Read Murder in Bollywood for Free Online

or leave. The rest, as they say, is history.
    The solution to this sensational double murder made front-page news in all the national dailies, apart from being featured as ‘breaking news’ on every news channel in the country, catapulting ACP Meeta Kashyap and her entire team to instant stardom, particularly one sub-inspector, Hossain Shariyar Khan, who got maximum credit for cracking the case, along with a catchy moniker, courtesy the press, who came out with the headline, ‘Hoshiyar Khan solves Malabar Hill homicide’. The Tarachand murder case also proved to be the catalyst in bringing Meeta Kashyap and Hoshiyar Khan together as a team; so a number of years down the line, when the Special Case Squad came about and she was made its chief, she made sure that Hoshiyar came on board. She gave him a free hand in selecting his team, and the first officer he selected was a hard-as-nails street cop, Sub-inspector Yashwant Zagde, who became Inspector Khan’s trusted lieutenant. But the formation of the Special Case Squad was no mean feat, for there had been several obstacles along the way, which at times seemed insurmountable, and all of them created by a single person, namely T.L. Ghankar, Mumbai’s commissioner of police and Meeta’s boss. An officer of the IPS batch of eighty-four, just like Meeta, Tanaji Laxman Ghankar, or ‘Total Loss’ Ghankar as he was popularly called behind his back, would have been a terrifying foe if he wasn’t unbelievably incompetent. He was a portly figure, with a thick moustache and no more than five and a half feet in height, but his ego was ten times his size, and if ever bruised, he would unleash upon the offender his version of violent fury, which was nothing but one petty act of vindictiveness after another, with that sequence only coming to a halt when the object of his ire took the necessary steps to placate him, which at the end of the day made Commissioner Ghankar appear less frightening and more annoying to everyone around, not that he ever noticed. Now Total Loss had a long-standing axe to grind with the newly appointed ACP, Meeta Kashyap. It all began in the 1980s, when the two of them were together at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy in Hyderabad, training to be officers of the law, for that’s when Ghankar proposed to Meeta eleven times with a total of eleven red roses, and she turned him down each and every time. It was also back then that Ghankar’s obvious lack of aptitude in his chosen field was exposed, making him the laughing stock of the academy, so much so that the other cadets, including Meeta, had nicknamed him Santri, because everyone believed that standing guard outside some police station gate armed with a rifle from the days of the Raj was the only thing he was good for. Needless to say, this nickname irked him no end. The last and final reason why Meeta had landed in Ghankar’s cross hairs was that she hailed from a family of highly respected police officers; that, according to him, made her a child of privilege, which was a breed he thoroughly detested, since he himself came from a simple hut made of mud, somewhere in Shirud, a little-known Maharashtrian village. Anyway, once the training at the academy ended and the cadets disappeared to different parts of the country as per their postings, Meeta found herself as sub-inspector in Pune, from where began her meteoric rise, purely on the strength of her ability, which ultimately led her to the big, bad city of Mumbai, and the post of additional commissioner of police (crime branch). Ghankar, on the other hand, found himself posted in Nagpur, and within the first few weeks of duty itself realized beyond doubt that he had neither the toughness, nor the intelligence to reach the top in his profession, so he decided to fall back on the one skill that he possessed—his ability to shamelessly butter up all the right people to get ahead. Soon, he was a regular fixture at all the prominent events