Keeping Secrets

Chapter 10

As Gaurav took deep drags of his cigarette on the lawn opposite the pool and gazebo, he still could not put Nikki's phone down. He looked towards a heaven he did not believe in beyond the endless pitch black sky, that unlike the world beyond it nobody could deny.

"What am I missing?"

Nikki's pregnancy was the last of everyone else's theories about Nikki making up a boyfriend and a whole love story. Now, Gaurav could not find a trace of this mystery man. He was still fidgeting with Nikki's phone, staring at the happy photographs of Nikki with all her friends, tucked behind the clear phone case. Nikki's grotesque, bloody, lifeless face stared back at him. In a shudder, the phone slipped and fell on its screen. Luckily, the screen was safe, but the phone cover came off. Given the kind of phone case Nikki used, this was not supposed to happen, unless the case was being taken off frequently.

He promptly picked up the phone and instinctively slid the back cover off, and there it was! A second nano sim was tucked discretely in the memory card slot. Nikki's phone could hold only one sim at a time. This was probably the number that people did not know about, the key to all the missing links and to her mystery man. It felt like a tiny miracle to Gaurav how a small slip had made room for a key piece in his puzzle. He looked up once again amidst a cloud of smoke and silently thanked a power he did not believe in.

Gaurav's life and career had made it hard for him to believe in any such thing as a god. He believed there was no place for a kind, loving almighty in a world filled with so much hatred. Yet, the tiny miracle had tugged on the part of his old, human self that he had almost forgotten about.

When the phone rebooted this time, things unfolded differently. The OTP verification for the Chatsnap account linked with this number was instant, and just like that, Gaurav was inside Nikki's secret world, barely aware of the number of ways this was about to unleash new nightmares on him. To start with, despite a strikingly similar interface the app was a different one. It looked like a rigged version of the original app, which also allowed people to access to online chatrooms for adults to connect with strangers who shared similar fantasies. These chatroom conversations did not have a 24-hour lifespan like the chats on the main app. Most users were unregistered and almost all of them had given fake details. However, only registered users could see the interface that resembled ChatSnap. The others were guest members and only saw a chatroom interface where they could chat privately and anonymously, but had no way to come back and retrieve any previous chats or records.

Nikki's username on the registered account was 'princess_loves_pain'. The archives were full of revealing selfies in bold poses with some sticker or another over her face. Nikki had been smart enough to blur out a rather telling freckle just below her right collarbone. Gaurav had to zoom in and check for colour correction since he knew about it, but it was impossible to tell at a glance.  Moreover, the girl in the photos looked poles apart from the happy, bubbly Nikki he had known of throughout the investigation. This profile pointed towards someone dark and twisted.

He immediately recalled Ryan's mention of Nikki coming to college, ever so often, speaking about a new special someone whom nobody knew about.

Utter shock hit Gaurav when he saw her profile name and description:
'Arushi: 30 lonely f India (36-24-38) looking for someone who is not afraid if hurting me. Whimsically attracted to scars and pain. No strings. #Sub4Dom #masochist.'

The chats dated all the way back to the first year of college. There were thousands of them, and Gaurav could not understand where to start looking for answers. He decided to start from the most recent ones but realised that Nikki was not just talking to one person at a time. The chats seemed to  have nearly stopped for a month. Many of the chats seemed to be with unregistered accounts and it looked like they had been deactivated now. Nothing about this corner of the world made it look like a place for the girl whose friends were mourning her outside. Even at a glance, it was evident that Nikki too, only had a very sporadic but obsessive indulgence with this app. She was not consistent here, but when she did come back, she was a regular for a few weeks. This was interspersed with a couple of weeks or even months of disappearance. There was no dearth of people knocking on her chats in the meanwhile, but she only seemed to come back when she did.