FF: Destiny (Ch. 7 Updated on Pg. 36!) - Page 22

My dear Rose,

Here I am at long last, but it is definitely not mea culpa, far from it! In fact I am patting myself on the back for having managed to borrow a laptop for today, so that I could both read all the 6 chapters of your Destiny, the first 5 all over again, and then comment on the whole case at one go. As things turned out, it was just as well that I could not do this 6 days ago, as then the case would not have been wrapped up, and it is always better not to have to second guess the author!

In a word, your Destiny has been, so far, exceedingly work(wo)manlike. This first case was in fact much better than most of the efforts by Anshul & Co., as there are no loopholes or howlers that I could spot. Nor were there the kind of glaring improbabilities in terms of motives or actions that often mar even otherwise excellent scripts in the TV Arjun. I was rewatching the one in which a hanging is averted at, as is mandatory in such cases, one second to the deadline. It was all very nice and dramatic, but the basic motive for the multiple murders, as stated by the MLA, was pure nonsense. I could simply not understand WHY that MLA could not have had a professional thief swipe the computer of Martin Gomes as easy as anything, operating thru a cutout and thus avoiding any direct link with the thief. Why on earth would he have a contract killer take out 5 persons, including a kid? It made NO sense at all.

In happy contrast with this kind of stuff, your case is foolproof. No loose ends, no glaring inconsistencies in character, and no snafus in the details of who knew what when and who did not.

I felt that this one too could have been named Old Sins cast Long Shadows, as I called the episode of the mother who is forced to poison her own daughter and then commit suicide by jumping off a building. What Aniketh does to Nisha, in a rage stoked by a hurt male ego – spiking her fruit juice and making her disgrace herself in public - does cast a long shadow, for it comes back after 2 years to haunt him and those linked to him as well. Of course, you needed the cinematic device of Rohan opportunely overhearing (and recording) the incriminating conversation between Aniketh and Rita, but that kind of ploy is almost mandatory!

Jealousy, says the poet, is as cruel as the grave (I think it is from Othello, but I dare not guess, and risk offending the shade of Shakespeare if I was wrong!). This comes thru very convincingly in the motive for Aniketh's increasingly criminal behaviour. It is jealousy that drives him, when Nisha slaps him in the guest house, to molesting her, and this in turn leads straight to the murder of Rohan and all that follows. It is tragic, the extent to which these crimes are the result not of present malice or murderous intent, but of blind chance that resurrects old crimes and ends in the worst of them all, murder.

You have also brought out very well, thru the character of Rita, how accessories to crimes act often not so much from deliberate intent, as from weakness, and the desire to profit from the misdeeds of another. Rita helps Aniketh because she has a grudge of her own against Nisha, and she sees that she can use Aniketh to take her own personal revenge on Nisha. She convinces herself that her guilt is less than his, both 2 years ago and now, but this is a moral fallacy, even if not a legal one. As for Samar, he is drawn into this web by even more tenuous threads – those of his love for Rita. So does an otherwise admirable sentiment lead to something that is the opposite of admirable. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

Your tale also brings out the danger that awaits those, like Nisha, who are so egoistic and self-centred that they have no idea what others are thinking and feeling, and they care even less. Such persons are the prime candidates for being murdered. Nisha cannot be blamed for turning Aniketh down, but she need not have done it so rudely and contemptuously. Having done that, she has no idea of how much enemity she has stirred up in him, or of its likely fallout. It is the same with Rita; having cheated her out of a contract, she does not see that Rita will now hate her for life. Then, after her comeback, she is so stupid as to imagine that all is forgotten at his end, and carries on billing and cooing with Rohan right under Aniketh's nose. If she had been able to see an inch beyond her own wants and desires, she would have been more wary and decidedly safer. I suppose a top model is bound to be vain and arrogant, but Nisha is in a class by herself, and you have brought her off exceedingly well. It is the same, to different degrees, with the rest of your cast of characters, even a passing one like Kaira D'Souza.

I did have a few small quibbles – about the way in which the ETF barges into people's residences without a search warrant; Rathore's collecting fingerprints and liquor bottles from Samar's residence acting on Arjun's idea, again without any legal authorisation, and such like. But then I suppose these are liberties taken in all crime serials, so perhaps I should withdraw these objections!

I was curious as to why Rathore does not immediately brief Arjun about the caustic comments made by Rohan's sister about Nisha, including the fact that she had in effect supplanted Rita in Rohan's affections. If he had done so, Arjun would immediately have smelt a rat when Rita was extra careful not to blame Nisha for anything, or to display the slightest hint of natural animosity towards her, and in fact quite the opposite. He would then have linked this up with Kaira's catty comment about Rita, and this might have brought him to the end run a bit sooner. As it is, it is only his instinct that keeps him from dismissing Kaira's statement as due to jealousy. But of course, the best doctors and the best detectives have superbly honed instincts!

I also do not trust this to the minute estimates of the time of death. No doctor can or will say that a death took place at 10:30 pm exactly. They will never go beyond a band – say 10 pm to 11 pm in this case – and that too only because the doctor would have been on the spot before midnight, and this was a warm summer night, and out in the open. Since Arjun proceeds from this supposedly accurate time of death in calculating transit times, there might have been a real mistake made, though happily there is none.

That, my dear Rose, is about it. I am deliberately not going into the Arjun-Riya equations here, partly because I have written quite a lot about that in my Part 1, and partly because we have to wait a bit to see something concrete develop between them. Karan should be useful in this context!

Take care, and as I see that this is going to be a series of cases, I look forward to the next one.

Shyamala Aunty