It was in April this year that a young man named Aniruddhan came to our police station and filed a complaint about a missing woman.
He did not intend to file an official written complaint, only to report that a person had gone missing. Little did he realise, until he talked to us, that the police did not simply accept such reports and let the informant walk away. The realisation made him anxious, and he tried to retract his statement. But someone, presumably, was missing, and now that we were aware of it, we had to investigate. He was connected to the incident, or to the person who had gone missing, so we could not just let him go. At the very least, we were obliged to investigate whether there really was a “Missing Persons” case, and for that, we would need his involvement.
So, obviously, he had to make a written complaint. We registered the case: Kerala Police Act 57 – Missing Person. And as with all such cases brought to our attention, we hoped that the missing woman would return soon and that the case would not expand to involve other sections of the Kerala Penal Code. As long as the incident was not complicated by other offences or unnatural death, including by suicide, it would not be too difficult to find her.
As I was writing the report, the term “missing woman” brought a smile to my face. Who was missing her? What if she had gone away of her own accord? It reminded me of those who disappear in order to find themselves. There never seemed to be any women among them, and this thought made me smile again. Women were always for others to find. If they were not where they were or where they were supposed to be, complaints like this came to the police.
When women do leave by themselves, often it is their phones that betray them. Now that we have a Cyber Cell, missing women are less of a headache for the police. They come right back, or are brought back, except that most of them do not return, or to be exact, are not allowed to return, to where they were before. Only women are unable to return to a home or a relationship they chose to leave. Even if they did, they would be ignored, abandoned, like an old brass pot covered in verdigris. Any hope that one could polish oneself back to an earlier shine is best discarded.
Sometimes, the courts listen to her testimony and rule that she is free to go where she pleases. The woman who had gone away of her own free will is caught and brought back to be given permission to exercise her free will! What a joke! How many of them are then able to get away free? This second going-away is not like the first time. All it required that first time was courage, like making up one’s mind to jump into an abyss, eyes screwed shut.
The complaint Aniruddhan wrote down was vague. Significantly, it lacked details about the missing woman. What he gave us as proof of identity was a copy of her Aadhaar card, and that too printed out right then and there on our demand. It is usually quite difficult to figure out what a person looks like from the photograph on their Aadhaar card, but at least it gave us her name, age and address. Her age set alarm bells ringing because we knew from experience that women as old as her rarely ran away. The disappearance of a woman aged fifty or above is usually different from the disappearance of younger women. When younger women go missing, usually there is a fairly obvious reason – a love affair, or an extra-marital relationship. And all we usually need to find them is a bit of help from the Cyber Cell – the call history of their telephone numbers and the tower location of their mobile phones. All eleven cases I had personally investigated after coming to this police station were such cases.
This one, however, had all the hallmarks of being different. The missing woman was over fifty years of age, and this fact opened up other avenues – murder, property dispute, kidnapping, captivity… It was clear that we could not let the complainant walk away.
Unfortunately, Aniruddhan had very few concrete facts to give us. He told us that he had never met the woman who was supposed to have gone missing. The irony made me laugh, and I continued laughing at the young man as he sat pale-faced in front of us until Thomas sir, who was interviewing him along with me, said my name in a cautionary tone: “Vanitha…” I tend to laugh for the merest of reasons, because of which Thomas sir, Renji and my other colleagues often say that I am not cut out to be a police officer. I agree. That I was biding my time until the rank list for an assistant professorship was released was a secret I kept to myself. English departments all over the state were full of vacancies waiting to be filled…
Anyway, I was convinced that Aniruddhan was not the person who should have come to the police with this information. How come someone else, someone who was in daily contact with this woman, hadn’t come forward to report her missing? Was there no such person? We began questioning Aniruddhan in detail.
According to Aniruddhan, and according to the ID proof he gave us, the missing woman’s name was Mudritha. When we first asked him for her photograph and address, he said he didn’t have them. Then he remembered an email he had on his phone, and with our permission, printed it out on the station printer. As the printer was awaiting a cartridge change, the copy was not all that clear.
Aniruddhan told us that he had come into contact with the woman around seven months ago as part of a business deal. Since then, for forty-five days or so, he was in regular, almost daily, contact with her, although, in all that time, they had never met in person. The phone calls between them and the two longish emails she had sent him were the only evidence he had to prove such a relationship existed. Then, suddenly, she disappeared.
“Why do you keep saying ‘she disappeared’ when you’ve actually never seen her?” I couldn’t help asking.
He was taken aback, and his face paled further.
“I lost contact with her. Or I couldn’t get her on the phone. Would it be better if I said something like that, madam?” he asked, hesitantly.
I grinned and said yes. What else would you say to someone who had come to report the disappearance of a person he had never met before…
Excerpted with permission from Mudritha: A Novel, Jissa Jose, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India.
