The Hindu Business Line : A dead man’s tale

I couldn’t sleep last night. The horrific images of six bodies found at a gated community in the San Fernando Valley neighbourhood of Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles on Monday, October 6, 2008, and which were splashed on every single TV channel in India, haunted me.

A man clutching a gun, tiptoeing with feet clad in white socks, was all I could see, and every sound that the wind made against my window only confirmed my worst fear — someone was there, just waiting to take my life away.

Somehow the night passed to make way for a glorious morning; there were only leaves on the sidewalk — not footprints of the man who’d haunted my dreams. The window did not have any pry marks — just the old scratch marks that a crow I’d named Devi left as her calling card… “I was here” — for so many years now.

Media overkill

But daylight does not push back every nightmare — the electronic media makes sure of that. A few months ago, it was the buzzword of every conversation — the father the prime suspect, the Nepali servant another prime suspect — and before the case got to court — the electronic media was playing judge, jury and executioner. I told my friend Sudha that it was going to have a Hindi movie finish and she just laughed and said: “You’re a major conspiracy theory buff, aren’t you?”

But I turned out to be right. Before the gaze of the very media that put the whole case under its ever ‘watchful’ eye, the father was let off, the servants (those who were alive) were let off and finally the only people who had dung on their rather sorry faces were the cops.

Punishment transfer

Most of them who handled the case were shifted to places where there were no police stations. They called it punishment transfers, I think. Just the other day, a friend, an IAS officer, who studied with me in school, was visiting us.

‘Chilling out’ was what said, when we asked him if he was on a sabbatical. Then the grapevine had it that he was sent on a punishment transfer. Except he decided to go on long leave. How cool! He was seen on Besant Nagar beach almost every morning and evening, chilling out with those that frequent the beach.

So I was thinking to myself — perhaps this guy who killed his family and himself did maintain a façade of a story? I mean, what was he telling people when he was unemployed for so many months and his wife was filling up the family kitty?

Bruised ego

I did not know that it was such a big deal that it bruised the ego of anyone, let alone an IITian, so badly that he had to live on his wife’s earnings to the extent that he went on a shooting spree and killed even his seven-year-old child.

How many people do you know live off their wife’s earnings and not even think twice about it? Is that a big deal really? What really happened there? Like no one knew what exactly happened to my IAS friend, except what he’d told everyone who cared to ask. Chilling out was accepted in awe because none of us had the luxury of taking off like that from our work or our daily chores and life to merely ‘chill out’.

Maid’s insight

Malathi, my maid servant, was just telling me yesterday: “If that is the reason why he killed his wife and kids and his mother-in-law, I’d have been dead all these decades. My husband only makes enough for his own drinks and I have been looking after him and my kids and whatever else expenses there are to shoulder all these years.”

“Amma, is a marriage only as strong as the rupee that one makes?” Malathi asked me.

I was stunned. I turned around, looking at her and seeing, for the first time, the beauty and deep inner strength of this uneducated, illiterate woman. I was left wondering why this strength, that I am sure we all possess, deserted the man in that swank home in Los Angeles with a degree from a prestigious E-school and to top that an MBA from UCLA.

How could he have been so weak and yet so cold, precise and focused about moving from room to room and killing off five people before putting a bullet to his own head?

I don’t have an answer to that — in fact, just because I began to think of it so much, I started to get these nightmares. Now it’s reached such a state that I am thinking of it all the time. Just now, I was wondering if I was being used as a medium to convey something that would never be discovered.

Of course, the convenient cover is the economy. We’ve had worse things happen to us as a nation. I remember the tsunami. Families were wiped out due to no fault of theirs. And I remember the remnants of those families coming out of that disaster and standing tall. They were not crumbling and weak and defeated. Of course, they were sad. In fact, they were shattered with the sadness.

But they stood up and most of them are rehabilitated today mentally — even if the several agencies that went about garnering support (read money) in their name disappeared faster than the last tidal wave and did not really contribute to their rehabilitation in the real sense of the word.

Twist in the tale?

I’m left wondering if what happened in Los Angeles is really the true story. Will there be a twist to the tale, like in that Delhi murder case which dominated the print and electronic media a few months ago? All we are now told is somebody else’s opinion. It seems too pat that we have a couple of suicide notes and six bodies.

As my lawyer friend and colleague, Seetha Ganesan, said in firm judgment: “It’s an open-and-shut case Swati, just wait and see. He was broke, he was tired of living off his wife’s salary and he could not accept that an IIT grad with an MBA from UCLA can ever be unemployed, broke and bankrupt and so he simply went ballistic. End of the case.” She said that with clinical precision as if she’d studied the whole case first-hand from the DA’s office and investigating officer and Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police, Michel Moore.

Is it an open-and-shut case? Maybe. I am still baffled by why he took his mother-in-law’s life? Why did he shoot his youngest son or, for that matter, his three children? Was he the culprit? My mind turns to a similar scene that happened in Chennai a few years ago, when someone called Annanagar Ramesh, his wife and three children were found dead in their house at Anna Nagar, in Chennai. I think they called it a suicide.

I don’t remember the case being solved. I don’t remember anyone speaking about them anymore. The living are only remembered when they are seen. The dead? Out of sight is out of mind in these hectic days of ours. Especially if the departed left in such tragic circumstances.

Marriage expectations

And I just hope that I can get a good night’s sleep tonight. My friend and CA classmate Mithaley Dutta is getting married. I think I should take her out for a meal and tell her to keep the wedding for later, when the groom has a good job, and when she’s got a good job.

“Get married when everything is hunky dory and there’s nary a doubt about the future,” is what I am going to tell her.

Wasn’t marriage, indeed the institution of marriage, supposed to have been built from scratch? Or am I getting old? Are there conditions for a marriage to hold? Like, “If I (if that is the male) don’t have a job and if I am living off you the chances of you and the entire family getting liquidated is pretty high”. Or does one simply take an insurance policy “just in case” my husband gets unemployed in this turbulent economy and another policy to make cash in the event of ‘death by suicide’, caused by depression due to unemployment.

And, ironically, more and more of us are marrying only those with high qualifications and ‘propah’ jobs, people living the US of A dream, almost as if we’re so desperate to get those readymade dreams served on a platter with no sweat at all.

Are we becoming a microwave people? Pop something in and, in an expected time and temperature, that something comes out, all ready to eat. We’ve stopped understanding great cooking, micro-waved food is here and yes, there’s no sweat! Is that how we all want our lives to turn out, too? All pat and neat? Are we under such intense pressure from our peer group, from our family that we are expected to become the stuff of their dreams?

Is that what killed that family in Los Angeles? The unrealistic expectations that were carved into the psyche of an unemployed man?

And should we not cater to expectations, even in marriage — what a disaster of a reputation do you think you’d have? More than you, your family, your friends? Indeed it would make some of us aghast if one of us were to marry a lowly taxi driver who drives a rented cab. “Arrey, if he had a fleet it would not have mattered so much,” said Kulpreet Kaur, whose pretty cousin, wooed by the gentry, ran away to marry her father’s driver.

We don’t seem to realise that whatever ‘high qualifications’ one has does not guarantee a job any more in this economy. Why, it did not even guarantee that someone with these high qualifications lived, let alone happily.

What a pity!

Rest in peace Karthik Rajaram, I hope this plunging economy does not take responsibility for any more deaths — be it here in our country or elsewhere.

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