3 and a Half Murders: An Inspector Saralkar Mystery

by Salil Desai

  It was addressed to Senior Inspector Saralkar. Motkar took a closer look. The full official address of the Homicide Unit was printed on a piece of paper pasted on the envelope. Two postal stamps neatly gummed in the corner were overlapped by a Pune postmark.

  Some policemanly instinct prodded PSI Motkar to pick up the envelope and carefully open it. Inside was a short, printed, anonymous letter.

  Motkar began reading Kunika Ahuja’s note and immediately knew he needed to find the writer.

  Saralkar took a look around his room one last time to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. Satisfied he had packed everything, he proceeded to check out of the Officer’s Guesthouse. The guesthouse manager had made arrangements for a taxi and Saralkar was soon on his way to Bangalore Railway station.

  He couldn’t shake off a feeling of disappointment. Was he going back to Pune with anything substantive, he wondered. Certainly a lot of background information about Bhupathi and Sodhi and their crimes, as well as about their dead partner Fernandes. But did he really have any leads for cracking the mystery of why Bhupathi and his second wife Anushka were killed in Pune?

  He had to admit he didn’t. All he really knew was that Bhupathi and Sodhi had fled Bangalore after killing Fernandes in 2008 and that Bhupathi had been found dead with his second wife in Pune in 2015, while Sodhi had disappeared again. But only when the events of the seven years in between were meticulously pieced together, would he be any nearer to solving the case. And that piecing together would entail horribly tedious work.

  Saralkar grunted. The only alternative was inspired, intuitive hunches—letting the brain imaginatively twirl the facts and information available and spit out all kinds of wild possibilities; most of them garbled nonsense. And yet it had been his experience that when you let the brain set aside logic awhile, it could surprise you with some crazy germ of a thought that held promise of opening some secret compartment hidden inside the forbidding wall of hard facts.

  So far Saralkar’s mind had been disappointingly out of form, poking and prodding around to pick up singles but showing no appetite for big hitting or even stroke play. As he boarded his AC train compartment and took his seat, he realized he had a twenty-hour journey ahead with nothing much to do except stretch himself on his berth and think.

  There had been a time when Saralkar hadn’t minded train travel, gazing out from the cocooned comfort of an AC compartment at the landscape rhythmically speeding by, pleasantly blank-minded or thinking runaway thoughts—serene, undisturbed, peaceful—and unknowingly dropping off to sleep.

  But all that was before the advent of cell phones. For Saralkar, train bogies had never remained the same thereafter, nor had train journeys. He often wondered what was it that people incessantly yammered about? What was it that couldn’t wait? Or was it that people were so utterly bored or scared of their own company even for a few hours that they had to connect with someone or the other? Perhaps a more charitable explanation was that the enforced leisure of a train journey triggered the need to catch up with friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

  Whatever it was, Saralkar found it mighty irritating, especially co-passengers with loudspeaker voices—a description that fitted a huge majority of Indians. Why couldn’t the buggers talk softly at least or, better still, lose their voices or cell phones!

  He felt a twinge of ridiculous guilt now, as his own cell phone rang.

  “Caught the train?” Jyoti asked chirpily.

  “Yes. Catching trains isn’t half as difficult as catching criminals,” he replied.

  She laughed. “I’m sure you’ll catch them too, as always. What time does the train reach Pune tomorrow?”

  “Noon.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave lunch on the table. Don’t rush off to work without eating,” Jyoti said. “Now bye. I’ll get back to the TV.”

  Saralkar grunted. “Again watching some trashy serial?”

  “No, hubby dear, I am watching that old Shatrughan Sinha movie. Kalicharan. You know I always had a sort of crush on him, growing up,” his wife teased. “Bye!”

  “Bye,” Saralkar said, unable to resist a grin. Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Shashi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna. Yes, but whoever would have thought there were women like his wife who’d had a crush on Shatrughan Sinha of all the heroes of the seventies—an actor who’d started life as a stylishly menacing screen villain. With his thundering dialogues he was more of a male audience favourite than a female matinee idol.

  But then there was no accounting for tastes. And if his wife had indeed been a Shatrughan Sinha fan then Kalicharan was an obvious nostalgic ‘must-see’ considering that was the movie that decisively catapulted the actor from playing villain to hero roles. Saralkar sat back in his seat, still idly thinking of the movie. As a matter of fact he too remembered having liked the film back then, although not as much for Shatrughan Sinha as for the villain played by that endearing character actor Ajit, who had immortalized the role of the smuggler Lion with his trademark dialogue delivery.

  Much to Saralkar’s exasperation, his phone buzzed again. It was Motkar this time.

  “I’ve started back from Bangalore, Motkar. Anything to report?”

  “Two things, sir. Hrithik Dhond was busy burgling a flat in Vishrantwadi with his pals and fleeing Pune last weekend, so he might not be our culprit. Secondly, we’ve received an anonymous letter from a woman who claims Anushka Doshi used to dupe women through her past life regression gig and tried to entrap them for criminal and sinister purposes. The letter writer says she escaped narrowly and that the death of the Doshis could be directly a result of Anushka’s nefarious actions.”

  “No details or story of her personal experiences with Anushka Doshi or what she underwent?” Saralkar asked.

  “No, sir, but somehow it’s not like the usual crank letters we get,” Motkar said.

  “Hmm! None of Anushka Doshi’s other past life regression clients hinted at such issues, did they, when Salunkhe talked to them?” Saralkar asked.

  “No, sir. I was thinking of speaking to them myself to double-check. I’ll also see if I can get any leads from the GPO, where the letter was posted three days ago. It’s a long shot but I’ll try.”

  “Okay. I’ll be in office in the second half tomorrow,” Saralkar replied and switched off the mobile.

  He gazed out of the window. The train was just pulling out of Bangalore’s outskirts now. Soon the open country would be visible, sparsely habited and populated—sometimes lush with greenery, sometimes barren, sometimes a rocky or hilly terrain, sometimes flat lands—an existence far removed from the hurried, hectic, cramped, squalor-filled environs of city and town life. Where you could still see a bit of nature’s creations as against the artificial constructs made by man.

  Strangely, Saralkar’s mind did not start thinking about the case, as was its wont. In fact it was pleasantly blank as if suddenly aware that it was not obliged to generate the average of seven thousand thoughts that are supposed to flit through human minds daily.

  His fellow passengers in the section of six berths were mercifully quiet types, relatively speaking. And even though Saralkar had been allotted a side berth, no one had as yet occupied the seat opposite his. Saralkar stretched his legs and continued gazing out, aware that he was getting drowsier. Eventually, thoughts once again started trooping in, even as his blank mind resisted the onslaught. How had Sanjay Doshi or Shaunak Sodhi known about the advertisement in the Deccan Herald, even when the paper wasn’t circulated in Pune? Could it be explained by the possibility that by some almighty coincidence either Bhupathi or Sodhi happened to be visiting Bangalore on the very day it appeared?

  Saralkar’s mind instinctively rejected such a coincidence. It strained his credulity. Yes, such coincidences could happen, but wasn’t it far more likely that somebody Sodhi or Bhupathi knew was a Bangalore resident and helping them—an old accomplice or criminal acquaintance. Somebody who had tipped them off about the advertisement.
Who could that be?

  Saralkar wished he had had the time or authority to go through all the records of Bangalore police in the Fernandes murder investigation, as well as the recruitment scam case. Some name was bound to surface which had hitherto remained in the shadows, buried in the paperwork. It was probably at this point that Saralkar dozed off.

  The next thing he remembered was waking up with a start, with the acute sensation of having stumbled upon an extremely significant connection made by his brain. That link was present in his consciousness at the precise moment of waking up but before he could firmly grasp and register it in his memory, he was distracted by the immediate demand being made on his attention by the ticket checker asking for his ticket.

  In that micro second the momentous clue was gone, retreating away from his consciousness into some crevice of his mind. By the time Saralkar had finished furnishing his ticket and identity card for the ticket checker, the breakthrough link was nothing more than a vague, elusive feeling that the discovery was in some way connected to the movie Kalicharan, which his wife and he had spoken about just a little earlier. What in the world had the Doshi murder to do with Kalicharan, Saralkar wondered, thoroughly annoyed at his impish brain.

  In choosing to post the letter at GPO, Kunika Ahuja’s instincts had led her into making two errors. Firstly, she had entered the GPO and purchased stamps without realising that CCTV cameras stared down from above. Instead she could’ve done well to have bought the stamps from some other post office and posted the letter at Pune GPO, without being recorded by the CCTVs. Secondly, rather than taking an auto, she had driven her car and parked inside the GPO premises, which afforded a full view of her car registration plate to the CCTVs outside.

  But neither of these two mistakes led Motkar to her doorstep, because there was no way a random check of the CCTV footage would have enabled him to deduce that she was the woman who had posted the letter.

  The CCTV footage helped only by way of jogging the memory of the postal staff in identifying her as the lady who’d returned to the post office in panic half an hour later the same day, because she had, in her haste, forgotten her purse on the shelf meant for pasting stamps, where the glue bottle had been placed.

  In her ensuing attempts to trace and recover her purse, Kunika Ahuja had interacted with a number of postal employees, thus inadvertently etching her distressed face and the incident in their memories. This also included the assistant post master, the counter clerk who had sold her the stamps as well as the employee to whom she had handed over the letter. And so because of the purse incident, this particular employee, who would otherwise have completely forgotten all about her, immediately identified Kunika Ahuja in the CCTV footage as the same lady who had handed him a letter addressed to the Pune Homicide Unit, while he was clearing the post box.

  This recollection, in conjunction with the footage of the car registration number in which Kunika Ahuja was clearly seen to have driven in and out of the GPO premises, were the links in the chain that enabled Motkar to track her down deftly.

  “Kunika Ahuja?” he asked as soon as the door to the address in which the car was registered opened and revealed a middle aged, anxious looking woman.

  The guilty, flustered look Kunika Ahuja threw at him convinced Motkar that this was the lady who had written and sent the anonymous letter.

  “What is it?” she managed to ask through the grill door.

  PSI Motkar held up the pink envelope and letter for her to see, trying to sound non-threatening, if not friendly. “I am PSI Motkar from Pune Homicide Unit. I think you sent us this?”

  Kunika Ahuja had gone pale, as if she had sent the police a letter-bomb instead of a mere anonymous letter. Perhaps sensing her distress, Bruno started barking. It galvanized Kunika into action. “Just give me a minute, Inspector. I-I’ll tie Bruno up.”

  She frantically began hushing her pet, while simultaneously looking for his leash. “Sorry,” she apologized to Motkar over her shoulder, when she couldn’t find the leash after looking around. Then she turned to the dog and began ordering him out of the room.

  Bruno’s barks only got louder, trying to defy his mistress’s order as he growled at Motkar standing outside the grill door. But finally the dog backed away as she rebuked him and pointed inside. When he finally retreated into the next room, Kunika Ahuja closed the door on him, turned around, and hurried to open the grill door for Motkar and the woman police constable accompanying him.

  “I’m so sorry! He is very protective,” she said ushering them in.

  PSI Motkar couldn’t define what it was, but she distinctly had that spinsterly look and air about her—a kind of forlorn demeanour combined with a stubborn manner peculiar to lonely women, yet to come to terms with their doubts.

  “You did send us this letter, didn’t you, Ms. Kunika Ahuja?” Motkar asked, taking a seat like a man used to never being asked to take one.

  Kunika Ahuja stared at the letter in his hands, then at the lady constable, and finally back at Motkar. “I-I suppose there’s no point denying it,” she finally sighed, half apologetically.

  Motkar nodded. “Do you live alone?”

  She looked at him, unsure. “Yes . . . why?”

  “Just in case you wish to have some family member with you while we talk to you,” Motkar said gently.

  “No, it’s okay,” Kunika Ahuja said, then hastened to add, “Look . . . I was just trying to help, but I didn’t want to get involved in police and courts. I hope it’s not an offence to send such a letter to the police?”

  “No. You don’t have to worry about that. But it will be very helpful if you can tell us more about the matter. Your letter is very brief,” Motkar replied.

  Kunika Ahuja was a little less nervous now. She sat down on the opposite sofa. “What do you wish to know?”

  “Well, please tell us precisely what kind of bad experiences you had with Mrs. Anushka Doshi,” Motkar asked.

  Kunika Ahuja gave an involuntary shudder then looked in the direction of the door she had shut on Bruno. The dog could still be heard barking and scratching against the closed door. “Can I please calm Bruno down and get him in here? I’ll . . . I’ll feel much better,” she almost implored Motkar.

  The dog was probably her moral and emotional support, Motkar figured. He nodded, although apprehensive that Bruno might create more ruckus.

  Kunika Ahuja gratefully walked over to the door and began talking to the dog. When it had quieted down, she opened the door, squatted beside Bruno as he wriggled in, petting him and murmuring soothingly into his ear, while it glared at the visitors. Finally she led him to the sofa and ordered him to sit, sternly instructing Bruno to be a ‘good boy’ and ‘no barking’. Like a chastened child, the dog obeyed his mistress, not taking its eyes off Motkar, but the hostility was gone and a gentle wagging of his tail had begun.

  Kunika Ahuja sat down again, running her hand over his fur repeatedly. It seemed to have as much a calming effect on her as on the dog. She looked composed and began speaking. “Since I lost my father about four years ago, I had been, well, lonely and sad. I just wanted peace of mind. About six to seven months ago things got really, uhh, unbearable. I was always disturbed and crying. I’d even thought of visiting a psychiatrist but . . . kept avoiding it. That’s when Anushka Doshi walked into my gift shop one day.”

  She suddenly paused as if overcome by distaste.

  “Was she alone?” Motkar asked gently.

  “Yes, she . . . came in as a customer, to purchase some gift. I-I was a little upset that time because I’d just had an unpleasant argument with a girl who worked for me in the shop. As I was packing the gift for Anushka Doshi, she suddenly startled me by directly asking me why I looked unhappy. You can imagine how taken aback I was by a total stranger asking me such a question. But somehow I got drawn into a conversation with her and soon she was telling me about how she too had grappled with unhappiness and how past life regression therapy had helped her. She told me now she was
helping others using the same therapy. I was intrigued. We exchanged phone numbers and that’s how my acquaintance with her began. Subsequently, she dropped in a couple of times and she would tell me stories of other women clients of hers.

  “As I mentioned I was still having a lot of mood swings and felt very depressed at times. I would lie awake at night and just cry, feeling lonely and . . . It was really bad.”

  Kunika Ahuja stopped as if she didn’t want to think or talk about that phase.

  Motkar gave a little nod of understanding. He knew how loneliness brought people to their knees—that feeling of utter desolation, being unloved and unwanted, with no way out.

  “I was . . . I was so desperate to get out of that mental state that I allowed myself to be persuaded for a past life regression session. I thought what’s the harm. Anushka Doshi seemed like a nice, respectable kind of woman. At least till then I had got no negative and dangerous vibes from her.”

  “I see. So where was this session held?”

  “Here in my house.”

  “And were only you and she present?”

  “Yes.”

  “So take us through how Anushka Doshi conducted the session.”

  Kunika Ahuja petted Bruno again and pulled him a little closer. The dog snuggled and rewarded her with a lick. Then as if to warn Motkar that he could be both loving and fierce, he directed a low growl at them.

  “No, Bruno,” she chided him, then continued. “Anushka Doshi first told me that she would induce a state of hypnosis and then guide me to open the doors of memories of my different births. She said it would all depend upon my willingness to regress into my past lives and readiness in placing my trust in her to make that journey happen. By now I was quite impressed by her compassion and kindness, so I wasn’t sceptical.”