Legal Fiction

by Chandan Pandey

  For Shruti

  Contents

  DAY ONE

  DAY TWO

  DAY THREE

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise for Legal Fiction

  Copyright

  Everything in Legal Fiction is fiction. All that is fiction is fiction, of course, but even the truth is fiction. If the people, stories, places and incidents at any point appear to be true, it is our collective misfortune. We advise you to consider it a fault of the imagination and move on.

  The chariot of time lies besieged somewhere – a line from Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s poem comes to me, not as a reference but as a forgotten friend.

  (27/8/15, from Rafique’s diary)

  DAY ONE

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETIME around eleven at night when my phone rang, and Mohammad Rafi’s pitch-perfect voice called out: ‘Mujhe apni sharan mein le lo Ram…’ The phone was with Archana. I was at my writing desk at home, going through a book that had been lost for several years among my bookshelves. I was often reminded of the book, and after suddenly finding it today, I tried to understand why I had made so many marks and underlined the text in several places. The underlined passages were still fascinating, but why had I marked them up? What had been on my mind when I did that? I had even put down a few exclamation points, but I couldn’t remember why. So, I wanted to read the book all over again, taking notes this time, in order to imbibe the text fully.

  When Archana entered the office and stood between the desk and the light, I realized she had brought the mobile phone with her. She handed it to me.

  ‘Is that Arjun Kumar speaking?’

  The voice had a Haryanvi brusqueness. I sensed an anxiety in its tone, as if it urgently wanted to tell me something.

  ‘Yes. And you?’

  Archana was standing in front of me. The voice rang out in the quiet of the night. It was a woman, and Archana could also hear her.

  ‘This is Anasuya,’ the woman said.

  ‘Anasuya who?’ I asked, but I immediately remembered who she was. ‘Oh!’ I blurted out. Archana looked at the whirling emotions on my face. ‘You!’ Then, after a pause, I said, ‘Long time…’

  I could sense she was relieved that I had not forgotten her. Perhaps that was why she got rid of the honorary ‘aap’ in the very next sentence and became more informal. ‘You are Arjun Kumar the writer, yes?’

  ‘Yes, if people consider me to be one.’ I had no idea whether I said this for Anasuya’s benefit, or for Archana’s, or for a world that had an unwarranted hold over language. Anyway, that was a larger question. At that moment, however, I couldn’t understand why she had called, and that too, so late at night.

  ‘I read a short story of yours in a newspaper, perhaps in Dainik Jagriti, many years ago.’

  ‘That was around five years ago.’ I grew worried about the impression she would have formed of me had she read only that one story. When she became silent, I felt she might be crying. Archana continued to stand right there, looking at the bookshelf.

  ‘Arjun, my husband has not returned home since yesterday morning.’

  Dear reader, I should tell you that I have completed her sentence here, for she had begun to sob almost as soon as she started to speak. Hearing her sobs, Archana gestured at me to turn on the speaker phone.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked but got annoyed at my ridiculous question. She was simply telling me about her situation.

  ‘I have been to the police station twice today. But no one’s telling me anything.’ She paused as her voice choked up with emotion. I heard her take a deep breath before she resumed, ‘Three policemen just came home. The landlord literally begged them to go away. They’ve searched the entire house twice already.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Such a strange question. Someone you’d spent a long period of your life with – after a while, you don’t even know whether they exist or not.

  ‘Noma,’ she said. Then, thinking I wouldn’t know where Noma was, she added, ‘Salempur’, then ‘Deoria’. Perhaps she still wasn’t satisfied, so she finally said, ‘It’s near Gorakhpur.’

  ‘He will come back. Why don’t you go to a friend’s place and wait until tomorrow morning?’ I wanted to ask if her husband was an addict, but I couldn’t muster the courage. Such questions cut deep – even if he wasn’t an addict, it would have hit her hard.

  ‘Nobody from the police is listening to me.’ She began to wail. The room reverberated with the sound. They were the sort of cries that could make you forget who you were.

  ‘Wait until the morning,’ I repeated.

  ‘You don’t understand, Arjun. I’m in big trouble. I don’t know anyone with connections in the police force. They’re not even filing a missing-person report—’ And the call got disconnected.

  Only after the call got disconnected did it strike me that I rarely came across statements such as ‘You don’t understand’ or ‘Try to understand’. I usually went silent after such declarations and no longer had the drive to continue with the conversation.

  Something was going on in Archana’s mind. We stayed quiet, and silence took over the room. The silence persisted, but now we were mutely staring at each other. Then I asked, ‘What do you think?’ It was my attempt to break the silence. I didn’t really want to know what she thought, but immediately Archana said, ‘You must go.’ Then she added, ‘I will speak to my brother too.’

  A person has to be insane to not get worried when someone they love doesn’t come home, or to not be baffled when their husband suddenly disappears. Anasuya’s troubles were becoming clearer just as the darkness was beginning to lift outside. And we’d been more than just acquaintances. I was worried about her, but it had never occurred to me to go out of my way to help anyone, and it didn’t sit well with me now. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had spent my time and energy to help someone. Any assistance that I offered had been, at best, restricted to giving away some money.

  Archana held up the phone. The MakeMyTrip app was open. I could see an Air India flight listed on it. ‘It takes off at 5.15 a.m. and lands in Gorakhpur an hour and a half later,’ she said.

  Saying so, she turned to leave. I didn’t want to go. Even if I did, I would rather take a train. But as she walked away, Archana seemed to sense my thoughts and said decisively, ‘All trains depart later in the day and it’s impossible to get a ticket now.’

  There were a couple of reasons why I didn’t want to go.

  First, I knew where Noma was. And second, Archana and I had quarrelled over this very Anasuya a few years ago. That squabble had dragged on for almost a fortnight, and the word ‘divorce’ had come up for the first time between us. In the days that followed, I caught myself more than once wondering whether it was truly possible for the two of us to be divorced.

  The quarrel had started with a bookshelf. I don’t remember now whether we had been fighting about where to place it or how to arrange books in it. But during our argument, an old photograph fell out of my copy of Ashvamedha Yagna. The photograph was several years old. A girl wearing a blue-and-white college uniform pretended as if she were flying. All her weight was on her left leg, her right leg was raised behind her and bent at the knee. Her lips were pouted as if for a kiss. A boy stood beside her, laughing. Both looked into the camera.

  ‘Who is this?’ Archana had asked me.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘I can see that. But who is this girl by your side?’

  I could not recall her name at that moment. The argument got much worse before a truce was finally called. Then, some ten or twelve days later, while we sat drinking tea in the evening, her name came to me, and I simply uttered it aloud: ‘Anasuya.’ Although there would be more occasio
ns when names of other girls would come up between us, the fallout of that argument was such that Anasuya was never mentioned again.

  Whatever the true reasons for Archana’s anger may have been then, the apparent one was that I had never told her about Anasuya. I wasn’t prepared for her onslaught. Holding on to old photographs and letters is a strange disease, I admit, but it is one that I am afflicted by. And what was the big deal about an old photo anyway? If I had wanted to tip-toe around this fact, I could have simply told Archana the name of an old friend she knew about.

  Before I could pursue this train of thought further, Archana said, ‘Call Anasuya immediately, tell her you’re coming. She must be getting worried.’ After a pause, she calmly added, ‘If you don’t mind, can I speak to her?’

  I realized that Archana must be thinking along entirely different lines. She must be thinking that I wanted to stay away from Anasuya because of our past. But the truth was that I did not want to go to Noma. It’s preposterous to call someone after years and expect them to turn up immediately. And Archana knew I did not like to travel at all.

  I knew about Deoria very well. A certain ‘Deoraha Baba’ had influenced my father quite a bit, and he said Deoria had got its name because of the godman. There was another recent bit of news about how a policeman had saved a couple from a mob in a town called Deoria. But above all, I had been writing a story on Anjan Agarwal, an MLA from Deoria. He had won the elections despite being on the run. I had always been fascinated by the nexus between the police and politicians. In this case, the helplessness of the police was most interesting; they could not arrest Agarwal even when the nefarious criminal was filing his nomination papers for the elections. If I had to go to Noma, I would try and meet the legislator or his supporters.

  While Archana booked the ticket, I searched online for news from Deoria, Noma and Gorakhpur. Most were related to the legislator or his businesses. A couple of news items from Noma spoke about a ‘deemed’ university and sounded like advertorials pretending to be news. One spoke about a Union minister’s impending visit to the town to inaugurate the famous fair of Dol Mela. This news item was full of pictures. I kept going through the sites of various newspapers. But there was nothing about a missing person. Then I realized I should have asked Anasuya her husband’s name.

  In my rush to catch the flight and with all the anxiety on my mind, I made a mistake.

  It’s difficult to reach the Delhi airport from Gurgaon in the early hours of the morning – the state road tax is so high that Ola and Uber cabs do not want to cross the border. Sometimes, they cancel on their own. You are then left to fend for yourself, the imminent risk of missing your flight notwithstanding.

  This is exactly what happened. Anything that had to go wrong, did – Murphy’s Law in action. Two cabs cancelled on me, and I did not know what to do.

  Hurriedly, Archana decided to drop me at the airport. Except for a passing remark about Archana calling her older brother Ravi later in the day, we spent the half-hour ride in silence.

  Ravi Bhaiyya was a sore point with me. He was in a powerful position in the Ministry of Home Affairs. We had come to loggerheads over trivial issues several times in the past. He did not like me and had no qualms about making it known every now and then. Although the feeling was reciprocated, my failures had put me in a position where I could not criticize him openly, especially since he had done us a lot of favours. Although Archana got her job on her own merit, my job had come about as a result of his recommendation. Around seven or eight years ago, when Archana and I were newlyweds, Ravi Bhaiyya would say he liked my poems, and that since his sister had chosen me, there had to be something in me. But as the years passed, I fell behind.

  At the airport, when Archana repeated that she would call Ravi Bhaiyya, I realized that she had been asking for my opinion the first time, but now she was simply informing me. ‘Fly back this evening or tomorrow morning. If Anasuya is in trouble, bring her with you. Whatever the situation is, let me know and I will book the tickets accordingly,’ she said.

  If it wasn’t for the lines we drew around ourselves outside of darkened rooms, I would have embraced her right there, outside the airport. But those lines found us a rationale for not doing so – there was no parking space, and she would be fined if she got down from the vehicle.

  In any case, by the time I emerged from the slumber of my thoughts, the car had begun to pull away.

  The fact that I did not hug my wife goodbye was not the mistake I was talking about. Rather, I asked Anasuya her husband’s name over SMS, texting her while boarding the aircraft: ‘What was your husband’s name?’

  A thought sprung out of nowhere, either because of the message I’d sent Anasuya or because of the relief I felt upon reaching the airport on time. I wanted to see if I knew someone in Gorakhpur, Deoria, Salempur or Noma. I thought of saying something on my Facebook or Twitter, but then, language presented itself as an obstacle.

  Language and vocabulary render us helpless in moments of despair – a helplessness one can only express in language. Words abandon us, and one doesn’t know the right ones to use. What could I have written, then? That my ex’s husband hadn’t returned home for three days? Or that I had once abandoned an extraordinary woman, and now her husband had gone missing? What could I have written?

  If Archana hadn’t known anything, I could have lied. But it would be embarrassing to lie when she knew the truth. I ruminated on my words as my finger hovered over Noma on Google Maps. Then, paying no heed to what Archana might think, I finally wrote: ‘A family friend of ours has not returned home for the past three days. He lives in Noma, close to Deoria or Gorakhpur. If there is someone on my list who lives close by, please contact me. I am on my way to Noma.’

  I posted it on Facebook and Twitter, then went over it again and again. I read it from Archana’s perspective. She would usually be on Facebook in the afternoons. Would she laugh while reading this, knowing what the truth was? What would she say? She’d make fun of me for calling a man whose name I didn’t know a ‘family friend’.

  I realized my mistake just as the aircraft was about to take off.

  Why had I asked Anasuya ‘What was your husband’s name?’ The ‘was’ pierced right through me like a nail. If the soul could bleed, mine would be spewing fountains. I began to worry about Anasuya for the first time. Who was I to have asked her about her husband in the past tense? I shouldn’t have written ‘was’. My second mistake was that I made her aware of my first mistake – growing anxious, I shot off another message, simply typing ‘*is*’. But what did that even mean? That’s when I committed my third mistake – I sent her yet another message: ‘What is your husband’s name?’

  Before I could get a reply, the airhostess asked us to turn our phones off. I saw several passengers continue to click pictures of the sky outside, of themselves, or of those accompanying them. I saw an elderly woman loudly asking someone to come pick her up when she landed. I saw the airhostess then individually request each passenger to turn their phones off.

  What I didn’t see all this while was how Anasuya would read my three messages.

  I turned my phone on as soon as we landed. Two messages popped up one after another:

  ‘Bhaiyya will call you. He was mad at me. Keep me informed.’

  ‘Rafique Neel.’

  The taxi driver outside the airport slept with his legs on the steering wheel. He was wearing a blue kurta-pyjama. He looked like a short man, but when he stepped out, I could see he was at least six and a half feet tall.

  ‘Will you go to Noma?’ I asked him.

  ‘Two thousand eight hundred.’

  ‘Both ways.’

  ‘Will we be stopping there?’

  ‘At most until tomorrow maybe.’

  He took a good look at me. ‘Three thousand per day. And you will have to pay the toll.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  He introduced himself as Sahadeo and helped me load my luggage in the boot. Before turni
ng on the engine, he did a pranam to the steering wheel. He kept the engine running for a little while and began skimming through a newspaper.

  ‘You get Dainik Jagriti here as well?’ I asked over the rumbling engine. He handed the paper to me without looking and started driving.

  It’s my habit to read the newspaper starting from the back pages. The front pages usually have the same old news about government matters. Except for the sports page, there was hardly any news you couldn’t predict. This particular edition had no editorial. Instead, there was a page called ‘Arogya Darshan’ – philosophy of wellness. The fourth page was titled ‘Deoria Jagriti’ and had five sections. Under the ‘In and around Rudrapur’ section, there was a news item about a fire at a petrol pump that had been put out on time. Another section was titled ‘In and around Barhaj’.

  As I began reading, my phone rang: ‘Ravi Bhaiyya calling’. I took the call and wished him, ‘Hello Bhaiyya, pranam.’ I heard him bless me. As he began saying something, my attention shifted to the two sections at the bottom of the page: ‘In and around Tamkuhi’ and ‘In and around Salempur’.

  Ravi Bhaiyya was bristling. He was asking me to take the next flight home.

  ‘Sure,’ I said noncommittally and continued reading the paper.

  Under ‘In and around Salempur’, there were five reports. The one in the centre was accompanied by colour pictures. It was clearly the lead: ‘Preparations on in Full Swing for Noma’s Dol Mela’. The first picture showed an empty fairground; the second was captioned, ‘Officers surveying mela preparations’. A photograph of the Mela Committee’s chair S.P. Malviya (Dadda) had been placed within the news. Another advertisement, placed by some ‘Mangal Morcha’, welcomed a Union minister who was supposed to inaugurate the fair. Finally, there was a short news piece: ‘Student Missing’. A girl’s passport photo had been printed with it. The photograph was faded, but I could make out a wide forehead, a straight nose, and some sort of a birthmark below the eyes. I couldn’t make out the girl’s complexion, but even in this black-and-white image, I could see she was attractive.