Lavie confirmed it through her sources that Anand had visited DEAL at the day of the presentation.

Next evening Rohan met Tapan to inquire about his work. But he had another motive: to know the name of the MBA student who had given him the diary. Tapan mentioned his name as Ruhin from the 2024 batch of pass outs. A search in the alumni directory provided the current contact details of Ruhin. He lived in Delhi and worked at Anirudh Limited. He wrote an email to Ruhin asking if he could get some assistance regarding the recent auctions in which Anirudh has won the coal mines, for his research purposes. Ruhin replied back enthusiastically asking him to call on the weekend. Rohan called him on Saturday.

‘Hello Prof. Rohan. It was so nice to read you lovely mail. Tell me how can I help you.’

‘Thanks for being so welcoming. I have a questionnaire to send you regarding these auctions. It is a survey we are conducting to understand the bidding process in the private and public firms. Would you be kind enough to fill the survey?’

‘Actually I had no involvement in the bidding process. But if you send the questionnaire to me, I will pass it up to relevant people. And put in a word as well.’

‘Thanks Ruhin. By the way, I got your name from Tapan, a PhD student here.’

Ruhin kept quiet for a while. He was probably trying to remember who Tapan was. A strange student with shirts bigger than his body demanded. ‘Oh yes. I know him, haven’t been in touch though.’

‘He had once helped you pass on a dairy to another senior professor here.’

‘Oh yes. I remember clearly now.’ Ruhin gave a short laugh. ‘That diary had been lying around in my room for some time.’

‘Who had given it to you?’ Rohan knew he was in a way testing Ruhin’s patience by inquiring about a diary which had no relevance to their communication. But Ruhin was forthcoming, ‘It was the people of the Anirudh Corporation. I had just been selected in their company, and for some reason, they gave it to me rather than directly passing it on. Thanks to Tapan, he was very helpful.’

Rohan was now convinced it was her. He went to Delhi and handed all the evidence and details to Mr Khan. He said, ‘Suhasini carried a deep grudge towards the tribal communities because her father was killed by the Naxals. She has associated the Naxals with the whole adivasi community. When she came to know about IMAGED, she decided to use it to target them. For this, it was important to be close to them. My guess is she planned to trouble them by getting control of their land. Buying out mining leases at the forests where they resided was the way she chose to punish them. Hence, she opened a consultancy firm and helped the friends of her husband to secure mining leases. In the garb of consultancy, she would influence the operations of the firms against the wishes of the tribals. The companies thought she was lucky for them as her opinion won them the bids. None of them had an iota of a clue what she was doing to make them win the auctions. Prof. Dinanath, who studied each and every auction held in India saw something wrong and through sheer research analysis he was able to understand her bidding process. Prof. Rameshwar was not letting in the mining operations to be active by providing valuable help to the anti-mining groups.’

Mr. Khan replied, ‘we now know what made the companies bid like the way they did. The business heads tell us they believed her on account of the political clout of Anand Nehru and never questioned her on the bidding number,’ Mr Khan was holding the documents of investigation in his hands.

‘Her bidding number had a simple methodology. She would calculate the number of deaths of tribal's possible if all the trees in the mining area and its periphery were burnt with them inside the jungles. This was done assuming everybody residing within the area would be dead in the fire. Her calculations were based on the data provided by the government about the population and its spatial distribution in the area. Then she would multiply the number by five and pick out the last four digits of the calculation. To ascertain the value of the auctions, she had a team of committed economists who would suggest her on the bids. She would replace the last four digits of their suggestion with her own and leave the rest the same. One of the business heads told us that if this was a method to win the auctions of such precious natural resource, there is something really wrong with the whole process. He of course did not know about IMAGED,’

Rohan thought for a minute holding his right hand on his chin. A smile appeared on his face. He said, ‘Now I can see why Prof. Dinanath could reach the numbers through a statistical analysis. He too found out the method of calculating the last four digits, though in a completely different manner. He used the data on the mines, the forests and the prices of the natural resource based products at different local markets along with a multiplier. Another important point is the significance of the number ‘five’ and ‘four’. Suhasini’s father was killed on fifth of April which is 5/4. She seems to be obsessed by his death. Do you think we have enough evidence against her?’

‘No we haven’t. We have the story but not the evidence. There is nothing against her except the phone records between her and Sophia. But they would not be enough. I have contacted the Russian embassy for the extradition of Sophia. Only the call girls can lead us to Abideh. Even Dr. Ahluwalia hasn’t  met Suhasini ever.’

Next day news came that Sophia Loren had been killed in a car crash in Moscow. The Russian embassy sent pictures as proofs. They still had no idea who the other girls were and reports said they were not Russians but from Kazakhstan and then they had returned back to their original country. This was a blow to the CBI.

The death of Sophia was not a coincidence. Suhasini had worked hard for it. And Anand had helped her reach a politician in Russia who had accepted to make this happen at a high price. Now with Sophia gone, there was no other proof with the CBI. Her earlier conversations with Sophia were passed off as a research project her company was doing with call girls in India. She had not used the names like IMAGED even once. Every important detail was sent to Sophia through a bogus mail, whose owner and IP address was traced in a small town in Russia.

There was only one way to grab Suhasini. It was the transfer of money to the accounts of Sophia Loren and other call girls. Suhasini and Anand were VIP customers and had many bank accounts in India and abroad. The transactions were done in the name of the company. But if questioned it would be difficult for them to justify the amounts transferred for the sole cause of research. Suhasini realized this was her Achilles heal. She asked her husband to close some of their bank accounts forever. She had to lose clients of the company after the investigations were carried out. In a few weeks, her firm shut shop.

Law may work on its own set of proofs. But it seems nature has its own way of maintaining justice and equilibrium. Her husband had stopped making her a part of his political plans anymore after the investigations. She had confessed everything to him in order to get help to kill Sophia. He helped her knowing particularly well the negative impact it would have on his political ambitions if Sophia reveals the secrets. She stayed home most of the times with the kids. One day Suhasini was found poisoned and dead at her house. No one knew who did it. The children were at school, the maid had done her work and left. Normally she would be watching television during these times.

Anand Nehru was not very sad at this. He closed all the bank accounts from which the transactions were made. Few days later, even though it is a small event in the life of a politician, his guard resigned from his job. That well-built young man who spoke with an accent, had been appointed few months back and wanted to go back to his home in Dehradun. 

*

News of Suhasini’s death brought a relief on the faces of Mr Khan, who had been eager to get her punished, even though he did not approve of the punishment she met with. He had a clue about the murderer. But as nobody filed a report, no action was taken and he did not feel any urge to report it to the police. During his earlier investigations of the case, two men who guarded Dr. Ahluwalia had been traced. One of them was a local and the other a Russian. The Russian could speak in Hindi and chose to stay back in India while the others were leaving, in memory of his dead wife. Both he and his wife worked with Sophia, but she was brutally murdered on Suhasini’s orders. Mr Khan knew the person who had informed the bodyguard about his wife’s murderer.

Anand Nehru accepted that his wife was not keeping well recently and had died by suicide. Both Rohan and Lavie heard the news of her death with a feeling of surprise. But they decided to continue with their normal livelihood which they had earned after going through all the trouble Suhasini had caused them. While Rohan was working on his next paper with Tapan as the news came out, Lavie was writing a nonfiction novel based on the work she had done in this project. She was still eying the $10000 prize in journalism but was waiting for the permission from Mr Khan to get the story in print. The permissions, as she had guessed would never come. In the meanwhile, Bansi had been released from the Bokaro jail after the death of Suhasini and he had engaged himself in setting up his newspaper again. Mr Tudu had personally offered him office space at the posh Co-operative colony in Bokaro which he had rejected.