by UD Yasha
She recited the mantra in her mind. Om, she said again and again. She decided she would recount the last day she remembered. When was that?
She had woken her up at the usual time she got up during her holidays—nine o’clock in the morning. She had watched the cartoon channel on TV. The day had unwound gradually. She went to her friend’s house for lunch and then solved puzzles with her for a while.
Then her memory began to get hazy.
She did not recall when she went back home. Or even if she got back at all. For some reason, she remembered a sunset. She put a hand on her shoulders. She realized they were hurting. She remembered hard hands lifting her. It had left bruises.
Who was it? What had happened after that?
She completely blanked out.
She put both her hands to her head, trying to think, trying to get something. The more she thought, the louder her head drummed. The graveness of the situation hit her. She was all alone, far from anyone. Goosebumps thundered through her body. Her breaths became short and loud.
She opened her eyes, wanting to shout as loudly as she could, hoping someone would hear her. She wanted to cry because that was all that could make her feel better. She even tried to force out the tears. But the horror of it all took over her body. She froze in shock. Her body refused to bring out more tears.
At that moment, out of nowhere, she remembered something. A face. The face of a man.
First, her hands started trembling. Then her entire body began shaking. She could recall the face clearly now. Particularly the scar on it. It was raw and red and ran from his mouth to ear.
A sound.
She could not tell from where it came. All the directions appeared the same. She wished she was not shivering. The clattering of her teeth made it hard for her to hear the sound. It grew louder every second. Now too clear to miss.
An echo. A pair of footsteps. Someone was coming towards her.
Chapter Six
Confusion always has its roots in a deviation from the basics. As I sat at our usual table at Shelly’s, I thought about the mechanics of a crime.
Every crime has three elements. The method, the perpetrator and the motive. All three are important and all three must be satisfactorily explained to catch the person responsible for it. The job of a criminal defense lawyer is to only create reasonable doubt in the prosecutor’s argument, for a court of law would never punish a person if there is even a vestige of a doubt. They do not want the wrong person to be punished. The concept of reasonable doubt was the basis of all defense. I decided to go through all the three elements to examine if there was reasonable doubt in any.
The first element. The gun. The members of Sinha family had been shot dead. Manohar had been caught holding a gun. The method was tied to the suspect. A positive ballistics test on the gun would be conclusive evidence.
The second element. The person. Manohar was present at the crime scene. He was caught red-handed at the crime scene by the police with a gun in his hand. Additionally, he had the victims' blood on his clothes. I wanted to know if the pattern of splatter on his clothes would match that of when a person is shot. It would tell where Manohar was when the shots were fired, thereby proving or disproving whether he was in the right place to have killed. I knew a blood splatter expert from back in the day when I used to work under my mentor Santosh Hegde. I decided I would ask him to review the evidence. But Manohar was at the crime scene. A judge would be satisfied with that. So, even the second element was fulfilled, at least for now.
My problem was with the third element. The motive. Shaunak Manohar seemed to live a decent life. Speaking to his family, friends and colleagues would give a better insight into his personality. But it was hard to believe that an average and well-to-do man would kill an entire family in cold blood. I had seen crazier things happen, having practised law for almost a decade. But something about a normal everyday person committing brutal murders never sits right.
We do not believe that monsters walk among us. It is good in a way. The bricks that hold our society together will begin to crumble the day we think otherwise. But knowing what I knew then, Manohar did not have a motive to kill the members of the Sinha family. At least for now. The investigation had just started.
Which brought me to the girl. Rucha Sinha. I opened the photo that Atharva had sent me. It was taken a week back on her eighth birthday. My stomach sank for a beat as I wondered where she could be. Or if she would even be alive. And if she was, then was she alright? I remembered the change of expression in Manohar’s eyes when I had mentioned Rucha.
I looked around. Shelly’s Smokes had changed over the years but it still retained its old school charm and calmness, unlike other restaurants. Coming here always meant a new case for me.
I poured some water in a glass. I glanced at the artificial lake, the way the light from the restaurant shimmered on it. Its water level had gone down drastically. Summers in Pune were relentless. The heat was dry and burned the skin in the afternoon. Evenings were relatively better. There was also no respite from the heat this year in the form of pre-monsoon showers. Times were only going to get tough. A sub-par Monsoon was going to be cruel, especially for the seventy million farmers in the western part of India whose livelihoods depended on the rains. Already prevalent drought-like conditions coupled with widespread issues regarding minimum selling price had resulted in thousands of farmer suicides across the country. My heart went out to them.
I felt grateful for the position I was in. In a world where millions died from hunger, I did not have to worry about getting the basic needs of survival. Even maa was with us once again. We would have loved to have our dad with us as well, but he had vanished one night sixteen years ago and no one had seen him since. Since then, we were happy as a family for the first time only after we got maa back.
As I sipped more water, my mind drifted back to the present.
‘You need to stop doing this,’ a familiar voice said.
My chain of thought was broken. I turned around. It was Rathod.
‘What the hell were you doing at the CID office defending that guy?' he said. ‘I thought you had quit practising law. At least that's what you had told me when you last saw me.'
I had never seen Rathod lose his cool. I understood why he was angry. I felt bad, knowing Rathod deserved to know the truth. He always had my back. It was time to be a better friend. I did not know where to begin. He had no idea what had happened in the past three years, or even why I had quit practising law.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Rathod sat on a chair across the table. He had changed his clothes from an hour back. He was now in a crisply ironed light blue shirt and a black pair of jeans. His thin moustache was sharper than ever before.
He looked away at the drying lake for three heartbeats. He appeared less angry when he turned back at me. A lot of people thought Rathod was an angry and stern man. I did not fault them. He had a commanding presence at six feet three and ninety kilos. He was fit and loved discipline. It was apparent in the way he dressed. He used to observe his surroundings with narrow eyes. He spoke to the point and only when required. But that changed when he was around people he liked and was comfortable with. With me, he had always been gentle and talkative.
‘I owe you an explanation,’ I said, setting down my glass of water.
I slid a file across the table. It contained papers and the judgement from my case where I had defended night Shastri to keep him out of prison.
‘What’s this?’ Rathod said.
‘Have a look and you’ll understand. It’ll explain why I haven’t been around in the past three years.’
The Kunal Shastri case was not handled by the CID, but by the CBI instead, given its sensitive and brutal nature. Rathod did not know I had defended Shastri. He flipped through the first two pages. He looked up, realizing what had happened.
‘The young girl…’ his voice trailed off.
‘Suhana Kulkarni,’ I said.
>
Silence.
The expression on Rathod’s face changed completely. As annoyed as he was initially, his face softened. There was a deep furrow between his eyebrows. I could tell hundreds of thoughts were running through his mind.
I said, ‘Kunal Shastri came to meet me right after kidnapping Suhana. He bragged about his latest conquest. He told me about his earlier exploits and then he left. I could not move, knowing that I had let him get away the first time. I could not handle knowing that I had killed a girl. I thought she was dead from the way he spoke about her. But I still decided to take a chance. I managed to relay a message across to the CBI that Suhana was in danger. I shared a working theory of where she could have been held. I fainted soon after that. I found out later that the CBI got to Suhana just in time to save her life but not before she had suffered already. She is in a coma-like state today, even after three long years.'
Rathod turned to the next page, but I could tell he was not reading further. He probably needed a few more seconds to come to terms with the new information. He looked up eventually. The anger on his face had segued into agony.
‘I’m so sorry, Siya’ he said and then opened his mouth to say something more but then stopped. Words can sometimes make a situation much worse.
Silence resounded.
‘I should have told you,’ I said. ‘I was afraid. I’m sorry.’
‘We are partners of some kind, aren’t we? You’ll always have my back. Don’t ever think that I’ll judge you for anything. I was just mad when I saw you back at the CID defending a suspect because I was confused with everything you were doing. I didn’t hear from you for three years until your mother’s case came up. Then you vanished again before showing up today. I now understand why that happened.’
‘I should have told you, despite all that was happening. You deserved to know. I came close to telling you many times for all this time. But I was reminded of the mistake I made every time I thought of talking to you about it. It wasn’t you, but rather the thought of solving a crime that put me in that mindset. I was ashamed to admit my mistake as well. I didn’t want to let you down as I respect you both as a police officer and a person. Then, I started to recover from the initial trauma and I was afraid I’d relapse if I brought it up. It became a vicious cycle.’
Rathod leaned forward on the table. ‘What had started as a strictly professional relationship between us soon became a friendship, Siya,' he said. ‘I wouldn't be let down by you. I trust you, no matter what. I was wondering why you were behaving the way you were when I saw you today when you again emerged from your cave. Deep down, I knew there had to be a valid reason. You don't need to apologize to me, seriously. I'm here for you.'
‘Thanks,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a spell. A waiter got two cups of cold coffee for us.
‘But I still don't understand,' he said and paused. ‘Why are you representing Shaunak Manohar?'
‘I don't care about whether he killed them or not. There's something else. I'm worried about the eight-year-old missing girl. Rucha Sinha. I'm hoping he tells me something as his lawyer that could lead us to her.'
Rathod set his cup on the table.
I continued. ‘I know her uncle. Atharva Mehta.’
‘Yes, we spoke to him.’
‘We were childhood friends and then had dated for two years. He is desperate to find his niece. He called me and asked for my help. Children are my weakness. They have always been. From even before Suhana Kulkarni. I haven’t told this to anyone, but I was hesitant to defend Kunal Shastri in the first place because kids were involved. But I still took it on. And that’s why it hurt me more when I made the error. There’s not a waking moment in which I don’t think about that decision. I continued making mistakes.’
Silence.
‘You’re a good person, Siya. You cannot let one incident dictate your life.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. I ruined a girl’s life.’
‘You said Kunal Shastri’s wife also killed with him.’
I nodded. I felt heat emanate from my face. I had never spoken about this in such detail with anyone else before apart from my therapist, not even Radha.
Rathod picked up the file in front of him once again and said, ‘This report clearly states his wife was the dominant person in their relationship. Two independent criminal psychiatrists have confirmed that after speaking to them separately for hours. There’s a high chance that the wife would have continued killing even without her husband. Those are the words of the criminal psychiatrists again. Losing her husband could have made her more aggressive and hostile. For all you know, your mistake has saved more lives as his wife was also caught. I’m not saying one life is more important than the other. If you had not made that mistake, one more murderer would’ve still been out there, killing more children, with even more vigour.’
I had never looked at it that way. I felt better for a beat. But then the feeling washed away as quickly as it came.
‘How’s your mother doing now?’ Rathod said.
Thinking about maa suddenly lifted my spirits. She was the living example of beating the odds and achieving the impossible. Just three months back, a serial killer and his protegee had challenged me personally to find my mother who had been missing for sixteen years. The latter had provided evidence of her being alive while the former was still in jail. After a whirlwind investigation that had almost gotten Rathod, Radha, her fiancé Rahul and myself killed, we had somehow managed to save maa and five other women—all of whom were victims of long-term abduction. The protegee had been caught but his teacher, a notorious serial killer named Kishore Zakkal, had escaped from prison in an elaborate plan.
‘She’s recovering. But it’s going to be a slow process. Sixteen years in captivity is a long time. It can do a lot of damage. There are times when she gets sweaty and starts to panic even when the sun is out. But she’s a lot better now than how she was when we got her back.’
‘What you did to get her back was nothing short of remarkable. Siya, you need to get back. As I said before, one mistake cannot define you.’
‘I’m not getting back. I cannot afford to be wrong again because I am directly dealing with human lives. But it’s funny. I still have a strong urge to find Rucha Sinha. I cannot sit idle when I know a small girl is in danger, especially when I know I can do something about it.’
‘You were born into a family of crime solvers, Siya, with both your father and grandfather being in the police department. It’s in your DNA.’
I stayed silent. More than DNA, I felt my drive to seek justice stemmed from my parents going missing within three months of each other when I was fourteen years old. I had decided to be a criminal defence lawyer because my father had been accused of kidnapping and even possibly killing my mother all those years back. The police had wondered why else would he disappear just three months after his wife had gone missing. I knew even then that he would never ever hurt any of us.
His name had eventually been cleared when we got maa back. But he was still missing. No one had even the remotest of hints as to where he could be.
I put those thoughts at the back of my mind. I would have enough time later to ponder about the past. A girl had been taken. We had to get her back.
I said, ‘Manohar said he doesn’t know anything about Rucha’s disappearance.’
‘I know. He said the same thing to me. He was unmoved when I brought her up.’
‘That’s strange because the moment I mentioned her name, he seemed to get flustered for half a second. He didn’t know how to react but then gathered his thoughts.’
‘You spoke to him about her before we did. We got to know the girl was missing only when you went in.’
Silence.
Rathod put a hand in his trousers’ pocket and pulled out a pen drive. ‘This has everything you need,’ he said, placing it on the table.
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it and putting it in my purse. The pen drive wou
ld have all the crime scene photos, the initial reports and the medical examiner’s observations. Rathod always gave them to me when we worked on a case together.
There was one thing on both our minds. Rathod dared to say it first. ‘Do you think we are looking at two different crimes?’
‘It has to be one hell of a coincidence. Four murders and a kidnapping in the same family, on the same day,' I said. ‘What do you know about the Sinha family?'
‘We’ll start exploring tomorrow. But I know the basics. Daksh Sinha, the girl’s father, was a financial analyst. Malini Sinha is a doctor. A gynecologist. Word is that she was good at her job. But she limited her practice to focus on the kids. Their son was fifteen. Daksh's mother was seventy-six and his father was eighty-two. Hopefully, we'll get some useful information from the mother—Malini Sinha. She must be heartbroken but we need to know more about the family to find the daughter,' Rathod said and checked his wristwatch. ‘She'll be reaching Pune in an hour.'
‘Have you found anything that connects Manohar to the Sinha family?’
‘Not yet but my team is working on it.’
I downed the last sip of my cold coffee. I had finished it too fast so I raised my hand, signalling to the waiter to get me another cup.
‘Do you think Manohar killed them and somehow took the girl?’ Rathod said.
‘I can’t say yet, but I got a sense from Manohar that he isn’t telling us the complete story.’
‘Everyone at CID believes he is as guilty as they come. They're hell-bent on obtaining evidence against him to close this case fast. They have increased motivation to do so now because the media got a whiff of what was happening. Someone inside the department must have leaked information. You got out just in time. The gates were completely blocked when I got out of the CID building. I even saw Devaki Sharma.'
I shook my head. Devaki was the journalist who had published the fake story with my quotes that had irked ACP Shukla.
