Dil Beparwah | ✔

thirty eight

||CHAPTER 38||
《¤》

┊V A R U N┊

A distant look glazed her eyes. "Why I married him? Because I loved him. It felt rebellious."

An over-hyped café chain of Kawfee and Koolphi seldom received low customer traffic. However, Jyoti Negi's choosing was not inefficient this particular Thursday morning.

Scribbles of pencil on paper volumed over the smooth whirring of coffee. Kriti paused, "So you weren't blackmailed into it?"

"I wasn't, my late father was. I was unaware of it then."

"Did Mr. Negi have something to hide?" I asked.

An indignant smile came upon her face. "Everyone has skeletons in their closet, Mr. Malhotra."

"What did your father's have to do with Raman Oberoi?"

Jyoti Negi's eyes darted to the recorder on the table. Kriti didn't hesitate before switching it off, looking at her reassuringly. "You can tell us off the record. We're on the same side."

I reserved my doubts about that. Why was she coming out with all of this now? What flipped the sudden courage in her to out an ex-husband whose alimony she had herself denied?

"Raman joined the company in the mid-eighties," she began. "He was young, smart and hardworking, and had a business degree from a foreign university, that too on a scholarship. He knew how to navigate and negotiate, it didn't take long for my father to notice him, trust him."

"And make Raman Oberoi his assistant?"

Jyoti reached for her Styrofoam glass, taking a long sip. "He earned that spot, there's no doubt about that. He was one of those guys whom you would take one look at and know they have a bright future ahead. Charming, diligent, hardworking. But then came the nineties."

I guessed it had something to do with the trade reforms that had killed many local businesses of that decade. "Liberalization of Trade in India... Negi couldn't sustain it?"

She pursed her lips. "The nineties were not a blessing. Business was low and my father became desperate for an easy way out. That's how he started gambling."

That was old news, though. I sensed a series of embezzlements. Kriti caught on and prompted further, "So he dipped into the company's dwindling resources?"

"He didn't make sound decisions."

Sound, not smart. "All of it under Raman Oberoi's assistance?"

"Well, yeah. My father used to trust him blindly, the man was always shadowing him—in the company, the gambling parties, yaha taq ki ghar pe bhi. He would often stay over, work till late in my father's office. I started seeing him more, and eventually... we started fooling around a bit. My father was bound to find out, and he disapproved. Raman didn't belong from a family or class of his liking, he was still a middle class fellow whose ambitions were the only feature that made him stand out."

Mikesh did suggest something along those lines. But even if Oberoi did seduce his way to the top, romance could hardly be the reason for something as malignant as blackmail. He was too cunning for that. "Mr. Negi could have fired him then?"

"He could have," Jyoti agreed. "But Raman wasn't all about ambitions. He was a strategic thinker and during that period, he was indispensable to the company. You need to understand that this was the time when many low-level employees hadn't been paid for months, few had already resigned and joined the foreign competitors."