by UD Yasha
I had felt something was missing despite Zakkal’s conviction as we had not found the bodies. It did not really matter in terms of logic. The criminal was punished. But it felt incomplete then and in the years that followed. Until now.
Now, we knew that maa was alive. At least she was twelve hours back. Which gave me hope that she along with the other six would be breathing somewhere. Keeping them hidden for more than sixteen years and now showing they were alive in some way would require immense resources. We knew Zakkal was not short of them. What we did not know was that he had a fan – a person that he would mentor. Maybe even teach how to kill. A chill ran through my body again.
I pulled down the garage shutter. When did I start getting so scared? I hated it. I made a mental note to start punching the boxing sack we had on the terrace. I was so consumed in my own mind that I failed to realize I was inside the garage after three years. All the items were untouched from the previous time I had stepped in, except for the cleaning Radha did herself every three months. The last was just a week back around Christmas.
There was a long desk along the wall. It was stacked with books and newspapers, all relating to my mother’s disappearance. Clippings from trials had been added five years back when Kishore Zakkal was found guilty.
Even after the trial, I had continued to ruminate on all the evidence in an attempt to find maa’s body. Something about it did not sit right. I looked sideways and stared at a murder board. It had timelines of everything related to mom’s case. Photos of suspects and places were clipped and connected using strings.
I felt a chill crawl up my body. I felt better by being inside the garage. More than actually being there, getting over the challenge of coming back was refreshing. I had never thought I would be able to come back here again. The energy I had felt inside some time back, once again surged through my body.
Seeing my progress during the year, Radha had even asked me a month back if we should start parking the car in the garage. I had simply shaken my head. I did not know then what I would do with the all evidence in the garage if we started parking our car in it. I had always used it as the mission centre for maa’s investigation ever since we moved into this house.
I walked to the long desk in front of me. I had arranged all the documents in chronological order. Starting from right to left. I pulled out the chair and sat on it. I rolled it towards the right. I went to one of the initial files that had reports and photos from the crime scene of maa's disappearance. I peeled out the photos of our bathroom. I opened my laptop again. I held the photo next to the laptop screen.
I held the first stack in the rightmost corner. I picked out the first document on top. It was the FIR my father had filed the day maa had gone missing. I flipped through the other documents. I found what I was looking for. It was a diary of my investigation on Kishore Zakkal. I needed to read it again to be fully prepared.
I took a deep breath and opened the diary.
Chapter Eleven
Maa’s disappearance was constantly at the back of my mind through college though I got used to it. I learnt to live without knowing what had happened to her. I first thought I was betraying her by not feeling as hurt anymore. Karan was extremely helpful then. He said he used to feel the same. Together we came out of the hole we were digging for ourselves. We even spoke to Radha about it to ensure she did not have to go through the same pain.
I worked under Santosh Wagh on graduating from law school. He was a renowned lawyer cum private detective. He was sixty years old then but spoke and acted like he was a millennial. He went on to become my mentor, a man to whom I owe most of my practical legal knowledge. He was the one person who had backed me when I was just twenty-three years old. I still don’t know what he had seen in me then but I was glad he had. He shared all kinds of wisdom with us. He had only one condition. I had to call him by his first name.
All through law school, I had read maa’s case file thousands of times. I had kept gathering more information. Santosh encouraged me to know more about new technology and trends in crime scene analysis, criminal profiling and forensic analysis. Because of him, I began speaking to experts in various fields across the world. It was one such conversation that changed everything.
6th April 2011.
It was late in the evening. I had just gotten home from Santosh’s office and had directly gone to the garage. I had an appointment with Ester Francis, a graduate student in Forensics at New York University. Francis had told me there had been a murder in New Jersey in which the bathroom was covered with blood. That got me curious.
Francis shared the details of the case with me. The woman in question was a thirty-two-year-old brunette bachelor named Holly Summers. She was a doctor by profession and lived alone at her home in New Jersey. Her body was found in the living room of her house. She had been strangled. The bathroom of her bedroom was splattered with blood. The autopsy revealed that blood of an estimated amount of at least three litres had been drawn using a needle from Holly’s hand. It was highly suspected that Holly was killed in the living room and the killer later splashed her blood in the bathroom. The animalistic nature of the crime scene got local police department wondering if the motive of the crime was personal. The state of Holly’s bathroom was similar to the one at our house. Holly was killed on the 1st of May 2003. Maa had gone missing in August of the same year.
I could not help but wonder if there could be a connection between the two. The chances, I knew, were slim. The only common factor was the bathroom. Cross country killers were rare as well. But that was the first time I had come close to getting a new lead in maa's case. It was the coldest of clues if at all it was one. But I saw no warmer pursuit. That possibility did two things. First, my spirits sank as I realized if there was a connection then maa would most likely have been killed. Second, the possibility that maa's killer was a serial offender entered my mind.
I went back to Holly’s file. The police had found only one piece of evidence at her house – traces of unidentified DNA. They did not belong to any of her friends. They also could not find a match against any records. They were not even sure if it belonged to the killer.
Even though the DNA evidence did not match against any existing records, it gave me something at least apart from knowing the killer has black or brown eyes. I got to know he is a carrier of the Marfan Syndrome. If he had a child, the child was fifty per cent likely to have it as well.
The reason a minuscule amount of DNA and no other forensic evidence was found because Holly's living room, staircase and bathroom had been bleached, destroying all evidence that would have been there. The killer knew what he was doing. However, the most interesting piece of evidence had not been washed away by bleach. It was not in the house, but on Holly’s body instead. The autopsy revealed five pollens in her hair.
There was something strange about them.
The police identified four of the five pollens from areas around Holly’s house. They had never identified the fifth pollen.
At that point in time, I only knew one biologist. Rahul. It had only been a week since he and Radha had started going out. It was eleven at night but I snuck into Radha's bedroom and got his phone number. I was unsure for a beat because I knew Radha would have gotten hysterical if she knew what I was doing. Radha had told me about him in confidence. According to Rahul, I was not even supposed to know about him then. But after years of looking, I finally had a potential lead. I was in no mood to let it go.
‘Is this Rahul Saxena?’ I said when he answered the call.
‘Yes, who’s this?’ he said.
‘I’m Siya Rajput. Radha’s sister.’
Silence. What else was I expecting?
I said, ‘This may seem odd, but I understand you’re a biologist. I wanted your advice regarding something related to my work. It’s urgent so I called you right away. Can you please come home?’
Silence resounded again for two beats.
‘Of course,’ Rahul said.
/> ‘I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t have called if it was not urgent. It’s the same house where you picked up Radha for dinner two days back.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Rahul said, his voice bore a weird mixture of bewilderment and kindness.
Rahul reached in fifteen minutes. Understandably, he was awkward.
‘I’m Siya, Radha’s crazy sister,’ I said, offering him a handshake.
He said nothing but pulled out something from his bag. ‘It is my first time coming to your house, so I got a small gift. It's coffee – pure chickaree and cocoa. I was in Coorg a week back for work. It's fresh from the coffee plantations there.'
‘Thanks a lot,' I said, taking it. I knew right then we were going to get along very well. We went to the garage that was already lit up. I offered him coffee or tea but he denied. Back then, the garage was a cosy space with two armchairs and a small rug at the back. Rahul took the armchair and I turned my desk chair to face him.
‘I don’t know how much Radha told you about what I do. I’m a lawyer specializing in criminal defence. We seek innocent clients. Understandably, that does not always pay our bills so we do other consultations. I need your assistance with something I’m working on independently,’ I said. I did not plan to tell him about our mother or Holly’s murder.
‘Sure,’ he said.
I pulled out another chair and he joined me at the desk. ‘This is confidential information,’ I said and passed him printouts of the pollen section of the reports Ester had sent me. ‘I want to know everything I can about these pollen grains. What plants they belong to, what sort of changes have occurred or anything else that comes up. The sample you have was found in New Jersey, USA.’
‘Can you tell me where you got this sample from?’
‘I'm sorry but it's confidential. I'll try to solve as many of your queries as I can though.'
Rahul read the report. He said, ‘What do you know about pollens?’
‘I know that a pollen grain is the male sex organ of a plant. There are hundreds of thousands of kinds, all coming from the vast variety of plants found on earth.’
‘That's good. Pollens are minuscule in size. You wouldn't even know there are some in your clothes right now. They can stay there even if you wash your clothes. They're sticky and small.' He paused. ‘Can you give me the original sample of the pollen?'
‘That’s going to be impossible. I don’t think I’m even allowed to have this report.’
‘Can we ask for new reports based on the samples?’
I could always ask Francis to do it for me. She could speak to the local police department as a student. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Superb. Here’s the thing. Plant sex is not a sexy topic. Not right away. At least not on the surface of it. The funny part is a plant’s sex organs are under its surface. You can observe them if you look at them under a microscope. Pollen grains are the fingerprints of an environment. A pine pollen found in Mumbai or New York is different than a pine pollen found in Pune or New Jersey. It is different even in different localities of the same city. That is because each pollen interacts with its environment and becomes a little different than one from another area. Because of exactly this, a pollen grain can draw a map of the places where its carrier has been.’
Rahul read the report once again. ‘I’ll need some time. There’s no centralized record of pollen grains like there is for fingerprints. I’ll have to ask around for samples of different areas. I’ll get back to you soon. I would’ve given you a date but I’m afraid it is a slow manual process.’
‘I appreciate it. Also, Radha will kill me if she knows I called you. I wasn’t supposed to know about you.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll laugh about it later,’ he said.
I remained enthusiastic during the next month. I spoke to the detectives who investigated Holly's murder to no avail. Exploring the serial offender angle, I looked up more cases where blood was found in abundance in the victim's bathroom. I could not get any hits. But I came across a staggering fact. One thousand two hundred and sixteen women had disappeared from their homes without a trace since 2000 in India. More than ninety per cent of them were still missing.
Rahul called me thirty-two days after we had met. It was five in the morning. The ringing phone woke me up.
He said, ‘I’m sorry to have called right now –’
‘What did you find?’ I said, jolting up from the bed.
‘You would want to see this.’
‘Come to my office.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah,’ I said and clicked off.
I heard the gate open ten minutes later. I moved aside the curtains and saw Rahul. I went downstairs and into the garage. I put up a kettle of coffee for both of us. ‘Have you been up all night?’ I said, looking at his tired face.
‘Yeah, I kept finding one link after the other. I have most of the picture now.’
I leaned forward. The smell of coffee swirled in the air. Rahul turned his backpack and pulled out a stack of papers. He passed the first two sheets to me.
‘Palynology is the study of particulates like dust, vapour, gases, pollen and spores. I'm far from an expert. I only knew the vast applications of pollen analysis. As I told you earlier, studying pollen is useful while trying to trace where all the object carrying the pollen has been. This is because different countries, cities, regions or even two parts of the same garden at times have a unique pollen assemblage. Not just where, but a time-stamped location. At times, the pollen can tell when it was picked up by an object owing to seasonal changes that the pollen undergoes. Tracing pollens have busted drug cartels and counterfeit item trade. For example, heroin found on the streets of Mumbai could have pollen in it that is found in Peshawar. Or an old idol of God found in a cave should have pollen on it that are almost as old as the idol. If not, then it is fake. I found something interesting in the report you gave me,' he said.
I grinned and I cracked my knuckles in excitement.
Rahul continued. ‘India has only two palynologists due to lack of funds and infrastructure in the field. One stays in New Delhi and works for the government, probably on top secret projects; making him out of our reach. Luckily, the second expert stays in Pune. He's a sixty-five-year-old man named Raghav Barve. I showed him the report. As you know, four of the five pollens were identified in it. Probably because they were local pollens found in New Jersey. The only remaining pollen could not be matched. Until now. Raghav identified it. The last pollen was a mixture of several pollens, probably that it had attracted while it stuck to its carrier object. We found traces of a plant called Lundi – a plant found in India and as luck would have it, especially in large numbers in Pune.’
I gasped. The expression on my face must have changed drastically.
‘Are you okay?’ Rahul asked.
‘Go on, please.’
Rahul gave me a second look of concern. He swallowed. ‘We know this pollen was stuck to the carrier object first and then it interacted with other pollens along the way. Since it was originally attached in Pune, we can deduce with fair certainty that the person who wore the t-shirt was in Pune and then went to Dubai and then New York and New Jersey.'
‘In that order?’
‘Most likely. We know the starting point of the pollen was Pune for sure. It collected additional particulates along the way.’
Two heartbeats of silence.
Rahul broke it. ‘You have gone white. Can I get you something?’
‘I may have just found the first clue in ten years to our mom’s disappearance.’
Silence.
‘Rahul? Siya? You two know each other?’
Our heads turned to the source of the voice.
It was Radha. We had not realized how long we had been in the garage but the sun had risen and Radha was standing at the wide garage entrance. I had never seen her more surprised in her life. I ran to her and hugged her tightly. ‘I’ve got a clue regarding maa,’ I whispered in her ear and kissed her
cheek.
That increased the questions in her mind. Rahul got up and handed her a cup of coffee. I sat her down and showed her the progress from the last month. I gave her a gist and said, ‘As we stand today, your boyfriend has given us the biggest breakthrough we’ve ever had in finding what happened to maa.’
Radha’s eyes welled with tears. She kept shaking her head. ‘I don’t believe any of this is happening.’ Grinning, she turned to me and said, ‘You’re one crazy sister.’
Rahul chuckled.
Radha turned to Rahul. ‘Stop laughing. You're no less crazy.' She glared at him for a moment but could not even pretend to be angry then.
Rahul and I exchanged looks and burst out laughing. I somehow managed to speak. ‘You should have seen your face when you saw us here.’
The investigation into Zakkal also marked a shift in Rahul’s life. While he kept his day job, he began exploring ways in which he could use his expertise in biology to assist law enforcement authorities in various crimes. Over the next three years, he became a trusted partner with whom I could discuss my cases.
I could not help laughing as I thought back to that conversation.
All the doubts I had about myself vanished in a jiffy. This is for my mother. This is to find her. With this new resolve, I returned home. I found Shadow outside my bedroom, waiting for me to get in. I patted him above his tail and he followed me into Radha’s bedroom. He found a spot on the carpet next to the mattress Rahul had spread on the ground. He was fast asleep. So was Radha. I took my quilt and snuggled into it next to her. I stared at the ceiling for a while, knowing that maa was out there somewhere, still breathing, fighting on like she always had.
