Note for the UK Readers
This story unfolds in an Indian setting and carries with it the rhythms, textures, and emotional landscapes of Indian life. The names of the characters—Ranjita, Anamika, Pramathesh, Sudipta—are Indian names, and some readers in the UK may find them unfamiliar or a little challenging to pronounce at first. That is perfectly natural.
Rather than a barrier, I hope this becomes part of the experience: an invitation to step into a different cultural world, with its own cadences, customs, and domestic complexities. The social structures, family dynamics, and emotional expressions depicted here arise from a specifically Indian context, and embracing that difference may enrich your reading rather than hinder it.
If some of the names or nuances feel new, think of them as flavours from a different kitchen—distinct, sometimes unexpected, but offered with sincerity. Let the story guide you; the emotions remain universal.
Crime in the City
Ranjita always filled a room
before she spoke—her laughter arrived first and made whatever followed seem
smaller. In the house where she grew up, the books leaned toward the sunlight
as if they had learned from her how to open themselves. Her parents, Professor
Ranjit and Professor Padmavati, articulated the world in paper and lecture
halls; their home smelled of jasmine and old ink, and, for a long time, Ranjita
believed that language and learning could protect a life from the ordinary
cruelties of the world.
Marriage changed her. It did
not break her in a single violent night; it wore away her at the margins. The
first winters at her in-laws’ were bearable, then grinding, then suffocating.
The chores multiplied until every hour of the day had its task assigned; the
insults grew sharper as the months passed. She began to move like someone who
was always listening for the next reproach. When she finally left—one evening,
without luggage, with the small child clinging for a moment to a hem and then
released because she could not carry both fear and the child anymore—she came
back to her parents’ house hollowed and ashamed. That shame would not let her
step back easily into motherhood.
Ranjita wanted, at first, to
reclaim Anamika. She tried. She called. She came home with gifts, with attempts
at ordinary tenderness; she let the child sit close, whispering apologies into
a small shoulder. But the fissures between the life she had been trained for
and the life she was living were deeper than either she or her parents could
mend overnight.
Ranjita’s abandonment of her
daughter did not happen because she lacked love; it happened because she was
steadily hollowed out by fear, humiliation, and the sense of being replaced in
her own child’s life. When she returned to her parents’ home—exhausted,
ashamed, and still carrying the bruises of domestic cruelty—she found no soft
place to fall. Her intellectual parents offered plans and strategies but no
emotional refuge, and in that vacuum, her guilt grew teeth. Each attempt to
reclaim Anamika felt stilted, almost theatrical, as if she were auditioning for
a role she used to inhabit naturally. And every such attempt only deepened her
conviction that she had already failed as a mother.
What broke her finally was
Sudipta. Childless, hungry for attachment, and steadier than Ranjita in the
practical rhythms of care, Sudipta slipped into the empty spaces of the
household with frightening ease. She fed, bathed, quieted, and soothed Anamika
with the competence of someone who understood that this might be the only child
she would ever mother. Ranjita began to feel her daughter being tugged away
from her—not by malice, but by Sudipta’s fierce, aching need to belong. In the
small glances, in the way Anamika reached for Sudipta’s hand instead of hers,
Ranjita read a terrible prophecy: that her daughter was safer with another
woman. Shame, exhaustion, and the fear of losing Anamika not through conflict
but through quiet displacement pushed her into paralysis. And in that
paralysis, absence calcified into abandonment. The final blow arrived on a day
already stained with fear. Anamika, barely three, burning with malaria, lay
small and shivering on the hospital bed, her curls damp with fever sweat.
Ranjita, exhausted from nights without sleep and from the slow violence of her
own unraveling, tried to gather the child into her arms. But Anamika, dazed and
delirious, pushed her away. She reached out instead for Bomma—the steady,
practical Sudipta who had been her constant in recent months. “Where is Bomma?”
the girl whimpered, turning her face from her mother with the instinctive
honesty of a child who knew where comfort lived.
Something collapsed inside
Ranjita then. Overwhelmed by panic, guilt, and the sudden terror that she was
no longer her own daughter’s refuge, she made a terrible mistake. She slapped
the child. It was not a hard slap; it was the kind born of a woman who had run
out of ways to hold herself together. But it landed like a confession: that
motherhood, once a natural rhythm, had become a role she could no longer
perform. The nurses noticed the scene—the trembling woman, the crying child,
the name “Bomma” still on feverish lips.
The next morning, when the
duty nurse quietly reported the incident, Pramathesh arrived, face tight with
the kind of anger that grows out of humiliation rather than protectiveness. He
did not shout. He did not ask for explanations. He simply walked to the
hospital bed, lifted Anamika—still weak, still clutching at the air for the
familiar scent of security—and carried her out to the corridor where Sudipta
sat stiffly on a plastic chair. Without ceremony, he placed the child in
Sudipta’s lap, as though executing a verdict. Anamika nestled instantly into
that space, small arms curling around Sudipta’s waist.
From that moment, something
irreparable changed. The household shifted its axis. Sudipta became the de
facto mother—the one hospitals called, the one the child reached for, the one
neighbours saw carrying Anamika to school. For Ranjita, that scene in the
hospital corridor became a living wound. She watched, day after day, as her
daughter’s loyalty re-rooted itself in another woman’s arms. And each time she
tried to step back in, the memory of the slap, the feverish rejection, and the
quiet efficiency with which Pramathesh had handed their child to Sudipta
replayed itself like a prophecy.
It was from that moment
onward that Ranjita began to believe—not with anger but with a quiet, devastating
certainty—that she had already been replaced. And it was this belief, more than
cruelty or neglect that paved the long road to abandonment.
Her parents, brilliant and
exacting, offered refuge but not the kind of steady, everyday affection that a
child needed to feel safe after abandonment. Their sorrow was clinical, shaped
by books and essays; they made plans, arranged lawyers, argued strategy by the
clock. They did not know how to kneel and let a child tell them what she
needed.
Anamika, bewildered and
small, found in Bomma—the sister-in-law who had assumed the bread and the
lullabies—the first steady hand. Bomma loved the girl in a practical, stubborn
way: baths, school runs, the food she liked. A child learns where it is fed.
Gradually, in the tender economy of daily warmth, Anamika belonged to Bomma
more than to anyone who spoke of ideals and ideological commitments.
The affair between Ranjita
and her husband, Pramathesh, was not a romance; it was a collapse of two people
who had met before their hearts became determined. He was clumsy with words,
uneasy with the intellectual theatre that had been Ranjita’s first language; he
could not match or tolerate her in conversation, and in his small resentments
he found permission to dominate. The divorce pulled at the thinnest of threads:
pride, money, custody. Ranjita asked for thirty lakhs. To her it was
recompense, a shield; to him it was ruin. The demand became a fulcrum that
tilted more than legal ledgers. It exposed private humiliations that have no
place on the public stage.
Pramathesh, meanwhile, had a
life that kept narrowing and widening at once. He worked; he tried to love the
daughter left in his household; he was tired and sometimes cruel in ways that
smelled of fear. In town, people whispered about him. In the courtroom, he
became a man who could not afford generosity. Until she left for good, filed
for a divorce, asked for 30 lakhs as part of alimony, and…until Sakshi came
into his life. However, this entry doesn’t warrant Ranjita’s life, does it? Why
did she have to be murdered so brutally?
Sakshi had known Pramathesh
for years—eight, she would say later—first in the neutral territory of school
gates where their children’s lives brushed against each other. She was a woman
who had learned that trust was theft; her father had been ruined by a partner’s
betrayal, and she kept that lesson on her tongue. She had a son whose kidney
had been scarred by disease since infancy. The clinic lights and the hush of
wards had become constants in her life: nephrologists’ numbers, medication
regimens, the brittle count of monthly bills. Pramathesh, in the quiet
economies of adult consolation, had become for her something like a guarantor:
small favors, a steady presence, an arrangement of convenience that over time
acquired obligation.
When the thirty lakhs were
demanded, Sakshi felt the world tilt. She believed, rightly or wrongly, that if
Pramathesh had to pay that sum—if he had to sign his wages and his future
away—then the tentative assistance she relied upon, the small loans, the rides
to the hospital, would stop. She imagined nights sitting in the clinic corridor
as her son’s fever climbed, imagining doctors pronouncing decisions she could
not afford to fight. In those long, incandescent hours of fear, reasoning
narrows to a single imperative: survival.
Karthik, the senior inspector
who took the case, arrived to an apartment that betrayed nothing and
everything. The tea cup on the table, the book left open, the curtains lifting
like the breath of a sleeping animal—each quiet object was a testament to the
normality that had been erased. The trunk found in the warehouse three days
later was a scream in wood: it held the private life of a woman
disassembled—scarves, a crushed phone, a diary, each tear and smear readable if
one knew how to read grief. At its center, a parcel the shape of a head,
wrapped with the deliberateness of someone sending a verdict rather than
disposing of a body.
Karthik listened and
catalogued: no signs of forced entry at the parents’ house; no ransom; no open
dispute. The investigation touched on everyone—Pramathesh, humiliated and
insolvent in the public eye; the in-laws, whose small cruelties had been the
first shrapnel of Ranjita’s life; Meghna, the sister in Mississauga who spoke
with the poise of someone standing too far away to have fallen; and Sakshi,
whose presence at the hearing had been taut and watchful.
Meghna’s shadow, at first,
looked long and dangerous. She had been intimate with Ranjita’s private narrative
from abroad—calls made in other time zones, advice offered across continents.
Her paper trail had odd deletions; she had been cold in a video call,
economical with grief in a way that drew suspicion. But the trail ran thin; the
forensic accountants found no theft, no transfer, only the glow of social media
and grief that sometimes looks like indifference. In a diligent and human
investigation, Meghna’s name moved from suspect to witness.
The police found a trace of a
disposable phone. Tracing it—sometimes a straightforward task in a crooked
city—led not to a sturdy criminal but to a pattern of choices. Sakshi appeared
on videos in court, and later, someone found CCTV of a night where a woman
walked alone, carrying a box, deliberate as a midwife carrying a child she
meant to bury. The image was grainy; the face, composed.
When they brought Sakshi in,
she was as Karthik expected: controlled, a woman accustomed to bargaining with
fate. But the control had a brittle edge. She answered with restraint, rarely faltering,
because she had practiced the arithmetic of plausible deniability. The officers
found in her home evidence of clinic receipts, numbers of nephrologists, the
way her life had been designed around appointments and coins. She could explain
some things, could not explain others. The phone and the CCTV aligned in their
terrible simplicity.
Sakshi’s confession, when it
came, was not a sloppy surrender. It was a statement stripped of melodrama.
“I planned it,” she said. “I
did not buy a gun or hire a faceless killer. I did not want the noise. I wanted
a message. She abandoned her child and was taking thirty lakhs! She did
not know what that would mean for my child. She had no pity for a woman who
spent nights in clinic corridors. I thought—if her demand succeeds, if he is
ruined, the little kindnesses that keep my son alive will stop. I chose.”
She described the
carefulness—not of a hitman’s efficiency but of someone who wanted an act to
mean something. The belongings were arranged, the parcel made to be found: not
because she sought attention but because she wanted to guarantee that the world
would see what she had done, that there would be no mistake about the calculus
she had made.
There was brutality in the
way she spoke of calculation; there was also a peculiar, almost religious
certainty. In the quiet of the interrogation room, she said, “I am not a
monster. I am a mother who refused to be helpless.”
The juridical mind sees
motives and evidence. The moral mind sees a knot of needs and failures. In
court, the case read like a ledger of debts: of money owed and of attention
withheld. The prosecution called witnesses to show intent, to show
premeditation, to show how the trunk had been prepared—how the arrangement of
belongings was not mere cruelty but an ideological message that someone had
been deemed expendable. The defence argued desperation, argued a woman pushed
to the edge.
What the formal trial could
not easily quantify was the slow erosion that underlay the violence. The
parents, who had sat in lecture halls and educated others about compassion and
history, had not understood the ordinary grammar of repair. They had sheltered
Ranjita in the way professors shelter ideas: with analysis, with structure,
with plans. They had not learned to sit on a floor and mend a child’s torn
confidence. Their failure was not a scandal of malice but a tragedy of
emotional illiteracy. When Anamika reached out, they offered papers and plans;
she needed bread and bedtime stories. The gap between intellectual care and
emotional care yawned into catastrophe.
After Sakshi’s conviction,
the grandparents came to Bomma’s door. They were smaller than their
reputations. They spoke in the language of apology that sounded like subdued
lecture notes. Anamika, now older by grief and hardened by small betrayals,
listened and chose. “I don’t want a relationship,” she said. “I don’t want
money.” Her voice surprised them: measured but childlike, the voice of a person
who had made a decision by counting the warmth she had been given. She slipped
her hand into Bomma’s; this hand, not theirs, had kept her.
In the quiet end, the city
did not witness a single evil. It watched a constellation of failures—domestic
cruelty, legal coldness, a family’s inability to convert scholarship into
tenderness, a woman’s desperate arithmetic that placed a child’s life above
another woman’s. There was punishment: a sentence, the social paperwork of
retribution. There was also the unpunished: the slow cruelties of everyday
indifference that had prepared the ground for violence.
Karthik stood once outside
the gate of the villa where professors retired into the winter sunlight. He
watched the two elders walk like men reduced by their own learning, wrapped in
coats too thin for the remorse they carried. He thought of justice—how it could
close a case file but never recover the years that had been unspent in
consolation, the stories that had not been told at the kitchen table. He
thought, dimly, of a child who chose the family that fed her and held her, not
the one that taught her how to parse a text.
The city, at night, gathers
such stories and holds them in its belly. In some rooms, people weep, and in
others they correct their syllabi. In certain cases, courts assign blame and
measure time; in others, children choose hands that are warmer. In the scheme
of things, who, then, is not to be blamed? In truth, no one emerges innocent,
because every adult orbiting the child contributed—through action, neglect, or
cowardice—to a chain of harm that became almost inevitable. Sakshi’s crime was
merely the visible edge, the jagged tip of an iceberg whose submerged mass was
built over years of silent complicities and unspoken cruelties. Her act was
brutal, yes, but it did not arrive alone; it was carried on the shoulders of
parental failures, legal apathy, social indifference, and the quiet violence of
people who looked away when the child needed them most. In this city of
fractured loyalties and moral decay, the question is no longer who is guilty—it
is who had even the faintest claim to innocence. The crime had an author, and
she sat behind iron bars. But the true tragedy was the long, ordinary
beginning—the small refusals and the unlearned lessons that made the terrible
choice seem, to one despairing woman, the only way to keep a child alive. Period.
