by Vish Dhamija
Anything that could give him some clue or some pointer.
But there was nothing.
***
The letter came in the post next morning. Bahudur had kept it at the bar for Jay when he returned from work in the evening. All post ordinarily came to the office, except for junk mail. Jay looked at the handwritten address on the white envelope. The scrawl seemed familiar, but not something he had seen in years and hence it was impossible to identify and as such there was no urgency to open it. It must be one of the many hand-written pleas for charity. It could wait. He made his drink first, a liberal Patiala peg of Chivas, no ice, and gulped it in one go before he tore off the cover from the side to reveal the single sheet.
“Dear Jayakumar.”
Addressed to his name in full and the handwriting startled him; it was what it couldn’t be. He observed the paper — this wasn’t some decade old crumpled yellowing paper, this was fresh. He recognised that it was his mother’s handwriting, and only she would have addressed him by this name. But, she hadn’t spoken a word in years so how could she have been in any mental disposition to write coherently? The shock made him sweat. Before returning to the letter he picked up the bottle of Chivas and took a swig straight from it and started reading again.
“Dear Jayakumar,
This letter will come as a surprise to you, I know, but I can’t figure out telling you all this any other way. I hope you’ll forgive me for lying to you all these years, but I preferred being a lunatic in a mental hospital than to being incarcerated as a criminal in police cells despite knowing that the imprisonment would have terminated years ago. Though I actually suffered a psychological concussion when your father died I recovered soon after, only to understand what lay in store for me and for you, if I was diagnosed as normal. It was in the interests of everyone, including you, that I was declared mentally-imbalanced rather than being labelled as a convict, when I was neither. It immensely hurt me to remain silent all those times you came to see me, but I acknowledged that was the only tactic to keep the story covered: no one should know.
You might want to ask me why did I write this letter then? Because I wanted you to know the truth: I did not kill your father. Despite our apparent differences I loved and revered him. He generously provided and loved me too. His temperament was largely a result of his business failure and I never despised him for it although, as you know, things did get ugly at times.
I can discern that you despise me for robbing you of both your parents, but what good would I have been if I did not claim insanity? I would have been imprisoned for life and that, according to me, would have been far more disgraceful for you. If it is any solace I loved you and I could feel the hurt in your eyes. I am told that you are a very successful man now, which I secretly relish without displaying any emotions to anyone. I pray to God daily that you become even more successful and cherish your life.
I know I have lost the right to ask you for any favours but, as your mother, I can still ask you: forget about that unpleasant night and please do not go digging, after this letter, to get to seek the truth. It might be a hundred times more dreadful.
I don’t have long to live now. I can feel, I can’t explain how, but know my end is near. I will leave this letter with a nurse to be posted after my death. Hopefully you will get it one day and forgive me.
Ma.”
Drunk like he was, emotions flowed out. Tears just wouldn’t stop. While reading the note, he had a few more swigs of the whisky. The truth, he had suspected, was now on paper.
When did she write this? And if she wasn’t the killer, as she had mentioned, why did she take it upon herself? Since she never appealed “not guilty”, had he — after the court’s verdict — assumed she was the killer in the eyes of the law? Did he have no other choice or was it only too convenient? He cursed himself.
In the absence of any other suspect, the state prosecutor had had an easy case. Maybe the defence advocate had been incompetent. It wasn’t the idiot’s job to provide a suspect; his job was to prove his mother innocent. His mother’s posthumous admission that she hadn’t killed his father put Jay in an emotional free fall. He felt dizzy, his mind descended into rage and grief. He had lived in anguish with the knowledge that one of his parents was guilty. The slight relief of his mother’s purity was overtaken by the grief. Could he have reopened the case? Could he still reopen it for a posthumous pardon? He couldn’t till he had some concrete evidence. A mere letter from his mother could convince him, but would it convince any judge? Unusable in court.
Everything else seemed vacuous.
‘Or her innocence,’ Cooper whispered again.
The trouble with all tragedy is that it overwhelms all objectivity; later, when objectivity returns, the mind finds central pieces of the puzzle missing. But Jay knew he needed to go back in time — time travel back twenty years — to establish the chronology of events, the sequencing was important for him to reconstruct the day to figure what had happened and what did not. Where did it all go so wrong? And how? More importantly, who had escaped? Why he had drunk so much that day was his prime regret, but he had drunk before that evening; the anomaly was that everything had been wiped off totally from his memory. Or had it — if he remembered there was an extra individual in the house? The body needed rest, but the brain defied it; nightmares and ghosts always accompanied sleep anyway. Why bother with sleep when the truth was out there, so close and yet not within his reach? The facts were accumulating, but still added up to nothing. He had focused long enough on what could have happened; it was time to put the brain in reverse: what couldn’t have happened?
ELEVEN
Not sure what the best thing before sliced bread was but Bhīma was undoubtedly the best thing since. At least, according to his boss. Like his namesake in Mahabharata, Bhīma could deal with anything. Given his sharpness and size there were few things he couldn’t accomplish, and if that wasn’t enough, his military training had prepared him for multitasking. That left his boss to care about the more important and complex stuff, chiefly where his Advocateship’s personal presence was absolutely required. Putting his inebriated boss to bed — despite the fact that Jay hadn’t had dinner that evening — Bhīma ventured out on his nocturnal duty. Of course, he understood Jay wasn’t helping himself with all the alcohol, but Bhīma was aware that his boss’s life was personal and beyond his scope. He was willing to help whenever and wherever he was asked to. And tonight he had a mission. He needed to get to the rats to ferret out if any Glock — the murder weapon — had changed hands recently.
His first stop, however, was Kumar’s residence in New Friends Colony. With the headlight of his motorbike switched off, Bhīma took two rounds in the lane to spot the right address. Huge house. He had also spotted one of his helpers in the first round in the lane but circled the place again to see the white Honda Accord in the drive to confirm the registration on the car. It was Vinay Kumar’s. He rode past the house, stopped on the corner and switched off the engine. The helper came on the double.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come, Bhīma bhai. You had said 11pm.’
‘I got waylaid,’ Bhīma uttered without apology. The guy could have left if he was busy or if he wanted to, but he didn’t because the little helper knew if he were gone there would be a hundred others to do this for Bhīma because Bhīma paid handsomely. Jay, having experienced poverty and hunger and drudgery first hand, had given Bhīma a free hand to disperse money for the best under-hand dealings. This person was actually a linesman from Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, or MTNL, and worked extra hours to pay for his children’s education. A bad deed to pay for a good one; he wasn’t siphoning millions like some ministers did, he was only tapping into the bits to ensure that his children didn’t have to do low paying menial jobs or dishonest ones all over again. And he had been promised that if he ever got caught he had a saviour in one of the best advocates in town. Pro bono. This was chicken shit for someone like Bhīma’s boss. A telephone com
pany linesman caught on the telephone pole or having gone in to repair a line without an approval from the authorities would hardly require more than a phone call from the Cooper & Singh offices.
No words were exchanged. Bhīma had already agreed on the task for the night. He handed the parcel and rode off.
The linesman climbed the pole and disconnected Vinay Kumar’s telephone line. Tomorrow the linesman would go into the bungalow to restore the very connection and spread Bhīma’s bugs in all rooms with a telephone connection. Kumar’s house would be connected to Bhīma’s powerhouse computer, illegitimately of course.
Bhīma’s next stop was Rajpath, the road leading to Rashtrapathi Bhawan — the official residence of the President of India and the largest presidential estate for any Head of State in the world: more than five times bigger than the White House and even bigger than Buckingham Palace — and one of the most well-guarded properties in the world, especially after the attack on the Indian Parliament House only a few years prior.
No one envisages risky activities can occur in the most conspicuous places. They do and they prosper and they go unnoticed for understandable reasons: who would dare?
Bhīma turned off his headlight, switched off the motorbike engine from a distance and let the wheels roll to their destination. The three men waited for their orders. All clad in white, they stood silently.
The superman used his left leg to slide the motorcycle side-stand in position, pulled out the key from the ignition and looked around before he got down from his bike and slowly walked towards them. If you displayed urgency or panic, even the smallest of jobs cost more.
‘Good evening, Bhīma bhai.’
Bhīma nodded to greet.
‘What can we do for you?’
‘A Glock changed hands a week ago, a month ago or maybe earlier. There can’t be too many Glocks coming into Delhi. I want to know who sold a piece recently and who bought it and when. And I want to know that quickly. Want to help?’
Nods. No one bothered to ask what the remuneration would be for the job. They knew they wouldn’t be disappointed.
‘Okay. Go ahead and cascade this to everyone, but be discreet. No one should know who’s asking for the information, mind you. I need to know how a Glock got into Delhi. All understood? Any questions?’
None.
Bhīma repeated the sequence in two other areas: Barakhamba Road and Nehru Place. Same directions were given, same response. If anyone sold a Glock it wouldn’t be long before Bhīma and Jay would know about it, no doubt about that. But if the killer had bought and got the Glock in from elsewhere, it was a different story altogether.
The motorbike returned to the farmhouse at two in the morning. Bhīma went to bed and to sleep right away.
TWELVE
Over a month had passed since Jay returned from Jaipur. The initial despair had been waning as expected, though the words from Cooper and the subsequent letter he had received from his mother after her death had steered him to nowhere, really. The search for the police investigator, Saxena, who had been the lead in investigating his father’s case still needed to be found, which was a cause for concern as the failure was being attributed to the era: too old to dig out.
Jay’s son Yuvraj was over for the Diwali break. He was eleven, an adolescent going on to be a man. The circumstances and the hostel life had matured him far more than his other classmates. He had once asked Jay about his mother, but a few sob stories later comprehended that Mum was no longer alive. He had no knowledge that he was adopted. He loved his dad and Uncle Bhīma who untiringly taught him how to ride a bicycle and gave him endless rides on his motorbike within the farmhouse. Sometimes amusing, at other times inspiring and occasionally extremely annoying but, as they say, the heartache from the passing of a family member can only be relieved by the mirth of the next generation. For the ten days that Yuvraj was in town the funk deserted Jay. Yuvraj’s incessant demands on Jay’s time came as a desirable break. Jay had taken time off work. The courts were closed so there wasn’t anything he needed to step out of his house for. Father and son watched boy-flicks: Vin Diesel, James Bond, Bourne series.
Sheeba was over the moon and back, a few times; the attention she got from Yuvraj always pampered her rotten. She had been taught that all feral behaviour would have to be abandoned the moment Yuvraj went back to school, but dogs, unlike humans, live in the moment.
A lot of whisky was relocated from the bar to the first floor in Jay’s room. The last thing Jay wanted was his son to see that his father was an alcoholic. He had enough other problems in life to add any new ones. And he was taking treatment with the shrink, wasn’t he?
One of Yuvraj’s friends from school, Raaj Rohatgi was the son of Jay’s own school-time friend. Socialising with Raaj’s parents, Jay passed his mother’s autopsy file to Raaj’s dad who was a clinical pathologist. Dr Rohatgi agreed to look at it, though neither expected anything seismic from it. If anything, it would support putting the whole thing to bed.
Diwali break was short. As always, Yuvraj had to be mollycoddled to return to the hostel. However, he knew it was a short term, as he would be back for a longer break at Christmas.
Bhīma’s search was proving to be more exacting than initially anticipated. So far, all his snitches had failed to unearth where the Glock had come from, which could only mean one of two things: either the gun had changed hands in some other geography or the deal had taken place in history, long before Gina’s murder. The snitches had also been unsuccessful in locating where the weapon was discarded after the deed, which was anyway more Herculean to work out than its origin. With a myriad of Khakis looking for the same, the snitches had to stay away. However, they looked at places the police had ignored and scavenged the areas that the police had already been through when the moon took over the daily duties from the sun. Nothing turned up. The best guesstimate was that it was thrown into the river Yamuna, and if that was actually the case, the police weren’t going to spend precious resources on a deep dive search for someone like Gina. Of course, it would be an altogether different matter if Vinay Kumar had been shot. A politician was first among equals.
Kumar had been called in for questioning at the police station. As previously agreed, Jay had accompanied him to the investigation. With his advocate present there wasn’t much the police could get from Kumar, which was the whole idea. The police had done their homework; after the First Information Report and initial enquiry, they had investigated the circumstances of the crime, ascertained the facts — one of Gina’s neighbours was all too eager to oblige the police about Vinay Kumar’s surreptitious visits. And if that wasn’t enough, the autopsy revealed the moron’s seeds in her body along with his unborn child. And though the police didn’t discover or collect any real incriminating evidence to suggest that Kumar was the perpetrator, it being a cognizable offence they needed no warrant to arrest him on grounds of homicide. The Charge Sheet was filed under Section 173 of Criminal Procedure Code and sent to the Magistrate who was convinced that the crime, if proved, attracted more than seven years’ sentence, and hence, he was legally obligated to forward the case to the Sessions Court.
Murder is a severe crime anywhere in the world; in India it is a non-bailable offence and as such, an accused in a murder case is not entitled to bail as a matter of right. However, citing Article 21 of the Indian Constitution — a provision that protects every citizen of India from illegal arrest and governs the concepts of bail — Jay Singh filed an application to convince the magistrate that the allegations levelled against Vinay Kumar were, prima facie, in no way established by the police or any other investigating body. The court appreciated that someone as recognisable as Vinay Kumar would neither hamper the evidence nor tamper with the witnesses. Furthermore, Jay Singh assured that the accused would, at all times, co-operate with the investigations, and would appear before the court whenever required. The court asked Kumar to surrender his passport, but that was hardly a price. Thankfully, as it is the discr
etion at the Session Court Judge’s level to either grant or refuse the bail, the issue wasn’t flagged to higher authorities or the media, lest the result could have been entirely different. With all those conditions in place, the bail — zamanat — of undisclosed amount was granted. There was a huge relief in the defence camp. Whether Kumar was guilty or not was a question for another day, in another courtroom. For now he was free; he only had to report to the Saket Police Station once a week.
Even criminal cases in India can be protracted. One can take unnecessary adjournments on the flimsiest of grounds, but Kumar was adamant that he wanted a quick trial to clear him of the charges. With elections looming, the last thing he wanted was a pending criminal case against him.
‘I know I am innocent, what do I have to worry about? This is all a set-up’ he had been adamant.
No one from Gina’s family came forward and hence, the state had to provide a public prosecutor who wasn’t named yet. As such, the first trial date would easily be four to six months away.
Jay had repeatedly postponed his appointment with Anita pretending to be over-loaded with work, citing the infamous murder case he was working on. And though a mere thought of Manavi always made his blue funk disappear, it furthered his insomnia. In more rational moments he knew it was a fantasy, but he had started having more irrational moments since he had met her. The acorn of love that Ali had sown for Manavi had been blossoming in his fertile mind. Quite often, it is said, though reasoning initially lapses gradually when you are toying with love, rabidity accelerates without forewarning and before you know it, you find yourself on the periphery of the trap called love. Incessantly denying himself that he was besotted, partly because he found it crazy to accept the pining — he only wanted company he was convinced — and partly because he had never been in love before this to discern the feeling itself. Nevertheless, love is very much like law: simply not knowing the law does not mean you aren’t reined in by it, but it was something Jay Singh wasn’t aware of.