Sashi had been expecting the public reaction. What he didn't see coming was Vishal's travel to their hometown, and he wasn't even informed about it. He had always been careful about the amount of information he revealed in his videos about himself.
He wasn't bothered that everyone knew his name. Well, it wasn't his real name, not a name he ever used in front of anyone. There was no way anyone could find him using that name.
He couldn't understand why no one was on his side. Yes, the focus was entirely on Mitra, and people were either positively understanding her or critiquing her. Yet, none of them were commending him for being so dedicated to her. There were times when he got furious at people's indifference to his feelings, got peeved by the way people still called him a monster when it should have been clear to them that he had done everything to get justice for Mitra.
Maybe because they weren't aware of the complete story, everyone was assuming Sashi to be the culprit of a high school girl's rape and murder. Would they differ in their opinions of him if they learned the truth?
Sashi didn't know how to reveal it all to anyone, or even to Mitra. That monstrous night had been traumatic to him as well, and every time he remembered it, he could see his father sneering at him, quite devilishly. Years passed and he still wasn't able to erase it from his mind.
Maybe Mitra is also unable to forget it, much like me. This thought of his was a little comforting to him, to see that they were in it together. It didn't bother him how adversely tormented she was than him.
###
It took hours for Vishal to reach Ronadurgam, where the police had already begun an investigation. They were asking around if anyone had a suspicious person in mind who would fit the description of Sash: a young man with an abusive father, who didn't turn up for work or any gathering on the day of Lekha's death or after.
As it turned out, Vishal's assessment of 'Sashi' not being the real name of the culprit was right. People didn't know anyone with that name who could fit the description. They did, however, have a rough idea of who the person might be.
The restaurant where Sashi used to work was the first one to give the hints. The owner, despite growing old, remembered the boy whose father used to pinch away all his earnings, hit him regularly and informed the owner on the day they found Lekha's body that the boy was sick and needed rest for a couple of days.
Clues flowed in from there as the police tracked the boy's old residence and asked around the neighbourhood. Some of the residents remembered an extremely abusive man whose wife eloped years ago, leaving behind their son who was never much seen by them and was locked up mostly by his father. A couple of them reported having seen him sneaking around the town at times.
The boy's name, as everyone remembered, was Seshu.
Vishal was bewildered for a moment as to how similar the culprit's actual name sounded to his assumed identity of 'Sashi'. Ironically, they were as different as a moon and serpent - 'Sashi' meant the moon while 'Seshu' meant a snake.
It was not convincing that Sashi had chosen that name as his decoy just because it was similar sounding. There could have been some reason. People like him always had reasons and justifications.
They couldn't find any pictures of him. Seshu hadn't attended school since he turned ten.
His father had continued to work at the factory in the suburbs for a few weeks after Lekha's death.
He and his friend, though notorious for being violent people, had strong alibi in the form of the local wine store manager, who had seen him get drunk at the store the night Lekha got kidnapped, and Seshu's neighbours who said they had heard Seshu's father violently beating him around the house till the early hours of the next day.
Strangely though, both Seshu and his father disappeared a few weeks after that. There was just no sign of him anywhere and no one had any clue. Their shabby rooftop house was still intact with all their belongings. It looked like they ran away somewhere impromptu, or they had been in an accident.
The police at that time hadn't been much bothered with the disappearance of a working class, temperamental drunkard and his dark natured son. And so, no one ever looked into it, and they were forgotten in the town.
Vishal tried tracing their steps at the time of their disappearance. The factory was still running well, and though Seshu's father had conflicts and spars with a few of his co-workers and managers, he didn't seem like someone who would quit everything and leave; he was in desperate need for money.
Seshu, on the other hand, had become rather irregular at his work at the time; which was all owed to his father's behaviour towards him. The restaurant owner wasn't exactly fond of him owing to a dark aura that always seemed to surround him.
The information they had on Seshu, alias Sashi, wasn't enough to pull records about him from other sources. There wasn't anything on him. He had never been to jail or been in any trouble.
Where he was and what he worked as was still unknown.
Till Vishal had a hunch.
He dialled up Sandeep and asked him to try a test. Sandeep ordered Pritam to be brought in immediately. As they dragged in a heavily injured and frightened Pritam into the DSP's room, Sandeep approached him with intimidationand asked, "Where's Seshu?"
Pritam looked up at him in... surprise? Shock? Disbelief? There was a flicker of recognition in Pritam's face. It was the only hint police needed.
Pritam was already broken enough and a brief session of intimidating and violent questioning brought out the answers faster than before. Seshu was a hawala broker from Mumbai and had established the Internet Cafe Pritam ran as a local hawala exchange centre.
He had picked up Pritam from a suburban industrial area, attributing the scouting to the pity he felt upon watching Pritam struggle to get along with the older workers at the factory he was employed at. He had promised Pritam a higher pay and the store's location was in a much better locality than the shambles Pritam and his family stayed at.
Pritam followed Seshu, ultimately becoming the loyal servant who wouldn't give up Seshu's name when the store got busted. Pritam was of the opinion that unless the police knew Seshu's name themselves, he was in no danger of getting linked to the hawala crimes or the video upload incidents, so far as he denied having anything to do with them or having interacted with the criminal himself.
The police got tapes of the CCTV recordings to get him to identify Seshu. However, Seshu had smartly used his subordinates from Mumbai to do most of the hawala work and rarely made appearances at the cafe. Even in the few occasions he did, he covered himself well enough with a black hoodie, hat and a face mask.
Pritam alleged that Seshu had always used a hat and face mask around him, making it difficult for him to give the description of his looks to get a composite sketch done. He didn't even know where Seshu resided or what his day job was.
In fact, Pritam knew how Seshu looked. Yet, he took advantage of the way Seshu appeared in the CCTV footage and built his lie on it.
The police tried to speed up the investigation by looking into the associates of the hawala business in Mumbai. However, it proved to be difficult to poke an organized crime ring without the repercussions of the involvement of politicians and bureaucrats in the whole scenario.
The police were ordered from higher ups to not get involved with the crime ring, while Sandeep tried to strike a deal with them: just get the police the picture and every little detail of Seshu and the police would drop the case on Pritam and the hawala racket they had dug up.
Seshu got the information late in the night that police had found out his real name, who he was and were digging up data on him. The problem was with the crime ring he worked for, the original kingpins who were involved with the hawala network and the middleman who had overseen Seshu's actions so far. They wanted to handle Seshu on their own, as punishment for messing up their business. The people involved in their line of work were not supposed to take advantage of their dark connections and expertise to deal with extremely personal issues, especially without informing their superiors and in any way that could damage their entire network.
Seshu had crossed many lines when he used the internet cafe for posting the videos of Mitra, thereby exposing the shady business happening there, and revealing information about himself on a publicly viewed video leading the police in his tracks and in turn towards their hawala network.
Seshu's voice had been a big giveaway for the people he used to work with. A couple of them had known about his obsession with Mitra, thanks to the way his father had died. But, they had never imagined he would pull off something so complicated and problematic. Their ways of dealing with women were completing different from what Seshu was pursuing.
"You really should have thought about the consequences of bringing the whole network into this mess." It was a warning to Seshu from the superior he used to work for two years back, given to him over the phone call that enlightened him of what would happen to him eventually.
"Put an end to the act. Kill the girl, sell her off, do whatever you can, and come back to Mumbai soon. Else, you will have visitors coming to you," the superior threatened Seshu.
Seshu knew it all too well. He would be killed off without hesitation. Truth be told, he would have been killed off the moment the second video came, when his voice and tone got noticed by his gangster friends. Yet, he had been dealt with leniently owing to the fact that he had handled most of their financial and digital transactions and had a lot of incriminating information with him.
They had been putting off talking to him just because the police hadn't identified him. The second the internet cafe got busted, they resolved to remove Seshu from the picture. They waited for a while to give him a chance to wrap things up on his own without their intervention. When he didn't slow down, he practically sent them a red flag to bury him.
"Give me a week," Seshu almost pleaded with the superior who called him. "Just one week. I will put an end to all this."
"Ok, one week. That's the most we can give you. And if any of our other operations gets exposed, you will be dead within minutes," the gang superior reiterated.
"I get it," Seshu muttered.
Seshu really understood his position. Yet, he couldn't forgive the man for suggesting killing Mitra. Seshu knew what he would have done to that man had he been in front of him when he gave the idea: he would have killed him first.
He had one week. For one thing, Vishal was touring their hometown and so wasn't in Bangalore. By the time Vishal would return and police could get Seshu's details, he should have made some progress. Seshu could think of only two ways the whole ordeal could end, and the most possible of them accompanied a bloodbath.
It should turn to a good pace tomorrow.
That was all he could plan as slept off that night.