The single most arresting development in an otherwise fairly tame mahaepisode today was The Mystery of the Body in the Boot. Come to think of it, it is a catchy title. I was rather surprised to see that in all the 7 pages of comments so far on the mahaepisode, there has been next to nothing about the single most important development, the aforesaid body, while a lot has been written about all the rona dhona. No wonder PR is full of rona dhona; the CVs aim to please!
Let us list out the facts of the case ad seriatim.
1) The first and most vital point concerns the body - whether the man is alive and merely gagged and tied up, or he is already dead. If the former, Arjun will be released immediately, as the chap will, as soon as he regains consciousness , clear him of being the kidnapper. That would be too simple, so I expect it will be a corpse. That means a murder charge, and no bail for Arjun until he is definitively shown to have had nothing to do with the body. That could take as long as the CVs want it to last.
2) Arjun will have to become a Kirloskar again, get in touch with his father, and activate the Kirloskar machinery immediately. He cannot handle this himself without any resources, and Manav, even after he finds out about the arrest, would not lift a finger to help him. If he sticks to his quixotic desire to do it all as plain "Arjun", he will be railroaded into 14 years of rigorous imprisonment for murder, for the cops have got him, as they would think, 'redhanded', and they would not be inclined to look for any evidence that would prove him innocent. Nor would the public prosecutor, who would be only too happy to get a conviction with so little effort. This attitude is the same all over the world.
No one will believe anything Arjun says, and for those who fondly hope that it will be Purvi, and perhaps even Archana who get him out, I am sorry, but that is a pipedream. Fighting such a serious charge successfully needs a top flight criminal lawyer, and they do not come cheap. DK will have to be brought on board without delay. I hope the police allow Arjun that one phone call that is permitted, and he calls DK at once.
Now for the timeline.
3) The car had been brought into the garage earlier in the day for a minor repair, of a loose spark plug (?). Arjun had finished repairing it already when they decided to shut up shop early because of the rain. Now, when checking the car, he must surely have opened the boot, and that means that the body was not there then. Later, even if it had been left unattended after it had been repaired, with the boot unlocked, no one could have hauled that body into the garage and shoved it into the boot without attracting the attention of all the garage hands. So we can safely take it that the body was not in the boot while the car was in the garage.
The good thing about this for Arjun is that someone in the garage should be able to testify to the above.
4) There is no reason to assume that the garage owner will not back Arjun and testify that the car was not Arjun's and he had driven straight from the garage to the hospital with his permission. He likes Arjun a lot already, and he would be ready to help him beat an obviously unfounded charge.
5) From the time Arjun drove up to the hospital entrance, to the time he gave the car keys to the security guard to park the car in a proper parking place, he never went near the car and would thus have had no chance to put any body into the boot. The hospital staff should be able to testify to this.
6) So, it is clear, from this process of elimination, that the body must have been put into the boot while the car was in the parking lot, very likely with the connivance of the security guard to whom Arjun gave the keys.
This is further indicated by the fact that the person who put the body in must have needed the keys to open the boot, which is always locked when the car is taken out, to prevent any theft of the tools etc, stored there. After dumping the body, he must have left the boot unlocked, for Arjun is not shown opening it from inside the car, but despite this, the cops lift the boot lid at once.
7) Arjun's fingerprints must be all over the car as he was working on it that day. So that would not strengthen the case against him. If the police look for other fingerprints, besides his and those of the car owner, that could give them a clue to the identity of the kidnapper/killer.
8) The cops already had the number of the car, and had in fact been tracing it. It might have been a stolen car or one used for smuggling, which is why the police head straight for the boot. It is also evident that they were not looking for a body, so it was not initially a murder case that they were chasing up.
9) It can be easily proved that the car is not Arjun's, but that alone will not be sufficient to clear him. He will have to prove that it could not have been he who stuffed that body in.
The time factor will be vital here. Archana and Purvi, and the cash desk staff, should be able to give him a solid alibi for the whole time from the instant he handed over the keys to the time he left the hospital, as he was always in the sight of one or the other of these during this period. And as explained at (5) above, it should be posssible for his lawyer to sew up the earlier period as well, and clear him.
10) We are completely in the dark about the nature of the crime: a kidnapping or plain murder, transport of a drugs or some other criminal consignment, and so on. There is thus no point in speculating about this.
11) What is clear is that with such a serious charge, and with the corpus delicti having been found in the car that Arjun was driving, the circumstantial evidence against him will be strong. This would be all the more since there was no one else with him in the car except the semi-conscious Sulochana when he was driving to the hospital, and the police may claim that he picked up the body en route.
So, everything will hinge on Arjun getting the best criminal lawyer available, who can take the prosecution case apart clearly and convincingly. DK will take care of the lawyer, and I devoutly hope he will take care of our Arjun. It is a pity that PR is not on Sony or Adaalat on Zee, for then we could have had KD Pathak rescuing Arjun with his trademark panache!
For those of us who are meticulous in identifying parallels between PR I and PR II, this would seem a case of deja vu, as Manav was also the accused in a prolonged court trial, though not for anything like as grim a charge as kidnapping and/or murder.
As for Purvi, she will hear of it only when Churan comes running to her the next morning, for the garage owner would have gone to the hospital when neither Arjun nor the car turned up in the morning. I hope that she musters up the courage to go and see him in the police lock up.
I do hope too that the police do not beat Arjun up, as they did with the whole Deshmukh family when they were jailed on a false domestic violence charge lodged by Manjusha. That scene was patently ridiculous and unconvincing, and the police should have sued Balaji over it, but the CVs delight in such stuff, and one does not want that to happen to Arjun and provide yet another parallel between the two PRs.
All in all, rough times lie ahead for our Arjun,and this for us as well. However, I am sure he will survive them with courage and resilience, and come out unscathed, We should all wish him just one thing, Vijayee bhava!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
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