping with the meek little lamb persona I had adopted for their benefit. It would be no fun for me to sass them, get myself wrongfully arrested and become yet another tragic victim of police brutality.

Clearly, in the textbook these two had been made to memorize, Purvi and I were degenerates and it was most fitting if bad things happened to us. For a few uncomfortable moments, I ruminated on the possibility that they would drag me off to the station, strip me naked, tie me up on a rickety table stained with the blood, sweat and contents of evacuated bowels and bladders of previous unfortunates, and beat me with belts, lathis, and brass knuckle dusters till I confessed to every unsolved crime that had ever been committed in our neck of the woods. Then they would lock me up before dragging me to court so the news outlets would have a field day making my public humiliation complete before handing me a death sentence to be hanged till I died with my tongue lolling out of my grotesquely swollen face and a broken neck.

‘I did not know her that well. For a while, she worked as an editor for a publishing house who were also the publishers of a book I had ghost-written but then she quit. We knew of each other but met briefly only when she moved here.’

I said over the course of the interrogation, sounding very guilty, though it was the truth. ‘She travels, er…travelled a lot for work, I guess. We follow each other on social media and like and share each other’s articles. There were some common friends, and we were supposed to grab a cup of coffee some time, but we never got around to it.’