by Salil Desai
Kunika Ahuja quickly pasted both stamps. She knew one five-rupee stamp would have sufficed, but why take a chance? Walking out she glanced at the post boxes and took a deep breath, still wondering if she needed to do this. She moved closer to the post box marked local and her right hand hovered by the dropping slit, still unsure.
“You can give that to me.” Kunika Ahuja froze as a postman appeared from nowhere with a sack in one hand and a key in the other. “I am just clearing this box.”
He began unlocking the box and taking out the gathered letters, which he dropped into the sack. There were not many. He finished his task and held out a hand for her envelope. She knew it would look odd if she didn’t give it to him. Kunika Ahuja’s hands were shaking as she handed the envelope to the postman, with its face turned down so that he would not notice the address. But almost as a reflex action he turned it over, probably to check that stamps had been affixed.
Kunika Ahuja turned and quickly walked away, her heart beating faster. Had the postman noticed the address? What if he had? It didn’t mean her anonymity was blown. The postman had seen her but he didn’t know her name so it didn’t matter, she told herself.
She got into her car hurriedly and glanced back at the postal employee. He wasn’t standing and staring or looking at her with curiosity about why some lady was sending a letter to the Homicide Squad. In all probability he didn’t even know the meaning of homicide, she thought. He was already opening the other post box and emptying its contents into another sack.
Kunika Ahuja gave a sigh of relief, got into her car, and drove away.
Mrs. Seema Tambe had turned out to be the police sketch artist’s dream witness. Inhibited initially by extreme nervousness and fear, she had relaxed as the young, soft spoken police artist gently asked her questions for making the sketch. He had also shown her different types of facial features and options to choose from and ferreted out details of the man she had seen arguing with Sanjay and Anushka Doshi.
Her fear forgotten, and fascinated by the police artist’s work, Seema Tambe had begun recollecting and describing features and nuanced characteristics of the face, as if she had a photographic memory. Even her daughter and husband listened with awe at her level of observation.
The face soon began emerging on the screen—thick, long, coarse, and unkempt hair like that of Indian pace bowler Ishant Sharma, a narrow, pimply forehead, a hooked nose between two light brown coloured, staring eyes, a grizzled moustache bordering a thick, upper lip pushed upward by two teeth that jutted out below just a bit, and skinny cheeks sloping down to a narrow chin with a slight stubble. Red and black threads adorned his neck and a small, silver coloured amulet dangled from the black thread. The first button of the man’s shirt was open with a goggle straddled across the second button.
Overall it gave the impression of a scowling young man in his twenties who projected a self-image of strength and menace.
“Does it now resemble the man you saw?” the police artist asked. “Or does any feature require alteration or does not quite fit in?”
Mrs. Seema Tambe studied the image closely, trying to mentally match it with the man she had seen in flesh and blood. Everything seemed to be right but she had a feeling she was missing something—as if one little detail was creating a distortion that stopped the picture from being complete. And then she remembered. “Just . . . just one small change,” she said, her face suffused with excitement. “One of his ears, his right ear actually, was slightly folded and crumpled on top . . . like a . . . a rose that has half-opened petals.”
She paused and looked at the police artist as if apologising for her inadequate powers of description. “Do you . . . do you understand? What I mean?”
The police artist gave her a little smile, once again impressed by the middle-aged housewife. “I think I know what you mean, Mrs. Tambe.” It was such details which greatly enhanced the effectiveness of police sketches as identification tools. He quickly proceeded to make a few changes to the ear, trying out a couple of permutations, then settled on one and sat back. “Is that how it looked?” he asked her after a few minutes, turning the screen towards her again.
Seema Tame looked and gave a little gasp. “Yes that’s exactly how it was!” She suddenly seemed to feel lighter, as if the pall of fear and anxiousness were lifting. She turned and smiled at her husband and daughter, her eyes wet with tears.
Saralkar thanked the slim, middle-aged lady for the glass of water. Uneasiness was writ large on her face. Despite her prematurely grey hair, the bags under her eyes and the stamp of worry almost tattooed onto every inch of her face, Sanjay Doshi’s first wife, rather Krishna Bhupathi’s first wife, Latha Bhupathi was a far better looking woman than his second one, Anushka Doshi.
It made him suddenly curious to know how and why Krishna Bhupathi had chosen to marry Anushka Doshi? What were the charms he had fallen for? Of one thing he was certain. It could not have been Anushka Doshi’s looks.
It was a theory he had long held that men who had more than one woman in their lives, essentially mated a second time either with the same type of woman as their first wife or partner or girl friend or with someone who had exactly opposite personality traits. He wondered what similarities or dissimilarities between Latha Bhupathi and Anushka Doshi had influenced Krishna Bhupathi’s choice of both spouses.
“You said you had news of my husband, Krishna Bhupathi,” Latha Bhupathi asked tonelessly, keeping the emotions zigzagging across her face out of her voice. “We haven’t heard anything from him since the day he . . . fled . . . abandoned me and my son.”
“Nothing at all?” Saralkar asked.
Latha Bhupathi hesitated slightly, the fingers of her left hand rotating the single gold bangle on her right hand. “No, nothing,” she asserted.
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
She looked up at him and then down at the bangle again. “Because it is your job to doubt everybody, making no distinction between a crook and his family members.”
She had suffered, Saralkar could make out, like thousands of innocent family members of hundreds of runaway criminals. Subjected to repeated interrogation, accusations, humiliation, dire warnings, threats, and shaming by the police in their quest to nab fugitives and criminals who had left these soft targets behind to face the consequences of their misdeeds.
“Are you saying he hasn’t tried to get in touch with you even once in all these years? By phone or letter or email or in person or through someone?”
Latha Bhupathi shook her head slightly as if she felt no need to emphasize this simple truth.
“Why is that? Did your son and you mean so little to him?” Saralkar remarked. Sometimes taunts worked and provoked.
Latha Bhupathi shrugged. “Perhaps,” she replied evenly.
Again Saralkar noticed a mismatch between the tone of her voice and the expressions on her face.
“Maybe he was just too scared to take the risk,” she spoke again.
“Why? Did he think you would’ve reported him to the police?” Saralkar asked.
“I don’t know what he thought,” she replied abruptly. “Have you found Krishna?”
Saralkar did not answer, instead put forth another question. “What do you think? Did he murder his partner Rahul Fernandes?”
“I don’t know. Please, Inspector, I have answered all these questions over and over again at that time and from time to time since then,” she replied wearily.
“Your husband had confessed to the murder, you know, although he retracted it later. But you were his wife and perhaps know the truth. He must’ve told you something before disappearing, when he came out on bail. Or even earlier when you were all going to abscond just before he was caught,” Saralkar said.
“I had already told the police what I knew.”
“Can you please repeat it for me?”
Latha Bhupathi’s eyes flashed suddenly. “But why? You haven’t told me why you’ve come and what news you have about Kr
ishna. I want to know first,” She looked at him defiantly.
Saralkar reached into his shirt pocket and produced a colour photocopy of Sanjay Doshi’s passport. He opened the first page and thrust it in her direction.
She took the papers in her hand, closely looked at them and blinked several times. For a moment she was speechless, her attention riveted on the passport. Then she looked up at Saralkar, her eyes wide with disbelief and glistening with emotion. “It’s him,” she said in a hushed voice. “That’s what he is living as now?”
“Yes, that’s the current identity since 2012 at least. We are still not sure where he was between 2008 and 2012. Are you a hundred per cent sure it’s your husband Krishna Bhupathi?”
She nodded. “Has he been arrested? Have you brought him here to Bangalore . . . to face trial for the Fernandes murder?”
“No,” Saralkar replied, then cleared his throat, calculating if he could get more information by withholding the revelation of her husband’s death or by telling her right away. He realized he had one more question up his sleeve to double-check whether this woman had been in touch with her husband and known his whereabouts.
“Did you know he married another woman?” he asked.
A stunned expression rocked Latha Bhupathi’s face. And Saralkar knew it was too genuine to be put on. If Latha Bhupathi had any contact with her husband, she would certainly not remain quiet now, he was confident.
Her palm had now wrapped itself around the bangle and pressed down on the inside of her wrist. Saralkar could almost hear the angry, vindictive thoughts circling inside her mind now—‘he ran away, abandoned me and my child, ruined my life and happiness and he goes and gets married to some bitch!’
“Now that I have told you news about your husband, can you answer my earlier question?” Saralkar asked seizing the psychological moment. “What did he tell you about his involvement in his partner’s murder? Was he guilty?”
Latha Bhupathi did not break into tears or resort to hysterical ranting. But for once the expressions on her face matched her tone of voice. Both were harsh. “Krishna told me he and Sodhi confronted Fernandes for double-crossing them and thrashed and tortured him that night. But he was too drunk to remember if he had a hand in actually killing Fernandes. Krishna’s gut instinct was that Sodhi killed Fernandes when he had fallen asleep for some time. He told me he was so scared and numbed by the sight of the blood and the body thereafter that he just did what Sodhi told him to. Krishna also admitted to me that he had helped Sodhi in getting rid of the body, driving to Mysore and Mercara and all that. But he kept denying he participated in Fernandes’ murder.”
“And you believed him?” Saralkar could see she was biting back anger and bitterness.
“Krishna was bitten by the ‘get rich’ bug,” she finally said. “That’s why he could be crooked, could cheat, deceive, do all such things. But I didn’t think, still don’t think, he was capable of murder.”
“Then why did he run away? In fact immediately after the murder also he wanted to abscond along with you and your son, but the police landed up just as you were leaving.”
“Immediately after the murder Krishna was terrified . . . in absolute panic! He just wanted to disappear from Bangalore. He had no idea where we would flee, where we would hide. He just kept pleading with me to go with him. I tried to talk sense into him but he wanted to get away from the city. Our son was ill, down with a viral and very high fever, so I told Krishna it would not be wise to travel with him in such a condition. He agreed to wait for a day and said he would come back to fetch me early next morning. My son’s condition improved overnight but just as we were about to leave early the next morning, the police arrived and nabbed him.”
“What about later, after he was released on bail? What made him run then?” Saralkar grilled her further. “Why did he leave you and your son behind? Why didn’t you go with him?”
Latha Bhupathi flushed angrily and replied, “Because I had committed no crime! I had a son to look after and bring up. I had a proper job. If Krishna was convicted either for the job racket or the murder or both, I knew he would be behind bars for a long time. Running away was no solution. What future would I give my son as a fugitive from law? The only sensible thing to do was to remain here in Bangalore, where I had a job, so that I could give my son a respectable future even if his father was convicted as a criminal . . . Krishna spoilt his own life, I wasn’t going to let him spoil my son’s life because of that.”
She stopped, her face fierce and suffused with the emotions and convictions behind her choices.
“So you knew he was going to abscond after he got bail,” Saralkar remarked. “Why didn’t you try and stop him?”
Latha Bhupathi looked across at him with an inscrutable expression. “I knew Krishna was planning to disappear. He told me he had no other alternative. Sodhi had absconded, so if Fernandes’ body were found, Krishna’s goose would be cooked. On the other hand he was afraid of Sodhi, having witnessed what he had done to Fernandes. Then there was also the rumour that Fernandes’ family was seeking revenge—that they had put out a contract for having him killed. That’s why he wanted to run away while he could, to save his own life. He kept trying to persuade me but I had made up my mind. But . . . you are right, I didn’t try to stop him because I realized running away was Krishna’s only chance.”
“I see,” Saralkar said and paused. He knew he had to tell her about Krishna Bhupathi’s fate now.
But Latha Bhupathi spoke again before he could, asking a flurry of questions. “So . . . does Krishna and his second wife have children? How did you find him? Has he committed any more crimes? Will he spend the rest of his life in jail now? Will my son have to know?”
Saralkar shook his head. “Your husband, staying as Sanjay Doshi, and his second wife Anushka were found dead in their rented apartment in Pune last week.”
“What?” Latha Bhupathi looked as if she had been hit by a train.
“Yes. It seems he killed her and then committed suicide.”
“Oh, my God!” Latha Bhupathi had started trembling. A shattered look of immense hopelessness had come into her eyes, as if something inside had gone to pieces. Perhaps the distant hope that some day she would be united with her husband or that there would be a not-too-unhappy ending. Or maybe the horror of realising that her husband was indeed a killer, not once but two times over.
She sat like that, shell-shocked, as if her mind refused to deal with or process the facts he had just told her. Saralkar let her be. When she finally gathered herself, Latha Bhupathi said, “All these years . . . I told my son his father ran away because he was not a murderer . . . because he couldn’t prove his innocence. Now what do I tell him? That I had lied to him . . . that the blood of a killer runs in his veins—a man who has killed twice?”
Saralkar felt something approaching sympathy for Latha Bhupathi. He wondered whether to tell her that there was a possibility Sanjay Doshi alias Krishna Bhupathi had not killed his wife and himself.
What she asked next made it almost unavoidable.
“Why did Krishna . . . do it?”
Saralkar grunted. He held out a copy of Sanjay Doshi’s suicide note. “That’s what he left behind.”
She took the note and her eyes ran down the lines rapidly. Then as if she hadn’t understood the first time, her eyes again started at the top and went over the lines more slowly. Finally she looked up from it into the far distance, her eyes moist, her shoulders slumped. “Poor Krishna! Ultimately that beast Shaunak Sodhi ruined him! Why couldn’t he have stayed away from him?”
Saralkar asked, “Are you sure it’s Krishna’s handwriting?”
She nodded without any hesitation, still looking away. “Yes. But . . . but . . . not a word about me or our son . . . perhaps he had long forgotten us,’’ she paused and wiped her tears. “How am I to believe we weren’t in his thoughts, at least in his last moments.”
She choked, swallowing back a sob.
&nb
sp; Saralkar waited uncomfortably. Tears always stumped him. If she was keeping any secrets, now was probably the only time she would speak.
“Inspector?” she finally said. “It is not completely true that Krishna never got in touch.”
Saralkar sat up, alert. “Yes . . .” he encouraged her gently.
“Krishna . . . he . . . I mean . . . every year or two, I would receive a DD from him. There would be no name, no address, nothing, just an envelope with a DD. I knew it had to be from Krishna . . . for us, for my son . . . but I kept it all in a separate account. I knew it was crime money, tainted with blood. I had decided to use it only if my son needed it at some time, if I could not provide the amount required from my earnings and savings.”
“When was the last time a DD came?”
“About a month ago. Of ten lakhs and . . .” she hesitated, “around the same time I also got a blank call on my land line.”
“Blank call?”
“Yes, I was sure it was Krishna calling. It has happened earlier too. He never spoke a word but I would know it was him.”
“How often did it happen?”
“Once in two years, not often . . . but I could just feel immediately it was Krishna.”
She stopped and began composing herself. “That’s all I know and nothing more.”
For all his cynicism, Saralkar thought she was telling the truth. He thanked the unfortunate Latha Bhupathi and took her leave.
PSI Motkar had never met PSI Dulange in the course of his police career. Their paths had never crossed. Motkar had made the decision to talk to him immediately after Constable Shewale told him that Rangdev Baba was conducting a health camp at his ashram that day.
Motkar had thought it prudent not to meet the god-man on a day his ashram was swarming with devotees. Instead he had decided to ambush PSI Dulange. With Shewale in tow, Motkar had landed unannounced at the Dattawadi Police Station and requested two minutes of PSI Dulange’s time—a reasonable enough request which no police officer could refuse a brother officer of the same or higher rank.