I knew if I waited the coming days would be hateful, so as soon as I got home I embraced my earlier nightmare and called Inspector Bhadra to ask who I should contact regarding the Shivani Jalan case. I ended up telling him everything, and then repeated it all in person at Inspector Somayya’s desk the following afternoon at Karaya Road Police Station. I left nothing out, just as I hadn’t with Mrs Jalan, including the mad-sounding truth of being invisibly pushed along the pavement. I gave the inspector the date and the approximate time.
And I told both Bhadra and Somayya one additional thing I had kept from Karishma Jalan: the glimpses Shivani had given me of likely unhappiness at home. I remembered I had some evidence to back this up, two paragraphs from her second email:
If you knew my parents, if you spent just half an hour in our house, you would take back the suggestion of sharing my secret with them. And without parents behind me, show me the psychiatrist who would take me seriously.
You know what I thought while reading your reply? Why doesn’t he take the chance, and I’ll do exactly as he suggests? I’ll perform a (non-dangerous) feat in his presence. Then, once he believes his own eyes, I will tell him about my parents.
But, I emphasised at my meeting with Somayya, because Shivani had been so rattled by my deception, I failed to learn any more when we actually met.
‘And here’s another something that might be relevant: let me show you the final email her mother sent me yesterday.’
Inspector Somayya (who was a woman perhaps two or three years younger than me) photographed the message on my screen.
‘Inspector, I have told you everything that happened, from start to finish, over what was just a week. Five days between Shivani’s first approach and that final mistaken or delusional email, where she says “I caused that” and includes a link to a rural disturbance a hundred kilometres away. Which was followed by her sudden death, and this alarming sequel in which her mother, whose sorrow is absolutely understandable, nevertheless seems to want to transfer the whole blame on to me.’
Inspector Somayya allowed herself time before she spoke, as if she were considering the defence I had made. ‘Ms Bhowmick, if Mrs Jalan had not approached you, would you have contacted her, or Shivani’s father?’
I replied without hesitation that I would have. I was still absorbing the shock of Shivani’s death when Mrs Jalan wrote. But my first thought had been to share what I knew.
‘Then answer me this. Why didn’t you share what you knew right away with Shivani’s parents? You sensed, and correctly so, that Shivani was putting herself and others at great risk, yet you remained quiet after meeting her. And from the looks of it, your silence might have continued indefinitely if Mrs Jalan had not read her daughter’s final emails and contacted you.’
I realised I was in tears only when I was spluttering. As great as the shock of Shivani’s death was this sudden understanding of being scapegoated for it. Those five or six emails had given her parents an incredibly valuable get-out-of-jail card, and now the police too seemed happy to pin the reason for such an enormous event on one half-hour encounter with a stranger, rather than anything that might have been building up over years at home, or with friends.
‘Inspector, I’m not a lawyer or a doctor, but some of their rules apply to my profession as well. When someone asks me to respect their privacy, when they tell me they cannot share their problem with their parents, how can I betray that trust by going to those very people? How could I even have asked for her parents’ contact details without arousing Shivani’s suspicion?’
‘Dry your tears, Ms Bhowmick. No one plans to put you in jail, so you can relax. But the one statement of yours that I can agree with is that you’re not a doctor or a lawyer, so talking about their codes of ethics isn’t relevant here. In fact, to pose Mrs Jalan’s question directly to you, even if she phrases it more harshly, are you trained in any way to offer psychological advice?’
I shook my head, tears still streaming. A constable came in with a file and left again without so much as a look at me. Another suspect cracking, he must have thought. Absolutely routine.
‘And yet you confidently deal with people in one of the most vulnerable stages of life. Doesn’t that constitute a second lie to them, not just about who you are, but about the expertise that you implicitly claim?’
Somewhere in me anger tried to make a feeble stand.
‘I write a column in a newspaper supplement. The editor has always found me competent. Shivani is the first correspondent who has harmed herself in my five years of doing this. But today, instead of investigating the real causes behind her acute disturbance, you have decided to turn your energies towards questioning my credentials …’
‘Uh, not at all, that’s not true. Based on what has emerged thus far, I personally don’t hold you responsible for Shivani’s death. But I do consider you a potential danger to other teenagers, because you’ve set up stall as their helper when in fact you’re absolutely unqualified for the role. I’ve read through some of your replies to different queries. You give medical advice, emotional advice, psychological advice, career advice, and I think to myself, Who the fuck is this!
‘I’m sorry, excuse my language. What I really meant to ask, when you explained why you chose not to go to the parents, is what about us! It also occurs to me you could have asked at Shivani’s school if you were truly concerned, but …’
I had felt under such fierce attack for the past few minutes, and so full of guilt, there was something big I’d entirely forgotten. If Somayya hadn’t herself mentioned coming to the police, it wouldn’t have occurred to me, even though it was germane to my defence on this particular matter.
‘Inspector Somayya, I’m grateful to you for reminding me of this option, which in fact I did exercise over something else precisely in the time period we’re talking about. If you ring your colleague Inspector Bhadra at Lake Thana, he’ll confirm my statement. The very day after my meeting with Shivani, my household help and longtime friend Arati Bhandari chanced upon the ex-husband Ramesh who had abducted their nine-month-old daughter Tuntuni back in 2001. I spent that day listening to Arati’s story, followed by the two of us driving to central Calcutta to confirm whether it was Ramesh; and two days later, when we both felt ready and sure, we contacted your colleagues, who promptly detained him. Since then, further upsetting things happened, including a partial confession, which I’d be happy to tell you about, but while I was plunged in the midst of all this I noticed in the news yesterday morning that Shivani had died.’
I like to imagine I had the upper hand over Somayya for at least a couple of minutes, for sheer surprise if not in righteousness. But she hadn’t made inspector in her (very) early thirties for nothing.
‘Okay, I’ll look into that, Ms Bhowmick, thank you for letting me know. You seem to have had an especially eventful week. There’ll be nothing more, so you’re free to go. But I would like to leave this thought with you: are you sure it is right for someone unqualified and using a false name to be doing this counselling job? Could you live with yourself if, God forbid, something like this happened again?
‘Think about it this way,’ she added after I’d got up. ‘Someone is afraid for some reason to come to the police, although they desperately need help. Would you just take over our role in such a matter?’