Please check earlier stories by clicking on the month on the right
FOR: APRIL 2014
THE APPRENTICE
All Rights Reserved
Meghna was too tired to talk on the phone. In fact, she was exhausted. She was just back from her session with the jail inmates, listening to them and making careful comments on their attitude that needed to be corrected. She promised Shumit that she would see him the next day. He realized that she had gone into her shell once again and would like to be there for some time.
Meghna had a headache. It was a hard task convincing the inmates as most of them believed they were misguided and misjudged. There were complaints against the decadence in the social system, the judiciary and life in general. It was extremely difficult for her to make them see what they did wrong. What irked her most was that there was hardly any remorse or guilt in the minds of most of them. Some even looked hostile enough to want to commit the same crime given a chance. As a counselor this weighed on her mind.
But it was not always like this. It was a relief that once in a while she found some guys who listened to her and were willing to do some self -reflection and even said that they were sorry. They thanked her for introducing them to the Law of Karma -- giving them a different perspective to the eternity of life and death. On those days she came home jubilant and was eager to finish her report.
Today was not one of those days.
Today Dayaram didn’t speak at all. He held his head low and communicated in monosyllables only. He was one of those who staggered into a jail sentence for a crime that he, perhaps, didn’t commit and stood hovering over a precarious situation. Yet circumstantial evidence went against him contradicting testimonies from neighbors and associates saying that he was innocent. He stood just a few inches away from a death penalty. Meghna’s task was either to make him admit his heinous act or restore his waning self-esteem and return him to his nest to hold his head high. The court so far hadn't come to any satisfactory conclusion.
Some days Dayaram got too uncooperative and it was hard for Meghna to press him further. So after a while she would pack up and leave giving him a few words of comfort asking him to get in touch with his own soul. It was one of those days.
Dayaram was inattentive and restless. He refused to elaborate on his story that he had repeated a number of times on his alibi on what he did on the day Bharti was found murdered. His story had moved Meghna and she was struggling with the thought that he may have been framed for some odd reason and was, therefore, needed to be snubbed out by the prosecuting party. But what was most mystifying was that Dayaram chose to remain reticent about the true facts behind the conspiracy, if there were any, and she wanted to pry it out of him.
However, Dayaram was not a degenerate. He looked clean and sober. In his free time he liked to do some reading and lately he had been asking for spiritual books that he devoured with relish. He also made some notes but kept his little notebook hidden somewhere where others wouldn’t get to see. This came out in one of his unguarded emotional moments during a conversation with Meghna. But he wouldn’t tell her what he wrote in it. No amount of pressure or cajoling brought it out of him. Meghna gave up pursuing the matter and moved on to other topics like things that he was interested in as a child.
She was surprised that Dayaram’s major passion as a child was to fly kites in the open skies, that too racing with the birds in flight. He tried to catch them in the loop that he tried creating with the glass-coated string to pull them down. Sometimes they would escape and sometimes bits and pieces of their feathers or claws got disengaged from their unsuspecting bodies in the air. Not that Dayaram minded that. And if he happened to catch a full bird, he spread out its wings wide and studied its body parts with great concentration. Later, he would walk to the stone pit where his elder brother worked and steal a nice piece of stone or marble. Back home using Shivram’s tools, secretly he would carve out a replica of the bird that looked inert but real. His unofficial sessions as an apprentice to his big brother, Shivram, were beginning to help him grasp the art of skillful carving with the help of some interesting tools. He kept a jute bag under his bed and put all the stone birds he created in it. Nobody knew about them except Bharti, Shivram’s wife.
Strange way to pursue a hobby, Meghna thought.
Bharti liked the stone birds and gave each one of them a name for its shape and size. She said that someday Daya was going to be great stone-cutter, an artist, and make a name for himself. But Daya warned her not to mention this little secret to Shivram. He was petrified of his brother, ten years his senior and a bully. So was Bharti and she didn’t want to upset him either. Soon he graduated to animal forms replicating his catch with stronger strings and greater skill.
*******
After dinner Meghna sat down with Dayaram’s file and absently turned the pages. Dayaram’s reticence disturbed her. This was the first time she found something that made her feel incompetent to understand the psyche of a criminal mind. It also gave him no chance to defend himself. Was he really such a fool? Did he not care for his aging parents who needed support, she wondered!
Dayaram came from a suburban home. His family was small with just his parents, his elder brother and his wife, Bharti, and himself. As a young boy it was hard to contain Dayaram in a small place. He skipped classes at school and escaped to neighboring towns to look for distraction. When the rains stopped and the days grew cooler, he would also go to the riverside and fly kites in the open fields. That’s when something happened, he said, that changed his life.
It was a lovely windy afternoon. The air was damp and the sky was bluish grey. There were some common kites and egrets flying about and the grass was long and green. The dirt road that went through the open fields ran along the river between thickets and clusters of overgrowth all around. Dayaram took the road as far as the high walls of the stone pit and finally found a spot to rest his back on a wall that had ad lines of 'Mohan Biri' and ''Bapi underclothes' painted all over the uneven surface in gargantuan letters.
He sat there for some time and didn’t know when he had dozed off. He woke up to the sound of voices that sounded like people arguing over plans for a robbery that night. Darkness had deepened by then and fireflies were out and glowing. Dayaram realized he had to run back home. He got up stealthily and crept along the wall to take the dirt road to where it ended near the little cluster of housing of the small insignificant town. When he reached the end of the wall and took a turn he fell into a ditch and unknowingly gave out a cry. In a few seconds he saw shadows of hefty men moving out of the factory and looking around. Dayaram slumped to the ground in the long grass to hide but at that moment a stray dog came to make friends with him. It started licking his face. The delirious movement of its tail was noticed by one of the men and he moved towards where Dayaram lay hiding. The others followed him.
When Dayaram was brought inside the small enclosure of the walled stone factory, someone shone a torch on his face and to his worry he heard a cry escape from the man behind the torch. It was his elder brother. That night Dayaram was escorted home by Shivram but in the days that followed he paid tenfold for playing truant. He was threatened and tortured every day to keep his eyes and mouth shut about Shivram’s nocturnal deeds failing which he would never be seen alive. He was made to witness mugging, rape and even robbery. Not just that he was made to use his lassoing skill to entrap victims and fell them to the ground. He didn’t know when he had become an active member of his brother’s gang. Occasionally, he even got rewarded for his special talent after some unthinkable nefarious acts of violence that got committed in which he was also involved against his wishes. He had no motivation to go to school or even make friends with boys his age anymore. He started losing weight as he lost his appetite. He had turned into his brother’s slave. That was seventeen years ago. Now he was a man of thirty-two and still feared to talk about his own feats.
Unfortunately, when Bharati was found near a ditch with her head twisted and broken, snapping the spinal cord from the skull, his big brother was the first one to incriminate him.
Bharati was not a docile, silly woman. She was clever enough to guess what her husband, Shivram, was up to. First, she thought it was another woman that he went to most nights -sneaking out the back door while she pretended to be asleep. She even followed him up to a point a few times but Shivram would evaporate into thin air suddenly in the dark -- a few yards away before she could even rub her eyes to look for him. What disturbed her most was the fact that Shivram would often wake Daya up and drag him along on his nocturnal trips. She knew Daya was a simple boy who was devoted to Shivram and grew suspicious of her husband’s motives behind the practice.
The following days would be strenuous for the whole family as Bharti would not go in to the kitchen and not lift a single finger to do housework. She would lie in bed whimpering and cursing the whole family. This enraged Shivram no end when he returned home to find his partially blind mother doing all the work and he would beat her black and blue till she got up and entered the kitchen to cook for him. Shivram had never been a kind husband. In fact, he never missed an opportunity to cause her grief. He did have a morbid appetite to give her pain. Dayaram could hear her groans of agony whenever Shivram was around, but said nothing. He chose to walk out of the house and sit in the park nearby where boys played football or cricket. He was still in awe of his big brother.
Soon Bharti got wind of Shivram’s activities when she realized that every time he was out at night, some crime took place in the neighborhood and nearby towns.
One day she caught Dayaram by the collar to tell her the truth. Daya was disturbed to see his sister- in –law at the end of her patience. A little pressure brought out the truth from him.
Bharti sat still for a while, her eyes flashing, her fiery red anger rising to destroy everything in sight. She gave him a venomous look out of her small eyes and tightened her mouth. “I will see how you two can get away with such evil acts.” She looked fierce as she spoke." I’ll destroy you both.” She gave Dayaram a look of contempt and disappeared from his sight. Daya knew that this could bid ill for the days lying ahead.
He noticed a subdued recklessness about Bharti in the days that followed. She talked to neighbors more often and went to the women’s centre to offer her services even for a low wage. Some thought she was asking for trouble and some liked to see her defy that notorious husband of hers. But no one knew that Bharti was making plans for something that would set the town on fire and Shivram and Dayaram thrown in jail for life. During one of her periodic visits to the local temple she went straight to the ‘thana
The police swooped down the little house turning everything upside down and picked up Shivram from the stone factory and his men from places they were to be found. Daya and his parents stood mute in fear. Later in custody when Shivram was visited by Daya and Bharti with their father, he just glared at Daya and fumed. Bharti said nothing and stood there with downcast eyes under her ‘pallu’. The following week, Bharti’s body was found in the ditch with her neck twisted not very far from where they lived. Everybody said it was an evil spirit who did the job while Shivram was in jail and Daya away at the stone factory filling in for his brother as a 'temp'.
Shivram wailed and shed copious tears. He took his younger brother’s name to say that he was the actual culprit in all the misdeeds that had been recorded in his name. Most victims of their attack died the way Bharti died, with their neck broken with the pull of a lasso. He was not only a blood thirsty young man but was an immoral young man having an illicit relationship with his loving wife whom he adored. This horrified Daya who looked up to Bharti as his second mother and thankfully the theory was rejected on grounds that it was not a strong enough motive to get rid of Bharti, if it were true. However there were no eye witnesses or enough evidence to incriminate Daya. He needed to serve time for being an accomplice to his brother in his unsavory crimes. The police still needed to do a lot of investigation before they could come to any conclusion regarding the murder of Bharti.
Both Shivram and Dayaram had been in police custody for the last six years in different jails waiting for the final verdict.
*******
Meghna was feeling a little under the weather. She had another migraine attack. If it was from hitting a dead-end or just a physical symptom of an attack of Dengue, she wasn’t sure. But she headed for the jail to sit with Dayaram again. Last week she was not successful in getting any new facts out of him on the murder of Bharti. The police were still baffled in finding a motive behind the killing, especially when Shivram was in jail when it took place. They never paid much heed to Shivram’s ramblings as their neighbors and family shot his whole accusation down by saying that Daya was a loner by nature and an artist who spent time making stone figures in the courtyard most of the day. He also sold them to his neighbors and friends to make an honest living.
In the meantime, Meghna had been to his little town to meet his family and found his old parents shuffling along to stay alive. They had courted silence and spoke feebly if they ever did. There was not much coherence in what they said anyway. They passed no judgment on the ghastly deeds theirs sons were engaged in either. Dayaram’s mother had gone blind and needed help to move around. His father was short of hearing. Or perhaps, he had shut the world out of his hearing.
The neighbors had much to say about Shivram but no one said anything untoward about Daya. The general opinion was that he was a quiet guy, always bullied and dominated by his elder brother who was not only hot-tempered but obnoxious too with criminal inclinations. Surprisingly, Daya worshipped his brother and was a slave to him. Deeply attached to his family, he could never raise his voice against his seniors. They never heard any arguments between the brothers but yellings from Shivram who called his younger brother names and mostly a wimp and a coward. It came as a shock to them that Daya should also join his brother to engage in sordid misdeeds that went against his very nature.
The police didn’t know what to believe.
*******
Dayaram looked up when Meghna sat facing him in the dingy room that smelt of human body odour of the worst kind. The wooden table and chairs creaked when touched to be pulled. There were cobwebs hanging as a screen between the ceiling and the fan overhead. The policeman who opened the door for him was happy to wait outside and seemed least interested in their conversation. Daya looked tired and older than he was.
“I’m not going to ask you the same questions again, Dayaram,” Meghna said kindly with a faint smile. “But I must know one thing. Will you tell me the truth?”
Dayaram gave a blank stare. She knew he had made up his mind to say no more. He looked drained and a bit displeased. There was a long pause. At the end of it Meghna leaned forward and said almost in a whisper, “Did anyone else know how to pull a lasso like you do?” She was looking at him intently.
First there was shock in Dayaram’s eyes; then he lowered them to look at his hands on the table. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“Did you teach anybody how to use the ‘lasso’ technique from a distance?”
Dayaram just shook his head three times and remained silent. Meghna sat studying him for a while. Then she got up and paced the small room a bit thinking. Then she returned to her seat again and stood there holding the back of her chair.
She inhaled deeply and sighed. “Then why Dayaram?”
Dayaram looked up sharply, his eyes flashing for an instant. Then with a flicker he shut them and his body went limp. It took him a while to fathom what Meghna was asking him. When he opened his eyes again, they were moist. He was breathing fast and his body grew stiff.
Suddenly with the jerk of his head he looked up. His eyes looked insane.
“Because she threatened to kill him.” he hissed. This time his body was shaking and his voice sounded raspy. “She had no business to go behind his back to report to the police.” He looked angry now. "She betrayed him. She was a traitor. ‘Bhaiya’ always said that there was no place for a traitor in our family.”
“So you decided to punish her?” Meghna was curt. “You took the law in your own hands.Or you just wanted to play God, didn’t you?” Her voice was loaded with sarcasm this time.
Suddenly Dayaram was weeping like a child. Meghna watched him for a while. Her face expressed anger mixed with pity and soon it was replaced by disappointment. She picked up her bag and files and left the room with a heavy heart.
When Dayaram’s room was being cleared, they found a small notebook tucked in the handmade secret pocket of his shirt. It had only one line written in it thousands of times.
“God, I have sinned. Please forgive me.”
***********
Copyright: Dola Dutta Roy
Calcutta
FOR: APRIL 2014
THE APPRENTICE
All Rights Reserved
Meghna was too tired to talk on the phone. In fact, she was exhausted. She was just back from her session with the jail inmates, listening to them and making careful comments on their attitude that needed to be corrected. She promised Shumit that she would see him the next day. He realized that she had gone into her shell once again and would like to be there for some time.
Meghna had a headache. It was a hard task convincing the inmates as most of them believed they were misguided and misjudged. There were complaints against the decadence in the social system, the judiciary and life in general. It was extremely difficult for her to make them see what they did wrong. What irked her most was that there was hardly any remorse or guilt in the minds of most of them. Some even looked hostile enough to want to commit the same crime given a chance. As a counselor this weighed on her mind.
But it was not always like this. It was a relief that once in a while she found some guys who listened to her and were willing to do some self -reflection and even said that they were sorry. They thanked her for introducing them to the Law of Karma -- giving them a different perspective to the eternity of life and death. On those days she came home jubilant and was eager to finish her report.
Today was not one of those days.
Today Dayaram didn’t speak at all. He held his head low and communicated in monosyllables only. He was one of those who staggered into a jail sentence for a crime that he, perhaps, didn’t commit and stood hovering over a precarious situation. Yet circumstantial evidence went against him contradicting testimonies from neighbors and associates saying that he was innocent. He stood just a few inches away from a death penalty. Meghna’s task was either to make him admit his heinous act or restore his waning self-esteem and return him to his nest to hold his head high. The court so far hadn't come to any satisfactory conclusion.
Some days Dayaram got too uncooperative and it was hard for Meghna to press him further. So after a while she would pack up and leave giving him a few words of comfort asking him to get in touch with his own soul. It was one of those days.
Dayaram was inattentive and restless. He refused to elaborate on his story that he had repeated a number of times on his alibi on what he did on the day Bharti was found murdered. His story had moved Meghna and she was struggling with the thought that he may have been framed for some odd reason and was, therefore, needed to be snubbed out by the prosecuting party. But what was most mystifying was that Dayaram chose to remain reticent about the true facts behind the conspiracy, if there were any, and she wanted to pry it out of him.
However, Dayaram was not a degenerate. He looked clean and sober. In his free time he liked to do some reading and lately he had been asking for spiritual books that he devoured with relish. He also made some notes but kept his little notebook hidden somewhere where others wouldn’t get to see. This came out in one of his unguarded emotional moments during a conversation with Meghna. But he wouldn’t tell her what he wrote in it. No amount of pressure or cajoling brought it out of him. Meghna gave up pursuing the matter and moved on to other topics like things that he was interested in as a child.
She was surprised that Dayaram’s major passion as a child was to fly kites in the open skies, that too racing with the birds in flight. He tried to catch them in the loop that he tried creating with the glass-coated string to pull them down. Sometimes they would escape and sometimes bits and pieces of their feathers or claws got disengaged from their unsuspecting bodies in the air. Not that Dayaram minded that. And if he happened to catch a full bird, he spread out its wings wide and studied its body parts with great concentration. Later, he would walk to the stone pit where his elder brother worked and steal a nice piece of stone or marble. Back home using Shivram’s tools, secretly he would carve out a replica of the bird that looked inert but real. His unofficial sessions as an apprentice to his big brother, Shivram, were beginning to help him grasp the art of skillful carving with the help of some interesting tools. He kept a jute bag under his bed and put all the stone birds he created in it. Nobody knew about them except Bharti, Shivram’s wife.
Strange way to pursue a hobby, Meghna thought.
Bharti liked the stone birds and gave each one of them a name for its shape and size. She said that someday Daya was going to be great stone-cutter, an artist, and make a name for himself. But Daya warned her not to mention this little secret to Shivram. He was petrified of his brother, ten years his senior and a bully. So was Bharti and she didn’t want to upset him either. Soon he graduated to animal forms replicating his catch with stronger strings and greater skill.
*******
After dinner Meghna sat down with Dayaram’s file and absently turned the pages. Dayaram’s reticence disturbed her. This was the first time she found something that made her feel incompetent to understand the psyche of a criminal mind. It also gave him no chance to defend himself. Was he really such a fool? Did he not care for his aging parents who needed support, she wondered!
Dayaram came from a suburban home. His family was small with just his parents, his elder brother and his wife, Bharti, and himself. As a young boy it was hard to contain Dayaram in a small place. He skipped classes at school and escaped to neighboring towns to look for distraction. When the rains stopped and the days grew cooler, he would also go to the riverside and fly kites in the open fields. That’s when something happened, he said, that changed his life.
It was a lovely windy afternoon. The air was damp and the sky was bluish grey. There were some common kites and egrets flying about and the grass was long and green. The dirt road that went through the open fields ran along the river between thickets and clusters of overgrowth all around. Dayaram took the road as far as the high walls of the stone pit and finally found a spot to rest his back on a wall that had ad lines of 'Mohan Biri' and ''Bapi underclothes' painted all over the uneven surface in gargantuan letters.
He sat there for some time and didn’t know when he had dozed off. He woke up to the sound of voices that sounded like people arguing over plans for a robbery that night. Darkness had deepened by then and fireflies were out and glowing. Dayaram realized he had to run back home. He got up stealthily and crept along the wall to take the dirt road to where it ended near the little cluster of housing of the small insignificant town. When he reached the end of the wall and took a turn he fell into a ditch and unknowingly gave out a cry. In a few seconds he saw shadows of hefty men moving out of the factory and looking around. Dayaram slumped to the ground in the long grass to hide but at that moment a stray dog came to make friends with him. It started licking his face. The delirious movement of its tail was noticed by one of the men and he moved towards where Dayaram lay hiding. The others followed him.
When Dayaram was brought inside the small enclosure of the walled stone factory, someone shone a torch on his face and to his worry he heard a cry escape from the man behind the torch. It was his elder brother. That night Dayaram was escorted home by Shivram but in the days that followed he paid tenfold for playing truant. He was threatened and tortured every day to keep his eyes and mouth shut about Shivram’s nocturnal deeds failing which he would never be seen alive. He was made to witness mugging, rape and even robbery. Not just that he was made to use his lassoing skill to entrap victims and fell them to the ground. He didn’t know when he had become an active member of his brother’s gang. Occasionally, he even got rewarded for his special talent after some unthinkable nefarious acts of violence that got committed in which he was also involved against his wishes. He had no motivation to go to school or even make friends with boys his age anymore. He started losing weight as he lost his appetite. He had turned into his brother’s slave. That was seventeen years ago. Now he was a man of thirty-two and still feared to talk about his own feats.
Unfortunately, when Bharati was found near a ditch with her head twisted and broken, snapping the spinal cord from the skull, his big brother was the first one to incriminate him.
Bharati was not a docile, silly woman. She was clever enough to guess what her husband, Shivram, was up to. First, she thought it was another woman that he went to most nights -sneaking out the back door while she pretended to be asleep. She even followed him up to a point a few times but Shivram would evaporate into thin air suddenly in the dark -- a few yards away before she could even rub her eyes to look for him. What disturbed her most was the fact that Shivram would often wake Daya up and drag him along on his nocturnal trips. She knew Daya was a simple boy who was devoted to Shivram and grew suspicious of her husband’s motives behind the practice.
The following days would be strenuous for the whole family as Bharti would not go in to the kitchen and not lift a single finger to do housework. She would lie in bed whimpering and cursing the whole family. This enraged Shivram no end when he returned home to find his partially blind mother doing all the work and he would beat her black and blue till she got up and entered the kitchen to cook for him. Shivram had never been a kind husband. In fact, he never missed an opportunity to cause her grief. He did have a morbid appetite to give her pain. Dayaram could hear her groans of agony whenever Shivram was around, but said nothing. He chose to walk out of the house and sit in the park nearby where boys played football or cricket. He was still in awe of his big brother.
Soon Bharti got wind of Shivram’s activities when she realized that every time he was out at night, some crime took place in the neighborhood and nearby towns.
One day she caught Dayaram by the collar to tell her the truth. Daya was disturbed to see his sister- in –law at the end of her patience. A little pressure brought out the truth from him.
Bharti sat still for a while, her eyes flashing, her fiery red anger rising to destroy everything in sight. She gave him a venomous look out of her small eyes and tightened her mouth. “I will see how you two can get away with such evil acts.” She looked fierce as she spoke." I’ll destroy you both.” She gave Dayaram a look of contempt and disappeared from his sight. Daya knew that this could bid ill for the days lying ahead.
He noticed a subdued recklessness about Bharti in the days that followed. She talked to neighbors more often and went to the women’s centre to offer her services even for a low wage. Some thought she was asking for trouble and some liked to see her defy that notorious husband of hers. But no one knew that Bharti was making plans for something that would set the town on fire and Shivram and Dayaram thrown in jail for life. During one of her periodic visits to the local temple she went straight to the ‘
The police swooped down the little house turning everything upside down and picked up Shivram from the stone factory and his men from places they were to be found. Daya and his parents stood mute in fear. Later in custody when Shivram was visited by Daya and Bharti with their father, he just glared at Daya and fumed. Bharti said nothing and stood there with downcast eyes under her ‘pallu’. The following week, Bharti’s body was found in the ditch with her neck twisted not very far from where they lived. Everybody said it was an evil spirit who did the job while Shivram was in jail and Daya away at the stone factory filling in for his brother as a 'temp'.
Shivram wailed and shed copious tears. He took his younger brother’s name to say that he was the actual culprit in all the misdeeds that had been recorded in his name. Most victims of their attack died the way Bharti died, with their neck broken with the pull of a lasso. He was not only a blood thirsty young man but was an immoral young man having an illicit relationship with his loving wife whom he adored. This horrified Daya who looked up to Bharti as his second mother and thankfully the theory was rejected on grounds that it was not a strong enough motive to get rid of Bharti, if it were true. However there were no eye witnesses or enough evidence to incriminate Daya. He needed to serve time for being an accomplice to his brother in his unsavory crimes. The police still needed to do a lot of investigation before they could come to any conclusion regarding the murder of Bharti.
Both Shivram and Dayaram had been in police custody for the last six years in different jails waiting for the final verdict.
*******
Meghna was feeling a little under the weather. She had another migraine attack. If it was from hitting a dead-end or just a physical symptom of an attack of Dengue, she wasn’t sure. But she headed for the jail to sit with Dayaram again. Last week she was not successful in getting any new facts out of him on the murder of Bharti. The police were still baffled in finding a motive behind the killing, especially when Shivram was in jail when it took place. They never paid much heed to Shivram’s ramblings as their neighbors and family shot his whole accusation down by saying that Daya was a loner by nature and an artist who spent time making stone figures in the courtyard most of the day. He also sold them to his neighbors and friends to make an honest living.
In the meantime, Meghna had been to his little town to meet his family and found his old parents shuffling along to stay alive. They had courted silence and spoke feebly if they ever did. There was not much coherence in what they said anyway. They passed no judgment on the ghastly deeds theirs sons were engaged in either. Dayaram’s mother had gone blind and needed help to move around. His father was short of hearing. Or perhaps, he had shut the world out of his hearing.
The neighbors had much to say about Shivram but no one said anything untoward about Daya. The general opinion was that he was a quiet guy, always bullied and dominated by his elder brother who was not only hot-tempered but obnoxious too with criminal inclinations. Surprisingly, Daya worshipped his brother and was a slave to him. Deeply attached to his family, he could never raise his voice against his seniors. They never heard any arguments between the brothers but yellings from Shivram who called his younger brother names and mostly a wimp and a coward. It came as a shock to them that Daya should also join his brother to engage in sordid misdeeds that went against his very nature.
The police didn’t know what to believe.
*******
Dayaram looked up when Meghna sat facing him in the dingy room that smelt of human body odour of the worst kind. The wooden table and chairs creaked when touched to be pulled. There were cobwebs hanging as a screen between the ceiling and the fan overhead. The policeman who opened the door for him was happy to wait outside and seemed least interested in their conversation. Daya looked tired and older than he was.
“I’m not going to ask you the same questions again, Dayaram,” Meghna said kindly with a faint smile. “But I must know one thing. Will you tell me the truth?”
Dayaram gave a blank stare. She knew he had made up his mind to say no more. He looked drained and a bit displeased. There was a long pause. At the end of it Meghna leaned forward and said almost in a whisper, “Did anyone else know how to pull a lasso like you do?” She was looking at him intently.
First there was shock in Dayaram’s eyes; then he lowered them to look at his hands on the table. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“Did you teach anybody how to use the ‘lasso’ technique from a distance?”
Dayaram just shook his head three times and remained silent. Meghna sat studying him for a while. Then she got up and paced the small room a bit thinking. Then she returned to her seat again and stood there holding the back of her chair.
She inhaled deeply and sighed. “Then why Dayaram?”
Dayaram looked up sharply, his eyes flashing for an instant. Then with a flicker he shut them and his body went limp. It took him a while to fathom what Meghna was asking him. When he opened his eyes again, they were moist. He was breathing fast and his body grew stiff.
Suddenly with the jerk of his head he looked up. His eyes looked insane.
“Because she threatened to kill him.” he hissed. This time his body was shaking and his voice sounded raspy. “She had no business to go behind his back to report to the police.” He looked angry now. "She betrayed him. She was a traitor. ‘Bhaiya’ always said that there was no place for a traitor in our family.”
“So you decided to punish her?” Meghna was curt. “You took the law in your own hands.Or you just wanted to play God, didn’t you?” Her voice was loaded with sarcasm this time.
Suddenly Dayaram was weeping like a child. Meghna watched him for a while. Her face expressed anger mixed with pity and soon it was replaced by disappointment. She picked up her bag and files and left the room with a heavy heart.
When Dayaram’s room was being cleared, they found a small notebook tucked in the handmade secret pocket of his shirt. It had only one line written in it thousands of times.
“God, I have sinned. Please forgive me.”
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Copyright: Dola Dutta Roy
