I’ve written a few crime novels, but there was a real-life murder case I was involved in that I had all but forgotten till recently.
Almost 20 years ago I used to share a flat with three other boys from Shillong in Indra Vihar in North Delhi, near Delhi University (DU). By the late 90s there were more and more young people from Assam and the Northeast coming to Delhi to study and look for opportunities. They were far too numerous for the university hostels to handle, leading to the development of ‘student colonies’, places like Outram Lines, Indra Vihar and Mukherjee Nagar, residential areas that had first started out as refugee rehabilitation schemes mainly for Punjabis from Pakistan.
Rental idylls
In Indra Vihar, the buildings were stacked one against the other, and the flats all had the same layout: a balcony, a front room, an inside room, a small kitchen, all side by side, then a sort of storeroom with the bathroom beside it — a sort of train-compartment layout. Life spilled outdoors, especially in the hot summer months, and there was a crowded, communal feel to the colony.
There was also a remarkable tolerance for Northeasterners, even when girls and boys threw parties and got high.
We stayed in a second floor flat at one end of the colony. The building owner was a Punjabi man who worked in a government bank in the commercial complex in nearby Mukherjee Nagar, which housed, among others, the famous Batra cinema, a government wine shop, and the offices of the sleazy Crime & Detective magazine. The landlord lived with his short, plump wife and two teenage sons on the first floor. The ground and second floor flats and the barsati room were let. Our landlord would walk to work every morning on a back lane that went past a black, stinking canal, the ganda naala for part of the way , to Mukherjee Nagar.
Sometimes, we would get calls from home on their land line telephone, and sometimes we would ask them for ice from their freezer for our whisky. We would play tennis-ball cricket in the lane in front with their two sons, and when the younger one broke his leg in an accident on his father’s scooter we went to see him at the nearby Hindu Rao hospital.
I was the first among us four to start working, as a trainee journalist with a magazine. We did our housework and washing ourselves, but had a cook who made our lunch and dinner, a well-mannered young Bihari whom I shall call N. He stayed in cheap lodgings somewhere ahead of Mukherjee Nagar.
Midday murder
It was the middle of January in the year 2000. The tenant in the barsati on top and a few girls staying on the ground floor had all gone home. I worked late that particular day, and was dropped off by an office van somewhere around 10 p.m. at night. It was the night of Lohri, and some people in Indra Vihar had lit bonfires before their homes with pieces of wood.
As the van turned into our lane, I saw a crowd gathered below our building. What had happened? It was only after I had made my way up that I learned the story: our landlady had been throttled to death with a length of wire, and it seemed to have happened around noon that day.
Something amiss
Two of my roommates had been home that day, and they had decided to clean up the flat. They had music playing loud, and it was only when, a few hours later, they went out to the balcony for a smoke and saw a crowd below that they realised something was wrong.
Strangely, our landlord, who usually came home for lunch, had not run up and told my roommates when he found the body — lying on the floor in the second room. Instead, he walked back to his bank to tell his colleagues.
A few items were said to be missing, along with some cash, but nothing more than that. When I reached home, my roommates were sitting in the inner room, shocked by the turn of events.
I think we spent most of the next few days cooped up in that room, a feeling of fear upon us. A couple of hefty Delhi policemen came to talk to us: it appeared their interest was in our cook N., who hadn’t come to work since the incident.
A couple of constables came and took me on a scooter — with people in the colony watching — to the thana at Kingsway Camp, where a convivial SHO had a chat with me. It took him a long time to write down my roommates’ Khasi surnames and their addresses. Finally, with nothing definite turning up, he invited me to come and have a beer with him someday, presumably to try and dig some more.
Who benefits?
I must mention here that never did we feel intimidated or harassed by the police; just the unease of being viewed as potential suspects by the colony people, which was only natural I guess. We never saw our cook again, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — as a migrant labourer he would have known the moment he heard what the Delhi police could do to him.
Our landlord subsequently sold the building and moved to Bhai Parmanand Nagar, not too far away. We kept our flat, before finally shifting south to Amar Colony, sometime in 2001 I think.
Close call
A day or two before we shifted, my roommate suggested we go and say goodbye to Uncle. We met near his new home — he didn’t invite us in — out on a busy road as evening fell. The details of that short meeting escape me now, except for one thing that happened towards the end, which I can never forget. With autos and cars and buses screeching by, the mild-mannered bank employee told us something to the effect of: “And listen, remember that it was I who told the police not to go after you people.”
They still give me a chill, those words. Were we being given a warning, not to come poking around any more?
My roommates and I discussed how his wife had been sick and in hospital for many months before the incident. How much would he have spent on her, on his son’s treatment? It seemed the true heart of Delhi had been opened to us then. Or could we have been mistaken? Needless to say, I never did go for that beer with the SHO. I wish I had: it would have been useful to me now in my writing.
Ankush Saikia is the author of the Detective Arjun Arora series.
