‘i want my son to be hanged’

[1]

The essence of the Gita and Kabir’s poetry, which I had admired since my youth, had begun appearing more meaningful to me after I retired in 2008 and hoped for a life of inner peace in my twilight years. My family, despite our many imperfections, had been my last hope.

But a perversely complicated world that infects young people with the desire for easy wealth by unscrupulous means rendered me absolutely helpless in one fell swoop.
Devesh Kumar, the elder of my two sons from my first marriage, turned into a blind butcher on December 14 and mercilessly murdered my second wife, Alina (50) and my two daughters from her — Sonali (18) and Poornima (12). Devesh, fondly called Rintu, 37, crushed their heads with a hammer and left them dying in a pool of blood in my house at Indrapuri Colony. His act has led me to revisit the years since his birth to see where I might have planted the sapling for such monstrosity.
I was in the dark for a while after he committed the crime. In fact, Rintu asked me to accompany him back to Delhi after the incident, where he lived at Kalkaji with his wife and son and ran a coaching class. He was strangely insistent, and I kept saying no, but I could not refuse for even I longed to see my grandson for the first time.
In the train to Delhi, I asked him to give me my mobile phone so I could call Sonali and wake her up so she could make it on time to college. Rintu hesitated and stopped me from making any calls. I called anyway but no one answered. Seeing my restlessness, Rintu took me to the compartment’s bathroom and told me, with shivering hands and trembling lips, that he had killed his stepmother and two sisters with hammer blows. The train suddenly seemed to crush my soul on the tracks. Rintu stopped me from slumping down on the toilet floor and walked me out.
This monster of a son then forced me to accompany him to Delhi. Outside the railway station, he again confessed his crime, still shivering as I was beginning to faint. He took me to a temple at Green Park where he had asked his wife, Mousumi Panda, the only daughter of a rich Oriya foreign service officer, to come with their baby son.
Rintu asked me to bless the baby and I did. He then took me to my younger, unmarried son Omkar alias Chintu’s house at Chirag Delhi. I begged to be sent to Patna immediately by plane, but Rintu forbade that and asked me not to even make any calls there. But I called a neighbour, Yogendra Sao, and he confirmed Rintu’s crime. Calls began to come from the police in Patna and I told them that I was coming back. I boarded a train with Chintu. The cops took me into custody — they said “protective custody” — at Mughalsarai station and brought me straight to the Patna SP, before whom I narrated the whole sordid saga.
Born in December 1976, Rintu had been a wayward boy, made worse perhaps due to the physical distance between us in much of his childhood. I had named him Rintu, but he renamed himself Devesh in his school documents at Purnea where he was in a hostel as a fourth standard student. His mother, Sahita, my wife for 14 years, bore me three sons in all. The third one died three months after birth. Sahita committed suicide the same year, in November 1987.
I remarried in December 1988, but Rintu never liked his new mother, Alina Devi, who was 12 years younger than me. With Alina, I had three daughters and no son. Our eldest daughter, Sheetal was married off in 2009. I had been preparing for the wedding of Sonali with the son of a friend of mine, little knowing that the hapless girl was destined to be killed by her brother.
All through the growing-up years of my two sons, I painfully kept swinging between being a good husband and a good father. Rintu had to be sent again to live in hostels in Purnea and Hajipur since his standard five even though he was admitted at a school in Patna. Alina was never happy about me meeting him. I used to lie to her that I was going to my village in Katihar to check on the farmland.
Even when Rintu got married in July 2008 despite my objections, I was held back by Alina from attending the ceremony even though I wanted to. But in September 2008, I told her a lie and went to bless my daughter-in-law Mausumi. A graduate in German and Japanese languages and an MBA degree holder, she turned out to be a nice person. She and Rintu took me on a three-day tour of several religious places across north India in their car that she drove all the way.
I have no clue what propelled Rintu to kill three innocent people. Greed for my property could be a reason. I had clearly told my sons that I would give them my Patna house and sell my 11 bighas of village land to marry off my two daughters. Rintu’s dark plans were so meticulous that he had taken away all his photographs from family albums. He has now fled to Canada, but he cannot hide anywhere for long.
I want him to be hanged as punishment. If I see him ever, I might kill him myself. His crimes are simply unforgivable.