by UD Yasha
One thought resounded in my mind. ‘Is it possible that I could have seen my father?’ I said, wondering if that trauma was the cause.
‘I cannot say that with certainty. Doctors and patients tend to realize the cause of psychologically induced memory loss in hindsight.’
‘Is there any way I can accelerate the process of remembering?’
Dr. Rastogi shook his head and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘At times, you need to let some things unravel themselves.’ He smiled but saw that I was disappointed with the answer. ‘It’s important not to hurry in such situations. The cause of the memory loss could be something deep. Something you don’t even know exists. Maybe seeing a psychologist can be helpful but it can be a long process.’
I had stopped going to therapy almost a year back. It had helped me get on my feet and breathe freely after my mistake of letting Kunal Shastri and his wife off the hook. Suddenly, the way Shastri had laughed rang in my head like it was happening in front of me all over again. It hit me that even then, I had blacked out right after alerting the police and sharing with them my theory of where they had kept the girl they had kidnapped. But I had still been able to remember what had happened, right down to every last excruciating detail. I wondered if it was a good idea to take Dr. Rastogi’s advice and see my psychologist again.
‘Thank you,’ I said to him and rose to my feet.
‘I know you want to know what happened to your father and this is a critical piece of the puzzle.’ he said and his wandered for a few beats before settling squarely on me. ‘But Siya, you need to take care of yourself.’ He paused and took off the stethoscope around his neck. ‘I suggest you get those tests done to rule out anything that could be alarming.’
‘I’ll make sure she does,’ Rathod said.
Dr. Rastogi was still looking at me. ‘I will take some blood samples from your clothes and check them against that of the dead woman. You can wear my daughter’s clothes to get back home. I’m sure she’ll have no problem helping you out.’
‘Sure,’ I said, remembering seeing the folded clothes in her cupboard.
I went to her bedroom once again. I picked a blue T-Shirt and cream pyjamas. We were almost the same size. I folded my clothes and gave them to Dr. Rastogi.
‘I’ll also try to identify the woman,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you with a status report later in the day.’
I thanked him and exited the house. Rathod and I drove in silence for the most part.
‘Thanks for coming today,’ I said as we got closer to my house.
‘Please don’t do something like that again on your own,’ Rathod said.
I could sense a hint of annoyance in his voice. I grunted in acknowledgement.
‘How do you plan to go about this?’ he said.
‘I’m trying to figure it out.’
‘Why don’t you think out loud?’
‘You were probably right,’ I said. ‘Something happened when we found the register of corrupt cops at Mule’s house. It’s no coincidence that I got a call about dad a day after that.’
Rathod said, ‘Only you and I knew about it. Unless you told someone else.’
‘I didn’t. Did you?’
‘No, but you said you spoke to that hacker…Jay Parikh, right? You asked him to trace the location of the call.’
I hadn’t known Jay for long but I trusted him. He was a young man with strong ideals who had been mentored by Sitaram Mule. ‘I trust Jay,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have told anyone.’
‘But what if he ruffled the wrong feathers when he was searching for the number?’
‘That’s possible. I’ll talk to him once. But if it wasn’t him then I don’t know how anyone got to know about it.’
‘Maybe Mule could have been connected to it. But then again I haven’t been able to find a link between Mule and your father. I have searched a lot ever since we found Mule’s register. I know they knew each other by the virtue of Mule being the Pune Police’s Chief and your dad being at a senior position as well.’
Rathod slowed the car as we approached my house. It was a standalone bungalow with a front yard. We had moved into it after maa had disappeared from our old house. None of us, including dad, could see our old house the same way after having seen maa’s blood all over her bathroom walls. We had decided to move to a house that my grandparents had bought more than sixty years ago as a real estate investment and a retirement home. It was unoccupied then as they had both passed away even before I was born. I used to feel sad that they never got to enjoy the house they had built with their hard-earned money.
My two siblings and I had made it our home. With maa joining us almost a year back, it felt better than it ever had. I smiled as I subconsciously pictured maa and dad sitting on the swing in the verandah, enjoying a cup of tea in the afternoon. Would that day ever come?
I was drawn out of my thoughts when Rathod stopped the car in front of my house.
‘I’m not sure what my course of action will be,’ I said. ‘What do you make of the situation?’
‘My first goal is to identify the woman in your trunk. That will tell us a lot about who called you and why. That’s the start. In the meantime, I’m going to ask one of my trusted CID technicians to check the CCTV footage around Stan Mills. Let’s see if we can find anything useful.’
‘My car is still at Stan Mills. I was thinking of heading there in some time to get it back and also sweep the area in daytime. We didn’t see any blood when we checked earlier. But it has to be somewhere given how much was there on me.’
‘Don’t go alone,’ Rathod said, his eyes wandered as he thought.
‘I wasn’t thinking of it. I was planning on asking Rahul to come,’ I said. Rahul was a biologist. He worked as a consultant at a pharmaceutical company but had also advised law enforcement agencies on certain biology and forensics related topics to help them in their investigation. He was smart and had developed the expertise needed to examine a crime scene. I also shared a great bond of trust and respect with him.
Rathod said, ‘I would have come but I need to head to the crime scene and then follow up on that. I’ll ask someone from my SWAT team to accompany you. While he has the technical expertise, both of you need to be protected. You don’t know who could be waiting there for you.’
‘Thanks. I was going to request you to send someone,’ I said. Radha had been shot less than a year ago and I was in no way putting my family at risk again. ‘Who do you have in mind?’
‘Let me figure out who is available,’ Rathod said. ‘I’ll let you know.’
‘I was also wondering why I was specifically called to Stan Mills today. Whoever called me was possibly familiar with its location. That it burned down is all over the newspapers, but even in that case, the person who called me had to be comfortable with the factory’s layout both before and after the fire.’
‘Do you think it was someone who worked there?’
‘Might be. It’s worth looking into. You could filter out the women who worked there based on what Dr. Rastogi tells you about her age or other noticeable features, and then check which of them aren’t traceable.’
‘The labour working there would be difficult to trace down as they could be illegal workers or immigrants. But I’ll check nonetheless.’
‘I’m here to help you in any way I can.’
‘I will call you in some time. You need to rest.’
I nodded but didn’t tell Rathod that I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else until I got to the bottom of what had happened in the morning.
I pulled the handle on the door to leave when Rathod said, ‘Also, here’s a theory that has been circling my mind.’
‘Shoot,’ I said, closing the door.
Rathod’s eyes sparkled the way any good detective’s do when they are excited about an investigation. He said, ‘There are only two possibilities. You either attacked the woman or you didn’t. If you didn’t, then there was someone else at the factory who attacke
d her. Maybe you saw that third person and got shocked. The person may or may not be your father. Either the woman was attacked to silence her from sharing what she was about to, which according to what she told you was key information about your father. In that case, the person who attacked her was not on your side.’
I jumped in and said, ‘However, I don’t know why they didn’t attack me. It doesn’t make sense to kill the person who had called me, but then let me off with just a cut on my cheek.’
‘Yeah, I was coming to that. What if this was all a plan to kill you? The woman tried to save you, probably even injured the other person enough to drive them away. This is just a theory, but maybe you had so much blood on you because you tried to revive the woman. But there’s also the possibility that someone else attacked her because she posed danger to you. They were looking out for you.’
‘All these theories point to the woman being attacked by someone else,’ I said.
‘Yes, because if you had attacked her, I’m sure it was purely in self defense. I know there’s no way you would stab and kill someone for no reason. Your own life would have had to be at stake.’
‘I like the angle of a third person being present,’ I said. ‘They could have very well been the person I saw.’
‘But we don’t know whose side they are on,’ Rathod said.
I sensed he wanted to say something else. ‘What is it?’
Rathod’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m only not calling this in because there is a chance that corrupt cops are involved. We’ll see how it goes over the next twenty-four hours and then review the situation.’
‘Sounds fair,’ I said.
Rathod’s phone began buzzing on the dashboard. Bhalerao’s name flashed on the screen. Rathod pressed the green button on the touchscreen on the car’s console.
‘We’re back at the office,’ Bhalerao said, sounding tired. ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She’s better now, thanks. I was just about to head to the crime scene,’ Rathod said.
‘Sure, take a look. Dr. Sonia and her crime scene technicians are still there, collecting samples.’
‘I’ll see you back at the office and help you with the paperwork. Don’t worry,’ Rathod said, affording a smile.
He ended the call and turned to me.
‘Thanks for everything today,’ I said.
‘Please don’t be a fool next time, and ask for help,’ he said before I started for my house.
Chapter Nine
It was almost eight o’clock when I knocked on the door of our house. Radha opened it right away. Her face had turned white. Shadow ran to me. I could sense he was going to jump onto me but then he sensed something was not right so instead he nudged my knee with his nose. I petted him once.
Radha said, ‘Where were you? What happened?’ Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets.
Rahul, her fiancé, was next to her, with a hand on her shoulder. Even his eyes bore worry.
‘Your cheek…,’ Radha said, taking a step towards me and putting a hand on my face to see what had happened.
‘I’m okay—’
‘Don’t you tell me you’re okay. You go out somewhere in the middle of the night, leave me a cryptic note and then come back with a large cut on your face. And to add to that, a CID officer calls and tells me that my sister is safe,’ Radha said, the pitch of her voice increasing with every word. ‘You better not tell me you’re okay.’
‘Is maa sleeping?’ I said.
‘Yes, she had woken up but her head began to hurt so she slept again.’
I gulped. I was going to share everything with Radha and Rahul but I didn’t want to tell maa anything just yet and get her expectations up. The thing about hope is that as long as it exists, even somewhere in the distance, you are okay because a part of you can still believe that things will work out in your favour. But once that possibility is completely shut off, you feel like you're left with nothing. With that comes crushing pain, one that may take a long time to go away. That’s why I had not told Radha or anyone else at home anything about dad. But I knew I could only keep the calls away from Radha for so long. While recovering from the trauma post Kunal Shastri, she had seen me at my rock bottom. My face then bore no expression for months. Nothing excited me, and everything made me feel guilty and angry. It was a deadly cocktail of emotions. It was Radha who had pulled me through everything. She was the one person who could see through me. It was reassuring and uncanny at the same time.
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said and sat on the sofa, taking Radha’s hand to drag her next to me.
I told her everything from how Rathod and I came across dad’s name in Sitaram Mule’s register, to the events of the morning. She was concerned when I told her I had blacked out and didn’t remember what had happened for about twenty minutes.
She hugged me tightly. I remembered how I had felt when I had seen dad’s name in the register. Radha would be going through the same emotions. It was a mixture of hope, frustration, anxiety and anger. A part of us also felt betrayed at the chance that dad was corrupt. I held Radha closer and stroked her back.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ I said, not just saying it for the sake of it, but actually believing in it.
Everything that had happened since our childhood had shaped that belief. I had learnt to adopt it from Radha even more after I had stopped practising law. But as it so happens, sometimes, we forget that life goes on no matter what. Especially in the midst of turbulence.
‘I know, I have you and everyone else around me,’ Radha said.
I felt Shadow rub his nose against Radha and my knees, as if he wanted to console us as well.
All of us sat in silence for a while. Rahul made adrak chai and a large omelette for us and boiled eggs for Shadow. Rahul’s omelettes never failed to smell divine and put a smile on our faces. We ate without saying much. I had one eye on the staircase to see if maa had woken up. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Aakash Pande, had put her on a new medicine for the PTSD she suffered from the prolonged kidnapping. He had warned us that she might sleep more because of it.
‘What’s the plan?’ Rahul said as we were taking our final bites of the omlette.
I told them about the plan to check the factory once and get back the car. Just as I was going to call Rathod, my phone started ringing.
‘I have asked a person from my SWAT team named Harshvardhan Kuhad to accompany you guys to Stan Mills,’ Rathod said. ‘He should reach your house in fifteen minutes. He was also there when we rescued Rucha Sinha.’
‘Great, thank you. We’ll collect the samples and have them sent over to you.’
‘Just give them to Harsh. He’ll hand them to me,’ he said and clicked off.
‘Even I want to come,’ Radha said.
I had decided after she had been shot to not include her or Rahul in any part of the investigation that involved stepping out of the house. I had no choice but to take Rahul. There was no one else I trusted who had forensic expertise.
‘You need to be home with maa,’ I said. ‘Even Shama isn’t here right now.’
Shama, my sister-in-law, was visiting Kunal, my brother—a member of the Indian Army—in Kashmir. Kunal was supposed to come home for Diwali. But that plan was scrapped after his posting in the Kashmir valley was extended when the Indian Government scraped Section 370, a law that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir. The state had seen a lot of turmoil and unrest. When internet services stayed shut for a month, Shama had started to feel anxious. She soon joined Kunal and had been with him since November. Even the rest of us were relieved as they were with each other. We were further elated as the Supreme Court of India had ruled for the internet to be reinstated in Kashmir.
‘It makes sense,’ Radha said in a resigned tone.
I turned to Rahul. ‘We need to be careful and wear bulletproof jackets. I’m hanging one for you outside my room, I’m heading for a bath.’
With every step I climbed as I headed upstairs, the urge to take a showe
r grew exponentially. I stood under the hot jet of water for five minutes, watching streams of red trickle away from me, getting fainter every second. Once I was sure I had rubbed off all the blood on my body, I applied a peach scented soap to drive away the nasty smell. Finally feeling fresh, I stepped out with newfound enthusiasm.
I picked a pair of black jeans and a T-Shirt so that my mobility wouldn’t get affected. I slipped into a black jacket that had multiple pockets. I clipped my guns; my go-to Glock 17 that went in my chest holster and a Glock 42 that went into my ankle holster. The latter had saved Radha and my life six months back.
Sitting up on my bed, I tried yet again to remember who I had seen at Stan Mills. I wanted to scratch my brain. It was as if the answer was right there and yet remained elusive. Before I spiralled into my thoughts, my phone vibrated next to me. It was a message from Harshvardhan Kuhad, telling me he had reached.
When I went downstairs, Rahul was ready. He was wearing black jeans and a blue shirt that Radha had gifted him for New Year’s. I could see the outline of the bulletproof jacket under his shirt. He was also carrying a black bag that he took to work.
‘Let’s do this,’ he said to me and then turned to Radha and planted a kiss on her cheek before we headed out.
Chapter Ten
Rathod was glad that street side chai and coffee tapris had opened because he needed more caffeine in his system. He pulled over his car by one street vendor next to a large tree around which a footpath had been made. The tapri was outside a large office building. Rathod was glad it was just eight twenty. Half an hour later, at least twenty people would be around the tapri to enjoy a few cigarettes before the stress of office work hit them hard.
