Kavi Mrityu

(i)
It was a dreary, overcast October second. Ramanand Sarkar, an old poet, retired government official and a recluse, went out of his home at around 10.15 am to get his table lamp fixed. There was nothing extraordinary about this. The lamp was an old one, from the nineties, and it needed regular fixing.

Ramanand lived in a DDA LIG Housing Complex with his younger brother, Daya and Daya’s wife and daughter. Daya loved and respected Ram greatly, despite their great differences. Ram had been responsible for Daya’s upbringing and education when both their parents died. Ram was just a sixteen year old boy at the time, and Daya had only turned four. Ram was married once, but his wife died of blood cancer only a year after their marriage. The neighbourhood had always known Ram as an ‘amiable, but reserved’ man, engaging in most social events of their building complex ‘Suvidha Enclave’, but still somehow managing to merge with the background. His brother Daya insisted that it was because Ram was a ‘true poet’ he had this uncanny ability to disappear into the crowd and the chaos. Whatever it was, when Ram was officially reported missing that evening, there were very few in the locality (except his immediate family of course) that actually did miss him. Some neighbours were even discretely surprised that Ram was still alive.

The missing complaint was filed at Ashok Nagar Police Station at exactly 8:25 pm, and Inspector Govind Sagar visited Ram’s home for further investigation. Ram remained missing the next day, and then the next, and then so on. Inspector Govind Sagar was a lazy but sincere, generic sort of a man, and along with Rishu Ramesh, the young and driven Sub-Inspector, they pieced together the peculiar details of this missing persons case. It turned out that Ram had reached the electrical store at the Gharoli Main Bazar at around 10:30 am, where he met Sunil, the light-man, who, being unoccupied that day, began fixing the lamp right away, and might have finished his work in about half an hour. ‘The base needed a fix, it was a five minute job,’ he initially told Inspector Govind, but later changed his testimony, saying that it might have taken half an hour as the ‘wire needed to be replaced’ and he didn’t have the wire on him, so he went to a different wire shop, got the wire, and fixed the lamp. He was positive that he had given Ram the fixed lamp ‘as good as new, Sir’ by around 11 am. From there, it was later pieced together and revealed that Ram went to a paneer shop and bought a kilogram of paneer. He made a UPI payment of Rs 240 to the paneer shop owner at precisely 11:13 am. The cctv outside Shobha Opticals captured Ram walking towards the entrance gate of Suvidha Enclave at exactly 11:18 am. This shop, Shobha Opticals, was not more than two minutes away from his home. This meant he would have reached the colony gate at around 11:20. The guard didn’t remember seeing him enter or exit, but that was understandable. It was a busy hour and the guard had many visitors and entries to deal with. And anyway, as we have already seen, Ram somehow knew how to not be seen. So, Ramanand Sarkar was outside the colony gate at close to half-past eleven, but he never made it home. The obvious question loomed in the neighbourhood: where was Ram?

The team of cops sent out word to their underground networks. Daya’s wife Sunita was terrified of a ransom call. They had been going through financial troubles, and their situation was akin to dough gone damp in poverty. The neighbourhood gossiped that Sunita was ‘so relieved’ when Ram’s rotting body was found, a week later, in the garbage dump of Ghazipur. The workers at the dump hadn’t found the body earlier because its rotting stench had completely merged with the stench of the rest of the garbage. The autopsy report revealed the cause of death. ‘Cardiac Arrhythmia Due to (or as a consequence of): Sudden Surge of Catecholamines Secondary to Acute Emotional Shock, Other Significant Conditions: Structurally Normal Heart (suggestive of autonomic dysregulation)’. This technical-sounding verdict basically meant that although Ram had a normal heart, something caused him severe shock or stress, perhaps even astonishment, which resulted in an instant cardiac arrest. You would die this way if you fell off a very high cliff and suffered a stroke midway through descent. He had suffered no external wounds. The case initially had not come across as one of homicide. Several questions were unanswered. How did Ram manage to find his way all the way to the Ghazipur garbage dump, and how exactly did he die there? His body was buried deep in a garbage mound that might have accumulated for at least a few months prior. Did someone bury him there? Why? The prime suspect in this curious case was Ram’s younger brother Daya. During this ordeal of the Sarkar family, someone spread a rumour in the colony that things had not been all hunky dory in the Ramanand Sarkar household. This rumour spread, and details, true or not, began to emerge. Sunita was seen shouting, no, howling at Ram just a week prior to his going missing. Others claimed that Daya, who had been struggling financially for at least a decade, had asked Ram to go back to their maternal ancestral home in Dibrugarh, but Ram had refused, and this had caused much tension and strife in the family. The rumours somehow ended up becoming police evidence, ‘tips’, and Daya was brought in for questioning. But, of course, the investigation went nowhere and the police had no answers. This was also a slightly burdensome time for the police personnel at Ashok Nagar thana, as the death of a minor Malayali boy had caused a stir in the neighbourhood. The boy was murdered in a brutal fistfight by a Gujjar boy, and the two prominent sub-communities of the district, Malayalis and Gujjars were on the verge of a full scale battle. Amid rising tension and media pressure around this death, the Ramanand Sarkar case went a bit pale and inactive. The investigation would have died out (as the missing person had already been found) had Daya not called-up his friend, Vipin, the son of IAS officer, P S Nauriyal, posted in Lutyens Delhi. Inspector Sagar received a call from P S Nauriyal’s office at dinner time, November 11, and that call immediately expedited the case. A few arrests were made, but the case was nowhere near being solved. Inspector Sagar decided to go once again to Ram’s residence and take a final look at the house, perhaps find something they might have earlier missed, but it was also the month of Inspector Sagar’s daughter’s intercaste wedding, and because the marriage was intercaste, to compensate for loss of pride it had to be even more flamboyant and loud than any other wedding the neighbourhood had ever seen. Naturally, Inspector Sagar was kept thoroughly busy with the wedding preparations, and SI Rishu Ramesh had to be sent to the Ramanand residence ‘to take a good look at everything’.

(ii)

But Rishu Ramesh had his own ‘affairs’ to attend to, and if it wasn’t for chain of command, and his compulsive obedience, he would never have let Lata, his lover, be stranded alone waiting for him in such sweet rainy weather. Lata was a young, loveable girl employed as a primary school teacher in a small slum school run by a local Christian organisation. She had known Rishu Ramesh since childhood, first as a playmate, then as a tuition fellow, eventually as a neighbourhood hero, and finally, as her lover. For some reason, to her, the two of them always made sense to each other. Though her head was full of all sorts of confusions, her love for Rishu was always obvious to her. They both always seemed to end up together wherever, whenever. Their natures, she knew, couldn’t be more dissimilar, but that was what attracted her to him in the first place. He was all that she could never be, and she was all that was incomplete in him. While Rishu was a rugged man of the streets, sharp, brutish and somewhat stupid, Lata thought of herself as a sheltered, cunning, and manipulative woman. Anyone who knew Lata could never have guessed how she perceived herself. The defining trait of her personality, as her inner friend circle knew, was her unusual appetite for romance and death. She read endlessly and widely on the two themes, books she’d pick from the Delhi Public Library in Sarojini Nagar or the Sunday Book Bazaar. Rishu loved the fact that his girlfriend and would-be-wife could read and write in English and took great pride in the fact that though he had no patience for the written word, Lata read enough for the two of them, and then some. So when he was rummaging about in the Ramanand Sarkar household, getting a bit bored by all the details, looking here and there at evidence he had seen many times over, and all the while dreaming of his Lata, his eyes caught a glimpse of a torn thin notebook in Ramanand’s bookshelf. This seemed like Ram’s own personal journal, and SI Rishu instantly wondered how such an interesting piece of evidence could have evaded detection so far. On asking about the existence of this journal, Daya said that this was nothing extraordinary, as Ram had been a prolific writer all his life (though he never published much) and they had a whole almirah full of notebooks and journals belonging to Ram. Indeed when Daya showed Rishu the almirah of Ram’s books catching dust in a dim corner of his room, Rishu was overcome by an inexplicable and sudden sense of lust; he imagined the nape of Lata’s neck and her full upper-lips. Rishu told Ram that they would take some of the notebooks and get them vetted by an expert to determine Ram’s psychological state before his disappearance and death. That is exactly what Rishu did. He took a few books at random to submit as ‘evidence’ in Ram’s case. This, he thought, would help determine whether Ram’s death could be considered homicide or just a curious case of natural demise. He was about to leave the Sarkar household with the newfound evidence and a raging need for lovemaking when he was suddenly stopped at the door.

‘But what about the lamp, sir?’ Daya asked in a tone that completely baffled Rishu for a moment.

‘The … what?’ said SI Rishu Ramesh.

‘The lamp, Sir. The lamp was not found with his body, but he had taken it with him. The lamp is clearly visible even in the last CCTV footage seen of him. But where is it now?’

Daya asked. His wife Sunita was peeping out through the curtains, staring alertly at the SI.

‘We don’t know yet, but it could be anywhere. The lamp is not important,’ Rishu said, his head once again so filled with sensual fantasies of Lata, that even the sight of Dayanand’s old wife (who was standing braless in a thin blue nightgown) excited him.

‘What do you mean the lamp is not important? It was his favourite lamp! Why do you think he went out that day? To fix that damn lamp! And you say it is not important! A whole lamp goes missing, you think that’s not important, and you think these lousy old books of his are oh-so important … my god, is this how you will find out who murdered him?’ Sunita yelled.

She seemed like she was on the verge of throwing a fit. Daya pushed her inside after her outburst.

‘First of all, who said anything about a murder? We have not determined that Ramanand Sarkar was indeed murdered, and second, please do not tell me how to do my job. I understand that this (his thought-stream broke off suddenly) … We are doing our best, rest assured…, Dayanand ji, I am leaving for now, okay? I will surely let you know every relevant development, please try not to call the higher-ups for everything. Some things, nobody can fix.’ Rishu immediately went to the head-office, submitted Ram’s books as further evidence to be looked into when Inspector Sagar came back from his daughter’s wedding, and rushed to meet Lata.

(iii)

‘A notebook, you say? What kind?’ Lata asked, her eyes lit by the sparkle of uncontainable excitement. Smritivan Park bustled with the colours of its everyday evenings: sweaty smiling faces glowing, a colourful cacophony of suits and shirts, distinct eyes that held the stories of our world. Rishu Ramesh was in his civilian clothes, a white shirt and grey pants. Lata was wearing a yellow salwar-kameez which fitted perfectly over her taut dusky body. The lovers sat on a green bench by the shade of a champa. Rishu ignored the question and inched closer towards Lata to smell her hair.

‘Stop! It’s a busy hour. There are people all around. Tell me, a notebook?’ Lata insisted on her question. There was a teasing tone to her voice which did not go unnoticed by Rishu.

‘Hmm. A diary of some kind. He had a whole almirah full.’ Rishu said passively.

‘Ah! What did he write in it? Did you read it?’

‘A bit. It seemed like long-winded poetry.’

‘Ooh! A notebook of poems! Sounds exciting!’

‘We will use them to determine whether there was some strife in the family, or some such troubles the old man may have gone through, and hopefully that will help sort things out a bit.’

‘Oh, so, you think he will reveal his murderer in his poems? Too easy, Mr Sub-Inspector!’

‘I just hope it’s a plain old heart-attack.’

‘Let me read the poems.’ Lata said in a voice that sounded for a moment like it was coming from elsewhere. Rishu heard the sentence as a distant echo. There was a ringing in his ears. He looked around; no one was near. He inched close and bit Lata’s earlobes. Lata closed her eyes and moaned silently.

‘Come on, Rishu! Just once.’

‘Once what?’

‘Let me read the dead man’s poems.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You never do anything for me!’

‘Whatever I do, I do for you, please.’

‘Just this once!’

Rishu chose not to respond but when he saw Lata picking up her stuff and packing to leave him hanging, he couldn’t help himself. He had the first notebook which he picked from Ram’s house in his bag. Just when Lata was about to get up, looking all annoyed and a thousand times cuter, he extracted the book from his bag and handed it to her.

‘You are lucky I have this with me.’

‘And right on time too! You are the best, Mr SI.’

Rishu lunged towards her and squeezed her tight; she let him. Then, she promptly put the notebook in her bag and got up.

‘Just what do you think you are doing?’ asked Rishu.

‘Taking the book with me to read at home. You cannot expect me to read it here and now!’ she said, in a playful tone.

‘Give me the book back. It is evidence. It needs to be filed. I kept this one in my bag and forgot to submit it earlier.’

‘See, mistakes can be made. You can forget to submit it for one more day!’ she said and ran off laughing. She felt truly happy. Rishu chased after her and this game lasted for an hour.

(iv)
The last month had been difficult for Lata. She could sense she was going through changes, though just what the changes entailed evaded her. There was a deep despair that would catch hold of her, all of a sudden without notice, and she would collapse into a crippling sense of doom. This would happen sometimes while on her way to work she’d notice a bunch of children, naked as they came, roaming about in rough concrete, their bellies protruding from hunger, their eyes a grand abyss between hope and hopelessness. Sometimes the sight of a pair of donkeys munching on dry grass next to the wall of a Noida factory would move her to tears. There were many such inexplicable moments of terrifying compassion. This was new for her. She did not know what to make of it. And that evening after coming home from meeting her lover, when she should have been happy as ever, she felt suddenly depressed. She switched off the tubelight in her room of green walls and lit a dim side lamp and mechanically took out Late Ramanand Sarkar’s notebook from her bag. This precise moment was going to be the defining moment of her life. She began reading through the rough scribbles, half-poems, half-notes, half-journal entries, and suddenly something large and consequential and utterly profound began synthesising in her. She found images in the text that felt like her own memories. She found metaphors that spoke directly to her condition. It was like a terrifying exorcism in her mind. Ram’s notebook took her to the deep crevices of her neighbourhood; the gullies that were forgotten by the hustle-bustle of the marketplace. There was the tale of a woman who loved and fed dogs to the point of madness, to the extent that she would know if even one mongrel was missing in the gully. This woman hung herself when her nine year old daughter was out on her tuition class on an ordinary Wednesday. In this notebook there were curfews in the sky, hatred among the hearts of men, and pigeons shitting on the statues of our civilisational ideals. But beyond these fantasies and meanings, there was Ram’s peculiar touch of prose. The prose had a strange musicality. It was like enchantment to Lata’s ears. While whatever Ram wrote was filled with fantasies and metaphors of all sorts of ruin, there was a mysterious compassion hidden beneath these words. Lata instantly sensed it. She could not even weep, she was so astonished. She felt her heart sinking. She closed the notebook and looked out at the darkness of our city, of our times. There was this familiar stench in the air: the Ghazipur garbage dump. The night was damp after the rains. She heard the piercing cry of a passing bagula, and a strange thought struck her all of a sudden. She believed she finally understood what killed Ramanand Sarkar, but she knew it could not be explained. She instantly perceived why his body was found in the Ghazipur garbage dump, and why, though he had a healthy heart, he had died of a sudden cardiac arrest. She understood Ram’s sudden astonishment on the last day of his life. But this she could not explain, not even properly to herself. But she knew; she knew all too well, and then there was a final overwhelming silence.

That night a few passers-by claimed they had seen Lata walking alone in the middle of the road along the borders towards the North. Nobody saw her again. SI Rishu Ramesh was broken beyond recognition. On examining Ramanand Sarkar’s notebooks, the team of experts couldn’t determine anything conclusive or useful. The case remained open in a limbo for a while, but then eventually everyone lost interest. Daya continues to live a peaceful, if somewhat boring life with his wife and daughter. Everything else remains the same; the stench, the weddings, and the colours of everyday evenings.