Murder Next Door

Introduction

I have grown up on an almost too healthy dose of crime fiction in my life and many summer vacations of my childhood were spent imagining myself to be some sort of crusader living in a noir universe, unearthing some heavy duty clues from cigarette butts and cold corpses. Due to this constant play acting I received many jeers from my colony friends who preferred football or cricket and looked at me as some strange specimen lugging around a cricket bat and crouching behind corners. What they did not understand, of course, was that in my imaginary universe I was actually embroiled in an intense gun battle with the mafia or some criminal mastermind and the cricket bat was my machine gun. By the end of a hot summer day, although my elbows and knees were stained with mud I had usually successfully solved a very tricky crime in my mind and also snagged the pretty, red lipped dame. Such was my childhood, very glamorous in my imagination but otherwise, quite regular.

It is therefore with very little pride I confess that when the time came to prove my prowess in crime detection I did not do too well and in fact, was not able to impress the dame too much.

The primary reason being I realized that in real life corpses can be very unnerving. The way they lie, so still, that one could mistake them for a body in deep sleep. But when you realize that the body is lifeless it is this very stillness that takes on some strange, grotesque anti-performance. Ugh, I don’t even know what I am saying but I am hoping you will get it. Especially if you have ever been the first person to discover death. If you knew the person who ended up dead pretty well. And if you knew much more than that. Dead bodies are bad news.

But I have wandered too far.

I am here to tell you a story. A fascinating story. I have battled of course on whether or not I should put these words on screen. Sometimes, life throws us in such turbulence that the fragile lines of reality and imagination are blurred beyond realization and thus, if you believe every word I say you may be doing yourself a grave injustice. But if you do not believe me you maybe doing yourself a greater injustice. Ah! I will leave all these conundrums for you to solve. I am much too old fashioned to tell you what to think or do.

All you must know is that truth is a very strange thing and depends mostly on how much you will allow it to be. And so is the idea of MURDER!.

Chapter 1

The Beginning

The beginning is a little hazy but I can help you locate it in time with two words.

Student protests.

In the fringes of this big city a gigantic University campus stood aloof of mainstream politics. Then one day this peaceful campus suddenly erupted with protests and the middle class living rooms were invaded by sensational stories of national betrayal and a student level coup. A student leader had been arrested in strange circumstances and the usually benign students had chosen the path of agitation for his release instead of seeking refuge in the usual intellectual debate. It was generally agreed that the arrest was unjustified and unprovoked. The situation blew up and became national headline because of some wayward political decisions and enthusiastic news channels. Support for these students poured in from all academic quarters but the media and general public remained largely suspicious. The government became paranoid and refused to release the student leader sending most of the student bodies in a frenzy. I will not go into the details of this University or the incident that has now been largely settled although only in the surface. I am mainly mentioning them to help the reader understand the atmosphere and the times.

What the reader should know though is that I was very affected by all that was happening. Although it had been sometime that I had completed my education in Delhi University and had already forayed into the difficult reality of fending for myself by working as a lowly content writer in a PR firm. But such was my attachment to my alma mater that  I decided to live close by so that my former classmates and juniors were not very far and I could pop by their places for a quick chat and get the latest update about this matter in which they were also involved through protests and marches.

To anyone who is familiar with North Campus, once you leave behind Gupta Colony, a students’ ghetto with skyrocketing rents, there comes a rundown establishment called Gurmandi. It is a strange place that straddles two worlds- one half of the place shows signs of upliftment with new flats and clean roads while the other half rests in muck, filth and flies with half naked children running around among pig stool and cattle fodder. Most of the street hawkers of the North Campus area retire to this half at the end of the day. Although I would not call this place anymore unsafe than other places, petty thefts and drunken brawls were not unusual.  Needless to say that the rent is dirt cheap and given my paltry content writer’s paycheck the only place my broker could find me that was within my budget was a one room set in this very place.

It was in a huge building old, grey and dank that I finally found my abode. The street had a few trees but bore the signs of squalor and ill keep. That should have turned me off but the community like atmosphere with middle-aged ladies sitting on cots shelling peas outside their houses gave me some hope. A plate outside the staircase fancily read Student Lodge although I had been told that a lot of professionals did live there as well. However, it was not all that bad and I cheered up a little when I saw that the huge building seemed to house an endless number of identical one room sets each with a young inhabitant or inhabitants. The building was so huge that it seemed to have been built for the specific purpose of rescuing poor people like myself from the streets. Therefore, landlord interference seemed non-existent and I was very thankful about it. The lime green walls of my room were old and peeling and the kitchen was nothing more than a careless cement slab but the set had good ventilation and a common balcony ran in front of all the doors.

“All in all, could do worse,” I remember thinking as I had counted the cash and handed it the broker. It was then that I caught a stray glance of her. The door next to mine had opened abruptly and a pixie like face with unusual eyes peered out and looked straight at me for a fleeting few seconds before withdrawing softly. To say I was taken aback is correct but it was something else that hit me about that face which was neither exceptionally pretty nor really drab. There was something about the eyes-darting, inquisitive yet strangely reassuring, like an animal’s but a strangely tranquil animal. I knew then that my next door neighbour was a girl with curiously fascinating eyes and something about this knowledge made me forget about the dirt and squalor and I instantly began to look forward to living there.

Being a railway kid I do not take too long to settle down in any place and my days in the new habitat in Gurmundi slowly set into a routine. I did not bump into the girl next door again and something about her perennially closed door told me she did not venture out much. In fact, I suspected that the fact she was the only female living alone in the entire building made her a little reticent.  But she was definitely a night owl as I could hear her stroll up and down her room late at night. Sometimes, I also heard voices but it mostly seemed as if she was talking to herself or on the phone. Perhaps she was one of those IAS aspirants who never leave their rooms, I had wondered. However, every once in a while I would find her door locked from the outside, usually at night, when I returned home after dinner at a nearby dhaba. I had also noticed, at times, her door locked till the wee hours of the morning indicating that she had spent the entire night outside. This was in no way unusual as I myself had spent many nights at friends’ places but it did strike me that my neighbour was exceptionally private and avoided human interaction, at least with those in the building.

In fact, I never did catch a glimpse of her after the first day until one day when I peered over the balcony sipping my evening tea. There she was making her way towards our building with two heavy paper bags on either side. Behind her, two little urchins were also carrying heavy bags and seemed to be following her instructions with familiarity. The scene surprised me to say the least, these roadside urchins were a menace who often stole from the grocery shops and made away with bicycles if left unattended. The fact that she was using them as her minions was quite intriguing. As I watched her tall wiry frame huffing and puffing up the stairs I noticed her quick eyes run over my leaning figure. She passed me by with a slight nod and that was the only acknowledgement of my existence that I would receive from her in a long time. The urchins dutifully followed behind her into the room and exited empty-handed. They looked well-behaved and I would have almost changed my opinion about these trouble mongers had they not latched shut Shastri’s door from the outside on their way down while I was not looking. Shastri was my neighbour to the right. An exceptionally handsome and well-built man, he seemed to be quite popular among his circle and I had often noticed a steady stream of young visitors laughing and drinking in his room on week nights even.  I did not quite know what he did, whether he was a student or a professional-he seemed to be somewhat of a slacker, one of those with a rustic charm about them. Anyway, thanks to these urchins he spent a good half of the evening trapped inside his room that day until I rescued him after I heard him pounding his door. He seemed very chilled out about the entire episode and told me that he was on very good terms with the urchins which I found a little hard to believe. He invited me over for a cup of coffee which I declined but he left me feeling quite charmed by his easy personality and I promised him that I would drop by someday.

With the absence of anything to look forward to female neighbour wise  my concentration was focused on the political debates and discussions that my friends were deeply involved in. One such friend was KK. KK was a classmate from the University who had, unlike me, decided to carry the torch of academia to light the darkness. He was one of the first friends I had made in the University and we remained close. A jaunt and soft-spoken person from Uttarakhand, he was pursuing his PhD in Political Science and obviously, the one room flat in Gupta Colony that he shared with his girlfriend and fellow researcher Aloka became the hotbed of discussions about Left uprisings, farmer suicides, and-during those days- student politics.

Every evening I would freshen up at home after returning from office and head to their house for tea and torrid discussions about politics, media, films and everything under the sky. But mostly politics. Most of the people present were younger students who revered KK and their outlook towards things was very different from mine in many ways. Somehow I felt left out and rather grown up when I saw the excitement, sense of achievement or indignation with which these fellows spoke about the latest developments in the protests that had come through reliable internal sources but was unavailable to the media yet. They had something that  I was missing or had left behind. Although I felt some of their theories were impractical I could not help but admit that all the protesting and marching and forming human chains was at least giving them a sense of purpose and unity. My life had become restricted in a routine of office and back and although I wanted to be a writer I could not find that passion to write yet or for anything else really. Even my father, a retired engineer in the Railways, would routinely jibe me for my lack of action and goad me into picking up my pace in life in terms of material ambitions. Everyday I lived in the dread that my family would travel all the way from Coimbatore to see how their only son was faring in the capital city. My life lacked thrill and was swathed in the safety of ambition less routine. I thought about my lot often as I heard the students speak and felt a little depressed about my lack of passion and belief.

Little did I know that in these very discussions and thoughts lay the seed of transformation and my life was in fact heading to a precipice that overlooked neither safety nor routine and I would soon regret my amateur yearnings for thrill and romance in the worst possible manner.