Wondering how the one-time friends, unknown to each other, as if to make the world seem small, had converged on him to serve their own ends, for long he reminisced the time he spent with both of them. When it dawned on him that Rani, his live-in partner when he rescued Kavya, should have provided the material to pin down Radha, her old friend, he saw the irony of life and the hand of destiny in the affairs of man.

When Dhruva reached the Jubilee Hills police station, a sheepish looking Simon greeted him as the ‘poison’ that he seized from Kavya’s room turned out to be an inane solution. Shamed by the fiasco, as Simon apologized, Dhruva, who, trusted him by then, briefed him all about his housebreak into Radha’s Red Hills house, and theorized the aftermath thus: he was quick to realize that Radha would shift the deadly thing into 9, Castle Hills, for its safekeeping though that could also spell Kavya’s doom. So, unknown to Radha, he replaced the bottle with a similar one with that harmless look-alike potion, and with Kavya’s release on hand, she planted the ‘fake thing’ beneath Kavya’s cupboard and induced the police to search for it. When Dhruva reminded Simon about the parody on the adulterated liquor - the Scotch you drink is not the Scotch you think you drink – and said that the bottle that Radha planted beneath Kavya’s cupboard did not contain the poison that she thought it contained; the cop’s face wore the look of a devout.

Wiser for his reverses, as Simon wanted the proof of Radha having possessed the ‘real thing’ before he acted against her, Dhruva gave him the original bottle with poison that was bound to contain her fingerprints. While Simon still remained skeptical, for him to picture her motive to murder Ranjit, who jilted her, Dhruva showed him the wedding photograph of Radha with Ranjit, and on their way to the forensic laboratory, the detective appraised the cop about the story of Radha’s life abused by Ranjit, scandalized by Pravar and brutalized by Shakeel.




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