Moon Gazer continues……

Fearing the worst, particularly during dark nights, I was often gripped by bouts of anxiety that kept me on my toes. I patrolled the district, night after night, attempting to set an example for my subordinates, who too spent sleepless nights.

Just when we thought we had made an impression on the marauders and succeeded in keeping them at bay, they struck again. On 18 April 1991, O.P. Mittal and his wife, both over seventy, were found clubbed to death in their sleep on the ground floor of their Panchsheel Park house. The crime scene was as gory as the earlier ones left behind by the serial killers. We didn’t know where to look. By then the media had begun to hound me, and justifiably so. Two senior citizens had been murdered by a gang that had struck twice already, and that too in a luxurious neighbourhood. Banner headlines screamed across the front pages of newspapers the following day, scoffing at us. Mercifully, we didn’t have to contend with TRP-hungry TV channels then, as the electronic media was still in its infancy. Nonetheless, with the adverse reports in the print media that followed these incidents, my bosses had begun to show their displeasure with our inability to prevent these heinous crimes. The psychological pressure was mounting on me, and so was the sense of guilt and low self- esteem.

Predictably, some of the prints picked up from the crime scene matched those found in the earlier cases. Another glaring similarity was that all three incidents had occurred during dark nights. By now, I had seriously begun to follow the phases of the moon. Come evening, I would compulsively look at the sky to gauge the size and shine of the moon, whose waxing and waning determined the quality of my sleep. During dark nights I would invariably stay awake and organize ‘general gasht’ (patrolling by everyone) in the district, which meant that every last man in my district was out patrolling.

Then followed a hiatus of four months, again giving us the illusion that the worst was over.

To be continued……