by Salil Desai
PSI Motkar seemed to grasp his problem. “Age, looks, height, frame, fat, thin, complexion, clothes she was wearing, any striking or odd features you noticed?”
Kurmaiyya was silent for a second; trying to recollect a woman he had seen only fleetingly.
“She was a middle-aged woman, sir, not fair, not dark, quite tall and well-built,” Kurmaiyya paused, straining to visualize more, “. . . I . . . I think she was wearing a Punjabi dress . . . light blue colour, but I am not absolutely sure, sir.”
He stopped again, wondering what else to say. Clearly more prompting was needed.
“Hair?” Motkar asked.
Kurmaiyya’s brow wrinkled. “Yes, she had hair, sir.”
Saralkar suddenly felt the urge to guffaw at the delivery boy’s confused response.
“Yes, but what kind? Black, white, grey, short, long?” PSI Motkar queried.
“. . . didn’t notice, sir, but black I think, and short . . . shoulder length.”
“Okay. Eye colour?”
“I think black, sir.”
“Shape of nose?”
Something lit up in Kurmaiyya’s eyes as if he’d suddenly remembered a unique feature. “Flattened, sir, as if it had been pressed down hard.”
The two policemen looked at each other. This flattened nose feature, more than anything, made it clear that the pizza delivery boy was indeed talking about Mrs. Doshi, from the photos they had.
PSI Motkar took out three photos from his shirt pocket and put them in front of Kurmaiyya. “Was it one of these women?”
Kurmaiyya took one look and tapped his finger on Anushka Doshi’s photo. “That’s the lady, sir.”
Motkar took another photo from the same pocket and showed it to the pizza delivery boy.
Kurmaiyya recoiled violently at the sign of the mortal position shot of the dead body, her face a ghastly mess.
“Was that the dress she was wearing?”
It took Kurmaiyya a moment to recover from the shock and answer, “Yes, sir.” His heart was thudding and his face had gone pale.
Senior Inspector Saralkar gave him a sharp glance. “Did you do this to her?”
Kurmaiyya looked up at the senior inspector, his face horrified. “Why would I do it, sir? I had nothing to do with it!”
“Tell me your whereabouts after this delivery,” Saralkar continued cold eyed.
Kurmaiyya Raju had begun to shake with fear. “I . . . uhh . . . I had two more deliveries in the same locality, sir. I delivered the pizzas and returned to the outlet by around 10.15 p.m. You please check . . . I didn’t do anything, sir . . . I didn’t. I am a poor man!”
A lump arose in his throat and he gave one loud sob, looking all set to break down.
“Calm down!” Motkar stepped in quickly. “We are just asking you questions.”
Kurmaiyya struggled to control his sobs and panic, his facial muscles pulling in all directions, his palms quickly coming to the rescue of his agitated visage.
Saralkar gave him a few seconds, then spoke. “You may have been the last person to see this victim alive so think carefully and help us. Do you understand?”
Kurmaiyya Raju, still unable to trust himself to speak, nodded vigorously.
“Did the lady look disturbed or upset when you made the delivery?”
“No, sir. I-I didn’t notice particularly, sir. Normally when I deliver a pizza on time, customers smile or acknowledge or look expectantly in some way. I can’t describe her demeanour but the lady seemed tense and impatient. She . . . she didn’t even check the order, whether I was making the right delivery,” Kurmaiyya Raju said trying to be helpful. “She just took the pizza and thrust out the money.”
“Hmm . . . did she speak to you?” Saralkar asked.
“We just exchanged a few words, sir. She handed me a five hundred-rupee note. I said she should give me change. She replied she didn’t have change. So I requested her to at least give me seventy rupees change and I would return her three hundred rupees. She replied I should return two hundred rupees and keep the thirty-rupee difference as a tip,” Kurmaiyya paused and looked at Saralkar and Motkar. “That’s all, sir. Then I left.”
“Did you by chance see her husband or hear him speak from inside the house?” Saralkar asked.
Again that momentary flash of something remembered showed up on Kurmaiyya’s face. “Sir, when I told her to give me seventy rupees change, she sort of turned her head to look inside the flat and impatiently called out to her husband to ask if he had change. But he refused.”
“You heard his reply?”
“No, sir. The sound of the television was quite loud. I heard her question but not the answer from inside. I presumed he had replied ‘no’ because she turned around and said so.”
“Had she called out his name while checking with her husband for change?”
Kurmaiyya gave him an unsure look. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“Okay. You said you could hear the television. Any recollection of what kind of programme was on? Songs, movie, match, serial? English, Hindi, Marathi . . .?”
Kurmaiyya shook his head apologetically. “Can’t really recollect, sir. I-I wasn’t paying attention.”
Saralkar gave him a vexed look. It was not an unfamiliar sentiment. As a police officer he had often experienced unreasonable irritation, even anger, towards witnesses for not knowing or for not having noticed some small detail that could have helped.
“Okay. Now give us details of the pizza deliveries you made after leaving the Doshi house. And mind you, if there are any discrepancies in your movements from what you have officially logged, admit them honestly right now, because we will be checking,” Saralkar said with a hint of warning.
Kurmaiyya fidgeted and looked nervous, as if weighing what to speak. He finally said, “Sir . . . I . . . I-I actually first made a delivery at a regular customer’s place who tips quite handsomely, whereas I logged it in after Mrs. Doshi’s delivery. So actually the 9.37 p.m. delivery is for the other customer’s delivery while I reached Mrs. Doshi at around 9.55 p.m., even though she had booked earlier . . .”
He stopped and looked at the two policemen, guilt writ large on his face. He had started sweating and his stiff and wary body language clearly betrayed the anxiety, that he was probably expecting either a tongue-lashing or a blow.
PSI Motkar also wondered how his boss was going to react, since it pushed the ‘last seen alive’ time of the Doshis even further.
Saralkar looked at Kurmaiyya steadily. “Next time you think of fudging things, remember you could get suspected of murder. Okay? Now give all details of the first delivery to PSI Motkar.”
The mildness of his words did not lessen the menace of his tone and when Kurmaiyya Raju finally stepped out of the police station thirty minutes later, he almost collapsed with relief on the footpath outside.
Surekhabai had no love lost for the police. They hardly ever helped folks like her. Several times when her good-for-nothing husband had been alive, she had complained to the local chowky about his violent ways. But the cops had never been sympathetic and just shooed her away most of the times, telling her not to bring ‘frivolous’ family fights to them. Only once had they intervened and mildly admonished her husband. The vile fellow had turned on her the moment the police left and thrashed her within an inch of her life.
Mercifully, five years ago the maker had recalled her husband’s soul, but she had never forgotten the callousness of the police. What had compounded her distaste for them was that a year ago the police had picked up her twenty-year-old son, Hrithik, while rounding up miscreants in the slum, following some skirmish in the locality. The boy had been released the next morning, but not before being at the receiving end of some casual police brutality. Worse still, probably as a direct consequence of this incident, her son had also got introduced to neighbourhood goons and his descent into bad company had started assuming alarming portents.
Surekhabai stared at the three cops—two officers and a
lady constable—her hostility held up like an invisible banner.
“How long had you been working for the Doshis?” PSI Motkar began by asking.
“About a year,” Surekhabai replied grudgingly.
“What were the chores you did for them?”
“I am a cook, not a maid servant to do other chores,” Surekhabai replied testily.
She would’ve like to add that just as Motkar wasn’t a mere constable, her station in life too was higher than that of maid servants who washed clothes or mopped and swept houses.
“Did you cook two times a day or just once?”
“Afternoon and evening,” Surekhabai continued to keep her answers short.
“Did you cook for them last Saturday?”
“Yes, on Saturday afternoon.” She didn’t use any honorific like ‘sahib’ either.
“You didn’t go back in the evening?”
“No, Doshi madam said they might be eating out so I needn’t come and cook in the evening.”
“I see. What about Sunday morning?” PSI Motkar asked.
Surekhabai thought this was a terribly foolish question. “I rang the bell several times but obviously no one opened the door,” she said scathingly. “I also checked with Seema tai whether Doshi madam had left the house key with her or not.”
“Mrs. Seema Tambe?” Motkar clarified, taking no notice of her irreverence.
“Yes, I also rang the bell of Doshi madam’s house once more after I finished cooking at Seema tai’s place. She was present. Check with her. We could only hear the TV,” Surekhabai replied in a tone that suggested Motkar should’ve known about all this.
“And when you left on Saturday afternoon, were both Mr. and Mrs. Doshi at home?”
Surekhabai’s forehead wrinkled for a moment, then she replied, “I saw only Mrs. Doshi but she mentioned that Doshi sahib was taking a nap. The bedroom door was shut.”
“But you didn’t see him?’
“How could I? I told you the bedroom door was shut,” Surekhabai took another swipe at PSI Motkar, who represented the entire police force to her just now.
“Was this unusual?”
“What?”
“Mr. Doshi being at home on Saturday morning?” PSI Motkar asked.
“Doshi sahib was often home,” Surekhabai replied dryly. “He didn’t step out very frequently. Many times he would be watching TV when I went in the mornings and in the evenings he used to be watching TV and drinking.”
Middle-class men were no different than those in the working class, she seemed to imply—doing little work and getting drunk.
“He didn’t work?”
Surekhabai shrugged. “I don’t know. Not that he was in the house every day but you can’t be doing a job or a business if you are home so often, isn’t it?” she reasoned. She seemed to open her mouth to say something further but clamped up.
“What?” PSI Motkar prompted, observing her action. “You were going to add something.”
“Nothing,” Surekhabai said looking away.
“Okay, tell us whether you noticed anything unusual in Mrs. Doshi’s behaviour that day,” PSI Motkar asked, casting a sideways glance at Senior Inspector Saralkar who had been completely silent so far. He noticed his boss’s eyes seemed to be glazed over, as if he was far away.
“Like what?” Surekhabai asked Motkar.
“Well, did she appear sad or disturbed or was she behaving differently than usual? Did she look scared?”
Surekhabai shook her head slowly. “Not that I noticed. She didn’t talk much and was away from the kitchen most of the time. She seemed to be busy doing something—kept going in and out of the bedroom . . .”
“Did they fight much?” Senior Inspector Saralkar’s voice suddenly startled her.
Surekhabai reoriented her faculties to answer Saralkar. Her hostility to Motkar, which had graduated to condescension, now took the shape of wariness. “Well . . . I did hear them fight sometimes . . .”
“How often?”
“They seemed to be fighting a little more these days,” Surekhabai admitted cautiously.
“What about?”
“I don’t know,” she said indignantly because of the implication of eavesdropping in the question.
“What do you mean you don’t know? You must’ve heard something,” Saralkar snapped at her.
Surekhabai felt a little uneasy. The senior inspector was a different kettle of fish. She glanced at the lady constable who hadn’t taken any active part in the questioning.
“I mean . . . they never argued in Marathi . . . sahib, so how could I understand?” she said in a far less belligerent tone.
It was a fair point, Saralkar realized. Doshi was a Gujarati surname, certainly not Marathi. “Hmmm . . .” he conceded with a grunt. “Did you ever see Mrs. Doshi hurt or bruised?” Did she ever mention to you that her husband hit her or something?”
Surekhabai gave a little snigger. “No,” she said and paused. Then almost as if unable to control herself, she blurted out, “Seemed to me the other way around . . .”
There was a little note of triumph in her voice, as if Mrs. Doshi had done what she’d have liked to do to her own husband, when he had been alive.
“What are you saying? That Mrs. Doshi used to hit her husband?” Saralkar asked.
Surekhabai nodded and her tone was bitter and sarcastic when she spoke. “Well, I am not a stranger to sudden swellings and bruises on the face, sahib. I could tell . . .”
Saralkar and Motkar looked at each other. It was certainly plausible. Domestic violence cases in which wives beat their husbands were no longer unheard of and both officers had come across such incidents in their careers.
“Are you just making this up or do you know for sure?” Saralkar asked sternly.
Surekhabai looked offended. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, sahib. But I know what I am talking about!” she replied defiantly.
Saralkar regarded her. There was something about her unflinching demeanour that told him she wasn’t bluffing or exaggerating. “Is there any particular incident you can tell us about, which gave you that impression?”
Surekhabai looked away for a few seconds, probably debating with herself or thinking back. She finally spoke, hesitant and a little flustered for the first time, “Some weeks ago he made a pass at me, when Doshi madam had gone out somewhere. I immediately told him to back off and said I’d tell madam about it. He began apologising profusely, asking me to forgive him because he was drunk. He begged me not to tell his wife and blurted out that she would beat him up if she came to know.”
“I see . . . you are sure he wasn’t just fibbing about it to stop you from telling Doshi madam?” Saralkar dug deeper.
“No, sahib. I’d always suspected it from the frequency with which he would have swellings on his face and arms,” Surekhabai asserted, her face now more animated. “In the days after the incident I could see how terrified he was that I would tell her. The moment I would come into the house there would be a pleading, desperate expression on his face. He certainly was afraid of Doshi madam’s wrath. She was quite a fierce lady, you know. Looked a bit like one of those lady wrestlers, as Seema tai and I used to joke.”
PSI Motkar digested this information. He could make out by the way Saralkar was scratching his chin that his boss too was trying to do the same.
“Did any visitors come to their house frequently?” Saralkar asked.
“Sometimes there would be guests, but very rarely.”
“Doshi madam’s friends?”
“More like patients, actually, but no one I would be able to recognize. Doshi madam told me she sometimes gave some treatments to these people,” Surekhabai said, now almost completely bereft of hostility.
“What kind of treatments?” PSI Motkar asked. This was all getting intriguing.
“She didn’t explain although I did ask her. Most of the times the guests would be leaving just as I came to cook or arrived just as I was leaving,” Surekhab
ai explained.
“Would Mr. Doshi be present when these patients came?”
“No, never.”
“Did only women patients come or were there men too?”
Surekhabai scowled as if suspicious of what Motkar was trying to imply about her dead employer. “I never saw any men.” There was reserve and disapproval in her voice as if she was not going to be part of any salacious innuendos Motkar might have in his dirty mind.
“What about Mr. Doshi? Did any of his guests or other men come to meet him here?”
Surekhabai again shook her head in denial.
“Okay. Did you ever hear the couple mention a person called Shaunak Sodhi?” It was Saralkar who had spoken again.
“Shaunak Sodhi?” Surekhabai remarked as if pronouncing the name of some rare, exotic item, then shook her head again. “No.”
“Sure?”
“Sure, sahib!”
Saralkar was quiet for a few seconds, thinking perhaps of more questions to ask. “Anything else you want to tell us? Mr. Doshi seems to have killed his wife and then himself,” he said, then paused and looked at the cook. A look of distress was now evident on her face, probably because of having been reminded of the gruesome fate of her recent employers.
Saralkar continued with slow, deliberate emphasis. “. . . so any other information you may have will help. Don’t hide anything or avoid telling us, thinking it is unimportant.”
Again the same sly expression that Motkar had seen earlier appeared on Surekhabai’s face and she seemed to totter on the horns of a dilemma. PSI Motkar asked, “Surekhabai, there is something you haven’t told us, isn’t it?”
Surekhabai hesitated once again but then said coyly, “You are right, sahib . . . but . . . I don’t know if it’s appropriate to talk about it.”
“About what? C’mon, out with it,” Saralkar rasped.
“It’s, uhh, it’s just that Doshi madam didn’t pay me wages for this month. Will it be possible for you to pay the amount from any cash that madam has left behind in the house?” Surekhabai asked ingratiatingly.
It was hardly an insensitive request from someone who lived on working class income and yet Saralkar felt a knowing cunningness in her eyes, which he could not quite decipher.