Crime Novel "Item Girl" gets reviews from Actors Suniel Shetty and Viveik Oberoi

'Evil! Addictive! but Item Girl reminds us there is always a choice.'  -Viveik Oberoi

A chilling murder mystery. Must must Read. - Suniel Shetty

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Superstar Deepika Padukone gets the first advance copy of Crime Novel Item Girl by Richa Lakhera

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Item Girl by Richa Lakhera

Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one,’ bragged one of the officers to his groupie subordinates, looking pleased as punch with his smoothness.

‘Boys. It’s here. Right here where fear is,’ he said glibly pointing his stubby ringed finger at his head while the fresh recruits listened on in rapt attention.

‘I say the only race in police is khaki,’ he continued. ACP Bhonsle rolled his eyes and moved away from the group of policemen looking for last empty spots in the smoke-filled officer’s mess. It was still a Tuesday night but inside here it was always a Saturday at a cricket match. The smell of greasy burgers was over-powering and he could hardly breathe amidst the stench of the burning oil. He wondered why the café even bothered to install bins—nobody seemed inclined to use them. Spotting no empty tables, he made his way back downstairs to order his food. The young boy who took his order looked older than his years, tired, world-weary, uninterested. His order arrived, a huge veggie-burger, large fries and a chocolate milkshake. Kabir absent-mindedly popped a French fry in his mouth. It tasted as bad as it looked. Greasy, unhealthy and fattening. But ACP KabirBhonsle felt grateful that the shitty place had taken his mind off the case, even if only for a bit. Puffy faced and slack-jawed from the long hours, Shinde had slumped on the chaise lounge and dozed off.

‘Why is he sleeping?’

‘Double shifts, just a couple of hours of down time before the next shift kicks in,’ Holkar said.

‘Tell him to get up. Eat and get back to work… Shinde, chalutth!’

Shinde instantly wide awake, bounded to the attached kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of roasted dalia and milk and voraciously spooned the cereal into his mouth, before pausing to catch his breath. In response, Holkar rushed to the refrigerator, grabbed a container of orange juice and after a greedy swig childishly kept the carton for himself.

‘Excuse me—Bhonsle Sir.’

‘Not excused.’

‘Man can’t be excused to take a pisshaab?’

‘You should say take a leak bhnchot.’

‘Leak…piss yapishaab … matlabmootne se hai. Gooooingsir….’

Kabir shrugged while gulping down his now cold burger with the tepid fizzy.

‘Sir, the content of the Panvel farmhouse lockers.’

‘Found anything?’

‘Same thing. Naked photos of girls and boys. And lots of photos of Dannie.His niece. Remember Dannie?’

‘Yes bhenchodI remember Dannie.’ Bhonsle regarded the huge stash of photos and tapes and private letters dumped onhis table. Pausing for a moment, Kabir pored over Dannie’s pictures, as a child of three, five, ten. Even as a child it was evident that she had uncommon beauty, indicative of the star she would become. And one of the most sculpted heads he had ever seen.

A pale-faced office-boy shovelled into the room listlessly trying to figure out where to place even more sealed packets on the already full table.

‘Abbey kya?There is more stuff? Motherfucker keep it on the table—let me finish this crap first.’

‘Anything important?’

‘Boy photos, girl photos, more chics…pervert faggot…stubs of cheques, papers with studio addresses, producer details, too much useless information.’

‘One thing is for sure. Mr. Unpopular had an unending list of people who had a bone to pick with him.’ Kabir regarded the exhaustive material in front of him taunting him with its hidden truths and wondered just what had he succeeded in establishing? He impatiently waved to the skinny office boy signalling him to dump some more courier packets on the table and instantly felt bad for snapping at the boy. Poor sod. A late-night shift was no beachwalk in a station full of grumpy policemen. They were all snappy and tired and angry, at having to rework the summary, when all they wanted to do was to hit the field, down stiff ones, crack the case and head home. Not necessarily in that order.

‘Hey boy! Come back.’ The thin pasty-faced boy, unnerved by the sight of scores of angry men in khaki looking pissed like hell, looked like this was the last place he wanted to be in. ‘Boy don’t be scared. Take this money and buy yourself something to eat. And that’s an order—’ His men guffawed as the boy snatched the money from ACP Bhonsle’s hands and almost bounded out of the room.

‘Back off…! The poor boy was scared shitless.’

‘Hey give me a knife. Maadachotthis is tight—letter bhibhejengey chain lagaakar—’

Kabir struggled with the last remaining bundle and finally managed to open it. More photos. Shit.

‘Ayuuuikk?Whathefuckkkk is this!!’

Kabir stared at the photos, but nothing made sense for some time. He sat stunned for a moment, trying to understand what he was seeing. Then with a loud expletive which surprised the assorted men in the room, ACP KabirBhonsle’s team saw him doing the fastest sprint out of the room yelling at the doorman to stop the office boy. 

‘HEYY GET HIM!! GET THAT BOY—GET HIM !! LOOK FOR HIM—MAADACHOD HE WOULD NOT HAVE GONE FAR—’

But the thin boy had disappeared into the dark.

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Item Girl By Richa Lakhera

She had been punished long enough...she thought. There were little patches of dirty mud where she stood. The birds huddled together outside the window and stared disapprovingly. Six-year-old Sunny had been standing there for more than three hours in the suffocating heat of the garden. Punishment for wetting her bed. The sun which had been soft and harmless and a welcome end to a horridly cold night had become menacing and cruel now. It beat down on her neck and made her head swim.

But she would not move she thought. Let her Papa find her like this, she swore stubbornly.

The sweat which had gathered at the nape of her neck now dribbled down her back into the crack of her bum and then down her thighs. Sunny always waited till it reached the thighs.She had a habit of rubbing her thighs with the warm liquid in between… it felt better, since she knew that Kala, her step-mother, would get more angry, a stolen sin in the long hours of punishment. In front of her, Kala knitted non-stop on her dark wood rocking chair. The needles attached to her stepmother’s hands punctured the air around her at breakneck speed. Her eyes fixed on the little girl she created strange patterns on silk fabrics, her needles going.

—ATTACK SPLICE CUTT ATTACKK SPIN CUTT SPLICE—

When the silk got over her stepmother attacked the lowly cottons, herfingers moving with dizzying certainty. Jabbing the thicker contours of the cottons into mouldable shapes with such ferocity as if she wanted to jab out the actual essence of the unyielding raw fabric…

—SPLICE SPLICE CUTTT CUTTT ATTACKK ATTACKK—

Sunny always got frightened, and sucked her thumb when Kala started knitting and stitching. But over time, Sunny fancied she understood the language of the needles. She imagined the dancing needles were trying to tell her something. She imagined they were her friends. They warned her of Kala’s state of mind. Fast snippy ones when angry. Soft snips when calm. Uneven ones when Kala was raging. That’s when she would want to run away.

The stones now glistened moist and black and slimy from piss. Sunny felt like a voyeur of her own plight, a pretend tourist. Watching from her cot, two-year-old Dannie stared with huge bright eyes. Sunny resisted the impulse to cup her eyes against the rising sun. The silence sat angrily, making the birds in the garden even more depressed. This was the longest she had been punished, she thought chewing her lips. And she wondered whether this time Kala would punish her all night. She imagined herself as a tree. She imagined her legs slowly becoming wooden, and her soft skin turning scaly and black and hard. Maybe she was turning into a wood fairy. She imagined her legs getting sucked down into the ground and growing roots. And when her punishments used to be over, she moved around like how she thought a wood fairy should move. But today, standing in her own piss and sweat for so long, Sunny did not feel like a wood fairy, or any fairy, anymore. More like a horrid witch. Maybe that’s why she smelled so much now. She let herself go again. The muddy spot had transformed into a bad toilet, a hot fetid swamp. She knew she would have to clean the mess herself, after her quota of punishment was over. But just making Kala angry would make up for everything. It gave her a thrill of delight.

‘You had worms, this big, when I first saw your. Ate mud off the floor, little horrr!’ Kala indicated with her arms.

‘Theees big worms inside your guts. You were being eaten alive from inside! And your intestines hung out of your arsehole like a pig’s tail,’ Kala would say blackly. Perhaps she could no longer ignore the fact thatthe filthy little girl in front of her with her matted hair, all tangled with burrs, eating mud off the floor in the day and wetting the floor in the nights, was transforming into an uncommon beauty. That Sunny was becoming a carbon copy of Tabu,the woman Kala hated the most in the world.  

 

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Item girl By Richa Lakhera

The sky was miserably bleak. The hot air a blazing inferno. Like hell was leaking onto earth. Boiling hot cars inched along, mostly waiting for the others to inch on first, their inflamed tail-lights leaking red like cruel gashes. Even hours after the scorching sun disappeared, Mumbai’s summer nights offered little solace. The city contours dimmed into a gloomy dull grey hot smog, the air turned thick with haze. Power shortages had increased from 12 to an unbearable record of 20 hours.

Hot wind scorched Kabir’s breath as he got out of his car with his men, dried brittle leaves snapping under his feet. A lone sad dog morosely watched the men cross a garden patch to enter KD’s building. The apartment was locked, but luckily, the door’s locking mechanism opened inwards. He had been trained to handle that. Kabir stood with his legs apart. He knew exactly where to aim his kick. He had done it many times. After a few mule kicks, the wood began to splinter. As expected, the deadlock bolt extended only an inch into the door frame. With a final blow which seemed to shake the building, the door leapt back against the locks and hinges, the lock burst and the wreck of the door fell inwards on the carpet. His men stood back for a moment and Shinde peered inside.

‘It smells of shit. Hundred-year-old shit.’ Shinde said, breaking open the remaining stub of the door. The putrid interiors smelled of vomit and decay. There was bird poop and feathers everywhere on the floor. Pigeons had shat all over the furniture, their white and grey downy feathers spread like dandruff on the TV, the carpet, the dining table. Bird shit and filth and garbage… Milk cartons sitting out of the refrigerator in 105 degree temperatures. The table was littered with leftover food, mouldy and decayed, and that explained the revolting smell.

‘Yummy,’ coughed Holkar, trying not to inhale.

‘Looks like he grabbed what he wanted and left—in a hurry.’

‘Wait. What’s that sound? Running water?!’ a constable stepped into the kitchen and found himself standing in half a foot of stinking murky water.

‘Maashichi—where is this water coming—that’s strange! The sink has not backed up…? Where is the frigging leakage? Checked toilet?’

‘Water is dripping from the ceiling,’ Shinde said tracing the mildew growth on the wall, his eyes resting on a spot right on top of the hallway which was murky black and spreading.Standing on a stool, Kabir craned his neck to inspect.

‘That my friends, is the culprit. Water is dripping from the hallway ceiling down onto the soaking wet carpet. No wonder the house reeks of mould and mildew. Seems an added construction of some sort.’

‘Hold me up’ With the help of his men, Kabir stretched himself further and extended his hand to prod the crumbly, powdery roof. The ceiling was nearly featureless at first. It gave away unexpectedly and bits of the pink hallway ceiling disintegrated and collapsed to the ground. Kabir found himself staring at pinkish acoustical tiles peeking from under.

‘Shiiiit!’

‘At least now we know! That’s not a pink carpet. That’s pink attic insulation! I think the ceiling collapsed under the weight and sogginess of the water. The entire floor is wet and stinky. We will have to watch our steps in the room above.’ Meanwhile, inside the bedrooms, it was much worse. Foul-smelling fetid water had reached the far end of the rooms and was wicking up the boards of the wooden bed. There was a kind of storage room out back, filled with dirty clothes completely coated in bird poop. The owner had enclosed the patio and made an addition room. A constable peered into the darkness.

‘Hey…I think I can make out stairs here!’ Gingerly watching his step, Kabir tiptoed through the little path to the doorway. The stench in the room was unbearable. Like something very sick was dying a slow painful death. The room was not as small as it looked.

 ‘There has to be a light here some—’ One of the men reached for the switch in the gloomy fetid darkness and their dismay turned to goggle eyed astonishment.

 ‘Finally bull’s eye! Sir come here!’ Kabir found himself staring at what appeared to be the medicine drawer. Inside it, in plain view, were cartels of drugs marked and labelled in neat stacks. Hallucinogens, antipsychotics, amitriptalines, anti-depressants and stimulants along with prescriptions for HIV treatment and painstakingly packed Quad pills, the new wonder drug for AIDS.

‘Heaps of coke-N, rave & Xplode and Xtzees…very popular party drugs. Legal. You can buy these online. No big shit…except this stuff thrusts our man into a major league dope pusher—quite an illustrious career Mr KayDee—!’

‘My theory is that there’s a lot of girls and boys that come to bollywood with a lot of dreams. And whenever you have a lot of pretty and hungry young girls and boys in one spot, it attracts every fucking idiot from all four corners of the world. Every douchebag, scumbag, scumsucker shows up and sets up shop and teaches them to snort and roll.’

‘Like Salem. Number one degenerate fuck up whose idea of bliss is being passed out in a hotel room somewhere with four scantily clad women.’

‘Pphissssss …oye Shinde?—Hey what’s this—it’s a ciggie or what?’ Shinde gave a rolled up cigarette to Holkar. A chain smoker, Holkar smiled widely in appreciation, his unflattering stained teeth beaming unevenly as he clutched the ciggy and lit it in a flash.

‘Easy Holkar!This is not—’

‘Shinde I know how to handle a damn ciggie—’

Before Shinde could stop him, Holkar took a deep drag, holding in the smoke for some time. The next instant, he began to cough frantically, his face red, he doubled up vomiting in the hallway.

‘You fool, you don’t know how to handle 45,000 an ounce 90 percent pure skunk—’

‘What’s happened to him?’ Kabir shouted.

‘He smoked that!!’

‘What the fuck is this? Are you a chootiya? Do you know what this is?? Take him out. Empty a bucket of water on his motherfucking head.’

‘He—Sir—Shinde—Vwwaackk—’ Holkar vomited again, staggering against the doorway.

‘What did you do, Shinde?’

‘I just asked him to tell me what it is? These ciggies—the bastard sampled it!’

‘Fucker it’s not a ciggie—it’s a snort stoked with god knows what crap! It’s to be taken in through the nose—not through the throat—take these samples for testing.’

Kabir was well aware about the pervasiveness of heroin and crack cocaine in the filmi circuit. ‘Gotta perform’, ‘need drugs for the creative edge’were chanted like a Darwinian theory of evolution and used as pretext for any and every drug abuse, from smoking grass, coke-N, rave &Xplode and Xtzees to popping amms, acids and meths to gulping quacks to shooting speed. The phrase ‘sex, drugs and stars’ was interpreted as a devastatingly successful advertising slogan for an exciting life, but Kabir was far from amused when the super-rich and glamorous turned their druggy excesses into fashionable behaviour>

He knew it always ended in a crock of shit. 

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Item Girl by Richa Lakhera

 ‘The attacker banged KD’s head against the wall, provoking injuries to the back of his head and then attempted to strangle him with a piece of lingerie. In a bid to cause maximum pain, almost half the scalp was left badly bruised and huge chunks of hair were pulled out from the roots in bunches.’ In the court a blow-by-blow recreation of KD’s murder was being created.

Sunny stared unaffected by the tumult of the press around her earlier or the surreal drama being enacted in the suffocating heat of the courtroom now. Confined behind a firm wall of separation between her and the world, Sunny felt like a tourist watching the chaos of her life from a distance. She could not resist the impulse to stare at her step-mother in her favourite crispy tussars, ballooning around her like a tent, her stiff petticoat grating behind her. Kala’s face had twisted with a mean expression of implacable hostility.

On behalf of Sunny, P.K. Dang made a formal complaint against the fact that KD’s pictures which were being heavily used in the appeals process had been released by the victim’s sister to the media in a bid to bias public opinion against Sunny. He accused the prosecution of sinking to make a despicable personal attack on his client’s character by labelling her a ‘she- devil’. The defence argued that things had gotten out of control between Sunny and KD when she was molested at the party to which KD had sent her, crammed full of drugs.

‘Fear was his power over her and her weakness. This is not a fear which can be explained as a peddler has over a user, but a much deeper fear—built over the years of living with him, if you can call the beatings, the abuse, being stuffed with drugs, as living. Sunny’s uncle KD held such power over her that she had turned against her own family, her sister, her father. I want the court to just imagine a relationship so vicious and vile, where an uncle gets his own niece hooked to drugs of all sorts—for which the accused has already paid the price—she stands ruined in society’s eyes—and has memories so terrible it will probably take her the rest of her life to get rid of them—’

Many present in the court stared at the fragile girl in the dock. Shorn of makeup, she looked too young to be out unescorted, let alone face the charge of a murder.

‘Please imagine—from the age of ten the victim had been welcomed into her house by her father to look after the accused and her sister but what happened is cruel beyond imagination—’ For the hundredth time since entering the courtroom that morning, Sunny found Kala staring at her. Eye studying her intently, as a predator would look at its prey, her gaze seemed to bore into Sunny’s flesh.

‘Sunny—has seen brutality and cruelty beyond measure—she was in a physical state where she could be relieved of her sanity with just one piercing, invasive look—hate can drive you insane, but there is always reason in madness, just as love is madness in emotion.’ The sunlight streamed in through a high window, illuminated the polished patina of the elegant wooden panels around him. It glanced off the bald head of the judge. This was the third time in far too many weeks that the prosecutor and P.K. Dang had locked horns on the latter’s attempt to declare the suspect insane, and therefore unable to serve their time in prison.

‘She was also far too intelligent, and worse yet, crafty for her own good. She is not insane—however badly Mr. Dang wants us to believe…’

Unperturbed by the comments, Dang, with a flair for the dramatic, walked on determinedly to the prosecutor’s side, his coat slung over his arm.

‘In my opinion, Sunheri Kashyap or Sunny is as much a danger to herself as to others and prison is probably not the best environment for her rehabilitation—’ he smoothly rattled off, feeling a rush of self-satisfaction at the slowly forming acquiescent look in the judge’s eye, and the suspicion he could see, unhidden, in the prosecutor’s eyes. The latter proceeded derisively, ‘Do you really think a girl who butchers a man doesn’t belong in jail?’ he challenged, eyes fixed on the jury’s face searchingly.

‘I would hardly have testified to that otherwise, would I, but that’s not true.’ Dang’s voice was challenging and arrogantly dismissive, as the prosecutor stepped in front of him, blocking his path.

‘You have a habit of declaring your clients insane and moving into your asylum,’ he said softly, his voice dripping sarcasm.

‘I have a habit of siding with truth,’ retorted Dang.

‘Are we going to allow this sham to go on? To let the accused make a mockery of the legal system? The case is going against the defendant when suddenly, Mr. Dang, a creature of habit, starts making penguin noises, pulling vegetables out from under the defendant’s chair calling the witness’s pet parrot to the stand to testify. Perhaps he’s stalling for time while an associate tries to find the evidence to show the accused in good light or maybe he’s finally just flipped under the strain of the case.’ The court erupted and so did the defence attorney and the judge. In the complete commotion which followed, the judge’s voice could be barely heard—

‘To say—to say nothing of the high chance that you would be severely disciplined if not disbarred as soon as the nearest Bar Association ethics panel heard about it—’

‘Stop smiling YOU WHORE!’ There was complete silence in the court as Kala’s shriek interrupted the proceedings. A soft voice broke the chaos, Sunny was smiling as she spoke.

‘—When she embraces, your heart turns to stone, she comes at night when you are all alone. And when she whispers, your blood shall run cold, you better hide before she finds you.’ In a chilling voice Sunny taunted Kala.

Now there was complete commotion.

‘You cannot talk like this—in the court!’ The judge was apoplexic.

‘Just look at the devil’s daughter—jusssst lookkkk at herrr—she is that witch Tabbbuuuu—’ Kala yelled, madness dribbling off her eyes, her face split by a thin red gash for a mouth. The court orderlies moved towards Kala but the crazed woman’s reflexes proved too fast. She ran from them and lunged towards Sunny, knelt across before anyone could stop her and slapped her on her cheek. The noise of the slap ricocheted across the court corridor. Sunny’s face froze at the dark purple welt spread across her face. A shrill unearthly scream rang out in the room and for a second everyone stood still staring at Kala.

Something had snapped inside her.

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Item Girl - CRIME THRILLER MURDER MYSTERY

Sunheri and Suhana, twin sisters who share a horrific childhood, are caught in a vortex of pain and deceit when Sunheri, a popular item girl in Bollywood, is accused of murdering her vicious uncle and sent to jail. Suhana, an aspiring filmmaker, is determined to seek justice for her sister but Kala, their evil stepmother, makes matters worse with diabolical plans of her own. The plot thickens when three manipulative item girls—Nargis, Digital Dolly and Daisy—are identified as key eyewitnesses in Sunheri’s case. 

Throw into the mix a brutal blackmailer, a cruel boyfriend, a cynical journalist who knows too much, and a hardboiled cop, and what you have is a mind-bending psychological thriller that will hold you hostage until the end. 

There is not a dull moment in Item Girl, an intense, gripping account of the dark side of showbiz.

MY REVOLVER RANI INTERVIEW

''AB MARD KO DARD HOGA'' - says Kangana.
Kangana does not mince words on the power equations in bollywood to chambal couture! and reveals why no one will marry her after they watch Revolver Rani !! 

RANI MARRIED!

THE NEW MRS CHOPRA -- RANI MUKERJI-CHOPRA STATEMENT

"I would like to share the happiest day of my life with all my fans all over the world whose love and blessings have been part of my journey all these years. I know that all my well-wishers who have waited for this day will be really happy for me. It was a beautiful wedding in the Italian countryside with just a few of our close family and friends with us. The one person I missed terribly was Yash Uncle, but I know he was there with us in spirit and his love and blessings will always be with Adi and me. I have always believed in fairy-tales and with God’s grace my life has been exactly like one, and now as I enter the most important chapter of my life - the fairy-tale continues," says Rani Mukerji.

Revolver Rani...!!

 

SICK...CRAZY..TWISTED...PSYCHOTIC ...NYMPHOMANIAC !!

 

Kangana Ranaut spoke to me about why no one will ever marry her after they watch her forthcoming REVOLVER RANI...

AMITABH BACHCHAN'S MANIFESTO!

Bhootnath Returns grosses 16.8 crores on first day! Watch my interview with Amitabh Bachchan and producer-director of Bhootnath Returns…