After Rohan turned fifteen, Saran became increasingly scarce at her place, which loss of ardour she attributed to his advancing age, but when she came to know that he dumped her for a young thing, though hurt, yet she took it in her stride. But when he dragged his feet over fielding her as the party candidate in the ensuing elections, she felt he used her only to betray in the end. As her resentment of Saran grew, she began to perceive Rohan as a fruit of his vice and that made her contemptuous of her own son. Seeing her life was doubly jeopardized, as she was possessed with the idea of revenge, there came the breaking news of Shibu’s suicide followed by sustained media focus on the boy’s mother. When Rohan proclaimed that a dalit died in vain for he blamed none for his plight in his suicide note, she could visualize an anvil of her avenge and casually suggested that he might as well draft a meaningful one for fun. As he obliged her with a stinking indictment of his father’s desertion of his mother though without naming the character, she knew that would come in handy to bring about Saran’s doom.
That Twelfth Night, ensuring Rohan drank a glass of poisoned milk; she planted the suicide note under his pillow that the police had discovered on the morrow.
Having done with the past, Rasika began crystal-gazing.
In Rohan’s death she could see the means of Saran’s end. But not the whole means. Though he was bound to feel Rohan’s loss, yet he wouldn’t dare to face the media glare and so can’t even see his boy’s body. That in itself is bound to affect him in the short run but then death only warrants a limited grief period. It’s the political death that would devastate him. And God willing, she would ensure that happens.
She would usurp all of his unaccounted wealth he had vested in her as reparation for his sexual abuse of her. But then, she needs someone powerful to protect her in her endeavour. Why, she knew that Kanwal, the state mukhiya of the rightist outfit, had a glad eye for her for long. What with the opinion polls predicting change of guard in the state, it could be the right time to hitch on to him. After all, she was desirable and hungry and he was promising and young and that way, Saran’s ditching her could prove to be a blessing in disguise, a ‘right’ jilt so to say. And she would ensure to make her surrender appear to Kanwal as his conquest not only of her but also of Saran.