20 January 2021

Rohini Jail

New Delhi

Gauri tapped her pen to the legs of the scruffy wooden table she'd been seated at while the guards went to get Raj. Even before he had the chance to sit down on his chair, Gauri slid the photo in front of him and asked: "Who are they?"

"Sanjay and Neeraj," he replied desolately.

"Who are they?" she repeated, a little louder this time. The edge in her voice startled Raj who looked up at her.

"I don't know," he said. "They were Bhoomi's friends."

She nodded, encouraging him to continue. "She said they had recently moved into her neighbourhood."

"And she invited them to this friend dinner?"

"Yes," he replied, picking up the photo to take a closer look. "We all did that. It wasn't an exclusive group."

"Maya and Vivaan were my friends from school, Lata was my cousin, Adarsh was Lata's work colleague, Atul was Bhoomi's friend and Sanjay and Neeraj, her new neighbours."

"Atul was Bhoomi's friend from....."

"I don't know. I never asked."

She nodded, asking a different question.

"How did you meet Bhoomi?"

"At the shopping mall. She was standing behind me at the billing counter. I realized we both were from MP, she was from Bhopal and I was from Indore. We continued to chat and exchanged phone numbers. After that we just stayed in touch."

"When did you start dating?"

"Around four months back."

"Did your parents know?"

He shook his head.

"Do they know now?"

He shook his head again.

"Riya?"

"My cousin. I don't have any siblings. I am an only child."

"And Bhoomi?"

"She was an orphan."

Gauri let that sink in.

"Did you ever visit Bhoomi at her home?"

He shook his head again.

"Do you know where she lived?"

He shook his head.

Gauri sighed. This was getting nowhere. As she scraped her chair back to get up, Raj got up too to hand the photo back to her.

"I know where she worked," he said. "She said she worked at a call centre in Noida."

"There are a lot of call centres in Noida," Gauri argued.

"I don't know, she said Dial something was the name of the call centre."

She nodded, took the photo and made her way out while marvelling at the foolishness of the current generation to be so trusting and ignorant.

At least her life hadn't been her fault.

She willed her focus back onto the case. Quite a few things didn't add up. Why would Raj's childhood friends testify against him if he was innocent? Who were Sanjay and Neeraj and what had happened to them? What was Bhoomi hiding that had cost her life?

She picked up her phone and dialed.

"Banerjee, meet me at the Chamber in an hour."

She believed Raj was innocent. No, it wasn't a gut instinct. He was too stupid to be a murderer. Stupid to fall in love with a random stranger, stupid to not know much about her, stupid to not let his parents know that he was serving jail time for a non-bailable offense. He was just stupid. And stupid people didn't commit calculated murders. He had been framed. And Gauri had two weeks to get the judge to change his mind and grant another extension.