Walking down memory lane
As a crime reporter, I used to hang around mortuaries a lot. And they are not pleasant places, I can tell you. The government mortuaries in Chennai will win hands down for being the worst maintained for housing the dead. Hell’s Chamber. That’s what they are. Badly-lit rooms, peeling walls, dripping roofs, primitive tools, poor cold storage facilities and the gut-wrenching stench will make you feel sorry for their unfortunate occupants.
However, I dare not complain because that is how I got my break. But if anyone had told me that two months into the crime beat, I would be staring down at the corpse of a young man – beaten to death by a drunken cop – at a government morgue, I probably would have stayed glued to my editing desk. I had swapped its decade-long anonymity for a crime reporter’s glamour. I knew my job was not going to be easy. Not when the popular notion was that crime was a man’s world and reporting the ugly side of human nature a male prerogative.
Hence, it was a moment of truth. I sensed that I was the only reporter there. My ‘partners in crime,’ had been content to buy the cops’ cover-up story. Through the cacophony of angry voices of the victim’s family members, I made out that the 35-year-old petrol pump cashier had a tiff with his wife the previous night and fearing assault she had called the police. It was a pathetic sight to see the woman now wailing inconsolably at the tragic turn of events.
Digging into the issue, I found that there had been close to 40 such custodial deaths during a three-year period under that government. Next day, my stories caused a furore. The first call was from an assistant commissioner of police, who woke me up from my sleep. I was forced to listen to his 20-minute tirade. But the guilty policeman was grounded. When I walked into the press room at the police chief’s office the next day, I knew I had arrived.
My tryst with dead bodies became a routine affair after that. A beautiful young woman with a rope mark around her neck, a school boy still in his uniform and shoes, a local politician hacked at 14 places…In fact, a Communist leader’s wife held my hand as she came to the mortuary to identify her husband, who had committed suicide by drowning…
I remember another sordid story. In autumn 2009, I interviewed an 11-year-old boy in a southern Tamil Nadu village, who had been tortured into confessing his father’s involvement in a theft case. The man was found hanging at the police station a week later. The family was paid Rs 2.5 lakh as ‘hush’ money. In talking to me, they were breaking their silence for the first time.
In covering such incidents, the greatest challenge has been to not to lose sight of objectivity, but to try and gain an intellectual perspective of the systemic flaws that lead to such tragic aberrations.
I also recall making a trip to Vittukatti, a hamlet in Tiruvarur to report on a rights abuse case that had been dragging on for some six years before the State Human Rights Commission. Over all those years, the journey to redeem their dignity was turning out to be an increasingly arduous and harrowing experience for the seven men and two women picked up as suspects in a triple murder case that had rocked the village in 2003. All the torture victims fell by the wayside, except for one man holding his ground and saying ‘no’ to the sell-out. I had visited the village to interview him.
In the grisly stories about the “wretched underside of a community” — details about murder, robbery, assault, chain-snatching, house break-in, accident, kidnapping, sexual molestation, police abuses — that are churned out at the end of the day, the victim is a “faceless cipher” for a crime reporter, who even survives emotionally by making jokes at the press room.
But nothing prepared me for ‘Sandy Hook.’ Twenty children dying of multiple gunshot wounds inside their classroom. That was my introduction to mass shootings and gun violence in the United States…it shook me to the core…
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