I hired a private investigator. Discreetly, professionally, the way you'd hire a consultant for a business problem. The PI followed Meera for three weeks and delivered a report: she'd been seeing Kabir Menon for four months. They met at his cottage in Vagator, usually on the nights I was working late or travelling. The PI included photographs. I won't describe them.
So now I had the data. The complete picture. My wife was in love with another man, and I had the evidence. The question was what to do with it.
Here's where I become the villain.
I didn't confront Meera. I confronted Kabir. Alone. At his cottage. I went there on a Wednesday afternoon — Meera was at a yoga class — and I sat in Kabir's cluttered, artistic, deliberately shabby living room and I told him what I knew.
He wasn't surprised. He wasn't ashamed, either, which infuriated me more than the affair itself. He looked at me with the particular pity of a man who believes he understands love better than you do, and he said: "She's lonely, Rohit. She's been lonely for years. I didn't steal her from you. You left her, and I was there."
I told him to end it. I told him that if he didn't, I would destroy him. Not physically — I'm not violent. Financially. Professionally. I would use every resource at my disposal to ensure that Kabir Menon never worked in India again. I would call every gallery, every magazine, every client. I would make his name synonymous with scandal.
He didn't flinch. He said: "You can't buy your way out of this, Rohit. You can't manage this like a quarterly review. Your wife is in love with me. That's not a problem you can solve with money."
I left. I went home. Meera was back from yoga, making chai in the kitchen, her hair still damp, humming a song. She smiled at me. The smile of a woman who has a secret and is carrying it with the particular lightness of someone who has found, after years of emptiness, something that fills.
I smiled back. The smile of a man who has a plan.
The plan was the party. The night of November 11th. The night Meera died.
I organised a gathering at Villa Saudade — small, intimate, thirty people. Friends, neighbours, a few business contacts. The usual Goa expat crowd. And I invited Kabir. Specifically, personally, with the warmth of a man who has no idea his wife is sleeping with the person he's inviting.
My intention — and I need you to understand this, Sub-Inspector, because the intention matters — was confrontation. Public, controlled, devastatingly effective. I was going to reveal the affair in front of thirty people. I was going to humiliate Meera and Kabir simultaneously, in a setting where escape was impossible, where the social consequences were immediate and permanent.
I wasn't going to hurt anyone. I was going to destroy a marriage, including my own, in the most calculated way possible. I was going to be the injured party, the sympathetic figure, the man betrayed. I'd rehearsed it. I'd timed it. I knew exactly when, during the evening, I would stand up and say the words.
