“Blue is the colour of the sky,
My eye, your eye – all red & dry!
Garbage, filth and grime,
Anywhere I look, I only can cry!
You pain me, you hurt me,
And you think you’re gonna get by?
Your destiny, you shall’nt escape,
No matter how hard you try!”
It was a small couplet, a badly composed one at that, but Chaudhary was inspecting it as if his stare was going to make the typewritten letters reveal something that had remained hitherto concealed. “Nothing,” he muttered, shaking his head sideways, addressing no one in particular.
“I doubt if we’re going to find any fingerprints either,” he added, turning to look at Sharma who was crouched over the dead body. “Yes Saheb, no clues this time around either. And these newspaper folks, they expect us to weave a magic wand of some sort and solve every crime that’s committed,” Sharma’s words were desperate and reeking of frustration. Chaudhary nodded, making for the wooden wardrobe lining one of the room’s walls.
The call had come in just under two hours back, at around 4:30 p.m. The deceased, an owner of a garments dyeing facility, had been found by his driver, lying in his bedroom with the base of what seemed like a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Instructing the driver to call an ambulance and not touch anything inside the house, Sub-Inspector Chaudhary and four of his men had rushed to the crime scene – a posh bungalow in the DLF Phase-1 locality.
The story, as had been gathered from the accounts of the driver and neighbours, was that Rakesh Arora, the victim, was a successful businessman in his mid-40s. He lived in the bungalow with his family – his wife, a known face in the social circuit of Gurgaon, and two college going children. Rest of his family was away on vacation somewhere in Europe and Arora had been living alone in the house for the past a week. The neighbours could share his wife’s phone number, but they were not sure of her return plans.
There was a full-time caretaker in Arora’s employ, but he too was away on his annual leave to his village in Bihar. Neither the driver and nor the neighbours had explicitly stated it, but Chaudhary had gathered that Arora made the most of his family’s absence, often returning home with female companions who sometimes left the bungalow only the next morning. The caretaker’s absence might thus have been by design and not a mere coincident.
These days there was just the maid cum cook who visited the property in the mornings and evenings and Arora’s driver who comprised his support system. Arora went to his factory in the mornings and returned home in the afternoons for a siesta. Around 4:00 in the evening the driver was expected to ferry his master back to the factory. The driver had complete access to the house and would usually pick up the keys from the drawing room table and announce his availability before returning to the car. Only, today, when Satbeer, the driver had tugged on the bedroom door, it had opened to reveal the gory sight of his master lying on the floor in a pool of red.
“Seems like the same guy who got the builder,” Sharma remarked, a worried crease marking his forehead.
“Of course it is… The media have their headlines clearly cut out – serial killer at large in Gurgaon… and we are nowhere near cracking that case. They’re going to hang us out to dry on this one,” Chaudhary replied. “I bet this fellow got some sort of a warning too and he chose to ignore it. We might learn something about that at his factory,” he added after a pause.
The case under discussion dated back by two weeks, where the body of a renowned real estate magnate had been discovered on the passenger seat of his parked car. The deceased had several under construction properties across the city and his death had resulted in a media crucification of sorts for the Gurgaon police. Incidentally it was the same team, headed by SI Chaudhary, who was investigation that murder. And that wasn’t all as far as the similarities between the two cases were concerned. A typewritten, badly rhyming couplet with tones of reprisal and avengement had been found in the deceased’s pockets, just like the one that had been sticking out of Arora’s half-clenched fist.
Investigations into the first murder had revealed that the victim had received at least a couple of letters, both in possession of the police now, talking of the hazards that the exposed debris at his construction sites posed for the environment and warning him of dire consequences if he didn’t initiate remedial measures on an immediate basis. The words for the two letters had been cut from newspaper headlines and pasted on blank sheets to form coherent sentences. In short, the letters could provide no clues about the killer’s identity.
“It has to be some maniac of some sort… These ones, those with no logical motives to explain their crimes, are really a pain in the wrong place,” Sharma remarked exasperatedly.
“Maybe, and maybe not… for all you know, he could be a perfectly sane person holding some sort of a grudge. We will never know till we get hold of him, will we?” Chaudhary commented.
It had been a long day and by the time Chaudhary entered his quarters, it was ten minutes past midnight. His wife wasn’t home, she had been at her parent’s for the past two months, and so Chaudhary had eaten his dinner at a Dhaba on his way back. Switching on the lights he headed straight for the study table in his bedroom and pulled out his diary. He paused to look at Sheena’s smiling face staring back at him from the photograph on the desk and instantly a lump formed in his throat. “Why… Why her? She was only five? What could she have done to deserve this?” he screamed, banging his fists on the desk and wailing out aloud. It took him some time to get a grip on his emotions, and then, wiping his eyes with the back of his hands, he turned the pages of the diary.
The first few pages had pictures of their happy family – Sheena, her mother and him – in better times. Sheena’s respiratory problems had persisted back then too, but the Doctor had assured them that it wasn’t anything to worry about, and that these days most kids her age were plagued by similar ailments. “She will outgrow the medication as her immunity increases,” the Doctor had said. The next set of pictures were of Sheena on the hospital bed. This was when her problems had persisted, necessitating further diagnostics. They had eventually discovered a hole, the size of an undergrown pea, in centre of her tiny heart.
After a brief pause, Chaudhary turned the page to the first poem he’d written upon returning home from his daughter’s burial. Since then his writing had been his only companion, a vent for the many emotions that wreaked havoc within his head day and night. Another couplet was forming within his head and he needed to pen it down urgently.