A group of herder-milkmen had moved with their cattle to the uplands of the Ridge to escape the Yamuna’s lowland deluge. A little past midnight on 28 August 1978, on a relatively cool yet muggy early morning of the 29th, they were moving with their animals along the Upper Ridge Road. They ambled along the periphery of the forest that made up the Buddha Jayanti Park and other unnamed and untamed patches. Some of the periphery was walled, some fenced with barbed wire.

The dairymen encountered a stench towards the northern end. It smelled of putrefaction. They ventured into the bushes not far from the carriageway and came upon two bodies.

One was of a girl. She was face down in a small pit.

About 50 metres to her north lay a young boy, his face to the skies.

That was enough for the horrified party to rush back to the road in search of the police. They found Head Constable Rohtas Singh of the Mandir Marg police station, situated several hundred metres to the northeast of the spot, on patrol nearby. Singh relayed the message to the police control room, which in turn got in touch with police stations in the area, including the Rajinder Nagar police station to the west of the location.

Police arrived to find the girl lying in a large grassy patch which looked to be darkened with her blood. Other darkened patches and long hair would be found nearby as the uneasy night lightened to horrified day.

The boy looked as if he had been hacked to death.

NK Shinghal, an assistant police commissioner, soon arrived at the spot along with a team from the crime branch and a dog squad of Delhi Police. The crime scene provided no clues beyond the blood and the mangled, putrefying bodies.

A police team quickly reached the residence of Geeta and Sanjay Chopra. Their bodies had to be formally identified. Their parents would need to do it.

The deluge of shock and grief arrived for Delhi and the country with the papers on 30 August.

But for Captain Chopra and his wife Roma their nightmares had escalated to devastation a day earlier, around 3 am. That’s when a police team arrived to tell them of the discovery of the bodies of a boy and a girl answering to the description of Sanjay and Geeta.

Captain Chopra left immediately. The location on the Ridge was just minutes from their residence in Dhaula Kuan.

It didn’t take time for him to identify the bodies even with the mutilation and advanced state of putrefaction.

Geeta was wearing a printed kurta and a pair of black trousers on the day she had disappeared. She had worn a silver ring. Sanjay had mimicked his sister with the choice of black trousers. He had on a blue T-shirt.

The clothing matched that on the bodies.

Madan Chopra sank to the ground, speechless. Life as he knew it had ended.

It was 3.30 am on 29 August.

As the bodies of his children were taken to a nearby morgue for a post-mortem examination, the broken parent returned to his wife and their emptied nest.

Captain Chopra was inconsolable. He cried. He sobbed. He unreservedly reached out to his colleagues who came by to console him, hugged members of the family. The jovial yet dignified officer who headed the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office of the Indian Navy in Bombay, and had arrived in Delhi in February 1977 to take up another assignment, had no time or inclination for a public face of stoic grief. His children had been brutally taken from him. Nothing else mattered.

He beseeched the family doctor. “Please give me some injection... What is there left in life for us?”

Then he broke down again. “Everyone has to die someday. But not in this way.”

He sobbed: “Why were they murdered?”

Usually more expressive, his wife had become grief-mute, turned to stone since returning home after seeing her children in their tortured death at the morgue. She had stopped speaking.

That broke the captain’s heart thrice over.

“Roma, you must cry. I beg you with folded hands, please cry. Otherwise, you will die too and I will be alone.”

He begged the doctor: “You must make her cry.”

But Roma Chopra wouldn’t cry. Not yet. There would be a lifetime for tears.

That deluge would arrive just days later. For now, she sat on a bed in the children’s room, hands folded on her knees, her right hand occasionally gripping the wrist of her left, and sometimes the other way around, in support. She set her eyes to infinity, a statue of dignity in grief as friends and family gathered around her, hugged her, cried for her as they cried for themselves as the world outside, her world, the captain’s world, Geeta’s world that was Jesus and Mary College – “JMC” to all – and “Modern”, the world of Sanjay at Modern School, went into collective grief. And, in short order, anger.

Why were they murdered?

“She was such a bright, attractive, likeable girl,” grieved Sister Agatha McLoughlin. “Very active too.”

The principal of JMC held a wreath. She visibly struggled to hold back her tears. With her, waiting outside the apartment and in the neighbourhood were several hundred students and faculty of JMC. College was closed for the day; to do anything else would have been unthinkable. They were here to pay homage to their friend, colleague, student; best in her class in commerce in her freshman year. A teacher recalled how Geeta had spoken to her excitedly about her father having agreed to sponsor an MBA if she did well at JMC.

A swimmer, she was to also have taken the trials for a championship event just a day earlier. That day had died.

Now they all waited for Geeta and Sanjay to arrive. But they would not. They were too mutilated and decomposed to be placed in public.

“But I want to see Geeta,” wailed Sujata Malhotra, a dear friend.

An aunt spoke of Sanjay’s “blue eyes”. “He was so good-looking,” she marvelled.

Rumours and suppositions floated about like motes of rising anger riding on deep distress.

The police knew of the children being kidnapped just minutes after they had been bundled into a mustard-coloured Fiat. They had slipped up massively by waiting for the parents to file a missing persons report. The bodies of Geeta and Sanjay were actually discovered a day earlier, on the 28th, at about six in the evening. The police waited several hours to tell the parents. Why?

Why were they murdered?

Captain Chopra played back the scenarios in his mind. Was it something he had done during his time in Bombay in the Judge Advocate General’s office? Had someone at the wrong end of naval justice decided to take revenge? He dismissed it as unlikely. After all, he reasoned, he hadn’t directly sentenced anyone, just offered legal advice to court martial juries as they went about acquitting or convicting alleged offenders.

Waves of grief threatened to drag him under. His pride and joy Geeta, he was convinced, had died protecting her “honour”. And Sanjay – “my poor, little, small baby” – died protecting his sister. His tears flowed freely.

A slice of cake still lay on the children’s study table, partly eaten.

Geeta had baked it.

She had eaten a bit and then rushed off to record her programme, evidently with a mind to finish the dessert upon her return.

Like the shared study table piled with books, a couple of pairs of her shoes, their schoolbags, the neatly made beds, the exuberant oddity of the piece of cake was touched by wrenching memory.

The stale cake had become a fresh shrine.

Excerpted with permission from Fallen City: A Double Murder, Political Insanity, and Delhi’s Descent from Grace, Sudeep Chakravarti, Aleph Book Company.