“Aap log to hamesha sensational angle dhundte hain. Bahut seeddha case hai, batao jara Ram Lal ke kiya details hain.”
(“You people always look for something sensational. It’s a straightforward case. Ram Lal, just give him the details.”)
Ram Lal didn’t waste words. At 3 a.m. the thana had received a call from the councilor’s house. When Ram Lal arrived with a constable, Ekka was already lying motionless besides a pile of wood, perhaps already dead. They sent for an ambulance and Ekka was taken to a nearby hospital where he became another entry on the dead-on-arrival list.
Ram Lal was told that an hour earlier the councilor Rakesh Trehan had been woken up by a noise outside his bedroom. He set off the alarm and heard someone running up to the roof. He waited for the servants to arrive before following the intruder. They got there just in time to catch a glimpse of a man running to the edge of the roof. It was only the clatter that followed that made them look behind the house. Ekka, they had told Ram Lal, lay there moaning quietly on a pile of wood, and they sent for the police.
“That’s it. It’s a simple case. We have checked, the man was a troublemaker, a drunkard. He probably needed money and when he was caught inside the house, he panicked and ran up to the roof,” the SHO told me. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.” I duly jotted down his words; all the questions occurred to me far too late.
I did obtain the postmortem report from Ekka’s sister-in-law and asked the crime reporter to help me make sense of the document. It wasn’t all that difficult. On the printed outline of the back and front views of a generic male figure, the specific injuries to Ekka’s body had been marked and listed.
The crime reporter was somewhat bemused by my interest in the case. He called up Dr. Mohanty, the physician who had performed the postmortem. The injuries, it turned out, were “not incompatible” with the description of the incident. Mohanty had said, and the crime reporter finally showed some interest in the case as he told me, that perhaps the man may have been beaten by a lathi.
I went back to SHO Puri, who was expecting me. “You seem the stubborn type. You shouldn’t take your work so personally, it makes life difficult.” I let him have his say before I asked him about the blows from the lathi. Puri didn’t even bother to ask me how I knew. “Officially, if you want something from me, I can only say there is nothing to your question, everything is clearly spelled out in the postmortem. But I can tell you something off the record, if you agree.”
Today, I know the bastard was uncomfortable at that moment. I should have gone after him, but then you live and learn.
“Things are never the way we write them down in the FIR, certain norms are forced by our legal procedures. We would never get a conviction if we started noting things down exactly as people tell us. Ekka didn’t just run up to the roof when he was caught. The councilor got up in the middle of the night — you know how it happens when you drink too much in the evening. He was headed to the bathroom at one end of the corridor when he saw a shadowy figure slipping into his daughter’s room. She is a young woman, in college. The councilor switched on the lights and raised the alarm. The servants rushed in from the back. By then, the councilor had already caught hold of Ekka.
“Now, I know what you are thinking. You journalists are not very different from police officers, there is very little about human beings that surprises either of us. She is a rich, spoiled kid, maybe she already knew Ekka, maybe she was the one who called him home. But then again, maybe she didn’t. We didn’t ask. He is a councilor, a powerful man. Regardless, his rage was understandable. After all, he is a Punjabi. Aren’t you one as well?
“Yes, just as I thought, so you should understand. The shame of a man trying to slip into his daughter’s bedroom, you would have done the same. Yes, they beat him, beat him badly. Apparently, he managed to slip free as the blows were raining on him and ran up the stairs. They chased him and that is when he jumped off the roof. You already know the rest of the story.”
There were several things I should have asked, but as I said, they just didn’t occur to me at the time.
He could sense I was out of my depth. “Why don’t you check for yourself? Here, let me fix an appointment with the councilor for you.” I sat and watched him call the councilor.
He broke into Punjabi. “Haanji, haanji, kal shammi aaa jaoga, khul ke gall kar lo, chappan lai nahin hai, samjhada hai, sadde passé da munda hai.” (“Yes, yes, he’ll come and see you tomorrow evening, talk openly, it will be off the record, he understands, he is a boy from our part of the world.”) I didn’t need to be told I was being patronized.
I was to meet the councilor at 5 at his showroom. I was back at the house by 3. I didn’t have any desire to hang out at the office. The story was beginning to get to me, and I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. On a hunch I decided to stop by the councilor’s house on the way to his showroom. Even though I wasn’t sure what I’d do at the house, I decided to give it a try.
The councilor’s wife answered the doorbell. It took her a while to get there. Gray-haired, dressed in a salwar kameez, she could easily have been a relative of mine from Punjab. She apologized for having kept me waiting. She said she had difficulty walking because of her knees, and the servant was away on an errand. I spoke to her in Punjabi with the deference due to an elder, told her I was a journalist and that I lived not far from her house.
“Yes, I know. When you all moved in, people in the colony were very worried. Five bachelors living on their own, we thought there would be loud parties, people dropping in all the time. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was used to here. But you boys keep to yourself.” I wasn’t going to tell her that it was not for lack of trying. She asked me to sit down and hobbled to get me some water.
I found it very difficult to broach the subject. Sitting there, it felt more appropriate to ask how her children were doing, whether her arthritis was troubling her. When I did put the question to her, it seemed a betrayal of the setting, but she seemed to be expecting it.
“Kaka,” she began, and I was being addressed as a boy for the second time in two days, but this time it was not meant to be patronizing. “He was a thief. Some of his relatives work here, but you know how these tribals are. He was an alcoholic, everyone says so, and I think he was probably looking for some loose cash or jewelry that he could sell later. The poor man panicked when he heard us and jumped off the roof.”
Did she go out and see where he had fallen? I asked.
“Haan, he didn’t seem too badly injured to me. I even made him a cup of tea while we waited for the police to arrive.
I think there must have been some internal injuries, but he wasn’t complaining of any severe pain.”
Was she sure, was she really sure? I repeated slowly in Punjabi.
“Haan kaka, he was sitting in front of me like you are sitting now. God knows what the policemen did to him.”
I told her I was going to see her husband and asked the way to the showroom; I shouldn’t have. When I got to the showroom, Trehan was waiting for me, already aware of my conversation with his wife. “I didn’t realize you lived in Gyan Kunj, we could easily have met there later in the evening.”
All I could do was make some vague noises about being unsure of my way. It should have been no big deal, but such interactions are decided by small things. Being in control of the situation is everything; I wasn’t.
He was sitting behind his desk in a cabin at the rear of the showroom. Plywood had been used to partition it off from the open floor displaying electronic goods. On one of the walls there was a photograph of him dressed in saffron, staff in hand, on a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine.