None of them brought up the youngest member of their family.
‘I think the older boy wanted to know about his sibling,’ I told Andrew.
‘I thought so, too, but why,’ he said, steering his car through the traffic as we headed back to office.
‘Maybe he genuinely cares, maybe he was not part of those previous murders. He was 23 when they struck in Bengaluru.’
‘He may have known about a couple of them, advanced help to his parents… remotely, perhaps.’
‘His affection could be sincere, or he may just want to piggyback on him when he’s out of prison, which is ina maximum of three years. He could get out for good behaviour before that even.’
‘Or both.’
Andrew had melted into the background, waiting patiently for me to complete my job. The chair next to me was empty, but he had positioned himself behind me, at a considerable distance.
‘Were you comfortable speaking to the younger boy?’
I nodded. ‘He’s lucky in that he was allowed to grow into his own person,’ I said. ‘The lady he now calls his mother shifted from Koramangala to Kengeri less than a year after he went to live with her. That helped him establish a mental distance from that time in his life.’
She had gained employment as a housekeeper in a farmhouse, some 40 kilometres from where she first lived. It was a whole new environment for the boy.
‘Is he aware that his brother could be released from prison soon?’
I nodded, making a mental note to task the graphic artist with an imaginative sketch of the boy. We had file pictures of the parents.
‘Are you going to say he lives somewhere else in your story?’
‘I’ll make him a techie living in Kuala Lumpur maybe, out of the country for sure.’
‘Crime fiction!’
I laughed. No, I had snorted.
Silent tears flowed from my eyes. I didn’t want Andrew to know; I didn’t want anyone to know.
I clenched my hands tight and shut my eyes, willing the tears to stop. I forced myself to breathe quietly. It was at that moment Andrew turned on the radio. I couldn’t havebeen more grateful. I sank back in my seat, and this time, I closed my eyes and let the tears dry.
The volume of words coming at you for almost three hours, your mind taking in all that is being said and not being said, registering the reactions and deciphering content. It’s intense and exhausting. This time, though, it was more than the experience of a couple of hours ago; it was the weight of the last couple of weeks. I felt Andrew’s gaze on me. We had stopped at a signal maybe.
‘That was some show, Myraah Rai. You were doing such an amazing job in there, I wished I were you.’
When I opened my eyes and turned to him, we had already parked. My face was still moist, but he didn’t reach out to dry my tears.
I must’ve been bloody fucking good,I thought. Then I smiled a real smile.
It was Wednesday morning, five days after I had been to Parappana Agrahara.
I was missing my midweek coffee, where I’d have poured out the story to Ravi, repeating details, underlining them. Ravi let me run. He didn’t interrupt or ask me questions, but more than once, he had tried to talk me out of writing this series.
These meetings, listening to the recordings, the emotions that were stirred by recreating the crime, typing out nuances that weren’t in the recorder, were getting me into a state from which I took a while getting out of. I had nightmares after some of these encounters, and in the less gruesome cases, a gloom settled on me in the days that followed. I swung between talking non-stop and going intoreclusive mode. It took me a few days, a week even, to shake off the experience.
This time, I didn’t have an outlet. I spoke to my dad and Chhaya, but I wasn’t able to spill out as much as I would’ve with Ravi. Chhaya attempted to steer the conversation to sunnier shores, trying to help me escape the despair. My father was constantly interrupting, getting up to get something or the other. Still, despite not having a significant conduit, I was more in control of the situation.
Maybe because Andrew had accompanied me for the assignment and I had unconsciously drawn comfort from the company.
Though my spirit was still sore and the air around me was heavy, I was able to get on with my day, live my life without constantly going back to that beastly greed that cost an innocent man his life, leaving his visually impaired wife to grieve.
I had finished writing the two stories, 5,000-odd words, including additional intel that could be used for graphics. I forwarded it to my editor, who decided we should jump the queue and carry the piece this week, ahead of some of the other pieces I had banked.
