The wasted souls (Completed)

Chapter 3

Raman Sethi was a blacksmith in the town and had never had the reason to visit the police station in his life. His world was his parents, wife, and kid. The dark-skinned man of medium height who now sat before Acharya looked nervous. The only peculiar factor was that he limped slightly on his right leg.

"What's the matter?"

"My name is Raman...Raman Sethi, the blacksmith. I own a shop...at the chowk and live nearby,"

"Ok"

"My wife...Paru...Parvati is missing,"

"Since how many days?"

"Twenty days," he said after a long thought.

"Why did she leave the house? I mean, did you have a fight or something?"

"Yes, sort of. She wanted to attend her sister's wedding, but I refused to let her go,"

"Why refuse?"

"Because then there was no one to tend to my sick, aged parents at home if she stayed away for a long time. So I told her to go for two days and then attend the wedding and come back. But then she was adamant, and that ensured fights between us every day,"

"So she left the house without informing anyone?"

"Yes,"

"Did you inquire at her parent's place?"

"Yes, I went to attend the wedding yesterday and decided to bring her back, thinking that she must already be there. But I was wrong. They were baffled at my presence at the wedding alone and showed their displeasure at my wife's absence at her own sister's wedding. I did calm them down by giving excuses and returned,"

"She never reached there?"

"No,"

"Where else could she have gone then?"

"Today, I had been to Haveli, to ask if she had been coming to work there?"

"Haveli...you mean Babu Rasiklal Nath's Haveli?"

"Yes, she's a house help there,"

"Ok,"

"They told me that last she attended work was twenty days back and left that same day a little later than usual since there were visitors at the Haveli,"

"How old was she?"

"She was thirty,"

"Any children?"

"One boy. He just turned 5 this month,"

"Would she have left without her child for so many days?"

"No, she wouldn't have. But then she was so desperate to go and fought for it too, so I thought..."

"So you waited for twenty days to come to your senses?"

"What do I do now, sir?"

Inspector Acharya called out the constable and gave him instruction, and within a few minutes, a file and tray with a package were at the table.

A photograph was retrieved from the file first and placed on the table in front of Raman. He picked up the picture, and his face cringed with horror, and instantly slapped the picture back on the table and refused to look at it.

"What's...what's this?" he stammered.

"We found a dead body the same day you described, so I want you to have a look at it,"

"But she can not be...no..." his fear moved a notch up, and he sweated, and with his trembling hands, he picked up the picture and looked at it carefully and then place it back again after letting out a big sigh.

"It's not her," he said.

The picture went back into the file and kept aside. Now it was the turn of the package in the tray. He opened the package and brought out a blood-soaked printed skirt and placed it in front of Raman. But this time, as soon as the cloth was out of the package, Raman's eyes had gone wide, and tears welled up in his eyes. Picking up the skirt, he wailed into it, which muffled his pain and sorrow.

"Where is she? What...happened?" he asked coherently.

"We found her body on the railway tracks," Acharya said, then paused. He was thinking how to relate to him of the missing upper torso of his wife, "But the upper part of her body is still...missing," he finally said, to which Raman sat there with a look of disbelief in his tear-soaked eyes. But he came around finally to ask.

"I do not understand...how can it be?"

"We did not know whose body it was, so were vaguely searching for it everywhere. But now, since we know the whereabouts, we might be able to trace it soon," Acharya said, to which Raman just shook his head and looked at the skirt in his hand, and his tears began to flow again.

"Will let you know if anything comes up," Acharya said to the distorted man in front of him.

After Raman left, he called Lal Singh his constable and returned the items that were brought to the table. But he kept the picture with him. So now there was some headway in the case, and it was leading to the Haveli. 

The master of the Haveli, Rasiklal, was a noted miser in the town with his immense wealth, amassed from the various legal and illegal businesses. But that money did not ensure peace in his personal life. His wife was bed-redden with paralysis, and his only son Ramnath was educated but leaned heavily on drinks and drugs, a habit he picked up as solace to his broken heart if rumors were to be believed.